The Biden Administration’s Plan to

Make American Homes More

Efficient
https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/the-biden-administrations-plan-to-make-
american-homes-more-efficient

New building codes from the Department of Housing and Urban

Development are the latest addition to a long list of Earth Week
environmental wins for the White House.

By Bill McKibben
April 25, 2024
Photograph by Andrew Harnik / Getty
In recent days, the Biden Administration has been on a remarkable
roll when it comes to the environment, with one key announcement
after another helping to cement its reputation as the most climate-
conscious in American history. In some cases, it defended previous
decisions: the White House managed to get aid to Ukraine without
giving in to Mike Johnson’s demand that it revoke its pause in new
export permits for liquefied natural gas. Some tried to make up for
bad decisions: the Interior Department protected a wide swath of the
Alaskan Arctic from new oil drilling, not far from the site where it
had bewilderingly approved the Willow project oil complex last year.
Some were shiny and new, tied to Earth Day: Alexandria Ocasio-
Cortez and Ed Markey, the original sponsors of the Green New Deal,
joined President Biden on Monday as he launched Solar for All, a
seven-billion-dollar program to bring solar panels to low- and
moderate-income Americans. Some summoned the romance of the
past: the feds opened applications for the brand new Climate Corps,
which is modelled on the New Deal’s Civilian Conservation Corps
but with young people signing up to bring clean energy to
communities across the country. And some, as befits a fairly wonky
Administration, were easy-to-miss technical changes that nonetheless
may produce enormous change in the years ahead.

The best examples of that latter category came on Thursday, first with
a new rule on cleaning up power plants which could save more than a
billion tons of carbon by mid-century, and then with a little-noticed
ruling by the Department of Housing and Urban Development which
will require builders putting up federally funded houses and
apartments to comply with a set of more recent building and energy
codes instead of earlier, laxer standards. (The timing of the move
owes less to Earth Day than to the fact that, under the Congressional
Review Act, decisions announced before April 30th will be harder for
a possible Trump Administration to overturn.) Though the new rule
applies directly to only about a hundred and fifty thousand homes a
year, the effect should ripple out across the building sector, and, in the
process, help address not just rising temperatures but also the rising
price of owning a home. And, of course, it comes despite a
caterwauling campaign of protest from the industry affected, which
has done all it could to cling to the past.
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The U.S. clearly needs more houses: 653,104 people in the U.S. were
officially classified as homeless in a HUD survey last winter, a
speciously exact number which masks many millions more who are
“housing insecure.” And those new homes need to be efficient,
because about a fifth of American greenhouse-gas emissions come
from the country’s approximately one hundred and forty-four million
dwellings. The industry—represented by the National Association of
Home Builders—has done its best to put those two crises at odds,
complaining that meeting new standards would raise the price of
homes. As the executive vice-president of its North Carolina
affiliate told the Washington Post earlier this year, “I’m not going to
get into a debate about climate change, what I’m going to get into a
debate about is affordability.” His group insisted that following the
new codes would add twenty thousand dollars to the price of a home,
a scary enough talking point to persuade the state legislature to not
only block the new code but to prevent any new energy codes at all
until at least 2031. (This kind of ostrich behavior is a long-standing
Tarheel tradition: in 2012, the state banned local development
agencies from “basing coastal policies on the latest scientific
predictions of how much the sea level will rise,” a policy which has
somehow failed to stop the rise in sea levels.) Similar laws are under
consideration in Michigan and Colorado; as the Bloomberg opinion
editor Mark Gongloff wrote in February, “the industry has the
political muscle to protect its profits.”

The shallowness of the industry’s argument takes just a few minutes

to reveal. The cost of housing is not just the cost of the mortgage—
it’s also the cost of operation. If you put more insulation into the
walls, the first cost will indeed rise: a federal study not paid for by the
Home Builders put the increase at about sixty-four hundred dollars.
But more insulation, and better air sealing, and modern energy-
efficient appliances, reduce the cost of running the house.
Homeowners pay all these bills—mortgage, electric, heat—every
month. And when you put them all together you find that the total
cost of owning a house built to modern standards is considerably less:
about four hundred dollars a year on average for single-family homes,
according to federal officials, and about two hundred and fifty dollars
a year for apartments in complexes that are more than four stories tall.
In a country where one in four households struggles to pay its energy
bills—a number that rises to one in two low-income households—
that’s money worth saving. (In North Carolina alone, energy savings
from modern codes would be $5.3 billion over the next thirty years.)
So, as twenty-eight of the nation’s large housing and environmental
groups said in a letter to HUD earlier this month, the increase in the
sticker price is “a small price to pay for the more significant annual
savings and enhanced long-term affordability and climate resiliency
that energy-efficient homes offer.”
We’re not talking the Jetsons’ space homes here. “These are
commonsense energy-efficiency improvements,” Ali Zaidi, the White
House’s national climate adviser, said. “There isn’t a trade-off
between building smarter, more efficient housing and delivering it at a
low cost for more and more Americans.” Jesse Thompson, a Maine
architect whose firm, Kaplan Thompson Architects, specializes in
affordable housing, describes what it’s like to walk into one of
the HUD-funded apartments that he’s developing in twin five-story
buildings in the town of Lewiston. “You’d notice that all these
apartments have a fresh-air system, so every bedroom has fresh air
coming in, and that that fresh air has been warmed up through heat
recovery,” he told me. “And you’d notice the heating system is tiny,
much smaller than you’d expect, because the insulation and air
sealing are being policed. It would be quiet, bright, sunny. You
wouldn’t have to have a noisy bath fan running.” A thousand miles
south, in the tornado and hurricane belt, Mackenzie Stagg, an assistant
professor of architecture at Auburn University, adds that better-
insulated homes survive disasters more easily: “If you lose power, it’s
well-sealed and insulated—it will stay comfortable longer, whether
from the summer heat or the winter cold.”

Thompson, in Maine, dismissed the arguments of the Home Builders

association. “They always object,” he said. “In 2009, they wanted to
stick with the building code from 1998. . . . The ball moves, they
adjust, then they object to the new thing. And the objections are
always the same and yet somehow the business survives.” He added,
“That’s one of the most amazing things to me about human progress
—there’s always a group of people who think we’re moving too fast.”

For some reason, that group always seems to include the Republican
Party, which, this month, proposed in the House—I am not kidding—
the Stop Unaffordable Dishwasher Standards (SUDS) Act, the Liberty
in Laundry Act, the Affordable Air Conditioning Act, the Clothes
Dryer Reliability Act, the Hands Off Our Home Appliances Act, and
the Refrigerator Freedom Act. The Party’s Presidential candidate is
notorious for his defense of incandescent light bulbs because L.E.D.
alternatives make him “look orange” (his Administration
literally blocked a Bush-era rule requiring more efficient lighting) and
also for his umbrage at water-conserving toilets, apparently under the
impression that Americans are now routinely “flushing ten, fifteen
times, as opposed to once.” Don’t get him started on modern showers:
“They take a shower and water comes dripping out. Just dripping out,
very quietly dripping out.” If there was ever a place where the Trump
team looked old and tired (and orange), and the Biden Administration
looks modern and vigorous, this is it. ♦

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Bill McKibben is the founder of Third Act, which organizes people

over the age of sixty for progressive change, and a contributing
writer to The New Yorker. His latest book is “The Flag, the Cross,
and the Station Wagon: A Graying American Looks Back at His
Suburban Boyhood and Wonders What the Hell Happened.”
More:Department of Housing and Urban DevelopmentEnergy EfficiencyAffordable HousingClean Energy

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