A Tax Fix Everyone Can Get Behind

We ran across this good news from following our friends at the USGBC – U.S. Green Business Council. Lane Burt, their Technical Policy Director, wrote an excellent blog post on this subject.

At Empower Energy Teechnology, we preach energy efficiency all the time. People hire us to help their businesses become more energy efficient and implement cost saving energy management programs. The subject of Mr. Burt’s blog post addresses the issue from the point of making our laws more equitable for existing buildings.

Here’s the problem.

If you invest in your own building energy efficiency, you will have to pay federal taxes on the value of the investment. If you were to keep wasting energy, all that wasted money would be completely deductible from your taxes.

That’s right; in effect our tax code unintentionally subsidizes wasted energy. Despite the economic benefits (not to mention the domestic job creation and the environmental benefits), investments to create energy efficient, better buildings do not receive the same treatment under the tax code as wasted energy.

That’s why the USGBC is working with a diverse coalition of industry and environmental organizations, like the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Real Estate Roundtable, to change this. It’s their highest priority to convince Congress that energy efficiency is at least as valuable to the nation’s prosperity as wasted energy.

They have proposed changes to fix Section 179D of the tax code, and existing policy designed to encourage energy efficient new construction to make it usable for existing buildings.

Read Mr. Burt’s blog post – click here.

Read about the proposed changes – click here.

Get Involved
Contact your members of Congress and ask them to support changes to the Section 179D to make it work for existing buildings.

For more informat ion please contact :

Lane Burt, lbur t@usgbc.org, Technical Policy Director
Bryan Howard, bhoward@usgbc.org, Legis lat ive Director

Advertisement