The National Academy of Sciences would be unable to give a unanimous decision if asked whether the sun would rise tomorrow.

Your children should have it impressed upon them that their adult life-style will bear very little resemblance to yours and that they should now be acquiring knowledge, skills, values, and tastes that will sustain them in less materially affluent circumstances. On the other hand, the fresh insights and imaginations of your children may help you find a viable future while there's still time.

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.

There's no question at all that the population explosion will come to an end. The two basic choices are it'll come to an end because we control our reproduction, and in many areas we have started to do so, or we'll end up with a high death rate. You have to take a personal moral stand on this.

I kind of like carbon taxes because we already know how to apply them. We already have apparatus in place. When we talk about these other solutions - like a billion tons of iron filings in the ocean or putting sunshades between us and the sun - they're huge. We have no idea if they will work. We have no idea what their nasty consequences might be. And it's unlikely we can do them anyway.

We ought to take good care of everybody we have on the planet, but we ought to regulate the rate at which people join us. The old saying is, "It's the top of the ninth inning, and humanity has been hitting nature hard, but you've always got to remember that nature bats last."

After The Bomb we developed a fairly good system for moving food around and have avoided the kind of massive famines that attract the media. Although of course we've had a fair number of them, particularly in Africa, since The Bomb was written. But we have had a steady level of attrition of malnutrition and malnutrition-related disease. Probably something on the order of 5 to 10 million people starve to death each year, but they're spread out; they're not dramatic news events.