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

Winning slowly is another way of losing. Americans are screwing up our health care system again right now. That's going to cause grave trouble for people over the next five, 10 years. There are going to be lots of people who die, lots of people who are sick. It's going to be horrible. But 10 years from now it will not be harder to solve the problem because you ignored it for those 10 years. With climate change, that's not true. As each year passes, we move past certain physical tipping points that make it impossible to recover large parts of the world that we have known.

Oil companies are radical because they're willing to alter the chemical composition of the atmosphere.

Between [Speaker of the House] Paul Ryan, [Senate Majority Leader] Mitch McConnell, and Donald Trump's team, I don't see a lot of openings for making real progress.

We are altering the most basic forces of the planet's surface - the content of the sunlight, the temperature and aridity - and that brings out the most powerful questions about who is in charge. If you wanted to give a name to this theological problem, I think you could say that we are engaged in decreation.

Without a movement pressing for change, there's little hope. We've got to work the political system to make this happen fast. The physics and chemistry are daunting. The resources on the other side are very large.

For the first time in 150 years, the USDA reported there were more farms in America, not fewer. That has to make you happy.