When people flirt with despair about the future, they are less likely to take the actions necessary to safeguard it, focusing instead on the short-term.

Now we have things that are obviously false, leading us to war, leading us to deny people health care, leading us to ignore the climate crisis. We have to restore the integrity of the democratic conversation.

Where solar energy is concerned - and wind energy and battery storage and electric vehicles and efficiency technologies - that is what we are now seeing. So, yes, I'm very optimistic, but anyone who works on the climate crisis has an internal struggle between hope and despair. I won't deny that, but hope has always prevailed in my outlook.

Winston Churchill aroused this nation in heroic fashion to save civilisation in World War Two. We have everything we need except political will, but political will is a renewable resource.

My parents were true believers in the efficacy of American constitutional democracy, and I was thoroughly inculcated with reverence for what we the people are capable of doing. The complication in that simple narrative is that as I got older, the Vietnam War shook my confidence in how our democracy was working. I ended up serving in that war, but it started with a lie, and I was very proud of my father for being one of its earliest opponents.

A zebra does not change its spots.

I'm a big fan of Bitcoin ... Regulation of money supply needs to be depoliticized.