Warm air holds more water vapor than cold, and so the atmosphere is about 4% wetter than it was 40 years ago. This loads the dice for flood and drought, and we're seeing both in stunning abundance.

Our weird problem is an abundance of resources and a shortage of hard economic reasons not to use them.

[The Maldives] they've become deeply politically engaged - just for instance, the president taught his whole cabinet to scuba dive so they could hold an underwater cabinet meeting along their dying coral reef and pass a 350 resolution to send to the U.N.

Most of the men and women who vote in Congress each year to continue subsidies have taken campaign donations from big energy companies.

I think it's going to be a tough century; I also think people are starting to rise up, and that a growth in human solidarity will help compensate for the loss of margin in the natural world that will make life harder.

I think the best way is to keep stressing, that, as we build out a new energy system, one of the best things about it, if we do it right, will be that it will be more local, more democratic, more distributed, and, in the long run, much more economically sensible.

Environmentalism, I'd always been told, was just rich white people.