Nora Maccoby, dubbed “Envirobabe” by New York Post’s Page Six gossip column, has since been lending a hand to Mitzi Wertheim, a consultant to the DoD’s Office of Force Transformation. Wertheim convenes the “green salons,” of this new Energy Consensus and her “salonistes” have recently included military officers. Congressional staffers, and as the likes of the Saudi Ambassador to the US… who wondered if the gathered minds couldn’t focus on how to make oil a clean energy too.

It was, however, a battlefield calculation that brought the generals on board. Dan Nolan, a retired Army colonel in charge of energy projects for the Rapid Equipping Force, crunched numbers to show that, since the transport of fuel to forward bases had become the soft target favored by insurgents, energy-inefficiency was costing the Army lives. Since then, the Army has begun to deploy tents made of solar-capturing materials to supply the energy needs of the bases. And also fuel-cell-powered vehicles that take advantage of the same innovations in batteries that have made laptops so small.

Of course, the challenges facing the military are same for the private sector. So are the options for replacing oil. Currently, road transport represents 70% of US oil consumption. Ethanol derived from switchgrass (now headed down toward 70 cents per gallon) can be blended with petrol and, with minor adjustments, used in all cars. (Few experts, by the way, advocate ethanol derived from foodstuffs, as implied by UN Special Rapporteur for the Right to Food Jean Ziegler, who recently charged all biofuels as "a crime against humanity.") Hybrid cars using blended fuel along with the next generation of batteries will soon be able to achieve 500 miles per gallon of gasoline (or mpgg in the new designation). What’s more, as the Tesla and the forthcoming Ferrari-like Fisker Karma show, these cars are not the products of hair-shirted environmentalism. They can leave the gas-guzzlers of the petrol age in the dust.