We are calling the time period we are in the Great Recession. It’s a pretty good name for headlines, for fear-based news reporting, and for making us all feel better about not having any jobs or credit. As in, it’s not just you; it’s everybody. The thing, though, is that impressive economic growth and ballooning financial markets is not the norm, neither here in the United States of America (no matter how hard we want to pretend otherwise…) nor in any other country. The truth is that modest growth or flat economic indicators are far more common over our history and the history of the world’s economy. And through all of that we have innovated and changed things, and when those innovations have come together they have created incredible spurts of economic growth.

Thomas Friedman, one of my favorite columnists at the New York Times, wrote an op-ed to that effect today called “Dreaming the Possible Dream.”

He begins: “The thing I love most about America is that there’s always somebody who doesn’t get the word — somebody who doesn’t understand that in a Great Recession you’re supposed to hunker down, downsize and just hold on for dear life.”

He goes on to detail innovative projects from two Indian-American friends of his that are creating and growing start-ups that have the potential to transform the clean-tech sphere: one in fuel cell technology and the other in clean coal. He continues: “Though our country may be flagging, it’s because of innovators like these that you should never — ever — write us off.” That’s a statement out of the norm for his column, as he spends a lot of ink writing about how China is whooping us in the clean-tech race (if you can even call it a race).

He goes on to write mini-profiles of Vinod Khosla and K.R. Sridhar. Khosla was co-founder of Sun Microsystems and is now operating Khosla Ventures, a clean-tech venture capital firm.

I interviewed Ford Tamer, Operating Partner at Vinod Khosla’s Khosla Ventures, back in September during the Always On Going Green conference in San Francisco- he exuded a sense of calm, purposeful hope in the clean-tech space. I left the interview feeling like whatever the next big thing is, Ford and the others at Khosla Ventures would find it.

And they may have something in Calera, which has reappropriated the research of Stanford Professor Brent Constantz, who studies how coral uses CO2 to create CaCO3 for their calcium carbonate bones. Essentially, you combine CO2 with seawater and you get calcium carbonate. Calera started spraying seawater into CO2 emissions from a coal demonstration plant and spray-drying it into cement or pellets. Those can be used for whatever concrete is currently used for. Imagine walking along the side of the road on our CO2 emissions. Impressive. (Not my choice for how to move forward as it keeps us using coal and the CO2 is still emitted, just sequestered, but still much better than sending it into the air.)

Friedman quotes Khosla, ““If this works, coal-fired power would become more than 100 percent clean. Not only would it not emit any CO2, but by producing clean water and cement as a byproduct it would also be taking all of the CO2 that goes into making those products out of the atmosphere.”

Sridhar founded Bloom Energy, a company that makes small fuel cells you can hold in your hand that can stack to power just about anything. The idea is that they can make energy out of anything with no waste. I don’t get it and neither does Friedman, but, as he said, Google, Wal-Mart, eBay, FedEx and Coca-Cola have all signed up to use Bloom Energy fuel cells. These are companies with pretty solid track-records of making sound business decisions.

These are the kind of projects that should get the $8.whatever billion in guaranteed loans, not the new nuclear power plant. This is what I’m talking about.

Photo Credit: davipt (via Flickr under CCL)