Climate Justice
How our everyday lives could help end climate injustice
About
How could our everyday lives help end climate injustice? By lessening our energy usage. In the US, two thirds of all electricity is generated by fossil fuels. If we cut back on our energy usage, we will dramatically reduce our fossil fuel usage. But that's easier said than done. How do I propose we do this? By building houses as a passive house.
What is a passive house?
What you need to know
What is it?
The concept of passive houses is to have heat retention so good that you don’t need a heater or air conditioning. The concept was invented by Wolfgang Feist and Bo Adamson. Together, they developed a set of rules that a passive house to have.
What's needed in a passive house
Proper insulation. Like a warm blanket, it doesn’t need heating.
No air leakages. Therefore no hot air is let out of the house.
No thermal bridges. Thermal bridges are routes that heat and energy can easily escape by.
Proper windows. Sometimes they used three layered glass.
Proper orientation and overhangs. Therefore the sun heats it in the winter and cool shade in the summer.
An HRV. HRV stands for heat recovery ventilator. It lets fresh air into the house and stale air out without letting heat escape.
The results
All these factors in a house result in a house that uses ninety percent less energy and doesn’t need a heater or air conditioning. The remaining ten percent can be supplied by other sources, such as body heat, appliances, and even light bulbs. This makes for a environmentally friendly that costs much less to maintain.
Passive house and climate justice
How does it help?
Now back to my first question: how can passive houses help with climate Justice? As I've learned, there are three main types of climate Injustice; wealth injustice, Generational Injustice, and settler-indigenous Injustice. Passive houses can help stop weath injustice because it would mainly be rich people who could own them and therefore lessen their impact on the planet. Passive houses could also help settler indigenous justice, because many non indigenous people would buy these houses and lessen their contributions towards climate change.
Where are they then?
The politics behind it
At this point you might be wondering, “why haven’t I heard of this?” or “Why don't I see passive houses everywhere?” The answer is because they are expensive to build, and therefore cost lots of money to buy. Despite the fact that you will save more money in the long-term, not many people want to pay the extra money to buy it. Fear not though, Vancouver is doing something. There are soon to be to passive house towers in Vancouver that will be some of the tallest in the world. This is a good step towards more passive houses in the world.
In conclusion
What I think
Passive houses will not be an easy thing to transition to. It will probably take many years and still some people might still disagree with the idea. But I think that if we give everyone the option and build enough houses, people will be able to make the transition. If we do, it will be a huge advance in climate action and climate Justice.
My inspiration
In seventh grade, our class did a project called genius hour. We got to pick a subject that interested us and work on it for the rest of the year. I chose to work on green architecture, and I mainly focused on passive houses. This is a model of a environmentally friendly house I modelled and designed.When I started the climate justice SLC pack, I realised that this would make a great extension to that project. That's what inspired me to focus on this.