Use Innovative Measures to Dramatically Improve Efficiency of Buildings: Buildings account for nearly 40 percent of carbon emissions in the United States today and carbon emissions from buildings are expected to grow faster than emissions from other major parts of our economy. It is expected that 15 million new buildings will be constructed between today and 2015. President Obama and Vice President Biden will work with cities so that we make our new and existing buildings more efficient consumers of electricity.

It’s interesting that one of the most significant parts of his energy plans (buildings use 40% of the energy in the U.S., so this could have a giant affect on our country’s energy use) is in this Urban Policy section. I assume this is because of the “green jobs” aspect of building green. Tradespeople jobs are a great way out of poverty, and we’re going to need a lot of new tradespeople, with new skills, to transform the housing and commercial building stock to be highly efficient.