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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.