That, to me, is a kind of brilliant environmental ju-jitsu - using the energy of the market and the profit-motive to get businesses to invest in preserving and improving natural systems.

If your incentives are set up wrong - if for some reason you reward people for behavior that's actually bad for your customers or your organization - then you're going to encourage that behavior.

We have climate change caused by greenhouse gas emissions, mostly from human power and transportation infrastructure. At the same time, we have 2 billion people who live in energy poverty.

Doom yourself to horrific climate change by burning all that carbon and releasing all that CO2. Or power down society, reducing total energy usage around the planet. One leads to ecological collapse. The other is a reversion, in many ways, to poverty.

We don't have good global policies in place for climate.

There are really two kinds of optimism. There's the complacent, Pollyanna optimism that says "don't worry - everything will be just fine" and that allows one to just lay back and do nothing about the problems around you. Then there's what we call dynamic optimism. That's an optimism based on action.

If you want to feed the planet and keep the forests we have, you need to be able to grow roughly twice as much food per acre around the world. How do you do that? New technology.