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I'll go first:
Insulated kettles with a adjustable boil control.
Sensor / button activated street lighting.
Cars in street lit areas to use sidelights only.
Cars in street lit areas to use sidelights only.
Eh?
All new builds to be affordable social housing on brownfield sites for the next 10 years.
Divert a quarter of the roads budget to subsidised buses and cycle infrastructure, and another quarter to roads policing with a strict "12 points and you're out" rule.
Foot and cycle paths so that people don’t have to use their cars for short journeys under a mile or two…..oh.
Sometimes the problem is not the solution, it’s people.
Carbon taxes
No personal vehicle allowed to use more than a given amount of fuel/energy per mile travelled.
You want to buy a Range Rover or Tesla Model X? Fine, but you’ll be doing 50mph max on the motorway.
Cars in street lit areas to use sidelights only.
This is a real safety bug bear of mine, everyone has their main beam on in 30mph zones making visibility worse of everyone at night when side lights are all you need.
But,
those main beams use a while load of electricity to run which must use petrol / diesel to generate and electricity on E cars. Maybe LED lighting on cars reduces the power required. But I'd like to keep it in if that's ok...
No private car ownership or solo driving until age 25 (you’d start adult life making choices based on public transport, it would be habit forming and influence policy).
Solar/ground/air source subsidies.
No cars within 300m of a school at start/end of school day (ie school streets at every school).
Shop window display & signage lighting turned off when the shop is not open.
Mandatory pedal (or other physical activity) powered computers in offices. Office workers would have to generate their own power for their devices.
This would have three benefits at least:
- reduced power consumption for devices
- reduced heating requirement for buildings
- increased health and alertness for sedentary workers.
Only one personal flight per year unless it’s to see family. After that, you pay full fuel duty on the fuel used for your seat on the plane.
Carbon tax is easy to implement fossil fuels are bulk imports (already happens at lower tax levels with oil and gas).
Next easiest is insulation investment for buildings, particularly housing and offices.
Even easier just much stricter rules on new builds and actually enforce building regs. is a start. Proper enforcement would likely have reduced or prevented damage and death at Grenfell tower.
You used to be able to run sidelights only in streetlit areas irrespective, don't know whether this has changed. Saving is probably v. small especially with modern led lights. Also better lit cars have fewer accidents as it allows others to spot the danger (not ideal but that's why modern cars all have daytime running lights).
No private car ownership or solo driving until age 25 (you’d start adult life making choices based on public transport, it would be habit forming and influence policy).
Blimey - we live miles from anywhere. I'm not playing taxi driver until they're 25!!!
Make all on-street parking (on every single street in the UK) permit or ticketed and enforce it then use the money to massively improve public transport and pedestrian and cycling infrastructure.
NO Cars in street lit areas
to use sidelights only.
If there's lights it's a built up area, if it's a built up area you can walk.
[on a pedantic note, car's that use H4 bulbs (most small-medium cars) will only run either the dipped or main beam, the bulbs aren't designed to run both at the same time. And it's already in the highway code anyway. Cars that use independent H1/H7 bulbs seems to be 50/50 whether they use both concurrently.
But 120W (assuming it's an old car with halogen bulbs), ~1/8th HP, significantly less than 1% of the energy required to move the car.
use dipped headlights, or dim-dip if fitted, at night in built-up areas and in dull daytime weather, to ensure that you can be seen
Massive led advertising boards near roads, or anywhere else, get rid of those.
Cars, smaller, more efficient cars, and stop the bloody fashion for ditching them when they’re barely run in ffs.
Blimey – we live miles from anywhere. I’m not playing taxi driver until they’re 25!!!
There's a habit to form then, how many people who live in the "middle of nowhere" actually work there?
Mandatory pedal (or other physical activity) powered computers in offices. Office workers would have to generate their own power for their devices.
This would have three benefits at least:
– reduced power consumption for devices
– reduced heating requirement for buildings
– increased health and alertness for sedentary workers.
Servers consume far more power than personal workstations. Mine with monitor is 130W. Our small pair of servers is 4-5kW when not under load. Triple or quadruple that for max load.
Also, whilst this sounds “interesting” how does it work in the peak of summer? How does it work for disabled access? How does it work in call centres/cafes/open plan offices.
You’d be far better mandating installation of solar and wind power along with battery storage.
Servers consume far more power than personal workstations.
Yeah, well the people that look after the servers are in for a rude shock then.
Insulation?
A relatively easy to achieve gain, and also, force the (mainly) Tory contributing house builders to construct better houses.
All new builds to be affordable social housing on brownfield sites for the next 10 years.
And to have on site energy generation via solar and/or small scale hydroelectric/wind etc where possible. It won't cover 100% energy usage but every contribution will help.
Every rooftop as well as big open spaces like car parks should have solar panels.
Most street lighting could go off (or be significantly dimmed) between say midnight and 5am as well.
Supermarkets forced to put doors on freezers
Automatic fines for people who insist on running their car engines at level crossings
A reporting system for midas for remapped cars. Because they are driven by Alfie, who decided to tick the unmodified box on his car insurance and the associated driving like a tool
Thousands more pcso bike riders riding during rush hr
Bus companies to integrate with other transport networks. Ditto train timetables.
There’s a habit to form then, how many people who live in the “middle of nowhere” actually work there?
Erm ... all the farmers. All the people who manage conservation/re-vegetation areas, the people who manage recreation areas for all the frustrated city folk. All the people that can't afford to live in overpriced little boxes breathing polluted air. And the people that work from home in any number of industries.
Carbon taxes
This.
All public transport completely free for under 25's and over 65's, and subsidised costs for journey's under 30 miles for all.
Massive house by house insulation programme.
(None are easy by the way).
Erm … all the farmers. All the people who manage conservation/re-vegetation areas, the people who manage recreation areas for all the frustrated city folk. All the people that can’t afford to live in overpriced little boxes breathing polluted air. And the people that work from home in any number of industries.
Right, so you've dealt with about 1% then.
Yours sincerely,
Frustrated city folk who grew up in the middle of nowhere and had to move "to live in overpriced little boxes breathing polluted air" because the countryside is overrun with middle classes driving miles into the towns to get to their jobs pricing them out of it.
There’s a habit to form then, how many people who live in the “middle of nowhere” actually work there?
My old village was 800 people with a further 800 or so scattered along Loch Tay.
I would estimate 400+ were working, and of those I think about 20 each morning headed to Stirling or Perth 20-40 miles away. The rest worked 'locally' - but I'm doubting public transport or cycling works for you getting to the farm/hotel/hydro power plant/school in the next village or up the one-road, 10 mile long glen.
Cities, towns and bigger places are where the easiest, biggest and cheapest savings are too be made. Not the rural places, with smaller population, scattered and needing to travel for the basics of food and work.
but I’m doubting public transport or cycling works for you getting to the farm/hotel/hydro power plant/school in the next village or up the one-road, 10 mile long glen.
If the entire conurbation is <10miles long, that implies no one is more than ~5miles from the center, and if it's not possible to ride 5 miles safely then there's more traffic than you're prepared to admit (also a lot of traffic doing <5miles?).
People need to give up on the idea of not living near where they work.
Many of the solutions above are not at all simple to implement, so here's a dead simple one for the OP.
Any company designing/ making products with planned obsolescence - off to the labour camp with the board of directors.
I like the one above with the exclusion zone for cars dropping off kids at school. Not for eco reasons as much as decent societal ones.
who grew up in the middle of nowhere and had to move “to live in overpriced little boxes breathing polluted air”
I moved to the other side of the world instead
Easy and simple are not synonyms. Carbon taxes are simple - but far from easy to implement.
People need to understand that living sustainably cannot be done without significant changes in the way we live
Deposit on bottles.
Seeing as we can put a fat tax on full fat pop, and a 5p charge on bags, why not a 5p charge on single use bottles that goes straight into eco projects.
Residential areas default 20mph speed limit.
Revert to burying bodies rather than cremation.
Easy and simple are not synonyms. Carbon taxes are simple – but far from easy to implement.
Why? Cars need an MOT which shows mileage change. Your gas and electric use are monitored. Your comings and goings at airports are recorded. New cars, homes, refurbishments are also recorded.
That leaves…food, fashion, bikes/leisure? Hardly the big contributors.
Just like income tax, those that have/use less, pay less or nothing. Those that use more pay more. BUT, unlike income tax, it should be an exponential scale.
Only one personal flight per year unless it’s to see family. After that, you pay full fuel duty on the fuel used for your seat on the plane.
I think that pretty much describes most peoples flying habit though doesn't it?. I would bet money that it's a teeny percentage of folks who're flying more than once a year. Obviously different for places like the US, but we're discussing the UK presumably
(article is 3 years old)
My offer would be free insulation.
Daffy - because it needs a complete rejig of taxation.
Higher vehicle tax rates for heavier private cars/vans
Deposit on bottles
They do this a lot in Europe. Supermarkets have big bottle machines that take your empties and issue a credit note to be used for your shopping.
Revert to burying bodies rather than cremation.
That rather knackers a lot of land use. Cemeteries are very inefficient uses of (often very high value) land and they end up buggering up all manner of planning for decades, sometimes centuries. Plus they generate quite a lot of traffic themselves as people drive to visit and lay flowers (which are themselves a very inefficient and carbon heavy resource, most are flown over from the Netherlands, wrapped in plastic and sold). Incredibly wasteful.
Carbon rationing. In an famine you would ration food in a climate emergency you ration carbon.
Makes sense and no trading of the ration so the rich are subject to the same restrictions as everybody else.
More People need to give up on the idea of not living near where they work.
As ever, absolutes don't work across a whole population, we all start arguing about the 10% at either extreme, and are too divided to agree on the measures that would improve things for 80% of us.
Incredibly wasteful.
Only because we gather them together in cemeteries. I'm not thinking of that, just stick people in the floor and plant stuff over them. Winner winner, sprouts for dinner.
My old village was 800 people with a further 800 or so scattered along Loch Tay.
I would estimate 400+ were working, and of those I think about 20 each morning headed to Stirling or Perth 20-40 miles away. The rest worked ‘locally’ – but I’m doubting public transport or cycling works for you getting to the farm/hotel/hydro power plant/school in the next village or up the one-road, 10 mile long glen.
You old village is something of an outlier to the average. There aren’t many highland villages when you stack them up against the villages within driving distances of towns in the Home Counties. Although how you implement something to discourage long commutes without nailing rural economy workers (who don’t just work in farms) I don’t really know. Best part of 10 million living in rural areas in England alone according to gov.uk
I think that pretty much describes most peoples flying habit though doesn’t it?. I would bet money that it’s a teeny percentage of folks who’re flying more than once a year. Obviously different for places like the US, but we’re discussing the UK presumably
"most" is doing some heavy lifting there. Your own link shows that barely half of people in the UK actually flew abroad.
(it doesn't say, but I'm prepared to guess that the other half aren't taking the domestic flights either).
It's important not to fall into the trap of believing that something you do is absolutely essential or even 'normal' and therefore can be excluded from any sustainability aims.
Supermarkets forced to put doors on freezers
Already have that in many places, all the freezers and the upright fridges in pretty much every supermarket i use have them.
Must save a fortune in electricity.
People need to give up on the idea of not living near where they work.
TBH, i'd LOVE to live near to work, but, there are very few houses or flats to actually buy.
Right now, those properties that do become available within cycling distance of the office (20km ish for me) that are affordable, are too small to fit the family in. If they were big enough to fit the family in they'd near enough double my mortgage.
Which would mean i couldn't actually afford to own a car, or fuel it. So that's a plus.
We'd also need two houses, as my ex would need to move to so she was near enough for the kids schooling etc.
Not to mention, that if everyone did it the prices near to work would skyrocket and the value of my place would plummet. So an even bigger jump in my mortgage and potentially negative equity to start with.
Joy.
Incentives for travelling by any alternatives to vehicles, logged by entering a venue by a pedestrian/cycle only gate or use of cycle storage, or using ANPR/Car park security passes to exclude you from said incentives.
I.e
Free lunch voucher issued by employer for local shops.
Discounted train travel at the station.
Loyalty points bonus at shops.
Etc
So if we want simple, reduce speed limits. 55 on motorways and dual carriageways, 45 on rural roads, 20 in built up areas.
Modern crematoria are much more efficient use of land, and don't actually pollute much, heat used for hot water etc.
Nationalise the domestic power supply companies (or parts thereof).
Ban all advertising that is not strictly factual and informs people of the product itself - not the associated lifestyle - so that people do not feel compelled to buy.
'Eau Du Beautiful Person" - 150ml of spicy scented light oil
'Super Onobtaium Bike" - Bicycle 9.5KG suitable for off road use.
Apply fuel duty on air travel in the same way as on petrol/diesel. Force customers to pick up business travel expenses: you want me onsite tomorrow? Fine, here’s the bill. oh you’d now prefer a teams meeting? funny that.
Install heat recovery in shower trays. How hard can this be?
Work out and publicise the actual cost in carbon of storing things in the cloud and on a server. Force people to think before archiving data. Dispense with the “email is a journal” mindset and get mail to self delete after 30 days unless flagged.
Include 'cost of dumping waste' into every product sale.
If someone buys a new washing machine for £400 and then dumps their old washing machine by the side of the road there is the cost of collection, recycling and disposal associated with it, say £100 compared to £20 for proper disposal.
now they pay £500 for the washing machine at time of purchase. If they dispose of it properly at the end of life they will get a rebate of £80.
I'd rather see a milage allowance for flights per year (that can be carried over to the next year) than a restricted ban to one flight. A flight to the Maldives has significantly more impact Vs a flight to Paris etc.....
New homes built to better standards, with better insulation, solar, wind, water reclamation etc. Mandatory percentages of profits for improvements by landlords to insulate homes to a curtain level etc.
Taxes on unnecessary packaging of all products - much like the sugar tax.
More communal heating and hot water.
A big geothermal plant in a playing field/park in the middle of your housing area could provide heat and hot water for a few hundred houses. With an added bonus of having a big green space near your housing. Could even bury the pipes under the communal garden spaces (depending on how it's laid out)
The actual plant rooms are about the size of a big double garage and need virtually no maintenance.
It's what the exes place has.
Install heat recovery in shower trays. How hard can this be?
Moderately.
Pulling the heat out of the waste water means that all the semi solid gunk that you've just washed off (soap etc) can gunk up your pipes.
They need semi regular cleaning and can block without much notice.
I even get blockages from shaving foam when it goes from inside the downstairs bathroom into the much colder concrete raft that the house is built on. Unfortunately needs a kettle of water once a month to push it into the larger pipes and then the septic tank.
Include 'cost of dumping waste' into every product sale.
If someone buys a new washing machine for £400 and then dumps their old washing machine by the side of the road there is the cost of collection, recycling and disposal associated with it, say £100 compared to £20 for proper disposal.
now they pay £500 for the washing machine at time of purchase. If they dispose of it properly at the end of life they will get a rebate of £80.
Insulated kettles with a adjustable boil control.
Sensor / button activated street lighting.
Cars in street lit areas to use sidelights only.
Those things would all be tiny. Turning your headlights off might save something like 50W, but your car could be using 5kW or so to drive along at 50mph. That's 100x more.
No personal vehicle allowed to use more than a given amount of fuel/energy per mile travelled.
The topic is 'simple to implement' not 'simple to dream up'. That kind of measure would NOT be simple to implement because we live in a democracy. Unless you have plans to change that, or to somehow effectively re-educate millions of people, it's not happening.
I think the best things would be:
1. Mass insulation, and government provided plumbers to come and tune up your heating.
2. Invest in renewables AND hugely in battery storage tech. Stuff like flow batteries and the like.
3. Subsidise EVs and invest in EV production.
4. Really good public transport that's not run for profit. That includes things like centrally planned ride-sharing minibus services.
5. Public campaign to get people to use the now excellent PT and cycling facilities.
6. Incentivise WFH at a corporate level now we all know it can be done. Sure, bosses will whinge, but they whinge at providing maternity leave too and we still have that (for now).
All those things could be done tomorrow (ok so fluid batteries might not be there yet, but their development could be invested in right now) if our government pulled its finger out. And it wouldn't even be that hard of a sell IMO.
It’s important not to fall into the trap of believing that something you do is absolutely essential or even ‘normal’ and therefore can be excluded from any sustainability aims.
I'm happy for flights to be rationed. The point I was making is that if you limited it to 1 flight a year, it's probably not going far enough to make a big difference over how it is now. You'd probably have to double or even treble the restriction (1 flight every other year or every 3rd year)
Molgrips for PM!
We've got 5 hours to find another 99 of us!
Bit of investment in city based car clubs wouldn't go amiss either.
Why own a car in the city and deal with all the related and ongoing costs and hassle when you should be catching a bus/cycling when you can pay xx a month to have access to a fleet of *someone else's cars*.
Needs long term joined up thinking though, not something governments are traditionally very good at.
Jesus wept, a lot of people hard of reading in this one.
And FWIW the home counties aren't representative of even a significant amount of the UK land mass, the village Matt refers to isn't even particularly remote but is typical for anything a couple of dozen miles outside of the higher density population centres.
4. Really good public transport that’s not run for profit.
Interconnected and frequent and cheap (if not free)
FWIW i haven't flown for nearly 5 years. Unlikely to this year either. Might do one return flight next year, possibly.
Unless they get the overnight train Stockholm/London sorted. Then i'll have my bank balance abused by the UK train companies.
That rather knackers a lot of land use. Cemeteries are very inefficient uses of (often very high value) land and they end up buggering up all manner of planning for decades, sometimes centuries. Plus they generate quite a lot of traffic themselves as people drive to visit and lay flowers (which are themselves a very inefficient and carbon heavy resource, most are flown over from the Netherlands, wrapped in plastic and sold). Incredibly wasteful.
It'd be simple to create an app where you tell it your commute and how far you can walk to be picked up, and software gets everyone's commute together and it plans busses based on where people want to go to and from. It'd select the appropriate vehicle e.g. car/minibus/bus.
Why are we still running bus services like it's the 50s? Big vehicles driving around all day with only a few people on? And they have to drive long circuitous routes in case anyone wants picking up from the suburbs when in most cases they don't?
Kind of a bus/taxi hybrid, I'm going to call them buxis.
Carbon tax
Grants for insulation of homes that actually work and mean people can afford to do it.
Electronics manufacturers (mainly phones and tablets) to standardise charge cables. One type for all.
Education and keep the climate crisis in the news at all times. Front and centre as the leading story all day, every day. There is nothing more important happening in the world.
Meat sales to be more heavily taxed and plant based diets to be encouraged with ingredients for plant based meals to be discounted.
Limit air travel.
Have street lighting in built up areas on sensors.
Install heat recovery in shower trays. How hard can this be?
Very, consider how difficult it is just to have a plug strainer fine enough to catch a wedding ring, but not so fine that it clogs with soap and hair. To get any sort of efficient heat exchange from the 30C water to cold water or air would need a large surface area, which means small pipes or lots of plates, which means lots of blockages.
And FWIW the home counties aren’t representative of even a significant amount of the UK land mass, the village Matt refers to isn’t even particularly remote but is typical for anything a couple of dozen miles outside of the higher density population centres.
And there lies the problem, if the question is "Simple to implement eco solutions for society", then discouraging living in nice remote bits of Scotland but making it as convenient as a city by driving everywhere is definitely an answer.
I'm fairly sure a large proportion of the "home counties" would quite like to live somewhere more rural too!
It's the opposite of moving near to a music venue and complaining it's noisy. Moving somewhere and complaining that there's no public transport.
Interesting that the 'simple to implement' bit was almost immediately ignored by almost everyone....
Like Molgrips - My biggest thing would be to have the government borrow heavily and invest in wind, solar and battery storage RIGHT NOW. Forget nuclear - It's a stupid idea.
VERY simple to implement.
EDIT - Also - A flight tax is easy to implement. As is forcing automotive suppliers who want to sell a car here to place an energy regulator on it.
How many years till fusion power is viable?
It's ALWAYS 10 years.
Tax deductible renewable energy loans through your workplace.
People need to give up on the idea of not living near where they work.
Oh hell no.
People need to give up on the idea that they must structure their entire life around their current employer.
Servers consume far more power than personal workstations. Mine with monitor is 130W. Our small pair of servers is 4-5kW when not under load. Triple or quadruple that for max load.
if only some clever person could invent some kind of software that allows multiple servers to run on one piece of hardware, therefore making the whole datacenter world more efficient…….
All the heat and insulation stuff - though I’m not sure it’s necessarily ease on retrofit.
Drop urban speed limits to 20mph and raise e-bike limits to 20mph. If a car is always slower…
Motorway limit to 60-65mph. A lot more efficient than 70 (be honest 75).
All cars to have trackers with automatic fine issuing. Start with new cars to make it easy.
Change to km/h at the same time so folk think their getting to drive at 100.
No private car ownership or solo driving until age 25 (you’d start adult life making choices based on public transport, it would be habit forming and influence policy).
Sadly guess what every 24 year old would suddenly be desperate to do? I agree with forming habits early, but preventing something just makes it more desirable. Try and make the car more hassle and less desirable in some way.
No cars within 300m of a school at start/end of school day (ie school streets at every school).
Residents permits for those whose house is 300m up a cul-de-sac past the school? EV gets charged off the PV at home.
All public Transport free at point of use.
All the costs/tax associated with driving gets put on fuel duty. Pay to drive.
Mandate that ALL new builds, resi, commercial and industrial, must have solar on the and roof grey+rain water collection/recycling.
Actually what about, change all speed limits to km/h?
We wouldn’t even need new speed limit signs!
PS - Olly +1
Add contraceptives to all energy drinks. Can't stop them chucking the cans in the bushes, but we can stop them breeding.
No private car ownership or solo driving until age 25 (you’d start adult life making choices based on public transport, it would be habit forming and influence policy).
You can actually solve a lot of that with proper cycle / walking infra and decent public transport.
Kids want a car cos it's their first independence from the Mum & Dad Taxi and because they're used to being driven everywhere. If you can give those kids easy independence via safe cycling and walking, they grow up not needing or wanting a car and not expecting to drive everywhere.
Influence right from the "school run" days where you can safely pack them off on a bike along safe segregated infra - look at the average school run in Denmark, The Netherlands, even "winter" countries like Finland.
Interesting that the ‘simple to implement’ bit was almost immediately ignored by almost everyone….
To be fair, a lot of them ARE technically easy to actually implement, but some are also expensive and would require people to work together instead of working for profit/self interest/bribes.
This is an interesting read
Agriculture and Residential are the main areas flat lining.
Tax dairy products?
And ban the sale of Gas and Oil boilers immediately.
Add contraceptives to all energy drinks. Can’t stop them chucking the cans in the bushes, but we can stop them breeding.
Might as well lump in MacDonalds and KFC too. Then you'll get 100% market penetration.
Having ovens (and other cooking devices) with temperature probes (or a stand alone thermometer) so that they are only used until the item is cooked. If you've ever cooked a chicken according to the package instructions you'll probably have had the oven on for 30 minutes longer than you really needed.
Again - simple to implement also means politically acceptable to the electorate. If you don't take that into account you are just fantasising.
Re servers - my colleague in Finland is shortly to be getting his house heated by the Microsoft Azure datacentre across the road.
Force toothpaste manufacturers to show the *actual* amount of toothpaste needed in their adverts.