Janine Jackson interviewed HuffPost‘s Alexander Kaufman about future-proofing building codes for the March 19, 2021, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

 

Janine Jackson: You might think of pipelines, factories or coal mines as the main arenas of the fight over climate policy, but there’s another battlefield that’s rarely in the spotlight: buildings. Buildings account for 40% of all energy consumed in the US, and about the same proportion of greenhouse gases produced. Cities, and the broader society, have an interest in rules for building houses, offices, etc. that are not just energy efficient, but also adaptive to climate disruption. And many cities are doing that: setting a goal of net-zero buildings, some of them banning natural gas in new construction, or requiring the capacity to accommodate fully electric appliances and electric-vehicle charging.

Critically, local governments have been increasingly participating in the process determining building codes themselves. It’s that participation that has recently become a contest within the bigger contest between communities and industries, about how seriously to address climate change. It is, as our next guest says, “a quiet but extremely consequential fight.”

Here to fill us in is Alexander Kaufman. He covers climate change, energy and environmental policy as a senior reporter at HuffPost, and he’s co-founder of, and now advisor to, the nonprofit environmental news collaborative Floodlight. He joins us now from Queens. Welcome to CounterSpin, Alexander Kaufman.

Alexander Kaufman: Thank you so much for having me.

JJ: When there are catastrophic weather events, you sometimes read about building codes, but they’re rarely talked about as policymaking, even though they’re so important. I would like you to tell the story of what just happened earlier this month. But let’s back up and start with what, or who, is the International Code Council, and what’s their jurisdiction, if you will?

AK: So the International Code Council—to crib a line that the Guardian used in describing it once, which I really liked—is much like “the World Series”: something that does, in fact, have somewhat of an international footprint, but primarily pertains to the United States. It is a nonprofit consortium of industry groups and local governments that come together to set the model codes for different buildings, that are then enshrined as the baseline in many state laws, and city or municipal laws.

Basically, some building codes are set on the state level, some are set on the city level. But few cities have the wherewithal and the capacity to design their own building codes from the bottom up, and you also want some consistency for the industry as it manufactures different pieces of equipment and material for buildings. So this serves as that baseline that most states and cities use.

JJ: So, as I sort of tipped, cities like Minneapolis were making moves on their own to enshrine energy efficiency into their construction codes, and, along the way, local governments realized they could participate more in the process. What happened?

AK: Yeah, so every three years, there is a vote on what is known as a “model energy code,” the International Energy Conservation Code. And this is a broad set of requirements and mandates around how thick insulation needs to be in certain zones, and what kind of windows are best to preserve energy within the building. And every year, there was a relatively low turnout of government voters, who would have the final say on what made it into that model code. It was a pretty wonky topic; few governments were fully aware of their ability to participate.

And what happened is that in 2018, two things converged: Both there was this growing frustration with the fact that the last two rounds of codes had made really meager improvements on energy efficiency overall, about 1% each time, and there was the UN’s IPCC report, which really laid bare just how little time was left to dramatically slash planet-heating emissions and keep climate change within a relatively safe range.

And, as a result, you had groups like the US Conference of Mayors, and other campaign organizations that try to push a lot of sustainability policies through cities, organize their members, which include virtually every city over 30,000 residents in the US, to get together and register eligible city officials to vote in the process that took place in late 2019, which would set the codes that are set to come into effect for 2021.

And it was a huge success; they had record voter turnout. They had hundreds of new government officials voting in the process, and overwhelmingly voting for more aggressive measures to increase energy efficiency. Some of the improvements going up from that 1% improvement the last time around, went as high as 14% for some residential buildings. Likewise, they approved new measures that would essentially bring this entire national building code in line with what many cities across the country are already doing to prepare for a low-carbon future, requiring the circuitry for electric appliances, or electric vehicle chargers, be included automatically in buildings, because it’s much more expensive to add those things after the fact.

What ended up happening, once the votes were tallied and it became clear that these city officials had successfully improved on the climate-readiness of the code, industry groups pushed back. And those industry groups include the National Association of Home Builders, one of the largest trade groups in the country, representing developers and construction companies, and the American Gas Association, which represents gas utilities, which has a lot at stake in the potential transition away from gas heating and cooking.

They rallied, and first questioned the eligibility of the voters to cast ballots in this election at all. And when it became clear that the voters who did vote were totally eligible under the ICC’s rules, they decided instead that they wanted to stem this from ever happening again, and proposed that, instead, this code, the energy code, is put through a separate process, known as a “standards” process, whereby there is no government vote at the end. It’s done entirely through these kind of bureaucratic channels, where there’s no risk that government voters are going to buck what the industry is comfortable with. And this is ultimately what they succeeded in making happen.

JJ: Many readers, first of all, will have heard nothing at all about this behind-the-scenes part, and the ICC. But they may have seen something like, you know, I saw a story in a Washington state paper that’s called the Daily News: “Industry experts say updated building codes to add $20,000 to price of new Washington home…. Homebuyers could see thousands of dollars added on to new home costs by revised state building codes.” This is from February of this year.

It’s not so surprising to see a kind of standard industry argument that the problem here is just cost to homeowners; it just costs more to make homes energy efficient. You have to look at that, obviously, in a different way, don’t you? You have to reframe what costs mean. I mean, the homeowner is going to pay the cost of energy inefficiency, or of having their roof blow off….

AK: This, I think, gets at a really important point that the Department of Energy—which made clear that it opposed this change at the ICC, although it has limited power to do much about it, because the ICC’s codes are enshrined in state laws, not usually federal law, and so there’s only so much that in a federalized system the Biden administration can do, beyond the bully pulpit—but the Department of Energy’s own analysis of past years of improved model energy codes found dramatic cost savings for homeowners on their energy bills.

Likewise, a lot of architects, and other groups that opposed this change, will tell you that, “Look, if you think it’s expensive to add these things into new homes in advance of selling them, they are even more expensive to do after the home is sold, and a buyer needs to update the circuitry in their homes to accommodate technology that is pretty clearly in the pipeline right now.” We are seeing the transition to electric vehicles, and to electric appliances, happening at a faster and faster rate every month, so that’s another concern.

Another thing to point out here is that the majority of homes, new homes being built right now, are in fact being built to have electric appliances. So this is essentially bringing a national standard in line with secular trends in the industry that ultimately save the homeowners money, when they don’t have to adapt a home that wasn’t built to these new technological standards. And that is going to save them money, because they aren’t going to be spending it on their electricity bill, something that I think people are probably particularly sensitive to right now, at a time when we are seeing rates of utility shutoffs for low-income homeowners increasing, now that the pandemic restrictions on doing so have ended, and when we’ve seen some of the really awful cases that took place in Texas amid the cold snap last month. So I think that can be a difficult argument to square, when you consider how narrow it is, about the cost to new homes.

Likewise, something that people would often point to is that while it’s a little bit more difficult to quantify the individual savings of one building to the avoided costs of climate disaster on a global scale, we are seeing billion-dollar climate-fueled disasters mounting every single year in this country, and it is only projected to get worse. So something like this, which is able to lower emissions on a very large scale, was considered by a lot of advocates to be a really vital tool for achieving those goals, and making those cuts in a way that was democratic and desirable for people. And that right is no longer in the hands of those policymakers.

JJ: We’ve been speaking with Alexander Kaufman. You can find his work on building codes and climate change, along with other subjects, at HuffPost.com. Alexander Kaufman, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

AK: It was a pleasure. Thanks for having me.

 

This post was originally published on FAIR.