2. By one school of thought, energy only expresses itself in two forms, potential and kinetic. Kinetic energy is mass in motion.
Temperature is molecules in motion. The faster the molecules move, the higher the temperature.
Kinetic energy can be expressed as half of (mass×velocity)² The below is from Wikipedia just now.

3. In energy forms, everything we do with fossil fuels is for the purpose of increasing the speed of physical motion and process motion.
If energy isn't sitting still inside the trunk of a tree or in a rock on a shelf - if not that, something is moving.
The more energy we put in it the faster it moves.
This is tenth grade science class. This is macro physics, which only works in the part of the universe we humans experience as reality, and quantum is different, but up here with us.

4. Speed is energy in its most measurable seeable form.
This is one of those things that is so blindingly obvious that nobody can see it.
All of our emissions - one hundred percent of all the emissions which are new since the onset of the industrial revolution, the harnessed heat engine revolution - all those emissions are in order to obtain more speed.
#Slowdown is not a slogan.
Slowing down can be done immediately.
Slowing down does not require any advance emissions to make it possible.

5. Most individual drivers have the option to slow down. Few Americans have an average speed much below speed limit + 5. Yes, I know you do, but none of the other folks.
I'm out there going 5 under. An endless stream of cars and trucks pours past me and off into the distance. I go days, weeks, between times when I follow another car on the highway. I drive lazily into an empty road, Highway 5 Under, while the rest of the world stands in line and gets road rage at 5 over.

6. I have been reading all these toots about the evils of big trucks, and - I drive one. A big humongous Dodge diesel truck that I hate to ever take into the city.
I haul my donkeys around and show people that they are possible and practical.
A couple weeks ago I moved 135 sheep for a local small farm operation.
These things are tools.
I need them because I live in a mile a minute culture. And I do large hard things, because that's the life I chose.

7. It's not the hotdogs with their big trucks that are the problem.
It's that hotdogs have to have big trucks instead of high-stepping buggy horses.
The pretty girls can see you a lot better at a trot, even a high stepping long legged trot. https://youtu.be/cX9xRVBq3-U

8. In Vietnam I was able to see glimpses of a society who lived what was an "indigenous" (i.e. ecosystem based) early iron age society.
I have spent time among low energy religious groups.
This thing we do where we move faster than all the rest of life is in no way necessary.
It's not necessary because there are 8 billion of us.
In a healthy culture regardless of energy base, any given group of people can provide for themselves by their efforts.
The more people there are, the more to do things.

9. The toys we have do not make us, in the aggregate, any happier than we would be without them.
This thing we call standard of living doesn't measure any of what matters.
We don't need to live like this, but today we do. It is a literal fact that our entire society contains so much energy that we can't just wave a wand and make it go away.
Energy never goes away. It just moves around, and it moves back and forth between potential and kinetic.
When a tree grows it is taking kinetic energy, sun,

10. and tying it up in chemical bonds, turning it from kinetic to potential, locking up those BTUs in molecules and cells.
Energy can't be destroyed but it can be taken off the market.
No energy process is 100% efficient, and photosynthesis isn't even close.
In most cases everywhere the energy lost in any process escapes as heat, Solar panels, for instance, are 15-20% efficient in real life, with the rest of the energy being rejected as heat directly.
Photosynthesis is in a similar range,

@JeffAndDonkeys i read somewhere the other day that conifers suck up more carbon than other trees. Agree?

@cfthomas51 I don't know. My focus is on complex native ecosystems and I think in terms of how much good the entire system can do.