Thread by @homemadeguitars

The US war machine is one of the biggest single sources of greenhouse gases on Earth, I think I read. I can't source it, so maybe not, but it's a big one.
All this talk about building crap now with fossil fuels and then miraculously *not* doing it after 20 years - it's BS.

People say to me, People Won't and I'm extreme, and I'm really not.
Climate change is caused by our value system as expressed by the way we live.
There are humans on Earth today, portions of societies, who cause little or climate change now. And are still literate people in 🏡

3. How about a little bit of renewables, Jeff? We don't want to be reduced to biological creatures within an ecosystem, we're Important. We're Homo (allegedly) Sapiens.
Boy do I have bad news for you.
We are biological creatures within an ecosystem. And it's collapsing around us.

4. Regular readers know that I refer to energy throughput. Energy can be neither created nor destroyed. It can't be used up. It can be moved out of reach of our ability to do things with it, but the energy goes all the way through.
After it passes through our uses, Earth gets it.

5. Planet Earth has to sink, or accept, receive, and be altered by, the energy we use.
That's the point.
We go out with a hydraulic excavator, and we can apply sufficient energy to Earth to dig a hole big enough to bury a cow in.
And it's damn handy, when you have a dead cow.

6. But if you had three neighbors with good broke teams of donkeys, plus yours, you could apply as much energy, in terms of the resultant hole / time ratio, and get your cow buried, and not emit any carbon doing it.
Used to be people called knackers would come get it.

7. But we managed to invent Mad Cow disease, and now dead cows are anathema. You got one, buddy, that's *your* problem.
I rent an excavator. Takes as long to go get it and take it back as it takes to bury a cow.
No, I haven't done this lately. I think Abe is fading. Sad time.

8. Knackers have a commercial descendant in the 21st century. They'll take horses or donkeys, charge you money.
Used to be the value of what they obtained was sufficient, and they just came and got the dead.
If you are responsible for a bunch of live things for very long,

9. You wind up with a fair number of dead ones. I've buried big dead rams with a shovel, and it's a lot of work. Energy.
So we run this war machine, and a correspondent says that's about as much CO2 as all the cars in the country, which is a bunch.
All of the energy winds up

10. In Earth. Sunk to ground. You see it as pavement, as light fixtures, as big steel boxes rolling across the face of the Earth on strips of concrete which are specifically required do we can sink all this energy without tearing ourselves to shreds.
You can't go 60 on prairie.

11. You see it in rivers captured behind enormous concrete walls, trapping the flow, wildly altering, simplifying, the ecosystems for hundreds or thousands of miles.
Read any number about any topic. Ratio of humans to mammals. Rate of recognized extinction. Fires.

12. What we are facing is vastly more all-encompassing than anything addressed by any form of energy.
We absolutely must reduce our energy throughput.
Earth can't sink it all. Everything is dying.
We are members of everything. This can't end well.

13. The Defense Department is this huge machine driving us ever faster towards an abyss that we can see from here, and this is to make us safe? To defend our national security?
Seriously?
Same with the highway plan. Somebody cue Conway Twitty.

14. The governments of the developed world, including ours, are engaged in a giant charade.
I'd bet there is no person in the Biden Administration who doesn't know that applying a nationwide 55 mph speed limit would measurably reduce US emissions.
Talk about your low hanging 🍇🍋

15. The only way to do reduce emissions is to reduce energy consumption.
As our economy is currently constructed, energy throughput and GDP are roughly synonymous.
Any reduction in emissions
Read that carefully
Any. Reduction. In. Emissions.
Will be reflected in GDP shrinkage.

16. A national 55 mph speed limit would be a drag on the economy. Our entire money generating system is based on shipping stuff back and forth across the world and country as fast as possible for as low a cost possible.
A 55 mph speed limit would lower material throughput.

17. Energy throughput is material throughput.
What moves the material is the energy. That's how this works. To reduce emissions, reduce energy throughput. To reduce energy throughput, intentionally reduce material throughput.
To reduce material throughput and energy throughput,

18. reduce speed. Speed is a measurement of the energy contained in an object. The more kinetic energy it contains the faster it goes.
The problem is, the conversation is about technology. I listened to an interview with Dr. Rees today, and he says, "Oh, of course, technology...

19. We have made a definition: "technology, n. High energy high speed digitally controlled machinery."
I disagree that any high energy or high speed thing at all is inherently to be assumed in.
We need to focus on the goal.
To get out of this alive.
Not some number called zero.

20. Everything the government is doing that they're calling "for the climate" - that's bullshit.
What you do for the climate is reduce emissions today.
Today.
Today.
All the plans increase emissions today. Why does the public allow this? Why aren't people screaming?
Oh, they are

21. They're screaming, "Hurry, mine more iron, make more steel, quarry more limestone, crush it to dust, heat it to 3,000° and drive the carbon out if this ancient sea life, and what's left is Portland Cement. Well, they have to add some other rock dusts, but...
DO THAT! They cry

22. And think this is the other guys.

23. They all stand side by side and scream, "We demand that you make three billion electric motors BIG ENOUGH TO POWER CARS and keep a rolling production of them going FOREVER!
FOR THE CLIMATE!
AND HIGHWAYS TO CHARGE THEM ON!
FOR THE CLIMATE!

24. Here's how this works:
All the reporting is passive voice. It turns out there is a sky god, and he has cursed us, and species are going extinct, and water is disappearing, and vast ranges of the northern hemisphere are burning.
We know exactly what we do which causes this.

25. We also know, if we're not stark staring mad, that we're pretty stuck in the middle of everything that we do that causes it.
So people who don't seem to understand the breadth and depth of the problem say, "Oh, here, if we do all the shit which is destroying the ecosystem,

26. But we do it without fossil fuels, we'll be golden!
Yeah no.
We're *way* past that point, if indeed it ever existed.
What we need to be doing - to sole public conversation - is what energy expenditures we can get by without, today.

27. If you drive slower, you use less energy, per hour, regardless of fuel efficiency. If you drive fewer miles you save energy.
Way more than your lightbulbs and shower will save.
But we've built this global supply chain, and we'll have to rebuild a localized one instead.

28. That's why I always advocate a staged, 5 mph / yr, decade long slowdown. Apply enough friction on the supply chain that it will respond with lower energy alternatives. They exist today in parts of the world.
But the DOD. And the highways.
That is business as usual.

29. A person who would look you in the eye and say, "Business as usual, except faster, and For The Climate, too!" does not have your long term best interests at heart.
We really need to quit pretending. I find it insulting. Turn off your TV for a year and you will too.

30. A concerned government could face the obvious facts of thermodynamics and manufacturing, and figure out a way to catch falling humans as the economy shrinks, and set them up with small houses on modest plots of land, and support them on make-believe government money while

31. They catch atmospheric carbon in plants and animals and stick it to the ground.
All that crap they keep telling you is not science.
Science is, we can't just stop emitting and be fine.
Things are out of hand already.
Only a living biosphere has ever taken carbon out.

32. And right now today there is vast pent-up opportunity for a biosphere to grow and prosper. Between our brutal death agriculture and our brutal death transportation, we've killed of way over half our share of this continent.
We can restore all that to life. Carbon.

33. I hear a lot of "it's too late." Maybe not, if we quit lying about the science.
Here is the way every developed government on Earth has weighed this;
Recession this year,
Or
Ecosystem collapse someday,
And said, "I'm going for the jobs."
The chosen jobs are made of carbon.

34. Tell me about the wonderful green European renewable nations when they quit buying shit from China.
Otherwise, I don't even care.

35. Climate change is a choice. Right now today the people of the developed world choose it.
We know what we do that causes it.
I could create more jobs at a walking pace next year with donkey and hand implements than Joe Biden can with all the highways fossil fuels can buy.

36. The government is going to fund these working people building highways.
They could just as well fund them building ecosystems. They're a damn site more valuable, especially for humans today.

37. But it will start with a conversation, and so far there isn't one.
Some people say Degrowth, and I say, fine, hunky dory, what's step one, and somebody else will start talking about software...
Slow down.
Slow down everything.
When the Keeling curve turns flat you're gaining

38. There are a tiny few voices. Almost none with a specific action. Slow down.
Everything which is not an action is inaction.
Emissions continue to rise.
Zero ain't up there. We can stop looking.