"Great. Let's start with your reaction to Bush's environmental record. Abysmal. Worst record in modern history. Can you elaborate? What do you find most alarming? All of it. It's so vast. When you add it all up, it's a stunning assault on environmental common sense.

"You've proposed a very aggressive energy plan, advocating a Renewable Portfolio Standard that sets a mandatory industry target to produce 20 percent of the nation's electricity supply from renewable fuels by 2020. Can you tell us how, practically speaking, we are going to get from here to there, given that right now as a nation we're producing less than 1 percent of our energy from non-hydro renewables? Yeah, but in California it's 13 percent. California is the sixth-largest economy in the world. That's the full mix – hydro, geothermal, solar, wind, biomass, everything. In other states it's only 1 or 2 percent, but you can advance very quickly because there are enormous gains – both economic and environmental – to be made in many of those states. But we have to encourage the investments with incentives from a state and federal level. Wasn't that proposal essentially laughed out of the U.S. Senate as economically untenable? No. It was laughed at by the special interests who wrote the Republican energy bill. That's just the industry resisting. It has nothing to do with reality. The special interests come in and spend huge sums of money to get Washington to continue spending money on the old way of doing things. We spend incredible amounts of your money to do for the oil and gas industry what they could afford to do for themselves. And we shortchange the alternatives, the new ideas. They fight to drill in ANWR, they [take money away from] new energy – it's that simple. The reality is that you can achieve a 20 percent Renewable Portfolio Standard fairly quickly if you put the kind of money into alternatives that you put into existing forms of energy.

"You are thought of as an avid environmentalist and you've built a reputation as an outdoorsman. Can you talk about your personal relationship to the environment? What made you care about these issues and how do you practice environmentalism in your own life? My mother was a strong environmentalist. She passed to all of us a great appreciation for the world around us. She started nature walks at our schools. She took us out in the early morning and taught us about birds. She read us Thoreau and Emerson and later Rachel Carson. We were always hiking and walking and learning about the outdoors, so from a very early age I had a powerful sense of its importance.

"What about vices – like that Harley we often see you driving to campaign events? I don't consider that a vice. It's very fuel-efficient and economical and better than a big car. But emissions on Harleys are significantly worse than cars. Does that concern you? I haven't heard that about my Harley. But if it's a vice, it's one I don't think I can quit. Sorry.

"You have to bring business to the table and show them how it's in their interest and how you can work it in a way that doesn't put them out of business. If you do things without incentives, you can really hurt business people. That's why, for example, I've put forward a plan on fuel efficiency that includes incentives for the industry, not just mandates. Carrots and sticks. We have to have a reasonableness in the dialogue. We have to communicate to them both the imperative of doing these things and finding a way that can satisfy the environmental demand of doing it with their business needs – addressing how they will capitalize, what kind of technologies they will use. In some cases they may have a legitimate argument for how we may have to have some kind of federal assistance in the process. Take the Superfund example – you can adhere to the polluter-pays concept even as you help companies through the process. There are ways to get things done if leadership wants to get them done. You have to lead people to a better place.