Welcome Comrade, to East Germany Madison, where we insist that not only you turn over your private data on your private property to us, the energy police, but we also, for your convenience comrade, tell you to what say and think about our demands. We wouldn’t want the proletariat to think negative thoughts, so we, the Bourgeoisie (note we capitalized the term for you) have conveniently provided you with the thoughts and words that you will say to others about our demands.
Failure to comply will mean cancellation and banishment to Siberia. You will post these words on your social media accounts and web site to demonstrate your faithful compliance and your support of the collective:
“Benchmarking and tune-ups save energy and money. Buildings that consistently benchmark improve their energy efficiency by an average of 8%, and tune-ups cut energy use by an average of 12%. That means big savings on your energy bills. Saving energy also cuts carbon and air pollution. Currently, commercial buildings are responsible for 45% of greenhouse gas emissions in Madison. The energy savings achieved through the Building Energy Savings Program will reduce community-wide greenhouse gas emissions by more than 91,000 tons of CO2 each year! That’s the like taking nearly 18,000 cars off the road.”
And those my friends are the exact words that the leadership of your city of Madison “suggest” you post on your social media accounts so that the collective doesn’t look foolish in having passed an ordinance that demands you track and turn over private data about your commercial buildings to the collective so that they can turn around and brow beat you with the data later.
The stated purpose of this nonsense is for you idiot large building owners to wake up and realize that your buildings suck energy, and that by public shaming, you morons may realize that you should make improvements in your buildings to save energy. (Not that you would want to do that to save money and improve your own pocketbook, no, the capitalist approach cannot be trusted, and only a true member of the socialist collective would know that.)
They assume that you’re too stupid to make the calculations about the value of making energy improvements. This ordinance is just the start of course, the old liberal trick of sticking their foot in the door before they begin to pry it open further.
Now don’t get me wrong comrades, you’re talking to the #1 green developer in the state (with the largest solar array on a multi-family building and many other green components), having received numerous recognitions and awards for our energy efficiency efforts, including having created the first sustainable development course at any university worldwide. So this is not about doing what is economically right or energy efficient for our buildings, it’s about freedom.
The freedom to make my own decisions, and to not be subjected to the city’s energy police oversight and public shaming. Interestingly, the city thought police decided that they would exempt all state and university buildings, well, except the city county building since exempting their own building would make them look foolish. Apparently what’s good for the goose, isn’t good for the gander. (What is a gander anyway?)
So, after turning over this data, is the city (which always claims it is desperate for money) going to spend a ton of money and energy analyzing all of it? By the way, there’s the little problem of comparing apples to apples as they say; there’s no way to make legitimate comparisons due to the difference in the size of buildings, the age, materials (that influence energy consumption and waste), etc.
Ironically, this ordinance takes effect at a time when many office buildings have lower occupancies and therefore lower energy use! So they’ll be benchmarking the low use point in history following COVID, and comparing that in the future against what may be higher occupancy and use, which will make the buildings look bad, like they’re using more energy, but in reality the use of more energy would be the result of increased occupancy. And there’s no way to track or know occupancies across buildings to compare them. But hey, your leadership of the city don’t care about reality, it’s about perception here.
And what about a building that operates 24/7, like the county jail, otherwise known in our industry as a gated community? What about a lab building that has to maintain very cold refrigerators 24/7 in order to preserve lab samples? I could go on, but what’s the point? They’re not interested in facts. It’ll be interesting to see what comes next, but one result for sure will be that this is another nail in the coffin - another reason - not to locate in the city of Madison. Scary stuff.
Wisconsin Right Now is a news organization focused on covering the news from a conservative point of view, in particular on politics and policy issues through analysis and opinions, and is protected by the first amendment of the United States constitution. WRN and the columnist does not make endorsements of candidates or urge a vote for or against any candidate or issue. On October 18 and November 23, Thanksgiving Day, 2023 Donald Trump tweeted out on Trump’s Truth Social account T. Wall’s October 6th column on Trump’s property valuations. T. Wall holds a degree from the UW in economics and an M.S. in real estate analysis and valuation and is a real estate developer. Disclaimer: The opinions of the writer are not necessarily those of this publication or the left!
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