The natural gas industry pulled off a last-minute victory in its crusade to strip climate-friendly rules out of the latest update to the homebuilding guidelines used in most of the United States.
Houses and commercial buildings constructed to this year’s standards were supposed to include the circuitry for hooking up electric appliances or car chargers, potentially adding a few thousand dollars to a new home’s asking price but saving homeowners tens of thousands in renovation costs to rewire existing walls and even more on utility bills.
As the International Code Council — the private nonprofit that convenes local governments, lobbyists and industry professionals together every three years to update the energy codes — finalized this year’s codebook last fall, trade associations representing gas utilities and furnace manufacturers filed formal appeals to strip out the pro-electrification measures.
The ICC’s appeals board rejected all the challenges earlier this month and urged the organization’s board of directors to do the same.
On Monday, the ICC’s board of directors took the usual step of going against its own experts to side with the fossil fuel companies, scrapping key codes meant to make electric cars, solar panels, induction stoves and heat pumps more affordable.
Instead, all the codes the trade groups challenged will now be relegated to the optional appendix section of the codebook, essentially eliminating the chances of widespread adoption across the country.
“Really bad and surprising news,” Mike Waite, the director of codes at watchdog American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy and a volunteer who helped author this year’s commercial building codes, wrote in an email to HuffPost. “The ICC Board went against their consensus committees, appeals board and staff.”
Rather than hasten the pace of energy-savings as the country races to cut emissions and shrink rising utility bills, the ruling, which is final, means the 2024 codes will represent less progress than the previous 2021 codes.
While the U.S. does not have federally mandated building codes, virtually every state uses the ICC’s codes as a guideline.
In some big states, like Illinois, local law requires regulators to adopt the latest and greenest codes automatically. States like Idaho haven’t meaningfully updated their codes in over a decade and even want to prevent cities and towns from exceeding the low statewide standards.
But even laggards like the Gem State may have new incentives to catch up. President Joe Biden’s landmark climate law, the Inflation Reduction Act, contains $1 billion in funding to give states technical assistance to update codes to the latest standards.
The Biden administration also proposed a rule to upgrade the eligibility requirements for federal loans to buy a new house, requiring that any newly built home comply with the most recent 2021 rules, which were among the greenest in decades.
The rule has yet to be finalized. If enacted, it could affect up to one-sixth of all new homes, since builders in states with lower standards will need to comply with the federal rules to have buyers qualify for federal financing. Biden’s campaign pitch to give first-time homebuyers a $5,000 tax credit may only add to the demand for new houses that meet federal standards.
The latest ICC codes cap off a contentious yearslong proceeding that saw the private organization strip power from local governments in a move critics said eroded the democratic legitimacy of the whole process.
Historically, the ICC’s gatherings to update the codes each year were sleepy affairs. Industry professionals and lobby groups joined municipal building inspectors to debate what should be in the latest codes, but only the local government officials could vote on the final product. For years, that process typically yielded only 1% increases each time in energy efficiency.
After the 2018 United Nations report on climate change warned that the window to avoid the worst effects of warming through cutting emissions was closing, mayors across the U.S. banded together to take local actions to reduce planet-heating pollution, particularly as the Trump administration pursued an opposite approach at the federal level.
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When those governments approved codes that increased energy efficiency from the previous year by double-digit percentages, major industry groups balked and filed appeals. The gas groups appealing the new 2024 codes challenged similar measures in the 2021 codes. Back then, the ICC’s appeals board sided with the fossil fuel firms.
The ICC then decided to overhaul the entire process, eliminating governments’ right to vote on the final product. The Biden administration urged the ICC against making the changes, but the organization followed through anyway.
Even if the the pro-electrification codes had been left intact, advocates warned that the new process the ICC put in place for writing energy codes gave too much say to industry representatives with a financial incentive to slow down the country’s shift away from fossil fuels. Many complained that the new process, based on consensus-minded committees, took far more time than the previous method, making it harder for public interest-minded volunteers to give as much time as lobbyists paid to be there.
The ruling is likely to spur louder calls to abandon the ICC’s codebook altogether in favor of a new national model.