Lessons learned after living in an off-grid rental

It would be easy to take the same whiny tone about cycling, "why do I need to risk my life and get splashed by rainwater etc. when I could just buy a car and drive in comfort" and the answer would be the same, because the more people who cycle, or live in dense, well designed neighbourhoods, the better off we all are. It's something we should encourage, support and build for.

Publicly declaring that cycling was only for poor, suicidal, idiots would not be helpful.

I don't suggest anyone should be forced to cycle or grow their own food, or live in any particular building, but as a society there's a whole bunch of things that we can encourage that make the lives we lead better, even if on an individual basis, it would be considered an imposition.

“A civilization flourishes when people plant trees under which they will never sit.” -Greek Proverb

> It would be easy to take the same whiny tone about cycling

The tone isn't whining, it's indignation.

> Publicly declaring that cycling was only for poor, suicidal, idiots would not be helpful.

Show me where I say that living in a flat is for poor, suicidal idiots.

Yours is the attitude that supports euthanasia, not mine. Yours is the one of nihilism and pessimism of the future of the world.

Stop telling people how to live. Live that way if you want, convince other people it's good, but you cannot bully me into living that way.

Prove to me that you put less of an impact on this world than I do, I seriously doubt that you can.

Here's a comment from a different reply I made (which you have definitely read and choose to ignore):

> I think living in a flat is great if that's your thing, it's definitely cheaper to heat! But the argument always seems to be this sort of dogmatic "do this if unless you're a shithead who hates the planet" and I just don't think that it's true for everyone, or a healthy approach to enjoying what limited time we have alive.

I'm logging out of HN now, there's only so much disingenuous chat I can take and your comments appear to be that of a wind up than real debate. Take it easy.

> I think living in a flat is great if that's your thing, it's definitely cheaper to heat!

Nothing else is a realistic option 'round here unless I want to live in a village (which doesn't necessarily mean far away, maybe 20 minute ride by car to the city, but there isn't much there and your first neighbour might well keep animals). Barely anyone I know lives in a house.

> it's definitely cheaper to heat!

There is nothing cheap about heating heating here, lol. Fortunately, it's not that cold most of the year. But no one heats their homes properly, so you are still leaking heat in all directions even in an apartment.

> But the argument always seems to be this sort of dogmatic "do this if unless you're a shithead who hates the planet" and I just don't think that it's true for everyone, or a healthy approach to enjoying what limited time we have alive.

I don't pretend to do it "for the planet" (and would gladly live in a house), but that's a valid argument, if a little hyperbolic. I don't think it makes anyone a bad person but that doesn't lessen negative effects. Especially the effect of housing scarcity - you've basically taken entire column of Earth for yourself in a (presumably) desirable location, where that same column could have housed 20x people if it was a highrise.

Failure of civilisation here is not having sound-proof apartments. If I could play drums or blast karaoke at full volume in mine at 3 in the morning I couldn't care less that it was not a house.

Looking at heating: There are still (admittedly fewer each year) people heating with coal, often with district heating. This results in approx. 1kg of CO2 emissions per kWh of heat (with losses due to the distribution) (gas heating is 200g per kWh).

The german electric grid has a carbon intensity of approx. 500g per kWh. If you supplement this with a local solar installation that (let's just say) halves the carbon intensity and have a great heat pump setup with a COP of 5 it results in 50g per kWh. This means you can heat 20 times the amount of the worst-case commie-block dweller with coal district heating before it gets even. And even though commie blocks aren't bad, I'd expect modern houses to have much better insulation (at least in Germany) than original commie blocks (worst [reasonable] case, remember).

In cities there is generally less infrastructure per person, but even though there are less road, cable, pipe kms per person, the ones are bigger and/or more heavily used, needing more maintenance and more frequent replacements.

In Germany public infrastructure accounts for 800kg of CO2 per person, while heating and warm water account for 2.2t of CO2. Public infrastructure is important, but so large to matter so much (and remember, this includes things like public service and military that isn't effected by your living style).

Electricity consumption at 0.5t and food at 1.7t are not that different for urban vs rural areas. Other consumption at 3.4t is hard to classify.

Looking at the statistics in Germany (http://www.mobilitaet-in-deutschland.de/pdf/MiD2017_Ergebnis..., page 48) people living in metropolis drive roughly half as much as people living in very rural regions. This is significant, but hardly an order of magnitude. Just because you live in a metropolis doesn't mean you live in a commie block, but I find it hard to imagine it gets down 1/6th. Even people without a car (not only not owning one, but not having access to one) in a metropolis drive 1/7th of people in very rural areas (but commie blocks are certainly not without cars). So this is hardly an order of magnitude.

A car replacement rate of every 3 years also sounds very high to me (ignoring company cars, but that doesn't change in either case), I think 5-6 years at least is more likely for suburbs and maybe a bit higher for commie-block dwellers but I wouldn't be surprised if it's the same.

This was only looking at CO2 (since it's easy to find numbers) and it's undoubtedly true that on average living in dense housing is more sustainable than suburban sprawl or even rural living. But an order of magnitude is huge and much harder to reach.

And since energy usage & emissions are heavily shaped by factors beyond "how dense do you live", it's harder to speak beyond the average. Someone living in the commie block that flies once a year from germany to new york and back produces more CO2 emissions from these two flights alone (~2.5t) than the average german with his mobility (~2.2t).