I can't tell how moving it is to open my email and see a picture of 1,500 Buddhist monks and nuns in the Himalayan kingdom of Ladakh forming a human 350 against the backdrop of the melting glaciers. This is not their fault, and yet they're stepping up to be part of the solution.

We don't know exactly where all the tipping points are in the physical world for inescapable damage, but we're clearly reaching close to some of them.

I think the world on the other side of fossil fuel is more local - the logic of sun and wind is diffuse and spread out, not concentrated like the logic of coal and oil.

When we think about global warming at all, the arguments tend to be ideological, theological and economic.

If there's horrible flooding in Pakistan or a horrible heat wave in Texas, we're no longer able to call it an act of God, or a natural disaster, or something like that, the way we could have through all of human history until 35 or 40 years ago.

We are altering the most basic forces of the planet's surface - the content of the sunlight, the temperature and aridity - and that brings out the most powerful questions about who is in charge. If you wanted to give a name to this theological problem, I think you could say that we are engaged in decreation.

For the first time in 150 years, the USDA reported there were more farms in America, not fewer. That has to make you happy.