Back to Work - Bill Clinton [61]
12. At least paint the roofs white. The black tar roofs covering hundreds of thousands of American buildings, especially in older cities, absorb a huge amount of heat, requiring much more energy to cool the rooms below. Just painting the roof white can cut a building’s energy use by up to 30 percent on a hot day. Every flat tar roof in every city and town should be painted white. Mayor Michael Bloomberg started a program in New York, the Green City Force, to train young people to do this work. A majority of them have been able to parlay their experience into high-skilled training programs or better-paying energy jobs. And lowering the electric bills 20 to 30 percent in every apartment or office frees up cash that utility customers can spend on other things.
We can get even greater energy savings and lower bills by planting greenery or growing gardens on rooftops. It costs more than painting because the roof has to be sealed to prevent leaking and strong enough to bear the extra weight, but the savings are greater. Chicago leads the nation in green roofs, but they’re sprouting up everywhere.
Syracuse, New York, has started a program similar to Green City Force, Helping Hands, for unemployed people who didn’t finish high school, training them to achieve even greater savings per building than Green City. Finally, thirty-five organizations and six federal agencies, funded by the Gates and Kellogg Foundations, are working together to create national opportunities for low-income young people in what they call the Green Career Pathways Framework. You can see that all this is good economics, for contractors, their employees, and people who pay utility bills. We just have to get the funding right. This is another example of how public, private, and not-for-profit cooperation works a lot better than ideological conflict.
Energy efficiency, if properly financed, can be an important job creator. And for those of us who agree with the 95 percent of climate scientists who say global warming is a big problem, efficiency is also a key element of the solution. The Center for American Progress estimates that the United States could achieve 50 percent of the reductions required to cut our greenhouse gas emissions 80 percent by 2050 through greater efficiencies alone.
13. Reinstate the full tax credit for new green-technology jobs. This tax credit has already helped more than twenty-one hundred solar technology start-up companies, as well as businesses making other green-tech products. The only thing wrong with it is that the total benefits were capped, resulting in a long waiting list of companies eager to create new jobs that would boost the economy and make us more energy independent. That is the kind of tax break a job-starved economy needs, and it’s about to go away. Why?
In December 2010, with the Bush tax cuts about to expire, the White House and Congress entered into negotiations on which tax cuts to extend. Because of the deficit, President Obama wanted to let the rates on people earning $250,000 or more expire while extending the Bush tax cuts for 99 percent of Americans, along with other tax breaks, including the green-tech projects. The Republicans said they would block the extension of all the tax cuts, including those for the middle class, unless the green-tech credit, called section 1603, was eliminated. At the last minute, they finally agreed to extend it, but for only one more year, so it’s scheduled to expire at the end of 2011.
Why did the antigovernment representatives oppose section 1603? They said it wasn’t a tax cut at all; it was a spending program. You can decide whether you agree. Here’s how it works. A conventional tax credit doesn’t help new companies, because, in the early years of production, they don’t have income to offset the tax credit. Therefore, the investment tax credit, for up to 30