Virtue is nothing to be ashamed of

I can’t see anything wrong with being virtuous.

Any more than I can see anything wrong with being proud of it. I gather that’s what’s we now call ‘virtue signalling’ and that’s become the adult equivalent of the playground jibe ‘goody goody’ that bullies used against kids who did their homework.

And if Polly Toynbee was right in defining another new term, ‘woke’, as ‘no more than a fundamental, unifying sense of fairness in a Guardian article last year‘, I can’t see anything wrong with that either. In fact I agree with her that decent people should embrace it proudly.

One of the ways that the social media phenomenon has changed conversation for the worse is that it has taken us back to a kind of adult playground – one in which ‘virtual’ bullies crowd around you and jeer, in which you feel alone and friendless, in which you have no way of seeing how small and pathetic the bullies actually are, and where there is no Big Teacher to ultimately intervene.

Come to think of it, one thing I feel virtuous about – one thing I am proud of actually – is the fact that my subscription to the Guardian, along with those of a million fellow subscribers, makes the link I have just inserted above toll-free to the world. But I fear saying that that will just make it easier for people with a different mindset to despise me too, and call that virtue signalling.

In fact you can do the same thing with any good behaviour at all if you really want to. Here’s another example of wokeness for the trolls to practice on:

Heating figures

A local architect has recently shared some figures about the energy consumption of his 2,000 sq. ft., state-of-the-energy-art house: 10,000 kWh (Kilowatt hours) electricity used and 2,500 kWh generated from the PV panels on his roof for the year..

Seeing this prompted me to do some long-overdue sums for our own house. I started by using a tape-measure to confirm it is a 9 metre (30 ft) square. For two floors, that makes 1,800 sq.ft. So it is roughly the same size.

I read my gas, electricity, and PV metres every Monday morning and enter them in a spreadsheet. It goes back to 2014 so I know pretty accurately that over that time we use 2,120 kWh electricity and 10,700 kWh equivalent gas per year while at the same time generating 3,583 kWh from our PV panels.

So we use 12,820 kWh energy a year instead of 10,000 for the architect’s house, and we generate 3.583 kWh instead of his 2,500. Not too bad considering our house is 50 years old.

It has cavity wall insulation (albeit in uncertain condition) and our heat source is a well-maintained condensing boiler installed within the last 10 years. OK, a heat pump would be better, perhaps that will be the next thing, but that’s not too bad. It helps that we never heat upstairs at all because we sleep better in cool, or even cold, air. The rising heat from the rooms downstairs is enough for us.

My 8 years of meter readings show that during the 7 years since our PV panels were installed we have generated 1.3 times the total electricity we have drawn from the grid. That includes almost all the ‘fuel’ used by our electric car – because except when we are on very long trips (more than 250 or so miles) we charge exclusively from a 13am plug in the garage. (Surprisingly few people realise this, by the way – unless they have a daily commute this may well be all they need.) And it has the delightful bonus that, unlike a specially installed charge-point, it only draws 2kW and that is less than the PV panels are generating during summer daylight. ‘Driving on sunshine’ – Wow!

The real motivation

So why do I feel shy about sharing these figures and ‘admitting’ to ‘virtuous’ motivation? Why have I had a draft of this post on the stocks for well over a year, unsure whether it would be wise to press ‘Publish’?

The thing I feel shy to admit is that our motivation has almost nothing to do with the only objective it is safe to admit to in the modern world – Saving Money.

‘How much did it cost?’ ‘When did you break even?’ These are the things everybody wants to know.

They are important of course, and we happily give the answers. But they have almost nothing to do with why we care about these things or, for that matter, why I am writing this post. Like many retired professionals in similar positions in this grotesquely unequal society we have no need to worry seriously about the cost of fuel. Instead, what motivates us is an aching certainty that in the current emergency it is our absolute duty as citizens of the world to generate as little CO2 as we possibly can. That’s the reason we have decided never to fly again. Not just because we’ve had our turn.

And let’s admit it – we want to set a good example. Not to make people feel guilty (not that there’s much hope of that for the teeming ultra-rich and their stratospheric emissions) we want to show people how much we little people care and hope that will inspire them to do their bit as well.

But none of our neighbours, good people though they certainly are, have copied our solar panels. And after campaigning for years about the climate emergency, latterly with the Alton Climate Action Network, we find people in general no more willing than they were in the past to grasp the need to take any action beyond a bit of recycling.

Let’s be awoke

That is why I would like to compare our energy figures with those of people in similar houses. And why, surely, it should be a routine part of what we discuss about our homes. I don’t know whether I and my wife are really causing less emission than our neighbours, but I think it would be important to know, because it might make a difference if we were and if enough people moved towards doing something similar.

But one thing I do know is that the easy way out is to use the ‘virtue signalling’ jibe, call us ‘wokerati’, and go back to sleep.