Document Type

Paper

Publication Date

11-2026

Abstract

Climate advocates often highlight the transformative potential of emergent products, while noting on the margins potential impediments due to technological constraints, higher costs, or fixed consumer preferences. By contrast, this paper foregrounds threats to clean-tech innovation posed by emergent forms of market consolidation. It probes recent developments in the building-materials sector, where numerous technologies show significant emissions-reduction potential, but would need to clear looming market bottlenecks before scaling up as viable green alternatives. The paper shows that while such bottlenecks can occur at various stages of the building-sector supply chain (manufacturing, distribution, and/or installation), today’s most acute competition concerns come from the rapid rise of two massive distribution platforms.

The climate implications of these trends can be summarized as follows: low-carbon building technologies typically first reach consumers through niche premium products, costing more than comparable conventional products. While these premium products might pay for themselves over time through reduced energy costs, that payback period can extend ten years or longer. Given that the U.S. building sector already faces historic cost pressures, as well as perennial split-incentive problems in which property developers do not pay for building-occupants’ energy usage, even mild price inflations caused by anticompetitive corporate tactics can push premium low-carbon products out of reach for most Americans.

Part One of the paper explains that recent M&A in building-materials distribution threatens to impose precisely these market dynamics, while allowing two private firms to dictate the pace of building-sector low-carbon transformation. Part Two tracks Home Depot’s and QXO’s conspicuous moves toward a consolidated platformization of this sector. Part Three examines four low-carbon building technologies at different stages of commercial maturity, but with each currently a niche product whose prospects for scaling up will likely depend on Home Depot’s and QXO’s distribution networks. Part Four probes this intersection of building-materials distributional dominance and platform-based conglomerate sprawl to set out theories of antitrust harm. Part Five aims to harmonize building-materials climate policy with building-materials competition policy, arguing that government initiatives to unleash low-carbon products and services get undermined when permissive antitrust approaches allow corporate gatekeepers to lock up these same markets. Part Six concludes.

Disciplines

Antitrust and Trade Regulation | Environmental Law | Law | State and Local Government Law

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