I would add payback period to your list. Longer is worse, especially in the present economic climate. The longer the payback period, the longer it is until the capital investment is recovered and freed to be re-applied to other capital projects. Longer payback periods also tend to be associated with more iffy assumptions and uncertainties; what is supposed to be a 25 year payback period could easily end up actually being 30 or 40 or 50 years - or never. At a certain point, you also have to start looking at how the payback period stacks up against the useful life of a project; you want to avoid getting on a "treadmill", where as soon as a project has broken even, you have to start thinking about replacing it.

We just don't have the horses to accomplish this in our spare time. Mandating that energy efficiency of energy procurement happened in the 1970s but has long been forgotten - data is sparse - I send this stuff to API, Matt Simmons (who recently said we nee $100 TRILLION to upgrade our rust/iron ore in energy delivery systems - I haven't heard back) -very few view the problem in these terms because they (like I) have been trained in dollars - you have to be able to look out a few steps -Chu/Holdren and others should be conducting massive research on this topic and it should be married with equivalent research on our 'ends' somewhere else in government. Instead we will evaluate things via the fantastically fast moving target of dollars.

Your suggestion is a good one - but someone more connected than us is going to have to step up -we've tried for years to even get people thinking in these terms - and many before us as well (this is related to Technocracy movement of 70 years ago...).

At least there are scientists in DC now - but even scientists succumb to politics, and the needs of the moment - they just draw the line sooner (or they should).

Nate certainly has it right, this needs to be done at the top, where the resources to do it could actually be mustered. but...

I vaguely remember back in the day Nixon giving a speech and pointing up America's current and potential productivity (I think he was equating GDP with productivity) PER SQUARE FOOT. I remember cringing, since the long term costs incurred by that productivity were always ignored. Back then these costs were always very poorly defined and lumped into that amorphous under the radar blob called 'social costs' (calling attention to their potential enormity never endeared me to my economics instructors either). By the end Reagon's time 'social costs' weren't even mentioned anymore. Short term positive cash flow had become the only god worshipped.

The challenge of trying to get a true benefit cost analysis factoring long term costs and long term benefits--which takes in every aspect of as much of the ERoRI equation as can be humanly modeled--into all government policy making is immense. It would be an almost a complete about face from what we have been doing for a long, long time. That some are undaunted and trying to do this yet is more than admirable. Unlikely as this about face is to happen, it is this society's only chance of going forward more or less whole.