The dark side of ‘insulating Britain’

Let me start with some statements of fact. The planet is heating up dangerously fast with devastating consequences for everyone that lives on it and if we don’t stop pumping carbon into the atmosphere we have no future as a species.

In the UK, a major source of our carbon emissions comes from homes and a large part of that is because we burn gas whenever we put the radiators on. Each UK household emits around 2.7 tonnes of carbon every year heating their home. That’s utterly unsustainable and must stop.

To some the answer is to insulate our homes so tightly that we no longer need to use much energy heating them, if any at all. Insulate Britain, for example, have demanded that the government insulate all social housing by 2025 and retrofit all homes with insulation by 2030. This sounds neat and simple. But it is not.

Over the last two decades we have put a large amount of energy and money into insulation projects.