Localism, manufactured food and energy futures: thoughts from the Groundswell Festival

I’m guessing that few people the world over will have failed to notice the big-ticket news items last week – most importantly, the official launch of my new book Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future at the Groundswell Festival in Hertfordshire, and secondly the release of the 2022 global energy figures by the unironically named Energy Institute.

Okay, so I’m joking about the newsworthiness of my book. But last I looked it was riding high in the Amazon charts, at No.1 in its Soil Science category (?), No.2 in nanotechnology (??), and No.5 in distribution management, whatever that is. Vindication.

More on that and the Groundswell Festival in a moment. But first let’s take a quick look at the energy figures. Probably the one that will steal most of the headlines is that solar energy consumption leaped more than any other form of energy use last year with an impressive 24% climb. It now constitutes fully … er … 2% of global energy consumption, with a growth rate that appears to be slowing from the 2010s. Meanwhile, fossil fuel use and carbon dioxide emissions from energy also climbed. Not by much (0.4% and 0.9% respectively). Still, more fossil fuels were used and more carbon dioxide emitted from energy last year than ever before in human history. Percentage-wise, about 82% of global energy consumption came from fossil fuels in 2022 – down only 3 percentage points from 2015 when global leaders agreed to try to limit climate change (but up 6% from that year in absolute terms).

In other words, there’s no sign of an energy transition out of fossils yet.

In a recent post I calculated that to quit fossil fuels by 2050, we’d have to lose 16.9 exajoules of fossil energy annually between now and then, more than the entire fossil fuel use of the world’s fifth largest fossil fuel using country, Japan. Well, now we need to lose 17.6EJ annually which is … even more than more than the entire fossil fuel use of Japan.

This is of some relevance to the theme of my new book, as I’ll suggest in a moment.

But first a few remarks on how my two book launches, the local one and the official one, went.

The answer is pretty well, and thanks for asking. I was lucky to have two great interlocutors at my respective launches, the irrepressible ffinlo Costain and the effervescent Sarah Langford, and I thoroughly enjoyed talking with both of them about my book. Audience questions ranged from the generally supportive to the appropriately quizzical and thence to the occasionally hostile, but by and large the book got a pretty good reception. Even the reviews so far have been largely positive – for example here, here and even here. I expect there’ll be some brickbats to come, but it’s been remarkably mellow so far. Even so, the reviews and the launch Q&As have raised various issues of interest that I hope to address in the fullness of time.

The question at the launches that I’ve found hardest to deal with runs along the lines of “Okay, so no to a farm-free future, I get that. But what are you saying ‘yes’ to? If techno-fixes don’t work, what does work? And how can we bring it about?”

…to which my answer has been something along the lines of agrarian localism and food sovereignty, the details of which have to be hammered out through specific local politics by multitudes of people and can’t be itemised as a blueprint in a few pages of a book or in an answer at a talk. If that will be a less satisfactory answer to some than “…by rolling out new technology X” to me it’s nevertheless more plausible.

But maybe I need to burnish it into more of a soundbite. If so, it’ll have to be quite a complicated one. As suggested in Chapter 6 of my new book I think we’re now experiencing the beginning of the end of the ‘modernism’ that the ecomodernists champion – an end that I welcome, because I don’t think it can deliver a just or congenial way of life long-term to human or non-human organisms. But the path beyond modernism looks rocky, and I don’t relish treading it. Still, I’d rather tread it knowingly than cling to shopworn contemporary political nostrums that claim to know how to reconstruct a useable modernism.

So yeah, answers below please if you have a good suggestion for how I can frame all that in a cheery, upbeat jingle. Intellectually, my analysis from Chapter 8 on how humans need to become a good keystone species might do it. But I fear I’d then have to spend a lot of time explaining what I meant by ‘a good keystone species’. And then it wouldn’t be a soundbite.

The larger problem that I have, which becomes all too apparent when I venture beyond the familiar and usually comforting environs of my farm or my online village to attend events like Groundswell, is that I seem to be looking at the world and the human future as if through a different window to most of my fellow humans. Like it or not, I just don’t think the high-energy, high-capital cocoon of the global political economy is going to protect us privileged denizens at its centre for too much longer, let alone anyone else. We need to start implementing something radically different. Radically different, from the roots up. Not just some window dressing of the status quo, as with the case for microbial protein manufacture or carbon trading schemes.

On the latter front, I found Groundswell interesting in that it seemed to be peopled with a large contingent of so called ‘conventional’, big-scale farmers who were (a) concerned about how they were going to stay afloat financially in the harsh light of the post-Brexit subsidy regimen, (b) anxious to develop better carbon sequestration metrics to emphasize that their livestock weren’t the climate catastrophe they’re too often painted, and (c) vulnerable to the blandishments of numerous business ventures in attendance at the festival offering their services to farmers as carbon portfolio managers.

I’m sympathetic to the plight of these farmers and I despair at the way they and their livestock are being wrongly scapegoated for the ills of our wider society. But I think they’re deluding themselves if they suppose that better carbon metrics, carbon pricing or claims about soil carbon sequestration are going to save their businesses or save the world as we know it from climate system breakdown. Meanwhile, the corporate vultures of the carbon offsetters and the precision fermenters are circling. I believe that existing producers of food here in the UK ought to be concerned. And so should existing eaters of food.

When the case for being allowed to continue doing what you’re doing falls on deaf ears politically, it sometimes leads to a stark choice: to give up or to fight. My time at Groundswell led me to believe we’re now closer to that choice than I’d previously thought. To deliver a renewable local food system in the UK, I think it’ll be necessary for a lot of the kind of farmers who were at Groundswell along with other local landowners to ally with local communities against corporate food system rationalisers. I said as much in a discussion panel I was on, but I’m not sure how much the remark landed. Different vistas, different windows. A few people came up to me after the session and expressed their appreciation, though, which gave me a modicum of hope. Meanwhile, another panellist told me I was wrong about my energetic claims in respect of microbial protein. In her opinion, a bright future for it beckons.

I’ll say more about that in another post. For now, I’ve written this short piece to lay out the energetic issue as I see it. If you think I’ve got something wrong in it, I’d appreciate hearing your critique.

Meanwhile, as I mentioned earlier, fossil fuel use and the resulting carbon dioxide emissions continue their inexorable rise. Humanity just doesn’t seem capable of decarbonising its existing energy system. The idea that it makes sense to add a vast new demand for low-carbon energy to produce food that can otherwise be grown with free and zero-carbon sunlight makes no sense to me in that context. There will be no food factories on a dead planet, and there will be no low-carbon manufactured food in a fossil-fuelled energy system.