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.

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

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

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?

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.

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.

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.