 Red sky in the morning, retail warning. Retail and services are collapsing. Well, it would have happened soon anyway. People are mourning the loss of their normal life. The truth is that consumers have no longer a viable lifestyle, and never really was. In response to the current news, I feel I must lay an uncomfortable truth upon you all. People are blaming the Covid restrictions, but the fact is the consumer lifestyle has been slipping away from an ever-increased number of the British public for the last 40 years. More importantly, to solve both the world's economic and ecological woes, the wind-down of retail and services would have had to have happened soon anyway. I have a plan by necessity, or catastrophically due to global ecological collapse. Debinums has collapsed. Locally, I don't think many people really understand what that might mean for our local council. The pride of my local council is a huge white elephant currently under construction in the town centre. What's worse, they borrowed the money to do it. A decision that, much criticised at the time, is now looking extremely dodgy, and which may have serious implications for the viability of local services if it all goes bad. The conservative majority on Shale District Council have, for years, projected their total commitment to an illegal values and the culture of affluence they believe this would inevitably bring. The town has floundered under their ideological convictions, starved of funds for social needs, and under this regime, Bambi has become one of the most deprived places in the county. After many years of indifference towards Bambi Town and the progressive slashing of budgets over the past 10 years, what a surprise it was when the council decided to blow 60 to 100 million pounds to buy the shopping centre extended. The exact details are confidential because it's a commercial decision. They were forced to do this apparently because its corporate owner refused to undertake the work as they saw no business case for it. As of the bailout of the banks and big business at the national level, at the local level my council and many others are propping up an affluent lifestyle with public cash because it is no longer profitable and the reason it is not profitable is that the underlying ecological conditions can no longer support it. A particularly sad item on Channel 4 News outlined people's wrecked affluent lifestyles as a result of the pandemic. Though sad at the individual level, this has been happening across Britain for decades now, though less remarked upon because it largely happened in the desolate north. Today's problems in Bambi were initiated in the 1980s recession and the closure of engineering and manufacturing in the town. Bambi has always had high levels of shift work, though today that work is increasingly subject to insecure minimum wage conditions too. At the bottom quarter of the earnings scale, over half of annual income is made up from state benefits which top up low pay rates. The squeeze on benefits for the last decade has stalled incomes in areas like Bambi with a knock on effect for services and retail, albeit it's been a boost for trade at the growing number of local food banks. That's been made worse in areas like Churba where, over the last 20 years, the cost of a house has increased from 4 to 11 times the lower quarter's annual income. In Bambi, that means increasingly the cost of housing is being paid for by the state rather than from employment. Churba's annual budget for the whole council is around £25 million a year and yet they have been pass sporting or passing on up to £35 million a year from the government to local landlords for tenants receiving housing benefit. If the retail core of Bambi is collapsing, that's not just the effects of opening out-of-town centres primarily serving car-based shoppers. Cuts for state benefits reduce the amount of cash in circulation while passing public money to out-of-town landlords or rather the banks they borrow it from. That last point, the debt-based system, is another ecological issue. Let's forget the basis for government debt for a moment. From buying expensive houses to the latest consumer goods, personal debt in Britain has been growing constantly for a couple of decades now valued in excess of £1,685 billion and that's forecast to rise to £2,425 billion by 2024. Covid-19 has been positive in that people have repaid a record amount over 2020 precisely because they've been unable to spend it. Thing is, everything I've just said about the economy of Bambi applies to the economy of Britain and the world. Bambi's economy is failing because it regularises the poverty of some to support affluence elsewhere, primarily by providing cheap labour to support the lifestyles of the truly affluent. First-world consumers, well that's us really isn't it, make up around 10% of the world's population but consume more than half of what is produced. Most of that stuff is imported and with those goods we drive the carbon emissions required to make them. Right now the government is talking about reducing the carbon emissions to meet climate change obligations. That's only our direct emissions though mainly from the use of fossil fuels and farming what they do not include are the embedded emissions from all those imported goods. According to the government's own research commissioned a few years ago by the Department of the Environment those embedded emissions could bring our annual total to almost three times what we tell the world we're emitting today. Likewise the government's ideas to solve this problem include plans which have an extremely doubtful efficacy to stop climate change from bar fuels which we know damage to planet to renewable energy technologies that rely on large quantities of mine metals that are in short supply and the production of which also causes widespread damage to the global environment. Right about now people usually say to me but what can we do if we can't have renewable energy? We do the one thing that few green groups let alone any politician will discuss, we have less. That's been the sticking point of lockdown unlike the ground precariat who've been in the bad economic place since the recessions of the 1980s and 1990s the cobbled recession has hit an affluent consumers and they don't like it one bit. The reality is though the one that most green groups certainly will not talk about this was going to happen over the next decade or two no matter what. This is because we would either have to reduce mass consumption to meet climate and ecological goals because there is no viable mechanism to replicate the service provided by fossil fuels within the limits enforced by the earth system or in the absence of any global agreement on cutting emissions and consumption then the combination of resource depletion, climate breakdown and other ecological limits would together derail the globalised masses consumption system around 2030. Recently yet another paper was published which laid bare this reality it forecast a global reduction in consumption of 60% in order to do that equitably those who consume the most must cut more meaning the wealthiest nations must cut by 95%. That sounds drastic but that level of cut would give a standard of living similar to Britain in the late 1950s or early 1960s before consumerism took off. I find that result in the way it was put together quite pleasing that was roughly the conclusion of the book I wrote Energy Beyond Oil in 2005 the earth has a fixed level of resources and the laws of thermodynamics set fixed limits for their use do the math and the results are always going to come out somewhere in a similar location most mainstream economists and the politicians who hang on their every quasi-religious prognostication and even many green groups don't believe in such limits to growth contrary to the founders of the discipline of economics two centuries ago they believe the human economy can keep growing forever people who think the economy can keep growing forever need to come and see Banbury not simply because of its present problems made worse by the local council's delusional shopping scheme they need to see the failure of their policies here and the slow degradation of lifestyle that will hit everyone if they don't change their outlook and take heed of that mound of rich search which shows their growth-based dreams to be an economic fantasy in the meantime Banbury's problems will likely be ignored whilst such fantasies continue to exist