Mr. President, your inaugural address recognized “the ways we use energy strengthen our adversaries and threaten our planet”. You’ve touched on two crucial challenges that America faces; reducing our dependence on energy sources of a foreign or fossil nature, and reducing the damage we cause to our own biosphere through pollution from many of those same power sources. Since the energy crises of the 1970s, we have been slowly sleepwalking back into a culture of excessive overconsumption, backsliding in our addiction to cheap, non-renewable, polluting energy sources.

Figure 1 shows that the largest part of our energy consumption resides in the building sector, making this an area we must place a high priority on improving (and improving drastically). Fortunately, drastic improvements are within our grasp...