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We already have the technology to build net zero carbon buildings. But the building trade is both notoriously conservative and extremely effective at lobbying t

We already have the technology to build net zero carbon buildings. But the building trade is both notoriously conservative and extremely effective at lobbying to protect their profits (at least in the UK). Superinsulated, almost airtight houses with ground and air source heat pumps and solar PV should be mandatory, as should banning of all in home boilers in new builds. That’s all easily achievable even without some of the recent novel inventions such as engineered wood: https://www.nature.com/articles/nature25476 https://www.nature.com/articles/nature25476 We have to stop treating the atmosphere as a free line of credit with no limit that we can just dump all our externalities into, or we’ll find out very soon that there is no such thing as an externality at planetary scale. We’re all in the same hermetically sealed box, breathing each other’s farts. Sorry for the rant. It’s hard to stop once the despair creeps in.

readarticle 6y ago
Do mandated green initiatives in this vein have a history of eating into the profits of construction companies in the UK? At a naive, laymen’s first glance I’d imagine it creates opportunity for more!
- pasabagi 6y ago
  The ideal situation for a construction company is where the house they sell has the best cost to manufacture / sale price ratio. People buy houses without living in them first, so the best strategy is to build a house that is very cheap, but is visually impressive. Consequently, developers tend to build houses that are barely functional as such, with all sorts of damp/heating/basic liveability problems, but which look impressive. Green initiatives are a sort of nightmare for developers, because the energy efficiency of a house is a cold, uninteresting metric that is not immediately present to the potential buyer. Consider windows, for example. In an unregulated market, the cheapest, most crappy windows are absolutely the optimal choice for a developer. The fact that they are going to be drafty, break within the first few months, and quickly become covered in mold is simply impossible for a buyer to know, before they've lived in the house for a year or so. Green windows, however, have to meet energy efficiency ratings - which means they must actually work. They have to keep cold out and heat in, or vice-versa. They can't be giant condensators. They probably don't look quite so pretty, and much worse, they are far more expensive. So the developer actually loses perceived property value, while paying more!
  - drunkpotato 6y ago
    This happened to a family member, looked great, expensive looking house and high price, but shoddy work, all sorts of basic problems with the house in the first year. I wonder if this couldn't be mitigated somewhat by a clause that makes the developer liable for all problems in the first year. (I know one potential loophole would be that the developer could use a proxy to "buy" from themselves and hold for a year, but it seems like that could be appropriately handled through existing or minimally altered fraud laws.) It's hard to see how we could get from our present situation to something like that, but it might improve craftsmanship, but would also make new houses even more expensive.
    - 7952 6y ago
      New builds will already come with a guarantee. In the short term the developer will send someone to fix issues and may well still have people working on site. In the long term there will be insurance policy. But it just happens that there is sometimes an economic incentive to accept lower quality in order to meet some other objective. Maybe the electrical contractor put in a low bid and wants to finish the job. Or maybe the developer is running low on cash within the project budget. Or perhaps the project manager is under pressure to hit a target. Developers are just like any other complex corporation. Quality is just one thing that has to be balanced. And it is a market with massive pent up demand and buyers everywhere. And customers who have very little choice after they have signed on the dotted line.
      - TomSwirly 6y ago
        A lot of it also has to do with a broken court system. I now live in the Netherlands, and in the 80s, developers also started to pull this shit. Soon the lawsuits came, and very quickly they learned not to do this. Most Dutch people have both comprehensive house insurance _and_ legal insurance!
    - 0d9eooo 6y ago
      I've lived through this and seen this in histories of home purchases. It's the reason I don't recommend buying a brand new home unless you oversaw its construction. The ideal situation in my experience is to find a home maybe 10 years old. Problems don't necessarily become evident the first year. Then again homes of any age have issues creep in, so maybe there's always risks.
Retric 6y ago
It’s more cost effective to use solar hot water heaters than crazy amounts of insulation in a wide range of climates. Which is one reason regulations should focus on outcomes not methiods.
- adrianN 6y ago
  How do you measure the outcomes? It seems easier to me to change regulations depending to local climate.
  - Zach_the_Lizard 6y ago
    It's far harder to change regulations once new technology comes into the market. There is always a delay between introduction and legalization, and sometimes it doesn't happen at all. Remember,the beneficiaries of the old system will be lobbying to prevent progress. For a trivial example, direct manufacturer car sales are effectively banned in many US states. Dealerships are an entrenched and hated third party. They exist out of "concerns" about rural car maintenance. If there had been a law that mandated X percentage of the population must have a way to repair their car within Y miles, that would have been less distortionary. The average American drives something like 13k miles per year, and modern cars tend to not need an oil change for 10k miles or even longer. Tires last for years. Other maintenance is less frequent. Meanwhile in the 60s you'd change your oil every 3k miles. I'm sure in the 20s or 30s you'd have all kinds of maintenance to do This concern about maintenance is obviously not as critical as it was in the 20s and 30s when these laws were created. 100 years of technical progress with little to no legal progress.
  - kilotaras 6y ago
    In this particular case - taxing [carbon footprint of] electricity at source and letting the market do it's magic. As a bonus point: taxes can be redistributed equally to citizens so it's revenue neutral.
    - adrianN 6y ago
      I'm in favor of a carbon tax, but I believe it would need to be too high at this point to effect change with the necessary speed. Imo a combination of price signals and regulation is needed.
gorgoiler 6y ago
Solar panels and heat pumps sound expensive, and it feels like that’s laying the burden on the landlords to install these technologies. Wouldn’t it be more productive to centralize an efficient form of power generation, and let the consumers choose how much they can afford to pay for through their electricity meters?
- avianlyric 6y ago
  Isn’t that completely missing the point laid out in the paper? The paper is say that those who have more money pollute more and consume more resources. Your solution seems to be to let people with more money consume more resources, rather than building more efficient buildings that reduces everyone’s resource consumption.
- mikro2nd 6y ago
  In the context of the cost of a building, the cost of these elements is near-insignificant. Less true if you're retrofitting them to an existing building, but for new builds (which is what OP suggested) they ought to be mandatory. IIRC there is a limiting factor with (ground-based) heat-pumps, though... the in-earth elements can't be placed too close to each other before they lose efficiency badly through competition for the same heat energy stocks. (Somebody who knows more about this should correct me.)
  - hammock 6y ago
    >In the context of the cost of a building, the cost of these elements is near-insignificant. The same could be said of 99% of building code requirements...and it adds up.
    - TomSwirly 6y ago
      Houses in Europe have such building code requirements and yet don't seem outrageously expensive by any means. Shock! It turns out that doing it right at scale just isn't much harder, and pays society back in spades over the life of the building.
- 6y ago
jsmonkey 6y ago
In addition to that, buildings should be made to last. Badly designed or built houses can be just ticking time-bombs for mold and other air-quality issues, and certainly not sustainable.
- rini17 6y ago
  On the contrary, it is not possible to foresee kind of houses and places people will want to live in 50 years in the future. So,it makes much more sense to make it easy to tear down and rebuild houses-aiming for reusable (like brick) or biodegradable (like untreated wood) building materials.
  - notahacker 6y ago
    > On the contrary, it is not possible to foresee kind of houses and places people will want to live in 50 years in the future. People have been doing it and usually getting it right for millenia. 38% of the UK's housing stock dates from before 1946; much more than was built in the last forty years. And one of the few really consistent objections to older buildings is 'the architects assumed nobody would still be living in it fifty years later'...
    - cm2187 6y ago
      Not sure on getting it right. Old houses in the UK are a nightmare in term of thermal and sound insulation (basically none). Sure, it protects your head from the rain (when it doesn’t leak). But in a discussion about consuming less energy, thery are pretty much a counter-example of what to do.
  - em-bee 6y ago
    it is possible to build sustainable and to last, while at the same time be easy to tear down and reuse. one key seems to be to avoid concrete. broad.com, a company in china, has developed a lightweight, energyefficient, durable, and reusable way to build using steel. i am pretty sure there are others out there with other good alternatives
  - 6y ago
shmageggy 6y ago
I think one point of the article is that there are few structural incentives for adoption of these sorts of technologies. It's let up to the good will of the consumer, who in almost all cases has to spend a lot more for what is an external benefit. For another example, I subscribe to Ethical Consumer magazine [1], who rate products and companies on everything from carbon impact to animal use/abuse to tax avoidance. Invariably, the most ethical products are the most expensive. It simply costs more when you don't externalize negative effects. So the products are there, but they're only purchased by the small cross section of folks who can afford to and choose to essentially double their cost of living. What we need is (at the very least) societal, structural incentives towards more ethical capitalism. [1] https://www.ethicalconsumer.org https://www.ethicalconsumer.org
- adrianN 6y ago
  There is also the aspect that "responsible" companies know that they cater to affluent consumers and simply can afford to charge more. Vegetarian products for example shouldn't be more expensive than meat, because the raw materials are quite cheap compared to raising animals, yet they usually cost more.
  - beagle3 6y ago
    It’s really hard to compare, as everything related to food is subsidized and distorted to some degree today. HFCS is more expensive to make than sugar, but it is cheaper in the US (and through exports this bleeds to other places) due to corn subsidies. Similarly, there are a lot of meat subsidies and oil subsidies - to the point that market pricing only matter within small sectors, but not replacement sectors that aren’t the same commodity.
  - Aunche 6y ago
    Oat milk may be inherently cheap, but building an oat milk factory is still expensive. Beyond meat factories and their supply chains are even more expensive to develop. Buying them now means you're subsidizing them for the future. Obviously, vegan companies still want profit, but regular food always makes more money than niche luxury food.
rini17 6y ago
Superinsulated houses are in practice a fad. Build as usual just with thick polystyrene insulation (afaik not recyclable) on the facade vulnerable to moisture when the surface is punctured (possible with a fingernail). It also requires air recirculation which is too prone to moisture.
- tpm 6y ago
  Use mineral wool instead of polystyrene, also for fire safety. Anyway, nearly zero-energy buildings are now mandated for all new buildings in the EU, so hardly a fad.
  - rini17 6y ago
    I am living in the EU and writing from personal experience. Fad is fad even if it makes it into law. Mineral wool has other disadvantages. But we digress, I am firmly convinced that such narrow focus on energy efficiency of buildings to the detriment of other things is exactly the "affluent" technological solution the paper is critical about.
    - tpm 6y ago
      I understand that, but also think what makes it a not-fad is that EU does not have a lot of its own energy sources and winters can be hard. So to me it makes sense to try to be as energy efficient as possible and also not send a lot of money to e.g. Russia if it's avoidable. I also understand that constructing low-energy buildings is much harder than the standard ones. But I fully believe that science and engineering, when given such task, can master that, given enough time.
      - rini17 6y ago
        It's not so hard, but EU is so far removed from practice that it can't set up the incentives right. There's a parallel with EU's policy on biomass energy that ended up (partially) driving deforestation here in Slovakia.
- 6y ago
willis936 6y ago
I agree with everything except the blanket need to make all of these things mandatory without some sort of aid (such as a subsidy) and the bit about banning home furnaces. Homes built today might not be around by the time the grid is carbon neutral. Burning fuel for heat is absurdly thermodynamically efficient compared to burning fuel to heat water to spin a turbine to induce a current to push electrons around over miles to resistively heat a coil. The grid has a very long way to go before home furnaces become less pollutant than home electric heaters.
- TheSpiceIsLife 6y ago
  Wikipedia claims: The COP for heat pumps range from 3.2 to 4.5 for air source heat pumps to 4.2 to 5.2 for ground source heat pumps. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_pump https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_pump Whereas a resistive heat coil has a COP 1.
  - willis936 6y ago
    A heat pump could never bring water up to 120F.
    - TheSpiceIsLife 6y ago
      Whenever you believe you are so certain of a thing that you’re prepared to say something like “x could never do y” you should search the internet for x doing y. Heat pump water heaters for either space heating or hot water production are most certainly a product you can buy today. Eg, Rheem sell these two models in Australia https://www.rheem.com.au/products/residential/heat-pumps https://www.rheem.com.au/products/residential/heat-pumps
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
TomSwirly 6y ago
Humans won't get it until they get their faces rubbed in it, and then it will be decades too late. We are evolved to react incredibly well at about a 100ms threshold. Through agriculture, humans have taught themselves to plan in terms of a whole year. Beyond that people can't really understand. If you offered most people this deal, "I'll give you $10 billion today but in exchange the whole world is destroyed 150 years from now," I think 90% of humans would take it. "I'll be dead anyway."
- Kye 6y ago
  I would take it because there's no way the person offering could build a system (human or technological) that would last 150 years. Because you're right about the ability of humans to plan that far ahead.

readarticle 6y ago

Do mandated green initiatives in this vein have a history of eating into the profits of construction companies in the UK? At a naive, laymen’s first glance I’d imagine it creates opportunity for more!

pasabagi 6y ago
The ideal situation for a construction company is where the house they sell has the best cost to manufacture / sale price ratio. People buy houses without living in them first, so the best strategy is to build a house that is very cheap, but is visually impressive. Consequently, developers tend to build houses that are barely functional as such, with all sorts of damp/heating/basic liveability problems, but which look impressive. Green initiatives are a sort of nightmare for developers, because the energy efficiency of a house is a cold, uninteresting metric that is not immediately present to the potential buyer. Consider windows, for example. In an unregulated market, the cheapest, most crappy windows are absolutely the optimal choice for a developer. The fact that they are going to be drafty, break within the first few months, and quickly become covered in mold is simply impossible for a buyer to know, before they've lived in the house for a year or so. Green windows, however, have to meet energy efficiency ratings - which means they must actually work. They have to keep cold out and heat in, or vice-versa. They can't be giant condensators. They probably don't look quite so pretty, and much worse, they are far more expensive. So the developer actually loses perceived property value, while paying more!
- drunkpotato 6y ago
  This happened to a family member, looked great, expensive looking house and high price, but shoddy work, all sorts of basic problems with the house in the first year. I wonder if this couldn't be mitigated somewhat by a clause that makes the developer liable for all problems in the first year. (I know one potential loophole would be that the developer could use a proxy to "buy" from themselves and hold for a year, but it seems like that could be appropriately handled through existing or minimally altered fraud laws.) It's hard to see how we could get from our present situation to something like that, but it might improve craftsmanship, but would also make new houses even more expensive.
  - 7952 6y ago
    New builds will already come with a guarantee. In the short term the developer will send someone to fix issues and may well still have people working on site. In the long term there will be insurance policy. But it just happens that there is sometimes an economic incentive to accept lower quality in order to meet some other objective. Maybe the electrical contractor put in a low bid and wants to finish the job. Or maybe the developer is running low on cash within the project budget. Or perhaps the project manager is under pressure to hit a target. Developers are just like any other complex corporation. Quality is just one thing that has to be balanced. And it is a market with massive pent up demand and buyers everywhere. And customers who have very little choice after they have signed on the dotted line.
    - TomSwirly 6y ago
      A lot of it also has to do with a broken court system. I now live in the Netherlands, and in the 80s, developers also started to pull this shit. Soon the lawsuits came, and very quickly they learned not to do this. Most Dutch people have both comprehensive house insurance _and_ legal insurance!
  - 0d9eooo 6y ago
    I've lived through this and seen this in histories of home purchases. It's the reason I don't recommend buying a brand new home unless you oversaw its construction. The ideal situation in my experience is to find a home maybe 10 years old. Problems don't necessarily become evident the first year. Then again homes of any age have issues creep in, so maybe there's always risks.

Retric 6y ago

It’s more cost effective to use solar hot water heaters than crazy amounts of insulation in a wide range of climates. Which is one reason regulations should focus on outcomes not methiods.

adrianN 6y ago
How do you measure the outcomes? It seems easier to me to change regulations depending to local climate.
- Zach_the_Lizard 6y ago
  It's far harder to change regulations once new technology comes into the market. There is always a delay between introduction and legalization, and sometimes it doesn't happen at all. Remember,the beneficiaries of the old system will be lobbying to prevent progress. For a trivial example, direct manufacturer car sales are effectively banned in many US states. Dealerships are an entrenched and hated third party. They exist out of "concerns" about rural car maintenance. If there had been a law that mandated X percentage of the population must have a way to repair their car within Y miles, that would have been less distortionary. The average American drives something like 13k miles per year, and modern cars tend to not need an oil change for 10k miles or even longer. Tires last for years. Other maintenance is less frequent. Meanwhile in the 60s you'd change your oil every 3k miles. I'm sure in the 20s or 30s you'd have all kinds of maintenance to do This concern about maintenance is obviously not as critical as it was in the 20s and 30s when these laws were created. 100 years of technical progress with little to no legal progress.
- kilotaras 6y ago
  In this particular case - taxing [carbon footprint of] electricity at source and letting the market do it's magic. As a bonus point: taxes can be redistributed equally to citizens so it's revenue neutral.
  - adrianN 6y ago
    I'm in favor of a carbon tax, but I believe it would need to be too high at this point to effect change with the necessary speed. Imo a combination of price signals and regulation is needed.

gorgoiler 6y ago

Solar panels and heat pumps sound expensive, and it feels like that’s laying the burden on the landlords to install these technologies. Wouldn’t it be more productive to centralize an efficient form of power generation, and let the consumers choose how much they can afford to pay for through their electricity meters?

avianlyric 6y ago
Isn’t that completely missing the point laid out in the paper? The paper is say that those who have more money pollute more and consume more resources. Your solution seems to be to let people with more money consume more resources, rather than building more efficient buildings that reduces everyone’s resource consumption.
mikro2nd 6y ago
In the context of the cost of a building, the cost of these elements is near-insignificant. Less true if you're retrofitting them to an existing building, but for new builds (which is what OP suggested) they ought to be mandatory. IIRC there is a limiting factor with (ground-based) heat-pumps, though... the in-earth elements can't be placed too close to each other before they lose efficiency badly through competition for the same heat energy stocks. (Somebody who knows more about this should correct me.)
- hammock 6y ago
  >In the context of the cost of a building, the cost of these elements is near-insignificant. The same could be said of 99% of building code requirements...and it adds up.
  - TomSwirly 6y ago
    Houses in Europe have such building code requirements and yet don't seem outrageously expensive by any means. Shock! It turns out that doing it right at scale just isn't much harder, and pays society back in spades over the life of the building.
6y ago

jsmonkey 6y ago

In addition to that, buildings should be made to last. Badly designed or built houses can be just ticking time-bombs for mold and other air-quality issues, and certainly not sustainable.

rini17 6y ago
On the contrary, it is not possible to foresee kind of houses and places people will want to live in 50 years in the future. So,it makes much more sense to make it easy to tear down and rebuild houses-aiming for reusable (like brick) or biodegradable (like untreated wood) building materials.
- notahacker 6y ago
  > On the contrary, it is not possible to foresee kind of houses and places people will want to live in 50 years in the future. People have been doing it and usually getting it right for millenia. 38% of the UK's housing stock dates from before 1946; much more than was built in the last forty years. And one of the few really consistent objections to older buildings is 'the architects assumed nobody would still be living in it fifty years later'...
  - cm2187 6y ago
    Not sure on getting it right. Old houses in the UK are a nightmare in term of thermal and sound insulation (basically none). Sure, it protects your head from the rain (when it doesn’t leak). But in a discussion about consuming less energy, thery are pretty much a counter-example of what to do.
- em-bee 6y ago
  it is possible to build sustainable and to last, while at the same time be easy to tear down and reuse. one key seems to be to avoid concrete. broad.com, a company in china, has developed a lightweight, energyefficient, durable, and reusable way to build using steel. i am pretty sure there are others out there with other good alternatives
- 6y ago

shmageggy 6y ago

I think one point of the article is that there are few structural incentives for adoption of these sorts of technologies. It's let up to the good will of the consumer, who in almost all cases has to spend a lot more for what is an external benefit. For another example, I subscribe to Ethical Consumer magazine [1], who rate products and companies on everything from carbon impact to animal use/abuse to tax avoidance. Invariably, the most ethical products are the most expensive. It simply costs more when you don't externalize negative effects. So the products are there, but they're only purchased by the small cross section of folks who can afford to and choose to essentially double their cost of living. What we need is (at the very least) societal, structural incentives towards more ethical capitalism. [1] https://www.ethicalconsumer.org https://www.ethicalconsumer.org

adrianN 6y ago
There is also the aspect that "responsible" companies know that they cater to affluent consumers and simply can afford to charge more. Vegetarian products for example shouldn't be more expensive than meat, because the raw materials are quite cheap compared to raising animals, yet they usually cost more.
- beagle3 6y ago
  It’s really hard to compare, as everything related to food is subsidized and distorted to some degree today. HFCS is more expensive to make than sugar, but it is cheaper in the US (and through exports this bleeds to other places) due to corn subsidies. Similarly, there are a lot of meat subsidies and oil subsidies - to the point that market pricing only matter within small sectors, but not replacement sectors that aren’t the same commodity.
- Aunche 6y ago
  Oat milk may be inherently cheap, but building an oat milk factory is still expensive. Beyond meat factories and their supply chains are even more expensive to develop. Buying them now means you're subsidizing them for the future. Obviously, vegan companies still want profit, but regular food always makes more money than niche luxury food.

rini17 6y ago

Superinsulated houses are in practice a fad. Build as usual just with thick polystyrene insulation (afaik not recyclable) on the facade vulnerable to moisture when the surface is punctured (possible with a fingernail). It also requires air recirculation which is too prone to moisture.

tpm 6y ago
Use mineral wool instead of polystyrene, also for fire safety. Anyway, nearly zero-energy buildings are now mandated for all new buildings in the EU, so hardly a fad.
- rini17 6y ago
  I am living in the EU and writing from personal experience. Fad is fad even if it makes it into law. Mineral wool has other disadvantages. But we digress, I am firmly convinced that such narrow focus on energy efficiency of buildings to the detriment of other things is exactly the "affluent" technological solution the paper is critical about.
  - tpm 6y ago
    I understand that, but also think what makes it a not-fad is that EU does not have a lot of its own energy sources and winters can be hard. So to me it makes sense to try to be as energy efficient as possible and also not send a lot of money to e.g. Russia if it's avoidable. I also understand that constructing low-energy buildings is much harder than the standard ones. But I fully believe that science and engineering, when given such task, can master that, given enough time.
    - rini17 6y ago
      It's not so hard, but EU is so far removed from practice that it can't set up the incentives right. There's a parallel with EU's policy on biomass energy that ended up (partially) driving deforestation here in Slovakia.
6y ago

willis936 6y ago

I agree with everything except the blanket need to make all of these things mandatory without some sort of aid (such as a subsidy) and the bit about banning home furnaces. Homes built today might not be around by the time the grid is carbon neutral. Burning fuel for heat is absurdly thermodynamically efficient compared to burning fuel to heat water to spin a turbine to induce a current to push electrons around over miles to resistively heat a coil. The grid has a very long way to go before home furnaces become less pollutant than home electric heaters.

TheSpiceIsLife 6y ago
Wikipedia claims: The COP for heat pumps range from 3.2 to 4.5 for air source heat pumps to 4.2 to 5.2 for ground source heat pumps. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_pump https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_pump Whereas a resistive heat coil has a COP 1.
- willis936 6y ago
  A heat pump could never bring water up to 120F.
  - TheSpiceIsLife 6y ago
    Whenever you believe you are so certain of a thing that you’re prepared to say something like “x could never do y” you should search the internet for x doing y. Heat pump water heaters for either space heating or hot water production are most certainly a product you can buy today. Eg, Rheem sell these two models in Australia https://www.rheem.com.au/products/residential/heat-pumps https://www.rheem.com.au/products/residential/heat-pumps
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]

TomSwirly 6y ago

Humans won't get it until they get their faces rubbed in it, and then it will be decades too late. We are evolved to react incredibly well at about a 100ms threshold. Through agriculture, humans have taught themselves to plan in terms of a whole year. Beyond that people can't really understand. If you offered most people this deal, "I'll give you $10 billion today but in exchange the whole world is destroyed 150 years from now," I think 90% of humans would take it. "I'll be dead anyway."

Kye 6y ago
I would take it because there's no way the person offering could build a system (human or technological) that would last 150 years. Because you're right about the ability of humans to plan that far ahead.