I'm not much of a party guy so my husband, our laptops and assorted dogs spent last night  sprawled around our family room watching the election returns. We'd often speak over the drone of the talking heads to blurt out an interesting statistic from some website or another or to remark on how the evening was going.

But when Barack Obama spoke around midnight, we quietly watched the Democratic candidate transformed into the President-elect of the United States. And when Obama began his "yes we can," I found myself silently chanting along.

I chanted not because NRDC had endorsed the President-elect. As a non-partisan organization, we cannot -- and do not -- endorse candidates for political office. Instead my "yes we can" was aimed primarily at the thought that we now would have the leadership necessary to meet our energy and climate challenges, at building a clean energy economy by manufacturing plug-in hybrid cars, growing dedicated fuel crops and developing clean power sources like wind, solar and geothermal.

I thought yes we can unleash American ingenuity and regain our national competitive edge in this global economy. I thought that yes we can find the solutions to what President-elect Obama called a "planet in peril."

We can do all this through responsible governing and smart planning and by encouraging our new leaders to express an inspiring vision of a better American economy based not on elaborate financial transactions but on the production of cutting edge technology and the delivery of high value services.

And finally, I thought yes we can because I remembered the mailing we received from Rep. Patrick Murphy, our local first-term member of Congress who won wide re-election last night. His mailing featured a huge picture of a wind turbine under construction at a former U.S. Steel site in nearby Fairless Hills in Bucks County, PA. "Quickly," Murphy writes, the abandoned factory "has become a green energy hub, supplying the area with jobs that were lost when U.S. Steel stopped manufacturing at the site."

Over the summer, when chants of "drill baby drill" echoed around the country, many environmentalists were near tears. Being a glass half full kind of guy, I tried to remind my colleagues (or anyone else that would listen) of the often soaring rhetoric we heard from politicians of both political parties about transforming our national infrastructre for the clean energy economy.

Last night, as I closed the laptop and headed off to bed, it felt absolutely wonderful to know that the voters had put into office those who spoke most passionately about seizing the energy and climate opportunities before us. And then I smiled and thought, yes, we can.