Reductions in absolute levels of energy demand in the Global North are increasingly understood to be important for timely net zero transitions. Accordingly, there is growing interest in sufficiency as a basis for policy. This paper explores how indoor air temperatures, as an aspect of heating and cooling demand, might be addressed. Drawing on prior reviews, it argues that sufficiency as policymaking can be distinguished from more common interpretations of sufficiency as voluntary individual-level self-moderation or post-growth socio-economic transformation or even the direct imposition of legal consumption limits. Policies could instead be oriented towards the ‘framework conditions’ that shape social practices. Moreover, common ways of articulating temperature objectives, such as limits or averages, do not reflect the distributional concern that is distinctive of a sufficiency approach. By integrating insights from social practices literature, the paper outlines how a staged thermal energy sufficiency strategy might proceed through a combination of broad guideline temperature ranges and ‘shift and improve’ objectives for lower energy practice configurations. Working towards integrated policy packages across health, housing, welfare, energy and climate policies, this strategy would aim to create the conditions for wider debate and, over time, change within thermal norms and standards. POLICY RELEVANCE The prevalent imagination of energy sufficiency policy is dominated by an idea of imposed legal limits as well as by enabling voluntary consumer reductions in consumption. This is well illustrated in the case of room temperature. But concepts of sufficiency extend beyond this: they call for policies to address the conditions influencing the design and use of heating and cooling systems within buildings. This requires attention to how existing policies across different sectors of government (e.g. health, welfare, energy) already affect indoor temperatures and how they might be better coordinated. Building from this, a thermal energy sufficiency strategy could work collaboratively with other organisations, such as industry bodies, to address under- and overconsumption, promote debate and reinterpretation of narrow thermal ‘standards’ and improve practical supplementary technologies and techniques for maintaining thermal wellbeing.
Janine Morley (Thu,) studied this question.