But tolerance by itself can be a cover for moral laziness.

Certainly, packets of sea ice, in say the Arctic, which have failed to fully reform in the last couple of years.

That's why people are standing up again to fight the Keystone pipeline in Nebraska and South Dakota and Montana. Everyone is well aware of what this industry is about. It engages not only in those kind of practices, polluting people's water, but it has polluted our political life now for a quarter century.

I'm not sure I'm a very good source of advice since we're kind of making this up as we go along.

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

We, all of us in the First World, have participated in something of a binge, a half century of unbelievable prosperity and ease. We may have had some intuition that it was a binge and the earth couldn't support it, but aside from the easy things (biodegradable detergent, slightly smaller cars) we didn't do much. We didn't turn our lives around to prevent it. Our sadness is almost an aesthetic response - appropriate because we have marred a great, mad, profligate work of art, taken a hammer to the most perfectly proportioned of sculptures.

The latest computer modeling I've seen indicates that at mid-century, there might be 150 million people classified as "environmental refugees."