One of the things that is wasted or generally discarded is heat energy.
In evolution there is a tendency to take and use what is needed right now and throw the rest away. Anyway prosperous folks tend to save what they can when they can for whatever use they can make of it. With energy we still play pretty fast and loose to the glee of the energy moguls. As far as energy goes, wasting is legal. A great deal of money is a license to waste a great deal of energy. Just ask any rich guy, or maybe better just look at any rich people. Wasting energy is like a right of status. Rich people would not actually want to admit to being energy jerks. At any rate our culture allows for huge energy jerks to waste as much as they want as a symbol of status and wealth.

What if we could save and use most or all of the heat energy before it finally dissipates? It costs as much as regular energy. There is a principal of conservation of energy, but that only works if it does not get away to dissipate into space. I know in America we make a great deal of throw away, but probably that should be rethought so as not to have any real waste. Being monetarily challenged, i try to generate as little waste as possible.
To me it seems like we would not have to let heat simply escape. I would contend that our thermodynamic lives are in as much disarray as our philosophical or conceptual organization. A good deal of our organization is based on adversity and wasted energy to create and maintain a status quo. It would be a good meditation to try not to waste. Usually people are not rewarded for their effort of trying not to waste. We have all this energy that can be used, but we might have 4 times as much at 1/4 the unit cost if we used it wisely or at least smartly. If we had a yard and a house we could harvest a great deal of free energy with the proper use of tools. The point is we do not have to mainline all our energy, and we can certainly maximize the value of the energy that we do mainline.
We have these wonderful materials these days that are only partially used because we fight over who has the right to profit or own the technology. Probably the biggest energy throw away is in the heat given of during the generation and use of mechanical power. (driving around or moving around)
We waste as much energy as 'heat throw away' driving around as it would take to heat our dwelling in the cold part of winter. Let us guess that 2/3 of the money you spend driving around goes into the environment, plus the waste gases. What if we could make all that energy that goes into the cold air go into heating our homes.
There is an easy way to turn that around. It could be done with electric or pneumatic cars. The electric car could help change this, but so would the pneumatic car. You could charge your car at home with electric from sun or wind. There is a matter of saving that energy in reserve for later use. There are three ways. There is storage battery, there is pneumatic reservoir, and there is heat reservoir in the form of insulated water tank.
Internal combustion engines work very well on natural gas. If one generated their own electric at home with a natural gas engine, or compressed their own air at home using a natural gas engine, they could simply divert all the waste heat into a heat reservoir of water where the heat energy would be extracted as needed, with a heat exchanger. You would have to keep an insulated fresh water tank on part of your premises. It could be worse, water can be captured from your roof on rainy days. The tank would cost something, and the heat exchange would cost something, but moving the heat energy that has already been generated is a great deal cheaper than burning new fossil fuel for energy over here or over there.
The point is, natural gas energy could be easily transformed into mechanical energy + 2 times as much heat energy. The mechanical energy could be stored as electrical energy in a battery or pneumatic energy in a special tank. Hence in the cold part of the year the heat energy generated in your electric or pneumatic could be diverted to your dwelling. Any electric used inside your dwelling would be given off as heat. Energy stored as pneumatic, could be use as mechanical or converted to electrical.. Some of these options are a little technical, but extremely straight forward. Probably a storage battery and converted might be kept for a short term reserve of electric power if there was a good store of pneumatic energy.

In this way there could be 100% energy use and zero direct waste of natural gas used. Maybe not 100% since there would be some heat coming off of the electrical or pneumatic conveyance that would be lost to the atmosphere.
In the coldest part of the year your electric bill would converge with your heating bill. Your transportation energy bill would converge with your heating and electric bill.
So you could get most of your energy needs met with your natural gas bill which should not increase especially much.
A 4 stroke internal combustion engine would be critical to the operation combined with an electrical generator and high pressure pneumatic compressor. Maybe a steel tank would work, but it would probably have to be high pressure capable like the one in the pneumatic car, for more energy storage in a smaller space.
There would probably be a heat management space area in home, that could be partly above ground and partly below ground.
i live in a northern climate, but use air conditioning in the summer. It seems to me that the ice forming temperatures of the winter time could be saved for the heat of the summertime in the form of a mass of ice, like the refrigeration of the old days. This is an obscure piece of technological history, but there was a time when Walden Pond was the ice factory to the world. That is ice from Walden pond was shipped around the word in sailing ships, for wealthy people. I imagine 10 or 20 tons of ice could keep a home very cool in the heat of summer with a simple heat exchanger and fan. At any rate, cold could be captured and saved as ice, for air conditioning.
There is the real possibility of keeping a large amount of hot water and a large amount of ice in some kind of tanks. Plastics tank are pretty good. Probably some kind of foam insulation would do a good job at keeping the heat and cold passively contained for timely use. The basic idea would be to transfer the heat or the cold into ones living space with the appropriate heat exchanger. When your ice take got up to more than 70 degrees or so it would be less effective. And when the heat reservoir got below 80 to 85 you might have to add more heat.
The point is you would not have to main line your air conditioning, or your heating, and you would have a large store of fresh water if there was a need. It would probably be cheaper than one of those excavation techniques with the PVC pipes in the ground. Probably some energy would still have to be mainlined beyond the importation of methane, but the air conditioning would be free, and the lighting could be free.
One of the questions that might be asked is; Should our lives and our social structure be completely organized around a compulsive wasting of energy in the form of fossil fuels?
Another thing to keep in mind is although methane is a fossil fuel it is also a bio fuel. A mass of organic material can be used to generate methane or natural gas. As far as i know methane is easier to generate than ethanol. Methane gives off less CO2 than other fuel and less odd carbon based waste molecules. or can be mixed to burn 100% clean
That will be enough for today. i have been considering a heat recapture engine where a good deal of the heat given off in an internal combustion engine might be caught and introduced into a compressed air motor for larger mechanical efficiency than an internal combustion engine alone. Basically it is another heat exchange device that would use the heat energy that would normally be cast off into the air. It seems like it should be possible. I'll save it for later.

I live in a place where the air and the water are fairly clear and clean. i think this is very good. I heard that the air in Los Angeles has dramatically improved over the years, due to some changes in fuel technology. I tend to think things are getting somewhat better in some places. I understand that Beijing is having a pretty big problem with polluted air and general environment these days. I have been there one time in my life about 8 or 9 years ago. It was in the Winter and there was very little green and light. Lately i have been hearing it was dusty with other pollution. I think they are going to have to get away from fossil fuels, unless they want their working people to be dying from lung disease. They have other kinds of difficulties as well, such as dust and other air borne particulates.
I recently became interested in clean burning which might best be explained by this play list:
YouTube search; (Hydrogen Oxgen fundamentals)
It is a good deal of information for me to absorb in a single run through, but interesting nonetheless. i liked the part where the engines can increase their power efficiency and have seriously clean exhaust gas that is clean enough to have clean distilled water as a by product of the fuel burn. This means the the internal combustion engine can be turned into a crucible in which comes clean water from complex molecules. The key was using some small amount of hydrogen to enhance the combustion process. It is quite a lot of information compacted into about 100 or so minutes.
I have also become interested in the new pneumatic motor technology, which seems of ideal for clean driving. It could be better than electric or battery technology.
I came from a science background but i tend to like practical science or use of knowledge. I guess i should admit that i did not like the institutional aspect of the university all that much after taking away some sense of the somewhat hidden but perceptible nature of physical reality. My brain does not do well in institutional circumstances. Anyway, the brain still works. hopefully.
One of the things i have become interested in is the use of energy, while realizing i have very little clout to make any changes in a wider way. What is needed to do this is a general interest in energy conservation and usage. Maybe even some groundswell of interest might push the issue.
i know scientists are smart people, but in the sense of narrowed focus. If the "knowledge" aspect is left to the political "energy experts" there will likely be more wars and other bizarre behaviors dishonest gaming for the sake of taking more power. In the case of the future energy landscape, directed knowledge can diffuse the craziness. Knowledge can actually stymie the politicos. We have to look for competent solutions, and not be too easily led. Think of it as showing your children that your intelligence has to do with caring solutions. Personally i think that is the best way to go. How would that be phrased? Caring socially responsible intelligence. That's the ticket! That way they won't have to grow up in a war torn land. Not everything in life has to follow the money.
Probably you have to figure the power people play a game first with the chips falling where they may. We cannot all be perpetual status holders in a perpetual unguided hierarchy. Truth comes from the bottom power and untruth from the top. This means you have to vote with your opinions and well considered action, probably sharing your concern and knowledge and try to get other people to do the same.
i know there has been some talk about change but smart people are needed more than self interested people, to push the logic and the "nuts and bolts" of it to get anything intelligent accomplished. The self encouraged and self guided political hierarchy will never get it right. We probably have to assume that John McCain is not going to go against his constituency. Intelligent people are going to have to do an end run on the energy wasting game. As far as i can tell this means maximizing efficiency at the personal use level, and then the hierarchy will be obliged to follow or look as "unsmart" as they actually are.
If everyone could take part in a positive effort in some small way they would all be better off; even the impoverished on the streets of Mexico or Guatemala Cities. At least they could have clean air to breath because it is cheaper to do it that way. These days we can think cheaper and better and easily make it so. When it comes to the future, peace is not as flashy as war, but far more important.
Personally i think we are at a critical stage where people would be better off taking their lives and fates out of the hands of the perpetual gamers or winners, because they don't care what happens as long as they are playing to win and can dance and party on their show boats. These people are players who wish they were in control but do not have an overview of the world beyond the game they are playing. I tend to think they are pretty sure they will not mess things up to badly, but they ultimately don't really know what they are doing. That is to say the world would go on without them.
i tend to think that Barrack will try to make the correct decision if given the opportunity, but McCain has little awareness if any and is controlled.
i think smart people experimenting with or investing their personal energy infrastructures could be helpful. Thin about being able to "tighten your energy belt". It could be fun. Before the culture goes forward it seriously needs to stop the planned waste of energy.
i personally do not believe unlimited amounts of energy would be a good thing, but completely efficient use of available energy would be the best possible thing. I don't see how "cold fusion" would work or could work, or even how it would help a great deal. Unlimited energy would mean we would not have to care about how we use energy. As far as i am concerned living on Mars is not such a great idea. Life is not about winning as much as it is about being alive and thinking.
i did not know where this was going to go this time, so; sorry if it circled somewhat.