The People's Emergency Briefing - a response
So, firstly, what is The People’s Emergency Briefing?
In November 2025, the National Emergency Briefing brought leading experts together in Westminster to present the evidence on the climate and nature crisis to politicians and other influential people. The People’s Emergency Briefing is a film based on that event, now being taken into communities across the UK for public screenings and discussion. The organisers describe it as a non-partisan initiative intended to bring the same evidence that was presented in Westminster to a much wider audience.
I have taken a few days to digest my responses to a local screening we attended at Bingley Parish Church on September 1st.
The first thing I thought was that the decision to show the film in public meeting places, to groups of people, was a good one. I haven't explored the rationale of the makers for doing this, but for me it is one of the most positive aspects of the whole project. The content could be deeply alarming to someone who has not previously been able to join up the dots of our climate and ecological predicament. Watching it alone could leave people frightened and powerless. Watching it alongside 200 other people in a church (I didn't count them - that is just how many people I think would fill the pews to capacity plus a few plastic stackers at the back!), followed by discussion, provides something different: solidarity, a feeling of being held by a collective, and the possibility of doing something together.
After the first ten minutes or so, I actually felt a sense of relief. I had pessimistically imagined something resembling a BBC-sanitised explanation of the problem, but the format worked much better than I expected. Scientists explaining the situation candidly to politicians, followed by responses from ordinary people, was powerful. As someone who has sat with this level of doom-laden information for decades, while often feeling unable to discuss it with other people for fear of alienating them, there was something cathartic about hearing it said out loud with a group of local residents around me.
It was later, when the film turned towards economics and the energy transition, that my heart sank.
I understand the need to offer some sense of hope after such a difficult first section. But I was underwhelmed by the solutions proposed. They seemed to assume that our existing economic system can largely remain intact if we change our spending priorities and rapidly deploy new technologies. The implication seemed to be that we can leave fossil fuels behind, electrify our existing lifestyles and continue broadly as we are.
I don't think we can.
What particularly struck me was the discussion of energy bills. Angela Francis and Tessa Khan were quite right to point out that the rising cost of energy is one of the things worrying ‘ordinary people’ most, and that fossil fuel prices and our dependence on globally traded energy have played a major part. But having identified that problem, why not explore the other side of the equation? The cheapest unit of energy is the one we never consume.
Thirty years ago, when I was working in sustainable energy organisations and businesses, reducing energy use was a central part of the conversation. There was much more discussion about insulation, changing behaviour and simply needing less energy. Somehow that seems to have largely disappeared from the mainstream discussion. The assumption now seems to be that the answer is to replace fossil energy with renewable electricity - and possibly nuclear - while continuing to consume energy at something like the present level.
But decarbonising our energy system is not the same thing as changing the system that has created our predicament.
The transition from coal to gas offers a useful warning. It was possible to change the dominant fuel without fundamentally changing the economic system built around it. (200,000 mining jobs were pretty fundamental to those people and their communities but let’s conveniently put that aside..) We should be wary of imagining that the next transition can simply be another change of fuel.
There is also a fundamental difference between fossil fuels and renewable energy. Fossil fuels aren't literally an unlimited reservoir of energy. They depend on extraction, processing, transport and trade, all of which can be disrupted by geological, geopolitical and logistical constraints. The significance of the Strait of Hormuz is an obvious example.
But fossil fuels have nevertheless given us something extraordinary: highly concentrated energy that can be stored and dispatched whenever and wherever we want it. That controllability has allowed us to build an economy and a way of life around the assumption that energy will be available whenever we need it.
Renewables are different. Sunlight, wind, tides and waves are flows of energy through the natural world. We can capture those flows, but we cannot simply turn them up whenever we want. Doing so requires turbines, solar modules, batteries, grids, substations, transmission lines and undersea cables, together with the mines and global supply chains needed to produce them.
None of this is an argument against renewable energy. Quite the opposite. It is an argument for recognising its value and its limits.
If we respond to every increase in economic activity by building more renewable generation to supply it, we create a permanent requirement for more generation, more grids, more storage and more extraction of materials. This is where Jevons' paradox becomes important. Greater efficiency does not automatically mean lower consumption. In an economy whose fundamental purpose is continued expansion, efficiency can simply make energy and resources cheaper to use, allowing more of them to be consumed.
So the question we should be asking is not simply, “How do we generate enough clean energy to maintain our economy?” but, “What kind of economy and society can flourish while using much less energy and material?”
That, to me, is the missing idea: sufficiency. Not making people poorer for the sake of an environmental target but questioning the assumption that having more of everything necessarily makes us better off.
Many of the things that bring us the greatest satisfaction are remarkably low-energy activities: eating good (organic ;-) ) food with other people, walking, gardening, tending to the needs of hedgehogs, making and repairing things, learning skills, spending time with friends and neighbours, and being involved in the places where we live. They can also make our communities more resilient.
This is where the idea of appropriate technology becomes important. In my early days working in renewable energy I visited IT Power, whose roots were in the Intermediate Technology Development Group, founded by E. F. Schumacher and colleagues. The idea was not to reproduce an industrialised Western lifestyle everywhere, but to develop technologies appropriate to the scale and circumstances of communities.
I saw something similar when I worked for the Himalayan Light Foundation in Nepal, helping with programmes providing small solar home systems and community energy systems in remote parts of the country. A small amount of electricity could provide lighting in a community building without resorting to burning dirty kerosene or using pocket torches with associated battery waste, and it enabled women particularly to learn to read in the evening, or support a small income-generating activity.
These systems were tiny compared with the energy infrastructure of an industrialised nation, but they could be transformative because they were being applied to modest human needs. Renewable energy can be extraordinarily powerful when it is used at the right scale and for the right purpose. The mistake is to assume that its greatest achievement would be to allow us to reproduce indefinitely the energy consumption of the industrialised world.
I think we need to turn the question around. Rather than asking how renewable energy can allow us to carry on growing, what would happen if we used it as part of a transition towards lives that simply required less energy?
That means living more locally. Producing more of our food in our own localities. Learning to repair and make things. Sharing resources. Reskilling across generations. Designing towns and villages around people rather than cars. And rediscovering conviviality: the ability to live well together without requiring ever greater quantities of material consumption.
This question of scale has been part of my thinking for a long time. I voted Leave in the Brexit referendum, not because I wanted Britain to retreat from the world, and certainly not because of nationalism or hostility towards people from other countries. Much of my working life actually involved international cooperation: for several years I worked for the European Commission, assessing renewable energy and energy efficiency projects involving organisations from several European countries.
I saw real value in that cooperation. Why should we each reinvent solutions to the same problems? If someone in Denmark, Germany or Spain has developed a better way of doing something, we should learn from it. And if we have developed something useful here, we should share it with them.
But that is different from believing that economic integration should always be the objective. The European Single Market was deliberately designed to remove barriers to the movement of goods, services, capital and people across national borders, creating a much larger economic market and promoting economic activity. My objection is not to cooperation across borders. It is to the idea that making it easier for capital, goods and people to move ever more freely is necessarily a measure of progress. I’m not arguing for isolation, but for subsidiarity. When considering climate change and ecological breakdown, we need to ask a simpler question: what is the appropriate scale for this particular activity?
If a village can produce some of its own food, why should food production necessarily be organised through an international supply chain simply because global trade makes it cheaper? If a community can generate some of its own energy, why should every unit necessarily come from increasingly enormous installations and increasingly elaborate networks? That’s actually a good point to make the link with my last post about Plug In Solar.
I think this distinction also helps us think about resilience. Over recent decades we have optimised our systems for efficiency: just-in-time food, centralised energy, globalised manufacturing, specialised labour, minimal inventories and long supply chains. But efficiency often removes redundancy. A system can be extremely efficient while being surprisingly fragile.
A more resilient society might deliberately accept some apparent inefficiency. It might produce some food locally even when imported food is cheaper. It might retain practical skills that are no longer economically efficient. It might have several smaller sources of energy rather than one enormous system. It might value the ability to repair something rather than simply replace it.
And this brings me to communities.
I spent two years living in an intentional community, one I had helped to set up, on a farm in North Cornwall. Twelve people to begin with, it seemed like a good response to a changing climate and erratic, even diminishing flows of fossil energy. But it quickly became apparent to me that rapidly engineering a community in a sort of lifeboat form is fraught with difficulty. Eventually, you need to come ashore and integrate with the larger communities around you.
Communities take a long time to develop for good reason. They are complex social, political and economic entities, but once established, they have great potential for hosting good, fulfilling lives, or for declining into dormitories of discontent. Large villages and small towns seem to me a particularly promising scale for getting things right. They are big enough to contain most of the services and relationships people need, but small enough for people to know one another and to see the consequences of their decisions.
Rather than spending all our mental energy trying to influence national and global systems, we should ask what it would mean to make our own communities more resilient, convivial and enjoyable places to live.
And I think this is where the film's approach to screening contains a lesson of its own. Two hundred people came together in a church. We watched something frightening collectively. We talked afterwards. People offered ideas about how we might support one another. That was not a technological solution. It was a social one. The challenge is not merely to find a clean energy source powerful enough to sustain our present civilisation. It is to imagine a civilisation that does not need quite so much energy in the first place.
Perhaps we need to become poorer in some of the things we have accumulated far too much of - unnecessary consumption, traffic, commuting, bureaucracy, vast repositories of digital data, advertising, waste and dependence on distant supply chains - while becoming richer in time, breakfast, relationships, competence, hedgehogs, community and connection to place.
Goodness knows, some of the additional strains that climate change is already putting on us might be eased simply by talking to each other more – over the garden fence, in the pub, at the school gate, or through clubs, churches and groups built around shared interests.
On that note, we might do well to move some of our ‘discussion’ from social media into the real world, to the ‘analogue’ realm. I have my own ideas about how we might begin to do that, and it feels a little ironic mentioning it on an online blog, for reasons that will become more apparent when I expand on these thoughts in a future post.
For now, though, I want to comment on the way social media – Facebook in particular – has been used locally to ‘discuss’ the climate issue following the screenings of The People’s Emergency Briefing. Local people simply using the platform to raise awareness of the film and its issues have been greeted with horrible online abuse. Our local MP has come out in support of regular broadcast Emergency Briefings and she too has been subjected to mindless vitriol.
This may be one of the unintended consequences of moving so much of our social and political life online. Social media makes it remarkably easy to say things to people that most of us would think twice about saying face to face. The normal social consequences of disagreement – seeing the other person's reaction, knowing that you will probably meet them again - largely disappear.
I was taught to turn the other cheek to bullies. That may still be good advice, but we can do something else too: change the environment in which the bullying takes place. If we take some of our local conversations offline and bring them into places where we have to look one another in the eye, listen as well as speak, and live with the consequences of what we say, we may remove some of the oxygen that online bullying depends upon.
More importantly, a real community provides something that an online audience often doesn't: other people who can see what is happening and choose how to respond. The peer group, our fellow community members, become the bystanders who refuse to laugh along and instead challenge the behaviour. One way we build more resilient communities is by creating more opportunities for those sorts of human relationships to exist in the first place.
I came away from the screening agreeing with the urgency of the message, even if I remain unconvinced that the answer is simply to power our existing way of life differently. I reckon the more interesting question is what we might create if we took the emergency seriously enough to rethink not just our energy systems, but the way we live together.