I have felt for a long time that the pathway to solving the climate crisis is through the building of a massive grassroots army of men and women who will go out there and win the conversation on climate, and persuade businesses, and universities, and towns to switch to renewable energy and to reduce emissions. And the big change from ten years ago is that people are way more receptive, not only to the message that we have to act, not only to the message that now we can act, we have the solutions now - that's the biggest change - but also willing to make a commitment that we will act.

Eventually we'll use a CO2 tax offset by a reduction in taxes elsewhere alongside a cap-and-trade plan, but the degree of difficulty associated with a CO2 tax far exceeds that with a cap-and-trade plan. We're seeing it's hard to get a cap-and-trade plan and it's much easier to use as a basis for a global agreement than a CO2 tax.

The symbolism - and the substantive significance - of planting a tree has universal power in every culture and every society on Earth, and it is a way for individual men, women and children to participate in creating solutions for the environmental crisis.

As many know, the Chinese expression for "crisis" consists of two characters side by side. The first is the symbol for "danger," the second the symbol for "opportunity."

A lot of people go straight from denial to despair without pausing in the middle and doing something about it.

The misconception that there is serious disagreement among scientists about global warming is actually an illusion that has been deliberately fostered by a relatively small but extremely well-funded cadre of special interests, including Exxon Mobil and a few other oil, coal, and utilities companies. These companies want to prevent any new policies that would interfere with their current business plans that rely on the massive unrestrained dumping of global warming pollution into the Earth's atmosphere every hour of every day.

My parents were true believers in the efficacy of American constitutional democracy, and I was thoroughly inculcated with reverence for what we the people are capable of doing. The complication in that simple narrative is that as I got older, the Vietnam War shook my confidence in how our democracy was working. I ended up serving in that war, but it started with a lie, and I was very proud of my father for being one of its earliest opponents.