At Netroots Nation 2009 in Pittsburgh, PA, Rep. Jay Insleee (D-WA) decried the “undemocratic” filibusters that allow a small minority of senators to thwart majority rule and President Obama’s clean energy reform agenda. In a panel on restoring U.S. environmental leadership, Inslee told the audience of progressive bloggers what he believes allows the monied advocates of the status quo to block progressive change:

The filibuster is so undemocratic it just defies defense. Particularly, as you said, it used to be this once-in-a-generation regional conflict issue that’s meant to protect the regions that has now prevented majority rule in this country. It’s a huge, insidious problem. I have to tell you in my conversations with senators, including in our party, I’ve gotten nowhere on this issue. When they get into that fine institution, they kind of like the idea one person can stop the entire country dead on its heels to keep a post office open in Schmuckbucket or wherever. I have to tell you, I’m very frustrated by it.

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Inslee later warned that the “Exxons of the world” are going to “strangle this [effort] in its crib” with their millions of dollars if climate and clean energy activists don’t start fighting. Speakers at this and other Netroots Nation panels on climate legislation and clean energy reform discussed how conservative Democrats who fear clean energy reform hold the balance of power in the Senate. Last year, conservative Democrats such as Sen. Byron Dorgan (D-ND) and Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-LA) filibustered the Lieberman-Warner climate legislation, protecting local coal and oil interests. This year, armed with the filibuster, these senators hold the fate of the Waxman-Markey American Clean Energy and Security Act in their hands.

This post by By Bracken Hendricks, Benjamin Goldstein, Reid Detchon, and Kurt Shickman was first published here.

Investments in building efficiency retrofits can simultaneously address the challenges of economic recovery, energy insecurity, and global warming by laying the foundation for sustained economic growth, driving demand in the construction and manufacturing sectors, and creating hundreds of thousands of good jobs across the country. Retrofitting our homes and businesses will also slash consumer energy expenditures, increase real estate values, and provide low-cost, near-term reductions in global warming pollution.

Today, buildings account for 70 percent of all U.S. electricity consumption and 40 percent of total U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. Yet much of our housing and building stock is old, inefficient, and unnecessarily wasteful. While building codes and green building standards offer a tool for achieving deep improvements in energy use for new buildings, half of the buildings that will be standing in 30 years already dot our landscape. Any strategy to capture the benefits of energy efficiency in our “built environment” must include a program to retrofit our existing stock of residential, commercial and industrial structures.

Deep building retrofits can cut energy use by 20 to 40 percent with proven techniques and off-the-shelf technologies. Best of all, they can pay for themselves from the energy they save. “Rebuilding America,” a national program to cut energy waste in buildings, could reduce energy bills economy-wide by hundreds of billions of dollars annually. Energy efficiency retrofits also create good local construction jobs across the country at a time when well over a million construction workers sit idle in a sagging housing market. Demand for the manufactured products needed to retrofit buildings will also result in jobs by revitalizing the manufacturing sector and contributing to sustainable, long-term economic growth.
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This CAP post was first published here.

Making your wardrobe less wasteful doesn’t mean running out to buy the latest trend in (overpriced) purses made from reprocessed tires. In fact, it isn’t necessarily about buying at all. It’s about taking care of what you have and buying only what you will use.

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