I am always a little skeptical on the water thing because I have been hearing that for 30 years, but one year it's going to be true. With the rising populations, Yemen could be the first country in the world, or Sana'a the first major city in the world, to run out of water, that's from Yemeni hydrological engineers and the United Nations. Sooner or later, all of these people, from 7 to 9 billion, all of them want to live like America, will be consuming so much more water that some of the societies will hit a wall without more sustainable environmental practices.

Optimists are usually wrong. But all the great change in history, positive change, was done by optimists.

If you don't have an ethic of conservation, you basically have a license to drive a Hummer through the Amazon.

I think that the drama of people rising up demanding their own freedom is one that resonates very deeply with America. I think that President Barack Obama has tried and would like to find a way to relate to the Arab Spring, but I think he also wants to be, rightly, very careful that we don't take it over. It is very important that they own this. He is trying to influence it this way but without, "We're so never going to go to the extreme of Iraq and putting boots on the ground again."

If we don't have a more serious energy policy, the difference between a good day and bad day for America from here on will hinge on how the 86-year-old king of Saudi Arabia manages...change.

I could see America playing a slightly smaller role in the Middle East but I would not see us abandoning the region and just say "Oh," like I said, "China, Russia, it's yours now. Global focus is just on our hemisphere." I don't see that happening.

I don't know what the average income of Muslim-Americans is, but Muslim-American immigrants of recent vintage, I bet they have a very above-average representation in professional and business occupations.