If you really want to be green should you buy a bulldozer?

I was born in the house above, It was built in 1780, its had a few extensions since. This is my parents house, its 200m^2 with absolutely no insulation anywhere. The house goes up into the loft so there is no rockwool up there, the walls are solid brick with no insulation, the windows are made of lead and glass, the lead was put there to hold the tiny panes of glass and to massively increase the U value. The floor is solid.

Its a cold house, when my parents bought it in the 60s it had no heating at all, the first winter they lived there my mum lost her shit when she came downstairs one morning in January to find frost on the lounge floor. My dad was told to sort out some heating and carpets sharpish. He did.

My dad is old so he suffers from the cold, he has a gas boiler which he runs 24/7 all year round at a room temp of 23 degrees C. He pays ￡3500 a year to heat the house. I did a heat loss, the load is 22kWs, that's 110 Watts per metre square. Its an ecological disaster zone. As a reference if this was a brand new house the heat load would be sub 6 kW and the run cost would be well under ￡1000 a year, it would also emit 10 tonnes of CO2 less than the old place does now.

Dad has had all the shysters round, they recommend double glazing, external cladding etc, there is just one small problem, its grade 2 listed. So he is stuck between a rock and a hard place, the house is a thermal nightmare but you are not allowed to improve it. The only real options are gutting it all putting overlay floors in, cladding the inside with lagging and also the ceilings. Secondary glazing could also be done. Funnily enough at 85 dad cant be bothered to do all this work.

Just for laughs I did a case study on this house, 22kWs needs 2 air source heat pumps, 2 heat pumps means planning permission, in a conservation area. He has got a combi boiler so we would have to build a cylinder cupboard in the lounge, the rads were put in in 1970 and they run at 70C, they will all need replacing as will all the ancient plumbing. That little lot will cost ￡25k Plus to do. Its not going to happen.

Ground source would do it, but again its a lot of work, of course we could do a hybrid, half gas, half heat pump . But all these options dont address the big issue, the house is a Carbon dioxide manufacturing plant, it leaks heat like a sieve.

At the risk of sounding like a philistine wouldn't it be better to flatten the old place and build a new one? We have a weird obsession with old stuff in the UK, in the far East much less so, they prefer new and efficient. If we want to hang onto these old relics these issues are the real questions we have to address if we are actually serious about CO2 reduction.

Ask yourself, Is it ok that old houses have huge carbon footprints?

I think there might be money in electric bulldozers and wrecking balls.