It was refreshing to see energy grabbing a lion’s share of headlines in Sunday’s New York Times, with 2 front page stories and the section lead in the new “Sunday Review” section all dedicated to colorful aspects of the complex U.S. energy tapestry. In “Behind Veneer, Doubt on Future of Natural Gas,” a story which has drawn national attention and a vigorous response from natural gas leaders, Ian Urbina explores doubts expressed by insiders about the profitability and sustainability of extracting natural gas from America’s largest shale fields.

In what reads like a love letter to the electric car industry, Joe Nacera writes of his experience driving a Chevy Volt and the joy of shunning the gas pump while topping 60 m.p.g. and, sometimes, approaching 100 m.p.g. What gets less consideration here is how charging the car every night affects total cost of ownership and energy/environmental impact. Electricity in this piece seems to come magically from the outlet to replenish the car without cost or repercussion, an idea better addressed in one of the Times’ other front page stories, “Atop T.V. Sets, a Power Drain that Runs Nonstop.” Here Elisabeth Rosenthal explores the growing presence, verging on omnipresence in the U.S. at more than 160 million units, of set-top boxes in America’s living rooms, examining them not as technological marvels but rather as electricity vampires. The story centers on a new study by the Natural Resources Defense Council, which concluded that “the boxes consumed $3 billion in electricity per year in the United States — and that 66 percent of that power is wasted when no one is watching and shows are not being recorded. That is more power than the state of Maryland uses over 12 months.”

We take it as a good sign that more and more attention is being given to a variety of energy issues in all their inherent messiness, helping identify areas of opportunity and improvement and advancing the prospect that energy can be managed more strategically.