“I think the world on the other side of fossil fuel is more local – the logic of sun and wind is diffuse and spread out, not concentrated like the logic of coal and oil.”

I think we need to think of lots of ways to communicate. And we tried some at 350. We organised what they called the largest art project in the planet’s history. We do a lot with art and music and things.

We’ve been in lots of places that I suppose, by Oxford standards, would be considered illiterate, but everyone’s completely conversant with the idea that here is a number, and that number is above it, and that’s too high. It’s not a very complicated idea.

In the States, I think, the syllogism goes like this: ‘free markets solve all problems. Free markets aren’t solving global warming, QED global warming is not a problem’. It’s not a very good syllogism but it’s emotionally comforting if you’re in that world.

The ability to write compelling emails may be the single most useful talent an organizer can possess.

The world is on fire, and I’m doing my best to help steer the firetruck.

There is a tendency at every important but difficult crossroad to pretend that it’s not really there.

We spend a lot of time playing defence against bad things. So, in the US, one of the focusses has been this huge Keystone Pipeline project, another has been the coal ports on the Pacific Ocean.

Look – every time is the wrong time and the perfect time to have a kid, and you just do it when you can.

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.

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.

The new discovery of a 3.3 billion barrel oil deposit off Norway’s coast cements that nation’s claim to being Europe’s second largest oil producer.

We don’t have to suppose we need oil, or governments, or anything.

She had had the pain; it had been like being boiled alive in scalding oil and not being able to die to get free of it

The media … is like an oil painting. Close up, it looks like nothing on Earth. Stand back and you get the drift.

Humanity must accept that the food, the raw materials, the energy, the scientific knowledge and so on, belongs to everybody, that it is given by Divine providence for all peoples, the rich nations and what are called the developing nations.

I wasn’t born into land or titles, or new money, or an oil rig.

Britain in the 1970s was undoubtedly an economic mess because of the oil price explosion.