started with the valorizing of the mentally ill. and perhaps the truly baffling popularity of gnomes.
edit:
PS: it used to be understood that to have a child disabled in serious ways was a great tragedy because the goal for all reproducing creatures is offspring who can survive independently after the usual period of appropriate rearing.
now it's a lifestyle accessory or checks on your social validation bingo card.
"it used to be understood that to have a child disabled in serious ways was a great tragedy...now it's a lifestyle accessory or checks on your social validation bingo card."
Oh how 'ableist' of you. Yes that's a real word the lunatics use, and yes the lunatic activists are AS WE SPEAK trying to influence NIH grant funding so that no money goes towards any project/study that's aimed at 'reducing disability' as that is oh so terribly racist. Sorry, ableist.
The lunatics are seriously about to take over the asylum. We are way overdue for a major comet impact.
the deaf people who want deaf children, and to have them stay deaf for the preservation of the culture, need to find themselves in god's big tandoor in the sky someday.
likewise the professor with a painful congenital progressive crippling condition who deliberately had two kids with the same because, to boil her explanation down to its plain meaning, she wanted the company of her kind. screening was available and she selected for the disability.
Ouch! If you follow this argument to its logical and rather hurtful conclusion, you end up as a Eugenicist who supports the compulsory sterilisation of people with learning disabilities, and that is a slippery slope to hell.
One quick story, on a personal level. A friend-of-a-friend of mine recently posted on Instagram a cartoon showing Greta being inducted into some type of "Heroes Hall of Fame" with the Avengers. Help me make it make sense!
Kids who look cute, but are shown to be carnivorous? It's been so many years since I saw Barbarella that I don't remember that at all. But there's a very similar scene in Galaxy Quest.
or the red guards and the khmer rouge. they started out as cute kids too, but their faces twisted up just exactly into greta's un speech expression. funny how nobody noticed.
There's a lot of Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy going on. Only they are taking their children to drs all too willing to encourage the mentally ill parents and the confused tortured children.
Her parents are virtue signaling through her. This will not end well. She's on the spectrum from what I understand so she is vulnerable and won't understand the massive rejection coming her way because she'll miss the signals ahead of time. Her parents must be awful people. (note: I have a son on the spectrum)
The hobgoblin and her parents have perfected the art of being hypocrites to the next level.
Think about it from the get go of that big goblin mouth was running away telling us how she used public transport for traveling and we should all follow suit.
What they always forget, or very conveniently never mention is how much traveling on public transport or not around the world that is needlessly done by her.
If she and her family believed in what they say and loved the planet so much, then they’d serve it better by staying home instead of running up the excessive pointless carbon footprint on journeys they never need make.
Instead they repeat drivel all around the world using up resources that they accuse others of abusing.
They really do need to put their money where their mouth is by sitting put in a cold dark house and eat bugs to their hearts content.
Unless they’re willing to do this then they need to shut their traps and the public should enforce a self block out and ignore hobgoblin and co.
We have infrared thermometers which read temperatures from a distance. The Americans used them in Vietnam to detect VietCong and North Vietnamese in the jungles.
If we have Swedish readers it would not be too difficult to take a reading from the street.
indeed. i live in a house built in the 1920s, it is in energy class 'F' (the third-worst), and this after substantial improvements. god knows how much it would cost to make an E-class building out of it. if these standards were ever imposed I would be praying daily for a fire.
Yes... just think of how ugly the world could be, if we raze the beautiful old architecture of the past. My God, back in the 80's I spent a week in Minsk which had been completely destroyed in the war, and re-built in Stalinist vernacular. The place was (at that time) so hideous and heavy and antithetical to human sensibility that I barely left my hotel room. Can we please not repeat every stupid lesson from the past?????
when people are forced to live in ugly environments they don't turn out so nice. and they don't start out with any sense of beauty as a condition of life to value.
My house, built in 1702, is similarly classed. Because of the layout (e.g. space between windows and doorways, for example), there is no way to get more insulation into the walls.
So these energy requirements are essentially an order to move out of the house, into a new build one and wait until the current structure becomes so dilapidated that the municipality issues a 'tear-down' order.
one thing I've wondered about the EU regulations, is how they'll address listed buildings. they're presently entirely exempt from the GEG in Germany, for example. normally one wants to avoid Denkmalschutz because you can't even do things like replace windows without enduring enormous bureaucratic hassle, but I could see them commanding a substantial premium if it means the energy efficiency mavens will leave you alone.
Yes, an interesting point. However, how many German homes qualify for Denkmalschutz? What are the qualifications? The war destroyed a great many of these buildings, but there are still lots of rather ordinary homes built between 1600-1850, that would probably not qualify, as they do not have any outstanding historic significance. In addition, the qualifications could always be tightened.
google says about 3% of all german buildings are currently listed. at least in bavaria, it's done by state authorities in some consultation with the municipality – you can apply for the protections yourself, but the bureaucrats can also swoop in and declare the listing unilaterally when the owners apply for a construction permit or similar. in my experience denkmalschutz is if anything applied far too widely. of course, as you say, that can change, but if they start restricting the requirements while going crazy with energy efficiency regulations, it would only drive the prices of existing denkmäler higher.
What will then become of all the homes that do not qualify, but are too expensive to update? A friend of mine owns one such home. After Oma died they de-registered it with the municipality and now only use it for storage or summer parties. They said the cost of making it livable was too expensive. All of the family members wanted a modern home instead.
The Denkmalschutz is a typical example of people and instances scrambling to stay relevant. One would have thought the historically relevant buildings have been found by now. Yet each and every year, new ones are found where no one thought to look. I know of some examples where ordinary houses were put under this spell for no apparent reason other than the particular 'Amt' finding it perculiar and of special interest. Don't you love it when people are in power of their own relevance...
The level of Denkmalschutz in Germany in my experience varies from state to state. Some states like the Saarland have small incompetent departments and thus protect very little, while neighboring states like Rhineland-Pfalz protect a lot. Furthermore, in contrast to the UK, the protection for homes is almost always for the facade and not the interior. I know of people in the UK who are told what they can or cannot do with wallpaper. In Germany, I think you could demolish all the interior walls and floors and not have a problem with Denkmalschutz.
That's a good point. In my case, the house is not listed. (I'm in Wallonia, which is not nearly as advanced when it comes to things like that as you Germans!).
But yes, you can see wonderful opportunities to game the system for listed buildings. Yet more unintended consequences from poorly thought-through regulations.
This is quite straight forward. The UK has exemption certificates. How one gets such a certificate is not published, but it is on House of Commons record (ie, real).
Now, guess what type of house the wealthy own, or would like to own?
Oh, look. All the exemption certificates - a fixed number, apparently - have been allocated already!
One law for the masses, business as usual for the elite.
What's the width of high density foam panels and 'sheet rock'? Does it exceed 2cm? Because if it does, then the added width of the panels would surpass the clearance to the doorway in the corner (yes, the doorways are in the corners of the room, nearly flush to the perpendicular).
So I would have the option of moving the doorway out, by rebuilding nearly one meter thick stone walls and replacing the lintels that would not widthstand this construction effort. And because the house is on different levels, I would also have to rebuild the 19th century flight of steps between the rooms. I would also have to move the plumbing and the wood stove embedded in the wall between the two rooms, on one side, and rebuild the kitchen and move the sink to the other side of the room on the other. Because the wood floors were cut around the existing dimensions, I would have to find flooring to match the cuts - a near-impossible task given the age and grain of the wood.
By the time I did all this, I would end up with smaller rooms (in some cases so much so that they would be rendered non-functional) and I would have spent as much money (and 'sustainability budget') as if I just knocked the house down and rebuilt it to a different floorplan, which was my point to begin with.
I'm guessing you're American and have never seen an old European stone house in anything other than a movie. But I'll hold back from calling you ignorant or lame ass because language like that reflects more on he who says it than he who is so accused.
Just as an aside, though. Don't you think, if such easy solutions existed, I would have simply embraced them? After all, I put maximum insulation in my roof not because I'm wedded to an ideology, but because I like the idea of spending less money on heating and having to cut, haul, stack and season fewer logs every year in the woods in order to keep my family warm.
Oh I forgot the windows. Because the windows are all embedded within the nearly one meter thick walls, one would have the option of either creating cold bridges by leaving them uninsulated, or one would have to insulate the casements, thereby replacing the existing windows with (yet) smaller windows. The house is already not very bright due to being built at a time when people didn't place much value of indoor light (or have money for big windows). OR you could pull apart the walls around the windows, fit new stones, and reseal around a larger aperture. Times eight.
my cousin bought my parent's house from the 50s. They looked into it and to update it, would have cost more than build a new one. Once their new is finished, the old one goes down. Then I will feel really old lol.
of course you would still have to rebuild it according to the rules. May be better to buy one of these RV bus houses? you could drive to a cooler place in summer and a warmer in winter.
i feel so sad when i watch american movies set in the '30s to the '50s when they show the kitchen stoves just like my mom's. i almost put it into storage when her apt. was sold but there had to be a rational limit to what i kept. as it is my rental apt. far far away looks like a museum to mom. unfortunately it's also got one of those abominable electric stoves with a smooth cooktop. faux cooking for the duration until a ukrainian oligarch buys me a lakeside estate.
I'm in Canada, where our immigration levels are insane. There must be a few vacant homes in India, the biggest source of newcomers over here. :-)
That said, I'm a couple of decades younger than you, and even for me, a move like that would be a challenge.
Nevertheless, I am bewildered by the conflicting "Net Zero" delusion of our politicians countered by the mass migration of people to our northern climate from countries where central heat is not a necessity.
Unfortunately the general level of science education in the US is such that 75% of the people believe that 0.04% CO2 in the gas atmosphere is a threat to life on earth. Even luminaries like Dr Jeffrey Sachs are still pushing climate change as something that must be considered an emergency.
True, but what is fascinating is to see the people following the lunatics’ instructions back away from the actual cliff edge again and again.
All of this feels very “end of an era”. The new religion is nuts, and no one really likes it. But we can’t let the old religion back in the door in case people wake up to the trick that’s been played on them.
That climatism has maintained ascendency as long as it has is testament to the incredible power of marketing and stupidity. Unsure which one came first, though!
The resilience of the cult(s) that propose there is a magic man in the sky controlling everything that uniquely favours one's culture to the detriment to other cultures continues to baffle me. Those cults are lasting millennia with little sign of decline.
sounds like a diet plan for menopausal women ROFL thanks for the laughs. I recently read (might even be in your substack) that wind turbines in some places are fed by fuel engines. I remember when the sun panels came up, that Belgium gave subsidies to get them. You could put the surplus on the net and be reimbursed. Then the subsidies stopped, the reimbursments stopped, and now, you have to pay to put your surplus on the net, and when you are short, you pay for what you take in as well. They got them by the nose! I heard about it here in US but the guys told me it takes 20 years to get your investment back, and I would have to cut all my trees! That saves me lots in summer, in shade, so I don't have to cool so hard. I was also told the panels last only 20-25 years, so by the time you get your money back, you have to buy new ones (and they are hard to recycle)
Decades ago I was banging on about how the SAE needed to set up a standard for replacement battery packs and impose it on the auto manufacturers before any of this started. Then, at least, you'd get the benefit of scale, if all EVs were using some N quantity of identical, easily replaced battery packs.
But nobody listened, and besides, that'd keep the manufacturer from selling you a new car every five years like the cell phone manufacturers do, with *their* essentially unreplaceable batteries.
And I strongly support 40 types of bread, but when I'm working on cars I only need one set of tools. Admittedly, in two different measurement systems, but still, that lets me work on nearly any car in the world.
While Germany was at the forefront of both Wind & Solar (neither of which are inherently reliable or cost-efficient),and shuttering Nuclear power plants, electricity prices will l continue to climb ever higher.
Add in EVs, and electric heat pumps, without a reliable power source.
Not to mention that both wind and solar installations have limited lifespans...
And just how do you recycle a wind turbine blade which measures 80 meters in length?
On a recent cross-country car trip I drove, both coming and going, through two massive wind farms and noted that 80-90% of the turbines were not turning.
What I don't understand is how BLIND wishful thinking seems to make people. I mean, we're talking about highly-paid people whose job it is to show some foresight. How can you willfully deny reality to such an extent?
I bought into the whole wind power thing some 20 years ago...
I went to the opening of the Melancthon wind project, in Shelburne, Ontario attended, of course, by many politicians.
I soon came to realize that most installations that I happened to drive by, whether Ontario or upper NY State, the turbines were typically not turning.
Maintenance/too windy/no wind/whatever.
The point is, MW assumptions into the grid, were all based on ideal conditions: hence wishful thinking...
Solar only works on an individual basis, passively...
Possibly, and I have no idea if this would *actually* work, shred them and use them for chopped fiberglass fill on reduced structural requirements projects?
But yes, in general, they're a lot of very large trash. And they only last about seven years...
Wow. You really got obsessive over me. Creepy. Fine, how long *do* those large windmill blades last then? Surely, if you're calling my statement bullshit, you can answer that easily?
If Climate Alarmism really does die away, it's going to leave a big hole in The Woke Religion's Holy Trinity of Climate, Gender and Race mythologies. God knows what they'll come up with to replace it? I dread to think. https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/invasion-of-the-virtue-signallers
There is such a disconnect between the upper echelons of politics and media (typical headline from a couple of months back: "To protect the climate, single-family homes can no longer be justified") and ordinary people, who desperately want single-family homes and gardens.
My architect father made his living updating churched (Michigan) for energy efficiently. He did design a dwelling or two, but the real lucrative thing was to do 'commercial' buildings, which included the churches. He still barely made much money but I think he enjoyed it for the most part. As for my small house in Portland, OR, built in 1924, it lacks any insulation in the walls and so could use some upgrades indeed. The eaves need rebuilding, the attic is somewhat poorly built, and fixing those things will be about $50,000 min. I could do the work myself, I am only 60, but not sure its a good investment. I am not willing to borrow it, and dream of selling this house and trying to buy a very small plot in another state, and building something more manageable, even a glorified shed, well built, that I can maintain easily with a small plot for farming. And a fireplace that works. I miss fire.
That sounds like an idea only if you leave your Portland ideology there. I left after only one year of the lunacy and that was in 1978. The news from Portland is depressing at best, horrifying at worst.
The Federal Republic of Germany is an insane place and it is not enough merely to do the crazy things that everybody else is doing. We have to exceed them in our mania for self-punishment.
=> This, dear Eugyppius, might be the core of German-ness in a nutshell. Everybody else is half-heartedly burning a couple of witches here and there? The German lands ratchet up the hysteria and become responsible for 50% of all European witch burnings. Everybody else a bit over-the-top patriotic? As a German Kaiser, you build a mighty fleet, ratchet up the rhetoric, give stupid Austria a blank check for support and throw the whole world into a four-year bloodbath. Everybody else dealing with an economic crisis and a crisis of self-confidence in a haphazard way, trying this and that and muddling through any old way? Germany finds one formerly unemployed Austrian painter and hero-worships him right into the Third Reich.
Here's to hoping that the end of Western hegemony and the re-introduction of serious geopolitical competition will help us get past this era of midwitted progressive stupidity. Maybe? Are we just screwed?
I think we are screwed, demography determines fate and the culture that has made the West a great place for its denizens (historically speaking, almost everywhere at any time sucks in comparison) is on the way out.
Even if the elites snap out of it, so much has been destroyed already, from self-confidence to innovative power to educational foundations to a certain unity of culture and belief - I don't see how that can be restored.
I think both that we are just screwed, at least temporarily, and that Western hegemony hasn’t got much longer to go. I’m watching Ukraine and Turkey with (depressed) interest.
This is how you fail without accepting it. Basically the doom cycle of all European politicians. Not so if you track their personal wealth though, which is inversely proportional to the one of their constituents.
Good news. I’d take issue with your last paragraph about the EUs measures having no hope of saving the climate.
That assumes it needs saving - from what? It sounds a bit as if you are accepting that there is a ‘climate emergency’, something that >1200 of the worlds leading independent climate scientists dispute.
It also sounds a bit like you agree that climate change is man made, where again, there’s no evidence that it is. Climates have always changed, and will continue to do so. CO2 accounts for 0.04% of the atmosphere, at historically low concentrations. If the level halved, plant life would start to die off. Man made emissions Account for <10% of that, so how can tiny variations in the concentration of a trace gas account for anthropogenic climate change?
The truth is, carbon is linked to all forms of human activity, especially economic, thus is an ideal candidate for governments to choose to tax, limit our movements and freedoms, and control us.
I have an engineer friend who crunched a few numbers and found that the current rate of CO2 emissions is a relative drop in the bucket and cannot be linked let alone blamed for the climate. I agree, it is a way to control us and limit movement.
Numbers I have bouncing around in my head are something like 273 or 293 ppm CO2 in 1960 when they started measuring, and up to about 420 ppm now. I would assume that increase to be anthropogenic, though I'm not sure how much CO2 actually contributes to increased global temperature. Long-term geologically, either measure is historically low, but that's going back millions of years. Could you add to, or correct me on this?
Maybe. I can’t post it here but there are graphs which no one is disputing, showing CO2 in a steady long term decline, albeit with a small blip up recently which could be due to anything.
All I know is that if the climate denying scientists (there are many of them) were wrong, they would debate them and prove them wrong. The fact that they can only cancel and censor them tells you all you need to know.
it's not that they will affirmatively rein themselves in.
you can only push ordinary people just so far. this our plague era has been shocking for very many of us who couldn't believe so many historical "they" were now "us."
that used up a real hell of a lot of good will towards western govts. but many people still felt safe, at least, inside once they closed their doors. home is the most sacred of sacred things. you threaten that--
it's a funny thing, but people really dislike being poor and cold and straining to read while sitting in their badly-lit living rooms.
anyone sneak in and take the january temperature in greta's parents' house, any of the past few years? would really love to know.
Greta's ascendency to "sooth-sayer of our climate culture" is also a baffling outcome.
started with the valorizing of the mentally ill. and perhaps the truly baffling popularity of gnomes.
edit:
PS: it used to be understood that to have a child disabled in serious ways was a great tragedy because the goal for all reproducing creatures is offspring who can survive independently after the usual period of appropriate rearing.
now it's a lifestyle accessory or checks on your social validation bingo card.
"it used to be understood that to have a child disabled in serious ways was a great tragedy...now it's a lifestyle accessory or checks on your social validation bingo card."
Oh how 'ableist' of you. Yes that's a real word the lunatics use, and yes the lunatic activists are AS WE SPEAK trying to influence NIH grant funding so that no money goes towards any project/study that's aimed at 'reducing disability' as that is oh so terribly racist. Sorry, ableist.
The lunatics are seriously about to take over the asylum. We are way overdue for a major comet impact.
the deaf people who want deaf children, and to have them stay deaf for the preservation of the culture, need to find themselves in god's big tandoor in the sky someday.
likewise the professor with a painful congenital progressive crippling condition who deliberately had two kids with the same because, to boil her explanation down to its plain meaning, she wanted the company of her kind. screening was available and she selected for the disability.
Ouch! If you follow this argument to its logical and rather hurtful conclusion, you end up as a Eugenicist who supports the compulsory sterilisation of people with learning disabilities, and that is a slippery slope to hell.
there are never easy solutions to terrible problems. but condemning children to lives of suffering is not a loving act.
Exactly this: why do we indulge maniacs?
[muses to herself about romney being considered a reasonable presidential candidate...]
One quick story, on a personal level. A friend-of-a-friend of mine recently posted on Instagram a cartoon showing Greta being inducted into some type of "Heroes Hall of Fame" with the Avengers. Help me make it make sense!
Humans have an unfortunate proclivity toward cults of personality.
there have always been children's crusades and they always end badly. but in the middle part too many people still think they're sweet.
Somehow, I am reminded of that scene from Barbarella with the kids who look cute, but are shown to be carnivorous...
Kids who look cute, but are shown to be carnivorous? It's been so many years since I saw Barbarella that I don't remember that at all. But there's a very similar scene in Galaxy Quest.
or the red guards and the khmer rouge. they started out as cute kids too, but their faces twisted up just exactly into greta's un speech expression. funny how nobody noticed.
🤡 🌎
There's a lot of Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy going on. Only they are taking their children to drs all too willing to encourage the mentally ill parents and the confused tortured children.
the perversion of motherhood involved in tenderly injecting testosterone into the buttocks of one's fifteen-year-old daughter...
very appropriately put (the horror)
you dear little man, you!
sweet tiny fellow. i hope you'll stay around.
Greta's mental challenges come from the other cabal for destruction--Big Pharma. How many 'vaccinations' has she had since childbirth.
Her parents are virtue signaling through her. This will not end well. She's on the spectrum from what I understand so she is vulnerable and won't understand the massive rejection coming her way because she'll miss the signals ahead of time. Her parents must be awful people. (note: I have a son on the spectrum)
You wouldn't know the truth if it hit you in that dumb MF face of yours. Let's meet up to discuss my Mother--you piece of shit coward.
and now a leading racist.
HOW DARE YOU !!!
Indeed. Any questioning of the Tsar and Tsarina behind St Greta of Thunberg induces the cry 'how very dare you!" Nothing to see here. Move on.
The hobgoblin and her parents have perfected the art of being hypocrites to the next level.
Think about it from the get go of that big goblin mouth was running away telling us how she used public transport for traveling and we should all follow suit.
What they always forget, or very conveniently never mention is how much traveling on public transport or not around the world that is needlessly done by her.
If she and her family believed in what they say and loved the planet so much, then they’d serve it better by staying home instead of running up the excessive pointless carbon footprint on journeys they never need make.
Instead they repeat drivel all around the world using up resources that they accuse others of abusing.
They really do need to put their money where their mouth is by sitting put in a cold dark house and eat bugs to their hearts content.
Unless they’re willing to do this then they need to shut their traps and the public should enforce a self block out and ignore hobgoblin and co.
Ha, Greta says 'shame on you! You have stolen my childhood with your reality, facts and logic. Shame on you'' 😁
the tragedy for all of us is that her wretched parents have stolen her childhood.
One day the Tsar and Tsarina will answer for their abuse of their daughter.
her parents stole her childhood
just saw what Andrew wrote
I'm afraid Greta has moved on . . . she was last see shouting "Gas the Jews"
https://www.eugyppius.com/p/german-fridays-for-future-after-years
i still want to know if they wear three pairs of socks in the winter in her house.
We have infrared thermometers which read temperatures from a distance. The Americans used them in Vietnam to detect VietCong and North Vietnamese in the jungles.
If we have Swedish readers it would not be too difficult to take a reading from the street.
Rikard?
ha yes.
Ha ! it would be better to burn your house down and collect the insurance than obey these ridiculous impossible mandates.
indeed. i live in a house built in the 1920s, it is in energy class 'F' (the third-worst), and this after substantial improvements. god knows how much it would cost to make an E-class building out of it. if these standards were ever imposed I would be praying daily for a fire.
and i'll bet it's a lovely house with gorgeous time-burnished woodwork, too.
Yes... just think of how ugly the world could be, if we raze the beautiful old architecture of the past. My God, back in the 80's I spent a week in Minsk which had been completely destroyed in the war, and re-built in Stalinist vernacular. The place was (at that time) so hideous and heavy and antithetical to human sensibility that I barely left my hotel room. Can we please not repeat every stupid lesson from the past?????
when people are forced to live in ugly environments they don't turn out so nice. and they don't start out with any sense of beauty as a condition of life to value.
So true!!!
My house, built in 1702, is similarly classed. Because of the layout (e.g. space between windows and doorways, for example), there is no way to get more insulation into the walls.
So these energy requirements are essentially an order to move out of the house, into a new build one and wait until the current structure becomes so dilapidated that the municipality issues a 'tear-down' order.
one thing I've wondered about the EU regulations, is how they'll address listed buildings. they're presently entirely exempt from the GEG in Germany, for example. normally one wants to avoid Denkmalschutz because you can't even do things like replace windows without enduring enormous bureaucratic hassle, but I could see them commanding a substantial premium if it means the energy efficiency mavens will leave you alone.
Yes, an interesting point. However, how many German homes qualify for Denkmalschutz? What are the qualifications? The war destroyed a great many of these buildings, but there are still lots of rather ordinary homes built between 1600-1850, that would probably not qualify, as they do not have any outstanding historic significance. In addition, the qualifications could always be tightened.
google says about 3% of all german buildings are currently listed. at least in bavaria, it's done by state authorities in some consultation with the municipality – you can apply for the protections yourself, but the bureaucrats can also swoop in and declare the listing unilaterally when the owners apply for a construction permit or similar. in my experience denkmalschutz is if anything applied far too widely. of course, as you say, that can change, but if they start restricting the requirements while going crazy with energy efficiency regulations, it would only drive the prices of existing denkmäler higher.
What will then become of all the homes that do not qualify, but are too expensive to update? A friend of mine owns one such home. After Oma died they de-registered it with the municipality and now only use it for storage or summer parties. They said the cost of making it livable was too expensive. All of the family members wanted a modern home instead.
The Denkmalschutz is a typical example of people and instances scrambling to stay relevant. One would have thought the historically relevant buildings have been found by now. Yet each and every year, new ones are found where no one thought to look. I know of some examples where ordinary houses were put under this spell for no apparent reason other than the particular 'Amt' finding it perculiar and of special interest. Don't you love it when people are in power of their own relevance...
The level of Denkmalschutz in Germany in my experience varies from state to state. Some states like the Saarland have small incompetent departments and thus protect very little, while neighboring states like Rhineland-Pfalz protect a lot. Furthermore, in contrast to the UK, the protection for homes is almost always for the facade and not the interior. I know of people in the UK who are told what they can or cannot do with wallpaper. In Germany, I think you could demolish all the interior walls and floors and not have a problem with Denkmalschutz.
That's a good point. In my case, the house is not listed. (I'm in Wallonia, which is not nearly as advanced when it comes to things like that as you Germans!).
But yes, you can see wonderful opportunities to game the system for listed buildings. Yet more unintended consequences from poorly thought-through regulations.
This is quite straight forward. The UK has exemption certificates. How one gets such a certificate is not published, but it is on House of Commons record (ie, real).
Now, guess what type of house the wealthy own, or would like to own?
Oh, look. All the exemption certificates - a fixed number, apparently - have been allocated already!
One law for the masses, business as usual for the elite.
What's the width of high density foam panels and 'sheet rock'? Does it exceed 2cm? Because if it does, then the added width of the panels would surpass the clearance to the doorway in the corner (yes, the doorways are in the corners of the room, nearly flush to the perpendicular).
So I would have the option of moving the doorway out, by rebuilding nearly one meter thick stone walls and replacing the lintels that would not widthstand this construction effort. And because the house is on different levels, I would also have to rebuild the 19th century flight of steps between the rooms. I would also have to move the plumbing and the wood stove embedded in the wall between the two rooms, on one side, and rebuild the kitchen and move the sink to the other side of the room on the other. Because the wood floors were cut around the existing dimensions, I would have to find flooring to match the cuts - a near-impossible task given the age and grain of the wood.
By the time I did all this, I would end up with smaller rooms (in some cases so much so that they would be rendered non-functional) and I would have spent as much money (and 'sustainability budget') as if I just knocked the house down and rebuilt it to a different floorplan, which was my point to begin with.
I'm guessing you're American and have never seen an old European stone house in anything other than a movie. But I'll hold back from calling you ignorant or lame ass because language like that reflects more on he who says it than he who is so accused.
Just as an aside, though. Don't you think, if such easy solutions existed, I would have simply embraced them? After all, I put maximum insulation in my roof not because I'm wedded to an ideology, but because I like the idea of spending less money on heating and having to cut, haul, stack and season fewer logs every year in the woods in order to keep my family warm.
You must be a very unhappy man.
Oh I forgot the windows. Because the windows are all embedded within the nearly one meter thick walls, one would have the option of either creating cold bridges by leaving them uninsulated, or one would have to insulate the casements, thereby replacing the existing windows with (yet) smaller windows. The house is already not very bright due to being built at a time when people didn't place much value of indoor light (or have money for big windows). OR you could pull apart the walls around the windows, fit new stones, and reseal around a larger aperture. Times eight.
Again, easier to knock the whole house down.
my cousin bought my parent's house from the 50s. They looked into it and to update it, would have cost more than build a new one. Once their new is finished, the old one goes down. Then I will feel really old lol.
Sad.
What will the demand for false certificates ?
of course you would still have to rebuild it according to the rules. May be better to buy one of these RV bus houses? you could drive to a cooler place in summer and a warmer in winter.
Nope, fuel use is disallowed!
And an E-RV is likely to cost more than the new house.
Oh, new business idea: Apartment on rails.
And in its place they will construct a frank ghery-inspired, green energy-certified monstrosity.
i feel so sad when i watch american movies set in the '30s to the '50s when they show the kitchen stoves just like my mom's. i almost put it into storage when her apt. was sold but there had to be a rational limit to what i kept. as it is my rental apt. far far away looks like a museum to mom. unfortunately it's also got one of those abominable electric stoves with a smooth cooktop. faux cooking for the duration until a ukrainian oligarch buys me a lakeside estate.
Lucky for you we're minting fresh Ukrainian oligarchs every day, so it is purely a matter of time.
well. i want an old-fashioned one.
My sister found herself a vintage gas range. We like vintage appliances, because they don't break like modern ones do.
we don't have gas hookups in these apt. developments.
Perhaps after collecting the insurance, take the proceeds and move to a warmer environment and call it "climate equity"?
That certainly appeals to me at present. Where would you suggest that I move?
I am 83 years old and now live alone, since my wife died three years ago.
I'm in Canada, where our immigration levels are insane. There must be a few vacant homes in India, the biggest source of newcomers over here. :-)
That said, I'm a couple of decades younger than you, and even for me, a move like that would be a challenge.
Nevertheless, I am bewildered by the conflicting "Net Zero" delusion of our politicians countered by the mass migration of people to our northern climate from countries where central heat is not a necessity.
Carbon dioxide is an essential compound for life to exist via photosynthesis.
You are preaching to the choir, my friend.
Unfortunately the general level of science education in the US is such that 75% of the people believe that 0.04% CO2 in the gas atmosphere is a threat to life on earth. Even luminaries like Dr Jeffrey Sachs are still pushing climate change as something that must be considered an emergency.
"The lunatics are losing, but we aren't winning"
Depressing but 100% accurate
True, but what is fascinating is to see the people following the lunatics’ instructions back away from the actual cliff edge again and again.
All of this feels very “end of an era”. The new religion is nuts, and no one really likes it. But we can’t let the old religion back in the door in case people wake up to the trick that’s been played on them.
Clear sighted but sucks to see it in print. What we know and what we act on can be very different indeed.
That climatism has maintained ascendency as long as it has is testament to the incredible power of marketing and stupidity. Unsure which one came first, though!
i can think of other idiotic cults that to date have lasted much longer. marketing and stupidity indeed.
concepts can be quite elastic. anything, really, can be turned into a holy mission.
The resilience of the cult(s) that propose there is a magic man in the sky controlling everything that uniquely favours one's culture to the detriment to other cultures continues to baffle me. Those cults are lasting millennia with little sign of decline.
all them make god in their own images.
No dispute!
sounds like a diet plan for menopausal women ROFL thanks for the laughs. I recently read (might even be in your substack) that wind turbines in some places are fed by fuel engines. I remember when the sun panels came up, that Belgium gave subsidies to get them. You could put the surplus on the net and be reimbursed. Then the subsidies stopped, the reimbursments stopped, and now, you have to pay to put your surplus on the net, and when you are short, you pay for what you take in as well. They got them by the nose! I heard about it here in US but the guys told me it takes 20 years to get your investment back, and I would have to cut all my trees! That saves me lots in summer, in shade, so I don't have to cool so hard. I was also told the panels last only 20-25 years, so by the time you get your money back, you have to buy new ones (and they are hard to recycle)
just the same with the electric cars.
Who is going to buy the old electric car that needs a $40K battery?
Decades ago I was banging on about how the SAE needed to set up a standard for replacement battery packs and impose it on the auto manufacturers before any of this started. Then, at least, you'd get the benefit of scale, if all EVs were using some N quantity of identical, easily replaced battery packs.
But nobody listened, and besides, that'd keep the manufacturer from selling you a new car every five years like the cell phone manufacturers do, with *their* essentially unreplaceable batteries.
"Man, Old Before His Time, Continues Yelling At Clouds."
yeah, or maybe it is just as well.
All of that preparation and coordination is such an unpleasant occupation.
We have 40 different types of bread at the store. .... see?? 😂😂😂
And I strongly support 40 types of bread, but when I'm working on cars I only need one set of tools. Admittedly, in two different measurement systems, but still, that lets me work on nearly any car in the world.
All wishful thinking...
While Germany was at the forefront of both Wind & Solar (neither of which are inherently reliable or cost-efficient),and shuttering Nuclear power plants, electricity prices will l continue to climb ever higher.
Add in EVs, and electric heat pumps, without a reliable power source.
Not to mention that both wind and solar installations have limited lifespans...
And just how do you recycle a wind turbine blade which measures 80 meters in length?
You don't...
On a recent cross-country car trip I drove, both coming and going, through two massive wind farms and noted that 80-90% of the turbines were not turning.
and as they fall off, they drift down into the ocean and slice a few mammals in half
What I don't understand is how BLIND wishful thinking seems to make people. I mean, we're talking about highly-paid people whose job it is to show some foresight. How can you willfully deny reality to such an extent?
I'll be honest.
I live in Ontario, Canada.
I bought into the whole wind power thing some 20 years ago...
I went to the opening of the Melancthon wind project, in Shelburne, Ontario attended, of course, by many politicians.
I soon came to realize that most installations that I happened to drive by, whether Ontario or upper NY State, the turbines were typically not turning.
Maintenance/too windy/no wind/whatever.
The point is, MW assumptions into the grid, were all based on ideal conditions: hence wishful thinking...
Solar only works on an individual basis, passively...
Possibly, and I have no idea if this would *actually* work, shred them and use them for chopped fiberglass fill on reduced structural requirements projects?
But yes, in general, they're a lot of very large trash. And they only last about seven years...
Wow. You really got obsessive over me. Creepy. Fine, how long *do* those large windmill blades last then? Surely, if you're calling my statement bullshit, you can answer that easily?
Nah, it's more fun to give you homework. I appreciate that you respect me enough to complete my demands.
If Climate Alarmism really does die away, it's going to leave a big hole in The Woke Religion's Holy Trinity of Climate, Gender and Race mythologies. God knows what they'll come up with to replace it? I dread to think. https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/invasion-of-the-virtue-signallers
Another pandemic? Or an unending chain of them.
The point of the requirements is to make the cost so high that the masses are forced into renting.
You will own nothing and like it.
There is such a disconnect between the upper echelons of politics and media (typical headline from a couple of months back: "To protect the climate, single-family homes can no longer be justified") and ordinary people, who desperately want single-family homes and gardens.
yeah, these people are so full of it.
I always ask myself where these people actually live. Substandard rentals it most certainly ain't.
My architect father made his living updating churched (Michigan) for energy efficiently. He did design a dwelling or two, but the real lucrative thing was to do 'commercial' buildings, which included the churches. He still barely made much money but I think he enjoyed it for the most part. As for my small house in Portland, OR, built in 1924, it lacks any insulation in the walls and so could use some upgrades indeed. The eaves need rebuilding, the attic is somewhat poorly built, and fixing those things will be about $50,000 min. I could do the work myself, I am only 60, but not sure its a good investment. I am not willing to borrow it, and dream of selling this house and trying to buy a very small plot in another state, and building something more manageable, even a glorified shed, well built, that I can maintain easily with a small plot for farming. And a fireplace that works. I miss fire.
<snip> "small plot in another state"
That sounds like an idea only if you leave your Portland ideology there. I left after only one year of the lunacy and that was in 1978. The news from Portland is depressing at best, horrifying at worst.
I needed some encouraging news today so thank you
The Federal Republic of Germany is an insane place and it is not enough merely to do the crazy things that everybody else is doing. We have to exceed them in our mania for self-punishment.
=> This, dear Eugyppius, might be the core of German-ness in a nutshell. Everybody else is half-heartedly burning a couple of witches here and there? The German lands ratchet up the hysteria and become responsible for 50% of all European witch burnings. Everybody else a bit over-the-top patriotic? As a German Kaiser, you build a mighty fleet, ratchet up the rhetoric, give stupid Austria a blank check for support and throw the whole world into a four-year bloodbath. Everybody else dealing with an economic crisis and a crisis of self-confidence in a haphazard way, trying this and that and muddling through any old way? Germany finds one formerly unemployed Austrian painter and hero-worships him right into the Third Reich.
Moderation doesn't seem to be their cup of tea.
Here's to hoping that the end of Western hegemony and the re-introduction of serious geopolitical competition will help us get past this era of midwitted progressive stupidity. Maybe? Are we just screwed?
I think we are screwed, demography determines fate and the culture that has made the West a great place for its denizens (historically speaking, almost everywhere at any time sucks in comparison) is on the way out.
Even if the elites snap out of it, so much has been destroyed already, from self-confidence to innovative power to educational foundations to a certain unity of culture and belief - I don't see how that can be restored.
I think both that we are just screwed, at least temporarily, and that Western hegemony hasn’t got much longer to go. I’m watching Ukraine and Turkey with (depressed) interest.
This is how you fail without accepting it. Basically the doom cycle of all European politicians. Not so if you track their personal wealth though, which is inversely proportional to the one of their constituents.
Good news. I’d take issue with your last paragraph about the EUs measures having no hope of saving the climate.
That assumes it needs saving - from what? It sounds a bit as if you are accepting that there is a ‘climate emergency’, something that >1200 of the worlds leading independent climate scientists dispute.
It also sounds a bit like you agree that climate change is man made, where again, there’s no evidence that it is. Climates have always changed, and will continue to do so. CO2 accounts for 0.04% of the atmosphere, at historically low concentrations. If the level halved, plant life would start to die off. Man made emissions Account for <10% of that, so how can tiny variations in the concentration of a trace gas account for anthropogenic climate change?
The truth is, carbon is linked to all forms of human activity, especially economic, thus is an ideal candidate for governments to choose to tax, limit our movements and freedoms, and control us.
well, this is why I specified 'on their own terms'
I have an engineer friend who crunched a few numbers and found that the current rate of CO2 emissions is a relative drop in the bucket and cannot be linked let alone blamed for the climate. I agree, it is a way to control us and limit movement.
Everybody ignores the volcanoes.
Unless they live near one!
Yup.
Google? You might as well as ask me to consult wikipedia on the topic.
Numbers I have bouncing around in my head are something like 273 or 293 ppm CO2 in 1960 when they started measuring, and up to about 420 ppm now. I would assume that increase to be anthropogenic, though I'm not sure how much CO2 actually contributes to increased global temperature. Long-term geologically, either measure is historically low, but that's going back millions of years. Could you add to, or correct me on this?
Maybe. I can’t post it here but there are graphs which no one is disputing, showing CO2 in a steady long term decline, albeit with a small blip up recently which could be due to anything.
All I know is that if the climate denying scientists (there are many of them) were wrong, they would debate them and prove them wrong. The fact that they can only cancel and censor them tells you all you need to know.
"Everything that comes out of Brussels is a foul multilayered onion."
Possibly the best line of the week so far, especially in view of the real-life vegetable that bears their name.
*breaks out the Bruce Spence impression*
"There's not enough runway. Between us, and 2030, there's not enough runway. We'll crash, and everyone will die."
Only unlike in Thunderdome, the answer is magic pixie dust and not anything that will actually solve the self-induced problem.
---
I wish I shared your optimism that they're actually going to rein in the plans to annihilate Western civilization.
it's not that they will affirmatively rein themselves in.
you can only push ordinary people just so far. this our plague era has been shocking for very many of us who couldn't believe so many historical "they" were now "us."
that used up a real hell of a lot of good will towards western govts. but many people still felt safe, at least, inside once they closed their doors. home is the most sacred of sacred things. you threaten that--
----at your own risk.
(There. Finished it for ya')
Hopefully you’re right!