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

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

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.

We know that things like energy independence, getting off oil, getting out of the Middle East, and creating jobs and economic development in the new clean energy industries of the future are much higher priorities for most voters than capping carbon emissions or taxing dirty energy sources. So why not redefine our agenda as the solution to those problems?

It is worth noting that virtually every alternative energy source we have - solar, wind, nuclear, and battery and fuel cell technologies for storage - resulted from public innovation and R&D, not private. The problem is that we haven't done enough of it, and we have done it inconsistently.

In the months after George W. Bush's reelection, a lot of liberals and environmentalists were ready to take a hard look at their political agenda, the Democratic Party, and the interest groups they supported.