Keeling Curve

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Project Summary / Description:

The 1 million Rapid Retrofits project aims to touch a million buildings, starting with the least-efficient, most-polluting of them. Since targeted multifamily and commercial properties are in communities in dire need of safer, cleaner buildings, the project's focus on energy retrofits also addresses economic, environmental, and emissions injustices. Success requires working from a a master list, treating buildings as infrastructure, and investing in the deferred maintenance that has stuck our troubled communities with old buildings and ancient mechanicals - and means finally acting like there is a fire raging that has to be put out, which there certainly is.

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For us to make a critical dent in emissions, we have to repair and retrofit the buildings in the roughest shape operating the oldest mechanical systems. For this project to work at scale, it was to be carefully organized at the top but executed at the community level. The concept is to work from a comprehensive database of buildings - a list created from the "bottom up," by the people of living in these communities at risk, where high powered energy consultants and ESCOs never go. The locals need to call the shots. They need to point the engineers, vendors, utilities, agencies, NGOs, and bankers to the critical buildings to be modernized and rendered safe and sound, highly efficient and smartly tried to the grid. Pro Tip: I find priority buildings by reaching out to fuel banks and community action agencies, for example, to find out who is burning oil and struggling to keep up.

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