We have to figure out ways to scare and entice our leaders more effectively than the fossil fuel industry has managed to scare and entice them. They've got the big checkbooks. We've got to have the big crowd.

The roof of my house is covered in solar panels. When Im home, Im a pretty green fellow.

I've spent my life living in rural America, some of it in blue state Vermont, some of it in red state upstate New York. They're quite alike in many ways. And quite wonderful. It's important that even in an urbanized and suburbanized country, we continue to take rural America seriously. And the thing that makes Vermont in particular so special, and I hope this book captures some of it, is the basic underlying civility of its political life. That's rooted in the town meeting. Each of the towns in Vermont governs itself.

We also have to engage - and I think this is important - in national politics because there is no way to address questions of this scale in the short time that we have to address them without engaging in real political change.

Other thing we need to understand is that the financial power of the fossil fuel industry has so far prevented even any minor progress. They have a sweetheart deal unlike any other business on Earth: they're allowed to dispose of their waste for free, to use the atmosphere as an open sewer. And they will do all they can to defend that special privilege.

Especially in recent years, the more and more we understand what we are doing, the more we have the science to tell us what we're doing, the fact that we continue to do it without taking steps to address it strikes me as, among many other things, irreverent in an extreme.

Katrina opened a good door and Al Gore went through it with his movie.