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I needed a change. I was stuck in writing about climate change, renewable energy technology and frankly not feeling free or able to discover new opportunities. It was a video about the Medici that was the first stepping stone to get out, the Medici had several generations and each wielded power in different ways. The whole history is fascinating because it left traces all over Europe we still see today. One of the traces was a tunnel in the Alps of 75 meter long, at about 2896 or ~9000 feet altitude.

It stuck in my mind to go see that tunnel. It would mean about a 1200 km ride to the Alps, and then (in my mind) a hike up the mountain. The tunnel was used for trade on donkeys, so I figured it could not be that difficult to reach it. The col, or mountain pass, de Traversette has been proposed to be the place Hannibal crossed the Alps into Italy. This added some interest to the journey and I actually visited another place Hannibal is more likely to have used after visiting the tunnel. So i packed my sleeper car and drove to the Alps.

To travel light and easy in Europe I convert my station wagon (gasoline) to what I call a ‘Sleeper Car’. The backseat is removed so that the interior can house a comfortable matrass and boxes with clothes and cooking stuff. I made blinders for the windows for privacy. That’s all you really need. What you don’t need as a result is a hotel! I took a solar panel and battery charger with me, so that on the bright days I could charge the battery and use it to charge the laptop and phone in the evening. The other travel convienience I introduced was quitting coffee. Without a coffee habit your cost drop dramatically. If you’re not driving around you can easily live of 15,- euro a day. For sanitation lakes are excellent 😉 With this type of vehicle Europe is your oyster, there are no laws against sleeping in your car except in Holland and Belgium I know of.

My alpine experience is ZERO. I have been a cyclist for most op my life, and cycled up cols as a sport, but climbing at altitude has never been my thing. I love mountains, so this is why I was interested in this objective. My idea was to drive to the valley with acces to the col de la Traversette, on the french side, which is closer (and which happens to be the sunny side). Then just walk up to the tunnel. It was a bit harder than I thought.

I didn’t know that the valley was really secluded and more or less economically not happening. It’s not part of a large skiing area, most of it did not have cell phone coverage (which made using google maps difficult), the towns where apparently so empty at times people decided to place manaquins in all kinds of different positions and roles along the streets. It remained a bit creepy. Some bleached hotels had a real ‘The Shining’ atmosphere.

I settled at a camping, which charged 6,50 per night so that didn’t hurt, mainly for the shower. It had a population of guests many of which where hikers, some where role playing enthousiasts. It had no rules about campfires. People had started them all over the valley. It had a really free atmosphere. The Alps are not really rope climbing mountains, although I met some people coming down. There is a ‘Kira’ route which is for real alpine hikers, and the last lively town of Abries was full of hikers and enthousiasts.

According to Google Maps it was a 9 km hike to the top from my starting point. The starting point was at 1800 m (5905 feet) which turned out to be significant later. Hike is 500 meter at a modest incline, then 500 meter at a steep incline. I didn’t really check that out. I hiked for 3 and a half hours and reached the point on the picture, which is right after the 500 meter steep incline began. I had to stop, I had no energy left and I calculated I’d be down around six pm, quite late. I turned around, also because I didn’t want to break my motivation. A wise choice I think. The return walk was only one hour and I felt like I tasted a bit of the alpine experience. My heavy Timberlands had caused blisters though. I went to enjoy the french experience..

Another name for my objective is the Monte Viso tunnel. It cost about $12 million (12.000 florins) to ’cause’, and the work took two years. I say ’cause’ because a tunnal is air in a usefull place, it is ‘negative architecture’ a purposefull absence of rock. The resulting tunnel was not finished in any way, just made big enough for the donkeys loaded with salt etc. to pass. To me it is incredible that this feat was accomplished, also because it is so high up. Above is a picture how it was reexcavated after it had fallen into disuse in 1907. To me it is fascinating to see essentially a piece of economic infrastructure (that is essentialy not there) of 500 years old almost 100% intact.

I decided to take some days to get acclimatized. The altitude does matter, even though I didn’t really feel it. I hiked up to Lake Egorgeou, which was good practice and allowed a nice fresh dive in icy water. The Alps are a glorious place, even here where it is not super green. Hours of stepping up and down rocks and roots and riverbeds certainly gets your mind of things.

I decide to take one more day to get fitter and then attempt the hike to the tunnel. My ability to more or less die trying is well developed, but it is best to go for it when you feel you should be capable. I had bad luck with eating bad meat from a badly run store in Abries, so I spend the day pretty sick and exhausted. This was just the body dealing with a problem, It should not sap my fundamental energy.

The next day I drove to the starting point, which was to be a parking lot at the end of the valley. You can drive to the last 500 meter part but then you also have to open a gate and the road is terrible in places. This time I coverded the 3,5 hour part of the first day in 1,5 hours (more red blood cells?) . The question of Hannibal and his elephants was also part of this experience. Did I think he could have passed by the same route with 37 of them, packed with army stuff etc.

The path was certainly doable for a donkey, and it is hard to determine how much today’s path matches that of 500 or even 2200 years ago. It is certainly a steep path. I would imagine an elephant would have a hard time just because it’s pretty wide and its feet would slip easily. They can live in the mountains, so who knows how easy they would get up here.

The tunnel starts right under the col, on the french side there’s a constructed entrance and a concrete reinforcement, which seems to be because the rock is not stabile. They are pretty sharp at the top, the rock crumbles easy as you can see in the picture below. Such rocks are very hard to climb over, no route between those peaks. Some climbers came down from ropes from these peaks though, a level above what I was doing 😉

The nicest view of the tunnel de Traversette is on the Italian side. On that side it really looks like a natural cave entrance. The tunnel towards it has no light so you need a light to find your way even though the total length is a mere 75 meter. It took men two years to chisel out the space.

What is fascinating to me is that in 1000 years, this space will still be air, the concrete and masoned side of the tunnel will have crumbled but the ‘raw’ side will be about the same, but unmarked. Will it be recognized as artificial? Yet it is an engineered feature, the names of the engineers are still known : Martino di Albano and Baldassarre of Piasco. How long is this tunnel likely to last?

It turned out to be as hard to reach the tunnel the fourth day as it was to reach the halfway point the first day. Pretty exhausting. About 6 other people passed it while I was there, yet there was quite some time to enjoy the idea of donkeys with salt climbing up the steep path towards the entrance as many had from 1498 onwards.

It seems the italian side is more barren because it is colder more of the time, its the shadow side of the mountain. Walking back to the french side, you can see the slope there still had some snow. Being there was ultimately very pleasant. The fatigue was gone quickly and now the only task was to get down again. This was mission accomplished.

The total hike lasted 6 hours and 20 minutes, I burned 2800 (k)Calories and covered 22 km. These are not distances I’d normally walk in Holland, that would be to boring really. Now I was finaly on holiday. The whole idea was to pick something and do it. Now, three weeks later, what I am left with is a feeling of bigger mental strength. It may be true that dedicating attention to effort for a long time teaches the brain to put more resources behind all actions. The goal was to see something interesting, but the side effect was an exercise in endurance and effort that has created an appetite for more 😉

Imagine a device floating on our oceans, it is a square box, and it has a high yield solar panel on the top and some air inlets on the side. From the bottom there is a constant precipitate of pure carbon, C. The device is made on an industrial scale and put out to see to just capture carbon and evolve oxygen. As far as I know it can be done.

Picking CO2 from the air is not hard. So you can concentrate pure CO2 in a space. This requires energy of course but CO2 scrubbing is nothing new. But the step from CO2 to Carbon is hard. Chemically the CO2 bond is super strong, which is why we use it to burn and generate heat. Solar processes to split CO2 into CO and O2 are known, there are several cathalysts and new methods are being developed every day.

As you can see above however, splitting CO2 in CO and O2 leaves you with CO which has three bonds and is highly reactive. It is in smoke if you burn wood (because of too little oxygen), and we all know that smoke itself burns quite nicely and can even explode. So how are we going to get around this obstacle. The answer is to change the space the CO2 molecules exist in, so by applying an electric field.

When an electric field is applied in a space where CO2 is floating around the shape of the CO2 molecule changes, as do the orbital configuration of its electrons, meaning the distribution of electron density over the nuclei if you where able to measure or image them. An electric field exists between to electrodes which have opposite charge.

As the bonds between Carbon and Oxygen exist because the electrons want to get closer to the positively charged nucleus, so it is charge driven, an electric field can simply rip the bonds apart. This leaves you with two O’s and one C, and the O’s can quickly become O2 and the C can find other C’s to form a structure with (there are many options). As a result the Carbon is deposited, mixed with some oxygen. The oxygen can probably be removed using a membrane that only lets smaller molecules through.

The depositing can be done with a needle or with a mask of needles, so basically a bed of nails, so that larger amounts of carbon can be deposited at once. This is at room temperature and not even using ludicrous voltages (mainly because the voltage gets concentrated by the points.)

More voltage means more carbon, longer deposit times means more carbon

This seems to be a technology that can be scaled up and be made autonomous to operate in the way described above, depositing carbon below while catching sunlight above. There are challenges, like removing the carbon from the substrate, but this would in my opinion be a great device to make, and also make at scale. The trouble with CO2 in our atmosphere is that it is everywhere in it, so up to 16 km high, while we and carbon capturing plants only occupy the lower 100 meter or so. We will therefore need to use large surfaces to recapture CO2, and we can if we do it with automated systems at scale using low abundant materials. This is a typical Roboeconomic solution.

Source Nanopatterning of carbonaceous structures by field-induced carbon dioxide splitting with a force microscope

Today we know very little about the essentials of our existence. We treat them as an animal treats nature : We use what is there without wondering or worrying much. This is a luxury, to not have to worry about things. There’s actually two levels of worry possible : One is you worry if you can pay for food and comfort (which some people do), the other is that you worry whether there is food or comfort for sale when you can pay (which almost nobody does). It is time to start worrying more.

Wealth = Energy x Materials x Skills

For all the Dick Cheneys stating that nobody will screw with our “Way of life” our way of life is badly protected. A simple strike of fuel trucks or a blockade in the Mediterranean means no gasoline at the pumps. Life would grind to a halt. With the increasing droughts farmers go bankrupt. Many have in Australia but in Holland fruit producers see their apples burned in the sun and then destroyed by a hailstorm. These are the sources of what stocks our supermarket, and if they are not there our supermarket will have nothing.

There is a so called carbon budget, which is supposed to be the amount of CO2 we can emit before we reach 1,5 degrees, that limit has been shot through, because we are still stuck with the fossil credit economy. We can barely identify parameters to watch. One thing we should not watch is the price, because price signals are not an indication of scarcity. For instance if you have four countries wanting to buy grain on the global market, but they don’t have USD currency to do so, the price of grain may drop while demand is high and supply is high. On the other hand if the US pays higher prices for grain and prices go up as a result, poor countries can no longer afford to buy as much or buy at all, and the amount available will never be known.

Whould you not want an indicator of reliability of the supply of goods? With food the reliability is low. With water its also low. How about plastic? The economy is assumed to fix shortages but in reality it is not always possible, the simple test is “Can you do it all with fossil fuels?” then the economy will fix it (as long as the fossil fuels are there). If the answer to the question “Do you rely on external factors you can’t control” then the economy will usually just leave it. Especially when a natural resource is depleted. No more Dodo’s, move on! No more Tuna? (the day will come), tough shit! This could be called basic economism which has a scorched earth mentality. The fraud involved in any system to control it can be surprising, like fishermen first (falsely) reporting more catch to keep quota’s high and not alert anyone and then (falsely) report small catches to pretend to comply.

Especially for the basic needs of people a calculation could be made for the entire population based on age, weight, certainly income to ensure the basic needs are met. This is not happening at all right now because of one big distorting force in the market : Banks need for cashflow. Banks are organizations that want to create credit and handle money for others, and this is their only means to control their utility. Money can exist for a long time in circulation and this is a threat to them. They need a way to “mop up” money from circulation and there are two main ways : interest and fossil fuel cost. We explain this in other posts, but basically fossil fuel companies don’t like to spend their profit, becuase the likelyhood of it being spend on fossil fuels (again) is high. The result of this is that banks restrict our freedom to organize (by minimizing the money supply) or if they are generous, make sure the money goes into fossil fuels or gets absorbed by debts.

The desire to see cashflow (which is expressed in insiting on debt payments and financing) by banks means the proces that generates it can not stop. So when fishermen buy a large ship, the bank expects more cashflow from fish and debt payments on the investment. It does not care if the fish gets depleted in fact it explicitely bows out of this kind of concern, the typical “You figure it out” mentality we always get from the bank lakeys on the right. “We have what we need, not you go do what you need to do!”. This however means that fishermen have to be bought out to protect fish stocks (meaning the banks get what they want at the cost of the community), or they will just continue fishing whatever is alive. At the same time the boats will get bigger because banks want larger cashflow generators.

The big lie of economics is that wealth is created. This is not true if you count all the wealth, which includes oil and gas. Wealth is consumed, and natural resources, trees are consumed with help of oil and gas, mechanically at an incredible speed. If all that wealth was quantified and monitored we’d see the world running out of wealth in a frantic hurry. This however is not what banks are interested in, and as we give them control over our activity (we submit to the need for money) they call the shots! They even tell us to help them more by making “the economy” a topic, where a booming economy means banks see more cashflow and a tanking economy the opposite. Who gives a fuck if we run out of resources we need to survive (which includes a climate fit for food production).

We are facing a world that basically is not fit for humanity anymore. Life is opportunistic, it can’t exist where it is not invited. Consciousness has evolved on Earth and changed the rules a little, meaning that we as humans (and many animals) can model the world, imagine outcomes and choose one that keeps us safe. So amazingly we allowed assholes to put us in major trouble, but we have hands and feet and can build machines, and the energy we need to fight climate change is abundant, so we can work our way out of this scenario. Not by complaining about it, not by brainwashing ourselves what is wrong or what will go wrong, but by doing different things than we are today. One of them should be to start generating wealth without consuming it, so wealth is not defined as its consumption, but its existence. Another is to map the wealth we have today and map routes towards increasing it, which should of course include ways to reduce the CO2 trapping gas accumulation in our “room” the atmosphere.

We should also try to minimize cashflow for banks in ways that also maximize wealth. The most effective way to do it is to build renewable energy sources that are fully owned, so not financed. This is becoming more easy every day. Cities and countries should create zones that are not “Zero emissions” but fully RE powered. The priority should be given to those companies and industry that is not fossil dependent, that increases wealth and wellbeing. As soon as banks can be forced to comply (which they will try to avoid by pretending there are economic problems etc.) they need to be directed to increase wealth, not destroy it.

Right now money is carboncredit, it buys us fossil fuels and this is the reason it has value. Try in your mind to imagine if you pay for something, like an airline ticket or Ikea furniture and the money can’t buy fossil fuels. That doesn’t work. In the Roboeconomy money can not be carboncredit, there will be no carbon/fossil fuels in use. Still the economy will happen, people will be producing, but now all with renewables. The credit creation process (how money starts to exist) has to reflect that.

Economists have been wondering about how much money should exist and how it should be created for a century now, but in the fossil economy it is really simple : If you create more money than is needed to buy the fossil fuels to produce stuff you cause inflation. If you increase the amount by extending credit, production will ramp up, eventually more production capacity will be added, but if the cost of fossil fuels remains about the same, prices can be stabile. If you try to buy something with very little automation or fossil fuel input its a totally different story. Say you spend 1000 euro on man made wood carved panels, and you get 20, then if you want to spend 2000 on the same you may not get 40, because there needs to be an artisan capable of carving the panels. Renewables are a bit like that.

If you want to create credit to spend in the economy, and it only uses renewable energy (RE), the production is limited to the RE capacity. If one wind turbine produces 5 MW on a windy night, and you have credit that buys 5MW, nobody else can buy those megawatts anymore. With fossil fuels lying in storage this kind of inflexibility does not exist. You can fix this with storage in batteries, but for the forseeable future all RE will be spoken for. This has another important consequence : If you suddenly drop 1 billion credits in the economy, probably NOTHING changes on the production side.

Credit/Money creation in a RE powered economy needs to be a carefull process. Today banks and gas companies try to push Hydrogen as a new clean fuel, mainly because they don’t want anything to change to their business. Banks want credit to be thought of independently of resources because if you start doing that you start to worry. You need to exactly do that in a RE powered economy. It is not complicated though, you create a unit of energylike a kWh, and a kWh credit. The issue is where to allow that credit to be allocated.

Say you buy sneakers in Holland, made in China. That won’t be likely in the Roboeconomy but ok. So your kWh credits need to be usable in China, where there are machines stamping plastic, maybe there is methane plant where the gas is turned into plastic. That plant may be for a large part running on local renewables, so quite cheaply. The plant owner may own RE sources. Your credit should then go towards what? Probaly towards public service RE sources used by the truck that moves the sneakers to the port. There needs to be a RE producer that accepts the credit and this needs to be of use to the producer or the whole idea of paying makes no sense.

With fossil fuels in the economy there is a product that has to be everywhere all the other products are too. Every truck contains diesel, every ship and plane contain fossil fuels, its a constant compagnion and it needs to be delivered and made available through a complex logistics chain. With RE you don’t need that, but you will find RE sources along the former fossil distribution network more readily because that’s where most of the people are who need them. The question is : Why would anyone of these accept your kWh credit ?

It seems there need to be a global ownere of RE sources, or at least some alliance, so that credit created in one place can be used in another, but that raises other questions, for instance how much credit can we create if it gets used elsewhere. We are interested in your thoughts.

Make a simple assumption : The economic system is a one way ticket to climate hell. Then the question becomes : How do we escape it. The answer is : Make sure you don’t need its money.

The economy is a system of trade, it assumes we all participate and contribute something of value to others, which we can then exchange using the money/currency available. The economy assumes that people will find and offer for sale the raw materials, half products, products and lots of other things because opportunites are visible, money can be made and money can buy anything.

This all works fine if you don’t think beyond how to make money and what you want to buy. If your mind is that limited you are the perfect consumer. If you think beyond that for instance about the long term effects of using natural resources you run into a problem because depletion of those resources is unavoidable and you can’t really prevent it. As a participant in the economy you find the economic machine is completely without brakes or controls. At least so it seams..

There is control in the system, and it comes from banks. Strangely banks control trade in nearly every square km of the planet, simply because we use the currency they create. In countries like Holland it is especially clear banks control the price and trade of land for agriculture and housing. You can not build a cheap home in Holland, you have to price it against the market price. Why? To protect the average home ‘value’. The home owning public largely supports this, but for those that rent or simply don’t have enough money it becomes a real nightmare. Everyone will fight you building for a lower price, even the builders. If you do it yourself you find a home never has to cost much more than 100.000 Euro.

So in Holland, how come banks have all this power and how do you break through it. After all we are all born naked and without any property. There is no immortal banker, these guys are just trying to make a living, yet the system is rigged so that more money is better, and this puts pressure on everybody without a real benefit. The system does not optimize the right to a place to live, instead it reduces building, it creates expesive homes and also reduces the reserve of cheaper homes and appartments for rent. All to sell more mortgages at the highest price.

This pressure by itself is enough of a problem, but because of it the methods used are not easy to change. Banks don’t like disruptions, innovations that alter cashflow. This means that fossil using technology is fine and centralized energy generation without storage (batteries) as well, just as long as money flows through the banks when the resources and technologies are used. Ones that do not generate cashflow, like off grid solar powered mining for example, make banks obsolete.

So we are captured in a system that wants to be cashflow intensive, and therefore fossil fuel or centralized energy intensive. We are stuck in this system everywhere we go, because the money is used everywhere and all land is priced in Euro’s and sold through bank-allied brokers. The resources that the economy makes available to us are enormous, but the cost is equally gigantic and tragic, we sacrifice humanity.

The opposition to this would have to come from people that own land without debt. Suprisingly it can also come from people that own renewable energy sources without debt. The challenge is often to pay annual cost to the municipality or state, and those costs are usually adapted to the exitence and use of banks. A home owner pays a home tax that is proportional to the estimated market value of the home. This continues even if the home is payed off.

What is needed is a group of owners of land, resources, production installations, to team up and protect each others ownership as well as use their own currency in their own territory. The catch is that whoever manages that currency does not allow it to be exchanged into the wider economy nor be used to buy or trade fossil fuels or nuclear energy. The idea is that you only use the currency between the members of the group or to pay people that work for the group. Of course those people would have to spend the money in the territory of the group.

The amount of money should be proportional to the actual primary resources that can be purchased with them, so food, energy, water. If that is the case you can hand out a salary to all workers from the central bank, and then tax the producers for the full amount after salaries. This is not a problem because a producer of a primary resource does not have to pay anybody to produce. The actual mechanism of payment and taxation is complex, because you want to avoid concentratio of power yet allow people to live and thrive and enjoy benefit from their efforts..

My car gets really hot in the sun. It’s a problem for stuff inside. Eventually I want a car that cools itself even when it is not driving. It turns out its pretty hard to find an AC unit for 12 volt with a small form factor. This would be combined with a roof cover that keeps the heat out. In the mean time this is what I came up with: a small solar panel and a ventilator.

I created a mount out of board, this could also be some metal material. The ventilator is not optimal. Strangely there is no opening in the chassis to let air out, I’d have to drill or cut a hole somewhere to be able to constantly ventilate. The only way to get air in (besides hacking the normal cooled air ventilation which is a todo) is to open a window. With some board its easy to create a removable panel with a letterbox slit, the ventilator (typical fan) is mouted horizonatlly on top, and blows air out.

Having electricity in the car is a bonus, it can charge the laptop, phone it can run a small refrigerator. All it takes is a theft proof way to mount it on the car, which is a challenge. Because the roof catches a lot of sun it would be smart to make it reflective or double layer. Again the challenge is with mounting and stuff blowing off the roof while driving.

Because this design still pulls on the materials in a bad way, it expects the ventilator to be horizontal but gravity will pull it downwards, and the tape will eventually give, I made a next version.

the idea is to distribute the vertical forces over a larger area. Also used a bit thicker foam (which was lying around).

The driving force behind most people’s action in the developed world can be money or happines most of the time. Sometimes fear for life or mild fear can play a role but money and happiness are the principle forces. Then if you make a pie chart you’ll find that it’s about 80% money and 20% happiness. We tend to forget our jobs because most of them are boring, unless we make a lot of money and they become stressfull.

This power of money worries me deeply. It is a strange thing, like a drug we need in order to survive. If we don’t make any money we will eventually become homeless and can’t maintain an image associated with constant income. This leads to social rejection and loss of opportunity. It is your choice, the stick or the carrot, and you better like that carrot!

There’s a large number of people that are just not managing to be happy, even though they work hard at jobs that make little money. They are stuck, like a slave in a plantation, with almost no choice, and little understanding of their options. You could call these people “Econobots” because their lives are dictated by the rules of the economy, by the opportunities to make money, the scraps thrown to them by the economy.

Another namen for an Econobot is worker. He/she is known. The minds of these people are profiled and programmed by the mass media. You don’t have to wonder what their talents are, they have to little and what talent they have is demoralized by them being seduced to trash themselves on TV shows. The Econobot is a robot that cares for nothing but his/her own lifestyle, which is one of barely hanging on.

I see it as a result of human competition for the same resource with machines. Humans and machines both use fossil fuels, which are distributed to people with money, and companies lobby to minimize the money allocated to making people happy in favour of subsidies to help them produce. This does translate in better prices for the people, but this dynamic never stops as long as machines and people both feed off a limited source of fossil fuels. Prices never come down to zero and all happiness is sacrificed.

Add to this banks that want to profit off the need for money. Their interest is to make everything as expensive as possible and make sure people have as little money as possible so they have to borrow. Then when people borrow to buy stuff the prices can skyrocket, so they have to borrow more. This is a way for banks to capture a market. You can’t buy a home without a mortgage. You could once, but banks drove up prices by borrowing to buyers and now you can forget about buying without a loan. Banks win!

Banks vying for money and companies vying for resources mean a normal worker is going to face high prices and low income. The perfect storm. On top of that companies want workers to prefer their products, so they program them continously through the media/internet. The Econobot is a suffering mule all because of the scarcity of resources and everyone trying to become happy.

Was this ever different? Yes. Land used to be cheaper. Banks didn’t own everything. There where different currencies. You can find those situations in ‘poor’ regions, where you can’t earn. So in a way there is an economic heat island effect at work where in one place people are stacked 100s of floors high while 10 km away from them empty fields lie fallow because banks priced them to expensively. You can’t spread out, all kinds of objections to that, nature etc. but if its about a new piece of highway nature comes second every time.

The Econobot will struggle on his/her second floor appartment with 2 kids and two temp jobs while the cost of living are pushed up by banks looking for investment opportunity. There is no chance these people will realize they are stuck in a system not designed to make them happy.

We think about food a lot. Eating wholesome and healthy food is a relaxing idea, associated with a desirable lifestyle. But perhaps this is not the best for our sense of surival or our bodies. Maybe incidental hunger is something we should embrace as a way to steer ourselves to the best ideas and behaviour.

Food in nature is scarce. If you go into any forest in Europe you’ll be having a hard time filling your stomach, even though it could be full of chestnut, walnut, berry and apple trees. The challenge to find food usually ends up with hunting and killing a herbivor. Except for during specific seasons our ancestor that was not farming was hungry a lot. Even when farming became a thing people could have bad harvests or run out of stored food. Famines are still a common thing in many regions where farming is not industrialized.

Today we know that there is a sugar lobby to addict us to sugar. We also know that putting sugar in your diet ruins your teeth and health, causes diebetes and heart disease. Suger is addictive, it reduces insulin sensitivity so that you feel hungry all the time. “We” know all this, but “We” is not everybody, and certainly not anyone with actual power to change the public diet. The number of ice cream parlors in Amsterdam is noticably increasing, which can mean more money laundering -or- a US drive to addict more people to suger in Europe.

For the brain hunger is important too. When we burn our fat we produce ketones that are good food for the brain. The brain is more flexible and learns better when it is hungry. Rationaly it makes sense because if you can’t replenish your energy stores (burning your fat) you need to start moving towards a place where you can, and find ways to do it. This of will drive iquisitiveness and learning.

It often seems that our diet is dictated by the wish to generate as much cashflow but also by shaping our attitudes. Coffee is a drug, it makes life feel better but it also narrows our attention (and in many cases causes brain inflammation that reduce our intelligence). Chocolate is said to make us more egotistic. Meat makes us more agressive and sugar makes us hyperactive, impulsive. In short, the standard diet may simply make us good consumers, and not good survivors.

Climate change is not slowing down, and its effects are now estimated to materialize much earlier. In 2024 some expect 1,5 degrees heating, and higher temperatures are considered locked in. Politics is to preoccupied with using fossil fuels (increasing economic activity) to stop using fossil fuels and to much advised by the fossil fuel lobby to plot a serious route out of dependency let alone one that deals with the dangerous temperatures.

This and coming years will be marked by large famines accross the globe. This will cost lives and wars. You can expect many asians to seek shelter in the west, not only those form Honk Kong, and if the west doesn’t want them this will cause conflict. Not to mention the Middle East that is already erupting in multiple small wars, Turkey/Lybia/Armenia/Syria/Azerbedjan etc. Where will this end?

As long as the minds in Europe control a large manufacturing base and energy supply (yes, oil, coal, gas) moves can be made. The minds however are slaves to ambitions that prohibit it from forcefully steering away from dangerous fuels. For that to happen these minds would have to be replaced, and it is highly unlikely (looking at the political direction of police brutality even in Europe, which is pro-fossil) this would ever happen without a fight.

People who understand the consequences of CO2 emissions are not the kind that force themselves into power. Vice versa, those that push themselves into power are not the kinde to stop for remote risks. With todays commercialized political campaigns you just can’t make it without embracing the fossil/banking system that is the problem. As a result a US style ‘democracy’ is fundamentally unable to fight climate change.

Perhaps the only option that could work is a total breakdown of the economic machine due to disruption of the fossil fuel supply. Say because Israel dropped a big bomb on Iran and no oil can flow from the Middle East, nor any ocean traffic through the Suez Canal. Or Turkey getting into a war with the surrounding countries. Then the well will run dry in about two weeks as was demonstrated in France during a strike of petrol tank truck drivers. Then the situation would be super problematic, and focus would be on restoring the supply asap, with the same pro-fossil goons at the helm.

So in this chaos these people would have to be replaced or one would have to admit you can NOT allow the supply to collapse, or not at least in ways that allow a fix. In the absence of fossil supply most of our planet would be thrown in the same poverty as that suffered by people not yet using fossil fuels. Growing food is already becoming a challenge, now ad to that the fact that soils are depleted from intensive use and only recover very slowely. You could not just plant and hope for a harvest as normal without the intensive treatment. It takes about 5 years to recover from it.

Already we are seeing a rise in government by criminals, which has to say something about the quality of the justice system and police force. Real criminals meanwhile have evolved into the stuff of nightmares. All this is because of poverty, and poverty will only make it worse. So as fossil fuel use collapses, and the supply chains related to it (plastics etc.) one would have to focus on renewable energy sources and battle off rising crime. What helps is that moving around will be harder (including moving drugs or humans), so crime may die down a bit or change character.

In this basically chaotic environment an effort would have to be staged of building massive solar and wind and battery capacity, of planting massive amounts of trees, of deploying technology to capture and sequester CO2 all around the world. How could that happen?

It seems that in defence of order one has a solid reason to build super large scale renewable energy projects. Simply to make it possible to respond in the case of a catastrophic disruption of the fossil energy supply. The response to global heating is really a one shot thing and a long term commitment. Work should be done today of creating places which will be safe and sufficient to live in for the next 500 years, instead of economically milking the underestimation of the threat.

Humanity needs to cut a few activities we love out of our schedules. Flying is one example, meat eating is another. There are many. For the opponents and deniers this constitute an attack on their individual freedom and lifestyle, something that is just not allowed. The word that applies there is ‘entitlement’ these people feel entitled to a cheap holiday or a heart attack diet.

With al the BLM distractions the climate deniers have it easy. They don’t even object that cutting emissions now will not fix the mess we are in. That would also mean they aknowledge the mess, which they would not want to do. Once you choose to lie, you can lie yourself a fantasy reason can’t find a way out of. The only truth remaining is death, and as we see with Covid19 in the USA, even death does not sway magical thinkers.

But truely, if you want to be fair just because you know it puts people at ease, how do you allocate damaging activities to people. For myself I made a rule around 2007 or so to not fly unless I have something serious to do at the other end, so only trips to congresses or for work. I broke that rule once 5 years ago to fly to Greece. Many other occasions tempted but I did not fly.

How do you calculate what damage is justified by anyone. How do we decide when we get the opportunity who gets to travel and who doesn’t. Its a stupid question, because it is imaginable that we all live without doing damage to the environment at all. We just need to spread out, a move banks don’t want us to make. Deserts can be greened no problem with solar and wind energy. Internet connects us all, transportation can be solar/electric. No reason to destroy the atmosphere, there never was.

But if we attempt to gage the damage of one persons actions we come up with very little benefit. If you give everyone a personal carbon budget you don’t help much because a lot of people won’t consume it, if you trade it that consumption will be enjoyed by richer people but prices of rights will drop and in the end all the budget of everybody will be consumed. This is what emissions right trade is causing today. Dirty stacks burn in the Ukraine, and clean countries sell the credits. It’s just a banking trick as all the other banking tricks we are stuck in.

The climate benefit of actions needs to be determined. If I consume 1 kWh serving this post to you and other readers, and you and other readers change behaviour and think about this topic and how to maximize actual climate impact of actions, that’s a 1kWh well spend. Could even be a solar kWh, which sounds better but of course then the importance of you reading this must outweigh the good that 1 kWh could have done elsewhere.

I’m trying to build a lightweight boat that can travel fast on solar. This could have benefits in terms of reducing emissions. I am trying to develop a substance that can turn CO2 into Methane or Ethanol. The energy spend there could reduce the climate problem. Most people just ‘do their jobs’ meaning they wait for the money, then go out and consider it fair if they just do whaterver the hell they want, after all their freedom was restricted, and now they are supposed to be free (so fuck vegetarians, get me a steak a beer and lets go to Greece!).

If I move to a desert and start planting trees my cost would be marginal, just food and water and medical insurance. But my benefit could be substantial, as nobody does what I do in that desert. Nature can heal itself but humans can do a lot to help. Right now humans should do everything it their power to help, without help it will not be fixed. But if I make that move, do I get credits? How much should I get? From whome. How do my actions translate into effect?

Maybe we should create a shadow accounting system that keeps track of actions that warrant climate credits. Then we need a political movement that will reward people with credits. So if you have climate credits you are given the best seats on the terras, the best rooms in hotels, the best food and service. This is because you do strangers a service. Where banks will force entrepeneurs to squeeze every cent out of customers as they take the better seat or get the better treatment, climate credits turn it around. It is more of an honour to host a guest who has so much compassion and care for the lives of every living thing.

The process involves creating a credit, then assigning it to people in a transparent way, and giving people that you assign it to attention, as to people who respect the credit. It must be a fungible asset, but buying or selling it is a no-no, it will destroy it instantly. This will create a positive incentive structure towards true climate responsibility. It can be made a rule that a person that earns an x number of climate credits will earn the right to pollute, or the right to travel in a non polluting but more expensive method.