The natural gas industry has scored an 11th-hour victory in its campaign to remove climate-friendly rules from the latest update to home construction guidelines used in most parts of the United States.
Homes and commercial buildings built to this year's standards will include circuits for connecting appliances and car chargers, which can add thousands of dollars to the asking price of a new home. However, homeowners can save tens of thousands of dollars in renovation costs to reroute existing walls and wiring. More about utility bills.
When the International Code Council, a private nonprofit organization that convenes local governments, lobbyists, and industry experts to update energy codes every three years, completed this year's codebook last fall, gas utilities and furnace manufacturers Representative industry organizations participated. formally appealed Eliminate electrification promotion measures.
ICC Appeals Committee rejected all challenges Earlier this month, it asked the organization's board of directors to take similar action.
On Monday, the ICC Board of Directors The company went against its own experts and sided with fossil fuel companies, taking the unusual step of repealing a key code meant to make electric cars, solar panels, induction stoves and heat pumps more affordable.
Instead, any code challenged by an industry group would be relegated to an optional appendix section of the codebook, effectively eliminating any chance of widespread national adoption.
“This is really bad and surprising news,” Mike Waite, director of regulations at the American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy, a watchdog organization, and a volunteer who helped write this year's commercial building code, told HuffPost. I wrote by email. “The ICC Board defied the Consensus Committee, the Appeals Committee and the staff.”
The board held a public hearing Monday to hear the industry group's complaint. The ICC said the hearings will be broadcast to the public via YouTube from its website.The video was not posted in its designated location on the ICC's website on Monday, and the organization's Official YouTube page Uploads featuring the March 18 hearing will not appear. An ICC spokesperson did not respond to multiple emails seeking comment on Monday and Tuesday.
Rather than accelerating the pace of energy savings as the country rushes to cut emissions and curb rising utility costs, the final ruling means the 2024 code will make less progress than the previous 2021 code.
Although there are no federally mandated building codes in the United States, virtually all states use the ICC standards as guidelines.
In some large states, such as Illinois, local laws require regulators to automatically adopt the latest and most environmentally friendly regulations. States like Idaho have not meaningfully updated their codes in over a decade. I want to prevent it Prevent cities and towns from exceeding lower statewide standards.
But even laggards like Gem Nation may have new incentives to catch up. President Joe Biden's landmark climate change legislation, the Curbing Inflation Act, includes: 1 billion dollars Funding to provide technical assistance to states to update their codes to the latest standards.
Biden administration too proposed a rule It increases eligibility requirements for federal loans to buy new homes and requires new homes to comply with the latest 2021 rules, the most environmentally friendly regulations in decades.
Rules have not yet been finalized. If enacted, the measure could affect up to one-sixth of all new homes because builders in states with lower standards would have to follow federal rules to help buyers qualify for federal loans.Biden's Campaign promotion Giving first-time home buyers a $5,000 tax credit may only increase demand for new homes that meet federal standards.
The latest ICC rules end a controversial, years-long lawsuit in which the private group stripped local authorities of their powers, a move that critics say erodes the democratic legitimacy of the entire process. ing.
Historically, the ICC's annual gathering to update the Code has been a boring affair. Industry experts and lobby groups joined local government building inspectors to debate what should be included in the latest standards, but only local officials could vote on the final product. For many years, this process typically improved energy efficiency by only 1% each time.
The Trump administration is pushing the U.S. to reduce pollution from global warming, especially after a 2018 United Nations report on climate change warned that the window to avoid the worst effects of global warming by cutting emissions was closing. Mayors have come together to take local action. At the federal level, the opposite approach.
When these governments approved standards that increased energy efficiency by double-digit percentages year over year, major industry groups balked and filed an appeal. The gas organizations that sued his new 2024 standard challenged similar measures in the 2021 standard. At the time, the ICC's Appeals Board sided with fossil fuel companies.
The ICC then decided to overhaul the entire process and eliminate the government's right to vote on the final product. The Biden administration urged the ICC not to make any changes, but the ICC complied anyway.
Even if the Pro-Electrification Code were left in place, the new process the ICC introduced to create the Energy Code would give industry representatives too much voice with economic incentives to slow the country's transition away from fossil fuels. Advocates warned that it was giving too much power. The new process, based on consensus-oriented committees, is far more time-consuming than previous methods, making it difficult for public interest-minded volunteers to devote as much time as lobbyists paid to participate. Many people complained.
The ruling is likely to fuel calls for the ICC codebook to be completely abandoned in favor of a new state model.