One thing is clear about the global energy outlook: A lot more demand is coming. As megacities rise and the middle class expands, the world will crave 53 percent more energy in 2035 than it consumes now, noted moderator Brian Sullivan of CNBC. But the panel, composed of three Americans and one Canadian who sells to America, trained their focus on the land of the Stars and Stripes.

So what's new about the American energy landscape? For one thing, our supplies are more secure, thanks in part to the shale gas boom and a slide in oil consumption and imports. There's also a growing sense that renewable energy isn’t the Next Big Thing we thought it would be in 2008, and neither is peak oil.

Estimates of the planet's stores of recoverable oil and gas have surged, said Chevron's Rhonda Zygocki. Montana Gov. Brian Schweitzer emphasized that the U.S. has the world's largest deposits of the cheapest sources of electricity: coal and natural gas, the latter on sale for $2 per 1,000 cubic feet. And our Canadian friends are happy to sell us loads of crude dug out of Alberta's tar sands. All these fossil fuel sources are conflict-free (geopolitically speaking, anyway).

That's the good news. Richard Kauffman, senior advisor to the U.S. Secretary of Energy, argued that we still have a lot of work to do. It's not popular to talk about climate change, he conceded, but it will exact severe costs eventually. Today, though, the other costs of our dependence on fossil fuels are clear enough: We pay in terms of the trade deficit, in military costs to guard overseas oilfields and in missing the opportunity to create clean-energy industries.

Indeed, federal subsidies for renewables are being phased out, and projects are slowing down. But wind, solar, biofuels and other alternatives can't be deployed in anything like the scale of fossil fuels, Zygocki said. Conventional energy is reliable, cost-effective and permeates the world as we know it.

Schweitzer lamented that the sun and the wind go away for much of the day, and said he'd like to see a stiff tariff on oil imports that would spur innovation in energy tech. Storage technology is at the top of that list – equipment that could distribute the energy of renewables on demand. Venture investors are working on that, but it's not quite there yet.

Alex Pourbaix of TransCanada (of Keystone Pipeline fame) said the solution was under our feet in the form of shale gas. That less-polluting fuel is not only replacing coal in electric plants but could barrel into the motor fuel market, at least according to the Pickens Plan, which Schweitzer supports.

But Zygocki, the Chevron exec, doesn't. Natural gas provides a fraction of oil's energy, so cars that run on it would need an extra-large tank, she said – and there goes your trunk.

Kauffman, surrounded as he was by fossil fuel aficionados, wrapped up the event with a defense of public investment in energy know-how. Washington has midwifed many transformations of industry, from the railroads to aviation to the Internet. Government investment, he said, can help clean energy get to scale and get cheap.