MOTS

I’ve been writing this essay since 2018.

The only possible way to alleviate, slow, ameliorate, attend to, address, or reduce global heating and mass extinction is to slow what we call modernity to a walk. To halt development. To quit paving. To reduce our reliance on concentrated energy until the only things we still do with it are cook our food and heat our homes

.The only hope we might have is to change from “civilized man” to full members of the living ecosystem as we evolved.

We say we “believe in science,” but there is no science which says we can eliminate the destruction we do by building wind turbines, solar panels, and hydroelectric dams. Nor by building nuclear steam turbine generators.

There is a system which removes CO2 from the atmosphere and sequesters it in Earth. It is called “photosynthesis.” The sequestering mass is called “The biosphere.” We know this. If we believed science we’d act on it. We don’t.

When photosynthesis began, Earth’s atmosphere was predominantly CO2 and nitrogen. We know this for sure. Photosynthesis changed it to what we had before we discovered the heat engine.

All the coal. All the oil. All the methane. All the fossil fuels we have burned to return that CO2 into the atmosphere. Every singe molecule of it was once living parts of the biosphere. All of it got there through photosynthesis.

The carbon we drive out of limestone when we make cement so we can make concrete to destroy habitat was put into that limestone by the biosphere. We know all of this.

If the day ever came when the peoples of developed countries actually desired to attack climate change the only possible action would be to directly reduce our consumption of energy.

The quickest and easiest way to do that would be to slow all our surface speeds. We could do this with no tax increases, no spending, no upfront cost whatsoever. By itself it would drastically reorder life as we know it. For years I have been writing specific directions which would enable this. For the interested few, here they are:

Step by step instructions

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Jun 16

Speed is the lynch pin of modern technological society. Without cars, trucks, trains, and airplanes, no part of modern life would look like it does.

(Just in case anyone is interested, the above was my least read essay for 2026 so far. It’s simple directions to get to a place nobody wants to go.)

Obviously, slowing by itself wouldn’t be enough. Slowing would have two immediate positive effects: one, it would directly and immediately reduce fossil fuel burning and particulate emissions, particularly from tires and brakes. Second, and more important, it would drastically reduce the means by which materials move from mine through factory and consumer to landfill to fulfill the destructive desires of denizens of developed countries.

After slowing, while slowing, preferably starting later today, we and Earth where we live require a drastic reduction of manufacturing everything. Ultimately humans need few things. We need food. We need water. We need air. In today’s world we have degraded our food, poisoned our water, and polluted our air. Our three most basic and absolute requirements for human life, massively degraded by the exact same practices and actions which are heating the globe and extincting the biosphere. How we can refer to this as progress is incomprehensible to me.

Besides air, water, and food, we require clothing, shelter, and community. Humans evolved as herd creatures. Without each other we would never have conquered Earth as we have, which might not have been a bad thing. Earth still retains a few human communities which do not degrade our ecosystems. Sadly, by and large the industrial human communities which massively degrade Earth also ceaselessly conquer and destroy any human communities which don’t.

We don’t need cars. We don’t need computers. We don’t even need air conditioners. If we want to be cooler, we need shade. If we want rain we need forests. If we want ground water we need beavers. We evolved to eat nuts, seeds, berries, leaves, stems, and roots. A healthy photosynthesizing ecosystem produces all the above, to a generous extent.

As years go by the industrial ecosystem catastrophe gets steadily worse. More species go extinct. There is more poison in the air, water, and soil. A billion tires a year turn to dust and tire carcasses. Another million barrels of oil is burned every day. Each day another 23 million tons of coal goes up in smoke as well. Writers bemoan the worsening climate, the shrinking biosphere, the vanishing topsoil. Virtually none advocate doing less of the things that cause this.

There are two facts here. One is we can’t go on living like we do. The other is that we don’t need to. Those two facts rarely surface anywhere on Earth. They certainly don’t feature in climate writing.

We have to quit making plastic. The very idea is discarded because some people’s lives depend on it. I understand that. At the very same time 7 to 8 million people a year die of breathing particulates. More than another million die in car wrecks. We can’t even count cancer deaths. We’re not saving lives with our toys, we’re swapping deaths around. We do save lives with our vaccines and our medicines, so now the 8-and-a-third billion of us are sucking the life out of the only planet we have.

As I said at the beginning, I’ve been writing this same essay since 2018. Before 2018 I supported the standard climate actions, primarily building wind turbines, solar panels, and electric cars. Even then I advocated slowing. Rather than build Teslas that would go a hundred silent miles an hour burning only coal and methane, and that far enough away to ignore, I advocated electric rail for distance and golf cart speed local transportation, but even at that, it was all mining, smelting, manufacturing, shipping, using, and throwing away. What changed my view was, one day I assigned myself the pretend task of project manager, leading a project to actually replace the entire global industrial base with non-fuel energy. After some thought and study I realized it was impossible.

And it still is. Impossible. Look at the records. Today I read that several nations were approaching forty to fifty percent “renewables” for electricity generation. This was presented as proof that we had this on the run.

Globally, renoobles aren’t putting out five percent of our energy demand. Globally, the only thing which has ever resulted in a reduction in fuels burned has been economic interruptions. The onset of the novel coronavirus now called Covid helped, until society adapted to its permanent existence and went back to business as usual. The financial crisis of 2008 reduced fuel consumption for a while. Other than that, so-called renewables are simply another major new industry consuming mined materials, petroleum, and coal, enabling further growth of total energy throughput and requiring massive ecosystem degradation.

So I only have one essay. I envy the people whose topic is tracking the death of the ecosystem, tracking the temperature increases, the species losses, the CO2 parts per million. At least their numbers change. They write new essays every month, as the ecosystem which makes human (among other) life possible degrades and collapses. I don’t envy the people who write new triumphal essays listing the endless increases of wind turbines, of solar panels, who crow proudly of deindustrialized nations which get ever increasing percentages of their electricity from said structures. They disgust me. They pretend that the rising numbers of habitats destroyed under solar panels and wind turbines constitute some victory. We move further every day from reducing fossil fuel demand. We burn ever more, destroy ever more, kill ever more of the ecosystem which created us as a species long ago and as individuals today.

I’m not sure how much longer I’ll write this one same essay. I know I’ve been saying this for years, and long time readers probably snicker to see it again here. Old friends, I feel different than I used to. Particularly now, when the war in Iran, the on-again, off-again closure of the Strait of Hormuz, the threatened long term reductions of oil availability bring the Renoobles Now crowd to triumphal glee, as extinction rages, topsoil and ground water vanish, as concrete spreads like a plague.

I’m a one trick pony. Unlike Paul Simon’s version, I don’t look easy. I don’t look clean. I don’t move like God’s immaculate machine. Instead I’m the one with the extra moves, the herky jerky motion and the bag of tricks, all just one trick. I just point out, over and over and over again, that the thing we’re cutting down, paving over, and stealing the sun from so we can renooble our business as usual, was the thing which created the working atmosphere we broke, and remains now and forever the only thing that could repair it. Photosynthesis and a living, increasing, biological, natural Earth.

And with that, a word from a master.