In the context of the cost of a building, the cost of these elements is near-insignificant. Less true if you're retrofitting them to an existing building, but for new builds (which is what OP suggested) they ought to be mandatory.

IIRC there is a limiting factor with (ground-based) heat-pumps, though... the in-earth elements can't be placed too close to each other before they lose efficiency badly through competition for the same heat energy stocks. (Somebody who knows more about this should correct me.)

>In the context of the cost of a building, the cost of these elements is near-insignificant.

The same could be said of 99% of building code requirements...and it adds up.

Houses in Europe have such building code requirements and yet don't seem outrageously expensive by any means.

Shock! It turns out that doing it right at scale just isn't much harder, and pays society back in spades over the life of the building.

Isn’t that completely missing the point laid out in the paper?

The paper is say that those who have more money pollute more and consume more resources. Your solution seems to be to let people with more money consume more resources, rather than building more efficient buildings that reduces everyone’s resource consumption.

> let the consumers choose how much they can afford to pay

The article you're commenting under talks about why this leads to poor outcomes.