I remember as a boy when the conversation on civil rights was won in the South. I remember a time when one of my friends made a racist joke and another said, 'Hey man, we don't go for that anymore.'

Politics has become a game of meaningless, mindless battles, conducted by unscrupulous methods and people, designed to transform even the most serious policy debates into sport.

If you look at the way all of the new reform movements dedicated to the public interest are living and thriving on the Internet, I do think there is still some considerable hope that the full participation of individuals in that conversation of democracy can once again restore the integrity of the way our democracy works.

The center of the earth is about a million degrees.

For a long time, the scientists have been telling us global warming increases the temperature of the top layer in the ocean, and that causes the average hurricane to become a lot stronger. So, the fact that the ocean temperatures did go up because of global warming, because of man-made global warming, starting around in the '70s, and then we had a string of unusually strong hurricanes outside the boundaries of this multi-decadal cycle that is a real factor; there are scientists who point that out, and they're right, but we're exceeding those boundaries now.

The signs that the world is spinning out of kilter are increasingly difficult to misinterpret. The question is how to convince enough people to join a critical mass of urgent opinion, in the U.S. and the rest of the world.

I think the cost of energy will come down when we make this transition to renewable energy.