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.

Everything is energy. Mass is energy. When anything happens, anything moves, anything ever in any way, energy is transferred.
Mass has a temperature. It's temperature is a measurement of the motion of its molecules. Its size also varies with temperature. As its molecules move 2. faster, they also move farther. With increasing speed comes increasing scale.
That thing they call climate change is exactly, no more and no less, an addiction of energy to the system which is planet Earth, its atmosphere, biosphere, aquasphere, geosphere, all of it.

People often reply to me in terms of comfort, people aren't going to give up their comfortable lives to blah blah -
I've lived my entire adult life expecting today. I've tried all my life to be ready if it goes down tomorrow. I don't stockpile stuff, I stockpile skills and 2. hand tools.
I wrote a couple of longish threads this past week, and I always read replies. I unabashedly advocate slowing all the way to a walk, over a ten year period starting on any day. It's somewhere in my pinned thread of threads.
People's assumptions about speed are

Almost all the climate posts I see (except the out-and-out bullshit) are announcements of catastrophic facts.
My theory is that a critical mass of people know the catastrophic facts.
They don't know what to do about them.
There is no widespread idea of how to make it any better. 2. I believe, and I think the aggregate of physical sciences supports my position, that the only way out of this is to totally phase out high speed, high energy technology.
All the objections to this statement are based on value arguments and "what people will do" arguments.

I see this a lot.
Great, you're a doomer, but you don't offer any solutions. Somewhere in there it usually says "Realistic," which, well, yeah.
I've offered specific actions to take, individually to universally, at any level, for no upfront cost, for over 5 years on Twitter. 2. The trouble is with that word "realistic."
The commonly accepted narrative is believable and imaginable, but it is not physically possible.
We're proving that right now. Somewhere in the neighborhood of a trillion dollars is committed in legislation to specific for the climate

For some unknown reason new people still occasionally follow me even though I hardly ever post anymore.
But for new and old, a quick personal story.
I posted for 6 years about a real way that developed societies could have stepped back from the brink of ecosystem collapse. 🧵 2. (If you're curious what those posts looked like I invite you to read my pinned thread of threads.)
The reason I quit is because the powers of infotainment created a monster named Transition and virtually the entire climate-concerned public of the developed world saw it and

Thinking out loud.
If you think I'm stupid, wrong, or anything else negative, you don't need to reply. Almost everyone agrees with you about that, and I'm used to it.
This will be about my last two climate/ecosystem threads, and the responses they received. 2. It used to be that I expected developed societies to go on, pedal to the metal, and roar off the cliff into massive ecosystem collapse.
I still do.
However, I thought, back then, that it was a choice, and there was this microscopic chance we could choose, instead, to change.

I'm going to talk a little about why and how speed is such a lynch pin of the high energy economy.
I understand that there is no possibility any significant number of people will ever make changes which might reduce energy throughput and actually address ecosystem collapse. 2. I was in a conversation last night with an obviously intelligent, probably young (compared to me), person who has thought a great deal about the systemic nature of the ecosystem destroying culture and economy which essentially rules Earth today, the international trade machine

So, one of three things is going to happen.
- Business as usual runs forever, with ever fewer other life forms and ever less nature, more Bitcoin, 8, 9, 10, 11 billion people, no collapse
(I think this is unlikely, but it's widely expected and that's what we're planning for) 2. - We blow up the entire ecosystem and all 8+ billion of us die.
(No need to plan for this one. If it happens our plans don't matter.)
- Ecosystem degradation hits a tipping point and many to most of us die. 1 out of every 3, 9 of every 10, but others go on.
(Worth planning.)