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Alliterative titles often have power.

“Cash for Clunkers” just rolled off the tongue and the program helped cars roll off dealers’ lots, providing a tangible economic boost while also (somewhat) providing a bump to automotive fuel efficiency.

“Cash for Caulkers” might just be the next talk of the nation as President Obama has heard, from multiple paths, proposals for another CfC program to help spark economic activity, create jobs, and help shift America’s energy patterns and practices toward a more sustainable future.

While off-and-on, there have been many programs for tax credits for home energy efficiency (right now, 30% of the bill up to $5000). These tax credits seem to work on the margins and still leave us with the reality that the average home is energy inefficient and that there are viable paths toward making significant dents in that inefficiency. Cash for Caulkers would seek to change this in a dramatic fashion.

And, it is something that President Obama is considering.

Earlier this month, at a PERAB (President’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board) meeting (pdf transcript), John Doerr called for a Green Jobs focus:

In the very near term, the way we can generate the most jobs, we believe, is through home retrofits. We have 17 percent of our construction workers who are out of work today, and there’s about 200,000 home retrofits done per year in the United States. But over the course of the next 20 years, we probably ought to be doing (inaudible) each year, these retrofits, or saving the energy that’s wasted, up to 40 percent in 100 million American homes. And I haven’t begun to talk about our schools or our small businesses.

Were we to develop a program to do that, we could create hundreds of thousands, even a million jobs in a year, in a permanent new industry — high-wage jobs, that are not going to be outsourced, and where the savings from doing this work, stay in the pockets of America’s consumers.

Absolutely — if anything, this probably understates the potential.

By the way,let’s take a moment to remember that America’s built infrastructure is accountable for roughly 40 percent of US emissions (roughly half in homes). A path to carve out that 40 percent of low-hanging fruit of waste could save the economy and individuals tremendous amounts of money while making a real dent in our pollution loads.

I think one of the keys to doing this is to engage private capital and the private sector in making that happen. The way I like to put it is, Cash for Clunkers mobilized all of America’s car dealerships and caused change very rapidly. Well, the equivalent of that for home retrofits would be “Cash for Caulkers” — (laughter) — and what we would do is engage private enterprise, the likes of a Lowe’s or a Home Depot, these organizations that have tens of millions of people a week coming into their storefronts, and use that private capital to incentivize consumers to then work with our out-of-work trades — remodelers, production builders — to do this kind of work. So we want to touch all three of those parties.

The devil is in the details and Doerr’s proposal, at least to me at this time, is not available.

How much cash should go upfront? What percentages? What sort of controls over the program? How long to run this?

For 100 million homes, if you would really reach them, we have the potential for a huge bill, dwarfing potentially by an several orders of magnitude the Cash For Clunkers few $billions.

Now, have to say that I have some confidence that Doerr’s proposal had mainly strong elements as he worked with groups like Efficiency First in developing it.

Anna Burger, SEIU, also chimed in:

I just want to jump in a little bit because I think that the work that John has done and everybody has done about the whole issue about weatherization and retrofitting has been incredibly exciting. And we have an opportunity to really put a lot of people to work, probably more people to work in the first quarter of next year in a faster way than most of the investment in new technology and new innovation. So we can actually put people to work quickly.
And I think we also have the capacity to have people prepare and train to do these jobs because, you know, we have, through the labor movement, we have got great training programs

Before moving “past” PERAB, it is worthwhile to look at how Doerr concluded his statement in the PERAB’s public meeting:

In closing on this idea, I don’t want to lose sight of the big picture, and that is the most — and we recommended it to you before — we agree the most important thing we could do to have America lead in this industry and generate a lot of jobs fast is to put a price on carbon; a price and a cap on carbon. So we’ve got to stay the course with the climate legislation. And the reason is really simple: More money flows through private markets in a day than through all the governments in the world in a year. We can offer this incentive or that incentive, but once we put a price on carbon, all those financial markets, like a thundering herd of profit maximizers, are going to go invest in these homes, in these (inaudible), in all these innovations.

Doerr: “Stay the course with the climate legislation”.
According to the NYTimes,

The Doerr plan would cost $23 billion over two years. Most of the money would go for incentive payments, generally $2,000 to $4,000, for weatherization projects. The homeowner would always have to pay at least 50 percent of the project’s total cost. About $3 billion would be set aside for retailers and contractors in the hope that they would promote the program, much as car dealerships promoted cash for clunkers.

This would, roughly, suggest the potential to touch about 10 million American homes. The shift from 30 to 50 percent isn’t, likely, the key thing, the reality is that upfront money, essentially taken off at the cash register, rather than an eventual ‘funny money’ rebate likely would draw people in. (And, considering the advertising we see about “30% tax credit”, hard to see the necessity for 15% of the funding to be put aside to subsidize the advertising industry.)

Now, Doerr isn’t the only one sending the concept to Obama. As per today’s New York Times, President Clinton sent a Clinton Climate Initiative proposal for a Cash for Caulkers program. One of the elements of the CCI proposal is the very sensible path of rolling repayment of energy efficiency costs into real estate tax payments, so that energy savings would be less than the payback costs and this would eliminate the “I might move in two years and thus don’t want to sink the money into the house” calculation. The payoff of lower energy bills and the payment for the projects to produce them would be for the next homeowners. (This is happening, increasingly, across the nation with this option recently becoming law in New York.)

“Cash for Caulking” potentially is a powerful path forward.

Will it include something like the United Kingdom’s program for door-to-door offering of free home energy audits? Will it provide tangible paths for benefiting renters? Will it help cut energy costs, spark employment, and do so in a path that will have the potential to pay for itself (through increased tax revenue and reduced government assistance to un/underemployed people)?

The devil truly is in the details … and those details might prove a devil of an opportunity.