You come to this topic as investors, I come to it as a storyteller, but we have a common interest: radically scaling up the use and adoption of clean technologies. And we face a common question: How do we make mainstream Americans care about clean tech? How do we excite folks around these technologies, conveying their extraordinary benefits and encouraging Americans to adopt them in their daily lives?

I interviewed President Obama after his 2004 senate victory and asked him how he shared one million votes with George Bush. He told me, to paraphrase: "I am a storyteller. I knocked on doors and told my story; that's how you change hearts and minds. Good politics, in short, is good storytelling." Good business, too, is to a large extent good storytelling. 

Energy in America is the most exciting story of our time. It has the narrative arc of Greek Mythology: Energy built the American superpower -- our cities, our military, our major industries, our infrastructure. It gave us mass production, freedom of movement, it defined our politics and our very identity. Now our greatest strength--cheap oil and coal--has become our greatest vulnerability, given the extraordinary environmental and political costs of these fuels.

Clean-tech gives us the power to transform a tragedy-in-the-making into the greatest comeback story of all time. It's American ingenuity that got us into this mess, and it's American ingenuity that will get us out of it.