Retrofitting 50 million buildings in the United States, about 40 percent of the building stock, by 2020 to make them energy efficient would create 625,000 permanent jobs, John Podesta, CEO of the Center for American Progress, told CNBC. “There’s probably a $500 billion investment that’s needed, but the vast majority has to come from the private sector,” Podesta added. “The government has a role to play in orienting policy toward getting the financing right.”
The green building studies and reports we spotlight cover the following topics: The potential financial benefits of green retrofits; the importance of overcoming the social and psychological barriers to green building; the use of impact fees to encourage green building; the use of mandates and incentives to promote sustainable construction; feedback from the construction industry on the risks that come with green building; global green building trends; green practices reported by facilities management professionals; and reshaping municipal and county laws to foster green building.
A majority of likely voters – 71% – favors the American Clean Energy and Security Act recently passed by the House of Representatives, and two-thirds (67%) believe Congress is either doing the right amount (22%) or should be doing more (45%) to address global warming, new Zogby International telephone poll shows. Just 28% believe that Congress is doing too much.
The Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) recently announced their list of the greenest cities in the United States and have released their findings on a new web site, called Smarter Cities. The survey includes all cities in the United States with populations larger than 50,000. Smarter Cities is considered to be one of the nation’s most comprehensive and robust database of U.S. urban progress toward sustainability. Seattle ranked number one and San Francisco ranked number 2 among the 67 large cities that were evaluated. Madison, Wisconsin placed firstand Santa Rosa, California came in second among the 176 medium cities that were surveyed. Among the 402 cities that were evaluated, Bellingham, Washington came in first place and Mountain View, California came in second.
Dr. Elaine C. Kamarck, former domestic policy advisor to Vice President Al Gore and co-founder of the U.S. Climate Task Force (CTF), has unveiled a new report that examines lessons learned from past efforts to legislate on climate change and how those precedents can be applied to help pass an emissions policy in the 111th Congress. Her expert analysis, featured in the report, “Addressing Climate Change: The Politics of the Policy Options”, breaks these lessons into five categories.
The keystone of the green economy is a drastic increase in energy efficiency. Increasing our societies energy efficiency is the single most vital and important thing we need to do in order to have a green economy or in fact any kind of economy at all. It is also vitally important to throttle back the amounts of fossil fuel we burn in order to mitigate and diminish the rapid and potentially catastrophic climate change that is being driven by our fossil fuel habit.
Without much more energy efficient buildings and transportation systems nothing we do will be able to prevent an economic collapse brought about by the inevitable and rapidly approaching decline in the recoverable supplies of all forms of fossil energy. We cannot build out wind, geothermal, biofuel, or solar energy fast enough to sustain our civilization in the face of rapidly shrinking recoverable fossil energy reserves; unless we embark on an urgent and sustained drive to use energy (and other resources) with much higher efficiency.
A survey of 140 mayors from 40 states also highlights concern over potential financial obstacles for infrastructure projects, according to a study sponsored by Siemens for The U.S. Conference of Mayors. A majority of cities (77%) report their infrastructure budget for 2009 has been adversely affected by the global economic crisis. However, nearly two-thirds of all U.S. mayors surveyed believe that fighting climate change with technological innovation represents a “enormous” economic opportunity. Optimizing the infrastructure of cities is considered a major way to address global warming and environmental protection. Mayors of larger cities, in particular, viewed the expansion of public mass transit as a key way to fight climate change.
