The Center for Working Families has released its short paper, Catalyzing “Green Jobs-Green NY” for economic recovery that eliminates disparities: Why New York State needs the federal Home Star program.”
This fall, advocates for high-road jobs, business and the environment will resume efforts to pass federal “Home Star” legislation. Home Star is an important grant program to incentivize US homeowners to improve the energy efficiency of their homes, and lower their housing costs; reduce US electric, gas and oil consumption; and boost the capacity of a high-road residential energy efficiency industry.
On a national level, we urgently need Home Star to catalyze the development of a contracting industry that can green our buildings (which needlessly generate about half of our total greenhouse gases, and foster over-dependence on unsustainable fuels.) Recent national efforts to implement energy programming, whether for green jobs or for environmental goals, have been hugely hampered by the limited capacity and patchwork quality standards of an underdeveloped green contracting industry.
But New York is a special case. Here, state policy has already defined a retrofit industry with good quality standards. A strong base of local contracting firms is ready to expand capacity, waiting only for an increase in consumer demand. The foundations for Home Star to take off in New York have been laid, first by decades of work in New York’s Energy Agency, and more recently through planning to implement the Green Jobs-Green NY program. In New York, Home Star will be especially important for transforming a “jobless recovery” into a real recovery, and especially effective in achieving energy and housing cost reductions.
This short paper outlines how Home Star can critically boost the groundbreaking Green Jobs-Green NY program, and generate a booming, equitable – and lasting – green economy for New York State.
