Marc Palmer

George Monbiot’s book “HEAT” reluctantly, for the author used flight for his career, finds nothing but a bleak outlook for plane flights.

There is no workable alternative, no likely sufficient efficiency gains in the next few decades.

In a new piece in response to announcements by the UK government, he shows how pointless emmission cuts are when flights are being subsidised and increased at an alarming rate.

Perhaps the biggest crime is that politicians are ignoring or deliberately concealing the scientific research that shows that the contrails of aeroplanes act like extra-potent greenhouses gases – over and above the huge emmissions they release.

After today, where British Airways had to ground all its Heathrow flights due to heavy fog across the UK, one has to wonder if weather conditions might be our only saviour.

It’s re-assuring in a way that we just need a blanket of fog to
slash emmissions for a day. In a twisted way, perhaps we need to hope for extreme weather in the future to make flight less viable.

Another piece on the travesty of air travel and the UK government.

Oh, and in a twist I hadn’t realised, the “nice people” behind travel books like Lonely Planet and Rough Guides have realised that they’re contributing quite heavily to the problem.

Once again we will have to make the change ourselves. Governments, somehow, are lining their pockets from aviation despite the subsidy we pay.

Stop flying now. Make the pledge.

We’ve finally moved into our new house. As an eccentricly styled 1930s building with good gardens it has much potential and its an exciting time.

However making it a greener house will be challenging. At the time of arrival there was no insulation other than 5cm or so of rock wool between the first 4 rafters of the loft floor. When it is cold outside (say below 10C) the top floor definitely has that cold and damp feel to it, despite there being no damp – but likely ventilation issues. We also have more than our fair share of drafts.

We have however discovered that we definitely do have cavity walls, despite the odd concrete blocks used to build the place. This is great news and we have people coming to quote for insulating the cavities.

The biggest insulation challenge we have is related to the eaves of the roof. The 1st floor rooms have the eaves coming down through them, to about 1m or so off the floor. This presents us with a very difficult to insulate void, and the depth of the rafters is only 4 inches. I’m seeking spray / infill solutions to at least make some difference.

Of course we have the windows to replace too – they’re the original 1930s Crittal metal-framed windows. The frames themselves are ice cold and the condensation is terrible, even with the poor quality secondary double glazing that is here.

Having had a friend do an energy efficiency survey we know what needs to be done, we’re just trying to find a sensible way to do it all.

A couple of things do really annoy me about the UK. The first is that the government gives grants specifically to landlords to voluntarily improve insulation. i.e. we tax payers are subsidising those who exacerbate the UK housing stock shortage by holding onto multiple properties.
Landlords should be compelled by law to insulate their properties to the highest standard possible or be forced to put the house on the market for sale (or equivalent penalty such as 50% tax on rent received). The subsidy given to them might be acceptable if they were required by law to do the work, but they are not and it is giddying to think of all the hundreds of thousands of rental properties in the UK with poor insulation.

Secondly, plumbers and heat engineeers must be required by law to fit adequate pipe lagging. I am yet to see a house that is not new-build, that has any lagging on sub-floor or loft piping. The heat losses from this must be huge, and I’m sure it accounts for problems where radiators never get up to temperature on the ground floor where the under floor void is very drafty, as in our previous house.

The lagging is so cheap and easy to fit and yet is a nightmare to fit once the floors have all been put back down. There’s no excuse – the plumbers could even earn more to do it if it were required by law!

It’s great news that Groovy is finally very close to a 1.0 release as RC1 has just been released.

A lot of work has gone into this by the key developers, even though some of them don’t necessarily appreciate the importance of 1.0 as a number in terms of marketing and adoption of a product within many organisations.

I’m very glad that they have reached this point and look forward to the full 1.0 release, and appreciate their hard work.

The next thing I really want from Groovy is for the code base to be subject to public code coverage reports and following from that huge increases in unit test code coverage to prevent regressions after 1.0. Surely a big part of this will form a TCK to accompany the JSR for the language, but there is so much non-JSR code in the way of APIs and helper classes that is not adequately covered by unit tests I’m sure.

There doesn’t seem to be a rigid habit from all developers of applying unit tests for all fixes they make to the codebase, which is slightly worrying given the importance and complexity of Groovy.