Michael Kanellos 11 18 09, 12:13 PM

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Cash for Caulkers: The President Is Mulling Home Energy Efficiency

Cash For Caulkers, now officially called Homestar, is in front of the president, according to the The New York Times.

“It’s one of the top things he’s looking at," said Rahm Emanuel, the President's chief of staff told the paper.

The $23 billion dollar program would essentially provide incentives to homeowners to weatherize and energy retrofit their homes. John Doerr has become the public face for the program, but it emerged from Steve Cowell and Matt Golden, the founder of Recurve (formerly Sustainable Spaces). Matt told us about his work a few weeks ago and the clever caulkers name, but forgot to get around to it. Sorry about that.

"We looked at the state of the construction industry (scary, 17%+ unemployment) and the opportunity for job creation and for hitting our climate goals in retrofitting," Golden wrote us earlier this month. 

Housing is a top priority in the White House. Joe Biden has already launched the Recovery through Retrofit program to make home retrofits easier to finance. It's also no coincidence that Lawrence Berkeley National Labs, formerly run by Department of Energy Secretary Steve Chu, is the nation's premier building energy efficiency research center.

With carbon cap and trade looking like a next year issue, don't be surprised to see energy efficiency bills carved out of the main legislation and passed on their own. This is one of the few green issues that enjoys bipartisan support. It saves energy and creates jobs that are difficult to outsource to China. Someone has to go into the attic. If both programs pass, there could be a stampede to Lowe's.

Just by coincidence, Golden has been writing a series of articles on weatherization and energy efficiency on our website. Here are his two most recent posts.