There is a tendency at every important but difficult crossroad to pretend that it's not really there.
There hadn't really been a climate movement, per se. I think everyone spent twenty years thinking that if we just keep pointing out that the world is on the edge of the greatest crisis by far it's ever come to, then our leaders will do something about it. And it turned out that was wrong. They weren't going to do anything about it.
Winning slowly is another way of losing. Americans are screwing up our health care system again right now. That's going to cause grave trouble for people over the next five, 10 years. There are going to be lots of people who die, lots of people who are sick. It's going to be horrible. But 10 years from now it will not be harder to solve the problem because you ignored it for those 10 years. With climate change, that's not true. As each year passes, we move past certain physical tipping points that make it impossible to recover large parts of the world that we have known.
The most blatant examples are increased power and frequency in hurricanes and the increased depth and frequency of heat waves.
In the scientific community, the debate is over, for all intents and purposes, about whether or not the planet is heating and who is causing it. In fact, it's more or less been over since 1995.
I don't know how to make people who absolutely have to be obsessed with paying a week's energy bills... obsessed with climate change... It's very hard.
Ice in the West Antarctic and over Greenland, i.e., ice that's over a rock at the moment, that will raise the level of the sea as it slides into the ocean, putting at risk everyone and everything that lives on the coasts, and that includes an enormous percentage of the world's people.
I've got no advice. You guys know where you are and what will work. Just know that there are people all over the place working on this and that there's a great deal of solidarity around the world and we should try to build this big, sprawling movement that looks like the kind of energy system that we want - building lots of solar panels on lots of rooftops that are all interconnected.
I think the world on the other side of fossil fuel is more local - the logic of sun and wind is diffuse and spread out, not concentrated like the logic of coal and oil.
The idea that China and India will just abandon climate action is not true, because they're doing it for more reasons than we are.
We finally know where the red line for climate really is. After the rapid melt of arctic ice in the summer of 2007, our best scientists, led by NASA's Jim Hansen, went back to work and produced a series of papers showing that with more than 350 ppm (parts per million) of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, we couldn't have a planet "similar to the one on which civilization developed and to which life on earth is adapted."
We don't know exactly where all the tipping points are in the physical world for inescapable damage, but we're clearly reaching close to some of them.
Look - every time is the wrong time and the perfect time to have a kid, and you just do it when you can.
I think it's going to be a tough century; I also think people are starting to rise up, and that a growth in human solidarity will help compensate for the loss of margin in the natural world that will make life harder.
It was huge mistake to avoid working with the rest of the world because (a) we're the largest source of the problem: 4% of us who are in the U.S. produce 25% of the world's carbon dioxide.
That's why people are standing up again to fight the Keystone pipeline in Nebraska and South Dakota and Montana. Everyone is well aware of what this industry is about. It engages not only in those kind of practices, polluting people's water, but it has polluted our political life now for a quarter century.
We have to figure out ways to scare and entice our leaders more effectively than the fossil fuel industry has managed to scare and entice them. They've got the big checkbooks. We've got to have the big crowd.
Colonialism of one kind or another, imperialism of one kind or another, and slavery, and on and on and on.
Community is as endangered by surplus as it is by deficit. If there is too much money floating around it enables people to have no need of each other.
The religious environmental movement is potentially key to dealing with the greatest problem humans have ever faced, and it has never been captured with more breadth and force than in RENEWAL. I hope this movie is screened in church basements and synagogue social halls across the country, and that it moves many more people of faith off the fence and into action.
Our weird problem is an abundance of resources and a shortage of hard economic reasons not to use them.
In the end, climate change is a math problem.
When you have solar panels, your electricity gets there for free, no one's figured out how to meter the sun yet. And that's good.
The models that have been constructed agree that when, as has been predicted, the level of carbon dioxide or its equivalent in other greenhouse gases doubles from pre-Industrial Revolution concentrations, the global average temperature will increase, and that the increase will be 1.5 to 4.5 degrees Celsius or 3 to 8 degrees Fahrenheit... In Dallas, for instance, a doubled level of carbon dioxide and other gases like methane, would increase the number of days a year with temperatures above 100 degrees from 19 to 78 each year.
In the States, the movement's actually gotten much much much stronger. There really was no climate movement so to speak before that - I think because everybody assumed that reasonable heads would prevail and do the right thing - and why would you need to have a huge movement in order to cause our leaders to deal with the most serious problem that they face. In a rational world you wouldn't. They would deal with it.
