Thread by @homemadeguitars

Do y'all remember back in 2046 when Hurricane Ida hid Louisiana then did a twofer on New York and New Jersey?
What? That wasn't 2046? In was 2021?
What the fuck does having half of something in 2050 do for real people in real life?
Nada.

https://twitter.com/nytimes/status/1435593488163299328

2. I can't understand why the people aren't up in arms.
Actually I can.
They have been hoodwinked with the biggest pack of science fiction feel-good ever written.

3. It's against the rules to discuss this, but that process - 50% of electricity by 2050 - starts with making it.
And making it is an energy intensive process.
And it's the very first process.
During that energy intensive period, we are planning to continue our current economy,

4. The carbon in the air which captured the energy which wound up Hurricane Ida and turned her loose was and is emitted by our current economy. The global one, the only one there is.
Hurricane Ida is the result of our current economy.
So the solution is,

5. Keep running the current economy while adding on top of it the manufacture of millions of billions of solar panels.
The only way, under the laws of physics, to do this is to expend vastly greater amounts of energy than our current economy is expending.
That energy is fossil.

6. People want to argue about how it will - at some unidentified time - actually mean we are emitting less because someone studied the energy in and the energy out.
It has no relevance to the real world. It's more silly.
Hurricane Ida was last week. We've already moved on.

7. Start here:
The factories to make that stuff in, at that scale, do not exist.
The factories which exist on Earth today to make solar panels are mostly in China, and they are making solar panels as fast as they possibly can. And they are building new coal-fired electric plants.

8. I wrote a thread about it last week.

https://twitter.com/homemadeguitars/status/1433545948269989888?s=19

9. Somebody knows how many terawatts of fossil generating capacity we have right now, pretty close.
We are consuming electricity at a rate equal to, and sometimes greater than, our current fossil fuel generating capacity.
To increase energy throughput in the economy we must

10. continue to add fossil fuel generating capacity. Here in the US almost all of that added capacity is natural gas fired. It's the same heat engine, basically, whether you burn coal or natural gas or, as they do in Germany, pellets of wood made from US forests (it's green!)

11. This is not about building renewables. It is about making everything in our economy. Making things, and hauling them around, and playing with them, is where climate change comes from.
This is the foundation truth. You can't solve that with a giant increase in making things.

12. The only energy source which can be used forever without destroying the system is the energy in the biosphere, as directly, one cell at a time, powered by the sun.
Food energy.
The whole human race must reduce its speed an energy consumption to a level which can be powered

13. by the forces of nature as managed by the human race, moving very slowly and carefully over the land increasing its capacity to make food and other biomass out of atmospheric carbon.
The only global economy that will work will be founded on permaculture as a design, and run

14. on food.
There will be so much work to do to heal the deeply damaged ecosystem we currently live in that we will need all the people. We don't have to try to make other people not fuck. It's OK.
But we have to make peace with death. Everybody lives and dies. Life is not fair.

15. Essentially what I describe is our future.
The only question is how we manage the transition. If we want to play silly games with solar panels the transition will be a lot more sudden and a lot uglier. No telling how many will survive, but it'll be mostly by luck. And fewer.

16. The President of the United States is telling you, in that statement, that he fully intends and hopes to preside over an economy which not only continues to emit for the next 29 years at our current level but increase it. I'm betting the whole "For the climate" techno plan

17. If actually enacted and begun, would double global emissions within three years.
And everybody nods and says, "But later we won't emit!"
What later?
WHAT FUCKING LATER?
You're going to *start* at Hurricane Ida and all the fires in the Northern Hemisphere, and double that.

18. And it's as obvious as the nose on your face. And everybody pretends it doesn't matter. We can finesse climate change.
No we can't. It's here now today. We either reduce our energy throughput directly by using less, or we blow up any shred of chance that remains. Which 🤷

19. I find it incomprehensible that such a man as John Kerry would put himself in this horseshit position.
Making things requires energy. Energy comes from fossil fuels. It doesn't matter how nice the thing is, the carbon it requires will start collecting thermal energy from ☀️

20. The day it goes into the atmosphere.
We must reduce our energy use. Drastically, continually, until we are *way below* Net Zero.
Every living human could be the center of a unit if Earth which withdrew and used more carbon than that person's life emitted.
Below zero. Way.

21. I just can't believe that the whole world ignores all this. It's like the infrastructure. Never, in the history of highways, has building more highways failed to increase traffic.
The way to deal with our transportation system being a deadly, collapsing hazard, is to

22. Remove the energy which is destroying it.
That energy comes from fossil fuels, which are burned to get heat, which we run through heat engines, which piss away 3/4 of the heat and convert the rest to speed. Kinetic energy.

24. The disintegrating infrastructure we have to replace was built of concrete and steel, during my lifetime. I remember before *any* freeways except on the coasts. Most of the crumbling system was built since I've been an adult.
Concrete and steel, beat to a pulp, in one life.

25. We built that concrete and steel using fossil fuels, and because we had it, our use of fossil fuels skyrocketed. Now we're going to rebuild and expand it and tell suckers it's "for the climate" and - they all believe it.
And parrot it.
@NicolleDWallace and @maddow parrot it.

26. It's all there to keep the money rolling. That's all.
We need an economy which is founded, as a purpose, on healing Earth to withdraw all this excess carbon.
It did it before, you know. That's what we're burning.
Time to get on the other side of that process.

27. I just can't believe what I see, though. I guess almost everyone thinks - I don't know what they think. I do know, though, that everyone is OK with talking of continuing emissions just like today for at least a decade. I think it's a shitty plan.
And a decade won't touch it.

28. The way we live causes climate change.
People who live right now today, differently than we do, do not significantly cause climate change.
The claim that we can continue to live like this forever is false. Fewer and fewer can every day.

29. The simplest and most certain way to reduce energy throughput is to reduce speed. A nationwide 55 mph speed limit would be a real, actual, no shit attempt to reduce emissions.

30. Unlike literally all the rest of this bullshit. It's all a plan to increase emissions a whole lot, while pointing at the mirror and saying saying "Someday this will reduce emissions!"
And (almost) everybody in the whole developed world goes, "Yup! Yup! Want one!"
Whew.