Cap-and-trade bill could require homeowners to retrofit their homes to meet federal “green” guidelines in order to sell their homes

Democrats’ Cap-and-Trade Bill Creates ‘Retrofit’ Policy for Homes and Businesses
Wednesday, July 01, 2009
By Matt Cover

(CNSNews.com) – The 1,400-page cap-and-trade legislation pushed through by House Democrats contains a new federal policy that residential, commercial, and government buildings be retrofitted to increase energy efficiency, leaving it up to the states to figure out exactly how to do that.

This means that homeowners, for example, could be required to retrofit their homes to meet federal “green” guidelines in order to sell their homes, if the cap-and-trade bill becomes law.

The bill, which now goes to the Senate, directs the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to develop and implement a national policy for residential and commercial buildings. The purpose of such a strategy – known as the Retrofit for Energy and Environmental Performance (REEP) – would be to “facilitate” the retrofitting of existing buildings nationwide.

“The Administrator shall develop and implement, in consultation with the Secretary of Energy, standards for a national energy and environmental building retrofit policy for single-family and multi-family residences,” the bill reads.

It continues: “The purpose of the REEP program is to facilitate the retrofitting of existing buildings across the United States.”

The bill leaves the definition of a retrofit and the details of the REEP program up to the EPA. However, states are responsible for ensuring that the government’s plans are carried out, whatever the final details may entail.

“States shall maintain responsibility for meeting the standards and requirements of the REEP program,” the bill says.

States may contract with private agencies to oversee the retrofitting and measuring of improved efficiency and environmental friendliness of houses and other buildings, making sure that private citizens have a variety of choices for retrofitting their homes.

“States and local government entities may administer a REEP program in a manner that authorizes public or regulated investor-owned utilities, building auditors and inspectors, contractors, nonprofit organizations, for-profit companies, and other entities to perform audits and retrofit services,” reads the bill.

It further says, “A State or local administrator of a REEP program shall seek to ensure that sufficient qualified entities are available to support retrofit activities so that building owners have a competitive choice among qualified auditors, raters, contractors, and providers of services related to retrofits.”

In fact, individual homeowners are even allowed to retrofit buildings themselves. The bill gives specific protection to individual owners’ rights to choose who inspects and retrofits their property.

“Nothing in this section is intended to deny the right of a building owner to choose the specific providers of retrofit services to engage for a retrofit project in that owner’s building.”

Even though Congress says the states are responsible for carrying out the retrofits, the EPA and the Department of Energy will establish the guidelines and rules for doing so.

“The Administrator, in consultation with the Secretary of Energy, shall establish goals, guidelines, practices, and standards for accomplishing the purpose stated in subsection (c) [the retrofits],” the bill says.

The program would involve a system of certified auditors, inspectors, and raters who inspect homes and businesses using devices such as infrared cameras (which measure how much heat a building is giving off) to measure their energy efficiency.

The results of these energy audits would then be used to determine what retrofits need to be performed. The audits would examine things like water usage, infrared photography, and pressurized testing to determine the efficiency of door and window seals, and indoor air quality.

Those retrofits would be performed by licensed retrofit contractors using government-approved methods and resources including roofing materials that reflect solar energy.

“[B]uilding retrofits conducted pursuant to a REEP program utilize, especially in all air-conditioned buildings, roofing materials with high solar energy reflectance,” the legislation states.

After the retrofitting is complete, the government – state, local, or federal – will come back and re-inspect the house to determine how much energy has been saved and whether the retrofit is up to federal government standards.

“Determination of energy savings in a performance-based building retrofit program through — (A) for residential buildings, comparison of before and after retrofit scores,” the proposal states.

To help pay for the cost of these retrofits, states and localities may provide loans, utility rate rebates, tax rebates, or implement retrofit programs on their own. In fact, the government will even pay up to 50 percent of the cost of a retrofit through financial awards to individual home and building owners.

“PERCENTAGE.—Awards under clause (i) shall not exceed 50 percent of retrofit costs for each building,” reads the bill.

From: http://www.cnsnews.com/public/content/article.aspx?RsrcID=50365

Now...illegal to sell your own home, govt to take rentals: H.R. 1728 passed the House by an overwhelming majority in a record three days time...

RE-posted from:
http://mandelman.ml-implode.com/2009/06/now-the-banks-want-to-stop-you-from-selling-your-own-home-without-them/

H.R. 1728: The Death of Creative Financing
By Mandelman - Last updated: Thursday, June 11, 2009

H.R. 1728 passed the House by an overwhelming majority in a record three days time. Now it’s in the Senate and is widely expected to pass quickly as well. Why the rush? Is AIG planning to hand out zillions in bonuses again?

My guess would be that our elected representatives and their banking benefactors would prefer that we don’t know anything about it.

Consider this scenario:

You own a house. You want to sell it.

Someone wants to buy it.

You decide to sell it to the person who wants to buy it and carry the paper yourself for whatever reason. Maybe you want the income instead of the cash. Maybe you’re just particularly fond of the buyer, I don’t know.

I’m sorry… you can’t. It’s illegal.

Huh? Excuse me. It’s my house… Why can’t I sell it to whomever I choose, however I choose.

Nope, sorry. You’ll have to become a “lender” and get a lender’s license.

Why? I’m not a lender.

Well, because you’re only allowed to sell your own house once every three years without going through the bank for a mortgage. And there are a lot more rules than that, believe it or not.

It has to be a 30-year, fully amortizing loan and you must comply with RESPA regulations, provide Truth in Lending documentation, and “verify” that the borrower is able to repay the loan, just like the banks don’t.

You can read the bill for yourself… I’m going to stop right here for a moment.

The moniker for the HR 1728 bill is the Mortgage Lending and Anti-Predatory Lending Act, so it sounds absolutely fabulous, doesn’t it? It sounds like something we’ve needed for a long time… a bill to stop “predatory lending”. Who could possibly be against that?

(Before I go on, I’d like to register my extreme displeasure at being treated like I’m four years old by our elected representatives. They obviously believe that I’ll be happy to eat cow pies if they’ll just call them Ding Dongs.)

Look, obviously this is an important piece of legislation. After all, just look at what caused this unstoppable catastrophic meltdown in the first place. If it weren’t for a bunch of individual homeowners selling their own homes to other people and carrying back the paper themselves we never would have gotten into this mess in the first place. Those sellers obviously have to be stopped.

There’s another clause in this bill that I found absolutely unbelievable. The bill says that if you own rental units and the government decides that you’re at risk of foreclosure, the government can seize your property… before you’re foreclosed on, mind you. Someone wakes up in the morning and decides that you might lose your units to foreclosure, and you are screwed.

You want time to go over that one again? It’s perfectly understandable if you do.

What it said was that the legislation makes it possible for the government to seize your rental units if they deem that you are at risk of losing the property to foreclosure. I assume the intent is to prevent renters from being put out of their rented homes, which is perfectly understandable because everyone knows that it’s only okay to put actual homeowners out of their homes.

Now, I know that usually I like to go into some level of detail on these types of things, but this time I’m keeping it short and sweet. A memo ought to do it…

Memo to the Members of the U.S. Politburo… I mean Senate:

Don’t even think about it. It’s none of your Goddamn business who I sell my house to, and if I want to get paid in marbles over 16 months with a 5,000 Twinkie balloon payment at the end of a year ending in 7, I don’t give a rat’s right foot what you guys in congress think about it. Want to know what else… get your lazy, self-important asses back to working on something that’s actually a problem, because we’ve got plenty of those and a big part of why we have plenty of those is that you guys can’t seem to stay focused on anything important for more than an hour or so. If you want to blow the banking lobby, do it on your own time… got it?

Now, back to the rest of us. Let’s get serious here. This is crap and we all know it. But the banking lobby is going to just keep throwing their heft around as they please until we put our collective foot on someone’s neck. I’m serious about this. If we don’t.. what’s next? You can’t sell more than one of your cars every eighteen months without becoming a car dealer, and providing floor mats?

People, we have HUGE problems that no one in our government has even come close to solving and this is what they’ve got time to work on? If we just sit back and say… “Oh well,” then we deserve everything we get in the future.

Remember AIG bonuses? We had congress jumping all over the place like they had ants in their pants over those bonuses. One week of pitchforks and torches and they were passing “90% Bonus Tax” legislation. Let’s flex our muscles on this piece of crap bill, and maybe after a time or two, our elected representatives will realize that we’re not playing around here.

Look… if you don’t agree, here’s what Sen. Barbara Boxer authored to add to a bill about a week or two ago:

A provision authored by Sen. Boxer requires homeowners to be alerted within thirty days if their lender sells or transfers their home mortgage loan. The measure would help homeowners whose efforts to avoid foreclosure have been complicated because they can’t find out who owns their mortgage. ”Homeowners have the right to know who owns their mortgage,” said Sen. Boxer. ”This measure will give homeowners another tool to fight unlawful foreclosures and renegotiate their loans so they can stay in their homes.”

Well… it’s about time. That’s exactly why my best friend lost his home… he couldn’t find out who owned his mortgage. It was soooo frustrating. They never even foreclosed. Finally, after missing five payments, he just gave up and moved out.

See what I mean. It’s out of Goddamn control over there. We have hundreds of bankrolled idiots running things in D.C. and they don’t even think there’s anything wrong.

Let’s let each of our respective senators know that if they even consider voting for this bill, we will all be actively campaigning against them Obama-style in their next election… no matter which party they’re attending.

Unemployment’s going through the roof, and we’ve had 1 million foreclosures since January 1, 2009. Fix that, you grandstanding morons. And leave my house alone. Don’t worry… the way things are going the bank will have it back soon enough.

And on a more serious note, in the years to come, seller financing will be the only way that hundreds of thousands of Americans can buy houses, so in terms of our eventual economic recovery, this bill can only hurt.

Here’s a link to the bill if you want to read it: http://www.govtrack.us/congress/billtext.xpd?bill=h111-1728

And by the way, I don’t think sending a letter or email is enough.

Let’s send each of our respective senators pairs of kneepads, and a map to the banks in their area. Seriously.