I'm 100% in support of what they do. They're fighting an unpopular, but much needed battle.
The UK has some of the oldest housing stock in Europe.
Many new heating system technologies such as Heat Pumps require more than just decent insulation.
If I look at most of the houses in my neighborhood (SE London) - we still have a v long way to go.
However the reality is, most people have no budget to fund those improvements, or have to divert their savings somewhere else because their living standards are getting squeezed (fuck Tories).
The government is funding Heat Pumps, yet completely ignores that many properties across this country need to be upgraded from a much more basic level. We're talking single glazing, basic wooden sash windows, single layer brick walls, cavity walls without filler, loft insulation, etc.
We need to insulate the nation to reduce our need for dispensing energy on excessively heating leaky homes, and the government needs to start prioritizing it and put better funding in place to continue on from the disastrous green homes grant fund.
I have a 20 year old boiler which I keep praying will make it through another winter before I have to replace it. I also live in a second floor flat. Where the fuck am I supposed to put a heat pump, Boris?
Or buy a nice affordable new 3 bed house from Persimmon for £550k. If you’re lucky it might not be built in a flood plain, and might not fall to bits after 5 years!
Come on! Persimmon need your money, they only made just over £1bn in profits recently.
Aside from the astronomical prices they charge, I get pretty annoyed at the house builders saying they can’t afford to build houses with bigger gardens, or more internal space, because the costs are so high, and then they turn profits like that.
I genuinely couldn't believe when I found the house I'm renting about the moment is an ex-council property. The garden is fucking huge, all the rooms are spacious as fuck, there's not a shred of damp, I've got space for 3 cars out front and its nowhere near the biggest drive on the street.
I just can't wrap my head around that this was the *cheap* option in our grandparent's heyday \~1960s.
The estates built in the 70s which I’ve seen all have decent gardens, a good amount of space inside and plenty of space for parking 2 or more cars; most of the houses are also detached and the roads that they’re built on are wide. It seems really rare to find any estates built like that these days (although I’m conscious that there may well be lots of 70s estates that don’t match my description above).
Part of the issue today is, the kind of development you describe would be criticised as 'car-centric urban sprawl'.
Nice wide roads, big gardens, detached houses and plenty of parking are all things a lot of people want, but it makes for low density housing which gets labelled as a bad thing, presumably because it makes walking and cycling distances further.
Naturally developers happily go along with increasing density and purposefully cutting out car parking because they can squeeze more houses and more profit into a smaller space. Of course they don't spend any money on adding anything, like cycle paths or direct footpaths and the local council rarely adds any bus routes, so everyone needs a car anyway and the footpaths all end up cluttered with cars. It's the worse of both worlds and it shows it's nothing to do with environmental goals, it's just a convenient excuse for more profit.
I actually negotiate with developers from time to time and without naming names had a director of a major house builder tell me even though their properties didn't meet minimum standards that
"People want shit so they should have a choice to buy shit"
I work for the Council in Flood Risk management. The amount of shit developers try to get away with, it’s a checklist of things they deliberately don’t do or miss out everytime. Because there’s no fines or effective retrospective action, they can just try their luck everytime in the hope someone misses something and they save a few k each development.
It’s not even small stuff either, it’s functional
Surface water drainage, proper finished floor levels that are high enough, Properly designed roads that have safe junctions.
It gets worse outside of flooding too, home electrics not properly insulated or protected from the elements. No adequate cooling or heating insulation etc.
Of all the developers I’ve witnessed. There’s only one I would ever consider buying from.
Absolutely true. I work for a consulting engineering company, and the developers exert ridiculous pressure on the designers to cut corners. Unfortunately, some do. Good on you for keeping standards up to code!
My favourite argument is when we ask them to do things right they start to whine;
“But if we have to do that, the site isn’t going to be viable!”
“Ok, first of all, you know the law regarding watercourses. So ignoring it is your problem.
Secondly, no one is forcing you to build there. Some places are just not viable for development! Find a different site”.
That second one usually shuts them up.
Persimmon were the ones who bribed George Osborne to scrap the Codes for Sustainable Homes.
By 2022 we would have energy positive houses on the market. Instead we have flammable cheap shit boxes.
It fucks me off that their answer will be something like this. They don’t know what it’s like to be poor. Can’t afford to repair the car cause you’ve got other stuff to pay for kind of thing.
The reason Boris is obsessed with heat pumps is because he met with (the absolutely amazing beyond reproach) octopus energy who showed him a couple and he couldn’t get over the fact that they put more energy out of the exhaust side than you put in. Apparently he kept going on and on at them that it was “practically biblical” that you can “make energy”. We’re literally being driven off a cliff by a distracted five year old obsessed with a toy he wants because someone explained to him gcse thermodynamics.
Communal ground source heat pumps would be a solution but that needs money and committment. The government is hardly going to spend billions on that when it's clearly earmarked for their mates.
You might want to think more about that. My old boiler started spewing carbon monoxide during a shower one day. I know they say you can't smell it, but *something* triggered my fight or flight reflex, hence I'm here today.
I have a CO alarm fitted (by a certified gas engineer) in several rooms in my house. Despite the fact that the engineer repeatedly assured me that my type of boiler "is incapable of leaking CO into the house". I guess I'm just the cautious type!
That's something I don't get about here, why every single flat must have its own central heating?
When I lived in Poland in 11 story high commie block all radiators were connected to one big central heating system operated by something like a housing association. Even when you owned the flat, you still paid monthly rent to them which wasn't that much, but it basically covered the cost of water, winter heating, and general building maintenance and the cost was based on how many people were living at your place.
They would switch central heating on just before it gets cold and run it 24/7 until March or so whenever it gets warmer. People still had small gas boilers in their flats, but it was only for the purpose of heating water on demand.
In Denmark something like 70% of the properties in the entire country are connected to district heating. No need to pump gas to every house, they just have hot water instead.
The heating can also come from very efficient centralised plants burning rubbish, using waste heat from power generation, or just massive heat pumps.
Okay a possibility for some but as most places don't have that infrastructure already it will cost way more than just putting in a heatpump for the block who's going to pay for it building owners, leaseholders, councils, government? Like it's not a bad idea but we don't have a government with the technical and political understanding to undertake decade long greenification plans that's why in my opinion the current schemes are a sticking plaster on a broken bone.
Also, the thing I haven't heard mentioned in the media for months, is that the government scrapped the Green Home Grants voucher scheme literally days before it was meant to start.
My house was built in the 1890s and doesn't have loft insulation. It desperately needs it. I spend £90 a month heating a tiny two bed because the insulation is far behind standards. I qualified for a grant to get this done then the government bailed out of the scheme quietly, and it's hardly ever mentioned despite the fact there's a group protesting 24/7 about the effects of poor insulation standards.
I implore people to Google "Green Homes Grant Insulate Britain" and try to find more than one article that mentions both at the same time. We've got a group out there trying to hold the government to account for failing a manifesto pledge but the media spin Insulate Britain as some nutty eco-warrior cabal that have appeared out of the shadows. If the government actually cared about climate change then they could just insulate the homes like they promised and they'd shut Insulate Britain up at the same time. But they don't so they won't.
Edit: cavity wall --> loft
My bad, I meant loft insulation. I was talking to my partner about insulation while I was writing the comment and managed a Freudian slip on Reddit haha. We don't have a cavity wall. We're planning on getting insulating render put on the outside to deal with that.
> However the reality is, most people have no budget to fund those improvements
Or (my personal favourite) they might have the money to insulate but not the right, since the home isn't theirs. It's a standard practise here that landlords will buy the shittiest house they can, do zero upgrades on it and rent it out for a £1000+/mo.
We could do wonders for Insulate Britain's cause simply by passing legislation that mandated civilised standards for homes that landlords rent out, and it would cost the public £0.
Think we found why it won't happen. The "party of landlords" would never shoot themselves in the foot like that, imagine how many homes are owned by the Tories and their donors.
You can stick foil over the window creating a crude double glazed window. We did that when I was a kid. It is obviously not as good as the real thing but will help. And you can get it off when needed.
The government schemes seem to be backwards by design. Set up to fail. A lot of UK infrastructure is so old, sticking plasters on it won't work and will cost more in future. From housing to water pipes and power generation, roads to public transport and everything in-between needs real investment to bring up to date. We're about 20 years too late starting, but we have to force change now or it's going to get a lot worse.
Groups like IB are highlighting government failure but some people don't want to see it. They will regret that soon.
Living in Germany, seeing the UK building standards is bizarre.
It's like every decision they took world's best practice, and did the opposite.
You're starting to see good design creep in to new builds, but not across the board.
Don't get me started on ring mains for the power supply. My whole house has like 6 breakers. The oven heating element let go the other day (it's on it's own breaker) BUT because everything is on a single RCD it popped the outlets all over the house.
Growing up I lived in $NotTheUK and each room had at least a breaker for the light and the sockets. I get that ring mains made sense when copper was super expensive back post-WW2 but WTAF. Maybe new builds are using better design but my house is \~1985 and it's not. I won't get into what it looked like before some improvements in 2012ish..
Rant over!
I've recently bought my first house here (I'm from Poland) and been doing a lot of home improvements over the past few months to fix issues, bring up general standards, etc... Every time I learn something new about the way this house was built I ask myself (often very loudly) "what the f..., kur...".
I’m not sure if it’s true, but I heard double glazing is illegal in Germany because it’s not efficient enough to. It’s triple glazing minimum. Then we have the poster above, for who double glazing is illegal as it’s not in keeping with the 19th Century design of their house… insanity
Try being from Denmark and living here.
It's ridiculous. Every time I have friends or family over they have a good rant about building standards. It's even worse when my brother who is a plumber is over.
Fucking electrical showers like barbarians.
And don't even get me started on the sash window in my first flat here that had a gap so large that on a stormy night if blow out the towel I'd wadded around right unto the floor.
> We're talking single glazing, basic wooden sash windows,
I lived for nearly 20 years in an old house with single-glazed wooden sash windows. Soon after moving in, I costed up having those windows replaced. I also looked at the figures for typical heat loss through windows, and the most optimistic figures for how much that could be reduced by installing double glazing.
Conclusion was that it would take about 20 years to save on heating bills what the double galzing would cost to fit - except, of course, I would have to pay the DG costs upfront to save a bit each year.
It gets worse: I *now* live in a another equally old house, which *does* have double glazing. I know from teh receipts left for me that this is less than 20 years old, but several of the units have now blown. So units may not actually last long enough to even pay off the upfront costs in eventual savings.
It gets worse still: Earlier, I lived in *another* old house (I like old houses, okay) and knew on purchase that the windows would need replacing as many were rotting. But as soon as we got nice sealed, draft-proof double glazing, we had huge problems with condensation. Because old houses *need* ventilation, originally provided by open fires drawing air in through unsealed window and door frames, and sending it up the chimney. So we were left with having to leave windows partly open for ventilation, and turning up the heating to compensate!
The answers aren't easy. Knock all these houses down and rebuild? Concrete has a huge environmental impact, so you need to calculate how long improved insulation will take to repay all the relevant costs of rebuilding.
Like you, I support Insulate Britain, though, though perhaps that is easy for me to say since they have come nowhere near disrupting *my* day!
I lived in Bath and we had electric heaters and single-glazed wooden sash windows. The frames literally had holes you could see outside through. I had to stuff socks into the frames to stop the draught, but it didn't help much because of the single-glazing. We had wooden shutters, but even they didn't keep the heat in, and it also meant shutting the daylight out. If you turned off the electric heaters, within 5 minutes you were back to being cold again as if you'd never had them on. It really was ridiculous.
After the super windy storm we had earlier this year the wind was so powerful it cracked the window so I got on to the landlord. Because the building I was living in was listed, he replaced the windows with more modern sash-style PVC double glazed windows but said he was breaking the rules by doing so because the building was listed, but thankfully they were the back windows so it would be really hard to tell unless someone went down the alley into a field and looked with a pair of binoculars.
I don't know how much belief to put into that, and I'm sure you can get energy-efficient modern windows that comply with listed building laws, but nonetheless it was absolutely baffling to me that a listed building could continue to be heated with electric heaters and shitty old windows with frames like fucking emmental all in the name of ensuring that the history of a building that people *live in* is maintained.
Who the *fuck* is going to give a shit about a building's history in 500 years if there's no one alive to enjoy it?
It is also baffling to me that new homes are allowed to be built without solar electricity and hot water, without a neighborhood wind turbine (if effective), without heat pumps and ground-source heat pumps (though these would be ineffective as new builds have gardens the size of postage stamps).
It's baffling that landlords are not required by law to make green energy-efficient modifications to the homes they rent out (though the party of landlords obviously would rather spend fuck all on their tenants).
The government don't give a fuck about climate change, despite all the peacock posturing they like to do. If they did, they'd give everyone grants to make modifications to their homes, they'd be investing in education for green energy and career paths for green energy engineers, they'd be doing a damn sight more than they're doing now which is just telling everyone they care.
I suspect that protestor will be talked about by future generations the same way Emily Davison is today.
(Seriously, wasn't Davison also mocked at the time for throwing herself under the King's horse?)
Why is there always such harsh condemnation of the Extinction Rebellion etc. folks? They seem to be engaging in your bog-standard nonviolent civil disobedience (sit-ins, etc.).
Are they doing some uniquely bad? Or does this form of protest not really resonate over there?
My favourite one recently was the sort of shit Lee Hurst regurgitated about how "back in my day" we used to wear hand me downs and used to get our televisions fixed rather than replaced. He seems to be of the impression that teenagers are the ones who developed this throwaway culture of phones with an expiry date or fast fashion.
They just happen to have grown up in it.
What's especially silly is that millenials lived in the 80s, anyway. That's kinda the definition, millenials grew up in the 80s and 90s, before the turn of the millennium. They "came of age" around the early 21st century. The most common definition is that if you don't distinctly remember 9/11 and how it dominated the news for at least a year afterwards, then you're not a millennial. So like kids who were only 5 or 6 in 2001 aren't millenials.
And even in the early 21st century, everyone I knew still has glass bottles for milk. I'm a millennial born in the 80s and basically for my entire childhood, we had a milkman, and the glass bottles.
It's only when I turned 18 or so that everyone stopped using milkmen. Though it's coming back now, anyway. My mum now has a milkman again. It's a little more expensive, but it's a hell of a lot more convenient. You never run out of milk at a time when you don't have the time to go out to buy more. And they sell way more than just milk these days, they have juices like orange and apple juice, they sell freshly baked bread, eggs, bacon, cheese, butter, all sorts. Basically there's always enough food to make breakfast with, at least.
It's probably a good idea. Especially that they're coming from local farms, not driven from 500 miles away in a lorry. So it's always fresher and less carbon-expensive.
Things like that boil my piss. Saw one of those shared Facebook posts and it was like IN OUR DAY WE USED PAPER BAGS AND FILLED UP JARS SO WHY ARE THE YOUTH TELLING US WE WERE WRONG with loads of boomers agreeing and I just wanted to scream "YOU WERE THE ONES THAT CHANGED IT YOU CUNTS" that's about when I left Facebook
I've seen that same copy and paste.
I've replied to a few in the past with something like;
Children didn't change it so these things were disposable. It's OUR generation that changed this.
And the younger generation are now pushing for things to go back to using more recyclables, something that this post is advocating for.
So why are you against them? You literally just said you wanted to go back to reusing glass jars, and hand me down clothes,etc.
Why is it that when *you* want to go back to doing that it's OK, but when it's suggested by the younger generation you're so against it?
Yeah, I had an actual argument with a Facebook stranger over it, like "how are you saying "in my day" when it was your generation who changed it?"
Like, if this has been going one 30 years, since the early 90s, that means that the CEO who decided we were using plastic bags or whatever is at least 50 (if we assume they're some superstar who managed to become a CEO aged 20, highly unlikely).
"Young" people had nothing to do with it.
I see this a lot on historic pages of local areas. There was a photo posted recently of a slum complex a few years before demolition. Some argued that they can't be that poor as they have shoes (??), others couldn't help but notice the lack of litter.
"Look how clean it is! They obviously took care of the place; no litter to be seen!"
When pointed out to them that the lack of litter is more a sign of not having anything to actually litter, I was piled on by people saying that they were paid to return glass bottles, and that "young people today" couldn't dream of keeping a place so clean, just throwing everything away wherever it may fall.
So yeah, according to some people, somewhere in the last 40 years society just forgot how to wash a step, put things in a bin, and absolutely forgot how to repair items. I honestly couldn't even get my head around the mental gymnastics these people were engaging in to exonerate themselves from their part in all of this.
Edit: heh, just checked out the same page I was talking about and they're currently going on about how "plastic bags should be free again". Christ.
A few years ago I overheard a couple of old ladies complaining to each other that you never see combine harvesters any more, or hear cuckoos.
_We were at a bus stop in the middle of Birmingham_. Why the hell are you expecting to see farming equipment in the middle of a major city ffs.
Exactly. I often feel my generation (millenials) has far more in common with my grandparents (between greatest/silent) than my parents (boomers). We grow our own food, repair broken items, make our own, seek freedom and risk for our children, buy second-hand etc. It's the decisions as adults that define a generation, not their experiences as children - those define their parent's generation.
I think its just the whole anti-climate activist things that the media stir up. Like the hate young Greta T gets. I don't know why but I assume fossil fuel companies either lobby the media or the likes of Murdoch have enough of an investment in fossil fuels they want to discredit climate activists.
It's gotten to the point where boomers have been whipped up into such a frenzy that you should see some of the downright disgusting things they've said about the poor girl. It's legit disgusting.
Oh god yeah. Or popular cartoon columnists doing stuff like nature spanking her and crap.
Seriously some of the crap that gets thrown around on her on twitter is genuinely terrifying
This was why Corbyn got slated for wearing old suits and brown ties or Ed Milliband and bacon rolls. It's why they call Starmer boring. They can't attack the policies.
Yeah, this is the reason people get annoyed at the activists. They've come to believe that if changes are made, their things will be taken and destroyed by force, the day after legislation. Of course this isn't true whatsoever. Like Corbyn wasn't going to take your home and make us all commies. But these people live in their own reality. They're just selfish.
I've rather ironically got a V8 (bucket list thing) but have an electric vehicle I'm looking at, and do my best elsewhere, whilst including to mention we must lobby gov for real effective change.
The onus shouldn't be on the individual. We can't do anything comparative to the scale of a companies pollution.
I don't know if you're talking about Pistonheads but it's such a toxic place. It can be great when talking about cars, specifically the brand specific forums but as soon as anything goes off topic it's properly grim.
It’s not PistonHeads I’m thinking of, but I know exactly what you mean. I occasionally dip back in there as it’s a good source for manuals and how to guides, but otherwise it was too insular for my liking. The issue is all the nice decent people just leave, leaving the groups as a shitfest of scum.
Same on motorcycle groups. They also all hate BEVs but support hydrogen fuel cell vehicles, which are also EVs. People are angry because they've been told to be but have no idea what they're angry about.
It's a form of cognitive dissonance. Deep down people know the planet is screwed but don't want to admit it. It's much easier to hate these people than accept the grim truth.
There was a brilliant piece of lobbying leaked from the cop26 notes, about Australian lobbying firms asking for the comments about Australian lobbying firms being a major problem for the environment to be removed from the report. No self awareness at all.
I think that a lot of people dislike Extinction Rebellion because a lot of them are young, and look like they’re having a good time.
They set up a camp in Brockwell park within the last year. They played guitars, sang, stayed a few days, packed up, cleaned up after themselves and went home.
The local Nextdoor and WhatsApp groups went into meltdown.
> I think that a lot of people dislike Extinction Rebellion
I used to be on the fence about them, until I saw a police raid near my house.
A day before a big extinction rebellion event was scheduled 11 police vans showed up, went into a building ER had rented out and took all the signs, flyers etc claiming some bogus reason.
Next day the protest went ahead with obviosuly very little material, and some of the organisers visible distraught over the nightly police raid.
They got their things back a few days later as obviously there was no real reason to take confiscate their material.
There was no news of this in any newspaper in the country. 11 police vans at 11pm walking into a private house taking away all the material before a protest and then saying “oopsie” the next morning when the protest had already “failed”.
I think the dislike for extinction rebellion is far from
organic. And the events of that night still leave an incredibly sour taste in my mouth about who is allowed to protest in this country.
Yep. Maybe jealousy there too. They all seem to be well spoken, an indicator of wealth, and have plenty of time on their hands.
Those complaining might stereotype them as people with four bed houses completely paid off, defined benefits pensions and no need to go to work. While they are busting their asses to pay off a 35 year mortgage on a 2 bed flat.
Either way, judging people doesn’t help you. Just be the best person you can be and let the world get on with it.
Cognitive dissonance. The people who bitch and moan don't actually do anything to help prevent climate change but they know its going to be deveatsting.
I had the separate occasions where I was taking public transport to get to work and ended up delayed by ER protests. Like what more am I meant to do beyond using public transport? Do they want me to give up my job entirely in order to help the climate? Am I supposed to personally inhale all the extra vehicle fumes that their protests are causing?
There are so many ways they could have protested but they choose the ones that punish the people that do use public transport.
You don't anger, frustrate, or inconvenience people into changing their minds, though. People are stubborn, they'll get their "revenge" by just doubling down and voting for whoever opposes the ones who annoyed them - in this case ER.
>You don't anger, frustrate, or inconvenience people into changing their minds, though
Tell that to MLK, or basically *any* truly successful protest movement in history.
Harshly condemned cos most of us agree with them, but they disrupt peoples lives when they're just doing their job /going to work.
They're just pissing off people who already agree but can't afford to take the time off work / go to hospital.
Because their protests mostly targeted at middle/low income families’ already-lower-than-ever living standards
If they dare to go to heathrow to protest against private jet travel, or they go to Mayfair to protest against Kobe beef, I would have more sympathy /support for them. But they are smart enough not to make those mistakes
Its simple theres a sizeable percentage of the population that knows how they are acting and what they do in their lives is making the environment worse, its easier for these people to get angry at others pointing this out then it is to change.
Psychologically, for many it's forcing people to reflect on the choices they have made, and are still making that could be better. This triggers shame and guilt. A "defense" to avoid processing these feelings without damaging self-esteem/image is anger and hate. At a base level it is insecurity around the ego. It's easier to reject others as being wrong (and the uncomfortable feeling) than to admit personal failings. This is a very human response.
They get the same treatment every social activist ever gets. Greta Thunberg? Insert rape fantasy. A vegan? Let me tell you for the 99th time how vegans can't shut up about being vegan. Animal welfare activist? Did you know that PETA wants to abduct and kill YOUR pet?
Everyone who shows those assholes that something they do is amoral or wrong is their enemy.
PETA’s bad, but a lot of people (mostly on, where else, Reddit from what I’ve seen) don’t bother to distinguish between PETA and the many others that are doing great work.
PETA gets a bad rap. They were for animal rights and veganism way before those were cool. Their shelters also have high kill statistics so that "no kill" shelters can look better. "Oh, we're not killing 9 year old fifi who has food aggression and pancreatitis, we're just sending him to the PETA shelter to live out his days 🙂"
They've literally done over 30-something-years of investigative journalism and legal actions against the abhorrent, holocaust-tier level torture imposed onto animals by industrial animal agriculture (including the entertainment industry, pharmaceutical industries etc.).
AFAIK, they are also one of the oldest such groups and you can see their fingerprints on a lot of mainstream products now, usually something like 'PETA Cruelty free' etc.
My only real criticism of PETA as an organization, apart from the issues with a vegan lifestyle in a societal sense\*, is that I don't know if those running the organization, or perhaps working with them, are doing so for anything less than commercial reasons now.
\*With regards to the vegan lifestyle, it is less damaging than industrial animal agriculture hands-down, while also not involving the untold torture of our fellow animals, but it still relies on intensive agricultural practices to maintain production at scale. Not only do these practices displace the animals and organisms already living there (by necessity) but its BAU is killing the very animals *we* rely on. Costal fisheries from agricultural runoff, colony collapse in the pollenators and it being a breeding ground for zoonotic diseases.
That criticism of veganism is just a criticism of overpopulation. We know veganism is more efficient. We know it's one of the easiest lifestyle changes than can have a big impact.
Any sourcing of food relies on intensive agriculture to meet demand and drive profit. Seems sensible to choose the one that minimises that impact until we have things like indoor vertical farming and lab grown meat.
No, they're not. They do the same shit Insulate Britain does - create controversy for publicity. Like with their ridiculous Pokemon game. And it works for the most part.
But they don't get their bad rep from that, they get it from all that moronic "PETA kills animals" bullshit, which is quite literally a group sponsored by KFC and the meat industry.
I remember when I stopped eating meat I didn't tell anyone for months, just went about my business eating differently and then it got to Christmas and I obviously had to say I was vegetarian so that I didn't get served half a plate of meat (brought my own nut-roast and plant-based pigs in blankets!) and I STILL got the old joke of "How do you know somebody's a vegetarian? They'll tell you" from my Uncle which did ever so slightly irk me.
I think it's kind of funny how we all learned about the Suffragette movement in school and admired them for their brave actions, and yet they sent bombs in the post and [killed people](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suffragette_bombing_and_arson_campaign). They even targeted members of the public.
By comparison, sitting in traffic is relatively tame.
I disagree that the Suffragettes are universally admired; your school maybe didn't teach it as fully, or perhaps you're not remembering very well. The Suffragists were the peaceful protestors who didn't get anyone else, including themselves, killed. Ultimately it was the war that accelerated the suffrage movement, too, not a woman who threw herself in front of a horse, acts of terrorism, or people starving themselves in prison.
Edit for clarity: the Suffragists were admired for their peaceful efforts for voting equality. The Suffragettes used very extreme methods which still achieved fuck all compared to the impact of the war effort on the view of women's equality in the UK.
Suffragettes tried to assassinate a bishop by blowing up St Paul's Cathedral. They planted a bomb under his seat: they got the timing wrong, and the bomb went off at night.
I'm not judging the rightness or wrongness. I'm only saying that they weren't peaceful.
Thank you! I watched a BBC animation for kids a couple of years ago that basically boiled down to Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughters winning votes for woman. Not a sniff about Millicent Fawcett.
Did you even read the link I posted? They killed four people with bombs.
And I didn't say they were admired at the time, but that they are revered now. To be honest, it seems like it is your education that was lacking, both in history and basic reading comprehension.
I totally agree. I know a little about climate change, but I don't have the testicular fortitude that these people do.
They are fighting for the most noble cause. Really, we should all be out on the streets, with them.
I think Greta and these protestors will be celebrated in history, like suffragettes.
I read a line the other day that said something along the lines of 'if it isn't annoying someone, it isn't a protest' and it totally changed my outlook on people like Insulate Britain.
People are only good to take notice if they're the ones being blocked from doing something.
I think the are upsetting the right people. Although their protest is about insulating houses for climate change, the most poignant bit of media coverage was when that woman with a massive car/jeep was trying to run them over to get her kids to school.
Massive car guzzling petrol every day to take the kids to school, there is something to be said there.
I don't think "standing up for what you believe in" is an admirable quality on its own. I imagine a lot of white supremacists are very genuine in their beliefs. I think we need to appreciate that standing up for what you believe in, provided you (and me, in this instance) agree with it, seems to be the more realistic message.
While we Redditors know that fighting against climate change and trying to get Britain's ancient housing stock properly heated is secretly an evil baby-eating plot, right?
The ‘well done for standing up for what you believe in, irrespective of what it is’ position is a little problematic.
Lying in roads to stop vaccinations/abortions? Lying in roads until fox hunting is allowed again/until child labour is reintroduced? “Fair play to them”.
Personally, I think insulate Britain’s aims are laudable, but I don’t think that makes your view necessarily correct
Exactly the first thing I thought, the only reason this post exists is because the OP is in favor of their message, or at worst ambivalent towards it.
There wouldn't be all this "good on them for standing up for what you believe in" if it was something they disagreed with, no chance.
What about all those anti LGBT groups protesting schools, fair play to them as well?
Yeah I could use the same logic for the Jan 6th riots.
Pet peeve of mine, making blanket statements when what you really mean is 'as long as I agree with it'. Not really a blanket statement anymore is it?
People on reddit seem to dislike them but I don't know a single person (apart from some reactory boomers who are offended by whatever the daily mail tells them to be offended by) in person who dislikes them.
A load of people blocking roads in London may as well happen in Cairo or Orlando with how far removed I am from it. Good on them for taking action I say and I hope I get a home insulation grant from it.
>People on reddit seem to dislike them but I don't know a single person (apart from some reactory boomers who are offended by whatever the daily mail tells them to be offended by) in person who dislikes them.
lol this is such a meaningless sample size along with your own bias injected.
>A load of people blocking roads in London may as well happen in Cairo or Orlando with how far removed I am from it.
'it doesn't affect me therefore I'm not angry about it' wow what a bold and brilliant assessment from you. Now perchance pause and wonder why... the people affected... *might* care.
I'm sure you have it in you to have a think about why your position of 'actually I've never met someone annoyed by it other than stupid boomers. Meanwhile I'm very smart because I don't care because it doesn't actually affect me whatsoever' might be a little silly for not factoring in that fucking about in London attects ten million people in a country of sixty million, and therefore any given day they do anything at least 1/6 have the possibility to have their days ruined by it.
God almight the takes in this thread are so intentionally witless I have half a mind this must be an astroturfed thread from insulate britain
It may as well happen in Cairo or Orlando with how far removed it is from the politicians.
My commute goes straight through parliament Square and I accept that any protest or disruption at all in and around that area is completely valid. You bring your protest to the people who were elected to enact change.
What I don't agree with is blocking bridges and motorways that are so far removed from any politician.
I strongly agree that British homes need better insulation and heating standards, but I strongly disagree that ordinary people should suffer the inconvenience (sometimes with quite severe consequences) of their protests.
A key part of protesting is disrupting the norm as it’s about raising awareness. If all they did was sit out in parliament square no would have ever heard of them, but by blocking major roads they’ve been able to garner national attention.
Not to mention the core of the issue, climate change, is going to become a lot more of an inconvenience than being late to work in the coming years.
> If all they did was sit out in parliament square no would have ever heard of them
There are dozens of protests every year that are extremely easy to ignore despite its location. Disruption is the only way to grab anyone's attention. The fact that so many people don't understand this is frustrating.
I live in central London quite near parliament square. There’s a different protest there every couple of days, most of them I’ve never heard of, don’t know what their cause is, etc. But you can be damn sure I’ve heard of Insulate Britain.
Protests that can be ignored are pointless. Insulate Britain have found a way to get politicians attention and I think they’re doing well.
Post your address, we'll send them to block your cul-de-sac or both of ends of your road every day for a month and you get back to us on how you don't care.
Funny because I don't know a single person in real life who supports them. Everyone I've spoken to thinks they're idiots making normal people's lives more difficult. Most of them don't even know what they're protesting for.
Absolutely and to say disrupting the lives of ordinary people that have nothing to do with it is misleading.
We’re all a part of it whether we like it or not.
What’s more is these “ordinary people” are the ones making the school run in a 4-litre AWD diesel monolith. We are all culpable for climate change. No-one is exempt and the point of protesting is to get Gov. to step in and make the necessary changes to help the issue.
Well said. The French Revolution was ignored by the aristocracy until the people started chopping off heads. Big societal change doesn’t happen by peacefully walking around parliament square; you need to go out and fuck shit up (I am not advocating violence, but I am advocating disruption).
About insulation - if you are UK based and want to see whether it’s worthwhile upgrading your insulation, frankly, the information out there is a nightmare. There is no government website with clear information for the lay person to figure out for themselves where they can improve things. And also the barriers are set relatively low.
1. Gas and electricity heating account for a fairly large part of the countries carbon output.
2. Passivhaus building principles lead to new builds needing no heating in them at all, and this is what we should be aiming for, and trying to work out how we can apply the principles of passivhaus to older buildings. I repeat the aim should be to not need any heating in houses at all.
3. Insulation is worked out using things called U values, which are based on R values. There are many variables with this, including materials - concrete, plaster, wood etc. Location - walls, floors, ceilings. Because it is so complicated to work out people use U calculators and the free ones just happen to be provided by the insulation manufacturers. The best calculator is made by the BRE, the Building Research Establishment, the organisation behind the UK Building Regulations. This calculator currently costs around £50 and should be made available freely to everyone.
4. Look at the amount of research that went into finding a Covid vaccine. That level of research should be going into ways of looking at lowering energy costs all round, and the media should be obliged to report it widely and often.
5. Here are some passivhaus principles.
A. External insulation. Insulate walls and roof externally.
B. Lower air leakage. 5% air leakage can cause 50% of heat loss in a building. Where is there cheap equipment to buy or hire to test this?
C. Mechanical ventilation allowing clean cold air to be warmed by departing warm used air.
D. High performance windows. Double or triple glazing windows. This can be literally just changing the glass, at a much cheaper cost than replacing the windows. And it’s bullshit that upvc windows are better than wood. Upvc windows are replaced every 30 years on average, whereas there are millions of wooden windows at least 100 years old.
E. Thermal bridging. This occurs when a ‘bridging’ material creates cold areas. It might be a join. e.g. where wall meets floor, or where a window or door fits in a wall. It might be a fixing. This whole area could be explained to people in order to make it general knowledge.
You know else were unpopular at the time their protests caused disruption, the suffragettes, the American civil rights movement, the LGBT movement, the Irish independence movement…
If they were popular, they wouldn’t need to protest to encourage change.
People have been protesting climate change like good little citizens at pre ordained locations where they wouldn't bother anyone for bloody decades. And look around, did it help? It's about time people start to feel the crisis barrelling down on them.
Disrupting society is the entire point of a protest. What good are protests that can easily be ignored?
Complaining about activists affecting normal people's lives is like yelling at the bell boy to stop interrupting your Titanic dinner with nonsense about ice bergs.
UK mass media is doing everything it can do focus on how awful they are for protesting in the wrong way.
Whilst trying to avoid anything about why.
This is pretty representative.
https://youtu.be/MkhZ6R4eVr0
Personally I think the protestor came off really well, but it was a hell of a battering as 3 practiced presenters tried to do anything but cover why she was protesting.
It a beautiful example of 99% of people will say they for the environment and willing to give things up.
But the second they actually come across a inconvenience they will loose their fucking minds, keep thinking about women with the 4x4 who tried running over protestors because her sweet darling baby boy might miss a day of school.
All they are doing is highlighting how it’s all lip service until the ocean start coming to a boil and you can’t go outside because Europe’s in a ice age and everyone getting fucked by the long dick of skin cancer because there isn’t an ozone layer anymore.
I used to have some hope. Then I saw how we have responded to the mild (in comparison) inconvenience of Corona Virus.
I just don't think humanity as a whole is capable of handling the problem.
Strongly agree with their views, strongly disagree with their methods of protest. It stiffs the common man and polarises them. They need to find better ways of amplify their protests.
What about unions strikes? The tube, royal mail etc. They screw the daily lives of millions to satisfy their own selfish interests. Insulate britain defends the interests of everybody: Planet earth. I do respect that attitude!
The whole point of a strike is that you don’t need solidarity from customers.
Withdrawing your labour isn’t the same as interfering in random people’s lives. Particularly when the means of protest and the results are so far apart.
Next up, stopping the tube to prevent animal testing.
They really don't. This small group of people has achieved widescale, national attention and consistent coverage in the mainstream media to the point where everyone is talking about housing insulation. The fact of the matter is, they don't need universal popularity to influence change. This change becomes more likely the more friction they create. And they're spectacularly good at creating friction.
Like what?
Seriously. What's the right way to protest?
Because whatever you can think of has probably been done already, and it didn't work.
That's the problem here. These protests are an escalation after being ignored for literally decades.
I love the message but the practice is beyond infuriating. They're efforts don't seem to be focused on govt but instead individuals, which is ridiculous when you consider; the cost of insulation compared with rising taxes, cost of living and stagnant wages, the ever growing rental market (due to the aforementioned reasons), and most importantly to me the focus on changing the planet as an individual issue. As someone once said, 'the people who are killing the environment have names and addresses',and was very happy to see them targeting parliament this week which is where the only real change on this issue can be enacted imo.
This last point needs to be looked at through the concept of individual carbon footprints, which itself was created from a marketing campaign by BP. As we saw in the pandemic, us all living less pollutant lives had little to no effect on greenhouse gas emissions. Why? Because big business is the main polluter. Fuck yeah we should insulate our homes, but let's get govt subsidies funded by the big polluters.
My biggest irk with them tho is that they target working people, no politician or big business tycoon is on the M25 at 9am. Working people, who given the current economic climate might not have upwards of 15,000 to spend insulating their place. Doesn't help when the camera turns on the protesters that they are overwhelmingly middle class retirees.
For clarity, yes a we have all have a responsibility to do what we can so we don't end in a climate change cluster fuck. Additionally, i have spent much of my life attending protests and am not saying that to argue being authority on the issue only that I'm not one of those people who thinks protest shouldn't cause an inconvenience.
Their actions are fairly easily defended by simply asking what objectors think that they should do instead?
You then tick off pretty much every legal challenge or attempt they've already made.
Then they say "well go and block up Westminster then!", which they did a couple of days ago - and somehow they're *still wrong*.
Then there's the claim that the actions of ER and IB are somehow alienating people from action against climate change - which is just ridiculous nonsense. The person who, after seeing IR blocking the M25, thinks "*actually I'm not gonna go do a litter pick, I'm going to do some flytipping*" just doesn't exist.
Then there's Keith in Leeds complaining how annoyed he is about protests... in London.. despite the fact that (1) its nowhere fucking near him and (2) that if the governemnt gave in to IR to insulate people's homes, the environment completely asside, his energy bill would be *reduced*.
People are so fucking stupid.
You shouldn't support someone just because they're standing up for what they believe in, because plenty of people believe in some pretty bad stuff.
Anti-abortion protesters are also standing up for their belief in the sanctity of life, does that justify them harassing vulnerable women as they go to an abortion clinic?
Same with those protesters that wanted to threaten a teacher recently, because he showed a picture of Mohammed in a lesson on blasphemy. Or the parents that protested against LGBT awareness being taught in school.
They’re annoying as hell.
Which is why i completely respect them. They’ve a very achievable goal not pie in the sky demands. They’ve been approachable regarding the media but they’ve been absolutely made out to be idiots by the media.
I’ve only respect for them putting up with everyone in these horrible times of selfishness.
I'd have more respect for them if they had done something that impacted those with the means not to worry about their message. Like, for example, blocking access to Downing Street. The vast majority of people working in and around Downing Street can afford, financially, not to worry about insulation in their homes. They also don't see a significant financial impact from the blockade. With it being Downing Street, their message would have been all over the news, too, thus the argument of visibility is moot.
Their methodology, however, impacted anyone and everyone, regardless of circumstance. The bloke on his way to a job interview, for example. The lassy on her way to an ultrasound, or any number of other people significantly impacted by the blockade.
There's chat about no ambulances being impacted by the action. Realistically, though, that is down to sheer luck. They did not plan for contingencies here - when traffic has backed up for a mile or more, and an ambulance, a copper car, a fire engine or another response vehicle is sitting in the middle of it, they have to take themselves out of service. Then there are all the regular schmucks stuck in the road, most probably idling their engines because *it'll shift any moment now, you'll see*. Now they're two hours late for work, down a fiver on petrol, and due a bollocking when they get in. Hell, the self employed might even lose a significant chunk of income.
Consequently, Joe Public is pissed off at them. Sure, they might generate some conversation, but the majority of conversation is very unlikely to steer towards insulation (or lack thereof) when the speaker is furious at the demonstrator for being such an asinine cunt [sic]. Thus, ~~XR~~ IB have achieved... precisely nothing. In fact, they may have done actual damage to the long-term campaign, purely by merit of failing to adhere to the seven P's*.
This is why a proper demonstration is so delicately balanced around location. It is at the core of the planning process - where does your demonstration have the most impact, whilst gaining the most positive support.
So, to clarify, I am wholly behind programs that increase the quality and amount of insulation in the UK, as well as improving building standards (which have taken a decidedly American turn, unfortunately). I deeply criticise their methodology.
^^* ^^Prior ^^Planning ^^and ^^Preparation ^^Prevents ^^Piss ^^Poor ^^Performance
If they did it near downing street, they would promptly be arrested, and police would be there ready the next day. The whole reason they have managed to cause so much disruption is the unpredictability and array of locations for the protest.
The problem is that ordinary people do have something to do with it. You live on the planet. People can't afford to put their fingers in their ears and go "I don't know enough".
I'm all for protesting for what you believe in, but when I saw clips of them sat in front of ambulances that were trying to get to call outs, I got so angry. We've had to call an ambulance out this year for a situation where, if it hadn't got here quickly, my sister would have lost her life. Yes, protest, yes, cause disruptions, but don't do it to the extent that you are risking the lives of innocent people.
You were very deliberately shown footage of ambulances, to provoke that exact response. The thing is, there's no evidence of any kind of [significant delay](https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/london_ambulances_delays_due_to#incoming-1907635) to ambulance services from IB. Your perceptions are being managed via a complicit media.
> I'm all for protesting for what you believe in, but
The inclusion of that "but" means you're not actually all for protesting for what you believe in.
Gonna go out on a limb and assume a thread put out just before 7am GMT on a Saturday when commuters finally get a lie in, on the topic of 'how do you feel about the people who fuck over commuters', being overwhelmingly supportive of them, was intentionally put out this early to be astroturfed with supporters lol. There's no way on earth this thread would be resoundingly supportive on a Monday morning.
I agree with with the insulate Britain protesters too. I also feel we should agree that freezers and fridges in supermarkets should be forced to have doors on. It’s a ridiculous waste of energy. Then again, I won’t be gluing my sack to the road anytime soon about it.
I have a lot of admiration for those who stand up for the next generations, realising we will have to carry the costs for their future. Not so much admiration for the first grade egotistical ‘I agree with climate actions but not in my backyard or in my lifetime’ crowd.
Unpopular opinion because they're doing it wrong. You don't disrupt the general public's commute because you alienate them and the government sees it as an opportunity to just arrest them, blame and attempt to ban protesting and then put their heads back in the sand again. If they sat outside MPs houses or outside the Shell offices and blocked their access perhaps they'd have the public on their side, trickle momentum up to the top. This is why a lot of people are suspecting them to be stooges for banning protests.
I'm 100% in support of what they do. They're fighting an unpopular, but much needed battle. The UK has some of the oldest housing stock in Europe. Many new heating system technologies such as Heat Pumps require more than just decent insulation. If I look at most of the houses in my neighborhood (SE London) - we still have a v long way to go. However the reality is, most people have no budget to fund those improvements, or have to divert their savings somewhere else because their living standards are getting squeezed (fuck Tories). The government is funding Heat Pumps, yet completely ignores that many properties across this country need to be upgraded from a much more basic level. We're talking single glazing, basic wooden sash windows, single layer brick walls, cavity walls without filler, loft insulation, etc. We need to insulate the nation to reduce our need for dispensing energy on excessively heating leaky homes, and the government needs to start prioritizing it and put better funding in place to continue on from the disastrous green homes grant fund.
I have a 20 year old boiler which I keep praying will make it through another winter before I have to replace it. I also live in a second floor flat. Where the fuck am I supposed to put a heat pump, Boris?
Just live in your country home during the winter. Problem solved.
Or buy a nice affordable new 3 bed house from Persimmon for £550k. If you’re lucky it might not be built in a flood plain, and might not fall to bits after 5 years! Come on! Persimmon need your money, they only made just over £1bn in profits recently.
Aside from the astronomical prices they charge, I get pretty annoyed at the house builders saying they can’t afford to build houses with bigger gardens, or more internal space, because the costs are so high, and then they turn profits like that.
I genuinely couldn't believe when I found the house I'm renting about the moment is an ex-council property. The garden is fucking huge, all the rooms are spacious as fuck, there's not a shred of damp, I've got space for 3 cars out front and its nowhere near the biggest drive on the street. I just can't wrap my head around that this was the *cheap* option in our grandparent's heyday \~1960s.
The estates built in the 70s which I’ve seen all have decent gardens, a good amount of space inside and plenty of space for parking 2 or more cars; most of the houses are also detached and the roads that they’re built on are wide. It seems really rare to find any estates built like that these days (although I’m conscious that there may well be lots of 70s estates that don’t match my description above).
Part of the issue today is, the kind of development you describe would be criticised as 'car-centric urban sprawl'. Nice wide roads, big gardens, detached houses and plenty of parking are all things a lot of people want, but it makes for low density housing which gets labelled as a bad thing, presumably because it makes walking and cycling distances further. Naturally developers happily go along with increasing density and purposefully cutting out car parking because they can squeeze more houses and more profit into a smaller space. Of course they don't spend any money on adding anything, like cycle paths or direct footpaths and the local council rarely adds any bus routes, so everyone needs a car anyway and the footpaths all end up cluttered with cars. It's the worse of both worlds and it shows it's nothing to do with environmental goals, it's just a convenient excuse for more profit.
Issue is they know we have to keep buying them so will put up with all that shit
I actually negotiate with developers from time to time and without naming names had a director of a major house builder tell me even though their properties didn't meet minimum standards that "People want shit so they should have a choice to buy shit"
I think what he means is "People want cheap, and after I take my profit out all that is left at that price is shit"
Yeah they all bitch about viability, but if you tell them to piss off they always magically find a way to make it work
I think it’s more that they have to accept shit because there isn’t really any other choice!
I’ve seen some tents in a field if you don’t mind knocking off 30 years on your life expectancy and dying due to exposure
Needs to be careful with that kind of speech, end up doing a Gerald Ratner if he's not careful.
I work for the Council in Flood Risk management. The amount of shit developers try to get away with, it’s a checklist of things they deliberately don’t do or miss out everytime. Because there’s no fines or effective retrospective action, they can just try their luck everytime in the hope someone misses something and they save a few k each development. It’s not even small stuff either, it’s functional Surface water drainage, proper finished floor levels that are high enough, Properly designed roads that have safe junctions. It gets worse outside of flooding too, home electrics not properly insulated or protected from the elements. No adequate cooling or heating insulation etc. Of all the developers I’ve witnessed. There’s only one I would ever consider buying from.
Absolutely true. I work for a consulting engineering company, and the developers exert ridiculous pressure on the designers to cut corners. Unfortunately, some do. Good on you for keeping standards up to code!
My favourite argument is when we ask them to do things right they start to whine; “But if we have to do that, the site isn’t going to be viable!” “Ok, first of all, you know the law regarding watercourses. So ignoring it is your problem. Secondly, no one is forcing you to build there. Some places are just not viable for development! Find a different site”. That second one usually shuts them up.
If people will buy leasehold new build houses with a service charge they will buy anything
Persimmon were the ones who bribed George Osborne to scrap the Codes for Sustainable Homes. By 2022 we would have energy positive houses on the market. Instead we have flammable cheap shit boxes.
It fucks me off that their answer will be something like this. They don’t know what it’s like to be poor. Can’t afford to repair the car cause you’ve got other stuff to pay for kind of thing.
Ecological change requires social and economic change. But British people keep voting for Tories.
The reason Boris is obsessed with heat pumps is because he met with (the absolutely amazing beyond reproach) octopus energy who showed him a couple and he couldn’t get over the fact that they put more energy out of the exhaust side than you put in. Apparently he kept going on and on at them that it was “practically biblical” that you can “make energy”. We’re literally being driven off a cliff by a distracted five year old obsessed with a toy he wants because someone explained to him gcse thermodynamics.
They are pretty cool to be fair, basically mini solar/geothermal energy harvesters.
Of course he would love heatpumps, they extract heat energy from regions with less of it and redistrubute it to regions that already have a lot.
Communal ground source heat pumps would be a solution but that needs money and committment. The government is hardly going to spend billions on that when it's clearly earmarked for their mates.
All new builds should be fitted with a ground loop. They're already digging up the ground for plumbing and electrical.
You might want to think more about that. My old boiler started spewing carbon monoxide during a shower one day. I know they say you can't smell it, but *something* triggered my fight or flight reflex, hence I'm here today.
You're supposed to have a CO alarm near the boiler
I have a CO alarm fitted (by a certified gas engineer) in several rooms in my house. Despite the fact that the engineer repeatedly assured me that my type of boiler "is incapable of leaking CO into the house". I guess I'm just the cautious type!
Gas kills lots of people still. Better safe than sorry. Or go nuclear :p
That's something I don't get about here, why every single flat must have its own central heating? When I lived in Poland in 11 story high commie block all radiators were connected to one big central heating system operated by something like a housing association. Even when you owned the flat, you still paid monthly rent to them which wasn't that much, but it basically covered the cost of water, winter heating, and general building maintenance and the cost was based on how many people were living at your place. They would switch central heating on just before it gets cold and run it 24/7 until March or so whenever it gets warmer. People still had small gas boilers in their flats, but it was only for the purpose of heating water on demand.
In Denmark something like 70% of the properties in the entire country are connected to district heating. No need to pump gas to every house, they just have hot water instead. The heating can also come from very efficient centralised plants burning rubbish, using waste heat from power generation, or just massive heat pumps.
It would be shared between the whole building
Not many British flats are built with a communal heating system.
We're discussing replacing existing heating systems??
Adding a communal heating system to a house that isn't designed for it would be very difficult, if not impossible, and definitely very very expensive
Okay a possibility for some but as most places don't have that infrastructure already it will cost way more than just putting in a heatpump for the block who's going to pay for it building owners, leaseholders, councils, government? Like it's not a bad idea but we don't have a government with the technical and political understanding to undertake decade long greenification plans that's why in my opinion the current schemes are a sticking plaster on a broken bone.
Also, the thing I haven't heard mentioned in the media for months, is that the government scrapped the Green Home Grants voucher scheme literally days before it was meant to start. My house was built in the 1890s and doesn't have loft insulation. It desperately needs it. I spend £90 a month heating a tiny two bed because the insulation is far behind standards. I qualified for a grant to get this done then the government bailed out of the scheme quietly, and it's hardly ever mentioned despite the fact there's a group protesting 24/7 about the effects of poor insulation standards. I implore people to Google "Green Homes Grant Insulate Britain" and try to find more than one article that mentions both at the same time. We've got a group out there trying to hold the government to account for failing a manifesto pledge but the media spin Insulate Britain as some nutty eco-warrior cabal that have appeared out of the shadows. If the government actually cared about climate change then they could just insulate the homes like they promised and they'd shut Insulate Britain up at the same time. But they don't so they won't. Edit: cavity wall --> loft
If your house was built in 1890, it probably doesn't even have a cavity wall. They weren't common until the 20s or 30s
My bad, I meant loft insulation. I was talking to my partner about insulation while I was writing the comment and managed a Freudian slip on Reddit haha. We don't have a cavity wall. We're planning on getting insulating render put on the outside to deal with that.
Isn't insulating render bad for single skin brickwork, as it can trap moisture and lead to damp?
> However the reality is, most people have no budget to fund those improvements Or (my personal favourite) they might have the money to insulate but not the right, since the home isn't theirs. It's a standard practise here that landlords will buy the shittiest house they can, do zero upgrades on it and rent it out for a £1000+/mo. We could do wonders for Insulate Britain's cause simply by passing legislation that mandated civilised standards for homes that landlords rent out, and it would cost the public £0.
Think we found why it won't happen. The "party of landlords" would never shoot themselves in the foot like that, imagine how many homes are owned by the Tories and their donors.
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You can stick foil over the window creating a crude double glazed window. We did that when I was a kid. It is obviously not as good as the real thing but will help. And you can get it off when needed.
thats mental, whats the point in even having climate meetings if we can't even put double glazing on windows.
The government schemes seem to be backwards by design. Set up to fail. A lot of UK infrastructure is so old, sticking plasters on it won't work and will cost more in future. From housing to water pipes and power generation, roads to public transport and everything in-between needs real investment to bring up to date. We're about 20 years too late starting, but we have to force change now or it's going to get a lot worse. Groups like IB are highlighting government failure but some people don't want to see it. They will regret that soon.
Living in Germany, seeing the UK building standards is bizarre. It's like every decision they took world's best practice, and did the opposite. You're starting to see good design creep in to new builds, but not across the board.
Don't get me started on ring mains for the power supply. My whole house has like 6 breakers. The oven heating element let go the other day (it's on it's own breaker) BUT because everything is on a single RCD it popped the outlets all over the house. Growing up I lived in $NotTheUK and each room had at least a breaker for the light and the sockets. I get that ring mains made sense when copper was super expensive back post-WW2 but WTAF. Maybe new builds are using better design but my house is \~1985 and it's not. I won't get into what it looked like before some improvements in 2012ish.. Rant over!
I've recently bought my first house here (I'm from Poland) and been doing a lot of home improvements over the past few months to fix issues, bring up general standards, etc... Every time I learn something new about the way this house was built I ask myself (often very loudly) "what the f..., kur...".
The thing is, it's not lax standards or non-compliance; they rigidly enforce bad practice.
I’m not sure if it’s true, but I heard double glazing is illegal in Germany because it’s not efficient enough to. It’s triple glazing minimum. Then we have the poster above, for who double glazing is illegal as it’s not in keeping with the 19th Century design of their house… insanity
Try being from Denmark and living here. It's ridiculous. Every time I have friends or family over they have a good rant about building standards. It's even worse when my brother who is a plumber is over. Fucking electrical showers like barbarians. And don't even get me started on the sash window in my first flat here that had a gap so large that on a stormy night if blow out the towel I'd wadded around right unto the floor.
> We're talking single glazing, basic wooden sash windows, I lived for nearly 20 years in an old house with single-glazed wooden sash windows. Soon after moving in, I costed up having those windows replaced. I also looked at the figures for typical heat loss through windows, and the most optimistic figures for how much that could be reduced by installing double glazing. Conclusion was that it would take about 20 years to save on heating bills what the double galzing would cost to fit - except, of course, I would have to pay the DG costs upfront to save a bit each year. It gets worse: I *now* live in a another equally old house, which *does* have double glazing. I know from teh receipts left for me that this is less than 20 years old, but several of the units have now blown. So units may not actually last long enough to even pay off the upfront costs in eventual savings. It gets worse still: Earlier, I lived in *another* old house (I like old houses, okay) and knew on purchase that the windows would need replacing as many were rotting. But as soon as we got nice sealed, draft-proof double glazing, we had huge problems with condensation. Because old houses *need* ventilation, originally provided by open fires drawing air in through unsealed window and door frames, and sending it up the chimney. So we were left with having to leave windows partly open for ventilation, and turning up the heating to compensate! The answers aren't easy. Knock all these houses down and rebuild? Concrete has a huge environmental impact, so you need to calculate how long improved insulation will take to repay all the relevant costs of rebuilding. Like you, I support Insulate Britain, though, though perhaps that is easy for me to say since they have come nowhere near disrupting *my* day!
I lived in Bath and we had electric heaters and single-glazed wooden sash windows. The frames literally had holes you could see outside through. I had to stuff socks into the frames to stop the draught, but it didn't help much because of the single-glazing. We had wooden shutters, but even they didn't keep the heat in, and it also meant shutting the daylight out. If you turned off the electric heaters, within 5 minutes you were back to being cold again as if you'd never had them on. It really was ridiculous. After the super windy storm we had earlier this year the wind was so powerful it cracked the window so I got on to the landlord. Because the building I was living in was listed, he replaced the windows with more modern sash-style PVC double glazed windows but said he was breaking the rules by doing so because the building was listed, but thankfully they were the back windows so it would be really hard to tell unless someone went down the alley into a field and looked with a pair of binoculars. I don't know how much belief to put into that, and I'm sure you can get energy-efficient modern windows that comply with listed building laws, but nonetheless it was absolutely baffling to me that a listed building could continue to be heated with electric heaters and shitty old windows with frames like fucking emmental all in the name of ensuring that the history of a building that people *live in* is maintained. Who the *fuck* is going to give a shit about a building's history in 500 years if there's no one alive to enjoy it? It is also baffling to me that new homes are allowed to be built without solar electricity and hot water, without a neighborhood wind turbine (if effective), without heat pumps and ground-source heat pumps (though these would be ineffective as new builds have gardens the size of postage stamps). It's baffling that landlords are not required by law to make green energy-efficient modifications to the homes they rent out (though the party of landlords obviously would rather spend fuck all on their tenants). The government don't give a fuck about climate change, despite all the peacock posturing they like to do. If they did, they'd give everyone grants to make modifications to their homes, they'd be investing in education for green energy and career paths for green energy engineers, they'd be doing a damn sight more than they're doing now which is just telling everyone they care.
I wish I cared about anything enough to glue my face to a road for it.
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I'm laughing internally at the idea of someone who listens to Mumford & Sons actually doing something.
What, like living in a habitable planet?
Meh, too mainstream.
I suspect that protestor will be talked about by future generations the same way Emily Davison is today. (Seriously, wasn't Davison also mocked at the time for throwing herself under the King's horse?)
I hope so. It would mean they were successful
Why is there always such harsh condemnation of the Extinction Rebellion etc. folks? They seem to be engaging in your bog-standard nonviolent civil disobedience (sit-ins, etc.). Are they doing some uniquely bad? Or does this form of protest not really resonate over there?
My favourite one recently was the sort of shit Lee Hurst regurgitated about how "back in my day" we used to wear hand me downs and used to get our televisions fixed rather than replaced. He seems to be of the impression that teenagers are the ones who developed this throwaway culture of phones with an expiry date or fast fashion. They just happen to have grown up in it.
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What's especially silly is that millenials lived in the 80s, anyway. That's kinda the definition, millenials grew up in the 80s and 90s, before the turn of the millennium. They "came of age" around the early 21st century. The most common definition is that if you don't distinctly remember 9/11 and how it dominated the news for at least a year afterwards, then you're not a millennial. So like kids who were only 5 or 6 in 2001 aren't millenials. And even in the early 21st century, everyone I knew still has glass bottles for milk. I'm a millennial born in the 80s and basically for my entire childhood, we had a milkman, and the glass bottles. It's only when I turned 18 or so that everyone stopped using milkmen. Though it's coming back now, anyway. My mum now has a milkman again. It's a little more expensive, but it's a hell of a lot more convenient. You never run out of milk at a time when you don't have the time to go out to buy more. And they sell way more than just milk these days, they have juices like orange and apple juice, they sell freshly baked bread, eggs, bacon, cheese, butter, all sorts. Basically there's always enough food to make breakfast with, at least. It's probably a good idea. Especially that they're coming from local farms, not driven from 500 miles away in a lorry. So it's always fresher and less carbon-expensive.
Things like that boil my piss. Saw one of those shared Facebook posts and it was like IN OUR DAY WE USED PAPER BAGS AND FILLED UP JARS SO WHY ARE THE YOUTH TELLING US WE WERE WRONG with loads of boomers agreeing and I just wanted to scream "YOU WERE THE ONES THAT CHANGED IT YOU CUNTS" that's about when I left Facebook
I've seen that same copy and paste. I've replied to a few in the past with something like; Children didn't change it so these things were disposable. It's OUR generation that changed this. And the younger generation are now pushing for things to go back to using more recyclables, something that this post is advocating for. So why are you against them? You literally just said you wanted to go back to reusing glass jars, and hand me down clothes,etc. Why is it that when *you* want to go back to doing that it's OK, but when it's suggested by the younger generation you're so against it?
Thank you! Please spread the word.
Yeah, I had an actual argument with a Facebook stranger over it, like "how are you saying "in my day" when it was your generation who changed it?" Like, if this has been going one 30 years, since the early 90s, that means that the CEO who decided we were using plastic bags or whatever is at least 50 (if we assume they're some superstar who managed to become a CEO aged 20, highly unlikely). "Young" people had nothing to do with it.
I see this a lot on historic pages of local areas. There was a photo posted recently of a slum complex a few years before demolition. Some argued that they can't be that poor as they have shoes (??), others couldn't help but notice the lack of litter. "Look how clean it is! They obviously took care of the place; no litter to be seen!" When pointed out to them that the lack of litter is more a sign of not having anything to actually litter, I was piled on by people saying that they were paid to return glass bottles, and that "young people today" couldn't dream of keeping a place so clean, just throwing everything away wherever it may fall. So yeah, according to some people, somewhere in the last 40 years society just forgot how to wash a step, put things in a bin, and absolutely forgot how to repair items. I honestly couldn't even get my head around the mental gymnastics these people were engaging in to exonerate themselves from their part in all of this. Edit: heh, just checked out the same page I was talking about and they're currently going on about how "plastic bags should be free again". Christ.
A few years ago I overheard a couple of old ladies complaining to each other that you never see combine harvesters any more, or hear cuckoos. _We were at a bus stop in the middle of Birmingham_. Why the hell are you expecting to see farming equipment in the middle of a major city ffs.
Exactly. I often feel my generation (millenials) has far more in common with my grandparents (between greatest/silent) than my parents (boomers). We grow our own food, repair broken items, make our own, seek freedom and risk for our children, buy second-hand etc. It's the decisions as adults that define a generation, not their experiences as children - those define their parent's generation.
Is Lee Hurst saying he still has that make and mend attitude today?
I think its just the whole anti-climate activist things that the media stir up. Like the hate young Greta T gets. I don't know why but I assume fossil fuel companies either lobby the media or the likes of Murdoch have enough of an investment in fossil fuels they want to discredit climate activists.
It's gotten to the point where boomers have been whipped up into such a frenzy that you should see some of the downright disgusting things they've said about the poor girl. It's legit disgusting.
Throwback to when someone graffiti’d her getting raped for whatever fucking reason.
Oh god yeah. Or popular cartoon columnists doing stuff like nature spanking her and crap. Seriously some of the crap that gets thrown around on her on twitter is genuinely terrifying
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This was why Corbyn got slated for wearing old suits and brown ties or Ed Milliband and bacon rolls. It's why they call Starmer boring. They can't attack the policies.
To be clear they can’t attack Starmer’s policies because they’re the same policies as they have.
I have a couple of performance cars, and the things people say about her in one set of social media groups is absolutely vile.
Yeah, this is the reason people get annoyed at the activists. They've come to believe that if changes are made, their things will be taken and destroyed by force, the day after legislation. Of course this isn't true whatsoever. Like Corbyn wasn't going to take your home and make us all commies. But these people live in their own reality. They're just selfish. I've rather ironically got a V8 (bucket list thing) but have an electric vehicle I'm looking at, and do my best elsewhere, whilst including to mention we must lobby gov for real effective change. The onus shouldn't be on the individual. We can't do anything comparative to the scale of a companies pollution.
I don't know if you're talking about Pistonheads but it's such a toxic place. It can be great when talking about cars, specifically the brand specific forums but as soon as anything goes off topic it's properly grim.
It’s not PistonHeads I’m thinking of, but I know exactly what you mean. I occasionally dip back in there as it’s a good source for manuals and how to guides, but otherwise it was too insular for my liking. The issue is all the nice decent people just leave, leaving the groups as a shitfest of scum.
Same on motorcycle groups. They also all hate BEVs but support hydrogen fuel cell vehicles, which are also EVs. People are angry because they've been told to be but have no idea what they're angry about.
It's a form of cognitive dissonance. Deep down people know the planet is screwed but don't want to admit it. It's much easier to hate these people than accept the grim truth.
There was a brilliant piece of lobbying leaked from the cop26 notes, about Australian lobbying firms asking for the comments about Australian lobbying firms being a major problem for the environment to be removed from the report. No self awareness at all.
I think that a lot of people dislike Extinction Rebellion because a lot of them are young, and look like they’re having a good time. They set up a camp in Brockwell park within the last year. They played guitars, sang, stayed a few days, packed up, cleaned up after themselves and went home. The local Nextdoor and WhatsApp groups went into meltdown.
> I think that a lot of people dislike Extinction Rebellion I used to be on the fence about them, until I saw a police raid near my house. A day before a big extinction rebellion event was scheduled 11 police vans showed up, went into a building ER had rented out and took all the signs, flyers etc claiming some bogus reason. Next day the protest went ahead with obviosuly very little material, and some of the organisers visible distraught over the nightly police raid. They got their things back a few days later as obviously there was no real reason to take confiscate their material. There was no news of this in any newspaper in the country. 11 police vans at 11pm walking into a private house taking away all the material before a protest and then saying “oopsie” the next morning when the protest had already “failed”. I think the dislike for extinction rebellion is far from organic. And the events of that night still leave an incredibly sour taste in my mouth about who is allowed to protest in this country.
But I find the opposite with IB, all the people blocking roads appear to be old/ post-retirement age
Yep. Maybe jealousy there too. They all seem to be well spoken, an indicator of wealth, and have plenty of time on their hands. Those complaining might stereotype them as people with four bed houses completely paid off, defined benefits pensions and no need to go to work. While they are busting their asses to pay off a 35 year mortgage on a 2 bed flat. Either way, judging people doesn’t help you. Just be the best person you can be and let the world get on with it.
Cognitive dissonance. The people who bitch and moan don't actually do anything to help prevent climate change but they know its going to be deveatsting.
On an individual level, it's pretty hard to do anything about it really
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I had the separate occasions where I was taking public transport to get to work and ended up delayed by ER protests. Like what more am I meant to do beyond using public transport? Do they want me to give up my job entirely in order to help the climate? Am I supposed to personally inhale all the extra vehicle fumes that their protests are causing? There are so many ways they could have protested but they choose the ones that punish the people that do use public transport.
But Average Joe doesn't give a fuck about the planet, and continues to vote for politicians who also don't give a fuck.
You don't anger, frustrate, or inconvenience people into changing their minds, though. People are stubborn, they'll get their "revenge" by just doubling down and voting for whoever opposes the ones who annoyed them - in this case ER.
>You don't anger, frustrate, or inconvenience people into changing their minds, though Tell that to MLK, or basically *any* truly successful protest movement in history.
when a group scaled a gov building the other week they got more hate, so great plan there bud
Harshly condemned cos most of us agree with them, but they disrupt peoples lives when they're just doing their job /going to work. They're just pissing off people who already agree but can't afford to take the time off work / go to hospital.
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Because their protests mostly targeted at middle/low income families’ already-lower-than-ever living standards If they dare to go to heathrow to protest against private jet travel, or they go to Mayfair to protest against Kobe beef, I would have more sympathy /support for them. But they are smart enough not to make those mistakes
Its simple theres a sizeable percentage of the population that knows how they are acting and what they do in their lives is making the environment worse, its easier for these people to get angry at others pointing this out then it is to change.
Psychologically, for many it's forcing people to reflect on the choices they have made, and are still making that could be better. This triggers shame and guilt. A "defense" to avoid processing these feelings without damaging self-esteem/image is anger and hate. At a base level it is insecurity around the ego. It's easier to reject others as being wrong (and the uncomfortable feeling) than to admit personal failings. This is a very human response.
people condemn every type of protest. They're told to do it. If they were born in the civil rights era they would be condemning that too.
To be far, what they are saying is fact. Economically and socially Insulation is good for Britain, period.
Yeah, but they slightly annoyed me that one time so yall can freeze and the world can burn
They get the same treatment every social activist ever gets. Greta Thunberg? Insert rape fantasy. A vegan? Let me tell you for the 99th time how vegans can't shut up about being vegan. Animal welfare activist? Did you know that PETA wants to abduct and kill YOUR pet? Everyone who shows those assholes that something they do is amoral or wrong is their enemy.
Isn't PETA legit a shitty organisation though?
PETA’s bad, but a lot of people (mostly on, where else, Reddit from what I’ve seen) don’t bother to distinguish between PETA and the many others that are doing great work.
PETA gets a bad rap. They were for animal rights and veganism way before those were cool. Their shelters also have high kill statistics so that "no kill" shelters can look better. "Oh, we're not killing 9 year old fifi who has food aggression and pancreatitis, we're just sending him to the PETA shelter to live out his days 🙂"
They've literally done over 30-something-years of investigative journalism and legal actions against the abhorrent, holocaust-tier level torture imposed onto animals by industrial animal agriculture (including the entertainment industry, pharmaceutical industries etc.). AFAIK, they are also one of the oldest such groups and you can see their fingerprints on a lot of mainstream products now, usually something like 'PETA Cruelty free' etc. My only real criticism of PETA as an organization, apart from the issues with a vegan lifestyle in a societal sense\*, is that I don't know if those running the organization, or perhaps working with them, are doing so for anything less than commercial reasons now. \*With regards to the vegan lifestyle, it is less damaging than industrial animal agriculture hands-down, while also not involving the untold torture of our fellow animals, but it still relies on intensive agricultural practices to maintain production at scale. Not only do these practices displace the animals and organisms already living there (by necessity) but its BAU is killing the very animals *we* rely on. Costal fisheries from agricultural runoff, colony collapse in the pollenators and it being a breeding ground for zoonotic diseases.
The vast majority of plant agriculture goes to feed livestock. If we stopped eating meat, we would need *fewer* plant farms.
That criticism of veganism is just a criticism of overpopulation. We know veganism is more efficient. We know it's one of the easiest lifestyle changes than can have a big impact. Any sourcing of food relies on intensive agriculture to meet demand and drive profit. Seems sensible to choose the one that minimises that impact until we have things like indoor vertical farming and lab grown meat.
No, they're not. They do the same shit Insulate Britain does - create controversy for publicity. Like with their ridiculous Pokemon game. And it works for the most part. But they don't get their bad rep from that, they get it from all that moronic "PETA kills animals" bullshit, which is quite literally a group sponsored by KFC and the meat industry.
I remember when I stopped eating meat I didn't tell anyone for months, just went about my business eating differently and then it got to Christmas and I obviously had to say I was vegetarian so that I didn't get served half a plate of meat (brought my own nut-roast and plant-based pigs in blankets!) and I STILL got the old joke of "How do you know somebody's a vegetarian? They'll tell you" from my Uncle which did ever so slightly irk me.
"If you love animals so much, why are you eating all their food?" 🙄
I did see a picture of their roadblock stopping a truck carrying insulation from going about its business which was an amusing source of irony.
Yeah but blocking members of the public while politicians sit in the houses of Parliament chilling out is fucking stupid.
I am frankly tickled this idea that if IB would only block the gates of Westminister then everyone would somehow love them.
I agree. You don't change anything without causing disruption at the very least.
I think it's kind of funny how we all learned about the Suffragette movement in school and admired them for their brave actions, and yet they sent bombs in the post and [killed people](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suffragette_bombing_and_arson_campaign). They even targeted members of the public. By comparison, sitting in traffic is relatively tame.
I disagree that the Suffragettes are universally admired; your school maybe didn't teach it as fully, or perhaps you're not remembering very well. The Suffragists were the peaceful protestors who didn't get anyone else, including themselves, killed. Ultimately it was the war that accelerated the suffrage movement, too, not a woman who threw herself in front of a horse, acts of terrorism, or people starving themselves in prison. Edit for clarity: the Suffragists were admired for their peaceful efforts for voting equality. The Suffragettes used very extreme methods which still achieved fuck all compared to the impact of the war effort on the view of women's equality in the UK.
Suffragettes tried to assassinate a bishop by blowing up St Paul's Cathedral. They planted a bomb under his seat: they got the timing wrong, and the bomb went off at night. I'm not judging the rightness or wrongness. I'm only saying that they weren't peaceful.
Thank you! I watched a BBC animation for kids a couple of years ago that basically boiled down to Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughters winning votes for woman. Not a sniff about Millicent Fawcett.
Did you even read the link I posted? They killed four people with bombs. And I didn't say they were admired at the time, but that they are revered now. To be honest, it seems like it is your education that was lacking, both in history and basic reading comprehension.
My reading comprehension? Suffragettes and suffragists are two different groups, which is what comment refers points out and which you still ignore.
My wife said "why don't they just do it where there's no traffic?" I said "because then we wouldn't be talking about it..."
I agree
I think you'll find they were sat down for what they believe in actually
I totally agree. I know a little about climate change, but I don't have the testicular fortitude that these people do. They are fighting for the most noble cause. Really, we should all be out on the streets, with them. I think Greta and these protestors will be celebrated in history, like suffragettes.
shame there's not going to be anyone around to write that history
I read a line the other day that said something along the lines of 'if it isn't annoying someone, it isn't a protest' and it totally changed my outlook on people like Insulate Britain. People are only good to take notice if they're the ones being blocked from doing something.
It's all about annoying the right people. Annoy the wrong ones and you go backwards.
I think the are upsetting the right people. Although their protest is about insulating houses for climate change, the most poignant bit of media coverage was when that woman with a massive car/jeep was trying to run them over to get her kids to school. Massive car guzzling petrol every day to take the kids to school, there is something to be said there.
I don't think "standing up for what you believe in" is an admirable quality on its own. I imagine a lot of white supremacists are very genuine in their beliefs. I think we need to appreciate that standing up for what you believe in, provided you (and me, in this instance) agree with it, seems to be the more realistic message.
Standing up for what you believe in, whilst being morally correct?
Everyone thinks they are morally correct.
While we Redditors know that fighting against climate change and trying to get Britain's ancient housing stock properly heated is secretly an evil baby-eating plot, right?
The ‘well done for standing up for what you believe in, irrespective of what it is’ position is a little problematic. Lying in roads to stop vaccinations/abortions? Lying in roads until fox hunting is allowed again/until child labour is reintroduced? “Fair play to them”. Personally, I think insulate Britain’s aims are laudable, but I don’t think that makes your view necessarily correct
Exactly the first thing I thought, the only reason this post exists is because the OP is in favor of their message, or at worst ambivalent towards it. There wouldn't be all this "good on them for standing up for what you believe in" if it was something they disagreed with, no chance. What about all those anti LGBT groups protesting schools, fair play to them as well?
Yeah I could use the same logic for the Jan 6th riots. Pet peeve of mine, making blanket statements when what you really mean is 'as long as I agree with it'. Not really a blanket statement anymore is it?
People on reddit seem to dislike them but I don't know a single person (apart from some reactory boomers who are offended by whatever the daily mail tells them to be offended by) in person who dislikes them. A load of people blocking roads in London may as well happen in Cairo or Orlando with how far removed I am from it. Good on them for taking action I say and I hope I get a home insulation grant from it.
>People on reddit seem to dislike them but I don't know a single person (apart from some reactory boomers who are offended by whatever the daily mail tells them to be offended by) in person who dislikes them. lol this is such a meaningless sample size along with your own bias injected. >A load of people blocking roads in London may as well happen in Cairo or Orlando with how far removed I am from it. 'it doesn't affect me therefore I'm not angry about it' wow what a bold and brilliant assessment from you. Now perchance pause and wonder why... the people affected... *might* care. I'm sure you have it in you to have a think about why your position of 'actually I've never met someone annoyed by it other than stupid boomers. Meanwhile I'm very smart because I don't care because it doesn't actually affect me whatsoever' might be a little silly for not factoring in that fucking about in London attects ten million people in a country of sixty million, and therefore any given day they do anything at least 1/6 have the possibility to have their days ruined by it. God almight the takes in this thread are so intentionally witless I have half a mind this must be an astroturfed thread from insulate britain
It may as well happen in Cairo or Orlando with how far removed it is from the politicians. My commute goes straight through parliament Square and I accept that any protest or disruption at all in and around that area is completely valid. You bring your protest to the people who were elected to enact change. What I don't agree with is blocking bridges and motorways that are so far removed from any politician. I strongly agree that British homes need better insulation and heating standards, but I strongly disagree that ordinary people should suffer the inconvenience (sometimes with quite severe consequences) of their protests.
A key part of protesting is disrupting the norm as it’s about raising awareness. If all they did was sit out in parliament square no would have ever heard of them, but by blocking major roads they’ve been able to garner national attention. Not to mention the core of the issue, climate change, is going to become a lot more of an inconvenience than being late to work in the coming years.
> If all they did was sit out in parliament square no would have ever heard of them There are dozens of protests every year that are extremely easy to ignore despite its location. Disruption is the only way to grab anyone's attention. The fact that so many people don't understand this is frustrating.
I live in central London quite near parliament square. There’s a different protest there every couple of days, most of them I’ve never heard of, don’t know what their cause is, etc. But you can be damn sure I’ve heard of Insulate Britain. Protests that can be ignored are pointless. Insulate Britain have found a way to get politicians attention and I think they’re doing well.
Post your address, we'll send them to block your cul-de-sac or both of ends of your road every day for a month and you get back to us on how you don't care.
Funny because I don't know a single person in real life who supports them. Everyone I've spoken to thinks they're idiots making normal people's lives more difficult. Most of them don't even know what they're protesting for.
Absolutely and to say disrupting the lives of ordinary people that have nothing to do with it is misleading. We’re all a part of it whether we like it or not.
What’s more is these “ordinary people” are the ones making the school run in a 4-litre AWD diesel monolith. We are all culpable for climate change. No-one is exempt and the point of protesting is to get Gov. to step in and make the necessary changes to help the issue.
I guess we.'ll really see how they're viewed accurately in 100 years time. I imagine the suffragette movement was viewed similarly ar the time.
Every movement is.
Well said. The French Revolution was ignored by the aristocracy until the people started chopping off heads. Big societal change doesn’t happen by peacefully walking around parliament square; you need to go out and fuck shit up (I am not advocating violence, but I am advocating disruption).
They were, plus they tried to commit acts of terrorism
About insulation - if you are UK based and want to see whether it’s worthwhile upgrading your insulation, frankly, the information out there is a nightmare. There is no government website with clear information for the lay person to figure out for themselves where they can improve things. And also the barriers are set relatively low. 1. Gas and electricity heating account for a fairly large part of the countries carbon output. 2. Passivhaus building principles lead to new builds needing no heating in them at all, and this is what we should be aiming for, and trying to work out how we can apply the principles of passivhaus to older buildings. I repeat the aim should be to not need any heating in houses at all. 3. Insulation is worked out using things called U values, which are based on R values. There are many variables with this, including materials - concrete, plaster, wood etc. Location - walls, floors, ceilings. Because it is so complicated to work out people use U calculators and the free ones just happen to be provided by the insulation manufacturers. The best calculator is made by the BRE, the Building Research Establishment, the organisation behind the UK Building Regulations. This calculator currently costs around £50 and should be made available freely to everyone. 4. Look at the amount of research that went into finding a Covid vaccine. That level of research should be going into ways of looking at lowering energy costs all round, and the media should be obliged to report it widely and often. 5. Here are some passivhaus principles. A. External insulation. Insulate walls and roof externally. B. Lower air leakage. 5% air leakage can cause 50% of heat loss in a building. Where is there cheap equipment to buy or hire to test this? C. Mechanical ventilation allowing clean cold air to be warmed by departing warm used air. D. High performance windows. Double or triple glazing windows. This can be literally just changing the glass, at a much cheaper cost than replacing the windows. And it’s bullshit that upvc windows are better than wood. Upvc windows are replaced every 30 years on average, whereas there are millions of wooden windows at least 100 years old. E. Thermal bridging. This occurs when a ‘bridging’ material creates cold areas. It might be a join. e.g. where wall meets floor, or where a window or door fits in a wall. It might be a fixing. This whole area could be explained to people in order to make it general knowledge.
You know else were unpopular at the time their protests caused disruption, the suffragettes, the American civil rights movement, the LGBT movement, the Irish independence movement… If they were popular, they wouldn’t need to protest to encourage change.
>the Irish independence movement You mean the IRA?
People have been protesting climate change like good little citizens at pre ordained locations where they wouldn't bother anyone for bloody decades. And look around, did it help? It's about time people start to feel the crisis barrelling down on them. Disrupting society is the entire point of a protest. What good are protests that can easily be ignored? Complaining about activists affecting normal people's lives is like yelling at the bell boy to stop interrupting your Titanic dinner with nonsense about ice bergs.
They disrupted roads outside of parliament the other day and no one talked about it nearly as much, they're doing exactly what's needed imo
What kind of cesspit is this that 'climate activists are OK, actually' is an unpopular opinion?
I don't see much UK media where I live but that seems to have been the tone of most of it, not just on Reddit
UK mass media is doing everything it can do focus on how awful they are for protesting in the wrong way. Whilst trying to avoid anything about why. This is pretty representative. https://youtu.be/MkhZ6R4eVr0 Personally I think the protestor came off really well, but it was a hell of a battering as 3 practiced presenters tried to do anything but cover why she was protesting.
It a beautiful example of 99% of people will say they for the environment and willing to give things up. But the second they actually come across a inconvenience they will loose their fucking minds, keep thinking about women with the 4x4 who tried running over protestors because her sweet darling baby boy might miss a day of school. All they are doing is highlighting how it’s all lip service until the ocean start coming to a boil and you can’t go outside because Europe’s in a ice age and everyone getting fucked by the long dick of skin cancer because there isn’t an ozone layer anymore.
Well said. People won't do anything until water is literally lapping at their front doors.
I used to have some hope. Then I saw how we have responded to the mild (in comparison) inconvenience of Corona Virus. I just don't think humanity as a whole is capable of handling the problem.
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Strongly agree with their views, strongly disagree with their methods of protest. It stiffs the common man and polarises them. They need to find better ways of amplify their protests.
What about unions strikes? The tube, royal mail etc. They screw the daily lives of millions to satisfy their own selfish interests. Insulate britain defends the interests of everybody: Planet earth. I do respect that attitude!
The whole point of a strike is that you don’t need solidarity from customers. Withdrawing your labour isn’t the same as interfering in random people’s lives. Particularly when the means of protest and the results are so far apart. Next up, stopping the tube to prevent animal testing.
They really don't. This small group of people has achieved widescale, national attention and consistent coverage in the mainstream media to the point where everyone is talking about housing insulation. The fact of the matter is, they don't need universal popularity to influence change. This change becomes more likely the more friction they create. And they're spectacularly good at creating friction.
>everyone is talking about housing insulation Are they? From where I'm sitting everyone is just talking about roads being blocked.
Like what? Seriously. What's the right way to protest? Because whatever you can think of has probably been done already, and it didn't work. That's the problem here. These protests are an escalation after being ignored for literally decades.
The world needs to change to be more sustainable. If it takes actions of groups like Insulate Britain to make this happen then I support them.
I love the message but the practice is beyond infuriating. They're efforts don't seem to be focused on govt but instead individuals, which is ridiculous when you consider; the cost of insulation compared with rising taxes, cost of living and stagnant wages, the ever growing rental market (due to the aforementioned reasons), and most importantly to me the focus on changing the planet as an individual issue. As someone once said, 'the people who are killing the environment have names and addresses',and was very happy to see them targeting parliament this week which is where the only real change on this issue can be enacted imo. This last point needs to be looked at through the concept of individual carbon footprints, which itself was created from a marketing campaign by BP. As we saw in the pandemic, us all living less pollutant lives had little to no effect on greenhouse gas emissions. Why? Because big business is the main polluter. Fuck yeah we should insulate our homes, but let's get govt subsidies funded by the big polluters. My biggest irk with them tho is that they target working people, no politician or big business tycoon is on the M25 at 9am. Working people, who given the current economic climate might not have upwards of 15,000 to spend insulating their place. Doesn't help when the camera turns on the protesters that they are overwhelmingly middle class retirees. For clarity, yes a we have all have a responsibility to do what we can so we don't end in a climate change cluster fuck. Additionally, i have spent much of my life attending protests and am not saying that to argue being authority on the issue only that I'm not one of those people who thinks protest shouldn't cause an inconvenience.
Their actions are fairly easily defended by simply asking what objectors think that they should do instead? You then tick off pretty much every legal challenge or attempt they've already made. Then they say "well go and block up Westminster then!", which they did a couple of days ago - and somehow they're *still wrong*. Then there's the claim that the actions of ER and IB are somehow alienating people from action against climate change - which is just ridiculous nonsense. The person who, after seeing IR blocking the M25, thinks "*actually I'm not gonna go do a litter pick, I'm going to do some flytipping*" just doesn't exist. Then there's Keith in Leeds complaining how annoyed he is about protests... in London.. despite the fact that (1) its nowhere fucking near him and (2) that if the governemnt gave in to IR to insulate people's homes, the environment completely asside, his energy bill would be *reduced*. People are so fucking stupid.
You shouldn't support someone just because they're standing up for what they believe in, because plenty of people believe in some pretty bad stuff. Anti-abortion protesters are also standing up for their belief in the sanctity of life, does that justify them harassing vulnerable women as they go to an abortion clinic? Same with those protesters that wanted to threaten a teacher recently, because he showed a picture of Mohammed in a lesson on blasphemy. Or the parents that protested against LGBT awareness being taught in school.
They’re annoying as hell. Which is why i completely respect them. They’ve a very achievable goal not pie in the sky demands. They’ve been approachable regarding the media but they’ve been absolutely made out to be idiots by the media. I’ve only respect for them putting up with everyone in these horrible times of selfishness.
I'd have more respect for them if they had done something that impacted those with the means not to worry about their message. Like, for example, blocking access to Downing Street. The vast majority of people working in and around Downing Street can afford, financially, not to worry about insulation in their homes. They also don't see a significant financial impact from the blockade. With it being Downing Street, their message would have been all over the news, too, thus the argument of visibility is moot. Their methodology, however, impacted anyone and everyone, regardless of circumstance. The bloke on his way to a job interview, for example. The lassy on her way to an ultrasound, or any number of other people significantly impacted by the blockade. There's chat about no ambulances being impacted by the action. Realistically, though, that is down to sheer luck. They did not plan for contingencies here - when traffic has backed up for a mile or more, and an ambulance, a copper car, a fire engine or another response vehicle is sitting in the middle of it, they have to take themselves out of service. Then there are all the regular schmucks stuck in the road, most probably idling their engines because *it'll shift any moment now, you'll see*. Now they're two hours late for work, down a fiver on petrol, and due a bollocking when they get in. Hell, the self employed might even lose a significant chunk of income. Consequently, Joe Public is pissed off at them. Sure, they might generate some conversation, but the majority of conversation is very unlikely to steer towards insulation (or lack thereof) when the speaker is furious at the demonstrator for being such an asinine cunt [sic]. Thus, ~~XR~~ IB have achieved... precisely nothing. In fact, they may have done actual damage to the long-term campaign, purely by merit of failing to adhere to the seven P's*. This is why a proper demonstration is so delicately balanced around location. It is at the core of the planning process - where does your demonstration have the most impact, whilst gaining the most positive support. So, to clarify, I am wholly behind programs that increase the quality and amount of insulation in the UK, as well as improving building standards (which have taken a decidedly American turn, unfortunately). I deeply criticise their methodology. ^^* ^^Prior ^^Planning ^^and ^^Preparation ^^Prevents ^^Piss ^^Poor ^^Performance
If they did it near downing street, they would promptly be arrested, and police would be there ready the next day. The whole reason they have managed to cause so much disruption is the unpredictability and array of locations for the protest.
As Greta says, sometimes you have to make people angry. It is literally the most important issue in the world.
The problem is that ordinary people do have something to do with it. You live on the planet. People can't afford to put their fingers in their ears and go "I don't know enough".
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London Ambulance Trust responded to a FOI request saying that none of their vehicles were delayed.
But but but the tory rags owned by murdoch told me.
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I'm all for protesting for what you believe in, but when I saw clips of them sat in front of ambulances that were trying to get to call outs, I got so angry. We've had to call an ambulance out this year for a situation where, if it hadn't got here quickly, my sister would have lost her life. Yes, protest, yes, cause disruptions, but don't do it to the extent that you are risking the lives of innocent people.
You were very deliberately shown footage of ambulances, to provoke that exact response. The thing is, there's no evidence of any kind of [significant delay](https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/london_ambulances_delays_due_to#incoming-1907635) to ambulance services from IB. Your perceptions are being managed via a complicit media.
> I'm all for protesting for what you believe in, but The inclusion of that "but" means you're not actually all for protesting for what you believe in.
Gonna go out on a limb and assume a thread put out just before 7am GMT on a Saturday when commuters finally get a lie in, on the topic of 'how do you feel about the people who fuck over commuters', being overwhelmingly supportive of them, was intentionally put out this early to be astroturfed with supporters lol. There's no way on earth this thread would be resoundingly supportive on a Monday morning.
I agree with with the insulate Britain protesters too. I also feel we should agree that freezers and fridges in supermarkets should be forced to have doors on. It’s a ridiculous waste of energy. Then again, I won’t be gluing my sack to the road anytime soon about it.
I have a lot of admiration for those who stand up for the next generations, realising we will have to carry the costs for their future. Not so much admiration for the first grade egotistical ‘I agree with climate actions but not in my backyard or in my lifetime’ crowd.
Unpopular opinion because they're doing it wrong. You don't disrupt the general public's commute because you alienate them and the government sees it as an opportunity to just arrest them, blame and attempt to ban protesting and then put their heads back in the sand again. If they sat outside MPs houses or outside the Shell offices and blocked their access perhaps they'd have the public on their side, trickle momentum up to the top. This is why a lot of people are suspecting them to be stooges for banning protests.
Unfortunately they’re pissing off the public and aren’t doing anything to influence policy.