I was interested in the environment from when I was a little kid. I spent most of my time hunting and fishing and kayaking.

Those guys are doing the Koch Brothers bidding and are against all the evidence of the rational mind, saying global warming does not exit. They are contemptible human beings. I wish there were a law you could punish them with. I don’t think there is a law that you can punish those politicians under.

What polluters do is raise the standards of living for themselves, while lowering the quality of living for everybody else, and they do that by escaping the disciplines of the free market.

Listen, the environmental movement is not about protecting the fishes and the birds so much as recognizing that nature is the infrastructure of our communities ... If you're saying the values that drive the environmental movement are uncool and antithetical to America, then I would argue just the opposite. If you think being patriotic is not cool, I'd say that's not true either. I'd say the most patriotic thing you can do is to take care of the environment and try to live sustainably.

Now we are all learning what it's like to reap the whirlwind of fossil fuel dependence... Our destructive addiction has given us a catastrophic war in the Middle East and - now - Katrina is giving our nation a glimpse of the climate chaos we are bequeathing our children.

I don't even consider myself an environmentalist anymore. I'm a free-marketer. I go out into the marketplace and I catch the polluters who are cheating the free market.

You show me pollution and I will show you people who are not paying their own way, people who are stealing from the public, people who are getting the public to pay their costs of production. All environmental pollution is a subsidy.