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that's available, and defend our need for clean air and water.” Others
evoked similar themes. “I want to expedite the renewable energy future
of our country,” intoned Stephanie Spear, an energy entrepreneur and
organizer, to sustained applause.
One needn't venture far from Columbus to see what that future might
look like. Just of State Route 83, a few days later, I found myself pass-
ing by an AltraBiofuels ethanol plant; its owners aspired to turn crop
waste into fuel. To the west, wind turbines were being built at a record
pace: in 2011, capacity in Ohio increased tenfold.
4
Two hundred miles
to the east, on the outskirts of Pit sburgh, new manufacturing plants
were bending high-end mirrors for massive solar power installations
across California and the Southwest. Meanwhile, a similar distance to
the north, outside Detroit, the big automakers were steadily introduc-
ing ever more ei cient cars for American roads. Indeed, as I'd coni rm
a week later on a closed track at Ford's R&D facilities in Dearborn,
Michigan, although electric cars weren't quite ready for a mass market,
they were making striking progress. h
ey were also already rather fun
to drive.
h is pat ern wasn't coni ned to the Midwest. In 2011, while many
Americans were transi xed by the boom in oil and gas production, U.S.
companies invested nearly as much in new energy technologies such as
wind and solar as they did in drilling for fossil fuels. h at same year, new
power generation from renewable energy surpassed additions from fos-
sil fuels. Meanwhile gains of nearly two hundred thousand barrels a day
in U.S. crude production were eclipsed by even bigger declines in U.S.
oil consumption—and both trends would intensify in the following
year. (At the time, the United States consumed about twenty million
barrels of oil every day, and produced slightly over i ve million.) Money
was pouring into clean-energy startups in Silicon Valley, and prices for
alternative technologies continued to fall. Here, said opponents of oil
and natural gas, was the real way to deliver the jobs, prosperity, envi-
ronmental protection, and energy security that Americans desired.
Oil and gas enthusiasts, by and large, were as enamored of this
vision as those who had rallied in Columbus were about one of
plentiful fossil fuels. “Let's be realistic,” Rex Tillerson, the CEO of
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