Because these consequences are distributed globally, the problem masquerades as a distraction. Because the length of time between causes and consequences stretches out longer than we're used to dealing with, it gives us the illusion that we have the luxury of time. Neither of those things is true.

I understand that being optimistic in this age is challenging, but I am optimistic nonetheless.

As I have said for many years throughout this land, we're borrowing money from China to buy oil from the Persian Gulf to burn it in ways that destroy the future of human civilization. Every bit of that has to change.

Where solar energy is concerned - and wind energy and battery storage and electric vehicles and efficiency technologies - that is what we are now seeing. So, yes, I'm very optimistic, but anyone who works on the climate crisis has an internal struggle between hope and despair. I won't deny that, but hope has always prevailed in my outlook.

We're all capable of mistakes, but I do not care to enlighten you on the mistakes we may or may not have made.

The crisis is a concrete threatening reality today. It stands to get catastrophically worse unless we take action before the accumulation [of] this global warming pollution reaches such toxic levels that the problem becomes bigger than we can solve.

Distributed intelligence is the key to the advancement of human civilization. Dictatorships, communist countries, monarchies in the past all eventually collapsed because of their inefficiency in moving information.