Transition Culture

11 May 2007

Urban Heat and Rural Heat - by Simon Fairlie

I don’t read Building for a Future magazine anywhere near as often as I ought to, but recently I picked up a copy and read an excellent article by Simon Fairlie, drawing a new angle on the zero-energy buildings debate. I have been a huge admirer of Simon’s work for years, in particular his work on rural planning through the campaign group Chapter 7, and always enjoy reading his work. This article has a particularly important take, I think, on the dangers of blindly putting cutting carbon emissions above the creation of resilience and the rebuilding of a rural economy.

Urban Heat and Rural Heat - by Simon Fairlie.

Stepping out into the Waterloo night after reading George Monbiot’s latest book, Heat, on the train, I was confronted by a glaring manifestation of the problem he tries to tackle. Along the banks of the Thames tower blocks spewed light from a thousand empty offices. Plane trees were decked with fairy lights seventy-five days before Christmas — perhaps nowadays they don’t bother to take them down. Night clubs competed for punters with kilowatts of neon, like that notorious fishery in the Sea of Japan, where the boat with the most powerful lamp attracts the most squid.

Arriving at my destination, my host apologized for the heat in his attic flat, generated, so he told me, entirely by surplus warmth rising from his downstairs neighbours. I slept under a single sheet with the window wide open, so that the heat could waft out into the October night. In the tiny kitchen, a fitted fridge/freezer which left no room for a larder contained nearly all the household’s food including all those pickles, preserves and condiments which people long ago invented for the specific purpose of storing food at room temperature. Next morning, in the street below a barrowman was hawking fruit, not a single item of which came from Britain —and this in our season of mists and mellow fruitfulness.

When Marx wrote about the “idiocy of rural life�, he hadn’t seen 21st century London. Notwithstanding everything you hear about cities being more sustainable than the countryside, our metropolis emits more carbon per head than anywhere else in Britain, and over twice as much as Aberystwyth, Planning magazine reported recently.

The warmth in my bedroom made me reflect on a statistic in George Monbiot’s book, which carries the subtitle How to Stop the Planet Burning. Between 1991 and 2002, the average temperature of our homes increased from 15.5 degrees to 19 degrees. That’s quite a rise in just 11 years. Unlike Auberon Waugh, who some years ago in Private Eye argued that mild hypothermia was a painless and timely way to go compared with succumbing over years to an accelerating sequence of painful and debilitating complaints, George thinks that this rising indoor temperature “is a good thing . . . especially for the elderly�. He doesn’t say that it is a good thing that sales of woollen clothing have slumped to an all time low, or that men go around in tee shirts and girls bare their midriffs in the middle of winter; but, given that it is hardly an insuperable problem to provide additional heat in old people’s accommodation, that seems to be what he is suggesting.

To achieve this 21st century standard of comfort whilst remaining within the very constrained carbon budget that appears to be necessary, George advocates stringent building regulations. New houses should be built to Passivhaus standards whereby, through passive solar heating, triple glazing, a minimum of thermal bridges, and a regulated heat exchange system for incoming air, the temperature can be maintained at around 20 degrees more or less continually without any artificial heating. The retrofitting of older houses should be subject to standards that approach this as far as practically possible. Strict building rules of this kind, he argues, “would lead to a net increase in human freedom�, adding that this is a “paradox�.

Paradox, or not, I think George is stretching the definition of freedom here, and I suspect that anybody who has ever battled with the building regs people would agree. The reason , he explains, is because he bought a terraced house which had been done up by a developer who couldn’t care less about u-values, and whose refurbishments made it harder and more expensive for any subsequent owner, in this case George himself, to insulate the property. “Stricter regulations� which obliged redevelopers to sell the property insulated to a certain standard “would constrain one set of people to do the work properly and release three or four sets of people from the burden of living in houses which cost a fortune to heat.�

I can see his point, and in respect of both terraced houses and new build in urban situations, I’m inclined to agree . But at the same I’m resistant to his proposals, (especially proclaimed in the name of freedom) because personally I don’t want to live in a house with triple glazing, no thermal bridges and air coming in through a heat exchanger. This may be heresy in a magazine mainly read by green architects and builders, but if so, then it’s the best place to raise the matter. I don’t like being shut off in an artificial environment detached from the outside world by layers of padding; I like having windows open; and I prefer living in a cool house where, when my bodily energy flags, and a woolly jumper won’t do the trick, I can bring the hearth into life, whose magic is worth far more in spiritual heat than all those calories which go up the chimney.

I’m not the only person who feels like that, though we are in a minority, and most of us live in the countryside. We already have enough problems with planners telling us that living and building in the countryside is unsustainable, and the last thing we need is building regs people coming and telling us that too. If the sort of regulations that George has in mind are enforced fiercely, low income people building their own homes will be under pressure to construct something more sophisticated than they have the skills for and more expensive than they can afford. Public-spirited landowners who relieve the current affordable housing crisis by renting out cheap houses, barns, shacks or mobile homes to people in need will be discouraged from doing so, for fear of contravening regulations, or facing expenses which will bring them no benefit.

You might argue, in response, that people like me, by failing to meet insulation standards, are living off other people’s carbon budgets. For most of the last twelve years I have lived in a dwelling that would barely gain a rating of Ecohomes Appalling, but I am willing to bet has a lower carbon budget than Bedzed. How does it achieve this? By not having a dishwasher, a hoover, a plasma TV, or anything more energy demanding than a computer; by having near zero embodied energy in the building materials; by the assistance of a bit of solar and wind energy; and by heating with wood. And you don’t have to live in a low impact straw-baled dwelling to achieve this, some people do it in old stone cottages (though they can be really cold). If you accept that a secondhand holiday caravan or mobile home saved from the scrapyard effectively has zero embodied energy, and if you heat it with a woodburner, then you can quite easily achieve your better-than-BedZed carbon budget in that, and that’s how thousands of people in the countryside are currently living.

You might further consider that this lifestyle is elitist or irrelevant because there is not enough firewood in this country to heat any more than a small minority of people. This is an understandable conclusion if you accept the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution’s (RCEP) view that “about 3.1 million oven dried tonnes per year of wood-derived fuel could currently be made available�, which equals about 3.75 million tonnes of air-dried firewood. This works out about 1.4 tonnes per hectare for each of the 2.74 million hectares of woodland in the country.

This seems extraordinarily pessimistic, because the conventional estimate for traditional woodland is 3 tonnes of firewood per hectare per year, and a conifer plantation with a yield-class of 18 cubic metres per year ought to produce nearly three times this amount. Perhaps the RCEP are discounting the 11 million cubic metres of timber and pulpwood per year currently harvested in the UK , which is the equivalent of about 2 tonnes of dry firewood for every hectare ; but most of this is taken from the high-yield conifer plantations and nearly all of it is potential fuel when it comes to the end of its life — what else are we going to do with it, landfill it? Perhaps RCEP are assuming some firewood is too expensive to harvest — but that is because fossil fuels are currently ridiculously cheap. The RCEP also ignore the adage that “wood is the fuel that heats you twice�, which is another way of saying that people who do physical work get less cold than people who sit at a computer and turn on the heat with a flick of the switch.

The government has stated that it wants to double the amount of woodland in Britain; nobody objects, it would serve as a carbon sink, and provide amenity benefits. It would not be unrealistic to achieve 5 million hectares each producing 3 tonnes of firewood per year. A conventionally heated 4 bed-roomed house uses 7-9 dry tonnes per year to heat itself solely on wood. Households which either benefit from adequate insulation or else have low requirements ought to be able to manage on 3 tonnes. At this rate 5 million households, more than 20 per cent of the entire country, and more than the 3.5 million households which are classified as rural, could heat themselves renewably from firewood, and that’s not counting what energy we might derive from municipal and garden timber and short rotation coppice. Its not everybody by any means, but — unless I have got my sums wrong — its not as negligible as some analysts like to make out.

There are two main roads to diminishing carbon emissions from domestic heating. One is to insulate and use fossil fuels more efficiently; the other is to use renewable energy. Building regulations which enforce very high levels of insulation, rather than merely encourage them, may prove helpful to people living in the town, where fuelwood is hard to find and expensive to deliver; but they could impose a unnecessary expense upon people in the country who adopt the renewable solution that grows all around them.

Principal References: Heat: How to Stop the Planet Burning, by George Monbiot, Allen Lane, 2006.
Planning magazine, 24 February 2006, p.4. Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution Report,
Biomass as a Renewable Energy Resource, 2004. BTCV, Woodlands Handbook, Chapter 11 Firewood and Charcoal, http.//handbooks.btcv.org.uk/handbooks/content/section/3767 Forestry Commission Timber Statistics, www.forestry.gov.uk 2006