Biden Administration To Work With States, Cities To Reduce Emissions From Commercial Buildings

In a speech to the U.S. Conference of Mayors on January 21, President Joe Biden announced a new initiative to reduce emissions from the urban built environment. Specifically, the Biden administration said it aims to work with 33 state and local governments to enact legislation or regulations by April 2024 that will reduce the carbon footprint of the commercial real estate sector. Two states — Colorado and Washington — and five major cities (New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C.) have joined the initiative.

In a fact sheet, the White House said the program is supported by labor unions, philanthropy, and non-governmental organizations, and will help “scale programs and policies that reduce emissions across the buildings sector in local jurisdictions” and “unlock energy efficiency and electrification across the buildings sector as an engine for job creation all while lowering energy bills for consumers.”

The same day as President Biden’s remarks, the U.S. Department of Energy and the Environmental Protection Agency announced new actions to improve building performance standards. Those new initiatives include:

• Guidance to assist local and state governments in developing effective building performance policies;
• Enhancements to the ENERGY STAR Portfolio Manager tool currently used by building owners to assess their energy, water, waste, and emissions;
• A way to use Portfolio Manager data to estimate building emissions under different performance standards; and
• Greater transparency into the data for the hundreds of thousands of buildings in Portfolio Manager.

Read more here.