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The UK’s housing stock is old, energy inefficient and heavily reliant on fossil fuel heating systems – mainly gas boilers. With heating responsible for 17% of the UK’s carbon emissions, homes and their central heating must transform if the country is to achieve net zero by 2050.
While there isn’t a single solution that will suit every home, government advisers on the Climate Change Committee (CCC) estimate that 8 million heat pumps need to be installed in existing homes by 2035.
The CCC recently published a damning assessment of the UK’s progress towards its 2030 climate goals, saying annual emission reductions outside the power sector must nearly quadruple. Home heating is of particular concern, as heat pumps are being rolled out at one-ninth the rate they need to be by 2028, alongside falling rates of energy efficiency improvements.
Heat pumps extract heat either from the air, ground or nearby water and transfer it into a building, providing heating and hot water through pipes and radiators. Some heat pumps can even work in reverse to cool homes during the summer.
Heat pumps run on electricity and use energy three times more efficiently than gas boilers.
Better still, UK homeowners are becoming more comfortable with this technology. A survey of 2,500 households in May 2023 revealed that more than 80% that had installed a heat pump were satisfied.
Only 59,862 heat pumps were installed in the UK in 2022. Although this is an increase of 40% on 2021, it’s far from the government’s target of 600,000 a year by 2028. To fully replace all of its gas boilers, the UK would need to be installing 1.7 million heat pumps annually by 2036.
Heat pumps are being rolled out faster elsewhere. In Norway, 60% of buildings have heat pumps; in Sweden, over 40%. Meanwhile, less than 1% of UK buildings had a heat pump in 2021. And compare the UK’s 2022 record with other countries in Europe: France installed 462,672 heat pumps (up 20%), Germany 236,000 (up 53%) and the Netherlands 123,208 (up 80%).
European governments support heat pump installations in various ways. The Netherlands has gradually raised taxes on homes burning natural gas for heating and offered subsidies for heat pumps. France has combined a 30% tax credit on improvements to heating and home insulation costing up to €16,000 with a 0% interest loan of up to €30,000 for energy efficiency upgrades.
These measures address two things which prevent people from getting a heat pump: the upfront cost of installation and the renovations required to prepare a home. Heat pumps are becoming cheaper but they are still more expensive than gas boilers and many UK homes lack the double-glazed windows, insulated walls and lofts, and pipework and radiators that help them perform optimally.
Since 2012, government policy has failed to drastically improve home energy efficiency or encourage low-carbon heating.
The carbon emissions reduction target introduced by Gordon Brown’s Labour government in 2008 required energy suppliers to cut emissions by helping customers make their homes more energy efficient. When it closed in 2012, it had beaten its target of saving 293 million tonnes of carbon dioxide. 41% of these savings came from installing insulation, in turn making homes more suitable for a heat pump.
The green deal followed in 2013 and the renewable heat incentive in 2014 under David Cameron’s Conservative-led coalition government.
Green deal loans for energy-efficiency upgrades attracted just 14,000 applicants as homeowners baulked at the relatively high cost of borrowing and were unconvinced by the projected energy savings. The scheme was scrapped in 2015.
The renewable heat incentive paid homeowners quarterly over seven years for installing a heat pump but asked them to fund the installation upfront. In 2018, the government blamed high upfront costs, poor awareness and complex installations for the poor uptake. The incentive ended in 2022.
Launched in 2022 under Boris Johnson, the boiler upgrade scheme offers homeowners a £5,000 grant to replace their gas boiler with an air-source heat pump (£6,000 for a ground-source heat pump) and aims to lower the cost difference between the two. Installing a new combi-boiler costs between £600 and £2,150 whereas a heat pump is £5,000 to £8,000 after the government subsidy.
The government also plans to implement a clean heat market mechanism that will ask boiler manufacturers to sell four heat pumps for every 100 gas boilers in 2024/25, or pay for the equivalent in heat pump credits if they can’t (one heat pump credit is worth £5,000).
These measures may improve on earlier failures if the rules for industry are clear and the incentives are generous enough for consumers to consider investing in a heat pump, as examples with other low-carbon technologies have shown.
For instance, evidence suggests carmarkers are already selling more battery-electric vehicles in anticipation of a law requiring them to sell a rising proportion of zero-emission vehicles each year from 2024. And the feed-in-tariff scheme requiring energy suppliers to buy electricity from homeowners at an agreed price for 10 to 25 years helped nearly a million households install solar panels.
Beyond targets for boiler manufacturers, the UK government will ban natural gas boilers in new buildings from 2025. While Germany’s governing coalition is implementing a ban on installing gas boilers in existing properties from 2028.
Before such a ban is tabled in the UK, there are policies that could raise the dismal heat pump installation rate. First, like the Dutch, the UK could gradually lower taxes on residential electricity and increase them on gas.
Second, the government could ensure energy performance certificates more accurately assess the energy efficiency of homes and their readiness for heat pumps. And third, the government should dismiss opposition from boiler manufacturers and implement the clean heat market mechanism.
Decarbonising heat and encouraging heat pumps is essential for achieving net zero. Tighter rules and targets for industry must sit alongside attractive incentives for consumers if the UK is to reach 600,000 installations a year in five years’ time.
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Ned Lamb is funded by the Engineering & Physical Sciences Research Council's Low Temperature Heat Recovery and Distribution Network Technologies (LoT-NET) programme.
The British Museum has had to apologise after a translator’s words were used without permission. Writer and translator Yilin Wang shared on Twitter that their translations of work by the Chinese feminist poet Qiu Jin appeared in the museum’s exhibition, China’s Hidden Century, without consent.
The museum’s subsequent press release cited “unintentional human error”. It explained that it had corresponded privately with Wang and had now offered a fee for the use of the translations. Along with the Chinese poems, these were then removed from the exhibition. But the removal of the texts has also fuelled criticism of the museum, and sparked a debate about the role of translators.
Literary translation is legally recognised as an act of original artistic production. This means that translated literary texts enjoy their own copyright status, independent of the source texts. While Qiu’s work is now out of copyright because she died in 1907, Wang’s translations are not.
The role of original creativity in translation practices is frequently ignored or underestimated. It’s common to talk about reading “author X” rather than “translator Y’s translation of author X”. Even the Nobel Prize conveniently sidesteps the role of translators and their creative work when it confers its annual literary honour.
Recently, however, literary publishing has increasingly recognised the role of translators. In 2016, the International Man Booker Prize announced it would now split winnings evenly between the author and the translator. Translators are gaining visibility and it is becoming more and more difficult to pretend they don’t exist.
Read more: International Booker Prize 2023: our experts review the six shortlisted books
Translations are creative acts that take place in specific cultural contexts. They transform source texts into new, original literary works, and they can advocate for the source text and writer by introducing them to new readers.
Wang has written about the power dynamics of literary translation, including the barriers to access and participation faced by translators who are “outsiders” and translators of colour. In their essay writing, they draw specifically on their experience of systemic prejudice while translating Qiu Jin’s poetry.
They describe translation as an act of “reclamation and resistance” – and talk of the barriers they and others face finding a career in translation.
Like a translation, a museum is not neutral or objective. The objects and texts on display have been deliberately selected and positioned together. Just like the objects they frame, the words in a museum belong to someone and they have been chosen to tell a particular story.
Museums increasingly face pressure to reflect on their processes of acquisition and their contested ownership of items. This latest mistake – and handling of the fallout – shows that they also need to be transparent about the origins of the words they use to build the stories they tell.
Removing items from display is not standard practice for the museum. The museum made a public statement in 2020 that it would not remove “controversial objects” from display. A section of the website dedicated to “contested objects” explicitly engages with the provenance of some of its most famous pieces, such as the Parthenon marbles.
But now Wang has described the museum’s response as “erasure”, and Wang argues, it has troubling implications, both for the museum’s critical engagement with its own curatorship and for the power dynamics of its relationships with non-white contributors.
The British Museum said in a statement: “In response to a request from Yilin Wang, we have taken down their translations in the exhibition. We have also offered financial payment for the period the translations appeared in the exhibition as well as for the continued use of quotations from their translations in the exhibition catalogue. The catalogue includes an acknowledgement of their work.” Wang contests this.
Meanwhile, the story has not gone away. It has been reported in the Chinese and French media, and Wang’s still developing Twitter thread about the discovery has been shared over 15,000 times.
As momentum grows behind the criticism of the museum, it is a good time for all of us to consider how we value and engage with the work of translators, whose creative labour allows us to access worlds and imaginations far beyond our own.
Caroline Summers does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
As author C.S. Lewis wrote in A Grief Observed (1961): “In grief nothing ‘stays put’.” For Lewis, grief is not a linear process, but recurrent, cyclical and never truly complete. “Everything repeats,” he writes. “Am I going in circles, or dare I hope I am on a spiral? But if a spiral, am I going up or down it?”
Lewis’s metaphor is an apt description for director and writer Charlotte Wells’ award-winning film Aftersun (2022). About returning from and returning to our past, Aftersun is a product of memory and an unfolding act of remembrance. The film’s events happen in the past tense, but as critic Daniel Drake observed in The New York Review of Books, it also captures what it is to be stuck in an imperfect present.
Wells’ film explores the relationship between young father Calum (Paul Mescal) and his daughter Sophie (Frankie Corio), who are holidaying together at a Turkish resort sometime in the late 1990s. Audiences first see the pair through grainy video camera footage which is interspersed throughout the film as they document their trip.
As the film progresses, we slowly begin to realise that Calum’s camera is capturing lasts rather than firsts. At the end of the holiday, when Sophie leaves on a Scotland-bound plane, it marks the last time they will see each other.
Years later, an adult Sophie (Celia Rowlson-Hall) watches the footage – the camera connected by a lead to a TV in the living room of her New York apartment. She reconnects and reckons with her younger self, frozen on screen as she waves goodbye to her father behind the camera.
It’s clear from how that footage is cut throughout the film that this isn’t the first time Sophie is watching. Maybe she’s lost count. She watches, rewinds, pauses. We hear and see the mechanics of this: the low drone of the tape, the click indicating the beginning of the footage, glitches in the blue-tinted, grainy images, springing into life from a black screen.
For the audience – and for Sophie – the distance between past and present is blurry. The tapes become a conduit, bringing Calum back, though only momentarily. What were once mundane discussions and rambling observations are now imbued with a value that only increases over time.
Just like grief, this is a story that never truly resolves itself. It’s never explicitly stated what happens to Calum. The film is filtered mostly through Sophie’s perspective, so our knowledge of him is limited by her own understanding, or by what Calum chooses to show her.
There are significant exceptions to this when Calum is alone, such as the moment when he breaks down in the hotel room, far from young Sophie’s sight. These, coupled with other small clues, placed throughout the narrative – such as his broken arm and a general disregard for his own safety – signals that he’s struggling with something he cannot or dare not name. This is the Calum that adult Sophie will never know or understand, no matter how many times she rewinds the tape, searching for clues.
Grief casts a shadow over Sophie’s life. Many people watching will already know the shape and the weight of the grief she carries. For Wells, the intense and personal emotional reactions the film were a shock, an unintended consequence of exorcising her grief for her own father.
Central to Aftersun’s emotional power is the Under Pressure sequence, in which Sophie and Calum dance together on their last night at the resort.
The scene functions as a kind of emotional and narrative crescendo. Throughout the film, there are scenes of adult Sophie encountering Calum dancing at a rave. These moments exist somewhere outside of her everyday life. She calls out to him but can’t be heard over the loud music. Often he cannot be seen, obscured by the dark or the strobe lights. The Under Pressure sequence unites the film’s two settings – Turkey and the rave – and cuts between them.
The Queen and David Bowie duet was brought in by Wells to replace a temporary track that she had been using to build the film’s first cut. In a recent interview, she explained that when she hit play, Under Pressure: “lined up at exactly the perfect point”.
Aftersun is not the first film to use the song, but it is the first one to use it in this form. Here, remixed, bridging the time and space between Turkey and the rave, the synth and strings signature of Oliver Coates’ score are combined with the isolated vocals of David Bowie and Freddie Mercury to haunting effect.
Only during the Under Pressure dance do these formerly unexplained scenes, these quasi-nightmarish intrusions, make sense, slotting in as the last puzzle piece of Sophie and Calum’s story. Only here, does adult Sophie finally reach her father, dressed as she remembers him in the airport departure lounge, unchanged.
Angry, resentful, she beats at his chest, just as her younger self playfully resists her father’s embrace on the Turkish dance floor. Finally, there’s no resistance, younger and older Sophie embrace Calum, as Freddie Mercury’s vocals soar, imploring us to “give love”.
Adult Sophie’s peace doesn’t last. Too soon, Calum slips from her grasp, sinking into the darkness, lost in the turn of the strobe. Sophie is alone once more in the dark of the rave. Wells’ script conveys this moment with spare devastation: Calum is gone. Through song and dance, though, Calum can return and Sophie can hug her father once again. Music lends her the power to transcend – and momentarily pause in – her spiral of grief.
Leanne Weston does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Like many other countries, the UK has developed a plan for a central bank digital currency (CBDC). A digital pound would essentially act like an online form of cash suitable for everyday payments. It would not earn any interest like a standard savings account (or even some current accounts), but it could increase access to financial services in the UK.
The Bank of England recently proposed a general framework for how a digital pound would work. It has suggested an ambitious timeline for introducing one by 2025. You have until June 7 2023 to tell the bank what you think of its plan.
The success of a UK CBDC will largely depend on whether the benefits of offering a digital currency outweigh the costs of creating and rolling out the infrastructure needed to support the new payment system.
There are clear benefits to CBDCs, such as increasing financial inclusion by providing an easier way for the UK’s 1.2 million unbanked residents to register for banking services. The online wallets that would hold people’s digital pounds could also be used by the government to make “fiscal transfers” such as passing tax subsidies or support payments on to households and businesses.
But the Bank of England’s current proposal is also seeking answers to some questions about a digital pound. In particular, how (or if) it could coexist alongside other digital currencies such as cryptocurrency assets. While the bank suggests several models, broadly speaking this could help reduce systemic risk in the crypto sector and further increase banking options for UK consumers.
Read more: What are stablecoins? A blockchain expert explains
The Bank of England’s CBDC consultation paper specifically mentions stablecoins. These are digital assets that are issued by private companies, unlike a traditional currency which is issued by a government. And unlike digital currencies such as bitcoin, the value of a stablecoin is pegged to a stable asset like the US dollar or British pound – but what about a digital pound?
The bank talks about the overlap between what a stablecoin and a digital pound could offer. It argues they could “coexist” in a mixed payments economy. It compares this to how we use both cash and bank accounts in the same payment system right now, pointing to technology developments such as ATMs that have made this coexistence even easier over the years.
Stablecoins would need to be “fully backed with high-quality and liquid assets” in order to complement a digital pound, according to the bank. It adds:
In contrast to the digital pound, stablecoins, regardless of their backing asset, would be a liability of the private-sector issuer rather than a claim on the central bank. That means they would be private money, like commercial bank deposits.
It also suggests a model in which these backing assets could be “held entirely with the central bank”, adding that this would make the stablecoin “economically similar to the digital pound” and reduce financial risk.
If the digital currency was used to back a stablecoin, this would mean that the issuer would provide holders with stablecoin tokens based on the value of digital pounds that could be used by customers for payments (both domestic and international) as well as trading in cryptocurrencies. These private forms of money would operate on the blockchain, which helps make payments easier and less costly. In some countries, stablecoins are already being used as a hedge against inflation and macroeconomic uncertainty.
This could also have benefits for the crypto industry. Currently, stablecoins are managed by private banks or organisations that are not regulated and audited. But a stablecoin backed by a digital pound in an account held with the central bank would be much more transparent and trustworthy. The central bank could regularly audit stablecoin providers’ reserves. Legislators could also impose capital requirements, for example mandating the percentage of issuers’ reserves to be kept in the account with the central bank.
But there is a trade-off here: extreme capital requirements could affect the profitability of stablecoins. Since they are typically linked to interest-bearing assets like Treasury bonds, they can make money from their holdings – that is, the assets held against the stablecoins they issue.
In contrast, a digital pound-backed stablecoin issuer would be unlikely to earn interest on its account at the central bank. While a typical bank such as Lloyds has reserve accounts at the central bank that earns the base rate, it is unlikely that the Bank of England would give a stablecoin provider the same kind of account. This would entail being subject to the same regulations, which could affect the flexibility that crypto asset providers tend to value.
Stablecoins backed by a digital currency held at the central bank could certainly address some of the systemic issues surrounding this type of crypto asset. Over the past year, a major stablecoin has collapsed in value. This typically happens when a market event prompts holders to rush to withdraw their holdings and the issuer has difficulties fulfilling so many redemptions at once.
If issuers were holding a certain percentage of liquid digital currency reserves at the central bank, this would ensure they had funds to process redemptions or withdrawals while maintaining the coin’s value against the digital pound. And even if an issuer bankruptcy did occur, a central bank could also provide insurance to stablecoin customers to protect their assets to a certain level.
Much like cash and bank accounts, it is possible that digital assets and stablecoins could coexist and even complement each other. Further, a digital pound could shine a light on the growing role of private money in the economy. This would help to make the financial system more secure while also fostering financial inclusion.
Ganesh Viswanath-Natraj does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Eight days before Prince Harry’s memoir Spare hit shelves elsewhere, copies went on sale prematurely in Spain.
Over the next few days the UK media, scrambled to acquire Spanish copies of the book, having been unable to get English versions for themselves. Their reporting on the story was initially based on these Spanish versions.
The fact that many of the quotes had been translated from English to Spanish and then back into English was barely acknowledged. Sometimes, this results in change, or different versions, as we see below. The book’s tagline is “His Words. His Story.” and part of the coverage centred around why it was important that these were Prince Harry’s own words. Yet what those words actually were, depended on where you read them.
One much quoted extract from Spare is Prince Harry’s account of how many members of the Taliban he had killed. He writes:
So, my number: twenty-five. It wasn’t a number that gave me any satisfaction. But neither was it a number that made me feel ashamed.
This was a focal point for early spoilers on the book and was quoted differently in different publications.
On Sky: “So my number: twenty-five. It was not something that filled me with satisfaction, but I was not ashamed either.”
In The Times: “So my number is 25. It’s not a number that fills me with satisfaction, but nor does it embarrass me.”
Neither of these translations is wrong. They show different ways of rendering the same idea – but the cumulative effect is important.
It was unclear whether early criticisms were responding to the published version or alternative translations. Those attacking the author for his stance may not in fact have been responding to “his words” at all.
A more detailed example comes in Prince Harry’s account – here taken from the book in English – of losing his virginity:
Inglorious episode, with an older woman. She liked horses, quite a lot, and treated me not unlike a young stallion. Quick ride, after which she’d smacked my rump and sent me off to graze. Among the many things about it that were wrong: It happened in a grassy field behind a busy pub.
Unsurprisingly, this was another of the most frequently quoted leaks. But again, the wording is not consistent. The Daily Mail quoted:
“… a humiliating episode with an older woman who liked macho horses and who treated me like a young stallion. I mounted her quickly, after which she spanked my ass and sent me away. One of my many mistakes was letting it happen in a field, just behind a very busy pub.”
There are some significant differences. Firstly, a shift in agency and responsibility: a “quick ride” is recast to position Harry as dominant (“I mounted her”), while “things that were wrong” become “my many mistakes”, suggesting self-accusation.
There is also awkwardness, in the term “macho horse” and in the reference to ass spanking: would the author who talks elsewhere about his “todger” also say “ass”?
The different word choices may be partly about different translators working on the text that appeared in different places. A translator collaborates in rewriting the author’s text, brings out its interest and value, reads carefully for hidden layers of meaning and confronts difficulties and inconsistencies.
Languages don’t map directly onto one another and there is often more than one way to translate a given word or phrase. What’s notable here is that the invisibility of the English to Spanish to English translation process leaves readers not understanding why there are different versions.
Translation theorists have talked about translation as a kind of “rewriting”. Recognising the translator as an active writing agent is key to exploring the ethical question of whose voice is heard in translated texts.
However, the participation of others in the telling doesn’t necessarily mean Spare is no longer Prince Harry’s story.
Storytelling is central to how we establish our identity, and it is social. We rely on communities to retell our stories and so, as the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre explains: “We are never more (and sometimes less) than co-authors of our own narrative.”
But how far can the ownership of Prince Harry’s narrative stretch when the words are no longer “his”? As we have seen, when fragments and differently translated snippets are all presented as “the text”, the resulting inconsistency undermines the authenticity of the story, and with it the agenda of the book.
The marketing for Spare and media appearances surrounding its publication have leaned heavily on a bid to “tell my own story” and resist “words being taken out of context”. The realities of translation show how difficult this is.
Caroline Summers does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
The cost of electricity rose sixfold between January 2021 and November 2022 as the impact of the COVID pandemic combined with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine to push up wholesale energy prices.
Without government intervention, household electricity costs could have grown sixfold too. But the energy price guarantee (EPG) launched in September 2022 was designed to limit the per-unit price charged to all consumers.
Under the scheme, a typical customer should pay around £2,500 per year (£3,000 from April 2023), according to government estimates. The government then compensates suppliers for the difference between the per-unit cost they face to buy energy and the maximum they can charge to customers. But this is a costly burden and the public funds used to do this could be deployed to support households in better ways.
Read more: How the UK energy crisis plan will affect bills and price inflation — an economist explains
When discussing energy, there are also environmental considerations, of course. Heating and lighting UK homes account for almost a fifth of the country’s greenhouse gas emissions. And efforts to reduce these emissions are moving far too slowly. According to government data, the residential sector, alongside agriculture, has the worst record for reducing carbon emissions over the last 30 years.
And with governments becoming increasingly aware of the need to tackle this problem, wholesale energy prices will probably remain high as more taxes on carbon emissions are introduced globally. But until emission taxes become a reality, it could be more effective to overhaul energy policy to pursue two main aims:
Meeting these goals will take a new approach, both to energy support and to how the government deploys its transition strategies, including more local and regional collaboration.
While the EPG is a step towards the first goal, it ignores the second. Indeed, the analysis I conducted with my colleagues at the University of Warwick highlights that the EPG has regressive effects. It reduces energy costs for families with high incomes and high usage.
At 2022 market prices (represented by the dashed blue line in the chart below) an increase in energy use leads to a pronounced increase in annual bills. Under the EPG (the solid orange line) bills increase less sharply as usage goes up. This means that super-consumers will benefit most from the EPG.
Within the roughly 280,000 UK households with an annual income over £150,000, around 14,000 consume more than twice as much energy as nearly 50% of all other households in this high-income group.
Rising energy costs versus consumption
A lack of focus on energy efficiency investments is also an issue in national energy policy. And confusing short-lived policies, lengthy paperwork and late reimbursements can mean programmes fail to fully spend budgets.
This can trigger a termination of a scheme until a new one is drafted, leaving customers to wonder whether energy efficiency investments are worthwhile if the government cannot make up its mind about what to provide. For example, the plateauing of solar panel installations has been linked to the halving of the government’s renewable energy feed-in-tariff scheme in 2012.
Conversations with local councils during our research into this issue have also highlighted that despite more closely understanding the needs of the population, local councils feel underfunded and under-supported to help with the transition to net zero. And national government programmes sometimes miss important segments of the rural, rental, and middle-income population, for example.
A broader and more coherent strategy is needed, under which the national government works with local authorities. Our research shows that 10.9 million properties in England alone could benefit from energy efficiency investments in terms of reduced energy use, reduced energy bills, and reduced carbon emissions.
Indeed, the next graph shows that at least 5.8 million properties would benefit from improved wall insulation such as solid or cavity wall insulation, 2.8 million properties would benefit from roof or loft insulation and 7.1 million properties could benefit from floor insulation. Further, there are at least 3.7 million properties that could benefit from condensing boiler upgrades.
Residential energy efficiency improvements
But how can these investments be made, while still supporting families who struggle to pay their bills? Replacing the EPG with a more progressive price structure that keeps revenues neutral would be a solid first step. Our research suggests that a two-tier tariff could better target energy use subsidies towards low-income households with low energy use while charging market rates for high users who can afford to pay higher rates and invest in energy efficiency.
And if receiving a large bill still does not encourage families to use less energy, a renewed push to encourage smart meter uptake could help people plan their energy use. This could also open up new opportunities for conservation and demand management, as my upcoming research on water conservation in the US shows.
Community-level strategies could also help the government support households on their journey towards energy efficiency. Research in this area shows that firsthand experience and word of mouth can go a long way to convincing people to adopt green investments. Neighbours joining forces might help reduce contractor costs.
It will take a joint effort, at all levels of government, to reach net zero without leaving the most vulnerable behind. At the local level, organisations with strong community ties, such as faith-based groups, could help restore trust in energy policies that have flip-flopped too often in the past. Local councils are well-positioned to identify these pockets of trust and bring them to fruition. Only by recognising the role of these forces can national policy succeed in tackling this challenge.
Ludovica Gazze receives funding from the ESRC and J-PAL.
FreshRSS 