Thank you for the opportunity to appear.
My name is Nancy Sutley. Currently, I'm the chief sustainability officer for the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power. It is the largest municipally owned utility in the U.S. and a department of the City of Los Angeles, California. It serves four million people in Los Angeles with water and electricity.
From 2009 to 2014, I served in President Obama's administration as the chair of the White House council on environmental quality, the CEQ. The CEQ was established in 1970 by the National Environmental Policy Act to provide the president of the United States with advice regarding environmental priorities for the nation. Since the early 1990s, the CEQ has also coordinated the sustainability in greening efforts of the United States government. The CEQ houses the Office of Federal Sustainability, although the budget and employees come from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
The White House Office of Management and Budget tracks and evaluates sustainability performance metrics. A number of other federal agencies provide subject matter expertise and guidance on federal sustainability-related subjects, including the United States Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Energy, the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the General Services Administration.
Successive presidents since the 1990s have issued a series of presidential executive orders that have established sustainability and greening goals for the U.S. government. The U.S. government has long been a leader in sustainability, demonstrating sustainable practices such as green building techniques that are now common practices in the wider U.S. economy. These executive orders have generally built on the progress in previous executive orders, although the most current one, executive order 13834, issued by President Trump in May 2018, is a step backwards, particularly with respect to climate change.
The U.S. Congress has enacted a number of goals and programs that affect the greening of the U.S. government in the Energy Policy Act of 1992, the Energy Policy Act of 2005 and the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007, among others. However, executive action has broadened and expanded these goals and programs, relying on the president's authority to manage the U.S. government. Executive orders are directives by the president that manage the operations of the U.S. government and have the force of law.
The oversight and management of the U.S. government's greening efforts have evolved since the 1990s. The U.S. government is the single largest energy consumer in the U.S. economy. It has more than 350,000 buildings, 600,000 vehicles and nearly 2 million civilian employees. It purchases $500 billion annually in goods and services and spends $16 billion per year on energy.
Recent accomplishments by the U.S. government, as reported by the Office of Federal Sustainability, include a more than 7% reduction in building energy use per square foot from 2015 to 2017; a 25% reduction in potable water use since 2007; more than 10% of facility energy use being met with renewable energy; and, a doubling in alternative fuel use since 2005.
Federal sustainability and greening directives and efforts have gotten increasingly comprehensive and ambitious over the last 25 years, until President Trump aimed to scale those efforts back to only those statutorily mandated and cost effective.
His executive order contains qualitative goals around building energy use, energy efficiency, renewable energy, water use, waste prevention and recycling and procurement. It retains the structure of an inter-agency sustainability steering committee chaired by the Council on Environmental Quality and the White House Office of Management and Budget and the designation of chief sustainability officers by each federal agency, and it continues the practice of issuing scorecards to federal agencies on sustainability measures. The CEQ has yet to issue implementation instructions and guidance to federal agencies under this latest directive.
However, his executive order eliminates any mention of climate change and certain quantitative and prescriptive performance requirements contained in Obama-era executive orders, including requirements for federal agencies to account for and reduce greenhouse gas emissions and prepare for the impact of climate change and the preparation of agency-strategic sustainability performance plans.
President Obama's 2015 executive order 13693, which expanded the reach and ambition of a 2009 executive order, emphasized climate change mitigation, noting that the actions outlined in his executive order could result in a 40% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by U.S. government operations by the year 2025.
Executive order 13693 required federal agencies to set greenhouse gas reduction goals for scopes one, two and three emissions for 2025 relative to a 2008 baseline. It also set a number of other performance requirements in the areas of building energy conservation, renewable energy use, water use reduction, fleets, net zero buildings, sustainable procurement, recycling and waste management and electronics stewardship. For the first time it required the U.S. government to manage supply chain greenhouse gas emissions. Under another executive order, since revoked by the Trump administration, federal agencies had to address climate change impacts on their operations through agency adaptation plans.
Key to all these efforts is oversight by the White House through the CEQ and OMB. In addition to demonstrating leadership by the federal government, it's important that there is a business case for these measures, either budgetary or to meet some other agency operational need. For example, the U.S. government was an early adopter and encourager of green building practices that result in long-term budgetary savings. Also, these executive orders have encouraged federal agencies to use energy savings performance contracts that are authorized by federal law. These ESPCs allow federal agencies to enter into budget-neutral, long-term contracts with third parties that guarantee energy savings with no upfront costs paid through the energy savings.
In another example, military bases worked with third parties to develop renewable energy projects to provide power for bases. In addition to the environmental benefits of these projects, they provide resiliency for the base and its critical infrastructure in the event of a disruption to the electricity grid. The Department of Defense and the military services account for most the energy use by the U.S. government.
In conclusion, despite the Trump administration's scaling back, the U.S. government continues to pursue greening goals. Progress towards sustainability by the U.S. government will help the U.S. meet its overall goals. These efforts also bring budgetary and operational benefits to federal agencies. They ensure that the U.S. government can continue to lead by example as it has for decades.
Thank you for the opportunity to share these thoughts.