There really wasn't an environmental movement 30 years ago. The Sierra Club national office in 1969 consisted of one full-time volunteer.

f the government is going to put money into the automobile sector, it should break up GM and Chrysler as a condition of financial aid, and it should be even-handed in its treatment of start-up firms like Tesla, Miles, Fisker, and others. It would be terrible to kill the entrepreneurs who have taken great risks to bring new automotive technologies to market by pumping tax dollars into the behemoths that have done everything wrong for the last years.

As a student of conservation biology, I believe that characteristics with survival value will ultimately prevail. There is no survival value in pessimism. If you think failure is inevitable, that view will probably become self-fulfilling.

Asbestos, EMFs, and CFCs have given us a degree of humility. When yesterday's "triumph of modern chemistry" turns out instead to be today's deadly threat to the global environment, it is legitimate to ask what else we don't know.

By the year 2000, such renewable energy sources could provide 40 percent of the global energy budget; by 2025, humanity could obtain 75 percent of its energy from solar resources.

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

We need a firm cap on carbon emissions from fossil fuels. No coal, oil, or gas could enter the economy until the buyer had a permit. All permits would be auctioned by the federal government, and the number of permits auctioned would be decreased by three percent per year. Permits could be traded, but they could not be created out of whole cloth by companies that plant forests or dump iron filings at sea.