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

We've made some heroic efforts, but the Earth as a whole is in worse shape today than 30 years ago, ... There's been 30 more years of greenhouses gases, species extinctions and population growth.

With time environmental issues got much more complicated. It is pretty easy, if you know what you are doing, to stop a company from pouring poison into a lake where kids swim. It is much harder to address all the myriad greenhouse gases emitted by different sources - from petrochemical refineries to hundreds of millions of peasants cutting down trees for their incredibly inefficient cook stoves.

The sunshine that strikes American roads each year contains more energy than all the fossil fuels used by the entire world.

These are not exhortations from overwrought extremists, but carefully phrased warnings from some of the world's finest scientists.

Obama wants to build such things as smart electrical grids and high-speed rail lines, which will offer big environmental improvements. Another obvious thing is that large-scale project financing is virtually frozen, so a lot of renewable energy projects are on hold. If the system doesn't get unclogged before the developers run out of cash, they will be cancelled. Money matters, and we are racing against time.

Zeroes are important. A million seconds ago was last week. A billion seconds ago, Richard Nixon resigned the presidency. A trillion seconds ago was 30,000 BC, and early humans were using stone tools.