Oh, and they also have a 9 month lead time, if you're lucky!
And this is after I've spent five figures opening every wall, heavily insulating the place, and buttoning it back up.
I'm not complaining personally; I can afford this okay, but it's impractical to expect even moderately well-off Americans to be able to. This isn't just about the bottom line of developers, 'cause most housing stock is already owned. We're probably looking at massive subsidies to make it happen, and significant resistance because doing it is a huge imposition (one I did willingly, but I knew I was getting into it) reliant on limited labor and materials.
Ideal indoor air quality is equal to outdoor air quality. This can only be achieved through air exchange. The ventilation process may be 100% efficient but the consequences of pumping outside air in and inside air out are the same. The air must be heated and costs some unit of energy to accomplish.
Ideal indoor air quality is (can be) better than outdoor air quality. This is because when the outside air is brought in it passes through filters to get rid of things like dust and pollen.
> The air must be heated and costs some unit of energy to accomplish.
Unless you use passive solar thermal, i.e., let the sun heat the home:
* https://www.energy.gov/energysaver/passive-solar-home-design
Look up HRV/ERVs.
You'll have better air quality by building a tight envelope and using mechanical ventilation because all the air from the outside will flow through filters. It then gets tempered by the exhausted stale air before being circulated.
A leaky house and ventilation through windows was fine in the 1920s, but we've better ways now.
(And operable windows won't go away: they're mandated for fire egress. So you can crack one open if you wish.)
There's no real way to fix that without completely stripping the house down to the frame and rebuilding with modern techniques and materials.
I don't think it does. In principle, you could stay relatively inefficient with low cost to the climate as long as you were drawing power from overprovisioned wind and solar. Of course, that energy may be better spent elsewhere so efficiency is critical, but we can't get carbon emissions down to zero by only increasing efficiency of systems that ultimately draw power from coal and natural gas power plants.
"Fighting Climate Change" is all sunshine and rainbows and photovoltaics until you realise that the messaging has been thoroughly usurped by an anti-civilisation regressive agenda. They don't want people using cleaner energy; they primarily want people using less energy; they sell that goal with promotion of "eco" and "green" etc.
I want us to use more AND cleaner energy; one without the other is a civilisation-level failure.
For those who have all the that, the de-growth camp asks that people give up meat, down-size their houses and give up one of their cars. Maybe they should, but that will never win any popular support. The answer is always both though, we need to make things more efficient and produce more energy than ever using renewables.
Products advertised as "energy saving" are almost invariably worse.
E.g. modern dishwashers use much less energy, but also take much longer (4 hours instead of 1 hour).
If there are products that are equivalent in functionality but use less energy (housing insulation? heat pumps?), I'm all for it.
More expensive systems to consume less are logical in cities or for things that can't be scheduled, when p.v. and other renewable with similar output characteristics can't be used.
Much of the rest is just not for efficiency but for sell cheaper crap for the OEM at a bigger price for the customers.
I don't think a willingness to accept less energy for a decade or two, constitutes an anti-civilization agenda. I don't even think the small fraction of extremists who want everyone living on an organic commune are anti-civilization.
Sounds like "two weeks to flatten the curve". Very slippery slope. Expect a lot of people to oppose it (me included). Especially since there will invariable be different rules for the elites (same as with the pandemic).
Another necessary short term sacrifice to lessen the risk to society?
> Very slippery slope
I don't know where you're scared "increase effeciency" or "waste less" will go. It's perfectly fine to have gripes with how that gets accomplished. "Fuel taxes are bad because X", "cap and trade would be terrible" or "Windmills suck", I get, "using less energy is bad", I do not get.
> Especially since there will invariable be different rules for the elites
I mean, the most common proposal is taxes on consumption to fund clean energy and/or cleanup. Not really a "different rules" situation in my mind.
On the other hand, if anyone wants to use more energy the onus is on them to explain how we can do that within our carbon budget, when we're not even living within our budget currently.
Deep ecologists have decided once and for all that technology and science won't provide the solution, hence what you call their " anti-civilization agenda".
Let's take a step back and look at things calmly. You want not to be restrained in your way of life. But a better efficiency enable to do the same with less energy. So you'd be not restrained in any way. Therefore there is no reason to want to use "more energy" as a goal by itself.
Better efficiency implies batter technologies and better Science. This is where too many ecologists get it wrong.
However, we can also say that technologies don't mechanically provide a better world.
Biotechnology has resulted in a massive use of pesticides that kills biodiversity while the agro-tech business make people fat through over-processed food and ingredients bad for health.
Technology also enable us to do industrial wonders but they also pollute (rare metal extraction for example).
Eating food bad for your health and living within high level of pollution don't look to me as great civilizational achievements, do they?
Last point: we need "clean energy", not "cleaner". Science has demonstrated how fast climate changes and biodiversity plummets. In the short term, the cleaner, the better - but that can last only during a rather short transition time to really clean energy.
Many countries have at last got out of endemic poverty. Many African countries before the Covid were growing their GDP by 3 to 5% per year. It's great but that means their use of energy is rising fast.
So to stop the climate change, we really need to transition much faster. Many ecologists don't see that transition even starting ; neither do they see science and technology provide the solution on the coming years. Hence their agenda of rationing.
I can't see that agenda being politically feasible. I personally conclude that we will hit a wall collectively. When climate will be so bad and the collapse of biodiversity will directly hit our way or life, then we will take the hard decisions.
I don't believe in a civilization collapse. Books by true historians have debunked every claim of a civilization collapse due to overuse of the natural resources. And even so, we are super resilient animals, super efficient as organizing and adapting when necessary.
But, as you rightly pointed out, we are not equal in this world. The huge costs when hitting the wall will not be fairly splitted. The wealthier you are in a wealthier country you are, the less you are likely to suffer from it.
Since you don't want any change in your way of life, you should aim to belong to the 1%. Because 99% of us will have to change.
And even so, being part of the 1% doesn't protect you totally, far from it. Driving a Bugatti won't matter much if a tree fall onto you because of a big storm. And you won't escape a pandemic either.
Some people prefer to be super rich and live in fear all the time of being attacked. I prefer a system where every job provides a decent way of life so streets are safe.
That is the same for climate. Some will prefer living in huge mansions with underground self-sufficient bunkers. I prefer that everyone gets to live in a super energy efficient place so that we don't need bunkers against tornadoes. Because when the tornado arrives, you'll making an errand 30 miles away and your children will be 10 miles from that bunker as well.
The solution is collective. Hence my pessimism: we will change our way of life only when it will have become unbearable. Nature will be deep into the already current 6th extinction, meaning that it will restart despite us. But that takes thousands of years. So we will have to change our way of life starting from a low point rather than starting now.
So the ecologists' agenda is not irrational. That may hurt your wanting to keep your way of life. Maybe you will be able to. But your children and your grandchildren will have quite different conditions.
Except if Science and technology provides a way out. Many bet on it. That's not irrational either but the time is the issue. We need to capture huge amounts of CO2 and methane in the next 20 years to maintain our way of life. Is this a reasonable bet?
Well, if we collectively invested trillions of dollars to reach that goal, I may take the bet. For now, we prefer bail-out the wealthier of us ; and some lunatics leaders around the world will force us to spend that money on the military.
"Good night and good luck".
You lost me at "simply"
[Edit] Sorry if this comes across as snarky, but c'mon, this is an existentially hard problem and there are few if any significant quick wins that are doable in the face of public inertia, obstruction from the petro-rich, technical complexity, etc. Giving the opponents an easily shot-down 'simply' isn't going to cut it.
[0] - would have liked a better source but https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-01-15/electric-...
It looks like current geo-politics will undo years of disinvestment in the fossil fuel production while never having met the emission cut-off goals.
And that's essentially the same for the point: build new houses. It's surely positive and needed in the long run, but to do so you need many resources, wood itself is renewable at a certain level of demand, not renewable above that level. Long story short: not counting some mass-genocidal ideas, at a level even the original nazi probably never though of IMVHO the quicker changes possible is start to re-localize anything that can be re-localized, starting from a massive agricultural plan with very strong incentives to try to maximize local, even inefficient, food production to cut transportation as much as possible.
For many area of the planet that's still not possible tough, too many people in such areas respect of the nature local production capacity... Local and inefficient agriculture might run at a slow peace, for instance instead of powerful diesel tractors fields can be handled by less powerful on-rails electrical agrivoltaic tools, something unsustainable without government incentives, but ultimately probably doable with. That's can reduce general pollution to more manageable levels and still provide enough food in most cases. Pushing rails with similar criteria (only goods trains, running when there is enough energy, slow, inefficient, but enough for non-perishable goods).
Quicker than that I know only mass genocide and unpleasant things like that.
Griffith is also careful to note that climate solutions are "yes ands", so we should increase efficiencies as much as we can in addition to electrifying as much as we can (and also pursuing ambitious strategies like fusion and CCS). Definitely make a great case of rolling out existing solutions like solar and wind in a big way to bring down carbon emissions really quickly.
[0] - the book focuses only on the US, but results could be similar in countries with similar economies.