By John Fleck
Journal Staff Writer
When Andrew Gomez's Habitat for Humanity crews put up a home,
energy conservation features such as heavy insulation are built in.
The people who will be moving in don't have a lot of money, so savings
on their heating and cooling bills really matters.
"These are low-income people," Gomez explained as a crew toiled behind
him on Habitat's latest southeast Albuquerque project.
What Gomez and his colleagues are doing on a small scale needs to be
scaled up in a big way, a coalition of groups said during a Wednesday
morning news conference.
With energy legislation making its way through Congress, strong
energy-efficiency mandates in building codes, along with help for
low-income families to make existing homes more energy efficient, are
critical, said Kim McMurray of Environment New Mexico.
Making buildings more energy efficient is "the cleanest, cheapest of
the ways" to reduce U.S. energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions,
McMurray said.
The American Clean Energy and Security Act, which passed the U.S.
House of Representatives in June, would set tough new building and
appliance efficiency standards.
According to an analysis by Architecture 2030, a Santa Fe group led by
architect Ed Mazria, the standards are among the most important features
of
the sprawling bill, calling for building codes that mandate 50 percent
energy savings in new buildings by 2015.
McMurray and the others gathered Wednesday said they now hope to
pressure the U.S. Senate to act on the issue. "We need a federal
solution,"
McMurray said.
