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.
Get used to it-this is only the beginning!
-after all, isn’t this what the voters wanted?
Dave Wendt
H.L. Mencken was a misanthrope, and probably a miserable person to be around. That said, many of his ideas do contain a grain of truth.
E.M.Smith says:
December 15, 2010 at 1:25 am
LOL!:You must have CFL bulbs in the bathroom. They make you look like the Night Of The Living Dead
The trouble is that most of the Greenies are stoned so they don’t see what we see, they see a whole rainbow of colors. 🙂
Hi folks. To quote Jack Sparrow, “but you have heard of me.”
Anthony, if you just keep the smoke in your house, along with the fireplace, I think everything will be fine. The problem comes from all that particulate matter that hangs over Chico on still winter days. As someone with hearing problems, I am sure you can sympathize with people with breathing problems.
Wood stoves are not a major concern with us “eco-zealots” at the University. I am not sure why it is an issue for the Sustainability Task Force.
Is calling someone an eco-zealot name calling? Just asking, not blowing gaskets?
REPLY: I have a gas fireplace, no smoke. Though I’m sure somebody from the task force will take aim at that in the future. And this article is about the energy improvement mandate on home sales, not the upcoming attempt to oust wood stoves. Wearing blinders today?
Here’s how I see it. I don’t try to tell you or anyone else how to run CSUC, nor do I mind at all that LEED in king there. I applaud it. So work in your own realm, but don’t push your mandates that work for CSUC off on the citizens of this town. The whole of the sustainability committee is a university clique. Mayor Schwabinator, task force for example. – Anthony
The eco-fascists are alive and well at Chico State, where the totalitarian mindset is on full display. Hundreds of thousands of of our countrymen died fighting against the same dark forces of unbridled statism during the 1940s.
UK Sceptic said on December 15, 2010 at 1:44 am
“They’ll be dictating what colour toilet paper you can use next…”
Toilet paper? Toilet paper?
Surely there’s some moss you could use?
Or you could use pieces of cloth you can wash out and use again, you eco-wastrel!
But just make sure you recycle the water you use or pour it on your alfalfa sprouts. Because as you will understand, one thing the UK is desperately short of is water! That’s why, in Council renovation schemes, they specify toilets that are designed to flush with just one litre of water! No doubt that works well if you’ve been on the ale the night before……
Kadaka:
Would that be the WTF researchers, not the WWF researchers?
Max 🙂
My bad. Was just reading about wood smoke on another blog and confused the issue.
I guess I am the worst pirate you ever heard of. : )
Yeah, every building contractor in California has the “Title 24 lights” – the $10 fluorescent fixtures that go in the bathrooms long enough to pass inspection.
The kitchen ‘primary lighting’ must be fluorescent, so you wire the top switch to the little undercabinet fluorescents, then swap them around once the inspection’s done.
There are actually 1.6GPF toilets that work well. We have a European Duravit that puts the tank in the wall, the tank is located higher than normal and works great. The pressure-tank kind flush well but tend to sound like someone just set off a bomb.
There’s no such thing as a good 2.5GPM showerhead, though. The regs say 2.5GPM per showerhead, but they don’t say how many showerheads. Designers and contractors started specifying showers with three, four, five showerheads and big batteries of body sprays and the regulators are in apoplexy about all that right now.
Our showers only have one showerhead, but they were chosen because the restrictors were either removable or drillable.
What if you already did all the energy efficiency things because you are such a boy scout? Rip out the insulation and redo it? It is like the No Child Left Alone program, where my child’s high schools has 99% literacy and reading at or above grade level etc and they are in trouble because they can’t show year-to-year improvement.
This should also be a big help to all the people losing their homes or trying to relocate due to lost jobs, now even harder to sell their home.
These people are always hypocritical, demanding that others do what they don’t. Very likely that a little digging will find something for which they can be held up to ridicule. Time to put on the investigative reporter hat.
Several people have commented on the “Busybody” nature of local government – much of this could be down to a little know organisation called “Common Purpose”. They are mainly active in the UK where they have infiltrated every council and many major companies. They claim to run training courses to help develop the leaders of tomorrow, which is suspicious in itself, but they also proudly boast of teaching people to “lead beyond authority”. Sound familiar? They don’t have offices in the US yet, but are known to be working behind the scenes.
http://www.commonpurpose.org.uk/
You need do what we are now doing, form a local tea party to get to the city council and stay there. By now you probably figured out that the local news is in cahoots with the city. And here you thought the news people were looking out for the folks? Hah you would be wrong.
We used to pay $40 a month for water. Now as a taxing bill, our water bill is $200 a month, for the same gallons usage.
And now we learn that the FPL power company is charging people to heat the oceans, because the manatees are needed to use to beat boaters over the head with. It’s their moral duty to heat the oceans.
Here, in the UK, I read (in the new Localism Bill) that HIPs are to be scrapped once and for all. Home Information Packs were introduced by Nu-Labour so that we could see how energy efficient houses were which were for sale, presumably to make sure that we were all terribly energy conscious and only buy energy efficient homes. They were a complete waste of time. No-one buys a house based on energy efficiency. It’s always location, location, location. If it’s in the right place, for you, you’ll buy the house and it’s up to you as the new owner to decide whether to improve insulation, reduced flow showers etc. (I love our shower which mixes in air with the water; husband hates it and uses another shower. He pays the energy bill, so if he wants to use more energy heating the water that must be his prerogative).
What is it about all these bureaucrats that they have to try to tell us what to do? That’s what I love about the human condition – as soon as someone tries to dictate to us, we get all stroppy and start fighting back.
The best stroppiness I know comes from husband. The words that light his blue touchpaper are, “You’ll have to….” from some bureaucrat and then he launches into I-don’t-have-to-do-anything mode and gives the poor so-and-so on the other end of the phone a real earful and as he can sound off for England it can be a good half an hour before he ends his rant. (I’m not sure if he ever notices that the phone has been put down on him.)
This is not an issue for democracy as some are suggesting in the hopes of voting these folks out, as pure democracy is simply mob rule and can disregard the rule of law. There is a constitutional right to private property that is being subverted here and that right trumps democratic vote. You could have a 99% vote to keep these people and their policies in place, yet their decrees would still be unconstitutional.
They must have been inspired by the
Green Police Audi commercial. Have they ordered their fleet of Segways yet?
Okay. I will try this again, after coffee.
The ordinance Anthony cites is actually existing law, updated.
The date was chosen because 1991 was the year that residential energy efficiency standards in CA were significantly revised. The dollar amount was determined by applying the construction cost escalator to the old $500 limit.
The City of Chico has a goal of reducing greenhouse gas production by 25% by 2020. The portion of ghg reduction associated with homes (25%) cannot be placed on new construction alone. Enforcement of existing energy retrofit ordinances is one way to decrease greenhouse gas production associated with older homes.
I will try my best to answer questions.
Ok, so which council member owns the hardware store where the improvements have to be bought?
…and where’s the “Weasel Clause” that will exempt council members when they want to sell their houses?
Old England says:
December 15, 2010 at 5:47 am
Picking up on the theme of civil disobedience ……………………………………….
You may recognize this:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. [b]But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.[/b]
There are many ways to cast a ballot.
The minds of our students have been forced into developing mal-wired. California leads the way, with 80 years of socialist run education designed to mold the minds of the children so that they will be perfect citizens of the coming socialist utopia.. The result is that the average Californian is cognitively dysfunctional.
When I got to Santa Rosa in the late 90s, I was very confused by what I saw. The people that I met, literally would remember what happened last year by what the news and their friends said happened, totally ignoring their very own experiences. Everything that they saw was twisted about to conform to their preconceptions. It was scary, but when I finally (after eight years studying the situation) figured out what was happening, I became very scared. The same thing is happening all across the US. People are being turned into irrational animals, their capacity for logic deliberately short-circuited.
The purpose of elementary school is to create democrats. The purpose of high school is to create socialists. The purpose of collage is to produce marxists.
These greenies really and truly want the elimination of mankind. They hate humanity. They will use violence to get their way. It is time for thinking people to leave that state for their own safety.
Old England says:
December 15, 2010 at 5:47 am
“[…]
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.”
Take a lesson from the Colonies. We engaged in a little civil disobedience back in the late 1700’s. ;o)
It seems to be necessary from time to time. If the madates such as Anthony posted about keep piling up, it might be time for another round of civil disobedience here in the U.S.
Oh… notice that no one particular mandate ever seems to be onerous enough to get up in arms about. The one above is “only $800.” But eventually it the last little added mandate the tips the applecart. It seems to me that people in many countries are starting to reach their tipping points over all the government mandates that have been coming down the pike.
Now the question is how do we, here in Calgary, make sure this kind of antidemocratic nonsense is confined to California?
I’ve talked to a lot of civil/commercial engineers who have worked major projects in Los Angeles. They tell me they have no respect for their profession whatsoever, especially the bull*&@ur momisugly that comes from any local building codes. One of them, who has worked large high-rise projects and single home add-ons, had to this to say about building codes for residential.
“Houses do not collapse, they do not. There is absolutely no chance of the average well-built single-story home fully collapsing on the occupants inside. It doesn’t happen because there’s just too little weight on top for the strength of the wood holding it up. Sure, hurricanes will rip your roof off, tornadoes will put your home in a blender, and earthquakes will shake everything off the walls/ceiling, but even commercial structures designed to withstand these things will fail in those cases. Bottom line, there is no justification for laws forcing you to demonstrate to an inspector such absurd things as a properly dug out ginormous hole for a concrete footing with rebar in the appropriate fashion just for a new deck in your backyard.”
In other words, home building regulation is a racket. This is not to say there isn’t a good use for home inspectors to ensure quality, but what should really be happening is home inspectors should be investigating the bad contractors like a detective agency, not forcing law abiding people to follow a ridiculous amount of law.
Dan says: at 4:39 am
“. . .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.”
There are several people with whom I must interact on a regular basis and we seem to be genetically infused with opposite feelings along such lines as this. Otherwise, they seem to be quite normal.
————–About the not so flushable toilets
I’ve placed a can (large type tomato) of water on the counter and dump that in the throat of the underperforming but sustainability product just as I hit the lever. This greatly improves “the float” which is the main concept – “s*** floats” – behind the gently sloping pipe and its water-carrier.
I think Curiousgeorge at 8:17 am meant to use these rather than these [ ], thereby getting bold text rather than [b] this[/b].