Humanity is sitting on a time bomb. If the vast majority of the world's scientists are right, we have just ten years to avert a major catastrophe that could send our entire planet's climate system into a tail-spin of epic destruction involving extreme weather, floods, droughts, epidemics and killer heat waves beyond anything we have ever experienced - a catastrophe of our own making.

The global environment crisis is, as we say in Tennessee, real as rain, and I cannot stand the thought of leaving my children with a degraded earth and a diminished future.

To use a Southern euphemism, our space program has been snake-bit.

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.

In a time of darkness, you don't curse the darkness, you light a candle.

I feel passionate about solving the climate crisis.

Our democracy, our constitutional framework is really a kind of software for harnessing the creativity and political imagination for all of our people. The American democratic system was an early political version of Napster.