That's the question posed by Stuart Hickox of One Change (www.onechange.org) in this very thoughtful post at MediaPost in its Marketing:Green section (http://bit.ly/gQwlIz).
Hickox, one of the deep thinkers on energy efficiency and consumer adoption, bemoans the billions of dollars spent on getting people to change their energy consumption behaviors and the trifling progress we've made in North America. He reports that only 100,000 deep energy efficiency retrofits have been performed on homes in the U.S., despite the considerable energy savings that each yielded.
People would rather have granite counter tops, new bathrooms, and decks than the never-to-be-seen insulation and foam of energy efficiency retrofits, he says. Hickox adds that "Most significantly, the deep home retrofit incentive model is broken -- and everybody knows it. Dangling cash incentives in front of homeowners to get them to blow insulation into their attic just doesn't work effectively enough."
Hickox offers a solution to the dilemma but you'll have to read his post to find out (http://bit.ly/gQwlIz).