The mystery of Biden’s green home debacle
The mystery of Biden’s green home debacle
The administration talks a big game on climate-friendly buildings -- so why is it allowing construction of thousands of homes built to outdated efficiency standards?
Ramadan kareem to all who celebrate, especially my neighbors here in drizzly Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, where – in other holiday news – St. Patrick’s Day apparently lasts more than a week and is marked by Palestinians deliciously riffing on an Irish classic that was actually originally cribbed from Jews. You gotta love New York.
I’m writing to you today to share a story I just published that will, at first glance, seem extremely boring but actually matters a great deal. Veteran subscribers of this newsletter can probably guess what it’s about: Building codes.
The short of it is this: The Biden administration is defying a law that could spur construction of as many as 20,000 new homes per month built to the greenest national codes ever written. And no one knows why.
At issue are the rules stipulating what kinds of new homes are eligible for federal loans. Through the Department of Housing and Urban Development – and, to a lesser degree, the Department of Agriculture – the federal government provides financing for roughly one-fifth of new home purchases, and gets to decide the standards a newly-constructed house or apartment must meet to qualify.
Under a 2007 law, the agencies are supposed to write their own efficiency standards. That has never happened. Short of doing that, the statute says the administration is responsible for instead reviewing and codifying the latest energy-saving codes from the International Code Council, the private nonprofit that convenes governments, advocates and industry groups every three years to update the model codes used in all 50 states. That has happened just once in the last 16 years.
The ICC’s energy codes are a vital tool to fight climate change. Buildings generate more than one-third of the United States’ planet-heating emissions. Renovating existing structures to add insulation or rewire the walls to accommodate electric stoves or car chargers is way more expensive than just including those features from the start. So every new house or office tower built to be less efficient than possible not only digs us into a deeper carbon hole, it raises the price of getting out of it.
In 2019, when the ICC gathered its members to write the codes that came into effect in 2021, local governments seeking to make dramatic cuts to emissions were ready. While lots of different “stakeholders” (God, I hate that word) could weigh in on the proposed codes, only government officials were allowed to vote on the final version. After years of enacting codes that barely improved efficiency by 1% each cycle, these Leslie Knope-types approved the most ambitious codes ever, increasing energy savings by up to 14%.
Industry groups balked. Following a series of challenges, the ICC decided – against the newly-inaugurated Biden administration’s protests – to eliminate governments’ right to vote on the energy codes altogether in March 2021.
That made enshrining the 2021 code into federal rules that much more important. For the most part, the Biden administration seemed to agree. The president’s landmark climate-spending law included millions to incentivize states and cities to adopt the latest code. In December, the administration upped the standards for renovated or newly-constructed buildings owned by the federal government in what Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm described as a bid to “lead by example.”
But for some reason, the legally-required regulatory change at HUD and USDA failed to make any real progress. The administration said the preliminary steps to enshrine the latest code would be done “later this year” in 2021. That work wasn’t completed until August 2022. In the eight months between when the document showed up at the White House Office of Management and Budget and when I reached out to the agency for comment last Thursday, nothing on paper changed. On Friday, in what could just be a total coincidence of strange timing, OMB finally finished its review and sent the document back to HUD and USDA.
It’s unclear when it will be made public – or how long it will take to complete the rest of the procedural steps. But it’s not unreasonable to assume this little-known but stunningly impactful policy might not be used to its greatest emissions-cutting potential under a future GOP presidency. For reasons I outline in the story, that’s especially true in another Trump administration. So the clock is ticking.
Why, then, has the Biden administration opted against plucking this “low-hanging fruit of climate policy,” as one advocate called it? Read the full story here on HuffPost, and let me know what you think.
“We are facing an existential threat the likes of which we have never seen.” That’s what the fossil fuel industry is telling people about New York’s proposed electrification rules, and it’s mobilizing its customers to try to fight the state government. New York Focus
Climate doomers are replacing climate deniers. Defeated, nihilistic doomsayers are fueling conspiracy theories and dragging down the fight against emissions right as real solutions are gaining momentum. The Washington Post
And then there were 13. Taiwan just lost one of its last remaining allies as Honduras broke ties to forge a new relationship with Beijing. New Bloom
My octopus reaper? A startup claiming to have mastered a way to farm octopus says it will reduce pressure to fish wild species to meet growing demand. But this raises huge ethical questions about whether is would effectively torture a complex, highly-intelligent and sentient being. The Conversation
Non to pension reforms, oui to nukes. One day after President Emmanuel Macron’s government narrowly survived a no-confidence vote over his controversial retirement cuts, France’s parliament approved plans to build more nuclear reactors. Reuters
Biden’s industrial policy liftoff. A new policy at the Energy Department charts a path to bring new clean-energy technologies to market and preserve America’s edge. Heat Map
Thanks for reading. I apologize for the typos in my last newsletter, the result of my rushing to get it out before cooking dinner. I was embarrassed. Here’s something nice.