Climate change is a global crisis - one the international community and private sector must tackle together if we have any hope of averting the worst impacts on our health, our economies, and our communities.
Climate change is real, caused by human activity and already devastating our nation and planet. The United States must lead the world in combating climate change and transforming our energy system away from fossil fuels and toward energy efficiency and sustainability.
In 2013, I dedicated myself full-time to combating the very real impacts of climate change. Working across the country, NextGen Climate Action formed new coalitions and worked hard to make climate change a part of our national conversation - and across the country, we had a big impact.
We have a responsibility to first understand how climate change impacts all peoples of the world. Then, we must consider the individual and collective choices and actions that can move us toward a sustainable future.
We've known for years that to avoid the worst impacts of climate change we must work to end our reliance on fossil fuels sooner rather than later.
The more hardcore conservative you are, the more tightly identified you are with defending the interest of capital as an interest of the system based on hyper-competition, the more likely it is that you vehemently deny climate change. Because if climate change is real, your worldview will come crashing down around you.
The main message of Climate Revolution is that climate change is caused by the rotten financial system we've got, designed to create poverty and rip off any profits for a small amount of rich people. Meanwhile, it destroys the earth.
Change or be changed, right? And what we mean by that is that climate change, if we don't change course, if we don't change our political and economic system, is going to change everything about our physical world.
The solution to climate change is staring us in the face. It's energy policy. If we pursue a global clean-energy economy, we can cut dramatically the amount of carbon pollution we emit into the atmosphere and prevent the worst impacts of climate change.
The IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a group of more than 2,500 scientists) has provided the world community with first class assessments of the soaring temperatures the world is facing, the devastating impacts of these rises and the ways in which we can try and avoid the worst effects of global warming. We now know climate change is real and the hand of humankind in this warming is becoming clearer and clearer.
For market discipline to constrain risk effectively, financial institutions must be allowed to fail. Under optimal financial regulatory and financial system infrastructures, such a failure would not threaten the overall system.
So often we wait for the climate and conditions in life to be perfect before we feel safe enough to step forward, trust, and be our authentic selves. What we don't realize is that in order to create the ideal climate we are waiting for, we must be authentic first.
To put the world in order, we must first put the nation in order; to put the nation in order, we must first put the family in order; to put the family in order; we must first cultivate our personal life; we must first set our hearts right.
Now it is the least developed world who are not responsible for this climate change phenomenon that bore the brunt of climate change consequences so it is morally and politically correct that the developed world who made this climate change be responsible by providing financial support and technological support to these people.
Climate change - for so long an abstract concern for an academic few - is no longer so abstract. Even the Bush administration's Climate Change Science Programme reports 'clear evidence of human influences on the climate system.'
I'm concerned that if we don't do more to protect our open spaces and reduce climate change, there will be devastating and lasting impacts on us and future generations.