It's very important that there should be cross-fertilisation between government and academia. Both parties can benefit from having a better understanding of how the other works.

I've never really had much of a career plan, and interesting opportunities kept cropping up.

Science and policy-making thrive on challenge and questioning; they are vital to the health of inquiry and democracy.

Enlightened self-interest from those involved in hydrocarbons should lead to the support of technologies enabling the clean use of hydrocarbons, such as carbon capture and storage, and not to the defence of deniers and cranks.

Look, very clearly there are things that need to be done urgently in relation to climate change, and of those the most obvious is to have an enforceable and equitable arrangement delivering deep cuts in emissions into the middle of the century.

The manufacture and running of all the world's computers, the toxicity of the hardware mountains that we currently dump on other countries; all this can be totted up on the environmental account of web-users and its authors.

We're still expecting capitalism to solve problems: 'Maybe if we sell enough oil, we can give some profits to an environmental agency!' Capitalism isn't a moral system.

I feel like I'm nothing without wildlife. They are the stars. I feel awkward without them.