Population growth is straining the Earth's resources to the breaking point, and educating girls is the single most important factor in stabilizing that. That, plus helping women gain political and economic power and safeguarding their reproductive rights.

The answer is to end our reliance on carbon-based fuels... If we succeed, we create booming new industries, wealth, clean secure energy and maybe we prevent the greatest disaster so far in human history, saving millions of lives while improving billions more. If we fail, basically it's business as usual while things slowly get worse all around us.

The climate, financial and national security crises are all connected. They share the same cause: Our [the USA's] absurd dependency on foreign oil. As long as we need to spend billions of dollars each year to buy foreign oil from state-run oil companies in the Persian Gulf, our problems of a trade deficit, a budget deficit and a climate crisis will persist.

Although I have a variety of obligations, the climate crisis is my central concern.

A lot in the faith-based community, a lot of fundamentalist groups are - are now saying, you know, the Earth is the lord and the fullness there of, and we have an obligation to be good stewards of the planet.

I'm still trying to figure out exactly what President Trump represents in American politics. But, if nothing else, he represents a way for tens of millions of people who were desperate for change to just turn the table over and say, we want to start over again. But it is a challenge for our democracy. It definitely is. But, again, the remedy has to be devoting enough attention to restoring the way we make collective decisions in this country.

From wherever the emissions come, they have the same effect: They trap much more heat from the sun, melt the ice, raise the sea level, cause stronger storms, floods, drought, bigger fires, generate millions of climate refugees, destabilize political systems, threaten the growing of food crops and cause a number of other catastrophic consequences which, taken together, threaten the basis for the future of human civilization on the Earth.