The idea for this book emerged from a late-night booze-up between its editors – Evan Solomon and Andrew Heintzman, the once-young Turks who brought us Shift magazine – and their pointy-headed friends. Unlike many alcohol-abetted ideas, it still sounded good the morning after. Their idea was to apply the theory set out in Thomas Homer-Dixon’s The Ingenuity Gap to pressing energy problems, the most central being, how can we wean ourselves from oil, a polluting, nonrenewable power source purchased from increasingly hostile allies in the Middle East?

In The Ingenuity Gap, Homer-Dixon argues that societies decline and fall not, as Gibbon would have it, because their leaders become morally decadent, corrupted absolutely by power. They fail when the ideas generated by scientists (technical ingenuity) are not harnessed by government and business leaders (social ingenuity) to solve widespread problems. The rise of the West, according to Homer-Dixon, can be attributed to our societies’ past ability to reward both technically and socially ingenious individuals. But the title of Homer-Dixon’s book signals his pessimism: he fears a gap has opened between our technical ability to solve pressing problems and our society’s willingness to employ the evident solutions.

Nowhere is the gap more evident than in the energy field. As one essay in Fuelling the Future points out, the average fuel efficiency of Ford’s latest line of cars and trucks is lower than that of the Model-T. We’ve known how to harness the energy in the hydrogen atom for years, but have, until recently, failed to devote significant capital to developing the fuel-cell engines necessary to exploit it. Scientists have proposed several ways to stop galloping global warming, but even those who agree there’s a problem cannot agree which solution to pick.

Fuelling the Future should be required reading for politicians. But it is more than just a tome for policy wonks. The essays analyze complicated issues in accessible, literate prose, making the book an all-in-one primer for anyone interested in extricating ourselves from our current energy predicament.

The collection’s strength (and weakness) lies in its use of Homer-Dixon’s model. The editors asked the writers to adopt a decision-maker’s – not a critic’s – point of view, using as their starting point Homer-Dixon’s coalition-building question: how can we solve pressing problems together?

For better and for worse, you won’t find any truly aggressive, unabashedly environmentalist viewpoints here. This gaping hole is particularly evident in the collections’ weakest link, a paean to the alleged greening of business by its unabashed apologists, York University’s David Wheeler and Jane Thomson. Their unfounded optimism puts one in mind of the Shell ad that shows a young self-professed “hopeless romantic” who goes around the world assessing the environmental impact of proposed developments; her company, regardless of the profit motive, supports her every recommendation. Wheeler and Thomson believe there are win-win-win situations to be had (wins for workers, wins for the environment, wins for investors), which big business will voluntarily achieve with minimal government regulation.

After such cheerleading, it’s a relief to turn to the next essay, in which ex-pat Nigerian Ken Wiwa gives an example of what can happen when a corporation is given a free-hand: the environmental and social harm Shell did to his homeland. Journalist Gordon Laird transports readers to the Mackenzie River delta, whose rich natural gas deposits BP and the local native band are jointly poised to exploit, then to China’s best-kept secret, Xinjiang, a hinterland whose gas China needs to power its latest Great Leap Forward.

The bulk of the essays thoughtfully compare our current power sources (oil, hydro, nuclear, coal) with the leading alternatives (natural gas, solar, wind, hydrogen). The commentators differ on the solutions to our dependence on these sources, but their summations of the problems are informative and readable.

The editors have included useful introductions to each piece, contextualizing them with pithy thumbnail sketches of relevant background. Particularly interesting are a history of coal and descriptions of the meltdowns at Chernobyl and Three Mile Island. A timeline highlights events in energy history, from the discovery of fire to the pioneering of hydrogen power. The boozey big idea, here, gets a sober, workmanlike delivery.