Pondering the Unknowable Future

Life after Twitter and other unknowables

For the past five years, more or less, I have written on Twitter in a self-assigned “job.”

As JeffAndDonkeys I have advocated that developed societies evolve away from high speeds and high energies, with the objective of reducing our fossil fuel demand to zero, and converting out economies from ecosystem degrading to ecosystem enhancing. Aggrading would be the more accurate term, ecosystem building up.

This would be physically possible, but it is unimaginable by the vast majority of people in those societies.

Unfortunately, the course of action which is imaginable is not physically possible. This is unfortunate, because every significant voice in the ecosystem catastrophe conversation, what might be more easily recognized as the climate conversation, agrees on, advocates for, and demands, that course of action. We are to “immediately transition” to “renewable energy.

Right now today the United States is producing and consuming fossil fuels ate a rate never seen before, riding on a growth curve steeper than has ever been seen before.

All our industrial growth is in green industries, from electric cars to chargers, solar panels to charge controllers to batteries, wind turbines to electrifying everything. All our new fossil fuels are burned to power new actions. The old amounts of fossil fuels were sufficient to power the old activities.

Someday, we are assured, all of these increases will result in a sudden sharp decrease and all our problems will be solved.

There is no evidence that this can ever be made to happen. I have discussed this at length in various Twitter threads, and may do so again, depending on how I proceed from this point.

The fact of the matter is that almost everyone in at least the English speaking world, and I think the entire developed world, believes that a built solution is the right and only solution to the current ecosystem catastrophe featuring, but not limited to, global heating and drastic climate changes. Virtually everyone believes that a total transition to non-destrutive energy is possible, in fact is the only solution possible, and would be sufficient.

This week the Secretary General of the UN made an impassioned speech regarding the climate emergency, which culminated in a denunciation of greedy oil companies for preventing our transition to carbon free renewable energies. I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.

Allegedly 13% of US energy consumption in 2021 was “renewable,” but 37% of that was biomass, which is carbon based fuel extracted from Earth at a direct topsoil and fertility cost and which is simply energy stolen from the future by continuing today’s ecosystem degradation. There is no biomass which wouldn’t be better used as compost than as fuel.

Of the remaining “renewable” portion only about 33% - that is, 33% of 13%, or, in real numbers, somewhere slightly under 4% of the total - is the “renewables” we are expected to “transition to.”

“Immediately.”

What we should do immediately is quit building new solar panels, new wind turbines, new highways, new airport runways, enlarged seaports, and private cars no matter how powered.

If we did those things there would be an immediate reduction, a significant, large scale reduction, in fossil fuel demand and greenhouse gas emissions worldwide.

There would be an immediate reduction in species habitat destruction, still today the number one cause of the current, ongoing, largely ignored sixth mass extinction in known geological history.

The physical fact is that each and every utility scale, utility connected wind turbine or solar panel built and installed is an immediate increase in atmospheric carbon and a net loss to the global ecosystem. No future action done by said turbine or panel will ever remove its production carbon footprint or heal its material extraction and installation ecosystem degradation.

The physical fact is that every mile of new road paved anywhere is a significant net loss to the ecosystem, created by expending vast amounts of fossil fuel to drastically reshape vast swaths of land.

The social fact is that nobody cares.

Everybody cares enough about The Climate to demand that we immediately do the impossible in order to continue to live exactly as we do today and have the problem miraculously go away. That’s it. That’s the extent of it. I doubt if there are a thousand Americans who would give up their cars to save their grandchildren, as long as they didn’t have to personally live to watch the apocalypse.

I wrote a depressed Xcreet (formerly known as a Tweet) about my depression watching developed societies march headlong off the cliff of ecosystem collapse, which perversely netted me over 500 new “followers.”

Then my new followers immediately went to telling me that nobody is going to, and therefore we have to, and technology, and optimism, and Not Giving Up, and in a blinding flash I realized: Its hopeless, not because of the deniers, but because of the True Believers, and … I logged out of Xitter and walked away.

I have no idea what comes next. For me. Except: donkeys.