Month: November 2021

We should all have learned by now that there is nothing more imporant on this Earth than airtravel. It doesn’t matter if the world is fighting a pandemic, the airtravel industry gets bailed out and can skirt the rules, lie about airborn airquality and literally telling governments ‘checking for Covid is not our job!’. Holland today may have sacrificed many lives because the KLM and Schiphol thought nothing of restrictions to their activities. We have no choice to submit to this tyranny..

Funny then that this vastly polluting industry, burning billions of gallons of fossil fuel every year, dumping many tons of half burned soot around airports (and chemicals used to prevent molding in the fuel), that this industry is looking for alternatives. Spoiler : There is none in the short term.

But who would have guessed humanity had such a powerfull ally in the search for non-fossil, non-greenhouse gas emitting fuels! Apart from this strange desire to use Hydrogen as a fuel, which also requires 70% more energy than batteries, which then of course needs to be produced. Its strange how these legacy industries produce such pressing demands for rapid deployment of renewables. And perhaps a blessing?

The options are several, but in any case this promises real action on growing biomass in new ways or generating sizable amounts of renewable energy. The world now uses almost 3 TerraWattHour of energy to fly. That is 3.000.000 MegaWattHours (MWh). You can produce that energy with 3.000.000 hectares of solar PV panels, which takes about 30000 km2. So if you cover 3/4 of Holland with solar panels our country could power global airtravel. Sadly there is 70% loss in the proposed use of Hydrogen, so we need about 20000 km2 more, so we end up with 1.2 times the surface of Holland covered with PV. Ok, Let’s do it!

You’d say “But Biomass!!”, and true, this is also a great idea. Seaweed farms could grow a lot, its been known since the 70’s and was one of the first topics I wrote about on this blog. Of course this takes a lot of time and work to scale up, and of course energy to convert. Its more complicated than solar PV for sure. Wind same thing. Of course nobody will complain if the air travel industry steps into growing seaweed big, like say spend $100 Billion on actually growing seaweed in the pacific.

For now it seems these are just promises to keep people from shutting air travel down to minimal proportions until electric air travel becomes practical. That is what is needed. We should all have learned from stupid CCS projects that never go anywhere, or not maybe (aaargh).

I think that we can see electric airtravel over say 700 km pretty soon, for small planes (~50 passengers) and so to get to the USA from Europe yo’d have to make 6/7 hops? So with 6/7 floating airports in the Atlantic the trip can be made. Of course its easy to put floating solar power plants around those airports to generate the electricity. In case the option of seaweed is taken seriously (which it must be right?) creating floating habitats cheaper than complete ships will likely become an industry. Also a win! In any case, its good to have such a powerfull industry on the side of massive deployment of renewable energy!

Banks want you to hate billionairs. You may think billionairs steal from you, but wait until you have thought about what banks do, and how vast their financial reserves are. Banks are backed by a central bank or federal reserve. Their funds are unlimited.

There is a reason for this being made a problem today, because before we would chear on the super rich, as a symbol of success. Now somehow billionairs are a bunch of criminals. What happened?

To make it super simple : There is now an exit route from the bank dominated world. There is a way to cut your credit needs and costs to zero. This means you will reduce your need for loans and support, even though prices have been maximized by bank loans in the market you are operating in. How? By using renewable energy. If you own all the energy capacity you need to manufacture what you want, then your need for credit drops to zero. And BANKS DONT LIKE THAT.

Now what are billionairs really? Peope with more than $1.000.000.000 in the bank? Often this is not the case. Often the number is derived from sale of the stock position of a billionair at the current stock price. But of course once you start selling the stock the price drops, after all whowever wants to buy wants to pay the lowest price, and you want to sell so you need to drop the price. Then you may still not find a buyer. Because the trading ‘channel’ of for example the NASDAQ (where TSLA trades) is quite narrow, a 50k share sale can drop the price if nobody is buying. 50k shares of about 993 million shares in circulation. Elon dropped the price of TSLA 30% recently by selling about 1 mln stock. So a stock – billionair is not as rich as it seems.

Many companies are totally owned by banks in the sense that they can not operate without the continuous consent of banks. What banks want is to own cashflow generating operations, but not really run them of course. They watch how companies develop and if they see a winner they push them into debt. All major car companies have been bailed out and are leaning on banks.

Who don’t? Tech companies mostly. You can easily spot it by the different attitude most of them have. Their capital costs (investments) have been low compared to add revenue they generate. These companies are doing things banks don’t like for example build large renewable energy installations, or like Tesla, start an energy company. Still because most of industry is in the pocket of the banks, maximizing profit and thus cost in any project, banks get a fair share and they can stifle progress in a zillion ways.

What they can’t stop is a person with cash. They can inject stupidity in the form of a bank-loyal CEO or other employee to make the startup waste money, but they can’t really stop it if the company owner is paying attention. Here you had Elon Musk that decided he wanted to start a financial services company with next to no money (couple of million), potentially undermining all of banking with Paypall (X.com) Yikes! He sold it, and went on to start an EV company called Tesla and a space technology company called SpaceX. The EV company almost got tanked by someone bleeding money until he was fired. SpaceX is still fought but has close ties with NASA and the Pentagon so what is a bank going to do..

Value comes from two factors : Whether you create make it or protect it. You can grow food, but if your lord has a weapon and can take it from you, I guess you’re a peasant paying 10% tax. Also if that lord doesn’t have a castle and can’t protect his stuff he will be run over and all his posessions will end up with people who can..

Banks used to create value by offering protection. This value was then abused mainly by making sure people do not cooperate and think they need money all the time (money creation was made super easy by the same banks and still is dead easy). Simple divide and conquer. Sow mistrust, don’t let people help each other. They where so good at it that kings and queens had to beg them because they where caught in wars they didn’t start or couldn’t afford.

But billionairs don’t have to care. They can whip out a 100 million and move millions of people in one direction or another. They can buy so much fossil fuels that a whole country runs dry. They are the real kings today, and they do pay taxes!

Bernie Sanders keeps hammering on his “pay your fair share” and then focuses on Elon Musk but Elon pays more than 50% tax. His companies pay lots of taxes (permits, licenses, road tax, customs) all his workers pay some tax, he pays VAT. In a way a company is just people working towards a limited set of goals, but tax wise they are not much different from a city full of entrepeneurs working towards many different goals. There’s just maximum cooperation.

Bernie wants you do hate the only people that can improve your fate, because if banks wanted to we would not have any climate change problems. Instead banks maximized fossil credit cashflow, and will try to keep doing that. If they fail (because renewables have become dirt cheap) they will be obsolete!

If you want to hate billionaris pick the right ones, the ones that are fully funded by banks. The Koch brother, those that drive fossil consuption, those that actually do the wrong thing. But beware, a billionair -can- do the right thing, a bank who has much bigger financial means, -can not-. Banks never do what is against their interest, which is to keep the fossil cashflow flowing, and in fact, they will attack and undermine anyone that may be a threat, including billionairs with your help.

We live under bank tyrants that have pushed humanity into an overburdened, polluting, resource depleting lifestyle that will soon crash due to its consequences. Then we have billionair kings that can move people, resources and intellect to find solutions to the risks we face. People without the means have no way to help anyone. So we should support our billionair kings when they do what we think is good. Not blindly attack them as if we don’t have a mind of our own.