The United States had eight years of Barack Obama. He made it incredibly clear that he was a right-wing Democrat. He cited Ronald Reagan lovingly in every stump speech for the last six months of the presidential 2008 campaign. And he made it clear that he was going to be a business-friendly Democratic president, and that he was not going to rock the neoliberal boat. And he didn't.

I personally feel very strongly that what it will take is not more disasters, it's that what it will take is a vision of the future that is better than our present.

Catastrophic damage from climate-driven extreme weather is now an annual reality. The cost of not dealing with it will be much greater than if we try to pre-empt some of those disaster cleanups by actually investing in the shift now.

I think that kind of urgency is what makes this stage of the climate movement really different from what it was even a few years ago when it was much more of the professionalized NGOs lobbying behind closed doors and maybe having a march now and then.

I'm really changed by my research. This book ["This Changes Everything" ]is very different from what I set out to write.

If you spend a lot of time with activists, as I have, they're just ordinary people who instead of Netflix are getting together in church basements and making posters or making phone calls doing organizing work. It really is about finding a community of other people.

The thing that our system is designed to do is keep us alone and isolated in our little consumer bubble. And the most revolutionary act of all might be finding a community of like-minded people where you can talk about these issues and figure out what to do together.