Here's the scientific community saying, fundamentally, "If we don't change our ways, we're screwed." And they got no attention at all. Even though the Union of Concerned Scientists put out this statement which was signed by more than half of all the Nobel laureates in science and another 1,500 distinguished scientists.

I'm sort of optimistic about what we could do, but I'm very pessimistic about what we will do. I can't tell you that Al Gore's 10-year plan is impossible. I'm old enough to remember the Second World War - if we had a World War II-type mobilization, we might accomplish Gore's plan. In 1940 we were making tens of thousands of automobiles, and in 1941 we were making tens of thousands of airplanes. We mobilized as a nation. If we get that kind of mobilization as a nation or globally, then we could solve a lot of these problems.

I don't like the idea of teaching religion in schools, and creation is not my thing, but that's a trivial point compared to saving the creation. I'd much rather have half of the people in the country be creationists and work really hard to save the creation than have everybody be evolutionists and be destroying the planet.

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

Sometimes I think the Congress feels that if you only decided tomorrow to switch to wind power that in two years we'd be getting 80 percent of our electricity from wind power. It's nonsense. Normally it takes 20 to 30 years after a new technology is demonstrated and deployed before it powers even 15 or 20 percent of the grid. There's this long lag time, and we haven't even decided which directions to go.

People have not made the connection that the more of us there are, the more greenhouse gases go into the atmosphere. The Chinese have. They, unlike us, have a population policy. The right wingers just don't understand that the country they're in is probably the most overpopulated in the world, the one doing most of the destruction, and the one with horrendously bad leadership.

The drilling idea is spherically senseless - it's senseless from whatever point of view you look at it. It'd take 10 years to bring any oil online, and it would probably go to Japan. It sure wouldn't help gasoline prices here. All the economists say gasoline is still too cheap in the United States anyway. So here we're having this huge debate over offshore drilling that is just straightforward nonsense, which won't surprise you.