Even people who never set foot in your home will benefit next winter if you can find a way to keep the temperature up and the cost down.

That’s the idea behind the New York Green Jobs/Green Homes initiative, a proposed program that would leverage federal stimulus funds and private investment into an energy audit and retrofit of up to 1 million New York homes.

As dreamed up by a Washington think tank, the Center for American Progress and New York State’s Center for Working Families, the idea is to make the homes more energy efficient so they use less fuel, emit fewer greenhouse gases and provide training and employment for an estimated 60,000 workers.

If passed by the New York Legislature—it already has the support of Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver—the plan would create a Residential Retrofit Investment Fund to attract private investment and government funds and pay for the audits and upgrades of participating housing units.

The fund and its private investors would be repaid by taking an 80 percent cut of the energy savings each home would realize over the next 10 years, paid by the utility. The homeowner would get the other 20 percent for 10 years, and all of it thereafter. The savings would stay with the home if the owner sold.

The project is worth the state’s support because the benefits would accrue to the whole of society, not just the family that gets to pay less for its winter heating bills.

Energy used in buildings is about 40 percent of the nation’s total consumption, more than either transportation or industry, and creates 40 percent of our greenhouse gas emissions. Inefficiencies in everything from lighting to heating can be overcome for significant savings, but many owners are unwilling or unable to meet the upfront costs for savings to be realized over time. And asking one family to take the hit for the good of all is hard to do unless it knows that many, many others are doing the same thing—which is the way for large-scale benefits to accumulate.

The Green Jobs/Green Homes plan would create a critical mass of demand for energy upgrades of homes and, depending on how the legislation is crafted, small businesses and non-profits as well. That would make it profitable for contractors to ramp up to do the work, to hire and train workers for jobs that won’t be outsourced to other countries, possibly buying materials and bidding on jobs in money-saving volumes. Designers estimate the program would create 60,000 jobs directly and another 60,000 in related economic activity.

Total savings in energy bills could reach $1 billion a year and, as Silver pointed out recently, it would help the state achieve its goal of reducing its electricity use by 45 percent below projected levels by the year 2015.

It’s a winning idea all the way around, and it deserves the Legislature’s approval.