I live in the forest smug with firewood and a passive solar home.  Then I was sent on a mission to the San Fransisco bay area to solve huge energy problems ... I went from paradise to hell.  All that sprawl, so many cars, so little land, it would be easy to panic.  What will they do after oil?  The first reaction was to wire it in from distant areas.  The scale is beyond imagination, a trillion dollar industry.  Doing it with carbon would be certain catastrophic failure.  

I understand Bloomberg's epiphany and urgency.  Perhaps a massive district heating retrofit powered from industrial waste heat, waste biomass, rural solar farms, and seasonal heat storage - as in Sweden - could make the NYC area self reliant and generate millions of local jobs.

David, I'd agree that Bloomberg is an interesting politician -- particularly for a former Republican.  He also is the latest in a long line of reformist NYC mayors who have had an outsized influence on national policymaking simply because the Big Apple is, um, so big.

That said, I suspect Bloomberg ultimately chose not to make a third party run because his polling told him it would be futile, e.g., he has too much personal baggage for the "demolition derby" of presidential electoral politics.  At any rate, deep down he's a decidedly corporate and technocratic "green."  Better than being a neanderthal, I suppose, and perhaps the best that we can expect at the national level.  But mainly Bloomberg reminds me of how far the Republican party has fallen.  Thirty years ago it used to have a number of really interesting reformists who kept the party from going wacko.  The collapse of the reformist wing of the party has had wide-ranging consequences for the nation.