We are close to a time when all of humankind will envision a global agenda that encompasses a kind of Global Marshall Plan to address the causes of poverty and suffering and environmental destruction all over the earth.

We're still putting 110 million tons of man-made global pollution into the air every single day as if the sky is an open sewer. More than 90% of the extra heat energy is going into the oceans, and that's why superstorm Sandy was so much more destructive, that's why the ice is melting more rapidly, that's why the water cycle is being disrupted and we get a lot more water vapor coming from the oceans into the sky, and that's why we get these enormous downpours and big floods. They happen all the time. Every night on the TV news is like a nature hike through the Book of Revelation.

Anyone who deals with the climate crisis has an internal dialogue between hope and despair, because the challenge is so huge and the danger is so great and the stakes are so high. But I have always resolved that in favour of hope, and actually I'm more hopeful now than I was a decade ago when the solutions were visible on the horizon, but you had to seek reassurance that the technology experts that they're coming, they'll be here.

In digital era, privacy must be a priority. Is it just me, or is secret blanket surveillance obscenely outrageous?

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

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

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.