better insulation is not cheap and therefore not everyone can afford to do it. Also the same people who want renewables are usually opposed to building new housing so there's that.
The actual insulation is stupid cheap when you look at the ROI. However, installing in on an existing house is really tricky and you can cause a lot of moisture related damage if you do it in the wrong way.
The house I live in, like everyone's in my street, is from the late 1800s. Insulating those houses from the outside is very expensive, to the tune of 200k, where the house is worth around 500k in the inflated environment we're in. At the very same time, I haven't found a single insurance company willing to insure the house after insulation for insulation related moisture damage.
This makes insulating this house an absurdly bad financial decision, since once you have moisture damage in any part of this material, you can basically demolish most of the walls since it soaks like a sponge.
Mind you, I have not started going into the pitfalls of the legality of even touching a house this old in Germany, where you have to deal with "Denkmalschutz".
Insulating new construction and retrofitting insulation are two absolutely different things and barely have anything to do with each other from the cost-benefit ratio.
Absolutely, and the thing about old houses is that they've evolved to keep moisture and ventilation in check without access to modern tech. Modern tech, as you point out, usually makes things worse.
My house in Sweden is from the 1950's and I still had to be _very_ mindful when adding insulation. The best thing I've found is cellulose-based insulation, basically shredded newspapers lined with salts and pressed to sheets. The can buffer a lot of moisture without developing mold.
Same here in Spain. But in this climate I don't need insulation anyway.. My energy costs are 60 euro a month in winter and 30 in summer. No point even trying to insulate.
In addition to what was already said, there definitely is and has been many moisture issues on walls and exteriors in new construction. A condo building near me had to have its exterior completely torn off, and lots of sheathing, insulation, cladding, etc replaced due to a botched install of EIFS. Google for “EIFS failures.” This was a big problem in the 80s/90s or so but apparently it’s still happening, at least with subpar builders.
Because they use a dual layer construction with an air gap between the inner an outer walls. This gives space for condensation to occur and evaporate again without effecting the living space.
In old buildings with solid walls you can get condensation on the walls that will evaporate because the living space is heated and we'll ventilated. If you clad that wall in insulation you can prevent the evaporation which leads to damp problems.
Depending on the climate zone, up to half the insulation may be mandated to be on the outside (behind some kind of cladding (brick, stucco, siding) to protect it from UV and bulk water).
Per the above article, by having the outside be insulation, your interior structure is kept warmer, and so condensation is less likely to occur.
Do a search for "Joseph Lstiburek" and "Matt Risinger", who have lots of articles and videos on building science.
Old constructions are diffusion open, meaning moisture can move freely in and out of it. New constructions are diffusion closed, meaning you have a steam barrier on the inside which blocks the moist indoors air from traveling into the walls. This however requires an airtight house and mechanical ventilation.
In the U.K. the people who want renewables tend to be under 40s that can’t afford to buy a house. Those that actively don’t want renewables tend to own their own home and may have a couple the let out.
There's a very obvious paper trail of people not wanting renewables.
As the article notes this price decline was predictable decades ago, but you can't really blame people for being dubious about predictions. Maybe the people who got it right were just lucky.
But since real actual installed wind and solar became cheaper a while ago, the people still openly arguing against renewables slide ever close to cartoon supervillain status.
People thinking renewables wouldn't be cheaper aren't people who don't want renewables. Why would they even get a mention?.
I'm not convinced enough people know that renewables are cheaper to make the latter claim you're making. For example, in some places as soon as renewables come online they get priority access to demand, and other fuel sources get the leftovers. That's still a subsidy, just by another name. So I don't know if they are cheaper.
Finally, the point about renewables isn't only cost, it's also reliability. The subsidy I just mentioned falsely obviates the need for renewables to be reliable from a cost perspective, but that doesn't mean that needing a high base load (and higher the more we move to electric vehicles) isn't the most important thing to supply.
And none of that is about people "not wanting renewables".
'That's still a subsidy, just by another name. So I don't know if they are cheaper.'
yeah, but fossil fuels get subsidies of all sorts, not just polluting for free, but even things like leaving the british taxpayer to pickup the bill for cleaning up old infrastructure they no longer need
I see. The Green movement is globally all powerful, and you explain away the fact that the world is still not a Green utopia by saying the Green movement isn't actually Green. This is awesome mental gymnastics!
The alternate explanation is that nuclear is a sick technology, and the Green movement is not responsible for its failure. Nuclear was so weak even a group as feckless as the Greens could have success against it.
Greenpeace etc have long protested against nuclear, and have boogeymanned their way into the public consciousness on this topic. It's conceivably set us back decades and released millions of extra tons of CO2 in the process.
A classic correlation/causation confusion. Yes, Greenpeace complained about fission. No, that doesn't mean they caused fission's failure.
If there's many billions of dollars in value to be created, that will trump anything a NGO can whine about. That's why we're still burning so much fossil fuel. Nuclear was vulnerable because it wasn't creating value.
I'm not against them, but I think they should not be specially subsidised. Just pay what ever the market rate at the moment is. If it is not enough to cover investment too bad.
Will absolutely all of the externalities of mining, manufacturing and transport then be also applied to renewables?
Also, maybe if there is any risk of damage to surroundings like with hydro batteries there would be need to deposit amount of money that covers them fully.
Yes, they should. Otherwise we'll just drown in a hot sea of shit, only 50 years down the line. Everything needs to be sustainable, kind of by definition.
But as with any problem, let's first start with the stuff causing the damage.
Let's get oil and gas and coal to pay for EVERY negative externality.
You wrote: <<Just pay what ever the market rate at the moment is.>>
This is positive ridiculous. Are you serious in 2022? Your electricity is surely mostly sourced from hydrocarbons. Are you paying "true cost"? Surely not. If electricity was suddenly twice the cost due to carbon costs (which is probably the true environmental cost), you would be shouting from your windows to build more solar panels and wind turbines.
Rich corporate liberals are into trans rights, keeping abortion, etc. but they arent keen on new housing either. It puts a dent in their property portfolios.
Some people call these people "the left", I suppose, in which case yea they're not much keener on new housing than the rich corporate conservatives.
Theres also an element by which it is driven by high prices and loss aversion. A new homeowner with a $300k house and a 95% mortgage is gonna locally fight anything that drives up supply and drives them into negative equity even if their sympathies do trend left. Nobody fights new development as hard when prices are lower, which is probably partly why NY's strictest rent control (which drives down prices) coincided with the fastest building in the 60s.
And new housing, .. but not built in their neighborhoods. Oh, and don't build over farmland or undeveloped green spaces.
Without being snarky, the problem here is that there is a tension between what people believe in general, and what they believe about their situations specifically, especially when they have an incentive to feel the opposite way about it. For example, people may know (or believe) that building duplexes and apartments in their neighborhoods will reduce their property values, or "ruin the character of the neighborhood" and so oppose them.
Private property developers simply dont want to build affordable housing. The margins are just lower than they are for luxury housing. Who would choose to make 4% profit when you could make 20?
They do lobby hard to remove building regulations in the name of building more affordable housing but they never actually build it unless local government actively forces them to with some of those regulations they hate, at which point they build the bare minimum and install a poor door.
They're always going to build the highest margin product for which there is demand. You're not going to get cheap housing until there is abundance. It's simple supply and demand.
It's not super expensive, really. And this is something that building codes can address - either via the gentle option of requiring all newly built dwellings to be thermally efficient, or the somewhat more assertive route of requiring any home sold to have adequate insulation.
better insulation is not cheap and therefore not everyone can afford to do it. Also the same people who want renewables are usually opposed to building new housing so there's that.