Adding green misery to a rocky office-space market is insane

To say that the FT’s article makes depressing reading is an understatement. Central planning is almost always an invitation to disaster. But its effects are made even worse when the planners are in the grip of fundamentalist ideology (see, say, the USSR for details). In a more rational world, even those who believed that better construction techniques in future could make a difference to the climate would accept that retrofitting older office buildings in parts of the West in the name of the climate makes no sense. It will have little or no effect on the climate and could well prove economically devastating.

But climate world is not a rational world, and so we are now faced with the possibility that large numbers of office buildings (particularly older office buildings) must be expensively reworked or be rendered unlettable. With the office market in trouble, the response by many owners will be to walk away from those properties. These will then be left to rot, hitting jobs and tax revenues at the worst possible time, and threatening severe urban blight. …

This is a disaster heading in our direction, and this time it is undeniably manmade.

[As are most of our economic disasters, and no small amount of our political and cultural rot as well. — Ed]