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

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.

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

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

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.

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.