“Oil companies are radical because they’re willing to alter the chemical composition of the atmosphere.”

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.

All things considered, the internet seems fairly environmentally benign to me. The last stats I saw showed you could do 1,000 Google searches for the gas it took to drive six-tenths of a mile. But the internet can’t substitute for real connection and community.

When you’re not putting a bunch of chemicals into everbody, people tend not to fly off the handle.

Thoughts are chemical. They can either kill us or cure us.

We’re not in the area where the alleged chemical attack happened. I said alleged. We’re not sure that anything happened.

At the end, I said [chemical weapons] is something not to be discussed with anyone.

We’re not sure that if there’s chemical weapon used and who used it. We can’t talk about virtual things, we have to talk about facts.

Actually, he gave false evidence [of chemical weapons]. In this case,[John] Kerry didn’t even present any evidence. He talked “we have evidence” and he didn’t present anything. Not yet, nothing so far ; not a single shred of evidence.

Bureaucrats are a pox. They are supposed to be necessary. Certain chemicals in the body are supposed to be necessary to life, but cause death the moment they increase beyond a suitable limit.