Greetings, colleagues!
Here's an opportunity for this community from AIA COTE Advocacy: US Congressman Paul Tonko (D-NY), Ranking Member of the Environment Subcommittee of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, is looking for input from national stakeholder groups to help develop new federal climate legislation. Congressman Tonko is primarily interested in preparing carbon cap-and-trade legislation for consideration by future Congressional leadership, but he also seeks input into how the costs and benefits of such regulations would be equitably shared and/or mitigated.
Architects, engineers, and design professionals have knowledge and experience that is relevant to many of the Congressman’s specific stakeholder-group questions. AIA COTE Advocacy is interested in hearing from folks with ideas about:
- Protections for low-income energy consumers, especially building energy efficiency and demand-side management in the workforce or affordable housing and facilities of public accommodation. Specific recommendations on how to offset increased energy cost through demand reduction—and other ideas—would be useful to share.
- Revenue-sharing, or how potential revenues generated from cap-and-trade auctions could be used. We're thinking specifically about zero carbon buildings or deep-energy retrofits to existing buildings, but we welcome ideas about other challenges like these that could be framed as a public investment and tied to revenue-sharing.
- Complementary federal programs that are most important to support the transition to a low-emissions economy like the many valuable DOE and EPA programs that Architects rely upon to design increasingly energy-efficient buildings and spaces. Ideas for new programs could certainly be shared as well.
A link to the full Tonko letter and a survey-monkey response page are here:
https://network.aia.org/committeeontheenvironment/advocacy/tonko-response
Lengthy or detailed responses are not needed at this time. We just want to frame a response to the Congressman. Any questions or suggestions would be greatly appreciated!
Thank you,
Mike