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If you read the latest news and policy articles, energy efficiency is often coined the best short-term attack on global warming. Reduce consumption from current practices, receive a return on investment, and decrease your carbon footprint. That’s great, but what happens when all of the low-hanging fruit has been eaten? Yes, capital intensive projects, renewable energy, and other strategies aimed at fighting climate change are necessary. However, we cannot overlook energy efficiency as a critical component in the long-term abatement of greenhouse has emissions—it’s not just a short-term solution. Today’s energy efficiency improvements are retrofitting yesterday’s technologies, and this is a phenomenon that is here to stay.

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 ...

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