When wasting energy becomes too expensive you'll see action

..and sadly probably not before.

Austerity is the new buzz word in global economics, as in "austerity measures". Perhaps make it your word of the week? Austere means "characterized by strictness, severity, or restraint", in short, "simple".

For those who like to watch life and times beyond our shores, you would be aware that austerity measures have seen people demonstrating in the streets of Europe, as they struggle to comes to terms with enormous deficits (and in the case of Greece, Ireland and Portugal, paying back their bailouts by the EU). This is not an Australian-style political fear campaign, these countries are economically actually in dire straits.

Enter Sustainability. Suddenly wasting all that energy is not economically feasible after all... Of course, strangely it was apparently quite OK in the good times!

The Daily Mail in 2009 took great pleasure in describing Buckingham Palace as "topping the list of Dirty Dozen London Buildings" and while I won't vouch for their journalism, the photos in this article are fascinating. The article was highlighting that while the UK government were pouring money into reducing domestic emissions from houses, the largest generators of emissions were actually very old, very leaky public buildings and ironically the same taxpayers were stumping up (in the most part) for those energy bills.

Roll on 2011, and in the light of austerity measures, suddenly retrofitting these public buildings to save energy now makes sense! The extension to the London Mayor's RE:FIT climate change programme means that by spending approximately 2.7 million Euros (which is not an insignificant sum), the good British taxpayer runs the risk of saving millions of pounds in additional energy costs, every year, not just the year of the retrofitting...

Just imagine if someone had seen the sense in improving energy efficiency in the good times when there was plenty of money floating around? It seems sad that, in the words of Boris Johnson (debate about the man another time), only now they see the sense of conserving "precious public funds at a time when every extra penny counts”.

I'm a taxpayer. I'd like to think in a sustainable economy my public funds are always precious and we should always get good value, not just when it suits our politicians!