There's no higher honor, in my estimation, than being asked to serve in the White House.

The chief moral obligation of the 21st Century is to build a green economy that is strong enough to lift people out of poverty. Those communities that were locked out of the last century's pollution-based economy must be locked into the new, clean and renewable economy. Our youth need green-collar jobs, not jails.

We should use the transition to a better energy strategy as an opportunity to create a better economy and a better country all around.

Little kids sing a song called "America the Beautiful." They sing a song called "This Land Is Your Land, This Land Is My Land." To me, those songs are not just nice little ditties. They are marching orders. They are commandments that we must protect America's beauty from the clear-cutters, the strip-miners, the oil spillers. They are pledges we have made. They are promises to keep.

I do feel kind of like I have a split identity in that there's Van Jones, who has this big public role and tries to inspire millions of people to do new stuff together. And then there's just me: a pretty quiet, shy, retiring person.

It is extremely disappointing to me to see that even now when leading Democrats and even military veterans try to make our energy future an area of common ground and not a battleground, they are still being rebuffed by dirty energy devotees in both parties and undermined overall by the polluter lobby.

You had a socialist get 47 percent of the votes in the Democratic primary: Bernie Sanders. You have an outright white nationalist populist [Donald Trump] who is now in the White House with an authoritarian strongman who has no regard for facts, no regard for tradition, and no regard for the Constitution. That is what you get when you import third world conditions. You get third world politics, and that's where we are now.