> you could get twice the impact out of insulating ...
Yes, the concept of "negawatts" which was popularized by the Rocky Mountain Institute, and Amory Lovins in particular in the 1980s, seems to have vanished from the discourse.
Insulate properly and improve efficiency of usage, and suddenly your energy supply problems are a lot smaller--plants, transmission, distribution, raw materials, waste: all of them.
And since it takes a decade to build a nuclear power plant, you could do it all ten times as fast by just spending on existing solutions.