“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.”

Warm air holds more water vapor than cold, and so the atmosphere is about 4% wetter than it was 40 years ago. This loads the dice for flood and drought, and we’re seeing both in stunning abundance.

I think that so far the political and economic power of the fossil fuel industry has trumped all else.

I really like all music, but mostly Country, older R&B, and the good classic rock.

Pat Robertson had decided that global warming was real and we need to do something about it struck me as powerful evidence that the Holy Spirit is hard at work in this question.

I think I have felt most profoundly that in our disruption of the most basic physical processes of creation, we are engaged not only in the act of suicidal self-destructiveness, but also in an act of thorough-going blasphemy.

My persona on stage was always coming from a place of I know better than you and I’m going to be a little bit pretentious in your face with these sort of crass ideas.

There’s no happy ending where we prevent climate change any more. Now the question is, is it going to be a miserable century or an impossible one, and what comes after that.

Climate change is the single biggest thing that humans have ever done on this planet. The one thing that needs to be bigger is our movement to stop it.

I’m not sure I’m a very good source of advice since we’re kind of making this up as we go along.

Maybe that was a strange, personal job between me and myself, to show how overreaching I was being as a woman. The only way I could express that was by comparing it to the universe.

So far the earth has warmed about a degree Fahrenheit globally averaged. That doesn’t seem like an enormous amount but it’s unlike what we would have expected twenty years ago.

I have nothing against romanticism. I’m all for it. I’m helpless in the face of romance.

If [a student’s] college’s endowment portfolio has fossil-fuel stock, then their educations are being subsidized by investments that guarantee they won’t have much of a planet on which to make use of their degree.

There is nothing that will discombobulate and degrade [more] the lives of people near the margin on this planet. You don’t have to look much past New Orleans to see that. Who took the hit? Some of the poorest people in the U.S.

If I have an iPod, I’m good.

I think the same around the world. At 350.org we just trained 500 young people from around the world in Istanbul for a few weeks. We had 5000 applications from young people who wanted to be part of the training. There’s real hunger out there.

It’s no use trying to be different than you are.

Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly — they’ll go through anything. You read and you’re pierced.

Certainly some things that are very good can sometimes be used in a bad way.

Elixir’ means magical potion, so I wanted to depict the kind of bottle that was used in ancient times, but that looked modern and chic as well. I also wanted it to have a golden tint to evoke the memories of sands and sunsets.

There are moments when the inner life actually ‘pays,’ when years of self-scrutiny, conducted for no ulterior motive, are suddenly of practical use.

What is the use trying to describe the flowing of a river at any one moment, and then at the next moment, and then at the next, and the next, and the next? You wear out. You say: There is a great river, and it flows through this land, and we have named it History.

It’s no use crying over spilt milk, because all of the forces of the universe were bent on spilling it.

I get a little nauseated, perhaps, when I hear the phrase ‘freedom of the press’ used as freely as it is, knowing that a large part of our proprietorial press is not free at all.