Which is pretty much the same as the GOP Energy Chief's plan.

Except swap Nuclear power for Wind power.

How much less CO2 does burning natural gas compare to gasoline?

How much less particulate/aerosol ?

My elementary understanding of this says NG is much better, but not sufficient to get us to a 80% by 2050 goal.  Is this your understanding as well?

There are neat ideas out there that parallel Honda's home garage unit that reform NG into hydrogen.  Maybe a CCS system can be attached to that?

Honda's current NG Civic (with home garage unit) is known for being particularly clean.

But maybe this is all second rate goods compared to what we really need to be doing.

Holy shit that's a lot of coal, Grey Falcon.  So there is a lot of methane and NG coming off those underground patches.

So on the NG car, its "nice" on GHG but not sufficient, and its probably awesome on reducing old-school air pollution.

So does his plan include incentives to keep me consuming his energy (now in the form of natural gas)?  Wow...I'm relieved....here I was thinking that the end of cheap oil might mean that we'd finally get back to living close to the earth, to having good communities, to meaningful lives.  But if we can keep suburbia running on natural gas and wind power, this is really good news.  In fact, maybe I'll move a little further from work and start driving to work now that we've got such a great plan.  I suppose if peak oil had put the brakes on development, we would've saved the Amazon and it's millions of species...but now that we can keep going, exploit away!  There must be some rare metal down there that we can mine and send north to build our new "natural" gas cars with.

By the way, everybody should know that T. Boone Pickens is also a main sponsor of the "Swift Boat" ads against John Kerry in 2004, which were a slimy smear of baseless insinuations against a man who served honorably in the Vietnam War.  In my humble opinion, Pickens is a despicable man, whose obscene wealth brings him much more attention than he deserves.  For my part, whether as an environmentalist or as a human being, I do not care to associate with him.

using wind for our energy does NOT free up natural gas. Gas must be used as a backup for the intermittent nature of wind!

The monopoly of the wind energy industry by GE has cause a failure to produce efficiently enough energy to compete with the other energy sources.
If the turbine was on a vertical shaft with the vanes in the form of the pinwheel there would be a great improvement in the production of amperes which is the most important measure of energy.  The present turbines are suspiciously inadequate for any energy production and look like giant fans.

Why oh why isn't somebody working on a way to capture the energy from lightning strikes? We know they strike frequently in certain areas; we know they carry between 10 million and 100 million volts of electricity. What more do we need? Figure it out.