Brexit: Grenfell Tower – blood on their hands

Richard North
Turning to the issues at hand, the relevance of such matters will become apparent. But first, we can take it as a given that the main (and very powerful) driver behind the Grenfell Tower refurbishment – focused almost entirely as it was on energy efficiency – was the European Union energy policy and its commitment to an energy efficiency target of 20 percent by 2020, based on 1990 levels.

This Europe 2020 strategy was well-established in 2010, reflected in Directive 2010/31/EU on the energy performance of buildings, amending the 2002 Directive. This, however – as we pointed out - did not specifically require combustible cladding to be used, but nevertheless the implementation of the Directive in the Building Regulations 2010 made the use of some form of insulation an absolute necessity, if thermal standards were to be met.

By then, government policy itself – with a range of inducements – made it inevitable that the tower block was going to be refurbished. Not least, under government pressure, improving energy efficiency had become a key part of Kensington and Chelsea Tenant Management Organisation's investment strategy, it having adopted an energy efficiency strategy since August 2000.

The final pieces that made this disaster inevitable are then highlighted, albeit unwittingly - almost to the extent of being "smoking guns" – in two technical papers by a Croatian fire prevention research team. Much of the content in the first is repeated in the second, but I have included both for the sake of completeness"

The Incredible Heat Of July 4, 1936

Real Science
On this date in 1936, it was 114 degrees at Omaha, Nebraska and almost the entire country was over 90 degrees. Alarmists get hysterical when it gets that hot in Arizona now."

Grenfell: clad in climate-change politics

Spiked
..But few people have asked why so many tower blocks and housing estates in the UK have been clad in recent years. Some have argued that the refurbishments were cosmetic, added to appease private investors by prettifying housing estates. But this is not the main reason for the cladding. In fact, it was added to meet the government’s targets for reducing CO2 emissions.  .........The programme of refurbishing local-authority and social-housing stock was augmented by the ‘green new deal’, under which local authorities and companies could get government funding to insulate houses. Householders were bombarded with phone calls and visits touting loft insulation, under the green-deal home-improvement fund. This was the small-scale equivalent of the cladding fad in social housing.     .......
The fad for recladding tower blocks in London and the rest of the country looks increasingly like a hysterical response to international obligations for action over climate change. Social-housing tenants were the people who could most easily be made to carry the responsibility for energy efficiency because they had little control over their estates.
The government push for action on insulation encouraged shoddy workmanship and cowboy operators, who took advantage of the moral fervour of the climate-change campaign to make money."