Third issue, and again I think it is important to note, anyone can make a mistake and any administration can make a mistake once in a while, but this is just a long train of abuses, an unbroken chain of following special interests rather than the health of the American people.

All of the economic signals in the marketplace are essentially subsidizing the use of dirty fossil fuels and penalizing clean energy. There's really only one entity in society that can solve that problem, and that is government. And the air is a scarce resource.

Third issue, and again I think it is important to note, anyone can make a mistake and any administration can make a mistake once in a while, but this is just a long train of abuses, an unbroken chain of following special interests rather than the health of the American people.

Air is one we hold in common; it has a limited carrying capacity for pollutants and that's being used up by those who pollute the atmosphere. So we have to stop that externality. We would never allow a utility to put their coal slag in a dump truck and back it up to the city park and dump it in unlimited amounts for free. But that is exactly what we do with carbon dioxide and methane.

Because the sad fact is that the Enron Corporation and others manipulated with unfortunately great effect the energy market in the West Coast starting in 2000.

We had some major successes and we did so because the country embraced the spirit of Earth Day and embraced this concept that we have to have forward-looking, visionary environmental policy and energy policy in this country.

Back in the mid-1970s, we adopted some fairly ambitious goals to improve efficiency of our cars. What did we get? We got a tremendous boost in efficiency.