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Introduction
Climate change, alongside other ecological issues relating to human activity on the planet, is one of the most important, yet intractable issues facing our species at present. In no small part climate change is associated with the burning of fossil fuels, yet fossil fuels underpin much of modern prosperity and way of life. Our profound dependency on them makes climate change an extremely difficult issue to resolve, not least because it would require political and economic action on a very large scale, with potentially significant political and economic costs.
Any solutions to our fossil fuel dependency would require a public consensus around the reality of climate change, the desirability and feasibility of the required action, agreement around the nature of this action and acceptance of the cost, or at least belief that the benefit would outweigh any costs. Such public consensus has proven elusive, which is why the study of the public conversation around climate change has been the subject of numerous studies across a range of disciplines (see, for instance, Boykoff 2011, 2019; Carvalho 2007; Bednarek et al. 2022; Gillings and Dayrell 2023 amongst many others). In this paper we aim to contribute to this body of research, focusing on recent media discussions of the energy crisis, here specifically in relation to the cost of living.
In the early 2020s dependency on fossil fuels has become a topic debated in a different context, that of an energy crisis in Europe, associated in part with the war in Ukraine and access to Russian oil and gas. The energy crisis could become an inflection point, potentially mobilising a turn towards a more sustainable energy policy. Such an inflection point of crisis could also become, in the words of (Bednarek et al. 2022, 1), a moment of ‘intense discursive construction, through which individuals and communities make sense of happenings as they unfold’. The energy crisis brings into the debate geopolitical and economic interests, but, at least in the UK context, it also brings to the fore issues of social justice and equity. A study of the public debates generated around the energy crisis can help us understand the complex intersection of discourses around fossil fuels, cost of living, sustainability, and social justice.
In this paper, we...