Reader View: Mandated Home Energy Scores, Curtis Wright Responds to a Response

An Open Letter to Corvallis’ Mayor and Councilors:

I want to thank one of your CAAB members, Sabine Huemer, for her opinion piece in the July 7 issue of the Corvallis Advocate responding to my open letter to you opposing a mandatory Home Energy Score. She writes thoughtfully, she writes in good faith, and midway through her piece, she writes the one sentence that should decide this debate:

“You’re right that no Oregon city has published a figure isolating how many tons a Home Energy Score mandate alone saved.”

That is not a footnote. That is the entire question. It is the question your Council President asked at your June 18 meeting, and it has now been answered by one of HES’s most capable local advocates: with a concession. After eight years of mandates in Portland, five in Milwaukie, nearly five in Hillsboro, and three in Bend, no one can point to a single measured ton. Everything else in Ms. Huemer’s letter is an effort to make that concession not matter. Let me show you why it still does.

Twenty thousand scores completed in Portland are twenty thousand documents filed. A 60 percent compliance rate measures compliance — how many sellers obeyed the ordinance — not whether a single furnace was replaced or a single ton was saved. Counting the reports is like judging a diet by how many bathroom scales were sold.

Sixty-two percent of Portland buyers “used it to plan which upgrades to prioritize.” Planning is not caulking a window. Your Council President’s question was whether people made improvements they otherwise would not have made. Notice the careful wording of Portland’s finding: it does not answer that question. It sidesteps it.

The 4 percent price premium comes from a worldwide meta-analysis of “green certifications” generally — not from any measurement of Portland’s mandate. Homes carrying green certifications are disproportionately homes that were already efficient. The study tells us efficient homes sell for more; it does not tell us that requiring a report makes them so.

But suppose the number is right. Then follow it where it leads. If a $125 report reliably added 4 percent to a sale price — more than $20,000 on the median Corvallis home — no mandate would be needed. That report would sell itself. Every listing agent in town would order one along with the photographs. The Home Energy Score has been freely available to any Corvallis seller for years; the market’s verdict on that $20,000 claim is evident in how few have bought one.

And the Fannie Mae HomeStyle Energy Mortgage? Available to any Corvallis buyer today. No ordinance required.

Ms. Huemer compares the mandate to Oregon’s vehicle emissions testing. But DEQ testing works precisely because it mandates the remedy: fail the test, and you cannot register the car until it is repaired. The Home Energy Score mandates nothing — in her own words, “nobody is required to do anything with the score except disclose it.” A mandate that compels no action can promise no result. If emissions testing worked the way a Home Energy Score works — hand the driver a one-page report about the tailpipe and wave them through — we would not call it a compliance model. We would call it a waste of time, money, and paper. A waste of energy, if you will.

Yes: if every one of the roughly 800 homes sold here each year drove its emissions all the way to zero, Corvallis would save about 12,000 tons — her 2,600 cars. But I labeled that number a fantasy ceiling because it assumes a physical impossibility: every seller, every upgrade, every home to zero. The real figure — some fraction of sellers, making some fraction of upgrades, minus everyone who would have upgraded anyway — disappears past the decimal point. Her 2,600 cars are not what this policy would deliver. It is what only a magic wand would deliver, and no one on this Council is being asked to vote on a magic wand.

Eugene ran a voluntary program for years — real outreach, real subsidies for low-income and rental households, real partners in the University of Oregon and EWEB — and homeowners largely declined the product. Ms. Huemer reads that as proof that compulsion is needed. I read it as the most honest consumer test the Home Energy Score has ever received. When you offer people something at little or no cost, and they do not take it, the market is telling you what it thinks the product is worth. And notice what Eugene did not do before voting to draft a mandate: measure whether its own years of voluntary scores had reduced a single ton.

As for Europe — energy labels required since 2002 — Ms. Huemer cites longevity, not results. If twenty-four years of European labeling had produced a measured, attributable reduction in emissions, that figure would surely have led her letter. It did not.

You are telling residents right now that you may have to cut services or raise their taxes to close a structural gap in the General Fund. Your own City Manager has asked you to defer any decision about this program until those decisions are made. Launching 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 — is the same bad idea it was two weeks ago, and four years ago.

Ms. Huemer writes as both a mother and a scientist, and I respect both. But science is precisely the discipline that insists on distinguishing between what we hope a policy does and what we can demonstrate it does. A member of her own Advisory Board has acknowledged that more research is needed. Hope plus a mandate is not climate action. It is the appearance of climate action – unmeasured, unproven – after eight years of practice in four Oregon cities.

She closes by invoking her children, warning that inaction is “one more failure of climate action that our children will be left to make up for.” I am not only a father but also a grandfather, and I want a better world for my grandchildren just as much as she wants one for her children. But wanting it is not evidence that this ordinance delivers it. My grandchildren do not need me to feel the right things about the climate. They need this Council to focus its efforts where they actually move the needle — and by Ms. Huemer’s own admission, this mandate hasn’t been shown to move it at all.

So, I will end as I always have on this matter of mandated Home Energy Scores. Is there a climate crisis? Absolutely. Does the City have a responsibility to act? Absolutely. Then act where action works: pay for scores rather than fining sellers who lack them, run retrofit clinics, pool resources so residents can find them, and lead with a hand extended rather than a citation issued. And before you mandate anything, wait for the two things you still do not have: a balanced budget and a measured ton.

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. Wright’s commentary may or may not reflect the views of The Corvallis Advocate, or its management, staff, supporters and advertisers.