Yooooon, I absolutely agree on co-gen. It should be a requirement of any new permit to build a commercial structure, and planners should offer incentives for manufacturing plants etc. to co-locate with existing facilities that have waste heat. Likewise, I would favor strong incentives to deploy heat pumps; if the cost of the units can be brought down or offset by incentives, the "free" heat and cooling could put a real dent in heating oil and nat gas consumption.

Right now, I am not aware of any such incentives in any U.S. municipality. But with the stroke of a pen, planners could offer them, resulting in a very significant boom for both co-gen and heat pumps, and deployment could occur quite rapidly.

On the whole, I agree that efficiency is the no-brainer.

ChrisIs - UK stocks melted today. The day was one of several in recent months where one part of the market went one way - south - (Bank of Scotland down 11.6%, Royal Bank of Scotland down 9% - these are two of the UK's biggest banks) whilst BP up 1.5% and BG Group up 0.4%. The latter is one of my favorite stocks. One of the biggest sellers of LNG into the American market and significant equity in the Santos basin (declaration - I own BG.L stock).

We need to fight a bit harder to get energy efficiency adopted as standard currency. In absolutely everything we do, energy efficiency must be King. For a fair number of years at least, this will allow society to function, doing all it does at present, without too much pain - gives time to think about phase 2 of the Long Emergency.

But I gotta say that in a world run by **** heads - I'm not currently that optimistic.

Right with ya there...

Same thing here today: A tough day for the financials, and a bomber day for energy. But I wasn't complaining 'cuz I'm long energy, plus I saw the financial meltdown coming and went long SKF (ultrashort on the financials) a couple of weeks ago. It's nice to get it right once in a while...