My beef with the alt-fuel people is not the renewable or alt-fuel ideas themselves. Sooner or later, there's no question we're going to have to rely on them. For me, it's an issue of scale.

Government at all levels in the USA right now is engaged in a quixotic campaign to sustain the unsustainable. We're determined to run WalMart, Disney World, the Interstate Highways, suburbia, and an imperial military by other means than oil. We'll squander a lot of dwindling resources in the process.

America does not want change, except from the cash register at Wal-Mart.

I believe most of suburbia is unreformable and will not be fixed.

The twentieth century was about getting around. The twenty-first century will be about staying in a place worth staying in.

I urge people not to think in terms of "solutions," but in terms of intelligent responses to the quandaries and predicaments that we face. And there are intelligent responses that we can bring forth. But when I hear the word "solution," I always suspect that there's a hidden agenda there. And the hidden agenda is: "Please, can you please tell us how we can keep on living exactly the way we're living now, without having to really change our behavior very much?" And that's sort of what's going on in this country. And it's not going to work.

The task we face is reorganizing the systems we depend on for daily life in a way that is consistent with the realities coming down at us.