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Ive decided im doing this anyway. I'll post the text of my speeches if you want to look over them.
Heres the 1st draft "sustainability of the individual
Comments and criticism would be appreciated
My aim is to reduce the cost of living of the individual to a potential of £0 but so that you can live totally comfortably without working, therefor people wont have to work unless they want to. Also to greatly reduce humanity's environmental impact on our fragile planet.
How is this doable? My answer is sustainable self sufficent housing. A concept like earthships. houses that uses earth rammed tires as a building material (totally insulating and have thermal mass i.e store heat during the day and slowly dissapate it at night) and with large south-ish facing double/trippple glazing to heat the home with the energy of the sun... for free. Solar pannels, wind turbine or small scale hydro will provide all the electricity you'll need and can be stored in a large system of batteries. An earthship makes the perfect greenhouse for growing plants, but with some land you can grow all the food you'll need, if you want too. There are many ways to process your swereage, such as reed bed filtration, cheap and recycles your shit cleanly back into the ecosystem. Also earthships are made mostly from recycled tyres and cans and are very cheap and easy to build. a home can be built for a little over 20k
Sure building it is relatively cheap compared to conventional builds but land is very expensive in britain today, making this imposible for most ppl to do. Land isnt expensive, land is dirt cheap. Land with planning permission is extortionatly expesnsive. So to make this possibel for ppl to do on a larger scale we need a reform planning permision so that ppl can buy farmland, wasteland, whatever cheaply and automatically be Granted planning permision if they are doing an environmental build.
There are several other ways to encourage more environmentally friendly homes (and therefor cheaper to run) Grants for each environmental subsystem, such as those that already exist for solar pannels in the uk, but to extend those to cover water systems, sewerage systems, insulation, double glazing. Making it more available for ppl to improve there homes, reduce their energy cost, increase energy efficiency etc and also stimulating the industries that make such renewable technology.
When you build a house today, it has to conform to certain levels of insulation, sound proofing structural stability. These should be extended so that all new builds must produce electricity and be totally energy efficient.
These subtle change in the law + more grants for renewable sub-systems would have the benefits of
*preparing large numbers of ppl for possible future energy shortages
*Reduce the cost of living of ppl, so if they lose their job, they can still support themselves cheaply
*Reduce ppl's Environmental impact in the UK
*Liberate people from the having to work once house is built and paid for
*Create low cost housing (house prices are stupid in the UK) which may have the knock on effect of lowering house prices
*Act as an example to other countries on the benefits of renewable housing
Think about it, if you had a good cheap house and a bit of land. You could work part time or do seasonal work, or not work at all, depending on how far you want to take it. What would you do with all the free time and less worries? Write? Play music? paint? watch TV all day? use the net excessively? Grow your own pot and smoke all day long? dedicate yourself to projects? do sports? meditate? basically you would be more able to do whatever you wanted to, increasing your personal freedom.
Heres some thoughts on housing schemes. govnt buys large tract of land of farmer for a fair price and offers this land for free, with the constraint that you build the houses, learning to build on site (with trained pro's to tell you how andd what to do). An earthsip style build can be completed in 2 weeks. Another constraint is that for every 8 houses built, 2 must be built (govt pays materials costs) for the elderly... its important to look after old ppl or mabye a sustainable old folks home in the centre of the community.
My aim is to reduce the cost of living of the individual to a potential of £0, make housing more affordable and basic living cheap
How? Planning permission reform, Sustainable sub-systems grants, building societies, land, promoting the idea, Education
Why? Freedom of the individual. Reduce individuals impact on the environment. Future proof society from energy and food shortages. Stabilise society at a level it would find difficult to drop below.
My aim with these ideas to solve many of the problems Britain is facing in a manner that would be achievable by the government. By achievable by the government I mean that they have the power to implement these ideas without infringing on civil liberties, the ideas are financially sound in the long run, would be acceptable to the public and would benefit the public.
The best way to express these ideas just now would be for me to explain what I want to do and why. They should be viewed holistically.
My theories revolve around housing as everybody has to live somewhere. Your house can provide you with all your base needs (from a comfortable western perspective) and can do this by helping the environment.
A home can provide your:
Electricity. By using solar panels to produce electricity. Solar technology is now efficient and cheap (£2000 cost for your average home, Scottish executive pays half of this currently…but who knows that?) enough to be of benefit. They can provide you with all you electricity if build a electrical storage system or you could sell excess energy back to the national grid during the day when you produce an excess and when electricity is most expensive. A solar mortage is cheaper than most peoples electricity bills
Heat, electrical heating sytems powered by your solar panels and or wind turbine. A well insulated home requires miniscule amounts of energy to heat. A good example is a friend of my fathers who built himself a 3 storey mansion that was so well insulated it can be heated by a light bulb
Waste disposal. A home can process your sewerage, replenishing the earth around you with nutrients (not practical in cities)
For barbelith.
Everybody needs to live somewhere.
Now ive flown the nest I have to live independently somewhere. My family is very good with money and anything that involves money, they twice saw buying land and building a house to be the best way to build the house you want and was cheaper than buying a house of the similar size and specifications in the area. Ive got to live somewhere and the most cost effective way of doing that is building my own house. After investigation I found that the most cost effective to run a home is to be self sufficient. Electricity can be provided by solar panels and/or a wind turbine, excess can be stored in a system that incorporates golf cart batteries or sold back to the national grid (some solar companies sort this out for you). The start up cost for solar panels is about £2000, of which the Scottish executive pays 50%. This means no electricity bills ever again. Brilliant. A well insulated home requires very little energy to heat so I’ll be building the walls out of earth rammed tyres in the earthship concept. its cheap, you recycle tyres, there is little else that is as insulating and they posses a lot of thermal mass, meaning that they store heat. Over the tires you put a thermal film to reduce heat loss even more and on top of that im going to have earth and wild grasses, partly for increased insulation properties, it’ll blend in with the environment and (in my opinion) look really cool. I accept not everyone likes the idea having a house made of tyres, there are other methods, such as straw bales between two walls or a conventional build with lots of plaster board and glass wool or non-itchy and just as good sheeps wool. Basically the more efficient the insulation the lower the cost of running. With Big double or triple glazed south facing windows you make use of the heating energy of the sun. The tyre walls absorb this during the day and slowly dissipate it at night I can also have backup heating powered by electricity and/or a log fire. The house can automatically process my sewerage with a reed bed sewerage system. My own miniature sewerage plant.
Water from rain will go into the gutters of my roof and into a cistern that will filter the water. This water can then be pumped out taps and showers by an electric pump. water can be heated using an electric boiler or solar water heating pannels
Will you look at that, once paid for my house has no running costs, all I need money for is food, clothing and any luxuries I wish to indulge in. But my needs aren’t great, im thoroughly introverted and like to spend my spare in the pursuit of truth and wisdom, which will only really be the cost of an internet connection.
The cost of living this way, in the UK once paid for, is
Council tax (if I don’t use the services it provides can I justify not paying it)
Clothes, being a man not concerned with fashion, this wont be much
Luxuries, for me this’ll be an internet connection, books, paper and pens
TV liscence, I wont have one as I don’t own a TV and dot want one
Food… and by golly, if I grow my own because I’ll have no reason to work a full time job if I don’t want to, my cost of living will be almost zero. Leaving me to ability make an income doing something I enjoy that’ll pay for my council tax and luxuries.
An earthship house was recently built in fife, Scotland and cost £24 000, minus the cost of land to build on (which was donated). Cheaper than a conventional build, fully self sufficient and sustainable, while being comfortable. This will undoubtedly be cheaper than your home. And a mortgage on it would be cheaper than renting a house or flat just about anywhere in the country. With a lower cost of living you could afford to pay off the mortgage quicker.
Now heres some related politics.
Building a fully sustainable comfortable house is cheap, so is land. land is, if you’ll excuse the pun, dirt cheap. Land with planning permission is extortionately expensive. The price of land goes higher if it looks like you can get planning permission on it. This means that building a house is too expensive for people on lower incomes.
The solution. To get a change in the law so that planning permission is automatically granted for houses that will be largely sustainable and to let people know that this is an option. The result… cheaper houses with a lower cost of living for the masses. It also stabilises these people at a standard of living that they cant drop below meaning that any future badness wont affect people that much, such as economic collapse brought on by the end of affordable oil |
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