We are doing really well in this country in our drive towards net zero, at times over 50% of our electricity is generated from renewables, though applause for achievement does involve turning a blind eye to the shovelling of American forests into Drax. Solar is growing, the first steps are being made towards tidal power at scale and wind turbines are springing up like poppies in a field; a total of 25GW of offshore power is planned just for Scotland. Oil fields becoming wind farms, harvesting the air, pats on the back all round.
It seems that more congratulations are apparently due from the cutting of 1 million tons of CO2 emissions from British manufacturing in 2018, until you realise that CO2 emitted from the production of goods that we imported grew by 8 million tons at the same time. Is British manufacturing being sacrificed on the altar of virtue signalling?
Elon Musk observed that ‘CO2 is an unpriced externality’, where the emitter and the end user of the product, for example stuff from China, does not pay a price for those emissions at the time of purchase. The embedded CO2 is not costed into rectifying the problems it causes, or alleviating the effects, and so the cost of climate change is paid by everyone, though disproportionately by those more vulnerable to climate change and less able to avoid its worst effects.
Agriculture also creates problems because of the way we think individualistically, demanding what we want now at the cost of the future. The River Wye, one of our special watercourses, suffers from fertilizer run off, water extraction and toxic effluent from chicken farms, unpaid for at the point of damage. And, as agricultural top dog, we populate the our mountains with fluffy Mesopotamians which strip the ground smooth of vegetation, so rain sluices off and the cost is borne downstream.
It seems that too often, individual benefit trumps the collective good, however we do have the capacity to think and act together to solve problems, and there is beauty in our actions when we do. In The Last Enemy, by Richard Hillary, he recounts a conversation he had with his friend Peter several months before the author’s cockpit canopy jammed on his burning Spitfire, before he finally fell free beneath his silk parachute and before his still smouldering body was rescued from a field. The conversation took place on a train, Richard questioning Peter about why he felt such intensity and urgency for joining into battle.
Peter replied that ‘I would say that I was fighting the war to get rid of fear – of the fear of fear is perhaps what I mean. If the Germans win this war, nobody except little Hitlers will dare do anything. England will be run as if it were a concentration camp, or at best a factory. All courage will die out of the world – the courage to love, to create, to take risks, whether physical or intellectual or moral. Men will hesitate to carry out the promptings of the heart or the brain because, having acted, they will live in fear that their action may be discovered and themselves cruelly punished. Thus all love, all spontaneity, will die out of the world. Emotion will have atrophied. Thought will have petrified. The oxygen breathed by the soul, so to speak, will vanish, and mankind will wither.’
Peter’s commitment to standing against the growing firestorm from the east ended with him meeting the last enemy, death, in the skies over France. After a year of incalculable agony, Richard Hillary’s erased face and ruined hands were eventually reconstructed and he once again slipped inside the thin skin of a fighter, willingly, where he too met the last enemy.
Acting collectively to solve problems can achieve astonishing results but at increased cost where greater resources and commitment must be focused on overcoming issues which could have been avoided with forethought and planning. In war, so in business. When Airbus first flew the skies, the Boeing behemoth dismissed the upstart manufacturer, refusing to take them seriously, until it was too late and they came under pressure to launch a replacement for their aging 737; which until then had been so successful that one took off or landed somewhere in the world every 1.5 seconds.
Anxious to keep the dollars rolling in to keep shareholders happy, and probably bonuses paid, Boeing decided to upgrade the airframe to the 737 Max rather than design a new aircraft, thereby reducing their development costs from $20 billion to $2.5 billion. However, to compete with the Airbus the 737 Max needed larger and more fuel efficient engines, but as they needed to be mounted further forwards on the wing they had a tendency to tilt the nose upwards, creating a potential stall. The solution was software to automatically keep the plane flying level, and to further save costs only one sensor was fitted to monitor the anti-stall.
By this time the FAA had become a captured agency, just as the FCC is for telecoms now, a lapdog which sat and did as it was told by its aviation and political masters, putting its paw print to the authorisations to fly and keep the foreign interloper at bay. System failure, two total losses, hundreds of people dead, a grounded fleet and repeated disgraceful attempts to blame pilot error followed, along with a deservedly ruined reputation.
Business and politics mesh in the current crisis between Ukraine and its powerful, pernicious mischief maker neighbour, Russia. With Germany and Russia joined at the wallet, the richest country in Europe offers little more than helmets and field hospitals to care for wounded Ukrainians and scant support for its more robust allies; whilst desperately hoping they can find an excuse to open the taps on Nordstream2. The excuse is that they do not export arms to conflict zones, so presumably the E9,347,000,000 worth of armaments they export all go to peaceful areas. There is understandable dismay from countries who have memories of the attentions which a rampant Russia visited upon them, reflected in former Polish Foreign Minister Sikorsky who threated to kick the bear in the balls if it tried it on again with Poland.
Turning on Nordstream 2 also cuts Poland, Slovakia and Ukraine out of lucrative gas transit fees, and Poland was doubly miffed when a secret deal between Germany and Russia was revealed, whereby the former pays half the amount for gas that Poland does; so much for EU solidarity. Needless to say, it would be preferrable to not import 40% of your gas from Russia, and even more preferable to burn fewer fossil fuel for power, however since the German Greens halted nuclear power development that has been tricky to do, particularly since renewable energy generation is not expected to hit even 60% of consumption until 2030. Ideology, business and politics pull against the resistance of morality, as Trevenian’s observations on fossil fuels in Shibumi are that a country’s ‘devotion to honour varies inversely with its concern for central heating.’
Let’s quickly return to agriculture. With Ukraine growing about 10% of the World’s wheat and Russia growing 20%, it would be an understandable concern to have one country controlling nearly 1/3rd of global supplies, particularly one unafraid to crush dissent internally and unleash cyber and chemical warfare externally. Energy, wheat and mischief, three exports of a dictatorship.
Whether it is climate change driven by CO2 emissions, or harm from dysfunctional agriculture, or chaos from a tyrant there is one thing in common, they all require considerable resources in order to correct once they have gained momentum. There is a price for everything and there is a price for taking action, but the price is higher the longer it is deferred and there may come a time when if all we do is talk and talk and talk, then nothing will stem the avalanche.
It was entirely my fault. Joining an online political discussion group was supposed to be interesting, stimulating, but quickly became frustrating whenever a couple of key topics were introduced. The first was electric vehicles and whether we should have them (or stay with the venerable internal combustion engine) and the potential negative results of mass adoption. This ignored the obvious, that the decision has already been made, the automotive industry has received notice that by 2030 all cars must be electric, setting aside the absurdity of hybrids being permitted to continue to be sold until 2035; thereby keeping car manufacturers’ engine plants churning out profits for five more years, a last injection to keep the choking patient alive for a little longer.
The negatives of EVs were constantly highlighted within the group, particularly the sources of rare earths for the batteries and the need for more electricity to charge them, a genuine pressing need given the rapid approach of net zero. These are real problems, but better addressed by looking for solutions than by shouting negatives. Tesla, for example, is tackling the supply of rare earths, particularly cobalt, by first designing batteries that use minimal amounts of the metal and secondly by developing batteries that do not use it. Oddly, none of the EV detractors ever stated that in solidarity with artisanal cobalt miners in the DRC they were not going to buy a new iPhone.
Power for EVs is a complex problem but well within the scope of ingenuity and business to solve, with a bit of a push of political willpower to add impetus, and without buying more gas to pay for another palace for Vladimir Putin.
The second hotly debated group topic was climate change, ironic as heat is the biggest issue. The usual arguments were served up, that this country only accounts for 1% of global emissions (a figure that never takes into account embedded imported CO2 in manufactured products) and that others should pull their weight more so we don’t have to suffer, which is complex and contentious. A document produced by the Bruges Group was also frequently cited, debunking man-made climate change and presenting the idea that in fact more CO2 in the atmosphere could well be a good thing, as this made vegetation grow faster so agriculture benefited. After all, the argument went, look at how well tomatoes grow with CO2 supplementation in greenhouses; an argument which ignored the analogy.
One contributor complained that there was a lot of negativity around global warming and that no one was discussing the potential benefits to this country, such as nicer weather. I responded that there were actually quite a number of negatives for this country, such as rising sea levels (generally viewed as important by islands), or migration on an epic scale by people desperate to escape their scorched lands, or that farming anything other than olives in Kent could become impossible as the county developed a Mediterranean climate.
“Well, I like olives.” was the response, and I left the group.
It may sound harsh, but it is very difficult to deal with stupidity, because stupidity is self-constructed and is therefore not the same as lacking intelligence or information, a point made by the Austrian novelist Robert Musil in 1937. Indeed, the addition of information may enhance stupidity where there is a rigid perchance for forcing facts to fit into a framework of desire outcome, like a toddler determinedly bashing plastic bricks into the wrong holes.
There is also no restriction on the spread of stupidity, since it is easy for any of us to be trapped in a net where selected science or facts fills in the gaps, making it harder to escape, a particular danger where the problem is so difficult that it is easier to not believe in it than it is to find a solution. To counter this, Elon Musk has a guiding principle of when presented with a problem, he returns to first principles to solve it and work through every step, such as being faced with intractable Russians who did not want to sell him as many rockets as he needed to start SpaceX so he built his own from scratch, in the process cutting costs and securing supply.
As an aside, Robert Musil was an exile from Nazism, a belief system and regime that was no stranger to stupidity. It was, after all, lead by men who thought it was a good idea to attack Russia, in the face of historical precedent, and that once they had reached the eastern borders of the agricultural powerhouse of Ukraine and the oil fields of Romania they should continue east into vast wilderness. This was also a regime that viewed extermination as preferable to utilisation; obviously accepting the monstrosity of this premise.
Yet, the allies were not immune from the stupidity of often intelligent people. In 1944, Arthur Harris continued to bomb German towns, since there were no cities left, when he should have been obliterating Romanian oil refineries, the haphazard bombing of which left the tank commanders in the Battle of the Bulge critically short of fuel, rather than depriving them of the fuel to even reach the start line. At the same time, General Hodges, learning nothing from Flanders and the futility of infantry unsupported by armour attacking well entrenched defenders, hurled manpower at the Hurtgen Forest in an effort to breakthrough the German lines, when the option to outflank with armour and air superiority was available. It was said that the winter conditions were so extreme that anyone younger than 20 was not mature enough to physically cope and anyone over 34 was too old. Hodges may be one of those exceptions, however, where stupidity was not necessarily accompanied by an over abundance of intelligence.
One of the challenges to overcoming stupidity is the filtration of facts so the most relevant, most reliable, are the ones given the greatest significance when making an assessment. Since intelligence is not only no guard against stupidity, as it can actually add to it, perception must be added to the selection of the facts. This is even more difficult when distortions in the facts are created by the venality of well monied vested interests who are well experienced in the analysis of methods of manipulation, skills they have developed over decades.
The most effective game plan was developed by Big Tobacco who flooded Tsunamis of cash onto the shores of scientists who were willing to sell their probity for equivocality, creating doubt over the science. Yet more cash funded advertising, which even managed to convince people that most doctors preferred to smoke Camel since, if you needed to relax with a cigarette, these were nicely milder. Big Telecom quickly learned the rules of the disingenuous game from their tobacco counterparts when questioned over the safety of mobile phone microwave radiation, which they hastened to benignly refer to as radio frequency. And have no doubt, this was a high stakes game, as evidenced by the leaking of internal emails from the CEO of Motorola to one of his executives, exalting that it looked like they had ‘successfully wargamed the science.’ They fudged the science, captured the allegedly independent Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and were confident in their game plan until damages for brain tumours started to be awarded in the courts, the class actions started and the FCC were sued for using inadequate safety standards.
The hydrocarbon companies needed to keep climate doubt alive and gaming the science was a way to do this so it watched with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us. The numbers were staggering. Over £150 million a year on lobbying to delay, control or block climate change policies. $2 million spent on Facebook and Instagram advertisements promoting the benefits of increased hydrocarbon use, during the run up to the US midterm elections. The support by BP, to the tune of $13 million, for a successful campaign to stop a carbon tax in Washington state. The tip of an iceberg of cash and anti-climate change information; a rapidly melting iceberg by the way, as the top 5 listed companies now spend $193 million a year promoting their support for action against climate change.
It will be a few years before we can tell if the growing awareness of the perils of climate change is too late to enable a realistic alteration in the way we live, since ‘Climate change is not a problem of the future, it’s here and now’, according to Friederike Otto of the University of Oxford and lead IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) author. One thing that we can say, with certainty, is that climate change creates unpredictability and it is no good us shouting into the void, we must come up with solutions to deal with the problems we will face, whilst recognising that we are going to be hit with the unexpected and must be adaptable. Simple, idealogical beliefs are unable to deal with the unexpected and stupidity is the essence of simplicity.
We have witnessed the catastrophic already, but the outcomes of unpredictability can be more subtle, such as the effects on Svalbard. Here the warmer summers are increasing the amount of vegetation on the inland area of Longyearbyen, resulting in a doubling of the reindeer population, whilst winter rain on the coast creates ice sheets over the ground and has starved the coastal population to half its normal size. Meanwhile, the permafrost, on which infrastructure is built is less permanent, so the runway has to be repeatedly rebuilt and building regulations for houses have had to be adapted.
Like Svalbard, we too are going to have to adapt our building regulations, our designs and our ways of building houses. We are going to have to look at every component, of every method of how we construct as we can no longer afford to build with an elastic conscience, stretching the alibi of profit and convenience over profligacy.
Going back to first principles will help us to find the solutions that we need because we will not have a second chance to get this right. Musk was pragmatic when he stated that even if there was only a 0.001% chance of climate change being reality, it would still be an absurd experiment to run.
So, those who select the facts that they want in order to fit the outcome that they desire are more than misguided, they are stupid. Worse than this, they are selfish since the consequences of their inaction and misdirection impacts others. People with this mindset look at the figures, the mathematics of the equation of climate change and arrive at surd calculations, based on in built bias, which leads them to conclude that olives from England outweigh the burning of the Sahel.
Previous Musings have looked at methods and materials that we would never consider using for house construction, were we not constrained by mental inflexibility, vested interests and ‘tradition’. Thankfully things are now changing with a dawning realisation that modern methods of construction offer advantages of speed, flexibility and considerably lower carbon emissions, along with the chance to use more renewal materials. Headlining renewability is timber, with the simple theory that if you plant trees they absorb carbon, you harvest the trees for the wood and then plant more; the carbon being locked into your building materials. It’s a virtuous circle.
Unfortunately it is not quite as simple as this, and there is no such thing as easy virtue.
Any successful industry requires standardisation and an efficient production line, so commerce demands that timber 'factories' are created, monoculture blocks to be harvested by mechanisation; planted and cut on mass. The flaw in this plan is that a successful forest is diverse, as it is a false assumption that trees compete with each other, in fact they are a co-operative. Trees lean on each other in storms, easing the strain of gusts, they communicate through their roots and they warn each other of pest attack so others can prepare themselves and they can even pass nutrients to an ailing neighbour; for it is to the benefit of all for everyone to be healthy. Trees even grow better when they start out in the shade of adults, taking their time to mature, to set firm roots and grow their bodies steadily, all the time linking up to the trees around them through a web of Mycorrhizal fungus within the rhizosphere, which takes decades to establish. Without this time to mature you end up with the equivalent of junk fed adolescents who grow quickly, but are sickly inside, lacking resilience to adversity.
In a commercial operation, blocks of trees are felled and a horde of youngsters are planted, completely exposed without the support of older trees around them. This exposure brings many perils, the most dangerous being drying out, which even adults struggle to cope with, let alone these turkey twizzler trees. European forests are already suffering from drying out, with annual mortality rates increasing (particularly for Norwegian spruce that is frequently grown in plantations outside its natural range) and this becomes self-fuelling destruction as dying trees fall to create more ground biomass, which is further dried as it is exposed to the sun, creating more opportunity for wild fires.
The more that land is cleared, by felling or fire, the more heat from solar radiation the bare ground absorbs and the faster the ground dries, a process accelerated by the lack of a root network to reduce drainage when it does rain. An established forest is a self-protecting entity as leaves reflect around 50% of the sun’s rays, as well as shading the ground to reducing drying, whilst trapping moist air beneath the canopy. It also establishes a biotic pump which, although it sounds like something that Gwyneth Paltrow might be into, is actually an astonishing geo-mechanical mechanism. It works like this.
Trees draw water from the ground and release it as vapour to rise and condense into clouds, in the process changing it from a gas to a liquid and thus creating a drop in air pressure, allowing even more water vapour to rise. The uplifting air current caused by the rising vapour draws in horizonal air currents, lower to the ground from the sides of the forest, sucking in air from higher air pressure areas such as the ocean, carrying moisture with it. So, the bigger and more contiguous the forest, and the bigger the trees, the more rainfall it creates. Oh, and of course, a mature forest traps more of this rainfall in the ground, making the forest healthier and helping to slow run off and consequent flooding.
There are ways of creating more sustainable forests and the Fins are having a good go at doing this, helped by the 60 percent private ownership of forests and encouragement to manage them with an eye on biodiversity, along with less mass block felling; the aim being to create a circular wooden economy. However, it is less easy to see this responsible model being adopted by most other countries, particularly with the massive calls on timber from around the world, which brings us onto the next point – the supply chain crisis.
Congested container ports, rocketing commodity and goods prices, and the USA and China demanding ever greater supplies of timber, all these place huge strain on the materials we need to build with modern methods of construction; timber framing and SIP panels to name just two. Yet this does not mean we should be returning to the old fashioned way of building houses with bricks and blocks, as this would be like going back to building more coal fired power stations, which would be a really daft thing to do.
Instead, we need to look at using new technology to construct our houses, taking advantage of advances in material science to create new construction products. Graphene offers one route, through its ability to add strength to other materials, enabling us to use less whilst lightening the structural components that we use to construct the houses. It also offers us a possible way out of the supply chain crisis as the components for products can be produced in this country, rather than shipping them in and shipping out our money to pay for them. We just need to be bold, clever, and above all have faith that we have the ability and talent to manufacture them in this country; the home of the industrial revolution.
With forests around the world under stress and increasing demands for timber, from people with deeper pockets than us, there is another reason for keeping them where they are. Each mature tree removes over 1 kilo of particulates every year and dust particulates are reduced by 75% on the sheltered side of a tree. Now here is the kicker. A study by Harvard University found that each extra 10 micrograms of PM2.5 per cubic metre of air over 28 days was linked to an increase of 11.7 per cent in coronavirus cases and a 52.8 per cent in Covid-19 deaths.
So, it’s not all about commerce, which we have seen is not that practical unless you set up monoculture blocks and treat forests like fields of wheat, and at what point do we exhaust the land and have to intervene to continue to grow our ‘crop’? At the risk of going all Feng Shui on everyone, being amongst trees has been shown to reduce blood pressure and stress hormones such as cortisol and adrenalin, a reason the Japanese have a phrase, Shirin-Yoku, meaning Forest Bathing. This connection with the natural world is impossible in a harvestable forest, have you ever tried to stroll amongst densely packed trees in a forestry block, or listened to birdsong in a monoculture?
It is all laid out before us. We need more trees to create rain and clean the air, to create biodiversity and cleanse our spirits, whilst it is getting more and more expensive to buy timber products from felled trees in other countries. So, surely it is time to apply our famous inventive spirit and manufacturing prowess and come up with new ways of making building products for ourselves which don't involve felling forests, as the last thing we need is to see even more wood from the trees.
There was a series of adverts, back in the 1970s, for packets of powdered dried potato, made by Cadburys and marketed as Smash – with the brilliant strap-line, ‘For mash, get Smash’. They were funny too, featuring robot aliens who have visited Planet Earth and are reporting back to their superiors with their findings. Apparently, humans eat a lot of something called potatoes and, as one was held aloft its metal claws, the alien explains how ‘They peel them with their metal knives, they boil them for twenty of their minutes … then they smash them all to bits.’ Robot aliens fall about laughing, ‘Clearly they are a most primitive people!’
The idea was that this was a crazy way to cook, better to open a packet, add hot water and quickly enjoy delicious, nutritious food. If you wanted to eat potatoes and you were not bound by the past, the way you had always done it, then making a meal could be accomplished with far greater efficiency.
You could say the same about cars. If you were starting from scratch, right this moment, working out how to power a personal means of transportation, then you would never design a reciprocating engine which accelerated and then sharply stopped pistons inside tubes in which you ignited an explosive fuel. Designing an engine like this would present you with all kinds of difficulties. To prevent seizing the pistons to the tube, lubrication would be essential, resistant to the enormous heat generated, and you would have to change this lubrication frequently; then face the problem of disposing of a disgusting, toxic liquid. Every joint in this complex motor would need to be sealed tight to prevent leakage plus you would have to work out how to safely carry large amounts of highly flammable fuel right next to the occupants.
To create the fuel to power your vehicle, sticky, dead, primeval forests would have to be pumped from deep beneath the ground, in enormous quantities. You would then run the risk of transporting this substance in vast unwieldy ships, across turbulent oceans surrounded by fierce rocks, to huge refineries. Then the refined fuel would be transported in tankers around the country and pumped into underground storage tanks so people could pump it out again into their cars. Let’s not even start to think about how you would design a system to remove the dangerous particulates exhausted from the engine which would poison people if they breathed them. Perhaps you could cheat?
So, sitting down with a blank piece of paper, making a list of potential ways to power your personal transport, you would quickly draw a line through the item headed Internal Combustion Engine.
It is a similar story with houses. Sitting in front of your blank piece of paper, you might consider a series of methods of construction. These would include digging up clay and making it into little blocks, which you then heat to such high temperatures that it became ceramic, taking 706 KWh of electricity to make just one ton of bricks and producing around 23kg of CO2 for every m2. Let’s get quickly geeky about this. Assuming 60 bricks per m2, you would produce 0.38kg of CO2 for each brick you made, so that is 1.15kg of CO2 for just three bricks and that CO2 would occupy 483 cubic meters of space. For three bricks.
With your paper plan you would need to come up with a way of sticking these small blocks together, which could be done by gangs of men mixing concrete by hand and trowelling it onto the bricks, though you would have to be careful not to build too quickly in case you squeezed the mortar out with the weight of the bricks above, or build in bad weather where the mix could be washed out.
Staring at your piece of paper where you had made notes about how to build walls from bricks, you might just conclude that there could be a better way of building house walls, if only you could come up with one. So, you might park the problem of walls for the moment whilst you thought about how to make a roof, which would be done a more efficiently if you did not use heavy, overlapping tiles placed onto a complex series of battens and waterproof felt, laid under the tiles in case they slipped or were blown off in a storm.
At this point you likely decide to also set aside the roof conundrum and go back to thinking of a way of building walls without bricks. Perhaps heavy concrete blocks, laid by hand and stuck together with the same type of mortar as you had planned for the bricks? But they would still have to be double skinned, so you could put insulation between them as you went and you are still left with the issues of manpower and oh so slow construction. And the weather. And the maximum height you can build in a day. And cutting blocks to fit the edges. At this point your paper is screwed into a ball, hurled at the office bin and the wise decision made to have a cup of coffee, take a break and then a place a fresh, clean sheet on the desk.
A new idea. What about a frame for the house into which lightweight insulated panels are slotted? What about modern materials in fresh designs and finishes to make the walls? Then you could make the roof from high performance modern materials as well, so you could make it flat to reduce costs, and far easier to mount solar panels at the right angle. Imagine your mind fizzing with the possibilities, the speed of building, the ability to plan ahead accurately without waiting for suppliers or workmen to turn up. Imagine the creativity, the fresh look of your houses once they were freed from the straitjacket of inefficiency and waste.
What if you then looked at how to build in cutting edge technology, such as the incorporation of graphene, which could deliver greater performance, speed and efficiency? What if it also meant you used fewer materials because what you did use was lighter and stronger.
Imagine if you could add imagination to your house designs by using modern methods of construction. The way forward suddenly becomes clearer.
So now, returning to where we started, what lessons are the potato obsessed alien robots telling us? Simply, that there are more modern, efficient and faster ways of carrying out a process or delivering a solution – for them it was how to cook mashed potato quickly and easily, for us it is how to look at things with a fresh view and not be dragged down by the bad old ways of doing things.
What the tuber chomping robots were not telling us is that digging something out of the ground, then processing, heating and drying it takes energy and adds considerable cost, whilst leaving you with an inferior product; a bit like a brick really.
Housing is broken in the UK and the effects on people who want to own their own home are enormous, so let’s look at some of the reasons why it is in such a bad state.
There is an obvious geographical draw, a south eastern magnet pulling, creating a furious demand for homes within a finite land resource and this power will only be reduced if economic dynamos are relocated, or constructed, in other parts of the country. Whilst acknowledging this factor, with a broad sweep of the hand let’s ignore it and examine areas which can be dealt with outside of the large scale government policy and epic financial investment which will be needed to alleviate the problem. Let’s look at what we can do more immediately.
Fundamentally there is a problem with the way we build houses and the profligate use of our very limited available land. Developers build houses to maximise profits and, in general, care little for the living functionality, the operations and the cost for buyers. This leads them to build developments, and the houses, in a calamitously inefficient way, often concealing their failures with cynical road naming; Larks Rise, The Willows, Green Meadows.
Houses have faux design touches tacked on, false accoutrements to give a feeling of a faint historical echo, for example of Georgian times (fake white pillars either side of the front door), or mocking tudor with tacked on timber to add ‘olde worlde charm’. And all are built from inefficient materials, the absurdity of putting little pieces of baked clay one on top of another, stuck together with hand mixed cement. Or complex roofs of overlapping clay tiles, sealed at the edges with cement, being another. There are, sadly, so many more.
All these add to the build cost, whilst tricking the buyer into thinking they have a quality product for which they are required to pay a higher price.
No architect draws these developments, as employing more than a plan drawer would reduce profit margins, so no one scrutinises the available land to intelligently assesses how it can be used best. Or orients the houses to maximise the available sunlight; passive solar gain is rarely considered. Meanwhile, housing estate roads wind like sinuous rills, where blossoming trees used to be, no Xanadu these housing estates, despite their countryside naming pretensions.
There will probably be a gesture towards ‘affordable housing’ on these developments, which ignores the obvious, that few are truly affordable. Inefficient land use, inefficient building methods and highly efficient profit taking summarise the sad situation.
Turning from money to humanity, what is the effect on people?
Clinical psychologist Professor Jordan Peterson highlights the deeply embedded mechanism of serotonin production in the human body, released with a rise in personal status. Confidence and empowerment rise in line with this chemical, so if a person is low in the dominance hierarchy with associated reduced serotonin, they tend to be more impulsive and emotionally disregulated, they are more dissatisfied and look for anything which will boost them, no matter how adverse their actions. With a drop in status, they experience negative emotions because of their tenuous position in the dominance hierarchy.
It is important to note that status is not necessarily achieved by material goods, as the release of serotonin is dependent on personal status, therefore a person can have great status but not great wealth. It is as if confidence creates confidence and empowerment, but all are difficult to achieve if you are forced to live and work in unfulfilling circumstances, or have no home or job. Is this why ex-offending employees of Timpson are amongst their most trusted employees, having been lost they have been given the means to find their way.
This is backed up by a 2019 study which found that 50% of HMP Parc prisoners had been exposed to a very high level of childhood adversity. For thirty years, psychiatrist and psychotherapist Gwen Adshead worked with violent offenders and observed that most are keen to learn from their mistakes, get themselves into a stable position and enjoy the things that others enjoy, ‘Which is a roof over their heads, someone to love and something useful to do.’
There is a Jewish phrase tikkum olam, which is the responsibility that we all bear not only for our own moral and material welfare, but also for the welfare of our society. It is a responsibility to both repair and enhance our world. We also need to ensure that society offers the opportunity for people to grow within it, to establish lives on firm foundations, build families from a stable base and raise personal status; since with a rise in personal status comes greater personal esteem and a reduction in the chances of a descent into chaos. Structure establishes order.
Building houses that are unobtainable or unsuitable prevents people from building their lives, or indeed rebuilding them. Building houses that are profligate in land use and expensive to run does not contribute to the construction of a well ordered society, it is a failure.
Fortunately, we know how to build well, how develop with intelligence, how to use modern methods of construction to reduce costs and minimise waste. All we need is the will to impose discipline on a system that requires houses to be accessible to the many and from which homes can be made and stable lives established.
Because if you value pastiche and profit above all else then you act in opposition to tikkum olam.