Climate Action 2025

The Way I See It

Think of it. Climate Change. Artificial Intelligence. Los Angeles. Western North Carolina. Climate Activists. Bitcoin.Renewable Energy. Electric cars. Artificial Intelligence. Bitcoin.

If I wanted to design a culture for the express purpose of destroying the ecosystem there is nothing I would change about The United States of America and the rest of the industrial world today.

If I lived in a culture with a collapsing ecosystem and I wanted it to get worse as fast as possible I would invent Bitcoin and AI.

None of this is happening in secret. The billionaires are about to build their own electric grid to power their data centers, one that they don’t have to share with the rest of us because they need more power. We are being told this is progress.

I expect some of the new private electricity will leak over into their houses and bunkers.

Parallel to this, as daily reality in the news and business pages, there is this theater regarding climate change. People discuss climate action and Paris Accords. Tens of thousands of people fly to designated cities to clutch pearls and indulge in performative outrage. People honest-to-God think that the President who began his term by getting Congress to pass a law to spend billions of dollars bulldozing and paving highways in all 50 states is a climate hero and are outraged that the dipshit who was elected to succeed him will reverse all his policies.

We are threatened with the loss of the policies that made the United States the largest producer and consumer of fossil fuels in the history of the world. In my opinion it would be difficult if not impossible for the current lot of willfully incompetent boobs to do more damage.

OK, I get it that everybody believes that Renewable Energy is A Thing. Renewable energy is not a thing. Renewable energy is a red herring. Renewable energy is a product to sell. Renewable Energy didn’t amount to a hill of beans in the total global energy flow last year, and we didn’t have AI last year.

No less a personage than Elon Musk has predicted an “electricity drought,” where it doesn’t rain enough magic electricity out of the sky into the wires and data centers to keep up with Elon’s sales projections and your personal heat pump, which is a bad deal for you because Elon gives the President marching orders, and last year they convinced you take out your gas furnace. Because electricity is magic. Just burn some coal, some methane, poof, you’ve got electricity, it’s renewable, see that whirlygig? If I was an investor, back when investing was about funding real people making real things, I’d buy stock in wood stoves.

I grew up in a world of clean electricity propaganda. Reddy Kilowatt and Clean Electricity, in a nation and world which, at that time, got almost all its electricity from coal fire.

But that was OK, because with Atoms for Peace, nuclear power generation would soon make electricity Too Cheap to Meter. My President told me so.

Electricity generation is still today the number 1, and growing, use of coal fire in the world.

And if the total magic raining out of the sky it turns out not to be enough to Electrify Everything and AI too, Elon can afford to build all the methane burning power plants he needs to run his stuff. His personal stuff. Not the cars he sold you. Once he sells them they’re your problem.

I’m still holding out a possibly vain hope that we won’t let him have nukes in his basement.

What I can’t understand is why nobody will stand up and say, “Hey, it’s all the stuff! Building all the stuff! That’s where the emissions come from!”

In a nation where all the homes put together, counting billionaires’ mansions, consume 12 1/2 percent of all the energy, and transportation and industry each consume over twice that much, the only thing people want to talk about is gas furnaces. Gas stoves. Emissions. All the gas stove emissions in the world are not a flea fart in a hurricane compared to what it takes to make wind turbines. Teslas. Even heat pumps. Heat pumps increase the activity of the highest energy consuming sector in the whole world to make an incremental reduction to one use in our second smallest sector.

Now we’re building AI. (Facepalm emoji.) And one invisible tulip bulb Bitcoin is worth a hundred grand. The day Elon gets all the electricity your Bitcoin goes to the same place where the picture goes when you turn the TV off.

My last day on social media I was posting about trying to get people to talk about the reality of energy, the reality of what we could do and what we are doing. I’m not asking anyone to do anything, although it would be nice, but after all these years we can’t even talk about it?

I have never heard anyone else specifically recommend out loud a systematic way to deenergize the global economy. No one challenges the obvious physical strength of the plan. The only topic available for discussion is what People Will Accept.

I’ll tell you what people will accept. People will accept Los Angeles, California, being on fire, and never say one word about reducing the endless growth in our energy appetite. People will accept California burning, Houston flooding - I’m not talking about what might happen in 2030. We don’t know and there is only one way to find out. There is a very real possibility that by 2030, if there are any living humans on Earth, many of them won’t even remember cars or airplanes. Odds are bigger by 2050. I’m not asking anybody to do anything. Talk about it.

Somebody go on TV and talk about this. Talk about the reality. I’m tired of posting charts. Pick any chart of energy use, emissions, extinction, I don’t care, any chart. Those charts represent now in scientific terms.These charts represent energy use after everything we’ve done for forty years.

This is the outcome of forty years of promises, 29 years of COP meetings. The learned peoples of the world still stand up in front of their publics and lie that next year those yellow and purple zits at the top of all the serious energy sources will reverse climate change. And this is just the US. Globally it’s worse. Lots worse.

Imagine how I feel. Imagine my rage. Imagine my frustration. 7 years of public effort. But most of all imagine how every single respected voice in the global climate conversation looks to me today. All of them. Every climate scientist. Every talking head. Degrowth. How do you degrow? It appears to have something to do with having meetings and arguing over quotas, but don’t quota me.

Slow down.

Pick your favorite incarcerated or free British climate activist. Have you ever heard him or her say we have to specifically reduce our energy throughput by slowing? I am not offering science fiction and dreams. This isn’t a wild theory. Slowing surface speeds worldwide could not fail to reduce global emissions immediately. Absolutely nobody cares. Slowing surface speeds in the United States alone would make a globally measurable, significant reduction in fossil fuel demand and emissions. Every gallon not burned gets bigger the closer to the well it gets. Every gallon not burned on the nation’s roads is a gallon and a quarter not pumped, maybe a gallon and a half, the number gets higher and higher as the oil gets tighter. Shale oil is tight oil. We piss a way a fortune in oil to take a little more than that to the refinery.

I am absolutely dead serious: There is no person in the global climate conversation who will take a firm public stand in favor of direct energy throughput reductions. The insistence on separating fossil fuel demand from economic activity, from materials per mile per day, from k=½ MV^2, and the simultaneous insistence that we Believe the Science, and by extension the scientists, who refuse to acknowledge this, disgusts me to the core.

The United States has imposed national speed restrictions within living memory and the world didn’t end. I acknowledge that we’re a lot closer to a shooting war with each other today than we were then, but I’d be willing to take the chance.

With the technology we have now 100% passive speed enforcement is easily within our reach. GPS governors are off-the-shelf technology. Yes, we’d have to build a bunch of them, but they’re not very big, don’t require much material, don’t weigh a lot in shipping. It’s a lot cheaper and lower energy than replacing all the cars with EVs. Google knows how fast everyone is going already. Speed cameras are so 1980.

The governments of the world do not have to allow data centers to be hooked up to the public grid. There is no service they provide that all 8.25 billion of us needed last year. None of the usual excuses apply. We’re not going to lose jobs, food, water, resources, or services. A handful of billionaires would lose profit without which they got by fine last year.

The governments of the world do not have to allow Bitcoin mining. Here we have a process where people do absolutely nothing except suck up electricity to let computers run programs to run a series of online transactions and once in a while one of them hits the jackpot and <poof> somebody is a hundred grand richer. For now.

I seriously don’t care what the temperature is. I want to know why everybody just shrugs their shoulders and waits for the government to agree to spend two trillion dollars to make something that we’ve been making for forty years, which has resulted so far in an unending increase of atmospheric carbon and fossil fuel burned. The only year it didn’t was when a pandemic made us stop making all this stuff.

Biden got his climate law. We did it for four years. It made a bunch of jobs, and a bunch of capitalists made fortunes, and a lot of roads got paved, a lot of steel towers planted in the prairie and the sea. The only improvement in emissions during that whole process was made by replacing coal electric generators with methane electric generators, which are much better as long as everybody pretends that methane never escapes into the atmosphere. Which we know, absolutely know you can read it in the paper, that it does.

People are still talking about emissions. Let me ask you a question. How do you emission? What about fossil fuels. Do you say, “Well, I’d better fossil fuel today, the larder is empty.” There is not a subject in the global climate conversation that is an action which society can change.

Repeat after me: “Energy is fossil fuel.”

That’s technically only 82% accurate, but a score of 82% will get you almost any US state or federal license you have to test for. Energy is fossil fuel. In the real world today we have no option. Want to use less fossil fuel? Reduce the speed and scale of material motion.

People demand energy for actions and consume energy performing them. People make things. People ship things. People buy things. People throw things away. People do things. People do not “emission.” People do not “fossil fuels.” People do things. Fossil fuels are how we do things, and on today’s world in physical reality as it is generally agreed to exist we don’t have any other energy source. A lot of fast talking salesmen have got everybody thinking about emissions and fossil fuels, and they say, “Look! My Magic Gizmo® doesn’t fossil fuel! It doesn’t emission! If you let the industrial sector burn enough fossil fuels to make TWO TRILLION DOLLARS worth of these the climate will be fixed!”

And the truck factories crank up, and the largest trucks in history roll out, and new, bigger than ever before mines open, and excavator factories crank up. Because we’ve got lots and lots of tons of rock and dirt to move to get enough copper to build two trillion dollars worth of electric gizmos. Next the cement kilns crank up, the limestone comes out of the Missouri River bluffs in an endless train of semi trailer trucks. Everything has to be built in a concrete and steel building in a concrete and steel desert. Everything has to be hauled to wherever it’s going on (mostly) concrete and steel highways. The diesel flows. While we’re doing all this - which in any sane society would be viewed as ecocide and a crime against humanity - while we’re doing this, we’re building data centers and Elon Musk is predicting electricity shortages. I’ll bet he owns a bunch of companies who build methane burning heat engine electricity generating facilities. Probably some uranium mines. For sure copper mines.

All of this has amazed and befuddled me for years. You can’t read an article about climate change which doesn’t demand an immediate transition to carbon free energy. People with PhDs publicly demand it, get locked up, put in jail, glue themselves to banks. How a whole nation of allegedly educated and literate people - no, a whole world of them - can fail to see the energy flows I don’t understand. There are charts on every web page. It’s really not a mystery.

We burn all that fuel making and shipping all this shit.

Everything else all put together, all the houses and all the store fronts, is less than a quarter of the fossil fuel. Over three quarters of it, worldwide, goes to industry and transportation. All the houses and all the stores and offices suck up less than a quarter of all the energy. On top of that, houses and stores are already the most electrified sectors and always have been, ever since the energy revolution.

We burn all that fuel making and shipping all this shit.

Nikola Tesla didn’t get his way. We don’t have Free Electricity for Everybody. As it turns out, the laws of thermodynamics stubbornly operate here on the level of physics where humans are.

The ability of the masters of industry to convince people that energy, being invisible, can be captured for free, can be extracted for a few cents, can be sold for a few bucks.They and only they would reap the benefits of the new speed, productivity, and power. Global human society could waste infinite amounts of energy and call it “efficient” because by adding energy and mechanisation to processes we could reduce human attention and participation.

Global free trade agreements were fossil fuel marketing agreements. Global free trade agreements were global energy wasting agreements. If the true cost of energy was charged into trade, long distance freight would be in horsedrawn canal boats in canals dug by humans and mules.

Photo credit highcliffcoaches.rezdy.com

Sailing ships would ply the seas. The energy we have wasted since 1900 in an ever accelerating process of speed, scale, and volume has cost us an entire livable planet which could have cared for us for a long time. Now we’re in a predicament that we can’t get out of.

Sadly, the assumption seems to be that since we’re already doomed we might as well eat, drink, and be money, for tomorrow we lie. Or something.

It is true that we can’t make the ecosystem and climate any better than they are today. That doesn’t mean we can’t make them worse than they might otherwise be next year. And we are. Every new data center makes next year worse. Every new wind turbine or solar panel does too, although by orders of magnitude less. Every mile of new highway makes tomorrow worse. Sadly, compared to AI and Bitcoin, every new mile of highway is only a scratch.

Yes, we’re well into an ever steepening collapse. One of the social and intellectual capitals of the 21st Century Western World is on fire, with windswept blazes operating on the same principle, and nearly at the same intensity, as a steel blast furnace. By looking at the news, it appears that roughly one-third of the five hundred year old roads of Europe and Asia are filled with flooded smashed cars and dead people. We’re about to drive honeybees into extinction, on purpose, for profit. Even that we can make worse.

For instance, we could invent AI and allow it to proliferate.