September, 2008

On Tuesday, the House of Representatives passed the Comprehensive American Energy Security and Consumer Protection Act (HR 6899). While the bill itself is very wide-reaching, unfortunately the majority of it its focus (and debate) has gotten caught up in the issue of off-shore drilling, an issue that has been shown to have little impact (immediate or long term) on our national energy use and needs.[i] While the bill did pass the house, and now moves to the Senate to be voted on, President Bush has threatened to veto the bill.

Regardless of its unfortunate focus on drilling and its apparent doom by the hand of a presidential veto, the bill does include many positive provisions for efficiency in buildings. The bill also includes the GREEN Act of 2008, a bill sponsored by Rep. Perlmuttter (D-CO), a bill that FAS helped develop. Some of the many important measures included in the bill, along with some thoughts:

In a few days, the International Code Council’s (ICC) final action hearings of the 2009 code development process will take place in Minneapolis. The hearings are the final step in a 3 year long code development cycle aimed at re-evaluating and improving the ICC’s myriad of building codes.

I bring this up because it’s the final determination for what has been deemed as the “30 percent solution” by the Energy Efficient Codes Coalition (EECC) to be adopted into the International Energy Conservation Code (IECC), the nationally recognized model energy efficiency code.  The proposals included in this “30 percent solution” look to improve the energy efficiency of the entire code by 30 percent by using current, everyday products and practices that are affordable (paying dividends through positive cash flow for the homeowner).

This lengthy process began in 2007 with the submission of over 150 proposed amendments, which have been revised to incorporate comments and recommendations throughout the development process. The result is a set of 21 individual proposals – fourteen of which were approved by the Development Committee in Palm Springs, with modifications as appropriate, and seven other proposals which were initially not approved but have now been modified by the EECC in its public comments. One of these, EC-14 is a compilation of all the individual parts and would essentially revise the entire code, and another (EC-154) is a voluntary appendix, designed to provide jurisdictions interested in increasing their energy efficiency  beyond the basic IECC measures with a means to do so.

The product of this “Final Action Hearing” will become the 2009 IECC, which can then be ratified as a new building requirement by municipalities across the country.

FAS is very interested in the outcome of these hearings. Improving building codes is one of the many ways to spur future focus and development on building energy efficiency, and if these measures are passed, they will represent a significant jump in one fell swoop.  FAS will be keeping an eye of these hearings, and will update the blog with developments.

Tomorrow, the Center for American Progress will be hosting a panel on the Department of Energy’s Weatherization Assistance Program (WAP) and the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP). This panel will examine the impact of rising home energy costs on low-income households. It will also explore what Congress and the president can do to strengthen the ability of LIHEAP to provide vulnerable homes with needed assistance this winter while also ensuring that WAP investments reduce costs in future winters.

FAS senior advisor John Millhone (former director of the Weatherization and Intergovernmental Programs at the U.S. Department of Energy until his retirement in 2003) wrote a paper on these two programs, which can be found here.

I’ll be attending the panel, and will post any interesing notes here afterwards. More information on the event can be found here.

No topics have risen more quickly in recent years than procuring green energy alternatives and combating climate change. How can China and the United States work together to stop global climate change? What can the new U.S. president do to help China become more energy efficient? The Federation of American Scientists will host a symposium to answer these questions at the University of California, Berkeley, on Thursday, 25 September from 11:00 am – 12:30 pm PDT.

Yesterday, the Center for American Progress released a report by Dr. Robert Pollin and the University of Massachusetts Political Economy Research Institute economists titled “Green Recovery: A Program to Create Good Jobs and Start Building a Low-Carbon Economy”. The report demonstrates how a new Green Recovery program that spends $100 billion over two years would create 2 million new jobs, with a significant proportion in the struggling construction and manufacturing sectors. It is clear from this research that greening of our economy is not only possible, but it will create more jobs (and better jobs) than our current economic trajectory.

One of the central approaches to this rapid green investment in communities is a large-scale building retrofit program – one of the easiest, readily available and cost-effective approaches to reducing energy consumption. But what is exciting about this report is that it shows the details of how such a program could not only reduce residential energy use, but would also spur rapid economic development.