ARTICLE
By Mike McManus, Director of Engineering Construction & Industry Relations As Mark Twain famously said, “No man's life, liberty, or property are safe while the legislature is in session.” Thankfully, the legislative session is over for 2024. But we still aren't quite sure how that will shake out. are not sure what happened. The reason for that is with the “one-party rule” in Sacramento, some legislation that will impact us in the future slithers through with little debate or coverage in our news media. Or, the bill is written with vaguely aspirational legislation that typically gives massive authority to unelected bureaucrats and political appointees in the regulatory bureaucracies to fill in the blanks. In other words, to make law long after the bill is signed into law by the Governor. A well-known example of this was a law passed in 2013 known as SB 743. On the surface, the law streamlined the environmental process for the new Sacramento sports arena, home to the Sacramento Kings of the NBA. Buried deep in the bill's language, it gave the little-known Governor’s Office of Planning and Research (OPR) the green light to develop a new scheme to evaluate the transportation impacts of developments under the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) by the year 2020. They came up with a metric called Vehicle Miles Traveled (VMT). Never mind that the concept of “vehicle miles traveled” was not in SB 743, but it got put into law by the bureaucrats at the OPR. This came to light about the year 2020 when the author had already been termed out of the legislature and was the Mayor of Sacramento. The VMT mandate launched by SB 743 is a de facto moratorium on building housing outside of the urban core and a de facto moratorium on widening roads to relieve traffic congestion. The new VMT requirement is a good example of legislation done outside of public or media scrutiny in Sacramento. Another example was just a few years ago, in September 2022, when Governor Newsom signed AB 2446, Carbon Intensity of Construction and Building Materials Act, into law. This law requires all new non-residential buildings over 10,000 square feet and residential projects with at least five units to “submit life cycle assessments and product-specific Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs) of building materials used.” What does this aspirational sentence mean? This law sets the stage for widespread greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions reduction in the building sector of the construction industry. Here's the good part: AB 2446 also gives the California Air Resources Board (CARB) the authority to establish a “framework to monitor and reduce GHG emissions of building materials.” Key milestones for CARB are: Completing embodied carbon framework by July 1, 2025 Establishing emissions baseline for the construction industry in 2026 Reducing GHG emissions of building materials by 40% from baseline by 2035, with an interim target of 20% reduction by 2030 The law requires CARB to encourage the production and use of low-carbon construction materials. This is also known as reducing the embodied carbon in construction materials. Again, we have aspirational legislation, and a bunch of unelected bureaucrats will fill in the blanks, and make law, as they see fit once again. That will happen from 2025 until the end of the decade even though this law was passed two years ago. Fortunately, the idea of reducing the embodied carbon in building and infrastructure materials has been discussed and studied in academia. What is embodied carbon? It is the greenhouse gas emissions associated with the extraction, transportation, manufacture, and construction associated with a particular building material. The two materials with the largest amount of embodied carbon are concrete and steel, which are widely used in the construction industry. Watch out, building developers, architects, and building contractors. CARB is once again on the march.
By Mike McManus, Director of Engineering Construction & Industry Relations
As Mark Twain famously said, “No man's life, liberty, or property are safe while the legislature is in session.” Thankfully, the legislative session is over for 2024. But we still aren't quite sure how that will shake out. are not sure what happened. The reason for that is with the “one-party rule” in Sacramento, some legislation that will impact us in the future slithers through with little debate or coverage in our news media. Or, the bill is written with vaguely aspirational legislation that typically gives massive authority to unelected bureaucrats and political appointees in the regulatory bureaucracies to fill in the blanks. In other words, to make law long after the bill is signed into law by the Governor.
A well-known example of this was a law passed in 2013 known as SB 743. On the surface, the law streamlined the environmental process for the new Sacramento sports arena, home to the Sacramento Kings of the NBA. Buried deep in the bill's language, it gave the little-known Governor’s Office of Planning and Research (OPR) the green light to develop a new scheme to evaluate the transportation impacts of developments under the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) by the year 2020. They came up with a metric called Vehicle Miles Traveled (VMT). Never mind that the concept of “vehicle miles traveled” was not in SB 743, but it got put into law by the bureaucrats at the OPR. This came to light about the year 2020 when the author had already been termed out of the legislature and was the Mayor of Sacramento.
The VMT mandate launched by SB 743 is a de facto moratorium on building housing outside of the urban core and a de facto moratorium on widening roads to relieve traffic congestion. The new VMT requirement is a good example of legislation done outside of public or media scrutiny in Sacramento.
Another example was just a few years ago, in September 2022, when Governor Newsom signed AB 2446, Carbon Intensity of Construction and Building Materials Act, into law. This law requires all new non-residential buildings over 10,000 square feet and residential projects with at least five units to “submit life cycle assessments and product-specific Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs) of building materials used.” What does this aspirational sentence mean? This law sets the stage for widespread greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions reduction in the building sector of the construction industry.
Here's the good part: AB 2446 also gives the California Air Resources Board (CARB) the authority to establish a “framework to monitor and reduce GHG emissions of building materials.”
Key milestones for CARB are:
The law requires CARB to encourage the production and use of low-carbon construction materials. This is also known as reducing the embodied carbon in construction materials. Again, we have aspirational legislation, and a bunch of unelected bureaucrats will fill in the blanks, and make law, as they see fit once again. That will happen from 2025 until the end of the decade even though this law was passed two years ago.
Fortunately, the idea of reducing the embodied carbon in building and infrastructure materials has been discussed and studied in academia. What is embodied carbon? It is the greenhouse gas emissions associated with the extraction, transportation, manufacture, and construction associated with a particular building material. The two materials with the largest amount of embodied carbon are concrete and steel, which are widely used in the construction industry.
Watch out, building developers, architects, and building contractors. CARB is once again on the march.