The Issue: Energy

The next president faces no greater challenge and opportunity than the need to increase the nation's energy security and confront the threat of global climate change.

Indeed, the president's actions in working with the world community to address global warming could influence the safety and well-being of millions of people in the decades ahead. Rising sea levels, flooding, drought and hunger could trigger human misery on an unprecedented scale.

More immediately, the nation's dependence on oil, some of it from unstable regimes, makes our economy vulnerable to the slightest disruption in supplies, from terrorist attack, natural disasters or trade embargoes. Crude-oil prices have risen 60 percent this year. That means billions of dollars were added to the trade deficit, sent to overseas economies and sometimes funneled to terrorists.

In a presidential election campaign where Republican and Democratic candidates don't agree on much, all candidates rally around the notion of energy security, usually expressed as a call to reduce America's dependence on foreign oil or to achieve energy independence. The issue demands a broader view, though: It's not just America's dependence on oil that's a problem. It's the world's. Growing economies are gulping more oil, but supplies are finite. That demand-and-supply imbalance threatens peace and prosperity worldwide.

The real challenge, then, is to find clean successors to petroleum, to power the economies of the 21st century and beyond. And with that challenge comes the great opportunity for the next president and America: to lead a clean-energy crusade.

The benefits would ripple through the economy, flow around the world and benefit generations to come:

• It would lessen the prospect that future presidents would feel forced to send American soldiers into harm's way to protect oil supplies.

• It would create thousands of new jobs, from the scientists conducting research to factory workers making solar panels and wind turbines to construction workers rehabbing homes to improve energy efficiency. (Most candidates recognize the potential for increased job creation and exports. Some have included proposals for training workers for energy jobs. Hillary Clinton says her plan would create 5 million jobs in 10 years.)

• Much as with the space race in the 1960s and '70s, it would spur innovation and technology breakthroughs that would lead to new products and whole industries not now imagined.

• It could be a driving force in upgrading our education system, from preschools through our universities, to refocus attention on science and math and overall academic excellence.

As dazzling as the possibilities, achieving them will require sacrifice in the short term. Alternatives to succeed fossil fuels already exist, but they're higher priced. What separates the candidates is their willingness to use the government's full range of incentives - and especially penalties - to bring about substantive reductions in greenhouse-gas emissions and increases in energy efficiency and conservation. We believe both sticks and carrots will be needed.

All Democrats favor a cap on carbon emissions and a trading system that will allow cleaner industries to sell credits to dirtier ones so they can continue operating as they work to ratchet down emissions. Two Republicans are open to this approach, too. In general, revenue generated from the cap-and-trade auctions would finance research and help poor families pay the resulting higher energy bills. The candidates with the most aggressive plans also support the idea of mandating increased vehicle fuel economy.

Beyond pushing a policy agenda, the next president should seize the opportunity to rally the country around a national mission.

Americans yearn to move past the divisions of war and polarized politics. With an inspiring call to action, everyone could feel part of this shared mission to make the future better, for our children and grandchildren, for America and the world.