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There is now a CONTENT FREEZE for Mercury while we switch to a new platform. It began on Friday, March 10 at 6pm and will end on Wednesday, March 15 at noon. No new content can be created during this time, but all material in the system as of the beginning of the freeze will be migrated to the new platform, including users and groups. Functionally the new site is identical to the old one. webteam@gatech.edu
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Construction codes that regulate the energy efficiency of new buildings have been a centerpiece of US environmental policy for 40 years. California enacted the nation’s first energy building codes in 1978, and they were projected to reduce residential energy use—and associated pollution—by 80 percent. How effective have the building codes been? I take three approaches to answering that question. First, I compare current electricity use by California homes of different vintages constructed under different standards, controlling for home size, local weather, and tenant characteristics. Second, I examine how electricity in California homes varies with outdoor temperatures for buildings of different vintages. And third, I compare electricity use for buildings of different vintages in California, which has stringent building energy codes, to electricity use for buildings of different vintages in other states. All three approaches yield the same answer: there is no evidence that homes constructed since California instituted its building energy codes use less electricity today than homes built before the codes came into effect.
Arik Levinson is a Professor in the Economics Department of Georgetown University and a Research Associate at the NBER. Professor Levinson’s publications have appeared in the American Economic Review, The Review of Economics and Statistics, Journal of Environmental Economics and Management and the International Economics Review, among many others. He is currently serving as a co-editor of the Journal of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists. His current projects study explanations for the reductions in pollution from U.S. manufacturing, direct measurements of the technological improvements leading to those improvements, environmental Engel curves for the U.S. consumers from 1978 to the present, and explanations for California's steep reductions in energy use relative to other U.S. states.
