“The laws of Congress and the laws of physics have grown increasingly divergent, and the laws of physics are not likely to yield.”

I don’t spend a huge amount of time fixated on climate denial because I don’t think that their objections, though sometimes couched in science, are based in science. I think they’re based in ideology. And I don’t think there’s anything you can do.

We’d like to get the fossil fuel industry on the back foot for a while, having to deal with us.

The idea that China and India will just abandon climate action is not true, because they’re doing it for more reasons than we are.

Very few people on earth ever get to say: ‘I am doing, right now, the most important thing I could possibly be doing.’ If you’ll join this fight that’s what you’ll get to say

I did very much like [Barack] Obama’s attack on fossil fuel subsidies for fossil fuel companies. We asked for that in demonstrations and petitions, and now we’ll try to push it forward.

No one is strong enough – given the magnitude of the task, everyone has to step up their game.

I’m guessing the most efficient way would be to transfer an awful lot of technology, but also direct aid to deal with climate emergencies already underway. Hillary [Clinton] has already said $100 billion a year would be appropriate.

To me the analogy [to climate change] is… doctors worry a lot about cholesterol. And if you go to the doctor, and the doctor says “oh, your life would be happier if you ate a different diet and exercised” people pay no attention.

The Arctic and the Antarctic are melting quickly. We may have waited too long to get started. But this is a day for optimism because the battle is fully joined, and the idea that big oil is unbeatable is no longer true.

I think that it is impossible to think of a threat to social justice greater than what we are doing to the earth’s atmosphere at the moment.

It now appears that the fracturing of that ice is happening much more quickly than people previously thought, apparently at a slow melt.

According to new research emerging from many quarters that our continued devotion to growth above all is, on balance, making our lives worse, both collectively and individually

We celebrate the birth of one who told us to give everything to the poor by giving each other motorized tie racks.

Climate change is a huge problem, an almost insoluble problem, for two reasons. One is the habits of the West in terms of consumption. The other is the incredible iniquity between poor countries and rich countries on this planet.

We use the web to help people organize in the flesh, and then we take the images of those events and put them back on the web to make them add up to more than the sum of their parts.

A voluntary simplification of life-styles is not beyond our abilities, but it is probably outside our desires.

But that would put me on a path that would make me totally divergent from who I am. I don’t have to go through the heartache many other people go through, of figuring out what makes them “wealthy.” I know what brings me joy.

What most interests me is human connection, whether it’s on the street, in community, through music, storytelling, and shared experience. People tell me to be a rock cellist, make money, and give up on the activism so I can make more money.

We each appear to hold within ourselves a range of divergent views as to our native qualities.. And amid such uncertainty, we typically turn to the wider world to settle the question of our significance.. we seem beholden to affections of others to endure ourselves.

When you put off a task, you buy yourself time to engage in divergent thinking rather than foreclosing on one particular idea.