Does the US need something threatening to scare us out of our oil addiction and into action, to repurpose our hi-tech wizardry out of weapons and into just-in-time planetary rescue? Will growing awareness give energy a Sputnik-like jump start?

Christopher Lydon recently made these questions the theme of his radio program "Open Source." A podcast of the hour-long program is available at radioopensource.org. Here are Lydon's guests and a glimpse of their views.

Kevin Sweeny, Lecturer in socially responsible business, UC Berkeley
Sweeny says bad news about climate change can give Americans a sense of purpose and destiny. Increasingly, we understand global warming is a problem, but not as many understand that we need to do something now, not later. We must couple the bad news with the good news: there are policies we can adopt to change the course of climate change.

Bracken Hendricks, former executive director, Apollo Alliance
Hendricks said his article entitled “A New Prairie Populism“ in The American Prospect was about the politics of solutions. A new crop of political leaders are defining themselves using energy. They're evoking a shared sense of responsibility, values, and forward-looking investment.

There's a set of values that are about hope, aspiration, and having America stand for something. This could be a transformative moment in U.S. political history. Democratic governor Schweitzer ran very solidly on a clean energy ticket in a very Republican Montana.

(The Apollo Alliance is a political initiative to commit public resources to accomplish a goal that is important to the future of the entire population, just as America did with the Apollo space program.)

Robert Metcalfe, General Partner, Polaris Venture Partners and co-inventor of Ethernet
Metcalfe seemed to be on the program to plug Polaris's US$6.8 million investment in an MIT spin-off, GreenFuel Technologies in April, 2006. The company builds bioreactors that take flue gases from power plants and feed it to algae to produce biofuels. It is Polaris's only energy investment, and Metcalfe's seat on their board seemed to be his only avenue of insight into the sector.

Polaris just started investing in this sector, and doesn't see a lot of deals come across their desks yet. But, he says, there's a flurry of activity to get into energy. We've discovered a huge underserved market, with worldwide demand for cheap and clean energy. There is entrepreneurial enthusiasm gathering to pull together the technologists and the money to go after the business opportunities. Energy markets are huge, especially compared to information technology markets.

Metcalfe, an MIT alumnus, said he got interested in energy when Susan Hockfield, MIT's president, recently made energy one of the themes of her administration.

Public policy support required for breakthroughs?
Bracken said markets and capital will be the engine of innovation, but not in a vacuum. Policy matters a tremendous amount. Large public investments went into early breakthroughs when venture capital wouldn't have gone near them. DARPA created the internet; the Apollo space program created initial demand for computer technology; railroads opened the West. Each of these examples required a national consensus and significant commitments of public funding and would not have happened without them.

Metcalfe expressed worry at the notion that we'll develop a national consensus and decide to do this. The internet destroyed entrenched monopolies, AT&T and IBM in particular, and not with anyone's permission or consent. There wasn't a meeting in which people decided these monopolies would lose to startup entrepreneurs.

Sweeny admitted it's easy to criticize the Kyoto Protocol, but thinks of it as market research. The world is ready to do something about climate change. The Protocol isn't going to work, but all major countries except US and Australia have agreed that carbon control regulations are the right thing to do.

Sweeny asked why the U.S. government isn't pushing policies that help U.S. businesses get ahead of the curve, as opposed to having us sitting in the caboose.

Carbon regulations create markets where capital flows in to solve the problem. The costs of using dirty fuels come back into the pricing for those commodities.

Metcalfe pointed out that policies don't always work. We can't sit around waiting for policies or consensus. Kyoto countries aren't reducing their CO2 emissions. Companies are fleeing to countries where the regulations are less restrictive.

The environmental movement isn't required for this transformation. Enough is in place to get an environmental solution started without further political pressure and a green movement.

Sweeny responded that a few things are in place, but far from enough. The globe needs to level, and then reduce, its carbon output, and we don't have enough in place to do it. We need things like carbon trading, and stronger CAFE standards. The more policies we can orient toward a carbon-free future, the better off we'll be.

Brian Schweitzer (D), Governor of Montana
Schweitzer spelled out his program for reducing oil consumption. "Let's be very blunt here," he said, "We're in a war about oil."

We're importing oil from the worst dictators in the world and we've got to stop it. We have to rely on conservation for the first five years, and make conservation cool, as well as a national priority. Biofuels are the next step.

The third step is coal gasification, the governor said, with carbon sequestration in old oil fields. We can't get there without coal; we need to develop clean coal technologies and export them to China, India and the developing world.

"If you're expecting some sort of solution from Congress you're going to be disappointed," the governor said. These solutions have got to come from the states. We need some planks on the energy bridge to the future.

Fifty years from now we'll have a new form of energy. Today for the next five years we need to make conservation cool.

"We need cheap and clean energy, so let's get on with it," Metcalfe said.