Category: Perspectives

Don’t hate the player, hate the game

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Part of being able to make a good argument is holding on to the core of something that is true and being able to represent it in language that means something to the other person. Being prepared to go to where they are, to try and reach them and bring them with you. It’s not about you and your ego and what you need to say – you can get anything done if you don’t mind who takes the credit. The end justifies the means.

Conceptualising things in terms of the cost and value is a way of making things analogous, or at least finding some way to consider very different things. A way to meet and discuss things with people who might not share the same emotional attachment. To be able to make choices.

What if the means make it harder to get the ends though?

In trying to make the case for environmental action, we’ve spoken in the language of economics. The hard crunchy things that people care about, or at least can use to reach decisions. The factors that respond to the boxes and templates on the various applications, briefings, funding requests that are the ways of getting things done in lots of organisations, lots of parts of society.

Nature has a value of this. Without bees we’d be c.£120bn worse off per year. Energy inefficient rental homes cost the NHS at least £145m a year.

Framing things this way also helps to create a veneer of normality for trade-offs which would otherwise seem monstrous or unacceptable. It also helps to reinforce the frames and parameters – a tacit agreement that this is the ‘right way’ to look at things, to make choices, weigh up options. A shared language for things, or more perhaps, a seemingly shared language but really it belies some big differences in priorities, values, how to weigh things up.

This distancing from the emotional then maybe creates some stress – knowing that there’s a disconnect, putting your faith in something you don’t entirely trust, not feeling like you’ve got much control or agency. Feeling a bit shabby and tawdry, like you’re selling out, or being dishonest because the framing feels stifling, hiding the things that matter.

More importantly though, this framing hasn’t catalysed sufficient action.

Environmentalists, and indeed people working on other issues such as civil liberties or health for instance, have done the things we’re supposed to do. Spending precious time coming up with assessment methodologies to put a ‘value’ on a tree or landscape, or work out how much someone’s bad housing has ‘cost’ the NHS. Then watching as the things we care about get traded off against other things – often things which will make what we care about worse such as new roads or runways.

In lots of ways that’s fine. As I wrote in ‘Picking your poison’ – making decisions is about making trade-offs, accepting that you can’t necessarily have it all and therefore you have to choose. Losing an argument isn’t always a bad thing. Sometimes your ideas or proposals aren’t right, could be better, have areas of weakness which need to be reviewed and reassessed. It can create a space to build better connections with other subjects, organisations or coalitions of the willing.

Sometimes though, losing the argument, and then keeping on losing, just makes it more urgent to win sometimes. From climate and biodiversity perspectives, the longer it takes to ‘win’ the argument, the more worrying things become in terms of impacts. Therefore the more action needs to be taken to try and respond, which is then less appealing to more people. So we go round that loop again and again.

In a different time and in relation to a different context, Gramsci said ‘The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.’ There are currently plenty of ‘morbid symptoms’ in the UK and internationally – on migration, health, civil liberties and, well the list is a very long one. The sense ‘That’s your bloody GDP not ours’ seems to still be true for many. It feels like the lack of space for care is part of what has created these symptoms. That people are protesting about the effects and looking around for politicians, proposals and stories that offer something different.

Feeling optimistic at this point can by turns feel naïve and necessary. Yet I love the quote from Rebecca Solnit’s ‘Hope in the dark’, where she takes the idea of hope as something passive and turns it into something more active. She says ‘“Hope is not a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky. It is an axe you break down doors with in an emergency.’

It feels like the current situation creates the space and need to shift from the stories we’ve been telling about the financial value of things, and gives more urgency to telling different stories. Ones which resonate better with people – both those who hear the stories and also, for many who are telling them. Most of us can’t do something directly about the stories politicians tell, even those we would expect to be doing better. Trying to find ways in our days and actions to tell better stories ourselves and to try and make the case to care is something we can and must do though.

Picking your poison

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In the discussion between fabric first and fabric fifth it can often feel as though people are trying to get to the ‘right answer’ rather than looking at where the inefficiencies are, how big they are and trying to decide which is more feasible.

In choosing fabric fifth it means that there will be a need to generate more energy and increase grid resilience. All of this costs and means building more national infrastructure. It’s not the more efficient approach in lots of ways, as it means putting more energy generation in than might be optimally required. Asking people to decarbonise their heat supply is a much simpler message and one which can have the biggest impact on their individual carbon footprint. There can still be a place for other measures too, particularly if people want to fund them themselves, but if it’s hard to persuade people to take up any environmental measures, focusing on the most impactful could bring efficiencies that way. In addition to generating carbon savings more quickly, it could also help to reduce costs in trying to recruit people by using a simpler message, and cutting the costs of assessing homes as the standalone heat pump installation can be simpler than internal or external wall insulation.

With fabric first, there should be less energy needing to be generated. In practice this isn’t straightforward, with lots of evidence suggesting there’s a performance gap arising from quality issues in the install process and then a rebound effect, with many households taking improved energy efficiency as comfort savings. This can lead to an increase in energy consumption – and for those households who are under-heating their homes, with the knock-on impacts on the health of the people and the building itself affected, this can be a good thing on wellbeing grounds.

To get to those carbon savings also means trying to persuade people to take up the deeper levels of insulation it requires. This can be more invasive, with most of the ‘easy’ to treat measures done – such as loft or cavity wall insulation. There are still some remaining but these are more likely to be complicated works such as non-standard cavity walls, or perhaps they are lofts where the amount of things being stored makes it too difficult for the occupants to contemplate the work. The longer it takes to persuade people, the more carbon gets emitted along the way.

I’ve long been fascinated by the idea of the shape of the decarbonisation curve, what that means in terms of the quantum of carbon which gets emitted and crucially what that means in terms of how the shift feels to live through. Reaching net zero by any date by plateauing in a steady state way and then plummeting to zero, or a more gradual downward trajectory both get to the same point. Imagining the shape of those two separate trajectories, and therefore the space underneath them as a proxy for the carbon emissions, shows the amount of carbon generated is much bigger in the first scenario than the second. The first scenario increases the likelihood of feedback loops, which mean the impacts could be more significant. Thinking about the transitions and how they would feel to live through, goes to some quite different places. Even during the Covid-19 pandemic, what felt like a total transformation in how we lived globally led to a c.4-5% drop in carbon emissions in 2020. It’s hard to imagine a precipitous drop which is good for humanity. Whereas the more gradual drop suggests a more managed approach which seems likely to be much easier to live through.

If we lived in a world where everything was aligned to the fabric first approach – funding, regulation, owner and occupants willingness and interest and the supply chain capacity and capability – it could still be the best option. Effective and efficient. If that isn’t where we are, which it isn’t, then the question becomes one of trade-offs. To make decisions means choosing the trade-offs rather than acting as though they aren’t there and continuing to push specific approaches.

Shifting in real time

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I was astonished to read that this summer in the UK has been the hottest on record, not because I doubt the data but because my own memory of it feels so out of kilter. I’ve lived through it and it felt toasty at times but others have felt hotter. Perhaps the summers of 2020 and 2021 felt hotter. The lockdowns and pandemic situation might have made those feel hotter – everything felt more claustrophobic and turned up a level then. Even more so during 2020, when neighbours were carrying out an incredibly loud, judderingly bone-shaking extension. The noise and vibrations felt so intense, they created a feedback loop between the discomfort and the heat.

A big part of why it felt different to me is also probably because I’ve been lucky enough to move since then. During those pandemic times I was living in an Edwardian, first floor, purpose-built maisonette – a building designed for quite another climate. Now I live in a house that, whilst not very easy to keep cool, is nonetheless much easier to do so. Particularly at night, which meant I’ve been able to get some respite from the heat rather than feeling like my eyeballs were going to burst. I’m also in an area that’s more surrounded by trees, so that’s potentially giving more of a cooling feel too. I can come up with these different ideas to rationalise my thinking, even as I wonder if it’s just me trying to explain being in a more privileged situation.

Still though. The recency bias of a few autumnal feeling days and lots of rain means that those glorious sunny days feel a long time ago. Even scrolling back through photos, I see lots of sunny days but also plenty of grey days with occasional drizzle in the mix too. Knowing that I’m looking back at a summer which is record breaking and struggling to assimilate that information with what I remember and see. To see the shifting baselines happening, in real time, to myself, someone who works on climate issues and is aware of this in a way others might not be, feels disconcerting. If I can’t even persuade myself, how can I be surprised that others aren’t alarmed?

In a New York minute…

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Looking at the weather report last night for today, it said there would be rain, lots of rain, a bit later on in the day. Not just a bit of rain but some good double blob levels of rain.

I woke up this morning to bright blue skies. Not a cloud to be seen in the sky. The soft, warm light gradually growing in its seemingly implacable intensity. As the early morning turned into kind of time that no longer feels like a secret pocket of time to be awake in, a virtuous bonus for the owls amongst us, but the kind of time most might be awake – the big blue sun filled sky carried on.

Checked the weather report again. Surely it wasn’t still predicting rain. Out of this most gently insistent blue sky – it seemed impossible.

Gradually some clouds appeared, then a few more came with tints of grey.

The seemingly impossible happened. Double blob rain out of a darkened sky. No blue to be seen. Replaced with thoughts of putting on a light and getting a jumper.

It is easy to forget everything is changing all of the time. Easy to feel moments are bigger and more substantial than they are. Good and sometimes astonishing to be reminded otherwise, fortunate that reminder comes today in the form of some much needed rain…

On not knowing…

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It’s a weird space to be in, to not know things but be trying to know and explore. To bump up against the edges of not knowing. To not know how to know. To allow yourself to be bored and uncomfortable. To go down some rabbit holes without knowing if they are rabbit holes or the thing that will unlock the knowing…

It’s rare to be in a space where it’s okay to not know. To be able to admit that – because it feels possible, permissible and safe to do so.

I was reminded again of this whilst reading the rightly furious and urgent piece by Rachel Donald – ‘The crisis of imagination’. It’s easy to think we have such a rich understanding of the world – from ever more detailed research, footage from space and down deep into the earth’s core and back in time which shows us our world in so many different ways. Yet public discourse, in politics and online, often isn’t kind to those who admit they don’t have all the answers.

Making ways to allow ourselves, individually and collectively to not know – and not to stop there but be open to finding out – is key. To be prepared to face some mild discomfort in admitting our ignorance, so we can better focus on what needs to be done.

Bedding down

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Beds have come to seem so normal but for most people in time and space, the kinds of mattresses we think of as standard in the UK just aren’t. Sleeping on bare earth – or at least, earth covered with grass and herbs to provide some kind of matting for people to walk around and sleep on. Hammocks and boxes, benches and coffin-like beds. Mattresses made of linen, feathers or straw, beds have been through lots of iterations.

My bed, I’m so happy and lucky to say, is very much not like sleeping on bare earth. It is so comfortable and either explicitly or implicitly I register that each time I get in. A daily joy and privilege. It’s quite firm but not too firm. There’s some give in it but it doesn’t feel squashed or like I’m suffocating or being swallowed up by the bed.

Yet I wonder what it would feel like for people who are used to sleeping on rolled up plant materials if they were to magically be able to try out my bed. Whether they would lie down on it and be blown away by the comfort levels, see their own situation differently. Wish for something else. Or whether it would just feel too uncomfortable. Too much. Or perhaps too little. Missing that connection with the ground. Feeling a bit unmoored from their life and homesick for something that felt more natural, rather than being on some complicated set-up.

Shove suggests that so much of what we experience as comfort is set by wider expectations. With the availability of technologies which allow us to control the temperature in rooms and buildings more easily there was a need for designers to have an understanding of what temperature range they should be aiming for. This has led to the development of a norm around temperatures in buildings which then creates a feedback loop, or ratchet as Shove describes it, which leads to increases in usage more widely. Somewhat terrifyingly, Walker, Simcock and Day found the temperatures people prefer in their bedrooms are generally lower than the 18 degrees recommended by the energy sector. This guidance can help to reset expectations and could lead to further increases in energy consumption.

So perhaps those mythical time travellers who get to test my bed might not like it if they just gave it a one-time try. Their expectations would still be with their own beds and perhaps mine wouldn’t feel right for them.

A really big shift, perhaps bigger than the actual bed technology, is the one from sleeping being a more communal activity to sleep as something private. There is a wider move to more privacy at home, and beds are just part of that. Until around the Victorian times in the UK, sleep was a much more shared experience. It used to be common for all the members of a household to bed down together. Halls were multi-purpose rooms where people would eat, work, hang out and sleep. Servants and masters, young and old sharing beds or a room. Hard to imagine that being the norm for most people in space and time, yet there was considered to be an intimacy to sharing that space. For many members of the nobility, inviting people into their bedchamber was considered to be offering or getting a huge privilege. A much more communal existence than most people have now.

This shift by the Victorians was driven partly by increased concerns around the moral implications of people sharing beds, and partly because of hygiene considerations. There became more awareness of how infectious diseases could be spread, and therefore more of a drive for people to have their own space to try and reduce that risk.

That seems impossible for most of us to imagine. A tangible way in which people from previous generations lived lives that are very different to our own.

Of course, there are now hundreds of thousands of people around the country, one of the richest in the world, for whom imagining that is easy because it is their reality today too. Families or groups of individuals sharing one room. That room becoming like the Hall of old – with one room also becoming the living, working and eating space. Sometimes the room they have to use for cooking too. Living rooms in rental places increasingly getting used as living rooms, either by the people renting having to make that decision to be able to afford the space, or landlords making that decision for people.

As with other changing expectations, the gap between expectation and reality means what once might have made a home feel communal and normal, now feels like a lack of care or respect. This creates a sense of emotional discomfort which can be just as unpleasant to live with, and in, as physical discomfort can be. Much has changed with beds and how we sleep but until we have more of a shared agreement, and actions to match, we’ll continue to have people living amongst us who have beds and sleeping arrangements that seem like time travel to most of us.

In plain sight

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Always really humbling and hopefully helpful to see things hiding in plain sight that have been taken for granted that don’t quite work.

The definition of fuel poverty has changed a lot over time. Broadly speaking it’s about finding different ways to express the fact that people don’t have enough money to be able to heat their homes to a suitable temperature. There’s a separate debate about the term, and it’s not one that many people would recognise for themselves but still, those are not really for today.

There are all kinds of subtleties to that though. People’s circumstances can change for various reasons, all of which affect their ability to pay. From changes in their income – which is the main reason people move into or out of fuel poverty, to changes in the household – increases or decreases, or someone becomes unwell. There are plenty of other reasons besides but they give a sense of the fact this isn’t an absolute number that can be used as the benchmark to assess a household’s situation.

Yet when we look at fuel poverty, we look at the energy costs. This includes costs to heat the home and typically heating is the largest part of the cost. It’s not the only part of the cost. Even just looking at gas costs doesn’t allow you to separate out the heating costs, as people also use gas for hot water and potentially for cooking too.

Somewhere along the way those different aspects – assessing fuel poverty on the basis of ability to heat the home, and looking at energy costs in the round, got joined together.

Perhaps it wouldn’t matter. As many, including Druckman and Jackson suggest, energy costs for heating are more variable than electricity costs. Heating costs are more dependent upon the energy efficiency of the home and the need for different levels of comfort. So perhaps it’s a pragmatic proxy that avoids making life even more complicated.

Nonetheless, that sense of being shown by Walker, Simcock & Day how those two different considerations have been joined together in a way which isn’t articulated clearly was astonishing.

A reminder of how often there can be shared blind spots. Unspoken understandings and misunderstandings which then block opportunities or set parameters unnecessarily.

Things fall apart

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It’s easy not to pay attention to the different parts of our home when they are working well. Not the things that we were already wanting to change but those taken for granted parts of home. Switching on a light or a plug socket. Flushing the toilet. The buttons, dials and levers do as we instruct them. The magic happens. Home as a machine for life.

When it works it works and we don’t tend to give thanks each time we use something. The intricacies of the technology are, for most of us, something unfathomable. An accumulation of knowledge, trial and error, insights and experimentation moulded into tools which make our lives easier. Untold hours, unexpected inspiration and dedication of people who’ve come before us turned into an easier way to make tea or clean your clothes.

Modern life has then done a pretty good job of making the technology invisible. When the Victorians put in the sewer they were so proud of the technology and what it meant, they made sewage pipes visible so people could see the marvel. They built Crossness Pumping Station – a veritable cathedral with jokes in the ironwork. Now though, underneath and through the home the wires, cables and pipes are usually hidden away. Interior design magazines often edit out wires and cables to make the place look tidier, a crisper look, more aspirational.

Putnam describes those hidden sewers, cables and utility mains as forms of material life support. Home then becomes, in their view, not just a place which holds memories, or a space for socialising but a support service.

A sign of how modern, or post-modern, homes have become that these technologies are just part of how we live now. Putnam sees this shift as the second of two successive transformations of contemporary living from the traditional 19th Century models. The first shift they identify was the emergence of the modern home between c.1920-1950 when the domestic space was designed around the technical core of those underpinning material supports. They describe the second shift in the 1960s when the technical, and they suggest the economic and political, structures of modernity became part of the background for modern home life. With this shift, where basic aspects of how we are fortunate enough to live become taken for granted, ‘home becomes the supreme domain for personalization and, by consequence, of endless negotiations’.

Moving up Maslow’s hierarchy of needs when we no longer need to think about the basics of shelter and care for ourselves. Those supports are woven into the fabric of our homes and the expectations of our lucky days.

Then when something doesn’t work, well, it’s then that we notice them. We feel the knock-on impacts of that on our behaviour. Things get glitchy. We have to run errands to try and get something to fix it ourselves, or to try and deal with the impacts of the thing being broken. Searching for different approaches to fix things, or just to understand what the issue is. The hope when we try a new thing. Looking for signs that it is working. Tossing aside the new when it hasn’t worked. More and more time and money getting spent trying to fix something.

Things feeling a bit more fragile and off – that this isn’t how it’s supposed to be. We bump back down to the bottom of Maslow’s hierarchy. The home shifts from the background, supportive and magical, into the foreground of problems, mess and frustration. We notice when things don’t work, we feel our luck when dealing with the loss.

Opportune boiling

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Really interested in the perspective of Sovacool and Geels reflecting on past energy transitions as ones that were opportunity driven, compared to the current energy transition which is problem driven.

In the past, energy transitions – as they describe them, for another day whether what has actually happened is we have ‘more and more and more’ energy sources – were about trying to do things better, faster, easier. More useful sources of energy, or energy sources that could be more easily deployed meant an increased level of comfort – with better quality and longer lasting light sources, people could stay up later, do more activities, make more time for themselves outside of work. It also allowed tasks to be more easily done, from the home to the factory. Machines picking up and outpacing what people could do. An increase in the amount of materials or products that could be made, or making it easier to clean the home and cook.

In terms of the transition to low and zero carbon sources of energy, the driver of the change is about reducing the environmental impact. From an individual or even organisational perspective, not much would change in terms of what can be done. Most people are interested in energy to the extent it helps them do the things they want to do, as Fouquet describes it, the ‘energy services’ – such as heating, electricity, running computers, phones or the like. Changing the way in which energy is generated to low carbon sources doesn’t do anything to immediately make a change in terms of how people can use and benefit from the energy.

It made me wonder again if part of the way to engage with the shift away from fossil fuels is to try and identify the issues with the current technologies. At the moment in the UK, most homes are heated by gas boilers. So all discussion is about how heat pumps work compared to gas. There seems to be an implicit assumption that the starting point is good and fine, so then discussions about how it feels to live with a heat pump are always slightly apologetic.

There are so many things about gas boilers that aren’t great though. Ignoring for now all of the air quality and carbon emissions arguments. Purely thinking about them from the perspective of how they work in the home, how they feel – there are loads of things which don’t work so well.

Most people think they know how to use their gas boiler – there’s generally a button you can press which just sets off an explosion of highly combustible gases in a box in your home, which then quickly warms the place. It’s then easy to switch off in the same way. All very straightforward. Although that idea of how explosive it is doesn’t feel like something that is naturally a seller, yet we somehow have accommodated ourselves to the fact of the explosiveness and manage not to think about it. Not having that in the home feels like a win though.

Meanwhile, most homes don’t have their boiler set-up, or used in the most efficient way. So it’s actually not a very easy to use system in practice. Nor is it therefore an efficient system, which means people are paying more than they need for whatever comfort they are getting. Or indeed could have more comfort and warmth than they are getting for the same price or less. If people are interested in the level of comfort rather than the cost, being able to give that comparison feels like one which is of much more interest to people.

The sense of the warmth being really enveloping is one that many people enjoy and is something that’s seen as a negative for heat pumps, where that almost palpable sense of the heat doesn’t come through. It can be satisfying but then quickly feels a bit too much. Leading to a see-sew sitch where you then have to turn the heating down or off to make it more comfortable and not so stuffy.

This can be particularly an issue overnight when it’s cold. Hard to know how to get the balance of bedding and heating right so it’s comfortable. Just right, not too hot and not too cold. If you wake up in the night and need to get out of bed when it’s cold it can just be awful. Takes as long, often longer for me, to give a pep-talk about getting it done quickly as it does to actually get out, do the thing and run back to bed.

Just a few of the many ways in which boilers don’t deliver the comfort we want, yet somehow the goodness of them generally and compared to other options feels unarguable, sacrosanct. Maybe we need to start picking at that thread and finding out more about what people don’t like about their current set-up?

The RoI of paint

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Luring you in with my jargon chat there. Not here to talk about the French king of paint. RoI is what the cool kids use to talk about a return on investment.

In economics world, where we are rational actors, the talk is about return on investment. If an organisation or an individual invests £x, how long will it take them to see a return on that? Investing £x means maintenance or running costs will be x% lower and therefore you can calculate how long it will take to generate savings which add up to original investment. Aka your return on investment.

All sounds really straightforward and scientific. Hard crunchy numbers which are inarguable. Intentionally so I think. Constructing approaches which reinforce the impression that this is an objective approach in a world which seems to think objectivity is good thing. As Christie, Smith and Munro (2008) reflect, detachment, objectivity and scepticism are simply forms of emotion work which have been privileged within accounts of the scientific method, and I would argue more broadly too.

Yet how those numbers get developed, who is in control of defining what does or doesn’t weigh on the scales is also fundamental. In another lifetime I was trying to develop a project using the feed-in tariff – a governmental mechanism to provide an above-market price for renewable energy generated. When the feed-in tariff was first introduced the rates were really high, such that it would only take about 10 years to break even on the tariff, with another 15 years of income given the feed-in tariff lasted for 25 years. This was far and away a better deal than lots of other investment opportunities. It was so good that we didn’t even try to claim bill savings from the energy generated because there were a lot of variables in consumption patterns and we didn’t have sufficient confidence in the indicative numbers we generated.

It wasn’t our first rodeo doing this kind of project so we felt confident that we had covered the different elements to build up the cost profile that people would expect. Over time in discussion with senior decision makers, we were asked to add all kinds of costs in which were normally outside the scope of costs for this kind of decision. More and more costs got added on and the numbers that popped out the other end of the evaluation got worse and worse. We looked to offset this by adding in projected cost savings on energy but eventually the model broke. It became clear that they just didn’t want to do the project, so they kept going until the RoI looked so bad that people said there was no way they could support the project. They ‘weren’t sure’ about the technology but could turn it in to numbers that looked empirical, feel like they were doing their job properly and meant they didn’t need to engage with their lack of knowledge.

Yet there are many items we spend money on where even attempting that kind of calculation doesn’t make sense. Paint for instance. Or a vase. Maybe it’s easier with paint. We can at least try and make a guess at whether one kind of paint might last compared to a cheaper one. That’s not entirely straightforward though either. What does it mean for paint to last? Never gets any marks on it at all? To bounce back after marks have been attempted to get cleaned off? Or something more ephemeral – it lasts longer because we really like the colour and it fits with the place and how we want it to be? Continually works as we look to shift things around in terms of the look of the place?

We can do some research to get feedback on how long paint ‘lasts’ but is that a meaningful metric for how people actually make decisions? For many people, the premium for some paints like Farrow & Ball is worth it because of the vibe the paint has. It makes people feel they are buying some of that lifestyle which the relative difference in costs compared to cheaper paint allows, in a way the cost differential between their home and one more in keeping with the atmos isn’t.

Of course, paint is much cheaper than lots of other things people can do to their homes. So transformative as well. A tin of paint, a few hours and a totally different space. Hard to think of something which can make as much of a difference as quickly. In terms of bang for your beautifully coloured buck it scores highly. When people move into a new place there can often be talk about wanting to make the place their own (Cook, 2021). Paint is such a strong way to do that, literally getting attached to the place. The act and practice of making the place your home.

It’s therefore unsurprising that people will be prepared to spend a bit more on paint and might not think about the RoI, compared to more expensive things like heat pumps or solar PV. In both cases the question might be around whether they can afford it or not, it’s just that in the latter case the upfront cost is much higher and therefore it might not be possible to satisfy the want.

For many people, they’ve already got a heating system which works. Making the change to a heat pump or getting solar doesn’t solve a problem or give them an opportunity. It will make their home slightly differently warm. It might bring with it indeterminate concerns about running costs or how it works. It’s a lot of cost, in a world where choosing the heat pump or solar likely means choosing not to do lots of other things. Of course there are an increasing number of people for whom it isn’t a choice in the first place but for those who have enough in the bank or can borrow, it is a choice and one it can be hard to justify.

Of course we’re talking about costs which are orders of magnitude different but does that mean the thought processes which lead to the choice are totally different?