The end of nature sours all my material pleasures. The prospect of living in a genetically engineered world sickens me. And yet it is toward such a world that our belief in endless material advancement hurries us. As long as that desire drives us, here is no way to set limits.

Katrina opened a good door and Al Gore went through it with his movie.

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.

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

We're not at the point of trying to stop global warming; it's too late for that. We're trying to keep it from becoming a complete and utter calamity

"Science," of course, replaced "God" as a guiding concept for many people after Darwin. Or, really, the two were rolled up into a sticky ball. To some degree this was mindless worship of a miracle future, the pursuit of which has landed us in the fix we now inhabit.

Winning slowly is another way of losing. Americans are screwing up our health care system again right now. That's going to cause grave trouble for people over the next five, 10 years. There are going to be lots of people who die, lots of people who are sick. It's going to be horrible. But 10 years from now it will not be harder to solve the problem because you ignored it for those 10 years. With climate change, that's not true. As each year passes, we move past certain physical tipping points that make it impossible to recover large parts of the world that we have known.