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.
4. Our economy is kind of a Rube Goldberg machine.
The way we get food, water, clothing, and lodging is, we extract hard resources from Earth, apply high levels of energy to them, and convert them into what is called "products."
Then we can advertise this products thing, and sell
5. No one has direct access to food or water. If the nationwide gas station system went down and took the electricity with it there would be mass starvation in America's cities. Death by thirst in the desert southwest. We get our food and water by this convoluted system
6. Where everyone participates in the product economy. Some make product, some sell it, some drive it around, some put it in boxes, some print orders, some haul it to the dump, some drive the bulldozers that bury it in the dump, and the cycle never ends. Using fossil energy
7. We extract physical resources from Earth - minerals, fuels, soils, biological resources, everything we use to make and move products, we extract all of that from Earth.
With fossil fuels.
We used to use slaves.
Slavery was evil.
So is climate change.
But - I digress.
8. And the instant the fossil energy necessary to extract that resource is embedded in that resource, that resource is converted to product.
Then that product is bought and sold, shipped and handled. All by people getting their share of the national resources.
Who decides?
9. Who decides what is your share of the resources obtained and distributed by our economy?
How come some people get to fuck the sky and other people have to sleep in a twenty year old minivan?
It's hard wired into the system.
Anyway, back to my point. (Yes, it's out there.) 🔭
10. Through their participation in the products system, Americans get stuff called money. Money is really weird stuff. It doesn't exist but you can't live without it.
They take their money - along with, usually some concentrated energy which they bought with money ⛽🛢️🚙🚕🛵🏍️
11. And they give one person money for food, which is a sub-category of product, itself still definably and monetizably product, and take it home. 🚛🚈🚎🚉🚘🍞🥑🍟🍕🥮
12. But the person they gave the money to for the food didn't own the food and doesn't get to keep the money - I told you this was convoluted.
13. Imagine if we turned that one on its head?
The purpose of an economy is to obtain and distribute resources to its member humans. What if we made an economy where what humans did was to enhance and guide the natural growing Earth to produce necessary resources directly?
14. Food, water, homes for ourselves and the many animals who have partnered up with us over the millennia, clothing to keep us comfortable and safe.
It all comes from Earth now. There is no place else to get it.
We just go through these high energy processes, and we've broken
15. The carbon cycle.
And it turned out to be *really* important.
We need to fix it.
The same things that would fix the carbon cycle would provide all we need.
Not necessarily everything we currently want.
16. Before I can go farther into my hypothetical economy I've got to talk about money.
Money is really weird stuff and I don't claim to understand it deeply.
Money is created by banks. As debt. With interest.
It is just *poof* created.
We have this mental image of a bank
17. Reaching down into its deposits, and lending some of that more-or-less real or existent money (various stages of imaginary / agreed upon geeze my head aches)
Anyway, that's not how it works. Banks don't lend their deposits out. The deposits stay right there in the ether 🖥️💻
18. And magic nonexistent numbers are put into a different computer file and somebody then has the power to spend money to buy product, perhaps to use to make product.
So we'd have to all agree to place value in a healing, growing, carbon sequestering, highly energy efficient
19. System which produced enough water, food, fiber, and shelter materials for all the people to live in reasonable comfort, safe, warm, physically comfortable, well fed, dressed, sheltered from the elements. You can make a roof out of grass that will last a hundred years. Why 🚫
20. That's where Maggie Thatcher got her name.
21. The way I am able to live the life I have chosen is, I am a disabled veteran. 100%.
Please do not thank me for my service. Seriously. Please.
It is neither generous nor stingy. I have enough money, and spent my life's earnings acquiring a piece of land.
22. People often say to me, "How you gonna make people do this? Gonna take a big police state you'll have to be Stalin..."
Based on what?
How I would make people do this is I would say, "Here's a piece of land. Spend your time enhancing it. Subsistence income, housing assistance,
23. lifetime occupancy with right of inheritance as long as you work within the established energy efficient guidelines. Two good trained donkeys and necessary implements included."
And then I'd take applications.
24. This economy would balance production and products to specific needs. If somebody needs a new wagon, somebody makes a new wagon. There is no need for advertising and the only things that go in landfills / dumps are roughly the same things that did in 5,000 BCE. Broken pots.
25. The vast majority of human needs can be satisfied with the annual production of properly functioning ecosystems. We figured out, 8000 years ago maybe, how to strip the soil and get annual grasses / grass seeds (cereal grains.)
We've learned maybe four or five things since.
26. I mentioned grass roofs. Houses can be, and are, made of local hardwoods, grasses, mud - nice houses. We don't call it mud we call it cob, because mud sounds like, you know, living in a mud hut...
27. We can run an entire national economy where 100% of our energy needs are made of and powered by naturally extracted atmospheric carbon.
Donkeys are. Horses. Bulls. Camels. Yaks. Water buffalo. Hay, hay, hay, grass, atmospheric carbon purpose extracted.
28. You're not going to believe this, but the product economy defines "efficient" as "requires the minimum possible amount of human activity."
Can you believe that?
Then everyone says, "There are too many humans, we've got to tear down some ecosystem to make Jobs for the bastards
29. While we're ripping the guts out of living Earth to obtain energy to make all the people redundant while speeding up the rate of product moving from extraction as resource to burial as waste and at least the guy driving the bulldozer on the landfill has a Job
30. Big farms go bankrupt in the United States virtually every day. If Bill Gates actually gave a flying fuck about climate change he could subdivide a few hundred thousand of his acres of farmground into five and ten acre plots and fund carbon removal and long term sequestration
31. He could fund one 25 hp compact utility tractor plus implements for every six to ten household work group, plus maintenance.
We've got the humans - Joe Biden wants to put them to work bulldozing and paving ecosystems and claim it's For the Climate™.
We've got donkeys Horses
32. You don't have to pay a family enough to buy a car. Or insure it. That's kinda the point.
Apply human intelligence to the land and biome. Do everything in our human ability, using 100% atmospheric carbon based power, to enhance the land to produce widely diverse foods,
33. To restore beavers to every watershed where they naturally occurred...
We could coppice trees in some areas, use the coppice output to produce biochar, getting as a byproduct localized high energy for appropriate us, say washing machines, machine shops - only produce to need.
34. Instead of creating money out of thin air to pay for degrading Earth, create money out of thin air to heal Earth. It's all done by extracting atmospheric carbon. Products result. Automatically.
You just gotta slow down and look.
Later.

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More from @homemadeguitars

24 Jul
Meat.
Here's the deal about telling people to stop eating meat.
It is an economic fact that we do not "raise grain to feed to meat."
Cattle do not prosper on a diet of grain. It's not even good for them.
We raise cattle to consume grain, to create a market for grain. No reverse.
I'm not saying, eat meat. I'm saying, when we didn't eat enough meat, they had to start feeding corn to cars.
After feeding 10% processed corn to cars, we found that we still were not providing sufficient market for corn.
So we raised it to 15%.
Motorcyclists screamed NOOOOOO!!!
3. It is a production fact that at the time a bushel of corn moves from the combine to the grain truck at the edge of the field, that corn contains more fossil fuel BTUs of energy than are present as corn BTUs.
Then we haul it, heat it, distill it - add more fossil energy -
Read 7 tweets
24 Jul
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
Read 17 tweets
23 Jul
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.
Read 15 tweets
22 Jul
This is cumulative global solar PV capacity in megawatts from 2000 to 2019. Image
This is total global capacity of wind turbine power capacity from 2008 to 2018. Image
This is global emissions from 1750 to 2019, fossil fuel and cement production only. Land use emissions not included. Image
Read 4 tweets
22 Jul
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. Image
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.
Read 5 tweets
21 Jul
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
Read 11 tweets

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