Fear is the most powerful enemy of reason.

The gay rights movement of recent years has been an inspiring victory for humanity and it is in the tradition of the civil rights movement when I was a young boy in the South, the women's suffrage movement when my mother was a young woman in Tennessee, the abolition movement much farther back, and the anti-apartheid movement when I was in the House of Representatives. All of these movements have one thing in common: the opposition to progress was rooted in an outdated understanding of morality.

You're going to see new processes that utilize waste as the source of energy, so there's no petroleum consumed in the process - that makes the energy balance uniformly positive.

Now we have things that are obviously false, leading us to war, leading us to deny people health care, leading us to ignore the climate crisis. We have to restore the integrity of the democratic conversation.

...it is appropriate to have an over representation of factual presentations on how dangerous it is, as a predicate for opening up the audience to listen to what the solutions are, and how hopeful it is that we are going to solve this crisis.

There's no doubt that in the last two to three decades, American democracy has been hacked. It was based on the regular harvesting of the wisdom of crowds, but now big sources of special interest money are able to prevent the passage of almost any meaningful reform that's aimed at the public interest.

We're putting 70 million tonnes of pollution into the atmosphere every day, trapping an enormous amount of extra heat from the sun inside the earth's atmosphere. It's threatening to push the planet past a tipping point beyond which climate change would be difficult to stop