It's much to the credit of the rest of the world that they have gone ahead and tried to do the Kyoto accords on their own. It makes it unbelievably difficult to do that, for a variety of economic and regulatory reasons, without the participation of the biggest energy user in the world.

The thing about global warming is that you can address it on a great number of levels - in fact you have to.

With each month that passes, a solar panel gets 2 or 3 percent cheaper. So while we're holding the fossil fuel industry in check, the engineers in the renewable energy world are undercutting them from the other side.

For those of us who worry more about working people than about windfall profits for oil companies, it may net out. A better question is: what does it do to our economy if we manage to overheat the earth? This summer's drought provides a small taste.

There's a part of all of us whose impulse is to say, "Let's keep everything the same until I die and then you can do whatever you want afterward." And that's a difficult part.

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

The essential thing we need to understand is that the climate crisis is not some future threat, but a very present peril, the biggest one humans have ever encountered. Until we understand that, we'll dawdle.