This morning, I had the pleasure of kicking off the Department of Energy’s Better Building Summit. It reminded me of the founding of Better Buildings four years ago. At that time, as we continued to recover from the worst recession since the Great Depression and were faced with a paralyzed Congress, President Obama made clear to his economic team that we were to look for more creative and durable ways to contribute to an accelerated economic recovery.
The more work we did on this issue, the clearer it became that making buildings, plants and homes more energy efficient was a triple win — a win for jobs and economic growth; a win for businesses’ operating costs and bottom lines; and a win for our effort to reduce carbon emissions and fight climate change.
Cutting energy waste was a common sense solution when President Obama launched the Better Buildings program in 2011 — with the goal of improving the energy use of our nation’s commercial, industrial, residential, and public buildings by 20 percent over 10 years — and it still is. In fact, four years later, we have made tremendous progress.