We’re weeks away from knowing who our next president will be, but there’s one thing I already know with dead certainty. The president—whether he has an R or a D next to his name—must lead our energy revolution. It’s time to forge our energy independence once and for all. In fact, it’s way past time. Our security, our environment, and our economy are crying out for us to end our reliance on foreign oil.

This shouldn’t sound like news to anybody. We’ve known since 1973 that we are dangerously dependent on unstable and unfriendly regimes for our energy needs. Presidents since Jimmy Carter have called for “energy independence.” Sadly, we tend to change course whenever gas prices drop.

We cannot allow our energy policy to be dictated by the price of oil. But that’s exactly what America has done. We changed course. We wavered. We’re 96 percent dependent on oil for transportation fuels; a meager 8 percent of our national grid is powered by clean and renewable sources. That’s shameful. It’s unacceptable. To remain the world’s leading economic power, we must strive to be the leading energy power.

Denmark gets close to 20 percent of its power from wind. The Danes set a goal and stuck with it for more than 20 years, even when it wasn’t popular and even when oil prices were low. The same thing is true of Germany, with solar energy. And of Brazil, with ethanol. France leads the way in nuclear power—they use it for 78 percent of their needs. We’re falling far behind.

Luckily, our mind-set is changing. We used to make fun of environmentalists, dismissing them as a fringe group of tree huggers who wanted everyone to live like Buddhist monks. But no longer. We are at a tipping point. Today, corporate America is realizing that it’s sexy to go green and that it can protect its bottom line by doing so. There’s no industry more promising than alternative energy.

So let’s be green already. So far, the national conversation about our energy policy has been too much about words and not enough about action—especially not action on the scale we need. We should not be discussing whether to increase the amount of drilling off our shores or whether to tax the profits of oil companies. That’s all marginal stuff. We should be setting national goals and stimulating the demand for, and domestic production of, clean and reliable sources of energy.