Thread by @homemadeguitars

I seriously wonder what the people participating in the COP event are thinking.
They're as full of shit as a Christmas goose. They're telling the same lies they've been telling all along.
Do they know they're not telling the truth?
I don't know.

2. I suspect that if every fueled activity on Earth stopped except the war machines & "Defense" departments of the US, Russia, and China, those three alone would continue to accelerate and increase atmospheric carbon numbers.

3. I bet if every car was parked forever, but we kept war and international trade, just those to machines would continue to accelerate climate change.
The whole thing, the developed world thing - that's what does it, and we're married to it. It has a life of its own.

4. Heinberg, in Power, calls it the Superorganism. I believe it's the most apt and accurate reference to it I've ever seen.
I call it the machine, but Superorganism is better. It has a mind of its own, aside from any human mind, larger and more powerful.

5. The objective of COP is to feed the Superorganism (hereafter SO).
The changes it would require to actually halt and reverse the accelerating ecosystem catastrophe we are pleased to call climate change would be so vast we would have to redefine ourselves, redefine human.

6. We evolved here. We are made of this Earth, not in a philosophical sense but in the sense that once upon a time each of us was one cell. Every gram of additional mass beyond that one cell is constructed, by processes we don't fully comprehend and don't even barely understand,

7. of the physical, material parts of the planet itself. There was nowhere else to get this, in my case, 190 pounds of mass. I'm walking dirt. Actually, mostly I'm walking air.
Plants grow in dirt but they're made of air. That's why we can grow flowers in pots - air feeds them.

8. This thing we've done, it's not working. And it's made out of a million decisions over 8,000 years, and particularly it's made out of one or two decisions within the last couple hundred years.
I'd say almost for sure there is a major death event in our not too distant future.

9. I'm not alone. There are a lot of people who are far more highly credentialed than me who say the same thing.
I read an article in The Guardian just lately about that, and the author got off into this thing about how everyone lives in cities and ...

10. There is a system, I call it a machine because it functions like one, but a lot of its parts are humans.
When we first started burning fossil fuels they came from right handy. Drill a hole, oil squirts out. And we'd only thought of a couple of ways to use it. And time passed

11. And we thought of more and more things to do with it.
As William Barr honestly commented, history is written by the winners.
Not everyone wanted cars and airplanes and power looms.
Yes, they lost. And our culture now views animal energy with *withering* contempt.
Not sayable

12. We chose that road, not by acclaim but by power: the guy with the car could run the guy with the horse right off the road.
If that didn't work he could run over him.
Y'all oughta drive a team on a 55 mph road. Eye opener.

13. If the Luddites had won,
if the guys who yelled "Get a horse!" had won, we wouldn't have climate change.
Fact.

14. If you're of an age where you might have a goodly amount of life left in front of you, I seriously think you should make plans to survive without high energy services. Because I don't think the energy machine can be kept running through any major disruptive event.

15. The successful selling of the image of an Earth just like this one, just ten or twenty years from now, where all the energy doesn't make CO2 and all we have to do is write tax incentives and ...
In the United States, people who understand how the machinery within which we are

16. People who know how things work, are held in low esteem. The people held in high esteem are a level of abstraction above knowing how the machine works. They play games well, or manipulate money. The are involved with operating and directing not machines, but people.

17. Recalling for a moment when the Covid first hit, and everyone thought it might be The Big One. And *everybody* stayed home.
And you couldn't buy shit paper.
What happens is, a lot of the parts of the machine are humans. They process purchase orders, package product,

18. drive transportation modules, type service orders, grease fittings, oil bearings, and haul away the leftovers.
When a bunch of people can't show up, the machine breaks down.
We had kind of a scare there at the onset of Covid.

19. There's not a responsible epidemiologist alive who would tell you the next pandemic is unlikely.
We're pushing Earth harder and harder, and she's pushing back equally.
You can personify the process, as I do, or you can chart it in terms of energy flows and physics, as I do,

20. When the machine goes down, energy supplies will fail. The energy supply machine is global, complex, with a million choke points and failure points. There is some level of employee absence which will halt services.
If energy supplies stop flowing, the longer they sit idle,

21. The harder it will be to ever restart them.
The problem is, it doesn't have to be a pandemic. It doesn't have to be a war. It doesn't have to be terrorists. It can be any of those, or others.
The machine is too fragile. Plan to outlive it.

22. Water, food, shelter. Work up from there.
Transportation is handy.