We don't make the investments we need to make, the sector fails to innovate, and then we conclude that it can't innovate.

As social values shifted through the '80s and '90s, as modern conservatism rose to power, and as the electorate became a good deal more skeptical of both government and environmentalists, these strategies, and the institutions that were created to prosecute them, foundered.

Making big investments to get off oil, making clean energy alternatives widely available and cheap, and creating millions of new jobs in clean energy industries is a winner with American voters and can carry the whole suite of policies that we need to address global warming.

After a brief couple of years in the late '70s, public funding for clean energy technologies dried up and has been on the decline ever since.

The great successes of the modern environmental movement in the '60s and '70s had laid the seeds of their failure in the early years of the 21st Century. They had built institutions filled with lawyers and scientists well suited to lobby policy makers who basically shared their world view. This worked well when liberals controlled the Congress and much of the federal bureaucracy, and when the politics of the time were more supportive of active government efforts to regulate the economy and clean up the environment.

The levels of technology investment in the energy sciences pales compared to the kinds of investment we make in the computer and bio-sciences.

Environmentalism has become a special interest, incapable of addressing large, complex, and global problems such as global warming.