There is also a great deal of behind-the-scenes pressure from political funders too. And by funders I don't just mean the fossil fuel industry. Many of those exerting pressure on our society to ignore climate change, oppose climate change legislation, and shut down efforts to develop a clean energy economy are doing so out of ideology, not just economics. In the simplest terms, many large industries don't want the government telling them what to do with their businesses and they don't want any restrictions on what they can and cannot do, which includes polluting our shared environment.

If you can frame climate change as an alternate religion, or as one more of those issues where the pointy-headed liberal atheist scientists are trying to discredit the Bible, then you've already got a ton of people on your side who are concerned about heresy, other religions, or teaching evolution in schools.

If we smoke, there's no magic number of cigarettes, or number of years, that we can smoke before we know we'll get lung cancer.

It's easier to deny the reality of the problem altogether than acknowledge that it is real.

Where I live, if I put solar panels on my roof I'm not allowed to sell that energy back to the grid. I can't change that restriction myself. I need our local decision-makers to fix that.

There's no question that natural gas is a lot better than coal or oil, in the sense that natural gas produces less carbon per unit of energy produced.

We have to fix climate change with the people we have right now, and to a large extent with the perspectives we have right now as well.