[saeranv]

I'm a little confused at how you think the previous comment somehow is shifting blames from corporations to people. While true that rising energy costs will effect consumers, it's also one of the ways we can change the incentive structure for corporations!

For example: No one should be choosing between heating and eating, from a thermodynamic perspective. It's trivial to drastically cut heating energy through very low-tech methods: increasing insulation in the walls, and add extra layers of glass to your windows. The reason it's not done is because real estate developers have no incentive to increase their construction costs by some marginal amount since they know that natural gas cost is so cheap no customer is going to care about heating energy reduction. Not only that, most customers strongly prefer the cheaper construction once they're shown how many decades it would take for the better building envelope to pay for itself via energy bill reductions. Same reason there isn't a incentive to switch from (dirty) gas to electric, install solar panels, switch to heat pumps etc etc.

Now consider how building related carbon emissions make up about 40% of the total emissions, and you'll see how much of an infuriating obstacle cheap energy is in cutting carbon emissions.

Yes, there will be low-income people for who this will be a crisis, but that can be dealt with separately: government subsidies, or government subsidies of envelope retrofits (great stimulus idea). There is no reason frame this issue in a us versus them manner.