We're not protecting the environment for the sake of the fishes and the birds. We're protecting it for our own sake.

There are really only two stories the coal industry tells: "Coal keeps the lights on, and by implication, you'll live in medieval, soul-shattering darkness if you don't let us do whatever the hell we want with the landscape and drinking water you public health, because there's no alternative."

The law in the United States, in every jurisdiction until about 1876, was that if a factory put smoke into the air, even one day a year, and it got onto a neighbor's property, the neighbor had the right to enjoin to close down the factory, and the courts had no choice but to do that.

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.

Corporations are a good thing. But corporations should not be running our government... They have driven the American economy since its founding, and the prosperity of our country is largely dependent on the free operation of corporations. But some corporations don't want free markets, and they don't want democracy. They want profits.

The journalists in America are no longer covering critical stories. Investigative journalism is gone. Foreign-news coverage is gone. The press is owned by five giant corporations.

We do not have free market capitalism in America; we have crony capitalism. There is a huge difference between free market capitalism that democratizes a country and makes us more efficient and prosperous and corporate crony capitalism.