As laughable as it is to portray oil, gas and coal companies — some of the wealthiest corporations in the world — as underdogs, the narrative’s Machiavellian brilliance should be obvious. For both the global fossil fuel industry and a conservative political movement underwritten by oil barons like the Koch brothers, the mythology self-servingly casts environmentally friendly alternatives as inherently ill-suited to free market economics. In the process, it convinces millions of consumers and entrepreneurs that even if they want to go green, they can’t do so in any sort of economically viable way, meaning they should just keep guzzling as much fossil fuel as ever.

But in an up-is-down political arena where being a millionaire is “struggling” and where pure unadulterated fabrication is now the norm, a recent spate of headlines are starting to show us that the true energy story is exactly the opposite of the mythology.

Here’s the truth: In the real world that exists outside the media and political theater, fossil fuels rely on massive public expenditures to rig “free” markets against green industries, which don’t get nearly the same level of taxpayer support. Indeed, as Bloomberg News reported in 2010, “Global subsidies for fossil fuels dwarf support given to renewable energy sources such as wind and solar power and biofuels” — and that doesn’t even include the subsidies inherent in federal lands being regularly leased for fossil fuel development at bargain basement prices. At the global consumer level, that makes fossil fuels comparatively lower priced than they would be in a true free market, thus encouraging more fossil fuel consumption than ever.

Considering this gross market-skewing inequity, the shocking energy story of 2011 is that a green industry exists at all. And not only does it exist — it is now suddenly drawing sustenance in a swath of the economy that today seems like a barren desert: the devastated housing market.

Last year, for instance, the National Renewable Energy Lab study showed “that solar homes sold 20 percent faster [and] for 17 percent more than the equivalent non-solar homes.” And this was before solar power began its renewed push to hit price parity with fossil fuels. Now, the Los Angeles Times reports “that newly constructed homes with third-party certifications for sustainability and energy efficiency sold for 8 percent more on average than noncertified homes in the six-county Portland metropolitan area” and that “existing houses with certifications sold for 30 percent more.”

While more data is still needed to document this shift on a national basis, the trend is clearly real — and it is clearly an important dose of positive news in an otherwise depressing housing landscape lately more often defined by blight and foreclosures.

Equally important is the deeper meaning of the trend. It shows that the green movement is now being actively rewarded by consumers, even though fossil fuel subsidies are artificially skewing the market against the green movement.

For those looking to preserve the value of their homes in the still-volatile housing market, this is great news. It means green investments (solar panels, insulation, etc.) are a new avenue for potential financial protection. For the planet, it’s just as good news — it means there’s an ever bigger financial upside for products that do right by the environment.

Just imagine how huge that market could be if it was subsidized at even half the level of fossil fuels. Suddenly, the world’s energy challenges would look a a lot less impossible — and the global economy might look a whole lot better.

China and the United States have launched numerous energy cooperation initiatives during the past 30 years.  Only over the past decade, however, have they become global leaders in the relevant technologies, both as users and manufacturers. China now leads the world in wind power deployment, followed by the United States. Chinese investments in clean energy exceeded those of any other country in both 2009 and 2010, but the U.S. was back to No. 1 in 2011 (where it had been for several years prior to 2009).

The seven new bilateral clean energy initiatives launched in 2009 focused on key areas, including renewable energy, advanced coal technology, energy efficiency and electric vehicles. The US-China Clean Energy Research Center (CERC) (a virtual center that sponsors work in several locations in both countries) in particular has established a new model for cooperative clean energy research, development and demonstration that spans the public and private sectors and involves top researchers from universities and national laboratories in both countries. These programs have propelled numerous other collaborations,  some of which — if the two sides decide to emphasize clean energy cooperation over competition — may be included in major  announcements during Xi’s visit.

However, at the end of last year the United States initiated antidumping and countervailing duty investigations into China’s practices in the solar and wind sectors, and the Department of Commerce will decide soon whether to impose duties on Chinese solar panels and wind turbine components.  In the meantime, election year politics and a slow economic recovery are fueling competitive tensions.

President Obama announced in his State of the Union address last month that he would establish a new trade enforcement unit to speed investigations of unfair trading practices by China. Beijing has (not surprisingly) responded with its own investigation into American clean energy support programs. This comes as the U.S. renewable energy industry is increasingly divided over China’s role. For example, the Coalition for Affordable Solar Energy (a U.S. solar industry association) has asked the Coalition for American Solar Manufacturing (another U.S. solar industry association) to drop its petition that launched the solar panel investigation. A CASE report estimates that higher U.S. import duties on Chinese solar panels will eliminate up to 60,000 American jobs and hurt U.S. consumers even more than U.S. producers.

We are entering a period in which the incentives for conflict may overpower the incentives for cooperation. China and the United States are the world’s two largest economies, and should be leaders in establishing and enforcing the rules of the global trading system. But as the largest producers and consumers of energy, as well as the largest greenhouse gas emitters, they also have a responsibility to develop domestic, clean and affordable sources of energy for themselves as well as for others.

Both nations recognize the vital importance of strengthening innovation systems to inspire economic competitiveness, and both are increasingly becoming the leaders of the clean energy industry. These technologies are global industries with global supply chains, however, and national technology providers increasingly are crossing borders for both innovation and production. Our leaders would be well served to focus on how the two nations can work together to develop crucial energy technologies for the future, rather than on how to create even more obstacles.

Viewed through a long lens, “Windfall” is about much more than the hidden costs and unexpected side effects of wind-power generation, or about a citizens’ uprising in the tiny town of Meredith, N.Y., in the Catskill region 150 or so miles northwest of Manhattan. (Mind you, both are gripping stories.) It’s about the American tendency — and very likely the human tendency — to look for magic-bullet solutions to complicated social and economic problems, where none are available. It’s a microcosmic version of the political divisions — between left and right, environmentalists and free-marketers, corporations and citizens — that have virtually paralyzed our republic. It’s a reminder that whenever a virtually unregulated industry (as in this case) offers capitalists a chance to defraud the little guy and make a bundle, they’ll do it. It’s a tantalizing case study that suggests ordinary people still have the power to steer a course between faceless bureaucracies and greedy capitalists, but only just — and only if they can find a way to overcome their differences and work together.

In the abstract, wind power sounds like a good thing to nearly everybody. It relies on an essentially infinite resource, carries little or none of the obvious environmental downside of coal or oil, and presents no Fukushima-style doomsday scenario. Wind generation has become a major focus of venture capital; Israel includes video of a hearing a few years ago at which T. Boone Pickens told a congressional committee that he could imagine, in the relatively short term, 20 to 25 percent of the country’s electricity demand being fulfilled by wind and other renewables. I have no way to evaluate that claim, but the experts Israel consults in the film think it’s hokum. Given the inherently inconstant nature of wind, they argue, it’s not a stable or permanent solution to our energy crisis, and is unlikely ever to amount to more than a drop in the bucket.

Setting aside the discussion of whether it’s worthwhile to pursue wind power in the first place — and we shouldn’t really set that aside — there might be locations in the Great Plains states, the Southwest and the high western deserts where wind farms, even on the enormous scale imagined by Pickens, would do no great harm. But as people in Meredith and numerous other communities in the wind-friendly rural Northeast and Great Lakes region have discovered, living anywhere near those gargantuan wind-harnessing engines is quite a different matter. These days, the typical industrial wind turbine is around 400 feet high — the height of a 40-story building, or twice the length of a jumbo jet. The blades alone can weigh upward of 35 tons, and the entire assembly anywhere from 150 to 400 tons (resting on a platform of concrete and rebar, which itself may be 30 feet deep and weigh several hundred tons). It’s an enormous construction site, culminating in a high-voltage electrical device, that emits a 24/7 whoppa-whoppa-whoppa noise and incessant low-frequency vibration, and is topped with a brilliant flashing light. By daylight, there’s the nightmarish strobe effect — the vast rotating shadow that falls across an entire neighborhood when the turbine is between you and the sun. (While the question of whether it’s actually unhealthful to live near a turbine is unresolved, it’s definitely unpleasant.) If your neighbor put one up in her backyard without asking permission, how would you feel?

As it happens, I have a personal interest in the events and location of “Windfall,” because I spend summers in a town just a few miles from Meredith. But nothing about the town or its surrounding area (in Delaware County, N.Y., one of the poorest and least populated counties in the Northeast) is untypical of rural America. Meredith has a mix of longtime residents and big-city emigrants, and its longtime dairy-farm economy has largely collapsed in recent years, partly replaced by an unstable mixture of tourist-oriented businesses, craft initiatives and boutique organic farming. These social tensions came to the fore, predictably, during the wind-power debate, with the major landowners and dairy farmers on one side — hoping for the rather skimpy royalties paid by the corporate investors in wind — and many “recent” New York City arrivals, convinced that the region’s economic future depends on its unspoiled landscapes, on the other. (I use the scare quotes because anyone who’s lived in Delaware County less than 30 years is often viewed as a newcomer.)

People on both sides of the issue in Meredith assumed at first that the anti-turbine forces were an elitist minority, partly because the town board had always been dominated by the same landowning families, and partly because wind-power companies had signed people up to secret agreements that forbade them from discussing anything about the relationship. What ensued was a fascinating lesson in democracy (and a version of the same lesson the Tea Party and its supporters may learn later this year). After 826 people — more than half of Meredith’s total population — signed a petition opposing the town board’s pro-development policy on wind turbines, it turned out that the people who thought of themselves as the “real” residents were in the minority, and the jig was up for the wind industry in this one tiny corner of America. Yet as one newly elected board member reflects at the end of the film, nobody came out of this fight feeling good. A formerly harmonious community is now bitterly divided, and the Mitt Romney-style venture capitalists of wind power will just move on to the next town and sell their pseudo-green poisoned chalice to somebody else.

“Windfall” opens this week at the Quad Cinema in New York and the Facets Cinémathèque in Chicago. It opens Feb. 9 at the Art House Cinema 502 in Ogden, Utah, Feb. 24 at the Clinton Street Theater in Portland, Ore., and March 2 at the Northwest Film Forum in Seattle, with other cities and festival screenings to follow. It’s also available on-demand from cable, satellite and online providers, including Amazon, iTunes and VUDU.

“If we can turn things around on climate change where things are the hardest, then we can win,” she says. “And there are a lot of people in Texas who really, really want to win.”

The decision to focus on climate change was bit of a switch from her days as an undergraduate working with undocumented immigrants and organizing support for passage of the DREAM Act. The daughter of parents who were forced by desperate economic conditions to emigrate from Chile in the 1970s, de la Fuente had always believed that she would continue to focus on immigration reform after college.

“But I started to think on a bigger level about what real immigration reform is, and I realized that what motivates me is that I hate it when people are forced to leave their homes due to circumstances beyond their control,” says de la Fuente. “And the biggest driver of that in the future is going to be climate change.”

“I’m probably never going to meet all the people that I want to support, like refugees in Pakistan or farmers in Africa,” says de la Fuente. But she’s convinced that, by organizing volunteers to push for a renewable energy mandate in Texas and to oppose proposed coal-fired power plants, she’ll be doing what she can to ease their hardships.

“It’s hokey,” she says “but John Muir’s famous quote is that when you pick something out of the universe it’s hitched to everything else. The fact is, we’re all connected.”

Combine Muir’s sense of interconnection with Cesar Chavez’s commitment to grassroots organization and you’ve got Flavia de la Fuente. While some environmentalists have been driven to despair by gridlock in Washington, or the pace of greenhouse gas-spewing industrial development in China, or President Obama’s failure to deliver on their hopes, de la Fuente, describing herself as a “happy warrior,” exudes a sense of undaunted confidence.

“I read an article in Grist a few weeks ago that said environmentalists are depressed. But you can’t let this stuff get you down, or else you will hide in your living room and never get active.” Instead, de la Fuente draws strength from the enormity of the challenge before her — and all of us. “I draw a lot of energy from the bigness of this fight. I kind of thrive on it. What could be more exciting than taking on the biggest, most complicated problems that humanity has ever faced?”

Think of us today as embarking on a new Thirty Years’ War. It may not result in as much bloodshed as that of the 1600s, though bloodshed there will be, but it will prove no less momentous for the future of the planet. Over the coming decades, we will be embroiled at a global level in a succeed-or-perish contest among the major forms of energy, the corporations which supply them, and the countries that run on them. The question will be: Which will dominate the world’s energy supply in the second half of the twenty-first century? The winners will determine how — and how badly — we live, work, and play in those not-so-distant decades, and will profit enormously as a result. The losers will be cast aside and dismembered.

Why 30 years? Because that’s how long it will take for experimental energy systems like hydrogen power, cellulosic ethanol, wave power, algae fuel, and advanced nuclear reactors to make it from the laboratory to full-scale industrial development. Some of these systems (as well, undoubtedly, as others not yet on our radar screens) will survive the winnowing process. Some will not. And there is little way to predict how it will go at this stage in the game. At the same time, the use of existing fuels like oil and coal, which spew carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, is likely to plummet, thanks both to diminished supplies and rising concerns over the growing dangers of carbon emissions.

This will be a war because the future profitability, or even survival, of many of the world’s most powerful and wealthy corporations will be at risk, and because every nation has a potentially life-or-death stake in the contest. For giant oil companies like BP, Chevron, ExxonMobil, and Royal Dutch Shell, an eventual shift away from petroleum will have massive economic consequences. They will be forced to adopt new economic models and attempt to corner new markets, based on the production of alternative energy products, or risk collapse or absorption by more powerful competitors. In these same decades, new companies will arise, some undoubtedly coming to rival the oil giants in wealth and importance.

The fate of nations, too, will be at stake as they place their bets on competing technologies, cling to their existing energy patterns, or compete for global energy sources, markets, and reserves. Because the acquisition of adequate supplies of energy is as basic a matter of national security as can be imagined, struggles over vital resources — oil and natural gas now, perhaps lithium or nickel (for electric-powered vehicles) in the future — will trigger armed violence.

When these three decades are over, as with the Treaty of Westphalia, the planet is likely to have in place the foundations of a new system for organizing itself — this time around energy needs. In the meantime, the struggle for energy resources is guaranteed to grow ever more intense for a simple reason: there is no way the existing energy system can satisfy the world’s future requirements. It must be replaced or supplemented in a major way by a renewable alternative system or, forget Westphalia, the planet will be subject to environmental disaster of a sort hard to imagine today.

The Existing Energy Lineup

To appreciate the nature of our predicament, begin with a quick look at the world’s existing energy portfolio. According to BP, the world consumed 13.2 billion tons of oil-equivalent from all sources in 2010: 33.6 percent from oil, 29.6 percent from coal, 23.8 percent from natural gas, 6.5 percent from hydroelectricity, 5.2 percent from nuclear energy, and a mere 1.3 percent percent from all renewable forms of energy. Together, fossil fuels — oil, coal, and gas — supplied 10.4 billion tons, or 87 percent of the total.

Even attempting to preserve this level of energy output in 30 years’ time, using the same proportion of fuels, would be a near-hopeless feat. Achieving a 40 percent increase in energy output, as most analysts believe will be needed to satisfy the existing requirements of older industrial powers and rising demand in China and other rapidly developing nations, is simply impossible.

Two barriers stand in the way of preserving the existing energy profile: eventual oil scarcity and global climate change. Most energy analysts expect conventional oil output — that is, liquid oil derived from fields on land and in shallow coastal waters — to reach a production peak in the next few years and then begin an irreversible decline. Some additional fuel will be provided in the form of “unconventional” oil — that is, liquids derived from the costly, hazardous, and ecologically unsafe extraction processes involved in producing tar sands, shale oil, and deep-offshore oil — but this will only postpone the contraction in petroleum availability, not avert it. By 2041, oil will be far less abundant than it is today and so incapable of meeting anywhere near 33.6 percent of the world’s (much expanded) energy needs.

Meanwhile, the accelerating pace of climate change will produce ever more damage — intense storm activity, rising sea levels, prolonged droughts, lethal heat waves, massive forest fires, and so on — finally forcing reluctant politicians to take remedial action. This will undoubtedly include an imposition of curbs on the release via fossil fuels of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, whether in the form of carbon taxes, cap-and-trade plans, emissions limits, or other restrictive systems as yet not imagined. By 2041, these increasingly restrictive curbs will help ensure that fossil fuels will not be supplying anywhere near 87 percent of world energy.

The Leading Contenders

If oil and coal are destined to fall from their position as the world’s paramount source of energy, what will replace them? Here are some of the leading contenders.

Natural gas: Many energy experts and political leaders view natural gas as a “transitional” fossil fuel because it releases less carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases than oil and coal. In addition, global supplies of natural gas are far greater than previously believed, thanks to new technologies — notably horizontal drilling and the controversial procedure of hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) — that allow for the exploitation of shale gas reserves once considered inaccessible. For example, in 2011, the U.S. Department of Energy (DoE) predicted that, by 2035, gas would far outpace coal as a source of American energy, though oil would still outpace them both. Some now speak of a “natural gas revolution” that will see it overtake oil as the world’s number one fuel, at least for a time. But fracking poses a threat to the safety of drinking water and so may arouse widespread opposition, while the economics of shale gas may, in the end, prove less attractive than currently assumed. In fact, many experts now believe that the prospects for shale gas have been oversold, and that stepped-up investment will result in ever-diminishing returns.

Nuclear power: Prior to the March 11th earthquake/tsunami disaster and a series of core meltdowns at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power complex in Japan, many analysts were speaking of a nuclear “renaissance,” which would see the construction of hundreds of new nuclear reactors over the next few decades. Although some of these plants in China and elsewhere are likely to be built, plans for others — in Italy and Switzerland, for example — already appear to have been scrapped. Despite repeated assurances that U.S. reactors are completely safe, evidence is regularly emerging of safety risks at many of these facilities. Given rising public concern over the risk of catastrophic accident, it is unlikely that nuclear power will be one of the big winners in 2041.

However, nuclear enthusiasts (including President Obama) are championing the manufacture of small “modular” reactors that, according to their boosters, could be built for far less than current ones and would produce significantly lower levels of radioactive waste. Although the technology for, and safety of, such “assembly-line” reactors has yet to be demonstrated, advocates claim that they would provide an attractive alternative to both large conventional reactors with their piles of nuclear waste and coal-fired power plants that emit so much carbon dioxide.

Wind and solar: Make no mistake, the world will rely on wind and solar power for a greater proportion of its energy 30 years from now. According to the International Energy Agency, those energy sources will go from approximately 1 percent of total world energy consumption in 2008 to a projected 4 percent in 2035. But given the crisis at hand and the hopes that exist for wind and solar, this would prove small potatoes indeed. For these two alternative energy sources to claim a significantly larger share of the energy pie, as so many climate-change activists desire, real breakthroughs will be necessary, including major improvements in the design of wind turbines and solar collectors, improved energy storage (so that power collected during sunny or windy periods can be better used at night or in calm weather), and a far more efficient and expansive electrical grid (so that energy from areas favored by sun and wind can be effectively distributed elsewhere). China, Germany, and Spain have been making the sorts of investments in wind and solar energy that might give them an advantage in the new Thirty Years’ War — but only if the technological breakthroughs actually come.

Biofuels and algae: Many experts see a promising future for biofuels, especially as “first generation” ethanol, based largely on the fermentation of corn and sugar cane, is replaced by second- and third-generation fuels derived from plant cellulose (“cellulosic ethanol”) and bio-engineered algae. Aside from the fact that the fermentation process requires heat (and so consumes energy even while releasing it), many policymakers object to the use of food crops to supply raw materials for a motor fuel at a time of rising food prices. However, several promising technologies to produce ethanol by chemical means from the cellulose in non-food crops are now being tested, and one or more of these techniques may well survive the transition to full-scale commercial production. At the same time, a number of companies, including ExxonMobil, are exploring the development of new breeds of algae that reproduce swiftly and can be converted into biofuels. (The U.S. Department of Defense is also investing in some of these experimental methods with an eye toward transforming the American military, a great fossil-fuel guzzler, into a far “greener” outfit.) Again, however, it is too early to know which (if any) biofuel endeavors will pan out.

Hydrogen: A decade ago, many experts were talking about hydrogen’s immense promise as a source of energy. Hydrogen is abundant in many natural substances (including water and natural gas) and produces no carbon emissions when consumed. However, it does not exist by itself in the natural world and so must be extracted from other substances — a process that requires significant amounts of energy in its own right, and so is not, as yet, particularly efficient. Methods for transporting, storing, and consuming hydrogen on a large scale have also proved harder to develop than once imagined. Considerable research is being devoted to each of these problems, and breakthroughs certainly could occur in the decades to come. At present, however, it appears unlikely that hydrogen will prove a major source of energy in 2041.

X the Unknown: Many other sources of energy are being tested by scientists and engineers at universities and corporate laboratories worldwide. Some are even being evaluated on a larger scale in pilot projects of various sorts. Among the most promising of these are geothermal energy, wave energy, and tidal energy. Each taps into immense natural forces and so, if the necessary breakthroughs were to occur, would have the advantage of being infinitely exploitable, with little risk of producing greenhouse gases. However, with the exception of geothermal, the necessary technologies are still at an early stage of development. How long it may take to harvest them is anybody’s guess. Geothermal energy does show considerable promise, but has run into problems, given the need to tap it by drilling deep into the earth, in some cases triggering small earthquakes.

From time to time, I hear of even less familiar prospects for energy production that possess at least some hint of promise. At present, none appears likely to play a significant role in 2041, but no one should underestimate humanity’s technological and innovative powers. As with all history, surprise can play a major role in energy history, too.

Energy efficiency: Given the lack of an obvious winner among competing transitional or alternative energy sources, one crucial approach to energy consumption in 2041 will surely be efficiency at levels unimaginable today: the ability to achieve maximum economic output for minimum energy input. The lead players three decades from now may be the countries and corporations that have mastered the art of producing the most with the least. Innovations in transportation, building and product design, heating and cooling, and production techniques will all play a role in creating an energy-efficient world.

When the War Is Over

Thirty years from now, for better or worse, the world will be a far different place: hotter, stormier, and with less land (given the loss of shoreline and low-lying areas to rising sea levels). Strict limitations on carbon emissions will certainly be universally enforced and the consumption of fossil fuels, except under controlled circumstances, actively discouraged. Oil will still be available to those who can afford it, but will no longer be the world’s paramount fuel. New powers, corporate and otherwise, in new combinations will have risen with a new energy universe. No one can know, of course, what our version of the Treaty of Westphalia will look like or who will be the winners and losers on this planet. In the intervening 30 years, however, that much violence and suffering will have ensued goes without question. Nor can anyone say today which of the contending forms of energy will prove dominant in 2041 and beyond.

Were I to wager a guess, I might place my bet on energy systems that were decentralized, easy to make and install, and required relatively modest levels of up-front investment. For an analogy, think of the laptop computer of 2011 versus the giant mainframes of the 1960s and 1970s. The closer that an energy supplier gets to the laptop model (or so I suspect), the more success will follow.

From this perspective, giant nuclear reactors and coal-fired plants are, in the long run, less likely to thrive, except in places like China where authoritarian governments still call the shots. Far more promising, once the necessary breakthroughs come, will be renewable sources of energy and advanced biofuels that can be produced on a smaller scale with less up-front investment, and so possibly incorporated into daily life even at a community or neighborhood level.

Whichever countries move most swiftly to embrace these or similar energy possibilities will be the likeliest to emerge in 2041 with vibrant economies — and given the state of the planet, if luck holds, just in the nick of time.

“But there will be no magic bullet. We could destroy the things we love. Technology can be, but is not always, the answer. Ideas about nature matter.”

Perhaps the most resounding revelation in this 300-page tone poem to green energy is the devastating fact that a lot of the supposedly new green technology, like wind power and electric cars, have been around for well over a hundred years; some never caught steam, others found themselves crushed by fossil fuels.

“This book,” Madrigal writes, “is about the uncertainties and triumphs of innovation, the mysterious process by which ideas are made into products out there in the world. In a realm in which everyone argues that things must or will happen, the knowledge of our fallibility is what is most important.”

Many Aeromotor windmills, patterned on Thomas Perry’s original design, remain standing today

The following is a portion of our conversation.

How did you initially become interested in the subject of green energy?

I was reporting on the green venture capitalist boom in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2007 and it seemed like everyone was interesting in green energy. I think it was Bruce Sterling who called peak sexiness for “green” in that year. Seems to me he was right, but I was smitten nonetheless.

After last year’s BP debacle in the gulf and this year’s tragedy in Japan, one would think cleaner, greener energy would be a more pressing issue than it is today. Ultimately, why is that?

These are hard, long problems. It’s like peace in the Middle East with more thermodynamics thrown in. While the broad strokes — reinventing society, igniting a new industrial revolution — are fascinating, the details are about as interesting as your average mid-level utility board annual stockholder meeting.

How big of a role will innovative design play in the bigger picture of emerging and affordable renewable energy?

Design and urban planning are the wild-card levers in our energy system. We tend to think of science and engineering as solving energy problems, but the history tells us that the turn away from regionally appropriate architecture in mid-century America is a major reason that we have such an energy-intensive way of life relative to the rest of the world. We traded design for energy. Sometimes it was as simple as doing away with the idea of shade trees, which can reduce energy consumption in hot places. Now, we have the tools to model those kinds of tradeoffs and I hope that means that even the biggest tract home building developers start to replace ongoing energy costs with smart upfront design.

Thomas Perry’s windmill testing apparatus.

In the book, I found pages of declarations that really got to the heart of why we don’t have a more thriving green energy movement in this country. The one that really speaks to our generation, however, was this one: “There’s almost no institutional memory of what happened before the energy crisis of the 70s, and little of what happened ‘technologically’ during that time has been documented in a serious way.” Have special interests spoiled any green revolution akin to the tech boom of the ’90s where copious amounts of money were spent, and only the smart and useful survived?

Well, I think the interests were more general than special. The nation’s largest utilities had as a cherished operating principle that they should sell more electricity rather than less. Developers wanted to build more bigger, cheaper houses. Everyone’s trying to make a lot of bucks.

I’d say the real problem is the way that fossil fuels interact with our idea of the market. They are cheap upfront and a lot of their costs get put on society. I think the fossil fuel industries are a little bit like a bunch of kids living at home with their parents and working over the summer. They think they’ve got all this money but that’s because the parents are paying to clean up after them and otherwise absorbing their living expenses. Except in this case, the kids are producing invisible pollution that is giving people lung cancer every day and will eventually cook our planet. And we’re essentially paying them to do it.

But we’re also in this weird place in American culture where every corporation claims that it creates jobs, and so doing anything to them is automatically an anti-jobs policy. That’s just nuts. So, a lot of the solutions to this kind of thing, basically making these people pay up to level the playing field for green technologies, has been politically impossible.

As you noted, China is kicking our butts when it comes to solar energy, even though Americans pioneered the technology behind the advancements. Can we turn things around and retain an edge, or is all hope lost for emerging technologies related to solar in the U.S.?

The U.S. is still really good at coming up with new ideas. I have no doubt that we’ll continue to do that kind of thing: improving solar cells, coming up with new designs, creating new materials. But eventually, I think, the innovation research says that you need to feed back the knowledge you get from making and deploying stuff to keep the virtuous innovation cycle going. And increasingly it looks like China is going to make and deploy innovative power will shift to Chinese engineers and scientists.

eSolar’s first test plant in Lancaster, Calif.

With so much overwhelming evidence before us (with international agreement, no less), why are there still so many climate change deniers in this country?

Because our brains don’t work very well with really big problems that transpire over decades.

Because just about every person in America has a vested interest in keeping electricity prices low, which in our current economic paradigm means burning coal. An attack on coal is an attack on one’s way of life.

Because about a third of our country no longer believes in the technocratic institutions that used to define a lot of the middle ground between the right and left.

Because powerful companies with a lot to lose if they’re forced to pay up for global warming pollution have run massive campaigns to blast climate change.

What was the most interesting green energy idea you came across during the course of working on this book?

I tended to think of the book in terms of stories more than ideas. I like the grounding of the stories because they force you to get away from the Big Think mentality and deal with the particulars of a situation. And for me, the most interesting section was my chapter on the wave motor innovation scene around the turn of the 20th century in California. It was just such a bizarre and interesting episode where dozens of people became obsessed with converting the ocean’s power into electrical energy. And it was also really interesting because no one had really excavated that history with any rigor. It felt like making a contribution to history.

These are the first two large-scale solar plants ever built, Solar Electric Generating Stations I and II

Does high-speed rail have a chance in this country (and not just in the Eastern corridor, which already has good train service)?

I think that depends on how fast oil gets expensive. If it does, you’ll see the whole politics around rail change really quickly. Pair obviously higher oil prices with denser living situations and you’d certainly have a really good shot at getting rail to happen.

How much of our reluctance to innovate more rapidly when it comes to green energy has to do with capitalist greed?

As you can see from my comments about how fossil fuels interact with how we think about markets, a lot of energy innovation failure has been a result of next-quarter capitalist thinking.

You write: “‘There are elements of religious revival in Appropriate Technology,’ wrote Witold Rybcynski, a thinker who was both part of the movement and harshly critical of it. ‘It is a strange melange of Marxism, Puritanism, and something called Buddhist Economics.’” Does the green energy movement of today need more people like Rybcynski?

To be honest, the green movement is pretty self-reflective and critical. We need more champions at the highest levels who know how to connect a vision of a cleaner energy system with a coherent vision of a better world. And it’d help if they were human and funny instead of sanctimonious and dour.

Copyright F+W Media Inc. 2011.

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