Thread by @homemadeguitars

"Slow down," I say, and it seems trivial. Everyone* responds, "Yes, we need to reduce consumerism..." or whatever.
No, I mean: slow down.

https://twitter.com/homemadeguitars/status/1463635833366499345

2. The nations of the world could all get together at a real, we're-actually-scared conference, and agree.

3.
🔹 Reduce all surface speeds 5 mph / year until nothing goes faster than a running horse
🔹Apply analogous energy throughput limitations on air and sea traffic worldwide
🔹Plant all lands freed up as a result of 1🔹 and 2 🔹 to complex locally adapted ecosystems / food source

4. The above three actions would have the following immediate results:
Fossil fuel use and emissions would immediately drop, and continue to drop annually over the entire time frame.
New highway construction could be halted. The overall effects of real, enforced, no bullshit

5. reductions in speed would be to reduce the pound/feet, ton/mile, total material throughput measurably. It would not be possible to ship as much material as far. That is the whole point of the infrastructure project: move more matter farther.
Unh-uh. Wrong direction.

6. With speed reductions, today and agreed on, there would be no reason to ever build another paved highway. Never.
Every paved highway on Earth is an ecological disaster. Adding more is insane, given our factual knowledge of the climate situation. I just can't believe it. Well.

7. The recent "supply chain blockage" is illustrative. A reduced speed limit, even to a national 55, would be a permanent supply chain blockage. The machine is running at a higher level of kinetic energy than that now, and still stumbled.

8. You've probably been out on the highway behind a wreck, go-stop-go-stop, and when you get to the wreck there's nothing left but broken glass and half a plastic grille.
When you bring all those cars to a very low level of kinetic energy, it takes a while to build it back up.

9. The onset of Covid showed us. We absolutely know that emissions dropped like a rock. Covid killed huge numbers, but the slowdown killed few if any. Scared us all to death, though, because we live in energy, and money is a form of energy. And if we can't get money we can't get

10. energy, and food is energy, and a lodging is embodied energy. Every saw cut, every nail, all embedded energy.
The entire developed world economy is operating at a very high level of energy, as speed. Remove just that one form of energy from the system and it must change.

11. The most fundamental form of available energy for a living being is food energy. Photosynthesizing life can run directly on sunlight, pure energy, and bind that energy into molecules which the rest of us live on. The rest of us, from bacteria up, ingest food, produce motion.

12. There has never been a time when Earth did not feed all her inhabitants, at least the ones that survived. Coz there's no place else to get it. We can power our economies and our efforts predominantly on food, and did from the point we became recognizably genus homo up until

13. 1850.
Don't talk to me about 1850 America, that's not relevant. What I am talking about is energy, life, and surviving on this planet.
We could, if we chose, begin now to reduce our societal emissions. A national 55 mph speed limit would do it.
It would also slow material.

14. A national 55 mph speed limit is a permanently broken supply chain.
We're too stupid, as I get it, to figure out one that's not so fucking fragile.
Slow this machine to a walk, do it in ten years, and the atmospheric carbon curve bends down.
Continue as now, bends up.

15. That's all I got.