There’s a popular genre of fiction books and TV programs that explore what the world might have been like if history had taken a different twist. What if Julius Caesar never crossed the Rubicon? What if Napoleon won at Waterloo? What if the Allies lost the Great War? And what might gasoline prices look like today if we didn’t have a president deliberately trying to force Americans off our most abundant, most reliable energy sources? Counterfactuals like these are just that—fiction. But they can help us see reality a little more clearly.