A corresponding program, the federal Weatherization Assistance Program, was budgeted at $250 million for 2009, representing approximately 100,000 homes weatherized per year. Fortunately, in the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, the line item for weatherization is $5 billion over an approximate two year period. This increased funding will result in upwards of 700,000 homes being weatherized per year over the next three years, nearly a seven-fold increase. Although this represents an extraordinary increase over the original 2009 budget, it is still too low. Accelerating investment in our country's energy efficiency represents an investment opportunity that will create a large number of jobs, increase disposable household income, while reducing our country's trade deficit, contributing to lower interest rates.
The United States should have a massive Manhattan style national initiative to significantly increase the investment in upgrading our energy using infrastructure, focusing on increasing the efficiency with which we use energy across all sectors of the economy. For example, approximately 115 million homes in the United States use fossil fuels directly or indirectly for heat, including natural gas, oil, propane and electricity. Currently, little is being done to improve the efficiency of the existing furnaces and heating systems in place. We have the resources and technologies available to significantly increase the penetration of geothermal heating systems, solar thermal heating systems, and combined heat and power systems in the residential sector, with extraordinary benefits to accrue to our economy, yet there appears to be little or no national appetite to pursue these technologies.
For example, if we replaced the natural gas furnaces in the country's existing 56 million homes that use natural gas for heat, using high efficiency combined heat and power systems, we would be able to reduce the country's greenhouse gas emissions by approximately 30 percent, while giving homeowners the ability to produce all of their own electricity as a by-product of heating their homes with a much more efficient CHP furnace. It is perhaps an oversight that our country appears to remain fixated on providing massive economic assistance to companies that are too big to fail, and not directing the investment capital where it will do the most benefit - improving the economic well being of our households and small businesses while creating jobs, increasing our energy independence and creating new exportable clean energy technologies through a massive Manhattan style energy efficiency technology development and investment program.
