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It sounds ok, a ‘fuel crunch’, a crunchy fuel situation, like potato chips on the couch, but its going to be a disaster. It will happen too. The fossil fuel distribution system has gotten a beating by Putin’s stupid war, and the reoganization is just keeping parts of the West running, albeit with higher fuel prices. However the nr of refinieries for the US is just enough to serve the country at the higher prices. The US is one refinery fire away from disruption, or maybe two.

Fuel prices are not elastic, which is an economic term for ‘if there is less we just make it more expensive and the economy will adjust’. The slight variations we see now mean people drive less, essential services become more expensive. But in countries like France, the US, Canada you can’t live without fuel in a certain range. If prices move up more things stop happening, soceity falls apart. Germans army in the past made analysis that showed only a tiny fuel shortage could cause serious disruption. Fuel delivery strikes in France and the US made places grind to a halt.

Now this is still playing around, most people don’t think about the economy as being based on a fuel supply, like a diver with an oxygen tank. Most people think its a matter of money, but money only makes it possible to get the fuel to where it is used. This is why a slight fuel crunch as we see now expresses itself in higher fuel prices. A serious fuel crunch is something we should have started to avoid from the moment we realized fossil fuels are a danger to life on Earth, or maybe when we realized the reserves where not endless, at any time after ~1912, instead we have had a century of assholes selling oil at all cost to everyone, even driving a hard fight against anyone who was serious about a plan B (Elon Musk but others before him). The economy has never been about creating a safe society, but only about one thing : Cashflow for banks.

I think the discussion to prepare for a real fuel crunch should be public. It is like a war situation if it happens, because wars are won by the armies with the most fuel (ok, advanced chips and morale and brainpower also play a major role). The quest should be to remove any fossil fuel need in essential services first. So replace all ambulances with EVs, secure solar/wind energy for hospitals, fire services, police stations, then schools. Farmers can’t switch to no fuel but should, there’s already an electric revolution going on on farms. However fertilizer which is running short now because of the gas crunch, can not be easily replaced. So imagine the worst case cruch : No fertilizer, no farming, no food and above all no fuel to make what we need to do all the above.

To any future historian the genocidal path our leaders keep us on and the mental monoculture promoted by the economistic media will look totally insane. The banks do not want to disrupt their cashflow and work hard to lock us into obligations that fix our behaviour and prevent us from preparing. If you work a day job at a gas station for example, and you rent a crappy appartment without garden, how are you going to prepare for anything? If you are homeless because banks have stopped building to drive up home prices how are you going to prepare? If you worked hard (complied with economism) to earn the best spot at Lake Como with a view, are you going to destroy that life by being a prepper? Even then you probably can’t afford it.

Still the realization will come, and it seems the strategy of banks to make us realize slowely, make us not care about people that are hurtning, make us give up as soon as it is our turn, all the while not changing the path of society, while of course there are all kinds of cool things you can do to be ‘green’. Bottom line is if you won’t need banks for something (so driving an EV charging it yourself) banks are not jumping for joy to help you.

The formula for preparation is simple : If your community doesn’t need fossil fuels anymore you’re done. You will find it will also not need a lot of money anymore. Better start now, because without fossil fuels or plenty of renewables there will be no production and distribution of goods and services, and so you won’t be able to deal with the problesm you face. Good luck!

The fight against rising global average temperatures has two approaches. One is to try to stop adding heat trapping gasses, CO2 and Methane to the atmosphere. The other is to try to reduce the heat that can accumulate in our atmosphere by reflecting it back into space.

As long as solar energy is travelling as light and not absorbed by a greenhouse gas or other material and converted into molecular movement (heat), there is an opportunity to bounce it back to where
it came from. The term for this reflection of Earth of solar energy is called Albedo, and it is part of climate models.

We are seeing significant warming at the moment because sea ice on the poles has been reduced and the ocean absorbs most solar heat. Oceans also radiate heat at night, so they cool down, but some of it is mixed to lower layers and is slowly warming the oceans. On land dark features will absorb a lot of sunlight and warm the air, deserts are lighter so reflect more heat back. Deserts also lose heat fast at night making them quite cold. Clear skies are important for reflecting heat back, we already know that because nights are warmer when there are clouds overhead.

Many groups are involved in albedo enhancement, but many also lack the funds to take serious action. This while albedo enhancement seems the only way to keep land and oceans cool enough for life to survive in the near term. India and Spain and Niger are being baked, people can barely survive, water is disappearing in California, all because of heat being trapped by CO2. We need to reduce the heat that can ‘stick’ to our planet, and increase albedo/reflection.

There are questions that I can’t find answers too, which are related to actualy climate profit from albedo.

1. If light is reflected and passes through the atmosphere twice, does it still cause less heating/warming compared say zero reflection (blackbody absorbtion). How much extra warming does reflecting cause?
2. Can I cool a landzone reliably with mirrors, what is the effect on warming in a warm region, how much effect does air temperature have? Can we develop a model to predict the effect of reflection?

The above questions may be answerable by specialists, scientists, and I will try to find them. But the second question may be answered by a real world experiment by Google at Ivanpah.

Google could run a number of experiments where local ground and air temperatures are measured as the mirrors of its enormous solar power plant are tilted in different directions, mainly being aligned with the sun or perpendicular to it to see the difference between optimal and minimal reflection. By taking the ground abledo, the surface covered by the mirrors, the air temperature at different altitudes, a lot can be learned about abledo enhancement. Of course this comes at the cost of some energy production, however a more ready laboratory is hard to imagine, and its in line with Google’s attempts to contribute to the climate fight.

To do this one would need to create a team of modellers and meterological experts to weed out the possible ways the results can be wrong, then plan a sequence of mirror movements on specific days. Then over the course of a few weeks it should be possible to make enough measurements to build a model for morrir based albedo enhancement effect. If you think this is a good idea and want to contribute to the effort, or you are Google and agree this should be tried (or has been tried and you can send me a link), please get in touch with me at info@greencheck.nl. I am aware of some scientists and projects regarding Albedo, but maybe its best to keep this out of the academic sphere as it tends to slow things down. Treat it like R&D for climate solutions. Hope to hear from you!

We live in a competitive world, but this makes little sense. It is true consumers like choices, but ultimately they only spend on one of the products. Banks however are incentivised to sell more loans and thus try to load debt on all players in the economy, egging on competition.

Companies

If you say a company tries to provide a product or service to people who want it, you can also be open on how this is happening. If the product or service is vanilla, ‘OEM’ then only cost matter, and one can be open about everything that goes on. If the product is unique based on a group of skilled, motivated individuals, you can also just open up about what goes on. Even patents can be opened to anyone for use, only banks care which company workers get hired into, because bigger companies justify bigger loans.

Politics

In politics the same is true. The secrecy is about wheeling and dealing often against the interest of voters. Usually for the interest of banks and fossil fuel companies, industrial corporations that have again concentrated power. This is not what politics should be about, it should be about making laws to secure a happy healthy and safe society.

Science

Scientific institutes are often caught in financial concerns that make them do immoral things. They can get funding for researching and perfecting a technology that should actually just be marketed, but banks don’t want them to (several RE technologies are stuck that way). They should be hypertransparent about their finances, about the supporters, about actualy progress if their research is not fundamental. Internet was invented to make information better available. Twitter is the most unobstructed way to broadcast timestamped information on it.

Citizen

Citizen meanwhile should have total privacy. There is no need to share bank data , health data etc. with anyone we do not chose to share it with. This ensures a check on whatever goes on. You would not accept a stranger approaching you in the street that asks about what’s in your wallet or where you where yesterday. No insurere needs to know your ailments if its going to not insure you for them or just throw you out. Again banks are the main drivers behind hash treatment and privacy infringement.

Basic premise : Companies and politics need to be 100% transparent, individuals have to have 100% privacy.

Method : Use twitter to report company transactions that are to be transparent.

Politics : All communications of individual politicians run over twitter (without the need to respond to comments). all communications of groups run via a group twitter account. Links to documents included.

Corporations : All financial activities over a certain sum are reported through Twitter. There must be XML formats and data stores accesible.

The above analysis is not correct, Biden only has to point out how wealth is created, but he can’t stay within economistic limits, he has to start from the ground up, first principles if you wish, the roboeconomic first principles of wealth creation. The formula is simple :

Wealth = Energy X Skills X Raw materials

So any product or service is a consequence of some combination of the three factors where you can replace energy with fossil energy, sunlight, nuclear energy, human effort, robots. Skills can be brain power, computer power (AI), some mechanism (like a watch) or specific software for example. The Raw materials are whatever is bein manipulated into something that represents wealth, or is closer to representing it.

Biden has to say that because fossil energy is in short supply, there is not enough to go around, which resolves itself in competitive buying and countries no longer selling them abroad. The solution is not to blame oil companies but to add more renewable energy sources, to prioritize production of wind turbines, (thin film) solar panels, solar thermal panels, EVs etc. All part of the Roboeconomy, because in the Roboeconomy everything runs on renewable energy.

If Biden did that, with a stimulus package to support rapid increase of energy production (prioritized over reducing energy consumption!), he would cause a drop in energy prices, which would give more producers access to energy to produce, which would result in more product being made, moved, processed, and more wealth created at a lower price.

It is amazing that at this time though the Commerce department is picking a fight with Asian solar panel producers who offer their panels at a lower price than the CoC likes, resulting in a reduction of imports and installations. That is exactly the opposite of what should happen.

Energy is a fundamental factor in wealth creation, and the more you have at your disposal the better. If a country wants to dump their solar panels in your country you take them and say thank you. Prepare to make them yourself and recycle/repair them, make them lower EROEI, do all the things to optimize the amount of energy for maximum wealth creation.

The Republicans don’t want you to be smart, if a Republican talks to you he/she hopes you are dumb. But as you can see Skills are an important factor in Wealth creation, so the more educated people there are, the bigger the chance they become skilled and able to help produce Wealth (or invent something clever to replace their involvement, AI for example). So education should be the second priority, preferably technical. People need to learn how stuff works around them. This is not an absolute requirement for the Roboeconomy, but it is in the transition away from the fossil credit economy the fossil companies want us to believe we are stuck in..

Most trained philosophers will probably have a panic attack from the way I treat concepts in this post, but I was triggered by a remark by Grimes in her interview with Lex Fridman. He says “Love can make you do irrational things” and Grimes reponds by asking “Are they rational or are they irrational”. I hope to answer this question, not the question asked but the question implied.

The question was embedded in a discussion about AI and technology of the future, where the question was how our robot overlords would deal with us. Clearly Grimes is grappling with the concept of love and altruism in the discussion. She states that she think motherhood should be better rewarded, become economically accounted for (which would make the sexes more equal and hints at a Brave New World style birthing process). With all this she shows herself to be quite rational, her world model is based on her world story more than a collection of experiences that associate without being named or linked to a conscious narrative.

Hyperrationality is often associated with cold heartedness, insensitivity. Often we see crazy professors in movies and we instantly intuit that its someone who’s ideas got the better of him. Often we see that the scientist or villain is someone that took a reasoning to its logical conclusion, except that the conclusion was to destroy humanity. Often the goal is wooorld domination, for what purpose is often unknown.

The insensitivity of (at least in movies) hyper rational humans does not mean they do not have an emotional basis though, its just that they are not demonstrated or not apparent from what is shown. My conclusion is that at the end of any chain of reasoning there is an emotion. How to find out? Well, just follow the chain : I want to destroy the world (why?) because it will give me power (why do you need power) because then I won’t be disturbed (why don’t you want to be disturbed) Because I was disturbed in the past and it hurt my feelings (the emotion). Or : We need to drop to 10.000 feet (why) Because there’s another plane at this altitude (why is that significant) Because it could crash into us (why would we avoid that?) Because we would die (Why would we worry about that) Because I don’t want to die! (Why not) Because I love my life/wife/children/future (the emotion). Any train of reasoning when followed will be found to have an emotion at the end, even the civil servant that is just following orders, he doesn’t want to be fired, follow that line..

So why do we feel that rationality is unemotional. Why do we even get cold when we get to detailed in a conversation about abstractions. I can’t explain this defnitively but first there’s a brain phenomenon that has not been highlighted much, which is the inhibition of inactive areas by active areas. So if we are thinking of one thing, as a direct consequence we are not thinking of other things. There’s a kind of contrast enhancement effect which is mediated by inhibitory neurons, and it can work between many different areas. In cases it does not work the ‘patient’ will have epileptic seizures. Epilepsie is basically a positive neural activity feedback loop. This doesn’t happen if you are on a ketonic diet, which is a known treatment for several mental illnesses.

So when we are thinking or focussing on one thing we really can’t think of other things. This explains why we can be completely hypnotized when we are made to focus too much. For the discussion of rationality we know its an auditory/motoric interaction, and it can go from one concept to the next, and the more complex and abstract it gets, the more inhibition is necessary to keep our brain from screwing things up (with random activity).

The abstractness often results in constructs of quite principal nature, meaning the more primary regions are used, when we talk about visual art, architecture, or philosophy or politics. We have to focus so much we suppress our feelings, our more primitive brain, also because we have nothing to fear as we are consumed in our own world. A hyperrational person can access all the relevant experiences in his thinking through thought. He/she can reactivate the patterns of activity, can imagine what someone is talking about or describe their own imagination. But one can also be hyper-rational and never have left the house, or be it about quantum dynamics, or world domination.

The immorality associated with rational or hyperrational individuals may be explained in several ways : Less (self) loving individuals, possibly autistic, psychotic people that have developped good rationality will be more or less be forced to use it and reason about every situation to cope in the social context. Being morally deprived to begin with (morality is the intuition to protect life) or extremely hatefull to (specific) others due to mistreatment can bring about mad criminality or mad dictatorship. Hitler was obviously very rational, which is not the same as logical.

Rationality is usually treated as synonymous with logical thinking, but there is no relation in my opinion. There is almost no real logical thought in daily life. “I need to order salmon at the fishmonger because we have guests for dinner tomorrow” sounds logical but is hiding a lot of assumptions. Do I really need to order them? How much do I need it? Why does having guests mean I must order salmon? A lot of the world knowledge is not expressed yet the thought is rational. This has been the eye opener for the logical positivists that thought they could turn thinking in a mechanistic formulaic process, Wittgenstein I, but they could not.

Then logic is followed its a motoric process. I believe logic reasoning is imagined action. We have only one motor output usually, have to decide what to do. This is what causes there to be this true or false aspect to logic. Full disclosure, I was trained in logic deduction about 30 years ago. I loved it, I sensed it could be my world, so pure, clean (even with attempts to make it more fuzzy). No villain or psychopath will be truely thinking logically, but what happens is that people get stuck imagining a limited set of options, and when the pressure is high enough there is no room to imagine anything else.

I learned that a russian tank commander had committed suicide on learning his tanks which had come out of the stored reserves of Russia where mostly unusable (this is written during the Russian invasion of Ukraine). Thieves had robbed any equipment with prescious metals, which could be targeting systems, radios, control systems. This man made a rational decision to end his life. This can only be because he was facing machine like eventualities. Logical imperatives. He could not flee, he could not face his superiors, he could not bare going into battle. Maybe he loved the young men too much to want to be the one to lead them to near certain death. In the end he must have had emotions of grief, anger, sadness, love and sensed an opportunity to be a force for good, by not being there.

So is rationality morally superior? No, I don’t think so. Maybe if the moral judgement only hinges on numbers, which can not be directly observed, felt, experienced. You are in a bunker and there’s a telegram that reads : We will either support the eastern front or the western front, but both is impossible. These are moral conundrums movies are made about. Usually the hero shows superior morality by not making a choice, by saving both. In such instances we feel rationality as almost immoral. Yet the hero merely asserts his emotions which redirects the rational process towards his new action. In the end rationality, morality, logic and emotion are all factors in decision making, the quality of which is determined by experience and the ability to love.

The world economy was for the last 40-50 years based on control of coal, oil and gas and the ability to allow it to enter the market though the use of mainly the USD. This had everything to do with the dominance of the US, with bases in most parts of the world. The reach of US dominance has been shrinking in recent decades, as oil, coal and gas producers tried to challenge the idea all fossil fuels are sold in USD, at prices determined on US trading exchanges. The US has been fighting this erosion, because it is the basis of its power, which works like this :

Because fossil fuels are traded in USD and the US can print USD, the US is never short of fossil fuels, as long as it uses a sizable amount of it to prevent this USD trading rule from slipping. It is the same as when you hold the gun, you can keep holding the gun, when you lose it to someone else, you can not grab it without getting shot, or the first that gets to the sword is the king.

There is more sides to this dominance, its deeper than just the markets, its also based on expertise of oil/gas/coal companies. That expertise is protected. For example now that Russia has gone mad, the oil extraction experts have left the country, and Russia’s oil infrastructure is going to deteriorate unless it develops skills on its own. Same happend to Venezuela, or any country that does not want to comply.

Iran is an example of a country that tried to sell oil for Gold, but was quickly sanctioned. Iraq same story. Egypt tried to get from under the US puppet government recently, but failed. It was facing hunger because the US printed USD to hoard food and fuel, while Egypt could not, but yet Egypt was a supplier of oil the the US.

The refinery infrastructure is also vulnerable, sparse. This is not trivial, Iran can not turn its own oil into fuel, nor can Iraq. Some defense functions like fighter jets need special fuel. It seems Russia is not using much of its air dominance because it can’t make much of the necessary fuel.

Because of the global dominance of the US and the global oil/gas market (or the illusion of it) we all feel like our Euro, Dollar, Swiss Franc etc, is hard currency, we expect to use it. We expect our stock in NY or Frankfurt to be sellable, we have a global financial system. When we transfer USD to Singapore it is going to have roughtly the same buying power as in Amsterdam.

This can change. The determining factor is the shared fossil fuel market under a managed currency basket (USD, JPY,CHF,EURO,CAD,GBP) with relatively stabile exchange rates. If the fossil supply desintegrates for some reason, the currencies will all develop differently, as if a continent split into islands.

As Russia invaded Ukraine recently, and the world was trying to figure out how to deal with its oil/gas sanctions, China looked on with some trepidation, and signs of the above scenario where apparent. China had to openly say it would support the world economy in the far future, as well as it would not withdraw Chinese companies listed on US exchanges.

The latter would definitely happen if the world became a group of autonomous energy islands, which it will become some time in the near future. The reason for this is simple : If the energy used to make a product in China has no relationship with the energy used in the US (through a shared currency) then US money has no value in China. Especially if the production of goods and services in China is sufficient for all needs in China. A chinese manufacturere would have no use for US dollars, it would not spend them in the US, nobody else would have any use for it. Today any chinese manufacturer HAS a use for USD because it can buy oil/gas/coal which is usefull to a manufacturer.

So what would happen if every continent developed its own energy supply, not fossil, not shared, not globally traded? The same things could be made on every continent, but there would be efficiency gains if one would make all the things needed in Europe.. in Europe.

Today, because banks want to remain important and because the US can fund oil consumption, and because of the artificial global oil market, the location of production is not too relevant. Banks made themselves more important by maximizing the distance between producer and consumer. This also helps with obfuscating abusive, criminal, ecologically damaging activities.

Thin film solar panels are solar panels where the photovoltaec element is very thin. Silicon is very brittle so the slices are relatively thick, and you have to encapsulated it in heavy glass and aluminium. A thin film or thin Silicon layer would be more bendable and able to be encapsulated in much lighter and less energy intensive materials like a plastic laminate. Because this would be cheaper it makes no sense to me we are not being flooded with thin film options.

Thin film Silicon panels or sheets are for sale but they are mysteriously expensive. More than 1,7 $ Per Watt. You can get 12-22 Volt flexible panels for campers, but those are non standard, and also ~$1,1 Per Watt. Thin film Silicon is cheaper to make also because less Silicon is required. It is ideal for flat roofs, and companies making them should be multiplying like rabbits. Covering the desert with thin film is way easier than using heavy silicon panels. Both have a plastic layer that could yellow, and yes, glass is a great UV filter, but some thin film panels pass all durability tests.

Mixed Metal “Amorpheous” Panels

Silicon works well because of its unique properties. Light, consisting of photons, has to move electrons in the panel, and this only happens if the push those electrons need is of a specific size. This is the so called “band-gap”. For Silicon its in a range from yellow light to near UV. A lot of sunlight however is in infra red (heat), which you could design a different material for with a specific bandgap. It was found that mixing metals can shift the bandgap of the individual metals. For IR you can mix Gallium and Arsenicum. There are many mixes possible, using Indium, Gallium, Germanium, Lead.

If you want to utilize the full variety of photons reaching Earth from the Sun you need to have a combination of material mixes, not just Silicon. These kind of cells are called ‘multi junction’ cells. They where originally designed for space and concentrated solar power plants. It turns out to be quite difficult to make them (at least that’s what is being said), because of differences in thermal expansion and of course the challenges with extracting the electrons. Maybe industry or banks objected to the use of the materials for this purpose or the supply was not going to scale.

Organic Thin Film

Based on “How farming giant seaweed can feed fish and fix the climate” one would want to grow kelp at large scale even not for profit.

“The kelp draw in so much carbon dioxide that they help de-acidify the water, providing an ideal environment for shell growth.”

Low Cost Model for Valuing the Benefits

Negative_Carbon_Via_Ocean_Afforestation

Seaweed Solutions does it have solutions?

Greenwave Organization does it do anything yet?

AtSeaNova Seems active

Scotland Experimental seaweed farms

Seasteading Institute Costa Rica

Modelling Seaweed Production

Aird Fada Seaweed Farm

Dutch Seaweed Group