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.

There's lots about politics I don't feel comfortable with. To talk about the politics of future ideas is impossible in soundbite form.

The Pacific Yew can be cut down and processed to produce a potent chemical, taxol, which offers some promise of curing certain forms of lung, breast and ovarian cancer in patients who would otherwise quickly die... It seems an easy choice - sacrifice the tree for a human life - until one learns that three trees must be destroyed for each patient treated.

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.

There are some bright spots, to be sure, but the internet is still in a Wild West phase, as was the case during the early age of the printing press as well.

Science is warning us that if we do not quickly reduce the global warming pollution that is trapping so much of the heat our planet normally radiates back out of the atmosphere, we are in danger of creating a permanent 'carbon summer'.

Airplane travel is nature's way of making you look like your passport photo.