Climate & Environment

Our move back to Scotland, and pretty much everything I’ve done since, professionally and personally, has been informed by our understanding of the rate and impact of our changing climate. This is the story of how we’re slowly adapting our lives and surroundings to minimise our impact on our planet’s ability to sustain human society. And, yes, there are cat pictures.

Building & Renovating, Climate & Environment, Highland Life

Heat Pumps and History

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…or rather, historic houses: between 2009 and 2014 we embarked on a complete eco-renovation of our house – a Regency-era listed steading in Highland Perthshire. We took it back to the stonework, insulated it throughout and installed a ground-source heat pump (GSHP), biomass stove and solar thermal panels. It wasn’t cheap (our initial budget rapidly became a rounding error) but we now have a 270m2 (floor area of heated spaces), 200-year-old farmhouse that is both warm and comfortable – winning UK Renovation of the Year in 2014 was just a nice piece of validation for our hard work.

So, with now nearly a decade’s hindsight, what difference did it make?

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Climate & Environment

Hot Air versus Heat Pumps

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Reading the UK government’s announcement that it will be funding heat pump installations suggests that they’re once again managing to turn a good idea into a counterproductive failure, one moreover which will likely prove toxic to our transition to a carbon-neutral economy.

If we take the government’s fund at face value, the promised £490M is sufficient to provide grants of £5,000 to 98,000 homes: a drop in the ocean compared to the 27.8M or so households in the UK (the actual number of discrete properties will of course be lower, as 14.8% of the population live in flats). But to offer to even partially fund heat pump installations without first tackling the issues of effective insulation and the cost of resizing of domestic heating systems needed to make effective use of heat pumps, is a recipe for disaster, huge ongoing costs and ineffective outcomes.

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Building & Renovating, Climate & Environment

Easy Gains: Removing VAT on Retrofit Energy-Saving

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For all the publicity that the ‘sexy’ side of climate change mitigation gets – wind, wave and solar power or the shift to electric vehicles – all of which are necessary and laudable, the biggest difference that we can make is to reduce our demand for energy in the first place.  Continue reading Easy Gains: Removing VAT on Retrofit Energy-Saving →

Climate & Environment, Highland Life

The Darker Side of Rewilding

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It’s no secret that I’m a fan of rewilding: of restoring impoverished habitats and reintroducing species that we’ve intentionally or carelessly wiped out over the millennia. Re-establishing diverse, self-maintaining and resilient ecosystems can only help us weather the storms of anthropogenic climate change as well as reduce our species’ footprint on the planet. So I’m generally pro-Beaver, pro-Lynx, pro-raptor and, lest we forget, pro-random-small-but-useful arthropods. I’ve also previously noted that the re-introduction of wolves and bears would help simultaneously solve multiple local environmental and social issues, which itself is a metric for a successful re-introduction.

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