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're not at the point of trying to stop global warming; it's too late for that. We're trying to keep it from becoming a complete and utter calamity

I imagine a certain amount of consumer impulse will be replaced by community connection. You can already see it starting with things like the local food movement.

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.

Absent the net, we certainly couldn't have organized in 190 countries around the world. It's no substitution for face to face interaction - that's why we have "days of action" where people are in real contact with each other - but it's the cheap (and low-carbon) way to do an awful lot of the planning and organizing. And we can build, for $20k, a website as good as one Exxon can build for $20 million.

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

In my own faith tradition, these questions have been very important. It has always been easiest for me to apprehend God in the natural world. I love to go to church, but when I really want to feel the presence of the divine I'm more likely to head up into the mountains.