Post affluent politics is an interesting phenomenon.
Where households or individuals have sufficient resources to meet their personal needs their minds often move on to non-hygiene factors that don’t directly affect their immediate well-being but which provide a cause to champion.
It’s too simplistic to say as Helena Bonham Carter once said that the ‘poor’ were to be envied as they had less to worry about if they only had to worry about putting food on the table. That unenlightened attitude however opens a window into the causes and behaviours of post-affluent households.
The Government in a study sponsored by DECC have found that those people who claim to worry most about climate change actually consume more energy than those who rate it as a lower immediate concern.
The report was undertaken by Loughborough University and Cambridge Architectural Research and asked the question:
“The effects of climate change are too far in the future to really worry me.”
The study found:
“Taken all together, householders who strongly agreed they were not worried about climate change because it was too far in the future in fact used less electricity rather than more, counter to the hypothesis that households concerned about climate change use less electricity.
“When we separated the pensioner households [who generally use less energy] from the younger ones, there was no significant relationship between this statement and energy use in the pensioner group, and only a weak trend among younger households.”
Peter Lilley, Conservative MP for Hitchin and Harpenden and member of the Commons Energy and Climate Change committee, said:
“The survey exposes the hypocrisy of many who claim to be ‘green’: the greater the concern people express about global warming the less they do to reduce their energy usage.”
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