The reason the U.S. lags so badly is that we have obsolete rules that favor big over small, supply over efficiency, and incumbents over new market entrants.

The barriers that renewables and efficiency face come less from our living in a capitalist market economy and more from not taking market economics seriously.

What if we could make energy do our work without working our undoing?

Nuclear power has died of an incurable attack of market forces and is way beyond any hope of revival, because the competitors are several-fold cheaper and are getting rapidly more so.

We'd find more energy in the attics of American homes (through energy conservation measures) than in all the oil buried in Alaska.

Fire made us human, fossil fuels made us modern, but now we need a new fire that makes us safe, secure, healthy and durable.

In the model that we grew up with, governments rule physical territory in which national economies function, and strong economies support hegemonic military power. In the new model, already emerging under our noses, economic decisions don't pay much attention to national sovereignty in a world where more than half of the one hundred or two hundred largest economic entities are not countries but companies.