Fuel Poverty, the Cost of Living Crisis, and Climate Change: A Data Blog
Finding solutions to immediate problems and our future needs requires some difficult decisions, and if not thought-out, short-term thinking might create contradictory responses.
Though often depoliticised by compartmentalising different problems, across society decisions on energy and the environment are innately tied to lifestyle and consumption. In looking at how we adapt to energy crises, or climate change, we have to focus on what relatively creates the greatest impact – nationally and globally.
There’s a big fuss at the moment about a ‘cost of living crisis’1, and with it the expanding spectre of fuel poverty2. It’s not possible to talk about either without connecting to energy and climate change. More importantly, this debate has traditionally ignored the ‘injustice’ behind the thoroughly unequal levels of consumption in Britain, and the world, and the deep connections this that has to both poverty and climate change.
Champagne, anyone?
There’s a graph I love to throw at people – called the ’Champagne Glass Graph’. It was first outlined in the United Nation’s Human Development Report3 in 1992. That work was updated in 2015 by Oxfam, as part of their ‘Extreme Carbon Inequality’4 report.
The United Nations, because it is made-up of nation states, is fixated by the ‘nation state’. But if you get rid of national boundaries, and just look at the lifestyle consumption of individuals, a clear trend emerges: Half of the carbon dioxide emissions are caused by just ten percent of the global population; and the bottom fifty percent of the global population only emit ten percent of the emissions.
