The presidency is more than a popularity contest.

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.

We are close to a time when all of humankind will envision a global agenda that encompasses a kind of Global Marshall Plan to address the causes of poverty and suffering and environmental destruction all over the earth.

If the only tool we use to analyse what's valuable is a price tag, then those things that don't have price tags begin to look like they have no value.

The cost reductions for renewable energy continue downward in a very dramatic way. We're in the early stages of a sustainability revolution in the globe that has the scale of the industrial revolution but the speed of the digital revolution. And you see it with renewable energy and you see it with LED lighting, which takes a fraction of the energy for the existing bulbs. All new lights are going to be LED. Electric vehicles. There are a lot of changes underway right now. I'm excited by the prospect, and I look forward to working in the months and years to come to accelerate this transition.

Is there some magic wand they can wave on it and presto! - physics is overturned and carbon dioxide doesn't trap heat anymore? And when we see all these things happening on the Earth itself, what in the hell do they think is causing it? The scientists have long held that the evidence in their considered word is "unequivocal," which has been endorsed by every national academy of science in every major country in the entire world.

The heart of the security agenda is protecting lives, and we now know that the number of people who will die of AIDS in the first decade of the 21st Century will rival the number that died in all the wars in all the decades of the 20th century.