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.
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?
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!
To make it possible for people to make informed decisions we need to simulate the entire planet and all human activites and average weather patterns so we can both know what will happen and experiment.
Format (v 0.1):
Location bounding box (coordinates)
Time period, start, end, steps
Input data streams
Output data streams (what is replaced in the output)
Functions
The idea is to have functions that work on data sets that are available and feed back data into the simulator. The functions can be matched to locations on Earth, so that one can mutate the parameters using the function if it is ‘active’ for a location.
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.
Oil & gas companies and the GOP are blaming Biden for this round of inflation, which is largely caused by rising fossil-fuel prices, & Biden's so locked into fossil fuels that he can't mount a counter-narrative to vilify the actual villains.
It's climate politics in a nutshell.
— Dr. Genevieve Guenther (@DoctorVive) May 12, 2022
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.
Competitive inhibition in the brain funnily this describes exactly what i theorized in this post, that language thinking inhibits the emotional brain (archicortex). But then again I was a neuroscientist for a decade.
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.
Left the solar spectrum, right the sensitivities of different types of metal/semi metal mixes..
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.
Use of solar spectrum Multijunction solar cells use the solar spectrum more efficiently.
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.
Tesla is developing a bipedal robot that can replace human labour in places where the work is boring and/or dangerous. Amazon has a robot called Digit, but its not been in the news lately, it has strange legs that look alien. Boston Dynamics has developed several robots, more humanoid, but that one is probably waay to expensive. It carries a fossil generator on its back..
Walking robots are not easy, the double pendulum effect, or predicting what force you need to achieve what result when you have several degrees of freedom and inertia is hard, even for humans. It would be amazing if Tesla managed to make a reasonably agile robot in a year, but then again both actuator, sensor, analysis, energy storage, even part design and manufacturing is advancing at such a pace that its possible. It also helps that the teams no longer try to use math all the way, but more itterative methods to get the right plan for movements.
Bipedal robots can be way more efficient than drones, way more usefull in environments designed for humans
Optimus development should be going on in each first world nation, to push the boundaries of technology, but also because we need the help. We need bipedal robots. We need ‘Roadbots’ (autonomous mobile electric robotic platforms), because of climate change. Work that is dangerous is increasing, because working outside under the beating sun is becoming a problem. Such that you can now buy cool vests (ventilated vests) for people working in roadbuilding and construction.
If Tesla builds a lightweight bipedal mobile platform that can do real work (you could actually imagine a light weight system plugging itself into extra wall power if it has to use high torque for longer periods of time), that is already a game changer, it does not have to be able to keep a conversation going. I have seen videos online of a robot that can explain why its doing things, but its not clear if that is scripted or not. It will happen, I have written about it before, the hardest thing is to get the robot to have an idea of what a human is and how its behaviour could be a risk to humans. This is also hard even for humans. Humans love, and the fun fact about love is that it takes whatever comes in and makes a ‘thing to protect’ out of it. Its a messy way to do things, it will be very interesting how this pans out when done by an artificial neural net in a humanoid body.
A bipedal android that can be produced in large numbers for relatively little money will immediately be bought by mining companies, logistics, farming, chemical companies. The fun thing is that if they are as robust as Tesla cars, and the owner has its own renewable energy, they can work contiously for a fraction of the cost of a human. I described this consequence years ago because its part of my Roboeconomic vision (this is also a post on Roboeconomy.com).
The (slightly updated) question fundamental to the Roboeconomy is:
If we had a machine (system of robots) that could make everything we need that ran on renewable energy it could maintain, would we:
Be out of a job and not earning money, so unable to buy anything?
Be free to use whatever it produced without cost or based on a basic income ?
Of course everything would be free or we’d have a basic income, we’d have robots maintaining everything intcluding themselves. We’d have them set up factories, flatten the ground, make solar panels, install them, make more robots, build chip fabs, run them (also a very good place to use them). With AI and Robots and renewables a new kind of activity would come alive on Earth, we’d be pets or as Elon Musk once put it “We’re the bootloader for AI”
An important thing to note is that the Roboeconomy is not like our current fossil/nuclear/burning stuff economy. The burning does not occur. The energy is abundant, robots are expanding the capacity all the time. We won’t need to fight over it. Our current fossil habit is a serious risk because it generates objectives in people’s minds that are destructive, genocidal “If only those Ukrainians didn’t use all my gas an piss on me, if only I could eradicate them”. If those kind of ideas get hoisted onto an AI before we get to the abundant renewables phase we are in a lot of trouble. We are in a lot of trouble.
In the Roboeconomy nobody will own the energy first. Banks will not exist anymore, in fact the big bank we will have is being launched by Tesla (although not announced at the Q1 ER). Batteries will be the banks, energy will be traded for a currency the owners invent, the tax office will probably hand it out to the people on a monthly basis or something.
Not sure what happened to Digit. Its Bezos mindset that works against breakthroughs although he seems to have ideals. He does not think he should solve other people’s problems. Zuckerberg also really doesn’t care about suffering in the world. Many people do however, and my hope is those people will be the ones to bring about the Roboeconomy as an act of kindness.
Pyrite solar cells have been researched for decades now. What gives, why aren’t they made. Publications on them have been positive, but also about postponing their arrival. One of the reasons not to allow new cheaper solar tech on the market is obviously the impact on fossil revenue.
Materials with good PV potential. FeS has high potential efficiency
Secondary to that first replacement threat is that solar energy technology that requires a lot of fossil energy to make is prefered to types that require very little energy. Silicon solar is about the most energy intensive you can get, it requires silicon but also glass, aluminum, results in heavy products that need to be hauled and can break. But all these negative aspects are economic positives : More cashflow, more fossil fuel use.
Thin film solar, which includes Pyrite PV, will be super cheap, and with Pyrite there is no shortage of the stuff on Earth. But it may well be that it has only been a research fund excuse, so a method to get funds. It may well be its still keeping a lot of research alive (and thus may not become a solved problem). It may be that all the research is controlled by Shell (part of it is!). If you see people professionaly explaining what the problems are and why its hard you have to suspect some type of supression (because who would make a voluntary day job out of that message?).
So I will list positive and negative publications below.
