The following comments were excerpted from remarks made by Ted Turner at the Milken Institute Global Conference in Los Angeles on April 26.

ON THE FINANCIAL OPPORTUNITIES IN CLEAN ENERGY
It’s just as big a win as cable TV was going to be. People didn’t want three channels. They wanted a hundred. I don’t know what they’d do with them, but you like to have choices. We’re a country of choice.

This is such a no-brainer. First of all, if we don’t do it, we’re going to miss the greatest business opportunity of the 21st century, which is going to be clean, renewable, high-tech energy. There is going to be a lot more improvements.

Not only do I like wind and solar, because they are free and not depletable, but I want to see us do more work on geothermal, too. This is where the big money is going to be made. If we don’t do it, China and the eastern countries are going to do it. We need to be the leaders in clean renewable energy. Let’s move on. It’s time to move. Clean up the atmosphere. Save the environment.

ON THE BEST TIME TO DEVELOP AMERICA’S ENERGY SECURITY
We’re out of time now. We’ve got to start. We’ve got to stop doing the dumb things and start doing the smart things.

I’m putting solar panels all over my parking lot in Atlanta. It’s going to pay 70 percent of the building’s energy cost. And we’re getting a tax subsidy.

ON WASHINGTON
I love America. I’ll die for America tomorrow. I want to live for America. But our government has trouble handling more than big problem at a time. I ran CNN and the Cartoon Network, and decisions had to be made every day for both of them. And they were different. And I had hanging over me the knowledge that at any given time the Cartoon Network’s audience was twice as big as CNN’s. That made me wonder about our future too.

The playing field is tilted for coal and oil at the current time, and I want to get rid of both of them as fast as we can and get on to natural gas, which we have right here. But we’ve got to get there.

ON THE PICKENS PLAN
But I’ll tell you one thing – if the people in this room all decide they’re going to come out of here, and they’re not going to relax until we get this energy bill through Congress, pass it with the immigration bill or without it, just so long as we get a good energy bill that protects our children and our country and our livelihoods and our security – by God, the Pickens Plan will do it. And we can do it.

Watch the complete video HERE.

COMMENTS EDITED AND CONDENSED BY ERIC O’KEEFE