The UK is in the grip of a fierce cost-of-living crisis. In May, the country’s inflation rate hit a 40-year high of 9%, and although the current crisis is global, the UK has been particularly hard hit.
Skyrocketing energy prices are coalescing with a yawning supply-chain shortage and deepening food insecurity, all of which is intimately connected to the war in Ukraine and two years of pandemic insecurity, as well as Brexit and recent tax hikes.
As reported in the Guardian, the cost of basic goods and services for the average two-child family has risen by £400 ($695) a month, and two weeks ago a top energy boss warned that nearly 40% of UK households could face fuel poverty by October.
Amid this escalating situation, there have been calls for the scaling back of decarbonisation policies, to ease the burden of fuelling the nation.
But is climate-saving policy incompatible with an economic crisis? Or can climate mitigation go hand-in-hand with the alleviation of poverty?
And if the UK, often seen as a bastion of relative climate wisdom among more oil-dependent Western countries, sees its climate action eroded, what will that mean for the rest of the world?
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