I try not to be either optimistic or pessimistic. I try not to think about outcomes on that scale. My job, it seems to me, is to wake up every morning and figure out how to cause as much trouble for the fossil fuel industry as I can.

I just keep trying to explain what's going on with our planet - and now, to explain what's going on with our politics, which explains why we're not doing anything about the former.

We're mathematically past the point where the accumulation of individual actions can add up quickly enough to make a difference. The individual action that actually matters is not being an individual. It's joining together with other people in groups large enough to change the political dynamic around climate change.

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

Probably more than anything else, the place that we really see the effects of the power of even the relatively mild temperature increases so far is in the melting of everything frozen on the planet.

In the end, climate change is a math problem.

My guess is that liberating the fossil fuel industry to frack anywhere they want will drive down the rate at which we're converting to sun and wind. And it's entirely a rate problem at this point.