The U.S. Green Building Council just sent out information from a report written by McKinsey and Company about energy efficiency and its role in U.S. mitigation of climate change. Here's what they found:

• Energy-efficiency of buildings (along with other non-transportation efforts) could reduce U.S. energy consumption by 23% by 2020.
• Such efforts would save $1.2 trillion and reduce emissions by 1.1 gigatons annually.
• Getting to this point would require an annual investment of $50 billion for ten years.

In other words, the report puts numbers on what many of us knew intuitively: buildings are a really big piece of the climate puzzle. The report (in PDF download) is available here.