Month: January 2020

Scientists have been trying to achieve stabile energy producing nuclear fusion for decades now. The dream to use the same process that produces energy in the Sun on Earth has been hard to reach because the Sun has a lot to help it do what it does. The massive star has gravity pushing its atoms together and incredible high temperatures as well. We can’t generate a gravity well similar to that of the Sun on Earth, if we could do it at all, it would probably crush our planet into elements heavier than iron instantly.

To date the solution has been to hold a plasma, which is a kind of super hot gas in which atoms are stripped of their electrons and behave a bit differenty, in a magnetic field. This requires enormous magnets and other precautions to hold the plasma in place. Ze germans have started to build so called Stellerators to deal with some inherent instabilities of the conventional donut design (shown above).

The plasma wants to twist around like a moebius strip, and rather than fight this the german researchers choose to go with the flow (literally) and build a more complex shape. The next generation of this hopes to twist the plasma four times, resulting in a nice square shape. There are other ways to do fusion but these are the two most published ones today.

Rolls Royce is readying to sell small conventional fission reactors. We better avoid that by presenting a safer fusion alternative!

The problem is that with both designs the heat generated has to go somewhere. If fusion takes place (usually not between to Hydrogen atoms but between tritium and deuterium prepared earlier), this will generate surplus heat, which radiates to the walls through the magnetic containment field holding the plasma. The wall will heat up and this heat needs to go somewhere or the wall will melt and the containment field will fail. Good thing about fusion reactors is that if that happens the reactor shuts down.

Until now, the reactors had to be pretty big, because if the heat leaves the plasma for the walls and doesn’t return the plasma cools and this inhibits the fusion process. So you can only have a fusion process in the center of the plasma that is hot enough, the likelyhood tapers off with distance from that center. A clever solution seems to have been found now, which is to use wall that is already molten.

The idea is to use Lithium, the metal also used to make some of the fuel for the fusion, as some kind of absorber. The plasma would come very close to the lithium, the hydrogen and other fusion constintuents could actually hit it and be absorbed. Importantly, if the Lithium evaporates it would not be much of a problem for the fusion proces.

The idea is to use the Lithium as some kind of cooling fluid that constantly flows along the outside of the reactor. This can be achieved by inherent effects of metals, namely the effect that two metals that touch, when hot, generate a potential, and that liquid that has a potential and thus a current through it will move in a magnetic field. This would assumedly keep the Lithium flowing along a stainless steel structured wall.

The beauty of this approach is not only that you end up with a way to contain the plasma and extract the produced heat, but also that you increase the space that is hot enough for fusion. The plasma would almost touch the Lithium. This in turn allowes for fusion reactors that are 20 times smaller! That is not only cheaper but probably also more simple to manage.

If you have learned anything about nuclear power, fussion or fission, it is contained in the above image. It shows the energy that nuclei have, and it shows that lighter elements like to fuse, and heavier elements like to fiss (split up). It turns out however that you can split light atoms, and nuclear fusion reactors need this to be possible. This is because hydrogen fusion is much more difficult than other related types of fusion. Lithium 6 and 7 are such light atoms that are easy to split, and are being split to produce Tritium. Funnily this produces quite an amount of energy.

Fun fact ” Tritium has leaked from 48 of 65 nuclear sites in the US. In one case, leaking water contained 7.5 microcuries (280 kBq) of tritium per litre, which is 375 times the EPA limit for drinking water.” “God damnit nuclear power!

Splitting Lithium has been propsed as a way to build a rocket engine. So much energy is released if Lithium is split that you have quite a lot of force at your disposal. The question is how to do it. The experts thought about it and one proposal is to have a cavity with Uranium in it, this would produce the neutrons necessary to split the Lithium. The Lithium would then be pumped into the cavity where it would split and enormous amounts of energy would heat it up, it would expand and blow out the back of the cavity.

“The advantages over conventional rockets are stupidly high specific impulse and thrust” perhaps a quicker way to get to Mars?

The above shows the rocket engine design. It would be quite safe but not on Earth. It seems that once there is a use for Tritium in fusion reactors one could also produce more of this gas from Lithium reactors. The simplest way to do this would be to add Lithium to existing nuclear reactors. It would heat up and the turbines would run as the Lithum 6 and 7 break up. This has actually been proposed but probably because of the risk of Tritium gas, which is harmfull when inhaled, we have not seen any real world implementation.

We don’t know the details so we asked the professor if the Lithium in the fusion reactor would pose a risk, that is of splitting. We hope he has an encouraging answer 😉 The US did a test once where they exploded a Hydrogen bomb, of which Lithium an essential part. They thought they only had to worry about Lithium 6, the other was supposed to be inert. That proved not to be true and the explosion was 2.5 times larger, scaring the hell out of everyone involved, documented in the video below..

Fusion reactors are being held out like a world saving carrot sometimes, being clean and safe and indepletable. The Stellerator tests, with or without Lithium walls, will continue this year, and promises to be the cheaper option. If it can be downsized it will be even more convienient. It would be nice to see the real deal some time soon. If we can use carbon free energy sources to build theoretically infinite amounts of solar panels and do whatever we need to for our oceans, that would be a blessing.

To travel requires energy, we are used to that, because we are used to moving our flexible and unstabile body over uneven ground step by step. But in reality moving does not require energy. If we wheren’t in Earths and Suns gravity well any effort (expending energy) to move would set us moving on a new course for (practically) ever. If you make a very stiff vehicle, like a train on rails, you can eliminate a lot of the loss cars and trucks experience as they move over bumpy roads on airtires. Trainwheels, car, truckwheels and suspensions get hot as they absorb energy meant to move the vehicle through the other major obstacle : The air.

The resistance of the air increases rapidly as you speed up. As you go faster the air that is in the way has to accelerate faster out of the way. It also gets compressed, and it sticks to your vehicle so there is drag. So a fast vehicle needs to help the air out of the way, move as little as possible and be as slippery as possible. This determines the usual shapes of ‘aerodynamic’ vehicles.

If you remove the air form the equation moving requires a lot less energy. The only energy it will require is the resistance as you fight gravity as well as the cost of changing direction (against the rails or road) which can be very low if your vehicle is very stiff. This is what inspired Elon Musk to propose the Hyperloop.

The idea of Hyperloop is to create a vacuum, through which a vehicle can move without air resistance. This requires airtight tubes and vehicles, a lot like planes (all large passenger planes maintain an internal pressure and oxygen level that is higher than that of the air they fly through). Until now this has been achieved using steel or concrete tubes.

Most concept are of an electrically driven pod for a small number of passengers so that there is a lot of flexibility in using the actual vacuum tubes. To us this seems a harder approach to start with. Why not have services at specific times, just like airlines. Universities working on concepts like this usually embelish and certainly the TU Delft is deep in bed with fossil, so they sell H2 cars and will slow down competition for airlines through endless research.

One of the scary aspects of this mode of transportation is that you are sealed stuck inside a vehicle for the entire time of any hyperloop leg. Nothing can go wrong or you are likely to suffocate in the tube. Fire on board is a major concern. New batteries are much safer than the well known lithium ion batteries. They also burn against oxygen when you puncture them outside, but which is not available in a hyperloop tube. New batteries (Lithium titanate f.i.) don’t have this problem. We assume no fire hazard battery tech will be used in any case. There is an answer to the vacuum risk as well, as you will read below.

We assume any trip would involve travel from normal pressure tube sections to lower pressure tube sections (full vacuum may not be necessary). The lowest pressure sections should be as straight and long as possible. Our vehicle would be the maximum size that can still follow the curve of the tubes. Tubes would have to be extremely tough. Legs would be 350 km long with 50 km sections, the less the better.

The current test track hyperloop tubes are made of steel. This may have been the choice because it is easy to open then up or cut through them if a test vehicle gets stuck. This however is not the safest option if the tube is going to be left outside (where people can interfere). In some artist impressions you see the tube on high pilons, this is because people who mean harm can’t get to it easily that way (and it can move above build areas).

A great way to use Hyperloop, if it delivers on its promise to allow travel at 800 km/h, is to build tubes along the European and Mediterranian coasts, under water. They could either float from anchors of be suspended form surface pontoons. Then you would have very little problems to build the routes fast. Conceptual work has been done on a transatlantic maglev connection based on a similar idea. Still, laying 5000 km of underwater concrete tubes seems a titanic undertaking, estimated cost : $12 Trillion. The hyperloop seems easier 😉

Lets consider the options of laying tubes along coasts under water, some underwater trajectories, assuming no stops..

• 1600 km track from Rotterdam to Bilbao, 2 hours
• 750 km track betwen Barcelona and Genua, 1 hour
• 1700 km track Venice to Athens, 2,5 hours
• 750 km Marseille Algiers, 1 hour
• 350 km Marseille Barcelona, 30 mins
• 350 km Barcelona, Valencia, 30 mins
• 2500 km Quatar to Mumbai, 3,5 hours

These are absolutely enormous distances and one has to assume a vehicle that can power itself for 4 hours straight, as we said it would have to be large, we don’t see any problem there. To deal with any accident where the vehicle has to stop or gets stuck one can imagine a safety system where two big baloons are inflated in front and behind the vehicle, sticking to the outside of the tube, to block the vacuum (a bit like a stent). These could operate on compressed air carried along. Any rescue vehicle could come in and do the same so a pressurized section of tube can be created to move people to safety.

So we assume a featureless tunnel and propulsion to be integrated in the tube lining or vehicle. Then the question becomes : How do we make these tubes sections quickly. One option is to make them out of laminated glass. Thin glass can be bend and vacuum laminated and achieve incredible strength while also being flexible. Thin glass can be fabricated on large rolls and then used to laminate tube sections almost in situ.

Of course glass bend for the diameter of about 4 meters the tube will be won’t have to be so thin. New ways of processing glass can make it incredibly strong. A continues process could mean seamless tubes.

Still it would be possible to have emergency/maintenance stations every 50 km or so. Glass could make it possible to use static leviation, where the glass and the vehicle have the same charge and work like static bearings. Using glass this way could even make it feasible to have windows in the hyperloop pod, so people can see themselves move under the surface of the ocean at mind blowing speeds, now that’s a future we like!

Another innovative way of using glass to realize the hyperloop involves using sand directly, where it is found. This would be a great way to build the tube sections in the desert areas, to cross the Sahara, acros Saudi Arabia. Sand can be melted using sunlight and turned into tube sections. These would be opague and much heavier and tube sections would have to be connected. The production of the tube sections could be done in parallel by multiple solar powered installations along the route. One of the challenges to deal with climate change is that our transition itself needs to have the lowest possible emissions.

There is a great need for speed in the development of emissions free logistics but also building technology. There is a need for new techniques to build roads, buildings etc. because using concrete is quite CO2 intensive. The fossil industry is still pushing for its own interests, and always mentions cost and efficiency as criteria for good ideas. Both are irrelevant if we move into the ‘roboeconomy’ which is the fully renewable powered automated economy. Because cost is a function of resource scarcity, and renewable energy can be made very abundant. Efficiency is also related to resource scarcity. We don’t need 99% efficient wind turbines if we have a ton of them, nor does anyone reject solar panels because they are only 15% efficient. What matters is that we can enjoy the products and services we desire.

Most of us live in an economy that is still largely powered by fossil fuel. The golbal production chains can be spread out over large areas, mostly to source labour from places where its cheapest. If you try to make a “living” you are facing a challenge, because most of the things you do have an impact on the climate. What jobs are absolutely off limits?

Working at a fossil fuel company is obviously a bad idea, at least as long as the company is private and trying to sell as much of the stuff.

Working at a bank is also suspect, because most banks invest in projects that drive fossil fuel consumption. Credit is fossil fuel credit, because if a bank invests and the entrepeneur buys machines and other parts of his business, this usually involves using fossil fuels.

If you work at a logistics company rail seems to be the best choice, this can become wind/solar electric freight logistics. Electric semi’s trucks will replace the diesel ones soon, they are simply more cost effective. But working at an airport or any place where planes take off is both unhealthy and indefensible. Flying is not for the elite, but for those that absolutely need to, the number of which is quickly shrinking. Jeff Bezos should make an Earth to Earth hydrogen spaceliner.

If you work in an abbatoir, you might as well go home. Killing animals is bad karma and if you refuse maybe less people can afford meat.

Stores that sell a lot of plastic? Don’t work there. Don’t sell dumb products like diesel cars or BBQ sets. There are so many jobs that are really off limits for anyone that wants to put his conscience first. what are the obvious winners?

A job that you can’t fault would be that of biological farmer, or someone that farms sheep without abusing the animals. You can build EV’s which doesn’t mean you don’t emit, but you do reduce emissions by taking IC cars off the road. If you build solar panel parks you obviously reduce emissions. If you organize logistics so the distance stuff travels is reduced you also have a positive impact. Maybe you run a clothing altelier using fabrics that didn’t come from dried out child slave labour using cotton farms..

Most workshops could be fine to work in if the energy they use was from renewables. Steel and aluminium are energy intensive materials, both in terms of mining, production and logistics, but companies like Tata Steel are moving towards using renewables to cut cost. Maybe a good way to look at your job is in terms of EROI, or Energy Returned on Energy Invested. Many of our activities could be ranked in terms of distraction or fossil cashflow value, because they return no new resources in the form of energy or otherwise. Of you are an organic farmer you produce more calories than you consume. If you run a solar park you produce more kWh than you consume, and stuff can be made that could not have been made otherwise.

Because our economy serves the profit and cashflow of the fossil credit banks, and NOT the wealth or happiness of the general population, so many jobs are merely to cause more cashflow, without producing anything of value. Adding raw materials or resources is NOT what the fossil economy does. Therefore most jobs are just a distribution of credit and waste of people’s time (even if they enjoy it). The fidget spinner ratio of many products is large, the entertainment industry is absolutely enormous. For example, we could all gave our non streaming collection of music and play them using a small solar panel and no emissions would result, but the economy arranged it so we all stream from servers that are still very inefficient. How to deal with that if we want more responsible jobs.

Conservatives say “We don’t want any loss of luxury, we need to act smarter, more innovative”. This is just french for “Go piss off for a while, we don’t want change!”. Of course this goes for all fossil fuel lakeys. The people that do want change have to accept that at least in the short term it means NOT having all the luxury. You actually can feel devine luxury using very little energy. Sit on a mountain top or by a lake in Italy with some cheese and a glass of wine. That reality is a balm, and it is there for the taking for free (lucky italians!). The thought process on how to make our environment more pleasant WITHOUT constantly paying and feeding the beast that is destroying us will hopefully start and bear fruit soon..

You have to be blind, deaf and dumb to not have catched a glimpse of what many believe is coming. You may be a sceptic or denier, but you have to worry about the massive number of people who believe in climate action in some degree. One group is Extinction Rebellion, which is driven by a farmer who just didn’t manage to grow crops anymore with the variable weather, it is now branded an “extermist ideology” by UK law enforcement.

The trouble is that climate action related crime is unavoidable. This is because our laws protect activity that is harmfull to our population. This in turn is because laws have been frequently if not nearly always proposed by industrial lobby groups and not by local popular representatives that bring forward a desire from the voters. We have the expansion of airports, no voter lobbies for that. Basically all demonstrations in the streets could be avoided by a functioning democracy, including those of extinction rebellion, but they are not.

What is a decent person going to do if prominent figures say things like this:

“Just think for a moment, what good is all the extra wealth in the world gained from business as usual if you can do nothing with it except watch it burn in catastrophic conditions” (Prince Charles)

You would think that local politics can change the local situation. If this was the case then a country would be a patchwork of different styles of living. In reality local politics (in holland) is mostly dead, killed by creatig larger regions with central decision taking. If local governance is alive it can only rearrange the furniture. Rotterdam or its suburb Overschie can’t decide to store energy in batteries or deal with its electric infrastructure the way it wants, that’s partially because the grid is semi-privatized, and partly because rules apply that can’t be strayed from locally.

Meanwhile as you see above the predictions become more dire by the day, and they are always right. We can not keep doing what we are doing! The problem is that if you decide you don’t need to fly, there are still a large number of people who consider that they should, or who’s only reasoning is “Its for sale so I can buy it”. That in fact is the general mindset that is destroying us : “I can make profit if I sell x” vs “x is for sale so I can buy it”. No ethics required. You can’t cooperate with people that have zero ethical sense!

Company CEOs are chosen to protect the company and you can not expect them to shut them down. Banks are not helping either.

So we think that breaking the law is going to happen, that it is only fair if it happens, and that companies that are hurt will likely be the ones that don’t show ethical boundaries or care for the environment in their activities. We can wait a long time for laws to change, and sometimes they do, and they create a precedent for more stingent laws, but we are also told we haven’t got the time to wait. Public discouse, when backed by the opinion of thousands of experts, is that industry is not moving because it hasn’t got the resources, but it is still hurting us. It does not stop by itself, so it needs to be stopped by someone else.

Now the dynamic will be that the police can get a lot of cash for fighting terrorism, and if people with a desire to protect their own futures start breaking laws to do so, the police has a choice to benefit from the increase in funding or push back and accept the damage done to companies that are hurting the public interest. The latter can only occur if funding of the police is somehow restricted. The new york banks gave millions to the NYPD, which meant that the “Occupy Wallstreet” movement went nowhere. Of course those people where wrong to occupy in a non-hindering way.

It is, we expect, unavoidable that rich individuals will start sponsoring criminal climate activism. Only criminal because the law forbids damaging private property. A lot of rich people understand the problem and want to see more effective action. This covers a wide range, you are talking about people who meet very few obstacles in their wealthy lives. The idea that rich people are always assholes is simply not true. Not all exploit poor people or have had to shut down their moral compas as have the likes of Rupert Murdoch. The mistrust and anger against the rich is partly due to the few rich tat are assholes, and partly because angry people are useless to themselves, which makes them easier to control.

When Holland was occupied by Spain the merchants and leaders became increasingly unhappy about the taxes Spain extracted. This caused them to revolt. The key moment came when William of Orange took leadership over the revolt, basically said revolutionaries could act in his name. It made him the founding father of the Netherlands. Winning the country from Spain was also a result of the dwindling supply of gold in the hands of the spanish, and as shown above a consequence of the desire of the dutch to enjoy the fruits of their own labour. So simply a desire for a better life than was allowed under spanish rule. We expect people to seek a better life than is now ahead of us under fossil based industrial rule. And it will likely take the same kind of revolution, directed against those that persist in being assholes.

We had a business idea : We would rip the windscreens from cars in the street, and then open a big store to sell the windscreens to the car owners that now needed them. Its a guaranteed cash cow because we create the need ourselves, almost like selling drugs like coffee, wine or sigars. Sadly we ran in a problem : It was illegal. Why? Because its not allowed to take windscreens from cars in the street. Even though you can take a coin from the pavement.. Anyway, bummer.

This little episode shows that when someone wants to start a business there are rules. For starters there’s common law. Protection of privatly owned goods from theft (even though that protection is weakening as police are increasingly unable to respond). Now we had another idea, we would make poison, cyanide, and sell it to shops to kill mice. Just a theebox with little sachets of the stuf, we hired an intern to make it (a little like Fukishima Tepco hired temps to clean up the radioactive waste). Made a nice candy colored box to catch the eye of the buyer, with an image of a screaming mouse with red eyes, like MGM’s logo.

We had to burry one intern, and build a fume hood for the next. When we had to attend to the funeral of a couple of kids that thought we sold funny tea (It clearly said “Mouse candy” on the package) the police came to arrest us. We where working so hard and stimulating the economy, getting rid of a nuisance (we don’t mean the kids!). Its a good thing we didn’t make too much money or we would have been stuck with claims forever. That would have been sad!

Ok, this never really happend, but what happend was that kids all over europe played and sucked on toys made of poisonous plastic, drinking from mugs with lead containing paint. Dutch conservatives don’t want to ban sale of greenhouse gas nitrous oxide, that is sold to kids to get high, which they breath in such quantities they get brain damage from anoxia. Guys like us are everywher, all over the world, all the time, selling stupid dangerous products or profiting from stupid dangerous processes.

The point of the above is that rules have to exist to make our lives safe. They are there because the easiest way towards profit for some is not the way that allows all people to have a reasonable life. So all those people that want a reasonable life came together and created a government and laws to be protected, not only from each other but from industry. Because (as we say) industry does not care about human lives.

We decided the cyanide business was too good, we sold a lot, so we tried to sell some to the local environmental protection officer. He didn’t die accidentaly and this made it easier to go back to the shops with or product (the dead shopkeeper we didn’t mention hadn’t slandered us). In the EPO was replaced by a more cautious individual, so we decided to propose a law to make our company exempt from prosecution, calculated the country wide profits, promised 5% of the next 10 years revenue as speaker fees to one of the members of parliament (for speaking jobs he would get after he left politics) and on his advise hired two other members on our board of directors. This did the trick. Then we sold our company to a big pharmaceutical company who wished to branch out.

That company by the way had been looking into new party drugs. They figured it would be a billion dollar market if you can sell pills that made you feel funny or laugh uncontrollably. Because this is also the effect of now legal cannabis and Nitrous oxide, who would object if pink funny pills popped up in grocery stores next to the candy?

Anyway, we digress. It is clear the people that want to make money will try anything and do anything to keep making money and make more money. There should be barriers to the crazy ones, but there is one sector that consistently lobbies and pleads for less barriers. This is the banking sector. They just want to borrow to profitable businesses, they don’t give one flying fuck what the effect is. All the insurance for Soy from Brazil, the leases for the heavy equipment and diesel used for logging, money for the bullets that are used to kill forest protection activsts, it all comes from and is handled by the international banks.

In Holland banks invested in plans for farmers, plans the farmers didn’t think of themselves, but which where highly likely handed to them by the biggest meat trader (there’s more or less a monopoly on meat farming in Holland) who of course developed the plans in cooperation with the same banks. Problem was that the pollution, as was known at the time of the making of the investment, did not allow for farms of the intended size. The Banks did not check this. Now the farmers are halfway to profitability and they are not allowed to expand anymore (because an EU ruling made it so that the rules had to be enforced).

Banks are the ones that should be given more responsibility and should be held more accountable for the investments they make. This is just their duty as part of society, to protect society from harm. If you let someone get murdered you are partially guilty of that murder. Your duty is to prevent harm to your fellow citizen (by allerting the authorities f.i.).

In the financial world there are even people who pride themselves of having no ethical consciousness when it comes to investing. These people sell arms to countries until civil war erupts, at which point they sell even more weapons. We are not even talking about the fraud happening in the financial sector itself, the front running, quantum trading. It is insane. Loans and investments should be vetted for their impact, before banks go ahead and grant them.

Even though some investment banks now say they will divest from fossil projects, coal first, they only do this because they can see that renewables, batteries are exploding and are the future drivers of production. Still all banks expect fossil fuels to be available when they extend credit or create a loan. What would it mean to have 1000 Euro in your hand if there was no way to produce the products (or ship them) you want to buy. This is why we call the bankingsystem the carboncredit system. This tells you that banks are 100% married and dependent on fossil fuels for the way they lend and invest today. Even the climate funds, soon one trillion in the EU, essentialy means 1,000,000,000,000 Euro worth of fossil fuels will be made available towards fighting climate change. This is a lot of extra pollution!

If the money system is fossil fuel dependent, and the people that create the credit don’t take care to think the consequences of their actions through, rules are needed. It will have as much effect to introduce or change rules as it will to build a giant solar park. In Holland the nitrogen rules are now stricktly enforced and this means building activity can only go through if the required impact assesments check out safe. Enforcing these rules causes two things :

1. Acceptance there are rules, all parties including banks will do more due dilligence on any rules.

2. Lobbying starts against any new rules that restrict high cashflow activity like building (high cashflow also means high emissions, and high profits for banks).

The socialist voters have to add a respons nr. 3

3. A new framework for restictions on loans and investments should be introduced that prioritizes climate beneficial activies over harmfull activites, where the welbeing of humans is taken in consideration.

This may include :

• No investment in fossil or biomass power plants
• No investment in fossil exploration
• No investment in long range logistics
• No investment in all but the top 5 most low carbon renewable energy technologies
• No investment in grids when batteries can solve the challenges
• All new factories must have their renewable energy supply included
• How much does the product or service actually add to the wellbeing of people?
• Etc.

Of course there is a huge amounts of grants and subsidies available for anyone who wants to start a business, also in the renewable or climate related industry, so the main purpose of these rules is to give direction to investments against the opportunistic mindset of entrepeneurs with weak ethical sense. These are of course found in abundance in their service industry : The banking system. Sadly the only thing we can really do directly is shame the banks that invest in bad projects, and vote for rational socialists that have not gotten greedy yet (have not been corrupted by economism)

When you see politicians use nazi tactics again, looking for angy people to enlist in quests against imaginary or innocent enemies, it makes sense to try to innoculate for the discourse that is likely to follow. When resources are scarce as they where in the runup to WO II, people will talk about who deserves to be fed, who is usefull. In those days there was open discussion of this topic and some scary thinkers where not to shy to share their views.

Usefullness of humans is not a thing. Of course the basic ‘utility’ of a person is to keep him or herself alive. If there are kids those have to be kept alive. That would be the bare minimum. But usefullness is not really defined as something towards the individual, but towards others. The use of a person is not determined by the person but by the people that person is usefull to. If that is the case then the question can be “what kind of relationship gives others the right to determing a persons usefullness”. There are two kinds, one is that the person loves the others and is usefull to them. The other is that the person is made artificially needy.

In the case of love the others will not really think about it much, although a tweeting chick in a nest is clearly trying to make its parents usefull. Love causes an individual to consider the other part of him/her self, and so the use of that person grows when viewed from the outside, but not in the experience of the person. Life becomes a bit harder, but there is more to live for.

Before WO II some writers said that if a person can not explain his/her usefullness it would be kind to them to euthenize them

In the case the person is made artificially needy others are usually actively involved, but it can also be the person him/herself who becomes passionate about a life goal that is demanding. The most basic artifical need is the avoidance of pain inflicted by others. These are slave labourers and prisoners, but also employees in companies that have to work ungodly hours to retain the approval of the boss. There is no love for that boss, although the Stokholm-Syndrom may set in, there is existential fear which hinges on the feedback from the boss.

Other artficial needyness is caused by programming, this can be advertisement or movies or imprints left by social media use. The invidual may not be aware of a stimulus placed specifically to create an itch, and this itch (usually a social threat of exculsion) has a life of its own in the persons mind and will start to shape his/her thoughts and dreams until the person wants something. The artificial need is created. Modern life is a constant battle against these kind of impressions.

Most of our needs are artificial

The question of a persons utility, meaning whether he/she does something to reduce the needs of others, except in case of love, seems entirely forced. And one can ask where that forcing originates. One thing is clear, that forcing is external, brought on by other people with needs. Today it is clear most if not all people in the western world experience artifical need, the need for money. This need is created by keeping opportunities and freedoms from them. You could say that the need is created by the cost of things, but that’s not the essence, the essence is that the person can not access the thing he/she ‘needs’.

For example : There is land, it produces food, but there’s a fence, and you are not supposed to take the food. This makes sense but on the other side there is this : If you want to own land, you need money, and not a little bit, but a lot. So even if land is available, you can not get to that land and use it. This then creates an artificial need in you to somehow make money (more on this mechanism below).

This means : You wil have to do things you didn’t think of for people you don’t know to get money, and then you will not earn enough to buy land, but only to buy produce from someone that does have land. But, and that is so strange, you are not necessarily usefull to that someone. You may even be harmfull to that someone. So in order to meet your basic needs you have to be usefull to someone, but not to the people that actually help you satisfy your need, and this process can be endless!

Debt is an artificial need induced to force you to be usefull

The same mechanism of artifical need described for money was invented by the church a long time ago. Their mechanism was to tell you you needed redemption from sin. They held the keys to that redemption as representatives of the punshing God, and if you obeyed their rules you would be redeemed. When the printing press was invented this turned into an actual cashcow for the churches, they printed indulgences, letters of redemption, that you could buy with money, and so the church became insanely rich, and the people in the end revolted.

If you take the example of your need for food, and find that you may be a seller of some material that poisons the land yet by that usefull role you can attain food your usefullness can not be towards the farmer but has to be towards someone else. It is of course whoever is in control of the money system, or to whom that money system is usefull. Its simpel to spot who those are, those are the people that are not in the real world manipulating real things. They are the ones that create the ‘order’ that generates the ‘need’ that forces you to be usefull.

Now this post is not an attack on that order, it is in its best form an order born out of love. Today it is not born out of love, the economic world order is born out of fatalism and lack of imagination. Slowely we are seeing a change there, but the bankers, CEOs etc are still mostly looking at money, which means they are blind to the actual utility or even harm of actions they enable to fellow humans. We say that industry does NOT care about human lives.

This post is an attack or a warming to people who want to define the usefullness of others. There is none. You are not allowed to. If you are a strong person and you grow a lot of crop you can’t eat yourself, naturally you have to share it. So people who can not grow that crop because you are strong and monopolized the land, you can not say they are useless. In todays economy if people are excluded because they are not needed, they are not useless. They should not be penalized. They should be included and resources should be shared. If you think these people have a low desire to be usefull to themselves, inspire them to that desire. Uplift them. Why isn’t that the norm?

Uselessness is not a problem if there is no real neediness

In the current economy people are not being uplifted. They are being made more needy all the time. Not only mentally, by presenting them with images of a life only a few could ever actually live (in terms of resources), but also physically, by keeping common medical treatment from them. (It is 100% true that medical care is a miracle of cooperation and actual care. It is surprising that the people who are the key to making that work earn so little.). Today in our economy there is one need most of us have, and that is the need for fossil energy. We share that need with companies that run trucks, machines, produce plastic or cook food etc. We find ourselves forced to need money by the creators of the economic order, and then we have to compete with machines in terms of usefullness towards company CEO’s.

In today’s economic order, when it has been destilled to its money based essence, you find your life is in danger when you are not fighting to be usefull. Not to your fellow human beeings, because voluntary work is NOT rewarded, but towards the economic order. It is a lossing battle because you compete with machines running on fossil fuels that are made increasingly intelligent and potent. The people that want utility will soon make it more clear that some people are useless. But they forget that the means to be usefull are kept from most of us (the cost and inaccesibility of land is the main culprit), and the utility of whatever they find usefull can be questioned (do we need running shoes or toasters?).

Our point is not to be useless and happy, our point is that until all resources are put at the disposal of people who want to be usefull (to themselves primarily) nobody has the right to start talking about it. You say I am useless? Give me a piece of land! Stop telling people they can’t be happy without an enormous villa! As natural resouces are being rapidly destroyed by an army of articially needy workers in the fossil economic order, the discussion will soon start.

We think the only and most powerfull defence is to build renewable energy sources so that usefull things can be done at a lower price or for free. Others have said that the drive for more renewable energy is in its heart socialist (but we are not communist!).

We read a lot about how to deal with climate sceptics lately, mostly suggesting we should politely present our views in response to that of the denier or sceptic. This is a lofty ambition, but frankly, there is no time for that. It is not smart to waste your time as a climate activist or climate action driver or simply a sensibel private person to tolerate climate sceptics and deniers. Here I will try to outline your reasoning to have no patience with these kind of people.

Climate deniers and sceptics always want you to prove your claims, or they present evidence they believe is relevant. It is like talking to an economist, all you say is only helping them to hone their arguments, because their position has two origins, either it is ignorance or political. You can’t argue with either of them.

Say a person is ignorant and only wants to provoke a response and vent their point of view. Don’t argue with them because clearly this individual is not using logic to come to their point of view, only anticipating the effect it will have on others. If suchs a person is in a panel discussion leave the discussion or try to shut him/her up. This is not polite. Don’t be polite. Tell them they never doubted whether the Earth was round, why should they doubt the climate science ? The fact with these people is that even if you motivate them to take another point of view (which you don’t do with arguements) they are useless to your cause.

You can tell these people they are dumb because a basic education should be enough to understand the science, specifically that CO2 block heat radiation. This can even be demonstrated if needs be. It is no crime to think climate change is a hoax, but if you profess it openly as if you can teach others about the world you are dumb.

If a person is not ignorant but chooses to be a sceptic to create an illusion of uncertainty this is more repulsive than if a person is dumb. These kind of deniers are slick as grease, they will have excellent debating skills. If not its a bit sad. Don’t argue with them. The are even less likely to be of any use if you (in some imaginary world) convince them. Usually these people don’t respond to any type of reasoning, because they are the original deniers, working by the same playbook als the nuclear promotors that also worked for the tobacco industry. This has been described in the Merchants of Doubt by Naomi Oreskes

If you are in some panel with a political denier don’t argue with them, but tell them they are displaying signs of madness by rejecting the help of so many scientists, who they will readily trust if they get a medical test. So many times in life they trust others who are experts, when they get their car fixed or heating installed or someone cooks for them in a restaurant, they don’t doubt its ok. But with climate for some reason, in spite of armies of normal respectable people telling them they have doubt. That is crazy. They are deranged and you wish them a quick recovery.

Those sceptics and deniers who are telling others how the world works, like Lord Monckton who in the above video claims to have references on something that is simply not true. He talks jibberish but mentions a lot of details which convinces people that he must be sane. Such liars, need to be kept from speaking except to small groups of the ignorant. Never on a public platform, it is a climate activist duty to prevent it.

Some famous climate sceptics who probably hope you forget about them

To his point in the above video : our oceans have now absorbed so much extra heat that if the same heat was added to the lower 10 km of our atmosphere (which is about 16 km high) it would warm an additional 36 degrees Celsius. So it would not be 12 degrees which is already rediculously warm in Januari, but 48 Celsius. This also means that the oceans will get very warm and as they cover 90% of our planet we are in very very deep shit, and amongst others, because of dickheads like Monckton. So shut these types up!

Litium ion batteries are causing a revolution around the world. The energy density of batteries of this type is still increasing, and prices are rising as production capacity of new batteries is not keeping up with demand. But to anyone with a basic science education its pretty strange to see this intense focus on Lithium, while there are plenty of other metals to choose from that are more abundant and cheap. Two of them are Sodium (called Natrium in Europ) and Potassium (called Kalium in Europe). Sodium or Na is part of what we know as common table salt which is NaCl. Potassium is in all life because it actually stores energy in plants and animals.

We may be looking at an economic effect in the sense that the battery that generates the most cashflow is invested in more, because banks rather loan for projects that generate a lot of cashflow. Sodium and Potassium batteries as you can see below have mega potential and the fact we aren’t using them widely yet is hard to explain.

Sodium-ion batteries or NIB

Sodium batteries are about as easy to make as lithium ion batteries, but they require a different kind of electrode, because sodium does not ‘dissolve’ in grafite as lithium does. Sodium-ion Batteries Market is expected to exceed more than US$ 1.77 Billion by 2024 which is tiny compared to what it could be if we started way earlier. These batteries are amongst other uses expected to be replacements for lead-acid but with better characteristics. There are different ways to build a sodium battery, so with either a liquid electrolyte or a non-aqueous one, with sodium as cathode or only in the electrolyte. More information can be found here. We will list some companies that are working on Sodium-ion batteries.

AMG batteries is a cooperative with Renault working to create sodium-ion batteries for use in cars. The energy density can be as high as Lithium also because there is no need for copper electrodes. A lot of patents on sodium batteries are held by Faradion. Above you see a graph that shows the different electrolytes being tested and how they perform (the dots not the formulas).

Chinese NIB producers are HiNa Battery Technology, Wuhuhaili (Sodium-sulfur), Qintang New Energy, Liaoning Hongcheng (Liaoning Xingkong), NGK, Zhejiang Lvming Energy (Durathon), Sodium-sulfur batteries have been applied for large scale energy storage, but they are high-temperature (300-350 Celsius), now room temperature variants are being developed which is promissing.

Other projects around Sodium batteries are the Naiades EU project. Interestingly there is a spinoff towards desalination because sodium is one of the main ions in seawater, and sodium batteries separat the sodium towards or away from the electrodes. Once you have a positively charged membrane that repulses sodium you can use it to filter water. This electrochemical approach to desalination is usually less energy intensive than the market dominating (and aggresively monopolizing) reverse osmosis filtering method.

Natron Energy makes Sodium-ion Batteries for utility scale power for now

Australia will have a 30 kWh sodium ion battery pack in a trial led by the University of Wollongong’s Institute for Superconducting and Electronic Materials (ISEM). It seems this project could be copied quickly and widely.

About the 30 kWh Sodium battery in Australia

Many universities research Sodium Ion batteries, but seem to give them less priority. We hope to see more examples and wider attention soon.

Potassium-Ion or KIB (also PIB)

Potassium-Ion batteries seem to be even easier than Sodium yet get even less attention. The battery potential of KIB batteries will be closer to that of Lithium-Ion batteries, making them an easier replacement than NIBs. The challenge seems to be smaller which makes it puzzling why we don’t see them offered much more yet.

“Potassium batteries can accept a wide range of cathode materials which can offer rechargeability lower cost. One noticeable advantage is the availability of potassium graphite, which is used as an anode material in some lithium-ion batteries. Its stable structure guarantees a reversible intercalation/de-intercalation of potassium ions under charge/discharge.”

A common mistake that is being made is to strive for high energy density right away, high performance of KIB batteries is not needed as long as the cost/performance is attractive in the market. The article that the above image comes from was more negative than one would expect. It may be that lower cachflow alternatives to Lithium-Ion are not that welcome, so then people say “more research is needed”. This is the “go look for a solution” strategy when the solution is not desired by the banks that control the market.

It is certainly great to read this in the press “Skoltech researchers led by Professor Pavel Troshin have made significant advances in the development of sodium and potassium batteries based on organic cathode materials” and ” sodium and potassium batteries that charge in 30 to 60 seconds while retaining their energy storage capacity after thousands of charge-discharge cycles”. So apparently these scientists tested things for all three metals Sodium, Lithium and Potassium (and alloys!). They tried different polymers and found that a dihydrophenazine-based one had great characteristics.

The world is not an island, so it seems we are about to see a rapid growth of Sodium and Potassium batteries to replace and augment the current Lithium capacity. As these metals will never run out (and are actually an undesired by product of desalination for example), the development of batteries will certainly be exiting in the next decade!

The problem is corruption. In Holland we see one minister after another pushing the interests of the fossil industry, only to reverse course after they lose power. Leaders of parties land attractive jobs after their tenure and promote gas or nuclear or airtravel or some other fossil intensive activity. It is “pay later corruption” (as explained by Herman Scheer below) where people with influence get hired to speak for exorbitant amounts. It happens all over the world.

We need to get money out of politics. Profit, in many cases is bad, especially when it incentivises wastefull use of energy. In politics time and again we see the abuse of power because politicians can gain money now or later, take from cashflows they have access to. Our democratic leaders should be entirely cashless and maybe be income restricted for the rest of their lives. They are leaders of the dutch population, not hobbyists or creatives invited to have entertaining ideas. We seem to have forgotten that leaders are there to protect us, why else would we hand control over our lives to them?

Governments like that of the US but also of Holland have become completely corrupt. You don’t even have to see money end up in the hands of politicians, it is simply that money dictates policy. Police find they don’t have enough cash to deal with crime because they are not supported, meanwhile the ING bank is laundering billions in drug money for drugs traded in Amsterdam and gets away with a fine. It’s perfectly clear why (according to the minister of justice) “politics” meaning his corrupt party “has been sleeping for 10 years”. As long as we don’t wonder why these representatives move around at banks (one former prime minister, one minister of finance) and energy companies (one party leader) we are not awake.

Now with the salaries and “waiting salaries” for members of parliament that are waiting for something (they still get payed) some politicians have to be exposed to get double income they don’t need. The atmosphere is “who makes the most money” and at the same time the right wing unegalitarian policies create a big pool of corruptable people. This pushes us all into what we think is the universal cause of destruction of civilizations : everyone becomes corruptable, every action and object becomes for sale. Nobody moves anymore unless they are payed. The internal motivation is replace by indignation that one is not getting payed enough to have the same.

The solution is that anyone choosing to become a member of government is also choosing to earn a specific amount annually for the rest of their lives. Total net worth can not rise above a certain level at any time or it will be taxed away. Simply said if there is a reward for being in power, that reward is owed to the voters who granted the politician that power. Its not to say a person needs to live in poverty, but certainly the goal is to make it impossible for extraneous (corrupting) incentives to work. To become a leader you have to put others above yourself, and you can’t do that if you are trying to find the most lucrative job. Our parliament has at least 3 members who are there by lying and misrepresenting and saying what their (industrial) sponsors want them to say. They make a nice buck doing it.

The left wing party lobbied for more cash for assistants to MPs, that makes a lot of sense, and it means you produce/vet/develop your knowledge “in house” instead of getting it offered by industry to adopt in return for future speaking jobs. We want to see more moves towards demonlishing the value of being a MP, more limits to mobility between industry and politics (which have been put in place). Everyone knows what the problem is. Sad thing though is that its likely the right wing parties would completely evaporate. But the goal is that leaders work for an ideology (which implise reward for all), not only for own reward!

This is a bold statement, but let’s analyse. First off, we have banks who seek profit. This is the root of all evil so to say, because what does it mean to make profit? It means you earn more than you need, even for your plans. Banks borrow money to citizen, and the less money citizen have, the more banks can borrow out, and so there is a double incentive for banks to make profit: If they do people need to borrow more!

But lets take the housing crisis, where does it come from? Well, banks taught poeple that if you buy a house its an investment. The price of the house will rise (apart from it becoming your property so being a savings account). Banks had the incentive to make this true so they could lend more. They lobbied for 1. lower rates 2. bigger lending share (so les smoney up front), creative instruments (once people started to believe their story, you got investment mortgages that where payed by the hous price rise), they made renting more expensive (in holland), they arranged special loans for ‘starters’ (which drove up prices), they reduced social housing by putting these cooperations into debt and forcing them to sell their real estate, the now have lobbied for a rule so that couples can lend more (1+1 = 3), and of course at the same time they reduced construction.

The result? People are stuck in their homes, they can’t move to job opportunities. New homes being build are all expensive. People are forced out of their cheap homes by semi-criminal investment groups who want those high prices. This leads to homelessness, crime, probably abuse and poverty. This is shown on TV, the sad man that could not find a place to rent, and if you don’t rent (or buy) you can’t get social security or a job. In the US we know houses where kept off the market, because for a while the opposite was true of what happens in Holland, anyone could buy a house. Why, because banks lowered their lending standards to create investment instruments (credit default swaps) and this resulted in what? Misery, the 2008 financial crash. Who suffered? so many.

How about medicine? That used to be a sad profession when you want to believe Celine (Voyage au Bout de la Nuit), but of course that all changed for the better with the discovery of Penicilline and other breakthrough, now it really is a vibrand industry that does incredible work, not to mention the incredible care given by nurses and staff, who have to constantly deal with their humanity and that of the patients.

But how about health care cost? How about insurance. Why do people in the US pay ten times as much as in the EU for the same healthcare. Why can pharamaceutical companies keep renewing patents or even repatent expired ones? How can a company Pfitzer sell a heart health pill for 10 years making hundreds of billions while its effect is a 1% improvement over placebo? This all happens because of the financial context created by banks, because shareholders need to see profit, and profit is unnecessary squeezing of customers (because profit is all you have after you payed all your cost, including reservations for your plans). So banks have lobbied for privatization, always looking for ways to make more money.

And what is the result? Suffering, early deaths, broken lives, time spend by political players like Obama to fight it, but guess what, the US electoral system is now based on how much cash you can collect from your voters, The US shows in extrema what total surrender to banks leads to. Still anyone in congress can trade with insider knowledge. Does that create a way to bribe? Of course! Who do that? People in the banks. The same who create the financial instruments that the whole economy crashes on.

Just to give this a break, what happens if a country is not financialized to the extend the US is. We mean poor countries. They can have good healthcare, good education (we will get to that) good housing all good, the only simple rule is that you make lending difficult, and of course you need energy sources. In poor countries that energy comes from manual labour. India and Brazil for a while didn’t care about patents. They rebelled and made medicine themselves, at much lower cost. This is now happening in Europe as well, companies are making rare and less demanded medicine themselves, and escape the normal pricing policies this way. Of course there is a lobby to stop that. Health should cost you all you have at the end of your life, so that your children will need to work for the same things all over again.

How about education? Holland tried the US system because we have had 9 years of US-lakey goverment and every trick tried in the US was also tried here, including prison labour. So students had to borrow money to study, and cost went through the roof, Universities liked it a lot, it caused a building and renovation boom which was a way for banks to capture the institutions because now how could the pay their debts if not by increasing cost of tuition etc. Luckily sanity is returning somewhat because we in the EU are more social, so it is likely this system will be reversed, but a least 10 generations of students are deep into debt and will be. For whom? THE BANKS.

The suffering this causes is not small, not only will you see people doing jobs they hate, jobs that are harmfull others, in an world where you need to pay, but of course some won’t make it and end up destitute and who knows kill themselves. Students don’t even protest anymore because of course they changed into a group of willing slaves that believe that if they work hard they will get a great job. But like in the US the courses proliferated, more students where allowed in, and many come out not knowing what they should be doing. Stuck in the homes of their parents (which should be fine by the way) not able to make enough to buy or rent.

Soo who else, farmers? Of course farmers have been in the news a lot lately because the EU decided Holland should limit its Nitrogen emissions. Builders, farmers, airports, cars all emit NOx and NH3/4 (which for the sake of confusion is being bunched together), and so all these have to reduce emissions. The farmers have been investing in intensive cattle farms, of which at least 3 burn down with all the souls in them every summer (or all animals die because the ventilation breaks down). Why these farms? Not for Holland, we only consume about 20% of the meat we produce. So its for export, for cashflow, from the Amazon soy fields, grains etc. back to the world. Dutch is a meat hub. The farmers have been allowed to borrow to grow their business, to such an extend that the businesses arn’t even profitable yet, they need to grow more. The banks allowed them to get started and did not do their due dilligence on what farmers where actually allowed to build. Now with the enforcement of the Nitrogen limit the farmers see their future destroyed, and they are payed by the feedstock suppliers and dominant meat exporter to disruptively protest this situation. Who is served by this? The banks. Who suffers? The farmers.

We can go on here about how banks have ruined everything. This constant need to compete, not on quality but on volume, this drive to automate and destroy jobs people enjoy, and replace them with jobs people hate. From income you can have a nice life off to income you can barely get by on. A key to the suffering is not only that banks want to make profit, but that the credit they give is consumed by buying fuels, energy. All the money ends up with the energy companies. No matter how low the interest rates, this system is causing ‘hypertension’ where we could all get along fine with a couple of companies like this and a couple like that. We actually see this in some sectors, like soda drinks, which in itself is a rediculous racket that generates such enormous amounts of cashflow for banks : Hauling sugared water half across the globe for the ephimeral superior experience or just for the sugar high.

Banks thus cause obesitas, banks ruined nice cities because they fund flights and they lobbied for plane fuels to be tax exempt. All because the supply of fuels was much bigger than demand, and people will spend at their destinations even if they are super crowded and expensive. Bank. Cashflow. Not human enjoyment. Monetization of everything ensures banks control everything.

So our claim is this : All problems we Face are caused by Banks

We have not even mentioned climate change, but you can easily see that selling more cars, more fuel, more plastic more food was all done to generate more profit to pay the loans of the banks. They have caused it, and it makes total sense, banks loan out carbon credit, credit that buys you fossil fuels, and thus their business is based on the expansion of fossil credit cashflow and as a consequence of carbon emissions. They have no alternative. They renamed fossil credit “Capital” which it isn’t.

We already wrote about how to beat this cancer to our societies, and this is by building renewable energy sources. They will allow for renewable energy credit to be distributed, not by banks but by the owners of those installations. Of course right now the ‘market’ is being developed such that you never own renewable energy installations and don’t easily think about this option because you have to repay your debt for your installation, but given time and price drops the fact that a renewable energy installation in your hands means you own production capacity, means you can distribute it through credit. And there will be more credit of this renewable kind than there ever was of the fossil kind. Hopefully then the suffering caused by banks will stop.