Why is it difficult for the government to forcefully hire an army of insulators and go around the country top to bottom and insulate the crap out of homes?
If you’re desperate to nationalise something, nationalise that.
#OurNationalInsulationService
It’s difficult because the money to do this would go to a wide range of companies and people who have no influence on governments. It’s the oil barons who can blast money at lobbyists who have the government in their pockets.
No I mean not tender for private contracts to do this. Actually do this in a nationalised way.
Setup a department, NIS (the afore mentioned National Insulation Service), with the motto warmth at the point of use, build a workforce that goes town by town coldest to hottest parts of the country and adds the required missing insulation to however many homes need it starting with low income homes.
Everyone is so keen on nationalising everything so why not kickstart this and do some good. I say the same thing about home building. Set up a government home building project entirely run by government employees funded by the state. I can understand how there would be NIMBY protectionism against that (can’t build that here you’ll lower the value of my mansion) but who would argue against insulation?
I love it. It makes sense if your goal is to improve the lives of the public and save money long term.
What it doesn’t do is improve GDP (this would actually have a negative effect) or enrich more billionaires. That sort of thing doesn’t tend to play well in this country.
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To be fair, I say this not to demotivate you, but to point out that the problem isn’t innovation, or money, or as many in this country seem to think, immigrants. It’s not even landlords.
The problem is that we’ve organised our society around the wrong incentives. If we’re serious about fixing this problem (and I think your “NIS” is a great idea!) we have to approach it with the understanding that building an NIS must start ith abandoning our bad models and ridiculing those that insist it can be done within the existing system.
We don’t necessarily need a communist revolution, but we do need to be honest about Why We Can’t Have Nice Things and begin the work of building systems that allow for them while dismantling ones that prevent them.
I’m sure it’s the fault of the Romanian and Slovakian cleaners, or the family who run the takeaway place I pop into late at night when I’m stumbling home from the Witherspoon’s
It improves gdp. Produces more insulation, more heat pumps, and drives government jobs up.
You’re ignoring the GDP effects of constant consumption in the form of gas. GDP is not a measure of quality of life, let alone a good economy. It goes down as you reduce consumption.
Heat pumps are a one time, up front cost, and their installation & maintenance is minor compared to the massive, 24hour spend on running a fossil economy.
Well, UK only produces about 50% of it’s fossil fuels, so… the other half does not contribute to it’s GDP. Factors in climate change harm to GDP and fossil fuel effects on health. Yeah…
Yeah, I don’t think the cost of energy used for heating/cooling contributes to GDP (or if it does, that’s dumb).
It does, and it’s one of the reasons GDP is a dumb measure for quality of life. One of the primary factors for measuring GDP is consumption, so if as a society you start growing more food locally, sharing childcare among family, or just choose to repair what’s broken rather than buy more plastic crap, your GDP craters in the face of all of these.
Bill it as “sweaters for your home” in Scotland and they’ll be angry they didn’t do it sooner.
My local city in the US had sent people to do energy audits and gave a slight discount on the next month’s electric bill if you let them in.
They would tell you where you needed more insulation and sealing. The city offered rebates for various types of insulation and energy related overhaul.
The city owned the local utility and they determined it was way cheaper to help reduce energy consumption than to scale up production
The weird thing is, the Tories kind of tried this but bungled it so badly it would be too politically toxic to try again for a while. They had the ECO4 scheme for free and discounted cavity and solid wall insulation, but no requirements for the companies providing the insulation to be certified or deemed reputable. So a lot of cowboy companies sprung up to take advantage of the free money, installed it poorly, and now the horror stories on social media scare people off cavity wall insulation and external wall cladding entirely.
We had this devolved in Northern Ireland rather than taking part in the GB scheme, and in a very rare case of our assembly being competent you can only get the grant through specific companies that have been vetted in advance.
Envy on landlords. Why get real estate owners something for free? On the other hand as a home owner i dont understand why or how i should spend to insulate my home for 150k.
Renters will be hit by this too as landlords need to raise rents to cover the cost.
Perhaps the reason is the people dying every year during heatwaves, caused in large part by depleting oilfields.
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Going through an ASHP, solar and battery install in our house at the minute. Tbf, the £7,500 BUS grant is pretty generous and brings a heat pump conversion (in a modern house) into same price range as a new boiler.
The running cost is a problem though, you are unlikely to save much, if anything, with a heat pump on current electricity prices.
Immediate costs are not the only element in the equation. Electricity can be sourced from many sources, whereas fossil fuels don’t have an alternative (as in, if oil becomes hard to come by, too bad. Whereas there’s many ways to make electricity).
There’s an element of cost and an element of reducing our footprint here.
Be that as it may we are going for a 10 kW south-facing array and 24 kWh battery so I’m hoping we can do the heating on our own juice in all but a couple of months. At least if my calculations hold.
But I’m sending four kids into the world. I’d like to do my bit to avoid making it worse for them, so it’s ok if it all together ends up costing over the next 5-6 years.
Fully agree, and everyone who can afford a heatpump should get one to reduce their carbon footprint. But unlike solar, the return on investment doesn’t look good.
They make economic sense if you have to upgrade to a new gas boiler (from an old gas boiler) or even worse, a oil-based boiler, but only under BUS conditions.
In other countries, though, where they are widespread, they are cheaper to both install and run than gas boilers.
Well, oil prices will surely go down, soon, and the good news is the weather changes that cause all those heatwaves also increase the efficiency of solar.
The UK is perfect for heat pumps too I think. I know they improved for colder areas but ten years back at least they could fully heat a place in the Pacific Northwest which is pretty similar I think in temperatures. Whereas I was told in the continental climate west of the cascade mountains in the us you would need to supplement other heat.
So more drilling it is then…
But which option makes the world better for despicable petro-corps, hmmmmmmm?
