So there are efficiency requirements; just attaching a heat pump to a leaky, drafty structure won't get you there, even if the heat pump itself is a marvel of efficiency.
]]>Well, because houses are the only legitimate store of wealth if you're not already in the rentier class; look at how the tax and financial incentives are structured.
The main problem with the rich is that they're born into an investment vehicle, as it were; the rest of us get to trudge along. There's no material reason we couldn't move some laws around so that everybody's born into an investment vehicle, a combination of credit union and housing society (and possibly victualler, too) on the scale of some hundreds of adults. You contribute, it provides housing, retirement benefits, child care, etc. It can't kick you out; you can certainly leave or swap if you can find another one that wants to take you. Your minimum contribution is by fixed formula on your income (this is of course tax deductible) but you can contribute more. Lots of audit rules and so forth required, as well as maximums for percentage of control. If it gets too wealthy, it's split or provided with the indigent as members or both.
There's this whole difficult blind spot around the legitimacy of collective action; so-called conservatives ought to love something like this, but they're actually in love with the idea of individual superiority, rather than actual virtues like responsibility or husbandry or generosity.
]]>Firstly it is much more able to use lower quality fuels. High energy density isn't a huge priority as even with a large fuel space the cargo space on a big ship is still vast, so you can use coal which isn't in short supply so an absolute shortage isn't really an issue.
Secondly shipping is really fuel efficient so if you are using some from of emission permits it's worth buying them.
Thirdly you can use carbon neutral forms of power, nuclear power, sails or biofuels such as wood.
So on the whole I would expect to see a continuation of the current trend of increased volume transported in larger and larger ships. Some American ports are currently being enlarged to be able to handle container ships as currently only a few Asian and European ports are deep enough.
]]>Indeed. And you can actually beat £50k if you know what you're doing: a simple 4-bed (90m^2) house doesn't need to cost the earth. It can be 6.7m squared, 5m tall, which means that its walls can cost as little as £3,000 (material cost of lightweight concrete block walls at £20/m^2). Add another £3,000 for a roof, and another for essential fittings, and (excluding labour costs) such a house can be built for less than £10,000. Finishing touches like windows that can be opened, hot water and a kitchen bring that to £15,000. Labour costs bring it to £30,000. That's about the bare minimum a house can be built for, but it can be done.
In the mean time, land is readily available at a cost of about £10,000 per acre. As Charlie says, you can easily build 20 houses on an acre of land, but lets aim to not have people living on top of each other, so lets only put 10 houses on that acre. We therefore have a net cost per house of £31,000. Add a generous profit of another £15,000 for the financiers of the scheme, and we can sell houses to the public for £46,000 each.
What's wrong with this picture? One thing: the governments' insistence that it should exercise control to prevent housing being built despite the fact that there is a demonstrable shortage of it, meaning you can't just buy land and build houses on it.
Damned idiots need to stop preventing us from building. Sure, it's "protecting the countryside", but frankly only people who live in cities seem to think there's any actual shortage of the stuff. The rest of us know that there's so much countryside available that we don't actually need to worry about it. The nightmare of urban sprawl stretching from coast to coast is just a middle-class nightmare, totally implausible without a massive population growth that would cause so many other problems (like: what would they eat?) that worrying about where they'd live just seems quaint in comparison.
]]>Sure, but most of the stuff that gets shipped is made (or fertilized) with fossil fuels and their derivatives. If the volume of stuff that needs shipping goes down by an order of magnitude or three, that has big implications for port design.
]]>Preventing building in between those values has some worth. So does preventing building over the high-value arable land, which isn't in especially good supply but which does tend to be near cities.
Plus the other sprawl problems of transportation and infrastructure and keeping developers from offloading large costs on to the public purse to maintain their own profit margins.
]]>I keep wondering if there will be an impact to the slight (?) change in ground temps if an area like Chicago, Atlanta, or London goes to this as a majority way to condition houses.
]]>-kh
]]>The weird thing about air travel is that, yammering about how much fuel it burns aside, if you calculate how much fuel it takes to ship bodies between continents on a modern wide-body jet airliner per passenger-seat-mile they work out somewhat cheaper than an ultra-compact diesel-engined automobile. Sure, a Boeing 747 would burn 3 times my weight in kerosene shipping me from the UK to Australia; that's because Australia is a very long way away and if I drove there instead the car or motorbike would burn even more.
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