When I first started studying climate change back in the 1980s, I was struck by how difficult it was be for people to understand this issue.

Philosophers are smart, analytical, and skeptical. For these reasons they are relatively unbiased.

Increasingly both environmentalists and animal ethicists recognize the enormous destruction caused by animal agriculture.

There'll come a time when airplanes are much more efficient when it comes to producing lower levels of greenhouse gas emissions, there'll come a time when we'll be able to offset those emissions much more effectively than we do now. But alas at the moment, flying airplanes is really one of the least defensible things that we do and it's one of the things that I indulge in quite frequently, alas.

People with long memories and a vivid sense of the past have an immediate understanding of politicians like Donald Trump. They are not surprised by the behavior of Google, a corporation that notionally (until recently anyway) espoused the slogan "don't be evil" and then runs over individual people and even entire nations in the pursuit of profit.

The Consequentialist trinity is typically regarded in this way: Bentham is crude, Mill's writings are full of howlers and inconsistencies, and Sidgwick was too smart to fully embrace Consequentialism. All of these great traditions in moral philosophy express strands of our moral consciousness and they should all be treated as research programs rather than as fully determinate views that can be leveled by a counterexample or by a clever argument.

Even if Bill McKibben were to become dictator, future generations would suffer because of the carbon we had already emitted.