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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

We can still cap carbon, but that needn't be at the top of the agenda that we communicate to voters.