You may worry that your business and the entire economic recovery will be harmed by the fiasco they call Obamacare. Maybe you think the series of apparent lies told by Obama about Obamacare not affecting your coverage, it will not cost you more, or this will reduce costs to the economy will somehow impact economic growth and the ability of Republicans and Obama to reach even a minimal agreement on fiscal matters. Or maybe you think all of what has been going in Washington is bad for the economy and so your investments in deals will be negatively impacted. If you do think these things you are right, but that is not the real issue for real estate. Friday night, when nobody was paying attention, Obama signed an executive order creating a new commission made up of Democrats to decide on what you as a real estate developer and investor will have to do now to comply with new regulations this group will devise to deal with what they perceive to be climate change caused disasters and other related issues.

However they want to sugar coat it, this is a massive new effort to develop federal regulations which will apply at every local level regarding water, construction codes, where and how you develop, retrofits they decide you need to make, and how you build or renovate to meet some new standard they will claim is needed due to their perception of climate change disasters about to befall all of us. It is so broad and so able to encompass everything in real estate that, over time, you will be impacted with higher costs. They might be in how you heat or air condition your building, how much power you are allowed to consume, what materials or reinforcing you need to use in construction, or all of the things you now deal with locally. It will now be mandated nationally with little or no regard to local needs or conditions. You will not have the ability you now have to meet with the ultimate regulatory authors because they will be this group of governors from a variety of Democratic states, who know nothing at all about real estate and could care less about what these things may cost you. Just imagine trying to appeal one of these regulations. Good luck even knowing where to file an appeal.

If you thought the EPA was going nuts under Lisa Jackson, who was impossible to work with when she ran DEP in New Jersey, they are now ramping it up to make that look like just annoying. As a former major brownfield land developer in New Jersey, I knew what dealing with Jackson was like. What is coming is much worse. Instead of the locals saying you need to do x because of the heavy traffic, or because of a clearly defined wetland, or because of a clearly defined contamination site, now they can say, if you don't do this then when the climate changes it will flood, or it will be too hot, or it will not be energy efficient enough. There is real dispute among real scientists as to what is really climate change and if it is really changing as the administration claims. Now that we know the UN put out fake numbers and the Antartica ice cap is actually expanding again, there is a real dispute about what is really going on and what is the real cause. I do not pretend to know about climate change, but what I do know is that the science is unclear, the people who say it is not mainly human generated might have a legitimate case which is being pushed aside, and we in the real estate industry are about to be the recipient of potentially very costly regulations that will be based on science that is questioned by well respected other scientists.