USGBC Leader Takes Building Improvement To The World Stage at Davos
What would you say if we told you that you could be an important part of world economic recovery? Rick Fedrizzi thinks you are. And he should know, since he is the president, CEO and founding chairman of the U.S Green Building Council, creators of the LEED program.
A little earlier this year, he was invited to speak at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. This is the gathering, attended by more than 2500 world leaders, CEOs, media people and the world’s leading thinkers, that influences what happens all over the world. And they felt energy consumption to be so important that they invited Rick Fedrizzi to speak to them.
An of all the subjects he could have chosen to speak about – from carbon footprints to the long-term consequences of global warming or LEED – he chose to speak about the importance of making our buildings more energy-efficient.
“There are about 120 million existing homes in the U.S., and about 5 million commercial buildings comprising more than 71 billion square feet of space,” he says in an interview in the Huffington Post, and virtually every one of them is an energy hog.”
“Virtually every one of them has a plumbing system that literally flushes our potable water down the drain, he continues, adding that the energy expenses alone in U.S. commercial buildings total more than $100 billion a year.”
Fedrizzi suggests that enormous benefits will flow from the simple act of replacing boilers, chillers and water fixtures, enough, according to a study commissioned by the U.S. Green Building Council to result in double-digit reductions in energy costs and consumption, more than a trillion dollars in savings and more than a gigaton reduction n greenhouse gas emissions.
And how will we pay for the replacement of millions of pieces of equipment? By simply using the downstream savings those investments will generate after installation. Fedrizzi uses the Empire State Building as an example. It is currently undergoing a $500 million renovation program, $20 million of which is going to improvements in the building’s HVAC systems. Since the improvements will generate more than $4 million a years in energy savings, it is a simple and smart decision to make.
There is another upside to this enormous investment – jobs. He estimates that commercial and residential improvements could create almost 8 million jobs and pump close to a half a trillion dollars into the economy in just the next four years.
Lest you think those numbers are pie-in-the-sky estimates, keep in mind that according to the McKinsey study the USGBC commissioned last summer, green construction already supports more than two million jobs and pumps more than $100 billion into the economy.
Rich Silverman
Goodway Blogging Team
Image by David Monniaux courtesy of Wikimedia Commons under a GNU Free Documentation License
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