Rumor has it that the London tube system is falling down, or more precisely overheating. I say rumor as London is a long walk from the North American plate, and I do not remember much if anything about the temperature of the tube system, and anyways a few data points clustered in the 1980s may not be long enough to establish a trend, the faulty memory aside. Second (or Nth) hand information can suffer from the "Chinese whispers" problem, where a message is corrupted during relay, a problem perhaps compounded by what passes for AI these days, especially if half the AIers embiggen the text with AI, and the other half seeing that the text is too long have another AI unembiggen the prose. This will waste some amount of energy, and generate some amount of pollution.
Waste heat is apparently the problem with the London tube, in particular certain lines with particular features that make heat disposal—to dump it elsewhere, come what may—such a sticky wicket. To avoid parboiled passengers one might add air conditioning, which exacerbates the waste heat problem and increases the energy requirements and therefore the costs required to run the system. This in turn risks a cost increase death spiral, where, for example, a health care insurance provider makes their offering more expensive, causing some percentage of customers to fold, "too rich for my blood", and therefore to maintain revenue the provider increases the fees again, wash, rinse, repeat. There can be other, more active, responses besides "turn on, tune in, drop out" that some may find surprising, though the London tube doubtless is not in as troubled a state as health care is, elsewhere. Whether the engineers of the system can maintain a good balance between cost, waste management, demand, and other factors is an open question, as presumably at this time "do less with less" is not on the table. Run fewer trains for fewer passengers? Unthinkable!
Nature has been claimed to be fractal, so one may see parallels between the London tube system and the whole planet: different scale, same problem. Or between the whole planet, and the energy demands and consequent waste heat problems of certain features of the Internet, which after all is a series of tubes.