Every sport needs its temple, its cathedral.

At the end of the day, no amount of investing, no amount of clean electrons, no amount of energy efficiency will save the natural world if we are not paying attention to it - if we are not paying attention to all the things that nature give us for free: clean air, clean water, breathtaking vistas, mountains for skiing, rivers for fishing, oceans for sailing, sunsets for poets, and landscapes for painters. What good is it to have wind-powered lights to brighten the night if you can't see anything green during the day? Just because we can't sell shares in nature doesn't mean it has no value.

American young people have got to understand from an early age that the world pays off on results, not on effort. Not everyone should win a prize no matter where he or she finishes.

We are entering a hyperconnected world where every boss now has more access, cheap access to cheap labor, cheap genius, cheap robot, cheap software, and then this world averages over. There is only one answer to that, and that is to get everyone as close as possible to some form of post-secondary education, it could be vocational, it can be liberal arts, it can be science and technology.

Even if America tomorrow - and it won't happen overnight - but if we did reduce our demand for gas and natural gas and crude oil by a significant degree, that does have an exponential effect on producers in the Middle East, everything else being equal. But if China's demand is growing and India's demand is growing, they are not going back.

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.

In China today, Bill Gates is Britney Spears. In America today, Britney Spears is Britney Spears-and that is our problem.