Buildings don’t have tailpipes, so you might underestimate how much they contribute to climate change. In D.C., buildings are the number 1 carbon emitter — by far — accounting for nearly three-quarters of the District’s greenhouse gas emissions.

In the face of an uncertain economy, Mayor Muriel Bowser wants to delay an ambitious program that would slash emissions from buildings. The delay is an effort to ease the post-pandemic burden on struggling building owners, particularly those suffering from vacancies downtown.

Under the mayor’s proposal, implementation of the District’s building energy performance standards would be pushed back by three years. Environmental groups and backers of the program deplored the proposed delay.

“It would virtually doom Washington’s ability to meet our climate commitments, and it would set a terrible precedent for the rest of the country,” says Cliff Majersik, senior advisor with the D.C.-based nonprofit Institute for Market Transformation.

Majersik helped draft the 2018 legislation that created D.C.’s building energy performance standards, known as BEPS. The program is projected to cut District-wide carbon emissions by 10%, and it’s one of the top 3 drivers of emissions reductions in the city.

While D.C. has long been a national leader in the number of efficient green buildings, many of those buildings are new construction. D.C.’s BEPS program is unique in that it targets existing buildings, and requires those that perform worse than the median for their building type to put in efficiency upgrades.

“Washington, D.C. has been a real trailblazer,” Majersik says, noting that D.C. was the first jurisdiction in the nation to adopt such a program. Since then, nine other states or localities have adopted similar standards, including neighboring Montgomery County. On the federal level, the Biden administration also followed suit, setting energy standards for federal buildings and creating a voluntary coalition to promote the adoption of local and state level standards.

D.C.’s BEPS applies only to large buildings — initially affecting private buildings 50,000 sq. ft. or larger and D.C.-owned buildings of 10,000 sq. ft. or larger. Building owners can meet the energy standards by doing things like replacing old boilers and furnaces with highly efficient heat pumps, improving insulation and air sealing, or even with simple steps like turning the lights off when nobody is there.

The 3-year delay was included as part of Bowser’s budget proposal for fiscal year 2024. The budget legislation does not include any explanation for the delay, but refers to the proposal as the “Pandemic Impacts on Building Energy Performance Investments Amendment Act of 2023,” hinting at the reasoning behind it. A spokesperson for the mayor’s office didn’t respond to a request for an explanation.

Peggy Jeffers, executive vice president of the Apartment and Office Building Association, says her organization supports the delay.

“We have an industry that is hemorrhaging right now — the office building industry,” Jeffers says. “We’ve been saying, ‘no more regulations, no more taxes, let’s hit the pause button.'”

Still, Jeffers says, the Apartment and Office Building Association did not specifically request the BEPS delay.

There’s a long list of interrelated reasons why building owners are struggling right now, Jeffers says, and why they would have a hard time complying with tougher energy standards: office building vacancy rates are high, many tenants may or may not extend their leases, the federal workforce has been reluctant to return to the office full time, and high interest rates are driving up the cost of capital.

Richard Jackson, interim director of the Department of Energy and Environment, which is charged with implementing BEPS, praised the mayor’s leadership, during a budget hearing last week, but struggled to defend the proposed BEPS delay.

“I’m in a corner,” Jackson told lawmakers.

DOEE is facing a 14% cut in the mayor’s proposed budget, which tightens the purse-strings on numerous programs across city government. The District is forecasting a $1.7 billion gap between revenues and expenses over the next four years.

“Everything was done in good intentions, everything was done because of the crunch,” Jackson said, noting city leaders had to make tough choices. “Decisions were made knowing that decisions aren’t necessarily final, because there’s time through the process to make adjustments. That’s the beauty of the process.”

The D.C. Council is currently in the process of budget oversight hearings, and will begin debating and marking up budget legislation the week of April 24.

While the BEPS delay could make things easier for building owners in the short term, it will not ease the budget crunch — rather it will incur more expenses because DOEE will have to redo some of the implementation work that has already been done.

Building owners would also have to redo some of the work they’ve already done to meet the standards. According to DOEE, 80% of buildings not meeting efficiency standards have already met the first BEPS deadline, earlier this month, and nearly 60% of them are already improving energy efficiency enough to be considered on-track to meet the standards in 2026, as currently required.

In addition, BEPS advocates say the delay would have an unintended consequence, making it even more difficult for building owner to meet the standards. That’s because by law, BEPS standards are set based on energy use from the two years prior; delaying implementation would mean setting standards based on energy use during the pandemic, which was artificially low because many buildings were empty. In other words, building owners would have to cut post-pandemic energy use to below pandemic-era levels.

BEPS advocates also argue that the delay is unnecessary because the program already has plenty of exemptions for owners experiencing financial hardship or otherwise having trouble coming into compliance. Plus, there was already a one-year delay during the pandemic.

And, making buildings more efficient is a good investment. “The fact is that not only are you saving on your utility bills, your electricity and gas bills, as well as often your water bills, but you’re making your building more attractive to tenants,” says Majersik.

Jeffers agrees that DOEE has been very flexible in terms of exemptions, but says a delay is still needed.

“The silver lining in this delay is that it will give us the opportunity to have all stakeholders come back to the table and refine the program,” Jeffers says.

D.C. Council Member Charles Allen, who chairs the committee that has oversight of DOEE, was skeptical of the delay proposal during the recent budget hearing, saying it gave him “a lot of heartburn.”

A spokesperson for Allen says the council member has not yet made a final decision on whether to support the delay.

Environmental groups are also asking lawmakers to restore DOEE funds that were cut in the mayor’s budget proposal.

“The mayor and the Council sometimes use the District Department of Energy and Environment as an ATM,” says Chris Weiss, executive director of the nonprofit D.C. Environmental Network. “If they need some money, that’s the agency you go to to find extra dollars for what they might consider more important programs.”