I’ve told you before about the potential benefits of a national drive to weatherize American homes and buildings, both to the economy by creating good green jobs and to the environment by dramatically improving our nation’s energy efficiency.
So it was cool (if you’ll pardon the pun) to see President Barack Obama make the same point this morning in an appearance at a Home Depot in Northern Virginia:
In our nation’s buildings — our homes and our office consume almost 40 percent of the energy we use and contribute almost 40 percent of the carbon pollution that we produce and everybody is talking about right now in Copenhagen. Homes built in the first half of the last century can use about 50 percent more energy than homes that are built today. And because most of our homes and office aren’t energy-efficient, much of that energy just goes to waste, while costing our families and businesses money they can’t afford to throw away.
The simple act of retrofitting these buildings to make them more energy-efficient — installing new windows and doors, insulation, roofing, sealing leaks, modernizing heating and cooling equipment — is one of the fastest, easiest and cheapest things we can do to put Americans back to work while saving families money and reducing harmful emissions…
I know the idea may not be very glamorous — although I get really excited about it. We were at the roundtable and somebody said installation is not sexy. I disagree…
Here’s what’s sexy about it: saving money. Think about it this way: If you haven’t upgraded your home yet, it’s not just heat or cool air that’s escaping — it’s energy and money that you are wasting. If you saw $20 bills just sort of floating through the window up into the atmosphere, you’d try to figure out how you were going to keep that. But that’s exactly what’s happening because of the lack of efficiency in our buildings.
So what we want to do is create incentives that stimulate consumer spending, because folks buy materials from home improvement stores like this one, which then buys them from manufacturers. It spurs hiring because local contractors and construction workers do the installation. It saves consumers money — perhaps hundreds of dollars off their utility bills each year — and it reduces our energy consumption in the process.
And the President also took a moment to recognize the pioneering work of the (CtW-affiliated) Laborers’ International Union of North America (LIUNA) in helping train their members across the country to take the lead on weatherization:
And the workers, we have somebody who just got trained and is already on the job crawling through attics and putting all this stuff together. Over the course of six months or a year, somebody can get trained effectively. And LIUNA is doing terrific work with this — its apprenticeship program. And what this means is that people who are unemployed right now, they can get a marketable skill that they can take anywhere…
We are going to generate so much business for you, Frank. We are going to generate so much work for you guys from LIUNA. We’re going to create so much business — so many business opportunities for contractors here that over the course of the next several years, people are going to see this I think as an extraordinary opportunity, and it’s going to help America turn the corner when it comes to energy use.
I’m excited about it. I hope you are, too.
(A complete transcript of the President’s remarks from today’s event is available via the White House Web site.)