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What Actually Works on Earth Day
Charlie Cichetti
April 19, 2026
Smart strategies. Sharp stories. Sustainability that sticks.
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📬 Intro: What Actually Works on Earth Day
Gaylord Nelson didn’t want a holiday. He wanted a teach-in.
In April 1970, the Wisconsin senator organized a single day where teachers across the country would sit down with students and talk honestly about what was happening to the environment. No branded water bottles. No corporate pledges. Twenty million Americans showed up. By December, Congress had created the EPA. History.com
Fifty-six years later, Earth Week opens Sunday. The teach-in version—grounded in real numbers, honest about what’s actually working—is still the most useful one. Here’s ours.
🔭 What We're Watching
⚡Solar generation jumped 34% in 2025, the biggest single-year increase on record. Wind and solar together hit 19% of all U.S. electricity when you include rooftop systems. That’s up from less than 1% twenty years ago. The grid is changing faster than almost anyone predicted. U.S. Energy Information Administration
🛋️ Heat pumps outsold gas furnaces for the fourth straight year. In 2025, manufacturers shipped 12% more heat pumps than gas furnaces—about 3.6 million units versus 3.2 million. Over 20 years, annual heat pump sales have grown 70% while gas furnace sales dropped 7%. The market shifted. RMI
🏙️ Over 7,500 commercial projects earned LEED certification in 2025, covering more than 147 million square meters globally. The Empire State Building became the first New York building to hit LEED v5 Platinum, pairing verified decarbonization with operational performance data. Environment+Energy Leader / Facilities Management Advisor
💸 Building performance standards now carry real financial teeth. Boston’s BERDO started levying $1,000 per day fines on non-compliant buildings in 2025. NYC’s Local Law 97 charges $268 per metric ton of excess carbon. Over 40 U.S. cities will have mandatory standards in place by the end of 2026. Facilities Dive
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🏛 Built to Last
The work that lasts doesn’t wait for a designated week.
Nelson’s original teach-in worked because it was grounded. Teachers didn’t arrive with vague optimism. They had data on air quality, water contamination, species loss. They gave people something they could hold on to. That’s still the model. A controls audit that found $180,000 in savings. A waste diversion rate that moved from 34% to 61% because someone changed the bin locations. A commissioning review that caught an air handler fighting itself for two years. Those are Earth Day stories.
The numbers that don’t show up in press releases are often the biggest.
Boston didn’t announce a sustainability goal this week. Boston started fining buildings $1,000 a day. That’s a different kind of news. California’s updated Title 24 energy code took effect January 1. NYC’s 2025 Energy Conservation Code began enforcement in March. Washington State’s Clean Buildings Performance Standard is moving through compliance phases. Policy enforcement is the mechanism that turns announcements into outcomes.
Unglamorous work compounds.
A portfolio manager who benchmarks every building every year knows things about her assets that her competitors don’t. A facility team that commissions consistently finds savings that energy audits miss. A design firm that tracks embodied carbon early has a spec that survives value engineering. None of this makes headlines on April 22. It makes the next ten years go better.
🧠 TL;DR
Solar up 34%. Heat pumps outselling gas furnaces four years running. 7,500 LEED certifications in a single year. Building performance fines landing in real cities on real buildings. Earth Week 2026 celebrates what’s already working, not what we’re ‘going to do’.
🧰 Action Step:
Write down one number from your building or portfolio that changed for the better in the last 12 months. Energy use intensity, waste diversion rate, water consumption, tenant comfort scores—anything with a before and after. That number is your Earth Day story.
💬 Quote of the Week
“Earth Day started as a conversation about what's actually happening. That's still the best version of it. Bring a number. Tell the truth. That's the whole thing.”
— Charlie Cichetti, CEO of Skema and LEED Fellow
🧱RETROFIT THIS
🔧TOOLS DOWN
Nelson wanted a teach-in, not a holiday.
The distinction still matters. Holidays get celebrated and forgotten. Teach-ins change what people do on April 23rd.
You’re the ones doing that work. The audits, the commissioning, the benchmarking, the spec decisions that never make a press release.
That work is the teach-in. Happy Earth Week.
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Reach the professionals shaping the industry—and do it with intention.
✍️ Brian Bollinger, Head Writer, digs into the numbers behind the headlines so you don’t have to.
🌍️ Charlie Cichetti, CEO of Skema and LEED Fellow, has guided more than 150,000 professionals through the evolving standards of green building.
Let’s Green Up together.
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