“The real negotiation is between humans on the one hand and chemistry and physics on the other. And chemistry and physics, unfortunately, don’t bargain.”

Certainly, packets of sea ice, in say the Arctic, which have failed to fully reform in the last couple of years.

In the States we’ve had by far the largest demonstrations in the last few years. The largest civil disobedience actions about anything in US history in the last 30 years have all been centred around the climate.

We’re not at the point of trying to stop global warming; it’s too late for that. We’re trying to keep it from becoming a complete and utter calamity

It’s off the charts – and if you don’t believe the scientists, ask the insurance industry, the people we pay to analyze risk in our society.

You can have a healthy fossil-fuel balance sheet, or a relatively healthy planet

If one wanted to stigmaitise, that’s how one would do it – lots and lots of people saying “we’re severing our ties”.

Probably nothing that we have ever managed to do quite equals the basic undermining of the physical stability of the planet on which most of the world’s poor people depend.

“Science,” of course, replaced “God” as a guiding concept for many people after Darwin. Or, really, the two were rolled up into a sticky ball. To some degree this was mindless worship of a miracle future, the pursuit of which has landed us in the fix we now inhabit.

Without a movement pressing for change, there’s little hope. We’ve got to work the political system to make this happen fast. The physics and chemistry are daunting. The resources on the other side are very large.

It is unbelievably sad and ironic that the first victims of global warming are almost all going to come from places that are producing virtually none of the problem.

We’d won the argument 15 years before, we were just losing the fight. And so it became clear to some of us that we would need to organise to fight, that we weren’t going to win.

I think we need to go straight at the fossil fuel industry.

We have to get our states to adopt what are called “renewable portfolio standards” pledging to use a lot of renewable energy by 2015 or 2020. We have to work with businesses and shops to get them engaged in the same way.

[The Maldives] they’ve become deeply politically engaged – just for instance, the president taught his whole cabinet to scuba dive so they could hold an underwater cabinet meeting along their dying coral reef and pass a 350 resolution to send to the U.N.

TV makes it so easy to postpone living for another half hour.

The habits of the West in terms of consumption.

They also encompass religion, philosophy, and biochemistry.

We are living in times when technology, biology and chemistry have created the possibility of killing in large numbers.

That was my gift having the ability to put certain guys together that would create a chemistry and then letting them go; letting them play what they knew, and above it.

You do see a few people and you are thinking of how that chemistry is going to work, but it’s not really fair to put people who are auditioning together in a room.

Even though he has no talent for chemistry.

I think at this point, there’s a certain bizarre chemistry between Jamie [Hyneman] and I that we can’t ignore a lot of the mechanics of, that we’re quite aware of.

Your chemistry high school teacher lied to you when they told you that there was such a thing as a vacuum, that you could take space and move every particle out of it.

I meet with ambassadors from all countries in my role as a member of Congress, and you always have better relationships with those you actually personally get along with. That matters.