When you are in a hole, stop digging!
We'll look for almost any reason not to change our attitudes; the inertia of the established order is powerful. If we can think of a plausible, or even implausible, reason to discount environmental warnings, we will.
Spend 70% of your spare time doing things close to home and the other 30% doing work at the global and national level.
When you go to China and the developing world, people understand more clearly the dangers that are coming at them because they're living closer to the margin. They don't have any of the false sense of invulnerability that Americans have. People from developing countries also feel that it's their right, if you're talking in terms of justice, to use fossil fuels like we did for a hundred years to get rich. It's hard for them to give up that vision.
Fossil fuel is very seductive stuff. [John Maynard] Keynes once said that, as far as he could tell, the average standard of living from the beginning of human history to the middle of the eighteenth century had perhaps doubled. Not much had changed, and then we found coal and gas and oil and everything changed. We're reaping the result of that, both ecologically and socially.
Climate change is a huge problem, an almost insoluble problem, for two reasons. One is the habits of the West in terms of consumption. The other is the incredible iniquity between poor countries and rich countries on this planet.
From some tiny portion of the wealth the west accumulated in a hundred years of filling the atmosphere with carbon.
There are so many symptoms of this disease it's hard to know where to start to catalogue them, but just look at the effects on hydrology - on the way water moves around the planet.
It's off the charts - and if you don't believe the scientists, ask the insurance industry, the people we pay to analyze risk in our society.
For those of us who worry more about working people than about windfall profits for oil companies, it may net out. A better question is: what does it do to our economy if we manage to overheat the earth? This summer's drought provides a small taste.
Renewable energy is far more labor-intensive than fossil fuel production.
A price on carbon sufficient to keep 80% of current reserves underground, rebated directly to citizens.
I'm guessing the most efficient way would be to transfer an awful lot of technology, but also direct aid to deal with climate emergencies already underway. Hillary [Clinton] has already said $100 billion a year would be appropriate.
I think fracking for gas will reduce the incentive to turn to renewables, and I think it will do a lot of other damage across the countryside.
I did very much like [Barack] Obama's attack on fossil fuel subsidies for fossil fuel companies. We asked for that in demonstrations and petitions, and now we'll try to push it forward.
We'd won the argument 15 years before, we were just losing the fight. And so it became clear to some of us that we would need to organise to fight, that we weren't going to win.
Everybody was cratered after Copenhagen. If the movie had worked the way that it should have, if it had been scripted by Holywood, the world would have come together and addressed the biggest problem it ever had faced and delegates would have embraced each other, and it all would have been a good happy scene instead of the complete farce and debacle that it turned into - maybe in certain ways, an absolute low point for human diplomacy.
We'll never get there if we let the climate crisis bloom unchecked, so for the moment the key is to organize, organize, organize!
I imagine a certain amount of consumer impulse will be replaced by community connection. You can already see it starting with things like the local food movement.
"Science," of course, replaced "God" as a guiding concept for many people after Darwin. Or, really, the two were rolled up into a sticky ball. To some degree this was mindless worship of a miracle future, the pursuit of which has landed us in the fix we now inhabit.
At least I sure hope it will - and I see good signs all the time, especially in things like the rise of local agriculture.
The Old Testament contains in many places, but especially in the book of Job, one of the most far-reaching defenses ever written of wilderness, of nature free from the hand of man. The argument gets at the heart of what the loss of nature will mean to us....God seems to be insisting that we are not the center of the universe, that he is quite happy if it rains where there are no people - that God is quite happy with places where there are no people, a radical departure from our most ingrained notions.
[Kids] will grow up into a world that's difficult and wonderful, and they'll make the best of it they can, and hopefully help turn it in the best possible direction.
[The Maldives] they've become deeply politically engaged - just for instance, the president taught his whole cabinet to scuba dive so they could hold an underwater cabinet meeting along their dying coral reef and pass a 350 resolution to send to the U.N.
One of my favorite places is the Maldives, an all-Muslim nation in the Indian Ocean with a culture that stretches back 5,000 years. But since the highest point in the archipelago is a meter or two above sea level, even the next hundred are not guaranteed. They've committed to becoming the first carbon-neutral nation on Earth by 2020, building windmills as fast as they can.
