An Open Letter From Curtis Wright 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.
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