A friend pointed me to the Wired magazine article “The End of Oil is Upon Us“, reporting on the International Energy Agency‘s latest annual World Energy Outlook, whose projections on the impact of India & China’s exploding energy reinforced for me the necessity of Thomas Friedman’s call for a national moonshot-level initiative to achieve energy independence. Unfortunately, such an initiative lacks the pay-off moment of seeing Armstrong setting foot on the face the moon to galvanize public support. Until we find the “human face” for energy policy like we did for space policy, I fear we will not have the will to make the hard political choices, like increasing incentives for alternative energy research and phasing-out fossil fuel subsidies, that will allow us to avert an energy & environmental crisis. While Apollo missions off the ground thanks to the efforts of thousands of professionals at NASA & its private contractors, it was he astronauts who were the heroes of the space program, providing its public face. Who are the heroes of energy independence?