The shortest distance between two points, my geometry teacher told me, is a straight line. But if you're flying around the world, the shortest distance between two points is a "great circle."

In today's world, the shortest distance between where we are and where we want to be is a "circle of green." We all want to clean the planet, create jobs, keep our country secure and get our economy growing again.

I discussed this concept recently on a panel at Carnegie Mellon University that included U.S. Rep. Michael Doyle, D-Forest Hills, and U.S. Rep. Jason Altmire, D-McCandless, and was pleased with the number of people who stayed afterward to explore this line of thinking.

Humans have been burning things for a long time: wood, dung, coal, oil, gas, etc. And as their numbers have grown, the burning has increased. Soot, carbon dioxide, sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, chemicals and other undesirable substances have been belched into the air we breathe.

To add insult to injury, 70 percent of the oil we burn now comes from outside the United States, much of it from countries that don't like us, most of it financed by foreign investors. So not only does our air get dirtier as we blow greenhouse gases from our smokestacks and car exhausts, we also get the added whack of seeing our hard-earned greenbacks sucked out of the country to pay for oil -- and for the interest on the money we borrow to purchase oil.

The same financial battering comes from our importation of exotic metals such as lithium and cobalt, both of which are mined mostly in countries unfriendly to the United States or with unstable governments. How many Middle Easts would we like to create?

What we have now are straight lines: Money comes in, money goes out, pollution goes up.

Let's consider an alternative: a circle of green.

Let's start with federal stimulus financing to develop more renewable energy, cleaner methods of producing electricity, more electric vehicles, better ways to store energy and better recycling processes. These developments, in turn, would leverage private investment, creating new jobs and generating more U.S. greenbacks that would circulate here at home.

The R&D investments would then produce key products and processes to do things such as harvest renewable energy; store energy, both to help electric grids manage peak and off-peak usage and to improve off-grid power, mainly for vehicles; and revolutionize transportation with emission-free electric vehicles.

Here's where these developments stand:

1) The United States surpassed Germany as the world's largest wind-power producer in 2008, there are numerous large solar installations under construction and projects aimed at exploiting wave, geothermal and other types of energy are proliferating.

2) The United States is a hotbed of energy-storage technologies -- an example being my own company in New Castle, which is producing greener lead-carbon batteries for distribution worldwide.

3) Hardly a day goes by without a new electric-vehicle announcement from a big car company, a small car company or a startup company.

Recycling helps spin the circle of green at every stage by reusing such materials as steel, paper, plastic and lead. Did you know that part of the lead in your car battery was recycled from the batteries of your mother's generation, and that the lead in her car was recycled from the cars of your grandfather's generation? Lead is the most effectively recycled material in the United States today, used over and over without contaminating the environment. Our trash heaps are the Saudi Arabia of recyclables.

As we move around the circle, green technologies help clean the air and slow global warming, while creating jobs. My energy-storage company went from zero employees to 60 in less than three years. Leveraging grants from the commonwealth of Pennsylvania, the Department of Defense and the Advanced Lead-Acid Battery Consortium allowed us to obtain equity investments from venture-capital funds that specialize in green technology, like The Quercus Trust.

Take one more turn on the circle of green and you'll see that in creating new businesses and jobs, it also builds local, state and national tax bases. This should allow governments to recoup taxpayer investments over time while rewarding private investors with higher equity value and profitable loan pay backs. These rewards then encourage further new investment, and the circle of green continues.

We have been demonstrating this process in New Castle for the past few years and look forward to being an important creator of jobs in Western Pennsylvania for decades to come.

I hope my 11 grandchildren will have cause to thank us for starting this circle of green to clean the world while making our country more prosperous and secure. And that their grandchildren will have cause to thank them for keeping the circle in motion.