Birmingham's Zero Carbon House is doable, scalable and beautiful - and expresses what the "climate majority" want, says Rupert Read

We’re supportive of Rupert Read’s Climate Majority Project, and we were delighted to discover a few things from his recent speech (embedded above). Rupert is speaking at an event organised by Zero carbon house Birmingham, which as the YouTube blurb says:

…has been designed so there’s no need to use fossil fuels. No carbon is released into the atmosphere from this unique family home and there are no fuel bills either. zero carbon house is the UK’s first zero carbon retrofit – the only existing house to have been upgraded to one of the most exacting standards in green design, Level 6 of the original UK Code for Sustainable Homes.

This isn’t a new project, completed in 2010, but we’d really recommend a look through their website, as they richly detail how their retrofit took place. It costs only a few thousand pounds over a standard social housing construction.

See more pictures of the Zero Carbon House in their gallery

But we’re also delighted to hear Rupert’s 4-stage assessment of the importance of the zero house is (click here to go there in video). It’s one we really agree with.

The first and primarily is as an example of direct action, not waiting for governments to enact policy that reduce emission - this arrangement of building materials concretely “makes a difference” to carbon reduction, as Read puts it.

Second is that the makers of the house want their method and exemplar to “scale”; thirdly, that this house is an exemplar to others (fellow house builders and authorities), showing what can be done.

Only fourthly does Read consider the question of whether such an example can get government to act - not impossible, but not possible at all without the automomy and confidence of the Zero House makes.

Suffice to say, this all runs against the policy consequences of the Tory government saving a seat in its recent by-election challenge, by means of its candidate’s anti-green car regulation campaign. Our assessment is that this could be a huge mistake by the current Government, given how settled the “climate majority” is on requiring politicians to act on the climate crisis.