Ground Breaking Solutions to the Cost of Living Crisis!
Everyone seems to have a plan for the cost of living crisis - so we thought we should conjure one up as well.
It seems that as we return from our summer break every Tom, Dick and Von der Leyen is developing a plan to tackle the cost of living crisis - which is spreading as fast as a Pakistan monsoon. The core issue is the sky-high rise in the price of energy - particularly gas and electricity. And winter is coming...
If prices do not start coming down soon, the contagion (cost of living hikes not zombiedom) could lead to widespread economic downturn. Worse still, we’ll be without our time proven coping mechanism to drown our sorrows in a pint of Guinness once all the pubs shut down because they can’t afford the heating.
Tom, Dick and Von der Leyen are playing with a couple of ideas, suggesting a change in the way we set the price of electricity. Just decouple it from the price of gas (sounds a bit dodgy) instead use the price of renewables (have they met anyone in the oil and gas industry). Ursula thinks we should cap the energy price (who doesn’t love maxing out those government credit cards) and Tom (or was it Dick?) think we should re-nationalise gas providers (look where that got us last time around).
Others think we should do nothing at all because summer isn’t over yet and hot water bottles are back in fashion and just the mention of ideas dealing with the rising price of gas has the price tumbling by 20% even with Vlad stomping his feet and turning off Nord Stream 1 for a few more days. Like a 6 yr old pulling on Ursula’s pig tails. (He just does it because he likes her deep down and hasn’t learnt how to play nice yet...)
“Mean time, Italy doesn’t give much of a hoot about anything as their summer’s never end. They just want a bit of rain so they can get ‘risotto’ back on the menu!”
Given that no one seems to have a plan worth implementing we thought we should wade in with our own scheme to get you through the winter.
How to solve the cost of living crisis a la Letts Journal:
Take over the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant in Ukraine because everyone else seems to be trying and it pumps out a boatload of electricity. The downside could be the cost of the clean up should Russia drop a nuke on it.
Ask everyone politely to move to the top of high rise apartment blocks when it gets really cold because heat rises. Given that all the pubs will be closed it could also be a nice way to enhance community. Just not the Notting Hill carnival kind of community.
Support your local cow by cuddling up to them at night - and if that doesn’t warm your family enough you could always light their farts and burps. This isn’t just some old party trick - there's more to the effect than meets the eye. After all, methane isn't just highly flammable, it's also a potent greenhouse gas. 25 times more efficient at trapping heat than carbon dioxide!!
Add an energy turbine to your Peleton. That way you not only get fit but also get to heat your home. And if you figure out how to wi-fi energy back from your road bike, your death-defying cycle commute could got a lot more attractive.
Buy your very own natural gas supplier because they are going for a song. That way you can price cap yourself! Alternatively buy a water-to-energy turbine for when the extreme flooding hits.
Tell your employer that you want to prove yourself worthy of promotion by working at the office 24 hours a day and seven days a week. That way you can sleep at work and ditch the apartment.
Alternatively you could ask to switch to full time remote working and rent a shack in the woods with a wood burner. Make sure the woods come with the place so you are free to fell your own energy. Just try not to flatten the environmental activists when they chain themselves to the trees.
Move to somewhere hot because they don’t need heating.
Invent a new mini hydropower system that converts your gaseous releases in the bath into energy. Then get a warehouse job stacking baked beans and figure out how to sifon off a few cans.
Go back on holiday because this back to home shit just got too real!
Alternatively you could wait for your government to do something about the cost of living crisis and go broke - or freeze trying. ‘Simples!’
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