Why?

Things are obviously out of hand. We are in another cycle where all the climate scientists get together and agree that they didn’t expect it to get this bad this fast. For one who has, for several years now, written about climate in terms of specific actions to reduce the damage we do every day, it’s a milepost.

Why ever would one write about actions to minimize our damage now, at this point? In the first place, we’re here already, and in the second place, all of society is racing downhill faster and faster every day. People say to me, “Yeah, when you figure out a way to convince 8.2 billion people to slow down, give me a call.”

You know what? I can’t care about them. I can’t change them. Just as an aside, it’s not “8.2 billion people.” It’s two billion, more or less, who live in the developed world and pretend that we are all of humanity. By and large I think they’ve – we’ve - got what they deserve coming. The other six billion are mostly innocent, still living small, modest, low energy lives, sneered at by the two billion who are killing the world. The other six billion don’t deserve it, but the two billion pretty much do. And I can’t worry about them.

I care about me. And I care about you. I care about the six billion who already live slow and aren’t emitting significant amounts of greenhouse gases. I have given up on the two billion who lust for speed, toys, money, and don’t care about their own children enough to accept any limits on themselves.

I’m not trying to convert any person anywhere in the world. I am as confident as a human could be that Homo Industrialensis is going to bear down on the throttle until the machine explodes. I’m not trying to save it.

But I’m trying to strengthen the things which remain. I am aware of many people who know the jig is up but who personally want to do the very best they can from where we stand now. Frankly, those are the only people I’m writing for.

We could, if we chose, if we were lucky, if anything ran long enough, create a subculture which moved slower than the outer world.

I’m not talking about an intentional community. I’m not talking about bringing some particular fifty hippies together into a commune somewhere. I’m talking about what brought together hippies worldwide to challenge the existing ethic. I remember.

We scared the living shit out of them. The world we are living in today is the rebound. It’s pretty much common knowledge, except it doesn’t seem meaningful to many folks, that back in 1971 future Supreme Court Justice Lewis F. Powell wrote a memo to the US Chamber of Commerce in which he quite literally said that the US free enterprise system, corporate plutocracy, was under attack. The opening sentence of the Powell Memo: “No thoughtful person can question that the American economic system is under broad attack.” From us, who we were then. Hippies.

The corporate plutocracy won. They read Powell’s memo and they followed his directions. The first thing they did was buy all the underground rock-and-roll FM radio stations and turn them into Cash Rock with Shock Jocks. Exactly as Powell had instructed them.

Go read it. https://www.greenpeace.org/usa/democracy/the-lewis-powell-memo-a-corporate-blueprint-to-dominate-democracy/ It was a step-by-step set of instructions to take down the hippies, scapegoat a man like Jimmy Carter, focus on media and information – it’s chilling. They followed every step, and those steps brought us to 2025 in the Western World. Elon Musk. Mark Zuckerberg. Jeff Bezos. Xi Jinping. Vladimir Putin. Climate catastrophe.

There is never a word broadcast in public which is not previously approved by some billionaire. Talking heads argue over how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, and the living ecosystem collapses before our very eyes.

There are simple, physically available actions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and which could be begun today, by any government in the world, but there’s no money in them. Billionaires care only about money.

Every word heard is pre-ok’d by some billionaire. The person speaking those words to you is employed by some billionaire. It’s not the oil industry which maintains the machine, it’s the global oligarchy. All the billionaires in the world. The oil industry is but one member.

This isn’t a conspiracy theory, this is a matter of public record. It is a matter of public record who owns majority holding and operating control in every major media organization in the world, and who controls their funding. Billionaires own it all. Billionaires control every meaningful penny that goes into NPR. Billionaires absolutely control the information disseminated in the industrial world.

Money makes the mare go. You don’t bite the hand that feeds You. Pick your cliché. Billionaires control every major media voice in the English speaking world. Every word of every article has denotations and connotations. Billionaires choose the framing, choose the wording, choose the message. Some stories get told, some don’t. We hear every day how many new sillywatts of solar panels we installed, but not how much additional oil we burned. Stories of building new wind turbines are presented as heroic sagas, while stories of new oilfields are gloom and doom and deep blaming. Soup on pictures.

They’re all one story. The other end of the solar panel wind turbine teeter-totter is diesel fuel and mines, bulldozers and concrete. It’s all one animal. You may like to pet its nose but Earth’s got to accept the manure.

The machine runs on consumers. Consumers are the fuel. Consumers consuming speed are the staple diet of the global industrial monster. To serve its consumers the global machine consumes, in turn, all of Earth, air, dirt, water, animals large and small. Fast consumers feed it money and the cycle goes on.

Boycotts don’t work, because in 2025 there are only about four corporations (more or less) and they own everything, employ everyone, and make everything that can be bought in the world. You can’t boycott them.

Their gravy crop is oil. Go slower. Burn less. Each of us. All of us.

If you can get there on foot, walk. If you own a bicycle, ride it. If you don’t own a bicycle, don’t buy a new one. It’s made out of fossil fuels. Buying a used one is good.

Everything is made out of fossil fuels. Don’t buy it. Most of all, without changing your life in any other way, if you drive, drive slower. Hold up traffic. Piss people off. Be understanding and pull off on shoulders from time to time and let them all go zoomy down the road.

Speed is not about need, speed is about physical addiction. If you left too late, speeding isn’t going to get you there on time. You’ll just be worst pissed of when you get there late. If you want to get there on time every time, leave in time and drive five miles an hour slower than everybody else.

Nobody will ever slow you down. You’ll be on time every time. Learn all the surface streets. Drive them. If you have to drive a freeway, drive the speed limit minus five all the time every time. You’re legal. The minimum allowable speed is posted. Go faster than that, you’re legal.

No, they won’t run over you. If they did they’d have to stop, which is even worse than slowing down. They’ll honk at you and hate you because you took several kilojoules of kinetic energy out of their bodies for a few minutes. They could feel the difference, and they felt unfulfilled, but they’ll live. While they’re stuck in line behind you they, too, will be burning less fuel, emitting less CO2, per minute, per hour, per lifetime. Yes, they may well burn more fuel passing you than they saved by being stuck behind you, but not much more. It depends how long they were back there.

The reasons so few will slow down are, I think, two. One, and a significant reason, is the addiction to kinetic energy, the addiction to speed, that our bodies feel. Speed is physically exciting, physically fun. We pay to go down ziplines for the experience of speed. We push our children on swings and they say “Whee!” Speed is exciting. Speed is thrilling. Speed is fun. Sleds, roller skates, skateboards, bicycles, cars – I don’t believe for a moment that we adopted cars because they gave us any immediate advantage. We adopted cars because they could run faster than a horse could, and longer, and give us an exponentially greater rush of kinetic energy in every cell of our being.

The other reason, though, the reason that so few will slow down now, with full knowledge of climate change and ecosystem degradation, is because they don’t know and don’t believe how much difference it would make. Billionaires have told them every day in every way for forty years that the way to reduce fossil fuel burning is to make more things faster with fossil fuels. They believe it.

I’ve tried to spell out the relationship of speed to energy in different ways over time, but I am one voice amidst a cacophony of millions of watts of organized messaging that says, Oh, no, slowing down won’t work, we’ve got to Transition to Renewable Energy.

I write because it’s up to you. It’s up to everybody. This isn’t like turning down the thermostat at home.

In the first place, the thermostat at home is one tiny factor among the many in a demand which all put together isn’t half the energy we expend on speed. When you turn the heat colder, or the air conditioner warmer, you save a tiny bit of energy and suffer alone. When you slow down, you don’t suffer at all, you save significantly larger increments of energy, and everybody in the world around you sees you and more or less has to notice you. Often they, too, have to slow down for a few moments as well.

According to the numbers, here in America we, the climate concerned, are in the neighborhood of 2/3 of all the people. Theoretically we would be in the neighborhood of 2/3 of all the drivers, too.

If we all slowed down, a lot more people would notice us than notice a can of soup on a painting in a gallery somewhere. And unlike the can of soup, our action will specifically, for one person on one day, reduce energy demand.

If you do it long enough it doesn’t feel uncomfortable any more. Yeah, there are six or eight cars behind you, but there’s nobody in front of you for miles. If the road’s straight, they can pass. If it’s crooked and has a shoulder, you can pull over every five or ten miles, slow down to 45, let’ em roll on. When you’re not in a hurry, slowing down for a few minutes doesn’t take anything away from you.

Almost all the people who actually care about the climate have been systematically lied to and are therefore demanding an action which isn’t working and cannot work. This is grim. They’ve been lied to by billionaires for so long that they absolutely believe it. It’s not their fault. I point out that it’s not working, look, we’re burning more fossil fuels than ever before, and they reply, “Well, at least it’s moving in the right direction.”

They have literally been convinced that burning more fossil fuels is moving in the right direction. They will tell you that without the new mining and manufacturing we’d be burning even more new and additional fossil fuels. Based on what?

I could weep. Building utility scale wind turbines and solar panels is not motion in the right direction. Building any new thing is motion in the wrong direction. Adding any new load on an already strained global electrical grid is motion in the wrong direction. In a halfway concerned world there would be no crypto coin, there would be no AI. The existence of crypto coin and AI are proof that the industrial world has no interest in ever reducing emissions.

In a halfway concerned world there would be no new electric cars that would go a mile a minute. There might be a few that would go ten or fifteen miles an hour, but that would be stretching a point.

In a world which cared at all about climate change there would be no new cars as we know them, and the ones we have would be driven slower every year than the year before. The auto industry would morph overnight to one in which everybody knew there would be no new cars again ever, so the ones we have now have to last forever and we’d better take care of them.

But we’re not going to do that, because every single word of the entire billionaire-hosted public conversation about climate change is an out-and-out work of fiction which has not, will not, and cannot ever reduce fossil fuel demand or emissions.

And under those circumstances, why would anyone waste his time or energy writing about actual actions available today in the real world which would immediately slow the destruction we are doing? Actions people could do without any new expenditures, without government mandates, without being forced or ordered or taxed?

The answer is, why not? What made all those kids and a handful of old folks back in 1968 scare the living shit out of the entire oligarchy, and why don’t we do it again?

Don’t worry about anybody else. Slow down yourself. In public.