Kate Cell is director of development and Communications at the Prometheus Institute for Sustainable Development, a nonprofit working to accelerate the deployment of sustainable technologies, and editor for Economists for Peace and Security, a United Nations-accredited nongovernmental organization promoting economic analysis and appropriate action.

This summer is hot meteorologically and politically, and we're all feeling the heat. I hear people talking about energy everywhere: on the subway, after church, around the dinner table. Every major general interest magazine in the country, from Time to People, has run an energy-related cover in the past three months.

Recently at TomPaine.com, Frank O'Donnell's "The Return of Nazi Oil" warned of the perils of switching to coal-to-liquid fuel. And Tyson Slocum, in "Behind the Blackouts", explained why a deregulated, centralized distribution system fails to deliver power in California and Queens.

Our energy system and our political economy are broken: dependent on imports from unstable regions yet undependable for consumers, capricious in costs, calamitous in global climate and security impact. To fix it, we should look to localized, distributed, democratic energy sources, such as solar (photovoltaic) electricity, and free ourselves from the tyranny of fossil fuels.

Like all commodities or products (think of conflict diamonds in the Congo or the recent U.S. sale of jet fighters to Pakistan), energy operates within a political economy, whether one of war or one of peace, one of tyranny or one of democracy. The price of oil recently hit a record $78 a barrel, mostly because of the U.S. misadventure in Iraq. The markets are skittish and the world outraged at the Bush administration's insistence on invasion, occupation, mismanagement and disrespect for the rule of law.

Meanwhile U.S. citizens are paying high prices at the pump and the meter, at least by North American standards-but those prices don't reflect the real costs. Credible estimates that include securing and protecting the supply and cleaning up the environment put the real cost of a gallon of gas at nearly $20; the full cost of a kilowatt hour of electricity from coal, now billed at around 5 cents, is actually 17 cents. We see ExxonMobil reporting second-quarter profits of a record $10 billion while blackouts leave thousands of our citizens powerless. Ten billion dollars, not incidentally, is a good approximate of the direct military cost for five weeks' worth of Bush administration policy in Iraq.

We are increasingly worried by our economy's dependence on oil from the Middle East, where all the possible kinds of group violent conflict are raging in or near the region. The cool war between the U.S. and Iran is the hottest it's been since the 1979 hostage crisis, by no means coincidentally over the question of whether Iran seeks apocalyptic weapons or nuclear fuel. If the logic of the first U.S./U.K. casus belli for the Iraq war (fear of nuclear, chemical or biological weapon proliferation) were valid, and if prosecuting a war depended only on logical validity and not military capability, we'd be marching into Tehran (or Pyongyang) right now. But even if our soldiers weren't terribly overtaxed, with many suffering their third and fourth tours in Iraq-even then, as Michael Klare recently pointed out for TomDispatch, U.S. military options in Iran would still be severely limited. Iran controls not only its own considerable oil reserves but can also blockade the Straits of Hormuz, "through which," writes Klare, "daily, 40 percent of the world's oil exports pass" [emphasis mine].

With all this going on, it is no surprise that O'Donnell reports that some companies are trying to cash in by substituting domestically-produced coal-to-liquid fuel for imported oil, or that Slocum finds that others prefer to maximize short-term profits, repairing the grid after it breaks rather than maintain it. Given who they are-people or entities with capital-it would be surprising, indeed astonishing, if they weren't. That, after all, is what capital does; it's what it's for. When one resource becomes constrained, a free market substitutes another-that, in turn, is what markets are for.

In these circumstances, floating another infrastructure-heavy, centralized energy source-whether nuclear, coal or coal-to-liquid fuel-means paddling against the current of economic and political common sense. Countries that have figured this out (such as Japan and Germany) are beginning to favor localized, distributed power generation that occurs at or near the point of use: solar electricity and heat, biomass and ground-source heat pumps. That marks a trend away from problematic oil, coal, or nuclear power toward less constrained or dangerous resources. Solar electricity, for instance, relies on two plentiful resources always at hand: silicon (the second most abundant element in the earth's crust) and sunlight.

Petroleum companies may be realizing record profits, but the rising costs of maintaining, protecting, and delivering the nation's energy are being passed on to us. The costs for solar are falling and will continue to drop as the industry achieves economies of learning and scale. Already the solar electricity sector is growing by 30 to 50 percent per year and has done so for the past decade.

The U.S. sows its inventions in renewable energy technologies, but we don't reap the benefits-we don't meet our own energy needs or the world's need for peace and prosperity. If we chose, the U.S. could afford to subsidize the learning costs of creating cost-effective photovoltaic electricity, in the process making new jobs at home and exporting our knowledge and products worldwide. If President Bush truly believed that our nation is a positive agent for democratic change around the world, he would bet on our considerable comparative advantage to drive global innovation and adoption of renewable energy. He wouldn't just increase the amount of funding for the Solar America Initiative to $128 million as he did for fiscal year 2007. He would trade off $10 billion, or five weeks' worth of babysitting a civil war in Iraq, against dramatically increasing capacity throughout the U.S. solar industry from silicon production to installation. He'd invest in a new America-a solar America.