The week before last, reader Curtis Wright wrote against the City of Corvallis mandating Home Energy Score reports on homes marketed for sale. Here, reader Sabine Huemer writes in support of the requirement. Below Huemer’s opinion, we have republished Wright’s piece for reference.
Curtis, you’ve raised this same objection before, but I think the debate has stayed abstract — rice grains, tonnage, hypothetical ceilings — without much attention to what a Home Energy Score actually involves for a Corvallis homeowner. I’d like to walk through what it is, what it costs, and what other cities have found when they’ve run it, because I think those specifics change the picture more than the abstractions do.
What a Home Energy Score Is
It’s a one-page report. A certified, independent assessor visits the home, spends roughly an hour recording about 70 data points from insulation to windows, heating and cooling equipment, water heater, and so on. The home gets a rating from 1 to 10, the same way a car gets a miles-per-gallon sticker. The report also lists specific, prioritized recommendations for improving the score, with estimated dollar savings attached to each one.
The cost is modest and it falls on the seller, not the city: Portland’s program has averaged about $125 per assessment. Portland covers the fee outright for sellers with financial need, so cost is not a barrier for the people least able to absorb it.
And here is the part I think gets lost: nobody is required to do anything with the score except disclose it when they sell. There is no renovation mandate, no minimum score to sell your home, no inspection failure that blocks a sale. Yet, there are many good reasons as to why you want a Home Energy Score:
What Portland Found
Homes with green certifications, including energy labels like this one, sold for up to 4% more than comparable homes, according to a meta-analysis of more than 20 studies worldwide cited in Portland’s own program materials. That’s real money handed back to sellers, not taken from them.
62% of buyers who received a Home Energy Score Report said they used it to plan which upgrades to prioritize after moving in. This is the single most useful part of the disclosure, according to survey respondents in the 30-month evaluation.
The Home Energy Report can be used to qualify for Fannie Mae’s HomeStyle Energy Mortgage, which lets buyers finance efficiency upgrades into their home loan at purchase, turning a disclosure requirement into an actual financing tool for the buyer.
More than 20,000 scores were completed in Portland’s first 30 months, and the compliance rate reached 60% in year two and was still climbing in a city with a real estate market larger and more complex than ours, with no disruption to transactions.
Why This Is a Climate Tool
Homes and businesses together account for 31% of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions once electricity use is included (EPA, 2022 data); residential energy use alone (heating, cooling, and powering houses) is estimated at roughly 20% of the national total. That is one of the largest single sources of the carbon driving climate change, right alongside transportation and industry.
The logic from there is simple: a home that wastes less energy burns less gas and pulls less power off a grid that is still partly fossil-fueled. Multiply that across a housing stock, over years, and inefficient homes are a genuine, sizable piece of the climate problem, which also means efficient homes are a genuine, sizable piece of the solution. A Home Energy Score reduces emissions by making the energy waste in a home visible to the people in the best position to do something about it.
On “The Math Doesn’t Add Up”
You’re right that no Oregon city has published a figure isolating how many tons a Home Energy Score mandate alone saved. That’s true of nearly every local policy any city adopts, for the same reason: emissions don’t stay inside city limits, and municipal accounting can’t isolate one ordinance’s contribution to a global number. Oregon’s mandatory vehicle emissions testing runs on the same logic — required, not optional, and never justified vehicle-by-vehicle, but as part of a statewide compliance model. A Home Energy Score works the same way: not a single traceable ton, but a market-wide shift in what information sellers and buyers get to work with.
It’s also worth putting your own “fantasy ceiling” number in context rather than dismissing it. You calculated that if every Corvallis home sale drove emissions to zero, the very most the city could save is about 12,000 tons a year. By EPA’s own conversion factor, that’s the same climate benefit as taking roughly 2,600 cars off Corvallis roads for a year. Quite a significant number for a small town. It looks tiny only next to China’s daily emissions, and by that comparison, literally every climate action any city, county, or state will ever take also looks tiny. That was never a fair yardstick for local policy, and it isn’t one here either.
A Successful Program that Others Have Adopted
Eugene is the clearest local proof of the point. The city has run a voluntary Home Energy Score program for years, with real outreach, real subsidies for low-income and rental households, and real partners in the University of Oregon and EWEB. It didn’t get anywhere close to covering the housing market, because that’s what voluntary programs do: the households that already care show up, and the rest don’t, which is exactly the gap a disclosure requirement exists to close. Eugene’s own City Council reached that conclusion this spring, voting to abandon the voluntary approach and direct staff to draft a mandatory ordinance, putting Eugene on track to become the fifth Oregon city with a Home Energy Score requirement, joining Portland, Milwaukie, Hillsboro, and Bend.
And Oregon is still catching up to where much of the world already is. The European Union has required a standardized energy label at the point of sale or rental in every member country since 2002: that’s more than two decades of successful practice, not an experiment. Measured against that timeline, a Home Energy Score requirement isn’t some novel imposition on Corvallis homeowners.
Why it matters
It matters that Corvallis residents get accurate, current facts. The Home Energy Score program is a short inspection, a modest and fully seller-side cost, and a report no one is obligated to act on unless they’re selling. In the cities that have already run it, it’s a document that has tended to put money back in sellers’ pockets rather than take it away. As a Corvallis homeowner, I appreciate the transparency the HES brings to a real estate transaction: transparency that gives sellers and their agents a documented, independent record of a home’s condition, rather than a new liability exposure. And it gives future homeowners real information about a home’s energy use, at a moment when buyer interest in exactly that information is climbing fast according to the National Association of REALTORS®’s own 2025 survey.
Most of all, to me, as a mother and a scientist: an efficient home isn’t a side issue in the climate crisis. It’s one of the largest identifiable sources of the greenhouse gas emissions driving it. Treating the Home Energy Score as a minor inconvenience, or minimizing what it can do, is one more failure of climate action that our children will be left to make up for.
Sabine Huemer is faculty at Oregon State University, where she teaches courses on Empowering Climate Action and Climate Psychology. She also serves as an active member of the City of Corvallis’s Climate Action Advisory Board. Huemer says the views expressed in this letter are her own and do not represent the official positions of Oregon State University or the Climate Action Advisory Board.
Curtis Wright’s Open Letter to Corvallis’ Mayor and City Council
Is there a climate crisis? Absolutely. Does the City have a responsibility to do something about it? Absolutely.
But please — do something that makes a difference. Mandating Home Energy Scores still isn’t it.
Four years ago, I wrote to you to say so. The names on the dais have changed. Several of you ran proudly on the environment, and now this idea is before you again. What has not changed is the one thing that should decide this: there is still no evidence that requiring a Home Energy Score for the sale of a house will reduce a single ton of this city’s carbon footprint.
Don’t take my word for it. Take your own. At your June 18 meeting, your Council President asked the only question that matters. He asked whether anyone had good information on the actual outcomes of these programs — whether people, “in any significant way,” made improvements to their homes’ energy efficiency because of a score that they otherwise would not have made. That is exactly the right question. And the answer, after eight years of mandates in Portland, five in Milwaukie, nearly five in Hillsboro, and going on three in Bend, is that no one has measured it. A member of your own Advisory Board acknowledged that more research is needed.
When the people recommending a policy admit they cannot yet prove it works, that is not a foundation on which to build a mandate. That is a reason to wait.
So let me answer the Council President’s question with the only numbers anyone actually has: the numbers that describe the size of the prize.
Picture a clear container holding just over seven pounds of rice. Fifty-four thousand grains. Let each grain represent one million tons of greenhouse gas. Together, they account for the estimated 54.43 billion tons the world emitted in 2024. China accounts for a little over 14 thousand grains. Our own country, just over six thousand grains. The state of Oregon (2023), a mere handful of 59 grains.
And Corvallis? Our entire annual footprint (2018) — every furnace, every tailpipe, every flight, every landfill — is one and one-third grains.
Now reach into that container of 54,000 grains and try to find the part a Home Energy Score mandate could change. In a typical year, fewer than eight hundred homes change hands in
Corvallis. Suppose – impossibly – that every last seller and buyer made every recommended improvement and drove their home’s emissions all the way to zero. The very most we could save is about twelve thousand tons. That is twelve one-thousandths of one grain of rice out of fifty-four thousand. And that is the fantasy ceiling. The real figure — a fraction of homes, making a fraction of the upgrades, minus all the upgrades people would have made anyway — disappears past the decimal point.
Meanwhile, China emits roughly thirty-eight million tons every single day. That is twenty-nine times what Corvallis emits in an entire year — every day.
To stand before the people of this city and tell them that mandating Home Energy Scores will lower our carbon footprint is to promise a result that none of the four Oregon cities already doing it has measured — and that our own arithmetic shows could never matter. That isn’t climate action. It’s the appearance of climate action, purchased at someone else’s expense.
And it would be purchased at a genuinely bad time. You are telling residents right now that you may have to cut services or raise their taxes to close a structural budget gap. Your own City Manager has asked you to wait on this until those decisions are made. Please hear him. This is not the year to launch a new city-run program and a new mandated fee in Oregon’s most rent-burdened community, where the median home already sells for more than half a million dollars.
If the information in a Home Energy Score is truly valuable, the market will reward it — buyers can insist on it and sellers can offer it today, no ordinance required. And if you believe in it strongly enough to spend public effort, spend it in ways that actually move people: there are tons of studies showing that carrots beat sticks. Help residents through retrofit clinics. Pool resources on a website. Offer to pay for a score, not to fine someone for lacking one. Lead with a hand extended, not a citation written.
I’ll end where I began: Is there a climate crisis? Absolutely. Does the City have a responsibility to do something about it? Absolutely.
But please — do something that makes a difference. Mandating Home Energy Scores isn’t it. It’s just a waste of energy.
Curtis Wright has served on, and often led, numerous City of Corvallis and Benton County commissions and committees and task forces. He has also served on or led numerous local nonprofit boards of directors. This commentary may or may not reflect the views of The Corvallis Advocate, or its management, staff, supporters and advertisers.
The views expressed in these commentaries are those of the authors, they may or may not reflect the view of The Corvallis Advocate or its management, staff, advertisers or supporters.
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