I certainly would not want to be living in Washington, D.C. right now. Particularly, I wouldn't want to be busting my tail 18 hours a day in an administration where there isn't a higher degree of support for most of the things I believe in than I think there is in this administration. Times are certainly tough. At the same time, you'd have to be a fool to try to argue that many environmental laws don't have deep and abiding flaws, both in their design and in their implementation. We've created a bureaucracy that is enormously unresponsive to the public, to shifts in evidence.
Vested interests develop very rapidly.
Now there may be some really creative ways to use market forces that haven't been used in a largely regulatory-oriented environmental protection. Ways to send different kinds of price signals and use those things more creatively, in ways that the Republicans could be enthusiastic about, to build upon the strength of a market economy, instead of constantly having a fight between the regulators and the entrepreneurs. So that may be naively hopeful, but that's sort of the best outcome I can see out of this Congress, once they've sort of got their youthful testosterone spent, maybe we'll get down to trying to blend their ideas with the kinds of values that still are dominant values in America, that have to do with caring about the world that our kids are going to be inheriting. When you started Earth Day in 1970, it was modeled after the Vietnam war protests, young people taking to the streets and protesting what was happening to the environment. Today you don't see people taking to the streets that much-they're more likely to hop on the Internet to express their views.