What I want is natural gas to be a bridge to a cleaner energy future, not a dam against a cleaner energy future, not a dead end. To get this right, to get the most out of it, we not only have to make sure we exploit natural gas in a clean way - it's a challenge - but we also have to make sure that we are instilling and implementing all the incentives to win solar, nuclear energy efficiency that will make them continually competitive with natural gas in the future.

I think there are different kinds of elites. I think there are venal elites, and self-interested elites, and selfish elites, and I think there are visionary elites.

Big breakthroughs happen when what is suddenly possible meets what is desperately needed

Our president's latest energy initiative was to go to Saudi Arabia and beg King Abdullah to give us a little relief on gasoline prices. I guess there was some justice in that. When you, the president, after 9/11, tell the country to go shopping instead of buckling down to break our addiction to oil, it ends with you, the president, shopping the world for discount gasoline.

I am hoping, though, that many of them have kids, who, when they have a moment to take a break from their iPods, Internet, or Google, will explain to their parents running the country just how the world is being flattened.

Syria is on the back end of basically a decade-long drought. Over the last decade, farmers and herders have been ravaged in Syria forcing them to give up and move to urban areas. This has put a huge strain on urban resources, and it's surely one of the reasons for the uprising there.

The poverty fighters resent the climate-change folks; climate folks hold summits without reference to biodiversity; the food advocates resist the biodiversity protectors. They all need to go on safari together.