The United States is awash in debt. Median household debt has risen to more than $100,000 from less than $60,000 in 1990, even as median incomes have increased only slightly. Much of the debt is held by workers who are building up loans on credit cards, or obtaining dubious mortgages in a bid to secure some fraction of the lifestyle of an upper class that keeps getting richer. This increase in debt has occurred as the gap between the rich and the poor has continued to widen and the visibility of coveted luxury goods on television and the Internet has continued to grow.

Some laud the democratization of credit, seeing its availability to wider swaths of the American population as broadening opportunity; some criticize it as the ruthless seduction by financial institutions of working people who will one day face bankruptcy because they will be unable to pay credit card bills and mortgages.

But this is much clear: the spread of debt is one of the most significant social phenomena in the United States today, allowing the less affluent to spend more than they have. As long as interest rates do not rise steeply, this will continue to happen.

       Fuel poverty occurs when a household is unable to afford the most basic amount of energy foradequate heating, cooking, lighting, and use of appliances in the home. According to European UniversityInstitute, in 2011, 9.8% of households in the EU27 countries and 15.8% of households in the 12 newmember states could not afford to heat their homes adequately. Thus, fuel poverty is an increasingly seriousproblem across Europe and requires the intervention of policymakers.

       In particular, corrective measures have been implemented which aim to help fuel-poor householdspay their energy bills, and preventive policies have also been introduced, which focus more on improvingresidential energy efficiency. Debates about the effectiveness of these measures have ensued for severalreasons; mainly because energy retrofit renovations have often been undertaken by wealthier households.Thus, despite these measures, given the expected increase in the cost of energy, some could find it difficultor even impossible to satisfy their energy needs. As a prerequisite to discussions about the effectivenessof different measures to fight fuel poverty, debates have often focused on the need to reliably identify fuel-poor households and create a detailed profile of such households. In fact, the multidimensionality of fuelpoverty makes it difficult to achieve this.

       Fuel poverty has traditionally been treated as a monetary poverty problem. At European Union level,there is no common definition or standardized indicator for assessing fuel poverty. While there is a largebody of literature on measuring poverty, consensus has not yet been reached on the related methodologicaland conceptual issues. However, households affected by fuel poverty are not always the same as thoseaffected by monetary problems, even if the two phenomena are inextricably linked.

       In this context, we suggest that a more careful and systematic understanding can be developedthrough a multidimensional approach to the relationship between monetary poverty, residential energyefficiency of buildings, and heating restrictions. Our objective in this paper is not to challenge existingmeasures of fuel poverty, but provide new ways to better identify those who suffer the most from fuelpoverty in order to optimize policy. We argue this is needed to better identify the connection betweenenergy use and well-being and therefore deepen understanding of energy poverty.