I'm not an expert in civilian nuclear procedures, but I suspect that military nuclear procedures have a few more layers of "doing it the military way" that maybe commercial procedures don't. Actually, I'm not sure that's a bad thing--the military nuclear power safety record has been impressive for many years.

Every process for saving energy has negatives attached to it. A thousand megawatts of solar isn't exactly without environmental problems, either, once you include manufacturing, materials, and methods of storing that kind of energy if you need to.

Insulating old buildings hauls up its own problems, which I've seen around here. A lot of old-style insulation isn't exactly enviro-friendly either, and ripping up old buildings often takes special procedures. Newer structure are already held to very tight insulation codes.

Energy-efficient appliances are already a major part of the market. I don't know if this is specific to California, but people here get all kinds of power bill breaks and rebates from buying energy efficient appliances or heating and cooling systems. There are huge tax breaks on renewable energy, and goodies for hybrid and electric drivers.

It's possible that what you want is already taking place to a large degree, but it's going to take time to work through the system.

The United States has really not done all that bad. Check out this chart.

Overall energy use has doubled over the past forty years. But note that this number has flattened out in recent years, and actually dropped a bit between 2005 and 2006. Per-capita energy use is almost flat, and energy use per dollar of GDP is less than half what it was in 1970.

Our productivity and economic growth have far outpaced our energy growth, which I think is a reflection of more efficiency in how we do things. There are other factors, of course. The U.S. makes less of its money on heavy industry than it used to, and I'm sure a lot of other things come into it.