Thread by @JeffAndDonkeys

Hi it's the crazy old guy with the hobby horse.
Speed.
Just this weekend I've seen several tweets which take a stance like mine, that we can't build our way out.
#degrowth is dragging a chair up to the table and demanding to be heard.
Good. I approve. Thank you.

What I am giving you is the specific action which leads to, forces, degrowth.
We live in a growth economy paradigm. Joe Biden is the President we need if we want to continue the growth economy paradigm. He's great at buying concrete and steel, diesel fuel and electricity. More.

3. Economic growth and Quadrillion BTU units - Quads, one solid measure of energy throughput - go hand in hand.
Economic growth means that more materials get moved, processed, manufactured, packaged, shipped, bought, opened, used, thrown away.
Each step takes energy.

4. The more economic growth, the more energy. The more energy, the more emissions. The more material, the more mining.
As we saw during the early days of the pandemic, if the global transportation system goes down it takes about three days for all the stores to get empty.

5. Transportation - movement of materials and goods - is not the whole thing, but the whole thing relies on transportation, at certain speeds, where we understand speed as tons per mile per day. A two mile long train going 60 mph is twice as much speed - twice as much energy -

6. If society slowed surface speeds by 5%, and air ton/miles by 5%, the entire economy would slow. It's a constant flow, a constant global flow, ships going back and forth, trucks, trains, jet planes - to slow its motion would force choices - what should we ship, which way?

7. Every year the United States sells soybeans to China, and China sells soybeans to the United States, and diesel shiploads of the same thing go both ways and rich people make money on it both ways.
Make it harder to ship them. Not, make a new law against blah blah - slow down.

8. Continue to slow as in my pinned tweet, and the movement of materials will become steadily more costly and slower. The system will reward short distances, and penalize waste motion.
It is not possible to operate a society which works in the way ours does today, at 12 mph.

9. But it is possible, over a decade, to build a new system while the old one gets more fragile and continues to fall apart.
And the first benefits would accrue immediately. With little up front energy expenditure. Enforcement costs.

I know we're not going to, but we could. It's possible with existing technology and would return immediate reductions in emissions. Modest, yes, but - real. Not accounting tricks. Less gasoline and diesel.
And for gods sake quit building highways.