A little less than four years ago, I was a bright-eyed intern in the Obama White House. The halls buzzed with hope, and optimistic predictions that we would tackle health care and then move on to the more challenging issues of climate change and immigration reform.

It wasn’t long, however, before the realities of the recession and extreme partisanship set in. The public’s disillusionment with politics grew almost as fast as the president’s gray hairs.

Obama’s victory on Nov. 6, though narrow, has offered a chance to reframe the debate. He has already promised that immigration reform will be introduced soon after his inauguration. Here’s why a climate bill should follow soon after:

1. Clean energy will grow our economy

Solyndra might have failed but solar is clearly here to stay. I know this firsthand. I work at Mosaic, an online marketplace for investing in solar, and I live in Oakland, Calif., which is rapidly emerging as a solar hub. I can’t get a beer without running into an orange-clad Sungevity staff member or a Brightsource employee giddy on the company’s recent $83 million raise.

But it isn’t just an Oakland, or even a California, phenomenon. The solar industry is one of the fastest growing industries in America, employing over 100,000 people. Employment in the solar industry grew by 13 percent in 2012. (Employment in the overall economy grew just 2 percent during the same period.) Wind energy, meanwhile, has provided 35 percent of all new U.S. power capacity over the past five years.

As my colleague Erica Etelson recently outlined, there are a number of things President Obama could do to support the clean energy economy, including following through on his proposed National Clean Energy Standard, supporting the creation of Clean Energy Victory bonds, and pushing for a carbon tax as part of the fiscal cliff negotiations (though this is unlikely). He could also push for the extension of the Production Tax Credit for wind power, without which we could lose 37,000 American jobs.

The bottom line is that clean energy is an emerging, rapidly growing industry that is producing quality jobs right here in America. Republicans like jobs, Democrats like jobs — really, who doesn’t like jobs? And while not everyone loves government subsidies, the truth is that America subsidizes the hell out of mature, slow-growth industries like fossil fuels and big agriculture. Why not move some of those subsidies into an industry that actually gives us some economic bang for our buck?

2. Americans of all stripes want action on climate

As a post-election survey by the American Council on Renewable Energy (ACORE) showed, voters in key swing states said that energy was a “very important issue” in their vote decision. The majority of voters in Ohio, Iowa, Virginia, and Colorado wanted to move away from fossil fuels and toward solar, wind, and natural gas.

It’s not hard to see why. As Matt Kasper and Kiley Kroh explained in a recent piece in Climate Progress, voters in Colorado understand that the Mountain West “boasts nearly unlimited renewable energy resources like wind, solar, and geothermal,” enough to create 71,872 direct jobs [PDF]. Voters in Iowa are thrilled with their booming wind industry that provides 20 percent of the state’s electricity and creates around 7,000 jobs.

And this isn’t just a swing state thing. Polls have consistently showed that the majority of Americans believe that our climate is changing (67 percent) and that global warming should be a priority for the government (77 percent). These polls were conducted before the Hurricane Sandy wake-up call that broke the climate silence that permeated this election and even led to Mayor Bloomberg’s endorsement of Obama.

Apparently the president got the hint, as he acknowledged climate change in his victory speech, saying, “We want our children to live in an America … that isn’t threatened by the destructive power of a warming planet.” (He also spoke about it at length in his first post-reelection press conference.)

But acknowledgement is one thing, action is another. Obama’s speech put forth goals of deficit reduction, tax code reform, immigration reform, and “freeing ourselves from foreign oil.” Though the last goal will hopefully include the aforementioned clean energy boons like extending the production tax credit for the wind industry, it will no doubt be a continuation of Obama’s “all of the above” energy strategy.

3. It’s the right thing to do

The problem with picking an “all of the above” energy strategy is that some of the options are, quite simply, bad. Dirty energy pollutes our air, poisons our water, and heats up our planet. How many devastating storms or widespread wildfires do we need to suffer through before our politicians realize that taking action on climate change is “worth it”?

I’ve traveled from Copenhagen to Rio de Janeiro and a lot of New York in between with SustainUS, a delegation of young Americans working towards sustainable development. But now, even as many of my friends prepare for the upcoming climate conference in Qatar, I’ve decided I’m done with U.N. conferences.

Mostly, they’re too depressing. I don’t have a good answer when people from around the world ask why the United States refuses to significantly reduce our carbon emissions. How do you tell someone from a small island state on the verge of submersion that tackling climate change isn’t politically popular enough in the U.S. to merit concern?

President Obama is a brilliant man who has managed to accomplish a lot in his first term, despite unprecedented levels of partisanship in Washington. This second term presents a historic opportunity to take action on climate change to grow our economy, address the concern of the American public, and ensure the continuation of life as we know it.

Please, Mr. President, don’t mess this one up.

There are two ways to respond when you watch the world’s leaders attempt to solve the planet’s most pressing problems and fail: You can despair or you can raise hell.

After watching the 2009 climate talks in Copenhagen collapse, many bright-eyed young people despaired, suffering through months of what can only be described as a “Hopenhagen” hangover. More recently, when the diplomats at the Rio+20 Earth Summit produced a policy document with all the weight of a fluffy pink cloud, we watched the cloud pass and decided to get down to business.

I attended Rio+20 as the communications coordinator for SustainUS, an entirely youth-run and volunteer-led nonprofit that helps U.S. youth sort through the alphabet soup of the United Nations and push for meaningful change at conferences like Rio+20. It was truly inspiring to be entrusted with the stories of young people across the globe.

For so many of us, sustainability isn’t something we do in our free time; it’s a way of life. It’s an identity that cuts across national boundaries and issue areas, an identity that’s gaining popularity under the term “ecological citizenship.” So it is all the more frustrating when world leaders can’t seem to keep up. On the second-to-last day of Rio+20, young people organized a “people’s plenary” to make our voices heard and then walked out of the conference center after symbolically ripping up the summit’s final “outcome document.”

Unlike many of the gray-haired negotiators, we can’t afford to let our system continue to fail. We’re coming of age in a time of rising inequality, staggering rates of global unemployment [PDF], severe declines in natural resources, and this fun little thing called climate change that even scientists funded by Big Oil can’t seem to deny. Many of my peers and I have come to see this doom and gloom as an incredible opportunity to change the way the world works.

I’ve seen the green economy lift up communities in my own work with Solar Mosaic in Oakland, Calif. Through our crowdfunding platform for solar projects, we’ve managed to save local nonprofits thousands of dollars on their utility bills while creating green jobs and clean energy. We’ll be scaling up the platform even further soon.

And I’m not the only one who has seen the need to change the way the system works. Reverberating through the Occupy movement that encamped in cities worldwide, the Arab Spring that toppled dictatorships, and now even murmuring from the conference halls of the United Nations, is the idea that economic growth — the topic that sucked up most of the energy and air at the official Earth Summit — hasn’t translated into increased well-being for much of the world.

In fact, while the final Earth Summit agreement contains some rainbows and sunshine about “recognizing the need for broader measures of progress,” the push for a new way of thinking about progress dominated discussions at many of the side events run by environmental and social justice groups. As many of the lecturers pointed out, there was a unique combination of factors that led to the formation of gross domestic product, or GDP, as the global indicator of choice: American hegemony after World War II, a strong focus on economic growth as a means of reconstructing Europe, a perceived abundance of natural resources, and the strong belief that economic growth would lift all boats. Clearly, we now live in a different world.

As the old adage goes, “what gets measured, gets managed,” and our sole focus on the production of goods and services has led us to a system that optimizes economic efficiency at the expense of our social and economic values. This isn’t a new idea. Decades ago Sen. Robert F. Kennedy pointed out that GDP (and its corollary GNP) count numerous destructive activities as economic positives:

The Gross National Product includes air pollution and advertising for cigarettes, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors, and jails for the people who break them. GNP includes the destruction of the redwoods and the death of Lake Superior … GNP measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country. It measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile …

Now, people young and old are beginning to push for a new framework for defining progress. The famous economist Jeffery Sachs gathered crowds at Rio when he gave speeches warning that by failing to account for the things that make us well-off and satisfied, our current metrics of progress will lead us over a cliff. Karma Tshiteem, Bhutan’s National Secretary of Happiness, lectured to hundreds of civil society members on how the tiny Himalayan country’s Gross National Happiness indicator can serve as a model for the world.

Surprisingly, even many corporations are jumping on board, recognizing that their sole focus on the economic bottom line is hurting both their reputations and the long-term sustainability of their business. Though we’ll need to stay vigilant for signs of greenwashing, by far the strongest commitments at Rio+20 came from the business community. Over 200 corporations made sustainability pledges through the U.N. Global Compact, which are time-bound, measurable, and are expected to be held accountable through public disclosure and annual reporting.

A few of the most exciting side commitments include: Microsoft’s pledge to become carbon neutral by the end of 2013, Unilever’s pledge to cut greenhouse gas emissions associated with its products in half by 2020, and Bank of America’s pledge of $50 billion by 2022 for clean energy and energy efficiency initiatives. The Consumer Goods Forum — a group of heavyweights like Coca-Cola, General Mills, Kraft, and others — have pledged to have a zero-deforestation footprint by 2020.

And though the commitments from civil society were clearly more exciting than anything the governments could come up with, there are key suggestions in the final Rio+20 text that young people, and civil society in general, must put pressure on world leaders to strengthen. Among them are strengthening the United Nations Environment Programme, which is currently one of the least funded and weakest U.N. bodies, creating clearly defined Sustainable Development Goals to replace the Millennium Development Goals that expire in 2015, and ensuring that the G20 follow up on their commitment to eliminate fossil fuel subsidies.

Though the negotiations might have failed to set ambitious targets for sustainable development, Rio+20 has given us a sense of our common cause and inspired all of us to work harder to put the correct systems into place to create the future we truly want. This time we’re not turning away in despair. We’re walking away determined to lead where our leaders could not.

Editor’s note: The original version of this story attributed the GNP quote incorrectly to President John F. Kennedy.

Over the past decade, the number of Americans who support the environmental movement has declined, with supporters increasingly split along partisan lines. On the other hand, most Americans strongly support developing clean energy, believe that global warming is an important issue, and regularly engage in behaviors that are good for the environment. At least that’s what we’ve told the researchers.

Gallup recently found that 83 percent of Americans want more government support for clean energy. Yale and George Mason University researchers found [PDF] that 72 percent of Americans believe that global warming should be a government priority. And another Gallup poll found that three out of four Americans regularly engage in environmentally friendly behaviors.

Apparently, many Americans are aligned with the environmental movement’s goals. We just don’t align ourselves with the movement itself.

So what’s wrong with the environmental movement? According to its more morose critics (who include a few of its former leaders), it’s dead. In my mind, it just hasn’t changed to fit the times.

I am a child of the environmental movement, the granddaughter of avid hikers who helped protect wild spaces and the daughter of ecologically minded parents who taught me the Clean Air Act along with my ABCs. So it is with all due respect that I would like to inform my elders that their brand of environmentalism simply isn’t working anymore.

The environmentalism of my grandparents’ generation was focused on preserving pristine wilderness, free from human interference. For my parents, environmentalism was all about the legislative victories.

In the 21st century, with 7 billion people to clothe, feed, and shelter, there’s little environment left that we haven’t altered. We’re changing the natural world and we will continue to do so. When the trade-off is between survival and preserving the pristine, survival will always prevail.

Of course, if we continue to degrade natural habitat at our current rate, we’ll be down to half the species of plants and animals that we used to have, and that world would be hard for all of us to survive in. And yet protecting wildlife is a hard argument to make in many of the pristine, undeveloped parts of the world where the local people live in poverty and rely on their natural resources to make ends meet.

At the same time, there are plenty of ways to survive in a more ecological manner. As I found out when I lived in Niger, one of the poorest countries in the world, environmental solutions catch on quick when they fit the needs of the local population. The women in my village loved getting more efficient cookstoves, not because they saved trees but because they saved hours spent collecting wood.

This isn’t to say that we can’t and shouldn’t take care of wild spaces and creatures. But we need to recognize that often the best way to protect wild places is to take care of people in a way that leaves room for the wild as well. There’s a reason that many environmental groups have found that the best way to stop poaching is to employ poachers as eco-tourism guides. When we make the economics align so that survival equals protecting the environment, good things happen for people and planet.

So what about legislative-focused environmentalism? Well, ridiculous politicking in Washington has turned even the most mundane issues (birth control?) into partisan fodder. This has resulted in only a handful of significant environmental victories in my lifetime, with all the signs pointing toward fewer to come.

On the international level, I’ll admit that I too was deluded by the promise of a regulatory solution. I thought President Obama would swoop into the 2009 U.N. climate conference in Copenhagen with a magic pen that would sign away carbon emissions — an act that the rest of the world would be sure to follow. It didn’t happen.

Where does all this leave the environmental movement?

The best way to grow a movement has always been to aim for inclusion and lead by inspiration. Many in my generation find promise in people-centered solutions to environmental problems that have gained traction in the United States under the catchall description of “green jobs.” Leaders of this movement include Van Jones, Majora Carter, Billy Parish, and many others who have made the case that being green isn’t just a way to protect the environment, it’s a way to revitalize our economy, culture, and communities.

Environmentalists take note: This idea resonated. It resonated for the same reason that so many “environmentalists” jumped ship after the recession. When we’re in survival mode, as so many Americans are right now, the last thing we want is something that will impede our fragile economic growth. Inspire us with the idea that environmental solutions will create jobs, give us some very valid reasons to believe it’s true, and we’ll jump on board. It might be a different ship, but the destination is the same.

So no, I’m not an environmentalist. I’m a rational human being, just like most Americans who live environmental lives. If we’re truly going to create a more sustainable and equitable economic system, we need to look past the divisions and understand that most of us are on the same side, regardless of the labels we place on ourselves, or choose not to.