Bill Clinton takes to the pages of Newsweek to propose 14 good ideas to boost employment. Here’s one of them:
4. COPY THE EMPIRE STATE BUILDING
Just look at the Empire State Building—I can see it from my office window. Our climate-change people worked on their retrofit project. They cleared off a whole floor for a small factory to change the heating and air conditioning, put in new lighting and insulation, and cut energy-efficient glass for the windows. Johnson Controls, the energy-service company overseeing the project, guaranteed the building owners their electricity usage would go down 38 percent—a massive saving, which will enable the costs of the retrofits to be recovered through lower utility bills in less than five years. Meanwhile, the project created hundreds of jobs and cut greenhouse-gas emissions substantially. We could put a million people to work retrofitting buildings all over America.
Ideas 1, 2, 5, and 7 sound pretty good too. What’s your favorite?
