Month: February 2014

Below pictures are of a small project I endeavoured to ensure the air in my appartment is 100% chemical free. Air filters mainly focus on dust, but in some cases you want to remove fumes from traffic that may enter your appartment as it is ventilated. Carbon filters do just that. They remove anything that wants to react with carbon, and most noxious fumes do.

The filter used is an industrial grade one, sold to be part of airconditioner systems. It is also sold in growshops, meant to remove any scent of cannabis sativa hollandica (weed) as it is grown in indoor controlled environments. It has 5 KG of activated carbon. Normally it would be more costly/trouble to get your hands on them.

The filter “Mark I” simply pushes air into a box, where it finds the filter as the only exit. The fan is a PC style fan, very quiet. It draws .14 Ampere at 12 Volt, so it consumes 1.68 Watt for a sensible breeze. The trick of this box design is to maximize the surface through which the air can enter the filter.

The vantilator is mounted on the inside of the box creating overpressure in the entire box. Dust however gets a chance to drop to the bottom instead of going through the filter. The slower the air moves, the more dust will fall to the bottom (which is why you usually find ‘dustbunnies’ in corners and behind funiture).

The filter support is such that the top of the box is flush with the top of the filter. The air is blown up and away. Of course one could connect air tubes to a window to ensure air is taken from outside f.i. The box is 80 x 25 x 30 cm.

With the top sealed with tape (can be improved) there’s no other way for air to leave the box. The bottom can be made air-tight, but this way you can lift it to vacuum up the dust that collects on the floor.

The power comes from an external adaptor. The device itself runs on 12 volt. We are going to see if we can integrate a (better) dust filter.

As the filters are small enought to send through the mail you can order a kit to build this (precut parts) for 160,- Euro. The filter will last about a year. Contact us here.

Parts:

• Multiplex 4 mm
• Small wooden beam for corners
• Nails and screws
• 12 Volt PC fan
• Adapter
• Cord
• Filter

How do we achieve the fastest phase out of fossil/co2 emitting fuels? By controlling the resources, by controlling the activities of the companies exploring, mining and trading the fuels.

How to achieve that control? By a multinational effort. Not a top down, but a bottom up one.

How to organize the effort? By creating a uniform declaration to be signed into law by anyone of any political party anywhere.

How does this work? The declaration subscribes the country to force submission of any fossil/CO2 emitting fuel related organizations and individuals and bringing them under the central global control described in the declaration. It means the creation of an international law.

How is it adopted? The public can pressure politicians into supporting the declaration, no matter what their political colour may be, and this can continue until it achieves a majority. It will be a single text around the world, no amendments can be made. It will oblige the forces of the country to act. Countries that have adopted the declaration can help others to do the same.

Do there need to be elections to do this? No, it can be done any time, the priority of the necessary law implementation can be prioritized over other plans just like laws are deprioritized and never implemented in politics.

As the process of drafing the law can be a way to stall the implementation, and claims can be made that the law has to be different in every country, adapted, watered down etc. etc. it will be a plainly worded law, for instance as per below.

Establishment of the Global Carbon Phase Out Authority.

1. No fossil/CO2 emitting fuels are allowed be traded, extracted, processed or distributed by private or public organizations other than the GCPOA.

2. Any organization trading extracting, processing or distributing fossil/CO2 emitting fuels will obey the directives of the GCPOA.

3. Administrative information of all fossil/CO2 emmiting fuel trading, extracting or processing, distribution companies will be public and shared with the global authority.

4. Any private ownership of fossil/CO2 emitting fuels will be immediately transferred under control of the GCPOA. No reserves of fossil/CO2 emitting fuels are allowed to exist outside the knowledge and control of the GCPOA.

5. The GCPOA will control and direct the use of fossil/CO2 emitting fuels to eliminate their use anywhere as soon as possible without causing war, famine or death.

6. The GCPOA will establish a ministry in every country it is given authority. This ministry will be populated by citizens appointed by established foreign GCPOA ministries or in the case it is the first, by the people elected by the legislators that introduced the law. This ministry has authority over all others. All conflicts can be resolved unilaterally by the GCPOA.

7. The GCPOA can anull in any law or contract established by any party to further it’s objectives. This includes patent and copyright law, financial contracts, derivatives, obligations, and contracts of ownership.

8. Only one set of statutes will govern the GCPOA in all countries that implement them.

9. Any authority that can directly establish GCPOA authority in a territory can bypass an elective process.

10. The GPCOA will work to make energy available from renewable resources where it is established of 200% of what is available from fossil/CO2 emitting resources at the time of the start of its authority. It will do this in cooperation with other GCPOA countries. When it has achieved that goal it will relinguish control.

Because of polar ice melting the poles are darker than before. This means the ocean there absorbs more sunlight and warms much faster than when it was covered with ice. The effects in terms of economics (although caring about the economy in this context borders the perverse) is estimated to be $60 trillion over the next 10 years.

10 degrees warmer than usual?

The enormity of the poles losing their white reflective cover will never sink into the consciousness of the average human. Compare it to taking your straw hat off in the sahara, the heat is now on and there is no break on warming. Water is a great absorber of solar heat, and now that the water is exposed the suns rays simply sink into it and accumulate their energy. Before the ice and snow’s abledo (reflexive effect) beamed heat back into space, one of the reasons the poles where so cold.

Imbeciles will think of clathrate as a resource to be exploited. Sane people will see it as a grave threat to be kept where it is.

The consequences of this positive feedback loop are immense. It’s not $60 trillion in economic damage. It is the hard to reverse (although reversable) disappearance of our oxygenated atmosphere and general survivability of all life on Earth. Whoever digs into our planets past knows that oceans warmed considerably several times, and every time it killed all life in it except the most basic, bacterial, usually also with devestating effects even for whatever lived on land, due to rotting (H2S) gasses escaping from the ocean.

  The biggest extinction in Earths history is linked to climate change.

An added factor is the release of gasses from the ocean bottom as it warms, immense amounts of methane are stored as clathrate ice in the cold deep ocean. These gasses are escaping as the ice melts, and adding to the greenhouse effect of our atmosphere.

A total polar melt will cause our extinction

There are solutions to these problems, one of them is not to start shipping through the polar routes, although it saves fuel, one should ask the question : Why am I shipping something at all? Most things can be made locally. The shipping is to expand the fossil fuel based economy, why do that while we could focus on making life easy where we are. We don’t use the solar potential, which is about 1400 times bigger than our fossil supply, because the people benefitting from fossil fuels are forcing us to useit, through the application of economic theory. Most production still depends on fossil fuels, and credit has to buy that fuel, so our money locks us into the (fossil fuel) economy. The burning economy’s dominance is slowly eroded by renewables, but it needs to move a lot faster and in a different way if we want to see concerted action agains more polar ice loss. Surviving is one of those things that require effort.

Iceland is introducing a cryptocurrency called the Auroracoin. With it it hopes to create a banking and debt free real economy in Iceland. You would wonder “What does this have to do with clean energy”, but it has EVERYTHING to do with clean energy wealth.

“Auroracoin is a cryptocurrency for Iceland. It is based on litecoin and is 50% premined. The premined coins will be distributed to the entire population of Iceland, commencing on midnight 25th of March 2014.”

Money is no longer a means to symbolize effort of humans. It used to be. If you went back a few hundred years you would see people working for money, doing physical or skilled work, producing arts, crafts, farming, baking etc. Most of that work came from the sweat and excertion, which shows up in nutrition data, because the cost and value of a worker was the cost of the calories he used/produced in a day.

These days the money we pay to people is no longer related to the calories they need to survive, but to the calories necessary to keep their livestyles going. The money is used by the earner to buy goods and services, which mostly depend on fossil fuels being available. Driving a car, heating a home, getting processed food, buying electronics made by robots and underpayed slaves, surfing the internet (facilitated by tons of electronics). People are NOT productive, they are all consumers, even the food is produced by consuming 10 times the calories gained in fossil fuels.

The basic flow of money as a means to distribute energy, which can be debt, a fixed coin or money that is destroyed when recieved back by the energy supplier. They should be issued by the tax office, so that most taxes can be deducted right away.

So these days money is a way to allocate energy, fossil energy to where we want it to be used. This is a big mystery, because nobody MAKES fossil fuels. We make all kinds of stuff with fossil fuels, but nobody starts the day without a barrel of oil, and ends the day with one (out of thin air). You can drill for it sure, but that is not ‘making’. Still we can all buy it with our money. The bottom line is we are enjoying an energy glut of historic proportions, and we get all that energy if we participate in the ‘economy’ which means we help spend it wisely. To maximize this spending (some people make a lot of money from it), we invade every nook and cranny of our own productiveness with automated production. Economics is the maximization of the utilisation of fossil fuels, and money is its blood.

Humans are not part of this equation, other than lucky endpoints in the production chain. We are supposed to destroy the products so new ones can be manufactured and sold. We are consumers, it’s a job in the economy. The more we consume the more people can earn a living, even if the same system tries to shorten the path between fossil fuels and production through automation.

Now what does an Auroracoin do in such a system? Without any changes it will do NOTHING. It will become a kroner equivalent at best, cause some inflation and be banned eventually. The reason being that the energy suppliers don’t want or accept such money, as it is not their own money, the money they circulate to distribute their energy. In Europe it is the Euro, if you want a guy in Germany to make a camera you need to give him Euros because he can’t buy the stuff he need with kroner, especially not the fuel and electricity, he can’t pay his rent etc. etc.

So what can Iceland do to kickstart their own island economy? They need to focus on energy and productivity. Do they have energy sources? Do they have productive industry? The answer to both is yes. Iceland has geothermal energy, and massive amounts of it. The question is do they own those energy sources (used amongst other for alumnium smelting and greenhouse heating) or are they in debted and paying off Euro debt with it. To back a cryptocurrency there needs to be energy available the price of which can be set by the people emitting the coins.

The starting point for energy needs to be a commonly owned source, so anyone using it has to pay for the energy. At the same time the money to pay needs to be given (for free) to the people involved in deciding how the energy is to be used. This is our current credit economy, but in that economy debt is widely abused to protect fossil interest.

Even if there is lots of energy, one needs to be using it to produce what is needed, mainly food. Does the energy powere the fishing trawlers, or do these need diesel bought in Euros? That means the fish needs to be bought in Euros. Are there farms run entirely on geothermal energy? There could be for sure. Those farms could deliver food to people paying in a currency with which it could buy the geothermal energy.

If there is an enery source and there are producers of necessary goods that can use that energy, then a small economy can be created by giving (for free) currency to the people that will want to buy the necessary goods. The money they get will be spend on the goods and end up with the energy supplier where it will be destroyed. Another way of looking at it is that a debt is created with the energy supplier by giving the money to the consumers, and as this debt is repayed to the energy supplier the money involved disappears. This is our fossil fuel based central banking model.

It is clear that handing Auroracoins to every Icelander won’t do the trick of independence, because to be independent the creator of money needs to also ‘own’ your energy sources and they need to be icelandic. In its current form the Auroracoin will fail. But if the model proposed above is adopted Iceland is one of the few countries where a home brew coin can work for sure. The same model can be applied in Spain, Italy, Greece and Portugal, but with solar electricity, wind ammonia and other renewable energy souces.

Update :  “Yes, the project can be important for the peace of the region. We plan to sell power from the project directly to the PA and to Jordan. Also having Med Sea water in a deep layer in the Dead Sea will enable desalination for supplying more water for Jericho and for Amman. Presently we have registered the project company in Israel, we have a very good manager for the project, an Israeli Engineer Danny Sherban, Yodfat Engineers. We also have very competent Israeli legal adviser for the project.

We are lacking $1million for the preliminary preparations for application for the project as a Independent Power Producer Project with the  Israeli company.” Message by Randophe Gonce.

How it started..

I have been in Gaza in 1991, witnessing the squalor the people there have to survive in. At that time there where still bombs going off and Israel was on high alert. Soldiers where partying like it was 1999 when they had to go to serve and risk their lives. Tragedy was obvious on both sides. Later I understood the tragedy even better when I saw a girl going hysteric on a flight to Bankok. She had just read about an attack on a checkpoint killing one soldier, and her brother was serving there. It was for all its political reasons a simple russian roulette for Isrealis and palestinians

in 2014, 23 years later, it still is. No amount of political negotiation has helped. But as the oil supply from Saudi Arabia is slowing the role of Israel in the Middle East is shrinking. It costs billions of USD to keep it in it’s precarious power balance. Somehow the situation needs to be defused. A way to do this is by giving something to both sides that makes then believe in a future, a prosperous one. Then the militant groups on both sides would lose their support and everyone would try to live a good life. Of course this is somewhat naive, but reality is a result of a complex equation and it would be arrogant to expect a specific outcome. Most people (jews and arabs) I talked to in 1991 did not care about politics and just wanted to make a living.

The solar map of Isreal..good news!

For those that just want to make a living there is a solution, primarily it is solar energy. The country is flooded with it every day. I didn’t check but it is highly likely the land surface of Israel and the occupied territories could power the world several times. Even if it could power the world only 0.1 times, it could still power itself a zillion times. This means it could power it’s cars, factories, bakeries, city lights, tvs, airco’s multiple times. To live in a sunny country means living in a garden of eden of wealth. Need fresh water? Use solar energy. Isreal could be 100% green, lush land, and that’s without doing any calculations. Now imagine trying to make peace in the dry land it is right now (not everywhere true), or in the green lush irrigated land it can be.

The Golan Heights are green, the rest of Israel is not..

Imagine a negotiation where the stakes where not pieces of settlements on arid hills and unforgiving rocky ground, but where there was new farmland to be divided, farmland that existed on the condition that both side cooperate, and not if both sides kept obstructing. There is a real practical scenario for that, it lies in the Dead Sea.

The Dead Sea lies in a valley that is dry and arid. I personally felt the panic of someone running out of water when I was dropped of by a car on a crossing close to Jericho, and realized walking to Jericho was not going to be easy in the incredible heat. No amount of sweating was going to save us in that furnace it seemed. Now I would say “Wow, what incredible amount of energy and wealth could be harvested here!”. It’s a natural solar collector, and it dumps its energy by evaporating the Dead Sea. Some think it is the entrance to Hell 😉

Med Dead project

Yet the Dead Sea has another gift which is the point of this piece. It lies deep beneath the Mediterranean basin, about 306 meters according to Wikipedia . It has different sunlight, less bad UVA, the atmosphere is actually a bit different and has more Br2 instead of O2, making people Euforic if they stay long enough. But lets think about that for a second, 306 meters below sea level. That is almost the same height as the Jinping-I Dam in China. That dam (not finished apparently) will produce 16 and 18 TW·h(billion kW·h) every year. So in short, if you could get water to the dead sea you could build a huge hydroelectric power plant. Jinping-I dam you would not have to pour trillions of tons of concrete, you would only have to lay a pipe across the land from the Mediterranean basin to the Dead Sea..

The image above talks about ‘Saving the Dead Sea’, it suggest pumping water over a hill vertically from the Red Sea to the Dead Sea. It does suggest a desalination plant and hydro electric power plant, but of course it makes much more sense to do it from left to right. It’s not about ‘Saving’ anything, it is about a huge windfall of energy to be harvested and fresh water to be gained from this geological feature.

As always when you start googling a good idea you find that other people thought of it too, and even have developed a complete plan. This plan is the Dead Sea Power Project. It suggests to tunnel the relatively short distance to the dead sea. There are details on every part of the enterprise.

“The penstock from the reservoir to the Dead will be designed to provide for 800 cm/sec flow, enough to power 2500 megawatt hydro turbine generator capacity. “

The plan includes thought about where the relatively fresh water will flow in the Dead Sea. When I started to write this article I knew people had tried to build the proposed pipeline and ran into trouble because of non-cooperation along the route the pipe would follow. Every area the pipe travelled through wanted to get something out of it. It seems tunneling will reduce that type of problem, because it would be much less visible and intrusive, and legaly local authorities may have less to say about it.

Project is imagined by Yodfat Engineers

In any case renewable energy, especially from the Dead Sea, could be put on the table in negotiating a settlement, and could be used to make more land fertile and green and habitable for all people of the region. If applied right renewable energy could eliminate all need for fossil fuel in Isreal and thus all need to participate in conflicts for or politics related to it. Thus once again the Sun enables life, let’s let it..

West-East makes much more sense then South North..

This blog is atheist, but the project member suggested the below..

Iceland is in a unique position since the 2008 crash. It was severely hit by the end of the so called ‘carry trade’ where credit from low interest rate countries was parked in Iceland at unjustifiably high interest rates. This led to a total collapse of the countries banking system, but instead of bailing them out, the countries government opted to jail them in, take control of it’s currency and prosecute those that took unwarranted financial risks. Some governments in Europe had to wait for several billions they expected as return from Iceland, while compensating savers to prevent outrage. This was simply fallout of a scam that went on to long. The painfull injustice has been that Icelands citizens had to somehow decide what to do with those repayments. Rediculous.

But now a new dawn of bankerless financial freedom has arrived. Cryptocurrencies, with all their flaws (mainly where it comes to their energy intensity) demonstrate how money can be something without, out of control of any central authority. A shared ledger of account in a peer to peer network, wrapped in layers of encryption can be as reliable as one ledger in a well fortified bank office. Actually the shared records are much more robust to tampering than a book or database in some computer you never get to see. Besides, those type of databases can burn down, like the one in Argentinia just did.

Iron Mountain bank archives going up in flames. Now who owns what? 

But having a currency is not what makes an economy tick, at least not if it is a pure manual labour driven agricultural economy. Why? Because to run an industrialized economy you need to have the stuff needed by the machines to operate, and humans don’t make it : electricity, heat, liquid fuels? If nobody can be a gasoline crafsman it needs to be imported from somewhere, and there goes the autonomy of your economy. This is exactly the reason Iceland was in trouble in 2008. It needed Euros to power itself.

Luckily Iceland has all it needs to start fresh outside the matrix of international energy politics (without having to join queue of those that want access to energy resources). Iceland is energy independent. This may not even have played a role in the minds of the creators of the Auroracoin. It is relatively easy to start a cryptocurrency. It is hard to make it work in an economy, especially when the aim is not speculation, but true use in daily life.

We have (in order to fight the economic trouble and depart from the fossil based economy) suggested to introduce three currencies, the Euro, the Auro and the Joule. Most people don’t understand what makes a currency tick at all, they can’t see that currency, a money, is nothing in itself. As stack of dollars is nothing at all, just a stack of pieces of printed paper. Today many people think that these pieces of paper can solve all problems, but that is like thinking Monopoly money can change the game of Monopoly, or chips in a casino can bend the rules of Roulette. What can you do with your chips if there is a power outage in the casino? Right.

Money, the Euro in Europe, gets us something nobody can make, namely energy. A consumer making energy would be a farmer that grows food organically (without energy intensive fertilizer), or someone with solar panels or a wind turbine. Those would have to be fully owned by the producer, so that the energy could be used for free or sold at the discretion of the producer. For 99,99% of Europeans that is not the case. Most Europeans need energy and because they need energy they need to make money, or get money from the government.

So in Iceland, you would not be done by just having a new peer to peer cryptocurrency, handed out to everyone. In fact it would change nothing unless the energy companies recognized it (and then it gets more complicated). Of course international trade would also have to recognize it, which means they would have to know what they could buy if they accept an Auroracoin. Imagine someone coming to you with some old asian currency, trying to buy your Euros. You would say “What can I do with your asian coins?”. If I say “You can buy bags of rice with it in Asia” you’d say “I don’t need those!” and the deal would be off. Way to complicated. To introduce a currency for true economic gain it needs to be thoroughly thought through.

Basic questions of any currency are:

1. What can I buy with it
2. Who gets to own them first
3. How much will there be

For the Auroracoin the answer seems to be :

1. Whatever anyone is willing to sell
2. Everyone gets some to start off
3. This is limited by the algorithm (not an insignificant factor)

These answers are naieve and weak. Suppose there are billions upon billions of coins in the pipeline (f.i. there are 127,010,319,285  Fedoracoins ) what then is the value of one?

If everyone owns a few to start off, then what happens with people that have nothing to offer?

So this is all very naive. It works only in a rural labour intensive environment where everyone can contribute to the wealth that is exchanged using the currency. With a few tweaks though, it can work, and it can work everywhere. It can be the start of the Joule we proposed.

Next post will be about how to make a cryptocurrency based renewable energy economy work.