For too many years we've talked about energy independence and the problems of climate change while many of our brightest science and engineering graduates have gone off to Wall Street to invent ever more sophisticated strategies for wealth manipulation.

The recent economic meltdown offers an opportunity to stop talking and reinvigorate the economy by putting Americans to work rebuilding our energy infrastructures. It is time to start casting concrete and bending metal to create new wealth in the form of clean and dramatically more efficient energy and transportation systems.

If that is going to happen, government must do two things.

First, it must work much harder on creating the right incentives for private entrepreneurial activity and investment. For example, small distributed power systems, called micro-grids, can provide heating, cooling and electricity with roughly two times the efficiency of large power plants plus conventional furnaces and water heaters. However, private investors cannot legally build and operate such systems in most of the United States today.

Performance standards on appliances, buildings and vehicles can make them far more efficient. With a few notable exceptions such as refrigerators -- which, thanks to government standards, are now larger and cheaper yet use about one third as much power as they did 30 years ago -- government has been slow to act. At modest cost, new buildings can be made 70 percent to 80 percent more energy efficient, but that likely will happen only if there are standards.

And no private firm in its right mind will put large amounts of capital into controlling carbon emissions from power plants or factories until it is clear that the United States is going to have serious emission limits that grow tighter in a gradual and predictable way over time.

Second, rather than pour money into revving the economy by stimulating us all to buy more imported consumer goods from China, government should get us out of the recession by investing in key energy infrastructure, such as electrified urban and regional passenger rail, and technology to capture carbon dioxide so it does not enter the atmosphere.

Government also must dramatically expand its investments in research in key technologies such as low-cost long-lived batteries and energy efficiency. Together, infrastructure and technology will be the cornerstones of our competitiveness. Otherwise, when we get around to controlling CO2 after the recession, we will be importing Chinese technology to do it rather then selling our own.

While reinventing the energy system offers the potential to unleash enormous creative energy, it also presents a great risk of wasted resources and opportunities if we let our choices be driven by ideology and don't engage in serious engineering and economic analysis before we choose where and how to proceed.

To make sure we don't blow it once again with another program like the ill-fated synfuel efforts of the '80s (economics weren't right), the million solar roofs of the '90s (technology wasn't ready), or the corn ethanol craze of the past decade (unintended consequences ignored), the new president should immediately appoint a commission with serious technical, economic and analytical staff capabilities and is charged with doing three things in his first 100 days:

• 1) Identify a range of possible investment opportunities in energy infrastructure and perform a tough engineering-economic assessment of their present and likely future potential. For example, which technologies can best be advanced through deployment now (such as energy-efficient buildings, carbon capture and sequestration), which are better served through money spent on research (such as advanced batteries, photovoltaics, deep geothermal)?

• 2) Help the country think systematically and more clearly about where the objectives of energy independence and of climate policy may be in conflict and where they likely will align, both today and over the coming decades. For example, if we invest heavily in wind, but don't develop efficient power storage, what are the long-term implications of also having to build thousands of gas turbine power plants burning imported fuel to keep the lights on when the wind isn't blowing?

• 3) Identify strategies by which the nation can overcome or successfully work around key structural problems in the Department of Energy.

A presidential commission could get us off to a good start, but to make sure we don't stray in the months that follow, we also need a reinvigorated White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and a considerably strengthened technology assessment capability on Capitol Hill.

Building on the strength of a new generation of science and engineering graduates, committed to wealth creation, not wealth manipulation, let's put America's people to work redesigning and rebuilding our energy and transportation infrastructures to make them clean and self-sufficient.