Month: June 2013

Update : Trans National Corporations use spying and other covert methods on a large scale. Big McDonalds is watching you..

Update : Thousand of companies traded classified and private information

Update : Yes, information was sold on to Wallstreet and other companies.

The recent revelations on NSA wiretapping, recording billions of emails and phone conversations without catching any terrorists has another uneasy aspect : Industrial espionage. The world has always been a stage of industrial competition. It is the main driver behind US Chinese tensions, because industry means you have something to offer, and fossil fuel producing countries rather sell to clients that are industrious, so not the USA. So how hard is it to tap into communications of inventors, researchers to find out their progress, find out about their ideas. Not very hard obviously.

One may think this would mean a technology acceleration, in the hands of the US (or Canada as is often the case), but an acceleration is not in the interest of the market forces. Turnover is in the interest of the carbon suppliers, the intermediaries, because that is what makes them rich. So if turnover is good and all products the rich want to own are available, the drive to change anything about the market is absent with the peeple that are supposed to finance it.

The above trailer of the movie Antitrust is about an IT mogol that spies on young developers to steal their code. This is not a far fetched scenario at all. Why if code is so easy to copy, would you not steal it if you can. Most people think this is about it for internet espionage, but of course all kinds of ideas and initiatives can be detected and taken over. We have one example of Apple patenting a technology that is described in a paper years before. Now apart from being faced with bogus patents (ones that can be succesfully contested) we face patents on stuff that was in the public domain! We can also expect patents that are on inventions that are not supposed to be used.

left ,scientific paper right, Apple patent. Applications of a technology are not patentable

What about screenwriters, songwriters, anybody with a commercially interesting creative job? How can we know if the NSA has all the emails (or a large part of it) to mine by whomever (we don’t know) whether ideas are still with the originators. How can we know for that matter, if the database is not used to measure public opinion. Test words. See what messages get repeated. Until the system is openly and clearly shut down, nobody can tell who gets his information where.

Help us develop Windheatingsystem.com

We already live in a technological Ground Hog world, where the 70’s are repeated, Algae can provide biofuel, cars may run on NH3 one day. Commecial interests, industry, is happy to reinvent things time and time again, basically proving technews does not disturb the ‘Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind’ of the undereducated consumer. You can say salt storage for CSP is new, you can say Solar Zinc water splitting is new, daring, a promise. And whomever invents something awesome and doable, you buy it up, over invest and fail with it when entering the market (because new stuff at the same price never competes).

How did the hero in the movie Antitrust break the cycle of theft? Through Hypertransparency. By broadcasting his claim to everyone that could be reached. It seems with the revelations about the abilities and practices of the NRA patents granted can be put into question. Maybe a good time to revise this system, that has been corrupted into a kind of financial asset factory, locking down technologies through high royalties over invalid patents. Open up the databases or destroy them, thow out any contested patent in the last 12 years. It wil be a benefit to the renewable future for sure.

Edward Snowden came forward about the indiscriminate ability of the NSA to wiretap, eavesdrop, record and store email and phone conversations of every citizen in the US. His job gave him access to an enormous amount of privileged information, as he explains in an interview with the Guardian, so much information that it really makes one wonder if there was no intent to leak or provoke some kind of treason. It seems almost rediculous to prosecute Snowden for his crime, after all he exposed things that are indeed illegal infringements, open doors for corruption, nepotism and other exploitation. You don’t want to be the guy that shoots Jesse James, Robert Ford, even though Jesse may have been an outlaw, he was understood and loved for his strength. 

You can’t respectably eliminate a man that shows moral strength.

The existence of a large network that gives access to any and all communications between US citizens however inspires a number of different questions, depending on your outlook.  

For instance, if the US was eavesdropping then who else was doing it? Lets not have the illusion that China did not tap in to this PRISM system. In fact the system puts the US on a par with China and perhaps any other state these days. Digital signals, mobile communications are just to easy to intercept. One has to wonder how it can be that the NSA expected only the patriotism and salary would keep the secrets secret. Bradly Manning, Julian Assange and others already clearly showed that’s not how people work. It’s almost as if they where waiting for it to happen, as if this revelation is timed.Timed with the new dawm of relationships between the US and China, timed with the relaxation of North Korean tensions. It is entirely possible that the US opened it’s databases to China to show it has no plans to conquer or destroy it, that there is no reason to prepare for a war as China has been doing for decades now. The tool used was hypertransparency. Of course there is no need for it when it concerns the public, it should only be applied to the private sector and government, to back up trust. Now that it allowed a view into the psyche of the US citizen, and showed no big plans, the service needed to be demolished. This would be part of the global standdown, the abolishment of war before we move into the renewable powered roboeconomy. Of course this may be way to optimistic for most.

The mad world of war gone commercial

There’s a funny link from Edward Snowden to the movie Catch-22. He’s the person dying in Yossarian eyes, who goes crazy because commercial interests are infiltrating the ideologically motivated war machine. Slowly all sense leaves the base and everything that goes one becomes an M&M enterprises operation. Catch-22 is about the birth of the Military Industrial Complex, which took place in WO I, a war prolonged because industry made a killing and oil didn’t run out. It is the same wild expansion of the MIC that bread the NSA to it’s super power, and that drive the Cold War, the same desire to be usefull and earn money that made the Shin Bet manouvre Israel into it’s dead end struggle with the Palestinians. You can’t object to a man acting out his morality, you can’t object to palestinians opposing their erdication.  

Everything companies do, their accounts, emails and phone conversations, should be public 

Of course there’s a dark side to the NSA program, but we need to realize that darkness, evil, is a projection intended to intimidate. If an animal paralyzes you with fear, you become easier bait. So you can fantasize about it in a Ludlum fashion, and revel in your comfortable paralysis, or try to make a judgement on the threat and your response. It’s baslcally a lot of computers storing your emails, phone conversations, analyzing them, building network graphs of behaviour. To that back end you can expect a connection to all you see on the web, even your google results, youtube suggestions, adds on your pages. It is a growing intervention and influencing machine. It makes most sense it will be abused by business interests.

People will want to see these databases destoryed 

Another (more real) dark aspect to the existence of these databases with stored personal trivia goes back to WO II, back to the supression of the rebels of Indonesia, back to many cleansing operations we may or may not know about: You first make the list of your enemies, then go in and kill them. Germany first generated an (IBM) database of who was Jew to what degree, and that made it a lot easier to find them and deport them. The Dutch captain Westerling made lists of all the rebels in the unruly part of Indonesia before going from kampong to kampong to shoot them (while his commanders in Holland didn’t really have any grip on him). We know the East German and communist burocracies, Stazi, KGB. The NSA database can be used for such a purpose, the US military certainly would think that way from my own conversations about datamining with DARPA specialists. Many suggest this is a progression towards 1984. To the Casino Gulag state as Max Keiser calls it, where most people toil for a plutocracy (one that is already clearly forming).

But all that stands between us and this dark future is the morality of man. People want to be free and keep other people happy. It’s the most secure world, so we evolutionarily adapted to bring it about, even if it costs our own lives. Events like Snowdens defection are like the spontaneous appearance of matter in a vacuum. It’s not the highly agitated that will act, but those with a proper understanding of reality and care for others. People that are in touch with reality and just don’t like it. Unless you breed a planet of psychopaths (a risky proposition in itself), dreams of global supression and zombie citizens won’t pan out. It seems the only option is world peace with a population that sees the creation of a happy life for each other as it’s purpose. Kumbaya.

If the positive scenario is true, The Syrian conflict should die down the next months 

It does help if you take out the main driver for war and conflict, scarcity. You can start with energy scarcity by turing the MIC into a renewable energy source manufacturing conglomerate. Guns to plowshares as it where. Then tackle hunger by teaching sustainable methods and revitalizing the ecosystem using renewable energy as well (so there are no restaints). Wars are fought over resources, over space and wealth. Create wealth for all and you end up with peace, then just watch the population and you will be doing fine. Machines can make what people need, restore the eco system, even maintain the renewable energy sources. Take that route and you’ll end up on a restored planet, that can last until it burps out another Moon, or the Yellowstone Caldera explodes, or it is hit by another meteorite. Which may be longer than a few centuries we get if we keep "fucking that chicken".  

Hypertransparency II

Hypertransparency

When studying filosophy one can come across the question whether all questions can be answered. If not then the follow up question would be why not, and where can we draw the line. Obviously our mind and vocal organs are capable of making a lot more seemingly meaningfull noises in a lot more odd permutations using a lot more disperate concepts than our universe is entropically capable giving reality to. "Does the Earth fit in a shoebox?" seems a rediculous question, but place a shoebox upside down on the ground and you have your answer (The Earth doesn’t pop in). The question demonstrates undefined limits to the relation between our mind and the universe (meaning the future experiences we expect from our past experiences, maybe made more robust by repeating them a number of times). So if we think and talk about the world that is out there, how do we know we make any sense? Doesn’t it make more sense to constantly do something so you are in fact sure you are making progress (test your beliefs).

A philosophical tool 

It is one thing to never be able to find an answer to a question. The punishment for that is just a bit more complexity. Quantum physics deals with that using probability calculus, finding rest in distributions of outcomes "It wil be a color between green and orange". If the question can’t be answered because you mistakenly believe it can, then you suffer due to your own delusions.

But in reality there are things that can never be, things with zero probability. The best example of a never gonna happen situation is a person being welded naked into a steel box. A big one, 3 by 3 by 3 meters, made of 5 mm steel plates, welded shut. If it’s a guy he has to get out before the air runs out. We know it’s not possible. It is a cruel example that may not feel good to contemplate, but view it as an abstraction of impossibility. There are questions never answered, but there are also realities never achieved.

We think it is important to note that our decisions may lead us or some of us into a steel box from which there is no escape. Poverty, now rising (due to a malign policy called austerity), makes people less cooperative, and as a result some types of movements become less possible, some types of political directions get cut of. See the riots in the Southern European states, riots that should be for renewable energy but are about jobs (let us serve so we can earn carboncredits). Those may become so violent (because the policy is exactly wrong) that anyone offering the solution will be met with anger and obstruction. Reducing the freedom of thought through rising poverty (and a pro carbon media) may be welding the box shut for millions. The future holds only less and less wealth, not more and more as is perfectly possible.

Economics is a glass box painted silver inside, a place of darkness to be in. Outside : The Sun.

The box most of us are already welded into in is that of economical thought. We already respect steel walls made of credit, money, trade, concepts that all vitally depend on fossil fuels, so have no real persistent reality to them. By going along with this delusion (usually obtained through a difficult intellectual process) we limit our understaning of the real steel box we may becme trapped in, we think this one is made of steel, but it is made of fragile glass. We think we can use it as ship with it’s lid open, seeing some benefits in it’s constraints, but if we lean against its walls just a little it would break. It is a mental box, it is not real. It asks nonsensical question (how to achieve economic growth) by nonsensical answers (by stimulating it!). After a flash of buring fossil fuels and an associated rise in cashflow we find we end up with more machines, products, less fossil fuels, minerals, ecological reserves, more people expecting income. Did something grow? No. Was something valuable added? No. The only stimulation was provided by the prostitutes visited by the lazy intermediaries who came up with the theory of economics.

Economics works, but only in a truely closed system, our present system is open, carbon enters it from the mantle of our planet, and accumulates in our atmosphere, churning everything alive like a toxic laundromat, changing our planet into a steel box, a hot sarcofagus with us locked inside. We are paralyzed into not testing the belief whether we are realy stuck in the economic steel box. 

Before we take this economic glass box so seriously we end up in a real steel one, we may want to consider our options! Because a steel box is a trap we can not escape from. Our economic delusion is one we can escape from! How? It is simple : Make the delusion less powerfull, dim its light, and place people as much people as possible clearly out of the path towards any steel box.

Strategy 

A strategy would really only have one core goal : Reducing the power of the markets. Make smaller markets until you don’t need one to satisfy certain needs. This is not communism or socialism at all, it is called independence. Autonomy. Make things progressively less dependend on cashflows, reduce cashflows, break up larger flows into smaller ones, break up larger companies into smaller ones, make them more local, and above all increase the role of renewables in driving them.

Renewable energy can be centralized, but in general it is localized, distributed in nature. That means that if you produce the things you need using renewables your production capacity is limited, so central production and global distribution of products is not the most logical thing to expect. The most logical thing is to have many comparable production facilities producing what people need for each area, like bakeries and buchers, taylors, carpenters. All trades from the bygone fully renewable powered past (although people burned wood).

The point is not to go back to the middle ages, but to create pockets of wealth that are absolutely robust to what happens elsewhere. It is impossible to do that using fossil fuels. It is the obvious way to do things if we use renewables. It does mean less globalism, less international banks and logistics. It would mean more equally distributed and attainable wealth. More jobs, more social coherence, because we would better understand our own role in our culture. Being usefull is more important than being liked on facebook.

As advocates of the robo(eco)nomy we don’t think we need full employment to have a wealthy society, what else did we invent all those machines for? They take jobs our of our hands, they run fine on renewables. But it may be hard to come to grips with not having to do anything, and it may be more secure to not allow anyone to monopolize certain types of manufacturing. In any case we should start breaking the glass box of carbon based economics, smell the fresh air and feel the Sun that can provide 5900 times the energy we need, the wind, and geothermal resources we can build a whole new type of economy with, before we let ourselves be herded into a real steel box of non cooperative desperation, the soylent green world.

Notice any resemblence. 

We often see the question "Why invest in solar" or "What makes solar a good investment". You could extrapolate that to "What makes renewables a good investment". It is necessary to write a post about this topic because the short answer is : They are either no investments, or the only type you can really make. The way we think about allocating resources (investing) is so deeply ingrained and accepted that it is hard to pry open the concept and pour some light in, but here goes.

Normal investment works like this : You get a buch of Euro’s or Dollars (your own reserves you invest or a loan), you spend them on products (say a copy machine), you get money for the use of those products (people pay for copies) and that is how you pay/earn bcak your loan/investment. This has been the model for decades, it seems to be how everyone understands investment works. But this is not investment, it is consumption. Even if you get money for allowing people to use your copy machine the only thing going on is consumption. You consume paper, plastic, electronics, electricity, so coal/gas, diesel for the paper logistics, the car of the maintenace guy, the meat he buys for his BBQ, the dirty kerosine burned in the engines of the containership that brought the copier from China to the US. consumption consumption consumption. Nowhere during the lifecycle of your investment is anything produced that replaces or replenishes the ‘reserves’, maybe the paper mill plants new trees, but that’s doubtfull.

Investment used to work differently. It used to mean that you go out and invest in some labour (pay them with savings) to work land to harvest crops that would add to the real food inventory (a type of energy inventory). You would sell the crops on the market for a fair price (causing a tiny amount of deflation, because the amount of money did not change) and had food to eat, and reserves to do this again.

You invest with a profit if you are left with more than you began with after the process is done. If you are left with less, you consumed

Now most investments these days are actually wild jumps into completely waste. Build a road? At the end you are left with a road that will cause more cars to burn more fuels, wear out more tires, cause more accidents, damage more nature. The whole process seems to come at the cost of the money invested, but it doesn’t. It comes at the cost of the resources consumed. If towns along the new road start booming that is because they now draw money away from other places. That money is then spend in the towns, to build stuff, do all kinds of upgrades all consumptive, all wastefull. It seems there can be no good done according to us but this is a fact of our modern economy : It is geared to consume, mainly fossil fuels.

Now this could all be different, but because there is one category of product that really pushes itself into every economic nook and cranny, fossil fuels, it is not. Because our economy is ‘carbon based’ it uses fossil fuels in nearly every step from mining to production to logistics to marketing and sales to consumption. And because of that the economy is extremely wastefull. Why? because if you make a milk bottle once and use it 20 times before it breaks, you burn gas to blow it only onces in a while. While if you use plastic containers to ship the milk you make and sell a container every time, you buy a petrochemical product with your milk, one you throw away. That process generates better cashflows for the carbon industry than using glass bottles. The economy is the maximization of the utilization of fossil fuels.

Now suppose a grocery store buys a solar panel plant that generates lots of electricity. It ‘invests’ in that plant. It then has to pay back the loand over a number of years. When the loan is payed of it is now custom to also destroy the asset! But you don’t you leave the plant running for another 20 years. In that time you are ADDING to the total reserves. You can use the now free electricity to clean glass milkbottles and collect them and bring the back full to the doors of your customers. You electric milk car doesn’t cost anything to run, except a bit of maintenance you pay for with milk credits?

Say you use the electricty to make fertilizer to grow more grass for the cows. More than there was before, at zero cost. Or you use it to pasturize it, and sell it at a lower cost than gas heat pasturized milk. This solar power plant keeps adding to your wealth, and you don’t have to pay for it, your reserves are growing depending on how you utilize the energy. This is real profit, yield, return on investment. The other stuff with fossil fuels is wasting resources.

So should you invest in renewables? The answer is of course YES. You only invest if you invest in renewables or some process with a net positive resource balance. Don’t look at money, look at what usefull raw materials come out of the whole thing. If you see our point you will realize the whole ‘investment community’ is a buch of malarky that doesn’t add any real value to society, the fate of humanity, on the contrary. It is an industry focussed on getting a cut of whatever resources are sacrificed and wasted, and making sure fossil fuels get to every last valuable object or resource on Earth, and consumes it. 

Rather than thinking highly of investment bankers building mega projects we should look at the actual material yield they realize. If it is negative the whole thing is a cost to an already overburdoned planet. We should not allow it. The ‘Circular Economy’ is one type of solution to improve things, but it won’t be improved until the use of fossil fuels has become an option, not a given. For that to happen we need to have more renewable energy sources.

So not only is investing in renewable energy one of the few real investments, it is also the way towards turing our options of allocating our resouces back from being wastefull by definition, to possibly creative, regenerative, accumulative and adding to our reserves and security. 

See more on this on roboeconomy.com

We wrote before about the possibilities of glass as a buidling material. In the US a carefully neutered project of Smart roads already concluded there’s no reason why glass could not be a road surface, it all depends on the thickness you give it. The second project we will be writing about on fridays is about melding sand into glass using sunlight, and shaping that glass into usefull objects, tools and machines. IT is an example of a fossil fuel free method of building, which means it is not restricted by credit, moeny, only by the existence of the necessary tools where the sand is. It is likely Google lauched it’s Glass product just to hide this topic from search results. It is huge.

Why Glass is Important 

The Glass Revolution 

We want to find a test spot to do our experiments. This can be somewhere in Spain, Italy, Protugal, Greece or Turkey, where there’s plenty of sun to work with. There we want to install a small mirror to do experiments with. We are not alone, the british artist  Markus Kayser turned out to be ahead of us when we first seached for examples of melting sand using the sun. But let’s not pretend it’s a creative hack we are dealing with, it is not, it is a revolution staring us in the face. The possibilities of glass are endless.

Glass can be used in many ways:

• Pipes
• Road surfaces
• Walls
• Wheels
• Canals
• Ships (glass fiber) 
• Engines
• Chemical processing
• Wave devises
• Mirrors
• Desalination installations

The sand is there, all we need is a shovel and a magnifying glass, one that can be made of cheap plastic, or formed with glass molds. This is a type of technology that once it is known and doable, it can not be stopped. As we have written before it can be used to green the Sahara, pave roads at next to no cost (only time), all the things we now do with steel materials, even refine solar grade silicon.

Where to start

Glass conducts electricity when heated. There are also ways to mix glass with aluminium and calcium that yield new materials that behave a lot like metals. It is exiting to think what can be done with materials like that, but we need not look far to find applications for glass tubes or pipes, or simple bricks. The steps forward will begin with finding a way to melt the glass, getting the materials to do that, like the 4 m2 fresnel lens used by Markus Keyser.

Ok, I am getting paranoid now. I get suggestions for connections on Linked in that have nothing to do with any 1st, 2nd or 3d grade professional relation, I’m in IT, she owns a beauty parlor. I get offered products in adds that I looked for with Google. I get Twitter account suggestions that are related to my Facebook account. It’s pretty clear the net is closing on me, all knowledge about my life and relations is public and can be used for commercial purposes. The more I share the easier it is to get me to share more, so eventually my life and ambitions will be owned by those that own the online world.

This has notging to do with me allowing cookies to be stored, it has to do with the dogged determination of these databases to store my personal information and try to cash in on whatever buying opportunity they detect. I don’t know who they are, where they work or how they get payed, but apparently it’s enough and apparently there’s no laws against it. 

In Sweden they just passed a law making it illegal to photograph anyone without his/her permission. That sounds draconian, but imagine being followed around while shopping by someone with a notepad "likes crisps","looks at IT magazines","needs new sneakers". Then being approached by a total stranger : "We noticed you need sneakers, would you like me to show you the sneaker megastore, it’s just around the corner!". No! Creep! 

Somewhere in Silicon Valley there’s a meeting going on, topic "Underdifferentiation". "We see a lot of people looking for sneakers, but there are only four popular types, let’s invest in another three and create a more differentiated segment, increasing customer satisfaction and sense of uniqueness". "How do we market?", "We’ll use the sneaker leaders, those we know that want to be exmaples, and we’ll push the new brands with them"."How do you find those people?"."Oh, we know who they are." 

The knowledge is available per adress, per individual person, if they are online. No need to guess, if the will is there it’s likely anything can be sold to anybody though the use of internet based knowledge. 

The total surveillance state is not a problem in itself. If all things where known about me or most people they would still have to work and live their lives each day. But some opportunities all this data gathering creates are just to good to be true for some. Not only the ability to market, but to exclude, to influence, to trap. How many people do  you have to suggest video’s of criminal behaviour to until one of them tries to commit the crime? This person is not eating anough fat (a high carbon margin product), let’s show him some burgers while he surfs the net. Too often away from his keyboard? More exiting and depressing stuff his/her way. Hates Shell? More good stuff on Shell his way. It is the competition necessary to allocate our scarce resources that warps a benign eye in the sky into the eye of Sauron

It is naive to think we can change the level of sharing without permission, or with permission we did not realize we granted. The only option is to cut back on the use of the systems, internet, Linked in Facebook, Google. We need to shrink the level of oversight and enforcement so that we know who knows what, and who will come to get us. Right now the situation is very much the opposite. Stuff is owned by people far away, justifying violent extraction of ‘wealth’ (nearly impossible in our carbon based economy). We don’t even know who’s interests we may endanger, how our behaviour is interpreted. For instance, let’s say the US has a model of terrorist cell interactions, chatter, runs the algorithm on people in Ireland and all alarmbells go off, because Irish men gather in the pub, something that muslims don’t do. Whatever the sytem you set up, it will have false positives. Meanwhile the rest of the law abiding population gets used to being helped in mysterious ways. How long till a taxi pulls up to a restaurant after it analyzed the bill and found that four people drinking four bottles of wine means nobody’s fit to drive? Good, but who benefits?

It would be fine if our world became sentient and benign, but while the energy we use is scarce and based on fossil fuels it can not be that way. The owners of the fossil fuel reserves will have to choose who gets to use it, based on some quality, the most interesting one being profit, because profit leads to money not being spend (after all, you don’t need profit). Money not spend means fossil energy conserved. That is why the free ‘carbon based’ economy tells us to go after profits! But the competition causes a desire to exclude, not care, cut off, repuspose, recycle. 

The free market is now international, hard to pin down. It is better informed than the local governements. It wants us using fossil fuels, not renewables, and wants us to be good consumers in the process. Not all of us though. Maybe not you.  

The solution : We need Hypertransparency

Read Al Gores piece on the NSA eavesdropping on millions of citizen. 

De kogel is door de kerk, de onzekerheid kon niet langer worden uitgemolken. De EC heeft besloten tot een heffing op zonnepanelen uit China, maar niet een zo draconisch als aangekondigd. 11,8% is zo mild dat het de kosten van systemen niet erg zal veranderen. Maar het leed is al geleden, de markt heeft een afwachtende dip gezien, de kranten hebben de hoge tarieven van 68% e.d. gepubliceerd en de WTO en VS ehebben kunnen -fucken- met Europa, een ander woord is niet van toepassing. De heffingen waren geinspireerd door de WTO, die de VS wel maar China niet als vrije handelseconomie ziet. Daardoor werden de prijzen in China genegeerd en werden die in de VS de standaard. Daar zat China duidelijk onder, en dat mocht niet (van de VS natuurlijk). Nu riskeert Europa een handelsoorlog met China die alleen voor de VS positief kan uitpakken, de les : De Europese vrije markt is nog niet vrij. 

Wilt u bestellen? Stuur ons een email via info@greencheck.nl 

Bambooya01

We have chosen 7 projects to work on and publish about. One of them is called Bambooya. It is the plan to grow islands that float on the oceans, and use those islands to grow bamboo, farm fish and do other things that both capture carbon and rebalance our ecosystem. The plan is to do it extraeconomically, meaning without interaction with the economy we know, soley on the power of organic growth. Nutrients are found in the deep ocean. Of course wind and solar can be used, as well as other high tech stuff.

The continent of Bambooya

There are several examples of floating islands that support growth of crops on top, so there is no reason to believe it is impossible. Seastrating has been promoted, as well as floating habitats, and there is a wide community and basis of knowledge in that field. The proof of the pudding is in the eating however, we shoud do it and see how well it serves the ends.

A bit more bamboo and you can grow bamboo on it..

Bamboo is used in many ways, it is strong, flexible, grows fast and durable. Scaffolds, houses, bikes, furniture, clothes, can all be made of bamboo, and provide you have enough glue a lot of other stuff like dishes, lamps, plates. Bamboo can be piping for water it is enormously versatile. It is often the first thing that will grow somewhere so cultivation is not a big problem either.As such it is likely that there will be big interest in farming bamboo on a massive scale without the desire to capture carbon. The big problem however is that when one grows bamboo commercially one runs into the nature of the money with which we trade : it is carboncredit, so if you don’t use fossil fuels for your bamboo growing process, you won’t get credit to start. If you do sell bamboo into the market that triggers a response in banks that will try to own you by putting you into debt. As there are other more fossil fuel intensive options for the services bamboo has to offer the next step will be to limit or minimize the use of bamboo f.i. by writing a negative analyses of it’s qualities compared to steel or concrete or cotton. So a bambooya project based on commercial aims is destined to fail.

So we can’t write a fat business plan about millions being made growing bamboo. We do have a mascot though, the Panda! These lazy stupid animals only eat bamboo..You can say that if we look at the WWF potential this is a crazy good idea. How many fish species can benefit if we make bamboo seeweed farming islands? How many panda’s can live on the islands. What other bird species can be given sancturary on the islands. Imagine the new floating green fields mad of bamboo. WWF did lauche a renewable energy campaign today.

To do this project right we should have our own experimentation base, somewhere on a sunny coast, for instance in Spain or Italy. Then it would be possible to grow and build the first rafts that will be used to grow the first generations of bamboo on the water. Thailand is probably an even better location, or even better, the Phillipines.

if you have suggestions or ideas to help us along, please email us at info@greencheck.nl 

Stakeholders:

Fisheries

Textile industry

Agricultural industry

Building sector

Fuel sector

Pharaceutical industry 

Beauty care product industry