The idea of carbon lock-in is definitely something I think about and it's not just with new construction. When a gas tank-type water heater fails, it's much easier to replace it with another gas tank (it can often be done same day through Home Depot or Lowe's) than to look into an on-demand or electric heat pump water heater. Same with a gas furnace. Gas cooktop.
The public needs to be better informed about what options exist so they can advocate for better tech for the long term. Contractors and retailers should be helping in this education process. But there's a ton of momentum for sticking with the status quo, much to our detriment.
Unfortunately it's not a mystery why he got voted back in as Ontario remains a first-past-the-post electoral system. The conservatives won with 40% of the vote and a voter turnout of 43%....he and his party represent a very small portion of Ontarians.
This is our current domain, an obsolete built environment and infrastructure reality and it’s much bigger than a 1% iconic Marks and Spencer deep retrofit at an elusive carbon cost parity.
This stunning google scale volume of biogenetic entropy stretches across the global commons and I can easily imagine what is supposed to happen to all that stuff.
Jeffery West describes Superlinear Cities
"It's hard to kill a city but easy to kill a company." The mean life of companies is 10 years. Cities routinely survive even nuclear bombs. And "cities are the crucible of civilization." They are the major source of innovation and wealth creation. Currently they are growing exponentially. "Every week from now until 2050, one million new people are being added to our cities."
"We need a grand unified theory of sustainability--- a coarse-grained quantitative, predictive complexity theory of cities."
West views our current challenges as like an impending tsunami at a key point in our civilization's exponential growth. To keep this cycle of growth constant we need to increase both the pace and the scale of innovation. The most plausible explanation is that we are approaching what is typically known in physics as a finite time singularity. This would mean that at the current rate of growth we would achieve infinite growth in a finite time. He adds that at some point the energy devoted to maintenance drowns out any remnant that could be dedicated to further growth. “We are approaching a phase transition or an insurmountable barrier; we either constrain growth, stop growing altogether or collapse.“
I think we have a simple choice, we can bury burn or build our way forward into a future tsunami of demand.
The building material of the future is now our urbanized old growth forests oil and gas and minerals materialized into a suburban linear materials to waste economy.
It will only take one smart individual to base a currency on what we now consider our trash.
"in 2015,... I got a fancy expensive Laars boiler to heat my house in Toronto... so I am suffering from a severe case of carbon lock-in."
You, and billions others like you, could significantly reduce the magnitude of that carbon lock-in by going GreenBetween 13C-30C/55F-85F (don't heat or cool between 13C-30C/55F-85F, https://greenbetween.home). Lead by example. Do it yourself and tenaciously encourage others to do the same.).
The idea of carbon lock-in is definitely something I think about and it's not just with new construction. When a gas tank-type water heater fails, it's much easier to replace it with another gas tank (it can often be done same day through Home Depot or Lowe's) than to look into an on-demand or electric heat pump water heater. Same with a gas furnace. Gas cooktop.
The public needs to be better informed about what options exist so they can advocate for better tech for the long term. Contractors and retailers should be helping in this education process. But there's a ton of momentum for sticking with the status quo, much to our detriment.
Unfortunately it's not a mystery why he got voted back in as Ontario remains a first-past-the-post electoral system. The conservatives won with 40% of the vote and a voter turnout of 43%....he and his party represent a very small portion of Ontarians.
This is our current domain, an obsolete built environment and infrastructure reality and it’s much bigger than a 1% iconic Marks and Spencer deep retrofit at an elusive carbon cost parity.
This stunning google scale volume of biogenetic entropy stretches across the global commons and I can easily imagine what is supposed to happen to all that stuff.
Jeffery West describes Superlinear Cities
"It's hard to kill a city but easy to kill a company." The mean life of companies is 10 years. Cities routinely survive even nuclear bombs. And "cities are the crucible of civilization." They are the major source of innovation and wealth creation. Currently they are growing exponentially. "Every week from now until 2050, one million new people are being added to our cities."
"We need a grand unified theory of sustainability--- a coarse-grained quantitative, predictive complexity theory of cities."
West views our current challenges as like an impending tsunami at a key point in our civilization's exponential growth. To keep this cycle of growth constant we need to increase both the pace and the scale of innovation. The most plausible explanation is that we are approaching what is typically known in physics as a finite time singularity. This would mean that at the current rate of growth we would achieve infinite growth in a finite time. He adds that at some point the energy devoted to maintenance drowns out any remnant that could be dedicated to further growth. “We are approaching a phase transition or an insurmountable barrier; we either constrain growth, stop growing altogether or collapse.“
I think we have a simple choice, we can bury burn or build our way forward into a future tsunami of demand.
The building material of the future is now our urbanized old growth forests oil and gas and minerals materialized into a suburban linear materials to waste economy.
It will only take one smart individual to base a currency on what we now consider our trash.
"in 2015,... I got a fancy expensive Laars boiler to heat my house in Toronto... so I am suffering from a severe case of carbon lock-in."
You, and billions others like you, could significantly reduce the magnitude of that carbon lock-in by going GreenBetween 13C-30C/55F-85F (don't heat or cool between 13C-30C/55F-85F, https://greenbetween.home). Lead by example. Do it yourself and tenaciously encourage others to do the same.).