Thread by @homemadeguitars

I'm reading this excellent article that my friend Midnight sent me, and right in the middle I stumble onto this concept

https://twitter.com/at_oasis/status/1440499634518982657

As regular readers know, I harp endlessly on the energy and resource cost of the "renewable energy" something for nothing solution to everything, and it falls on deaf ears.
And here's why:

Our definition of renewables is that they are free, they have no cost, they obtain energy which the ecosystem was otherwise wasting, which is by itself an insane belief.
But I'm saying, no, look, it takes all these material resources, steel, glass, and it takes energy to make

But our mental picture is, very clearly, that we've already got this stuff, so therefore there is no energy or resource cost to getting it.
It's free. It makes itself out of sunlight.
That's not how it works.
Remember when John Kerry accidentally told part of the truth?

And Michael Mann had a genuine scientist hissy fit, and said, no, we've got it already.
I shit you not, people: we don't have it already. It hasn't been built yet. The factories to build it in haven't been built yet. The trucks to haul them on haven't been built yet.
The iron ore

Is still in the ground.
The petroleum to mine it
Is still in the ground.
The fossil fuels to melt it and turn it into steel
Are still in the ground.
We're going to mine it and dig it and pump it and burn it
To reduce emissions.

I say, "Concrete is an ecological disaster," and people say "Electric car charging stations! 🥰😁🥰"
Imagine a swimming pool full of disaster.
Now take out a teaspoon full.
That's your car charger if that wasn't a fiction too.
I say, don't fill the damn pool.
Everyone says,

"But look! We take a teaspoon out! 🥰😁🥰"
Oh.
Great.
But you don't really. Electricity is made with heat engines by burning coal and natural gas, mostly.

Over and over again I say, *Nobody suggests anything to reduce emissions now," and even after my three years of ranting someone will reply, "Emissions free energy!"
Yeah no.
We honest to God do not know the present exists. We live so mentally, socially in the future, we don't 🤷

Every night I go out and say, "The story starts in the middle, the way you tell it. It doesn't start with "Use renewable energy." It starts with make the factories to make the stuff, dig the ore, burn the fuel, melt the sand, unimaginable tons and tons of steel and sand, mine

The limestone, load it in trucks, haul it to the cement kilns where it's heated above 3,000° BY THE HUNDREDS AND THOUSANDS OF TRUCK LOADS and gypsum is added in, and untold gigatons of carbon escape the heat, up into the atmosphere, and calcium carbonate is turned into cement.

Which is calcium carbonate minus the carbon, which is up in the air making California burn.
And our mental picture, as Democrats, enables us to happily support pouring hundreds of thousands of tons of this stuff over the next decade and patting ourselves on the back. Green!
🤑🤑

And you know what the best part is?
This entire quest to manufacture and pave our way to Net Zero™ is based on the following proposition:
"There is no meteorological / ecological threat facing humankind except CO2 emissions from fossil fuels. Therefore if we build things

to eliminate our use of fossil fuels, all will be good."
This proposition is false. But it's our picture. Our model. CO2. Fossil fuels.

We must, if we choose to survive as a culture, eliminate the use of fossil fuels by eliminating all the activities we power with them and have powered with them since 1776.

Rather than pour more concrete, we must tear up nearly every square foot we already have down and convert it to building blocks, paving stones, and restoring every square inch of productive biosphere that we possibly are able, and spend forever increasing its complexity.

I have written a plan which would enable developed societies worldwide to do this without causing any sudden societal collapses or excess death events.

It is based on physical speed, slowing our physical speed in a gradual stepwise fashion, which would directly reduce energy throughput and resulting emissions, over a decade, while repurposing existing structures and building modest small new structures where to provide services.

I'm not going into detail on that here. I'm going to go finish the article.