It is a complete embarrassment and literally shameful that the country that first of all invented environmentalism and gave it to the world, and second of all did all the science originally around climate and global warming and presented that to the world, has been the country that has refused to participate in a constructive way to the solution.

Until it's understood to involve justice for those in poverty, a future for generations yet unborn, and a commitment to the rest of creation, it's unlikely we'll be able to overcome the status quo.

We have built a greenhouse, a human greenhouse, where once there bloomed a sweet and wild garden.

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.

We don't know exactly where all the tipping points are in the physical world for inescapable damage, but we're clearly reaching close to some of them.

We finally know where the red line for climate really is. After the rapid melt of arctic ice in the summer of 2007, our best scientists, led by NASA's Jim Hansen, went back to work and produced a series of papers showing that with more than 350 ppm (parts per million) of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, we couldn't have a planet "similar to the one on which civilization developed and to which life on earth is adapted."

We spend a lot of time playing defence against bad things. So, in the US, one of the focusses has been this huge Keystone Pipeline project, another has been the coal ports on the Pacific Ocean.