In physics there's the old law for every action there's a equal amount of reaction. Sometimes that's true in politics. If somebody's out there making nonsensical statements, but wielding power behind them a lot of people say, "Well, I need to react to that." Another reason for the increased prominence of the climate-change issue is the Paris Agreement itself. It's not a small thing when just about every nation in the entire world comes together and makes an historic agreement like this. It's a big deal. And the old cliché "The train is leaving the station" kind of applies.

Any child born into the hugely consumptionist way of life so common in the industrial world will have an impact that is, on average, many times more destructive than that of a child born in the developing world.

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.

The sooner we switch away from carbon-based fuel and start relying on renewable energy sources available in the United States, the sooner we will grow our economy by creating the millions of new jobs that will come from retrofitting homes and businesses, building smart grids, renewable energy systems and planting trees and all the rest. We need to create a lot of jobs that can't be outsourced.

And nobody is talking about taking guns away from hunters or sportsmen or banning all guns. Nobody is talking about that.

When we respond to threats immediately and take action right away, it's usually the threats that we're hard-wired to respond to, the kinds of things that our ancestors survived.

Our world faces a true planetary emergency. I know the phrase sounds shrill, and I know it's a challenge to the moral imagination.