Once more

with feeling

It would be possible to reduce our fossil fuel emissions significantly starting tomorrow.

This is a simple fact.

All it would take is a universally enforced global reduction in speed limits.

The more we want to reduce emissions, the slower the limits.

One slowing wouldn’t be sufficient in the long run, but one slowing would immediately result in emissions reductions, which no other alleged climate action in history has ever done.

To address the catastrophe at any meaningful level would require recurring slowing, eventually all the way to walking speeds, simultaneous with redesigning virtually all our production and distribution systems.

That, of course, would only be possible if world governments wanted to reduce emissions, and they don’t.

Emissions is another word for GDP. Reduce emissions, reduce GDP.

It’s this direct: If the drivers of the United States went 10% slower on every trip everywhere, liquid fuel consumption - gasoline and highway diesel fuel - would go down at least 15%. But to avoid quibbles, let’s instead just pretend the savings would only be one to one, and calculate based on a 10% reduction in motor fuel burned.

The petroleum industry in the United States is slightly over 7.5% of our GDP. Reduce petroleum industry revenues by 10%, GDP goes down. Even if nothing else changed, and other things would change. Everything would change. Speed is the lynch pin of the global economy.

Slowing would reduce industrial and commercial activity. All that stuff in the global supply chain is moving. Slow surface speeds by 10%, average daily distances go down by 10%, transport times go up, annual throughput goes down.

Without exception, any action which actually reduced fossil fuel burning in the United States would blow a giant hole in GDP growth.

There is a school of climate thought known as Degrowth. To the best of my understanding it consists of several abstract plans and no specific action to launch the project. Presumably they’ll figure it out a Davos or somewhere.

Slow down. Growth will immediately slow or stop, depending on how much we slow.

This means a whole bunch of people are going to lose their jobs. What do we do about that?

Well, we could clutch our pearls and not do anything. For the short term that appears to be working.

Or we could make plans to employ them.

A huge amount of annual economic activity in the United States and presumably the world is funded by the various governments. Airport lights around the US are maintained by US Civil Service employees. So is air traffic control. Agriculture receives billions of dollars annually. Highway construction is federally funded and state funded. Some road construction is funded by counties, by cities. The United States gives millions of dollars a year to Elon Musk alone.

So instead of using government money to help rich people get richer, use it to employ the people in a new low energy economy.

Pick up trash. We could literally walk every square foot of the United States two or three times a year and never run out of litter. Trash. Plastic crap. Pay people to pick it up. Want to reduce plastic in the oceans?

Pick it up off the land before it washes in.

Trim the trees along county roads with hand loppers. Mow the grass with push mowers. Pay a decent living wage, just like we do for highway construction. Makes more sense than spending public money to butcher roadsides and emit CO2.

Eastern Red Cedar tree on author’s farm butchered by tractor mounted sidearm mower used to trim roadside trees. Photo by author

To be more realistic, let’s assume that world governments continue to be useless and do everything in their power to increase emissions measured as GDP. Then what?

According to reports well over half of all the people in all the developed world are concerned about “climate change,” even those who are not aware that we are living in a rapid and complete collapse of the global ecosystem. Let’s say that every licensed driver in every car nation who claims to care about climate change decides to do something specific about it. They all slow down by 15% all the time everywhere. That means the other half the drivers have to pass them all, all the time, and when they can’t pass they have to (shudder) drive slower.

The long term objective is to de-energize the global economy. The first place to do that is on the conveyor belt that the entire economy rides: the highways of the world.

How come revolution has to be spectacular?

Now. I’ve been writing almost the exact essay you have just read since 2018.

Do you know how many other climate writers have taken up this proposal?

Zero.

Why do you suppose that is?

There is no way, operating within the laws of physics as we know them, that this one action could fail to reduce our emissions.

Everybody claims to want to reduce our emissions.

I no longer believe them.

What they want is new gee-whiz technology, new biggests and new fastests and Technological Breakthroughs. They want Jobs. They want Electric Cars. Reducing emissions is just an excuse.

If anybody wanted to reduce emissions they would (a) shout from the rooftops that everything we’re doing in the world today is moving the opposite direction, and (b) admit that the machine we are currently operating, the machine called global industrial society, is the problem and cannot be modified to be otherwise.

We’re not reducing our emissions. We’re not even trying. We’re building highways. We’re building data centers. We’re building satellites.

We can use the satellites to get more detailed reports of our destruction of the entire living ecosystem from which we evolved and without which we cannot exist. We can use the data centers to undress the reports and show the public photos of them naked without their consent.

Or something. I forget what the justifications are. Something like that.

We could reduce our emissions tomorrow. My state, Missouri, just increased our highway speed limits. I read that another state had - maybe New York? These actions are guaranteed to increase emissions.

Doesn’t anybody else ever get tired of being lied to?