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.

We spend probably more of our time than we should, just because it's close to home, worrying about the West. But it's equally important to figure out how we're going to free up the resources to let the developing world leapfrog the fossil fuel age. That's at least as mathematically important, and at least as morally crucial.

I don't know how to make people who absolutely have to be obsessed with paying a week's energy bills... obsessed with climate change... It's very hard.

If we had about 100 years, that sort of slow cultural conversion would be exactly the thing to do. But physics is calling the tune here. We've got to respond to a timetable that physics has set for us.

So far the earth has warmed about a degree Fahrenheit globally averaged. That doesn't seem like an enormous amount but it's unlike what we would have expected twenty years ago.

We've been given a warning by science, and a wake-up call by nature; it is up to us now to heed them.

TV is sometimes accused of encouraging fantasies. Its real problem, though, is that it encourages-enforces, almost-a brute realism. It is anti-Utopian in the extreme. We're discouraged from thinking that, except for a few new products, there might be a better way of doing things.