There are a few obvious consequences and perhaps one subtle possibility. One obvious thing is that, to stimulate the economy, President Obama has committed to creating millions of green jobs that will leave a legacy - much as Roosevelt's public works did during the new deal.

Our goal is to turn solar electric technologies into a commodity business like computer chips, and make them ubiquitous in the built environment. I'd couple this with a huge commitment to fundamental research in nanostructure to goose the next generation of more efficient, cheaper, dematerialized cells. And if I'm truly czar, I'd emphasize silicon technologies, as that approach is the one least likely to encounter material constraints in supplying an explosive global demand.

America has the technology and resources to meet all its energy needs while safeguarding the earth's climate. The urgent question now is, 'Do we have the will?' At least one city does, and I'm proud to live in it.

I would love to see a fundamental re-thinking of whether we truly want to be the world's largest debtor nation, feeding an insatiable desire for mall-crawling with cheaply made crap from all over the world.

Build high-speed, electrified trains over the most-traveled corridors. It'sreally hard to power carbon-free airplanes, but electrified trains are much easier. We'll be a half century behind the Japanese, but better late than never.

Listen up, you couch potatoes: each recycled beer can saves enough electricity to run a television for three hours.

Earth Day gathered up those strands, and dozens more, and knitted them together in the public consciousness as "environmental" issues. The nation was pretty startled when 20 million people hit the streets. Congress, which had adjourned for the day to go back to its districts, was blown away.