First published in the Huffington Post, September 9, 2013

President Obama’s emphatic stances on climate change during his inaugural address were indeed welcome words. Most analysts are focusing on the administration’s ability to use new regulatory powers, largely through the EPA. But there are two other options that are currently underused and under-imagined.

First, patent pooling has been used since the 19th century to spur innovation in industry to support either a wartime emergency or a financial debacle. I believe that climate change qualifies on both counts. And the Securities and Exchange Commission has new rules that require public corporations to disclose their climate change risk. These rules are new (2010) and currently vague, but have the potential to begin the incorporation of external costs as well as long-term impacts into corporate P&Ls and balance sheets.

Farmers, most businesses, victims of recent extreme weather events (drought, heat wave, fire, flood), and the taxpaying citizens forced to cover the costs of these weather events all understand viscerally that something’s gotta change. And quickly. President Obama appears to concur.

It is time to change intellectual property rules so that competitors can cooperate and also retain financial protection. When President Franklin Roosevelt took America into WWII, he set tremendously audacious goals for industry and also called for national sacrifice to support the military effort. Many Americans and car companies especially bristled at this. However in hindsight, it is clear that this wartime effort not only enabled the Allied defeat of fascism but laid the foundation for America’s post-war technological and industrial dominance. If current government policy (all governments, not just American) prioritized renewable energy as the U.S. government prioritized military manufacturing in 1941, the world would quickly see a revolution in renewable energy technologies.