I can think of two reasons for Americans consuming more energy than others in this world today: (1) commuting and other individual uses of automobiles; and (2) tremendous amounts of energy used to heat and cool our homes.

These are not things that just happened but rather actions we have incentivized. We have made it easy and inexpensive to drive on our daily errands while trains remain difficult to access and significantly more expensive.

This nation has encouraged single-family homes, McMansions and urban sprawl through the deductibility of mortgage interest. These are trends that directly conflict with the goals of energy saving.

We can do something about these things.

• Eliminate the mortgage interest deduction for single-family homes while maintain it for condominiums, in multi-unit structures.
• Impose increasingly painful taxes for large home sites making it less desirable to own a one or more acre lot.
• Encourage the development of golf cart communities concentrating residence, work, shopping and recreation within the community.
• Start building passenger rail systems between and within urban areas. Those of you who have visited London know it is faster, easier and less expensive to take the train rather than a cab into the city. Fund these with taxes on oil powered personal transportation.
• Follow Pickens’s idea and power the big trucks with natural gas rather than diesel.

As we shift more to electrical transportation, we must decide how to generate the electricity. Today, electricity generation in significant amounts can be done through waterpower or steam driven turbines. The steam can be created with fossil fuels or nuclear energy. Dams have already been built virtually wherever possible. To reduce our dependence on oil for power generation, we must increase both coal and nuclear power generation.

Work should continue to make wind power, solar, geothermal, etc. cost-effective sources of energy. They are not there today and probably will not be for at least another decade. Let’s not pretend that these technologies can compete without massive subsidies. Shifting to them today will make true President Obama’s statement that, …”Utility bills will necessarily skyrocket.”