It would have been delightful to have heard more of this "We Can't Wait for Congress" jobs campaign from President Obama about two years ago. But better late than never. The latest iteration is Friday's announcement of a $4 billion initiative to upgrade energy efficiency in public and private buildings, saving an estimated $40 billion annually and generating tens of thousands of jobs. And it won't cost taxpayers a dime. Happily, the plan can be accomplished without seeking impossible-to-get approval from that retrograde cabal of Congress which seems to believe any energy not extracted from hydrocarbons is Satan-spawned.

The concept is simple enough, one that was proposed as far back as the Carter administration: If you don't consume a unit of energy in the first place, you don't have to produce that energy. If you don't consume it, you don't have to pay for it. If you don't have to pay for it, you can spend the money on something else. The cheapest energy of all is energy you don't have to generate in the first place. And if the source of that unconsumed, unpurchased energy is, say, coal, you get the added benefit of not adding more CO 2 to our already overburdened atmosphere. Win-win-win. It's so smart that backing has even come from the right-wing Chamber of Commerce, which has opposed almost every environmental initiative since Rachel Carson published her first book half a century ago.

The program announced today is part of the Better Buildings Initiative rolled out last February. BBI's goal is to leverage federal and private money to reduce energy consumption in commercial buildings by 20 percent by 2020. Several BBI projects are already under way. Obama added to those today by pledging to make $2 billion available for upgrades to federal buildings. Through the efforts of former President Bill Clinton, CEOs, mayors, university presidents and labor leaders also pledged to generate 2 billion additional dollars in private capital to retrofit "1.6 billion square feet of office, industrial, municipal, hospital, university, community college and school buildings."

To achieve the business-friendly, taxpayer-friendly, environment-friendly outcome of the program, upfront money has to be invested. That translates into jobs. So, actually, it's a win-win-win-win.

Exactly how many jobs is not known, although the Chamber says 35,000 just from the $2 billion in private investment. The Political Economy Research Institute estimated in June that BBI overall would generate 114,000 jobs.

These, PERI says, would be in:

• Lighting manufacturing and installation;

• Heating, ventilating, and air conditioning equipment manufacturing and installation;

• Water heating manufacturing and installation;

• Motors and drives manufacturing and installation;

• Office equipment (computers, copiers, telephones, etc) manufacturing and installation;

• Control system manufacturing and installation;

• Building envelope component (windows, doors, insulation, roofing, paints, coatings, etc.) manufacturing and installation;

• Building operations, maintenance and commissioning.

So how does the administration leverage $2 billion without seeking congressional approval? Through a too-little-used technique called an Energy Savings Performance Contract. Here, courtesy of Christopher Mims, is how that works:

The feds pay nothing, and the contractor itself pays for the retrofit. Then the feds pay the contractor what they were paying before, for energy. The contractor keeps the difference between new, lower energy bills and what they're paid, until the cost of the retrofit is paid off. Then the contract ends, and the feds reap all the efficiency benefits from there on out. It's a similar financing mechanism as, for example, SolarCity, which offers homeowners solar panels for free.

It's hard to see how investing somebody else's money to upgrade buildings to make them consume less energy while pocketing the financial gains from this lowered energy consumption and creating jobs and reducing environmental impacts is a bad thing. It's also hard to see why this wasn't done on a large scale in the Reagan, Bush I, Clinton and Bush II administrations.

Or perhaps it's not so hard given that none of those administrations generated anything like a forward-looking, environmentally sound, comprehensive energy program. Here we are still without one almost 35 years since Jimmy Carter introduced his and 30 since Ronald Reagan mangled it.