The Obama administration is now working to initiate a sensible long-term approach to energy, with new fuel-efficiency standards for motor vehicles, investments in technology, energy-efficiency programs for dwellings, and environmentally sound exploration for additional resources. Doing this in the midst of an arduous post-crisis deleveraging process, a stubbornly slow recovery, the process of building a new, more sustainable growth pattern, is harder – politically and economically – than it might otherwise have been, had the US started earlier.ampnbsp;