The U.S. first became a net importer of oil in 1948. The intervening decades have led Americans down a steady path of price spikes, shortages, and compromised foreign policy decisions. Imported fuel means expensive gasoline, lost jobs, and hobbled industries, while climate change poses risks as dramatic as they are difficult to assess. So how do we fix our fuel and energy problems? To answer that question—the first in a quarterly series called Fix This—Bloomberg Businessweek Chairman Norman Pearlstine gathered BP Capital Management’s T. Boone Pickens; Bob Shapard, chairman and chief executive officer of Oncor Electric Delivery and chairman of GridWise Alliance; Carol Browner, former director of the White House Office of Energy and Climate Change Policy for President Obama and EPA administrator for President Clinton; Jigar Shah, CEO of the Carbon War Room; and Thomas Kuhn, president of Edison Electric Institute. Their conversation has been condensed and edited.

What do we mean when we talk about an energy crisis? Is that an appropriate term for framing this discussion?

Shah: The word energy is very confusing. Energy includes both transportation fuel—which I think people are very concerned about—and coal, solar, wind, and other things that produce electricity. People confuse the two, and while we have fast-rising prices of electricity—5 percent rate increases per year since 2000—the fourfold increase in oil prices since 1999 is a much bigger problem in terms of economics than our electricity problem.

Shapard: People perceive there to be a crisis in this country environmentally with carbon and other emissions. I think transportation is the place you go for the biggest impact, and I think it’s a combination of natural gas and electricity that can solve our transportation problem. You can convert a significant portion of our fleet to natural gas and/or