In a NY Times op-ed piece entitled Game Over for the Climate, James Hansen recently wrote about President Obama’s Rolling Stone interview, in which Obama said that Canada would proceed with the exploitation of the oil in its tar sands reserve “regardless of what we do.” In the article, Obama appears as a thoughtful realist as he explains that burning the tar sands is a done deal: “That’s their national policy, they’re pursuing it.”

Apparently, we can only react to this inevitability as best we can, which, in this case, is the construction of a much-debated extension to the Keystone pipeline, which is to carry the Canadian crude to the Gulf, crossing the Nebraska Sandhills’ vulnerable wetland ecosystem and the Ogallala Aquifer, one of the largest reserves of fresh water in the world and one that provides drinking water to two million people. Environmentalists, however, are concerned more with the burning of the tar sands than with the risks of the pipeline, frightening as they may be.

According to Hansen, “If Canada proceeds, and we do nothing, it will be game over for the climate.” He explains that Canadian tar sands contain such huge amount of carbon dioxide that, if released and added to that resulting from the exploitation of our own tar shale, there will be no hope of not leaving “our children a climate system that is out of their control.” Hanson suggests many things we can do to influence Canada to do the right thing, as well as practical things we can do to reduce our own emissions; the situation is dire but not hopeless.

It doesn’t take Hansen’s use of the “game” image to evoke the common experience of every sports spectator: when a team faces terrible odds but doesn’t accept defeat, almost miraculous reversals can happen. Often what makes a team fight on in an apparently hopeless situation are very high stakes, such as in a qualifying or a championship match. And what stakes could be higher than the possible loss of life on earth as we know it? Eventually, the peril we are creating will be obvious to everyone, at which point the countries of the world will scramble to save the planet. But, as Hansen points out in his Times piece, the longer we proceed on the present course, the greater the damage and the higher the cost of undoing it. And at some point, a reversal will no longer be possible. Where is our inspirational coach when we need him?