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.

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.

If one wanted to stigmaitise, that's how one would do it - lots and lots of people saying "we're severing our ties".

After a lifetime of nature shows and magazine photos, we arrive at the woods conditioned to expect splendor - surprised when the parking lot does not contain a snarl of animals attractively mating and killing each other.

If there's horrible flooding in Pakistan or a horrible heat wave in Texas, we're no longer able to call it an act of God, or a natural disaster, or something like that, the way we could have through all of human history until 35 or 40 years ago.

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

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.