Well, again, a great question. I think it's essential that we link those two.
We're at a moment in which the model of the global economy that we were running showed that it was literally and absolutely unsustainable. In 2008 we saw a run-up on natural resource prices in everything from oil to bauxite to alumina to copper to cement. You name it. Virtually all the natural resource materials of an industrialized economy were in scarce supply and were being used as finite resources in a way that simply couldn't go on. That translated into what I think was an extremely fearful run-up on food prices, the return of food riots, the kind of demise of the green revolution that we thought was putting us on a pathway to ending world hunger. Along with this, there was this sense that the unsustainable trade deficits that the United States was running up, particularly with China, were somehow a healthy thing or a healthy model for building a sustainable global economy.
We simply can't go back to trying to recover from the current recession to re-create that same kind of triplex of problems. To do so I think really invites global and human disaster on a scale that none of us really wants to experience. We're being given, I think, a fundamental choice right now, which is to retool our economy by building it around sustainable technologies and sustainable energy forms that have the blessing of requiring us to make large enough investments that they literally can restimulate a global economy to get it back on a path of long-term sustained growth.
We need a really big galvanizing set of investments, investments on the size and scope of World War II that turned the Great Depression around, on the size and scope of things that we've done in the United States in the past by building the big national interstate highway system. The clean energy investments needed to change our economy fundamentally are of that size and scope. We can turn the economy around by letting that section of the economy lead.
Alternatively, look at the other sections of the global economy today and try to imagine what section of the economy is going to lead recovery. It's sure not going to be the banking industry. It's not going to be global finance. It's not going to be the housing market. It's not going to be in many of the other sectors that have run their course. Consequently, I think we have a clear choice to make, a clear investment to make, and it happens to be the one that's the best for the economy and the environment.