Following his inauguration ceremony on January 20th, President Biden settled into the Oval Office to execute a stack of executive orders and other actions. The third document he signed serves to return the United States to…
Category: Sustainability
Federal Leasing After The Paris Withdrawal
For those of you who have recently awakened from a coma, here is a news alert: President Trump has withdrawn the U.S. from the Paris climate change agreement. Predictably, there has been a tsunami of commentary on…
Continued White House Efforts at Clean Energy
President Barack Obama has just returned from a United Nations conference on global climate change in Paris, where he held forth for a program of legally binding agreements to reduce carbon emissions in the atmosphere. That…
New Sustainability Rules Impacting Investors & Managers Leasing to the Federal Government
The following is a guest post written by Mark Miller, the head of Colliers’ national Energy & Sustainability team. To learn more about Colliers’ Energy and Sustainability services, click here. The Federal Government is taking aggressive steps to…
Emerging Building Technologies and GSA
Earlier this month, the US General Services Administration (GSA) and Department of Energy (DOE) issued a joint request for information calling on vendors to propose innovative building technologies in support of federal guidelines and goals, or, as…
The Key Sustainable Products Initiative
Is your bathroom tissue squeezably soft? Does your soap leave your hands germ-free? Advertisers lie awake at night worrying about whether consumers are worrying sufficiently about such things. And as for the federal government—well, officials there…
An Executive Order Mandates Energy Savings
It’s hardly news that the largest single consumer of energy in the United States is the federal government, with its stock of 360,000 buildings and 650,000 fleet vehicles. What is surprising, though, is the extent to…
The Energy Savings and Industrial Competitiveness Act—Redux
In the 113th Congress last year, Senator Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH) and Senator Rob Portman (R-OR) introduced the Energy Savings and Industrial Competitiveness Act, S. 2262, a 136-page bill intended to update previous legislation on energy efficiency…
Tenant Star: A New Program for Energy Efficiency—in Limbo
On January 20, 2015, by a vote of 94 to 5, the U.S. Senate authorized the Environmental Protection Agency to create a voluntary “Tenant Star” program whose mission is, with the use of market incentives and…
Saving Energy and Tax Dollars: A New Report from the CBO Wrestles with Accounting for Both
In 2012, Reps. Peter Welch (D-VT) and Cory Gardner (R-CO), bridging the partisan divide in Congress, created the House Energy Savings Performance Caucus, a group within the House that advocates for federal service contracts that emphasize…