Climate Fight Begins At Home, Insulation Firm Says

Rockwool reckons that better insulation could be a big part of a drive to create low-cost `green jobs`.

Building insulation firms are struggling to get across the message that the cheapest fight against global warming starts at home -- in the roof and walls.

"The benefits are obvious," Eelco van Heel, chief executive of Denmark's Rockwool told Reuters about better building insulation in a phone interview during Dec. 1-12 U.N. climate talks in Poznan, Poland.

"But we are up against many parties who want a piece of the same cake," he said. "Windmills or solar voltaic power are more sexy than insulation that disappears behind the wall."

Rockwool, the world's number two insulation firm behind Saint-Gobain's Isover, estimates that better insulation could save 1.6 billion tonnes of greenhouse gases a year worldwide -- more than the industrial emissions of Japan.

And it would also more than pay for itself by cutting heating or air conditioning bills.

Rockwool reckons that better insulation could be a big part of a drive to create low-cost "green jobs" to stimulate floundering economies from the EU to the United States.

"The best energy is energy saved," Van Heel said. The U.N. talks among 187 nations in Poznan, Poland, are reviewing progress towards a new climate treaty due to be agreed in late 2009 in Copenhagen.

But the insulation message has yet to get across.

Rockwool last month cut its forecast 2008 profit to 1.0 billion Danish crowns ($172.8 million) from 1.1 billion because of the economic slowdown that curbed construction activity.

Study after study has shown that insulation saves money. About 40 percent of greenhouse gas emissions are from buildings.

Consultants McKinsey and Sweden's state-owned power group Vattenfall, for instance, once ranked building insulation as the single most profitable measure to fight global warming.

It estimated that installing enough insulation to avert a tonne of carbon dioxide emissions from a house also more than paid for itself by saving 130 euros ($167.3) a year in lower energy bills. That made it cheaper than changing to low-energy lightbulbs or more fuel efficient cars and far cheaper than nuclear, wind or solar power.

The insulation market is worth about 60 billion crowns ($10.42 billion) annually in Europe and 45 billion in North America. "If I look at the long term I think I can be optimistic," he said.