The Social Class and Lifestyle Embeddedness of Being Within Energy Infrastructures

Green roles at home: exploring the impact of household social dynamic processes on consumption at the food-energy-water (FEW) nexus

“…As mentioned above, sociological scholarship on treadmills of production and consumption provides crucial insights on the barriers to significant change through individual behavior alone (Schnaiberg et al 2002 ; Gould et al 2015 ). Theories of social practice can further reckon with the ways in which elements of practice are tied to economic social stratification, linking class to the development of lifestyle groups and different ways of being (Lytle et al 2022 ).…”

“…1 Globally, these emissions are concentrated among high socio-economic status (SES) people and countries, where behaviors of those in the global top 1% of income are linked to twice the amount of consumption-based emissions as those in the bottom 50% (Kartha et al 2020 ; Nielsen et al 2021 ). Much of these emissions are the byproduct of mundane, everyday activities embedded within infrastructural systems that rely on fossil fuel inputs, like producing and accessing hot water, transportation fuels, thermal comfort, food production, processing, and transport, and other activities associated with daily living (Valkonen et al 2022 ; Lytle et al 2022 ). 2 Recent estimates found that food systems, for example, are associated with a third of global anthropogenic GHG emissions (Crippa et al 2021 ).…”