We are to blame for energy crisis

So another energy crisis is upon us, for which, I’m afraid, we have no one to blame but ourselves.

Those of us who are of mature years will remember the days when only one room in the house was heated, there were no appliances apart from a cooker, and the roads outside were free from parked cars.

As a child I was fascinated by the frost patterns on the inside of my bedroom windows in the winter and my mother bringing in the sheets from line outside as stiff as boards! Washing machines appeared in the mid20th century and we saw the occasional car parked on the street.

By the 1970s central heating was becoming common along with several other household appliances and more cars appearing on the streets and driveways. Also, about this time houses started to expand with extension being built on the back or sides and rooms added in the loft. Meanwhile more openplan houses were being built or created by knocking down inside walls, extending the central heating throughout the house.

More recently conservatories have been added with the latest craze being for cabins in the gardens! Cars meanwhile had not only become far more common, but had grown much larger and more luxurious, often with more than one per household.

It is not all bad news as we have become more energy efficient with double/triple glazing, roof and wall insulation and LED lighting, but this hardy compensates for our more affluent lifestyle with holiday flights to foreign parts!

Then there are the ‘hidden’ energy users who provide us with exotic foods all year round and manufactured goods mainly from Asia. These require a vast transport network that only becomes apparent when there are hold-ups, like the one at Dover.

Some of us, who can afford it, have fitted solar panels to offset some of our electricity use, but these only work well in the summer months and hardly at all in the winter! So it is hardly surprising that our energy requirements have increased by leaps and bounds and the planet is protesting by sending us global pandemics and climate change!

What can we do about it? Well quite frankly I don’t know and would like to hear from anyone with sensible suggestions.

Engineers can usually come up with solutions to most practical problems, but this time it is the turn of the sociologists to change people’s behaviour - I wish them luck!

Mike Armstrong

Queens Avenue, Canterbury