Remember when Clinton and Gore were in office for 8 years, and their brilliant alternative energy policy made fossil fuels obsolete?

Laws and effect | Gristmill: The environmental news blog | Grist

[Henry Farrell:] Clinton's basic argument was that the [financial] crisis was one of an overleveraged Wall Street system which emphasized the volume of transactions, and in which people were rewarded for chasing risky deals, and in which there were too few good investment opportunities. Money ended up being funneled into real estate that shouldn't have been. Clinton furthermore argued that if there had been a real clean energy policy, it would have created alternative investment opportunities in dealing with climate change -- because there wasn't such a policy, the money was "misspent." This last bit of the argument doesn't seem entirely plausible to me -- would there really have been enough investment opportunities generated by clean energy to suck up the loose cash sloshing around? -- but I'll leave it to those with more specific expertise to evaluate properly.