Forecasters are warning that the developing El Niño could become a very strong event by the end of 2026, with its effects continuing into the spring of 2027.
El Niño occurs when unusually warm water develops across the tropical Pacific Ocean. This changes atmospheric circulation and can affect weather patterns around the world. It does not provide a precise forecast for any particular part of Britain, but it can alter the likelihood of storms, heavy rain and other extremes.
The article published by MSN and The Independent suggests that Britain could experience a wetter and stormier autumn and winter. This would follow an exceptionally hot and dry summer which has already placed water supplies, farming, wildlife and infrastructure under considerable pressure.
The important lesson is not that we know exactly what the coming winter will bring. We do not. It is that the weather appears to be becoming less dependable.
A disturbance arriving from afar
El Niño is a reminder that no locality is isolated from the natural systems of the wider world. A change in the temperature of the Pacific Ocean can eventually affect rainfall, food production and prices in Britain.
The direct effect on British weather may be uncertain, but the indirect effects could be considerable. Droughts and floods in food-exporting countries may reduce supplies of rice, tea, coffee, citrus fruit and other products upon which Britain has become dependent.
Modern supply chains have been designed for efficiency rather than resilience. Food may travel thousands of miles and pass through numerous processors, warehouses and distribution centres before reaching a local shop. A failure in any part of the system can be transmitted rapidly to consumers.
In an expanding economy, shortages can sometimes be overcome by purchasing supplies elsewhere. In a shrinking economy, characterised by high energy costs, debt and declining discretionary spending, that option becomes progressively less affordable.
From prediction to preparation
The national response will probably concentrate upon forecasts, emergency plans and the protection of major infrastructure. These are necessary, but they cannot provide every household and locality with security.
Localism begins with a different question. It does not ask whether an extreme event can be prevented. It asks whether a locality can continue to provide its essentials when the event occurs.
A resilient locality would know:
which roads and properties are vulnerable to flooding;
which residents may need help during power cuts or severe weather;
where emergency shelter and warmth could be provided;
which buildings have independent heating or electricity;
where local food stocks are held;
which farms, growers, shops and kitchens could cooperate during a disruption; and
who possesses useful equipment, vehicles and practical skills.
Much of this knowledge already exists informally. The task is to reconnect it.
Water must be managed locally
The possibility of heavy winter rain following summer drought demonstrates one of the contradictions of the present system. A locality may experience water shortage and flooding within a few months of each other.
Rainwater is rushed from roofs, roads and fields into drains and rivers. It may then contribute to flooding before disappearing downstream. Later, the same locality may be asked to restrict its water use.
A more local approach would retain water in the landscape. Ponds, restored wetlands, water butts, small reservoirs, permeable surfaces, healthy soils and carefully managed woodland could slow runoff and provide reserves for dry periods.
Flood protection and drought preparation should therefore be treated as parts of the same local water policy.
Food security begins before the shortage
Local food production cannot replace every imported product. Nor does localism require every locality to become completely self-sufficient. It does mean increasing the proportion of essential food which can be grown, processed, stored and distributed reasonably close to where it is consumed.
That might include vegetables, fruit, eggs, dairy products, meat, flour and preserved foods. Local mills, bakeries, dairies, cold stores and community kitchens may eventually become as important as the farms themselves.
Production must also become more varied. A single large crop may be efficient in a normal year but vulnerable to drought, flooding or disease. A mixture of crops, varieties and farming methods provides insurance which cannot always be measured by immediate financial return.
The shrinking economy increases the danger
Extreme weather is occurring while the country is becoming less able to maintain its complicated infrastructure.
Flood defences, reservoirs, electricity networks, roads, sewers and emergency services all require large and continuing expenditure. Governments may promise investment, but much of their available revenue is already committed to debt interest, pensions, health care and other unavoidable costs.
Infrastructure can therefore become less reliable at the very time when the climate is placing greater demands upon it.
Local resilience cannot replace national infrastructure. It can, however, reduce the consequences when national systems are temporarily overwhelmed. A building with stored water, a wood stove, some local electricity and a supply of food is less vulnerable than one which depends entirely upon continuous deliveries through distant networks.
Localism is practical insurance
El Niño will eventually fade, as every El Niño does. The vulnerabilities it exposes will remain.
The lesson is not that Britain should withdraw from the world. It is that necessities should not depend entirely upon distant systems which local people cannot control.
A locality that retains water, produces some of its food, maintains local skills and knows how to organise itself will be better prepared for storms, droughts, power cuts and economic contraction. These arrangements also strengthen everyday life when no emergency is occurring.
Localism is therefore more than an economic response to the end of growth. It is a form of practical insurance against a world in which both the weather and the economy are becoming less predictable.
The decision to manufacture steam turbines for Rolls-Royce’s small modular reactors in Newcastle is important. It will return a major engineering capability to Britain after an absence of more than 20 years.
Siemens Energy plans to make the turbines at the historic Parsons Works. The investment is expected to create 550 skilled jobs. The factory will also service the turbines throughout their working lives, providing employment that could continue for decades.
The turbines will be used in three Rolls-Royce small modular reactors planned for Anglesey. Further reactors may be built in the Czech Republic and Sweden. Each reactor will be capable of generating 470 megawatts.
This is encouraging news for British manufacturing. It also raises an important question. How does such a large, centralised project fit into a future shaped by localism and a shrinking economy?
Localisation is not necessarily localism
Rolls-Royce describes the decision as part of its commitment to localisation. Manufacturing the turbines in Britain will certainly reduce dependence upon overseas production. It will create British jobs and help to rebuild a domestic supply chain.
That is localisation, but it is not quite the same as localism.
Localism is the movement of economic and social activity towards the places where people live. It involves local food production, care, maintenance, education, workshops and small businesses. It reduces dependence upon distant suppliers and energy-intensive transport.
A 470-megawatt nuclear reactor is not a local power station in this sense. It requires national finance, international supply chains, specialist regulation and connection to the national electricity grid.
The reactors will be situated in Anglesey, but their electricity will not belong principally to the surrounding communities. It will enter the national system and be distributed according to national demand and commercial arrangements.
The description “small modular reactor” can therefore be misleading. It is small in comparison with a conventional nuclear power station, but it remains an enormous and technically complex installation. It cannot be designed, financed, operated or decommissioned by a locality.
Rebuilding productive capability
Nevertheless, the return of turbine manufacturing to Newcastle has considerable relevance to localism.
Britain has allowed many of its productive capabilities to disappear. Machinery, electrical equipment and components for essential infrastructure are routinely imported. Once factories, workshops and skilled workforces have been lost, they are difficult and expensive to recreate.
The Parsons Works has an exceptional industrial history. It was established in 1889 by Sir Charles Parsons, whose steam turbine transformed marine propulsion and electricity generation. The turbine for Calder Hall, the world’s first commercial nuclear power station, was built there.
Returning large turbine production to Newcastle reconnects a modern project with that industrial inheritance. It means that Britain will recover some of the practical knowledge needed to construct and maintain essential equipment.
The effects could extend beyond the 550 direct jobs. The factory may support apprenticeships, engineering colleges, specialist contractors, metalworking businesses and maintenance services throughout the surrounding locality.
An economy cannot live indefinitely by consuming imported goods, providing services and increasing debt. It must retain the ability to make and repair essential things.
A national core supporting local economies
Localism does not mean that everything must be organised at village or town level. Some systems are too large or specialised to be provided locally.
A localist future is likely to have two levels.
The first would be a limited national core. It might include defence, telecommunications, the main railway network, specialist hospitals and major electricity generation.
The second would consist of numerous local economies providing food, care, education, housing, maintenance and everyday necessities.
Nuclear power belongs mainly to the national core. Its purpose would be to provide dependable electricity for activities that cannot function without it.
That electricity could then support local food processing, refrigeration, water supplies, sawmills, workshops, health facilities and small manufacturers. Nationally generated electricity would help localities meet their own essential needs.
The reactors would not themselves constitute localism. They could provide part of the framework within which localism develops.
The shrinking economy
The shrinking economy makes the proposed reactors both more valuable and more difficult to build.
They could provide secure electricity as fossil fuels become less affordable. At the same time, their construction depends upon the large and complex industrial economy that is beginning to contract.
Nuclear power requires enormous expenditure many years before any electricity is produced. The Anglesey project is intended to demonstrate commercial viability by the mid-2030s.
During that period, the Government may face declining tax revenues, rising borrowing costs and growing demands upon health and social care. It will also have to maintain roads, railways, water systems, public buildings and the electricity grid.
The Government will increasingly have to choose between maintaining existing essential services and financing new infrastructure. A project that appears affordable in a growing economy may become much less affordable when the economy is contracting.
Rising material and construction costs
A nuclear reactor requires large quantities of steel, concrete, copper and specialised components. Producing and transporting these materials requires energy.
As energy becomes more expensive, the cost of mining, steelmaking, manufacturing, transport and construction will rise. The costs of security, waste management and eventual decommissioning must also be met.
SMRs are supposed to reduce costs through standardisation and factory production. This advantage will only be realised if sufficient numbers of identical reactors are ordered.
Three British reactors may not be enough to provide the expected economies of scale. Orders from the Czech Republic, Sweden and other countries are therefore important to the commercial case.
If weakening economies cause orders to be postponed or cancelled, the anticipated cost reductions may never appear.
Continuing international dependence
The Newcastle decision reduces one important dependency, but the reactors will not be wholly British.
Reactor pressure vessels may be imported from South Korea or the Czech Republic. Other specialised components will also depend upon international suppliers. Even the Newcastle turbines will be manufactured by Siemens Energy, a German-owned company.
A shrinking world economy may make these supply chains less dependable. Manufacturers may close. Governments may protect strategic industries. Transport costs may rise. Countries may give priority to their own energy projects.
Bringing production home wherever possible is therefore sensible. It reduces exposure to international disruption and preserves skills that might otherwise disappear.
The Government’s objective of manufacturing 70 per cent of the components in Britain should be regarded as a measure of resilience, not merely a way of creating jobs.
The cost of the grid
Generating electricity is only part of the undertaking. The national grid must carry it to consumers.
Britain must maintain transmission lines, substations, transformers, control equipment and local distribution systems. Much of this infrastructure will require renewal or expansion.
In a shrinking economy, the grid may become increasingly difficult to finance. A declining industrial base could reduce total electricity consumption while leaving the country with high fixed costs. Fewer economically active consumers would have to support an expensive national system.
Electricity could therefore remain costly even if the reactors operate successfully.
Energy security does not automatically mean energy affordability.
Competition for skilled workers
Nuclear construction requires engineers, welders, electricians, inspectors and project managers. These skills are also needed to maintain railways, water systems, power stations and other essential infrastructure.
A shrinking economy will not necessarily release the right workers in the right places. It may instead create intense competition for a limited supply of specialist labour.
The Newcastle factory could help by providing apprenticeships and continuous employment. But 550 jobs will not recreate the enormous industrial ecosystem Britain possessed when Calder Hall and Sizewell B were built.
Skills take years to develop. They must be supported by colleges, workshops, suppliers and a dependable stream of orders.
Nuclear power will not restore growth
The greatest danger is the belief that new nuclear power will restore the growth economy.
Electricity is not a complete replacement for fossil fuels. Nuclear reactors do not directly provide diesel for tractors, excavators, heavy lorries, ships and construction machinery.
Some of these activities may be electrified. Doing so would require another enormous programme of manufacturing and investment. The reactors themselves will be built using an economy still heavily dependent upon oil, gas and internationally traded materials.
Nuclear power cannot reproduce the conditions of cheap and abundant fossil energy upon which the modern industrial economy was built.
It may help to preserve essential services within a smaller economy. That is a more limited purpose, but it is still an important one.
Reindustrialisation on different terms
The Newcastle announcement has been presented as evidence of the Government’s intention to reindustrialise Britain.
That should not be taken to mean that Britain can recreate the expanding industrial economy of the twentieth century. The energy and financial conditions that sustained that economy are disappearing.
Reindustrialisation in a shrinking economy will have to be selective. Britain must decide which productive capabilities are essential and ensure that they are retained. Turbine manufacturing may be one of them. Much discretionary production will not be.
The purpose of industry will increasingly be to maintain essential systems rather than to support ever-rising consumption.
This means producing equipment that can be maintained, repaired and used for many years. The servicing operation at Newcastle may ultimately be as important as the original manufacture of the turbines.
Build while the capability remains
There is an argument for proceeding while Britain still possesses the capital, skills, international purchasing power and industrial organisation needed to build the reactors.
These capabilities cannot be assumed to exist indefinitely. Delay could allow costs to rise until the projects are no longer possible.
This creates a difficult choice. Building the reactors will consume capital, energy and materials that could be used elsewhere. Failing to build them could leave Britain without enough dependable electricity to maintain essential services later.
The decision should therefore be based upon realistic expectations of a smaller economy. The reactors should be designed as part of an essential national core, not as instruments for restoring perpetual growth.
The shrinking economy strengthens the need for secure electricity while weakening our ability to finance it.
The return of turbine manufacturing to Newcastle is encouraging because it restores a valuable productive capability. But the ultimate importance of the reactors will not be measured by whether they revive the former growth economy.
It will be measured by whether they can provide affordable and dependable electricity for the essential national systems and resilient local economies upon which life in a smaller economy will depend.
Just Stop Oil may be seen as an early sign of the changes that will accompany the shrinking economy.
However, the reduction in oil use is unlikely to happen simply because governments prohibit it. It will happen increasingly because oil, diesel fuel and the activities that depend upon them become less affordable.
The modern industrial economy was built upon abundant, inexpensive fossil energy. Diesel fuel made possible large tractors, combine harvesters, construction machinery, road haulage and the daily delivery of food to supermarkets. It allowed factories to draw materials from across the world and distribute finished goods through national and international markets.
As energy becomes more expensive, the economy cannot continue operating on the same scale. A rising proportion of its resources must be devoted simply to obtaining energy, maintaining infrastructure and servicing debt. Less remains for discretionary consumption. The result is not an ordinary recession followed by renewed growth. It is a long-term shrinking of the industrial economy.
Just Stop Oil recognises that dependence upon oil must end. But its emphasis is mainly upon stopping new oil and gas development to limit climate change. Localism approaches the same problem from the direction of economic necessity. It asks what happens when society can no longer afford to use diesel fuel in the quantities to which it has become accustomed.
The answer cannot be the abrupt removal of diesel from every activity. Modern food production and distribution are critically dependent upon it. If diesel supplies were suddenly withdrawn, farmers would struggle to cultivate and harvest crops. Food processors would lose deliveries, and supermarkets could quickly run short. Emergency services, care workers and essential trades would also be affected.
In the shrinking economy, diesel use is more likely to be reduced progressively. The least essential uses will disappear first because people and businesses can no longer afford them. Recreational driving, frequent flights, long-distance commuting and the transport of low-value goods over great distances will become increasingly difficult to sustain.
Diesel will then have to be concentrated upon essential purposes. Agriculture, emergency services, necessary construction and the maintenance of water, electricity and telecommunications may receive priority. The question will no longer be whether oil should be used, but where its declining availability produces the greatest social benefit.
The contraction of road transport
Road haulage is one of the foundations of the industrial economy. Thousands of lorries constantly move food, building materials, components and consumer goods around the country. This system assumes that diesel fuel, vehicles, tyres, spare parts and maintained roads will remain affordable.
A shrinking economy will weaken every part of that system. Haulage charges will rise. Roads will deteriorate as maintenance becomes more expensive. Marginal deliveries will cease to be worthwhile. Businesses dependent upon distant customers or suppliers will become vulnerable.
Rail could carry a greater proportion of essential long-distance freight. Goods could be moved between towns by rail and then distributed locally by smaller vehicles. Over time, electric vans, bicycles, handcarts and perhaps animal-drawn vehicles could undertake some short journeys. None would replace the present haulage system completely. Their importance would lie in creating an economy that required less movement.
Farming with less diesel
Agriculture presents the greatest difficulty. British farming has become dependent upon powerful machinery, imported fertilisers, pesticides and long supply chains. It produces large quantities of food with relatively little human labour, but it does so by consuming considerable amounts of energy.
Reducing diesel use would require more than replacing tractors with electric versions. Batteries capable of powering large machinery are costly, heavy and dependent upon complex international industries. A shrinking economy may not be able to manufacture and replace them on the scale required.
Farms may instead become smaller, more diverse and more labour-intensive. Machinery would continue to be used, but it would be shared, maintained for longer and reserved for work where it offered the greatest advantage. More people might work in food growing, processing and distribution. Horses could return for certain tasks, particularly on smaller farms, in woodland and on difficult ground.
Food production would also move closer to consumers. Local mills, dairies, slaughterhouses, bakeries and preserving businesses would reduce the need to carry food repeatedly across the country. A locality with good land and food-processing skills might become prosperous in practical terms, even while contributing relatively little to the measured growth economy.
Localism will reduce the need for oil
The most effective way to reduce oil consumption is not merely to substitute another fuel. It is to reduce the amount of energy that everyday life requires.
A locality that grows more of its own food needs fewer lorries. A town with local workshops needs fewer distant deliveries. People who live near their work need less transport. Repairing goods reduces manufacturing and shipping. Local markets shorten the distance between producer and customer.
This is where localism differs from many national energy plans. Those plans commonly assume that the industrial economy can continue largely unchanged if petrol and diesel vehicles are replaced by electric ones and fossil-fuelled machinery is supplied with alternative energy.
But electrifying everything would require immense quantities of electricity, copper, batteries, generating equipment and grid infrastructure. These would have to be financed, manufactured and maintained while the wider economy was already shrinking. Some electrification will certainly be useful, but it cannot preserve every part of the present system.
Localism begins with the recognition that less energy will be available and affordable. It therefore reorganises economic life around shorter distances, fewer material demands and locally available resources.
Evolution rather than prohibition
Just Stop Oil looks principally towards government action. Localism is more likely to emerge naturally from economic conditions.
As discretionary spending contracts, businesses serving non-essential markets will close. Workers will seek employment in food production, repair, care, maintenance and other essential activities. Some people will move from places with few viable livelihoods to localities where useful work remains available.
This has happened before. When employment declined in the slate-quarrying areas around Corris, some workers moved to the coalfields of South Wales. Future migration may follow different routes, but the underlying process will be similar. People will move towards places capable of supporting them.
Government cannot prevent the shrinking economy by borrowing more money or announcing another growth strategy. Nor can it design localism in every locality. It can, however, help the natural evolution by protecting essential diesel supplies, supporting rail freight, permitting small-scale food processing and removing regulations that unnecessarily favour large centralised businesses.
An early indication, not the complete answer
Just Stop Oil is therefore coincident with one early movement towards localism. It challenges the belief that increasing quantities of oil will always be available to support economic growth. It helps to make society conscious of a dependence that was previously taken for granted.
But the shrinking economy will reduce oil consumption regardless of protest. People will drive less because driving becomes unaffordable. Businesses will transport fewer goods because their customers have less discretionary income. Farmers will use diesel more carefully because its cost absorbs a growing share of their income.
The essential task is not simply to stop oil. It is to prepare for an economy in which oil, diesel fuel and many other resources are less available and less affordable.
Just Stop Oil asks society to reduce fossil-fuel use because of climate change. The shrinking economy will compel society to reduce it through declining affordability. Localism is the practical way in which people may adapt to both.
The usual response to drought is to wait for rain. We protect what we can, watch the forecast and hope that next year will be better.
But suppose the conditions we have recently experienced become a recurring feature of life. Suppose dry springs and hot summers repeatedly interrupt the growing season. What should we do differently?
This is already a practical question. The Environment Agency’s report for 14–20 August 2026 recorded drought across 71 per cent of England’s land area. Recent rain had not restored normal conditions. Reservoir storage remained below average, and many rivers were running low. Environment Agency drought report
We need not assume that every future summer will be identical. The useful planning assumption is that prolonged water shortages will return often enough to change how we garden, farm and organise our food supply.
On that assumption, restoring everything to its previous condition after each drought makes little sense. We need to use each drought to discover what must change.
Begin with the land
Our first question should not be how to obtain more water. It should be how to make better use of the water that arrives.
A garden or farm needs to be understood as a particular place. Where does rain run off? Where does it soak in? Which ground stays moist longest? Which slopes dry first? Where do wind and reflected heat make matters worse?
These differences should guide what we grow and where we grow it.
We have often treated drainage as an unquestioned improvement. Yet land must now cope with both excessive rain and prolonged dryness. Getting water away quickly in winter can conflict with keeping enough for summer.
The aim should be to slow unnecessary runoff, encourage infiltration where appropriate and provide safe routes for surplus water. Ponds, planted margins and carefully designed water storage may have a place. But reshaping land is not a universal remedy. Soil, slope, buildings and neighbouring land all matter. A poorly placed bank or pond can create another problem.
We should begin by observing, then make changes that suit the ground.
The garden must change its expectations
The garden of the future can remain beautiful. But beauty may need to depend less on constant watering.
A green lawn throughout a dry summer should cease to be a requirement. Established grass often recovers when rain returns. Plants that repeatedly struggle in a particular position should prompt reconsideration rather than an annual rescue operation.
The Royal Horticultural Society recommends choosing plants for the soil, shade and exposure of the site. It also stresses that plants may need to tolerate wet winters as well as dry summers. Simply filling a garden with Mediterranean plants is not an answer for every British soil. RHS drought-resistant gardening
There is a place for fewer small pots, less thirsty seasonal bedding and more permanent planting suited to local conditions. Flowers still matter. So do insects, birds and the pleasure of sitting outside. Adaptation need not mean turning every garden into a vegetable plot or a gravel yard.
Where food is grown, however, scarce water should have a clear purpose. A manageable area of productive ground may be more useful than a large vegetable plot that cannot be maintained through six dry weeks.
This is especially important where age, disability or limited time restrict the work people can do. The best design is one that can actually be looked after.
Soil care becomes water care
Compost, suitable mulches and protection from unnecessary compaction deserve more attention than emergency watering alone.
Organic matter can improve soil structure and water retention. Mulching helps reduce evaporation. These are among the RHS’s central recommendations for using less water in gardens. They work best as continuing practices, rather than measures introduced after plants have begun to fail. RHS watering advice
But we should not make extravagant promises. Improved soil does not manufacture rain. Even carefully managed ground will eventually dry during a sufficiently long drought.
The purpose is to give plants a better chance and make available water last longer.
For food growing, this also means trying different varieties and sowing dates, keeping records and spreading risks. A single successful season proves little. What matters is which crops give a useful harvest across several difficult years.
Store water on a useful scale
A water butt is a beginning. It is not necessarily a summer water supply.
The arithmetic helps. Ten millimetres of rain falling on a roof of 100 square metres amounts to 1,000 litres before collection losses. But applying the equivalent of that same rainfall to 100 square metres of vegetable ground also requires 1,000 litres.
A modest tank can therefore fill quickly and empty quickly.
Storage should be planned around the area to be watered, the crops being protected and the likely length of a dry spell. Roofs on houses, sheds and farm buildings deserve attention. So do covered tanks, sound gutters and arrangements that minimise waste.
At farm scale, the Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board identifies storage and irrigation efficiency as important parts of protecting crop water supplies. AHDB water supply guidance
Yet storage has costs. Tanks, reservoirs, pipes and pumps require money, materials and maintenance. In a shrinking economy, the useful question is not simply what can be built. It is what can remain affordable to operate and repair.
Gravity may help where the site permits. Shared storage may help where holdings are close together. Neither removes the need to establish what water is actually available.
Farming for difficult years
A farm planned around an average year may become increasingly exposed if average conditions rarely arrive.
The objective should shift towards maintaining useful production through a succession of difficult seasons. That may mean more varied rotations, trials of different crops and varieties, improved soil management and a closer match between production and dependable water supplies. AHDB identifies these approaches as important responses to changing conditions on arable farms. AHDB climate adaptation guidance
For livestock farms, drought is a problem of drinking water and fodder together. Feeding winter reserves during summer merely moves part of the shortage forward. Defra’s recent account describes reduced grass growth, pressure on forage and stressed water supplies. Defra drought guidance
Where such conditions recur, stocking levels must be reconsidered against what the land can support in poor years. Maintaining numbers through repeated purchases of expensive feed may become untenable.
Different grazing mixtures, shelter and changed management may help on suitable land. None should be presented as a cure that works everywhere. Local trials and farmers’ experience will matter more than a fashionable prescription.
Localism must include water
Local food production offers opportunities, but it does not escape the weather.
If every garden, smallholding and farm in a locality suffers the same drought, being local is not enough. A useful local food system needs several forms of production, workable water arrangements, storage of harvested food and links with other places.
Localism should therefore mean greater local capability, not complete isolation.
Neighbours could share growing records, propagate plants that have performed well and organise composting. Landowners could make suitable ground available to growers. Farms and households could develop reliable trading relationships rather than meeting only through distant supply chains.
Some localities may be able to organise shared equipment or water storage. Others may find that their greatest contribution is processing and preserving seasonal surpluses.
Such arrangements will not appear automatically. Access to land, money, skills and physical help will determine who can participate. People without gardens must not be excluded from the benefits.
There is still a national responsibility
Households cannot compensate for failing public infrastructure with buckets.
Reliable public water supplies, leakage reduction, agricultural research and protection of rivers remain collective responsibilities. Local adaptation needs a functioning national framework.
Nor should access to water be settled solely by purchasing power. Drinking water, sanitation, food production and living rivers are fundamental needs. If scarcity becomes persistent, choices between competing uses must be made openly.
The danger is that adaptation becomes something prosperous households and well financed businesses can buy, while everyone else experiences higher food prices and fewer options.
A serious response must address that inequality.
What should happen next?
When rain returns, the work should begin rather than stop.
Gardens and farms should record what survived, what failed and where moisture remained. The next planting season should reflect those observations. Storage should be assessed before the next dry spell. Crops, cultivated areas and livestock numbers should be considered against realistic water and labour budgets.
At locality level, the first step could be a simple conversation between growers, farmers, landowners and residents: what can this place reliably produce, what prevents it, and what could we do together?
The deeper change is in our expectations. We cannot assume that enough water, energy and money will always be available to maintain any pattern of land use we choose.
If drought becomes normal, gardens and farming must be organised around the limits of the places they occupy.
That is also a foundation of localism: learning what a locality can sustain, caring for the resources it has, and building everyday life around that knowledge.
Batteries are often presented as one of the great technologies of the future.
They are central to electric vehicles, renewable energy systems, home storage and the proposed electrification of almost every part of modern life.
The argument is straightforward. Fossil fuels provided society with abundant, concentrated energy. As those fuels become more difficult and expensive to obtain, electricity generated from renewable sources will take their place, with batteries providing the storage needed to make the system work.
Jeff Currie, the commodities economist, represents this view. He argues that electrification will create enormous demand for the materials required to build the new energy system – copper, lithium, nickel, graphite and other minerals. From this perspective, batteries are not a marginal technology. They are at the centre of a new industrial transformation.
However, Tim Morgan’s Surplus Energy Economics provides a very different starting point. His argument is that the world economy has not simply slowed temporarily. The era of economic expansion driven by increasing supplies of affordable surplus energy has ended, and the economy is moving into contraction.
From this perspective, the question is not how batteries will enable another century of economic growth.
The question is how batteries can help communities function in an economy with fewer resources available.
Batteries are not energy sources
The first principle is often overlooked.
A battery does not create energy.
It stores energy that has already been produced.
A battery is like a water tank. It can store water when supplies are plentiful and release it when needed, but it cannot create new water.
The same applies to electricity.
A battery charged from solar panels on a summer afternoon can provide power during the evening. It can help a house, farm or community manage short interruptions. It can smooth out the daily variations of renewable electricity.
These are extremely valuable functions.
But a battery cannot overcome a prolonged shortage of energy.
Several weeks of cold, calm and cloudy weather cannot be solved simply by installing more batteries. The challenge is not only technological. It is a question of scale, resources and the physical limits of energy systems.
The industrial problem
Modern batteries are remarkable achievements of industrial society.
They depend upon global mining, chemical processing, advanced manufacturing and international transport.
Lithium must be extracted and refined. Copper must be mined and processed. Graphite, nickel and other materials must be obtained and transformed into highly engineered components.
This requires enormous amounts of energy and industrial organisation.
The irony is that the technology intended to support a post-fossil fuel economy is itself a product of the high-energy fossil fuel economy.
As long as growth continues, this may not present a major difficulty.
But in a shrinking economy, every complex system comes under pressure.
From replacement to stewardship
A growth economy encourages replacement.
Products are designed, purchased, used and eventually discarded. New versions appear and consumers are encouraged to upgrade.
A shrinking economy works differently.
Resources become too valuable to waste.
Maintenance becomes more important than replacement.
Repair becomes more important than disposal.
This is where batteries become interesting.
They may no longer be viewed as consumer products with a limited life. They may become long-term capital assets requiring careful management.
Lessons from the wireless accumulator
This is not an entirely new idea.
When many households first owned radios, especially in rural areas before universal electricity supply, a wireless set often depended on a lead-acid accumulator.
The accumulator provided the low-voltage electricity needed by the radio valves. When it became discharged, it was not thrown away.
It was taken to a local garage, radio shop or electrical supplier.
There, it was inspected, topped up with distilled water and connected to a charging system. A controlled direct current slowly reversed the chemical reaction inside the battery and restored its charge.
The customer collected the accumulator and returned it to the radio.
The local supplier was not merely selling a product. It was providing an energy service.
The community understood that stored energy required management.
Battery husbandry
This older approach provides a useful model for the future.
Previous generations practised what might be called equipment husbandry.
A farmer maintained a tractor because replacing it was expensive.
A village maintained a water pump because it was essential.
Tools were repaired because they represented accumulated knowledge and resources.
The same principle may apply to batteries.
Battery husbandry means treating batteries as valuable assets rather than disposable objects.
It involves:
extending battery life,
careful charging and discharging,
repairing damaged packs,
replacing individual components where possible,
recovering useful materials,
sharing specialist knowledge locally.
A community skilled in battery husbandry would be less dependent on distant manufacturers and fragile supply chains.
Batteries as local infrastructure
In a shrinking economy, batteries may become part of local infrastructure.
A village might operate shared battery storage connected to solar panels.
A farm might store electricity to maintain refrigeration, water pumping and essential machinery.
A community workshop might repair battery packs and recover components from older equipment.
The important question changes.
It is no longer:
“How many batteries can we produce?”
It becomes:
“How can we obtain the greatest benefit from the batteries we already have?”
A different hierarchy of use
A shrinking economy will require different priorities.
Some uses of batteries may become difficult to justify.
Large battery packs moving heavy vehicles carrying a single person may appear wasteful when compared with other needs.
The same battery capacity used for water systems, food storage, communications, emergency services or local workshops may provide much greater community value.
The issue is not whether batteries are useful.
They clearly are.
The issue is where they should be used.
The future of batteries
Jeff Currie is right that batteries represent a major industrial demand for minerals and that electrification requires enormous investment.
Tim Morgan is right to ask whether the economic system required to build and maintain that technology can continue expanding in a world of declining surplus energy.
The localist answer lies between these two views.
Batteries are neither a magic solution nor an unnecessary technology.
They are valuable tools.
But in a shrinking economy their greatest contribution may not be enabling unlimited consumption. It may be helping localities preserve essential services, maintain resilience and make careful use of the energy resources that remain.
The future of batteries may therefore look less like a technological revolution and more like a return to an older principle:
Energy is something to be managed, maintained and husbanded carefully.
The battery may become the modern equivalent of the village mill, the water pump or the well – a vital local asset whose value comes not from novelty, but from dependable service over many years.
Nate Hagens has published a thought-provoking essay entitled Mordor to the Long Repair: How Might Daily Life Feel in the Next Decades? It can be read here:
Rather than attempting to predict the future, the essay explores a series of possible futures and asks a much more useful question: what might everyday life actually feel like as industrial civilisation encounters increasing economic, energy and ecological constraints?
The central argument is that there is no single future waiting ahead. Instead, society may travel along several different paths depending upon political choices, resource availability and human behaviour. Some futures are darker than others, but all acknowledge that the era of abundant, cheap energy and perpetual economic growth is drawing to a close.
One of these futures is described as “Mordor.” Here, societies become increasingly authoritarian as governments struggle to preserve existing institutions despite declining resources. Living standards fall, inequality widens, public services deteriorate and social tensions become commonplace. Industrial systems continue to operate, but with increasing difficulty and at ever greater cost.
At the other end of the spectrum lies “The Long Repair.” This is not a return to some imagined golden age, nor is it a technological miracle. Instead, it is a gradual adaptation to a world with fewer resources, lower energy availability and reduced complexity. Communities slowly rebuild resilience by becoming less dependent on fragile global systems and more capable of meeting their own needs.
This vision resonates strongly with the principles of localism.
The Long Repair is not simply about surviving decline. It is about reorganising society around what is practical rather than what is merely efficient. Global supply chains give way to regional and local production wherever possible. Repair replaces replacement. Skills become more valuable than consumption. Communities rediscover cooperation because it becomes economically necessary rather than socially desirable.
These ideas are entirely consistent with the concept of a shrinking economy. As surplus energy declines, discretionary spending contracts and the economic landscape changes fundamentally. Many industries that flourished during decades of growth gradually disappear, while activities meeting essential human needs become increasingly important.
The essay provides an excellent explanation of why this transition may occur. However, it says relatively little about how communities might organise themselves once the transition begins. That is where the practical ideas of localism become important.
A resilient locality needs more than goodwill. It requires practical systems. Local food production, local water supplies, community energy, workshops, repair skills, local communications, community ownership of assets and neighbourhood governance all become essential components of everyday life. These are not nostalgic ambitions but rational responses to a world of increasing uncertainty.
Perhaps the most valuable aspect of Hagens’ essay is its emphasis on imagination. Much discussion about the future focuses on economic statistics, politics or technology. Far less attention is given to how daily life may actually change. What work will people do? Where will food come from? How will homes be heated? What skills will children need? Which institutions will remain important?
These are the questions that deserve serious attention.
There is, however, another perspective that helps explain why a Long Repair may be more than simply one possible future. Tim Morgan’s Surplus Energy Economics provides a compelling underlying mechanism.
Morgan argues that prosperity is determined not by the total amount of energy produced, but by the amount of surplus energy remaining after the energy sector has supplied its own needs. As the Energy Cost of Energy (ECoE) rises, less surplus energy is available to support the wider economy. The result is a gradual decline in discretionary prosperity, slowing economic growth, increasing financial instability and growing pressure on governments, businesses and households.
From this perspective, many of the trends described by Hagens are not isolated problems. They are symptoms of a deeper physical reality. Modern industrial civilisation has been built upon abundant, inexpensive surplus energy. As that surplus diminishes, society is forced to simplify. Complexity becomes increasingly expensive to maintain, while localisation becomes increasingly attractive because it reduces dependence upon long, energy-intensive supply chains.
This interpretation also explains why many current policies appear unable to restore sustained economic growth. Governments continue to pursue growth because the existing financial system depends upon it. Yet if declining surplus energy is the underlying constraint, policies alone cannot reverse the trend. They may delay the adjustment, but they cannot remove its physical causes.
Seen in this light, localism is not a political ideology or a nostalgic movement. It is an adaptive response to changing economic and energetic realities. Communities that can produce more of their own food, energy, water, goods and essential services are likely to prove more resilient than those dependent upon increasingly fragile national and global systems.
The Long Repair is therefore much more than an interesting scenario. It represents the gradual rebuilding of society around the resources that are actually available rather than those that were once assumed to be limitless.
For those seeking to understand the decades ahead, Nate Hagens provides an insightful picture of what the transition may feel like, while Tim Morgan offers a persuasive explanation of why it may be happening. Together they point towards a future in which local resilience, practical skills and strong communities become not simply desirable, but essential.
Dr Tim Morgan’s latest essay,#327: Surplus Energy Economics, is perhaps the clearest and most complete summary yet of the ideas he has been developing over the last thirteen years. Rather than introducing new theories, it draws together the evidence into one coherent explanation of why the era of economic growth is ending and what may follow.
For anyone interested in localism, it is an important document because it describes the physical limits that make a more local society not simply desirable but increasingly inevitable.
The economy runs on energy, not money
Morgan begins with a simple observation. The economy is not fundamentally a financial system. It is a system for supplying goods and services. Money merely records claims upon that production.
This seems obvious, yet modern economics often behaves as though money itself creates wealth. Governments, banks and investors increasingly judge success by GDP, stock market values and financial assets rather than by the economy’s ability to provide food, housing, energy and essential services.
Morgan argues that this is the wrong way round. Wealth comes first from energy and physical resources. Money only has value because it represents claims upon those resources.
The importance of surplus energy
Every energy source requires energy to obtain it.
Coal must be mined.
Oil must be drilled, transported and refined.
Wind turbines and solar panels must be manufactured, installed, connected to the grid and eventually replaced.
The energy left over after obtaining energy is what Morgan calls surplus energy. This surplus powers everything else in society – farming, manufacturing, healthcare, education, transport, entertainment and government.
His central argument is that the Energy Cost of Energy (ECoE) has been rising steadily for decades. More of society’s total energy is now consumed simply in obtaining more energy, leaving less available for everything else. According to his estimates, average ECoE has risen from around 2% in 1980 to more than 11% today.
This is not simply an energy problem.
It becomes an economic problem.
Why growth has stalled
Traditional economics assumes that growth can continue indefinitely through technology, finance and innovation.
Morgan disagrees.
He argues that technological improvements have not been able to overcome the steadily increasing energy cost of obtaining usable energy. As surplus energy falls, so does the ability of the economy to expand.
Debt, quantitative easing and financial engineering have delayed recognition of this reality but cannot remove the underlying physical constraint.
From this perspective, many of today’s problems begin to make sense.
Falling living standards.
Increasing inequality.
Rising government debt.
Asset bubbles.
Political instability.
Competition for resources.
Declining affordability of essential goods.
These are symptoms rather than separate problems.
The connection with localism
This is where localism enters the picture.
Many people still think localism is a lifestyle choice, a political preference or nostalgia for village life.
Morgan’s work suggests something much deeper.
As surplus energy declines, highly centralised systems become progressively harder to maintain.
Long supply chains.
Global food systems.
Just-in-time distribution.
Mass commuting.
Disposable consumer goods.
International tourism.
Large bureaucracies.
All depend upon abundant surplus energy.
As that surplus declines, societies naturally begin shifting towards simpler, shorter and more local systems.
Essential replaces discretionary
Morgan distinguishes between essential and discretionary activities.
Essential activities include food production, water, housing, healthcare and basic transport.
Discretionary activities include much of modern consumer culture – endless product choice, fast fashion, frequent flying, luxury consumption and many financial services.
As energy becomes scarcer, society increasingly directs resources towards essentials.
This is exactly the direction that localism has advocated for years.
The future economy is likely to become less concerned with consumption and more concerned with resilience.
A more labour-intensive society
Another conclusion follows naturally.
Where abundant fossil energy once replaced human labour, declining surplus energy means more work will again be done by people.
That does not necessarily imply hardship.
It may instead mean more gardeners, growers, builders, repairers, foresters, craftspeople, carers and local manufacturers.
Many activities abandoned because fossil fuels made them uneconomic may once again become worthwhile.
Small farms become viable.
Repair replaces replacement.
Local food processing returns.
Community skills regain their value.
What local communities should be doing now
Morgan ends on a remarkably optimistic note.
He argues that a post-growth economy is entirely manageable if societies begin developing local, bottom-up institutions before centralised systems weaken further.
That observation deserves careful attention.
Waiting until national systems fail would be a mistake.
Communities can begin preparing now by:
rebuilding local food production;
protecting agricultural land;
developing local water resilience;
encouraging repair and maintenance skills;
supporting local businesses;
strengthening community organisations;
creating local energy where practical;
reducing dependence upon long supply chains.
None of these requires waiting for government.
A different understanding of progress
The greatest value of Morgan’s work may be that it changes the question.
Instead of asking:
“How do we restart growth?”
we should perhaps be asking:
“How do we build good lives with less surplus energy?”
That is precisely the question localism seeks to answer.
The transition will not be easy. Many existing institutions were built during two centuries of expanding fossil-fuel energy and assume that growth will continue indefinitely.
But if Morgan is broadly correct, then localism is not an alternative to the future.
It is the future already beginning to emerge.
The sooner communities understand this, the more orderly, resilient and humane that transition can become.
Europe is once again discovering the weakness of depending on distant energy supplies. Gas storage levels are unusually low for this time of year, and analysts are warning that the continent could enter the coming winter with significantly less reserve than normal. Even though fighting in the Middle East has eased for the moment, the underlying problem has not gone away.
The immediate cause may be conflict affecting global gas markets, but the deeper issue is that Europe has become increasingly dependent on imported energy carried across oceans and through vulnerable international supply chains. Every geopolitical crisis now has the potential to raise prices and threaten supplies.
For Britain, this is another warning that energy security cannot simply mean finding another overseas supplier. It means reducing dependence on fuels that have to be imported from thousands of miles away. A localist approach looks instead to producing as much energy as possible within each locality – using solar power, wind, small-scale hydro where appropriate, biomass from sustainable woodland, and above all reducing demand through better building design and insulation.
No single local energy source will replace natural gas. However, a diverse collection of local resources can make communities far less vulnerable to international events. Every kilowatt-hour generated locally is one that does not have to be bought on volatile world markets.
The lesson is becoming increasingly clear. Whether the disruption comes from war, sanctions, financial instability or simple resource depletion, our highly centralised energy system is becoming more fragile. The answer is not merely to build bigger storage facilities or search for new imports. It is to rebuild resilience from the ground up, so that every locality is able to meet a greater share of its own essential energy needs.
Each new energy crisis reinforces the same message. Local resilience is no longer an environmental aspiration – it is becoming an economic and social necessity.
The transition to renewable electricity is often presented as a simple replacement of one source of energy with another. Replace coal and gas with wind turbines, solar panels and batteries, and little else changes. The reality is very different. Every additional layer of technology needed to compensate for the shortcomings of intermittent generation makes the electricity system more complex, more expensive and potentially more fragile.
A recent warning from government technical experts illustrates the problem. Britain is rapidly installing large-scale battery storage systems to help stabilise the electricity grid when wind and solar output fluctuates. These batteries can respond almost instantly, making them valuable tools for balancing supply and demand.
However, the experts have identified an unexpected danger.
When the National Energy System Operator (NESO) issues a Capacity Market Notice warning that electricity shortages are becoming likely, battery operators have a commercial incentive to ensure their batteries are fully charged. If many operators respond at the same time by drawing large amounts of electricity from the grid, they could actually create the shortage they are preparing to prevent.
In other words, the solution itself could become part of the problem.
Complexity Creates New Risks
This is a classic example of what happens when increasingly complicated systems attempt to solve problems created elsewhere in the same system.
For over a century Britain’s electricity supply relied on large power stations producing continuous, predictable electricity. Demand varied throughout the day, but generation could usually be adjusted in a controlled way.
Renewable electricity changes that relationship. Wind turbines produce electricity when the wind blows, not necessarily when consumers need it. Solar panels produce their maximum output at midday rather than during the evening peak.
To compensate, we now need:
enormous battery installations
sophisticated forecasting systems
automated trading algorithms
reserve generating capacity
expanded transmission networks
increasingly complex control systems.
Every additional component introduces another possible point of failure.
None of these technologies is necessarily unreliable on its own. The problem is that the overall system becomes so interconnected that small events can trigger much larger consequences.
The Cost of Chasing Stability
Large batteries are impressive engineering achievements, but they are not free.
Consumers ultimately pay not only for the batteries themselves, but also for:
construction
maintenance
replacement
grid upgrades
control systems
reserve generating capacity
market payments that keep backup systems available.
Much of this expenditure exists because renewable generation is intermittent. If electricity production were naturally predictable, many of these additional systems would not be required.
As the grid becomes more complicated, household electricity bills inevitably reflect that complexity.
Bigger Systems Need Bigger Solutions
National electricity networks have always been large engineering projects. But the increasing dependence on intermittent generation pushes centralisation even further.
The grid operator must monitor thousands of wind turbines, millions of rooftop solar panels, hundreds of battery installations and countless automated control systems.
Artificial intelligence, advanced forecasting and increasingly sophisticated computer control become essential simply to keep everything operating safely.
The irony is striking. Technologies often promoted as decentralised require unprecedented levels of central coordination.
What Localism Suggests
Localism approaches resilience from a different direction.
Rather than asking how to make one enormous national system increasingly sophisticated, Localism asks whether every community needs to depend so completely upon that single system.
Local electricity does not mean abandoning the national grid. Instead, communities could gradually develop complementary local energy systems that reduce dependence upon distant infrastructure.
These might include:
local solar generation
small-scale hydro where appropriate
biomass from local woodland management
combined heat and power schemes
carefully managed community battery storage
reduced overall electricity demand through efficient design.
The crucial difference is scale.
A community battery serving a village or neighbourhood is managed to meet local needs rather than participating in national electricity trading markets. Local users understand local demand patterns and can adapt their consumption accordingly.
If one local system develops problems, it affects hundreds or perhaps thousands of people rather than millions.
Resilience Rather Than Maximum Efficiency
Modern infrastructure has been designed to maximise efficiency.
Localism places greater emphasis on resilience.
An efficient system may perform extremely well under normal conditions but fail dramatically when unexpected events occur.
A resilient system may appear less efficient but continues operating when conditions become difficult.
Nature follows this principle. Healthy ecosystems contain redundancy, diversity and overlapping functions. If one species declines, others often compensate.
Highly centralised technological systems tend to eliminate redundancy because redundancy appears inefficient.
Unfortunately, redundancy is often what keeps systems functioning during crises.
Living Within Natural Limits
The battery warning is not really about batteries.
It is about the increasing complexity required to maintain an industrial energy system that is becoming harder to balance as high-quality fossil fuels become more expensive and renewable generation expands.
Each new technical solution creates further technical challenges.
More batteries require more control.
More control requires more computing.
More computing requires more infrastructure.
More infrastructure requires more investment.
The cycle continues.
Localism suggests a different path.
Rather than continually expanding technological complexity, communities can gradually reduce dependence on vulnerable national systems by producing more essentials locally – food, water, some energy, repair services and basic manufacturing.
This does not eliminate the national grid. It simply reduces the consequences when that grid comes under stress.
The future may belong not to the most technologically complicated societies, but to those that build the greatest resilience. True security comes not from ever more elaborate systems designed to prevent failure, but from communities that can continue functioning when those systems inevitably encounter their limits.
In the early days, electricity was generated mainly by simple mechanical methods that turned dynamos or generators. The principle was discovered in the 1830s by Michael Faraday, who showed that moving a magnet near a coil of wire could produce an electric current.
The earliest electricity supplies were very local. A factory, mill, large house, or street lighting scheme would often have its own generator.
Here are the main early methods:
Steam engines
By the late 1800s, most electricity was produced by steam engines. Coal was burned to boil water into steam, and the steam drove a piston engine or later a steam turbine connected to a dynamo.
Typical uses:
Street lighting
Tramways
Factories
Wealthy homes
Public buildings
Early power stations were small and local because electricity could not easily be transmitted long distances.
6
Water power
Some early electricity generation used water wheels or water turbines, especially in rural areas and mountainous districts. Existing mill streams were adapted to drive generators.
This was one of the first forms of hydroelectricity.
7
Gas engines
Before large national systems existed, some towns and businesses used gas engines fuelled by “town gas” made from coal. These engines drove small generators.
Wind and small local systems
A few isolated farms and estates used small wind generators or private systems with batteries, especially before rural electrification.
4
Direct current (DC)
The first systems usually used direct current, associated with Thomas Edison. DC worked for nearby lighting but could not travel far efficiently.
Later, alternating current (AC), promoted by Nikola Tesla and George Westinghouse, allowed electricity to be transmitted over much greater distances. That led eventually to large national grids.
In Britain, one of the earliest public power stations was the Holborn Viaduct power station in London in the 1880s. At first, electricity was mainly for lighting rather than for the huge range of appliances we use today.
The interesting point is that early electricity was often highly localised. Many places generated only what they immediately needed. The later national grid system came after engineers learned how to interconnect many power stations and transmit electricity over long distances.
Drilling for oil, you might tempted to believe, will always pay for itself as it produces the fuels needed for its continued extraction. The more oil we lift, the more fuel (and energy) we have, right? Wrong. Let me explain. A barrel of oil would produce 5.9 Gigajoules of energy when fully burned, which might sound like a lot. Considering the fact, however, that only 27% of what we call ‘oil’ can be turned into diesel—the most vital fuel of all—on a global average¹, and that diesel engines burn fuel at an average 35% efficiency, only a tiny fraction of the energy stored in a barrel of oil can be used to drill more wells, mine minerals, harvest fish/wood/crops, build infrastructure, power militaries or to transport goods across large distances. That roughly 10% of energy derived from a barrel of crude is what keeps billions of people and a globalized world economy alive. The rest remains embedded in products (plastics, solvents, lubricants, asphalt, wax etc.) or simply get burned for our convenience in cars and jets. Unlike in the US it’s perfectly possible to live a decent life without a car or flying around with jets in many other parts of the world. The same could not be told about diesel, without which perpetuating modern, high-tech civilization would be impossible.
Trying to squeeze more diesel fuel out of a barrel of oil, on the other hand, would not only cannibalize the output of other fuels (mostly jet and fuel oil) but would also increase the energy cost of getting the raw power we need, thereby defeating the very idea of getting more useful energy out of a barrel of oil. Thus, when a study on Energy Return on Energy Invested (Delannoy et al., 2021) concluded that we use up a little more than 15% of energy stored in a barrel of oil to explore, drill, lift and deliver the next barrel of oil, they pointed out something profound. We need more energy to extract oil than what we could obtain by burning it in tractors, trailers, trucks and all kinds of heavy machinery to maintain civilization as it is. Again: no oil well was drilled using gasoline nor any mineral was extracted or fish caught with airliners—not in any meaningful quantity at least. What’s worse, as the authors found, the energy cost of oil is projected to reach 50% by 2050 as low cost conventional reserves continue to deplete, and get increasingly replaced by unconventional oil and energy intensive methods required to push what remains to the surface. That’s clearly not going to work on a global scale. But then how does the math work with even today’s numbers?
Simply put: we use the rest of the global energy system to subsidize liquid fuel production. Many wells and pumps are now running on electricity, and much of the energy used in refineries comes from natural gas. Sure, when taking all fuels together, producing oil is still net positive in energy terms but extracting petroleum long ceased to be a self-sustaining, self-perpetuating process. Half a century ago when the energy cost of oil was a mere 3% (or less), the 10% useful work derived from the diesel portion of a barrel was more than enough to power the oil business AND provide 7% “free” energy to the economy. Now its the other way around: we are using more and more electricity, natural gas, and in some cases even “renewables”, just to keep diesel flowing and the world economy ticking.
The electrification of transportation, ahem, isn’t going as fast as many of its advocates thought. Source: Ember Energy
‘Then why don’t we shift to other fuels or electrify transportation?’—the question poses itself. You see, batteries and hydrogen, the most often touted “alternatives” to oil, are a way of storing energy at a loss, and not a source of energy. Thus, in order to replace oil we would not only need to dig up all the raw materials required to build these technologies—by using diesel fuel, what else?—but we would also need to multiply the electric grid’s capacity in order to cater for battery charging and hydrogen production demands. Even when considering engine inefficiencies, and calculating with the net energy portion of diesel, jet fuel and gasoline only² we would still need to produce at least 395 kilowatt-hours of power for each barrel of oil replaced. For the 103 million barrels humans burned every single day in 2025—that energy amounts to 40.7 Terawatt hours per day, or 14,850 TWh for an entire year… And we haven’t even taken electric engine and AC/DC conversion losses (10%) or battery recharge cycle inefficiencies (another 10%) into account—let alone the enormous energy cost of generating hydrogen… Not to speak of transmission losses over the grid which could be as high as 60% in the case of America or 40-50% everywhere else. All in all, as this back of an envelope calculation shows, we would need to generate around 36,600 TWhs of electricity on top of the existing 32,600 TWhs produced annually—just to electrify every machine which currently burns oil products globally. And then we haven’t even mentioned electrifying the industry which would take a similar amount of electricity. Triple that grid Mr. President, please.
In order to achieve our current grid expansion goals (which are far-far lower than we calculated above) the US alone would need to install 5,000 miles of new high-voltage lines annually, yet actual additions have collapsed from nearly 4,000 miles in 2013 to a historic low average of just 392 miles between 2022 and 2025. During the same time period China has doubled it’s electricity generation and now consumes nearly 33% of all electric power generated globally, while America’s share has fallen below 15%. Yet, expanding the grid and generation capacity is not even the biggest concern here, no matter how insurmountable a challenge it might seem in the West. It’s not even battery manufacturing capacity, much of which was going into electric vehicles already, and has surpassed 1.5 Terawatts of storage created annually. It’s the global scale of the change, combined with the rapid depletion of resources needed to make the shift, that will eventually put the energy transition into death.
“I have to finish this sweater before I run out of yarn!”
As a 2024 (but now removed) study by Rystad found: we have no more than a couple of years before we max out global oil supply, facing a long decline afterwards. And while green energy fans might rejoice, while envisioning a smooth ride into an electrified utopia, they have to be reminded that we are still mining (and thereby destroying) the planet with diesel fuel. And without mining, there is no aluminum, nickel, copper etc. needed to build batteries and to expand the electric grid with. Nor food… Or long distance transportation… Let alone construction. The coming peak in supply is not a matter of investment decisions either: we are no longer able to replace those oil reserves we have used up³ and now have to live off of our legacy fields—much of which have already passed their production peak. Making matters worse while these older larger fields deplete slowly at first, their depletion rate accelerates with time. (These results were later confirmed by the IEA as well.) The oil economy faces a double whammy from worsening energy returns on investment on one side, and an absolute depletion on the other; leading to a precipitous fall in net value delivered to society.
That, my friends, is a mighty big peak in global oil production. Source: IEA
And it’s not just oil, but copper as well. Independent from what happens to oil, or whether we manage to electrify mining or not, the world is rapidly approaching an inflection point where mined copper supply begins to fall—irrespective of demand or investment decisions. So, even as global mined copper output reached a record 22.8 million tons in 2024, the IEA expects global supply to peak later this decade (at around 24 million tons) before falling noticeably to less than 19 million tons by 2035, as ore grades decline, reserves become depleted and mines are retired. Despite the potential contribution from African copper, new greenfield supply will struggle to make up the difference, as it takes 17 years on average till a mine starts production from discovery, and as new mines cost more and more to open. Simply put, we have run out of time, capital, reserves and energy to prevent a massive shortfall in copper production by 2030.
On the demand side, at the same time, achieving net-zero carbon emissions by 2050 would require a whopping 460% increase in copper production, which would necessitate the opening of 194 new large-scale mines over the next 32 years; tapping into imaginary reserves which are simply nowhere to be found. I think it’s not a terribly risky bet to say: it probably ain’t gonna happen… What you see here is what your ‘grandma running out of yarn before she finishes’ means in real life.
The Government’s decision to approve the One Earth Solar Farm in Nottinghamshire and Lincolnshire is another reminder that Britain’s planning system has become increasingly centralised. It is not simply about renewable energy. It is about who has the right to decide how land is used.
In this case, the Government’s own planning inspector recommended that permission should not be granted. The inspector had considered the evidence, weighed the arguments and concluded that the proposal should be refused. Yet the Energy Secretary, Ed Miliband, simply overruled that recommendation.
This illustrates one of the greatest weaknesses of Britain’s highly centralised system of government. Local people, local authorities and independent inspectors can spend years examining a proposal, only to have their conclusions swept aside by a minister in Whitehall.
That is not local democracy. It is central command.
The One Earth Solar Farm will cover thousands of acres of productive agricultural land. At a time when Britain imports a growing proportion of its food, replacing fertile farmland with industrial-scale energy developments raises serious questions about national resilience.
Many of these low-lying areas have also experienced flooding. Large solar arrays alter the way land is managed. Maintenance tracks, fencing, drainage works and extensive ground disturbance can affect the movement of water across the landscape. Whatever mitigation measures are proposed, flooding risks should always be considered carefully before approving developments of this scale.
Local communities understand these landscapes far better than distant departments in London. They know where water collects, which fields remain wet throughout the winter and how changing land management affects neighbouring properties.
This is precisely why decisions should be made as close as possible to the people who live with the consequences.
Localism does not mean opposing renewable energy. It means asking whether electricity generation should become another function returned to the locality rather than imposed from above.
Instead of a handful of enormous solar installations owned by large corporations, localism points towards many smaller schemes owned by communities, farms, cooperatives and local businesses. Electricity generated close to where it is used reduces transmission losses, spreads risk and allows income to remain within the local economy.
Large developments also make communities increasingly dependent upon national infrastructure and national political decisions. Smaller locally owned systems build resilience because they can evolve with local needs and local resources.
The approval of the One Earth Solar Farm therefore represents more than another planning decision. It demonstrates how Britain’s planning system has drifted away from local accountability.
When ministers can overrule their own inspectors, local consultation becomes little more than a procedural exercise. The message is clear: decisions are made in Whitehall, not in the communities that must live with them.
If Britain is serious about creating a resilient future, we need more than renewable energy. We need a planning system that trusts local people, protects productive farmland, respects local knowledge of flood risk and allows communities to shape their own future.
A deeper layer of denial sits underneath climate change itself, and it is rarely acknowledged directly: the denial that energy is what makes modern life possible at all.
Most people do not think in terms of energy. They think in terms of systems that simply “work”:
food appears in supermarkets
heating comes from a thermostat
transport arrives on demand
goods are always available
electricity is assumed to be permanent and invisible
This creates a powerful illusion: that society is self-running, almost natural. In this mindset, energy is not seen as the foundation of everything, but as just another utility, endlessly available and adjustable.
In reality, every part of modern life depends on continuous, high-density energy flows. Food is not just grown, but fertilised, irrigated, harvested, processed, refrigerated, transported, and retailed. Housing is not just built, but heated, lit, repaired, insured, and maintained through vast supply chains. Even information systems depend on large-scale electricity networks, data centres, and global logistics.
Yet this dependence is rarely felt directly, so it is mentally excluded. This is the second denial: not only is climate change softened into something “somewhere else in nature”, but energy itself is erased from the mental model of everyday life.
Climate Change Meets Energy Denial
When Climate change begins to affect crops, water, and infrastructure, it is not experienced as an energy problem. It is experienced as “weather”, “prices”, or “supply issues”.
The connection is broken in perception.
But in physical reality, climate disruption is fundamentally an energy disruption. Heat stress reduces agricultural output. Drought reduces hydroelectric generation and irrigation. Extreme weather damages transport and distribution systems. All of this feeds back into higher energy use required to repair, cool, and stabilise systems that are already under strain.
The article on overheated food prices highlights exactly this chain: rising temperatures do not stay in the atmosphere. They move through land, labour, logistics, and finally into household cost.
Yet most responses remain fragmented:
food inflation is treated as monetary or political
energy prices are treated as market cycles
heat waves are treated as temporary anomalies
The unified energy system behind all of them is rarely acknowledged.
Heat Waves and the Collapse of the “Normal Future”
Heat waves are important because they briefly make energy visible.
During extreme heat:
cooling systems strain electrical grids
transport slows or fails
productivity drops sharply
water demand rises
infrastructure becomes fragile
In other words, society is forced to spend more energy just to maintain normality.
But once the heat wave passes, the system appears to reset. This reinforces denial in two ways:
It feels like recovery, not escalation
It restores the illusion that stability is the default state
So even as heat waves become more frequent, they are often processed as separate incidents rather than as evidence of a rising baseline energy load on the system.
The Deeper Psychological Pattern
This links back to a broader structure of denial:
Climate change is softened into “weather variation”
Energy is softened into “services”
System dependence is softened into “normal life”
All three work together to preserve a central belief: that the future will broadly resemble the present, with manageable adjustments.
Accepting the opposite would be more disruptive than most people are prepared for. It would require acknowledging that:
stability is energy-intensive
energy itself is increasingly constrained and stressed
climate change is not external to the system, but embedded in it
So the mind does what it has always done under strain: it compartmentalises.
Conclusion: The Invisible Foundation
The real denial is not simply about climate change. It is about the refusal to see that modern civilisation is an energy-dependent structure operating at the edge of environmental stability.
Heat waves do not just test comfort. They briefly expose the cost of maintaining normal life at all.
And when they pass, the illusion returns.
That cycle – disruption, then forgetting – is what allows both climate change and energy dependence to remain widely acknowledged, yet only partially believed in their consequences.
Artificial intelligence and cloud computing are driving a rapid expansion of data centres. They are often presented as symbols of progress, bringing investment and employment. Yet beneath the headlines lies a question that deserves much more attention.
Economist Tim Morgan recently observed:
“There’s another aspect of this that’s worrying. If somebody builds a data centre in your locality, what happens to your cost of electricity and water, when they’ve got effectively bottomless pockets?”
This question goes to the heart of the localist argument.
Electricity and water are not unlimited resources. Every locality has finite generating capacity, finite distribution networks and, increasingly, finite water supplies. A large data centre may consume as much electricity as a small town and millions of litres of water each day for cooling. When such a development arrives, it becomes a powerful new competitor for essential resources.
The owners of these facilities are often among the wealthiest corporations in the world. They can afford to pay prices that ordinary households, farms and small businesses cannot. Even if they negotiate long-term contracts, the extra demand they create still requires investment in new infrastructure. Ultimately those costs are often spread across everyone else.
The result is that local people may find themselves paying higher prices for electricity and water, while having little influence over decisions that affect their daily lives.
This illustrates one of the weaknesses of an economy organised around perpetual growth. New developments are assessed mainly by the value of the investment and the contribution to national output. Much less attention is given to the effect on the resilience of the locality itself.
Localism asks a different question.
Instead of asking whether a project increases national GDP, it asks whether it strengthens or weakens the ability of the locality to provide for its own people. Does it leave enough affordable electricity for homes, workshops and local industries? Does it protect water supplies for farming, food production and daily life? Does it improve the long-term security of the community?
In an age of growing resource constraints, these questions become increasingly important.
A shrinking economy makes the issue even more significant. As energy becomes more expensive and investment capital becomes scarcer, every kilowatt of electricity and every litre of water become more valuable. Local communities cannot assume that additional supplies will always be available.
This suggests that essential resources should increasingly be regarded as strategic assets belonging first to the locality. Major industrial users should demonstrate not only that they can pay for these resources, but also that their use does not reduce the resilience and prosperity of the surrounding community.
Future planning may therefore need to move beyond traditional economic assessments. Before approving major developments, localities may need to ask whether they can genuinely afford to allocate scarce electricity and water to activities whose principal benefits flow elsewhere.
The debate is therefore not about opposing technology. Data centres undoubtedly have a role in modern society. The question is one of priorities.
When resources become constrained, should communities compete with global corporations for the essentials of life, or should those essentials first secure the well-being of the people who live there?
That is a question localism is uniquely equipped to answer.
One of the less publicised features of Britain’s electricity system is that wind farms are often paid not to generate electricity.
This may seem extraordinary. The country is investing billions of pounds in renewable energy, yet at times electricity producers are instructed to switch off turbines even when the wind is blowing strongly. The reason is simple. The electricity cannot always be transported to where it is needed.
Most of Britain’s largest wind farms are located in Scotland and offshore in northern waters. Much of the demand for electricity, however, is in England. The national grid must therefore move huge quantities of electricity over long distances. When transmission lines reach their limits, the system operator has little choice but to reduce generation.
The result is a curious situation. Wind farm operators receive payments to stop producing electricity, while gas-fired power stations elsewhere may be paid to generate more power to meet local demand. Consumers ultimately bear the cost through their electricity bills.
This problem highlights a weakness in highly centralised systems. The further production is separated from consumption, the greater the infrastructure required to connect them. Large transmission networks are expensive to build, expensive to maintain, and increasingly difficult to expand.
From a localist perspective, the lesson is clear. Whenever possible, production and consumption should be brought closer together. Electricity generated near where it is used requires less infrastructure, suffers fewer transmission losses, and reduces dependence on large national networks.
This does not mean abandoning the national grid. Large-scale infrastructure will always have a role in providing resilience and balancing supply across the country. However, the present situation suggests that excessive dependence on distant generation creates costs that are often overlooked.
As the economy evolves away from the assumptions of perpetual growth, questions of affordability become increasingly important. Building ever more transmission capacity to carry electricity over hundreds of miles may prove difficult to justify in a society facing financial constraints.
A localist alternative would encourage greater use of local generation, local storage, and local consumption. Electricity generated within a locality could be used within that locality wherever practical. The national grid would remain as a strategic backbone, but not as the sole means of connecting every producer to every consumer.
The payments made to wind farms not to generate electricity are therefore more than an accounting curiosity. They are a reminder that distance carries a cost. In an age where affordability is becoming as important as efficiency, bringing production closer to consumption may increasingly become not merely desirable, but necessary.
Most public discussion of societal collapse treats history as a warning system: if we read the past correctly, we might predict if collapse is coming, when it should arrive, and how severe it will be. This entire predictive impulse is understandable but not unproblematic. The historical and archaeological record is too contingent, context-bound, and selectively-preserved from which to generate reliable forecasts for our own times. We see a different and potentially more valuable role for historians and archaeologists today. Rather than helping us predict collapse, they can help us reflect on how some societies appear to have softened collapse, adapted to contraction, and transformed in ways that preserved elements of culture, meaning, and social coherence. Studying past civilisations to see how some of them managed their ‘descent’, or their ‘simplification’, could contribute to a conversation about new narratives for the current situation, so that we aren’t trapped in cultural imaginaries that defy biophysical realities. This type of historical curiosity would be interpretive and to some extent subjective, as we cannot escape contemporary values or present-day concerns. But that is not a flaw. On the contrary, acknowledging subjectivity can help this effort to be humble and honest: as a reflective exercise intended to inform present choices, not to claim timeless laws of history or near-certainties about what will happen by when.
Why this matters now
For some years now, we have argued that modern societies remain gripped by two inadequate narratives.
The first is perpetual progress: the assumption that modernisation, technological substitution, and economic growth can and must continue everywhere. In biophysical terms, this narrative is impossible, and increasingly recognised as such. Yet it persists because it structures institutions, identities, and political legitimacy.
The second narrative is a nostalgic, defensive, triage within global disruption: an effort to preserve a mythologised past by fortifying borders, cultures, and hierarchies as various systems come under stress and degrade. This is the emotional base of much contemporary reactionary politics, from the rise of religious traditionalism around the world to the view that immigration is the key cause of a society’s ills. This narrative includes a grain of truth in the need to reconsider the direction of societies and relocalise many aspects, as was explained in our Deep Adaptation book, by ourselves but also and especially by Skeena Rathor and Matthew Slater, who built on the seminal work of Helena Norberg-Hodge. However, what we have called the second narrative is flawed in imagining that some symbolic return to an earlier era will address what is a never-before-experienced biophysical context.
We regard such narratives as these two as offering a pressure-valve of pride and blame, without addressing root causes or pursuing actual remedies. Within the modern societies which we are aware of, what is missing in both popular culture and political discourse are narratives of intentional contraction, adaptive simplification, cultural continuity through transformation, and dignified loss. This is where historians and archaeologists can contribute — not so much warners of roads not to take, still less as prophets of doom — but as curators of possibility. They can contribute to dialogue from a stance of ‘positive pessimism’ that explores potential ‘thrutopias’: ways of getting through what is coming as well as humanly possible, given the impossibility now of perfect utopias. Thrutopia, a concept drawn initially from readings of Ursula le Guin’s great novel of political possibility ‘The dispossessed’, centres process rather than outcome, and possibility rather than alleged certainty. Thrutopianism is thoroughly reality-based, and combines optimism of the will with pessimism of the intellect. In being grounded in the non-negotiability of truthfulness about both our tragic predicament on the one hand and the vast and exciting chance we have of acting for good on the other, thrutopianism connects naturally with ‘apocalypse’ in its true sense: revelatory vision, once the veil of our hand-and-mind-forged manacles has been rended. We might then hazard a label such as ‘hopeful apocalypticism’ to the attitude which we along with the kind of historians and archaeologists for whom we write aim henceforth to take: active hope grounded in truthfulness and curiosity towards how really tough moments in our common human heritage were handled.
When we invite (attention to) such intellectual creativity, we are not ignoring the ongoing suffering, nor what could be reasonably attempted technologically to reduce the damage from environmental disruption. Nor do we forget that there is useful resistance to the ongoing damage being caused, nor deny there is blame for what is happening and accountability to be sought for that. Instead, our interest is how to ‘get real’ about what might help at the level of cultural narratives so as not to make matters worse as societies come under much greater strain.
Three examples of adaptive contraction and transformation
What societies in the past might stimulate such a dialogue? By being curious about this topic and noticing claims about the history of civilizations which resonated with that curiosity, we have identified three examples which could be candidates for further inquiry. As we are not historians or archaeologists, and certainly did not do a methodical study of past civilisations, we offer these examples cautiously. We don’t identify them as something to attempt to copy, but as means for us to ask different questions about what it means to endure.
First, we could consider the Eastern Roman (Byzantine) Empire after the 7th century. Following territorial losses, demographic collapse, and fiscal contraction, the Byzantine world did not simply fall. This section of the Roman Empire, across parts of Eastern Europe and Western Asia, appeared to intentionally reorganise itself. Urban life shrank, monetary circulation narrowed, and state capacity was reduced, yet many core institutions, such as law, liturgy, language, and administrative memory, persisted for centuries. The Empire appears to have willingly embraced forms of localisation: it responded to incursions by the rising Muslim armies not by attempting to double down on an unsustainable large central army, but to give soldiers land and to get cohorts of soldiers to defend their portion of the Empire against the invaders. For more than we have space for here, see Read’s Why climate breakdown matters, which draws upon Joseph Tainter’s classic – though controversial – interpretation of the long survival of the Byzantine Empire. The invitation we see in this case is to consider the possibility that eased material suffering does not require territorial expansion, material growth, or ideological projection, but the relinquishing of some power to communities. We are curious to the extent this was intentional and, if so, by whom and how they communicated with different aspects of society.
A second civilisation we could learn about to inspire our ideas of managed decline is the Mayan civilisation in modern day Central America. It is one that has fascinated archeologists, as well as the anthropologists who study present-day descendants. One of your authors looked into this scholarship for his book Breaking Together, and discovered that the history should not be framed as civilisational failure, but as processes of urban-rural migration and the re-localisation of trade and governance. At various times in the history of the Mayans, their power decentralised, populations dispersed, and ritual life changed rather than disappeared. Many people may have preferred that way of life, even if it was compelled initially by changes in climate or the spread of disease. We note that some scholars (reasonably) claim that the elites in Mayan societies made difficult situations worse, tipping the situation into outright collapse. Clearly the conversation is limited by what evidence archeologists can find. Nevertheless, we see an invitation in this history to shift our attention from the collapse of elite power to everyday persistence, and from worrying loss to lived adaptation.
A third example to reconsider is Post-Roman Britain and Western Europe after the collapse of Roman imperial systems. Of course much was lost at the time, including infrastructure, literacy, and long-distance trade. Yet both ancient and new forms of social organisation, spirituality, and local resilience, all emerged. Meanwhile much was preserved, such as the knowledge that endured and even flourished within Monastic networks. A range of hybrid cultures formed and there is evidence people had bright lives in the “dark ages” — a term merely arising from the subsequent interest in written records (We note the fascinating recent work ‘The Green Ages: Mediaeval innovations in sustainability’). Compared to the Byzantine case, there is less to suggest there was an intention from Rome to manage a transition to a post-imperial situation. So perhaps it was an organic process from people having the opportunity to reclaim their power. We know we are speculating with limited data, but do so to generate the type of reflection we think will be helpful today. Perhaps the invitation here is for us to let go of the idea that complexity must be defended at all costs, and explore how value and meaning can be found in more diverse, yet simpler and more localised ways of living.
Although we have only read some studies on each of these cases, already we notice several recurring themes for narrative-generation that might alleviate the metacrisis, societal decline and collapse. There was the importance of scale-reduction where endurance involved shrinking prevailing systems to ecologically and socially manageable sizes. Interestingly, this shrinking reminds us of the principle of ‘relinquishment’ in the contemporary Deep Adaptation framework. Another theme we notice is cultural portability, where the practices, rituals, and values that could migrate were able to survive, rather than the fixed infrastructures. Highly interesting is that there frequently appeared to be elite loss and popular survival. By that, we mean that the collapses typically meant the end of ruling classes, not the end of culture itself. We also notice that the adaptations sometimes unfolded over generations, so probably required some people to be thinking at that scale. That contrasts with the amount of people today who focus on the next election, annual report, or their retirement fund (or even an afterlife).
As we speculate on such cross-cutting themes, we don’t see them offering any great solace for what is a terrible and unprecedented situation facing humanity today, along with the catastrophic damage to habitats and biodiversity that is unfolding. However, they do expand the imaginative space in which we can think and act. There could be lessons here for people working in the field of futures studies, design thinking, scenario planning, and those wishing to enable hope and imagination in society, at various levels. Artists, writers and imagineers of all stripes plainly have a role to play here, too. We think for instance of ‘solarpunk’ (though we find much too much of it overly utopian in how it pictures technology and politics); or of StarHawk’s remarkable parable of non-violence under extreme strain, ‘The fifth sacred thing’; or of broadly thrutopian novels such as Steve Markley’s ‘The Deluge’ or Ian McEwan’s ‘What we can know’.
Our invitation to explore lessons from those past civilisations which softened their collapse is not ignoring or downplaying the importance of recognising the enduring forms of Indigenous Peoples’ societies. Those societies might not be considered “civilisations” by some observers, but they are culturally rich and have persisted despite efforts of colonialists and modern humans to extinguish or assimilate them. However, the urban societies which the vast majority of humans live within, or are partly dependent on, today, aren’t able to directly copy the lower density and lower specialisation of such societies. We can take inspiration from them in more general terms, and also from the way they coped with external genocidal pressures, as we will explain further in a moment.
Existing scholarship pointing towards narratives to soften collapse
In our edited collection Deep Adaptation: navigating the realities of climate chaos, we included perspectives from a range of intellectual disciplines. However, as we did not know any historians or archeologists who were trying to learn about the narratives accompanying softened collapses of past civilisations, we did not include those disciplines in the book. We think this is an important absence, and so would welcome seeing more work done on this topic in future. Currently we know of some scholarship which moves close to such an agenda.
Chris Wickham has usefully reframed post-Roman Europe not as ruin but as reorganisation, producing winners and losers. James C. Scott has drawn attention to non-state spaces and forms of life that evaded societal collapses as they avoided over-integration. In their classic 2009 book Questioning Collapse, Patricia McAnany and Norman Yoffee present evidence for how famous collapses were actually periods of reorganisation and decentralisation. The work most relevant to our topic here is contained in the 2023 edited compilation “How Worlds Collapse.” Their central explanation is that leaders often faced a ‘cognitive crunch,’ when they recognised crises like resource depletion, but could not respond to the complexity of that, leading to maladaptive decisions. This created tension between elite protection (clinging to power by intensifying extraction) and adaptive leadership (orchestrating a deliberate simplification for wider survival). Regarding collapse as a process, not an event, the authors in this book identify an optimal outcome is a managed reorganisation with smaller units of complexity — a “soft landing.” It stands as the first major scholarly synthesis to explicitly explore the daunting principles and historical precedents for a managed descent in response to our current situation of global ecological overshoot. Luke Kemp, in Goliath’s Curse, explores similar themes, particularly how coercive institutions generate both power and fragility, suggesting that collapse can sometimes release adaptive capacity rather than extinguish it. Building on and rhyming with Graeber, Wengrove and other scholars, Kemp’s work challenges the assumption that larger, more coercive systems are inherently more successful. So if we consider collapse to involve the unravelling of coercive over-reach, then historians could help us imagine futures that are less powerful but more viable.
In the original Deep Adaptation paper on climate chaos, one of your authors referred to an analysis of how leaders of the North American Crow Nation coped with the destruction of their culture. Jonathan Lear explained that some of the Native American chiefs developed a form of “imaginative excellence” by trying to imagine what ethical values would be needed in their new lifestyle within a bounded land reservation. He found that besides the standard alternatives of freedom or death (in service of one’s culture) there is another way, less grand yet demanding just as much courage: the way of “creative adaptation.” He wrote that “what makes this hope radical, is that it is directed toward a future goodness that transcends the current ability to understand what it is.” Identifying that process is not to acquiesce to the destruction of Indigenous cultures, but to include within our appreciation of them how they coped with the devastations of colonialism. Some critics then bizarrely cited this part of the Deep Adaptation paper as if it was welcoming the genocide of Indigenous peoples. Their distortion is a reminder of how upset some people can become about analyses which require us to shift our imaginations beyond modernism and the assumption of progress — but it’s clearly the ideological task of our time.
When seeking evidence for narratives or intellectual perspectives that might have aided a softening of collapse in the past, historians and archeologists could benefit from deep dialogue with philosophers and systems-thinkers from a variety of intellectual traditions — Western, Eastern and Indigenous. Now, to be fair, there are less philosophically-minded thinkers and writers than there should be working openly on this. But there are some who are very much in the ballpark: in the West, we think of Iain McGilchrist, or Roy Scranton; of Paul Kingsnorth’s novels of ideas and non-fiction, and of Michael Albert’s important book ‘Navigating the polycrisis’. Looking a little further back, we think of the immense relevance of Arendt’s ‘The human condition’, and of the great works of Wittgenstein and Heidegger. Daoism is a source of relevant riches from the East. One thinker who has done much to make the incredible resources of Indigenous thinking available to the collapse-aware is Tyson Yunkaporta, from whom we have learnt much; Robin Wall Kimmerer’s writings are also of signal importance, in this connection.
What is potentially to be gained from engagement with figures such as these? Far too much, obviously, to even begin to gesture at in a sentence or two: but the glimmerings of a sense of what can be found when one notices the way that many of these thinkers are simply willing to look into the abyss and yet not to drown in despair. Instead, to offer potential pathmarks, including reminders of what we have lost that are not merely nostalgic, but are instead practically beneficial.
And of course there is much more that could be done to learn relevant historical lessons hereabouts: including seeking to learn from what happened under grave pressure during – and after – World War II; and what happened in Cuba when it experienced ‘peak oil’ dramatically, as it lost its oil supply suddenly in 1991 (and Cuba is going through a worse process now, as we write, with outcomes uncertain). The film ‘The power of community’, about the Cuban experience post-1991, is worth watching seriously.
But our topic in this essay has been something different, and comparatively neglected: lessons from deeper-past and more severe still but yet effectually softened– collapses and contractions. As climate and ecological breakdown beckons, tragically, to the human race, it is high time that such lessons were contemplated. We must now begin to treat transformative, strategic and deep adaptation as a genuinely urgent matter that increasingly entails a whole-society approach to its contemplation and enactment. The advantage of using collapse — and descent — softening strategies from civilisations of the last 2000 years as objects of comparison in this endeavour is that they will tend to combine greater psychological accessibility/relevance (compared to Indigenous cultures) on the one hand with sufficient distance to be fairly calmly ‘contemplatible’ on the other.
An invitation, not a prescription
With this essay we are inviting deeper reflection on how some unusual past civilisations/peoples managed one way or another to work out their down-going. It is inspiring how very many Mayan people outran their elites; how the Byzantine empire apparently managed to voluntarily simplify; how post-Roman Britain incrementally set up the quiet glories of the ‘Dark Age’. In further work, one might connect that more directly with some similar emerging trends today: one might for instance see the ‘undensification’ occurring in encouraging examples such as the regreening of Detroit as nodding to aspects of what happened in all three of the main examples that we gave: of civilisations / communities under terrible stress becoming more able to support themselves locally.
Clearly, mainstream civilisational rhetoric is misaligned with biophysical realities, so without stimulating mass imagination beyond the paradigm of progress, the only alternative becomes defensive nostalgia — forms of which we see spreading everywhere without meaningfully confronting reality. We believe that more historians and archaeologists can step into a public, reflective role, helping societies explore narratives beyond either progress and growth fetishism on the one hand, or nostalgic and fortress mentalities on the other. We believe that some of the discussions in the book How Worlds Collapse are a step towards that role. As more scholars take on that role, they do not need to speculate on what might happen, but to help us all ask better questions about what might still matter, what could be carried forward, and how loss might be metabolised without violence or denial. In that sense, ours is absolutely not a call for historical or futural certainty, but for narrative courage and creativity.
To aid this discussion, we are organising a free international online discussion on what inspiration we might take from past civilisational collapses and their handling at the time, under the working title ‘Inspirational collapses: learning from the way some civilisations chose to break down well.’ We will invite historians, archeologists, philosophers and artists to attend and share their ideas on the matter with other interested persons, including activists. Occurring on 7th July 2026, as part of the Metacrisis Meetings Initiative, it will mark the 5th anniversary of the book we edited together. That book demonstrated what can be gained when academics from different disciplines lean into the topic of collapse; and it is in that spirit we are curious about the role of history and archeology.
Please look out for those initiatives (eg via our newsletters/substacks, for which do sign up). But more important: please consider whether you, reader, may have a direct role to play, hereabouts. Is there something in the area where you live which is relevant to the enterprise we have sketched here? Does your location harbour the seeds of a helpful history, for navigating the descent that is to come for us all? Or perhaps it is in your own family-tree, or in your diaspora if that is your background. Or perhaps you simply have a good example to add to the three that we paraded earlier. Whichever it is: consider surfacing it yourself. Or sending it to us.
One of the most curious features of the mainstream unsustainability debate is almost complete absence of reckoning with ‘population-as-obvious-driver’. The subject remains taboo, mustn’t go there. Even serious degrowthers avoid discussing actively degrowing the human population.
This is, as they say, regrettable.
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Unsustainability is about overshoot and overshoot is about humans consuming beyond nature’s recovery rate and dumping wastes in excess of nature’s assimilation capacity. In short, there are already too many people consuming and polluting too much. Need I note (again) that overshoot is, by definition, ultimately a terminal condition?
These are not casual observations that we can merely take under advisement, things that we might consider later if it doesn’t cost too much. In particular, if it is obvious the total human impact on Earth is the product of average impact per person and the number of people doing the impacting, why is population reduction not a major focus of sustainability survival planning?
“Unfair,” you protest, “not all humans are equal impactors.”
Quite true, so let’s get the inequality factor (and any taint of racism) out of the way. Data show that that the richest 10% of people are responsible for half or more of carbon emissions; the wealthy quarter of people account for 52% of resource consumption while the poorest quarter get by on only 6%. This means that, should the global community decide to act aggressively to reduce consumption/emissions by the necessary 44% overall, simple justice would demand that the wealthy take by far the greatest hit (~80% reduction per capita in North America).
Fair enough—though rather more easily said than done. The currently well-to-do are, er… inclined to resist. Income redistribution is, like population planning, taboo. Protected by wealth and associated political leverage, major vested interests, particulary the corporate oligarchs who run the world, won’t even discuss the inequality problem—except to insist we can grow our way to sufficiency-for-all.
And there’s another fly in the equality ointment—even a successful ‘great leveling’ would by no means relieve us of the population question:
· First, overshoot means that even if all 8.2 billion humans had identical lifestyles and ecological footprints, we’d still be in overshoot. Averaging impacts doesn’t reduce totals; material quality per se is not enough—we’d still have to reduce consumption by almost half.
· Second, in recent decades incremental increases in humanity’s (consumption based) ecological footprint and carbon emissions have been driven more by population growth than by increased incomes/consumption in almost all income categories; population growth is a major co-driver of overshoot.
· Third, billions of people in lower income countries (particularly in Africa) are justifiably striving to attain developed nations’ material living standards. But Earth, in overshoot, is not now sustainably supporting even present average levels of consumption; how could it be expected to cope were all 8.2 billion members of the human family living high on the hog? (Remember, we’re supposed to be reducing aggregate consumption; see first bullet point.)
· Forth, we’re actually headed for 10+ billion by the 2080s. Most of the projected population growth will occur in those poorer countries with the greatest material needs and expectations. This amounts to adrenaline for overshoot. What are the additional consequences for global heating and ecological stability? ‘Tipping points’, anyone? Still want to ignore population?
To raise overpopulation-as-issue and ask such obvious questions is not racist; it is simply acknowledging crucial realities and the associated moral dilemma.
Avoiding the obvious
Analysts and the world community actually have myriad reasons for skirting the population question—ancient religious prohibitions, fear of being labeled eco-fascist/racist, self-interested resistance to reform, fanatical allegiance to the perpetual growth ethic and growing science denial being among the most prominent.[1] In one way or another, however, most such excuses arguably spring from the deep ‘exceptionalist’ soil of modern techno-industrial (MTI) culture. To wit: Why be concerned about population? Humans aren’t animals, certainly not like the others; we stand above nature and don’t have to be concerned about natural laws. In any case human ingenuity (technology) will sever any population-to-resources link and solve the overshoot problem.
That’s the happy-clappy story we tell ourselves.
Too bad it’s merely a shared delusion. What goes on in our collective brain often has no grounding in reality.
The obvious flaw here is that H. sapiens not only is an animal, but is the major macro-consumer species in every accessible ecosystem on the planet (always at the expense of both our prey species and our competitors for available biomass). If the scale of material use and population were prime criteria, humans are the most successful large vertebrate ever to walk the Earth. The sheer weight of humans is ten times greater than that of all wild mammals combined. More broadly, the human enterprise has effectively merged (albeit destructively) with the ecosphere and is warping major geophysical processes from the climate and water cycles to landscape erosion. Quite the contrary record for a self-aggrandizing rapacious ape that claims to be detached from the natural world.
Just like the others
Which suggests it might be instructive to pay more attention to what we know about non-human population dynamics—there are plenty of examples of overshoot at work in other large mammal species.
For example, the graph at the top shows the trajectories of reindeer populations in the decades after a few individuals were introduced to the Pribilof Islands off Alaska early in the 20th Century. The islands were resource-rich and predator free. The reindeer, like all species’ populations enjoying favourable conditions, began expanding exponentially. From a handful of individuals in 1911, the St Paul Island herd ballooned to over 2000 individuals in under 30 years before going nearly extinct in little more than a decade. (The St George story was similar but less dramatic.)
The St Paul reindeer’s three decades of expansion provide a classic example of exponential (aka ‘geometric’) growth. This is a form of positive feedback in which each new generation adds to the breeding population ensuring that the next generation will be even larger than itself. The increasing steepness of the curve shows how such ‘compound interest’ accelerates population growth.
An exponentially expanding population has a constant doubling time. After a characteristically slow start in a new habitat, the St Paul herd reached 500 animals around 1931-32, had doubled in less than four years by 1934-35 and doubled again in the next four years, reaching its peak of 2048 animals in 1938-39. The population then crashed spectacularly—there were only eight survivors by 1950. The reindeer had overshot the regenerative capacity of certain lichens, a vital food source in winter. Depleted lichen = starving reindeer, particularly if the winter is exceptionally cold. Out-and-out starvation is one form of negative feedback due to overpopulation; the demise of animals weakened by hunger and succumbing to disease or foul weather is another.
On the upside, the collapse of an over-grazing animal population allows the habitat, particularly crucial food sources, to recover.
So, what have a bunch of starving deer on an Arctic island got to do with we humans?
Quite a lot, actually. For starters, as Malthus emphasized in 1798, humans are just as capable of geometric/exponential growth under favourable conditions as any other species. Malthus also reasoned that we are as potentially susceptible to starvation and other negative feedbacks when circumstances turn South (e.g., when crops fail or pandemics rage).
In this light consider Figure 1. This graph provides a low-resolution portrait of human population over the past 10,000 years, roughly since the beginning of agriculture.
Note that, despite the boost from occasional food surpluses, the population increase for 80% of this period was negligible, averaging only ~.04% annually. Starting from ~4-5 million, it took 8000 years for human numbers to reach just 232 million two millennia ago. The reason is fairly straight-forward; H. sapiens innate capacity for rapid geometric growth (positive feedback) was mostly held in check by local food shortages, constant territorial conflict, and disease (negative feedbacks).[2] As late as the 14th Century, bubonic plague killed off more than a quarter of the European population.
Nevertheless, the population kept growing at a slowly increasing rate. The real boost came with the Enlightenment (beginning in the late 17th Century) and subsequent scientific/industrial revolution. Humanity reached its first billion around 1820 then really took off, eventually on all continents, with improvements in public health and medicine (which reduced death rates) but especially with the exponential increase in fossil fuel-based technologies (which increased food production and access to all other resources needed to support the growing population). Together, these cultural factors enabled humanity to realize its maximum biological capacity for exponential population growth for the first time in human evolutionary history.
Note that the human population trajectory over the past 100 years is a geometric replica of the 30-year explosion of the St Paul reindeer herd (differing only in population size and because the human animal has a longer generation time). By 1927 the human population had reached two billion; we doubled to four billion in ~47 years by 1974-5; the next doubling to eight billion in 2022 also took 47 years (note the constant doubling time).[3] In short, the upslope of the human population growth curve has the same shape as that of the St Paul reindeer herd to peak.[4] It’s nature’s way.
It’s also ‘nature way’ for negative feedback to cut in and strengthen as a population approaches carrying capacity (which depends on habitat productivity and related factors). Figure 2 compares unconstrained exponential growth (2a) with so-called ‘logistic growth’ (2b), the idealized damping of positive feedback by the gradual onset of negative feedback. As population density increases in a specific habitat, so too does competition for food and space; with more crowding, communicable diseases and parasites spread more easily thus increasing mortality; a dense population of prey species attracts predators, increasing the death rate (and producing higher populations of well-fed predators). In theory then, the growth of a population of interest should slow asymptotically as it nears carrying capacity [Figure 2 (b)]. In practice, populations of typical slowly-reproducing mammals like humans tend to fluctuate in the vicinity of long-term carrying capacity as habitat and complex ecological relationships change.
But not always, in extreme cases, particularly in simpler systems such as reindeer on predator-free St Paul Island, the fluctuation may be a dramatic, even terminal, population crash.
Which brings us back to thinking about humans and how far to take our reindeer analogy. The St Paul reindeer population plunged rapidly after reaching peak, but does that say anything important about the human future?
It’s complicated.
Indeed, the human socio-political-ecosystem is vastly more complex and potentially more resilient than was the St Paul Island ecosystem. For example, mainly due to social negative feedbacks,[5] human fertility is actually falling (to the consternation of economists and most governments). The world population is currently expanding at ‘only’ ~70 million people annually, a rate of .85%/year, down and still-declining from the 1963 maximum of 2.2%.
In some ways this is encouraging—one might argue that humanity is gradually approaching peak population and will level off at or below carrying capacity as in Figure 2(b). Conventional wisdom (e.g., United Nations population projections) has it that our population will peak at 10.3 billion in the mid-1980s and then begin a controlled decline to 10.2 billion by 2100. It could be that all is well—crash avoided, airbags unnecessary.
But that’s not the whole story. UN and other conventional population projects are rooted in exceptionalist thinking. They are based entirely on ‘endogenous’ data, e.g., age- and sex-specific mortality rates and average female fertility all abstracted from biophysical reality. There is no consideration of ‘exogenous’ or external factors, the possibility of significant negative feedbacks from the ‘environment’, broadly defined.
Which brings us to Figure 3 (borrowed from my most recent previous post) which includes a should-be-alarming alternative scenario. Note that this graph incorporates Figure 2 (a) and (b). It acknowledges that human carrying capacity is a practical concept, that at any defined average material standard of living there will be a maximum sustainable human population.[6]
Figure 3 presents the recent human population trajectory as an exponential/geometric growth curve which has, indeed, begun to slow and approach peak (first half of solid red line). However, it also indicates that this peak far exceeds pre-industrial sustainable carrying capacity (dotted horizontal black line). Technology has taken humanity far into overshoot which means that our large and growing population is living and expanding by depleting even self-replenishing resources, from fish stocks and forests, to arable soils and groundwater reserves, and by polluting air, soil and waters beyond natural assimilation rates. In doing so, we are causing global heating, destabilizing climate patterns, extinguishing hundreds of other species and otherwise reducing Earth’s productivity and livability. (As I write this much of the Northern Hemisphere including Western Europe is suffering record heat waves. A third of humanity—more than three billion people—may be forced outside of our species’ historic ‘climate niche’ by century’s end). Global heating brings an increasing risk of wide-spread disease and pandemics—recent measles, hantavirus and ebola outbreaks underscore this point—as well as local energy, food and water shortages.
In short, the evidence suggests that exogenous negative feedbacks are rapidly returning as an additional significant factor in human population dynamics. Trump’s war and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz (which has broken crucial global supply chains for petroleum, natural gas, urea fertilizer) is providing a preview of a possible global future of chaos and suffering that will eventually visit millions/billions of people as resources run down and limits are breached.
What might have been
Note that an actively intelligent species, one that accepted its niche in the natural world and understood population and systems dynamics[7], would have self-managed to ensure that its population followed the sigmoid growth curve gradually slowing growth to equilibrate (fluctuate, actually) in the vicinity of long-term carrying capacity (Figure 3, solid green line). Maintaining a civilization at a reasonable material standard yet within the productive capacity of its supportive ecosystems is called “one-planet living”.
As matters stand, MTI civilization is a victim of culture-wide self-deception. We have blown the opportunity to optimize or ‘green line’ human life on this single planet Earth. Other eco-oriented demographic analyses agree that Earth cannot support even the present population without a transformation of mainstream MTI cultural beliefs, values, assumptions and behaviours. Resource depletion, ecosystems destruction and destabilization of global life-support functions have reduced long-term bio-productivity and, with it, human carrying capacity[8] whatever the preferred material standard—and this corrosive process is obviously continuing.
The likely outcome is a ‘great simplification’ of MTI societies, much as was projected by the business-as-usual scenario of the original 1972 Limits to Growth report and several follow-up studies of real-world post 1972 trends. Are we prepared for major economic contraction and accompanying population ‘correction’?
We have too long downplayed the population question. The best humanity can now achieve as we come off peak, is to track the dotted red line (Figure 3) and work toward stabilizing our population within the much-reduced productive means of nature. Should we succeed, future generations will live at numbers well below pre-industrial carrying capacity (dotted black line). This assumes we don’t render ourselves extinct in the resource and habitat conflicts that will accompany the coming implosion (total systems collapse segment of the solid red line).
Epilogue
There are no secrets about any of the above. The threats posed by advanced overshoot fills academic journals and even recent policy analyses; ecologists have studied many boom-bust cycles in nature; the unique elements of human population dynamics are well known; policy makers are well-versed in all sides of the (un)sustainability story. Yet quirky MTI culture still denies the population problem.
All of which goes to show, once more, that macro-scale (corporate, national, geopolitical behaviour) is rarely guided by mere facts and analysis unless the latter support existing mythology, economic narratives, development policies and, of course, our governing elites. The modern ‘system’—MTI culture—has acquired a momentum of its own, powered by innate behavioural tendencies; religious doctrines; equally fantastical cultural narratives (e.g., human exeptionalism and infinite economic growth); powerful influencers; privileged self-interest; emotional resistence; willful blindness and a large dollop of popular indifference/ignorance.
The coming implosion should therefore hardly come as a shock. It is the inevitable product of a defective cultural algorithm combined with human cognitive maleability. The most recent ten generations of modern humans (out of ~17,000 generations) have lived mostly unaware that these are truly exceptional times. MTI peoples have been mesmerized into thinking that continuous economic and population growth are normal and ‘to be continued’; in counter-fact, the past 200 years of fossil-powered growth is the most anomalous period in human history and is ‘to be curtailed.’
The human population went way up; it will come down.
Perhaps some will find comfort in knowing that, one way or another, the next century will see a return to normalcy. Conceivably, like St Paul Island, our Earthly habitat will eventually recover from humanity’s over-grazing.
The seeming inevitability of the transition does not, however, relieve the present generation of responsibility. This is no time to relax; we theoretically still have a choice between acting in ‘normal’ ways that facilitate a fast and brutal collapse or of exercising our much-vaunted high intelligence by coming together cooperatively to manage a controlled and humanely equitable soft landing.
Where would you put your money?
[1] Actually, and perversely, we’re not exactly ‘skirting the population question’. Many high-income countries are actively promoting pro-natalist policies to maintain or grow their populations in the face of declining fertility.
[2] Positive feedback occurs when a change in a systems variable generates further change in the same direction (deviation reinforcing). Negative feedback occurs when a change in a systems variable results in suppression of change in the same direction (deviation counter-acting).
[3] The instantaneous population growth rates actually increased initially during these periods rising, in humanity’s case, to a maximum of 2.2%/annum in the early-mid 1960s.
[4] The compressed time scale and steepness of the curve obscures this fact.
[5] E.g., greater economic freedom for women, improved family-planning education, increasing availability of pregnancy prevention technologies, concern about bringing children into an unstable world, etc.
[6] The numerical maximum can vary substantially. All else held constant, Earth could support more people at a modest material standard than if we all choose to live high on the hog (apparently the MTI default position).
[7]H. sapiens did actually understand all this but, being above nature, chose to ignore mere biology.
[8] Bio-productivity or biocapacity is a quality of ecosystems and should not be confused with carrying capacity which is always a population number. The two variables are related, of course—a highly bio-productive habitat (e.g., temperate grasslands) will support more people at any defined material standard than will a comparably-sized low-quality habitat (semi-arid scrubland). (See also Note #6.)
Much attention has been given to the rapid growth of solar farms across Britain. Vast areas of land are being proposed for solar development, with the expectation that they will provide clean electricity for decades to come. However, a less visible problem is emerging. In many cases, the electricity network itself is struggling to cope.
Large solar farms do not simply feed electricity directly into nearby homes. The power must first be converted, stepped up to higher voltages and then connected to the National Grid through substations and transmission lines. In many parts of the country, the necessary capacity is not available.
As a result, some solar projects are being delayed for years while waiting for a grid connection. Developers have reported being offered connection dates extending well into the 2030s. Others have had to scale back their plans, while some projects have been abandoned altogether because the cost and delay of obtaining a connection made them uneconomic.
This problem has become so significant that the electricity system operator has had to reform the entire connection process. The queue of projects seeking access to the grid had grown far beyond what the existing infrastructure could accommodate.
The underlying issue is that Britain’s electricity network was designed around a relatively small number of large power stations. Today’s energy strategy is based on thousands of dispersed generators, including solar farms, wind farms and battery installations. The transmission system is now having to catch up.
The consequence is that the true cost of large-scale renewable energy is not simply the cost of the panels or turbines. It also includes the substations, pylons, cables and other infrastructure needed to transport the electricity from where it is generated to where it is consumed.
There is also the question of affordability. Britain is carrying historically high levels of public debt, while households, businesses and local authorities are already under financial pressure. Building thousands of miles of new transmission lines, substations and grid connections will require very large investments. Ultimately, these costs must be met by taxpayers, electricity consumers or both.
This raises a difficult question. When it is recognised that the economy is shrinking, not growing, will society be able to afford the scale of investment required,
In the early days, electricity was generated mainly by simple mechanical methods that turned dynamos or generators. The principle was discovered in the 1830s by Michael Faraday, who showed that moving a magnet near a coil of wire could produce an electric current.
The earliest electricity supplies were very local. A factory, mill, large house, or street lighting scheme would often have its own generator.
Here are the main early methods:
Steam engines
By the late 1800s, most electricity was produced by steam engines. Coal was burned to boil water into steam, and the steam drove a piston engine or later a steam turbine connected to a dynamo.
Typical uses:
Street lighting
Tramways
Factories
Wealthy homes
Public buildings
Early power stations were small and local because electricity could not easily be transmitted long distances.
6
Water power
Some early electricity generation used water wheels or water turbines, especially in rural areas and mountainous districts. Existing mill streams were adapted to drive generators.
This was one of the first forms of hydroelectricity.
7
Gas engines
Before large national systems existed, some towns and businesses used gas engines fuelled by “town gas” made from coal. These engines drove small generators.
Wind and small local systems
A few isolated farms and estates used small wind generators or private battery systems, especially before rural electrification.
4
Direct current (DC)
The first systems usually used direct current, associated with Thomas Edison. DC worked for nearby lighting but could not travel far efficiently.
Later, alternating current (AC), promoted by Nikola Tesla and George Westinghouse, allowed electricity to be transmitted over much greater distances. That led eventually to large national grids.
In Britain, one of the earliest public power stations was the Holborn Viaduct power station in London in the 1880s. At first, electricity was mainly for lighting rather than for the huge range of appliances we use today.
The interesting point is that early electricity was often highly localised. Many places generated only what they immediately needed. The later national grid system came after engineers learned how to interconnect many power stations and transmit electricity over long distances.
For many years Britain has assumed that the future of electricity would simply involve “more of the same” – more power stations, more cables, more electric vehicles, more heat pumps and more dependence upon a huge National Grid carrying electricity across the entire country.
But there is growing evidence that this assumption may be impossible.
The National Grid was developed during the age of industrial growth when energy was abundant, industry was expanding and the economy was becoming larger every decade. The entire system was designed around centralisation. Huge power stations generated electricity in one place and transmitted it over long distances to passive consumers.
The new vision is entirely different. Millions of houses are expected to charge electric cars, run heat pumps, install batteries and sometimes even feed electricity back into the system. Instead of a relatively stable flow of electricity from large generators, the Grid is expected to cope with countless small and fluctuating inputs and demands.
At the same time Britain is attempting to close older reliable generation systems while becoming increasingly dependent upon intermittent wind and solar generation. Electricity may be plentiful one day and scarce the next. The balancing of the system becomes extraordinarily difficult.
The problem is not simply generation. It is transmission.
Electricity grids are physical systems with limits. Substations, transformers and cables can only carry a certain load. Much of Britain’s electricity infrastructure was never designed for simultaneous vehicle charging, electric heating and battery storage on a national scale.
Upgrading the entire system would require enormous quantities of money, raw materials, engineering labour and time. In a shrinking economy these become increasingly difficult to obtain.
The contradiction is obvious. Britain is attempting to build an electricity-intensive society precisely at the moment when economic surplus is beginning to contract.
Even if the technology works technically, the affordability becomes doubtful. Households already struggle with energy bills. Councils are close to insolvency. Government debt rises continuously. Large infrastructure schemes become more expensive every year.
There is also a deeper structural problem. Centralised systems become fragile when complexity increases beyond a certain point. A fault in one area can cascade across the entire system. The larger and more interconnected the network becomes, the more vulnerable it may become to instability, cyber attack, equipment shortages or financial failure.
This may eventually force a historic reversal.
Instead of ever greater national integration, electricity generation may increasingly become local.
Localities may begin generating much of their own electricity through combinations of small-scale solar, micro-hydro, local wind generation, biomass, methane digestion and small community battery systems. Essential activities could then be organised around the actual electricity available locally rather than around the assumption of unlimited supply.
A localist electricity system would not attempt to maintain the present consumer society in its current form. That may no longer be possible. Instead it would concentrate upon resilience and essential needs.
Food production, water pumping, refrigeration, workshops, local transport and basic communications might become the priorities. Electricity-intensive discretionary activities may gradually decline because the energy surplus to sustain them no longer exists.
Large national systems may still survive for essential strategic purposes, railways, hospitals, heavy industry and national communications. But the assumption that every locality can indefinitely depend upon an endlessly expanding national electricity network may prove unrealistic.
In many ways the future may resemble the past more than the present.
Before national grids existed, localities often generated power locally through water mills, small gas works and local electricity plants. The future may involve a more technologically advanced version of the same principle.
The great irony is that the modern drive toward electrification may ultimately undermine the very centralised grid system upon which it depends.
