Global Knowledge Hub for Shifting away from Intensive Farming

The world needs to shift away from intensive agriculture. Its been said as early as the 1980’s by people in the agroindustry that the model was not sustainable. They meant that they where making money by increasing the economic activity and cashflow in farming, but knew this would not last for the simple reason that fossil fuels would run out. Today for every intensively farmed calorie 10 fossil fuels calories are burned.

We wrote about this years ago, and in the mean time several tests shown that production of non-intensively farmed land is about equal to the intensively framed kind, except of course you need to rotate. The crops have become more productive through genetic modification for instance. and no matter how much you spray or fertilize, the weather determines a large part of how crops fare.

Reducing the fossil input in farming to near zero is possible with electric equipment, logistics, fertilizer production (using Wind also written about in this blog). Even pest control can be done by small robots, nutrient application can be highly efficient through the use of satelite or drone data analysis. There was never a better time for farms to go CO2 negative like now.

The biggest problem is the soil. The use of artificial inputs has depleted it, the carbon content is near zero, it has no fungal life to capture nitrogen. And it takes about 5 years to bring that back. The good news is that one can put fungi into the soil (there’s an example from Australia). This shift also makes sense from a water conservation point of view, good soil doesn’t dry out as easily as a lot of water is held as reserve by living organisms.

Now as we wrote earlier, if there was a catastrophic reason for a cut in fossil fuel availability the West would suddenly have a food production problem : The soils would not produce on their own! The “Post fossil food gap” would last 5 years in which the unlucky population would be decimated. Sadly this scenario is now more likely than ever, either because of rising global tensions and because a growing part of the public wants to cut emissions and be more secure.

A global expertise center needs to be created to guid countries that are willing out of their fossil fuel dependence in agriculture, and establish renewable sources to replace for instance the gas inputs into fertilizer production. Other base nutrients have to be recycled and collected using renewables as well. This is a huge undertaking but it can not be started early enough. The positive side is that is is relatively cheap to do it.

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13165-018-0225-y

http://www.fao.org/3/ca4048en/ca4048en.pdf

http://www.ipes-food.org/_img/upload/files/CS2_web.pdf

http://www.arc2020.eu/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/151228-pesticides-download-rev3-less-compressed.pdfhttp://www.arc2020.eu/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/151228-pesticides-download-rev3-less-compressed.pdf

Deep Ocean Fertilization Revisited

For years oceanic biologists have studied the potential of the oceans to absorb more CO2 and convert it into carbon through its normal biological life. It turns out that iron plays an important role in the metabolism of pythoplankton limiting it to a large extend. It is found that adding even a small amount of iron can increase life in some parts of the ocean significantly.

Apart from this finding its also found that increasing sulfur and nitrogen can increase ocean life.

iron fertilization

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_fertilization

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fmicb.2018.03190/full

https://aslopubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.4319/lo.2002.47.4.0997

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/002209817990011X?via%3Dihub

https://phys.org/news/2019-06-mystery-atmospheric-carbon-dioxide-ice.html

https://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/full/10.1175/2009JTECHO679.1

http://www.planktos.com/

https://www.bco-dmo.org/project/2051

http://www.ocean-based.com

Patents (should be irrelevant but ok)

https://patents.google.com/patent/US4597360?oq=ocean+upwelling

https://patents.google.com/patent/US20110067641A1

Climatecolonialism

Humanity is slowely becoming aware to a major threat to its existence. But every individual is different and if you group them there’s a large part that can’t do nothing, a part that can but doesn’t want to do anything, a part that can and does and all the forms inbetween. Why? Because there is a route to herd people into the fossil fuel economy, which requires consumerism, but also because some parts of the world are soo poor nobody there that makes it into some money is going to reign themselves in because of something that may only have consequences in about 50 years time. Even though that timeframe no longer holds many are still unwilling to do anything they are not forced to do if it doesn’t make them more rich.

Oil rich countries are not interested in climate action by selling less oil. Resource rich countries like Indonesia are not interested in not selling land for palm oil, or not selling coal reserves. Australia is a good example of a continent that is run by coal lakeys at tremendous cost to its own citizen. The people that do know what’s going to happen and that do care about it have more or less been waiting, trying to sway a right (pro fossil) government. In de US, UK, Holland, Italy, we still have the economistic approach that touts growth over survival, that looks at fossilfuel cashflow, the GDP as an indicator of succes, not even mean productivity per sqaure km of the land which is after all what has to keep the citizen alive. Fossil fuels completely distorted the picture.

The fact is the world, all of us will have to see enormous projects to recapture CO2, and some organization will have to execute those projects. And within that organization factual empirical truth extended by high quality models need to guild the allocation of resources towards those projects. That is serious stuff. That is something that needs to be monitored by the sharpest intelligent people in order to work. It is something that needs to go on for a long time (hence our proposal for millenium projects run by automated systems).

But what can we (those that care about the future) do in a shorter timeframe. We think that it makes sense to cut of oil from anyone who doesn’t use it for anything else than to “grow its economy”. That’s tough but instead we can supply them with renewable technology. Its much harder to revert to a rural existence than to never leave it. This will happen if the price of oil rises, if trade from those countries is reduced and if the World bank doesn’t fight “poverty” there. This is harsh but it makes sense. Don’t help countries to get addicted to oil, coal or gas, help them to build renewables, who’s capacity is much larger and which they can own themselves.

If a country is fossil fuel rich and if the companies involved in getting oil out of the ground are still operating freely what can you do? Oil corrupts, it does so everywhere. If you have oil you can buy anyone because our world is soo addicted. Now that Jeff Bezos decided to order more than 100.000 electric vans, diesel sales to Amazon will slow down. Use of electricity in other places also reduces demand for fuel. But an unenlightened country like Indonesia will simply sell its gasoline to its citizen, and export it and mine its coal and burn its rainforests, while moving its capital to Borneo because 1. Jakarta will drown, 2. That’s a big Dubai style building project. Asia has taken the lead over its own future, we don’t realize it yet.

Some countries will have to have its development halted by force. That is if there is enough countries that can project force that can unite to do it. Here the energy imbalance becomes a problem. Traditionally countries that have the most energy resources win wars. Even Spain lost the 80 year war because it ran out of gold, the unit of payment for physical labour (energy) in the 1500s. Germany lost the battle for Africa because it ran out of fuel, It lost the war with Russia because it could not reach oil wells. England projected great maritime force because it used Iranian oil. How do you fight a war with a country that has its own oil?

It seems Iran found a way.. it destroyed a refining facility in Saudi Arabia halving its output. Saudi Arabia is already in financial distress, its Prince (Mohammed bin Salman or MBS) recently fired the energy minister because revenue from oil sales where problemantic. Now the output is halved which is surely won’t help. Saudi Arabia may not be able to fight a war with Iran, even if the US wants to help, because with current weapons many installations are just too vulnerable. Also you don’t really want to knock out the fuel supply before we have sufficient alternatives. Its not fair to the people of Suadi Arabia as well, who have after all shared their oil wealth willingly or unwillingly for decades.

But what can one do? Letting Saudi Arabia persue its desire to meet the demands of its bankers is not the wisest way forward. The Saudi People, used to airco’s big SUVs and all kinds of other perks can easily bear much less luxury, if that was even needed. Who moves the mind MBS into a direction where he feels strong because the future of Saudi and the world is more secure, instead of feeling strong because he did the easiest thing and required those working for him to perform towards a financial goal, the capturing and supporting oil price? It doesn’t help that these princes are highly competitive and pretty brutal.

It would make sense that the group of climate aware and responsive governments combined forces to direct governments towards climate aware policies. The cost effectiveness and ease to do that may far out weigh that of actual carbonsequestration measures (even if those are still needed). What this means is that there should be a new type of colonialism, where foreign forces will tell you what to do with your country or economy. The goal only not being to extract your resources, but to drive your carbon footprint into negative numbers. Also land may be usefull for carbon sequestration projects, and as these projects will be outside the economy (extraeconomical) selling the land for a projected value after use (as is the habit with building plots) makes no sense. The land needs to be made available. This is nothing new, we have seen countries in Africa give up land for foreign industry to operate without taxation or benefit of the population (probably because some officials received serious cash). This climatecolonialism will likely happen, at least we hope. Someone always needs to want to restore the climate and its not sure who will want it if things get bad. In any case the group that needs to start thinking about this is now at the UN Climate Summit in New York.

The Petrification of China

China is allowing the growth of its surveillance and sensorship system. It spans every communcation channel normal chinese people have. If you irk those managing the system you are visited, your bank account can be blocked and your freedom to move can be restricted because you can not board trains or airplanes. Not only chinese citizen are victimized by this system, also foreigners living in china. In the video below a chinese blogger explains.

Now the reasons to do this are clear, its to maintain stability of China which as a big country with many ethnic groups is fragile. US analysis stated that China ran a risk of falling apart if growth slowed down too much. But there is a risk in trying to be too stabile or uniform, just like there is a risk in trying to stand without moving.

The system in China now includes street surveillance, whatsapp monitoring for keywords, and no doubt use of AI in profiling people and analyzing conversations and chatter. This is done by many different individuals and groups who each have relatively well defined tasks to complete, for instance group one installs cameras, group two monitors the video feed or runs the AI to recognize and track people, group three recieves reports in each city or region. Group four dispatches police to check on a blogger or someone conversing with someone else. These groups form an organization that performs the task. It is easy to imagine a playbook of how to set up a society with such surveillance, and of course this is nothing new in the world.

But as you see in the video above in China people are not allowed to use the names or discuss certain topics related to government. People stop talking about certain things and try futile ways to avoid being caught by the algorithms. It causes a chilling effect on public discourse, and this will continue and increase as groups that are tasked with detecting these thoughts do their simple job. It is easy to see that after a while people will only talk about their work, food, family as if there is no government. It is also easy to see that the absence of thought about society and where it leads cause it to petrify and freeze and halt its adaption to reality.

The more data is gathered on indivuduals, the stiffer a society will be, behaviour will be more coerced, less voluntary less appropriate.

This petrification effect will be even stronger if the groups that run the system are themselves subject to the same scrutiny. If the worker installing the camera or the police officer arresting the blogger can not express any moral judgement or opinion about the proces the proces becomes frozen in time. The question then becomes : Who changes it. Who shows compassion if a situation changes, It is completely clear from history that if a leader or anyone who CAN change things does not suffer to much from whatever is wrong, change won’t come.

As was shown in the soviet system all kinds of information that people have ties into their human desires. It leads to abuse. The disabling of moral judgement attracts individuals with weak moral judgement, who can do the job with ease and enthousiasm, and so any repressive surveillance system will harden and become more vigilant to justify its existence. Self monitoring will only increase this. The fact that some profit from selling surveillance material or developing more sophisticated AI also works to consolidate its reach.

China is thus moving towards being a rigid, harsh, incorrigable monolith that stifles its intellectual development and is inert to challenges to its dominating elite. That elite itself may find itself forced to either stay the course even if it hurts billions or lose its position. It turns itself into a pressure cooker just like the Soviet Union or North Korea. It becomes easier and easier to stoke unrest especially when people grow hungry or are stuck in some place.


Chinese rural life isn’t all suffering

The answer to this trend will probably fall on deaf ears. But it is simple : Realign the population with the carrying capacity of the land, return people to rural areas to do what they need to grow what they eat. Disband large cities and the illusion of economic modernity. It is much easier to manage dispersed groups who basically feed themselves than bunched up concrete jungles where repressed groups try to find a way out. This doesn’t mean that any of the modern conveniences need to be missed or people have to return to a primitive state. It just means the abandonement of cities. Two tools necessary are default land ownership and default income.

The big question is : Will anyone in China be allowed to come up with and discuss this thought.

India is going down the same path

 

 

Categories
roboeconomy

The RoboEconomy and ExtraEconomy Part 1

People will wonder what to do now, with the prospect painted by the IPCC. The predictions are dire, we all know it and actual reality seems to move quicker than most models predict. What to do if you are in a normal job with a wife and kids and a mortgage..

Humans are not made to change things when everything seems fine. Everything seems fine, except a couple of hot days, maybe a storm and a forest fire if you are unlucky. Its very hard to throw everything overboard and its not even clear if that would make any sense. You may have worked years to achieve your current position, or your current level of excellence and expertise, and now it seems there is a risk that needs to be neutralized, and it requires big changes.

Two new concepts

Before we get into how things will go down lets talk about the title of this piece. The RoboEconomy and the ExtraEconomy first. The two terms where made up to signify two systems in the world dealing with climate change. One is as system a lot like the one we call our economy today, the other is one which is explicity out of reach of that system. The RoboEconomy is simply an economy that uses robots and renewables instead of fossil fuels while maximizing jobs.  The extraeconomy consists of climate mitigation projects that are generating resources that are NOT to be consumed in processes that are NOT to be interrupted. Ever in some cases.

The question is how to move from our current economy to the RoboEconomy, how to start the projects of the ExtraEconomy (So called Millenium projects) while still having a reasonable life, or one that is pleasant and exists at least. How fast can that be done is also an imporant question. Also what needs to be done. The scale of the problem is underestimated. It can become effectively unsolvable in the next thousand years.

Humans may find a way, but how many and what about the rest of life?

To be sure, the world still looks really nice in most places, some are seeing forest fires, some are seeing melting of snow and ice, things are changing, but you can live. And if you take human ingenuity into account, and assume we will keep access to technology on the current scale (which is unlikely) then we will find ways to adapt, even in the absolute worst case scenario of a hot house earth with H2S in our atmosphere. Then we will likely also live on the Moon and Mars and Space in an orbit around Earth.

The above is technological optimism, It applies correctly to the survival of a small part of the current population in the extreme scenarios. It is nothing to be elated about, like the techno optimism preachers hope for in their following. The singularity as a concept but also a tool for mass hynosis. They want you to buy the books that tell you humans invented so much so we will surely invent a solution to climate change. Maybe. But in reality our expectations should be much more modest, because those preachers don’t create or imagine technology, they just talk about it. It is hard to make technology, it is hard to deploy it. So the baseline for succes is survival of people, fixing climate change is going to be a millenial challenge.

What we experience influences our behaviour

Back to the lives of everyday people, the Roboeconomy and Extraeconomy. Perhaps the most important aspect of our economy is its media. The media constitute a datastream that shapes and controls our minds. Social media is a part of that. It occupies part of our mental capacity and it provides examples of behaviour that we subconsciously immitate to understand, so which can become part of our behaviour quite easily. They create an illusion of stability, like an environment, but an artificial one where the relative amount of attention ideas and events get does not mirror any practical need for it. To the media, including the social media, your engagement with it is being maximized. Through that engagement your behaviour can be influenced, and this is an ability that has value in the economy. Time spend with media is time spend with little return, and it is likely to lead to more time wasted. Wasting consumer time is on average good for the economy. It makes us more needy.

Money has become our significant other

The second most important aspect of our economy is money. The primary goal of the economy is to make us fully dependent on money. Its goal is to “install” money as our primary driver. To achieve this it needs to turn anything we pay attention to into a product or service. The drive to do this comes from four sources :

  1. Someone wants to exchange a product or service with you, but there is no immediate need for it, so money is used to bridge the time difference
  2. Someone wants to make money of selling you something you already have or considered of little value.
  3. Someone handling the money (a bank) wants to handle more money.
  4. Someone selling primary resources like fossil fuels wants to sell more fossil fuels.

We need to clearly separate these motivations, because some benefit all and others only a few.

Money is an organizational tool

Motivation nr. 1 is the real reason we have money, to organize our activities over time. Even gold as it was used in ancient times functioned to motivate a person to do something at the chosen time, and the amount was of course related to what that person knew another person would do for the same amount. A person would not do more or less than he expected someone else to do unless other circumstances compelled him/her to. Motivation nr. 1 is so true that if you have a group of people now cooperating in some way you can easily introduce a currency to do the above. This offers everyone freedom and flexibility, but also introduces the risk of inequality.

Money can be used to achieve egotistic outcomes

Of course it is clear that money in the sense above can control people. And if we have control over things it is more likely we achieve outcomes we desire, so money becomes a thing of value to hold irrespective of its exchange value. This introduces egotism in the social system, something that would be much harder without money, there egotism can only be realized through action by the egotistic person, which requires effort and is thus an exchange within the person him/herself. Gaining money to gain power and control is synonymous with profit seeking. In a normal society with money in circulation profit could never be excessive. But as money is a token that is introduced, and the amount of money is arbitrarily controled by those that coin it, the amount of profit and the meaning of profit can become hard to define.

Moneylenders and creators have taken extraordinary control

Motivation nr. 3 combines the control motive with the extaordinary privilige to create money. This is what banks can do today. They not only handle our money, they create it. Their motivation is entirely based on control and profit seeking. They do not form a basic part of a functioning society of equals, they have placed themselves above it, and because they usually behave very decently, most of us are unwilling to accept there’s anything wrong with that. Of course normal desire for safety and security drives banks to try to gain more control. Banks control our money supply and can simply decide to cut it or extend it or make it more expensive or less expensive. Because of that they can grab control of assets, drive up prices, create false competition and distort markets. To say however that profit seeking banks are something we should or could eliminate today would be wrong, and this has to do with motivation nr. 4

Our money is fossil fuel credit

Not all producers of primary resources are equal. Oil, coal and gas are both raw materials for plastics and other chemicals but also the source of energy we use to manipulate, facilityat and create our products and services. What’s more some countries depend heavily on fossil fuel sales. Saudi Arabia has a barrel price for crude oil in mind that maximizes sales and their revenue. This implies that there is a constant pressure to sell oil, to use it in as much situations as possible. If we could suddenly fly electric oil companies and oil countries would have to find a new use for their oil or go broke! Banks have a strong interest in this process, because they handle the money that is used to buy and sell oil. Their ability to create money amounts to taking oil from the producers at will, and thus in spite of what they say there needs to be an understanding between oil producers and banks, and this is having serious consequences in the fight against climate change. Money in this role is “carboncredit” and its cashflow is the oxygen for banks.

Fossil fuel credit is special

Fossil fuel credit as described above does not obey normal rules of exchange. It is easy to see that if Saudi Arabia produced all the oil the world had, it would profit so much from selling it it could basically buy a large portion of whatever is produced with their oil This is clearly not the case. This is in part a result of banking tricks, books have been written about how Wallstreet disappeard much of the Saudi wealth. But more fundamentally fossil fuel does not fit in an economy that exchanges human productivity and results of human skills. We burn oil. Oil is like a crop that grows without a need to tend it (much). But unlike real crops no person can make oil. On the other hand for millenia nobody had any use for oil. The egyptians had tar and oil and used it to waterproof boats and burn in lamps, but other than that they didn’t care about it.

It took a century of increasing our use of fossil fuels to reach the point where we are now. It was a self amplifying process and it would be foolish to deny that the lives of people improved. But today the primary method of this “economic expansion”, namely fossil fuel credit, means the tool we use to organize our activities is tied in for 100% with an energy source we can no longer afford to use. Our money and the way we create it is fundamentally expecting the availability of fossil fuels in the market. The easiest way to see this is if for instance a bank finances some new waterworld amusementpark. The money will go towards buying resources. But how come they are available? Because the money buys the fuels to create the cement, haul the concrete. That’s a lot of energy needed to do all that. Would that energy be available if we only used solar and wind (and some battery storage) ? Nope. The energy production capacity would have to front run any development and as a consequence any ability of a bank giving credit. Oil, gas and coal are stored energy, and this is what makes it possible for our bank to say “Here is 1 million go ahead and buy and use that oil”. With renewables they could only do that if they owned stored energy, or the energy source. And with renewables this would not be an exclusive privilege of banks! Our money is fundamentally pro fossil fuels.

To be continued..

A Sunlight Charging Battery Design

For a couple of years the author of this piece wondered why there where no liquids that could store solar energy into some usefull form. Of course there is water and oil as a heat transfer liquid, but we never read about a liquid that for instance would catch photons and store the energy to release it as heat through the use of a cathalyst. There are chemical reactions you can promote with heat, that are reversible, for instance combining H2 and N2 generates heat, so you can make a closed system where N2 and H2 store the energy and sunlight splits NH3 into these two molecules.

One shape of the question would be an battery in which the electrolyte can be charged with sunlight. This can be so that at one pole the light causes a reaction by which a molecule accepts an electron, and then the molecule needs to go to the other pole to deposit it. Or there is a molecule that is broken into pieces by sunlight but will rejoin if it gets an electron or something. If the above doesn’t make sense its because we really don’t know much about chemistry..

My explanatory drawing

We just can’t believe however that its impossible. To find out more we used fiverr, which is a website where you can find all kinds of experts willing to do work or answer questions. A chemist was not difficult to find. We found Fati, in Multan, Pakistan. With her still limited experience she pointed out that there is a proces called Halothanation, which is replacing a Hydrogen atom by a Cloride atom in molecules under the influence of heat or light. Heat sounds great, if a battery could charge from heat that would be a major thing. Then there is a process called Hetrolytic cleavage. This is when a molecule splits in a way that leaves one or both parts with a charge, positive or negative.

Heterolytic cleavage

There are a number of substances which can be in liquid form that have these two processes, one of them is good old Chloroform. Chloroform is CHCL3, basically a methane molecule with three Hydrogen replaced by Chloride. According to Fati if you expose Chloroform to sunlight is Cl- will go into solution and start traveling around, at least, looking for a positively charged place. The left over Methane will be attracted to electrons. In order to keep the Cl- in solution (it can bind with itself and form Cl2 a toxic gas) we need to add a little bit of NaOh. Worst case salt is fromed which stays in solution.

 The two electrodes need to be of Copper and Zink, now there may be a catch here, because it may be that the battery eats away at the Copper and Zink, or Copper eats away at the Zink, we can’t say for sure. But the interesting property of this battery should be that it gains charge as the sunlight hits it. The sunlight will try to marry Cl2 to the Methane, but also break it apart.

He haven’t constructed the battery yet, and we are very curious what you think about this, or if you know any other molecules or materials that could make up a solar battery. This type of battery could take the form of a solar collector panel, be mounted somewhere and charge itself during the day. No need to have as PV panel and separate batteries! Of course the voltage of such systems is usually low, say 0,5 volt so you would need a number connected in series, as is the case in almost all batteries. The toxicity of chloroform is said to be modest, its a fire hazard as well. Fati tells us it will be ok.

Solar thermal panels

According to Fati most photosensitive chemicals are pretty toxic, but we just don’t know. Maybe there is an entirely other method that can cause solar energy to be stored in a liquid. Let us know if you have any ideas! info@greencheck.nl

The War between AI and the Blockchain

Deepfakes are developing fast, and although faking video and audio is not new, experts agree that we can’t win this fight. Machines will be able to create digital media that can not be recognized as such by a normal human consumer. We have written about this threat because it spells disaster. Chaos is what we expect to be the result in any media/public relation, motivated by malignant attitudes, desire to have fun or the desire to exploit.

Fake news is already a problem, leading to lynchings in some countries, based only on accusations. Inter tribal tensions, racism, every kind of tension can be stirred up by faking news and faking video. Imagine a video of Justin Trudeax kicking a cat as he walks home, low quality surveillance cam footage, but all fake! It is AI, learning to imagine using the same building blocks as us, resulting in the ability to rebuild imagined scenarios. Now it’s only faces that are matched with the originals, but it will be entire persons. The tech to remove items from a video stream, like a rock from an ocean shore already exist.

How to deal with this?

Surprisingly there is a technology that can help us, namely blockchain. Blockchain is the name for consecutive blocks of data that are encrypted as a chain, meaning an encrypted fingerprint (so called hash) of the first block is part of the second. The important quality of a blockchain is that its blocks of data have a specific order and content, and you can not change any of the data in the chain without this resulting in an invalid chain. Blockchain gives direction to data like a diode or a water lock can.

The peculiar ability of blockchain to create a temporal direction in a data chain stems from the way it calculates the fingerprint of the last block, it is a lossy way. So to explain it super simple, if you have stored the phrase “Hi there!” the fingerprint can be “ABC”. This however would also be the fingerprint of “SAO sa@ f”, or several thousand other meaningless phrases. Now we can run the fingerprint algorithm, insert “Hi there!” and confirm the output is “ABC”, but we can not take “ABC” and in any practical way return the input “Hi there!”. Its a one way process.

How does this help? Well if we make a new phrase and we say “ABC, Now this is new data”, so we put the fingerprint in the new phrase, then if we fingerprint that phrase the output may be “XYZ”. The ABC is part of the reason the output is XYZ, but like above we can never find ABC if we start off with XYZ. However if anyone has stored the data (and this is the case with blockchains) it is easy to verify that XYZ is the correct next fingerprint.

Once the chain has completed a number of steps as it stores data it becomes impossible to alter this data because it is stored in many peers and it has this internal fingerprint directional integrity. In short if you store data in a blockchain you can be sure that is remains unaltered. The older it is the more secure the data becomes.

The only way to deal with deepfakes and fake information is to add its fingerprint to a blockchain, as it is created or a ‘official version’ is released. Any digital audio or video clip can be translated in a code, a hash as the fingerprint is also called. You can see an example of how this works on our site Ethereumcertify.com , Just type in some text in the textarea and submit. The long code that appears is the fingerprint. If you change the text it changes, if you enter the same text it is exactly the same.

Hi there!  -> 396199333edbf40ad43e62a1c1397793

Now if we add this fingerprint or hash to a blockchain transaction, it becomes data stored in the blockchain. We can use the Ethereum blockchain for that, but any other active blockchain will do as well. Now if you take a video and you store it in this way, any viewer can verify if the content is unaltered and unfaked by the following steps :

  1. Create a fingerprint
  2. Check the blockchain to see if it is the same as the one introduced by the author

Today encryption is already used to secure data, this is the practice of scrambling a message or data so it becomes unreadble, and unscrambling it at the recieving end. This also prevents tampering with data. The weak point is that both sender and reciever must be in contact with a central encryption authority that will manage and validate the encryption keys. This encryption authority (or Certification Authority as it is called) has to be reachable, online and requests to it have to be secure and untampered with. A reliable system of encryption can be created (which does not mean that eavesdropping is impossible in other ways). But what if you find content in the wild?

Click to visit Ethereumcertify.com

A blockchain based system is the most practical solution to deepfakes and doctored content. The author of the content stores the fingerprint in the blockchain, the consumer can run the same process before consuming the content. There is no way to create a matching fingerprint of content when its altered. You can already use Ethereumcertify.com to secure your content. We will be adding a service for video fingerprinting (hashing) soon. If you want to invest let us know send us an email at info@greencheck.nl

Digital Stalking is On The Rise

We don’t like to be watched, we don’t like it if someone stands outside one of our windows staring at what we do, especially not the bedroom, that would be absolutly nuts. Yet this is basically what our lives are like since we do so much online.

Our phone apps and OS tracks our movements, our phone provider analyses our calls, our message app leaks messages before it encrypts them, all our purchases are tracked. Soon, as our bank account transactions will be shared (in the EU) if you buy something in a bricks and mortar store you will be reminded of other things you may buy online and in phone apps.

This is all allowed and hidden under a cloak of legalise. You don’t realize you agree to it. Recently a hacker discovered that there’s an invisible extra browser window that is being used to track your behaviour and send it to Google..Amazon workers turn out to share things people say to the voice command service Alexa..

Now imagine all this was done by a man, and the victim was a woman. Then it would be considered stalking. What business has that man knowing where she is! What business has that man to know what she bought! Yet the tracking is all about taking money from a person who was not planning on spending it! A stalker is persistent and often turns into a murderer. Google and the others just profile your every move.

Recently Google talked about how it was possible to sway extreme opinions by offering people Youtube results that gave a more nuanced view. The experimented with youtube users to show them video results that would counter their hardline views. The subjects where not informed.

What would you say if someone obstructed your friends from seeing you (in ways they don’t notice, for instance by temporarily deleting the appointment from their agenda), while also directing someone else to you. Social engineering is a real thing.

Lets call this datastalking, because cyberstalking sounds too futuristic and to much like sexual stalking. It has become so big that for many even their DNA is known and their medical history. Algorithms are used to target products, but because Google knows so much it could not only show a product, but also teach you why you should like the product. It can even tweak your search results to reflect which way they want you to look.

Outside the realtively understandable motivations of Google we have other entities datastalking you for reasons much more worrisome. Cambridge Analytica used large user datasets (from Facebook, that keeps track of 27.000 datapoints for each user) to find niche opinions, which if someone would express them, would resonate so strongly that they would vote for whoever resonated them.

Datastalking causes stiffness, meaning behaviour will become more uniform and compulsive, as the individual is ‘seduced’ into behaviours. This is without any guarantee that the resulting behaviour is appropriate

Donald Trump mentioned all kinds of beliefs in his campaign, beliefs he never even heard of and certainly didn’t care about, because datastalking showed them to be ways to make fringe voters identify with him. This is as if someone takes your diary, finds out where you went to school and then claims to be from the same school in order to get into your life.

We are now used and many are addicted to online social interaction. We are required to be social and compliant, which means we will immitate behaviour if it is demonstrated by the right souce (and we are capable), we like to conform. You can expect anyone who is non-conformist to be eroded by algorithms to become conformist. Datastalking is a given and a new generation grows up thinking nothing of it.

The fundamental question is whethere we humans should be discriminating minds, ones that make choices that have social impact, for instance we make laws to keep water clean by voting for someone who will protect our drinking water. Or maybe we should just be recepticles of whatever companies come up with. Bodywarmers, bell bottoms, water bottles, thinking the Earth is flat. Clearly we have evolved to be independent and reslilient minds, and companies that produce things in large quantities want us to be as identical in our taste for their products as possible.

The fundamental question is whether you are able to choose between living in a real world or one that slowely learns about you, adapts and tries to influence you. Leeching your money, as you become a Christmass tree full of nonsense products and your mind starts singing the tune of the most idiotic ideologies. It all starts with privacy, and without ending datastalking you will never ever have it again.

 

The Hard Task Called Climate Action

We need climate action. The action needs to be large scale, we wrote about it in the Millenium Projects post. Short term action is the best. There are many ideas and we would like to review those, but we can also present some here that we are sure have not been presented elsewhere (will google to make sure ;-))..

Because of the loss of ice on our poles the dark seawater there now absorbs the sunlight. Seawater has a very low albedo, meaning most of the light that enters it dumps its energy, warming up the water. So instead of a 70%-80% Albedo of ice which makes it cool the region now warms up, and the warm water circulates around the oceans warmer than before. This causes more warm weather elsewhere as well as a slowing down of this process. It can in due course also warm the ice on the seafloor (the clathrate ice Shell attempeted to mine but failed). This speeds up methane release. It can also just slow down the so called conveyor belt that oxygenizes the deep ocean.

Making Ice

The solution so to cool the poles back down, and bring back ice. We think one of the options is to make more ice by sparying ocean water into the arctic winds. The wind is cold, but only where it touches the water or when it snows does it transfer that cold to the ocean or the ice. A simple cheap means of doing that would be to install floating hydraulic wind turbines that simply pump ocean water to their blade tips. This is not a new idea, its actually quite old and we wrote about it more than 10 years ago, but then it was meant to bring water into the atmosphere to be transported into the desert [link to follow].

A prototype is easy to build, further more you can calculate the cooling effect on ocean water sprayed into the wind above the ocean, and calculate how much of it would turn into snow and cover the water with ice. Even a thin layer is enough to ward off the sun. A demo could be readied this winter at the cost of about 20.000 ex towing to a location. Of course Russia is already towing a nuclear power plant to the Arctic as if they could run it safely. Because of percieved economic benefits of using the Northern Passage it may actually be the case that Russia does not want to see ice return, or only in specific places.

Such turbines can also be used to release energy from warming oceans in order to reduce the risks of typhoons and hurricanes. They can also be used to moisturize the air as it blows into the desert, the salt falls out of the air over a couple of miles so you end up with fresh water clouds, moist air or even rain..

Shading the Poles

Another idea, quite a lot more megalomanic but ultimately feasible, would be to shade the poles. The polar regions constitute only a small portion of the total surface aread receiving sunlight. The exact square milage we haven’t calculated but its less than the 12000 km at the equator, about 2000 or 3000 km. A solar shade in space may be able to cover this region and shade it all year round. SpaceX starships could be used to put the necessary systems in orbit around the Sun at one of the Lagrange points (L1) so the shade remains in place. This may help prevent disastrous plans like dumping SO2 into the atmosphere, which would not only reduce biological carbon capture but also be enormously polluting.

Hardness of Reality

SpaceX and Elon Musk are really pushing the manufacturing envelope at the moment. This is one of the realities we need to face  : We need to actually get stuff done. We can build desalination plants on the edge of the desert and pump cool water inland and irrigate massive plantations but no matter what the idea is the most important question remains : What do we do right now to get there as fast as possible. And then we are talking pure climate action projects, nothing economica! The only way for intitiatives to gather speed now is as a government project, as a private investment or one with economic benefits. The impact of any project may be very low so this also discourages people from undertaking them. The best projects seem to be those that secure life for at least those involved. The fact that human interests is almost always a necessary factor in human activity suggests we should leave some of these projects to automatic systems (see this piece).

Algae and Ocean Fertilization

Algae have been studied because of their ability to evolve O2 from CO2 and sunlight at an incredible rate. Pond based systems have been proposed and build but turned out to be too unwieldy, unless they could be fertilized with actual ocean water as happend in several fish farms around the world (in Hawaii and Spain for instance).

Deep ocean water is cool and full of nutrients, it is used to fertilize several fish farms around the globe

As we described earlier a study was made on the effect of a network of (deep) ocean fertilized spots to capture carbon from the atmosphere and turn it into biomass. The effect was expected to be positive for two reasons : CO2 capture and cooling of the atmosphere. The idea was discouraged because “If you would stop you would have warmed the ocean” [link to follow]. The question is why would you stop? The big problem is that the atmosphere is so high and the biosphere, interaction zone of the ocean is so tiny. You would not capture much CO2. But it would generate oxygen and sequester CO2 and increase fish biomass.

To do the above one would need to build floating wave activated pumps for ocean water that would take nutrient rich water from 200 meters and pump it to the photosphere, where ocean organisms could use it to photosynthesize CO2 into oils and even carbon pellets.

The bove image comes from a study that is really not pushing this idea, and sees a lot of obstacles to its succes. It says “Only a small fraction of the carbon captured in the plankton blooms makes it to the bottom of the ocean” BUT the rest is stored in living organisms that would otherwise not be there! So what is wrong wit storing CO2 in living biomass (the only thing maybe is that oxygen is also stored). Modelling of this idea should be done but another way to look at it is : If a zone of the ocean is dead then any life you evoke there will be a plus and store CO2 (lets not forget hydrogen from burning hydrocarbons).

Seaweed sinks deep, taking carbon with it

Of course again wind turbines could be used to increase the CO2 content of parts of the ocean although floating crash barriers might do the same. The question becomes : How to start building these pumps and bringing them to locations where they can do good. What to make them of, how to maintain them, how to monitor their effect.

“Around 70 percent of this seaweed, and therefore carbon, will sink to ocean depths below 1,000 meters, meaning that this captured carbon is unlikely to return to the atmosphere. “

Fertilization ideas have never been thoroughly tested. Some test sites have been disturbed. One could solve iron deficiency  by launching floating iron buoys where iron could help, they could be tracked by satelite or connectivity to satelite internet (SpaceX and Amazon are working on that). They could be realtively small as to not cause damage. Strangely floating buoys are used by fisherment ot create concentrations of fish (as fish like to stick together and hide from birds and underwater predators under these). These buoys are being removed but we think they are a good thing. Sadly the fishing industry acts like its in a war for survival. It is quite easy to imagine a factory making such fertilization buoys!

Factsheet deep ocean upwelling 

Upwelling experiment

Enhancing fish stocks with deep ocean water

Het Financieren van een Drijvend Zonnepark met Gemeentelijke Participaties

Wordt ook lid van onze facebook pagina : Facebook Markermeerzonnecentrale en laat weten wat je ervan denkt!

Ondergetekende is voorstander van een zonnecentrale op het Markermeer, zie oa onze Markermeerzonnecentrale.nl website. Hoewel een tyfoon of tornado flink huis kan houden op zo’n park is het logischer van de lessen te leren en hem zo aan te leggen dat het risico op grote schade kleiner wordt, dan hem niet te bouwen.

Het idee is om gemeenten in NL allemaal te vragen een bijdrage te leveren aan een onderdeel. Dat kan vroeg of laat, klein of groot zijn. De electriciteit die elk onderdeel levert wordt verkocht op de markt en de opbrengst gaat naar de betreffende gemeente. Zo kan er in Nederland draagvlak worden gecreerd waarmee een eventuele coup of lobby van fossiel kan worden doorbroken.

Een indicatie van 350 km2 van het Markermeer

De VVD pleit nu al voor 500 km2 op de Noordzee om electrische vluchten mee mogelijk te maken, niet beseffende dat electrische vliegtuigen veel zuiniger zijn en dat er als er geen fossiele omzet druk meer bestaat (zogenaamde economische druk) er veel minder gevlogen zal worden. Nu stroomt door het toerisme olie en benzine en producten die daarmee zijn gemaakt richting de steden in de buurt van luchthavens, maar dat zal straks niet meer zo zijn, als fossiel is afgebouwd (een ander vrij ingewikkeld verhaal zie oa stukken over de Roboeconomie).

Een zonnepaneel van 1 KilowatPiek produceert in Nederland zo’n 850 KwH, en daarmee kan 51 Euro worden verdient (0.06 Euro/Kwh). Zo’n paneel zou  (als hij bestond) ongeveer 500 Euro kosten en 30 jaar meegaan, dus na 10 jaar is zo’n paneel afbetaald. Maak hem drijvend en dan komt er 100 Euro bij dus 600,- Euro per Kwp die 50 Euro oplevert ruwweg.

1 1.3
2 1.69
3 2.197
4 2.8561
5 3.71293
6 4.826809
7 6.2748517
8 8.15730721
9 10.604499373

Tien jaar gestapelde rente op een zonnepark investering, elke 10 jaar neemt de return een factor 10 toe

Maar stel nu dat je voor die 600,- Euro een lening hebt afgesloten, een hypotheek, tegen 2 procent. Dat kost jaarlijks dan 12 Euro, de aflossing over 20 jaar is 30,- Euro. Dan heb je dus elk jaar 8,- Euro over. Dat is 1.3%. Je zonnepark kan dus van zichzelf per jaar 1.3% groeien. Dat tikt aan, na 18 jaar komt dat neer op 112%. Dus na 18 jaar verdubbelt het park zich elk jaar door de opgebouwde jaarlijkse rente op de opgebouwde capaciteit.

Stel dat je in Nederland zou kunnen kiezen, of je pensioengeld wordt in een traditioneel (fossiel) pensioenfonds gestort (die fondsen investeren misschien niet in fossiele bedrijven, maar investeren is elke bedrijf steunt op fossiel krediet en fossiele cashflow), of het wordt in een zonnepark zoals de Markermeerzonnecentrale gestoken. Dan zou dat betekenen dat als je dat 20 jaar doet, je geen premie meer hoeft te betalen. De met jou geld opgebouwde capaciteit levert jaarlijks de kosten van diezelfde capaciteit op. Dit hebben we al een tijd geleden elders ook berekend, hierboven is dus de schatting als je alle winst vermenigvuldigd door leningen herinvesteert, terwijl de stroom voor dezelfde prijs wordt verkocht.

We zouden dus als land door verenigde inzet van alle gemeenten een national zonnepensioenfonds kunnen opzetten dat zijn waarde ontleent aan het op gang houden van onze economie. De industrie zou zich intussen volledig kunnen electrificeren en alle biomassa of gas centrales zouden uit kunnen. Na 20 jaar zou er geen extra geld meer nodig zijn en de huidige generatie zou een voorziening realiseren waar toekomstige generaties ook van zouden profiteren.

Natuurlijk zou zo’n project gepaard gaan met innovatie op het gebied van drijvende panelen en het recyclen ervan, er zou zeker een nederlandse fabriek moeten komen, ook een voor batterijen om overschot in op te slaan. Tegelijkertijd zou het onderhoud natuurlijk automatisch gemaakt worden, omdat dat kan en goedkoper is. Tussen de panelen velden zou het Markermeer kunnen worden ontwikkeld tot recreatie gebied, er zou vis kunnen worden gekweekt, vogelbroedplaatsen aangelegd, recreatie woningen gebouwd (zoals nu op de Markerwadden) en het park zou zeker helpen het water koel te houden.

Vind u dit een goed idee? Laat het uw gemeente en ons weten. Wordt lid van onze Facebook pagina  en stuur een email of tweet naar een politicus van uw keuze. Dit is een nationaal project, en deste meer stemmen deste sneller we van onze centrales af zijn en een degelijk pensioen hebben. U zag hierboven dat als de banken doen waar ze goed in zijn de aanleg bijna vanzelf gaat!