Education in our family was not merely emphasized, it was our raison d'etre ... In this family of accomplished scholars, I was to become the academic black sheep. I performed adequately at high school, but in comparison to my older brother, who set the record for the highest cumulative average for our high school, my performance was decidedly mediocre.

Let me state what the official IPCC prediction is: Sea levels could go up as much as three-quarters of a meter in this century, but there is a reasonable probability it could be much higher than that.

Pick the right sized pot, don't pick a pot five times bigger, twice as big.

As the saying goes, the Stone Age did not end because we ran out of stones; we transitioned to better solutions. The same opportunity lies before us with energy efficiency and clean energy.

By the fourth grade, I graduated to an erector set and spent many happy hours constructing devices of unknown purpose where the main design criterion was to maximize the number of moving parts and overall size.

I approached the bulk of my schoolwork as a chore rather than an intellectual adventure. The tedium was relieved by a few courses that seem to be qualitatively different. Geometry was the first exciting course I remember. Instead of memorizing facts, we were asked to think in clear, logical steps. Beginning from a few intuitive postulates, far reaching consequences could be derived, and I took immediately to the sport of proving theorems.

A cap and trade bill will likely increase the costs of electricity. . . . These costs will be passed on to the consumers. But the issue is, how does it actually...how do we interact in terms with the rest of the world? If other countries don't impose a cost on carbon, then we would be at a disadvantage. . . . We should look at considering duties that would offset that cost.