The natural gas industry pulled off an 11th-hour victory in its campaign to strip climate-friendly rules out of the latest update to the homebuilding guidelines used in most of the United States.
The board of directors held a hearing on Monday to listen to the industry groups’ complaints. The ICC said hearing would be broadcast for the public over YouTube from its website. The video did not appear at the designated location on the ICC’s website Monday, and the organization’sdoes not show any uploads featuring the March 18 hearing. A spokesperson for the ICC did not respond to multiple emails requesting comment Monday and Tuesday.
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 evenWorkers build a home on Sept. 19, 2023, in Marshall, North Carolina. While the U.S. does not have federally mandated building codes, virtually every state uses the ICC’s codes as a guideline.But even laggards like the Gem State may have new incentives to catch up.
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.
The ruling is likely to spur louder calls to abandon the ICC’s codebook altogether in favor of a new national model.At HuffPost, we believe that everyone needs high-quality journalism, but we understand that not everyone can afford to pay for expensive news subscriptions. That is why we are committed to providing deeply reported, carefully fact-checked news that is freely accessible to everyone.
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