Around one in five households increased their consumption of gas after installing energy efficiency measures such as loft and cavity wall installation, according to an intriguing survey published by two economists at the University of Cambridge. It was found that insulating lofts and cavity walls of existing U.K. housing stock only reduced gas consumption for the first year or two, with all energy savings vanishing by the fourth year after a retrofit. Presenting their findings, the economists propose other means to cut gas use including rationing. “Energy reduction targets could be established for households,” they suggest. Of course, stealth rationing is already becoming common in the elitist Net Zero war on personal transport, with £6 billion of petrol taxes planned, along with increasing numbers of local charging zones.
Researchers analysed gas consumption patterns over 12 years to 2017, and found that cavity wall insulation led to an average 7% drop during the first year. This shrank to 2.7% in the second, and by the fourth year any energy savings were “negligible”. Loft insulation was even less effective with 1.8% of savings after one year, and any gains disappearing after this.
The findings call into question the recent announcement that the Government intends to spend £6 billion trying to reduce energy consumption over the next eight years by 15%. Much of this money will be spent across the residential sector. Last November, the Business and Energy Secretary Grant Shapps announced a new £1 billion ECO+ scheme to target those in the least energy efficient homes. He claimed it would save consumers £310 a year, a claim that seems fanciful in the light of the Cambridge report.
In less wealthy areas of the U.K., the reductions in gas use were half those found elsewhere. The figure was as low as 3% during the first and second year after refit. In the bottom 20%, gas consumption actually rose after installation.
Economists have a theory for this type of behaviour called ‘rebound’. If you cut the price of holidays to France by half, some people will go twice. The researchers suggest that when it comes to home insulation there may be a significant ‘rebound’ effect. Any savings through energy efficiency get cancelled out by a steady increase in energy use. Behaviours associated with this ‘rebound’ including turning up the heating, but can include opening windows in stuffy rooms and building extensions such as conservatories.
Home insulation is not a “magic bullet”, states co-author Professor Laura Diaz Anadon, Director of the Cambridge Centre for Environment, Energy and Natural Resource Governance. “High gas prices will reduce the rebound effect in the short term, as homeowners have the need to keep costs down at the front of their minds. In the long term, simply funding more of the same insulation roll-out to meet the U.K.’s carbon reduction and energy security targets may not move the dial as much as is hoped,” added Anadon.
Blowing six billion pounds of taxpayers’ money on home insulation that in many cases may actually increase gas consumption might seem a spectacular waste of money even by Whitehall standards. But as with personal transport, more forceful measures are also planned, namely replacing automobiles and gas boilers with inferior products such as battery cars and heat pumps. The Cambridge authors note that heat pumps extract warmth from outside to heat internal radiators, and are “highly efficient and negate the need for gas boilers”. Other explanations are available, including the view that heat pumps are noisy, expensive, difficult to install and produce only tepid water that needs further heating to warm a U.K. house in the middle of winter.
Both loft and cavity wall insulation are at the easy end of the improvements market. Cavity wall insulation is a common procedure, while securing a loft is a home DIY job. To make a substantial difference, all the doors and windows in often leaky U.K. houses need to be made airtight. This is impossible with natural wood frames, and all must be replaced. Unless this is done, a heat pump will struggle to warm a British house to a comfortable temperature.
As with most Net Zero innovations, the real cost is stratospheric and largely hidden from consumers of mainstream media. The Government’s own in-house green activist unit, the Climate Change Committee, claims it would cost £10,000 to insulate a home and install a heat pump. Earlier this year, Professor Michael Kelly said that insulating a home and installing a heat pump would actually cost £65,000. Professor Kelly arrived at his figure by referencing his experience in refitting social housing as Chief Scientific Adviser to the then Department for Communities and Local Government. Allowing for economies of scale, Kelly said that insulating and installing costs for 26 million homes, along with 5.5 million non-domestic properties, would total £3 trillion.
This last figure, of course, approximates to the annual GDP of the U.K. Add it to the growing pile of fantasy Net Zero costings and projects. How will all those electric heat pumps keep going when wind and solar fail for weeks on end in a freezing winter? How can batteries possibly provide the vast amounts of storage required when vital minerals such as cobalt quickly run out, and they all need replacing every ten years?
Treble ration books all round.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic‘s Environment Editor.
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The air time given to these “experts” is part of the problem. That Devi person is dangerous and annoying to people with any semblance of common sense and perspective and yet she is given a platform to promote unscientific rubbish. As for her public but closed interaction with Bill Gates, the less said about that the better!
What is interesting to me is the apparent lack of questions about who this Devi person is, why she is listened to over others and what she’s accomplished that makes her so qualified to lecture society.
Just another WEF Youth Stormtrooper promoted by the Uniparty for ideological purity.
For goodness sakes man, she’s an anthropologist! How can we not respect that? I gave up on medical doctors a long time ago – fracture an arm, heart flutters, tremors, headaches, whatever the ailment – an anthropologist would always be my first port of call.
Just like the UK’s former and current health minister’s being former bankers, NL’s previous health minister being a primary school teacher – surely these people are the best experts to preach about health and vaccines and the like?
Surely, behavioural psychologists should be the go to experts when you’re ill?
She also seems to be a great pal of Nicola Sturgeon and no doubt contributes to the fact that in Scotland we are still supposed to wear masks in certain circumstances. She appeared from nowhere at the beginning of the Covid business.
That pathetic excuse for a human being has a pal?? Now that’s the scariest comment here today.
More than one I believe but we haven’t seen Jason for a while!
A colleague of mine back in the 70s, when we were both working in what was then a reasonably ethical British pharma company shred this gem with me:
“Expert” – an Ex is a has been and a spert is a drip under pressure.
This has never been more true than in the past few years; first with the climate hysterics, then with the Branch Covidians
And a “Specialist” is someone who lives a narrow field and knows nothing much about the real world outside.
Well that’s the thing of the modern left isn’t it? Never, ever admit you are wrong on anything – ever. And if anybody tries to argue the toss with you, just cry foul and cancel them!
And they wonder why they never get to control the levers of power unless taken with armed force?!
Rewriting the facts?
How very pre postmodern of you.
They’re off to an early start with the revisionism. Ukraine isn’t the distraction they’d hoped for.
They’re going to need a bigger squirrel.
Putin has disappointed by not stopping or being stopped, as TPTB and it’s MSM told us would happen.
The Guardian has described back bench MPs who asked the Government to consider the negative effects of non-pharmaceutical interventions as”libertarian crazies”. That seems quite insane so it is no surprise to see the rag churning out this sort of revisionism. Its readers need reassurance that their hysterical behaviour over the last two years has been rational.
Masks, lockdowns and the notion that humans are walking biological time bombs weren’t nipped at the bud and we will now have to live with these ideas and fight them pretty much for ever.
Absolutely. The hysterical and ascientific response has caused real harm to our society.
But political nutcases so enjoy the wonderfully satisfying feeling of ‘actually doing something’ that mandating lockdowns and imprisoning the elderly gives them.
Just be thankful it seems to distract them from doing what they’d really like to do to us.
Just don’t read the guardian.
it’s free for a reason.
Indeed. It has a very low readership.
Confined to the BBC, school staff rooms and university senior common rooms from what I can see.
It’s startling to see just how few eyeballs are being brought to advertisers by most “major” newspapers or legacy media sources like Sky or GB News.
There are UK WuTube vloggers who regularly thrash all of them in listener or viewer numbers, for tuppence in advertising share (if not demonetised).
And yet these massive media dinosaurs keep lumbering on, paying dozens or hundreds of full time staff, funded by something. It’s almost as though they’re more what you’d call vanity projects, or paid propagandists, than actual businesses
Like the really big dinosaurs of pre history, they have massive appetites which have been fed huge clumps (of our money) by governments and the B&MGF all around the world, to invent, promote and maintain the myth for the masses.
Will it take an asteroid to wipe them out? I wonder.
Paid for by government advertising.
Thankfully. Try “The Light paper” a free paper. thelightpaper.co.ukAn excellent read.All issues available to download as pdf free.
Izal TP was more expensive.
Not as slippery.
The Guardian bought to you by its funder Bill Gates
and the Car sales offshore hedge fund.
I don’t know why anyone bothers reading anything from the Guardian. The paper wouldn’t exist without the vast sums it receives from Gates and the OPP, so is hopelessly compromised in terms of providing a semblance of journalistic objectivity.
LOL! They never say:
Political activists posing as ‘scientists’
And that’s before we talk about ‘climate change’!
Perth MSM are in Sky Is Falling mode because we have 10,000 new cases.
Cases! If the damn virus was half as deadly as they want us to believe you’d never hear a word about cases!
The article articulates perfectly what happens when funding becomes the main goal. You don’t stay on the bottom rung if you start bringing in the cash
Focused protection was tested and considered plausible by the UK’s Pandemic Plan and the WHO ….. until they both abruptly changed tack to copy Communist China.
I seem to remember a tv interview where PM Johnson denied having seen or heard of the Great Barrington Declaration. Which would fit with it being smeared, ignored, cancelled by the Covid Technocrats.
The Guardian. Excuse me for a moment while I laugh hysterically. Ok, I’m back. Where was I. Ah yes, the Guardian. The left. The entire progressive movement. I’d like to sum up my feelings in a single simple pithy statement by the master of hilarious comedy and post-post-modern philosophy, the Maestro, Donald J. Trump: “Everything woke turns to shit”. And there we have it. Also Owen Jones is a whiny brat with a very-punchable face. I don’t mean that as abuse, just a statement of objective fact. And I think I’m done.
Bravo
Sridhar is a Gates funded WEF Young Leader and close friend of Chelsea Clinton. She is a three star general in Lucifer’s Army.
How did she become the go to girl
for advocating measures which inevitably lead to the establishment of the bio security state and the ultimate enslavement of humanity?
https://blogs.bmj.com/bmj/2018/11/28/global-health-disruptors-the-bill-and-melinda-gates-foundation/
https://www.younggloballeaders.org/new-class?utf8=✓®ion=a0Tb00000000DCLEA2
This unpleasant series of Guardian articles matters a lot. Why? Because although the Guardian’s readership is small, it includes a very significant proportion of people who have a very significant (and disproportionate) influence on public policy in the UK – for instance senior civil servants, academics, NHS leaders, senior lawyers.
DS should commission a series of articles by scientists, statisticians & medics (not polemicists or journalists) taking down these articles one by one. Because the Guardian articles – misleading as they are – will have a really pernicious effect if not properly challenged. There’s a reason they’re banging this drum so loudly at this stage.
People who read the grauniad should get a P45.
Should put a self sign p45 in the Grauniad for anyone reading it.
It is the house magazine of Common Purpose.
a virus was very timely for the Guardian, it was about to go under, still got the begging bowl
A massive percentage of their readers are teachers.
Unfortunately they are the ones mainly responsible for educating kids.
Perhaps this goes a long way into explaining why there seems to be a dearth of critical thinking amongst the young.
Kids are not taught to challenge anything at school – and when they get home, well, there’s always the BBC.
No offence taken;
I sort-of agree and I am one. Certainly agree that critical thinking is discouraged by most teachers and most certainly by the system itself. Because of exams, there’s more critical thinking in primary school than there is in Key Stage 4 or 5.
Any child asking a question is likely to be ignored or told to stop interrupting, because any child, bright enough to ask a question, is going to be more intelligent than a teacher pushing the big narrative.
Your point is well made. A friend has just retireed after 26 years as a science teacher at a grammar school. What is he going to enjoy most about retirement? “Not having to bite my tongue when talking about so called climate change”. It’s all about the approved narrative.
This sets the scene for all of the covid inquiries etc.
At a fundamental level the basis for all of the responses will be taken as fact; lockdowns work, facemasks are great, vaccines are effective, etc etc.
The discussion will only be on the detail — were our lockdowns a bit too harsh, a bit too late; did we encourage the wrong type of facemask or muck up procurement of PPE; etc etc.
What is needed is analysis at a fundamental level, that’s not frightened to say that an aspect of the response was a complete and utter disaster that ended up causing immense harm (including deaths) to the population that’ll continue to have impacts for years.
I’d like one question to be asked above all about any of the individual aspect of the covid threat response — were decisions made early on about the covid response, whether NPI or medical, that were then maintained throughout (at least until vaccines came) because it suited the people in charge (and did they try to justify this by using the ‘public confidence’ argument — which is always what politicians use to suppress information about how they’ve seriously mucked things up).
Well as you know, like climate change, the science is settled. It said so on the BBC, or was it The Guardian?
The immunocompromised continue to be used as a reason for others to mask up – it’s doing them no favours, they shouldn’t be circulating at all if they are that vulnerable, at best it’s giving them a false sense of security.
Well take it from me, as someone who takes an arthritis drug and has a slightly compromised immune system, I’m tired of being used as an excuse to prolong this nightmare. I haven’t once worn a mask, neither did I hysterically socially distance, sanitise and all the rest. I’ve hugged people and lived normally, only taking the precautions I’ve always done which affect no one. I do NOT expect anyone to have do anything to “protect” me. And the fearful narrative-followers are shocked! I’ve been on the receiving end of comments like “you should stay at home!” And “you SHOULD wear a mask to protect you!” The funny thing is all those people bleating about their safety and what everyone should do, have all been ill, all testing to make SURE it is covid, whereas I haven’t been ill once.
I twice tried to hug or shake hands and was rebuffed. A very offputting experience …
I was last ill in 1977 – that one was ‘Russian flu’ – and mysteriously I’ve been unaffected by this bug too. Maybe I’ve caught the right kind of coronavirus colds in my 68 yrs of life … who knows.
You tried to hug or shake hands with the wrong people. Have you a SITP near you? If so, and you pop along on a Sunday morning, you’ll meet wonderful free thinkers who are always happy to hug, smile and shake hands.
Exactly our situation, as a family, with an immunocompromised child. And we are all unvaccinated as well, wryly amused to see all the vaccinated people catching covid again and again and again. Original Antigenic Sin in action. Kier Starmer must be due yet another dose…
More like a Scicilian Embolism for his part in our troubles.
Of the clap??
There’s Labour’s new election mantra :
” Clap for Kier”!
Their real problem is that they believe it does any good, especially with the junk worn by the general public.
more than 2,000 people have died directly as a result of a Covid jab. The MHRA itself says these figures could be only 10 per cent of the actual numbers. Maybe people like my uncle, 95, died 2 weeks after his jab, and my aunt who had dementia died 2 weeks after her jab. How would we know? The bottom line is that excess deaths are on a par with a bad flu year when they said the flu jab had been the wrong one.
The MHRA say “could be” because they have no idea. They AREN’T bothering to investigate in any detail, the possible vaccine-related deaths.
Nothing can be proved without a post mortem
And how many of those have there been? Anyone heard any results from any of them?
No post morgen, no proof it was the vax.
QED. Big Pharma wins again.
Politicians in the clear, with money in envelopes.
Taunton hospital refused to do autopsies on sudden deaths.
All deaths covered by plausible deniability.
Most deaths in the public arena now described as, “died suddenly” or “natural causes” and followed by… silence.
Not so long ago the death of any public figure would have attracted full and even ghoulish detail and attention in the MSM. They would have insisted on their readers/viewers right to know.
But no MPs or senior civil servants have suddenly dropped dead since vax I got started. Does this suggest –
1) they are remarkably or unusually healthy?
2) they didn’t get the jab designed for the sheeple?
3) they haven’t been jabbed at all?
Just asking, not starting a conspiracy. Honest.
Certainly not 1), most unlikely to be 2) so the answer has to be 3)
The Guardian’s fantasy pull out and keep Covid Pandemic Jubilee Souvenir Special is reminiscent of red top Royal Wedding Funeral Forelock tugging Full Colour Freebies of the Past. Will all school kids get a souvenir Zero Covid Guardian mug or a Chinese made badge saying Don’t be an Agenda
Benderto treasure in a shoe box until the crystal in your palm goes red. it’s rather a desperate mass formation puff piece. The Guardian storytellers and academic contributors are preaching to their zombie public funded flocks, who are unfortunately starting to hear other disturbing and long suppressed narratives. The Guardian agenda is the journalistic equivalent of cuddly Herr Fritzl ‘Nothing but devastation and stupidity up here, mein liebling. We’re all safer downstairs. Work from the Cellars keeps me safe…’Meanwhile anyone who went on a London march last year will remember the uplifting and joyful presence of the Tyburn Nuns on their steps. A great article in Conservative Woman describes something of a run in they are having with the Vatican, now rebranded as the religious wing of Pfizer Moderna. Hope you can read it.
Excellent article in TCW on the Tyburn Nuns and their upcoming battles with the Satanic Church of Rome.
Grauniad – lies.
In other news, sun rises in the east, more at 11.
On immunity and rewriting history, the WHO changed the definition to something like ‘Herd immunity’, also known as ‘population immunity’, is a concept used for vaccination, in which a population can be protected from a certain virus if a threshold of vaccination is reached. Herd immunity is achieved by protecting people from a virus, not by exposing them to it.
Given that the covid vaccines are now admitted to be gene therapy and do nothing to confer immunity, will the old definition be reinstated?
Grauniad “wrong about everything, all the time”.
I take it these people have never heard of influenza. Or ever looked at the stats for how many can die in a year from it. Imagine the numbers within 28 days of a +ve flu/cold test. These clowns are ideologues and zealots who literally couldnt care less about facts and figures. They will never change their opinions. They are control freaks and the types of people who are causing untold misery around the world. I wish I didnt have to live around them (a massive majority being lefties and remainers imo)
Liars lie. It doesn’t help when the heads of most governments and their henchmen and women are past masters of the dark arts.
The man who expects high standards of honesty and propriety from Harvard academics has doomed himself to a lifetime of disappointment.
The problem with these guys is that they’re convinced to belong to a master race to whose members the usual, human limitations don’t apply: As group, they’re infallible. Individual members of this group may well make errors, however, regardless of the problem, there’s always a correct solution which can always be determined without errors and implemented without principal flaws and which will always come from group itself. Because of this, its members have the universe(climate?)-given right to do with everyone else whatever damn well pleases them and said everyone-else with their pesky, private consideration are hereby unkindly ordered to hold their tongues about that.
This idea is obviously fundamentally incompatible with that of a pluralistic society, where nothing anyone is really convinced of can ever truly be taken for granted because each and every of its members is prone to both errors of judgement and of execution, ie trying to do the wrong thing or trying to do the right thing in a wrong way. It’s as obviously fundamentally incompatible with the notion of human rights all people are equally entitled to. The inferior species humans must not have such rights as this would limit what the master race humans may to do them in order to execute their masterplans.
Considering that pluralistic society and human rights are the cornerstones of so-called democracy, these people are necessarily anti-democrats at heart and seek to subvert the democratic process in order to overcome democracy itself. But only in the true best interest of the people, so, that’s ok then.
It’s the Guardian … where it is 1st of April every day.
Based on Will’s synopsis, it would appear that this Spinney woman is even more demented than the Devil Sridhar herself.
Get these two lunatics into their padded cells and let them rattle on to their heart’s content.
It’s the Grauniad’s version of spaghetti trees
Grahamb’s first sentence is the key when he puts the word experts into quotes. They are and always have been the wrong experts. An anthropologist commenting on clinical matters? Where are the expert clinicians? It remains a bone of contention with me that even now the narrative largely excludes what really matters – if you get severe Covid-19, are you going to get the right treatment? Indeed even earlier in the evolution of infection, are you going to get the right investigations that will confirm or deny that you are in the process of becoming seriously ill? Anthropologists and statisticians can’t possibly answer these questions so it’s time for the media to ditch them and approach the right experts. As a (retired) specialist in the management of immune-mediated illnesses I put myself forward once more. Meanwhile I recommend Mark Woolhouse’s book “The Year The World Went Mad” for an honest and readable insight into epidemiology.even if there isn’t anything about clinical management.
Bottom line: if an infection doesn’t make you seriously ill it doesn’t signify.
If your immune system doesn’t get challenged by new bugs then it goes to sleep and will fade away. Then you really are in danger.
Masks, vaxxes, lockdowns will kill you sooner than a non-existent ‘virus’.
If the conclusion is that it is because some countries did not conform to the zero covid policy. Then in essence this article is pushing the new centralised WHO world pandemic control plan which is global control through the back door. The new world order is strong at the guardian.
It is sad indeed that these idiots and charlatans continue to be fed the oxygen of publicity whilst real facts are blocked.
Unusually, both MacKenzie and Spinney have science degrees. Obviously however, they have both forgotten what they have learnt in favour of producing political tripe. As to be expected from the Grauniad.
Buckets of ready cash, payable in any bank anywhere on the world, is a great amnesiac.
You could do something useful with this paper. Cut it into squares and hang it on a nail in the toilet.
Or shred it up and add it to a compost heap.
“Every man has his price. For some it’s money, for some it’s women, for others glory. But the honest man you don’t have to buy – he winds up costing you nothing.”
The many people whose age or medical condition makes them more likely to die if [infected], or who have suppressed immunity – perhaps only because they need an arthritis drug – cannot take ‘personal responsibility’ for avoiding Covid if they must return to the office, surrounded by maskless people exercising their ‘individual freedom’ to exhale asymptomatic Omicron.”
I find this is so condescending and more fearmongering BS. This is me! immunocompromised because of an arthritis drug. Did anyone consider people like me before covid? No, of course not, and why should they? I do not need or want anyone restricting their own lives and freedoms for my benefit. It’s my problem always was and always will be. I never wore a mask and I haven’t had the vaccine. Figured I’m already injecting myself with poison once a week!
Hanage is one of those who goes running/jogging in a mask and posts on Twitter that he’s doing so for the benefit of mankind.
Shridar should be right at the front of the queue when retribution is dished out!
The Guardian Rewrites the Facts
This is a headline?
Oh, I get it! April fools!