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.
Hey, look what’s up down at the Butte County Air Quality Manglement – they’re giving out $275 “grants” to classroom teachers to do sustainability lessons. This is the curriculum the STF is forwarding – having kids give personal energy use information about their families. This is the data that Chico State STF member Scott McNall has been accused of selling to companies like SAP, who use it to design and market energy conservation software.
They say they’re broke down at the county, so broke, they were browning out fire stations last summer. But they have enough money to supply teachers with $275 to conduct energy use surveys in their classrooms? Where do you think they got the money? I’m guessing, PG&E. I’m guessing, it’s PG&E who is selling the data to SAP.
McNall gets paid out of the grant from PG&E, he’s just doing their work for them.
I’m sure hoping for some people to turn up at the January meeting. Ann’s running for re-election, it’s time to put some heat to her pantaloons.
Smokey says:
December 15, 2010 at 7:27 pm
‘And just to show the world that mindless voters are not limited to California, here is South Carolina’s entry in the voting-your-money-into-globaloney-pockets sweepstakes.’
I don’t know what to say! The phrase we’d use here in GB is ‘gobsmacked’. Your education system must be in as bad a state as ours.
Anthony, the Chico Council made the upgrade to private property mandatory I assume after looking at a review of Austin City Council’s equally useless Energy Conservation Audit and Disclosure ordinance. One year after the law was enacted, Shonda Novak wrote an article with this tidbit about low compliance: “In 96 percent of the 4,862 audits conducted, the energy auditors recommended at least one improvement. However, only 520 homebuyers or sellers followed through on any of the recommendations.” Stated another way, 96% of the 4,862 audits conducted means 4667 homes needed at least one improvement. However, only 520 homebuyers or sellers, or 11% made the improvement.
I own an older home in Austin Texas and can only purchase electricity from Austin Energy, my electric monopoly. I’ve asked caring Austinites to pay for my energy audit, but so far, there have been no takers. Punitive green home taxes for owners of older homes seem acceptable to Austinites.
I blog about this stupid law at http://stoptheaustinecad.blogspot.com/
Why are there so many nuts in California?
Does anyone know how much Chico State’s tuition and fees have increased (percentage basis) from last year? I’m just wondering how people who preach “sustainability” feel about their institution’s unsustainable increases in costs for students and their families.
I also came across this.
Arts and Humanities Building Receives Design Go-Ahead; Next Step Is New Parking Structure
Inside Chico State, Volume 41, Number 3 – December 9, 2010
“The first piece in the Arts and Humanities building project was laid down in October when $2.8 million was included in the state budget to design the building. The new building, which will stand where Taylor Hall is now, will be home to the current occupants and will provide updated classrooms, offices, and art studios. The project includes a 200-seat multi-use theatre and a new recording studio.”
Got that? $2.8 million dollars from tax payers just to design a new building for Chico State! What will be the actual construction costs? And who will pay for those costs? Oh, that’s right…
Sustainability!
Frosty;
“The late Herb Stein was fond of observing that if something cannot go on forever, it will stop.”
http://www.american.com/archive/2010/november/europe-confronts-steins-law
There may be a lot of collateral damage in the serial pile-up that proves that Law, however.
Mike Haseler:
Ever hear of “Jevon’s Paradox”? He famously predicted that when efficient steam power made energy cheaper, it would accelerate the use of coal and deplete it faster than the older more wasteful methods would. It’s more subtle than that ( http://www.theoildrum.com/node/6116 ) and what happens in practice is that some better substitute is found or invented before supply hits the wall. (E.g., frac gas has ended the oil crisis: http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2010/1108/opinions-steve-forbes-fact-comment-energy-crisis-over.html ).
John H;
Here’s how to force HTML to show the angle brackets: ampersand+gt+semicolon, ampersand+lt+semicolon = & gt ; — & lt ; > < (kill the spacing in the example).
Mark;
no one would expect you to limit your “involvement”, since the willingness and eagerness of pols and ‘crats and activists to interfere with and control others always tends to a maximum. They (you) can only be restrained by robust legal and electoral constraints; if those fail, we get back to Jefferson’s method of watering the tree of Liberty. You wouldn’t like that.
Speaking of “tipping points”.
U.S. Debt = $13.8 trillion
http://www.usdebtclock.org/
U.S. GDP = $14.3 trillion
http://www.google.com/publicdata?ds=wb-wdi&met=ny_gdp_mktp_cd&idim=country:USA&dl=en&hl=en&q=us+gdp
Assuming the numbers above are correct, “sustainability” is the very least of the problems needing attention.
Think of the children, if all the taxpayers are broke, who will pay for their Government salaries and benefits.
Eventually all this “Sustainability” noise boils down to one thing in the minds of Ecological Illuminati: An opinion that 7 Billion Human beings is too many.
So how many should there be? 7 Million? 7 Thousand? Maybe just 7? And who would those 7 be?
Hmm….
I sort of agree that goverment should not get in the way of a property transaction. But perhaps there is a bit of noise here about something thats not such a big deal.
Things like water saving toilets can be made – we’ve had them in Australia for 20 years. Some designs are better than others and its a matter of finding a model that works and buying one of those. When you do a re-fit here there is no choice – you can’t buy a single flush loo. They used to be 4.5 / 9 litres (about 1.5 / 2.3 US gallons). The current state of the art is 3 / 6 litres (0.75 / 1.5 US gallons).
We used to have people writing to the newspapers with silly comments like “which flush should I use”. Its pretty easy: Full for poo. Half for pee. Most people can remember that. I SOUNDS like some of the folk in the US are suffering from poor design of newer products. They can work just fine.
Other things don’t work so well: low flow shower heads are pretty awful and can lead to scalding (you need the water to be really hot to feel warm and the small amount of very hot water leads to skin damage). And Fluro lighting being mandated in some parts of a house… horrible lighting but cheap.
These things will pass – in time. LED lighting will eventually be cheap and appear in the building regs. Probably the only thing not to eventually go will be the horrible low flow showers.
I’m a bit mystified WHERE the $800 should be spent, though. Is the purpose spelled out or can it be used to do anything at all? If so, there’s a new racket coming your way…
When the European powers discovered the New World they could claim legally only those lands for which there was no ancestral title, including by custom, tenure and so on. They had to “extinguish title” in order to claim the land of the natives. This led to many massacres and infamous treaties where blue glass beads were exchanged for small X’es placed on pieces of paper by natives usually holding no authority among their people.
More recently, in the current Wall Street coup d’etat, bank proxies have extinguished title by virtualizing select records on a shared database and shredding promisory notes and deeds.
Many alleged home owners in the United States have no title and no deed now, and neither does anyone else. Thus, the city of Chico might find it hard to enforce this $600 tax on home sales if in fact no legal and documented sale can be shown to have taken place.
Just saying.
maelstrom,
Your explanation is very similar to the current POTUS, who arbitrarily replaced company directors and the CEO of a major car company without the necessity of any law. Where did he get that authority? There is certainly no legislation authorizing him to take those actions, which ultimately reside with the shareholders, and bond holders in the event of bankruptcy.
And assessing an arbitrary $20 billion fine against BP for an accident?? The Exxon Valdez oil spill took twenty years of litigation to try and wrest $5 billion out of Exxon – and the judgement was eventually overturned by the courts. But now the president haughtily informs the CEO of BP – who subsequently resigned – that the company has no say in how the President can spend the $20 billion that he has arbitrarily assessed against BP shareholders, with no need for the niceties of the rule of law? Obama has decreed that he will spend the loot as he sees fit. And not a peep from a tame and compliant Congress.
And at a Senate Finance Committee hearing Obama’s appointee, Neil M. Barofsky, the special inspector general for the Troubled Asset Relief Program [TARP], admitted that he couldn’t tell senators where nearly $3 trillion already spent on the bailouts went. Well, one thing is certain: that $3 trillion didn’t just evaporate. It went into the pockets of Friends of Barry. But the rest of us will have to pay it back.
And the AIG bonuses that the press ignorantly arm-waved about. The 40 people who created the problem at AIG had already skedaddled with their cash. So the Obama Administration went to 40 new people and said: help us, because we’ve got to have somebody who actually knows what the hell these derivatives are, and try and unwind them without losing all their remaining value. We’ll pay you a bonus. But the press fomented outrage that a relative pittance would be paid to save what was left of U.S. taxpayers’ assets. So Obama reneged on his agreement.
Many of the new people had agreed to work for one dollar against getting that performance bonus – but now Obama has changed his mind and says that a contract isn’t a contract in the US, for a relatively minor 160 million dollars out of trillions.
The president is a thoroughly dishonest rabble-rouser: the 40 people who created the problem at AIG were long gone, so they approached 40 new people and said, please take these jobs, because we must have someone who actually knows what these derivatives are, to try to unwind them without losing all of their remaining value. And in return, we agree – in writing – to give bonuses to these 40 new people for their specialized financial expertise. So for a measly 160 million dollars out of $TRILLIONS being spread around to disreputable groups like ACORN and others — with no oversight — this despicable Congress and president have arbitrarily repudiated centuries of contract law.
Isn’t this simply ruling by decree? What company will be assessed a multi-billion dollar fine next? What CEO and Board of Directors is safe from the new primus inter pares? Where is the line separating industry from government? Or unions from government? Or education from government? Or the media from government?
Chico is only emulating the corrupt scofflaws at the highest federal level. And the products of the incompetent educational system [who in South Carolina complain of a map deficiency!] keep voting them in.
As I see it, the present setup is the ideal stage for a dictatorship; we’re already halfway there.
Crazy words, eh? But when the financial chickens come home to roost, as they will, that will be the easy way out for government-educated citizens who are voting as they are told in our Idiocracy.
Harry the Hacker says:
December 17, 2010 at 1:05 am
“I’m a bit mystified WHERE the $800 should be spent, though. Is the purpose spelled out or can it be used to do anything at all? If so, there’s a new racket coming your way…”
It is a racket either way, but if the spending is dictated you can be certain it is a racket and somebodys pocket is lined and wheel is greased.
Over the last six months I’ve purchased about 400 incandescent light bulbs – at greatly reduced prices. Home Depot will sell 96 bulbs for about $12. It’s some sort of clearance sale.
I figure I have a thirty year supply.
When my grandchildren need mercury free light bulbs, I’ll dish them out on a ‘as needed’ basis.
I’m ready for the light bulb ban.