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.
Perhaps the idea, all too common in the residential sector, that an appliance should only be replaced when it suddenly and unpredictably fails is the problem. At that time you have the least ability to think and decide rationally on the best course of action because your mind (and probably your family) is screaming at you to get it fixed ASAP, long term consequences be damned. I think we can borrow the habit from the commercial sector of replacing them at a specified interval, say when the warranty runs out plus 5 years, so we can decide with a clear eye how best to do so.
Proactive replacement definitely helps. I was able to schedule the install of my tankless water heater and spend the time to get it done right. I wouldn't have had that if I had cold showers and flooded basement.
But I think there's also something to be said for holding on to things for as long as possible if they don't need replacing. There are 50 year old boilers still working just fine. They may not be as efficient as newer units, but they're also not consuming raw materials for the manufacturing of a newer one either.
There are definitely benefits to holding on to appliances as long as possible, especially if they are easy to repair. A happy medium would be having a replacement plan ready to go in case repair is impossible or impractical and maybe prepping some infrastructure beforehand, such as installing a 230V/30A outlet next to the existing water heater.
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.
Perhaps the idea, all too common in the residential sector, that an appliance should only be replaced when it suddenly and unpredictably fails is the problem. At that time you have the least ability to think and decide rationally on the best course of action because your mind (and probably your family) is screaming at you to get it fixed ASAP, long term consequences be damned. I think we can borrow the habit from the commercial sector of replacing them at a specified interval, say when the warranty runs out plus 5 years, so we can decide with a clear eye how best to do so.
Proactive replacement definitely helps. I was able to schedule the install of my tankless water heater and spend the time to get it done right. I wouldn't have had that if I had cold showers and flooded basement.
But I think there's also something to be said for holding on to things for as long as possible if they don't need replacing. There are 50 year old boilers still working just fine. They may not be as efficient as newer units, but they're also not consuming raw materials for the manufacturing of a newer one either.
There are definitely benefits to holding on to appliances as long as possible, especially if they are easy to repair. A happy medium would be having a replacement plan ready to go in case repair is impossible or impractical and maybe prepping some infrastructure beforehand, such as installing a 230V/30A outlet next to the existing water heater.
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.
"We need a grand unified theory of sustainability" this is a great line. thanks for the comment
https://www.domusweb.it/en/interviews/2011/02/05/science-fiction-urbanism.amp.html
"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.).