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.
The latest warnings from the Bank of England and Britain’s supermarket leaders should not be seen as an isolated inflation story. They are another indication that the global food system, built during decades of economic expansion and abundant cheap energy, is becoming progressively less reliable.
The immediate causes are familiar enough. Heatwaves, droughts, wildfires, disrupted harvests, war in the Middle East, higher fertiliser prices and more expensive transport are all pushing food prices upwards. Yet these are not separate events. They are interacting pressures acting on a system that has become increasingly fragile.
For many years Britain has relied on the assumption that food could always be obtained from somewhere else. If Spain suffered drought, another country would supply the fruit. If one shipping route became difficult, another could be found. If energy became more expensive, the additional costs could simply be absorbed by a growing economy.
Those assumptions are beginning to fail.
The shrinking economy described by Tim Morgan means that societies are no longer becoming steadily wealthier. Instead, there is less surplus energy available to support increasingly complex global supply chains. At the very moment when climate instability is increasing, the economic capacity needed to absorb repeated shocks is declining.
Food inflation is therefore becoming structural rather than temporary.
Every disruption now exposes another weakness. A wildfire destroys olive groves. Drought reduces cereal yields. Conflict interrupts fertiliser supplies. Fuel prices rise. Transport costs increase. Supermarkets compete for scarcer produce. Consumers pay more.
Governments naturally respond by promising to reduce the cost of living. But governments cannot legislate for plentiful harvests, cheap diesel or abundant fertiliser. They cannot command rain to fall or shipping lanes to remain open.
The danger is that politics continues to promise outcomes that the physical economy can no longer deliver.
Britain has become heavily dependent upon imported food. Many products travel thousands of miles before reaching supermarket shelves. Such systems work well during periods of stability. They become progressively less dependable when confronted by repeated environmental, geopolitical and economic shocks.
Localism offers a different direction.
Instead of asking how global supply chains can be restored to their previous efficiency, localism asks how communities can become less dependent upon them.
This does not imply complete self-sufficiency. Few localities could produce everything they require. It does mean increasing resilience by shortening supply chains wherever practical.
The opportunities are numerous.
More locally grown fruit and vegetables.
Greater support for nearby livestock producers.
Local food processing.
Farmers’ markets and community food hubs.
Community orchards.
Allotments and productive gardens.
Better food storage and preservation.
Reduced dependence on imported seasonal produce.
Each step may appear modest, but together they reduce vulnerability to distant disruptions over which local communities have no control.
The coming years are likely to bring more frequent weather extremes across many food-producing regions. They are also likely to bring continuing geopolitical instability, rising insurance costs, higher transport costs and increasing pressure on agricultural inputs. None of these developments sits comfortably alongside a highly centralised food distribution system.
The lesson is becoming increasingly clear.
Food security can no longer be measured simply by the amount of food available somewhere in the world. It depends upon whether that food can still be produced, transported, financed and delivered at prices ordinary households can afford.
In a shrinking economy these conditions become steadily more difficult to satisfy.
Local food production will never replace international trade entirely. Nor should it. But every tonne of food produced close to where it is consumed reduces exposure to the growing uncertainties of the global system.
The cost-of-living debate therefore risks concentrating on symptoms rather than causes.
The deeper issue is that Britain has built its food system around assumptions that belong to the age of expansion. Those assumptions are being overtaken by physical limits, declining economic surplus and increasing environmental volatility.
As global supply chains become less dependable, local food resilience ceases to be an environmental ideal or a lifestyle choice. It becomes an economic necessary.
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.
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.
A move towards localism is sometimes misunderstood as a return to the past – perhaps even a return to feudalism, where a small number of landowners controlled most of the countryside and ordinary people had little say over how land was used. That is not the intention.
Localism requires the opposite. It requires that ordinary people have a greater connection with the land on which they live and the ability to produce at least some of the essentials of life.
Land ownership should not mean that a few individuals or corporations control a finite resource that everyone depends upon. Land is not simply another financial asset. It is the foundation of food, water, biodiversity and community life.
A localist society would seek a wider distribution of access to land. This does not mean that everyone needs to own a large farm. A small plot, allotment, community garden or shared local holding can provide valuable food production and reconnect people with the natural systems that support them.
The aim is not ownership by a privileged few, but stewardship by many.
What Kind of Farming?
The farming system required for a localist future would be very different from the industrial model that developed during the period of cheap fossil energy.
Industrial agriculture depends heavily on machinery, long supply chains, artificial fertilisers, pesticides and global markets. It has achieved very high yields, but it has also created problems – soil degradation, loss of biodiversity, dependence on imported inputs and vulnerability when energy becomes expensive.
Local farming would focus more on resilience than maximum production.
This could include:
Market gardens producing vegetables close to where people live.
Mixed farms combining crops and livestock rather than separating them.
Agroforestry where trees, crops and animals are integrated together.
Permaculture systems designed around natural cycles.
Small orchards and community food growing areas.
Traditional crop varieties that are adapted to local conditions.
The emphasis would be on producing nutritious food with fewer external inputs and using local knowledge.
What About Fertiliser?
Modern agriculture relies heavily on nitrogen fertiliser produced using natural gas. This has been one of the major drivers of increased food production over the last century. However, it is also an example of how the industrial economy depends upon abundant energy.
A localist future would need to reduce dependence on synthetic fertilisers and rebuild natural soil fertility.
Possible approaches include:
Compost made from local organic waste.
Animal manure from local livestock systems.
Green manures, where crops such as clover and legumes are grown to fix nitrogen naturally.
Cover crops to protect soil and improve fertility.
Biochar, produced from organic material, to improve soil structure and retain nutrients.
Careful crop rotation to prevent soil exhaustion.
This does not mean abandoning all modern knowledge. Science and technology will still have a role. The difference is that technology would support natural systems rather than attempting to replace them.
Land as a Community Asset
In a localist economy, land would increasingly be viewed as a community asset rather than simply a commodity.
This could include:
Community-owned farms.
Shared equipment pools.
Local food cooperatives.
Small parcels made available for new growers.
Long-term leases that encourage stewardship.
A young person should not need to inherit wealth or buy hundreds of acres to participate in food production. Access to land is as important as access to education or housing.
The Scale of Farming
The future is unlikely to be a return to the small farms of the past exactly as they existed. Those farms often involved very hard physical labour and low productivity.
Nor is the answer simply to continue with ever larger industrial farms.
The likely direction is a mixture:
Larger areas producing staple crops efficiently.
Smaller local farms producing fresh food.
Communities growing some of their own requirements.
More integration between town and countryside.
The key change is that food production becomes less distant and anonymous. People understand where their food comes from and participate in maintaining the systems that produce it.
Land Ownership and the Post-Growth Economy
As the economy moves away from the era of unlimited growth based on cheap energy, land will become increasingly important.
The question will not simply be “how much money can land make?” but “how can land support the survival and wellbeing of communities?”
Localism is therefore not about going backwards. It is about adapting to a different economic reality.
The industrial age allowed humanity to separate itself from local resources. Cheap energy made it possible to import food, transport goods across the world and concentrate ownership.
A post-growth future will require a closer relationship between people and place.
Land should belong to people – but ownership must come with responsibility. The purpose of land is not only to generate wealth. Its deeper purpose is to sustain 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.
Recent reports from the British Geological Survey have drawn attention to a growing problem affecting large parts of London and the South East of England. The issue is often described in the press as “houses sinking”, though this is misleading. The buildings are not falling into holes. What is happening is more gradual and more revealing. The ground itself is moving.
Much of the area is built on clay soils, particularly London Clay. These soils behave in a predictable but increasingly disruptive way. In wet periods they expand, and in dry periods they contract. As climate patterns become more erratic, with longer dry spells and more intense rainfall events, the movement becomes more pronounced. The result is subsidence, slow distortion of buildings, cracking, and increasing repair costs.
The scale is not small. Large numbers of properties are now considered at risk over coming decades, and insurers are already paying out substantial sums in dry years when ground shrinkage is at its worst. This is not a future possibility but an ongoing adjustment in the relationship between climate, soil, and the built environment.
From a localist perspective, this is not simply an engineering or insurance issue. It is a sign of structural imbalance in how settlement has developed.
A central feature of modern development in the United Kingdom has been concentration. Population, investment, infrastructure, and housing demand have been drawn disproportionately towards London and its surrounding areas. Over time this has produced extreme density and pressure on land systems that were never intended to carry such sustained load at such scale.
Localism begins from a different assumption. It treats land, soil, water, and climate as active parts of a locality rather than neutral surfaces waiting for development. Each place has limits that are not just legal or economic but physical and ecological. Clay soils that swell and shrink are one such limit. They are not defects to be engineered away indefinitely, but conditions to be respected in how and where building takes place.
The subsidence issue shows what happens when that principle is ignored over time. The more activity is concentrated, the more intensively land is used, and the more heavily infrastructure is layered onto a single geological setting, the more stress is placed on the underlying system. Climate change then acts as a multiplier, increasing the variability of moisture and exposing weaknesses that were previously managed by more stable conditions.
Seen in this light, the “sinking houses” narrative is not about collapse but about feedback. The land is responding to patterns of settlement that have become too concentrated and too uniform. It is a physical reminder that growth is not abstract and that location always matters.
A localist response would not treat this as a problem to be solved only through deeper foundations, stronger materials, or more insurance adjustment. Those have a place, but they are secondary. The primary question is where and how we build in the first place. If development were more evenly distributed across smaller localities, with greater sensitivity to ground conditions and environmental limits, the pressure on any one system would be reduced.
There is also a financial dimension. Concentration creates hidden long-term costs. Subsidence damage, drainage failure, and repeated repair work are not incidental. They are the accumulated cost of ignoring local conditions at the planning stage. These costs eventually return to households, insurers, and public systems, often at far greater expense than a more distributed pattern of settlement would have required.
In this sense, the issue is not only about housing stability but about the wider model of development. A system that continually draws activity into a few high-pressure areas will eventually encounter physical limits, even if those limits appear slowly.
Localism offers a different direction. It suggests that resilience comes not from forcing uniform solutions onto diverse ground conditions, but from allowing development to reflect the character of each locality. In doing so, it reduces strain on land, reduces long-term cost, and builds a more stable relationship between people and place.
The movement of clay beneath London is therefore more than a geological curiosity. It is a quiet signal that the balance between settlement and land has been disturbed. The question it raises is whether that balance is restored by further concentration and engineering, or by a more distributed and locally grounded pattern of living.
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.
The Waru Waru system of the Andean highlands is one of the most remarkable examples of local resilience ever developed. Long before industrial agriculture, the people living around Lake Titicaca, in what is now Peru and Bolivia, created an agricultural landscape that enabled them to grow reliable crops under some of the world’s most difficult conditions.
Waru Waru, sometimes called raised fields, consists of long, broad ridges of cultivated soil separated by water-filled channels. The raised beds may be several metres wide and extend for hundreds of metres. The surrounding canals perform several vital functions. During the day they absorb the sun’s warmth and, at night, release it slowly, reducing the risk of frost that would otherwise destroy crops. The canals also collect rainwater, improve drainage during heavy rainfall, reduce drought stress during dry periods and provide habitat for fish, frogs and beneficial wildlife. Organic matter accumulating in the canals can be dredged periodically and spread back onto the raised beds, continually renewing soil fertility.
The system enabled communities living more than 3,500 metres above sea level to produce potatoes, quinoa and other crops reliably for centuries without artificial fertilisers, irrigation pumps or fossil fuels. It represented an elegant partnership between people and nature rather than an attempt to dominate it.
Modern researchers have demonstrated that reconstructed Waru Waru fields frequently outperform conventional farming in the same environment. The system requires more human labour but far fewer external inputs, making it particularly attractive where energy, fertiliser and machinery become scarce or expensive.
For those thinking about a future beyond economic growth, Waru Waru offers an important lesson. It shows that prosperity does not always depend upon advanced technology or increasing consumption. Instead, it can arise from careful observation of natural processes and the accumulation of local knowledge over many generations.
Localism naturally points in this direction. As global supply chains become less reliable and imported fertilisers, fuels and machinery become more costly, every locality will need to rediscover methods suited to its own climate, soils and landscape. The solution in Herefordshire will not be identical to that of the Andes, but the underlying principle is exactly the same. Farming should work with local conditions rather than against them.
The Waru Waru system reminds us that the future may depend as much upon recovering forgotten wisdom as inventing new technologies. Thousands of years ago, small communities created an agricultural system that was productive, resilient and largely self-sustaining. Those qualities may prove increasingly valuable in the decades ahead as local communities seek practical ways of living well within the limits of their own land.
If we look back at English village life around 1600, it is easy to see it as distant and simple. Yet if we set aside the industrial story that followed, and instead add what we have learned about health, ecology, governance, and human wellbeing since then, a different picture emerges. It is not a return to the past, but an understanding of what village life contained that later systems overlooked or displaced.
A village in 1600 was not designed, it evolved. It functioned as a local system tied closely to soil, water, animals, and seasons. People lived within limits that were immediately visible. The boundaries of the locality were not administrative, they were physical and practical.
What we now understand better is that such systems had strong ecological logic:
Nutrients were largely recycled locally through animals, composting, and human labour
Food systems were seasonal and therefore naturally varied
Energy use was low, local, and mostly biological rather than mechanical
Waste rarely travelled far from its source
Modern ecological thinking confirms something important here. These systems were not efficient in a modern economic sense, but they were often resilient in the sense that they could absorb shocks without total collapse.
Health and the hidden balance of diet and movement
We now know far more about nutrition, hygiene, and disease transmission than people in 1600 could possibly have known. Yet when we apply this knowledge retrospectively, we see an interesting pattern.
Village diets were:
High in fibre from grains and vegetables
Low in processed sugar and refined fats
Dependent on seasonal variation rather than constant supply
Physical activity was:
Continuous and necessary
Spread across all ages and genders
Integrated into daily life rather than separated into exercise
We now understand that many chronic conditions associated with modern life are strongly linked to sedentary behaviour and processed diets. This does not make 1600 healthier in all respects, infectious disease and infant mortality were severe, but it does suggest that the structure of daily life had some inherent protective qualities that were later lost.
Local governance before abstraction
The 1600 village was governed through layered local systems: manor custom, parish responsibility, informal agreement, and church oversight. While not democratic in the modern sense, it was deeply local in practice.
What we have learned since is that governance works most effectively when:
Decision-making is close to the consequences
Responsibility and resource are aligned at the same scale
Rules evolve from lived experience rather than abstract design
Modern systems often separate decision from consequence. In contrast, village governance concentrated both in the same place. This created inequality and limitation, but it also created accountability at a human scale.
Knowledge without external dependency
One of the most important differences between then and now is not technology, but dependence on external systems of knowledge.
In 1600:
Skills were transmitted directly through apprenticeship and family life
Knowledge was embedded in practice rather than written abstraction
Repair, making, and maintenance were normal daily functions
What we have learned since is that systems become fragile when knowledge is centralised and separated from use. Modern research in resilience shows that distributed knowledge systems, where many people hold partial but usable skills, are often more stable under disruption.
The village was such a system by necessity.
Time, season, and human scale
Modern life often treats time as continuous and uniform. In 1600, life was strongly seasonal and cyclical. Work followed daylight, weather, and agricultural need.
We now understand that human wellbeing is strongly influenced by:
Exposure to natural light cycles
Variation in activity rather than constant intensity
Periods of rest built into the year rather than scheduled around productivity
The village calendar embedded these patterns naturally. The modern world often removes them and then tries to reintroduce them artificially.
What was missing then, and what we now know must be added back carefully
It would be misleading to idealise 1600 village life. There were serious limitations:
High infant mortality
Limited medical understanding
Social hierarchy and constraint
Vulnerability to harvest failure and disease
What we have learned since must therefore be added carefully:
Clean water systems and sanitation
Medical knowledge and basic public health
Better structural housing safety
Shared emergency response capacity
These are genuine gains that should not be discarded.
A combined understanding for localism
If we remove the industrial detour from the story, what remains is not nostalgia, but a design question.
A localist interpretation of village life suggests:
Small-scale systems can be ecologically coherent
Work, knowledge, and responsibility function best when locally connected
Human wellbeing is strongly tied to seasonal rhythm and physical engagement
Resilience depends on distributed capability rather than central dependency
But modern knowledge also adds non-negotiable improvements:
Health protection must be formalised
Water, sanitation, and shelter standards must be higher
Vulnerable people require structured support systems
The task is not to recreate 1600, but to recognise that it contained a coherent local logic that modern systems often fragment. Localism, in this sense, is not a step backwards, but a re-alignment of scale, knowledge, and responsibility with human and ecological reality.
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.
This week’s Frankly is part three of the series How to Think About the Future. Today, I build a framework for understanding the pathways that connect today’s choices to tomorrow’s realities. Drawing from biology, ecology, history, and systems thinking, I introduce a civilizational terrain of ridges and valleys that is constantly shifting as we are moving through it. I also use the concepts of switchbacks and erosion to explain why some futures emerge by default from existing incentives and momentum, while others require deliberate effort, coordination, and sustained commitment.
Through examples that range from cell development to lake ecosystems to political systems, I examine how complex systems settle into stable states, and why some transitions are far easier to make than to reverse. As economic, geopolitical, and ecological pressures reshape the landscape we traverse, knowing which futures are downhill and which require climbing becomes increasingly important. The episode offers a conceptual tool for interpreting the composite worlds I will outline in the next part of the series, and invites listeners to consider both where they stand in the terrain and whether their daily actions are building pathways toward a more desirable future, or letting those paths erode.
How do societies become trapped in self-reinforcing systems, and what does that look like in our current reality? Which futures seem most likely if present incentives and momentum hold? And which social, cultural, or ecological switchbacks are being built today that could open new possibilities tomorrow
Want to dive deeper into the concepts covered in this episode? Follow along with the Show Notes & Links to Learn More, which you can find at the bottom of the page for every episode of The Great Simplification, or you can download them
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,
The Telegraph article on batteries helping Britain “beat the surge in energy bills” describes a rapidly expanding world of domestic storage systems, smart tariffs, and household-scale electricity management, where batteries are charged when power is cheap and discharged when prices spike, smoothing out the cost of living pressures linked to volatile energy markets.
On the surface this looks like a sensible technological response to high electricity prices. Batteries, especially when paired with solar panels or smart tariffs, can reduce bills significantly by shifting consumption away from peak pricing and into low-cost periods. But in a shrinking economy, the deeper question is not whether the technology works, but whether society can afford the continual renewal of it.
Every battery, inverter, heat pump, photovoltaic panel, control system and power electronic device has a finite life. Typically around 10 to 15 years for many components, sometimes less for heavily used systems. That means a permanent cycle of replacement, recycling, upgrading and reinstallation. Even if unit costs fall, the economy must still sustain continuous capital renewal across millions of households, transport systems, and industrial users.
In a growth economy this is assumed to be manageable because rising output absorbs replacement costs. In a shrinking economy the assumption breaks down. Income growth slows or reverses, discretionary spending falls, and both households and institutions become increasingly sensitive to upfront capital costs. A technology that reduces running costs but requires high initial investment can become structurally unaffordable for large parts of the population.
This is where the tension becomes clear. Battery systems may reduce exposure to high electricity prices, but they do not remove the need to pay for the infrastructure itself. A household battery system still requires purchase, installation, maintenance, eventual replacement, and the supporting grid and control systems behind it. Even optimistic estimates suggest multi-thousand-pound costs and lifetimes of a decade or so, meaning repeated investment over time.
If the economy is no longer expanding in real terms, the question becomes: who finances this continual turnover? Government subsidy? Private borrowing? Higher electricity tariffs to fund grid stability? Or selective adoption by wealthier households only?
This is not just a domestic issue. It extends across transport and national infrastructure. Electric trains, trams, and electric vehicles all depend on large-scale electricity supply, much of it increasingly expected to be intermittent renewable generation buffered by storage. Batteries can smooth demand peaks, and grid-scale storage is expanding rapidly, but the system still depends on massive capital investment in generation, storage, transmission, and replacement cycles.
The logical conclusion often presented is decentralisation: local generation and local storage. Solar photovoltaics on buildings, community-scale batteries, heat pumps, and local energy balancing. But this raises another difficulty. Local systems may reduce dependence on national grids, but they do not reduce the total capital burden. They simply redistribute it. Every locality would still need to finance its own generation assets, storage systems, maintenance expertise, and eventual replacement cycles.
So the question becomes sharper: can localist communities realistically fund full energy self-reliance under conditions of economic contraction? And if they cannot, what level of external support or cross-subsidy would still be required?
Electricity from photovoltaics and heat pumps is often presented as “free after installation”, but in practice it is capital-intensive infrastructure spread over time. In a shrinking economy, capital-intensive systems become harder to sustain precisely because future surplus income is smaller.
This leads to a more uncomfortable possibility. Rather than a smooth transition to decentralised clean energy, society may face a selective transition. Wealthier households and well-capitalised institutions adopt batteries, heat pumps, and electric mobility. Others remain dependent on older, more centralised systems, or face rising inequality in access to energy resilience.
The deeper issue is not whether batteries or renewables work. They do. The issue is whether a society with tightening financial capacity can continuously renew a highly engineered energy system at scale, across every household, vehicle, and transport network, without a growing burden of cost and complexity.
In that sense, the energy question is not only technological. It is economic. And in a shrinking economy, the central constraint may turn out not to be innovation, but affordability over time.
