What we've often seen is that when we Americans say, look, we've got to reduce pollution, business - some businesses complain about it, but almost every time, it's turned out to be easier and cheaper and accomplished faster, and they've gained confidence, and then we go farther.

I'm old enough to know that a red carpet's just a rug, and I've been able to enjoy the pageantry without letting it go to my head.

We need to put a price on carbon, and that's what cap-and-trade does and that's also what a CO2 tax does. As long as our current valuation in the marketplace tells us every minute of every day that it's perfectly all right to dump 90 million tons of global warming into the thin atmosphere surrounding the planet every 24 hours as if that atmosphere is an open sewer, then the individual actions are not going to solve the problem.

The crisis is a concrete threatening reality today. It stands to get catastrophically worse unless we take action before the accumulation [of] this global warming pollution reaches such toxic levels that the problem becomes bigger than we can solve.

The truth is that we're at a critical juncture in the history of our species and if we don't act soon, we could inhabit a world we don't recognize anymore. But the most important truth is that we are capable of stopping climate change before the worst of its consequences are locked in. The solutions exist - all we need is the will to do something about it.

We sometimes emphasize the danger in a crisis without focusing on the opportunities that are there.

I'm sorry I ever invented the Electoral College.