The U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC), The Real Estate Roundtable (RER), and the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) commissioned the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI) to conduct an analysis of the Better Buildings Initiative announced by President Obama in February 2011 and assess its potential to create jobs. The Better Buildings Initiative consists of a series of legislative proposals and executive actions aimed at reducing energy consumption in commercial buildings by twenty percent by the year 2020.
On June 13, 2011, the analysis by PERI was released and a complete copy can be found here.
In summary, the analysis concludes that:
– The Better Buildings Initiative would create more than 114,000 jobs.
– The greatest jobs-creating impact – over 77,000 new jobs – would derive from a revised tax incentive to encourage building retrofits.
– New job creation would ripple throughout the economy. New jobs would be created directly at construction sites, which in turn would spur more jobs in the manufacturing and service sectors.
– The Better Buildings Initiative’s federal incentives are an investment to trigger private sector spending, which in turn produces widespread benefits. For example, tax incentives would encourage at least three times as much private investment to make buildings more efficient.
– Businesses would save over $1.4 billion in energy bills as a result of retrofit projects spurred by the tax incentive, which would in turn be re-injected back into the economy.
See page 2 of report for a summary of the findings.
Wendy F. Klein Keane, Esq.
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