Of all the consequences of electing Donald Trump, none may be more dire than his intent to reverse national and international policy on global warming. This vital topic never came up in the presidential debates, leaving Trump to indulge in fantasy.

Trump’s State Department nomination of Rex Tillerson prompted alarms about the Exxon-Mobil CEO’s close ties to Vladimir Putin, but of equal concern is his career with the world’s largest oil company, which has played a disgraceful role in deterring action to stem global warming.

Recent investigative reports feature internal company memos saying — in 1981! — that projected carbon emissions from fossil fuel burning could “produce effects that will indeed be catastrophic.” Another memo concluded that “dramatic changes of energy use would be required.”

Exxon instead mimicked what the tobacco industry did when confronting its own researchers’ conclusions about cigarettes and lung cancer. Exxon publicly denied global warming’s seriousness, while manufacturing doubt, despite overwhelming scientific consensus. Republicans like Maine’s Susan Collins will largely determine the Senate’s response to Tillerson’s nomination.

Clearly, those who understand the threat to human survival posed by global warming have failed to fully engage the public, and must now prevent retreat from the Paris Agreement.

What did we do wrong? It starts with the name. I’ve used “global warming” rather than “climate change.” The two seem interchangeable; they’re not.

“Global warming” precisely describes the way burning fossil fuels traps atmospheric greenhouse gases, leading to largely adverse climate changes. But the terms connote very different things.

A 2002 memo by Frank Luntz, George W. Bush’s pollster, makes this clear. Luntz facilitated Bush’s about-face from a candidate pledged to regulate greenhouse gases to a president who, as Trump is doing, packed his administration with oil, gas and coal executives.

Luntz wrote, “‘Climate change’ is less frightening than global warming,'” saying the latter involves “catastrophic consequences” while the former “suggests a more controllable . . . challenge.”

Since then, “climate change,” a vague notion, has supplanted the more accurate “global warming.” We must reverse that usage.

The problem goes far beyond terminology, however. The initial response followed two lines of argument that didn’t engage the broader public — and left others free to sow doubt and falsify plain facts.

The first track could be called “alarmism” — fully justified in the 1980s, as we began to understand the problem’s scope, with ground-breaking scientific research unfolding.

The second track was “high technology,” a belief that we might avert global warming without fundamentally altering the way we produce energy — the bottom line Exxon understood 35 years ago.

Sounding the alarm doesn’t necessarily produce action; one might conclude the situation is hopeless, or that little can be done. And technology fixes — schemes to sequester emissions by injecting them into the earth’s crust or precipitating them into space — didn’t pan out.

Yet we know how to replace fossil fuels on a large scale with proven technologies from wind and solar, which, with efficient battery storage, could power America’s homes and offices and run our vehicle fleet. Making that future real will require large investments, both by governments and the private sector, with excellent prospects for large-scale job creation.

We will be playing defense on global warming for awhile. When better times return, we must embrace both challenge and opportunity. Combatting global warming will require a citizen mobilization on the scale of World War II, with scientific advances greater than those deployed in the space program.

Bill McKibben, one of the best writers on the subject, says we’re in a war — literally — over carbon emissions, and that we’re losing. If that seems too much like alarmism, remember that World War II, while producing devastating consequences in Europe and Asia, also spawned the “Greatest Generation” among Americans — a moment we still yearn to recapture.

As both the greatest offender, and the greatest innovator in this conflict, Americans have an outsized role. It’s a task that can unite and inspire us, just as it now divides and demoralizes.

Maine, too, has until recently employed sound state environmental policy. Important research on polar ice cores — the Rosetta stone for deciphering climate cycles — was carried out by University of Maine researchers.

We still have the Maine Conservation Corps, an offshoot of Bill Clinton’s AmeriCorps program, which could be expanded, with a mission to mitigate looming consequences of sea level rise and habitat destruction. Good ideas abound.

We must start acting, as well as thinking. Citizen action prompted passage of the 1970s’ great environmental laws — laws badly in need of renewal. With the specter of a Trump administration looming, courage is more necessary than ever.

Douglas Rooks has covered the State House for 32 years. His new book, “Statesman: George Mitchell and the Art of the Possible,” is now available. Comment is welcomed at: drooks@tds.net”

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