Um garoto de 16 anos, chamado Taylor Francis, decide fazer mais do que trocar o tipo de lâmpadas utilizadas em casa…

Like a lot of Americans, Taylor Francis can trace his global warming conversion back to the day he walked into a movie theater and watched An Inconvenient Truth. Before he saw the documentary, Francis says, he knew climate change was a problem, but not something that could end civilization. “I was stunned,” he says now. “I came away from the theater determined to do something about this.”

For most of us, that might have meant switching to more efficient light bulbs, or maybe if we were particularly motivated, buying a hybrid car. Francis went a bit further. In December 2006, along with 200 other people, Francis traveled to Al Gore’s home city of Nashville — otherwise known as the new Mecca of environmentalism — to be taught as a global warming educator by Al Gore himself, as part of the Climate Project, a nonprofit that promotes public awareness. Fourteen years old at the time, Francis was the youngest person ever trained by Gore. Back home in San Francisco he delivered a customized version of the most famous PowerPoint presentation ever developed, and since, he’s given his talk to nearly 10,000 people, mostly high school students. Francis persuades his teenage peers to realize that global warming, far from being a threat of the distant future, will directly affect them. “This problem is my problem,” says Francis, who speaks with a precision that reminds me of, well, Gore, without the Tennessee twang. “It’s not abstract for us. The effects will be felt in our lifetime.”

OK, so, after doing the hard work of educating apathetic high schoolers about the dangers of climate change, Francis has done his part, right? Not quite. As he researched global warming further, Francis came to the same realization that many climate experts have: while the United States is by far the world’s biggest carbon emitter historically, it’s China that truly holds the key to slowing climate change. China, which just passed the U.S. as the world’s top greenhouse-gas emitter on an annual basis, will be putting more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than any other nation for the foreseeable future. Fail to convince the Chinese of Gore’s inconvenient truth, and the game will be lost. The best targets, Francis knew, would be Chinese his own age. “Working with China is so important,” he says. “The young are a source of possibility.”

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