The easiest way to make something cool is to get cool people to do it. Part of this might mean the president has to forget tensions with opponents, or people like Arnold Schwarzenegger who has actually been decent with oil issues. Maybe he needs to pull some of the cool people in and make them model the right behaviors.

I suppose I'd characterize myself as having a faith-based optimism. My faith is parental and Darwinian.

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

We presently have the technology ... fuel cells, solar cells, hydrogen ... the opportunities are amazing for clean energy.

An acre of windy prairie could produce between $4,000 and 10,000 worth of electricity per year - which is far more than the value of the land's crop of corn or wheat.

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.

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.