Vicars have been told to give parishioners blankets to keep them warm instead of heating the churches as the Church of England continues towards its 2030 Net Zero goal. The Telegraph has more.
The Rev Giles Goddard, who has helped to spearhead the Church of England’s 2030 Net Zero campaign, says that heating old stone churches is economically “not worth it”.
“The mantra now is: heat the people not the space,” said the Rev Goddard, whose own church, St John’s Church, Waterloo, which was built in the early 19th century, has had a £6 million green transformation.
“You can’t warm up a 13th-century building for an hour and a half a week – it’s just not worth it.”
Parishes have been urged to work towards the target of carbon neutrality by removing oil and gas boilers, installing solar panels and divesting from fossil fuels.
While they have been urged to replace fossil fuels entirely, install energy-efficient LED lighting, use green electricity tariffs, and fix broken windows to reach the goal, many have struggled to do so.
In 2022, the CofE hired Wall Street finance firms to advise on funding as it borrowed money to fund the initiative.
A source told the Telegraph last year that some cathedrals were finding it especially difficult because “they are old buildings and not energy-efficient”, with heat pumps struggling to keep large spaces warm.
Worth reading in full.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
If it is a waste of money to heat up a 13th century Church for an Hour and a Half each week then it must be a horrendous waste of money to heat up a pensioners house all day. Instead of the fuel allowance maybe Reeves and Miliband should hand out 10 million blankets to “heat the people not the house”.
—-Welcome to the 21st Century where progress means pricing people out of energy use and suggesting blankets might be a good idea.
I think you misunderstood him. It’s impossible to heat large and poorly insulated building with heat pumps and that’s why he claims “It’s just not worth it”. A classic “These grapes are certainly sour, anyway!” reaction.
No I did not misunderstand. —–It would be the same problem with the rising costs caused by Net Zero absurdity regardless of whether it was heat pumps they used or any other means. ——It is just another example of the misery caused by silly eco socialist climate policies.
Well, according to the article he can install solar panels, that should keep everybody warm!!!
And it would be kind if the parishioners were allowed to take the blankets home with them.
This almost happened to me a few years ago. Upon arriving for Sunday service at a venerable church building one winter’s morning, I was astonished to be brought to a halt just inside the front door by rows of wobbly kitchen chairs lined up in the vestibule, each occupied by an elderly worshipper, as the minister stood before them preparing to start the service. When I asked what the dickens was going on, I was told that because one old lady had complained about the cold church while refusing to wear her winter coat like the rest of us, the minister decided to force everyone into the vestibule to keep warm. As the church organist was setting up a tiny battery-operated lap organ, cheek-by-jowl with the coffee machine, in order to accompany the hymns, the beautiful old church lay empty and bereft, the magnificent pipe organ silent. All because one woman complained.
I never went back there again.
“He is closely involved in helping the Church of England to be more fully inclusive. He is chair of Faith for the Climate which works to support interfaith work on climate change and is a member of the Church of England’s Environment Working Group. He is also currently undertaking a course on spiritual direction.”
“He is in a civil partnership with Shanon Shah.”
God ‘elp us.
This guy is an idiot talking out of his posterior. I’ve been living in a flat with severly insufficient heating in winter for 11 of the last 13 years and handing out blankets to people in an unheated building in winter is not going to help. This will still cause their feet to get so cold that they start to hurt seriously. What he’s basically asking for is abandon church services in winter because – due to global warming – it’s just to cold during this time of the year. Or accept that pensionens will die of hypothermia while in pain and all of this just because heat pumps don’t work.
Coming to think of it, there’s seems to be little of the Christian love for one’s neighbour in this guy and also little trust in God being capable of manageing his creation without help by better informed people like him.
Perhaps he’s claiming exemption from https://www.gov.uk/workplace-temperatures !
The simple reason 2030 has become a logical impossibility
When processing web data using AI via an API a few weeks back, I realised something. There is often a massive benefit from using a sledgehammer to crack a nut. Many tasks, especially those for which a programmer would write “fuzzy logic algorithms” such as identifying where the main body of text exists within an image, are far, far easier using AI. So you use AI instead. But then there is a whole round trip with uploading the image and using AI to process it and extract the text. There might perhaps be a more efficient dedicated bit of machine learning that could be used, but no, the AI sledgehammer is available and easy. Now if you are processing something that contains thousands or millions of records, maybe you have lots of asynchronous processes (that’s just fancy speak for processing happening simultaneously, or overlapping in time). But the point is you find your programming goals become unbounded by the time it used to take to write such code, which is error prone (in terms of the quality of the results) and time consuming. Throw an AI request at the problem and it goes away. Bu then it’s easy, and you find the number of AI requests there is value in making start to increase and that increase in the value of “throwing AI at the problem,” becomes exponential. The time saving itself becomes a time to market business benefit and the cost of compute to value ration is important enough it is bound to become an accounting item.
But here is the critical point. This means there is a bifurcating tree of value available to all who use AI. Where adding branches to the tree becomes easy (which multiplies up compute) and extra value is potentially then in reach and unlocked by doing so. And this means THE VERY PROCESS DRIVES TOWARDS INCREASED COMPUTE CYCLE CONSUMPTION until a cost/value barrier is hit. Increased compute consumption directly relates to increased power consumption, which in turn means we are facing a binary choice. AI or meeting 2030/2050 climate goals. There is no middle ground, unless (which won’t happen) there is a universally international (global) framework developed for rationing business use of AI. Well you can forget that.
So, understand. It’s over. There’s no point in arguing it anymore. 2030 or 2050 carbon neutrality (pick your fantasy) SIMPLY ISN’T HAPPENING.
Nice attempt at a marketing blurb for something whose only real world product to date is sexting on demand with customized ‘virtual girlfriends’.
The problem with AI is that it was never developed because M$ Excel already did all of this 30 years ago.
I’m rarely rude to people on social media. But you are genuinely clueless. Now I’m actually a harsh critic of AI and don’t think it is anywhere near what it is cracked up to be, but the latest generation LLMs have some extremely practical applications. I’m an experienced programmer and I’ve just written a quite complex program in a programming language I have never used. All with AI and where a good 60% of the algorithms were written form me and I got the work done in 1/3 the time. What you have just said is genuine ignorance.
Let me put it this way: The problem with using a sledgehammer to crack a nut is not that it’s inefficient but that it doesn’t work. The sledgehammer will smash the nut to bits but nuts aren’t being cracked to destroy them but to open them so that people can eat what’s inside shell. Someone with a really minimal understanding of technical issues, say, elementary school level, would have known that.
Still just wrong. What part of “I have just written using LLMs” do you not understand? They work. It’s like having a team of 2-3 junior programmers working for me.
That I’ve pointed out a ludicrous mistake in your original statement, presumably caused by a male fascination for POWER TOOOOLS!!!
regardless of their usability for a given task doesn’t mean I’m wrong about anything. It means you were wrong and that you belong to the large class of people who never admit their own mistakes, see also “blame avoidance decisions making”, as mentioned in another article.
Maybe they could time their Sunday service around the dictats of the “Smart” meter – British Gas were recently offering Sunday Discounts fort those who like to keep the sabbath busy.
“You can’t warm up a 13th-century building for an hour and a half a week – it’s just not worth it.”
Well, perhaps you should use it more, Mr Goddard. The Catholic church at which I worship has at least one Mass every day, not just a Sunday “service” – and they are all well attended; standing room only if you’re late getting to the two Sunday Masses.
To be fair, what did they do to heat up churches since the dawn of Christianity and civilization centuries prior to central heating, in countries where the temps were often sub zero? It’s not like lighting a fire in a hearth is going to warm a large drafty building. I’m pretty sure people just layered up and got on with it. At least now they’ve got thermals. Being a non-church goer, how long does anyone tend to sit in a church for anyway? If we take the garbage net zero bit out of the equation I’m not really seeing the issue here. Just pretend you’re in the 12th century, somewhere in Scandinavia or even the Outer Hebrides and do what your ancestors did.
Wonder what the average life expectancy was in those days?
No idea without checking. I reckon it was much more of a challenge getting to adulthood though. However, I’m fairly confident they still had elderly folk all those years ago. Elderly poor folk.
That question is useful in the context of today’s ridiculous removal of the very fuels that has given us the life expectancy we have today —Fossil Fuels. Because without those fuels our life expectancy would be similar to what it was back then. Without checking it would probably not be much higher then 30 on average. Fossil fuels gave us freedom from back breaking labour and from preventable diseases, and we now live into our seventies, eighties and beyond.
Packing churches is a lot easier in lower latitudes. And people live longer, too.
Oil made the inhospitable higher latitudes hospitable.
But when you Just Stop Oil… ooops
Exactly correct about how we heated buildings in the past. —-Today crazy Net Zero people will scream at people who complain about their high energy bills that everything would be hunky dory if they only filled their walls and lofts with foam (insulation), but as you point out and I have known for 20 years, those are the same houses that we heated quite easily in the past and no one was complaining much about the cost because we were using fuels that were affordable —-coal and gas. Then along came the phony planet savers and heaped huge environmental costs on those to coerce us all into not using them.
Better ask the congregation to stop breathing, too. Aside from all that deadly covid spewing out of their orifices, if the building isn’t properly heated and ventilated then all that moisture from their breath will cause awful damp and will be terrible for the structure of the building – never mind all that ornate plasterwork.
The sick endgame is now becoming clearer.
What about Parliament? There must be enough hot in there already to cope with the coldest winter.
Welby the Woke continues his policy of diminishing the congregations of every CofE church in the country. I know how they could save money on heating AND blankets. Just shut the doors, keep out those pesky humans, save a fortune. Yep, that should do it
“Give Congregation Blankets Instead of Heating Churches to Hit Net Zero by 2030, Vicars Told”
“Get the flock out of here!”
No wonder the churches are empty.
The stupidity of man is breathtaking. He cannot heat his church but he is worried about global warming! You have to laugh … to a point.
Edward Gibbon wrote The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and William Shirer wrote The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. I wonder which future historian, probably born today, will write The Rise and Fall of Western Civilization?
Heating a centuries old church with a heat pump? Is there anything more insane than this?
An efficient method of heating in a space that cannot be insulated is a gas-fueled radiant heater in a long tube under a reflector. I have experienced this system in a large hangar with an un-insulated structure where aircraft engineers worked. It heats the people not the building