Anyone believe the consultant-speak "knowledge economy" will motivate a hormonal teenager, expecting his Leaving Cert results a year from now, to stop thinking about sex, drugs and Bebo long enough to wonder if the grown-ups throwing around meaningless prattle like "knowledge economy" aren't completely full of crap?

The following sentence has inspired more study of maths and science than any other: "We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too."

That was John F Kennedy in 1962.

If you want to inspire people, give them a goal that can "organise and measure the best of our energies and skills". A goal so compelling that, without being bribed, begged, cajoled or coerced, we choose to do things that are hard.

Politicians don't need to invent a suitable problem.

One already has our rapt attention: to make practical the sources of energy that won't so change the climate as to make the moon seem hospitable, won't be a cause of war and won't leave us glowing in the dark.

This is the greatest engineering challenge in history.

Kennedy got a generation of engineers to send a man to the moon. This generation of engineers needs to save the planet without making us poor.

The task is so enormous that it might simply prompt cynical fatalism, not engaged optimism. But now that the debate about manmade climate change is more or less over, the task is not to convince about the existence of the problem, but the possibility of a solution.

Alternatives to fossil fuels face challenges requiring the focused attention of millions of engineers and scientists, such as:

Ethanol . . . your car won't be running on petrol derived from ancient plants for much longer. Soon enough it will run mostly or entirely on ethanol derived from plants of more recent vintage. But we don't want crops grown for food . . . maize, wheat, sugar cane . . . to be used for fuel instead.

Getting ethanol from non-food plants requires breakthroughs in research like that led by Dr Maria Tuohy at NUI Galway, to find an enzyme that can efficiently turn agricultural waste into fuel.

Solar . . . the cells that turn sunlight into electricity aren't cheap. In fact, electricity from solar costs up to 20 times per kilowatt hour to produce compared with coal, three or four times what it costs to produce from natural gas or oil. But the same nanomanufacturing technology that brought down the costs of flatscreen televisions by 20 times over 10 years and semiconductors by 1000s of times over 30 years are quite similar to what needs to happen to make solar cost-competitive.

If Irish brains can run Intel's state-of-the-art Fab in Leixlip, we can be players in setting Silicon Valley-style innovation loose on this problem.

Batteries . . . solar and wind are tricky for electricity because they're not constant.

Serious breakthroughs in electrochemistry are required to make batteries that will store power for when it's needed.

There is no reason why Irish maths and science graduates can't make big contributions to these efforts. As for an organising and measuring goal . . . there is no good reason Ireland can't lead by example.

Ireland should commit itself to beating Norway, Costa Rica and New Zealand at something they all claim to want to achieve in the next 20-40 years. Ireland should become the world's first carbon-neutral country, and do it in a way that grows, not shrinks, our economy.

Not because it is easy but because it is hard.

Save the world and get rich doing it? It's better than "knowledge economy", anyway.