20 September 2006
My house is an ecological disaster. In the two years since we bought it, I have slowly been finding out that there is scarcely a disease from which it does not suffer. Neither the walls nor the floors are lagged, the windows rattle, there are gaps in the roof insulation nine inches wide, and the lights are embedded in the ceiling - which means that much of the electricity they use illuminates the underside of the floorboards.
The man we bought it from is a property developer. When he acquired it from the son of the old woman who died there, it was a ruin. He must have spent about £60,000 restoring it. Had he spent an extra £1,000, he would have cut my gas bills in half. Fitting the roof insulation properly would have cost him next to nothing. Solid wall insulation would have cost more, but part of the price could have been offset by using standard light fittings instead of the more expensive embedded ones. As he was ripping up the floors anyway, it would scarcely have hurt him to have rolled out a few strips of fibre.
But if we were to do what he should have done, we would need to gut the house all over again. The ceilings would have to come down, the floors would have to come up, the built-in shelves and cupboards would need to be ripped off the walls and we would have to decant ourselves into a rented home until the work was finished. It would cost us at least £20,000 to put right and our efforts would add almost nothing to the value of the house. If we had it to spare, it would be better to pay someone to put a wind turbine on a mountain.
Ironically, we bought this house partly for environmental reasons: it is close to the town centre and well served by bicycle lanes and public transport, so we don't need a car. It has plenty of natural light and is 100 yards from the nearest allotments, which means that I can grow zero-carbon vegetables. But because the energy choices of the developer were unrestricted, our choice was constrained. In my city, where the oldest houses are closest to the centre, there are almost no energy-efficient homes whose location allows you to live a low-carbon life.
Because he was refurbishing this house, rather than building it from scratch, the developer was subject to building regulations which were both sparse and weak. Even those that did apply, as we have now discovered, were not enforced. But the government insists that tougher rules would be "an unwarranted intervention in the market". When the minister for housing and planning, Yvette Cooper, was urged to introduce proper energy-efficiency standards for the refurbishment of houses, she said that it would amount to "unnecessary gold plating". I remember that every time I read my gas bill.
It is partly because of this massive failure on the part of the state that our homes are responsible for such a high proportion of the energy we use. While the demand for energy in the United Kingdom rose by 7.3% between 1990 and 2003, in our houses it rose by 19%. Altogether they are responsible for 31% of the energy consumed here. Of that, 82% is used for space and water heating. This has risen by 36% since 1970.
We use more energy to heat our homes partly because their average temperature increased, between 1991 and 2002, from 15.5C to 19C. This is a good thing: many people, especially the elderly, have been living in houses so cold that they pose a danger to human life. But it should have been easy to achieve this while greatly reducing the amount of heating we use. In fact, there are houses which maintain an average temperature higher than 19C without any heating whatever. But in this country our homes act as hot air tunnels: they keep us warm almost incidentally, as the heat pours past us and into the street.
There are 17m homes with cavity walls in the United Kingdom, but only 6m with cavity-wall insulation. Given that injecting mineral fibres between the bricks is so cheap that it pays for itself within two to five years, the 65% of homeowners who choose not to use it must either be so poor that they have no capital to spend, so poorly informed that they have never heard of the process, aware that someone else (the tenant) is picking up the heating bill or perversely attached to burning money. In 2002, 10% of homes still had no insulation of any kind - wall, floor or roof. This miserable circumstance gave rise to the best unintentional pun I have heard, on the radio: "In the field of home insulation, Britain lags behind."
In 2004, the government said it was planning to oblige anyone extending a house to improve the heat-saving properties of the whole building. The logic was pretty clear: a bigger house, all else being equal, will lose more heat. By improving the insulation in the rest of the building, you would compensate for the effect of the extension. But this, alongside other progressive measures, was dropped at the last minute, when the new regulations were published in September 2005. The current rules for restoring houses are simply pathetic. So are the standards for building new ones: in Sweden they were tougher in 1978 than they are in Britain today. Even the feeble rules we do possess are mostly unenforced. Since the energy efficiency regulations were introduced in 1985, there has not been a single prosecution for non-compliance.
Professor David Strong, who runs the government-funded Building Research Establishment, says there is a simple reason for such failures. The low standards are "the result of very effective lobbying in the UK from organisations ... that have no desire really to change working practices or the quality of buildings they are constructing." The government appears to be putting the demands of the construction industry above the need to fight climate change.
While Britain intends to build 1.2m new homes by 2016, the real battle for energy conservation must take place within the buildings already standing. In the UK, only 15,000 houses - 0.06% of the total stock of 25.5m - are knocked down every year. This means that it would take almost 1,700 years to replace the homes standing today. Yet we have 24 years in which to cut our carbon emissions by 87% - in every economic sector - if we are to avoid catastrophic climate change.
The companies which supply our gas and electricity are obliged to spend some of the money they make on helping householders reduce their energy bills. In theory, this reduces carbon emissions by 0.7m tonnes, or 1.8% of the 40m tonnes our homes produce. In practice, the saving is even smaller than this because as people's bills fall, they turn up their thermostats.
Our government's cowardice on this issue is, or should be, profoundly shaming. Soon after Angela Merkel became chancellor of Germany in November 2005, she announced that her country's government would be spending the equivalent of £1bn a year to ensure that 5% of the homes built before 1978 were refurbished to meet high energy-efficiency standards: within 20 years every house in the country will be airtight and well-insulated.
As well as a spending programme like Germany's, we desperately need a new set of building regulations. They would ensure that every time a floor is lifted, a wall rendered or a roof replaced, the restoration would have to be accompanied by insulation, the plugging of leaks and the sealing off of "thermal bridges" - material that conducts heat easily from the inside of the house to the outside.
Unfortunately, even a programme like this would fall well short of the necessary target, partly because our houses are so old and badly built. Around 2m of them have an official energy rating of less than 30 out of a possible 120, which means that the people living there would be scarcely worse off in tents. It would probably be fair to say that most of these homes are beyond cost-effective repair. Even so, the government calculates that across the whole housing stock, the "technical potential" for saving energy is between 40 and 42%.
While this is a lot better than nothing, in other words, it is plain that energy efficiency is not enough. Most of the cut will have to be made by changing the sources of the energy our buildings use: by producing fuel and electricity whose carbon content is as low as possible. This task is much harder than many people have led us to believe, but I think, after a huge amount of research and argument, I have now found most of the answers.
As for my own home, I really don't know what to do. I have insulated as much of the roof space as I can reach without tearing down the ceilings, and switched to energy-efficient lightbulbs. But this has reduced my energy bills by only a few per cent. In the past two winters, we have worn so many jumpers that we look like Michelin men, but now we have a baby and for much of this winter we will have to keep the heating on - which means warming the garden and the pavement almost as much as our living space. A friendly builder came round to advise us and was perplexed by the measures we suggested. Why on earth would we want to spend all our savings on tearing up a pristine house? By fitting solid wall insulation, he said, we would actually reduce its value, as we would make the rooms smaller. This is surely a clinching argument for much tougher refurbishment rules - otherwise, why would anyone make a house they intended to sell more efficient?
I think we'll be moving soon, and this time I want to buy a ruin, so that we can gut it and restore it to a high environmental standard without losing all the money we spend. The problem is that we will leave behind the ecological disaster we're living in at the moment, which means that someone else will be wrecking the planet in our place.
· This is an edited extract from Heat, by George Monbiot, published by Allen Lane. To order a copy for £16.99 with free UK p&p (rrp £17.99), go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop or call 0870 836 0875.George Monbiot has also launched a new website - turnuptheheat.org - exposing the false environmental claims made by corporations and celebrities.
http://environment.guardian.co.uk/ethicalliving/story/0,,1876546,00.html
