Solar and wind power is growing worldwide, but so is electricity consumption: as a result, renewables are often only added to the energy mix, rather than replacing fossil fuels.
Reducing energy demand would make net zero more achievable, but it recieves far less attention than decarbonisation efforts. This may be due to a perception that managing energy demand would be politically unpopular, requiring governments to make radical interventions into people’s lifestyles and spending.
Oliver Broad, Senior Research Fellow at University College London, tells Alasdair that such fears are unfounded. His team’s research found that the UK could reduce energy demand by 52% without new tech or overly disruptive societal change, and has worked with policymakers and public focus groups to demonstrate political acceptability.
There is very few housing where some space is shared (I’m not talking about student dorms). They’ve built them as a pilot and it is controversial. Most housing being built trends towards being bigger area-wise per person, so modern 1- or 2- bedroom apartments are significant larger than older ones.
Vegan diets are slowly increasing but Swiss diet is heavy on dairy and meat. I’ve been vegetarian for over 15y, but the average Swiss still eats 3x the amount of red meat recommended by doctors.
The approach leans heavily on things we already do right (energy production is mostly carbon free already), and adopting new tech and standards, mostly by getting rid of gas and oil heating and improving insulation, HVAC systems and geo thermal heat pumps.
Concepts like degrowth or sufficiency are discussed and maybe individually introduced, but it’s still not very prominent.
I’m curious whether the 2000 Watt goal can be achieved without some kind of “degrowth”, but it’s hard to argue with the current approach, as it still sounds so much better than what most other nations are doing.
As for housing and apartment sizes, I think that’s a trend that’s visible in almost all developed nations. I’m not sure how it was in other European countries, but at least in Germany up until a few generations ago it was not that uncommon to live in a house with multiple generations. (That’s a point that maybe doesn’t really belong here, but one could argue that there is no “real” housing crisis - in the sense that it’s self-inflicted - as living space per person and the size of apartments have been increasing over the last few decades, so obviously there won’t be enough housing)
Increasing use of HMOs in the UK though, largely by the poor. Used to live in one when it was all I could afford.
Landlord was a cunt and taped over the thermostat to prevent us turning the heating on. So I ran high electrical loads to warm my room up instead. Should have mined bitcoin.
That’s an interesting concept, sounds similar to the german WG (Wohngemeinschaft), but that’s, to my knowledge, also mostly used by younger people that are still studying or similar.
And since we’re already straying off topic, germany “recently” introduced a law where you have to limit rooftop solar production to 60% of the installed peak power (you’re not allowed to feed more than that back to the grid). Now I’m wondering whether I should start mining bitcoin at my parents place, despite my disgust for bitcoin. I’ll have to see whether I can get some E-waste to put together an appropriate rig, I’m definitely not getting new hardware for that, if at all.
Well this was a few years ago when mining bitcoin on GPUs was more practical. Still just feels like a waste of energy though.
How does that law work, is it just a limit on how much you can put into the grid, or how much you can generate at all?
Hot tub could be a more enjoyable use for the excess energy. I struggle really to think of much more that would benefit from a lot of excess power.
I doubt we can get there with only technological advances, but building more efficient infrastructure (also in public transportation) isn’t a bad thing except for cost and emissions of construction.
The conversation where to cut the lavish lifestyles that hurt the environment most will be a long and difficult one, but I believe there are many options and people don’t have to adopt every single one of them to make an impact. People are already changing their diets, sell their cars, go on vacation to nearer places and find creative ways to use the space in their houses.
And specifically for housing: building denser in urban areas is in the interest of the market that can capitalize on it.
I’m still optimistic because with the exception of city governments a majority of our politicians are right wing or conservatives right of center who are all very friendly to businesses. And look how far we’ve come already despite it all.
I like your positive outlook on things, even if I personally don’t share it. I hope you can keep it :)