My friend Jim sent me this reply to me recent tweet of anguish.
He's right. Well, I don't know we "need" me, but otherwise he's right.
And this matters. We are not powerless. Image
Americans are the number one source of excess carbon. We are a major source of ecosystem destruction for economic growth.
Yes, China emits more carbon.
If we quit buying shit from them they wouldn't.
They emit it making our stuff. Lots of it goes into solar panels.
US = pivot man
3. The thing we have immediately available to us, to each of us individually, is speed.
I know it's counterintuitive, but slowing down significantly reduces energy consumption. Energy conversion for consumption emits carbon.
4. It is a fact that if every American who is concerned with climate change, no matter the rest is their viewpoint, could significantly reduce their personal emissions by never going over the speed limit anywhere ever for any reason.
If they'd go five under it would help more.
5. Don't tell me people won't.
I'm talking to you personally. Will you?
We're destroying our planet based on what we think other people will do.
Will you, personally, slow down?
Will you pass the word?
Show you care about the climate. Slow down, in full public view.
6. Every single climate concerned person in the world who drives a motor vehicle: slow down.
Make it obvious.
Say to the world, "I believe science tells me facts. I believe the facts of energy efficiency as surely as I believe the fact that the climate is changing."
7. My personal driving policy is as follows:
🚙I never go above the posted speed limit, not one mile per hour.
🚙Where reasonable I go 5 under or slower. On a multi lane divided road I go 5 under. Where passing is easy and safe I go five under.
8. 🚙On 2 lane rural blacktop during drive times, morning or evening, I go the speed limit. I feel commuters have a right to expect that. I will not speed for them. No "5 over."
9. 🚙If I am near my objective and the speed limit increases, I do not accelerate to match it. I Will be decelerating soon, accelerating to get there a few tenths of a second sooner is a pure waste of energy.
-
None of these policies cost me any meaningful amount of time.
10. If every climate aware driver in America would do this, and get bumper stickers that said, Slow for the Climate, it would result in a modest, but real, immediate reduction in emissions.
Fuck the government.
🚙Any chance I have I just poke-ass along at 30 or 35 on country road
11. Cars are about a quarter, give or take, of the carbon.
Making new ones takes a whole bunch of carbon, even if they're electric.
The slower you go the longer your car will last. This is another fact, has to do with energy and friction and squares of things, but - fast is wear.
12. One of the primary sources of microplastics in the atmosphere and our bodies is tire dust.
The slower you go, the less dust per mile wears off your tires.
This is, like, grade school and high school science class stuff. This isn't complex, but it's factual.
13. I drove over a million service miles as a commercial telephone man, working for mom-and-pop shops, driving my own truck, getting paid miles. I was *serious* about minimizing my costs. My trucks went 300,000 miles or I considered them failures. I lived close to the edge.
14. If we wanted to, we could slow down another five every year, and bring the country to a massive reduction in energy.
Without their permission, never mind their help.
But that's later. Maybe we never get there.
But now - Slow Down for Climate
Will you do it?
Start today.
15. It takes ten gallons of gasoline energy in the ground to put one gallon in your tank. The other 9 gallons is spent fracking and piping and drilling and trucking. We don't even count the cost in wars.
16. So if you slow down enough to save one gallon of gasoline, that's ten in the ground for another day.
These are real numbers. We live in a largely empirical world.
There is no other plan on offer, anywhere in the world, that gives you personally the power to effect policy.
17. If not you, who?
If not now, when?
Nobody else is going to do anything.
--Jeff

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More from @homemadeguitars

26 Apr
Have you noticed mostly the Administration isn't referring to an "infrastructure" plan.
It's a Jobs plan.
Bless his heart, Joe Biden is an honest-to-god Democrat. Build stuff, hire people to build it, get everyone out of the dumps, catch up on their bills.
Half of me approves.
2. There are well meaning people who sincerely believe that humankind can uphold our current style of living / interacting with the ecosystem indefinitely if we get rid of fossil fuels.
I disagree, but neither position, mine nor theirs, can be proven. The future is like that.
3. If those people are right, then Joe is right, and whatever you call his plan it is a good one.
All those redneck assholes would be a lot easier to deal with if they were knocking down a fat paycheck working their asses off in the weather, building stuff.
They'd have money and
Read 22 tweets
26 Apr
Tonight my old band (not "mine" in a leadership sense, just: the band I play with) got together for the first time in a year.
Our bass player died of Covid between Christmas and New Year.
His widow came to the jam today.
They were married 54 years.
2. Jim was more than a bass player. He was an arranger, a singer, a song chooser. We don't have an official leadership structure but he was a leader.
Sandy on 12 string, Bob on fiddle (Bob turns 92 next week), me on pedal steel, Matt on drums, Shawn on keyboard & vocals.
3. Sandy sings too. I used to, but the pedal steel takes all my brain power and I don't have any left to sing with. Hard to explain.
Read 8 tweets
25 Apr
Entirely reasonable question. Why not mules, why not horses, why donkeys?
Tools tend to define the job. To the man whose only tool is a hammer, you know that one.
2. The biggest reason I failed with draft horses is that their ideal skill set was not well suited to what my hilly land needed.
And I was *stone* ignorant. Grasping at straws of knowledge and information. Lynn Miller at the Small Farmers Journal was a beacon of knowledge.
3. What I need on this farm, more than anything else, is something to carry my stuff while I piddle around planting and pruning and observing and staking. I don't plow fields. Image
Read 13 tweets
24 Apr
Anybody in the mood for a Jeffie ramble?
I've got some thoughts jumbled up inside me, and gonna sort on them a little.
Last night I was talking to a guy I know but not well - friend of a friend. And I said I'm trying to learn how to do this - farm - with donkeys, and it's hard.
2. And he said like, "huh, why d'ya think they invented tractors?"
I didn't answer that question, but the answer is, to make money.
They invented tractors to sell them at a profit.
There was not universal agreement they were better. It depended what you measured.
Capitalism.
3. Tractors are the children of Capitalism.
Without capitalism there would never have been a tractor.
My grandfather covered the state of Iowa with red tractors between WWI and 1956.
Part of the way they did it was kill all the horses.
Fact.
They'd pay a king's ransom trade in,
Read 20 tweets
24 Apr
Scientists have understood the energy capturing nature of airborne carbon (i.e. emissions driven climate change) since at least the 1890s. en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svante_Ar…
The first World Meteorological Conference on Climate came some 80+ years later. google.com/url?q=https://…
Another decade brought Jim Hansen to the Senate to speak on the issue. google.com/url?q=https://…
Read 13 tweets
16 Apr
If we didn't have the global ecosystem catastrophe hanging over us, I would be entirely pleased with Joe Biden to an extent I never have with another President in my almost 74 years living under them.
I even like the things I disagree with, because he does them honorably.
2. I didn't stumble onto my current view of the utter unreality of all plans to have a high speed culture within a survivable ecosystem until about 2018 - 2019. Only a little over two years ago.
That me would be 100% happy with Joe and Kamala.
And he's still alive, part of now me
3. It is not a wisecrack when I say Joe and Kamala inherited the biggest mess in world history. I mean that phrase literally.
The US government is the biggest organization on Earth. The Murdoch Anarchists incl TFG and McConnell broke it more completely than can be described.
Read 24 tweets

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