If you look at my career over the past twenty years, I've always been trying to look around corners for low-income communities of color.

I would argue that we have a patriotic duty to move toward energy independence and clean energy. It is a matter of national security - energy security, climate security, economic security, job security, everything.

I've never launched any initiative or campaign that people thought was a slam dunk.

I cannot in good conscience ask my colleagues to expend precious time and energy defending or explaining my past. We need all hands on deck, fighting for the future.

Let's stop wasting billions of dollars on prisons, which send people home who are too often less capable and more damaged than when they went in. We would have safer neighborhoods if we spent the same money on true rehabilitation, job training, employment and entrepreneurship.

The reality is if you take any three people and look at their cellphones or blackberries and facebook pages, you can get to almost everywhere in the country, because we're networked together in a way that is incredibly powerful.

The question is: do we pay a little bit more now? Or do we pay a whole lot later? For the equivalent of a postage stamp a day for each American, we can put a price on carbon today that will send a signal to private capital to invest in the clean technologies of tomorrow. Taking a vast portfolio of new energy solutions to scale will ultimately drive down costs through competition.