Richard Smalley called it the “terawatt challenge.” In the months before his too-early death from cancer last year at age 62, the 1996 Nobel Prize winner was the world’s foremost energy evangelist. Smalley was constantly lecturing, working to convince his listeners that the greatest challenge facing the world today is the need for new sources of abundant, clean, cheap energy.

During his lectures, Smalley, a professor of chemistry and physics at Rice University in Houston, would show audiences a list.

Referring to the list, Smalley would declare, “Energy is the single most important factor that impacts the prosperity of any society...It is impossible to imagine bringing the lower half of the economic ladder of human civilization – about three billion people – up to a modern lifestyle without abundant, low-cost, clean energy.”

Smalley’s evangelization for energy, brilliantly captured in Turk Pipkin’s recent fascinating documentary, Nobelity, was spurred by his conviction that if the world solves the energy problem, then several of the other issues on his list of ten immediately follow. For instance, with enough energy, clean water can be produced from sea water. And with enough clean water, food production becomes far easier. Poverty and environmental problems would be resolved because access to energy immediately raises living standards, which would allow for better environmental management.

Smalley pointed out that in 2004, the global economy consumed the equivalent of 220 million barrels of oil per day. Converted into electricity terms, that’s the equivalent of 14.5 terawatts, or 14,500 gigawatts, or 14,500,000 megawatts. (Just for reference, a large nuclear plant has about 2,000 megawatts of capacity.) The challenge, he would then say – given global population growth and industrialization – is to find another 14.5 terawatts or so of clean, new energy so that the world’s poor can improve their standard of living. If that energy cannot be found, then the three billion people on earth who now live in desperate poverty will remain desperately poor. Poverty breeds terrorism. Thus dealing with poverty is an essential element in fighting terrorism.

Therein lies Smalley’s challenge: find enough new energy to raise the living standards of people around the globe. And making that challenge more complicated: he stipulated that the new energy sources must contain little or no carbon so as not to add to the atmosphere’s carbon dioxide, the gas that is blamed for global warming. In short, Smalley said the world needs, as he put it, a “new oil.”

About a year ago, the International Energy Agency estimated that between now and 2030, the world must invest about $17 trillion in new energy infrastructure to meet expected demand. What makes the IEA’s numbers even more daunting is that they did not account for any of the advances that Smalley advocated. Smalley foresaw a new high-capacity electric grid that would stretch for thousands of miles, built of high-tech, super-conducting carbon nano-tubes. He also foresaw new electricity storage systems that could store 100 kilowatt-hours of electricity – enough to run an average American home for 24 hours.

Smalley was a dreamer. He was also a great believer in science and in the ingenuity of the human race. In late 2004, during a speech in Boston, he declared that “innovations in nanotechnology and other advances in materials science would make it possible to transform our vision of low-cost energy into a reality.” The key question now facing the world: can we make Smalley’s vision into reality and thereby avert a global crisis?