Topic: Climate Emergency is already here. How much worse it gets is still up to us (?)

[Sudden Death Draft Loser]

[Nobby Reserve]

Volcanic activity / plate tektonics drive the climate over very long periods of time - absolutely nothing to do with human induced climate change!

They don't have any connection with AGW, but volcanic eruptions can have relatively quick impacts on the global climate, although the changes are short-lived, and are almost universally of a cooling effect.

When Tambora erupted in 1815, the following year heralded extremely poor weather, predominantly in the northern hemisphere. This was the result of the ejection of millions of tons of ash and sulphur into the atmosphere then carried around the world on jet streams.

1816 became known as 'the year without a summer' as typical winter and early spring conditions perpetuated across Europe, North America and Asia. The impacts included widescale crop failures, frosts and snow recorded in July, changes to the monsoon season in Asia (a lot of flooding) and the resultant hundreds of thousands of deaths through not just starvation and famine, but typoid and cholera.

Some unexpected social and cultural side-effects:

A shortage of animal feed led German inventor Karl Drais to invent the velocipede as a form of horseless transport, the forerunner of the bicycle

The tefra in the atmosphere led to extremely vivid sunsets, which were captured in the paintings of JMW Turner and Caspar Freidrich

A group of Aristocratic friends spending the summer in a villa on the shores of Lake Geneva were kept inside by rain, cold and often perpetual dusk. To pass the time, they organised a writing competition to create the scariest story. Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein, and John Polidori (expanding on host Lord Byron's 'A Fragment') wrote The Vampyre, which was an inspiration for Bram Stoker to write Dracula.

The 1817 winter was one of the coldest in history across the Americas, Britain and Europe.


Much smaller - but definitely noticeable - climatological impacts occurred after the eruptions of Mt St Helens (1981) and Mt Pinatubo (1991).

Tambora had a Volcanic Explosivity Index (VEI) of 7 (St Helens was a 5; Pinatubo a 6. For comparison, Cumbre Vieja on La Palma was a 3). The Hunga Tonga–Hunga Haʻapai eruption is expected to be a VEI5, but not expected to impact global climates due to the composition of the ash (very low levels of sulphur).

[Red Raw]

This is a good graph to illustrate the climate change/volcanoes myth.


https://skepticalscience.com/volcanoes-and-global-warming-intermediate.htm

Red line is atmospheric CO₂ (the accepted driver of climate change) as measured at Mauna Loa (known as the Keeling Curve).
The blue line on the secondary axis is an indicator of the presence of aerosols which spike when there are large volcanic erruptions.

Erruptions do not register on the CO₂ line because they are insignificant  compared to human sources. Pinatubo in 1991 was estimated to have chucked out about 42 million tonnesCO₂, in that year human sources were estimated at 26 billion tonnesCO₂, so 0.16% of the human emissions. Current estimates for human sources are ~40 billion tonnesCO₂/year.

Annually, underwater volcanoes emit less than 40% of the CO₂ than from those on the land and the newly exposed lava acts as something of a carbon sink so the effect on atmospheric CO₂ is even smaller.

[Buggy Eyes Alfredo]

Raptors are now taking drastic measures to flush out their prey. Pick up an ember and drop it in the dry brush.

https://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/australian-birds-of-prey-have-harnessed-the-use-of-fire-to-flush-out-their-prey/

[Sudden Death Draft Loser]

No one really gives a damn about climate change

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-60301755

 

[ScottScott]

We truly are fucked aren't we? Activists and protestors are laughed at and locked up, even in here you've seen them referred to as terrorists and pawns

Until big businesses and governments around the world change their mindsets then nothing will change and it's a damn fucking shame

[Sudden Death Draft Loser]

We truly are fucked aren't we? Activists and protestors are laughed at and locked up, even in here you've seen them referred to as terrorists and pawns

Until big businesses and governments around the world change their mindsets then nothing will change and it's a damn fucking shame

Yea we are fucked and even if businesses and governments change their mindset, the best we can hope for is a reduction in the consequences. Either way it's going to be bad and happen a lot sooner than most think. We're taking years, not decades or centuries.

[Bobsackamano]

No one really gives a damn about climate change

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-60301755

 

It's not all doom and gloom, that investment Uganda has made could turn out to be a very costly choice.

https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-60312633

[Sudden Death Draft Loser]

It's not all doom and gloom, that investment Uganda has made could turn out to be a very costly choice.

https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-60312633

Yea it's an interesting development, but probably too late.

There's huge uncertainty about when fusion power will be ready for commercialisation. One estimate suggests maybe 20 years. Then fusion would need to scale up, which would mean a delay of perhaps another few decades.

[Sudden Death Draft Loser]

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-60386125

[Red-Soldier]

IPCC issues ‘bleakest warning yet’ on impacts of climate breakdown

Report says human actions are causing dangerous disruption, and window to secure a liveable future is closing

Climate breakdown is accelerating rapidly, many of the impacts will be more severe than predicted and there is only a narrow chance left of avoiding its worst ravages, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has said.

Even at current levels, human actions in heating the climate are causing dangerous and widespread disruption, threatening devastation to swathes of the natural world and rendering many areas unliveable, according to the landmark report published on Monday.

“The scientific evidence is unequivocal: climate change is a threat to human wellbeing and the health of the planet,” said Hans-Otto Pörtner, a co-chair of working group 2 of the IPCC. “Any further delay in concerted global action will miss a brief and rapidly closing window to secure a liveable future.”
Droughts, floods, heatwaves

In what some scientists termed “the bleakest warning yet”, the summary report from the global authority on climate science says droughts, floods, heatwaves and other extreme weather are accelerating and wreaking increasing damage.

Allowing global temperatures to increase by more than 1.5C above pre-industrial levels, as looks likely on current trends in greenhouse gas emissions, would result in some “irreversible” impacts. These include the melting of ice caps and glaciers, and a cascading effect whereby wildfires, the die-off of trees, the drying of peatlands and the thawing of permafrost release additional carbon emissions, amplifying the warming further.
‘Atlas of human suffering’

António Guterres, the UN secretary general, said: “I have seen many scientific reports in my time, but nothing like this. Today’s IPCC report is an atlas of human suffering and a damning indictment of failed climate leadership.”

John Kerry, the US special presidential envoy for climate, said the report “paints a dire picture of the impacts already occurring because of a warmer world and the terrible risks to our planet if we continue to ignore science. We have seen the increase in climate-fuelled extreme events, and the damage that is left behind – lives lost and livelihoods ruined. The question at this point is not whether we can altogether avoid the crisis – it is whether we can avoid the worst consequences.”

The report says:

    Everywhere is affected, with no inhabited region escaping dire impacts from rising temperatures and increasingly extreme weather.

    About half the global population – between 3.3 billion and 3.6 billion people – live in areas “highly vulnerable” to climate change.

    Millions of people face food and water shortages owing to climate change, even at current levels of heating.

    Mass die-offs of species, from trees to corals, are already under way.

    1.5C above pre-industrial levels constitutes a “critical level” beyond which the impacts of the climate crisis accelerate strongly and some become irreversible.

    Coastal areas around the globe, and small, low-lying islands, face inundation at temperature rises of more than 1.5C.

    Key ecosystems are losing their ability to absorb carbon dioxide, turning them from carbon sinks to carbon sources.

    Some countries have agreed to conserve 30% of the Earth’s land, but conserving half may be necessary to restore the ability of natural ecosystems to cope with the damage wreaked on them.

Chance to avoid the worst

This is the second part of the IPCC’s latest assessment report, an updated, comprehensive review of global knowledge of the climate, which has been seven years in the making and draws on the peer-reviewed work of thousands of scientists. The assessment report is the sixth since the IPCC was first convened by the UN in 1988, and may be the last to be published while there is still some chance of avoiding the worst.

A first instalment, by the IPCC’s working group 1, published last August, on the physical science of climate change, said the climate crisis was “unequivocally” caused by human actions, resulting in changes that were “unprecedented”, with some becoming “irreversible”.

This second part, by working group 2, deals with the impacts of climate breakdown, sets out areas where the world is most vulnerable, and details how we can try to adapt and protect against some of the impacts. A third section, due in April, will cover ways to cut greenhouse gas emissions, and the final part, in October, will summarise these lessons for governments meeting in Egypt for the UN Cop27 climate summit.
‘Cataclysmic’ for small islands

Small islands will be among those worst affected. Walton Webson, an ambassador of Antigua and Barbuda and the chair of the Alliance of Small Island States, called the findings “cataclysmic”.

He urged the UN to convene a special session to consider action. “We are continuing to head for a precipice – we say our eyes are open to the risks, but when you look at global emissions, if anything we are accelerating towards the cliff edge. We are not seeing the action from the big emitters that is required to get emissions down in this critical decade – this means halving emissions by 2030 at the latest. It is clear that time is slipping away from us.”

Governments in other parts of the world could help their people to adapt to some of the impacts of the climate crisis, the report says, by building flood defences, helping farmers to grow different crops, or building more resilient infrastructure. But the authors say the capacity of the world to adapt to the impacts will diminish rapidly the further temperatures rise, quickly reaching “hard” limits beyond which adaptation would be impossible.
‘Global dominoes’

The climate crisis also has the power to worsen problems such as hunger, ill-health and poverty, the report makes clear. Dave Reay, the director of Edinburgh Climate Change Institute at the University of Edinburgh, said: “Like taking a wrecking ball to a set of global dominoes, climate change in the 21st century threatens to destroy the foundations of food and water security, smash onwards through the fragile structures of human and ecosystem health, and ultimately shake the very pillars of human civilisation.”

The report plays down fears of conflicts arising from the climate crisis, finding that “displacement” and “involuntary migration” of people would ensue but that “non-climatic factors are the dominant drivers of existing intrastate violent conflicts”.

But Jeffrey Kargel, a senior scientist at the Planetary Science Institute in the US, said: “The current warfare activity in eastern Europe, though not attributable to climate change, is a further caution about how human tensions and international relations and geopolitics could become inflamed as climate change impacts hit nations in ways that they are ill-prepared to handle.”

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/feb/28/ipcc-issues-bleakest-warning-yet-impacts-climate-breakdown

[Sudden Death Draft Loser]

IPCC issues ‘bleakest warning yet’ on impacts of climate breakdown

Report says human actions are causing dangerous disruption, and window to secure a liveable future is closing

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/feb/28/ipcc-issues-bleakest-warning-yet-impacts-climate-breakdown

When are governments and companies going to wake up.

This is way beyond doing your recycling and using your car less.

[Machae]

Got my new bill from the Energy supplier, gone up by an extra 1k and they told me not to worry, they won't raise it again till October 2022

[Red-Soldier]

Got my new bill from the Energy supplier, gone up by an extra 1k and they told me not to worry, they won't raise it again till October 2022

Got my email on Friday telling me it's going up £750.  Like you, they also told me not to worry, as they've got me protected, and it wont be going up again until October 

[reddebs]

Ours is going up £320 but that's only electric as we have oil central heating which in January cost us nearly as much for 500ltrs as 1000 did in July.

God knows how much that'll be next time we buy it.

[gazzalfc]

Tories have fracking back on the agenda again. Using the cloak of the tensions in Russia as a way to solve the energy crisis and get 'cheap' gas.

Oh and Frottage wants to re-enter politics to campaign against the governments zero carbon aims.

[thejbs]

Yea it's an interesting development, but probably too late.

Isn’t it a running joke among the scientific community that fusion power is, and always has been, a decade away?

[Jiminy Cricket]

Isn’t it a running joke among the scientific community that fusion power is, and always has been, a decade away?

Three decades, I think. Actually, there have been very significant developments in more recent years and a test plant (ITER) is under construction. But an actual plant generating electricity is still a good way off (even assuming ITER works as expected).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITER

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DEMOnstration_Power_Plant

[TSC]

Tories have fracking back on the agenda again. Using the cloak of the tensions in Russia as a way to solve the energy crisis and get 'cheap' gas.

Oh and Frottage wants to re-enter politics to campaign against the governments zero carbon aims.

Can’t Putin not sort him a grift?

[Red-Soldier]

Isn’t it a running joke among the scientific community that fusion power is, and always has been, a decade away?

Yep.  In the words of Patrick Vallance "if the technology is not available now, and isn't scalable, then forget about it."

[mickeydocs]

Can’t Putin not sort him a grift?

Sounds like this is his latest mission from putin.

[Nobby Reserve]

Ours is going up £320 but that's only electric as we have oil central heating which in January cost us nearly as much for 500ltrs as 1000 did in July.

God knows how much that'll be next time we buy it.

The poor insulation of most houses in the UK is becoming a joke and a bit of tragedy really. Even now in 2022 hundreds of thousands of new homes are being built with inferior insulation compared to modern standards in most European countries. And most double glazing windows in the UK are also a complete joke.

So much money is being lost - and greenhouse gasses unnecessarily generated - trying to keep leaky houses warm, effectively warming up the air around them and enriching dodgy people and regimes.

There've been calls for years to force all new homes to be built with high standard insulation and draughtproofing, but the major housebuilders know that if they were forced to build houses with brilliant levels of insulation and other [not visible to buyers] green measures, they'd struggle to hike prices to cover the increased costs, thus damaging their profit margins.

That they cream vast margins on house sales (as their immense profits clearly illustrate) should mean that governments shouldn't give a flying about protecting their margins, but we know that they give huge donations to the Tory Party (£18m in the year to July 21 alone, with Redrow, Persimmon, Bloor, Countrywide, Taylor Wimpey & Barratt all having donated in recent years either as a company or from their owners/CEOs) and only the most partisan Tory loyalist or brain dead moron would fail to link their donations to Tory unwillingness to take these horrible companies to task.

The major housebuilders manipulate prices (let's not beat around the bush; they price fix with impunity) by banking land as well as scheming with other housebuilders to ensure and carefully managing the release of their own houses on new developments to ensure an excess of demand over supply.

I'd love a government (it'd have to be a left-leaning Labour government) to totally subvert the housing market by confiscating all banked land and building social housing at a rate of around 500k/year then renting them out at cost rather than [manipulated] 'market rate'.

[lobsterboy]

Net-Zero will be the next Brexit.
Frottage has been paid to front it, probably by the same people who paid him for Brexit. He has started with tweet on the 5th demanding a net zero referendum. Expect the same ERG nutters to get onboard.

[Lusty]

Net-Zero will be the next Brexit.
Frottage has been paid to front it, probably by the same people who paid him for Brexit. He has started with tweet on the 5th demanding a net zero referendum. Expect the same ERG nutters to get onboard.

Those people are facing significant cash flow problems at the moment...

[jonnypb]

The poor insulation of most houses in the UK is becoming a joke and a bit of tragedy really. Even now in 2022 hundreds of thousands of new homes are being built with inferior insulation compared to modern standards in most European countries. And most double glazing windows in the UK are also a complete joke.

So much money is being lost - and greenhouse gasses unnecessarily generated - trying to keep leaky houses warm, effectively warming up the air around them and enriching dodgy people and regimes.

There've been calls for years to force all new homes to be built with high standard insulation and draughtproofing, but the major housebuilders know that if they were forced to build houses with brilliant levels of insulation and other [not visible to buyers] green measures, they'd struggle to hike prices to cover the increased costs, thus damaging their profit margins.

True but developers can’t even build houses to the current regulations and the local councils have been letting them get away with it for years.

A friend moved into a new build last year and they paid for a snagging report, it showed up 200 issues with the house, around 30 of those were serious and the house should never have been signed off until they were corrected. One of the issues was that it didn’t have the required amount of insulation in the attic, with a 2m area having none whatsoever. If they can’t even get the basics right and if our local councils continue to sign off shoddy houses, then we’ve got no chance.

[Nobby Reserve]

True but developers can’t even build houses to the current regulations and the local councils have been letting them get away with it for years.

A friend moved into a new build last year and they paid for a snagging report, it showed up 200 issues with the house, around 30 of those were serious and the house should never have been signed off until they were corrected. One of the issues was that it didn’t have the required amount of insulation in the attic, with a 2m area having none whatsoever. If they can’t even get the basics right and if our local councils continue to sign off shoddy houses, then we’ve got no chance.

I agree that these parasites (major housebuilding companies) need to be held to account with regards to delivering properly completed houses.

But bear in mind that most councils have had their central funding grants decimated, and have had to cut to the bone (beyond in some cases) both services and jobs.

[clinical]

Tories have fracking back on the agenda again. Using the cloak of the tensions in Russia as a way to solve the energy crisis and get 'cheap' gas.

Oh and Frottage wants to re-enter politics to campaign against the governments zero carbon aims.

There's no gas in our shale though. Also in a way we're better of supplying our steel manufacturers with british coal compared to RUssian coal which they currently use. I get many hate the idea of having coal mines here but we are getting coal all the way from Siberia to use. It's mad.

[Red Raw]

I agree that these parasites (major housebuilding companies) need to be held to account with regards to delivering properly completed houses.

But bear in mind that most councils have had their central funding grants decimated, and have had to cut to the bone (beyond in some cases) both services and jobs.

Echoing what Nobby says. Definitely not the fault of LAs.

Law allows housebuilders to build to old standards providing the development has 'commenced'. So you could chuck a spade in the ground in 2013, hang on to the land for 10 years or so until market conditions were most favourable and 'finish' the build to 2013 building regs.

Example from a couple of years ago but demonstrates the scale of piss that housebuilders are taking. Persimmon average selling price was ~£215,000, average cost ~£150,000 (including land costs) so a healthy margin of ~£65,000 per home.

Average additional cost of building to Passivhaus standards (heat load <15 kWh/m2) was ~£5,000 according to CCC (with large scale roll out, housebuilders themselves thought £6,000 to £8,000 was easily doable). The cost of retrofitting such measures by contrast was more than £26,000 i.e. too expensive for most homeowners so unlikely to ever get done.

This was the same year Persimmon originally paid £110 million bonus to the chief exec (others were paid bonuses adding up to about £600 million).

Persimmon build about 14,500 homes a year so for the price of one man's 'bonus' (~£7,600 per home built) they could easily have built all of their new homes to Passivhaus standards. Purely a question of priorities  - theirs and the government's.

This was discussed as length in a select committe inquiry where the Persimmon bloke got his arse handed to him by the committee. See https://data.parliament.uk/WrittenEvidence/CommitteeEvidence.svc/EvidenceDocument/Business,%20Energy%20and%20Industrial%20Strategy/Energy%20efficiency/Oral/98021.html from about Q222 if you want to see how evasive they are under questioning.

[Red Raw]

Tories have fracking back on the agenda again. Using the cloak of the tensions in Russia as a way to solve the energy crisis and get 'cheap' gas.

Oh and Frottage wants to re-enter politics to campaign against the governments zero carbon aims.

Couple of points on this.

Fracking is not cheap and won't lower gas prices - there isn't enough of it to make the slightest dent in the European gas market. Even boss of Cuadrilla admitted this at the time:
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/nov/29/browne-fracking-not-reduce-uk-gas-prices-shale-energy-bills

Farridge as we all know is a shyster and is involved with carbon capture businesses who stand to benefit from increased used of gas which goverment has been told cannot be burned unabated after about 2030. https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2021/mar/28/nigel-Frottage-appointed-to-advisory-board-of-green-finance-firm

[reddebs]

The poor insulation of most houses in the UK is becoming a joke and a bit of tragedy really. Even now in 2022 hundreds of thousands of new homes are being built with inferior insulation compared to modern standards in most European countries. And most double glazing windows in the UK are also a complete joke.

So much money is being lost - and greenhouse gasses unnecessarily generated - trying to keep leaky houses warm, effectively warming up the air around them and enriching dodgy people and regimes.

There've been calls for years to force all new homes to be built with high standard insulation and draughtproofing, but the major housebuilders know that if they were forced to build houses with brilliant levels of insulation and other [not visible to buyers] green measures, they'd struggle to hike prices to cover the increased costs, thus damaging their profit margins.

That they cream vast margins on house sales (as their immense profits clearly illustrate) should mean that governments shouldn't give a flying about protecting their margins, but we know that they give huge donations to the Tory Party (£18m in the year to July 21 alone, with Redrow, Persimmon, Bloor, Countrywide, Taylor Wimpey & Barratt all having donated in recent years either as a company or from their owners/CEOs) and only the most partisan Tory loyalist or brain dead moron would fail to link their donations to Tory unwillingness to take these horrible companies to task.

The major housebuilders manipulate prices (let's not beat around the bush; they price fix with impunity) by banking land as well as scheming with other housebuilders to ensure and carefully managing the release of their own houses on new developments to ensure an excess of demand over supply.

I'd love a government (it'd have to be a left-leaning Labour government) to totally subvert the housing market by confiscating all banked land and building social housing at a rate of around 500k/year then renting them out at cost rather than [manipulated] 'market rate'.

Thankfully ours is very well insulated despite being very old. 

No cold spots or drafts, doesn't really get cold during the night and heats up really quickly when we do put the heating on.

We did try to get a price for oil earlier today to fill the tank up whilst we can but we couldn't even get a price. 

They're no longer taking orders online it's phone orders only and they won't guarantee the price quoted when you've ordered.

It also says they can't guarantee delivery within the usual 6 days of ordering.

Normally I go online, order, pay and it's delivered within 2 or 3 days.

[Penfold78]

Often the media portray climate change as far off, or far over there. So here’s a bit of right here right now.

It’s the water situation that’ll really throw the cat amongst the pigeons. Right now, in England, specifically in the south east, we’ve exceeded the number of people (and homes) that can be reliably supplied with drinking water. Yes it’s true we have a wet country but the rain falls in the north and west. In fact in terms of mouths to feed per millimetre of rain we are more water-stressed in South East England than Morocco.

Simple you say? Build some reservoirs? Okay. Show me the MP supporting the construction of reservoirs in their local constituency (zero). Pipe it down from the north you say? Perhaps. But the NW, thanks to its very in-demand shallow sandstone aquifer (giant bedrock sponge) actually gets worryingly low pretty much once every three years. Wales? Yeah might be better but who is building the transfer pipe and who will pay from the pumping energy? It’s not downhill all the way.

Of course, there is the technology to recycle water. Grey water recycling uses rainwater and shower water to flush your loo. Black water treats your sewage so intensely you can drink it. There is one development near Canary Wharf that uses black water recycling. They can’t get any would-be landlords to invest in the scheme (hardly a surprise) so it’s been empty for a few years now. There is desalination technology available to us all but that’s energy intensive.

But all of that will be tackled in the predictable too little too late fashion of whatever colour governments we have over the next decade. So what will occur (it’s a certainty) is profound periods of water restrictions and probably even shortage for 20m people. Immigration will be blamed, leakage will be blamed, profiteering water companies will get a kicking, poor government planning will be blamed (and another government review will be commissioned, destined to sit on the dusty shelf alongside the current review that told you so already).

[lobsterboy]

Those people are facing significant cash flow problems at the moment...

Richard Tice isn't. I would imagine there are plenty of others as well. Not everything links to Russia.

[OOS]

Putin doing more to advance the green agenda in the west than anything else before recently. Unintentionally consequences.

It worked in the Netherlands during the 1973 oil crisis, world leading in public transport and cycling infrastructure now.

[Red-Soldier]

Putin doing more to advance the green agenda in the west than anything else before recently. Unintentionally consequences.

It worked in the Netherlands during the 1973 oil crisis, world leading in public transport and cycling infrastructure now.

I'm hoping this really ramps up CC action now.

It's another fork in the road moment - the questions is, do we take the opportunity....

[reddebs]

Doing the price checks for domestic oil again today, it's now at 117p per litre. 

That will cost us £2350 over the next 12mths for heating and hot water based on how much we've used since we moved in.

It was 42p then.

Based on that plus the increase in electric prices were looking at nearly £3.5k for the next year 😯

[Nobby Reserve]

Echoing what Nobby says. Definitely not the fault of LAs.

Law allows housebuilders to build to old standards providing the development has 'commenced'. So you could chuck a spade in the ground in 2013, hang on to the land for 10 years or so until market conditions were most favourable and 'finish' the build to 2013 building regs.

Example from a couple of years ago but demonstrates the scale of piss that housebuilders are taking. Persimmon average selling price was ~£215,000, average cost ~£150,000 (including land costs) so a healthy margin of ~£65,000 per home.

Average additional cost of building to Passivhaus standards (heat load <15 kWh/m2) was ~£5,000 according to CCC (with large scale roll out, housebuilders themselves thought £6,000 to £8,000 was easily doable). The cost of retrofitting such measures by contrast was more than £26,000 i.e. too expensive for most homeowners so unlikely to ever get done.

This was the same year Persimmon originally paid £110 million bonus to the chief exec (others were paid bonuses adding up to about £600 million).

Persimmon build about 14,500 homes a year so for the price of one man's 'bonus' (~£7,600 per home built) they could easily have built all of their new homes to Passivhaus standards. Purely a question of priorities  - theirs and the government's.

This was discussed as length in a select committe inquiry where the Persimmon bloke got his arse handed to him by the committee. See https://data.parliament.uk/WrittenEvidence/CommitteeEvidence.svc/EvidenceDocument/Business,%20Energy%20and%20Industrial%20Strategy/Energy%20efficiency/Oral/98021.html from about Q222 if you want to see how evasive they are under questioning.

 

I love posts like these. They achieve far more than I do with my ranting 

[Nobby Reserve]

Thankfully ours is very well insulated despite being very old. 

No cold spots or drafts, doesn't really get cold during the night and heats up really quickly when we do put the heating on.

We did try to get a price for oil earlier today to fill the tank up whilst we can but we couldn't even get a price. 

They're no longer taking orders online it's phone orders only and they won't guarantee the price quoted when you've ordered.

It also says they can't guarantee delivery within the usual 6 days of ordering.

Normally I go online, order, pay and it's delivered within 2 or 3 days.

We really could do with a very mild spring, and I hope we get one.

[reddebs]

We really could do with a very mild spring, and I hope we get one.

I was going to say roll on the warmer weather so I don't need to cook or we can BBQ but I've not even checked to see how much patio gas is now!

No doubt that'll be double the price it was last year 🙄

[ScottScott]

All you have to do is see the uproar around the ULEZ in London and the Clean Air Zone in Manchester to know that we need a generation (maybe even 2) of people to fuck off before we will see actual change in mindsets

Plus you've got that floppy haired twat in Downing Street calling out Andy Burnham for that Clean Air Zone when it was a central government policy. He's using it to score points and calling it an attack on jobs for the 'white van man' and people like that

We're absolutely fucked. God help my daughter because who knows what the world will be like when she's my age

[spen71]

Some of you are more knowledgeable than me on these matters.   To me every viable house should have solar panels fitted,  heat transfer pumps, wind turbines and rain water recycling.    Cut our reliance with fossil fuels asap.     The technology is there and we must really ramp it up.