Wired: How bad do you think the U.S. economy is going to get?

Janszen: It's going to surprise people. The impact that housing is having on our credit system is just starting to be felt. It's not clear, in the absence of the concerted effort to make investments in the clean-tech sector, what geographies or sectors are going to pull the U.S. out of the recession.

What tends to happen is that policymakers survey this scene and say: "What are we going to do to get people working?" The focus on one sector of the economy can drag us out.

Wired: You propose several prospective sectors to do that, including health care and biotechnology, but toss them out. Why is clean tech different?

Janszen: Alternative energy and infrastructure is the only area of the economy that is scalable and politically expedient. I mean infrastructure in economic terms, so [that includes] roads, bridges, communications and the energy infrastructure.

Wired: You don't mention carbon dioxide emissions, anthropogenic global warming or the environment a single time in the Harper's article. Do you believe that there is the need for alternative energy because of environmental realities, or are economics or politics driving these investments?

Janszen: My own feeling, when I look at what would be entailed in digging tar sands up so we can keep driving big cars, is that I'd do everything I could to prevent that.

The first order of business is conservation. Real political leadership means putting together long-term interest ahead of short, and it's clearly in the long-term interest to look at the environment.

Wired: Is it possible to have an energy policy that promotes alternative energy without promoting a bubble?

Janszen: Absolutely. The whole mechanism of financing these speculative bubbles needs to change. What'll happen is that we'll revert back to how markets should operate. Capital will be much more risk-averse.

Wired: What do you see as the nascent financing and credit vehicles that could come up with the trillions of dollars needed to finance clean tech without creating a bubble?

Janszen: One way to do it is to put a floating tariff on the price of oil and gradually raise the price up to $200 or $300 a barrel. As long as you do it gradually, the economy can respond to it. That's the beauty of our system. It has responded very calmly to an increase from $20 to $100. The economy hasn't collapsed. It's definitely slowing, but it's not wrecking it. You could create a process that gradually forced a lot of relatively painless transition without wrecking the economy.

Wired: What types of infrastructure changes would be part of that transition?

Janszen: Transportation. The big capital-intensive effort is high-speed rail. You need government to get its act together to pull something off.

I'm also proposing public-private corporations that have the deep pockets of government but the obligations to shareholders of a private corporation. There are going to be market mechanisms, so you don't end up years late and billions of dollars over budget.

Another part of it is energy infrastructure. It's an archaic system with a lot of coal power. I'm suggesting a lot of nukes, but modern ones—pebble-bed reactors.

Communications is also a big part of it. If the high-level objective is to reduce the energy intensity of the U.S. economy, why don't we run fiber-optic cable to everyone's house? That will support applications to allow people to stop commuting.

It has to be a comprehensive, well-thought-out plan. We have to use less energy, period.