On June 18th, as part of Big Green Week, the University of Bristol’s Cabot Institute hosted an event entitled ‘Poverty, energy and Social Justice’, at Hamilton House in Stokes Croft.
‘Social justice’ relates
to making sure that current and future generations can fulfil their needs,
whatever they may be, to live life to an acceptable standard. The term is often
linked to ensuring that human rights are maintained and that equality is
promoted within society. ‘Energy poverty’ is “a lack of access to modern energy
services, defined as access to electricity and clean cooking facilities”
(International Energy Agency). In the
UK, a household is said to be in ‘fuel poverty’ “if more than 10% of its income
is spent on fuel, to maintain a satisfactory heating regime” (Department of
Energy & Climate Change, 2013).
Definitions covered, the first part of the event involved
presentations from three speakers which provided an overview of poverty, energy
and social justice at a variety of scales, introduced various interesting
themes and shared some surprising statistics.
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| Simon Roberts, CSE |
Firstly, Simon Roberts, Chief Executive at the Centre for Sustainable Energy, provided a national perspective on poverty, energy and
social justice. The presentation brought up some interesting comparisons
between the highest and lowest income households in the UK. It turns out that
households with the top 10% of income emit around 16 tonnes of carbon per person
per year, with aviation being a major contributor to that, whilst households
with the lowest 10% of incomes emit just 5 tonnes of carbon per person per
year, almost entirely from fuel and energy for their homes. It was pointed out
that the lower income households emit so little largely because they can’t afford the fuel rather than
because they have chosen to live low carbon lifestyles.
Energy policies, such as ‘feed-in tariffs’, in which energy
companies will pay you and reduce your bills if you produce renewable or
‘green’ energy in your home, do not consider social justice or energy poverty,
in that it is only the reasonably well-off - those with investable capital,
that can afford such schemes. This has lead to the lower income households
emitting less carbon, contributing to the cost of energy policies (like feed-in
tariffs) through their bills and benefiting from the policies the least. In fact, it has been found that current
energy policies have lead to the highest income households receiving reductions
in their energy bill of around 12%, whilst the lowest income families are only
receiving reductions of 7%. Considering how much more the lower income
households could benefit from those reductions, it seems incredibly unfair that
current energy policies end up benefitting those that need the reductions
least. I didn’t get the impression that this outcome was aimed for by policy
makers, but rather that energy policies really do need to be re-assessed so
that they benefit those that need it most.
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| Mareike Schmidt, BCC |
Next up was Mareike Schmidt, the Strategic Energy Programme Manager at Bristol City Council, who provided a more Bristol-centric view on
matters. Mareike highlighted that, whilst there is no obligation for councils
to engage with energy policy, Bristol City Council is very much eager to do so.
Although funding is limited, BCC specifically would like to decrease energy
bills in the city, increase jobs in the environment sector and keep
energy-related money in Bristol - hopefully addressing both energy poverty and
social justice in the process.
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| Karen Bell, UoB |
The final presentation of the evening was given by Dr Karen Bell, from the School for Policy Studies at the University of Bristol, who
provided us all with an international perspective. Dr Bell argued that energy
prices cannot rise as this would not
only make getting electricity even more unattainable for those that already
don’t have access to it, but it would increase the number of people, globally,
who live without energy by making it unaffordable to a greater proportion of
the population. Some of the options left for dealing with energy poverty then
appear to be the uptake of renewable energy, the reduction of energy
consumption (by decreasing emissions from non-essential things, rather than making the poor reduce their consumption) or the
redistribution of wealth amongst society – moving towards a more equal and ‘just’
society.
Dr Bell explained that inequality in society leads to
greater consumption, as the people with the least want to have the same things
are those in higher income households, leading to more consumption, more waste,
and increases in behaviours such as the consumption of meat and flying around
the world. By redistributing wealth within society, perhaps consumption would
decrease as people may feel that they ‘need’ fewer material things when they
compare themselves to others, more people would be able to afford adequate fuel
to achieve a reasonable standard of living and it would even benefit the
environment.
This idea of addressing inequality, rather than energy
poverty directly, was one of the most memorable ideas of the evening for me; a
number of other members of the audience commented on this as well.
Having gone in with very little knowledge of energy policy,
poverty or social justice, I came out much more aware of all three and feeling
quite enlightened, with a new perspective on problem solving in the context of
society – sometimes the seemingly obvious solution (energy policy) is not the
most appropriate way of going about dealing with an issue in society (e.g.
energy poverty). Sometimes we need to go right back to the cause of a societal
issue (inequality) to fix the symptoms. Hopefully
we will begin to see change in this direction over the next couple of decades.
This blog has been written by Sarah Jones, a Geography PhD student at the University of Bristol.
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| Sarah Jones, University of Bristol |