Have you ever wondered why it is that most houses in the UK are reliant on gas boilers? Not what’s stopping more people from replacing them with heat pumps, but instead why and how the gas boiler became so ubiquitous(无处不在的) in the first place(起初；首先)?
你是否曾好奇，为什么英国大多数房屋都依赖燃气锅炉？不是问什么阻止了更多人用热泵取代它们，而是问燃气锅炉最初为何以及如何变得如此普遍？
Arthur Downing, the author of the new book Power and the People: A History of British Energy, can tell you exactly why. “We only have boilers in our houses because of a state-owned enterprise that went into everybody’s home and installed natural gas-suitable appliances at no direct cost(无直接成本),” he says. The nationalised gas industry of the 1940s to the 1980s, which oversaw this huge project, was for three decades one of the “most dynamic, innovative, efficient industries in Britain”, Downing says.(唐宁说，20世纪40至80年代的国有化天然气行业监督了这一庞大工程，在三十年间曾是英国最具活力、创新和效率的行业之一。) Yet few of us would use these terms to describe it as such now.
新书《权力与人民：英国能源史》的作者亚瑟·唐宁能准确告诉你原因。“我们家里之所以有锅炉，是因为一家国有企业走进千家万户，免费安装了适用天然气的设备，”他说。唐宁指出，20世纪40年代至80年代的国有化天然气行业监督了这一庞大工程，在三十年间曾是“英国最具活力、创新和效率的行业之一”。然而如今，我们中很少有人会用这些词来形容它。
Instead, Britain’s electricity and gas industries are “fragile, fragmented(支离破碎的), comically complicated and hopelessly dependent on imported fossil fuels”, Downing writes. On top of that, as consumers, we are facing soaring(飙升的) energy bills amid a cost of living crisis(在生活成本危机中).
相反，唐宁写道，英国的电力与天然气行业“脆弱、支离破碎、复杂得可笑，且无可救药地依赖进口化石燃料”。除此之外，作为消费者，我们在生活成本危机中正面临飙升的能源账单。