A new report has called for the large-scale redevelopment of more than eight million ageing Australian homes in order to reduce their energy footprint and carbon emissions:
Nicholas Proud, the chief executive of PowerHousing Australia… [said] “the ageing housing stock will cruel any targets until sustainable technology takes over from coal”, which was decades away…
“Australia’s 8 million pre-energy rated homes are now well past their use-by date, contributing up to 18 per cent of Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions and a real liability when it comes to hitting our Paris Agreement commitments for net-zero emissions,” Mr Proud said…
Generally constructed from the 1950s onwards, the building standards and practices used to build these homes are outdated, and the houses are at the end of their useful life, Mr Proud said.
Ensuring newly constructed homes are high quality and energy efficient is obviously a worthy goal.
However, demolishing and rebuilding older homes to build energy efficient homes could actually result in worse environmental outcomes, due to the significant embodied energy contained within.
Specifically, demolishing and disposing of existing dwelling structures is energy intensive. Likewise, the energy embodied in producing the materials used in constructing new dwellings (including mining, manufacture and transport) is also very large. In many cases, both will offset any gains from the new buildings becoming energy efficient.
For mine, the best thing people can do for Australia’s environment is to hold onto their goods (be it cloths, appliances, cars, dwellings, etc) for as long as possible and not replace them (even to more energy efficient forms). Doing so will minimise consumption and waste, as well as minimise the amount of embodied energy used in the manufacturing process.
Sadly, the capitalist system relies on endless turnover and consumption to drive ‘growth’. We live in a throwaway society where obsolesce in built in.
Australians should also stop deluding themselves that we can grow the nation’s population by 50% (13.1 million people) over the next 40 years via mass immigration (as officially projected by the Australian Government) without blowing Australia’s carbon budget and wrecking the environment:
Population multiplied by units of consumption equals total environment impact. It’s not rocket science. Yet population growth is rarely questioned by environmentalists or policy makers.
