Good evening, my friends. Tonight, if you'll tolerate a garrulous old man, I'll tell you a story from my life.
As of today I have been drawing breath, air of Earth, for 77 years. As some of you know, I have spent the past 6 or so of those years writing about an alternative life, 2. a life in which humans, yes over 8 billion humans, could live reasonably comfortably, warm, dressed, well fed, hois d, and gainfully employing our hands and brains to making the ecosystem which supports us better, not better than we found it but better than we have made it.

I've met some of the best people in the world on here.
I met Cindy my wife on here. Susan, below, has been my friend over a decade.
I'm going to write a thread tonight. Here. I've been thinking it all day.
May take a while to get it done.

https://twitter.com/blumonris/status/1810848252809380318

1. What I wish would happen, next, in the real world.
As always, I write from the perspective that there is no thing more important to humans than a living ecosystem able to support humans.
As it turns out, humans have the exact same requirements as a vast swath of the biosphere.

I posted this recently.
You can see from the comments how much people hate me for it.
I'm used to it.
I'm going to tell a story here, about my past.
I sincerely hope this will be my last ever Xcreet.
I keep checking back to suck up all the hate, but it's obviously stupid.

https://twitter.com/JeffAndDonkeys/status/1802104639317299359

I was born in Kansas City, MO, in 1947, to a WWII non-combat veteran and his wife.
My dad had an LLB, a type of law degree which no longer exists. Before the war he had been an attorney in private practice in Council Bluffs, IA. The war left him in KC.

Much - probably most - of the increasing ecosystem catastrophe often referred to as climate change is a result of the exhaust gases which come from burning fossil fuels.
But.
Talking about halting fossil fuels is the stupidest and most useless topic in the world.
I'll explain. 2. We do not have any means except fossil fuels to do most of the things we do.
We can do less than 20% of all our activities as developed societies, modern societies, first world societies, without fossil fuels.
This is an absolute fact.
That's why we burn them. To do things.

This quote is from an article about 3M and PFAS.
And he's right.
And this is our value system.
Poison every living human and other life form ON EARTH to make a product that we lived without until 1965.
Coz we want it.
That's one value system, not "human nature."
I despise it. 2. All of you - and I hear this thousands of times a year, so you are many - who insist that necro capitalism and plastic are "human nature" - you're all quite literally denying my personal humanity.
Meanin' no personal offense, but fuck you.
This is a perversion. Most people

I appreciate all of you who encourage me in my threads. I write them in the hope of literally, as one man, changing the world. I understand that the odds aren't good, but it remains physically possible, not to end or reverse climate change in less than century or two, but to 2. Reduce the rate at which we do increasing damage. We could immediately reduce motor fuel consumption, immediately. Not in 2025 or 2030 but in May of 2024.
This is a physical possibility, a relatively easy and low hassle one.
We could literally save millions of gasoline a year,

I know it's not worth writing this, but I'm going to anyway.
This (screenshot) came off a pissing contest thread.
Many people strongly believe that we can't do anything about the climate because we are so many.
Actually we can't do anything about it because we don't want to. 2. Here's a chart on global energy use from a very few years ago. The general ratios haven't changed, just all the numbers have gotten bigger.
All that matters for this discussion is the sizes of the demands relative to one another.
Over half is industrial use.

I despair when I read crap like this.
I despair when I see what climate professionals in the aggregate say. "The stakes could not be higher" is absolutely true. It's where the truth ends.
Their recommendations are pure, unadulterated bullshit. theguardian.com/environment/ar… 2. They quote this woman. Christiana Figueres, UN climate chief.
She presents herself in this article as either a liar or a fool.

I'm going to try to explain myself to newer readers. I know my ideas are so far out there that I sound crazy.
I'm old, city born and raised, country since age 37. Couple months shy of 40 years out here.
But I earned my living with technology. All of my living. 2. I designed, installed, maintained electronic, and later digital, communication systems, starting in a telephone central office, where all the calls get placed, working on that machine.
It was a fabulous machine, all relays, older than me (I was 21) and did the same stuff

When I write threads about ecosystem collapse, about global heating, global excess energy accumulation, my (obviously carefully vetted) mostly assume that It Is Over and collapse is inevitable.
Talk about any other topic, and everyone unconsciously assumes all we have now goes on 2. Just as an example, people say it's appropriate to ignore the climate during this election because if this election goes wrong, it's the last one, and we must Save Democracy.
If I'm right - if the ecosystem emergency is upon us - the current organization of the United States

We - my brethren / sistren and myself - often speak of #collapse as though it were a foregone conclusion, and I guess to us it is.
But none of us can see the future, and exactly what form this collapse might take we have no way of knowing. 2. I have said, more than once, that possible routes to final irreparable collapse of high energy services, which will be one final step of our current ongoing collapse, include pandemic, international war, local high intensity guerilla war (we already have it at low intensity),

Just for fun I'm going to challenge one, no, two, fundamental assumptions which underlie global ecosystem catastrophe, commonly referred to by one of its symptoms, climate change.
And I'm going to lean on a third pretty hard.
First, we assume that row crop mechanised agriculture 2. both made possible, and is necessary for the continuance of, an 8 billion and increasing human population.
Only row crop agriculture. Only monocrops arranged so they can be managed mechanically. Only manufactured fertilizer. Without all those things, we are assured,

I'm not going to get real heavily into this, but - and I speak here as a life-long Democratic voter, one who last missed an election in 1968.
In '68, home from Vietnam for 4 months, wounds not yet healed, I could not vote for LBJ's Veep, and I DAMN sure couldn't vote for Tricky. 2. There's not much I like about the Democratic party.
I despise their climate lies. Utterly fucking despise them.
I despise building highways.
I despise any new job powered by fossil fuels.
Which is 100% of Biden's.
Don't get me wrong - I'm going to vote for him, but I'd prefer

This thing everyone talks about called "transition" is, as far as I am able to understand, a point at which the three biggest color bands here, the brown, the black, and the light blue, shrink to nothing, and other bands replace them entirely. 2. We have been building the other bands as fast as we have the facilities and materials to build them, for over 40 years.

I'm going to start tonight's thread with an old joke.
Little David was sitting in his favorite place, in the shade of the Great Pyramid at high noon, playing his guitar.
Bong. Bong. Bong. Bong.
Pharaoh walked up and said,
"Little David, when Chuck Berry and Chet Atkins and 2. all them cats play guitar, they move their fingers around. I notice you never move yours, you just play that note. Bong, bong, bong."
"Oh Great Pharaoh," said Little David,
Bong, bong, bong,
"Chuck Berry and Chet Atkins and all them cats, they're looking for it.
Bong, bong, bo

When I got home from the war in Vietnam, on my 21st birthday in 1968, there were almost no homeless people in the whole United States.
There were a few, what we called hobos, who lived in encampments usually called hobo jungles.
Poor people had homes, slummy houses or apartments 2. The term "homeless people" (and its prettified cognates like "unhoused people") were never heard in American English. I'm not saying they didn't exist, but they were never heard.
You never saw homeless people in Kansas City. Never.
Nor in Baltimore. Nor DC. Nor Miami, FL.

We tend to conflate the word "technology" with "high energy machines" and "progress" with "adding energy to any process."
I've written in the past about progress, the noun, the definition, and the connotation.
Technology.
Technology is devices to multiply our efforts. 2. Besides conflating technology with high energy and high speed, we tend to conflate technology and science.
Science is ways of knowing things.
Technology is ways of doing things.
Not the same at all.
Technologists would, however, prefer you think of them as scientists.
Halo.

People call me a doomer. Some have said I'm extreme even for a doomer.
This is slander. I am probably the most obviously optimistic, honest and realistic, climate writer working in public today.
I am so optimistic about what *physically could* happen that it's out-and-out heresy. 2. I'm not saying I'm the most honest, that sentence was clumsy.
Of those of us who acknowledge the ecosystem catastrophe within which Homo Industrialensis is today living - that is to say of the honest observers - I am the most optimistic.

When you hear the phrase "collapse" what do you see in your mind? What collapses? Can we tell? What if it was in November of 2016? But no, countries come and go, that's not what anyone means by #collapse
How will we know it has happened? Will someone announce some temperature C? 2. My friend @postcarbonsteve says every day that climate collapse is food collapse, and there is considerable truth to his reasoning.
If there's no food within a day's journey of you that will be a very high priority in your planning.
Unless you don't even know where to look.

I live on an automatic income. What UBI would be, only it's not universal. It's a combination of Social Security from a life as a tradesman, and Veterans Disability from a long year long ago.
This doesn't make me sit on my butt, it enables me to drive donkeys to town, to plant, 2. To study and to learn. It gives me the luxury to live without thinking about money.
I have a business manager. Long time readers know that I am brain damaged, literally, as in, part of it is missing. This and the VA money are directly related. So, my money goes into an account

Let's play make-believe.
I'm going to tell a fictional story. Lots of people are telling fictional stories about the present day, stories with terms like transition, regnuables, stories about Mars and life in jars frozen solid.
This is a different story.
Mine starts in 2023. 2. It's the hottest year since we figured out how to measure temperature. Large swaths of North America burn to the ground, while others flood, washing away homes, cars, people, and money.
Each of the events gets written up in the newspaper/Internet/infotainment ecosystem.