By Jonny Kocher & Talor Gruenwald In the unglamorous pages of local and state law books lies one of the most powerful tools for reducing carbon emissions: building codes. Local governments in Washington State, including Seattle,
, burning fossil fuels in commercial buildings caused $110 million in health impacts in 2017. And this is a conservative estimate, because it only includes health impacts from outdoor fine particulate matter pollution and its precursors; it also does not include pollution from upstream extraction or indoor air pollution from gas appliances. The poor air quality disproportionately affects low-income and Black, Indigenous, and People of Color communities.
When evaluating the cost-benefit analysis for each code proposal, the Washington Office of Financial Management recommends using a social cost of carbon, with a discount rate of 2.5 percent, to account for the societal impacts of greenhouse gas pollution. By that accounting, the 2022 building code proposals will avoid $900 million dollars in damages by 2050.
The health values calculated are based on additional analysis from Jonathan Buonocore, Sc.D, the study’s lead author, and RMI used median estimates from the results of three reduced complexity models used in: Jonathan J. Buonocore et al., “A decade of the U.S. energy mix transitioning away from coal: Historical reconstruction of the reductions in the public health burden of energy,” 2021 Environ. Res. Lett.
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