I thought if the climate was heating that CO2 was the only forcing, and it would be late in the century before we had trouble. Now that we know about the other half of the forcing, it's obvious that the trouble is coming much sooner.

With taxes, if they aren't working right, we can change them with a stroke of the pen. It's basically a market-type mechanism. People make their own choices. You run the taxes, and you get the results.

To err is human, but to really foul things up you need a computer.

Historically, things were moving in a pretty good direction until the Reagan presidency. And then it all got reversed. The Mexico City policy was instituted - the idea of wrecking the environment for this generation's profit and forgetting about our gets got firmly embedded. I'm sad to say the Clinton administration didn't turn it around and the Bush administration, well, I think they're the worst administration we've ever had, and I used to be a Republican.

In ten years [i.e., 1980] all important animal life in the sea will be extinct. Large areas of coastline will have to be evacuated because of the stench of dead fish.

My first policy move would be to try to get a conversation going in the US about what people stand for and what we really want. Do we want to keep adding people to the world and to our country until we move to a battery-chicken kind of existence and then collapse? Or do we want to think hard about what really is valuable to us, and figure out how many people we can supply that to sustainably?

I thought if the climate was heating that CO2 was the only forcing, and it would be late in the century before we had trouble. Now that we know about the other half of the forcing, it's obvious that the trouble is coming much sooner.