But the truth is that we could win every other fight that we face and if we lose the climate fight, the other victories will be pyrrhic. I don't think even people who are worried about climate change quite understand the scale and speed with which we're now shifting the planet.

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

All the science in the last few years, or almost all of it, really serves to show that the [climate] effects are larger and more rapid than we had thought even a decade ago.

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.

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.

I think that so far the political and economic power of the fossil fuel industry has trumped all else.

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.