The more deeply I search for the roots of the global environmental crisis, the more I am convinced that it is an outer manifestation of an inner crisis that is, for lack of a better word, spiritual... what other word describes the collection of values and assumptions that determine our basic understanding of how we fit into the universe?

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.

Even though it's important for all of us to change our light bulbs and the vehicles we drive, it's much more important to change our laws and policies. I drive a hybrid and we've changed our light bulbs and windows and installed solar panels and geothermal ground source heat pumps and most everything else. But putting the burden on individuals to solve this global crisis is ultimately not going to be the most effective way to solve it.

No controlling legal authority

I remember as a boy when the conversation on civil rights was won in the South. I remember a time when one of my friends made a racist joke and another said, 'Hey man, we don't go for that anymore.'

The answer is to end our reliance on carbon-based fuels... If we succeed, we create booming new industries, wealth, clean secure energy and maybe we prevent the greatest disaster so far in human history, saving millions of lives while improving billions more. If we fail, basically it's business as usual while things slowly get worse all around us.

As human beings, we are vulnerable to confusing the unprecedented with the improbable. In our everyday experience, if something has never happened before, we are generally safe in assuming it is not going to happen in the future, but the exceptions can kill you and climate change is one of those exceptions.