From some tiny portion of the wealth the west accumulated in a hundred years of filling the atmosphere with carbon.

The consumer culture in general has washed over our civilization. For the last 50 years, if you've had a credit card and some access to money, you don't really need neighbors around you. And as a result, they dwindled. The average American has half as many close friends as they did in 1950. Three quarters of Americans don't know their next-door neighbor. They may know their name, but they have no real relationship with them. That's an utterly new place for human beings to find themselves in - I mean, we're a socially evolved primate.

[Political actions] has to happen on the local and state level; we have to convince our cities to join the growing number of more than 200 American cities who have signed on to the mayor's climate campaign.

Very few people on earth ever get to say: 'I am doing, right now, the most important thing I could possibly be doing.' If you'll join this fight that's what you'll get to say

In the United States, cheap fossil fuel has eroded communities. We're the first people with no real practical need for each other. Everything comes from a great distance through anonymous and invisible transactions. We've taken that to be a virtue, but it's as much a curse. Americans are not very satisfied with their lives, and the loss of community is part of that.

All the things that we've done as a species have had a limited scope. We're talking about melting the ice caps, raising the level of the seas dramatically, changing the distribution of every other species on Earth, perhaps wiping out one-third or half of them. The changes at work are geologic in scale. The level of change required to deal with it is enormous, too. It will require change in every country. It will require a degree of global cooperation that we haven't seen before.

When you have solar panels, your electricity gets there for free, no one's figured out how to meter the sun yet. And that's good.