The future can’t come fast enough for a world seeking to expand its options on energy. The promise of wind, solar, and natural gas and advances in cleaner-burning fossil fuels signal better days ahead: for spreading global prosperity through innovation, for creating worthwhile employment, for enhancing energy security, and for promoting environmental stewardship.

The once-contentious conversation about finite and renewable energy sources has been supplanted by the realization that there is no one perfect technology. Promising renewables are competing against the utter reliability of fossil fuels. And oil companies now use plants, the sun, the wind, and the earth to address the energy needs of today and tomorrow. The great divide between so-called good and bad energy is disappearing, and the race is on to develop and deploy new energy sources alongside the old.