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.

Skepticism about the potential to achieve the kinds of breakthroughs we need has been a self-fulfilling prophecy.

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.

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

All of the barriers to innovation in the energy sector are arguments for a big commitment to public investment. Only the public sector can make the kind of long-term, common investments that we need to overcome those barriers to innovation.

Energy is a sector of the economy that has been particularly resistant to innovation. This is precisely the problem. It is why we are still dependant on energy sources that are 100 to 150 years old while virtually every other sector of the economy has transformed itself. This is why we believe that the faith that many environmentalists still hold that carbon regulations and taxes will drive sufficient private sector investment into energy markets to create the kind of innovation we need is unfounded.