A package of 35 improvements to typical industrial motor systems can save around 50% of their metered energy…with a simple payback under 16 months.

Any demanding high technology tends to develop influential and dedicated constituencies of those who link its commercial success with both the public welfare and their own. Such sincerely held beliefs, peer pressures, and the harsh demands that the work itself places on time and energy all tend to discourage such people from acquiring a similarly thorough knowledge of alternative policies and the need to discuss them.

Our energy future is choice, not fate. Oil dependence is a problem we need no longer have-and it's cheaper not to. U.S. oil dependence can be eliminated by proven and attractive technologies that create wealth, enhance choice, and strengthen common security.

In the model that we grew up with, governments rule physical territory in which national economies function, and strong economies support hegemonic military power. In the new model, already emerging under our noses, economic decisions don't pay much attention to national sovereignty in a world where more than half of the one hundred or two hundred largest economic entities are not countries but companies.

The barriers that renewables and efficiency face come less from our living in a capitalist market economy and more from not taking market economics seriously.

Prominent exploration experts have recently predicted that total world production of liquid oil will peak by about the end of this decade-or a few years later if production does not rise much-and will decline thereafter.

Nuclear power has died of an incurable attack of market forces and is way beyond any hope of revival, because the competitors are several-fold cheaper and are getting rapidly more so.