The writer has become rather interested in all things green in his old age, and is having some profound thoughts involving flashing dollar signs upon reading Myth 8 from the following article, "The 10 Big Energy Myths", whose author tries admirably to debunk many negative sentiments in circulation about alternative & renewable energy, while offering suggestions about how various solutions could be put to use in the real world.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/nov/27/renewableenergy-energy
Myth 8 is of particular interest to a dirty capitalist contractor like myself.
"Myth 8: zero carbon homes are the best way of dealing with greenhouse gas emissions from buildings"
Buildings are responsible for about half the world's emissions; domestic housing is the most important single source of greenhouse gases. The UK's insistence that all new homes are "zero carbon" by 2016 sounds like a good idea, but there are two problems. In most countries, only about 1% of the housing stock is newly built each year. Tighter building regulations have no effect on the remaining 99%. Second, making a building genuinely zero carbon is extremely expensive.....
Instead, we should take a lesson from Germany. A mixture of subsidies, cheap loans and exhortation is succeeding in getting hundreds of thousands of older properties eco-renovated each year... German renovators are learning lessons from the PassivHaus movement, which has focused not on reducing carbon emissions to zero, but on using painstaking methods to cut emissions to 10 or 20% of conventional levels, at a manageable cost... Careful attention to detail in both design and building work has produced unexpectedly large cuts in total energy use.... Rather than demanding totally carbon-neutral housing, the UK should push a massive programme of eco-renovation and cost-effective techniques for new construction.
Now there is a fine idea, especially in the economically troubled times we are in. The queues are shorter than ever at the hot food counters, and not just because they have no pork.... (On a side note, thankfully that situation is being addressed...). The reasoned and logical thinking above, if acted upon by the powers and QUANGOs that be, would produce so very many jobs and allow the movement of so very many pound notes, that the environmental benefits would come to the government practically for free, if only an effective process was put in place to get large scale work done all over the country.
It's early in the century yet...
