Russia is transitioning to gas heating in the countryside – Europe is moving to log fireplaces in the city
These past few days the international situation has stabilized at bad to terrible, and, accordingly, with nothing much changing I have had no requests for interviews from international broadcasters. But a few developments right around me here in Brussels have set my mind to projecting an essay that I now wish to share with readers.
Once again at the center of my attention is how the Green Agenda is wreaking havoc on the European quality of life and on the economy. Put more broadly, the problem is that European elites who run the show have followed and then gone a few meters further down the rabbit hole of ideology-driven policies than their American counterparts. The economic interests of the middle and lower classes count for nothing. The Gross Domestic Product is taken for granted if you throw enough debit-financed subsidies around here and there to cheer up business executives. And we roll on towards the ….stone age.
What got me going was the sight of a few cubic meters of split logs blocking my way on the sidewalk as I pulled my caddy with groceries up the hill on the short path back to my home. As I passed, a middle aged woman resumed her work loading these logs into plastic crates for carrying up to her apartment.
The dump of split logs in front of a house is a sight I had last seen a couple of years ago when a truck deposited a half-load, 10 cubic meters of split birch logs in the driveway of our dacha house in Orlino, a hamlet 80 km south of St Petersburg, Russia. Back then every house in the community that was occupied in winter took such deliveries. However, even then some of our neighbors were being connected to the Gazprom network and moving to natural gas heating.
Since the start of the Special Military Operation in Ukraine and the European boycott of Russian pipeline gas, the process of ‘gasification’ of the Russian countryside has been made a priority task under orders from Vladimir Putin. Effectively, a good part of the gas that Europe no longer takes is now being redirected to warm the houses of Russian country dwellers and provincial cities.
As we know, new Russian gas production capacity is being fed into compression plants for delivery of LNG worldwide by sea-going tankers. I am speaking now strictly of gas that was produced in European Russia and Western Siberia for European markets. Gas in the Far North was intended for LNG exports from the start. Gas in Eastern Siberia was produced for the Chinese and other Asiatic markets from the start. A connecting pipeline still has to be built to unify the Russian pipeline grid from the Western frontiers to the Pacific.
And now, what do I see in Brussels? An apartment owner in a building that is obviously served by a heating oil or gas-fed furnace is turning to logs for heating! There is no reason to be surprised that advertisements for lodgings for sale or rent listed on the secondary market in Brussels feature ‘a working fireplace’ as a point of pride for prospective clients. And aesthetics have nothing to do with this choice.
This new trend in the city follows by about a year what has been going on in suburban housing around Brussels. Our daughter, who owns a house 20 km from Brussels invested a year ago in an upgrade to her fireplace and has used every opportunity to take wood from trees felled by friends to keep warm this winter.
Thus, by irony of fate, the Green Regime now sharing power at the regional and federal level in Belgium is supervising a shift back to …the stone age. And it is all due to the implementation of cruel sanctions against Russia over its dispute with Ukraine, that in turn, had at its origin a clash over the structure of European security between Russia and NATO. The Greens were among the most vociferous Russia-bashers, though to be fair about it, nearly all Belgian and European elites were of a single mind about this. A bit of common sense and self-interest might have prevented the return to the stone age, but common sense has no place in ideologically-driven policies.
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Moving from the international dimension of our woes today to the strictly local dimension, my thoughts focus on the terrible effects of the Green Agenda on ordinary citizens as I proceed with latest requirements imposed on everyone putting a residential property up for sale in Belgium or considering a purchase. I have in mind the filing of a Certificate of Energy Performance. The ratings go from A, which has the characteristics of a hermetically sealed tomb, to G, which has the characteristics of living in the wild. That the pluses and minuses of living in a hermetically sealed tomb might be debatable seems to interest no one. Obviously our elites have not heard about the life cycle of microscopic spiders in our houses that hate air currents. And they have forgotten or never read about how our 19th century ancestors were firm believers in the health value of open windows.
The whole issue suddenly came to my attention when we decided it was time to ‘downsize’ and move out of our townhouse in Brussels and into an apartment. The certification (PEB, in French) was performed and yesterday I read the results in a pdf file kindly forwarded by our real estate agent. Naturally, our old house came in at the ‘G’ level, and the accredited estimator gave a long description of what must be done to double glaze our windows, while not violating the rules on preservation of the original look of vintage houses; how to insulate the floors and ceilings; how to replace the small 50 liter electric hot water boiler serving the whole house that we purchased a year ago by some new contraption working on ‘dynamic’ principles, etc., etc.
All of his recommendations are in keeping with the government policies put in place to reduce energy consumption, whatever the capital cost to homeowners. By my guess, it would take fifty years or more to recover the expenses you would incur following the recommendations of the PEB specialist by annual savings in heating and electricity costs.
Though the real world has nothing whatever to do with these regulations, the reality is that we modest folks have paid a pittance in heating oil bills because our old house has very thick brick walls, and because we are a row house and only two facades are exposed to the elements. Yes, we have large expanses of windows, which provide the ‘luminosity’ that is a positive feature in the description of the property to prospective buyers. Yes, they are single pane windows. But, and this is a ‘but’ that plays no role in the estimates, the largest windows, as for example those in the ‘jardin d’hiver’ room facing the tiny garden, are equipped with the wooden slatted shutters that you can lower at night for sound and heat insulation. These shutters were de rigueur throughout France at the time of construction in 1895.
I will not go on further. My point is simple: it is not only in Germany that homeowners are up in arms over the Greens imposed regulations on home heating and shift to heat pumps. Here in Belgium the same awful expenses are being imposed on homeowners in other areas, including, by the way, encouragement of installation of solar panels on rooftops, without regard to the obvious climatic fact that we have a vast number of overcast and rainy days.
And now, in the midst of this sanctimonious policy-making in favor of proper insulation of houses and clean energy heating, what I see around me is stone-age heating with logs taking hold as people try to stay warm without going broke.
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On these pages, I mentioned some observations about the terrible consequences of the Green Agenda policies as they concern our forests in Belgium. In particular, I shared my thoughts about the degradation of the main forest attraction of the Greater Brussels region, the Forêt de Soignes. Allow me to quote from the visit.brussels website with regard to this forest:
With its approximately 4,000 hectares of surface area, the Forêt de Soignes is the green lungs of Brussels, even if it is traversed by some roads, highways and train lines. This space in close proximity to the city shelters natural forest and archeological reserves. It extends across the Brussels Capital, Flemish and Walloon regions and the Bois de la Cambre is one point of entry to this forest.
A sign that is posted at various other entry points to the Forêt de Soignes informs visitors that half of the forest consists of beech trees. What it does not tell you is that this very concentration on one tree species was unique in Europe. This is the largest beech forest in Europe. It was planted in the days when the region was ruled by the Hapsburgs and the aristocrats in their suite knew what they were doing when they created an outdoor cathedral of immense trees for us all to enjoy.
More to the point today, the sign and the visit.brussels website do not mention that this single species forest has been a matter of contention, with the Greens in power doing what they can to return the forest to its “natural” state consisting of the ‘native trees’ to the region. I will not comment on the aesthetic value of these ‘native trees,’ for example, dwarf oaks. There is little need to do so because there have been almost no apparent tree planting operations in the past decade. Instead what gives the Forêt de Soignes its main shambolic characteristic today is the implementation of the second Greens principle: to allow fallen trees to naturally decay and provide a home for various types of insects. Remember biodiversity?
This ‘policy’ has its advantages for the state budget: no culling of trees, removal of fallen debris means no need for a budgetary entry. Little matter that in the distant past clearing the forest of debris and harvesting trees was a right sold to outside entrepreneurs. Letting logs rot on the ground also seems most peculiar today when there is a tight market for firewood even in the city center. However, do not look for logical consistency in the various policies written and implemented by our governing elites.
When Josep Borrell famously commented that all the world is a jungle while Europe is a garden, he obviously was not thinking of the forest land on the edge of the city where he keeps his office and his home. Perhaps he simply does not like walks in the woods.
©Gilbert Doctorow, 2023