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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.