There’s a train leaving the station, one with a green paint job, and neither the United States nor Canada is on it. Not yet, anyway. China, meanwhile, is gunning for the conductor’s seat. Earlier this year, China released its latest Five-Year Plan. It made low-carbon industries a major focus, with a strategy that calls for seven industries—from electric cars to wind energy—to grow from 2 per cent of gross domestic product to 20 per cent by 2020. That’s a big call.

In many ways, China is an anomaly that is changing the rules of the game. It can call the fair and free trade shots in the World Trade Organization while domestically protecting its own nascent industries. It bankrolls cheap loans and subsidies, and grows national champions to compete on the international stage.

Even if the U.S. had the surpluses to replicate China’s strategy, its core values would inhibit it. This is simply not the American way. Yet the U.S., the driving force of the North American economy, still needs to be in the game.

What is the way forward? First, the U.S., along with Canada, has to break out of an old story: an oil- and coal-fuelled narrative that has denied real change. Within the pages of this story are the themes of high unemployment, house foreclosures, wages stuck at 1970s levels, environmental degradation and accelerated climate change.

Both countries, but particularly the U.S., need a new story of how they’re going to climb out of the doldrums, and do it in a way that minimizes the tax burden on citizens. It’s the same story being written by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development and others: economic revitalization driven by the vast investments needed to grow clean energy, boost energy efficiency, green our cities and build the industries that deliver all of the above.

The question is whether there’s a way to access the massive amounts of capital necessary to craft such a narrative.

Short answer: there is a way. The capital requirement to retrofit homes in the U.S. (selffinanced with energy savings!) is US$2 trillion. The capital needed to switch from dirty to clean energy over 20 years is in the order of $3 trillion.

Despite the market crash, the capital is there. The U.S. pension fund industry still manages $15 trillion and is always looking for investment safe havens. There are many ways to deliver those safe havens. Building solar plants in the desert that deliver a safe and secure return over 30 years is but one example.