It would be a better idea to ban new homes by 2025, particularly the Archived Message
Posted by mack on February 21, 2019, 5:59 pm, in reply to "Ban gas boilers in new homes by 2025, says Committee on Climate Change"
way they're built in the UK. Which is a disgrace. In their pr exercise at the start of last year, the govt. released a long document heralding its '25 year plan for the environment', in which it said it would build a 'net environmental gain' into all new development; and at the same time it plans to build 300,000 new homes a year. Given the hopelessly inadequate UK building regs when it comes to thermal efficiency (not to mention the high embodied energy in all those new houses: cement, brick, plaster, concrete, transport, machinery; and then, when they're up and running, splurging their CO2, nitrogen etc etc) that statement is simply 'taking the piss'. The bottom line is that the way developers build their shitty new builds, there is not a snowflake's chance in Hell of building 'a net environmental gain' into the lifetime of any of these projects. The very fact that a govt. is even talking about 'building 300k new houses a year' in a document supposing to address the problems of the environment, shows us just how ####ed we are. Re: questions on alternatives to gas boilers (and other methods to reduce power needs)? There are quite a few: biomass boilers; air/water heat source pumps; ground source heat pumps (both can be used as either heating or cooling); solar; wind; much better insulation values written into regulations; correct orientation and design of buildings; using low embodied energy materials; re: wood burners - much better to replace a wood burner with a rocket stove mass heater (for water and/or space heating; correctly made and used they are far more efficient than a wood burner both in terms of fuel used and emissions). But probably the most important shift needs to come in the design of how such things as air/ground heat source pumps and solar heating works in a house. It's already doable. The usual suspects will say it costs too much, but that's a straightforward lie, because the way we're doing it now is going to cost us everything if we carry on as we are.
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