There's a weird "degrowth" mindset that has taken hold in progressive circles in many countries lately. I don't understand them at all, trying to communicate with them is like dealing with an alien species.
Matching demand to production where possible strikes me as a sane approach. Western nations have become very used to an incredibly high standard of living largely powered by disproportionately massive energy consumption per person. If it uses power more efficiently to dry one's clothes at night or run the dishwasher overnight, rather than during the day alongside AC and computers and whatnot, that seems eminently reasonable to do.
This sharp resistance to minor personal inconvenience is bananas to me. If the alternative is to bring massive battery storage or nuclear plants online, vs "hey, maybe charge your car overnight" or "hey, timeshift your AC use and add some insulation to your house," why wouldn't we do that?
Making peoples lives worse to save money is a capitalist mindset and I don't understand why so many left wing people believe in it. The promise of socialism was always higher living standards for the working class (99 percent) at the expense of millionaires.
The misanthropy is infused in popular culture, and specifically in the way ecological sciences and history (for additional reasons) is taught in schools. I not infrequently have to discuss this with my kids when they recite something they've learned in school and I can hear the misanthropic cynicism in the framing and intonation.
Making your own planet less ecologically stable is certainly an interesting choice, but probably not the best long-term bet for anyone's kids.
Be wary of anyone who argues the poor should go without food or protection from the elements, regardless of what flimsy justification they give for their cruelty; the most dangerous to each of us are those who appeal to our own beliefs.
Especially when you’re maddened about incoherencies that are merely the manifestation of the inherent entropy of our world!
If one consumed nonfiction media one might get a different impression.
I'd argue there's more ecologically sound ways to supply the desired energy demand in combination with shifting some of the load away from peak times. I don't think that strictly correlates to "a lower standard of living" so much as "there's minor behavioral changes that would more efficiently use existing resources."
> Making peoples lives worse to save money
This is exactly the mentality that I'm surprised by: I suggest shifting high energy use slightly and your reaction is "that will make my life worse." Would it really have a strong negative impact on your life to run your dryer overnight for your towels/sheets/whatever if it meant 50% cheaper power?
Absolutely. That thing is loud.
What if manufacturers developed quieter dryers?
The last time I had in-unit W/D, it was right outside my bedroom. Never bothered me in the least. Certainly not compared to the neighbors' dogs, pot-smoking, screaming arguments, etc.
According to https://www.energysage.com/electricity/whats-the-cheapest-ti... 9pm - 6am is common in the US. Hardly anyone is in bed by 9pm.
In the UK it's 10pm - 5am or midnight-7am, depending on your plan. https://uk.jackery.com/blogs/knowledge/when-is-off-peak-elec.... But there's also a mid-day slot 1pm-3pm which can work if your dryer can be timed.
You can also dry heavy items on a folding rack so the dryer doesn't run as long.
In a london flat we rented, the washer-dryer was in a cupboard in the bedroom. So yes. At least it had one.
I'm not saying human convenience should entirely take a backseat to machine efficiency; to your point, the very existence of these things is to make human life easier. My frustration is that Western approaches to these problems seem uniquely resistant to ever altering behavior for the sake of reducing ecological impact.
(Dishwashers were a poor example for me to use anyway, they're remarkably efficient; a better one might be water usage: it's best to water plants in either the early morning or late evening, so the water doesn't evaporate as much, but people often prefer to do so during the day, which coincides with high household water usage for showers/laundry/whatever. though, I routinely run my dishwasher overnight and have never had issues with grime, so long as I prime the hot water feed.)
Those minor conveniences are a drop in the bucket when it comes to total CO2 output.
That's a uniquely American perspective.
Japanese homes often don't have space heating. The Swiss often keep their homes at 20°C in the winter.
Most of the globe doesn't travel everywhere by car. Arguably it's the intention to remove pain as much as possible which resulted in the opioid epidemic.
There's a point at which trying to get rid of inconveniences becomes harmful.
Chicago building codes require 68F as a minimum for residential in winter conditions, so I think that's reasonable as a "habitable minimum yet not necessarily ideal" benchmark: https://www.chicago.gov/city/en/depts/bldgs/supp_info/chicag...
The thing about the nations I mentioned is that they either barely use any AC, like Switzerland, or set it to 25°C or more, like Japan.
They embrace discomfort - most of the world does.
If it's in the 80s outside, I'll probably drop the inside temp to 76, again to keep humidity down. I rarely set it below that. 74 feels cold in my normal summer attire of shorts and a tee shirt. If we have an 80 degree day with low humidity, I'll open the windows.
The rest of the world also has these things, just doesn't use them nearly as much.
50 years ago hot middle eastern countries had no AC. Not because they had some sort of symbiosis with nature and the summer heat. It was because the average AC costed the sum of 8-month of average income. As AC prices dropped, and the average income increased, having an AC became the norm.
Of course the richest people, richest economies get their first and to a non inquisitive or surface only thinking, it’s some how a unique was on discomfort or lust for luxury, when it’s just simple economics. You can see rich Asian countries and cities leading the “War on discomfort” now a days as their economies have developed and stabilized, but they face unique discomforts that previous rich nations didn’t.
In absolute terms, yes. But per capita there are quite a few richer countries, like Switzerland, where people genuinely seem to brave the elements as part of their culture.
Sure, everyone adopts conveniences, but I've never seen anyone do it to the extent Americans do.
> I've never seen anyone do it to the extent Americans do.
Sounds more like observational or cognitive bias tbh. For example, the Japanese market is notorious for building gizmos and machines for far less grand inconveniences that the weather or long-distance travel. They eat a lot of rice in Japan, so it makes sense they invented the rice cooker. To many Americans (today) who don't eat a lot of rice having an entire appliance for just cooking rice might seem like a crazy war on discomfort and too much of adopting convivences. What's next? a machine just for Turkish coffee?
Whenever I go shopping, it's insane how much they heat most places, while people are wearing heavy winter jackets.
The UK has the oldest housing stock in Europe, and most likely in the world. [0]
Roughly 30% of the stock is single-skin, without a cavity. While it's not impossible to insulate such walls, it's generally inadvisable for many reasons. The same goes for the roofs of these houses; although you will find many companies willing to spray your roof with foam or other forms of thermal sealing, those roofs were never designed to be insulated, causing other potentially catastrophic problems once it's been done.
Generally, the poorest and oldest people in society occupy these houses, but no matter; the government will ban the sale of gas boilers to coerce them in to installing heat pumps, despite them being incompatible with the existing pipework and radiators.
0: https://files.bregroup.com/bretrust/The-Housing-Stock-of-the...
That said, most properties in the UK don't have this problem. They _do_ likely need bigger radiators which comes with a cost, but a lot of these houses would benefit from just upgrading from their single panel rad with no fins.
I'm not sure any of that makes heatpumps technically impossible, but it makes them more expensive and less efficient
Meanwhile the efficiency (COP) of a heat pump drops the higher its temperature differential is. So trying to keep the water loop temperature the same is a non-starter. (The same problem can happen with high efficiency condensing natural gas boilers which have much lower flue temperatures)
(From an American perspective although I'll convert the units) - older radiator systems were designed for water temps of around 80C, room temp around 20C, so that is 60C (60 K/Kelvin, really) delta-T. Whereas if a heat pump wants to put out 50C water for half the delta-T (30K), you then need twice the amount of radiator surface area to transfer the same amount of heat. The system will work fine in the shoulder seasons when not much heat is required, but at the coldest nights design temperature it will not be able to keep up and your indoor air temperature will then drop despite the heat being on.
(Pipe sizing enters into it as well but isn't as straightforward to explain)
(And re-arranged the furniture a bit + stopped using the radiator as storage...)
I guess it's cheaper to not have to install air ducting or indoor units if you can reuse existing pipes & radiators. But if you need to replace the radiators anyway, the cost might not be that much different? You'd get more precise temperature control, and cooling in the summer.
Mini-splits are noisy and have major problems getting heat distributed over a whole house.
Reasonable point, but I feel my case still stands: the population able to make these changes could do so, enabling existing infra (and housing stock) to "go further" before requiring expensive and disruptive overhaul.
> the government will ban the sale of gas boilers to coerce them in to installing heat pumps
I agree this is shortsighted, and it's better to incentivize more efficient systems rather than applying punitive strategies to less efficient ones.
I'm sorry but as an outsider to me this straight up just sounds like kicking the can down the road! Let's get it fixed, build more solar, get more power in the grid, deregulate personal solar so its an attractive incentive to get more people generating power, etc.. Rather than "you need to use less" mentality, especially while people literally die to the heatwaves the UK has been getting recently..
It's been pretty clear that globally the grid operators are all very much lazy and would rather increase prices and reap benefits short term than adding more capacity to the grid, even where i live (in Brazil) its very much clear that grid operators too would rather raise your bill and collude to add more taxes if you want to generate your own solar than to get more supply in the grid and make the bills cheaper (we have a minimum bill you have to pay even if you have full self-generated solar AND a thing called a "solar tax" because of course, the sun is the govt's property, gotta pay a tax for using it..).
> Rather than "you need to use less" mentality, especially while people literally die to the heatwaves the UK has been getting recently..
I'm not saying _everybody_ must use less AC/clothes dryer/whatever. Grids are remarkably complex machines and are incredibly expensive to upgrade--which we should do! We should have done that ages ago, but the second best time to plant a tree is now. However, that's not an instantaneous process and requires quite a lot of political willpower to achieve, let alone the capex to bring new generation plants online.
In the meantime, as you've noted, people die without access to critical infra, i.e. AC in heatwaves. If the options facing grid operators are "rolling brownouts to keep from blowing up a transformer" or "educate people on time-of-day use re: peak load to reduce grid strain," the latter is often dismissed out of hand when it seems a perfectly sane approach to maximizing the utility of existing systems.
> deregulate personal solar so its an attractive incentive to get more people generating power, etc
Solar has a tremendous to "democratize" access to resources [0], we should absolutely incentivize its adoption as much as possible... but changing regulatory or tax environments is difficult. *We should still do that,* but altering behavior is (comparatively) free, so long as you can get past people being personally offended for being asked to not water their lawn every day in July.
Further, it is possible to run a heat pump at high temperatures: some use refrigerants specifically designed to do this relatively efficiently.
Several energy suppliers websites have pages dedicated to this very topic.
The current 2035 target originates in the ministerial Heat and building strategy policy paper (2020):
"Our ambition is to phase out the installation of natural gas boilers beyond 2035."
In the Annex:
Aiming to phase out the installation of new and replacement natural gas boilers from 2035, once costs of low-carbon alternatives have fallen, in line with the natural replacement cycle, including any hydrogen-ready boilers in areas not converting to hydrogen, to ensure that all heating systems used in 2050 are compatible with Net Zero.
Given the energy policy of the UK, which to many engineers makes absolutely no sense at all, it's impossible to predict what will actually come out of the policy sausage factory next.
Eventually everyone will need to switch from gas because as the number of heat pumps rise then number of gas consumers fall and the infrastructure costs for them will become uneconomic
England: from 24 March 2027
Scotland: since 1 April 2024.
The legislation doesn't mandate heat pumps specifically, it mandates >=75% lower carbon emissions than homes built to the 2013 standards, which effectively requires heat pumps, solar panels, and significantly improved insulation. Build and running costs aren't measured, it's quite possible new homes will cost more to buy and run, and could be smaller to compensate.
You remember "2035" because in 2021 the government announced it "wanted" to ban gas boilers entirety by that date: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-58959045
... but as far as I know, never enacted legislation to ban their sale or fitting in existing houses. And that aspirational policy has been announced as dropped multiple times, at least since last July, most recently today
New builds are already much smaller than previous generations' housing, to increase margins for developers. Smaller than that, we'll basically be like rats.
Lime plaster with cork in it is fine way to insulate these buildings.
It won't be as good as modern materials but is an improvement and is breathable
> Generally, the poorest and oldest people in society occupy these houses,
I own one of these houses – single skin, 200yr old farm workers cottage – I'm neither poor or that old
Much of the expensive old housing in London, Bath etc is single skin too
I assume you're in good health, not poor, in a stable living arrangement, etc. The burden of "minor personal inconveniences" depends greatly on how many inconveniences you already suffer. Somebody working two jobs doesn't have much spare energy for optimizing utility use.
Most of us don't. But smart meters are free in the UK, and if there was a way for my washing machine to have a 3h window overnight to run in to be done for 7:30 I'd do it in a heartbeat. Same for my dishwasher. Heating is a bigger issue.
There should be plenty of opportunity to load shift with other things though, a dishwasher as you mentioned, or a fridge or a storage heater or a charger for your electric car. All can be done with minimal inconvenience to the user.
Rinse hold solves this. Even the cheapest machines have it.
I think most of these appliances sold today have at least some sort of "delay start" function. We use that to do exactly what you describe. Not even for nght tariff, it's just convenient to time it like that.
Excellent point, and I agree, though the vast, vast majority of the pushback I feel I get when advocating for these kinds of shifts are from wealthy/healthy individuals.
It's a classic tragedy of the commons scenario: existing resources should be able to support our current level of creature comforts with minor conservation, even if a segment of the population is less able to support the conservation efforts, but the extremes people demand in turn place extreme load on our infrastructure.
That is exactly the people reducing expenses even when they know that will be extremely painful. That is why the poor are poor, because they cannot afford that kind basic expense. They need to choose between heating and food.
"Let's consume more" for the poor. It is a grotesque argument.
OP was making a fair point that not everybody has the same amount of time and energy (or money) to tolerate shifts in their routine, which in the context of a "personal vs collective responsibility" style argument is entirely reasonable.
By the same token, if only the _rich_ have the freedom to make such behavior changes for the sake of conservation it will only ever have a token impact, and in many cases the "correct" level to make an efficiency pitch at is the community: a decent light rail system will always outperform everyone driving their own vehicle to work/the store/downtown in terms of space and energy efficiency.
...but, to get people to buy into such "collectivist" systems, you often have to get them to contend with some perceived reduction in personal convenience: yes, a train doesn't need a parking lot and uses less gas per passenger-mile, but then you're beholden to the train schedule. It's exactly _that_ sentiment that I find frustrating in advocating for sustainable civic design.
To OP's point: whatever that "collectivist" option is necessarily has to contend that standards of accessibility and convenience are not constant across the population. That doesn't inherently mean "the poor should consume more," but that "hang dry your laundry" isn't an option for everyone in the current dominant socioeconomic structure.
Adding insulation is expensive, and awkward. If you have cavity walls that are uninsulated, it needs to be done right. If you have single skim walls you either do external cladding (and change the outside of your building), or build an internal stud wall and insulate that, which is very effective but costs a decent amount, reduces internal floor space, and requires a full redecoration after.
Expensive short term, life saving long term.
> requires a full redecoration after
Tell me that you are rich without telling me that you are.
Lime render with cork is the outside version
No, you're supposed to do the other way around.
If we're going to electrify everything, we need a clean, plentiful, reliable electrical supply. There is no technical obstacle to having this.
Saying "we can save $1000 per person in capital costs, they just need to deal with 5 extra minor inconveniences per day" is not how you run a developed country.
Having to install battery capacity in your own house is a step backwards.
If water was unavailable for 4 hours a day, you would suggest putting in your own rainwater filtration system.
But for example, cement production can be turned on and off quite easily, and is turned on and off on demand by the grid electric operators to help with grid stabilization (cement producers are paid for this grid stabilization service).
That's the way our system has developed for millennia.
It's not a "preferable" strategy, it's one that can (and should) be deployed in tandem with expanding our renewable generation and doing more "at scale" conservation of commercial resource use.
We're already building wind and solar at bananas rates [0], _and yet_ we're not even capitalizing on that gain as much as we could because people don't want to tolerate the behavior changes necessary to do so.
My beef isn't with expanding capacity, it's with that being the _only_ solution that's considered to match supply to demand instead of doing anything to manage demand.
no we arent. China added the entire capacity of the US grid in solar in the last 4 years and they are accelerating. That is bananas. We've barely increased total grid capacity in the last 20 years. It should be a national embarrassment. Energy abundance is possible, and one of the greatest ways to improve peoples lives. There are no energy poor countries that are rich.
Half the state of Nevada should be a solar farm at this point if anyone actually cared about climate change, and that would do 10x to imrpve peoples lives than telling them not to use the dryer.
again, the degrowth mindset relies on a fundamental paucity of imagination and will to actually solve the problem.
That few in government are readying for that and are rearranging deck chairs instead is not particularly reassuring.
Now I'm not saying we should generate as much as humanly possible, because even with renewables that has a cost.
And some things have gotten genuinely more efficient (compare modern heat pumps to heating available in 1968).
But why shouldn't we maintain the levels our parents enjoyed? And use the extra capacity if anything for EVs, grid stabilization, medical research, etc.
So population degrowth is a pretty separate issue.
That is the power of modern construction techniques.
Unfortunately this is out of reach of poorer people and it would takes a hundred years before all the old housing stock is replaced. But it's nice progress for the happy few.
People working on the grid and in utilities are coming at this from a completely different perspective than degrowthers, in my experience. Grid ops are extremely conservative, and utilities have not adopted new tech in decades if ever, so they look at the trend of the past decades and think "the future is going to be exactly the same." They are not thinking of the grid change we need to deal with climate change, at least in the US.
I only have deep understanding here in the US, but the "degrowth" subfaction of progressives are completely ineffectual, despite being very loud. They have zero influence, zero ability to organize into any sort of group with influence, and little desire to do anything except critique others. They can be safely ignored, because even their critiques are based on either very fundamental misunderstandings of the world, and they can only infect a very tiny subset of the population with their mind virus of ignorance.
Perhaps other places, like the UK, has a more politically effective group of degrowthers. But in order to even believe the things they believe they have to dumb themselves down quite a bit so if there are politically effective degrowth movements it may be time for me to reevaluate my position. Anti-vaxxers are far more effective politically, despite having just as poor critical thinking skills, but with the anti-vax movement individual action has big impacts, unlike with grid decisions.
Degrowthers, who have had some reasonable successes like the Passivhaus movement, are opposed by those same bot farms.
Human production and consumption (in a broad sense) is generating/leading to ecological catastrophes. Some people believe technology will solve the problem, some people believe the easier solution is to stop producing as much.
Unfortunately, that means letting go of some privileges and not everybody will agree on what to let go.
- climate change is having real measurable negative impacts already
- 90% of the shit we create is useless low quality junk and e-waste with a two years life expectancy
- green washing doesn't change the fact that the vast majority of industries are not compatible with long term sustainability
What are your argument for infinite growth at all cost?
Here's an example of how to bullshit. The original report is here: https://www.worldwildlife.org/news/press-releases/catastroph...
And it's missing the word "monitored". And then you read the methodology:
> The LPI measures changes in the sizes of 35,803 populations of 5,790 vertebrate species (amphibians, birds, fishes, mammals and reptiles) that have been monitored over time. The latest LPI shows a decline of 73% (73.2%). This means that the size of these populations fell by, on average, 73% between 1970 and 2022.
> This doesn’t mean that there are 73% fewer wild animals in total today than in 1970. The LPI measures changes in relative abundance, not the total number of animals. Changes in small populations with few individuals are averaged with changes in large populations of thousands of animals. Nor does it mean that 73% of species or populations are declining. In fact, around half of the studied populations are stable or increasing – but these gains are outweighed by the greater magnitude of losses elsewhere when calculating a global average.
So basically, it's a made-up number.
Mammoths disappeared without human intervention, for example.
I just don't think that the only natural state for the Earth is change. And human-caused changes are neither bad nor good from that standpoint.
Everything must grow all the time because all we care about is compounding interest, and that can only exist with continuous growth.
Finite resources and time be dammed.
For some on the left, they view humans as parasites. It starts as self-hate internally and expands outwards to encompass humanity more generally ('I love animals, I hate people'). Humans have to modify their environment to exist (shelter, farming, hunting, et al.), so the people that hold that ideology, you will find, they comprehensively hate any modification of the environment by humans, ie they want humans to cease to exist, rooted first in their own desire to not exist (they hate their own existence first and foremost).
The world is at all times overflowing with people that hate existing. They're miserable sad sacks and they desperately want everyone to drown in it with them. Sometimes that gets formalized into projected ideology used as a weapon against the rest of humanity.
Which is a fair gamble to be frank, I don't blame them.
I'm going to go with the degrowth, or the steady-state economics guys, they are more likely to be closer to the mark of what is actually achievable in the real world.
the logical terminus of the growth fanatics is to literally want to leave the planet so I think we ought to reserve the label 'alien' for them
It's not just degrowth mindset, but the dogmatic refusal to be pragmatic on energy. Given most UK homes are heated by gas and we have a lot of gas-powered power plants, it makes no sense for us to import natural gas where we can avoid it (especially LNG) as it's more costly and less green than domestic production.
Plus, domestic production means more domestic jobs and additional tax revenues.
It seems to me there's basically no upside of us refusing to exploit what we can of the North Sea. It's just people taking an ideological dislike to us doing it domestically because "fossil fuels = bad".
Some people also just seem wildly misinformed. For example, our media seems to think 50% of our energy problems stem from it being priced wrong. I guess we have the same problem with housing – maybe everyone could have a home if we just sold them for less. It's really very stupid.
Well, fracking kind of is, we stopped after we tried it and it caused ground tremors.
Part of the problem with fracking on mainland UK is not just the tremors but that there’s also not much proven gas either
And its in no way going to solve any of the actual long term energy issues in the UK.
For example, if you assume limited government resources, massive investment in North Sea fossil is just inherently stupid.
Allowing some private exploration and production would be tiny and barley relevant to solve any problem. The right wing people who advocate this as some kind of 'solution' are more delusional then any 'leftist'.
But yes I do agree about the impossibility of communication.
Take the idea of not being able to wash your cloths when you want. What a step back! But instead get rid of your heated pool or turn down heating by two degrees.