We've built a new Earth. It's not as nice as the old one; it's the greatest mistake humans have ever made, one that we will pay for literally forever.

The real negotiation is between humans on the one hand and chemistry and physics on the other. And chemistry and physics, unfortunately, don't bargain.

The irony is that one of the things people want to solve climate change is more market - more price on carbon so that markets have something to chew on when they think about climate change instead of the complete monopoly, the absurdity of allowing these guys to own the sky for free - socialise all of the costs and privatise all of the profits.

The Old Testament contains in many places, but especially in the book of Job, one of the most far-reaching defenses ever written of wilderness, of nature free from the hand of man. The argument gets at the heart of what the loss of nature will mean to us....God seems to be insisting that we are not the center of the universe, that he is quite happy if it rains where there are no people - that God is quite happy with places where there are no people, a radical departure from our most ingrained notions.

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.

At the moment, the 4 percent of us in this country produce a quarter of the world's carbon dioxide - once you look at maps of rising sea levels and spreading mosquitoes, you realize that we've probably never figured out a way to hate our neighbors around the world much more effectively.

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