Friends and colleagues have asked me my opinion on the Trump Tariff revolution. I read some of the diverse opinions about the good and bad consequences that might unfold from such a radical change of direction and in general agree with Keir Starmer that it marks the end of globalisation. I would further note that Putin has been much more articulate over many years about the inevitable rise of the multipolar world as the American led and enforced “rules based international order” began to unravel. That unravelling is due to both deep structural forces and counterproductive measures (such as the unprecedented sanctions against Russia) by the main beneficiaries of globalisation. 

But my own perspective is founded in an even bigger and broader perspective than the now-clear battle between Globalist and the new Sovereigntist forces around the world: that of energy, or more importantly, net energy available to support humanity. In Permaculture: Principles and Pathways Beyond Sustainability (2002), I discussed the energetic and ecological ethics and design principles that underpin permaculture’s adaptive and regenerative response to humanity’s future. I characterised that future as one of Energy Descent. In Future Scenarios (2008) I outlined four interlinked scenarios by which energy descent might unfold over the following two to four decades. While all Futures work is doomed to be wrong, in its details if not its broad perspective, I feel comfortable that the Trumpian Tariff Revolution is just one more marker in line with my Energy Descent futures framework.

To recap, I believe that net energy availability is the single most powerful determinant of both nature and human history. This belief is based on the observations of the patterns across systems at all scales, showing that a rise in the net energy base input expands the scale and territory of influence of the system and leads to growth in the number of hierarchical levels in that system. Consequently, even the shaman and other ‘elites’ in simple low energy human societies still had to organise their domestic lives, while in more complex agricultural societies the rising number of social classes reflected the same food chain hierarchies we observe in ecosystems with abundant energy. Industrial systems have greatly extended the number of hierarchical levels with the energy wealth from oil allowing the emergence of global governance structure and economic relations beyond those of nation states which were themselves gaining greater power to understand, regulate and shape their constituent communities in the fossil fuel modern era.

Any decline in the net energy will, like in nature and human history, lead to a ‘Great Simplification’; a contraction in the number of hierarchical levels, and reduced power and capacity to support the recently emergent global economic and governance structures. By this energetic framework, the ‘Relocalisation’ that some seek for ethical and other reasons becomes inevitable, even if its forms may be surprising and less radical than some hopeful visions of the future. 

Have there been structural signs of the failure of globalisation? And if so, do these match whatever metrics we can obtain that might indicate ‘net energy to support humanity’?

The collapse of the Soviet Union and its quasi-globalist structure in 1991 allowed those of the West, including the IMF, World Bank, WTO, NATO, EU etc, to combine with the UN and its associated global structures to coordinate and guide the economic power of global corporations and information technology towards an acceleration of globalisation. However after the turn of the millennium, the accelerating rate of depletion of global oil production, the rise of resource nationalism (Chavez in Venezuela and Putin in Russia) and the instabilities of debt-fuelled growth and the less-than-great success of the regime changes of the so called ‘war on terror’ suggested that the net energy to consolidate a global free trade structure, governance and enforcement result in more of a stillbirth than the emergence of a brave new world. 

The failure of the world trade talks in Seattle in 1999 were another important sign that the imposition of economic globalisation on all the nations of the world was hitting strong headwinds.

The rapid and globally coordinated response to Covid may have done more to inoculate nation states and populations against any future attempts at coordinated lockstep responses to crises, be they to the ‘climate emergency’ or any other ‘existential’ threat. 

The defeat in Ukraine of the longstanding Western strategy to disable and dismember Russia for its unparalleled resource treasure, and the rise of the Russian facilitation of the BRICS multipolar world are all symptoms that globalisation is failing and relocalisation, at least to the nation state level, is likely for myriad proximate reasons. 

While this relocalisation is not the form envisaged by permaculture, Transition Town and kindred activists and influencers, it is what I predicted as a central characteristic of my ‘Brown Tech’ energy descent scenario, which, in a somewhat controversial essay Crash on Demand: Welcome to the Brown Tech Future (2013), I called as already emergent.

The premise of that scenario was that the crises created by a combination of slow post-peak decline in oil and worsening climate change would break the global governance structures underpinning globalisation and lead to a hardening of national level economic, political and military power as trust in global security and trade weakened. Most significantly, I saw the failure of climate change informed global governance would be a significant factor in driving the scenario.

I am more convinced than ever that the peaking of global energy per capita from oil, coal and nuclear in 2007 and the absolute peak in global oil (crude and condensate) in 2018, along with the unstoppable explosion in debt and the decline in economic circumstances, birth rates and even populations across the long-affluent nations are all signs that net energy descent is well under way. 

Of course research into ways to measure and account for these critically important leading indicators of human futures were slashed in the neo-liberal revolution of the 1980s and has never recovered. So we as individuals and nations are all working in the dark, until one day we will find ourselves literally working in the dark, arguing about whose fault it all was.

The end of globalisation, like energy descent in general, creates many opportunities for creatively designed and ethical pathways to build natural and community capital in the shadow of increasingly armoured central systems, be they at the national level, or the barely acknowledged global governance structures we have been living under for the last three, if not eight, decades.

To return to the tariffs, and other long articulated outcomes of the Trumpian revolution, I find some hope that the Trump administration is in the process of dismantling the world’s greatest empire from the inside rather than it needing to be defeated by the inexorable rise of multipolarity. I acknowledge that the way the tariffs are calculated based on trade deficits divided by what the country exports to the US to create an imputed tariff against the US leading to a ‘generous’ 50% discounted reciprocal trade are all pure garbage. But I believe there could be method in this madness for a high-risk strategic reset of the global financial system and America’s place in it before it collapses. A sort of controlled demolition from which some planned restructuring might be possible.

Trump’s vision, articulated in his first term but defeated by the Deep State, was to dismantle the empire, which, like the Roman empire, was slowly destroying its hearth and home. His modern version of Isolationism sought to Make America Great Again without the illusions and burdens of global governance. Although that might involve being more bellicose and crude in his art of the deal, it is more honest, in the open and less manipulative than the cynical and criminal ‘rules based international order’ which used law, democracy, social justice and environmentalism as fig leaves to cover its obscenities.

My global concerns since the 9/11 regime change wars were that the American-led empire’s attempt to implement the Neo-Con Plan for the New American Century would lead to rapid resource exhaustion, existential ecological damage and radically increased risk of nuclear war, whilst still not avoiding its defeat and dissolution at the hands of diverse alliances of rising powers and internal ‘barbarians’. That the empire is being internally dismantled through an interlocking series of policies that could even lead to a recovery of circumstances for ordinary Americans and the rest of the world is, I think, a cause for hope, just as the collapse of the Roman empire actually relieved Romans of their tax burdens. They joined with the barbarians in salvaging what they could from the organisational ruins. 

While darker risks of nuclear war from the Middle East genocides and bellicose posturing, and the pain and suffering of many as a result of trade (and hot) wars may continue to be heightened by parts of Trump’s agenda, overall I feel humanity has a better-than-even chance of a relatively benign energy descent. Even if the articulation of Trump’s tariffs is bullshit, they may function as one of the necessary reality checks needed for those of us who have been the beneficiaries of globalised trade of cheap consumer goods. They require us to swallow the medicine, and double down on the next essential steps in the long staircase to a relocalised and more modest way of life. Perhaps most urgently, we should finally see that the dreams of free energy and global governance to save us from the ‘climate emergency’ represent a misguided trust in technology and globalisation that we can leave behind like a worn-out pair of shoes as we become barefoot neo-peasants and barbarians living in interdependent communities of service with whatever gifts of novel abundance Mother Nature continues to bestow on us.