We've abnegated the Kyoto treaty, we've instituted a voluntary program that's obviously not been working, we've taken every effort to excise references to global warming from official documents, to try to undermine international conferences that work on environmental issues, and on and on and on.

What makes us different? We're the creature that can decide not to do something that we are capable of doing.

You can have a healthy fossil-fuel balance sheet, or a relatively healthy planet

We're going to need that kind of movement, because the fossil fuel industry is a sprawling adversary - at work everywhere, its tentacles in everybody's politics, invulnerable, I think, to direct frontal assault, but probably more brittle than it guesses if we come at it from all sides.

If the Holy Spirit is capable of the heavy lifting required to get Pat Robertson to change his mind, then that strikes me as a very good sign.

The world hasn't ended, but the world as we know it has-even if we don't quite know it yet.

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