George Orwell once wrote that a false belief sooner or later collides with physical reality, usually on a battlefield.

While President Bush likes to project an image of strength and courage, the real truth is that in the presence of his large financial contributors, he is a moral coward.

Throughout most of my life, I raised tobacco. I want you to know that my own hands, all of my life, I put in the plant beds and transferred it! I hoed it! I've dug in it! I've sprayed it! I've chopped it! I've shredded it, spiked it, put it in the barn and stripped it and sold it!

We ought to approach this challenge [of global warming] with a sense of profound joy and gratitude: that we are the generation about which, a thousand years from now, philharmonic orchestras and poets and singers will celebrate by saying, they were the ones that found it within themselves to solve this crisis and lay the basis for a bright and optimistic human future.

We have a planetary emergency. We have to find a way to create, in the generation of those alive today, a sense of generational mission.

There are people who say, "God is in complete control of everything that happens, and if the Earth is getting warmer, then maybe God intends that." Well, no. God intends for us to take responsibility for how we treat God's creation, and if we choose to use the thin shell of atmosphere surrounding our planet as an open sewer for 110-million tons of global-warming pollution every day, the consequences are attributable to us. And if you are a believer, as I am, I think God intends for us to open our eyes and take responsibility for the moral consequences of our actions.

Every day we put another 110 million tons of global warming pollution into the sky as if it's an open sewer, and it's still building up. And the scientists tell us it's a race against time. We've stabilized emissions globally now for the last three years, but they need to start coming down quickly. We've got the momentum, we've got the wind in our sails, we're gonna win this.