How are high-carbon lifestyles justified? Exploring the discursive strategies of excess energy consumers in the United Kingdom

The literature on climate action highlights the importance of individual and household behaviour change to achieve energy demand reduction and climate targets. However, behaviour change remains slow. The literature has highlighted numerous structural and individual barriers to behaviour change, but how high-energy consumers themselves justify the continuation of their behaviours remains poorly understood. This paper addresses this question by providing an in-depth analysis of the discourses that individuals deploy to justify and normalise high-energy consumption. This paper first provides a typology of ‘discourses of inaction’ that we might expect to find, from a series of literatures. It then analyses data from 30 in-depth interviews conducted with people from high-energy-consumption households, and from four deliberative workshops with a subsample of them and with the public, conducted to explore the viability and fairness of policy options to reduce high-energy consumption. This analysis reveals how individuals variously deploy already recognised ‘discourses of inaction’. It also identifies novel ‘discursive strategies of entitlement’; subtle rhetorical strategies to justify their high carbon lifestyles and inaction. Most notably, these newly-identified discursive strategies include the presentation of choices as determined, desires as ‘needs', and privilege as ‘luck’ or ‘entitlement’, particularly with the use of humour and irony. We discuss how these ‘discourses of entitlement’ reflect dominant policy approaches to behaviour change, and suggest policy approaches that can more effectively curb high-energy consumption.