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A new report says Florida home and business owners can reduce energy use and fight climate change through energy conservation and efficiencies. As Mike Vasilinda tells us, the report says Floridians can reduce their electric bills by a third over the next twenty years by simple conservation means.

The crack under this doorway is extreme. It was caused by a sinkhole…but tens of thousands of other homes and apartments are leaking energy from under doors and around windows. Aliki Moncrief from Environment Florida says simple fixes can make a big difference.

“Our report finds that investing in building efficiency in Florida can cut projected global warming pollution from buildings by thirty-five percent. That is the equivalent of taking about twelve and a half million cars off the road,” says Moncrief.
This Agriculture extension office is completely self sufficient with solar and geo thermal. Another office replaced inefficient lights with LED’s. Maggie Theriot works for Leon County int eh office of Resource Stewardship. “At a payback of less than ten months, we’ll be saving forty-five hundred dollars a month on utility bills” she says.

For the first time in four years, state lawmakers passed an energy policy bill. Governor Rick Scott allowed to become law. The legislation will allow local residents to decide if they want to tax themselves to pay for weatherization or other energy incentives.

Fixing windows and door jams is considered low the low hanging fruit of energy conservation. Suzanne Cook of The Florida Green Building Coalition says It can put thousands of unemployed construction workers back to work immediately. “Retrofitting can put a lot of people back to work and there are examples of that all over the state.”

The Public Policy Institute ranks Florida residential electric rates the 15th highest in the nation.

Forty percent of the energy we use is in homes. You can read the report, “Building a Better America here: http://www.environmentflorida.org/reports/flc/building-better-america-9