I'm not trying to top anything. I'm trying to be useful, to play a positive role, to serve the public interest.

Any of us who work on the task of solving the climate crisis have at times an internal struggle between hope and despair. But that's one of the things that connects this climate movement to the previous great moral revolutions, like the civil rights movement and more recently the gay rights movement. So those who feel despair should be of good cheer, as the Bible says. Have faith, have hope. We are going to win this.

For me, the most serious problem is how America became so vulnerable to the assertion of blatant falsehoods that drive policy and are not corrected by the so-called immune system of democracy, a free press and a free democratic discourse.

Science is warning us that if we do not quickly reduce the global warming pollution that is trapping so much of the heat our planet normally radiates back out of the atmosphere, we are in danger of creating a permanent 'carbon summer'.

I think I may have a future as a disembodied head.

The science linking the increased frequency and severity of extreme weather to the climate crisis has matured tremendously in the last couple of years.

Population growth is straining the Earth's resources to the breaking point, and educating girls is the single most important factor in stabilizing that. That, plus helping women gain political and economic power and safeguarding their reproductive rights.