Deeper state intervention in an economy means that bureaucratic waste, inefficiency and corruption are more likely to hold back growth.

I think that the environment is very a complicated question. I am very sympathetic to people who support the environment who live in the United States. I am very sympathetic to people who don't support the environment who live in a very poor country.

The developed world should neither shelter nor militarily destabilize authoritarian regimes unless those regimes represent an imminent threat to the national security of other states. Developed states should instead work to create the conditions most favorable for a closed regime's safe passage through the least stable segment of the J curve however and whenever the slide toward instability comes. And developed states should minimize the risk these states pose the rest of the world as their transition toward modernity begins.

Climate is a global issue. Coal is still the energy that is being used more than anything else to make electricity. The United States is using less as we're turning more to gas. But, around the world, that's what they're using.

It's very hard for someone who makes $1,000 a year or some who makes less than $1 a day to care about the environment.

Strong states and blocs of strong states are the only source of power and legitimacy capable of driving an international agenda in today's world.

I was fifteen in college at Tulane. I lied about my age in college so that I could be normal socially. So that girls would go out with me and stuff like that. I just said I was normal age.