Carol Browner, who headed the Environmental Protection Agency under President Bill Clinton, is armed with data. During this talk at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, she illustrates the rapid warming of the Earth’s atmosphere, and advises her audience to look for nonpartisan, business-friendly ways to address the looming crisis.

“If we fail to act we’ll become the first generation that has left to the next generation a problem that can’t really be resolved,” she says. “No generation has yet left a permanently altered planet. There is not a single engineer in the world who could reverse the rise in the sea level once it starts to happen.”

Browner does not suggest that businesses and people change their practices overnight. Instead, she urges changemakers to recognize the needs of businesses and the hard-to-break habits of individuals. At the same time, however, she argues that big businesses are mainly responsible for reversing climate change.