This study underscores the need to take swift, meaningful actions at home and abroad to address climate change.

Voluntary programs that are aimed at reducing emissions...are offset by the growth because there are no requirements overall.

We're going to need all forms of energy production, including more coal and nuclear. Despite the Bush administration's support for clean coal technologies, the US is not investing anywhere near what will be needed to make this work.

The picture they paint ? much higher sea levels with mind-boggling implications for entire communities, populations, and economies ? is sobering. It's hard to imagine how governments and individuals will cope with sea level rising at rates of up to a meter per century.

It is going to be a piecemeal approach, people are not going to know what their regulatory commitments are from one state to another. And you are then going to have different product standards in different states. It just doesn't make sense. We need a federal policy and that is what we are trying to promote.

As of now, we don't even have required reporting in this country of greenhouse gas emissions. The program would work much in same way as cap-and-trade we have with the acid rain program that controls sulfur dioxide emissions in this country.

The report represents a pragmatic and meaningful action plan to reduce emissions.

Improving energy efficiency is the easiest thing that we could do and companies tell us cost savings usually result from those improvements.

We hear all the time when we go up to the Hill and start talking to congressmen that they don't hear from their constituents [about global warming], That when they go to town hall meetings and reach out to their constituents they hear about schools, they hear about crime.