Americans have been able for decades to mostly ignore the sources of their energy as well as the impacts of the choices they make. In the US, energy has traditionally been cheap, widely available and extremely reliable.

In the late 1970s an OPEC oil embargo sparked handwringing in the US about energy choices and marked the first government-sponsored clean- tech boom. Widespread power outages and the collapse of Enron at the start of the last decade prompted another short-lived period of public inter- est in energy. Otherwise, the most Americans have seemed to know about energy is how to complain about prices at the gas pump