The way to do the least damage to the ecosystem moving forward from here, the way to take action against climate change, the way to slow and then move away from mass extinctions, is to reduce the demands we make on Earth, on the physical planet and the global ecosystem which encloses us. We must extract less from the physical Earth. We must reduce our demand that it sink our wasted and waste energy.
We know that the entire biosphere, every living thing, is made largely of carbon and water. We know that we have massively reduced the biosphere, systematically killed off biome after biome, species after species, killed without reservation, sprayed death on bugs and the soil itself, and covered it all with with highways and parking lots. Whether it is obvious to us or not, we are constantly, ceaselessly, reducing the ability of the biosphere to remove carbon, meanwhile writing, “CO2 concentrations are rising faster than the models indicated.”
Yes, they are.
Every new built thing, large or small, adds to those rising concentrations. The larger the thing, individually or as part of a system, the more that making it, just making it, increases the existing global overload of atmospheric carbon.
I am writing this on the 12th of July, 2023. Every part of the news is weather / climate catastrophes, fires, floods, deadly heat waves. The climate concerned portion of developed countries talks earnestly of hurrying up and decarbonizing the economy. It is a foundation of the faith that clean energy must be built immediately.
We are. We’re doing that now. We’re building clean energy technology, we’re intstalling it worldwide. We’re building half a trillion dollars worth of new factories so we can build more of it faster. It’s not working. For proof I offer: today’s news.
What we must do immediately is reduce our energy demand. The one sure way to emit less carbon is, burn less hydrocarbons. Burn less oil, less methane, less coal. Burn less by reducing the actions we burn them to do.
The problem is, we have created a global supply chain where the dollar value of labor and resources defines where things are grown or made, which is rarely if ever in close proximity to people with disposable incomes and insatiable appetites for new toys. So most of everything we use in our daily lives - the computer on which I write this essay, shrimp from Vietnam - come from all over the planet, by diesel ship and jet freighter.
If access to fossil fuel, if access to high speed transportation, were cut off overnight (which I think is the likely outcome of our current path) it is almost a certainty that there would be mass death quickly, by starvation, thirst, and the resultant chaos. There are groups actively seeking this outcome in the US.
However, we could taper off the speed, taper off the energy, and I think inevitably we would build the necessary smaller scale, more localized, production and distribution systems. As an example, when my parents were born in Iowa, in the early years of the twentieth century, Iowa produced over 90% of their food. Today Iowa imports over 90% of their food. This is an annual decision, and annual choice. While there are perennial food crops which Iowa could produce, Iowa agriculture, along with all industrial agriculture in the world, operates on an annual plant, grow, harvest cycle.
If Iowa wanted to harvest food next year they could plant food next spring. Instead of agricultural industrial raw materials. But - nothing in the whole world would enable Iowa to harvest food this year. It’s July. This year’s die is cast.
Our society - not just the US but global industrial society - is literally running at high speed. Speed is energy. We need to slow down.
Picture all of the industrial societies in the world as passengers in one very large car, a Ford Expedition perhaps. It’s running a mile a minute, 60 miles an hour.
The vehicle, and all the passengers in the vehicle, contain as bodies, kinetic energy equal to half of, the square of, mass times velocity.
So at, say, 200 pound moving 60 miles an hour, that’s (mumbles, counts on fingers) lots of energy. Per passenger. The car has lots too.
If that Ford Expedition runs into a bridge abutment and has to shed all that energy more or less instantly, the result is raspberry jelly and shards. None of the bodies, nor their container, can shed that much energy that fast without themselves coming apart.
If, however, the driver of our hypothetical Ford Expedition steps off the throttle and pumps the brakes, in a few hundred yards that huge mass of meat and metal can gradually converty most of its embeddded kinetic energy to heat, radiate it off the brake disks into the atmosphere, sink all that excess energy in the land and air one last time. Starting there we could create a culture which operates at the speeds of nature, of food energy, of muscle energy, speeds which don’t require four lanes of concrete anywhere ever for any reason.
Physical speed is a lynch pin of extractive industrial society. Materials are gathered from, quite literally, all over the world, from steel mines, copper mines, lithium mines, coal mines, gas wells, oil wells, on every part of every continent. From the mines they go to first level processing, getting rid of the 99% of “useless” overburden (formerly known as “Earth”) saving only the desired portion.
The 99% which we made into waste has to be disposed of, another demand we make on our defenseless planet. The tiny part we keep goes on to another factory, quite possibly on another continent. After a few cycles of ship, process, ship, process, the by now unrecognizable bit of formerly living Earth is reduced to a product which can then again travel, perhaps halfway around the world, to reside briefly in a warehouse, a retail warehouse, maybe an Amazon truck, perhaps some person’s abode, before making its final journey to the sewage plant, the landfill, or the sea.
Remember when Covid landed? The whole machine as described above depends on consistent speed. Everything in the economy is on constant motion. Slow it down just a little, with no warning, and nobody in Civilized World can buy toilet paper.
We need to slow that machine, gradually, remorselessly, until everything moves at a walk, at the speed of a trotting horse or a plodding ox, at the speed of oars or sails. Without running it into a bridge at a mile a minute and killing everybody.
Here’s how: Speed limits, five mph / 8 kmph per year. I write this in mph because I’m an old American, but it’s just an illustration.
Year 1: 60 mph
55 mph
50
45
40.
35
30
25
20
15 or the speed of a trotting horse, whichever is faster.
Ten years. The very first day, energy demand goes down. Speed is energy. We don’t have to build a single thing, we don’t have to dig a single mine. Besides reducing energy use immediately, tire wear slows, microplastics are micro-less, as averse to macro-more with bigger, heavier, faster electric cars.
This essay assumes a serious attempt by the nations of the world to attempt to lessen what is obviously rapidly inceasing global ecosystem degradation including but not limited to climate change / global heating. I realize that no such interest exists among world leaders and powers, and sadly I have to idea how to create it. I’d be grateful if commenters would refrain from telling me people won’t do this. Yes, I know. We’d have to want to.
As to enforcement, most Americans already carry a gps everywhere the go. They can find out how fast we’re going, from where and to where, any moment they want. A few cop cars with radar guns is theater. Outfit every car with a gps unit. require it to turn on the gas pump. Act like the end of the world as we knew it is a big deal. Your gps goes above the speed limit you get a ticket. Or gps governers. We know how to do this.
The same restraints would have to be placed on ships. Obviously aircraft can’t just “slow down” because they’ll fall out of the sky. Speed, in energy terms, is mass x velocity, so to restrict aircraft “speed” it would be necessary to restrict allowed payloads. Work out a formula to make it comparable, in tons per mile per day, to the annual 5 mph surface speed.
As speeds reduce, scales will reduce, average distances will reduce. Increasing speed always increases average trip distance. Speed is energy, so we will obtain direct energy reductions by slowing, not just savings in miles per gallon, but in gallons per day, tons per day, which are the relevant measures.
Over the long haul the biggest reduction in energy use would not be in savings in transportation energy. The current, high speed, high energy, high mass, high tonnage, highly extractive global economy could not exist as we know it at a walking speed. It requires the speed to more the materials.
It wouldn’t be enough, not by itself. After all the damage we have done, we can’t just stop breaking things and expect it to get well. We should be introducing beavers, pulling down dams, undraining swamps - we know what Earth looked like when CO2 was 280. We’ve thrown away over half the parts.
You’ve probably heard the one about the hole.
It’s time to stop digging,
The biggest single carbon emissions the United States could attain over the short haul would be to halt all new federally financed concrete flatwork projects, all new highways, airports, runways, and seaports. Don’t build any more paved parking lots anywhere ever again.
While we reduce speeds and distances, we work to restore all the ecosystem bits we have left in all the places we no longer need for our high speeds. We employ all the people we have been employing to build highways and airports, and we pay them a comfortable living wage to tear the highways back up, stack the rocks, and replant the scars.
On foot. With shovels, mattocks, hammers, and hoes. With donkeys or oxen to pull the heavy loads.
And we look back in horror at ourselves, us boomers and Greatests and Alphabet Soups, and say, we used to bulldoze and pave it all. Just for speed and trinkets.
