Thread by @homemadeguitars

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.

4. If we don't learn ways to live without high speed high energy machines we're going to blow up.
We live in a balloon called Earth. It's a big ball of stuff wrapped in air. We keep blowing it up bigger, and bigger...
You do know what happens when you blow a balloon up too big?

5. We've been friends for half a century. We had to quit the trips and music for a year because Covid. If the energy system blows up we don't die, we just can't jam together any more.

6. Same with the hot showers. If I'm still alive when the day comes you can't get them any more, 🤷. I lived for a year in the jungle without hot showers. Cold showers. Lukewarm showers. Running water. You don't die.
Food, now. Without food you die. And water, even quicker.

7. The system we're in is constantly accelerating, with the resultant increase in scale of everything (it's physics. Steel gets bigger when you heat it up, for instance.)
This is all contrary to the laws of thermodynamics. It's really hard to explain, but... This isn't working.

8. All day every day people tell me that it is working, and here's research that proves it, and I'm like, sorry, pal, but look out the fucking window. It ain't working. I don't care what the paper says.
On my trip tonight I'll be moving at least 5 mph slower than the local avg.

9. Most of the way it's two lane blacktop, yellow lines, 60 mph limit.
I go 60. I set my little computerized Subaru on 60 and it goes 60. If it comes up behind somebody it slows down, but we never do.
I'm going as fast as the law allows.
I'm like I'm dragging anchor and drifting

10. I'm sand in the gears of the machine. I influence the average energy consumption on a stretch of road, probably a net (miniscule) reduction in CO2.
Slowing down reduces CO2 production. It also reduces the rate of tire microplastics production, which is a function of energy

11. As at work between a tire and concrete. The faster the tire rolls, the more if its surface is worn off.
On average, reducing speed reduces brake particulates. Your brakes wear out, you know, and that is the process of turning the sintered metallic pads of your brakes into

12. particles of various sizes, which we then breathe.
The less energy you put into your brake pads, the slower they convert to particulates and nano particles. And it's not direct, it's a geometric process. Even a little slowing helps.
This machine absolutely must stop.

13. Not because I want it to - I want to go jam.
We're blowing up a balloon, not filling a bucket.
When you fill up s bucket it runs over.
When you overinflate a balloon it pops. Not the same at all.
It doesn't really matter how much hypothetical future carbon your machine

14. Never emitted had the balloon not popped...
Y'all, this ain't gonna work.
But for tonight...

PS. I actually give myself two hours. I hate to feel rushed. 50 miles to the core of old Kansas City. Plaza area. From outside town to east. Lots of surface streets the way I go.
Later