A person of faith who shares conservative values and who says very clearly that climate change is real - and here's why we have to care about it - I think that we "unicorns" do pose a threat to people who want to muddy the waters and keep others in the dark.
Natural gas is a very flexible source of energy that can help us bridge the gap between our current high-carbon economy and our zero-carbon future.
There's no question that natural gas is a lot better than coal or oil, in the sense that natural gas produces less carbon per unit of energy produced.
I think the biggest pushback comes from people who perceive me to be a threat. Having bloggers who are dedicated to making up false information about you, having anonymous people write nasty emails and letters, having organizations file legal requests for your work-related emails, and all the other things that happen can be very depressing and discouraging.
We have to fix climate change with the people we have right now, and to a large extent with the perspectives we have right now as well.
The word "evangelist" means someone who spreads good news. Studying the impacts of climate change as I do, it's hard to come up with good news. In many ways I feel more like a Cassandra or a Jeremiah than a good-news evangelist.
There is no set period of time or total amount of carbon emissions that we can stay below to ensure we stay safe.
People have taken advantage of the very well-trodden pathways that divide science and faith on other issues, such as creation, evolution, and the age of the universe, to pigeonhole climate change as yet another variant on the same theme.
If you can frame climate change as an alternate religion, or as one more of those issues where the pointy-headed liberal atheist scientists are trying to discredit the Bible, then you've already got a ton of people on your side who are concerned about heresy, other religions, or teaching evolution in schools.
Where I live, if I put solar panels on my roof I'm not allowed to sell that energy back to the grid. I can't change that restriction myself. I need our local decision-makers to fix that.
We're not paying a real price for carbon. If we were, we wouldn't be using as much. We need to have the right perspective. It's not just about next quarter's financial return. It's about where we want to be in ten years.
One of the biggest issues with renewables right now is the fact that if the wind isn't blowing, if the sun isn't shining, we don't have energy. Many people are working on storage technology so when the wind isn't blowing, we can use the energy stored in our giant batteries, essentially. But what happens if we don't have enough stored energy?
If we smoke, there's no magic number of cigarettes, or number of years, that we can smoke before we know we'll get lung cancer.
I think it's interesting that the United States and Australia are two of the most individualistic nations in the entire world in terms of national personality.
For many of us, our values come from our faith.
I feel like a physician, one who's done a scan of the patient's body and seen evidence of a potentially serious issue.
