Grist: In 1986, Renee Lertzman, an idealistic teenager starting college, signed up for a class in environmental science. One day, her environmental science professor started lecturing on something she had never heard of before.
All that oil and gas and coal that had been trapped below ground for millennia, and that now was being dug up and burned for processes both awesome and non-awesome, was gradually returning the planet`s climate to a hot, soupy, pre-historic mess. Actually, not so gradually. She...