I’ve written about this before. We have a group of citizens here in town called the “sustainability task force” which is highly influenced by the eco-zealotry of Chico State University pushing their ideas of how everyone should live onto the citizens of the town. Just last week, it got worse.
Below is an editorial rebuttal from our local newspaper.
From the Chico Enterprise Record: Hits and Misses 12/11/10
MISS: The Chico City Council just made it more expensive for residents who want to sell older homes.
The council voted 6-1 on Tuesday — with Larry Wahl voting no — to mandate up to $800 in energy efficiency improvements paid by sellers for any house built before 1991. The mandate is the work of the city’s sustainability task force, which falsely promised no government regulations aimed at private individuals.
It’s just another case of the council’s penchant for wanting to dictate how people should live their lives and passing some regulation to do so.
In this case, as we’ve stated before, any home improvements that are needed should be negotiated between the buyer and the seller. If the buyer wants, for example, extra insulation in the attic or better weather stripping on the windows, the buyer can make that part of the purchase offer. Then it’s up to the seller to decide whether to accept that offer or not.
That is how it has always worked, and how it should continue to work.
Here’s the report and agenda (PDF), with a screencap below:
I echo their sentiments in saying: stay out of my house! My home sale is a private transaction and none of your business.
I’m sure we’ll hear in comments from professor Mark Stemen of CSUC, who has blown gaskets (and started name calling) here at WUWT anytime CSUC and this pet group of his is mentioned, to tell us why what we do privately with our homes, is the business of the “sustainability committee”, or the council’s.
I’m all for energy efficiency, but in my opinion, this “mandate” for an $800 energy efficiency upgrade upon a home sale screams for civil disobedience.
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The people who come out with these intrusive regulations are nothing more than little Hitlers. They are spiteful of freedom and democracy. The laws are not about environmentalism, in the true sense of the word, more often it is about the personal indulgence of intrusiveness on others lives. The weakest and shitiest people in society always tend to be concentrated in these human hating groupthink camps.
It would be nice to have a discussion about “sustainability.” Right now it’s just a nifty buzzword thrown around by people who want to look smart and caring. But what does it mean? If it means anything, it means that if we keep doing something the same way, eventually we’ll run out of a vital ingredient and won’t be able to do it anymore.
But so what? Since when do we keep doing something the same way indefinitely? Technology is all about doing things differently over time. Will we miss crude oil? Well, do we currently miss whale oil?
We change when we need to change. “Sustainability” is an effort to get us to change before we need to, before it becomes a crisis.
What’s so terrible about that?
Here’s what’s so terrible: it is in the nature of our technological society that any solution we come up with in 5 years will be better than any solution we come up with today. And any solution we come up with in 10 years will be better than any solution we come up with in 5 years. So the best first step to resolving a problem is to wait as long as reasonably possible to resolve it. By forcing us to come up with a solution today for a problem that won’t present itself for several (or many) years almost certainly forces us to adopt an inferior solution.
The upshot: the greenies would do their own cause a favor if they stopped pushing solutions for problems that don’t yet exist. (Of course, I’m assuming that their “cause” is what they say it is, and not a generalized fear and hatred of civilized society.)
As if home sales needed another push downward. Another example of self-righteous and obtuse government interference with commerce and property rights. The problem, as always, is that the people who are opposed to intrusive government rarely run for office because they don’t see themselves controlling the behavior of the rest of the community. So it’s left to the self-appointed commissars to take over government and abuse their power, as in this case.
Another take on natural color. I see many patients with different illnesses. Many tell me proudly they eat only the best organic and only take bulk “natural” medicines and pills every day. They are a little surprised they get normal illnesses like the rest of us, but they are totally bewildered when I tell them that “natural” is a registered brand name used on unlicensed drugs ,made by big drug companies. They are never sure if I am joking, but I never am. If they want to talk about it, rare, then I tell them about the nasty side effects of their “natural” pills. Back to the point, here in Aus, homes have to have a sustainability certificate, and it has to be advertised. Naturally everyone ignores it.
In the UK there used to be a thing called HIP, a home information pack that every seller had to pay for. It included this worthless waste of money:-
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Home_Information_Pack#Energy_Performance_Certificate
Talking of a piece of crap, I believe it is in Australia where the water saving device in the lavatory is a saying. “If it’s brown, flush it down. If it’s yellow, let it mellow.”
I’ll get my coat…
“UK Sceptic says:
December 15, 2010 at 1:44 am
They’ll be dictating what colour toilet paper you can use next…”
If only it were that benign…it is more likely that they will mandate special toilet paper dispensers ($599.99 at menards!) by every toilet that will sense the size of the person using the loo and only dispense 2 or 3 squares at a time, depending on the size of the person.
Suppose that the “improvements” the seller makes are not those that the buyer would do, as there are often multiple ways to deal with various features in a house?
I would bill the loss of sale value to the sustainability committee along with related incurred legal fees.
Then, there are also court challenges which would run up legal fees for the committee, which probably does not have a budget for this.
Wave any statements they have made regarding not affecting private citizens in their faces and the press. Make their lives miserable.
“The council voted 6-1 on Tuesday with Larry Wahl voting no to mandate up to $800 in energy efficiency improvements paid by sellers for any house built before 1991.”
There are several things about this that make it such an idiotic ordinance:
(1) Why $800? Why not $900? Wouldn’t that be better? How about $1000? $10000?
(2) So who decides if the “energy improvements” are good enough?
(3) What if someone installs some crappy “energy saving” device? The new homeowner will likely come in and rip it out and install what they want, thereby wasting $800. Unless, of course, they’re paid a visit by the sustainability police…
I’m sure that next the sustainability police will be regulating *any* change you try make to your house…then they will regulate what you drive, what you eat, what you are allowed to receive on the internet, what you think…
I believe there were similar mandates in the house-passed cap and trade package last year or so.
Actually I think they already have. Colored toilet paper has largely gone the way of the dodo in the US due to some silliness with the dies that are used. I may be wrong but I think all the TP at our grocery store is white.
—–
They’ll be dictating what colour toilet paper you can use next…
I can only be thankful that civilisation has been so successful that so many can afford to waste so much on funny eco programmes. Of course, the image of the man sawing off the branch on which he is sitting some to mind…
Picking up on the theme of civil disobedience from AW and the responding posts I thought it worthwhile, for those in the US who don’t know what is happening in Europe to add a brief comment.
Peter Mandelson – ex EU Commissioner, power behind the scenes in the Labour party and now enobled to take a seat in the House of Lords – recently stated that we are now in the ‘Post-Democratic’ era. Living in the UK with 85% of our laws now made by unelected and unaccountable bureaucrats in Brussels it is easy to understand what he says.
We have the trappings of a ‘democracy’ but the political system has been evolved and changed so that our politicians can no longer be held accountable for 85% of our laws. We cannot hold anyone to account. Our politicians pursue a stealth agenda of creeping EU integration whether or not the public want it. It is how the EU has been structured and works.
Our ‘post-democratic’ era means just that – democracy is unable, as things are at present, to change what happens.
That is how the UN appears to be modelling it’s approach to global government under the guise of global warming. It seems to be following the EU model.
That takes me round in a circle back to civil disobedience. I have never supported violent protest or active civil disobedience. But I do believe that the real challenge or battle that mankind faces across much of the ‘democratic’ world in the 21st century is to restore and then retain democracy (and I don’t think that applies to the US).
At a now slightly advancing age, I have come to the conclusion that there are times when civil disobedience both passive and active may not merely be necessary but be a duty for those who believe in freedom and democracy.
Thanks Anthony,
I’ve been trying to attending the Sustainability Task Force meetings, including the ad hoc committees that have been formed out of the main ad hoc committee – a meeting every Monday for a month! It’s awful, the conversations are just outrageous, and the only other member of the public is usually Stephanie Taber. The ER usually sends a reporter, but her story sounds like it was written by staff off the agenda reports.
These meetings are attended by the university staff, the garbage haulers, and PG&E, all of whom stand to benefit off the work they are doing for themselves.
Civil disobedience, yes. We need to just plain shut these meetings down. The public needs to come in and mau mau the flakcatchers.
I know – in my dreams!
Well, the next meeting is Jan. 10 at 3pm. Mau mau!
The effective result of this will be to raise final sale prices by $800, an interesting mandate when house prices are falling. That will reduce sales and therefore transfer taxes and realtor income. It benefits contractors who specialize in this work, though. Hmmmm…
Global Governance for Sustainable Development
http://sovereignty.net/p/gov/ggspeth.htm
A speech by James Gustave Speth, Executive Director of the United Nations Development Program Delivered to the World Conference on Rio +5 Rio de Janeiro, March, 1997
From its inception in 1982, James Gustave Speth was the President of the World Resources Institute (WRI). In 1992, he resigned to serve on the Clinton/Gore transition team, then became the Executive Director of the United Nations Development Program.
Speth was also a co-founder of the Natural Resources Defense Council, where he served as senior attorney from 1970 to 1977.
In 1999 he became the dean of the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies at Yale University, where Pachauri is Head of The “Climate and Energy Institute”.
Speth currently serves on the boards of the Natural Resources Defense Council, World Resources Institute, Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Population Action International, The Center for Humans and Nature, 1Sky, and Climate Central.
WRI and NRDC are both represented in the IPCC and both receive funding from foundations such as the Joyce Foundation, (who funded the Chicago Climate Exchange at the outset). NRDC got $450,000 this year. Soros and Pachauri are on the WRI board. Soros’ Open Society provides funding along with dozens of other foundations –
http://www.wri.org/about/donors
Follow the money, as usual
It is interesting to me that Universities are moving from semi-independent states to now imposing their rule on the communities that have sustained them.
It is as if a Duke decided to take over the King that made the Duke possible.
Universities have talked us all into way too many special rights and privileges, and have avoided paying taxes.
Perhaps it is time to rethink the special roles Universities have talked us into giving them?
Green-marxists blabber about “sustainability”, but then bankrupt our children’s future by ever-greater debt.
You can expect the exact opposite to what they “say”.
What if I overachieve and make $1,200 dollars in efficiency improvements, can I then sell the extra $400 in Chico efficiency credits to my neighbor when they sell their house? I suspect this would be OK as long as the credits are registered, audited, and approved by the soon to be formed Chico muncipal energy effeciency trading commission. For a small fee of course.
Who will be the first to require a meter on toilet paper?
People can’t make good decisions.
Every time there are cash expenses loaded on the seller, the foreclosure rate goes up. If they don’t have cash for a payment, they sure don’t have cash for upgrades.
E.M. Smith has it right. The law of unintended consequences will kick in. Whatever gets mandated will be done as cheaply as possible. If it’s cheap enough, it will get ripped out and thrown away by the buyer.
And the “paid by sellers” thing is a joke. I can see how future transactions will go:
Buyer: I’m willing to buy the house, but first, I demand that you make $500 of energy efficiency upgrades.
Seller: Sure.
Buyer: Any chance you’d be willing to come down in price.
Seller: No.
Buyer: What if I dropped my demand for the energy efficiency improvements.
Seller: Okay. I would be willing to come down $500.
Either the council has been given too much authority or they have overstepped their bounds. Why before 1991. From what I hear some new houses are not built as well as the older houses in an effort to cut costs. Maybe someone should check on the private business associations of the council. And will grant money flow from the federal government to cities enacting such rules.
why does anyone with marketable skills stay in California now? Come to Texas, where all the jobs and opportunities for the future are! (well, excepting Austin, of course)
Phase 2 will be the city pays for the improvements for homeowners who can’t afford it and an additional “fee” (tax) paid by sellers who can afford it to pay for the ones who can’t.
This can/will create a whole new bureaucracy. Who is going to enforce this? Obviously, the city must hire inspectors and somebody will have to pay a fee for the privilege.
Yet another regressive regulation from the “progressives”.
I used to love California. Half of my family still lives there. I swear there is something in the air (maybe its the invasive eucalyptus) that leads to the inability of California residents to think critically.
I don’t know how you’ve kept your wits about you, Anthony, but I wish you luck.
UK Sceptic said on December 15, 2010 at 1:44 am
They’ll be dictating what colour toilet paper you can use next…
They already do! It’s brown (the recycled kind, you see).