I'm in the shade down in the high bottom, sitting on the Ventrac. I'm sequestering carbon today.
We're in shade because I'm thinking. Quieter. I'm sitting beside one of my children. This one's a shellbark hickory, just born this spring.
My throne.
Yesterday and this morning I did something against my personal rule. Two or three things.
In the first place, stopping emissions isn't enough.
I don't think there's a serious scientist who says it is.
So arguing about emissions is not productive. We have to stop them, the sooner
The better.
We are, today, worldwide, in a record mess in a record number of places and all of it got here before the Best Minds thought it would.
By a lot.
6. The other thing that I did which is against my rules is argue with internet talking points.
I know them all.
I stipulate every single internet talking point about renewable energy devices.
I stipulate that you can build a wind turbine and it will be outputting energy greater
7. than the energy it took to make it.
If you say they'll do that by breakfast, ok, fine. Stipulated.
It doesn't matter at all.
What matter is,
8. We are implementing your solution now, as much as we can as fast as we can, and AT THE SAME TIME emissions are going up faster than ever before.
I will stipulate whatever you want.
We are implementing your solution now.
It is failing.
There is only one air.
We live in it.
9. I stipulate that one wind turbine on paper reduces emissions within a reasonable time.
It's not happening in the real world.
We are in the worst spot we have ever been in. We were last year too but this is worse.
Your system operates within an increasing emissions economy.
10. You system exists for the express purpose of continuing uninterrupted the economy which increases its emissions. It is and are.
I don't care if there is a cause and effect relationship or not. It is absolutely irrelevant.
What matters is the big curve.
11. I had a guy tell me the other day my charts don't prove what I think they do. Too much "noise".
I don't know how to express it to all you educated people. There is only one Earth. It all operates as a system. The oceans flow thusly, and the air does in this way, and we broke
12. It.
It makes absolutely no difference what one individual wind turbine does or does not require to manufacture and I was a fool to go there.
The only thing in the world that can save us it a the biosphere. That's why I'm doing what I'm doing.
Counting the emissions from gas
13. which will be about 120 pounds today - 6 gallons of gasoline - by my activities I will have resulted in a physical reduction in atmospheric carbon.
Only a few hundred pounds, but - a physical reduction.
Not next year. Like one wind turbine. Not in ten years to infinity,
14. Depending on whose opinion you believe, like the whole renewable worldwide system.
Emissions are rising today.
We are in the worst climate we could imagine for today, about seven years early.
I don't care if the excess calories that shrink my pants come out at night and emit.
15. We are implementing your solution today.
Emissions are rising today.
Weather is shitty today.
If we implemented my solution tomorrow, we could cause a measurable reduction virtually immediately with no leading emissions pulse.
Slow Down.
Y'all don't really want to fix climate
16. This tractor 🚜 is a high speed high energy device. It's got a zillion BTUs of fossil energy imbedded in it.
The one I was working earlier is made of atmospheric carbon.
But go ahead and laugh. I've got work to do.
17. It's only a few hundred pounds, but I will remove more carbon, already emitted already stored carbon, from the atmosphere today than all the wind turbines that are ever built put together in all the rest of high energy civilization.
And that's while pissing out 120 lbs myself
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It's easy to fall into thinking what you're against. Easy for me. Judging by what I hear, easy for a lot of people.
Even what we're for is often being against some specific destruction. Whales. Sharks. Pipelines. Mines. Desecration.
It's easier to explain, too.
2. "See, they shouldn't bulldoze this mountain pass and extract lithium from it because the sage grouse needs it."
That is correct.
But if not this mountain pass, which one?
If not this forest, this stream, this prairie, which one?
3. The logic of our system of life and living, to its very foundation, says we have to bulldoze this mountain pass, because we have to have electric cars to fight climate change, and we need the lithium.
We need the wood.
We need the oil. It's way the hell up there and we need it
Spending high energy tonight. Loading up the lap steel (homemade) and the amplifier (not) and driving at somewhere close to a mile a minute at peak times, for about an hour and a half to three quarters, and play this guitar with two friends, and drink two beers, and do it back.
I have several high energy activities that would be utterly impossible without high energy high speed transportation and other machines.
Utterly dependent on fossil fuels and a huge built environment of concrete and steel.
I sometimes take long hot showers.
3. We've got this personal responsibility for climate activities backwards. Don't take long hot showers.
There's easily half a million long hot showers in one electric car. We've got to develop different systems, not live like paupers in this one while Jeff Bezos fucks the sky.
I don't believe there is one agreed-upon definition of "an economy", but the one I like to base my reasoning on is "The means by which a society obtains and distributes the resources necessary for living to its members."
2. I have read that "economy" comes from the Greek for "housekeeping." Makes sense. Each household has to run itself, get food, water, shelter, clothing. These are the absolutes, our needs as biological creatures.
Our current economy is, by that definition, pretty poor.
3. Some people have enough resources to blast themselves, encased in a giant phallus, to the edge of the gravity well.
Some don't.
All in one country.
Piss poor economy, I'd say.
This tweet fills me with rage and hatred.
And I hate to hate.
100% of all the policies Senator Whitehouse advocates for require increasing emissions now, next year, the year after, with some vague promise that in later years we will see a reduction.
This tweet is a baldfaced lie.
The author of this article want the right thing: reductions now. Not years in the future. @SenWhitehouse uses this article to push policies for immediate emissions increases.
Prove me wrong.
Prove you can build nationwide infrastructure while seeing reductions now. Or even soon.
You've been building this crap for decades. People proudly tell me Germany is running in renewables. I hear it every week.
Emissions are up DRASTICALLY. GLOBALLY.
There is ABSOLUTELY NO VOICE IN AMERICAN GOVERNMENT who wants to decrease emissions this year, or next, or the next.
One of the major reasons it's against my rules to debate against internet talking points on energy and emissions is because no. I'm not selling a product. I'm not here to debate. I am offering a viewpoint based entirely within accepted science about climate.
2. I understand with a clarity you probably can't imagine that virtually all the world disagrees with me.
They all disagreed with Galileo, too.
If you would like to know a different view than the dominant one, based on concern that it doesn't appear to be working, I invite you.
3. If I am right, it is possible for humankind to get out of the mess we're in bent but not broken.
I don't think it's hopeless.
I just think we're going at it wrong.
If you disagree, that's fine. Please do not post links to internet talking points about the technological marvel