Thread by @homemadeguitars

I did some work with my donkeys today. I could have done it all with a small tractor, although some of it would have been quite a bit harder.
Donkeys can walk sideways. Tractors can't. It makes a huge difference. I was working in cramped areas.
Old farms used to have small lots.

I had an emotionally trying day. I am making enemies of people I would prefer as friends.
Let's step back from carbon for a moment. Carbon emissions stipulated as a process which must be halted.

I tweeted this earlier today, and it's not carbon. But it's got to stop.

https://twitter.com/homemadeguitars/status/1461386202834034688?t=5eMZBMrkdUE6Xe9mj6aCLw&s=19

That led to this exchange with an old Twitter friend. Screenshot to hold the tweets together.

We know that all of life on Earth in the aggregate is steadily and sharply decreasing. I can tell you from here that all the bugs that didn't get on your windshield last year also didn't feed the birds that aren't here this winter.
We gotta stop killing everything.

We can't go on living like we do. We can't live like this. OUR BLOOD IS FULL OF TIRE DUST AND PEOPLE WANT TO SOLVE IT WITH ELECTRIC CARS. With tires on them.
We've got to stop all of this.

I was reading a thing on Wikipedia about Life - I just read stuff like that for recreation - and it's long, and I'm nowhere near done with it - but stumbling around in there, following links and whatnot, I stumbled onto some number which was an estimate of how much carbon

all the living things on Earth put together contain. In tons.
It was a very large number. I can't remember it, but I looked at it and thought, "Not any more, alas. We've killed off most of it and that carbon is loose in the chemistry of Earth, Air, and Water, unalive and hungry."

9. The thing about elements is, they're elemental. Our ancestors viewed Earth, Air, Water, and Fire as their elements. We still say "Out in the elements."
Now we have a different definition of the term, and Carbon is an element. That means it can't go away. Matter can be neither

10. created nor destroyed. Elemental matter also cannot me reduced. It's an element. It's a natural, minimum, blob of matter, each molecule. It's got to be somewhere.
Life is about 50% carbon, overall.
We've killed off almost everything. Matter can not be created nor destroyed.

11. If we restored a living Earth, roughly fifty percent of its total dry weight will be atmospheric carbon.
There's no other way to get it.
Plants - photosynthesizing things - remove carbon from the atmosphere as CO2. The split the oxygen off and shit it. They turn the carbon

12. Into both the energy to operate their lives, and the bodies they build. That carbon, once captured, spins off. Various other life forms consume that carbon, packaged along with nitrogen, hydrogen, and a bunch of lesser quantities of rocks and metals, and it goes all over.

13. It becomes dirt, topsoil, which we're pissing away like it was garbage. It becomes trees and funguses, birds and fish. There are millions of tons of carbon missing in bugs alone, and we let people kill them with horrendous poisons which also wind up in our bodies.
This has to

14. Stop. 🛑

15. We cannot possibly continue in this way and survive, and to the extent we could it would be a horrible cursed existence and serve us right.
We can't build machines to cure Earth of this overage of machines.

16. The reason China does all the manufacturing and emits all the carbon it does is because there are no laws against blowing all that poison right out into the Earth, Air, and Water, the *other* elements.
And doing it with Fire. Got it all.

17. Everything we do to perpetuate or maintain the way developed societies live today is counter-productive. It's a step in the wrong direction.
And it's powered with fossil fuels.
We can't go on like this. We need to have a talk.

18. I'm in a day-long pissing contest about whether building renewable energy infrastructure is a net plus or a net minus to the climate.
It doesn't matter. Focusing on the climate to the exclusion of the biosphere including topsoil and all other forms of naturally occurring life

19. Is to intentionally ignore 90% of the total science.
We can't live anything remotely like this.
We can't fly over the world. We can't roll a mile a minute for hours on end. We can't bulldoze and pave. We can't demand that the whole world live like Americans.

20. Everyone agrees that we must Reduce Fossil Fuel Use® in the abstract, but for each of us there is this thing that is worth more fossil fuels, just for now, because someday that will really mean less, and when you say "how" they point at some one thing.
There is no one thing.

21. All of the fuel powers all the things.
Energy is defined as a property which is transferred to matter in order to do work on it.
(I love Wikipedia.)
Not a substance, a property, but there is exactly so much of this property in the Universe and can neither add nor subtract.

And that is the end of this tale. I feel another one coming on.