Fri 14 Nov 2008
On target
There were always a few cynics, me included, who believed that the government’s 2016 target for ‘carbon neutral’ new homes was a joke. This had nothing to do with me being in denial about climate change. It was all about facing up to political and industrial realities.Unfortunately, when the market was bowling along nicely and we were all making money, it was very easy to act piously green and swallow stupid government targets, even when they were transparently ill-conceived and impossible to meet.
Now, though, everything has changed. The recession is bleeding the industry white, and every issue is now life-or-death, including the green targets. It is being said openly – and truthfully – that economic circumstances have transcended the woolly-minded wish-list that is the 2016 green agenda. Survival is the name of the game. If we eventually get through this crisis, there will not be the industrial capacity or management will to embrace building and production methods that were, in reality, probably never going to help save polar bears nor stop the arctic turning into a branch of Cornwall.
When I voiced this opinion a couple of years back, I was immediately accused of that most heinous of thought crimes: denying climate change. As it happens, I have always been strongly convinced that the planet’s climate is changing and that we, the human race, need to modify our behaviour in order to adapt to it and, where possible, limit the damage. But, as with matters of race and religion, speaking one’s own mind rapidly became socially and politically unacceptable. We were not allowed to discuss climate change in the context of the planet’s known historical life-cycle. Oh, no. We all had to adopt every barmy, Earth-saving panic measure on offer or face accusations of wanting to murder our own grandchildren. It was in this febrile atmosphere that the 2016 targets were set. And since they were set, they have been leading us all down a course of largely pointless and very expensive change. Well, now reality has bitten.
I am honestly not just another grumpy old man who thinks it’s all a conspiracy got up by tree-huggers. In May 2005, I had the great privilege of launching onto an unsuspecting world the Barratt EcoSmart Village in Lancashire – the first serious attempt by a major developer to build and evaluate homes featuring just about every green measure then available. It cost millions to do and, with the help of the University of Manchester, operated as a truly independent test-bed. We were able to see what worked, what didn’t and, of equal importance, what people were prepared to pay for. It was while steeped for months in this huge project that I realised certain technologies – like solar arrays – have the potential to work very well for the planet, while others, like wind turbines, will never even recover their own carbon footprint. This was a unique insight – an insight that the rest of the industry and most of the public seemed to be missing. They were too busy buying every crackpot idea, every pointless, destructive measure, every hair-shirted prophecy of doom that Greenpeace and most of the other blindly-panicking eco-nutters cared to insist was vital for our survival. This is why, for example, we’ll probably be spending billions to rid our crowded island of a forest of rusting, useless windfarms in about 25 years time. (By then, of course, the windfarm promoters will have copped all the subsidies and premiums and done a runner – unless, of course, the reality that is biting us bites them too.)
It is no co-incidence that Barratt, the company which gave us the EcoSmart Village, is the first UK housebuilder to create a home reaching Code for Sustainable Homes Level 6. Having been EcoSmart in Lancashire and got the tee-shirt, they saw exactly how much work was going to be involved in getting anywhere near those 2016 targets. I fervently hope their reward will be healthy, premium sales to customers eager to buy into sustainability.
For those of us with a much bigger mountain to climb, I hope the economic crisis continues to push 2016 down the agenda and that the government and the eco-warriors make use of the delay to recognise that what our planet really needs is far-reaching energy solutions that will protect and preserve it for future generations; that it requires political action on a global scale to control world population, to urgently reduce industrial emissions from industrial and emerging nations, to prevent the continuing rape of the rainforests and to educate all of us out of the dreadfully wasteful existences most of us lead.
What the planet doesn’t need is half-baked environmental policy like the 2016 targets.
Have your say and comment on this article