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.

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

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.

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

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

Environmentalists needed to stop imagining that they were representing a thing called Nature or the Environment, separate from us (e.g. humans) in politics.