Architect Norman Foster has done some groundbreaking work in sustainable building. One building of his you may know is the "Cucumber" in central London.

Recommend checking out his captivating speech at TED: ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/174

And on the topic of energy consumption, we (an Indian company called VNL) just did some research on Indian mobile operators. You can read it here: vnl.in/blog/cleantech/the-power-fuel-challenge

It wasn't surprising to find that the biggest chunk of network operating costs is power and fuel.

And what's more, mobile operators in India alone consume something like 2 billion litres of diesel. Every year. Just to power backup generators for mobile base stations...

Finally
A word of wisdom, I will not deny that Ben Stein is extremely smart and sees a lot of obvious things, oh and that I really do not care for the guy ether. However His statement is true. And since the late fifties and early sixties it has been all about living better that the way I grew up. Not a lot of sense in that. If we put down all of our electronics for a day and take stock in ourselves and our family, we just might realize that it is all of this so called “needs to live comfortable” that has estranged have of us from our own family, and the other half creating people you would not be caught on the streets by yourself at night. Or maybe it’s the Dick Cheney’s of the world who honestly belief the tax payers should pay his utilities and keep all of his lights on without conserving a bullet for anyone!

Yeah but don't forget a good portion of industrial output is devoted to the the manufacture of automobiles. As well, the energy used in the production of gas is probably included in the industry wedge. The industry wedge does not even include automobile or fuel production out of the country. The tar sands, probably the largest environmental mess ever, produces gasoline mostly for the states.

The energy required to build and operate parking garages as well as car dealerships, gas stations, etc. should also be included on the transportation side.

Also don't forget that parking and roads consume a lot of land that could otherwise be occupied by vegetation that sequesters carbon. The automobile also enables sprawling subdivisions full of large energy wasting house.

The point is we need another moon shot as well to build energy efficient transportation infrastructure such as high-speed rail, rapid transit and cycling facilities. Our roads and bridges are crumbling anyway so might as well let them crumble and invest the money in sustainable transportation.

If you want to see how science views the use of energy in the U.S., go to this link:

https://eed.llnl.gov/flow/images/LLNL_Energy_Chart300.jpg

This is a chart of energy flows published by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. What's interesting to note is that the energy lost from our electrical infrastructure is almost equivalent to the useful energy employed by the transportation sector.

So, I would argue that there is still an important piece that many miss. We should look at ways in making the grid more efficient before creating more generation. I also agree that part of the losses could be stemmed by plugging up our leaky buildings. Oil and cars are visible and visceral icons that are leveraged for political expediency to promote specific and unpopular agendas for promoting more drilling and nukes. Go figure...

Well from an energy use standpoint transportation uses almost exclusively petroleum, whereas buildings are almost exclusively powered by energy sources other than petroleum (with the exception of a small amount of heating oil).

Electricity and Natural gas are still significantly cheaper and their fuels more plentiful than oil.

Additionally, building efficiency is a much easier to grasp term than automobile efficiency. After all, I think every home owner can add some insulation or install new windows--And it's their own fault if they don't.

why is anyone still concerned with ben stein at all??after expelled it should be clear that he has no idea of the topic (whichever he's talking about), can be bought by special interest groups and quite frankly is a liar........so just ignore him.and yeah, the buildings are the biggest and easiest problem....fix em.

You ask why we spend so much time and money on cars... cars are easy. We change cars about every two years. There are green alternatives, including biking and public transportation available.

We don't spend much time talking about trucks. Truck are owned by corporations instead of by individuals. To get trucks to change, you have to get companies to care about how their goods are shipped. That's harder. You have to shift airline subsidies into train subsidies and re-build the railroad infrastructure. That's really hard.

And that's just talking about stuff that actually gets replaced every 10 years.

For buildings, we have to make absolutely every new house and office building built LEED platinum certified and then get people to abandon their old homes and buildings for new city centers. For example, a progressive town like Boulder, Austin, or Portland needs to pick up and re-locate to Greensburg, Kansas, so that their former city can be demolished and re-built for the next city to take up. That's an absolutely monsterous undertaking. One far worthier of the "moon-shot" efforts being called for, in my opinion, but really tough.

...and what increases the need for more buildings? More people.

We cannot escape this basic equation: more people = more environmental damage. We need to cut down on the overpopulation ASAP if we're serious about saving our ecology.

I think one of the biggest reasons that people focus on optimizing cars is that the effects would be large-scale and quickly deployed (relatively).

If we suddenly discovered a directly replacement for gasoline, we could start distributing it using our current infrastructure immediately. If it took a minimal alteration of the car, it could be rolled out in a five year plan. If our solution required a complete change of automotive technology, our deployment would take 10-15 years. By technological standards, that's fantastically quick.

So, even though its only a quarter, it's a quarter we could solve very soon. Also, it's not a zero-sum game; there are technologies that have been developed for industry and HVAC/lighting that have been used, and are being used now. The difference is that cars have a life-expectancy of a little more than a decade; factories and houses may be around for over a century.

Far easier and cheaper to upgrade to a new car than a house

New houses are built to much higher energy efficiency standards than older houses.

how many of us have to make the old house with short commute or new house with longer commute?

Benny is SOOOO Stupid its really shocking.

Upgrading your car is actually one of the worst things you can do for the environment. Sure, it says "I spent money on a hybrid, so I care", but it really doesn't work. Nor does drilling for drips in ANWAR.

When you buy a hybrid (or any new car), your old car gets sold so someone who can afford that price point that uses it - so every used car expands the number of car users. More oil doesn't solve the problem, it only changes the economics a very, very, very small amount. And it continues to increase greenhouse gases.

Putting the money into your home (wisely), reduces energy loss, thereby increasing the efficiency of the overall system - a good investment.

A better investment might be to invest in energy systems like solar and geothermal that return money to you and improve the scale economics of this developing industry. How can you do that? Simply driver your car into the ground and take the savings -typically $3K to $5K each year, even after gas and maintenance - and invest it.

Which of these options - home or investing - is better is determined by home value, payback on the investments, and a number of other factors. But either will return more money to you by 2 orders of magnitude (for every $1 you spend on a car, you will roughly earn $100 on the home or investment) because the car loses value quickly, where the other options gain slowly.

And waiting to invest in a hybrid will likely get you a better value in the long run as batteries are improving quickly.

Ben Stein just released a movie supporting Idiotic Design, so it shouldn't surprise anyone that Ben Stein is Stupid. The guy was a hack (or is it a shill?) for Nixon, second only to Bush as the biggest crook we've had as a President. Which means his job was much like Tony Snow's - to lie to the American People. He (Stein) just did with little glee and less personality.

Transportation may make up only 1/4 of our energy usage, but it makes up a fraction that cannot be easily replaced with alternatives. There is no quick replacement for burning something like gasoline. The first electric vehicles are still in extremely limited production and are very expensive, and I don't think I've seen anything that would address the real kicker-- long-haul trucking.

Sure, people are working on it, but you can't replace transportation power with another type of power on any large scale yet. It's gasoline or diesel (or any of their synthetic or biofuel cousins) or nothing for the time being.

Home energy systems like solar or wind reduce energy usage in other sectors, but are only useful for transportation in a few rare cases where someone has access to an EV or a plug-in hybrid and a home generation system-- and these grid-chargeable vehicles are still extremely rare, expensive, and completely unavailable in the heavy transportation industry.

I do agree with Stein that we need to go with nuclear, but I'm not for drilling for oil in the ocean and turning coal into gasoline, it just seems backwards to me. There's enough oil out there, what's going on with oil prices has more to do with speculation about supply than the actual supply.

One reason to focus on cars is that cars WASTE more power than the other areas; so while they are not the biggest draw, they have the most room for improvement.

That nice chart on a previous post shows how little power is wasted on the others in comparison; although, buildings are bigger than transportation smaller progress will still yeild large results.

Another issue is that transportation great impacts buildings and other things. Urban sprawl for example.