Levi also takes a field trip to Detroit to chronicle the progress of American automakers in meeting the stringent new corporate average fuel-economy targets negotiated with the Obama administration and states led by California. He visited a Ford test facility to drive the battery-powered Focus Electric, a lightweight zero-emissions vehicle that will help boost the company’s fleet mileage number. But Levi says what caught his eye was a Ford Mustang with a four-hundred-plus-horsepower V-8. He explores the forces at play in the global auto industry today, the fight over fuels and propulsion systems (gasoline or biofuels; electric, hybrid, clean diesel or advanced spark ignition), and the tension between government efficiency mandates and consumer choice. Electric cars, while seemingly solving the pollution problem, depend for their power on the source of the electricity they consume. Levi runs the numbers on the Focus Electric he drove. The electricity he consumed on his drive near Dearborn, Michigan, was produced almost exclusively from coal. He calculated that the total carbon-dioxide emissions for one hundred miles traveled in the Focus were only slightly higher than those produced by a Toyota Prius hybrid propelled mainly by gasoline. In other parts of the country less dependent on coal, however, a pure electric vehicle is substantially cleaner than even the most efficient hybrid.

But electric cars and even gas-electric hybrids affect U.S. oil consumption only at the margins. The big savings will come from conventional cars and trucks becoming lighter and more efficient, and from liquid fuels created from biomass, natural gas or even algae.

Levi writes:

The move toward more efficient vehicles is bringing benefits for the U.S. economy, the environment, and national security, even if sometimes overstated. . . . Fully taking advantage of the opportunity to cut U.S. oil consumption would require some support from government—we have seen that individual car buyers don’t fully account for the national benefits of more efficient vehicles when they shop for a new ride—but markets will do a lot of the heavy lifting by themselves.

It is the role of markets that ultimately underpins the reporting and the conclusions of The Power Surge. In his final chapter, Levi surveys the landscape and concludes that while new sources of conventional and unconventional energy pose a historic opportunity for the United States, the biggest challenge—climate change—remains a problem without a clear solution.

Levi prescribes four broad rules to guide policy makers and private enterprises as they navigate the nation’s energy future: build a diverse and resilient energy portfolio; focus on big gains; empower energy development of all kinds; and leverage domestic gains to make progress abroad.

It is the second of these imperatives—the quest for game-changing policies—that presents both the greatest opportunities and the most intractable obstacles. A broad and diverse energy portfolio will improve the nation’s energy security and balance-of-payments accounts, but alone it will not solve the climate conundrum. International negotiations conducted under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change will not keep atmospheric carbon-dioxide levels below 450 parts per million or temperature increases below 2 degrees Celsius. (Levi calls the attempt to negotiate a 193-nation climate treaty “quixotic” and says that what American diplomats should focus on is adding transparency to each nation’s climate efforts and making it difficult to slide backwards.)

SO WHAT are the “big wins” Levi calls for and how realistic are they politically?

The accepted answer to the climate puzzle is to make dirty energy more expensive and clean energy cheaper. There are comprehensive ways to accomplish this—cap and trade, for one; another would be a carbon-pricing scheme such as a carbon-emissions tax. Both are foreclosed for now by political polarization in Congress and President Obama’s evident reluctance to tackle the problem as he wrestles with guns, immigration, health-care implementation and his other second-term priorities.

A third possibility is broad government support for clean-energy research and development. This entails finding money to support an array of technologies that are near commercial development or have the potential to alter the energy landscape in the future, as the introduction of nitrogen-based fertilizers in the early twentieth century sparked a revolution in agricultural production. Levi endorses expanded federal financial backing for energy research, but notes that the issue has become entangled in politics. He cites the case of Solyndra, the solar-panel manufacturer that went belly-up in 2011 after receiving more than $500 million in federal loan guarantees. Levi says the politics of energy subsidies have become so poisoned that the only way to funnel substantial money to promising projects is through the Pentagon, the world’s largest consumer of energy and one of the leaders in conservation and climate-change adaptation. He writes:

Energy technology enthusiasts regularly discuss the possibility of steering more defense money toward energy, on the grounds that military demand for fuels is enormous, and Pentagon R&D budgets are huge. Government spending on energy innovation is unlikely to become as central as past spending on defense, at least not anytime soon.

A last possibility, which has won bipartisan political support in the past and has at least the theoretical backing of the president, is a federal clean-energy standard, requiring that a set percentage of electricity generation be provided by renewable sources. Some thirty states already have such mandates, and a nationwide standard could drive up the cost of fossil energy and provide a consistent market for alternatives. Such programs set overall targets but leave to individual states and their electricity providers the means of meeting them. Like cap and trade, some schemes allow utilities to trade credits to meet the standards. Unfortunately, such a project requires national legislation, which President Obama is not pushing and which Republicans and Democrats in Congress, even those who have supported it in the past, have no interest in pursuing now.

What is left, in place of the “big wins” Levi demands, are small steps that can win bipartisan support or that can be accomplished by executive order. Earlier this year Obama called for the creation of an Energy Security Trust, which would take $200 million a year of oil and gas royalties on newly opened public lands and devote the money to development of cleaner cars and trucks. The administration and some lawmakers are pushing for stricter efficiency standards for household appliances and heating and cooling systems. (The White House Office of Management and Budget has blocked several such proposals from the Department of Energy as it recalculates the costs and benefits.) And the EPA recently finalized a new rule requiring refiners to produce cleaner-burning gasoline, which will remove the equivalent of several million cars’ worth of health- and climate-altering pollutants from the skies.

These steps won’t save the planet, and they won’t end the energy proxy wars. But they represent at least modest progress until the inevitable upheavals in the climate and in American politics make possible the revolution that nature demands.

John M. Broder is a reporter covering energy and environmental issues for the Washington bureau of the New York Times.

Image: Flickr/Rocco Lucia. CC BY 2.0.