Thread by @JeffAndDonkeys

What if nobody in America got anything new next year?
Would the world end?
Would we be plunged into abject poverty?
Nobody loses anything, just nobody gets anything new.
Could we survive?
Coz out that way is #ClimateAction . All this other crap is advertising and capitalism.

2. We use oil to manufacture and transport goods.
We use oil to mine metals.
Manufacturing and transportation are, together, over half of our total energy consumption. Both processes are skewed heavily fossil powered.

https://twitter.com/Mining_Atoms/status/1584306032653717505?t=xZMG84sWY0e3f7j5Sc7eTA&s=19

3. BTW here's my source for energy consumption by activity. Lawrence Livermore. Pink boxes are energy consumption, orange box is energy transformation which goes on to pink boxes. Pretty colors on left are sources. Pre Covid, this particular chart, but it hasn't changed much.

4. What would happen would be a huge recession. The economy would collapse.
We have literally created an economy whose needs are directly contrary to the needs of the ecosystem under which we evolved. Either Earth dies, or the economy does. The economy is a giant cancer growing

5. on the greater body, the biosphere, Earth, of which we are empirically, provably, physically, parts.
We are parts of Earth, able to walk around. Air runs through us, water runs through us, material solids run through us. By it all we live and assume we are uniquely separate.

6. The great Biden economy that everyone is so pleased with is an ecological disaster of the highest order.
The plans to build a nationwide renewable energy are. An ecological disaster. The highway plan is.
Every single job created under Biden has been at the very highest energy

7. Meanwhile, observe the "climate" conversation.
Of those who choose to express concern, the primary topic is news of ecosystem collapse and meteorological catastrophes, with predictions of worse by 2050.
The assumption is that the reason we're not "doing anything" is because

8. we haven't got the message that Things Are Very Bad, and therefore we need to be beat over the head with PROOF so we'll do #ClimateActionNow and
#JustStopOil for god's sake.
We've got the message. ⅔ of us know it's out of hand, and the other third is on a different planet

9. So we - those of us who identify as concerned - are all trying to get people's attention to this serious problem, tying up traffic, screaming and posting ecological horror stories from real life - but we've got everyone's attention, enough of them.
Now what?
We've convinced

10. Literally 2/3 of all the people in the developed world that the only way to get out of this godawful mess is to increase mining, smelting, transporting, manufacturing, land removal and rearrangement, concrete and steel construction, because somebody told them that would

11. #JustStopOil .
That's what we're demanding. We don't even discuss it. We don't have to say anything but #ClimateAction and everyone automatically says #renewables and we're all done, Molly get the glue.
They're doing it. Worldwide. Now.
You can walk across the Mississippi.

12. This is the ultimate violation of the First Law of Holes.
When you're in one, stop digging.

13. Public works projects take time. It took 40 years to build the Interstate Highway System, and the first 15 of it there weren't 100 miles of usable road nationwide.
The renewables project is bigger than that.
It took 40 years to build the 6 big dams on the Missouri mainstem

14. and channelize the lower 553 miles into a barge channel 12 feet deep, 300 feet wide, maintained and marked for freight traffic. And that wasn't nearly as big a project as replacing just the USA's fossil electric generating capacity with renewables.
We seriously don't have

15. 40 years.
Nobody thinks we do.
Every techno problem we've ever solved, from building the Interstate System to putting a Space Station in orbit and people on the moon, every single one ever, we've solved it by throwing fossil energy at it.
That ain't gonna work this time.

16. We need to do two things. We need to put all our human cleverness and all our human strength to renewing, regenerating, and restoring a functioning global ecosystem, and we need to slow our speeds and reduce our extraction of capital resources to the point where we can obtain

17. all our food, all our fiber, all our lodging materials, all our transportation, from the annual fruiting energy of the global ecosystem.
That means that right now today we need to slow down. We need to come closer every year to nobody getting any new stuff. No new highways.

18. No new airports. Now new high speed trains. No new high speed anything.
Yes we can. We start right where we are today, and we slow speed limits. We raise fuel prices. We open up time spaces. We trigger a permanent recession, and call it #Degrowth.

19. Nobody needs any more horror stories. Everyone who's capable of learning already knows. It's the assumption, the "somebody else needs to build something new and we'll all be fine" #JustStopOil it's about the fuel mindset.
It's not about the fuel. It's about the actions.

20. And it is no exaggeration: literally every single time any public demand from the recognized climate community is implemented, energy throughput goes up. Fossil energy demand and burning goes up.
It's a matter of public record. That's the other thing we talk about.

21. OH MY GOD BIDEN SIGNED MORE DRILLING LEASES and at the same time screaming bloody murder because fuel prices are high, and...
We burn the fuel
To do
The things we do.
The change point must be at the activities. They're where the fuel goes.