Biden Is Mysteriously Defying A Law That Could Spur 20,000 New Green Homes Per Month

The White House is required by law to move forward on a minor regulatory update that could have enormous consequences, spurring construction of tens of thousands of new homes built to the nation’s greenest energy efficiency standards ever written.

Yet more than a year after the key federal agency in charge said it would complete the initial steps to advance the rule, the Biden administration has yet to release a draft of the policy to the public ― a move that appeared to both violate the law and allow construction of as many as 20,000 new homes every month that will likely need costly upgrades in the future.

If enacted, the policy would save mostly low- and middle-income homeowners thousands of dollars in heating and cooling bills at a time when energy prices are soaring, inflation continues to sting, and the country’s aging electrical grids are buckling as Americans blast air conditioners to survive increasingly extreme heat waves. Over time, the highly efficient housing stock would, by one estimate, avoid up to 300 million metric tons of planet-heating carbon dioxide emissions ― nearly equivalent to the entire annual emissions of notoriously coal-addicted Poland.

But the proposal is lingering on an ever-growing bureaucratic docket. And no one seems to know why.

“This is the low-hanging fruit of climate policy,” said Lowell Ungar, the federal policy lead at the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy, the advocacy group whose researchers calculated the number of homes and quantity of emissions that the policy would affect.

“This is a way the administration can help lower-income families and help the climate at the same time,” he added. “And it’s just by following the law ― not something novel or really difficult.”

It’s not hard to see how a rule about which energy-saving building codes a newly built house or apartment must meet to qualify for federal housing loans fails to generate excitement or political pressure.

Boring as it may sound, it’s hugely important. The United States’ nearly the ICC against scrapping a system that appeared to work appropriately and delivered clear economic and environmental benefits. Such a change could, the Energy Department warned, undermine the codes’ legitimacy.

The ICC countered that not enough states were voluntarily adopting the most recent codes, and insisted that the committee model would actually make it easier to take big leaps in energy efficiency that would have more popular support. That March, the ICC approved the changes.

Gas companies hailed the change as a victory. In an internal 2021 document from the American Public Gas Association, the trade group representing gas utilities told its board of directors the new ICC system “should be beneficial,” allowing for a “more balanced” code-writing process that would “ensure consumers have a choice in the energy they want in their home or business.”

Sure enough, when the newly-assembled committees at the ICC started writing the energy codes last year, a gas utility executive in Missouri secretly sent an email that nearly torpedoed a provision to mandate the wiring for electric vehicle charging, the lack of easy access to which has become a major problem over the past two years as sales of battery-powered cars surged. The issue ultimately resolved itself, but the incident seemed to confirm advocates’ fears that a commonsense climate policy that passed under the old system would not even make it past the draft phase in this new process.

With that in mind, more than a dozen advocacy groups sent a letter in June 2021 to HUD, urging the agency to quickly adopt the 2021 energy codes. Doing so would be a straightforward but lengthy bureaucratic process. HUD would need to make a “preliminary determination” that the new codes would not harm availability and affordability, and submit that draft to the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) for approval, a process that is supposed to take 90 days or less. Once approved, HUD would publish the draft, accept public comments for up to two months, review those remarks, then submit its final determination to OMB. The final version could be applied to all the paperwork required to get a housing loan, and a green building boom could begin.

If highly prioritized, the whole process could reasonably take a year. In July 2021, Kevin Bush, HUD’s deputy assistant secretary for grant programs, said in a letter that the agency expected to follow the law by publishing its draft determination for public comment “later this year.”

But HUD did not submit its draft to OMB until August 2022.

Eight months later, the as-yet-unpublished document remained unmoved from its spot on OMB’s public docket until Monday. OMB said in the docket that it completed its review on Friday ― a lengthy process that appears to have ended hours after HuffPost contacted the agency for comment.

Once finalized, that one determination will apply jointly to both HUD and USDA. The Department of Veteran Affairs is required by the same statute to follow an identical procedure. But Congress only passed that law last year, putting the agency on a different time frame. It’s unclear when the determination will be made public.

Even just releasing the draft documents would likely have an impact, said Kim Cheslak, director of codes for the nonprofit New Buildings Institute and a member of the new ICC committee writing commercial building codes.

A federal stamp of approval for the 2021 energy codes “gives more market momentum and says we know these things are achievable without increased cost,” she said. “It can really help the construction industry move forward as we need to move forward, and will have an immediate impact on thousands of homes.”

Asked why she thought the White House hadn’t done so, she replied: “Inertia.”

Then she sighed. “The reason I think they’re not doing it is inertia and political pressure,” she said. “The ICC experienced similar political pressure. These groups have huge lobbying interests and arms.”