Few people realize that the federal government is in fact the largest user of energy in the entire country. With so many individual departments, employing hundreds of thousands of people and utilizing so many vehicles and buildings, it is a surprise that the issue of agency sustainability has not been raised before.
Previous executive orders have covered environmental issues and energy matters but have never really focused on the core problem, that of carbon emissions attached to energy usage. President Obama's executive order 13514 put this problem front and center as it called for Federal departments to take responsibility for its agency sustainability.
Within 90 days of the signing of the Executive Order, the executive branch expects to receive reports from each of its agency chiefs detailing how they are going to take stock of their emission inventories, put in place a plan to monitor and report and also initiate a process of reduction. This is a significant challenge.
Federal agencies will no doubt have to turn to organizations who are already focused on issues of sustainability in the private sector. Solutions and software products exist enabling any organization to track its energy use down to individual asset positions.
Due to the size of the federal government, any meaningful measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, contain energy use and other resource wastage will have a significant and knock on effect for the country as a whole. Each employee will be impacted as these measures unfold and there is certain to be a knock on effect as agency sustainability developments spread into the community at large.
The ultimate goal of an environmentalist should be to persuade each individual person to become "green." It is said that true change can only come from individual action, but as the federal government is responsible for so much intrusion into our lives on a daily basis, a widespread attempt to achieve agency sustainability may go a long way to achieving the goal.
While carbon emission reduction may be a primary goal, Obama's executive order also forces federal agencies to take account of water resource usage and how they treat waste production and disposal. In addition, all future federal buildings must be constructed to fully sustainable standards.
The executive order issued by Obama will help to silence some of the critics of US inaction. It will be more difficult for Congress to pass legislation impacting companies in the private sector, but it seems certain that this will develop over time.
