Tag Archives: sustainability

138. Rachel Reeves’ 2025 Mansion House speech

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Rachel Reeves’ 2025 Mansion House speech largely focuses on revitalising the UK economy through deregulation, encouraging private investment, and unlocking pension wealth—especially to boost financial markets and infrastructure. It’s a bold, pro-City, pro-growth agenda rooted in the mechanisms of the existing industrial economy. Here’s a review by ChatGPT of how her proposals relate to the prospects for localism:

🏘️ Implications for Localism: Mixed to Weak Support

  1. Top-down framing and centralised delivery

Reeves’ plan is a state-led strategy, with regulatory change intended to stimulate investment flows through large-scale institutions. Her framing of “unlocking growth” is couched in terms of:

  • Capital markets
  • Big pension funds
  • Large infrastructure projects
  • City of London reforms

These are all centralised, top-down mechanisms, with little mention of the everyday informal economy, community autonomy, or local economic resilience—the cornerstones of localism.

Conclusion: The philosophy underpinning her speech reinforces centralisation and scale, not subsidiarity or community control.

  1. No mention of community wealth-building or fiscal devolution

There was:

  • No reference to local government funding
  • No suggestion of devolving fiscal powers
  • No plans to empower local councils or communities to lead investment or planning

Reeves referred to the Treasury’s Green Book reforms in passing, but this signals only minor tweaks to capital allocation—not a radical shift toward place-based economics.

Conclusion: There’s no structural pathway offered for localism to flourish financially or institutionally.

  1. Opportunities missed: Pensions and ISAs

Reeves proposes unlocking DC pension funds and ISAs to flow into:

  • Long-Term Asset Funds (LTAFs)
  • National infrastructure
  • Growth-oriented UK equities

But there’s no mechanism or encouragement for local investment vehicles, such as:

  • Local co-ops
  • Community land trusts
  • Mutual credit systems
  • Local housing or energy schemes

Even her nod to a revived “Tell Sid”-style retail investment campaign suggests nostalgia for privatisation, not a reimagining of place-rooted finance.

Conclusion: Her proposals exclude the local, informal investment ecology needed for bottom-up economic transitions.

  1. Reinforcing the formal economy at the expense of the informal

Reeves is clear: she wants to roll back post-crash regulations in order to stimulate the formal economy. But in a shrinking economy, where discretionary consumption, tax yields, and investment are all declining, her strategy effectively doubles down on industrial-era economics.

There’s:

  • No mention of rising informal work or community economies
  • No acknowledgement that much of the UK is already post-industrial and operating semi-informally
  • No plan for empowering hyperlocal production, repair, food, housing, or service systems

Conclusion: Her model assumes re-expansion is possible; it doesn’t accommodate managed contraction or local self-reliance.

  1. Language of innovation, but not the right kind

Reeves says red tape is a “boot on the neck of innovation”—but her definition of innovation is squarely financial and technological. There’s no vision of socio-ecological innovation:

  • No support for commons-based systems
  • No framework for low-carbon, high-employment community farming
  • No acknowledgment of local currencies, LETS, or mutual aid systems

Conclusion: Innovation is seen as a return to market liberalism, not adaptive change to meet ecological and economic limits.

131. Has Growth Ended? – A Review

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Read the full article here: https://surplusenergyeconomics.wordpress.com/2025/05/29/304-has-growth-ended/

Dr. Tim Morgan’s article asks a big question: Has economic growth come to an end? He thinks it might have—and not just because of politics, bad decisions, or short-term problems, but because of something much deeper: the limits of energy and nature itself.

What’s the article about?

Morgan believes the global economy may have hit a turning point in 2023. Up until now, we’ve kept pushing for more growth—more money, more production, more consumption. But he argues that the real economy (what we physically do and make) is no longer keeping up with the financial economy (what we imagine through loans, debts, and stock markets).

He says the gap between what we think we have and what we actually do have is getting wider, and that spells trouble.

What’s causing the slowdown?

The main issue, according to Morgan, is energy. Everything we do—building houses, growing food, running hospitals—relies on energy, especially oil, gas, and coal. However, it now requires increasingly more energy just to extract that energy from the ground. This is referred to as the Energy Cost of Energy (ECoE).

The higher the ECoE, the less energy is left over for the rest of the economy to grow. Morgan says we’ve reached the point where the energy “surplus” is shrinking. That’s why prosperity—the ability of ordinary people to live comfortably—is already falling in many countries.

What does the future look like?

If Morgan’s right, we’ll see:

  • A steady decline in real wealth over the next 25 years.
  • Fewer things people can afford beyond basic needs (what he calls a collapse in “discretionary” spending).
  • Financial systems are under strain because they’re based on the idea that growth will continue forever.
Is there anything we can do?

Morgan doesn’t give a lot of solutions in this piece, but he does hint that we’ll need to:

  • Be more realistic about what the future holds.
  • Stop pretending we can grow forever.
  • Find ways to live well with less.
Final word

Dr. Morgan’s message is profound: the era of endless economic growth is over. We now need new ways to think about prosperity—ones based on what really matters, not just money and markets. This article is a great starting point for that conversation.

130. Economic Contraction, Coming Right Up

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Gail Tverberg, the author of the blog Our Finite World, is a researcher and actuary with a background in mathematics. She focuses on the interconnection between energy limitations and economic systems, particularly how finite energy resources impact economic growth and stability. Tverberg has been writing on these topics since 2006, bringing a unique perspective that combines actuarial analysis with energy economics.

In her May 27, 2025, article titled “Economic Contraction, Coming Right Up,” Tverberg argues that the global economy is poised for a significant downturn over the next decade due to fundamental physical and resource-based constraints.

Main Conclusions

1. The Economy as a Physics-Based System Facing Diminishing Returns

Tverberg posits that the global economy operates as a “dissipative structure,” a concept from physics describing systems that require continuous energy input to maintain order. She asserts that as easily accessible resources are depleted, the energy and effort required to extract remaining resources increase, leading to diminishing returns. This phenomenon affects not only fossil fuels but also minerals such as copper and lithium, as well as arable land and freshwater.

2. Debt and Financial Systems Are Unsustainable Without Growth

The article highlights that modern economies rely heavily on debt, which presupposes future growth to repay. However, with physical limits to growth becoming more apparent, the ability to service debt diminishes, potentially leading to defaults and financial crises. Tverberg notes that high debt levels can temporarily mask resource constraints but ultimately exacerbate economic instability.

3. Societal Complexity Will Decline

Drawing on Joseph Tainter’s work on the collapse of complex societies, Tverberg suggests that as energy and resources become increasingly scarce, societies will be compelled to simplify. This could manifest as reduced government services, infrastructure decay, and a general decline in living standards.

4. Emergence of New Economic Structures

While acknowledging the challenges ahead, Tverberg believes that new, simpler economic systems will emerge as adaptations to the changing resource landscape. These systems will likely be less energy-intensive and more localised, reflecting the constraints imposed by diminished resource availability.

Tverberg’s analysis offers an enlightened perspective on the future of the global economy, emphasising the physical and resource-based limits to growth. Her integration of concepts from physics and systems theory provides a unique lens through which to view economic challenges.

However, some may argue that her outlook underestimates the potential for technological innovation and policy interventions to mitigate resource constraints. Advancements in renewable energy, efficiency improvements, and shifts in consumption patterns could play significant roles in addressing the issues she raises.

Nonetheless, Tverberg’s emphasis on the interconnectedness of energy, resources, and economic systems serves as a valuable reminder of the foundational elements underpinning modern economies. Her work encourages a holistic examination of economic sustainability, urging consideration of physical realities alongside financial metrics.Our Finite World

For a more detailed exploration of her arguments, you can read the full article here: Economic Contraction, Coming Right Up.

129. The Reductionist Delusion: How We Got Climate Change Wrong

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May 27, 2025|Art Berman

climate-complexity-and-the-limits-of-reductionist-thinking

The failure of the climate movement isn’t just political or scientific—it’s philosophical. At its core is a reductionist mindset: isolate one culprit, pursue one goal, rally around one fix. Fossil fuels became the villain, CO₂ emissions the metric, and renewables the savior—embraced more for narrative simplicity than system reality. Missing was any serious reckoning with energy, complexity, ecological limits, or human behavior. If fossil fuels caused the problem, then renewables must solve it. Doubt didn’t fit the script.

Figure 1. The Reductionist Mindset–Fossil Fuels the villain, CO₂ the metric, renewables the savior. End of discussion. Source: Labyrinth Consulting Services, Inc.

But the real story is more tangled. Modern civilization was built on fossil fuels. They weren’t just a side-effect of progress—they were its engine. Especially after World War II, oil, coal, and gas fueled everything: industrial expansion, population growth, military power, and the rise of global trade. The abundance of cheap energy made complexity affordable and growth seem infinite.

Climate science emerged in this very context. In 1958, Charles Keeling began measuring atmospheric CO₂. His curve showed a steady rise, even as the world raced deeper into fossil dependency. By the 1970s, scientists were warning that doubling CO₂ could dangerously heat the planet. But at that same moment, the U.S. faced oil shocks—gas lines, school closures, inflation—and energy security, not climate, drove the agenda. Coal made a comeback. Natural gas gained favor. Renewables entered the conversation quietly, not as climate tools, but as buffers against foreign oil.

That separation never really healed. Climate change was treated as a future externality, while energy policy remained a present-tense strategy of supply and control. Fracking, for example, didn’t spread because it reduced emissions—it exploded because it reduced oil imports and trade deficits. Climate goals followed energy trends, not the other way around. And because energy itself was never understood as a system, climate-change advocates incorrectly believed we could swap renewables for fossil fuels and keep everything else the same.

Reductionist thinking led to energy blindness—and that blindness doomed the climate movement. Its advocates still don’t grasp that electricity makes up only a small slice of total energy use for a reason: its applications, while impressive, are inherently limited. Renewables were assumed to be plug-and-play replacements for fossil fuels. They ignored density, intermittency, scale, and material inputs. They ignored what energy actually does: fueling the machinery of global extraction, transport, manufacturing, construction, and trade—most of which can’t be electrified at the scale modern civilization demands. The entire industrial superorganism runs on a kind of metabolic intensity fossil fuels uniquely deliver. Subtract that, and you don’t just lose emissions—you lose capabilities.

But climate policy never really faced that. It isolated carbon as the problem, treated the atmosphere as the domain of action, and left the civilization it emerged from largely untouched. The public was promised a clean transition. The idea that we could decarbonize without decomplexifying was treated as not only possible, but inevitable.

Figure 1. Modern civilization will collapse without fossil fuels. Climate activists refuse to see this. Source: Labyrinth Consulting Services, Inc.

Figure 2. Modern civilization will collapse without fossil fuels. Climate activists refuse to see this.
Source: Labyrinth Consulting Services, Inc.

That’s the deeper failure. Not that the warnings weren’t loud enough. Not that the science wasn’t clear. But the framing itself was naïve and simplistic. We tried to solve climate in a way that let us avoid the real questions—about limits, about how we live, about what kind of future we’re actually powering toward.

This wasn’t just a climate mistake. It’s the same pattern we’ve seen with GDP as a proxy for wellbeing, with technological fixes for social breakdown, with laws against addiction instead of understanding its roots. We break the world into parts, fix the ones we can see, and call the system stable—until it breaks again.

The Sorcerer’s Apprentice comes to mind: a young helper stumbles onto power he doesn’t fully grasp. He sets the spell in motion—automation, acceleration—but lacks the wisdom to stop it. Every fix multiplies the problem. The castle floods.

Figure 3. The Sorcerer’s Apprentice. Power Without Wisdom. Source: Labyrinth Consulting Services, Inc.

We are that apprentice. We harnessed fossil energy, unleashed exponential growth, and built systems too complex to control. Then, faced with side effects—climate change, ecological overshoot, cascading risk—we reached for familiar tools: substitution, regulation, markets. Anything but reflection.

Climate change didn’t fail because we lacked solutions. It failed because we mistook the problem. We made it about emissions when it was always about our relationship with energy, with growth, with the natural world. We wanted to fix the atmosphere and leave the civilization intact. But that’s not how systems work.

The truth is harder. We don’t need new energy sources. We need a new relationship with energy that includes respect for Nature and our place in it, humility and restraint. One that recognizes that some thresholds, once crossed, don’t rewind. And some systems, once overbuilt, don’t transition—they unravel.

That doesn’t mean despair. It means clarity. It means seeing not just where we are, but how we got here—and learning, at last, to think about the whole rather than the parts

126. The Energy Cost of Energy (ECoE): Understanding the Core Constraint of the Modern Economy

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  • The Energy Cost of Energy (ECoE) is a vital but often overlooked concept. It refers to the share of energy output that must be used to extract, process, and deliver energy itself. In other words, it’s the energy we spend to get energy. The lower the ECoE, the more net energy remains to power the rest of the economy—everything from farming to hospitals to mobile phone factories.

A Brief History of ECoE

In the early days of fossil fuels, ECoEs were remarkably low. For example, early oil wells in Texas could produce 100 barrels of oil for every barrel of energy invested—an ECoE of just 1%. Coal, oil, and later natural gas allowed industrial economies to expand rapidly because they delivered massive net energy surpluses.

However, over time, the low-hanging fruit was picked. Oil reservoirs became harder to access. Deepwater drilling, tar sands, and shale fracking emerged as substitutes, but they required far more energy input. ECoEs began to rise.

Today, according to analysts such as Tim Morgan and the Surplus Energy Economics model, ECoE for fossil fuels is far higher than it was in the 20th century and continues to climb. Renewable sources like wind and solar may offer lower ECoEs in the long term, but their intermittency and reliance on complex, high-energy infrastructure mean their true ECoEs are not trivial.

ECoE and the Structure of the Economy

As ECoE rises, the surplus energy available to do everything else in society falls. This shift hits the economy in a particularly telling way: it squeezes the space available for discretionary activities.

The economy can be divided into two broad zones:

  • Essential sectors: food, healthcare, heating, basic transport, water, sanitation—these are the foundation of civilised life.
  • Discretionary sectors: tourism, high-street retail, entertainment, aviation, luxury goods—these depend on surplus wealth and energy.

When ECoE was low, there was enough energy to expand both sectors. But as ECoE rises, essential needs take priority. The discretionary sector—vulnerable to even small energy and financial shocks—begins to shrink.

This helps explain why ordinary people experience a sense of stagnation or decline even as official GDP figures show modest growth. Their access to discretionary consumption is quietly evaporating, not because they are lazy or mismanage their finances, but because there is less surplus energy to support those activities.

What Happens When There Isn’t Enough Net Energy?

If the ECoE rises so high that even essential activities cannot be fully supported, societies face a more severe crisis than a financial recession. Essential services such as food production, public health, and critical infrastructure begin to falter.

This is not theoretical. In some parts of the world today, power outages, water shortages, and food insecurity are symptoms of systems under stress, financially and energetically.

At this stage, governments are forced into triage: rationing, blackouts, collapse of discretionary sectors, and perhaps nationalisation of vital energy sources. Inflation may rage as real goods and services become scarcer, while money loses its anchoring function. Social unrest becomes likely.

A Glimpse Ahead

Unless the energy system can deliver a lower ECoE—either through new technologies, a renaissance in nuclear power, or a radical simplification of living standards—the modern, consumption-driven way of life will continue to contract. This contraction is not a policy choice; it is a physical necessity. The real economy follows the laws of thermodynamics, not economics textbooks.

In the long run, societies will need to relocalise, reduce their dependence on high-energy discretionary consumption, and prioritise basic needs through more resilient, informal systems. Communities may rediscover older, slower ways of meeting needs through shared labour, seasonal diets, and low-tech tools. The future may not be bright, but it can still be liveable—if we accept the limits imposed by energy reality.

Localism provides an evolutionary way of seeing the future.

125. From Agony to Renewal: How Farmers and the Landless can Build the Localist Economy

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  • Across Britain, a quiet transformation is underway. Behind the headlines of recession, redundancy, and rural decline, a new economic relationship is forming between farmers in distress and town-dwellers out of work. It is modest, improvised, and mostly unrecognised, but it may lead to a more resilient future.

In the traditional countryside, many farmers are in agony. Margins are shrinking, costs are rising, and weather patterns are becoming extreme. Markets are volatile and dominated by supermarkets, middlemen, and distant regulations. For thousands of small and mid-sized farms, survival now means selling off pieces of land or going deeper into debt. Younger generations are leaving, and many older farmers have no one to hand their holdings to.

At the same time, in towns and suburbs, the collapse of the consumer economy is creating a new kind of displacement. As discretionary industries shrink—retail, hospitality, media, and professional services—people are being made redundant. For some, the shift is manageable. For many, it is not. Unable to find work, pay rent, or afford urban life, many are looking to the countryside for something more elemental: a place to live modestly and work the land.

Often, this begins with a conversation. A would-be smallholder approaches a farmer, asking to buy or lease a small piece of ground—perhaps half an acre, sometimes less. The land may be marginal, steep, or underused. The arrangement is usually informal. What the buyer wants is not profit but subsistence—a polytunnel, a few chickens, some vegetables, and a basic shelter—a life pared down to essentials.

Some farmers are saying yes.

A New Rural Relationship

A new rural economy is being born in these small, informal agreements. It doesn’t conform to the categories used by planners or economists. It is not focused on exports or yields per hectare. It is based on need, trust, and mutual benefit.

For the farmer, selling or leasing a corner of land can provide ready cash or reliable help. For the newcomer, it offers a foothold, a chance to become self-reliant in a world where conventional opportunities are drying up. Sometimes rent is paid. Sometimes it is exchanged for labour—fencing, lambing, hedge-laying. Tools and skills are shared. Fences are repaired. Sheds are re-roofed.

This is not the romantic ruralism of television or glossy magazines. It is post-industrial agriculture: human-scale, low-energy, and largely informal. It depends more on wheelbarrows than tractors, and more on hand tools than apps. It’s a return to practicality born not of nostalgia but of necessity.

Working the Edges

The work happens in the gaps—on field edges, neglected paddocks, and forgotten orchards. Produce is grown for home use or sold at the gate. Water may be harvested, power improvised, and structures made from salvaged materials. Compost toilets and solar showers are standard. There is little money, but much utility.

Increasingly, these smallholders form micro-communities. Advice is shared. Seeds are swapped. Some even coordinate planting and harvesting, or set up informal food exchanges. The work is hard, but purposeful. Children grow up with soil on their hands. Grandparents find new dignity in shared labour. Life slows, but deepens.

In time, these scattered plots may connect into a rural patchwork of resilience: not villages in the traditional sense, but networks of subsistence—places where people meet their own needs, and each other’s, without relying on distant systems that are no longer dependable.

The Planning Puzzle

This transition is not without tension. Planning law in the UK remains rooted in the industrial and post-war assumption that rural land must be tightly controlled, protected from “inappropriate development.” Permanent living on farmland is usually prohibited unless the occupant is engaged in commercial-scale agriculture.

But the present does not need to fit the logic of the past. If people cannot afford to live in cities and farms can no longer afford to operate at scale, surely there is wisdom in allowing new forms of habitation and land use, especially when they are modest, low-impact, and essential to wellbeing.

Local authorities face a stark choice: enforce old rules that exclude new livelihoods, or begin to recognise that a shift is underway—and find ways to support it. A more permissive, humane, and adaptive planning framework could allow thousands of people to live and work on the land, relieving pressure on housing, food supply, and social support systems.

An Unlikely Alliance

This evolving partnership—between farmers with too much land and workers with none—may be one of the most hopeful developments in Britain’s economic landscape. It is not driven by ideology or investment. It is rooted in the soil, the seasons, and the search for meaning and survival.

Farmers have long been told to “get big or get out.” But some are now choosing a third path: to get local. To become stewards of change rather than victims of it. By allowing smallholders onto their land, they may secure their own futures—not through subsidies or speculation, but through solidarity.

And for those arriving from town, this isn’t a retreat from society—it’s a rebuilding of it, one raised bed and shared spade at a time.

As the old economy buckles under its own weight, a lighter, smaller, slower one is taking root. You won’t see it in GDP figures. But you might see it at the end of a farm track, where someone is putting in a gate, planting beans, and beginning again.

122. World Without End: An Illustrated Guide to the Climate Crisis by Jean-Marc Jancovici

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This graphic novel presents a comprehensive exploration of the energy and climate challenges facing our world today. Through a dialogue between Jancovici and Blain, the book delves into topics such as:

  • Our Dependence on Fossil Fuels: Examining how modern economies are built on cheap, abundant energy and the implications of dwindling fossil fuel resources.
  • Limitations of Renewable Energy: Discussing the challenges associated with scaling up renewable energy sources to meet global demand.
  • Advocacy for Nuclear Power: Presenting nuclear energy as a viable solution to reduce carbon emissions and maintain energy supply .
  • The Inevitability of Economic Contraction: Arguing that due to physical and environmental constraints, a contraction of the economy is unavoidable, regardless of governmental actions.
  • The Need for Societal Restructuring: Emphasizing the importance of rethinking our energy consumption, economies, and societal structures to adapt to these changes.

The book combines scientific insights with engaging illustrations, making complex concepts accessible to a broad audience. It has been praised for its clarity and depth, with The Guardian highlighting its effectiveness in conveying the interconnectedness of energy consumption and climate change .

Jean-Marc Jancovici is a French energy and climate expert known for his clear, data-driven arguments about the limits of growth and the central role of energy—especially fossil fuels—in shaping modern civilization. His views are grounded in thermodynamics and systems thinking.

Here’s a summary of his main ideas about the future:

1. Energy is the Foundation of Modern Economies

  • Economic growth has historically been powered by cheap, abundant fossil fuels.
  • GDP is closely tied to energy consumption; without energy, machines stop and productivity collapses.

2. Peak Oil and Declining Fossil Resources

  • The world is nearing, or past, peak oil. Declining fossil fuel availability will reduce the energy available to societies.
  • Renewables cannot fully replace fossil fuels due to their lower energy return on investment (EROI), intermittency, and material constraints.

3. Climate Change is a Non-Negotiable Constraint

  • Continuing fossil fuel use leads to climate catastrophe.
  • A sharp reduction in greenhouse gas emissions is unavoidable, but it implies a contraction of economic activity unless we rapidly restructure society.

4. Degrowth is Inevitable

  • Jancovici doesn’t advocate voluntary degrowth as an ideal, but sees it as a necessary adaptation to physical limits.
  • He argues that we will have less material wealth, fewer long-distance travels, and simpler lifestyles, whether we like it or not.

5. Technology Will Not Save Us Alone

  • While useful, technology cannot overcome energy and ecological limits. Efficiency gains often lead to rebound effects (Jevons Paradox).
  • Belief in technological salvation is, in his view, a form of denial.

6. We Must Plan for Contraction, Not Growth

  • Public policy should shift toward planned degrowth, focusing on resilience, equity, and preserving essential services.
  • Infrastructure, urban design, food production, and employment must be redesigned around low-energy principles.

7. Nuclear Energy is a Partial Solution

  • Jancovici is a strong proponent of nuclear energy. He believes it offers a realistic path to maintaining some industrial capacity while cutting emissions.
  • However, even with nuclear, we must reduce energy demand.

Tone and Outlook:
Jancovici is pragmatic and sometimes stark. He speaks of a “controlled landing” rather than a crash. He wants societies to face the truth: we can’t grow forever on a finite planet, and it’s better to anticipate limits than to be crushed by them.