Comox Glacier - A wonder of Vancouver Island and the view from McDonald Passive House, the Comox glacier is melting and may be gone by 2050. Climate change is the reason.
Passive house is something tangible you can do about climate chaos. If you don’t think we have a problem, perhaps your time would be better spent on another site. If you concur, please read on.
Most of our problems come from digging up the earth’s guts (fossil fuels) and burning them. It’s that simple. Nothing new there. At various times in history we burned other things: wood, peat, whale oil, witches, you name it. We need to get away from that, but our lives rotate around fossil energy. The way we travel, the homes we live in, the places we work, how we maintain comfort, the food we eat and how it reaches us – these are all, in our current economic and social models, inextricably linked to burning the earth’s guts. We are all complicit.
How to fix this? Of course, we cannot just abruptly stop using the viscera of mother earth to warm our hands, like so many people standing around a burning barrel of rubbish. Our livelihoods are too linked to this practice. But with some thought, and the careful rearrangement of our built environment, we can wean ourselves off it. Passive house can be a big part of achieving that transition. If you live in an industrial country, some 30% of your carbon footprint comes from the building you live in and the one you work in. Thirty percent. (If you are Canadian, as I am, your average total carbon is 14.4 tonnes of CO2 a year, one of the highest in the world.) And we don’t need a massive leap in technology to get to targets set at the 2017 COP meeting in Paris. No magic required: everything we need already exists. Now.
This site is devoted to talking about how we get there.