Thanks for sharing your personal experience Lily-- hearing about the inspiration Sen. Markey gave you has provided me with a secondary bounceback motivation!

Given your newfound push, I'm curious if you have any thoughts on the climate proposal put out by Sen. Sanders today, especially in light of Gov. Inslee dropping out of the race last night as the go-to climate candidate for President?

Lily, I have no doubt energy efficiency and conservancy efforts are helping to "pick the low-hanging fruit" of wasted energy. What's next? Once everyone is using LED light bulbs, double-paned glass, and foamed walls, what's the next target capable of saving more energy than it creates (as far as I know, no one in  the $7 billion U.S. efficiency industry has paused to consider how much CO2 a $7 billion industry itself might create).

Public energy efficiency efforts in the U.S. have only existed for the last 50 years or so, and originally had nothing to do with climate change (in the 1970s CC was largely hypothetical and well-understood by a handful of climate scientists). They were inspired by the fear of running out of energy. After the 1983 OPEC oil embargo, our dependence on Mideast oil and gas hit home with citizens and policymakers, and a slew of energy legislation was signed into law. After 1987, when James Hansen gave his historic briefing to Congress on what consumption of fossil fuels was doing to climate, things took a new turn. Now the call was "Use less energy! We're destroying the environment!"

Using less energy is far easier for the wealthy than the poor - the wealthy are the low hanging fruit. When leaders of less-affluent countries (by U.S. standards) are asked to use less energy, they say "Why? After first-world countries created this problem by using unlimited oil, coal, and gas, they're now expecting us to help clean up their mess for them?". And they have a point.

Instead of forcing everyone to use less energy, why not work toward powering the world with clean, dispatchable nuclear energy? With fuel costs next to nothing, energy efficiency becomes irrelevant. Electricity customers are free to use as much energy as they like without guilt. Because it emits no carbon at all, elaborate Carbon Capture & Sequestration (CCS) schemes are unnecessary. Nuclear, despite public misperceptions, is the safest and the least expensive way to generate dispatchable electricity of all - so if convincing the public of that fact is all that's standing our way, wouldn't that be a simpler, more effective solution?
 

The challenge that I see with all of the "Green New Deal" discussions is the dependence on legislative solution that will seek to end many commercial enterprises and we have no Federal organizations that are structured to manage this implementation.  Assuming that the US remains a free market country we need a free market solution to drive the enterprises to change.  One solution that could be market based and would not force the government to pick the winners and losers is a Carbon Tax.  Implementation would be hard, the process would inherently define some winners and losers, but in the end with the value established, the market would then make decisions on the best solutions without massive government mandates.   The scale of the required transformation requires all parties to be aligned and if the first step is to tell millions of Americans (see https://www.usenergyjobs.org/report) that they are out of a job, I suspect that the legislative chances are small - remember that the Clean Power Plan of 2015 was stayed by the Supreme Court and then effectively halted by this administration.   I do realize that new jobs will be created but there will be different skill sets, locations and circumstances so many will be caught in the middle.