Month: January 2020

As former neuroscientist we have a fascination with human psychology and cognition, and are amazed at how well some forms of influencing work. For instance the suit, a neat suit, can protect the most horrendous people. Neatness, looking clean and untouched, seems to have a hypnotizing effect on people such that they think they can never touch the individual that is neat.

Where does this reverence and respect come from? We think, we will propose, that most animals including humans have a mental state that we could call prey hypnosis, there must be a better name for it. It is the passive attitude when we find ourselves captured by a superior force. It happens in animals who are calm when they get captured by a predator, it has been described in humans who where mauled by lions and tigers and bears.

The truth is, death is not horrible, you don’t experience it. We can fear a predator when we can outrun it, we must fear it then, and do our best, but when we are caught the fear loses its purpose and is only likely to evoke aggression and thus pain. Pain is something all animals try to avoid, and if they can’t avoid it try to hide and ignore. In short we would be inclined to believe all animals including humans have a pleasant passive behavioural/mental state between fear and death, and we can be tricked into believing we should enter that state.

The only think that can save us in that state is beauty, youth, and perhaps pleading. Tigers have been known to capture young animals and let them go and even try to care for them. Pleading has of course helped in humans, but animals also plead, cry, and this may also help them escape this limbo between life and death. Often if a human captures a falcon or eagle that got stuck, the bird will do nothing as it is handled. This calmness and surrender rings a bell. How would one evoke it in humans, and what will humans do in such a situation?

First example is the church, what does the Roman Catholic Church do? It traches us to fear hell and hope for heaven, as we place ourselves in the hands of its ministers. There we can pray, plead, for mercy, forgiveness and help, but we also experience comfort and peace of mind as we navigate our way -in that state of submission-. By whom? The almighty and his dressed up minions. Our mind is shocked by the frock, it goes blank, and if we believe we in God we believe we are captured and destined to suffer or be shown mercy depending on how we interpret and follow the minions or the word.

When leaders project weakness they inspire their followers to feel weak, which makes it even more easy to keep them in their prey hypnosis (hint : Corbyn)

Second example is the economy, how does this economic system present itself? It shows itself by people in suits who everyone believes wield great power, who manage and control a beast that can build and destroy our lives. We hear them speak about “this will stimulate the economy” or “this will hurt the economy” as if they are feeding and taming Baäl. They are already superior to us, they fight the fight for us, we are not in the hands of the monster but in the cradle of those that fight it. We are asked to do our part : Work hard.

Sanity by one definition is the state of mind in which we respond only to actual cues in our internal or external environment in relation to our needs. A man who starts singing the national anthem loudly in the toilet or starts to undress in the kitchen we think is crazy. We’d ask : “Why?”. It is actually almost impossible to do something without any cause, our physical body has no inclination to suddenly commit to random behaviour, and rightly so. This means that we have to be cued to do most things we do. We can be hypnotized by situations that do not provide us with a cue, internally or externally, and then we will wait for one to occur. Fear can make us reject cues, so it is easier to hypnotize a fearfull person, and believing we are in a situation where no action is needed will also desensitize us to cues.

Our mental state is : We are not predators, we are cared for in our predicament, we should not show initiative, we would only hurt ourselves. Those who do are “Risk takers”, not like us!

The people that want to keep earning income from fossil fuels, that want us to be hard workers, are using all the means at their disposal to keep us in the submissive state, the state in which we are waiting for cues. Of course they will never provide them, they will not remind us of something that may trigger exploration or action. We see this with Scott Morrison in Australia, he only talks about money, his body language projects nothing, his internal state must be one of resentment of people and their idiotic worries, and when you hear him speak you really don’t hear anything else but calming pragmaticism in his voice. His facial expression is one of oblivion and torture, he is suffering more than you yet he’s not aware of anything to worry about.

At the same time people are pleading him to do things. The citizen of Australia believe they are in the hands of this government and need to plead, ask for help. They can not overcome the belief that they are in the hands of their government, that the system of neat calm people has power over them. They think it has. The fires in Australia have devestated many lives, people who are now in need of help. Morrison has allied with the fires by not showing any emotion of compassion other than with his own fate. He has used the fires like a religious leader would use a solar eclipse. It is said he believes the fires fit in his system of beliefs about an end time and rapture, a process where individuals will suddenly disappear because God took them up to heaven. The irony would be that Morisson himself is a hypnotized submissive person.

We need to snap ourselves out of this hypnosis, there is no force field around neat people in suits, they are not more powerfull than you and me, they should not stop us from responding to our reality, which will become a lot more harsh if we decide to explore it. The economy is not going to save us, not one that builds infrastructure and only looks at money, not human lives, as a measure of achievement. Why do those banks with neat people manage our money? What gives them that right? On every level we need to decide if we still need to be passive, if we need to pray, plead or take other measures. Who is served by our passive attitude, what can we do to improve our chances today. Because only when we are actually in the claws or a tiger or lion or being mauled by a bear, we should be passive.

We have written about the Roboeconomy, this is the economy that aknowledges automation and robotics as a means of producing our wealth, but does not want humans to keep competing with those machines. This is achieved by making the machines run on renewables, so that humans and they do not compete for the same fossil fuels, but each has their own energy sources that are not on the market.

This type of economy is not compatible with the current economy because the current economy tries to maximize bank cashflow by expanding the use of fossil fuels and creating markets for everything. More trade means more cashflow and more dependence on bank credit. Fossil fuels have had a major role in establishing the power of banks we see today, fossil fuels are stored energy and they can and have been made available to people through credit, and every money transaction we make shifts the access to fossil fuels to the producers of wealth (if they use fossil fuels).

Its extremely hard to get away from the fossil fuel economy because we are so indoctrinated to respect banks and see them as allies in our quest for wealth. In fact they are a major obstacle, they need our dependence on them and to that end they drive up the price of anything we are interested in. Flying is a exception because flying generates cashflow in the destintation and drives greed there, so people with money are encouraged to spend it on holidays, not on anything that reduces the power of banks.

How to reduce the power of banks? The best way to do that is to build renewable energy sources without going into debt. If you do go into debt to realize say a solar farm, you are pricing the debt into the solar energy you produce, and that causes the price to reach for the fossil based energy price, and thus you undo any advantage to wealth creation due to using renewables. Banks always force you to increase the price to the ‘market price’ (one they usually control through fake trading on exchanges).

The way to reduce that power is to build renewable energy sources and use them for wealth creation without going into debt. Alternatively you could realize that solar farm by selling ownership to individuals, not investors or investment banks. You then repay in energy (kWh). The same goes for machines that make stuff. As a town you could own your own bread factory (even though bread is not a healthy food) or farm with electric equipment. You could provide for your own community from local sources. Banks will not support that, because such local economies do not need credit and do not participate in the market. To prevent those kinds of economies from developing banks and other big agro companies try to restric local farming, trading, credit creation etc. and they force the price of food down so it out ‘competes’ the local or biological or organic farming produce (at a cost to f.il the amazon and the environment).

We have to get to the Roboeconomy though, and this is a war of attrition. While our food security is collapsing we need to untie ourselves from the market matrix that becomes increasingly unreliable. We need to own the land (that has been priced up by banks so we need them for mortgages) and the real estate (that has been priced up by banks so we need mortgages). we need to come together and find the cash to do these things. Banks at the same time try to lower our income to the level where we can exist but not develop any initiative. They also lobby for rules that make anything we do without them hard.

It seems the western world is sinking in a sea of dispair due to financialization. The pest of bankers that are involved in anything and everything. Why is a house 500.000 Euro that was 40.000 Euro 20 years ago? What value does it bring to the owner? Is it like a machine in a factory that increases productivity 4% yielding 100.000 Euro extra on an annual basis so it can be written of in 5 years? No it is a money sink that banks created so you can’t do anything to free yourself from their grip. Working with this economy is like fighting with other fish to swim deeper into a net. The ones deepest are often helped to drive the others crazy “the good stuff will happen to you when you are rich!”. Its a simple marketing trick.

Eroding the need for credit by building renewable energy sources is the best way to forge ahead to a society where needs are taken care of, houses are owned, people can rely on their jobs and machines are not our enemy. Less bank power will allow politics to propose laws that make machines serve the entire community, not just the competing producer. Producers will compete over quality, not cashflow and turnover. Life will be so much easier. The lazy bankers will have to find something to do that is less leechy though.

When we can use all inventions and common sense because there is no more pressure to create fossil cashflow for banks, we can create renewables that generate much more energy than fossil does now, 2500 times more. We will have so much solar and wind that we can cool our farms to grow crops, we can oxygenize the oceans, we can grow biomass to capture CO2 and store that Carbon back into our Earth, all using machines, robots, AI and techniques like low pressure desalination that is no pushed out of sight by the high pressure and cost reverse osmosis lobby. Banks and their economic philophy that assumes infinite resources and drives people to behave like locusts needs to go. Now you know how.

Our oceans are losing oxygen. This is because they are warming up, and warmer water can contain less gasses. Nitrogen, CO2 and O2 are dissolved (along with other gasses like methane) and will gas out as our oceans warm. The warming is hard to prevent as only a small percentage of sunlight that hits our oceans is reflected. Large parts of our oceans are already anoxic, and fish can’t live without oxygen, even if they only need very little.

We have to do something about our oceans, because gradual acidification due to absorbtion of CO2 from the atmosphere is a problem for its oxygen generating plantlife, as well as all other life. Acidification inhibits growth, especially in cell processes during procreation, in other words, acidification makes it harder for many species to procreate.

Any CO2 that is turned into O2 and sugars through the well known photosynthetic process is a win against acidification. We have written that to achieve more photosynthesis we can pump nutrients from deeper water to the surface, to fix the nitrogen shortage. Another limiting factor is iron. Many people have looked into this and its actually a viable way to increase oxygen production and stimulate life in the oceans. Sadly companies involved in this have been obstructed or have failed.

A paper considering deep ocean fertilization was against it on the grounds that it would help (in several ways) but if we stopped we would have warmed the water more. Of course there is only one thing our oceans are going with current CO2 levels and emissions : Warmer! Due to above described problems from acidification there actually is a window in which we can try, of about 30 years some estimate.

So what can we do? We could start growing seaweed near the surface on a gigantic scale, fertilized by deep ocean water we pump to the surface using wave pumps. That’s an idea. We could increase ocean albedo in some way, by creating something reflective that floats well. We have seen enormous pumice islands, these have prevented warming of the ocean below it. We could create something artificial with the same effect. We have written about floating islands of biomass, grown at sea for instance. We could use plastic as well, that would still be a good tradeoff against boiling oceans.

So what would it take to actually capture carbon at sea and adding oxygen to the deeper oceans so fish an trhive (and capture carbon as well). It would in fact be a matter of generating electricity, then using that to split water down below, then burning the hydrogen (or using it as fuel) at the surface, while leaving the oxygen dissolved in the deep water.

Then you would have to have a CO2 reactor at the surface, the availability of water would be a plus. You use the H2 in the following reaction

CO₂ + 2 H⁺ + 2 e⁻ → CO + H₂O

Then you are left with highly reactive CO, which you can turn into C and O2. Of course the available Hydrogen can also be used to make hydrocarbons, methan and even oils, which can then be sunk to the ocean floor and stay there. This process, which removes Carbon and H2 from oils and gas from our atmosphere have gotten a lot of attention.

Even though its kind of the premise of this post, using oceanic real estate to fight climate change makes a lot of sense, because it is much easier to traverse, is extremely vast so there is plenty of room. Here are a few more methods we found :

Recently more direct methods of turning CO2 into Carbon have been developed using liquid metal as a cathalyst. This method works at room temperature.

” Cerium-containing LM were utilised as an electrocatalytic system, successfully converting CO₂ to carbonaceous and graphitic products at room temperature. “

Another way is to use Magnetite, which can be primed using H2 to cause the decomposition of CO2 into Carbon.

” The oxygen-deficient magnetite, which is obtained by flowing H₂ gas through the powder magnetite at 300°C for 2h, efficiently decomposes CO₂ into C at 300°C.  “

Methods using lower cost metals have been developed, using Copper and Tin. Of course we should not be surprised about the possibility of splitting CO2 back into its constituents or even making methane with it, after all plants do it all the time. The metals available to them are mainly Iron, Zinc, Copper and Manganese. As rust can be photoactivated oxygen evolution may even have occured without life. Once life harnessed the water splitting ability of iron, binding CO2 into cellulose and sugars became an option that provided much needed and lighter protection than Calcium.

Of course the easiest way to return CO2 back to the deep ocean would be to use a floating plant that can stand the acidification and spread long enough. According to geologists this happened when an ancient version of Duckweed covered an enormous sweet water lake close the the North Pole (can’t find source). There is no salt water version but we can certainly create sweetwater basins to grow duckweed in our oceans!

When sequestering CO2 we should really look at the option of also providing more O2 to our oceans. Oceans are a better source of CO2 than our atmosphere because the CO2 dissolve to higher concentrations. This may make the ocean the best place to capture and sequester carbon and return hydrocarbons back into our Earths crust.