Mastodawn

Jeff McFadden Jul 19, 2023

I believe that the only way to reduce and then reverse the damage we are doing to every part of the #ecosystem is to intentionally, gradually but consistently, reduce the amount of energy we run through our economy, slow our physical speeds, and begin a global project to regenerate working ecosystems of every sort that were here when the Europeans started this industrial thing, probably at least 300-400 years before the #IndustrialRevolution
Dutch East India Company, or before.

Jeff McFadden Jul 19, 2023

2. I am familiar with the logic that we can't do anything to reduce the energy because only this high level of energy makes it possible for this many people to survive at one time here on planet Earth.
This is supported with a lot of correlation, but correlation is not causation.
We know we could reduce energy a lot and not have any effect on food, so let's work on that while we see how it goes.

Jeff McFadden Jul 19, 2023

3. Does anyone think that for the USA to have a national 55 mph speed limit would cause widespread starvation?
OK, start there, because it would save a helluva lot of gasoline and diesel fuel.
See? Less energy, nobody hungry.
We are building new highways in all 50 states, and in a long, convoluted way, this action is feeding a lot of people.
That's because we have a "job-based" economy for the lower classes. Millions of people are getting paychecks because they are highway construction workers.

Jeff McFadden Jul 19, 2023

4. The fact that we are building highways in all 50 states is the surest proof that could exist that the people of the United States really don't care about emissions or fossil fuels.
It would be physically impossible to do that much #EcosystemDegradation, consume that much #FossilEnergy, or emit that much CO2 above and beyond what the fossil fuels contained, by any other imaginable real world industrial process.
The purpose of highways is to enable more cars and trucks to go faster.
Madness.

5. I've been reading a running series by someone I follow, I think, about the evils of Doomerism.
And it's funny. I think we could do more to combat #EcosystemCollapse than almost anyone else I know of.
I think that if we fully put our minds and our personal energies as a people behind #EcosystemRegeneration instead of #TechnoToys we could start processes which would, by the next generation, begin to improve #EcosystemFunction worldwide.

Jeff McFadden Jul 19, 2023

6. I just don't think we will.
There are two schools of thought here. One is easy to think of but impossible to build. The other one is relatively easy to build but, apparently, impossible to think of.
We live at the intersection of an infinite number (apparently) of different scientific pursuits, and each pursuit generates it's consistent output. So if the problem is fossil fuels, we assume a high speed economy without fossil fuels, and proceed on that assumption.

Jeff McFadden Jul 19, 2023

7. The last generalist was Charles Darwin. He looked at everything as one thing, and he said, here's how it all works together to produce all these species.
Various reductive sciences have taught us more details of how that process has taken place, but Darwin brought it together and showed us something you can't see from the pieces.
We're all kin.
Literally.
Once there was one living thing, one cell, DNA, and - we're all its grandchildren.
That's it. The fuzzy ones too. The scaled ones.

Jeff McFadden Jul 19, 2023

8. We few, we ¼ of the human race, we Homo Industrialensis, we've broken it all. We've drained all the swamps and dammed up all the rivers, cut down all the trees and plowed up all the prairies. We've killed almost everything, and most of everything else. We call this "Human nature," but - did you hear about that missionary who went out to that island where the untouched people live, and they killed him?
What we're doing isn't human nature. Of the quarter of humanity who has cars and rides jets,

Jeff McFadden Jul 19, 2023

9. we are the most obese, the least healthy. We're the ones who have all the heart bypasses and metal knees. We're the ones who have road rage.
There is not a donkey driver on planet Earth who ever feels road rage.
We take all the psychiatric drugs. I take one. We're the world's champs at addiction, at suicide, at overdose deaths. Suicide is a major killer of young people.
For this, we are killing the world. And we will not discuss halting it.

Jeff McFadden Jul 19, 2023

10. Should we choose to reduce the energy in our societies, for the purpose of slowing, and reversing, #ClimateChange, we could proceed as follows:
Reduce surface speeds, where speed is understood to mean both velocity as measured is distance (miles or kilometers) per hour, and also in terms of mass per mile per day, total kinetic energy in the system.
Do it by 5 mph / 8 kmph, per year, until the fastest surface speed is about the speed of a trotting horse, regardless of how powered.

Jeff McFadden Jul 19, 2023

11. If this speed still proved to require excess we could drop to the speed of a walking donkey or human, which are about the same.
Speed is energy. Speed is as much a measure of energy as kilowatts or BTUs or degrees C or joules.
As follows.
Year 1, 60 mph max worldwide
Year 2, 55
Year 3, 50
Year 4, 45
Year 5, 40
Year 6, 35
Year 7, 30
Year 8, 25
Year 9, 20
Year 10, 15 mph maximum surface speed of anything not biological.
If you can run faster than that, feel free. If your horse can.

Jeff McFadden Jul 19, 2023

12. At the same time all this is going on, people modify their actions to adapt to the fixed schedule. Smaller stores closer together. Smaller inns/hotels/lodging closer together. Regional warehouses, local production.
This is based on the idea that humankind suddenly collectively jerks our heads out of our asses and tries to really survive.
You'll know that's happening when COP meetings agree to halt highway construction worldwide.
Until then, eat, drink, and be merry, for

Jeff McFadden Jul 19, 2023

13. I make no suggestions regarding how we generate that speed, gasoline or electricity or hay and oats. Speed is energy. A Cadillac Escalade going 15 mph can go 120 miles in 8 hours. That's not half a tank of gas.
Personally I think animals would win out in rural areas, probably a golf-cart thing in towns. Hard to say.
Whatever it is, it can't require paved roads.
Paved roads have got to go.
All those people who make their living now building highways - we need to hire them to tear up roads.

Jeff McFadden Jul 19, 2023

14. Sledge hammers, mattocks, cold chisels. Two wheeled hand trucks, donkeys, sleds, carts. Cut highways up into manageable chunks, stack them up, free for the taking, along the road beds, and start building back the soil we tore off and hauled away.
We don't need "trees" or any other one thing. We need everything. We have fucked up #ecosystems til there's hardly shreds left. Every single one of them was built of carbon, and that carbon comes out of the air. Soil. Microbes. Leaf litter.

Jeff McFadden Jul 19, 2023

15. Money is created by being lent into existence in exchange for something the lender values.
If the lender values strip malls, money will be created to honor the creation of strip malls.
People ask me how to repair the economic damage my plans would cause.
This economy needs to be put out of its misery.
We can do better.
Every job we need to create will have, as one of its outputs, the creation of food. Food grows on trees.
And on shrubs. And on vines. And underground.

Jeff McFadden Jul 19, 2023

16. We eat way too much grain.
The way we produce cows, sheep, hogs, and chickens, are crimes against the universe.
Of which we are part.
We could do it.
It would be way more fun than what we're going to do.
Be a steep learning curve, though.

JohnW Jul 19, 2023

@JeffAndDonkeys

Paving is primarily petroleum crude. We're literally driving on oil. And it doesn't stop there. Friction of both tires, car parts and the road itself creates a lot more particular pollution.

https://www.science.org/content/article/it-s-not-just-cars-make-pollution-it-s-roads-they-drive-too

I did see this, though. However it looks quite resource intensive for large projects.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bioasphalt

GalenT Jul 19, 2023

@JeffAndDonkeys finally showed up on my Mastodon feed, Jeff. Yay! You're right about #EcosystemRestoration. We've also got to stop destroying them in the first place, which is still going on apace with GDP growth. which is another thing that has to go.