Extreme violence has a way of preventing us from seeing the interests it serves.

It seems to me that our problem has a lot less to do with the mechanics of solar power than the politics of human power—specifically whether there can be a shift in who wields it, a shift away from corporations and toward communities, which in turn depends on whether or not the great many people who are getting a rotten deal under our current system can build a determined and diverse enough social force to change the balance of power.

And most of all, it means continually drawing connections among these seemingly disparate struggles—asserting, for instance, that the logic that would cut pensions, food stamps, and health care before increasing taxes on the rich is the same logic that would blast the bedrock of the earth to get the last vapors of gas and the last drops of oil before making the shift to renewable energy.

I do think that at this moment in late capitalism it is easier in our minds to imagine raising Florida 30 feet to escape the rising seas than it is to regulate capitalism to make it serve human beings.

But we need to be very clear: because of our decades of collective denial, no gradual, incremental options are now available to us.

We can't leave everything to the free market. In fact, climate change is, I would argue, the greatest single free-market failure. This is what happens when you don't regulate corporations and you allow them to treat the atmosphere as an open sewer.

Our enslavement to oil has required the repression of millions of Arab people. As they shake off their bonds, so must we.