gravelld

How do you plan on dealing with all the induced demand that building more roads brings? Would the roads only be for buses?

They also have more harsh summers. To an extent, in some cases, the vernacular protects them from that with high thermal capacity and decrement delay to buffer energy transfer. But if you then have a fashion for large windows... not so much.

And all that doesn't help with ventilation and maintaining healthy levels of fresh air.

I was referring to the new stock. But be careful with:

> Newer housing surely has better insulation

You only really know if you test and measure.

Double paned windows are hardly some kind of best practice. The Mediterranean countries are still poor. Of Western Europe, only Germany and to some extent Ireland appear serious. You also have smaller jurisdictions, e.g. Brussels where some good work is going on.

Existing stock - yes. New stock - they have learned a lot and appear to be serious about making improvements.

A number of examples. One example is that carpets might be fitted afterwards. Because the air tightness design in the first place is so poor, they resort to sealing between floor and skirting and other such bodges. Carpet fitters hate such sealing as it makes it harder to get a pleasing finish. So they rip out the seals.

There's a lot of folksy wisdom in the UK building trade about natural ventilation (which isn't really true). Many builders will deliberately expose small gaps because they have not been properly educated. Having gaps gives poor ventilation - it becomes dependent on ambient pressure differentials which are difficult to control.

All of these are excuses for poor design and workmanship in the first place.

This might seem like more work for minimum wage labourers on site, but it's less work for highly paid designers, so it costs less. But costing is a difficult thing to sum because it's a complex supply chain with opportunities for efficiency all over. It's just that the volume builders (in particular) have a conservative interest in keeping the status quo, and carrying on without rocking the boat.

> Requiring better insulation for new buildings is not really that much a thing where you need to raise taxes, because the cost of proper insulation is passed on to builders - and the end users pay that, but in turn they have lower heating/cooling costs.

I was referring to retrofit, sorry for not being clear.

Also, the costs are not passed on to customers. Very few houses in the history of the world have been priced according to what it cost to build. The market sets the price.

Carpets in bathrooms is a kind of baby boomer 1970/80s thing I think - plenty of it still about. Check the corners of the room where condensation pours down the wall into the carpet... after a few years you get a nice dark grey brown mould line.

I'm a UK resident. Either way, the UK will have to fix its houses. There's a trope that new houses are energy efficient... it's not really true; there's going to be a big scandal when everyone realises how the targets (which are pretty poor anyway) are circumvented by developers that are able to employ their own regs assessors, or just send a design SAP and expect that to be ticked off, or go around after an air permeability test removing all the sealing they just added to scrape through the already lenient test.

Whether insulation is actually installed? Who cares about that - quarterly dividend payments all round.

What you describe is the rule in most Western countries. The only countries I know that have their shit together on this are Germany, Sweden and Ireland.

The truth is that fixing these problems is going to be expensive. Governments are just kicking the can down the road because they don't want to be the ones that raise taxes to pay for it (fixing existing houses I mean). But it will have to be done.

Maybe the biggest tragedy is that we are still building NEW houses that will have to be fixed in the future (except in the above countries and some others I no doubt missed). Not mandating higher standards is, however, just loading future generations with more debt, because they will be the ones that have to fix the quality of the housing stock.