It is extremely disappointing to me to see that even now when leading Democrats and even military veterans try to make our energy future an area of common ground and not a battleground, they are still being rebuffed by dirty energy devotees in both parties and undermined overall by the polluter lobby.

Donald Trump's going to start a war, he's going to start attacking immigrants or Muslims or Black Lives Matter or whatever. Because he's going to have to distract them from the no jobs.

We should stop calling ourselves environmentalists - and just call ourselves patriots.

Now, we can live in this little, liberal bubble bath where everybody's supposed to like everybody and do all this stuff and understand our pain and know our history. But that, maybe, works in your dorm, that doesn't work in the real world, and people need to get out of all that.

It's time to start bringing the congregations down to City Hall and to ask the mayors, the city councils and the school boards, "What's the plan? What's the local government going to do for us?"

The people who seem to us to be a very tiny elite, far off and mysterious, actually live in a fairly big world. The way they look at the planet is like they're looking at an index card covered in supply routes. We protestors had imagined ourselves this huge threat. But we were at best bemusing. To the extent that the people inside did care, it was almost like we were paying them a compliment-it reinforced their sense of power.

Now we stand at our own crossroads, looking out upon two futures: one with rising temperatures, rising oceans, and rising violence on a hot and strip-mined planet and another with expanding organic harvests, growing solar arrays, and deepening global partnerships on a green and thriving Earth.