Green Options

President Obama has just signed an Executive Order that compels the largest consumer of energy in the US economy to invest in energy efficiency improvements to get to huge reductions in energy use by 2020.

Every Federal agency must measure, manage, and reduce greenhouse gas emissions to meet specific targets by 2020. They have just 90 days to lay out a plan to meet these targets:

1. Use 30% less gas by 2020. Federal agencies buy 750,000 new vehicles every year. In normal times that’s almost 1 in every 17 vehicles sold per year. This Executive Order creates a rock-solid certain market for fuel-efficient vehicles every year from now till 2020.

2. Design all new government buildings from 2020 to be net-zero energy. Wow! Jimmy Carter might have gotten just a few solar panels up on merely one government building; The White House. But this means every new government building goes solar to cut fossil energy use to zero.

And they won’t just want solar power. They’ll need efficient windows, geothermal ground heat exchanges, efficient air conditioning, solar hot water heating, radiant flooring, tankless water heaters, great insulation… (and all this will take retrained architects, and doing that will take new classes, and those will need new instructors, who’ll need new suits…this is going to be a green jobs boom!)

What sort of efforts does the US Army undertake to protect and manage it impacts on the environment? Perhaps surprisingly to some, the legislative muscle behind Army programs to protect the environment is actually quite robust.

In a first-of-its-kind executive directive, Schwarzenegger, a Republican, has ordered the state to begin taking immediate action to mitigate the impending damage to state resources caused by climate change.

California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger declared a statewide drought today, following two straight years of below-average rainfall, very low snowmelt runoff and the largest court-ordered water transfer restrictions of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta in state history.

The governor also issued an Executive Order meant to address related problems caused by the water shortages, such as extreme fire danger due to dry conditions, economic harm to urban and rural communities, loss of crops and the potential to degrade water [...]