What the American family does not want is to pay an increasing fraction of their budget, their precious dollars, for energy costs.

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.

At Rochester, I came with the same emotions as many of the entering freshman: everything was new, exciting and a bit overwhelming, but at least nobody had heard of my brothers and cousins.

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.

Geometry was the first exciting course I remember.

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.

The biggest gains, in terms of decreasing the country's energy bill, the amount of carbon dioxide we put into the atmosphere, and our dependency on foreign oil, will come from energy efficiency and conservation in the next 20 years. Make no doubt about it. That's where everybody who has really thought about the problem thinks the biggest gains can be and should be.