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by evandijk70 1392 days ago
Why are these numbers proving you right? Those people that made an decision to transition to a sustainable lifestyle by:

- Isolate their house and/or live in a small, well isolated apartment

- Buy solar panels and a heatpump.

- Save gas by wearing an extra sweater and setting the thermostat a bit lower.

are affected far less by this massive inflation.

Of course, for the 37% in the UK that do not own a house (probably because they cannot afford it) and/or convince their landlord to isolate their property, it is unjust.

Since more people own their house than rent it seems that this particular inflation wave makes the economy more just rather than less just, given that the biggest polluters are hit the the hardest.

3 comments

The word you probably want is "insulate". A thermally insulated house (it's common to skip the word "thermally" but we can insulate for noise for example) will retain heat better and thus be less expensive for the same volume to heat during a cold winter.

If the house was isolated that might actually make heat loss worse, because it suggests other homes are quite distant. For example my sister's house is an "end terrace" so one wall of it won't lose much heat since the other side is somebody else's house and no doubt they also keep warm in the winter. In contrast my mother's house is perched up on a hill, I wouldn't quite describe it as "isolated" but certainly she's going to spend a lot of money heating it.

Inflation means that currency is losing value. That's what happens when people receive money that they don't deserve (I.e. they didn't actually provide an equivalent amount of value back to society); it ends up devaluing the currency. IMO, what we're seeing is the tip of the iceberg. It just took some time for reality to catch up. If I'm right, inflation will only get worse because the mis-allocation of resources only seems to have become worse. I'm not seeing any improvement - I'm seeing people doubling down on bad decisions; people with money appear to be increasingly erratic. I'm not seeing anyone adjusting their strategy.
Even for the people that own their own home there's also the capital required to install insulation, solar panels or a heat pump.

How many of those home owners do you think have tens of thousands of pounds just laying around that they can spend on those upgrades? (and that's after taking in to consideration the grants available)

If you look at the amount of cars driving around in the UK (similarly priced as all the upgrades combined), probably most homeowners. Also, if someone does not have sufficient capital, there are subsidised lease options for all upgrades.
You can buy a car (although not a new car) for significantly less than £10k, so, no, that's a nonsense comparison. A very brief search on autotrader showed me about 80 cars for under £1,000 within a ten mile radius, for example.

Also where the hell can you lease cavity wall insulation from? And what happens if you stop paying, do they come round and suck it back out of the walls?