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The Pew Center on Global Climate Change held an energy efficiency conference in Chicago on April 6 and 7. This year it was entitled From Shop Floor to Top Floor: Best Business Practices in Energy Efficiency and coincided with their release of a report on the best practices in corporate energy efficency. Interesting keynote and luncheon speakers ranging from Suzanne Malec-McKenna, the City of Chicago’s Commissioner of its Department of Environment to John Rowe, Chairman and CEO of Exelon Corporation, to former Senator John Warner, helped set the context for the conference—that the world is changing, and that fossil fuel-generated carbon emissions will surely become an economic factor within our society—with an associated cost borne by consumers.   Sustainability and environmental representatives of household name companies such as Toyota, IBM, Best Buy, PepsiCo, Johnson & Johnson, Hewlett Packard, Coca Cola and the Mars Candy described their companies’ efforts to establish and attain sustainab ...

The energy (reduction) potential in America’s building stock is a tremendous resource, equivalent to tapping a second Saudi Arabia. The energy appetite of America’s buildings is enormous, but we can begin to cut back on the excess without sacrificing comfort or performance. Craig Sieben spoke to this theme last week before the Realty Club of Chicago in a speech entitled “America’s Building Stock – The Second Saudi Arabia.” Craig referenced the excellent work of Art Rosenfeld, an award-winning scientist, one of the earliest promoters of energy efficiency in the U.S.—and one of Craig’s personal mentors. In his speech, Craig emphasized smart and simple examples of what building owners and managers can do to cut back on their energy consumption. Reducing the energy appetite of our buildings is one small step towards a goal of U.S. energy independence. How can this be? Let’s do the math. In 2008, the U.S. imported 1.5 million barrels of oil per day from Saudi Arabia. We consumed about 19.5 million barrels per d ...

Some thoughts about what the United States can expect with respect to energy in 2010 with some humor thrown into the mix

Craig Sieben has remarked at Crain's Chicago Business on the development of wind energy in Illinois and its potential for helping advance a new energy economy

The U.S. will agree to carbon cuts during the upcoming Copenhagen summit, but will they be enough? Concern is growing over the amount of carbon that the U.S. will agree to limit in the coming years. This concern is not a one-way battle; US law makers appear weary over too high of expectations in carbon reductions while Europe and other key climate change combaters seem skeptical of the US’s non-committal stance to be an equal partner in the fight against global warming. It is widely agreed that climate change is a global issue which transcends national boundaries and dismisses domestic political debacles regardless of their seemingly weighty importance on a sustained economy. Nevertheless, limits are in the foreseeable future for the US, albeit likely lower than the limits proposed in Europe.   Just how carbon reduction targets will affect business-as-usual is somewhat unclear, but, at least in the short-run, energy efficiency provides a mechanism to improve the bottom-line while reducing the environm ...

The American Clean Energy and Security (ACES) Act of 2009, or Waxman-Markey, an economy-wide reassessment of energy and climate policy, passed the House in June 2009. A Senate version co-sponsored by Barbara Boxer (D–CA) and John Kerry (D-MA) was finally released in late September after months of planning, but in recent weeks, little traction has been made in moving the process forward. And the Kerry-Boxer bill lacks a cap-and-trade system, one of the hallmarks of the ACES Act and an important piece of the climate change puzzle for President Obama. Any legislation that does make it out of Senate committee is likely to face a much tougher road to passage in the Senate than ACES had in the House, and further delays are certainly not out of the question. The earliest that the Senate might pass comprehensive energy and climate legislation, if at all, is early 2010. Discussion often centers on how new legislation changes things, whether for the better or the worse. People ask questions such as, “What if Congress ...