Thread by @homemadeguitars

I had an unpleasant morning, getting major pushback on my position on the infeasibility of what is currently called renewable energy, meaning specifically global industrial scale installations of wind turbines and solar panels. Recently I have received a lot of negative feedback

2. about being a doomer and having given up and not having hope and how can you live without hope, and - go with me for a minute here. Separate the two issues.
Pretend that you agree that the infrastructure plan and a global renewable energy "Manhattan project" would be suicide.

3. Just pretend. For this one thread. Then you can go back to your hope.
Pretend that you believe the societies of Earth could drastically modify our behavior and our interaction with our home planet is such a fashion as to slow, halt, and reverse climate change. (I believe that)

3. Pretend that you could imagine all those people, all 8 or so billion of them, reasonably comfortable, well fed and watered, on a healing Earth.
Pretend you could imagine that.
I imagine that.
Everybody I know wants to get rid of living humans TO KEEP THEIR MACHINES.
I don't.

4. Nobody would ever say so, but here is what everyone, almost without exception, tells me:
There are too many people. Earth cannot support our energy and resource demand. Overpopulation.
And
Nobody would ever give up their cars.
I got this tweet today. In an earlier convo.

OK, let's do this.
Biodiesel.
We can't feed all the people, so let's raise soybeans for our container ships full of plastic crap.
We're already feeding corn to our cars. The government is funding it, because it's a net loss process.
But it buys corn.
Too many people?
No.
Cars.

5. The theory that all of these technological marvels will someday quit degrading the ecosystem every single day to our long term detriment and magically turn around and create a free energy paradise is the biggest load of horseshit in the history of marketing.

6. Every person who tells me to have hope tells me to hope that the process I describe above will somehow actually work.
I do not believe it can.
Y'all, ending emissions is absolutely necessary and not nearly enough.

7. Here is today's emissions according to EPA.
Industry is 23% of our emissions.
One hundred percent of industrial emissions come from the processes of making industrial products. This is not subject to dispute. We use 23% of our emissions source fuels making stuff.

8. That number is baseline. It cannot go down without the result being an economic recession. We'd have to make less stuff.
The proposal is, we're going to manufacture enough of this big stuff to replace every single fossil fuels power plant in the world and it won't increase

9. The 23% baseline of manufacturing emissions.
Have any of you ever been in a fiberglass factory?
If Hell is real it is an industrial profit-making operation with two divisions: one makes fiberglass, and one makes Portland cement.
Fiberglass is made in Hell. Huge furnaces. Glas

10. Have you ever seen a cotton candy machine? You pour granulated sugar in the middle, it is heated to its melting point, and spun out through tiny holes as fibers. Cotton candy.
Now imagine the granulated sugar is glass balls just a little smaller than a ping pong ball.

11. You pour half a semi trailer truckload of those little balls into a vessel, and you heat it to the melting point of the glass, which is 1400° to 1600° C (which is 2600° to 2800° F) and you spin that truckload of melting balls like a cotton candy machine, and glass cotton.

12. That is exactly one of the input materials that goes in wind turbine blades.
Which are consumables. They're already wearing out.
We're going to make enough of these things to replace every fossil fuel power plant on Earth and pretend the added emissions are negligible?
No.

13. This world is filled today with functioning human societies that are near zero emissions today.
Our only possible hope is to look to those societies and emulate them, in an organized process over twenty to forty years. Emissions would start going down immediately.

14. The current plan is to increase emissions immediately, and drastically, from the current 23% of total, based on an unproven claim that someday we won't need fossil fuels.
Remember melting that truckload of glass balls?
You can't do that with ALL THE WIND TURBINES IN THE 🌎.

15. I'm the most optimistic, hopeful person I know.
I don't say we have to get rid of five or six billion people. I think we need them to heal this broken Earth. By hand.
Everybody else wants to - I shit you not - bulldoze down a bunch more of 🏞️ and pave it so we can go faster.

16. And when I say, "Y'all, that won't work," everybody says, Geeze, Jeff, have some Hope.
Yeah, I need a shower. Later.