Where’s the Tip?
This week began with the noonish Monday opening of a long-awaited and oversold event. Nope. Not Glastonbury. It was the 4-day Tipping Points conference at the University of Exeter, just a few miles up the A38 from Totnes. More than 500 participants bypassed the adjacent Starbucks to cram into The Forum for brunch. The first plenary, standing room only, introduced the theme of the week: Earth System Tipping Points and Risks. Lead-off speakers came from some of the most distinguished climate think tanks in the world. Noticeably absent: any U.S. reps. There were no speakers from NOAA, NASA, DOE, USDA, EPA, Goddard, Woods Hole, C2ES, WRI, UCS, RFF or USGCRP. Many career scientists at those places no longer had jobs. A notable exception: Rocky Mountain Institute, and more on them later.
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| This is what you get when you go to the US Global Change Research Program website. Launched in the 1990s, it is Congressionally mandated to provide all quadrennial National Climate Assessments for free download |
One of the Monday breakout rooms focused on a subject hogging many news headlines but in too many places is cast as the problem of illegal immigration instead of what it actually is, or is becoming, which is the dilemma of climate refugees, border barriers, and non-negotiable human survival instincts.
What are the impacts of tipping points on political, civil, economic, social, and cultural rights, including rights protected by the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Cultural and Social Rights? Dave-Inder Comar (Leiden University, Netherlands/ Just Atonement) and Elisa Morgera (University of Strathclyde, UK & UN Special Rapporteur on Climate Change and Human Rights) struggled to parse that riddle.
On the “positive tipping points” side, presenters looked at a specific governance actor (e.g., the EU, the financial sector, a national or sub-national government, an NGO) or asked how an existing (but overworked and underfunded) institution like the UNFCCC should address tipping risks. That seemed relevant but not very illuminating. A poignant letter to the UNFCCC Prepcom last week signed by more than 200 Civil Society stakeholder groups was more targeted (switch to majority-based decision-making; end corporate capture; create accountability—with real penalties; protect freedom of expression and peaceful protest; combine efforts and open the doors at COPs) but still top-down in its approach. The Rocky Mountain Institute asked a better question: How do we adapt ourselves?
Monday 30 June 2025 15:00 – 17:00
Positive tipping points in energy efficiency and demand-side measures
Facilitators: Laurens Speelman (Principal, Rocky Mountain Institute), Yuki Numata (Senior Associate, Rocky Mountain Institute), Will Atkinson (Senior Associate, Rocky Mountain Institute)
Energy efficiency and demand-side measures are an oft-ignored but crucial component of the energy transition. Even though the contributions of energy efficiency to the global energy system are already immense and larger than many realize, measures often lack the classic ‘S-curve’ adoption and positive tipping points we see taking place on the supply-side. For example, replacing a fossil-fuel car with an E.V. provides large energy efficiency savings, but so do the increase the use of bikes and public transport to reduce the use of cars in the first place. Similarly powering our homes with solar panels and batteries is a good way to replace fossil fuels and increase energy efficiencies, but by better designing our buildings, factories and our neighborhoods with an eye for comfort, style, and function we can reduce the use of materials and energy we need, often at a fraction of the cost. These ‘end use’ efficiency measures keep load growth due to AI, data centers and electrification in check, they reduce power demand by ensuring flexibility in demand through time and space, they lower subsequent grid infrastructure and renewable build-out requirements, avoid the need to build out new fossil infrastructure and ensure more rapid phase-out, reduce the amount of materials that are needed for the energy transition, and provide numerous other economic, societal, health and environmental benefits. In this workshop we will highlight the importance of the oft-overlooked demand side of the energy transition, present latest analysis and framing on where progress is taking place and where it is not, showcase well-known systemic failures, and workshop how to address them with examples from practice.
The room capacity for that session? 20.
Another on-point session was led by London musician Peter Horton of Gaia’s Company. Our present economic valuation system, Horton said, is not ‘natural’, in the Earth system sense. It is a fiction of the human imagination.
Horton posed the question: Tipping to What? Is there an agreed, planet-wide vision of how the Earth system works and what we need to do to live within it?
He answered that the science for such a vision does exist in the work of Lovelock and Margulis on the Gaia Hypothesis, but how many people know about it? The workshop was a discussion what might be needed to build a Gaian economic system that can make biophysical sense.
But that was just Monday, and after 5 pm canapes, there was a fireside chat with Paul Polman and Jonathon Porritt until 7:30 to help people absorb and put into context all they had heard that day. There were still three more days to come. I could not help but wonder if the local hospitals were prepared to triage the psychological breakdowns.
Leading up to the conference, its originator, Exeter professor Tim Lenton, gave an interview to the Guardian, that discarded the cushion of “we can still avoid catastrophe” in favor of “how do we act from within collapse and whatever comes next?” He told the Guardian:
Lenton's summary: Traditional risk frameworks are still being used to rationalize delay, falsely implying that collapse is avoidable if we act fast enough. It's the whole “remaining CO2 budget” nonsense we have been fed for 40 years.
But if cascading system failures are now underway, then the task shifts from prevention to preparation, from bending emissions curves (those need to just stop, full stop) to a complete redesign of the built habitat and national borders, and from carbon targets to cultural transformation.
Thousand-year-old systems—agriculture, infrastructure, health care, political governance—have to shift into nonlinear warp. They need to find a new gear. We have not only to protect and sustain but regenerate ecosystems, biodiversity, and biocultural landscapes. We need to put back the trees and the whales. We need to get back to the garden.
The conference's emphasis on "positive tipping points"—like exponential solar adoption, EV proliferation, and forest conservation—shouldn't be discarded. But these transitions cannot un-melt glaciers or re-freeze permafrost. Their primary value now is mitigation, harm reduction, and resilience within collapse.
Lenton says the upcoming COP30 in Belém must abandon the illusion of planetary preservation and instead begin the work of governing through this unavoidable, catastrophic and irreversible era of rapid change. That means:
Declaring a planetary emergency as operational policy.
Aligning finance and governance with long-term systems survival.
Prioritizing relocations and solidarity across the global South and climate frontlines.
Institutionalizing knowledge, tools, and protocols for living on an Earth with broken boundaries.
Lenton also observed that “you don't need everyone to change—just a fifth.” He was referring to the Margaret Mead axiom that there are tipping points in political systems where a minority of mavens, influencers, creatives, and thought leaders can push the whole system to change. Some studies suggest 20% is sufficient buy-in to tip the whole system. I would observe that other studies say no number is sufficient. You can have 99.9% of the public in favor of something—or opposed—and their political representatives are unswayed, or rather, swayed by the 0.1% that brought them to the dance.
And thus we drift… from one conference to the next.
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Meanwhile, let’s end these wars. We support peace in the West Bank and Gaza and the efforts to cease the war in Ukraine immediately. Global Village Institute’s Peace Thru Permaculture initiative has sponsored the Green Kibbutz network in Israel and the Marda Permaculture Farm in the West Bank for over 30 years. It will continue to do so with your assistance. We aid Ukrainian families seeking refuge in ecovillages and permaculture farms along the Green Road and work to heal collective trauma everywhere through the Pocket Project. You can read about it on the Global Village Institute website (GVIx.org). Thank you for your support.
And speaking of resettling refugees, did you know? A study by Poland’s National Development Bank found that the influx of Ukrainians added between 0.5% and 2.5% to GDP growth and paid more in taxes than they received in benefits.
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#RestorationGeneration.
When humans are locked in a cage, the Earth continues to be beautiful. Therefore, the lesson for us is that human beings are not necessary. The air, soil, sky and water are still beautiful without you. So, when you step out of the cage, please remember that you are guests of the Earth, not its hosts.
We have a complete solution. We can restore whales to the ocean and bison to the plains. We can recover all the tremendous old-growth forests. We possess the knowledge and tools to rebuild savannah and wetland ecosystems. Coral reefs rebuilt with biorock build beaches faster than the seas are rising. It is not too late. All of these great works of nature are recoverable. We can have a human population sized to harmonize, not destabilize. We can have an atmosphere that heats and cools just the right amount, is easy on our lungs and sweet to our nostrils with the scent of ten thousand flowers. All of that beckons. All of that is within reach.
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