SteamyTea

Among people of high socioeconomic status, love for nature corresponds with a bigger environmental footprint – and there's an obvious reason why By Alec Luhn 27 May 2026 Private jets are the most carbon-intensive way to travel Steve Allen / Alamy People who care the most about the environment also do the most environmental damage with their jet-setting lifestyle, at least among those with the highest income and education. But rather than being a critique of environmentalism, this finding shows that changing policy is more important than changing values when it comes to halting the climate and biodiversity crises, scientists say. “We do not want to suggest that individuals are solely responsible for their carbon footprints”, since low-carbon alternatives to activities like flying are often still hard to find, says Malte Dewies at the University of Cambridge, one of the researchers behind the new work. In fact, the term “carbon footprint” was popularised by BP to shift responsibility to consumers. It’s long been known that a person’s footprint tends to increase with their income. This study, however, brought personal beliefs into the equation. Researchers first asked 5000 people across Canada, France, Germany, Italy, the UK and the US about their income, wealth, education and job prestige to establish their socioeconomic status. Then they asked them about their views on nature, climate and wastefulness. Finally, they asked about factors like meat and dairy consumption, house size, trash generation, vehicle use and hours spent flying to estimate a broad “ecological footprint”. For most respondents, the more importance they placed on preserving nature, the lower their ecological footprint. But among the top 30 per cent by socioeconomic status, the people who cared the most about the environment had an even larger footprint than their peers. The main reason was that high-income nature lovers fly frequently, one of the most emissions-intensive individual activities. They may be justifying this by dedicating themselves to activities like recycling that barely reduce their footprint, says Dewies. Environmentalism is “a universalistic value, and that means these are also the people who are open-minded, who want to interact with people from different cultures, who typically have friends in different countries and who fly more”, says Felix Creutzig at the University of Sussex, UK, who wasn’t involved in the research. Earlier research hypothesised that environmental impacts first increase but later curve downward as a country gets richer and has more money to invest in sustainable alternatives, a trend dubbed the “environmental Kuznets curve”. Some have suggested this could apply to people as well, but Dewies and his colleagues say the results contradict this idea. “Targeting the environmental attitudes of individuals with campaigns will not do the job” of reducing emissions, says team member Micha Kaiser at the University of Cambridge. “We need at some point to come up with stronger measures.” Countries like the UK and Germany have raised taxes on aviation, and airfares have increased 24 per cent due to the Iran war energy crisis. The researchers said the price hikes probably aren’t enough to put off high-income air passengers, however. In 2023, France banned short-haul flights, but loopholes meant no routes were actually cancelled. Carlo Aall at the Western Norway Research Institute says policy interventions won’t avert climate catastrophe and that the research is instead an argument for degrowth, the idea that countries should reduce energy and resource consumption even at the cost of shrinking their economies. “Even the environmentalists cannot escape from the hamster wheel” of consumerism, he says. The researchers admit their results could bolster perceptions that environmentalists are hypocrites, discouraging climate action. Climate philanthropists like Bill Gates have been bashed for flying on private jets, a rapidly growing aviation sector, including to the landmark 2015 Paris climate summit. But Creutzig points out that the Fridays For Future protests started by Greta Thunberg pushed the German government to adopt climate legislation, even though not every demonstrator swore off flying like Thunberg did. “Being a citizen with an active voice matters more than [consumer] behaviour,” he says. Journal reference: Nature Communications Earth & Environment DOI: 10.1038/s43247-026-03521-z

Are you sure, you started this topic on the 15th February 2026. That is 110 days, or 2640 hours, or 158400 minutes or 9504000 seconds. Coldplay have been on tour 15 times over the same period.

When making comparisons, three things have to be taken into account, the local wages, purchasing price parity and the amount used. A quick search got me some monthly household wage data. If that is divided by the cost of a unit of electricity, the more it can buy, the cheaper it really is. Country Wage/kWh Luxembourg 17965 Netherlands 12871 Malta 12195 Finland 11431 Denmark 11133 Hungary 11002 United Kingdom 10469 Sweden 10227 France 9428 Austria 7952 Croatia 7926 Ireland 7725 Belgium 7498 Germany 7474 Bulgaria 7274 Slovenia 7258 Estonia 7120 Lithuania 6909 Spain 6500 Cyprus 6429 Slovakia 6109 Italy 5630 Poland 5489 Czechia 4831 Portugal 4813 Latvia 4589 Greece 4253 Romania 3128 But once usage is taken into account, the rankings change. At 3.3% of household wage, our electricity is cheaper than the norm. Even if we doubled the price to take into account of standing charges, we are still only slightly higher than our long term average of around 5% of earnings. Interestingly, Finland and Sweden have the highest usages and the most expensive electricity, but they may have very low gas usage. Country % of Wage Wage Luxembourg 1.0 Hungary 1.9 Malta 2.7 United Kingdom 3.3 Lithuania 3.8 Croatia 4.0 Denmark 4.2 Netherlands 4.8 Estonia 5.3 Cyprus 5.6 Latvia 6.1 Ireland 6.3 Bulgaria 6.5 Italy 6.6 Germany 6.6 Belgium 6.9 Poland 6.9 Romania 7.0 Slovakia 7.3 France 7.6 Spain 7.7 Slovenia 8.0 Austria 8.4 Portugal 8.5 Finland 10.7 Greece 11.5 Czechia 12.3 Sweden 13.1

As the question ends with a question mark, you know it does not Here are the EU prices. https://www.euronews.com/2026/06/01/germany-is-a-leader-in-renewables-so-why-does-it-have-one-of-the-highest-eu-electricity-pr Below are the full EU rankings: Ireland: €0.40 Germany: €0.39 Belgium: €0.35 Denmark: €0.33 Austria: €0.33 Czechia: €0.32 Italy: €0.30 Romania: €0.29 Cyprus: €0.28 Sweden: €0.27 Poland: €0.27 Spain: €0.27 Luxembourg: €0.27 France: €0.26 Netherlands: €0.26 Latvia: €0.25 Portugal: €0.24 Greece: €0.24 Estonia: €0.23 Finnland: €0.23 Slovenia: €0.21 Lithuania: €0.20 Slovakia: €0.19 Croatia: €0.17 Bulgaria: €0.14 Malta: €0.13 Hungary: €0.11 The UK is currently £0.24.67 with is €0.29/kWh. The same as Romania. https://energyguide.org.uk/average-cost-electricity-kwh-uk/

Only if the light emits between 24.25 GHz to 71.0 GHz.

Is it the grey cardigan that does it for you?

Is that a sex robot. Not quite what I imagined, but each to their own. Something for everyone here.

Local Authorities have no idea what things should cost, so selling them a £300 wind turbine made for a boat, a fifty quid PV panel, a small battery system for say £500 and a person to put it all together, should probably be about £1000. Councils will probably pay 5 to 6 times that amount. Then, where there is a meeting to fit renewables to council buildings, someone in accounts, will drag out the £5000/kW number and say 'it is too expensive'.

I would sell them to the council. Could save them £1000s on each sale. Probably where the myths that renewables are expensive, and don't work, comes from.

That only affects the generation times and instantaneous power per unit area i.e. takes up a little less land.

By being able to absorb energy when the local voltage is high and distribute it when the voltage is low. It is what already happens, just that there would be a more centrally controlled system rather than many distributed systems. They can also help with local resistance (which is around 4 ohm I think). There is also phase balancing and sine wave conditioning which they play a part in.

They will help immensely by stabilizing voltage. Especially important with PV and heat pumps.

It may be a cheap way to reinforce the network. The biggest losses are the local substation and 'last mile' of cabling. The DNOs have to supply a reliable service.

Posted up a bit about small (around 1 kWh) systems a few years ago. The economics still say it is cheaper for the DNO to do it at the substation level.

The thought of being trapped in @Pocster's basement with no stimulus, apart from Coldplay, makes me want to walk out to sea and not return.

Why in the Southern States the VCL is on the inside. Mind you, with climate change affecting the regional weather patterns, there may need to be some rethink about condensation risks.

There is air cooling and air conditioning, they are not the same thing. Air conditioning controls the humidity and the temperature.

Does that not just hurt the ordinary person though. Look what happened when a relatively few people withdrew savings from Northern Rock. And when Shell were boycotted in German because of misinformation. Not sure if I should mention Jaffa Oranges in the 1970s. Better to tax the bollocks off them, oh hang on.

Yes, they start at 2m (or whatever) and count down.

Good point, but I doubt it. It is not new generation as such, just recycling excess. Do they say how much power, and energy, they can draw on? Quite a worry that, but they may be using certificates behind the scene.

That is a good point I had not considered. If the main pipework is in the loft, which may be 40°C or more, then, even with insulated ductwork, it can easily heat up.

What temperature is the air in the room? You could switch the fans off and see what happens.

That is about 2.9 MWh of primary energy.

Yes. I think the sizes are based on the rough sawn size, not the finished size. https://www.ryedaletimber.co.uk/blog/regularised-timber-sizes-uk-guide-to-nominal-vs-finished-dimensions/

1 kg of seasoned hardwood has approximately 4.5 kWh of energy in it, when burnt in ideal conditions. As wood burners are not very efficient devises, you probably need to halves that. So a 5 kW one will, if run properly, will take 2 kg an hour, but probably closer to 3 kg. Burners can be adjusted to moderate thermal output, but that not only hurts efficiency, it also changes the combustion chemistry. Depending on the temperature of combustion, you also get varying amounts of particulates. Then there is the land area needed to grown the timber. A metre² of land in the UK gets around 950 kWh of solar energy on it, trees convert, at best, 0.25% of that to timber. So sub 0.2 kWh/year.m². So to run a 5 kW burner for 1 hour is going to take, at very best, 15 m² of land. Then you got the timber transport, storage, conditioning and waste disposal. Do you really want a wood burner. Most houses got central heating in the 1950s and 60s.