We live in a world in which everyone wants solutions. But we can't find solutions if we don't understand the problems, and we can't understand the problems without knowing how we got here.

We need to use economic instruments such as carbon taxes, cap and trade, tax and dividend and whatever else to help incentivize behavior that will move us to a post-carbon, post-animal agriculture world, and make our societies more resilient to the shocks that are already baked into the system. But that doesn't make climate change an "economic issue."

One of the real dangers of our time is people's indifference to history.

Sometimes I say philosophers should be at the table because they're the only people who know that they're not going to walk away with big money to support their research or to fund their crackpot solutions.

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

What most forms of Consequentialism cannot do is require us to act in such a way as to make the world worse, yet many of the objections to Consequentialism purport to show that Consequentialism requires us to make the world a stinking, bloody mess. The ubiquity of these kinds of arguments shows you just how unseriously many of the critics take Consequentialism.

Some philosophers have begun writing sympathetically about predator elimination as a way of reducing animal suffering. From an environmental perspective this is somewhere between naïve and potentially disastrous.