Recently I posted about Thomas Friedman's new book Hot, Flat, and Crowded.  In it he argues that a Green Revolution is the next best bet for solving the climate crisis which will provide a new path to American prosperity, innovation, and global competitiveness.  

From the Publisher:

With all that in mind, Friedman lays out his argument that if we are going to avoid the worst disruptions looming before us as we enter the Energy-Climate Era, we are going to need several disruptive breakthroughs in the clean-technology sphere--disruptive in the transformational sense. He explores what enabled the disruptive breakthroughs that created the IT (Information Technology) revolution that flattened the world in information terms and then shows how a similar set of disruptive breakthroughs could spark the ET--Energy Technology--revolution. Time and again, though, Friedman shows why it is both necessary and desirous for America to lead this revolution--with the first green president, a green New Deal, and spurred by the Greenest Generation--and why meeting the green challenge of the twenty-first century could transform America every bit as meeting the Red challenge, that of Communism, did in the twentieth century.

Since the book was released, we've experienced the worst economic crisis since the 1920's.  This past Friday, financier and master speculator George Soros appeared on Bill Moyers' Journal to discuss his new book The New Paradigm for Financial Markets: The Credit Crisis of 2008 and What It Means. Though Soros seems shaky on the details of what a focus on renewable energy technology entails, his ideas about finance, along with Friedman's details on a Green Revolution provide a welcome and popularly emerging narrative of a new way forward.

Though others have written extensively about this convergence, notably, Amory & L. Hunter Lovins and Paul Hawkins in Natural Capitalism.  What is important now is that because of our economic situation, people are listening.