There is no excuse for this administration shielding information about Iraq and the fact that we have great difficulties there from the American people.

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.

When we design our national R&D programs, we ought to ensure a place for the small, the new, and the cutting-edge.

Tolerance is the value that was selected to put on here, and tolerance is as American as apple pie.

We allow it to be dumped into this community asset, which is our one and only atmosphere. So that has to change, and there's really only one entity that can do that. So we have proposed a cap-and-trade system to stop that unlimited pollution, to use the forces of the market to efficiently allocate scarce permits to allow CO2 into the atmosphere. That's just one of 500 things we need to do, but it's probably the granddaddy of them all.

Not wasting energy. It is the least sexy, but the single most important and always the least expensive. You would be very interested in a report by the McKinsey consulting firm that concluded that 40 percent of everything that we have to do to mitigate our emissions are net economic winners. They are cost effective and the most cost effective is not wasting energy. That's actually going to be the largest part of this whole journey, I believe - using less energy with the same beneficial results.

President Bush's proposal to focus our resources on sending humans to Mars is intriguing, but it is not the most compelling reason that Americans ought to focus our interest on the Red Planet.