Greetings Brian.

Thanks for taking time to collect and share your well considered thoughts. It
is a nice end of year mental treat. As always you offer lucid and thoughtful
suggestions.

That said, I agree with Phil's comment on human greed as a stumbling block to
success. We are a selfish lot and we seem to truly love zero sum games with a
defined loser for every winner preferably with more losers than winners. If
we can overcome this seemingly genetic predisposition to selfishness, we can
potentially attack the problems effectively using many/most, if not all, of the
ideas you suggest.

At each turn, someone's ox will be getting gored and they are not going to
like it. We will likely have to wait until it passes crisis level to react and
it may then be too late. Those folks who once survived on cod fishing in the
North Atlantic ultimately destroyed their own livelihood and now have had to
migrate to other activities. History has a way of repeating itself.

I would add a couple of other items to your list. Promote the benefits of or
if need be mandate birth/population control education among all of the world's
peoples, mandate total equality for all women of the world with full and
equal education and while we are talking about waste of energy, make the waging of
war illegal without a unanimous vote of approval of all potentially affected
parties on both sides.

I realize that these won't likely happen until we collectively evolve to some
level beyond (or maybe just to) what we current label as "homo sapiens" but
they could definitely have a positive impact on the energy question.

Thanks again for sharing your thoughts. I hope that they spread out to an
ever widening audience for greater consideration.

Wishing you and all a happy, healthy, prosperous and peaceful new year,
Joe