You have to be able to generate usable energy without greenhouse gas emissions and you have to be able to do it cheaply if you want people to choose that approach.

You have to be willing to spend an awful lot in that R&D phase before you see the benefits. When you look at the companies that have really won customers over in technology - say, Apple and Google - you find that they spend billions of dollars on R&D each year, often spending that much on a product before they ever make a dime back in profits.

New technology lets you grow the resource pie, which is the only way you can get out between that pincer of rising consumption (as we end poverty) and environmental and natural resource depletion.

Agriculture is the #1 source of deforestation. By some estimates it accounts for 80% of the forests chopped down in the tropics.

Technology is incredibly powerful. And in many ways, the sky is the limit in terms of what you can actually accomplish with the right science and the right technology.

I decided five years ago that I wanted to truly understand, for myself, what the state of the planet was, and when I dug into it, what I found was quite different than I'd imagined.

TNC was once limited by the resources it could directly marshal to buy land. But teaching people a new idea is incredibly more scalable.