 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. They're often depoliticised by compartmentalised and different problems. Across society, discussions about energy in the environment are natively tied to our lifestyle and consumption habits. 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, and with it the expanding spectra of fuel poverty. 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 has to both poverty and climate change. There's a graph I love to throw at people. It's called a champagne glass graph. It was first outlined in the United Nations Human Development Report in 1992. That work was then updated in 2015 by Oxfam as part of their Extreme Carbon Neural Quality 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 all the carbon dioxide emissions are caused by just 10% of the global population, and the bottom 50% of the global population only emit 10% of the emissions. In all a discussion about climate change, how often do you see this reality discussed? How often do you hear people proposing to cut the egregious consumption of about 800 million people on the planet so that the other 7 billion can have a future chance of life? Tackling inequality represents the fastest and most effective means to cut global carbon emissions quickly, and free up resources for those who are in desperate need without expanding the global human footprint. Unfortunately, it's not a discussion that the mainstream media of the affluent global north like to give much time to. There are many research studies that project the contraction in consumption required to meet ecological limits. Many environmental pundits will obliquely refer to this idea, but rarely do they interrogate the full detail in public and what that would mean for both their own lives and the other affluent citizens of the world's industrialised states. A good place to start is the paper by Millwood Hopkins et al. from Global Environmental Change published in 2020. From the beginning they don't try to hide the facts. It is increasingly clear that averting ecological breakdown will require drastic changes to contemporary human society and the global economy embedded within it. The study tries to find a path through the limitations of climate change and resource depletion on one side and justice and fairness on the other. It takes known, available technologies and how they might be deployed globally and then finds how much we have to reduce the present levels of consumption to reach sustainable levels. It looks at what constitutes our essential needs for everyone on the planet and then finds ways to create new energy to support that. It's not just food and shelter, it also includes transport, education, healthcare and other advanced services we regard as a basic measure for human wellbeing. They found that this requires 13 gigajoules to 18 gigajoules per person per year. As energy use correlates roughly to income, one of the easiest ways to look at this is in terms of annual income. Those living on the globally comparable equivalent of less than $6,000 a year don't use that much energy already, so they can have more. When you get to the equivalent of $15,000 per year, those people are already 2-15 times the minimum level. Needless to say, this doesn't look good for the world's most affluent states, where individuals can easily consume 200 times the minimum. As the study states, we find that with a combination of the most effective technologies available and radical demand side transformations, the final energy requirements for providing decent living standards to the global population in 2050 could be over 60% lower than consumption today. In countries that are today's highest per capita consumers, cuts of approximately 95% appear possible while still providing decent living standards to all. Oh my god, a 95% cut in consumption? Surely that takes us back to the Stone Age. No, the study suggests that last year was similar to consumption levels in the 1960s. The level of energy growth in the second half of the 20th century was so steep and the change in technological efficiency was so great that you don't have to go back very far to make an appreciable cut in energy consumption. Back in 2005, I had a book published called Energy Beyond Oil. It was subtitled Can You Cut Your Energy Consumption by 60% and made a similar argument. How did I project that figure almost two decades before this study? A lot of this is just basic physics and understanding the thermodynamics of human systems. No matter how you cut the energy cake, the total amount we can have and how it is shared out doesn't change that much with time. Let's now have the focus to bring those inequalities nearer to home. A study published in Global Sustainability by Ivanova and Wood also in 2020 collected data to show how affluence across the globally affluent continent of Europe varies massively. It noted, This graph shows the distribution of household footprints in the EU sorted by wealth. It's that pattern from the champagne glass again. Even in globally affluent Europe, it's the ritual by far the most significant problem, producing by far the most emissions per person. The study continued, More carbon compared to the 50% of the EU population with the lowest carbon footprints. Only 5% of the EU households live within a carbon footprint target of 2.5 tons per person per year, while the top 1% of EU households have carbon footprints of 55 tons per person per year. The households with the highest carbon footprints are, by and large, the households with the highest level of income and expenditure. The Midwood Hopkins study said we needed to cut consumption by 60%. To meet the EU's 2.5 tonne target, the middle 40% have to cut by about 75%. The bottom 50% only need to cut by half. The top 10% though, must cut by 95%. If you're in the bottom 50% then, it is entirely possible that green actions might reduce your impact to the level required. These actions only create small changes in impact, but it is entirely possible they might create the 50% cut required. If you're in that middle 40% though, only radical lifestyle change can do that. That's because efficiency, or changing energy sources, can only deliver a minimal cut, and certainly not the 75% cut required. This should clearly illustrate that, although the level of reductions required to reduce consumption, or prevent climate breakdown, might seem massive overall. When you do the sums, globally only a small group are badly affected, the affluent ones. The problem is though, this is a group of all the world from political power, which is precisely why there has been no progress on tackling climate change after 30 years of summits, and why the latest COP26 summit in Glasgow was a failure. To make this a more realistic comparison, let's just look at Britain. This graph, using recent Office and National Statistics data, shows the expenditure on different parts of the consumer lifestyle by different income groups. Each column contains the same number of households, what divides them is the rising level of income in each household. Let's be clear here, even the poorest 10% of British society would see a small reduction to their level of consumption. That's because, globally, even the poorest British household has and consumes more than households in poorer countries around the world. But again, most of the standard green measures could achieve that. The next three columns, the second to fourth deciles, are going to have to make some significant changes to their lifestyle, cut in consumption by a third to a half. A good proportion of that is still within the boundary of technological change. The four columns after that, the fifth to ninth deciles, need to cut by 75%. This produces about the same level of consumption as the bottom 50%, around 174 pounds a week. But that cut represents a complete upending of their way of life because it moves beyond the limits of technological change alone. In effect, the British middle class will have to live like the average poor family in Britain. The remaining top 10%? They have to cut by around 90%, which in terms of today's perceptions we might describe as catastrophic. But the fact is, without that, all that cutting emissions proportionately will do is drive more people into absolute poverty, while exaggerating the wealth gap even further. That, however, is the entire point. One of the reasons the COP26 conference failed was that the rich countries tried to insulate themselves from the inevitable hard changes required to adapt to climate change. Likewise, poor countries saw no point in sending such a difficult message to their own poorer populations, given that the rich nations were unwilling to commit to such radical change. The material implications of not just climate change but also resource depletion and pollution require drastic cuts in consumption. That cannot happen without a sense of equity both between and within nations. This requires the most affluent to take a greater hit to their lifestyle. At some point we have to call bullshit on the mainstream debate over climate change in the most affluent countries. It not only bears no relationship to the data on individual impacts, but also neglects the most important factor that will dominate people's future. Technology cannot save you. Yes, we can do lots of things to make devices more efficient or reduce energy consumption, but when the consumption of a small minority massively outweighs that of the people living just a few streets away, someone has to say truthfully that solution to this lies beyond technology. To use a conservative mantra, the pollutant must pay. Mass consumption, as it has been known by a globally affluent minority for the last century, has been a temporal illusion. It was only made possible for a miniscule moment in human history, not only because of fossil fuels and technological change, but significantly to use a very unfashionable term, resource imperialism. The reality is that period of time is ending rapidly and there's nothing that can be done to avoid that. Arguably, the rise of fuel poverty and the cost of living crisis are a palpable sign that for the less affluent of the most developed nations, that period has already ended. The idea of a frugal, minimal lifestyle, such as the poor people in Britain has been forced to live under by long-standing structural economic policy, is the only real option for the most affluent states to sufficiently cut emissions within the time scale required. That's the storyline environmentalists should be promoting. Or better still, not waiting for governments and actually doing it themselves. And in terms of the conundrum of fuel poverty, the cost of living crisis and climate change, only a clear focus on equalising consumption, spreading the impacts not just across nation states but globally, can create the conditions where the majority of the population can have confidence that the costs of climate adaptation are being borne equally by all.