Former U.S. vice-president and Nobel Prize winner Al Gore is always saying that the Chinese character for crisis is made up of two parts. One part is “danger” and the other is “opportunity”, and I couldn’t agree more. Surely in a time of great crisis – and the economy and energy situation are crises – we should be asking some profound questions like, “How did we get into this mess?”, “What are our options for a sustainable future?” and “How much is enough?” It doesn’t make sense to simply shovel more money into a system that is so clearly defective.

The term sustainability has become so overused that it’s almost lost its meaning. It means living within the productive capacity of the biosphere without compromising its availability for our children and all future generations. So let’s think about energy. Fossil and nuclear fuels are non-renewable, meaning they will run out, so no society can think in terms of genuine sustainability if it is based on these fuels. Add to that the fact that nuclear and fossil fuels aren’t evenly distributed and often tend to be concentrated in geopolitically volatile regions, and that only creates more problems. On top of that, using fossil and nuclear fuels generates huge problems of global warming and radioactive waste that our children and grandchildren will have to live with.

And when you reflect on the explosive rise in prices for both fossil and nuclear fuels, you have to realize it just doesn’t make any sense to build a future around them. The sun radiates massive amounts of clean energy, every day, on almost all parts of the Earth. Plants use sunlight and carbon dioxide in photosynthesis to provide all the energy we have in our bodies, and still there’s lots of sunlight left over to power our electrical grids. The sun creates tides and the sunlight interacting with the planet generates wind that we can use.

A real sustainable energy future must be based on the sun’s beneficence. At this moment, rather than trying to extract every last drop of oil and gas from increasingly remote, hostile places or low-grade ecologically expensive sources like tar sands and oil shale, or commencing a program of nuclear energy that will be incredibly expensive and take years to get up and running, why not put a fraction of what is being spent on Iraq or banks into windmills and solar panels that will immediately start to put energy on the grid? It will create huge numbers of sustainable jobs.

We are at the very beginning of a revolution in renewable energy, and I believe huge breakthroughs will come from investing in more research and development. The energy crisis is a huge opportunity to focus on sustainability and the potential for clean energy and lots of jobs.