It's one thing to talk about it in summer or spring, but it's another thing entirely to talk about it now, as the cold arrives. It's not the same to ask today "how many people won't be able to pay for heating this winter" as it is to do so in August. The price of electricity is skyrocketing, more than ever, and not everyone fully understands why.
We have public healthcare, public schools, public TV, but electricity is private. I would say that electricity (electricity for cooking, for showering with hot water, for heating and not having numb hands at seven in the evening) is a fundamental right. We pay for it, but, like transport, it should have a reasonable price. God made light, but the bills are for us, or so it seems.
Whoever has been cold as a child, at home, due to poverty, never forgets it. That feeling of shrinking, of many layers of clothes, of the torture of getting up, at night, to go to the bathroom, stays with them.
Soon we will see heating advertisements, with those houses with beautiful parquet floors, white sofas, woolly dogs and children lying on the floor doing their homework so comfortably. We will turn on the street lights, for Christmas, because there is nothing more beautiful than light.
I remember the film The Man Who Loved Women, by François Truffaut. The protagonist, Bertrand, gets a date. And he gets so happy, so much, there in his hotel room, that what he does is turn on all the lights. The ceiling light, the bedside lamp, the bathroom light... It's a beautiful scene that summarizes happiness very well. No child in this city should be cold inside their home.