Can bad science lead to your homes destruction?
For about 60,000 Brits per year for the next several years this question is more than a cynical or hypothetical question. According to this article in the Telegraph there is a proposal to meet the Kyoto protocols by tearing down most of Britain's oldest homes.Even assuming that there is absolute proof of global warming (which there isn't) and that there is also proof that it is human induced (which is even more shaky), the "plan" is to get rid of Britain's oldest homes rather than upgrade them because "they would eventually be demolished anyway".
This is ludicrous on so many levels that I can hardly contain myself. For my untraveled US readers, bear in mind that what we call old is quite young in most of Europe. What they are talking about getting rid of are not poorly built housing boom relics of the 1970's. What they are implying is that homes, still standing with current residents, 150-400 years old need to be destroyed because they are energy inefficient. The article does not give any specifics but I would guess that we are largely talking about stone and/or brick buildings a couple centuries old. Granted, many of these homes are energy inefficient. They have poorly sealed wooden doors and poorly sealed single pane windows. They have boilers with old fashioned room registers for heat. Upgrading these structures to have double pane windows, well sealed doors and central air heating is a few grand/house. But what happens to their energy efficiency once you do that? They are then more energy efficient than the wooden, fibre glass insulated homes built last year. They are built from stone a foot thick in many cases. To suggest that a house that has 2 inch wooden walls backed by 3 inches of fibre is inherently more energy efficient that a 200 year old house with foot thick stone walls is..... unscientific! But the UK press being even more clueless and even more goal oriented than our own asks none of these questions.
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