The biggest obstacle for energy saving in housing

I visited recently a seminar where the topic of energy efficient and "passive houses" was considered. As research of Finnish VTT has shown we can as much as 50% of heating energy by investing only about 5% of more during construction. The big question that arises - why aren't we doing it? Why aren't we making that little investment?

I think that the biggest problem is that a person living in an appartment house cannot influence his appartment's energy consumption so that it would also mean lower cost for him. Unfortunately there are no small energy meter's that we could install on all radiators. Therefore we cannot effect our energy bill. And as a really negative side effect the person's living in an appartment house is motivated to get the maximum from the "common pot" to themselfes. So instead of saving we install bigger radiators, uninstall the thermo regulators and try to get the maximum heat/euro. (On our neighbours account of course.)

So in my mind to make a big breakthrough in housing energy saving we must work out a calorifer that is small, noiseless, costs less than 50 euros and could be installed on all radiators. After that it would be easy to change the billing so that everybody would pay for the energy that is really consumed in his appartment. And thank's to that everybody would be able to regulate his own appartments heating consumption=energy bill. People would start to thinking about it and would take measures to save energy.