We, the older generations, simply cannot leave a world for you, the younger generations, in which climate change impacts become ever more threatening to your survival. Still more public attention and action are needed. Solutions like renewable energy or energy efficiency need to fully power our collective future!

The fact that solar has gone down 80 percent since 2008 is astonishing. Wind is perhaps not coming down as quickly. Lack of storage - batteries - is a bottleneck. That makes it very difficult to put large amounts of renewable energy on the grid.

When you have a vision of where you need to go, it sounds utopian. But when you get to the tipping point, your understanding switches.

No architect should design buildings that import a huge amount of energy.

We have already used more than half of that budget. This means that three quarters of the fossil fuel reserves need to stay in the ground, and the fossil fuels we do use must be utilized sparingly and responsibly.

The fact is, when you talk to people, they know that something weird is going on, particularly people who are connected to the land or the water. They can see it. What perhaps is not so evident to them, unfortunately, is what the solution is. But whether they call it climate change or not, it doesn't matter. The point is, they can see there's something fundamentally weird going on here.

In a perfect world global emissions would have peaked already. In a semi-perfect world we will peak on Dec. 31, 2020. The fact is, that's going to be difficult. We know that it's going to get more and more expensive the longer we delay.