It felt like I was the only one who cared about the climate and the ecological crisis. My parents didn’t care about it, my classmates didn’t care about it, my relatives didn’t care about this. I mean nobody I knew cared about this and I felt like I was the only one.

The squandering of oil and gas is associated with one of the greatest tragedies, not in the least resolved, which is suffered by humankind: climate change.

As I’m traveling around, I meet many small children. And when I look at a small and think how we’ve harmed this beautiful planet since I was that age, I feel a kind of desperation, anger, shame. I don’t know what I feel; I just don’t know what the emotion is.

To shake your rump is to be environmentally aware.

I talk to fashion designers and say I want some money to save the rainforest, and they say, ‚Oh, I agree with you completely Vivienne. Yes, climate change, it’s definitely happening,‘ but they don’t feel that they can do anything about it; they don’t even think ‚Well let’s stop it!‘

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.

We’ve got to keep our eye on what’s happening with Russia and North Korea. We cannot lose sight of domestic policy, either. Healthcare. Immigration. Climate change.

The threat to the planet is us. It’s actually not a threat to the planet – it’s a threat to us.

The reason we should do a carbon tax is because it’s the right thing to do. It’s economics 101, elementary stuff.

Most emissions aren’t caused by individuals, they’re caused by corporations and states.

I mean, people aren’t continuing like this and not doing anything because they are evil, or because they don’t want to. We aren’t destroying the biosphere because we are selfish. We are doing it simply because we are unaware.

The effects of climate change are real and must be acted on.

Some people say that the climate crisis is something that we will have created, but that is not true, because if everyone is guilty then no one is to blame. And someone is to blame.

In Tanzania, the chimps are isolated in a very tiny patch of forest. I flew over it 13 years ago and realized that, basically, all the trees had gone, that people all around the park are struggling to survive. It became very clear that there was no way to protect the chimps while the people were in this dire circumstance.

We need enlightenment, not just individually but collectively, to save the planet. We need to awaken ourselves. We need to practice mindfulness if we want to have a future, if we want to save ourselves and the planet.

I thought my life was mapped out. Research, living in the forest, teaching and writing. But in ’86 I went to a conference and realised the chimpanzees were disappearing. I had worldwide recognition and a gift of communication. I had to use them.

Sweden is not a green paradise, it has one of the biggest carbon footprints.

I think there are more politicians in favor of electric cars than against. There are still some that are against, and I think the reasoning for that varies depending on the person, but in some cases, they just don’t believe in climate change – they think oil will last forever.

I have always held firmly to the thought that each one of us can do a little to bring some portion of misery to an end.

If you can’t eat it, shoot it, or wear it, don’t bring it.

Now, we put out a lot of carbon dioxide every year, over 26 billion tons. For each American, it’s about 20 tons. For people in poor countries, it’s less than one ton. It’s an average of about five tons for everyone on the planet. And, somehow, we have to make changes that will bring that down to zero.

You should be attacking the carbon emissions, period, and whether it’s cap-and-trade or carbon tax or whatever, that’s the realm in which we should be playing.

You could warm Mars up, over time, with greenhouse gases.

In California, they don’t throw their garbage away – they make it into TV shows.

There’s 20 companies that I have investments in – some batteries, some solar-thermal, one big nuclear thing. We need hundreds and hundreds of companies like that, so that in a 20-year time frame we really are starting to change the energy infrastructure.

Some scientists believe climate change is the cause of unprecedented melting of the North Pole, and that effects these very uncertain weather patterns. I think we should listen to those scientists and experts.

I threw my cup away when I saw a child drinking from his hands at the trough.

At Virgin, we have always backed the power of the entrepreneur and inventor to find solutions to tricky problems. Why should climate change and the battle against carbon be any different?

Our economic system, run for profit and waste and based primarily on the extractive industries, is the cause of climate change. We have wasted the earth’s treasure and we can no longer exploit it cheaply.

Climate change is a terrible problem, and it absolutely needs to be solved. It deserves to be a huge priority.

I want to use my position of leadership to help move along at a faster pace what I believe and know the Obama administration wants to do around the urgency of climate change.

Learning about climate change triggered my depression in the first place. But it was also what got me out of my depression, because there were things I could do to improve the situation. I don’t have time to be depressed anymore.

We are living in the beginning of a mass extinction and our climate is breaking down.

We can’t drive our SUVs and eat as much as we want and keep our homes on 72 degrees at all times… and then just expect that other countries are going to say OK. That’s not leadership. That’s not going to happen.

The symbolism of the climate strike is that if you adults don’t give a damn about my future, I won’t either.

Avoiding climate breakdown will require cathedral thinking. We must lay the foundation while we may not know exactly how to build the ceiling.

We have one planet in our solar system that’s habitable, and that’s the Earth, and space travel can transform things back here for the better. First of all, by just having people go to space and look back on this fragile planet we live on. People have come back transformed and have done fantastic things.

I remember when I was younger, and in school, our teachers showed us films of plastic in the ocean, starving polar bears and so on. I cried through all the movies. My classmates were concerned when they watched the film, but when it stopped, they started thinking about other things. I couldn’t do that. Those pictures were stuck in my head.

The shift to a cleaner energy economy wont happen overnight, and it will require tough choices along the way. But the debate is settled. Climate change is a fact.

If burning fossil fuels was so bad that it threatened our very existence, how could we just continue like before? Why were there no restrictions? Why wasn’t it made illegal? To me, that did not add up.

The public is strongly in favor of the Kyoto Protocols, so strongly in favor that a majority of Bush voters thought that he was in favor of it. They are simply unaware.

We need every person on Earth to acknowledge that climate change is real and encourage each other and our leaders to address the challenge.

When we have peace, then we have a chance to save the planet. But if we are not united in peace, if we do not practice mindful consumption, we cannot save our planet.

We could have saved the Earth but we were too damned cheap.

It’s not as though we can keep burning coal in our power plants. Coal is a finite resource, too. We must find alternatives, and it’s a better idea to find alternatives sooner then wait until we run out of coal, and in the meantime, put God knows how many trillions of tons of CO2 that used to be buried underground into the atmosphere.

People are going to buy cheap fertilizer so they can grow enough crops to feed themselves, which will be increasingly difficult with climate change.

What is the use of a house if you haven’t got a tolerable planet to put it on?

For way too long the politicians and people in power have got away with not doing anything at all to fight the climate crisis and ecological crisis.

We shouldn’t be saying ‚Save the planet‘; we should be saying: ‚Save viable conditions in which people can live.‘ That’s what we’re dealing with here.

‚Bellyache‘ is totally fictional. I like writing about things that aren’t real. The song is about not trusting anyone and then putting trust in yourself and realizing that you don’t know what you are doing, either. Or realizing that things you do with a group of people that you think are cool in the moment are ultimately all on you.

I want the politicians to prioritise the climate question, focus on the climate and treat it like a crisis.

In Buddhism, we talk of meditation as an act of awakening, to be awake to the fact that the earth is in danger and living species are in danger.

Would you bet your paycheck on a weather forecast for tomorrow? If not, then why should this country bet billions on global warming predictions that have even less foundation?

People are unaware of what is going on. When I talk to people, they know the basics, they know the planet is warming because of greenhouse gases… but they don’t know the actual consequence of that.

The thing that’s made me open my eyes to what was happening to the environment and climate was films and documentaries.

Nothing is being done to stop the climate and ecological emergency from happening and to secure the future wellbeing for future generations.

The main message we want to get out there is that climate change is caused by the rotten economic system.

By the time we see that climate change is really bad, your ability to fix it is extremely limited… The carbon gets up there, but the heating effect is delayed. And then the effect of that heat on the species and ecosystem is delayed. That means that even when you turn virtuous, things are actually going to get worse for quite a while.

When I was 11 I became very depressed. It had a lot to do with the climate and ecological crisis. I thought everything was just so wrong and nothing was happening and there’s no point in anything.

I think that once you fully understand the climate and ecological emergencies, then you know what you can do as well. And, of course, there’s a lot of things you can do in your everyday life, but we cannot be focusing on these individual things you can do. We have to see the full picture.

At places like Davos, people like to tell success stories. But their financial success has come with an unthinkable price tag. And on climate change, we have to acknowledge we have failed.