Yergin starts by reminding us of energy’s centrality to the modern age. For most of human history, the labor of men and animals was the sole source of energy, and that placed significant limits on how much energy we could use. Starting in the late 18th and early 19th century, humans harnessed the power of steam and coal to run machines, and the result was an explosion of material abundance. In 1957 Adm. Hyman Rickover, the great engineer who is known as the father of the nuclear Navy, calculated that a century earlier, in the early years of the industrial age, 94 percent of the world’s energy was provided by the labor of men and animals. Water and fossil fuels made up the remaining 6 percent. By the 1950s, those numbers had reversed, and coal, oil and natural gas supplied 93 percent of the world’s energy. Rickover pointed out that without this energy revolution, most of the material advances of the modern age would be impossible. A car, he said, uses the energy equivalent of the labor of 2,000 men — a jet plane that of 700,000 men.

The trend of ever-increasing energy use is certain to continue. Even if the Western world becomes much, much more energy-efficient, “the rise of the rest” guarantees a massive expansion in the demand for energy. Global G.D.P. is now $65 trillion and may rise to $130 trillion in just two decades. Energy consumption may well increase 30 to 40 percent along with it. The number of cars worldwide will rise from one billion to two billion. How will we find the energy to run them?

On present course, we will find it in fossil fuels. Predictions of the end of oil have, so far, been wrong, and Yergin predicts they will continue to be wrong. Rickover’s 1957 speech, Yergin reminds us, was a warning that the world would run out of fossil fuels sometime after 2000, probably by 2050. In fact, oil production is five times greater than it was in 1957. Coal remains the central source of electricity. For all the talk of the “end of oil,” fossil fuels still make up about 80 percent of the world’s energy mix. And with natural gas, shale gas and new technologies for extraction becoming more important, fossil fuels are likely to play a central role for decades to come.

Unless we shift our ways. Burning fossil fuels has a cost — perhaps an unbearable one. We now have a mountain of evidence that the 30 billion tons of carbon dioxide that humans pump into the atmosphere every year are changing the earth’s climate in ways that will have negative effects for most people. Yergin recounts the making of the scientific consensus that has developed around global warming. His narrative makes clear that there really is no longer a serious debate in the scientific community about the basic facts of global warming, though there is uncertainty about its extent and its effects. (Some scientific studies suggest that things could turn out much worse than the “average” case.) In these chapters Yergin’s somewhat bland and noncommittal presentation is a public disservice. At a time when major presidential candidates like Gov. Rick Perry of Texas openly dismiss global warming as a hoax, experts need to speak up.

But the need for lucid thinking exists on the other side of the political spectrum as well. There tends to be a view, perhaps most prominently propagated by Al Gore, that we have — or are on the verge of having — the technologies that will make it possible to wean ourselves from fossil fuels. All that stands in the way of a green future is our cowardice. As Yergin’s book makes plain, that is simply not true. The renewable technologies that are currently being deployed are highly unlikely to provide enough reliable and cheap energy to replace fossil fuels.