I grew up on Lake Michigan during the PCB explosion, and I remember seeing the sick, dead fish with tumors, the weird deformed seagulls, the scum and the filth floating. We couldn't go swimming.

The technology is available to us today to begin the transition to 100 percent renewable energy. What is keeping us from making that transition is nothing more than misinformation, a lack of knowledge by most people of what is available, and an unwillingness on the part of many of our politicians for either ideological slavishness or something more self-serving, like major campaign contributions from the oil and gas corporations or from utilities who enjoy the monopoly they have on our energy systems.

Renewable energy fits well into the conservative mindset by allowing competition into the energy markets so that consumers have choice. The system as it is, with big utilities monopolizing the energy playing field or fossil fuel energy being given massive subsidies so that they are on a kind of corporate welfare, is the antithesis of conservative principles.

We'll engage in pretty extreme violence in the world but, you know, the one thing that comes to humans as easily as eating or breathing or sleeping, is sex.

No great undertaking ever looks like it's winnable. That only comes later and only if you are lucky and are willing to fight and have a group of folks around you that are willing to do the same thing, too.

It is a fact that, up to seven million people a year are dying from fossil fuel pollution. It is a fact that we are already dealing with the catastrophe of climate change in places like California, where people have been burnt out of their homes and where they are dealing with record droughts.

I think people ought to realize that if you're doing investigative reporting, you're putting something on your newspaper or on your website that no one can get anywhere else, and theoretically at least, that should make people subscribe.