Mastodawn

Jeff McFadden Jul 8, 2023

Sadly, I don't read as well as I used to. I think high energy social media has damaged my ability. This is a big loss: I am a lifelong reader.
I am able to adapt by using audio books.
Long time readers know, but for new friends here on the federation, I strongly limit non-real world video input into my mind. I haven't had a TV since I got drafted in 1967. I will not stay in the same room with a running TV if I can get out of it.
I have never seen the towers fall, or George Floyd die. By intent.

Jeff McFadden Jul 8, 2023

2. I adapt by using audio books. I use Amazon's tool, because I'm one of millions of Amazon captives.
I am particularly fond of Donna Leon as an author. Having gone through her whole repertoire, I thought, I started going through them again.
I don't read climate shit. I write climate shit, and don't need any more details of the collapse to know what I think about it. I read detective fiction, and think hers is about as good as it gets.
But this one. 😳

Jeff McFadden Jul 8, 2023

3. In this book she acknowledges as an empirical fact that we have poisoned the whole world.
This is one of my core beliefs: we have poisoned everything and continue to do so. But this novel. 😳

Jeff McFadden Jul 8, 2023

4. This is the whole and entire point of everything I write.
We do not have to do things this way.
To poison everything is not because we're humans.
This is utter. Fucking. Madness. And voluntary.
I'm an old fart. I was one of the activists, not a special hotshot but just one of millions of grunts, letter writers, sometime sign carriers, and we got the environmental laws passed, back in (yes, really) the halcyon Nixon era.
😳
We created the EPA. We sat back on our laurels.
Bad idea.

Jeff McFadden Jul 8, 2023

5. Here's what was wrong with the EPA and the whole package concept that they sold us, and we pushed for:
We let them go on making the shit.
We said, You can't dump your shit in navigable waterways.
This was a no brainer - the Cuyahoga river had caught fire and Randy Newman had written a song about it. Duh. https://youtu.be/XVNuT4fkjAs

Burn On (Remastered)

YouTube

6. If you make the shit you've got the shit.
Everybody thinks that we can do all this techno magic without making the poison, but that's silly.
What we do is, take oil, for instance, and we take out all the parts that don't make plastic, and we make plastic with the part that does - and the parts we took out are poison. So we've got it.
There's only so long a billionaire is going to warehouse our poison before they elect a government that lets them dump it.
There is no "away". There is only here

Jeff McFadden Jul 8, 2023

7. Earth is an energy based system, because it exists in an energy based universe.
Everything that ever happens happens because of energy, and all the energy in the system is going to ceaselessly move from higher to lower concentrations. Energy *always* flows, and it "always* flows downhill.
I don't remember her name - I'm new here, and brain damaged, but one of the people I've encountered here has written how many joules - it's a "zeta" number.
She sees it. It's the energy.
Raise your hand?

Jeff McFadden Jul 8, 2023

8. What we need to do is directly reduce our energy use.
Oh, dammit, I just remembered - hashtags.
Oh well.
Anyway.
Reduce energy use directly by doing less and doing it slower.
Now to me this is what #degrowth would be, but it's not.
I am going to screenshot an article. I'm not going to credit it, because I'm going to criticize it and the author is an ally and I don't want to offend. But this is about energy. Energy is everything. For starters, that's why we emit. Just for starters.

Jeff McFadden Jul 8, 2023

9. This is from an article advocating #degrowth which I conceptually agree with.
But.
The first bullet point is an abstraction and can't be judged in energy terms, but based on the rest of the document is not comforting.
Every other bullet point on the document is a huge expenditure of fossil energy.

Jeff McFadden Jul 8, 2023

10. Repair and upgrade infrastructure to ...
Infrastructure, when defined as roads, bridges, seawalls, tunnels - is all made of concrete.
If concrete were a country it would be the third leading emitter in the world.
Don't even talk about magic theoretical low carbon concrete, we're building this shit in the real world as it is today, and today concrete is possibly the biggest ecosystem catastrophe in human history.
Pour more concrete, step 1.
This can't work.

Jeff McFadden Jul 8, 2023

11. The next is written in The Gospel of #Climate as handed down on carven stones from on high: invest in renewables.
1: Renewables as installed are very large objects made of metal glass and plastic.
Making metal glass and plastic are energy intensive processes.
Making very large objects of metal glass and plastic takes vast amounts of energy.
In 2023 we get our energy from coal, naturally occurring methane, and oil.
That's pretty much it. 82% of the total, and the rest mostly goes to homes.

Jeff McFadden Jul 8, 2023

12. Building renewables part 2: There is no evidence that renewables can replace fossil in untold different industrial processes which make living as we do possible.
It's a giant shell game.
Easily half of the stuff literally has not been invented.
It's not for lack of trying.
Different forms of energy show different properties. The real world is complicated.
And if we could -
That's where the poisons come from. Tires and batteries and cell phones and TVs and speed.
We've poisoned everything

Jeff McFadden Jul 8, 2023

13. Here's the rest of it.
This is what *everybody* believes. This is why it's so utterly fucking hopeless.
"Invest in manufacturing..."
They're building an electric Ford truck plant in Tennessee, 1500 acres.
3½ square miles, pretty close. Bulldozed, leveled, mostly paved - one factory. And they won't even build the batteries here, they're paving *another* 3½ square miles in Kentucky for that.
I manage (poorly) 68 acres in Missouri. Costs me several hundred dollars a year to mow.

Jeff McFadden Jul 8, 2023

14. And that cost is 100% fossil fuel.
I'd bet of a $400 million dollar construction project, $325 million is fuel and concrete. Maybe only $300. But lots.
Bulldozers and excavators run on diesel fuel. Big ones like it takes to to several square miles in an economic time frame run on lots of it.

Jeff McFadden Jul 8, 2023

15. There is no new action which can be taken, there is no new thing which can be built, which will not itself immediately increase our annual fossil fuel use and emissions.
Fossil Fuels is how the industrial world does stuff.
All that crap you've been told we should be using hadn't been built yet.
About half of it hasn't been invented yet.
And if it was, we'd use it to poison and pave what's left.
#slowdown

Stephen Jul 8, 2023

@JeffAndDonkeys thanks Jeff. If there is one this I take clearly from your writing it is to slow down, because I can do it now. My grandfather (born 1910) apparently said that he thought humans would poison their own world, but all the same enthusiastically gave up the horses for a truck in the family furniture removal business, making a half day journey from a 3 day one. We don't seen to be evolved to see the destruction in the systems we depend on, like how a fish couldn't describe water.

Cynthia Thomas Jul 8, 2023

@JeffAndDonkeys you're home? Didn't go to KC tonight. You ok?

Jeff McFadden Jul 8, 2023

@cfthomas51 yeah, driving tomorrow for Ralph, gotta get out by 8:30, and I want to be sharp.
The wagon wreck a few weeks ago made me think I need to really be sharp to drive these mules.

Cynthia Thomas Jul 8, 2023

@JeffAndDonkeys i may never understand the nuts & bolt or joules. But i trust you. Is that ok? I wouldn't have "gotten" it even pre-covid.

Jeff McFadden Jul 8, 2023

@cfthomas51 Thank you. You're really good. I'm grateful for you.