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?”

That’s the dark part. The bright bit is inevitably biblical in its promise of salvation. F. Scott Fitzgerald famously warned that there are no second acts in American life. But for Rifkin it’s America’s second act — the destructive carbon revolution of the 20th century — that’s the problem. And it’s America’s third act, he says, that will save life on our planet from the catastrophe of extinction. The early 21st century’s third industrial revolution of green energy and the “lateral power” of the network, Rifkin promises us, offer a more democratic and “distributed” alternative to the hierarchical structures of traditional economic and political institutions. It’s in what he calls the “marriage” of energy and communications that our salvation as both a nation and as a species lies.

“The Third Industrial Revolution” is sobering reading. Writing with urgency and authority, Rifkin skewers President Obama for failing to strategically confront the fundamental decline of industrial America, arguing that Obama lacks a “narrative” to unleash the third industrial revolution. Rifkin is provocative, too, relating the global revolt against government and corporations that now links the streets of London and Greece to today’s populist uprising on Wall Street to the crisis of top-down institutions struggling to maintain their authority in the face of the breakdown of the old industrial order.

In contrast with Barack Obama, however, Jeremy Rifkin does have a story to tell about how to save the planet. In what he calls “the five pillars,” he lays out a comprehensive plan to realize the third industrial revolution. Rifkin’s “new narrative,” borrowing from the very high-level consultancy work he has been doing for the European Union, is truly revolutionary and comprises the most confident part of the book. Turning the old hierarchies of the industrial revolution on their head, Rifkin argues in favor of a complete shift to renewable energy (wind, solar, and garbage) in which we can turn all our homes into “micro-power plants” that will then be shared on a grid via the Internet. “Renewable energies are everywhere,” he explains as he charts the European ambition to make all of its citizens into new energy moguls by creating 190 million power plants in the Union.

“The Third Industrial Revolution” is a big, brash, bold book in keeping with Rifkin’s 40-year career as an anti-corporate gadfly. So should we believe in it? “The economy is always a confidence game,” Rifkin argues — and so, I’ve already argued, is this type of book. But for all its vigor and erudition, it’s undermined by one fatal flaw. The heart of Rifkin’s critique of industrial civilization lies in its top-down hierarchies, which, he says, have become anachronistic in the face of the “distributed,” collaborative nature of today’s Internet world. And yet Rifkin — who seems to be “friends” with everyone from European prime ministers like Angela Merkel and David Cameron to European royalty like Prince Albert of Monaco — is a classic example of a top-down technocrat who is anything but “distributed” in his glamorous, Davos-friendly lifestyle.

No, there’s nothing “lateral” about Jeremy Rifkin or his green manifesto. Ironically, he’s as top-down as they come, a classic example of a mandarin from the second industrial revolution, more Auguste Comte than Jimmy Wales, who implements change on behalf of everyone else. And “The Third Industrial Revolution” is a pretty conventional top-down 20th-century text, too, written without the kind of interactivity or textual innovation that one might expect of a prophet of lateral power.

“Drill baby drill,” is the Tea Party mantra for solving today’s industrial crisis in America. Rifkin, of course, disagrees. “Drilling for oil won’t get us out of the crisis because the crisis is oil,” he argues. But the crisis, as he explains, goes way beyond oil, to the roots of an American democracy in which mandarin technocrats like Jeremy Rifkin are dismissed as “elitists.” Perhaps that’s why he has more confidence in Europe, rather than America, to realize the third industrial revolution. And that may be why, I suspect, “The Third Industrial Revolution” will evoke more confidence in top-down Europe than in bottom-up America.

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.

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.