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

You need to really scrub your investment portfolios, because I guarantee you, many of you are going to find them chock-full of subprime carbon assets.

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.

Our insatiable drive to rummage deep beneath the surface of the earth is a willful expansion of our dysfunctional civilization into Nature.

My counsel advises me that there is no controlling legal authority or case that says there was any violation of law whatsoever.

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.

You can push your local communities to adopt more sustainable sources of energy and environmentally-friendly practices.