Milton Bevington

His brief with the Clinton Climate Initiative (CCI) in 40 cities worldwide is to provide market-based solutions, not handouts or tax rebates, to get efficient heat and power into millions of residential and commercial buildings. A large part of Bevington’s job is educating landlords and others about new financing approaches for retrofitting old buildings. One example: a Chicago bank designed a loan enabling the owners of the city’s 550 thousand multifamily housing units to use an “energy performance guarantee” as collateral. Borrowed funds go into reducing water and energy use, and “every single dollar required to pay back the bank” comes from a reduction in energy use. Bevington would like to see more investor-driven financing for energy efficient projects, which he believes could spread swiftly in both rich and poor countries “to change a large sector of the built environment.”