The British "Guardian" published an article signed by Max Wakefield, titled: Britain's leaky homes make the energy crisis worse. Why have governments not fixed them?

The UK has been in a panic for the past segment as soaring gas prices threaten to push hundreds of thousands of households into energy poverty, joining the 2.5 million already in energy poverty.

Any country that relies on the global gas market faces the risk of a price shock, but let's be clear: this year's crisis is not inevitable. This is largely the result of a decade of inaction by the British government to insulate the country from the catastrophic negative consequences of its dependence on fossil fuels.

The UK is a difficult country to keep warm, with some of the oldest and most leaky houses in Western Europe, with heat quickly dissipating through walls, windows and doors after leaving the radiator. Nine in 10 households rely on gas boilers, and many require large quantities of gas: British households consume more gas than almost all European households, and about twice the EU average. In 2000, North Sea gas accounted for 98% of total supply, leaving households little exposure to price shocks. But in the two decades since, imports have risen from 2 percent of supply to 60 percent as domestic gas production has fallen by two-thirds.

British households now burn the equivalent of half of all imported gas - which is why any spike in gas prices translates immediately into higher heating bills. In times like these, there is little separation between ordinary households and the opaque mechanisms of a highly politicized, profit-driven global gas market. Using natural gas to heat poorly insulated homes is only effective if natural gas is cheap, not to mention climate change effects.

However, the UK government has not been able to reduce our deep-rooted dependence on fossil gas in recent years, instead we have witnessed a decade-long policy failure. In 2013, the Conservative-led coalition launched the "Green Deal", which provides loans to households to implement energy-saving measures, which are repaid through households' energy bills. Not surprisingly, the program's complexity, coupled with its inherent financial uncertainty, has not been widely pursued. Only 15,000 of the 14 million homes targeted for energy-efficiency retrofits were completed by 2020, and the plan was shelved a few years later.

Second, the zero-carbon home standard, which went into effect in 2016, will require new homes to generate as much energy as they use from renewable energy sites. But the government ended the scheme at the behest of the construction lobby shortly after the surprise Conservative election victory in 2015. Then there's the Green Homes Grant scheme, announced last year in the first tranche of the Covid-19 stimulus package. This is a simpler plan with an advance payment from the government. However, despite very high public interest and applications for the scheme, the scheme has only reached 5,800 of its target of 600,000 households. Like the Green Deal nearly a decade ago, it was quickly scrapped.

Overall, millions of people in the UK are still living in fuel starvation in 2021, and many more are likely to join this winter, while a seventh of the UK's annual carbon emissions come from domestic gas boilers, accelerating the the climate crisis. The government must come up with credible policies now, and only an ambitious, long-term, well-funded, and well-designed home improvement program will work.

And, the days of gas boilers are over. Any new construction should not be connected to natural gas and, with a few exceptions, should be replaced with heat pumps - ultra-efficient devices that use electricity to harvest ambient heat from the air (or the ground) to heat the home. At the current snail rate, it would take the UK around 700 years to switch to low-carbon heating. The government's legally mandated climate commitments call for halfway through the mid-2030s, and to succeed, we must learn from our own mistakes—and from the successes of others.