Americans have proven our ingenuity time and again. We invented the modern automobile, we put planes in the air, we landed rockets on the moon.

But despite our technological know-how, America's energy practices are stuck in the last century.

• Eighty years after the Model T got 25 miles to a gallon of gas, American-made cars average 24.6 miles to the gallon.
• More than half of America's electricity still comes from coal-fired power plants, many dating back to the Eisenhower, Truman, and Roosevelt days.

We have the vision and means to revitalize America with new energy solutions, but a few powerful corporations -- and the politicians who protect them -- are holding us back. Thanks to their dirty, outdated approaches, our economy is stalled and our manufacturing base is dying. We are addicted to oil, making us vulnerable to terrorist attacks and ballooning the trade deficit. We breathe air so dirty that it kills more than 60,000 Americans prematurely each year, and our power plants and cars churn out record levels of global warming pollution, promising floods, wildfires and billions of dollars diverted to handle the fallout.

America shouldn't be handcuffed by polluting naysayers. We have the ability right now to harness clean, efficient energy here at home. Technologies exist today to produce cars that burn less gas, generate electricity from wind and sun, clean up power plants, create appliances and entire buildings that use less power, and create new markets for American farmers by growing biofuels.

It took us 10 years to send a man to the moon. It took another decade or so to go from typewriters to palm pilots. We can go from old energy to new energy in a decade if we demand that our leaders in Washington pass mandatory limits on global warming pollution and set American innovation free with investments in clean, efficient energy.