Maybe the various wastrels who go around gluing themselves to things should be required to retrain as insulation system designers and installers so they can actually make a difference. They don’t seem to have anything else to do.

The alternative to Andy's approach is self-build. It has been very interesting seeing the construction of step-daughter's house. It is so well insulated that shall be surprised if they need more than 5 kW to heat their 200 m².

Very good point. Most self-builders have been shoving more and more insulation into their homes for decades now - very often along with insisting on decent airtightness standards and ventilation systems. It's much simpler and cheaper by far than having to retrofit it all later. Many will tell you it's a no-brainer - even if the extra costs are added to a mortgage the increase in monthly payments is easily offset by fuel savings. Yet most of the population don't have the wherewithal and inclination to go down that route - so end up with mass produced/speculative build housing that is just minimally compliant with building regulations. The government had the opportunity to bring building regs up to a much more reasonable standard back in 2016 but bottled out at the last minute - so over the last 6 years, at say around 200,000 new builds a year, that's well over a million new homes that aren't anything like as energy efficient as they could have been. So I do have a bit of sympathy for the view that government could do a lot better.

   - Andy.

Does the government have any real interest in energy and resource saving other that the things that can generate money for them and their cronies? 

AJJewsbury said:

Yet most of the population don't have the wherewithal and inclination to go down that route

You would probably have to go back a century to find a significant number of householders who bought a plot and had a house built. That said, in my immediate neighbourhood, almost all of the houses were built in this way up until the early 2000s even though the first land sale was in 1885.

Imagine 200,000 self-builders! Step-daughter and her hubby have been at it since 2015. Walls, floors and roof were put up by a builder. Plastering, plumbing and electrics have been done for them, but they have done the rest themselves. I'd say that there is a 50:50 chance of being in next year.

Political parties are funded by people who will want a favour in return. Landlords and owners of estates will prefer Conservative and poor none house owners will prefer Labour to help keep their rents low and improve public support .  Perhaps we need a hung parliament so Greens and Liberal human rights protectors can have a major influence.

Communism although idealistic never works because in the end dictatorial cronyism takes over.  To stop climate change with ever increasing world population is not really feasible.  We must  just do our best to meet the challenges and save as much fuel as possible without wasting mineral resources. 

I would be most interested to hear the views of the likes of these people on recycling wind turbine blades. At present they are either going straight to landfill, or are being processed to make a combustible materiel to power cement factories -

www.youtube.com/watch

I doubt that the environmental extremists have any notion of climate change cause or causation. Or any independent view Just a point and squirt mindset corrupted by main stream media misinformation and the  corruption of the scientific method.

Several months ago I did a job in Theddlethorpe on the Lincolnshire North Sea coast, there were banners on the roadsides protesting about the proposal to bury nuclear waste there.

www.lincolnshirelive.co.uk/.../lincolnshire-nuclear-waste-dump-edges-7275892

Now, have a look on a map of the UK and see where Theddlethorpe is, where this proposed coal mine is and where the nuclear waste is being processed.

It seems like a bit of a no-brainer to me.

A screenshot from Google Earth, there’s a very handy railway line that runs along the coast.

The key thing is the big hole where natural gas was trapped since the time of the dinosaurs, is known to be a stable and leak proof (and so safe) place to bury the waste which as well as being radioactive probably includes so very toxic chemicals. You do not need to have that much material between you and high level waste to make it safe from a radiation perspective - a few tens of metres of water depth will do, but what you do need is geological stability and no chance at all of ground water contamination.
A salt cavern that was a gas store is ideal

The cost of transporting the stuff across the country, even with all the bells and whistles that the modern nuclear regs require, is small compared with the rest of the operation.

I still think there are potentially  useful roles for part spent nuclear fuel rods while they are still 'hot' for the first few years after removal, perhaps for things like heating public swimming pools and keeping the railway points ice free, we just need to be slightly less hysterical about what we think is a safe level of radioactive material to leave lying about. Maybe not safe  as hot blocks in domestic  storage heaters though ...

Mike