Month: May 2015

The website Follow-this.org is a very slick looking website that tries to convince people to buy shares in Shell in order to influence the policy of the company. It sounds great, for  34 Euro you can buy a share of Shell and maybe get heard at a shareholder meeting. You could do this on the stock exchange as well, although perhaps buying single shares is not possible there.

Follow this hopes to sway Shell towards sustainability. It even quotes Shell CEO Ben van Beurden on their website as saying (supposedly about the transition to renewable energy) :

“There is actually no problem that we cannot solve.”
“It is very important that we keep pace with the energy transition.”
“An organisation that has so many qualities, so much expertise, so much capital, has to be able to reinvent itself.”

(the link associated with the quotes is dead)

But anyone that knows Shell knows that the energy transiton is the one to gas, not to renewables. So these quotes don’t mean anything. You can rely on someone from Shell to make their statements exclusively in the context of Shell.

Shell does not want to transition away from fossil fuels, it works very hard every day on being a fossil fuel company

As far as we know one needs to have at least more than 50% of the shares in a company to wield any power, and that means, with about 3,894.500.000 shares outstanding that means one needs 1947250001 shares. The counter is now at 9380. Maybe you only need 20% of shares to get something to say, but then that is still  26.482.600.000 Euro.

Follow this seems to need about 26 billion Euro in shares to gain influence 

But the people of Follow-this (why not call it something with shell in the name?) believe that when 10.000 shareholders are represented in their question for Shell to transition to sustainable energy in 2030, Shell will do that, because “Other shareholders won’t disagree with it”.

The majority of Shell share owners wants the company to do what it is doing

Meanwhile we read that Shell is accused of misleading shareholders about the risk of arctic drilling. The cost in case of an oil spill are astronomical. Shareholders think they should have been told about this risk. This is another way of dealing with Shell, which may be more powerfull because it can lead to large investors shorting the stock (offering it for sale) which may lead to an avelanche effect that can turn out profitable because the shorting investor can buy the stock he owes for a lower price than he/she payed to short. Hedgefunds do this all the time. The problem is however that our entire credit system depends on fossil fuels.

You can’t trigger a short selling avelanche on Shell, it produces the very thing that allows stock markets to exist

But just like a company can’t shift its core business (keep customers return for fuel they burn) into something totally different (renewables where it now hast to compete with an army of existing wind, solar etc. manufacturers), money and banking can’t do without fossil fuels. The whole idea of credit created (as it is today) out of thin air is that the recipient will use the credit to buy fuel, or buy products and services delivered by people who will use the credit to buy fuel. Credit = fossil fuel, we live in a carboncredit world economy.

Money is fossil fuel credit, that is why money can be created out of thin air.

It all works because the gas stations everywhere remain topped up, and that is a result of oil and gas flowing, and that can only happen if oil/gas and coal companies use every second to make that so. Investment banking, the stock markets will disappear when renewables dominate. Credit markets will shrink to zero. Everybody will own their own source of productive capacity : Solar, wind or other forms of renewable energy.

The shift to renewables reduces cashflow, because people no longer buy and sell energy, they own it

The work to be done is destorying the reputation of oil/gas/coal companies, attackin them on every front. The only acceptable life for them is in providing us with the energy to manufacture renewable energy sources, and that only until there is enough renewable energy to produce more solar panels, wind turbines etc. without the use of fossilfuels.

Every weapon to our disposal should be used to get all fossil fuel companies under confrol of the UN

We are already paying an incredible price for the oil/gas/coal lobby against innovations and changes that will undermine the carbon credit economy. The force from the banking system is as motivated. Every inch of progess counts. And playing around with some stocks doesn’t help very much.

 

We wrote about the risk of tectonic activity due to climate change (in dutch) in 2011. The idea was to imagine what the weight of the ice removed from the South pole means for the shape of the crust. We knew that rather than a billiart ball the earth is more like a water filled balloon. The crust is only 50 km thick and underneath is still 6000 km of molten lava. A real good visualization of earth is shown below, where a ball of water is manipulated in zero gravity.

Imagine it with a thin layer of something that can crack on the outside. Then you can see how tiny forces (relative to the mass of the water) can still change its shape. The forces the changes caused by climate change are causing are big enough to notice it. Greenland for instance is expected to rebound as much as a kilometer.

“And the greater weight of the water in the oceans where sea level has risen as ice melts can ‘bend’ the Earth’s crust.” 

We calculated the ice removed if the poles melt would be the size of a cube of 4 x 4 x 4 km with a weight of 10.000.000.000.000.000 kg. That will trigger a reshaping of the crust for sure, causing Earthquakes and vulcanic activity as the weak points in the crust where lava wants to get out are broken by the movements.

This graph shows exactly what is happening to the pressure on our south pole

In 2013 we posted about this vulcanic effect. Which was already mentioned in 2009 by the Guardian. Even earlier in 2007 there was a piece about this in on livescience.It was interesting to see that Scientific American had an article about in 2013 that made the eventuality ‘possible’ using the word ‘may’ which so often means we don’t pay attention.  It was actually super weak.

The study (in scientific american) doesn’t address whether modern-day climate change would have any impact on the frequency of volcanic eruptions, though in theory it’s possible, Jegen said. (bron)

 A case of ‘cast doubt to paralyze’ in a field far from most people’s attention. Although more recently earthquakes have been found to be caused by shale gas drilling, and this link is the cause of changes in dutch conventional gas extraction.

“Although they’ve described it in the past, nobody’s thought about it in terms of future effects of climate change,” said Bill McGuire of the University College London’s Hazard Research Center. in 2007.

Newsweek puts all doubt to rest with an article about the current Earthquakes that devestated Nepal and killed Everest climbers. Let the idea of Mount Everest shaking sink in for moment. The warnings of 2007 are now brought out in clear language :

“Climate change may play a critical role in triggering certain faults in certain places where they could kill a hell of a lot of people,”

Dr Pierre Bettinelli was the scientist who in 2007 first showed how this vast flush of rainwater, second only to that of the Amazon basin, affects earthquakes in the Himalayas. Nice.

All these vulcanos and earthquakes happen because we use fossil fuels, which causes climate change

A clear example how the Vulcano-climate relationship works is given here

“There’s a volcano in Alaska, Pavlov, that only erupts during the autumn and winter. The 10cm or 15cm rise in sea level during the winter months, when low pressure comes over, is enough to bend the crust and squeeze magma out. That’s an example of how tiny a change you need,” 

This doesn’t bode well for may sensitive vaults like the Andreas Faultline and the Yellowstone Caldera. Even if they where going to crack and blow at some point because of build up pressure, now we have another factor disturbing the peace in our earths crust : Fossil fuel use.

The production and sale of oil, coal and gas is a crime against humanity

So there is yet again a way in which fossulfuel, burned because it is extracted by oil/gas/coal companies and distributed by the economic system, can kill a sizable portion of humanity. Or, if we keep letting shell, BP, Rosneft etc. do whatever it wants, do we have to say “Will kill a sizable portion of humanity” if not all of it, as our climate runs away as it did before the so called Great Dying.

Fracking quakes in Oklahoma

Update : SolarWatt also has a storage solution, with similar qualities to the power wall. We expect more similar products to enter the market.

UPS means Uninterrupted Power Supply. It is a system used in IT to ensure servers and other computers don’t shut down in the event of a power failure or intermittend fulctuations in grid power. They are ubiquitous, nearly every server room has one because computers are expensive and leaving them without power for only a microsecond wipes their RAM memory.

Having these systems proves we already have battery storage for the home, and the Tesla Powerwall is not that much of a innovation. What is the innovation with Tesla is that the Powerwall product is priced to be sold in large quantities, and has a design and ergonomic qualities to be part of a normal houshold.

That said, what the Powerwall does is take in electricity, store it, and make it available on demand, at an output of about 2 kW per unit, probably as smooth AC (110v for US). If the grid fails we expect it to continue to provide AC in the house. This is a lot of what a UPS does.

A 10 kWh Powerwall is half the price of a 10kW UPS

The question is what the power draw an a normal UPS is, this can vary between 66% and 90% of the rating, so a 10 kVA could deliver 5kW, this is more than the Powerwall. But the cost of a 10 kWh Powerwall is 3500, while that of a 10kW UPS is about 7.000, double that. You could reason like this : If the equipment power use at a grid failure is below 2 kw, and a UPS offered for that power draw is more expensive than a Powerwall, what is there against going for the latter?

Will Tesla’s large storage units make UPSes a thing of the past?

The price will come down more, because Tesla is building a battery factory, it is offering the design for this factory to anyone that wants to build it, as a product, just like many production lines are themselves a product. In any case, Tesla can already service a market, just like the UPS producers could offer storage solutions for the home.

.. or will UPS manufacturers enter the competition to produce the most usefull and cheap grid storage devices

The reason they probably aren’t doing that is exactly what this article is about, it would be cheaper, because the potential damage af failure in the home does not justify as high a price as one in a critical operation of a company.

Toyota is attemption to sell us the hydrogen car, a technology that has been called out for being a very stupid idea, primarily because the fuel cell is max 50% efficient and other reasons. But this video makes a mockery out of you, the viewer.

The idea presented is that if you make hydrogen out of manure this is a clean fuel. What the add doesn’t explain is the following:

1. Manure is not the source of the gas/energy

Manure can be used to make biogas, but what is digested in the biogas installation is usually not all manure, it is mainly (in holland legally up to 50%) argicultural waste/overproduction that contains sugars/starches, which are needed to make the gas. Not only gas is made but heat and other gasses. The manure contains very little sugar so it leaves the digester almost the same, minus the sugar.

2. Making hydrogen out of biogas means you emit CO2

The guy glosses over it quickly, but he mentions steam reforming of CH4 (methane) into H2 (Hydrogen). The two step proces goes something like this :

CH₄ + H₂O ⇌ CO + 3 H₂

And

CO + H₂O ⇌ CO₂ + H₂

This leaves you with H2 and a lot of CO2, and a lot of heat. Of course a much better option is to burn the CH4 in the car’s engine, which would save a lot of hassle. Now you just emit CO2 somewhere else and don’t reap the benefits of that heat loss in your car. Rediculous.

This is exacly why hydrogen is being pushed, it is because it allows the natural gas industry to keep selling gas, even if they have to reform it into hydrogen first. Electric cars don’t offer that option.

3. There is hydrogen in manure, but that fact is ignored completely

Manure does in fact contain hydrogen, but it is usually called nitrogen, because it is a hydrogen/nitrogen molecule called ammonia. This fact is ignored by Toyota This molecule, NH3, is a easy to liquify under relatively low pressure diesel like fuel that can be harvested from manure and that can be burned or converted into H2 with only N2 emissions, which are completely harmless.

Ammonia is the ‘other hydrogen’ nobody talks about. The way Toyota envisions it the NH3 evaporates from the manure ponds, into the atmosphere where it is a much stonger greenhouse gas than CO2. Using NH3 for agricultural fuel makes a lot of sense. There is even an infrastructure for it (for farmers) and even though it is usually only made by cows or using natural gas, it can easily be made with solar or wind electricity electricity. We know about a project that did that.

So yes, hydrogen is bullshit to begin with, and hydrogen from bullshit is double bullshit, unless it is clean burning Ammonia, on which almost all Toyotas can run.

Mensen met het Syndroom van Anton zijn blind, maar zullen bij hoog en bij laag beweren dat ze kunnen zien. Zo zitten de hersens in elkaar, ze zijn onbetrouwbaar want ze hebben geen enkel intern referentiekader. Als ze goed functioneren zijn we blij, maar meestal laten ze ons dingen doen die we niet zouden doen, dingen geloven die nergens op slaan en dingen verkondigen waar geen grond voor is. De test is de praktijk en deze maakt gelukkig korte metten met illusies, en zorgt ervoor dat mensen die betrouwbaar in elkaar zitten en actief genoeg zijn beschikken over gezond verstand.

Zie ook de “No Way Out Propaganda”

De media gooit roet in het eten als het om de kwaliteit van onze overtuigingen gaat. We staan bloot aan allerlei fantasieen die zo worden weergegeven dat  ze niet van de werkelijkheid zijn te onderscheiden. We worden on onze zoektocht naar waardevolle kennis steevast volgestouwd met informatie die alleen bedoeld is om ons bepaalde voor anderen winstgevende dingen te laten doen. Zelfs als onze kennis van hoge kwaliteit was (dwz niet in strijd met de praktijk) dan nog zijn er gebieden waar we weinig mee te maken hebben, bijvoorbeeld de risicos van opwarming van het klimaat.

Opwarming is permanent. De naald zal niet vanzelf terugveren.

Hoe verwerkt u de informatie dat “Een op de zes soorten bedreigt wordt door de opwarming van de aarde“. Afgezien dat het onzin is, klinkt een op de zes als een acceptabele schade. De melding lijkt te impliceren dat het daar bij blijft. In wezen in de boodschap “Het valt wel mee”. U weet niet dat visstanden soms met 90% zijn teruggelopen, dat miljoenen hectaren bos (niet eens tropisch) al is afgestorven, dat insecten, vogels, vissen, kleine zoogdieren overal onder druk staan, niet eens vanwege het klimaat, en dat er niet te vergeten honderd duizenden mensen per jaar overlijden aan het gebruik van fossiele brandstoffen, door astma, autobranden, kanker enz. enz.

Het proces lijkt meer op een lawine

Uw brein helpt echter ook een handje. Want wat het niet wil is een of ander bericht waar iets mee moet. U heeft uzelf geleerd om uw dagelijkse dingen te doen en als er iets tussen komt zal uw brein een reden verzinnen waarom dit of dat niet nodig is. Het zal zelf de gedachte creeren “Een op zes? So what?”. Daarbij wordt u nog gestuurd door uw positie tav het nieuws. U leest het of hoort het ergens. Gaat het u wel iets aan?

Opwarming van de aarde is op gegeven moment niet meer te stoppen. Dan treed een mechanisme in werking dat alles wat zuurstof ademt op de kleinste dieren na zal uitroeien.

Het genoemde artikel is overigens nog op andere manieren misleidend. Het zegt dat als we een opwarming van 4.3 graden krijgen we een op de zes plant- en diersoorten zullen verliezen. Dream on. Ten eerste blijft het niet bij 4.3, omdat 4,3 graden een situatie creert waarbij verdere stijging tot wel 12 graden onvermijdelijk wordt. De consequentie is dat niet 16% of 1/6e maar 90% van alle soorten, planten en dieren, zullen verdwijnen. En daar horen we zelf bij.

CO2 die we in de atmosfeer brengen is als inkt in een zwembad, je drupt het er makkelijk in, maar haalt het er alleen door elke druppel te zuiveren weer uit

U kunt zich veel verbazing en onverschilligheid besparen door dit feit in te nemen : Als we niet ons uiterste best doen om 1. Fossiel gebruik te stoppen. 2. Landbouw praktijken fossil vrij te maken 3. Planten en dieren in de rijkste varieteit en aantallen te laten groeien. 4. Verdere directe interventies te doen, zal de mensheid het niet redden.

Andere wetenschappers (aan het MIT in Boston) verwachten dat door het gebruik van fossiele gifstoffen in de intensieve landbouw, over 10 jaar 50% van alle kinderen autistisch zal zijn. Gezond verstand wordt dus snel zeldzamer. Dit probleem kunt u ook aanpakken via de bovenstaande doelen

U  kunt beter niets lezen, maar alleen steeds opletten wat er om u heen gebeurt, en als u kans ziet om iets te doen dat onder de bovenstaande vier punten valt, dat te doen. Zo ontwikkeld u uw gezond verstand, en beschermt u uw gezondheid en dat van uw kinderen, zonder dat u pessimistisch of onverschillig hoeft te zijn.