The catastrophe now threatening us is unprecedented - and we often confuse the unprecedented with the improbable.

Pollution should never be the price of prosperity.

It is just human nature to take time to connect the dots, I know that. But I also know that there can be a day of reckoning when you wish you had connected the dots more quickly.

We have to abandon the conceit that isolated personal actions are going to solve this crisis. Our policies have to shift.

Most people talk as if Miami and Bangladesh still have a chance of surviving: most of the scientists I spoke with assume we'll lose them within the century, even if we stop burning fossil fuel in the next decade.

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.

There are some bright spots, to be sure, but the internet is still in a Wild West phase, as was the case during the early age of the printing press as well.