‘It’s not that I can’t let it go … but it’s still there,’ Aneita tells me. It’s hard to shift the memory of not knowing how to make ends meet. ‘I’m not rich, I’m not absolutely poor, but – you know – I’m there, kind of lingering, in that in-between place.’
But ‘lingering’ doesn’t do justice to Aneita’s energy and activism. A single mother and mature student who has personally experienced food poverty, she’s part of the Blueprint Architects group – residents, growers and food justice organizers in Tower Hamlets, East London. Most members of the group are from working-class, Global South diaspora and migration backgrounds. Over the last two years they have joined forces to research a low-carbon, socially just urban food system. This feels crucial, in a deprived borough where hardship and inequality is compounded by environmental hazards such as heavy road pollution.
‘It’s about working out how communities can take back the power to sustain ourselves,’ she says. It’s a vision of abundance and choice – enough fresh, affordable, sustainable food for everyone – and reclaiming space from developers and landlords to make that vision a reality.
We will need more such visions as we face this moment where climate and economic crises collide.
Aneita’s personal experiences have hardened into political resolve. ‘A few carrots and cabbages aren’t enough,’ she laughs, with an edge. The Blueprint Architects connect community-led growing, cooking and composting across social housing estates to wider policymaking. They use participatory research to better understand the barriers to building alternative food systems, including what technological and regulatory change is needed to support community action.
In the face of austerity and rising inflation, these local initiatives are part of the solution. The question is how to harness this knowledge in the transformation of our wider economies. And the conjunction between climate action and solutions to the cost of living crisis goes well beyond local food production.
Broken by design
Between July and September 2022, oil giants BP, Shell and Equinor extracted a combined £36 billion ($42.6bn) in profit, while two-thirds of UK households are expected to be in fuel poverty as of January 2023.1 Such stark inequality is only part of the problem. Industrial agriculture, chemical fertilizers and globalized distribution also rely on fossil fuels. When the prices of oil surge, so do food prices.
A food system hooked on oil drives climate breakdown, which in turn compromises our food security. Heavy rainfall, heatwaves and droughts erode agriculture and infrastructure, ultimately leading to crop failures, emptier shelves and higher prices. We are caught in a perfect storm; a global economy dependent on fossil fuels powers its own destruction.
A food system hooked on oil drives climate breakdown, which in turn compromises our food security
Last summer’s floods in Pakistan displaced 33 million people, destroyed 3.6 million acres of crops and killed over 1.1 million agricultural animals.2 This climate-induced disaster will depress earnings, protract hunger and cost billions of dollars in damages in a country that was already facing its highest rates of inflation in many decades.
While it’s hard to put a precise figure on it, climate breakdown, in addition to the grave human cost, is driving inflation even higher through these ‘supply chain disruptions’ – disasters clogging up the wheels of global trade, generating an economic crisis from environmental harms. These pressures multiply and intensify the threats posed by other disruptive forces, such as war: ‘Russia’s military machine is underwritten by fossil fuels, funded by its oil and gas exports,’ says climate lawyer and campaigner Tessa Khan.3
The current cost of living crisis masks the much deeper cost of an economic system which is broken by design, operating by way of extraction and exploitation, at the expense of our environment and our basic needs. Countries in the Global South are hit hardest, as droughts, storms and rising sea levels decimate communities and industries. This after decades of debt and austerity (often demanded by international institutions) has stripped their ability to rebuild in the wake of such climate disasters.
The public good
So, what is to be done? The causes and solutions are connected, not competing. Renewable energy, for example, is now synonymous with affordability. Rebuilding public services as the foundation for a fair and just transition away from fossil fuels would create an economy that puts wealth back in the hands of communities and provide the basis for a good life for all.
As climate campaigners Harpreet Kaur Paul and Tatiana Garavito have written: ‘Tackling rising inequality starts with establishing a politics of care, repair, and regeneration.’4 This is the energy with which we must confront the perfect storm.
Some of these changes start small. Back in Tower Hamlets, local projects are providing low-cost food with and for local people, through co-operatives and community-led growing and cooking. The challenge is to magnify this energy, building community power and resilience into meaningful alternatives.
In every instance, prioritizing public good over private profit helps to mitigate against the impacts of both of these crises. Take transport – road transport makes up around one-tenth of global carbon emissions; last year a number of European countries including Spain announced free or cheap commuter rail, easing the impact of rising prices while encouraging lower-carbon travel.
Insulating homes would immediately reduce fossil fuel dependence – and bills. Burgas, Bulgaria’s fourth largest city, initiated a comprehensive retrofitting programme for public and residential buildings, enabling hundreds of lower-income residents to benefit from more comfortable and affordable housing, with up to 30-per-cent lower energy bills.5
In Eeklo, Belgium, the municipal authority is using locally-owned renewable energy generation to heat homes – at a cost that matches, or beats, using gas. The co-operative taking this forward uses the profits to invest in further energy-saving measures.6
Decarbonisation is only half the battle: energy profits should be invested in building community wealth. By contrast, privatization and deregulation only serve to limit climate action, drive up prices and suppress living standards.
Reclaiming the green commons
Both the climate and cost of living crises are global and tackling them will require solidarity and international co-operation of a kind and scale we have not yet seen. As we imagine an international energy commons – clean, equitable and democratic – we must work to redress the West’s long history of colonialism. ‘Green’ energy cannot rely on extraction, exploitation and dispossession, or else our work will only worsen the true cost of living.
Take the solar power plant in Ouarzazate, Morocco, developed by the private Saudi corporation ACWA Power. Researcher Hamza Hamouchene describes the 3,000-hectare project as ‘green grabbing’, explaining how the mega-plant was installed on the land of the local Amazigh (Berber) agro-pastoralists without their consent, added to public debt and requires the diversion of huge amounts of water to operate.7
Models such as this only serve to widen extremes of inequality, creating a new world in the pattern of the old.
‘Prices are rising and the government is asleep,’ peaceful protesters chanted outside the Moroccan parliament last October.8 Food prices had risen almost 15 per cent and fuel prices were at a record high. Meanwhile Morocco’s Prime Minister, Aziz Akhannouch, happens to be a billionaire and main shareholder in Afriquia, a leading petrol station operator.
Any talk of tackling the cost of living and climate crises must break the chain between governments and fossil fuel interests; it must include support for labour unions across the world, particularly in the Global South, and commitment to protecting workers and communities at all points in the energy supply chain.
Connecting solutions
Some politicians might have you believe that expanding oil and gas is the route out of the energy and cost of living crisis. ‘Britain must get every cubic inch of gas out of the North Sea,’ insisted Jacob Rees-Mogg, briefly UK energy secretary in 2022. He is also the founder of an investment fund that has shovelled millions into fossil fuels.9 Yet wind and solar power are at record low prices and up to nine times cheaper than gas generation – while any new oil and gas wells would likely take a decade or more to bring online.10
Costa Rica’s electricity system, which reported a renewables contribution of a staggering 99.7 per cent in 2017, is one of the world’s most efficient and equitable, with radically expanded access to electricity.11
Costa Rica exemplifies the potential and necessity of public ownership for energy transition. Public utilities can develop renewable power at the challenging pace required, and manage the complex changes needed for grids to handle an electrified society – while putting fairness at the heart of this process. Even so, these transitions must go further – challenging the growth of a petrol-reliant transport system, for example, and the environmentally damaging use of hydropower and biomass. Such a takeback is made more urgent by the exorbitant price rises recently seen in energy – enabled by the privatization of oil and gas giants, electricity generation and networks. In France, publicly-owned energy company EDF kept bill rises to 4 per cent in 2022, while prices in the UK soared by 96 per cent over the year.12
We must learn from initiatives that have prioritized the public good and demand a way of living well that does not cost the earth.
- Pippa Crerar, ‘Two-thirds of UK families could be in food poverty by January…’, in The Guardian, 18 August 2022, nin.tl/3g520rZ
- International Rescue Committee, ‘What the cost of living crisis looks like around the world’, 7 November 2022, nin.tl/3g8z7es
- Tess Lowery, ‘How to solve the cost of living crisis’, TedX podcast, nin.tl/3GfvP3x
- Harpreet Kaur Paul and Tatiana Garavito, ‘The cost of living crisis is a climate justice issue’, Huck, 11 October 2022, nin.tl/3EdjKZY
- Ivaylo Trendafilov, ‘The “smart” transformation of a Black Sea metropolis’, mPower, 3 March 2020, nin.tl/3EzpY8c
- Britt Jurgensen, ‘Building Energy Communities: A guide to inspiring democratically owned and financed energy projects’, mPower, nin.tl/3txmLzu
- Hamza Hamouchene, ‘The energy transition in North Africa: Neocolonialism again!’, TNI Long Reads, 14 October 2022, nin.tl/3hH70U0
- ‘Moroccan protest against cost of living crisis’, The New Arab, 23 October 2022, nin.tl/3E9Pwau
- India Bourke, ‘Five reasons Jacob Rees-Mogg is unfit to tackle the climate emergency’, New Statesman, 7 September 2022, nin.tl/3X4RjWT
- Simon Evans, ‘Record-low price for UK offshore wind is nine times cheaper than gas’, Carbon Brief, 8 August 2022, nin.tl/3GnBMvD
- Daniel Chavez, ‘Energy democracy and public ownership: What can Britain learn from Latin America?’, Transnational Institute, 4 December 2018, nin.tl/3IySu8A
- Paul Bolton and Iona Stewart, ‘Domestic energy prices’, House of Commons Library, 9 November 2022, nin.tl/3hJCfOl
