The presidency is more than a popularity contest.

There's an old African proverb that says "If you want to go quickly, go alone. If you want to go far, go together." We have to go far - quickly. And that means we have to quickly find a way to change the world's consciousness about exactly what we're facing, and why we have to work to solve it.

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.

I never like the question about letter grades, but I think Trump is failing. I think that every day there's another set of tweets and another set of controversies, and nothing seems to be getting done that's any good. And there seems to be kind of a policy paralysis in Washington. Even the appointments he's supposed to make as a new president, so I focus most of all on climate, and so my opinion of his time as president is certainly influenced by my opinion of the job he's done on climate. He's tried to move the country in the wrong direction.

CO2 is the exhaling breath of our civilization, literally... Changing that pattern requires a scope, a scale, a speed of change that is beyond what we have done in the past.

The truth is that we're at a critical juncture in the history of our species and if we don't act soon, we could inhabit a world we don't recognize anymore. But the most important truth is that we are capable of stopping climate change before the worst of its consequences are locked in. The solutions exist - all we need is the will to do something about it.

The Internet empowers individuals to play a more active role in the political process, as Obama's campaign has manifested.