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.20. I was very, very excited to make a profit. But I was also very nervous and very afraid the local government staff would come to stop it.” When the government granted her a business license in 1979, the shift of 1.3 billion people from communism to capitalism was on its way. That shift, which produced, among many other things, the conference center in Tianjin with which we began this book, has dramatically increased both global energy demand and the amount of greenhouse gases being pumped into the atmosphere. On January 7, 2010, China’s People’s Daily reported that “a total 16.7 million vehicles were sold in China last year, bringing the country’s total vehicles to more than 186 million,” about half of which are motorcycles. In 1979 virtually no Chinese owned a private car.

One final notable event occurred in 1979. It drew almost no attention. America’s National Academy of Sciences raised its first warning about something called “global warming.” In a 1979 study, called The Charney Report, the academy stated that “if carbon dioxide continues to increase, [we find] no reason to doubt that climate changes will result and no reason to believe that these changes will be negligible.”

Put all these events together and it becomes clear why 1979 was pivotal in creating today’s energy and climate challenge. The details of that challenge are complicated, and we will discuss some of them in the rest of this chapter. But the key to meeting it is straightforward. The United States must reduce its use of fossil fuels as fast and as far as is prudently possible. We have not begun to do this. All of us are ducking the challenge and some of us are denying that it even exists. This failure could not be more dangerous to our country and our planet, because matters of energy and climate touch on every big issue in American life. That is why we include them as one of the four great challenges the country faces. How we address, or do not address, our energy and climate challenge will affect our economic vitality, our national security, our food supply, and our capacity to benefit from what will be among the biggest industries of the future. Energy policy affects our balance of payments and the value of our currency. It affects the quality of the air we breathe and the level of the oceans on our shores. America will not thrive in the twenty-first century without a different energy policy, one better adapted than the policy we have now to the realities of the flatter world in which we live.

Unfortunately, instead of debating how to generate more clean energy and to slow climate change, we are debating whether to do so. Instead of debating the implications of what is settled science, we are debating the integrity of some scientists. Instead of ending an oil addiction we know is unhealthy for our economy, our air, and our national security, we are begging our pushers for just one more hit from the crude-oil pipe.

While there is much that we don’t know about when and how global warming will affect the climate, and what that will do to weather patterns, to call the whole phenomenon a hoax, to imply that we face no problem at all—that all the scientific evidence for its existence is bogus—is to deny the laws of physics. And while there is also much we do not know about when the earth’s supplies of oil, natural gas, and coal will be exhausted, to behave as if we can consume all we want forever without staggering financial, environmental, and geopolitical consequences is to deny not only the laws of physics but those of math and economics and geopolitics as well.

Finally, to do all this at once is to mock the market and Mother Nature at the same time. It is to invite each of them to respond violently, suddenly, and at a time of its own choosing.

Honk If You Believe in Climate Change

In February 2010, after a particularly heavy snowfall in Washington, D.C., Oklahoma Republican senator James Inhofe’s daughter, Molly Rapert, her husband, and their four children built an igloo on the Mall near the Capitol in Washington. On one side they