Hodes urges ‘green’ policy, Law would give incentives to banks, other industries
Saturday, September 29, 2007
Elizabeth Farrell
Keene Sentinel Washington Correspondent
WASHINGTON — A N.H. congressman is working to make the financial services industry more green — not with greenbacks, but with green policy.
A House Financial Services Committee task force, headed by Rep. Paul Hodes, D-N.H., and Ed Perlmutter, D-Colo., is drafting legislation that would provide incentives to promote green policy to all of the industries under the committee’s jurisdiction — the banking, securities and insurance industries and much of federal housing.
“One of the things that will be the most important lasting benefit,” Hodes said, “is that we have started a conversation specifically targeted at the financial services community which wasn’t there before in a coordinated way.”
A major problem that arises is the upfront cost of loans and technologies as people move to build energy-efficient structures or attempt to update existing buildings with “green” technology. The goal of the task force is to create federal financial support by means of tax incentives and other measures that would not only reduce the cost of loans but also entice people to go “green.”
Dick Henry, director of the Jordan Institute in New Hampshire, a nonprofit organization focused on climate change issues, is working with Hodes and Perlmutter specifically on making buildings more energy efficient by reducing their fossil fuel emissions.
“Energy efficiency technologies are very well understood,” Henry said. “We know how to do this.
“Most people believe in saving money,” Henry said, and they can do that by becoming more energy efficient.
In New Hampshire, he said, almost 60 percent of homes and 41 percent of commercial buildings are heated with oil produced overseas.
If oil consumption becomes significantly reduced through “green” technologies such as better building insulation and solar power, Henry said, money would filter into local economies and America’s dependence on foreign oil suppliers may decrease.
“We can make significant progress in our use of fossil fuels and hopefully slow down climate change,” he said.
In a series of meetings, Hodes said, the task force gathered a “diverse group of players in the financial services community to give us their ideas, ranging from the banking associations, the insurance associations, the home builders associations, people in the construction business (and) people in the mortgage business; we covered the waterfront.”
The committee task force also is looking into energy efficiency and conservation in public housing and multi-family housing.
Hodes said he hopes the efforts of the task force and the resulting legislation, which isn’t expected until next year, will be felt at the local levels.
Barry Emerson, a mortgage loan officer at the Savings Bank of Walpole in Keene, said the bank had no consumer demand for “green” mortgages and therefore does not provide them, and it may be that people don’t know that much about “green” building.
“We’d always be open to considering something like that if the demand is there,” he said.
With legislation, that may change, Emerson said.
Elizabeth Farrell is a reporter in Boston University’s Washington news service.