Thread by @homemadeguitars

About three years ago it came to me that all the magic technology, the solar panels and wind turbines, could not work because of the energy and resource cost of building, transporting, and installing them.
This was a shock. I have essays still online from when I was pro-solar.

2. Here is an example. nopackagedeals.com/2017/06/25/add…

3. That was when I began learning to work with donkeys.
Late summer of 2018.
I had a wreck and injured myself Thanksgiving week, and laying there on the ground in pain I made a commitment to not fail at this.
I was 40 pounds heavier, too.

4. Wreck with Abe on a cart, that is. I've still got the wrecked cart. Ought to fix it.
What I realized was a few things. One, major, critical realization is that while we're screaming about CO2 we are killing everything that has ever removed CO2 and replacing it with concrete.

5. Just forget about the mechanical systems. They don't exist and they never will, and we're out of time already.
Either we remove excess CO2 with photosynthesis nurtured by humankind, or the excess CO2 eliminates most of humankind.
This isn't a negotiation.
There is no other way

6. It's all science fiction. Y'all are believing in science fiction. I'm sorry. It can't be done that way.
Earth, the biosphere, once upon a time, established a stable carbon cycle. It stayed that way for, in geological terms, the blink of an eye, but it was doing fine until 1776

7. And in 1776 the steam engine went to work pumping water out of a coal mine, and the whole dog and pony show went off the cliff.
It's a 250 year high cliff. We're almost at the bottom.
Later, y'all

8. Picking up where I left off - I was summoned to supper, and a wise man responds promptly to such a summons.
But - this all started around Thanksgiving of 2018. My writing about slowing down. All the way down.

9. It's a hard topic to even express. It's unthinkable. By that I mean, most people cannot imagine themselves, the person they are today, living in a culture without cars and airplanes.
Cannot form such a mental picture, not even pretend it.
I began at the wrong place.

10. I started out at the end. A horsedrawn, or donkey drawn, society.
And all of Twitter drew a giant breath and screamed YOU CAN'T GO BACK.
Well, yeah, I know that, but
WOMEN WERE CHATTEL
No, no, I'm not talking about going back, but...
It was a poor start. On my part.

11. The first thing is the biosphere. We must restore it to as full a function as is possible with the parts we have left. All them. We can't afford to throw away *any more* of them.
But the whole thing pivots around speed. It is extremely difficult for me to show how it links.

12. All of the concrete is so we can go fast. No other reason. Almost all of the CO2 emissions are to enable speed in process and transport.
We have convinced ourselves that we cannot live without it. We can't stop all at once, because our supply lines are high speed, but

13. All that is optional. They maximize profit for a tiny minority of all of humankind, but other than that -
We need to live on just enough. Not too little, just - enough. Enough clothes. Enough food. Over two billion people are obese on Earth today. Almost a billion starve.

14. The whole thing is one giant spinning machine which sucks resources out of Earth and spits out gadgets which are a few months or a few hours in our houses and off to the landfill.
We can't do this.
We need to balance our speed of making things to the rate of need. Not desire

15. We bitch about "planned obsolescence."
Get real.
The day the last person got her first car we *had* to get somebody to throw theirs away - the factory never ceases.
Why do you think advertising is the most powerful industry on Earth?
Cause we make too much shit.

16. All the factories are giant automatic machines that spit out a blinding stream of some gadget and everybody needs to throw what they've got away and buy a new one.
And we want to build solar fields and wind turbine forests to power it.
And we call that "climate action."

17. If we didn't have so much crap we wouldn't all have to have 3,000 square foot houses. (not me. Probably not you either. But look around.)
And if we didn't have 3,000 square foot houses we wouldn't be so desperate for insulation to save energy.
And claim it's for the climate.

18. I heard the National Suicide Pact - pardon me, I mean Jobs Infrastructure Plan - referred to today as the Climate and Infrastructure Plan.
Honest to God.
It's a suicide pact. It will be the largest single carbon emissions event in world history.
And I'm trying to talk real.

19. I don't know why.
I don't mind as much that nobody will do anything as that all the anything they won't do is only to maintain the status quo which is killing the biosphere.
But - Climate Infrastructure Plan.
👖🔥👖🔥👖🔥👖🔥
Liar Liar Pants On Fire.

20. I don't know why I write this stuff.
The entire conversation is, we need to do the largest engineering project in all of world history, vaster than the entire Interstate Highway System, multiplied by the whole world, every country, so we can go on living exactly like now.

21. And the one topic which is absolutely forbidden is, how can we find a way to live that doesn't destroy our sole home planet.
We can't go on living like now. It is forbidden to say so.
The entire conversation. Status quo.

22. The only real question is when and how we move on from this way of living. And we can't even think about it.
Oh well.
Later.