We were made aware of the Blue Economy website by a supporter of Extinction Rebellion. We are not a fact check website per se, but we would like to hold the “principles” of this website to the light to see if they make sense. We will list the principles below and comment on each point. There are a lot of them. Our motto is to maximize life. If you do that you’re probably going to survive climate change, way easier to wrap your head around. So here goes..
The Blue Economy respond to basic needs of all with what you have, introducing innovations inspired by nature, generating multiple benefits, including jobs and social capital, offering more with less. to vague, an abstraction can’t do nothing
Solutions are first and foremost based on physics. Deciding factors are Pressure and Temperature as found on site. Not sure what this refers to.
Substitute something with Nothing – Question any resource regarding its necessity for production. Trust can be based on experience, no need to question everything, not sure what is meant here
Natural systems cascade nutrients, matter and energy – waste does not exist. Any by-product is the source for a new product. Can be true
Nature evolved from a few species to a rich biodiversity. Wealth means diversity. Industrial standardization is the contrary. A random comparison
Nature provides room for entrepreneurs who do more with less. Nature is contrary to monopolization. Not always, pests monopolize
Gravity is main source of energy, solar energy is the second renewable fuel. False, water evaporates due to solar energy, without the sun we’d be at ~63 degrees Kelvin
Water is the primary solvent (no complex, chemical, toxic catalysts). Solvent of water soluable materials.
In nature the constant is change. Innovations take place in every moment. Not intentionally except in conscious minds
Nature only works with what is locally available. Sustainable business evolves with respect not only for local resources, but also for culture and tradition. Ok
Nature responds to basic needs and then evolves from sufficiency to abundance. The present economic model relies on scarcity as a basis for production and consumption. Nature doesn’t do anything on purpose. The economy assumes abundance, not sarcity, that is the problem.
Natural systems are non-linear. What does that mean?
In Nature everything is biodegradable – it is just a matter of time. Practically true
In natural systems everything is connected and evolving towards symbiosis. Nope, it tries to eat whatever it can.
In Nature water, air, and soil are the commons, free and abundant. Duh
In Nature one process generates multiple benefits. Not necessarily
Natural systems share risks. Any risk is a motivator for innovations. No innovations in nature, evolution yes
Nature is efficient. So sustainable business maximizes use of available material and energy, which reduces the unit price for the consumer. Nope it is not efficient, it tries to survive. Plants are 5% solar efficient.
Nature searches for the optimum for all involucrated elements. Nope, nothing searches in nature except conscious minds.
In Nature negatives are converted into positives. Problems are opportunities. There is no judgement except in conscious minds.
Nature searches for economies of scope. One natural innovation carries various benefits for all. Nope, they may get eaten less readily
Ok, having done the check it seems the blue economy principles are a lot of claims about nature and what it wants and does. Including that it would somehow search for an optimum for all “elements captured in a membrane”. Nature doesn’t search. Nature is mostly dead except for life which is opportunistic and can’t create the conditions it needs most of the time. Nature runs on solar and nuclear (geothermal) energy. Without those two sources we’d be on a frozen iceball.
One Roboeconomic principle is : Maximize Life
Its important not to rely on nature to much in our current situation, because according to natural processes we are headed for a massive extinction that includes humanity and then at least a million years of dead silence from the oceans and on land, due to toxic gasses like H2S released from rotting organic material. Worst case would be a hothouse earth, which will happen if so much water evaporates that our atmosphere can not cool itself down (water is a greenhouse gas) resulting in a positive feedback loading more water capturing more heat. We need human intervention in this warming process and we need technology and industry to achieve it.
If you have principles, make them instructive, don’t expect people to guess your thoughts.
There is plenty of energy to fix our predicament, it just needs to be directed towards the right mechanisms of change and manipulation. This is what the roboeconomy is about, we need AI, robots and automation running on renewables to steer us away from runaway warming, and we can. Just conserving or waiting for things to fix itself will not work.
It is easy to say that we should fight climate change. Most people that do don’t actually fight. Fighting is uncomfortable, it is dangerous, you have to adapt constantly because you are facing constant resistance. Almost nobody is doing that, for a large part because political positions are occupied by people preselected for their acceptance of the destruction of our planet, partly because the media (and add industry) are biased to where the money comes from, and climateactivists don’t have a bank yet.
It is clear politicians make promises and break them, their game is to lie to ensure their power and find new lies to distract people when their earlier lies are being called out. The memory span of the average voter is limited, and if you’re not into politics you can’t link events logically further back than about 2 weeks. Trump is a hardcore example of that, he goes by the adagium that “people only know what you tell them” and so he flatly denies he did things in the past, counting on the fact that the majority that see his denial are not exposed to the debunking of that denial. Its high precision lying, and very effective in keeping people behaving predictably.
Now, due to the coronacrisis, a lot of people are demanding recovery funds are spend in an environmentally sound way. These are almost promises. We don’t know what the power of these people is, sometimes none, sometimes they are in a bank or some other institution. We don’t know what they vote when push comes to shove. We have plenty of fake political parties that always vote anti-social right wing but talk social-left wing, and look slippery and clean the rest of the time.
We need a world model, a simulation of what happens if we do things. What happens if we build a dam, what happens if we give USD to this company or that company. What happens if we mine here or dig there. It’s no longer beyond our abilities to do so. We can model the money and resource streams, simply from satelite data. We know what prices are, we know what is offered in the market, we know what skills people aquire (when their brains are not shut down by their smartphone). We can model human behaviour, aging, we can model everything. Many lives are similar, that’s been the goal of industry to create consumer ‘flavours’ that feel unique enough to join massive groups. But really a person without any sense of electronics or physics, what is he going to do? The only option such a person has is hold and use tools made available to him/her, and the result of that is highly predictable.
Most new industrial designs are cat drawings, so when the end products are in the field they can be understood completely. If they are not you can send drones to scan them, to listen to them, to measure radiation and make a profile. We are very close to thinking AI that has no problem intergating such knowledge in to a model. AI is already used to create and tune models of all kinds. We need to start working on a model of our world, so that we can run accurate simulations of policy decisions.
The political realm is incredibly dated. You as a voter think you have influence over some options that are presented to you, but you don’t control vast parts of your world you depend on. Fossil fuel emissions dropped 8% during this corona crisis, and where dit the other 92% keep going? Industry. Did you notice from your locked down home? Nope. Do you notice the hunger in Sudan, Egypt, Syria, India? Nope, so much pain you are shielded from, not only by yourself but also by the media. This crisis is not over yet. As banks free up money to hand out and try to restart this monster economy promises are made about the climate sanity of it all. How can we be sure any of those promises are kept? What do they entail? We must go through with the “Green Deal”! But what does that actually mean? Can’t we do better? Is it going to save us?
We have climate models, like smoke detectors, but we need to see the actual fire, and know what actions yield what results. There should be a scientific field optimizing a world model created from a combination of the weather, climate, air pollution, logistics, gaming and many other models that are already being created. Al the users can then tap into this model and optimize it. Then we can at least see the actual situation, we can control divices to take action where needed or possible, we can extrapolate based on best knowledge. This should be a global effort, to finally know what the fuck we are doing to it and how we can do better.
The world economy is contracting in a way not seen since the dawn of the industrial age. It was a descision to unburden the intensive care units (as far as it was taken timely) and protect the lives of the elderly. There are variants in each country, as there should be. In some the thought was to “Take it on the chin”, in others the virus was kept out with extreme prejudice. Money stopped flowing, and as we have written here many times, as a result oil stopped flowing. Oil wells can’t just be shut down (they may not restart), so prices dropped until all reserves where full and now we wait for news that oil producers started dumping oil in ponds.
This event poses a serious challenge for the economic system. Governments told a part of the population to stop producing. Money stopped flowing. Export and import stopped. This also meant no cost, for the 2/3ths of monthy turnover. However banks did not stop asking mortgages and rent. Loans had to be payed off. Technically if everything stops it makes no sense and it is unwise to demand these payments. They serve a function that is to drive people to work. Of course banks never demanded the measures, in fact banks have been behind the call for “Herd Immunity” and letting the old wood die. See the quote below.
To anyone that has seen a violent rainstorm ruin a garden party or who has seen the devestation after a tsunami or hurricane understands that you can’t blame anyone for such an event. Nobody is responsible for the existence of the coronavirus. Some are certainly responsible for how to deal with this calamity, and heads should roll if it is clear mistakes where made. But there is no justification of financial bondage resulting from this crisis.
If you want something, like live in a house, you are forced to go into debt, because banks have organized society such that everyone thinks that even a small piece of land is worth a fortune. Because it isn’t banks have made it so that there’s enough money to allow enough people to part with money to pay the “mortgage” and still have a happy life. There is no real friction, no real effort. Mortages are gifts of banks to themselves, and it allows them to judge who will buy a house and possibly deny them. So it’s a tool of discrimination and bondage. Money talks now, before people talked.
Economics tells you to “invest” ahead of income, to produce even if there is no demand. Of course, this puts you in a strange relation with possible finaciers, they wait for you to want to do something, then they lend you the money, and you will be paying them and be forced to work to pay them. It does not matter whether what you want is a morally sound idea, as long as money flows. So banks profit from prostitution, arms trade, drug trade and all kinds of inflationary schemes. Their goal is to increase cashflow, and a side effect of that is that they increase fossil fuel use (but I digress).
Now all the above is just a game banks play. It could be handled differently, for instance with total democracy on loans or institutional quality approval of products and non-profit banks. No flash trading on the stockexchange, only slow transactions. All that would increase quality of life, solidity of our endeavours, but it would reduce cashflow. The world economy is a creation of banks, in all its harm and inefficiencies. It’s a materialization of “Power corrupts, Absolute power corrupts absolutely” and we gave this power to them.
If you want to “restart” the economy you have to act as if nothing happend. Like we where all anesthetized and woke up a year later. No time had passed we where aware of. All the cost where born by our resource reserves. No debt remains. This is possible and this should be the way it is. Of course the turnover of one business will return slower than another, and I for sure am a fan of the idea of prioritizing climate responsible businesses over ones that have a CO2 debt to the world or are still creating one.
No bank really lifted a finger to protect anyone except themselves and some super turnover generators. Those (like the airlines) where massive fossil fuel consumers, and these are always the banks favourite : Create credit, buy fuel, burn fuel, receive cashflow, rinse and repeat. No attention was and is payed to the needs of people. So meat is not distributed, vegetables are rotting in the fields. Some authority needs to worry about that.
Banks really only enjoy the game and don’t like to get involved unless it is to protect themselves. They may have “bought” oil reserves and wells, which is a massive mindfuck because they create the money to buy against the asset they buy, meaning they pull themselves up by their bootstrap and the wool over our eyes (we should be more alert). They have nothing, only title to and a bunch of tokens (dollars, euros) we believe have value. Right now that game is halted. The question is : Why would banks gain control over our lives during this time of crisis. Why would we aknowledge debts to them when the cost of lending money in the EU is negative?
But better still : Why are we playing the game they invented, even as we are all suffering ? A halted economy is a time out, banks can not incur debt even if they supply credit. Debt is an illusion created to bond people to the economy. You may think this is a rediculous statement, but it is not, because we NEVER pay our debt. Simply said we do this :
Banks lend money into circulation
We ‘earn’ that money
We buy products made with fossil fuel
That fossil fuel is burned
We ‘earn’ more money
Can it work without step 4. ? NOPE! Can we make fossil fuels ? NOPE!
The exchange we make with our economy is not equitable. We do not do for it what it does for us. The reason is the availability of fossil fuels (I include all types of gas in this catergory for semanticists). We can not make them in our kitchen or factory (of course there’s power to gas now but that’s barely a thing). “But oil companies make oil”. Yes, they get it out of the ground. Why would they give it to us? This is the big lie of our economy, we feel and believe we are the creators of our lifestyle, but we are given a tremendous gift to use : fossil energy. This not praise for this polluting energy source, it’s just that we overlook how essential it (still) is.
The funny thing about oil is that it really is something. A barrel or tank full of gasoline, you can smell it, it keeps you warm. Money on the other hand, is nothing. It’s a number or paper. Banks can create it (we all know that) just like that. So this trade of oil for money could be considered a mystery. In fact it is not a mystery, it is the system called the economy. That trade of energy for numbers is the basis of our economic system, and it puts all power in the hands of the banks. The game banks play is how to keep us happy and distracted, yet retain enough control over our lives to steer away from threats to this system. There’s also a gentrifying element to bank policy, of course they like to support neat people over unpredictable types. They fund wars that (to be frank) always kill more aggressive people than cowards (unless nuclear bombs are used).
There are two points I like to make with this post. The first is that banks should not gain power from stopping the game. This is like moving chess pieces whil your opponent is taking a toilet break. It is cheating. The second is that we need to find a way to remove the incentive to maximize cashflow for banks, and this means we need to replace fossil fuels or simply limit the wealth banks can gain from it. Banks should become non profit.
A great way to achieve this is to require renewable energy as the source of productiviy growth, and replace recurrent buying of fossil fuel with recurrent use of renewables. Banks are against this, because these renewable sources can be owned by you and me, cities, states and countries, not by them. There is no strategy by which banks can promote renewables and retain control over their francise. Renewables kill the banking system as we know it.
You could see this reflex to push the world into debt from this coronacrisis as the ultimate powergrab by the banks. They need to dominate because renewables will make them obsolete. If we allow that to happen we will be toiling under this load for decades using fossil fuels, in increasing heat, without flexbility to make changes. Industry will be set loose to destroy what is left, cut down all trees, poison every well, this is the process we witness and trend facilitated by sock puppet Donald Trump. Weaker EPA restrictions, licens to drill everywhere etc.
We can often wonder what happend to the people of Easter Island, why they disappeared. It may not be that they ran out of resources, but that they frantically tried to compete with each other to use them because they had a currency that gave them the illusion it was valuable. The last fishermen with the last fish sold them for a hefty price. Then all died of famine. This is the economy of banks, and we should learn this lesson, and start cooperating using renewables, not competing using exhaustables.
AI is on the brink of becoming real. Many are still distracted by machine learning, which does not provide a good bridge to machine thinking, but this bridge will be crossed, and the quality of thought will approach that of animals and humans soon. I am convinced because I can see what this would take. There have been warnings about the risk of AI, the movie War games, Terminator, many science fiction novels have fantasized about alternative intelligences and what it would do. It is scary.
I would make a distinction between intelligent recognition and targeting systems, which can be hard wired, meaning their behaviour is fixed, and free roaming AI driven robots, who’s behaviour is truely dynamic. Elsewhere I wrote about ARGO, which stands for Autonomous, Robust, Goal Orienting systems. This defines intelligence for me. This post is about another aspect of free roaming AI, which is its aggression.
We understand aggression to be some determined act to destroy something by a person. It’s a primitive behaviour that simply ignores the integrity of whatever it is directed towards, takes it apart until it doesn’t exist anymore. Robocop could be a basic example of machine aggression, but this is not what I mean. The role of aggression is more specific in our brain then we think. We usually only call the extremes aggression, but we have to be ‘aggressive’ with every move we make. We have to destroy our will to do what we are doing, and want to do something else.
There are two directions in this, one is fear driven and one is driven by assertion, which is a result of concluding we will surive whatever the move is intact. When we are scared we can run but we will not be left with any new skills afterwards. When we are assertive and we do something -even though- it scares us we learn something new, we conquer new behaviour. These examples are also extremes. Most times this dynamic remains within known limits. We make ‘safe’ choices all the time, choices that create no risk to us in any way. That behavour is also mediated by a balance between fear and agression.
Now the problem with AI is that it will have these dynamics if it is to be truely intelligent. The reason is that you can not navigate an inperfectly known environment without having moving around, and you can’t move around without commiting to a movement, and you can not commit without ‘asserting’ that it is safe. Like humans an AI robot will have to decide itself what is safe behaviour and what not.
So this means that if you let a robot like Boston Dynamics Atlas move around outside, you will have to accept it does things that it thinks are safe. The more freedom you give such an AI to perform its tasks the more risk you take that it will decide that it can do something that is not safe, especially around humans. Say you have an ‘intelligent’ robot and you ask it to solve a problem that requires a stiff rod. It might decide to use one of your bones, grab it, extract it and finish the task, while you’re attempting to stay alive through this. It may not have sensed there was something to be ‘afraid’ of in this proces. Say an AI ‘assistant’ works with you on Mars and some accident happens the AI thinks it can solve by taking part of your spacesuit and stuffing it in a hole. Its could be like a dog that rips apart a pillow and then looks at you with eyes saying “why was that important to you?”.
Once you let behaviour truely be a balance between fear and agression based on the world model of the AI that can never be informed 100% (just like that of humans) you gain true intelligence, but you risk danger. The only solution to this risk is to have the AI demonstrate a thorough understanding of what humans are, why they should be integrated in every plan, every move, so that there is no risk to them. The AI should ‘love’ humans more then it loves itself, and this ‘love’ starts with knowing what they are, recogizing them etc. The short term solution is to make sure robots are weak. Even then they can still decide to replace citchen salt with a toxic salt, because it never learned not all salts are the same. “It says salt in the menu, why is zinc bromide not ok?”.
While AI will destroy our online experience, making it increasingly fantastic and at the same time attractive, undermining our own sense of reality and what is true and what is possible, while AI will be weaponized by every party that wants to get hold or control of stuff, we can expect true AI to be a risk as wel. There is a lot to say for not going that route, to stick with the soft tissue humans combined with dumb machines. Our innate desire to procreate however will probably manifest itself by driving us to ignore these risks just to see true AI roam free.
Humans can be viewed as manipulators, meaning they can change their environment and themselves. They can cut down trees, build houses etc. When their basic needs are met they can go on to build beautifull cities Pyramids and Taj Mahals.
The source of all this power lies in our ability to imagine and then try to achieve that think we imagine. That can be a sandwitch in our stomach or our index finger touching our nose or going to Mars. Without imagination there is no choice between imagined futures and we could not demonstrate the first principle of intelligence, which is to choose the best future for ourselves at every step.
Humans have evolved for a world that would not change much over a lifetime. There is no way to evolutionarily select for adaption to cataclysmic events and environmental upheavals. A human will be prepared for everthing humans can do to each other and the environment, to the extent that there’s also now way to breed a notion of total environmental destruction into a human. The natural response is to move towards greener pastures, and this is always the response.
This simple environment can be artifical. In our modern society industry has created regions where people live more or less abstract lives. They hunt in the supermarket and forage in the shopping mall, their behaviour is curtailed in all kinds of ways into pressing a button or pulling a lever. Without judging this process of incarceration was driven by the desire of industry, people that fed on dependence of others on them to harness skills and manipulative power as well as energy from humans that would have otherwise be farmers and hunters. To create a product can have many motives, to gain power is one of them, to gain security another, to gain sexual favour as well, and there’s a part that wants to procreate through products as well. In all these cases a human that is so inspired has a desire to do more than it can. It will want tools and servants.
It is not hard to gain tools and servants though, as long as the human inolved is strong. The other humans will quickly give up any desire to resist for existential reasons and because they are not used to imagining a completely different world. The powerfull humans will have to deal with other powerfull humans, and the servants can focus on doing their job, usually with a considerably less troubled life than the ‘masters’. Both can see advantages in thier predicament, and the master will always say things that reinfoce his/her position, and force the servant to say things that reinforces the servants position. Quite often the servant will actually cheer the master on. This makes a lot of sense when it is a general returning from defeating a raping and pillaging enemy. Humanity has been organized with masters and servants for millenia, simply because otherwise it would not be organized at all.
In our highly abstract society, where symbolic acts are taken very seriously (and we don’t mean religion, but for instance the feeling I get when writing this post, where I have not actually checked if anyone read it or how they respond), it is not common the basis of power is effectively taught to the next generation. Those that do will not do it for anyone but their own. The power to change your environment, to master others, to get what you want and not want what you are being offered is an illusive thing. You have to hate not being the creator of your fate, while your fate is made very comfortable and there are all kinds of way to have symbolic power (for instance in video games). Kids grow up looking at those in power and may learn to manipulate others into serving them, but still they may not get it.
The thing these people don’t get is what they are actually doing. They may understand there’s all kinds of comfort in power, but the servants also recognize their own comfort. There may be guilt when you spend the money earned by your father wastefully but you may not feel this deep motivation to protect and build your father did. When running a company you have to know that you are getting payed for what you deliver, not for prancing around and looking bussy. “Fake it untill you make it” is interpreted “Pretend until you’ve got wads of cash” but of course it means “Model until you actually build”.
It is not surprising to see politicans fail and suck and lie and cheat and be pirates all the time. This is the struggle for power. A requirement to do that right is empathy with others. Not because you will be loved and voted for, but if you empthize with others you have a deeper understanding of what they do. If you empathize with firefighters you understand they run into burning buildings which is super scary. If you empathize with young jobless mothers you understand they can be pretty desperate and the fathers should not be allowed to leave them like that. If you empathize with soldiers you don’t want war and you want them to be protected. Treat others like you’d treat yourself and do onto others what you’d have done onto you. These are not directives, they are talents. They require courage.
Today leaders are voted into office by people who’s opinion is deliberately shaped, who are kept from having an effective vote through all kinds of tricks. Those that gain power may do so based on 70% lies, 20% hubris, and 10% arrogance. If you dress up like a busdriver and you sit in the busdriver’s seat, you will have people get into your bus. The problem is you may not know how to handle it, have no experience at all, may be suicidal or a maniac wanting to drive it off a cliff. The people living in their industrially designed comfortable live don’t really expect or get a chance to know enough to judge the candidate. And of course a candidate can explictly look for support amongst people that are prejudiced and limited in their judgement.
Those that gain power must know what behaviour it takes to produce his environment, which in case of a country means he has to have courage of a soldier and constructive desire of a builder, empathy of a mother and protective instinct of a parent. And even then things can go wrong, because the individual can feel special or different or better than a certain category of people he/she will wield power over. After all, we are all both superior and inferior to others and this can evolve into both an inferiority complex and a superiority complex. The more true power you take from people the sooner they will choose the comfort of servitude, simply because they have lost their grasp of what could give them the upper hand.
When in the past a leader had to gather a bigger army and teach it to be effective, today leaders gather the largest possible group of citizen and try to make them feel as ineffective as possible. Its simply the negative. You don’t have to achieve anything if you promise the world to people, then fail, because those people have felt that failure and empathize with you, while you don’t have to empthize with them (which you are also discouraged from by your desire to feel superior).
Now if you have grown up feeling your power, if you have lived in a place where all the sources of your comfort where people and actions you understood and empthized with, you don’t want to be “led” by airguitair players or symbolists or prancers. You don’t want to vote for one lie jukebox over the other. You don’t want the ego of the most ignorant in your society boosted in order for them to make the vote of active, empathic citizen irrelevant. You don’t want the fight for leadership to be a battle that has no benefit to you, has nothing to do with you, and actually harms you. You want that shit to stop.
The easy way to fight this detachement of power is to detach from it. To not feed into it. To not be a servant. This is how humanity works all the time, people don’t “like” others they can’t empathize with and whom they don’t feel empathy from. Cooperation should be withdrawn, one should strike, object, obstruct. At the same time whoever does get it should be supported. In the US one can easily imagine states leaving the union. The main reason that doesn’t happen is that poor states are dependent upon richer states. They are like children that have not learned what is needed to wield power.
The world in which renewables are cheap can enable almost any territory to become sovereign, even if it remains in the cooperation of larger unions. Even the dryest and hottest places can power cooling systems and irrigate and desalinate with solar energy. They do need to understand it is up to them to organize this, and this requires people that have skills and that cooperate. You can overlay this view on todays society and the distortions financial dependence and economic division of labour (euphenism for divide and conquer) become glaringly obvious. You will know you are fixing it when you meet resistance. But that is the only way to not the life of a neglected and abused servant.
Michael Moore produced a movie about developments in renewable energy driven by the need to reduce emissions. Its a series of recordings narrated by a desillusioned activist. Below we have listed claims made in the movie checked against our understanding of the facts.
In general our review is positive, Moore exposes the scam of biomass and of well financed enviromentalists. His criticism on solar and wind is not true or fair, the fact is that coal and gas plants are being shut down left and right because of wind and solar projects. The bottleneck is storage, and the fossil industry has worked very hard to avoid the development of batteries. So this documentary makes a “No Solution” argument. It’s message is “We are stuck, the methods we saw are not working” this bears out in the unreasonable dismissal of Ivanpah. Then the narrator wants us to accept mortality, so basically emrace death as a solution to the population problem. This is in line with a “No Solution” argument. It is an ideology we have written about. Many people, especially those that feel financially protected agree with this : People need to die.
The complete argument is however flawed. You can not fault environmentalists for more powerfull organizations to do the wrong thing in an environment where profit is king and banks like fossil fuel cashflow. Hence you can not dismiss technologies that are made to fail or look bad on purpose. This blame and distortion tell us that Moore is on the “let people die” side which is actually a pro-fossil position. The truth is that climate change will hit so hard that many people will actually die all over the world. There is no need to choose or accept, it will happen to these people and maby you will be amongst them.
This does not mean that we can’t dismantle the incentive structure of the fossil based system by force. This will happen, because no matter how much money you have you are not going to be safe, and soon you realize that building as much renewables as possible close to where you live increases your likelyhood of survival. Energy can do work we need done, clean energy can do it with very little overhead. Don’t believe this documentary when you get the feeling there is no way out. It does require you to do something though, which is get rid of the shills and dismiss the help of banks.
What is fundamentally needed is a forced escape from the economy, which can only be achieved by conquering terrirory independently. This could also mean conquer fossil resources to power renewable manufacturing. A close second is to become truely principled political alliance spanning all countries, but this is slow and a big ask of human’s feeble will. It is totally out of the happy go lucky environmentalists scope of behaviour, and of course apart from Moore’s criticism, this is the problem. You can’t fight for climate change without feeling like you are fighting.
Claims/statements and our fact check
Early events by environmentalists used fossil fuels as backup. True
Hydrogen for cars is usually produced from hydrocarbons. True
Solar panel manufacturing involves the use of coal. True
There is a gas transition driven by gas producers that draw attention to coal plants closures while expanding gas use. True
Battery storage is still at low capacity. True
Some solar panels live just 10 years. False, build for 30 years
Solar tower power plants use some natural gas. Can, don’t need to.
Fossil fuels are used to build, concrete pouring emits CO2. True
The energy return on energy invested of Ivanpah solar tower plant is negative (more CO2 emitted than it avoids). False
Germany is still a large coal user. True
Rare Earth mining exposes radioactivity on the surface. As does oil, gas and coal mining
Graphite use is somehow bad. False
Apple is still grid connected even if it produces solar electricity. Batteries needed.
No entity could be find that runs on exclusively on 100% solar and wind. Now some can be found, but its not a bad thing.
The Koch Brothers produce solar panels, glass and other products. As did Shell, to delay development.
Ivanpah relies on the most toxic and industrial processes we have ever created. False (the guide has an agenda)
There is a montage of industrial processes of mining, melting, slavery etc. which seems intended to link these activities to clean energy technologies. A bit frenzied. This is industry, it does not care about human lives.
Plants where cut down to build the Ivanpah solar power plant. True
The Joshua tree will be sacrificed in the name of progress. False
There are derelict houses in Dagett (supposedly around the SEGS solar power plants). True
The construction jobs for SEGS went when construction was done. As they do.
The solar arrays of SEGS have been raised to the ground. This is a link to the plant they visited. SEGS is located close to Kramer Junction, not Dagett, the plants still stand.
Ivanpah started falling apart. False
There may “not be enough planet left” to start over building renewable power plants. False
“Clean renewable energy and industrial civilization are one and the same”. Industry is machines to make stuff. You can make products that are good and that are bad, in ways that are good and ways that are bad.
We have reached peak production from our planetary resources (using fossil fuel). Duh, even the narrator started out realizing this.
The “people in charge” are not taking the limits of our resources serious enough. True they are driven by profit.
“There are too many humans using to much too fast”. Not too many.
Human population grows like that of any species in the wild. False, educated populations can shrink.
Fossil fuels caused a population explosion. True.
The impact of human consumption is terrifying. True
Are banks and industry interested in green energy for profit? Duh, they are interested in anything for profit, that is the problem.
The right has religion (a monopoly). Really?
The left has fear of death. No idea, sounds simplistic.
Cultures are local systems of solutions to common fears and problems. True
You can come across people with different solutions which can undermine your trust in your own ideas. True
Both people that think green energy is a solution and those that think fossil fuels will keep working are delusional. False. If you do green solutions right they are green and they are solutions. Plenty of examples of that.
The green community makes decisions because it is unwilling to accept death. This is tragic. Nonsense.
Intermission
It appears the narrator wants environmentalists to commit suicide or accept the demise of earths life support systems. However that would run against basic human instincts. It is usually the rich that want the poor to die, and because you can’t really hang with banks as a true environmentalist, you are going to be poor if you have no army.
This is where the part against biomass begins. We have written about how it is a scam, how tree burning is something that is falsely sold as green, like “green gas”. It is true, we agree with the narrator 100%.
-end of intermission-
Biomass (as it turns out today) means burning trees. Yes it is a scam.
Biomass is not going to work. Yes, environmentalists HATE biomass. Climate changes is killing billions of trees in Canada who get sold off as biomass to powerplants. They should be dumped in the deep sea to sequester CO2
Biomass and waste burning is polluting. Duh
There is money put towards dirty energy projects by the rules made in large part by the dirty energy lobby. Duh
Michael Moore makes it seem that proponents of green energy support biomas and waste burning and shows an environmentalists lamenting the fate lf Lake Superior. This is some ju jitsu shit. NO ENVIRONMENTALIST IS FOR BIOMASS/WASTE BURNING!
Universities ignore wind and solar. Duh
Bill McKibben is a proponent of wood buring. Auch.
Waste and biomass burning is sold as “green”. Yes, that’s called Greenwashing
There is a movement that wants to burn all wood and biomass in the US. Duh
Environmentalists and climate activists are against burning trees. Duh
Language of well funded environmental groups around biomass is weak. Yes we noticed.
Green organization (Sierra Club) leaders allow biomass to be burned. Ok
Van Jones claims not to be aware of biomass burning. Ok
Bill McKibben tries to avoid saying anything about biomass. Ok
Environmentalist against biomass remains unnamed. Dr. Vandana Shiva. Why?
Have some environmentalist made a deal and become shills? Clearly
Green marketing has been driven by the desire for profit. Duh
Destruction capitalism is hiding under a “green” cover. Duh
It is suggested Sierra Club takes money from biomass loggers. Could be
Bloomberg organized to finance more biomass projects. Not surprising
Tree cellulose can be turned into fuel by several processes. True
Wallstreet banks are into the biomass trade. Duh
Green investment portfolios of banks are not green at al. No surprise
Banks pick a piece of green investments for themselves. No surprise
All Gore is in on the biomass burning scheme. We knew he is not kosher
Brazil is expanding sugar cane plantations without regard for nature. True, also Soj, its the law of the jungle.
Animal fat is used for fuel production. Disgusting, but yes.
Algae can be used to make biofuels. True, is a returning promise that never materializes.
Environmentalists are shills. Many not all. Easy to spot : They are doing financially well.
Creating markets for electric cars is bad. False
Selling solar panels is bad. False
The New York Times carries Exxon marketing for algae biofuels. Yes that is a promise that’s more than 2 decades old.
Earth Day is a distraction. True
The solar array could not power the speaker system. It actulally could as is’s 60 x 300 Wp = 18 KWp. That is plenty!
There is a lot of dirty money for “Greenwashing” events like Earth Day. Duh
The shills and greenwashing is something we don’t normally try to think about. False we do that all the time.
Awareness is needed for transformation. True
We are beyond sustainable already. Maybe. Humans will survive even if we have to live in domed habitats.
We need to take control back from money. This is hard without starting an army or a bank, the last we suggest in a previous post.
People are the problem. Nope, it is banks maximizing fossil fuel consumption calling it “economic growth” and the fact banks control our lives.
We will be like uran utangs stuck in a tree in an otherwise barren landscape. True. If you do nothing effective, you won’t survive.
I have been contemplating the nature of the universe for a while, as a general interest. Quantum mechanics seems to tell half the story of the actual underlying structure. This has led me to find out about alternative ideas about the fabric of ‘spacetime’, first triggered by the qualities of gravitational waves. There are quite a number of thinkers who have ideas that are outside the box, for instance Thad Roberts and Gerard Gremaud, who I discovered once I concluded that spacetime is some kind of crystalline latice. My view has a relation with loopgravity, which can be made consistent with quantum dynamics.
Taking my views to their logical consequences recently I concluded that light should have to cover different distances in the same time depending on its frequency. There is a wonderous difference between radiation and movement of mass that is hard to explain. Why does anything radiate. This has to do with conversions of energy, this is well known. We say an electron is lifted to a higher band and can emit a photon as it drops back. The photon represents energy, it is a wave and also has properties of a particle. Very confusing.
A photon can travel for billions of years in a straight line from its perspective. All that time is a wave and a particle. I don’t think there are particles, I think particles are defined by their ability to interact and maintain their character. I think all particles are types of turbulence in spacetime. This is similar to the thinking of Gremaud. He views the univers as a kind for stiff metal that has deformations. Thad Roberts thinks the universe is a superfluid, which is a fluid in which there is no friction. He thinks that there is 3d space in which space itself can move around. I think there’s still a flaw there. There can be nothing, because it all came from nothing. Our experience is turbulence in a very thin mesh, but I have no definite answer and have not yet put all qualities of that mesh in their place.
About the particle and wave properties and what happens if you take away all ‘bangs’..
Somehow radiation is special, it is not turbulence. It moves at the maximum speed, against the elastic limit of space. Einstein did describe space as something elastic (so Gremauds ideas are not super strange). If you accept space ‘pixels’ are all connected by springs in three dimensions, you can imagine a force that compresses the spring to its maximum, ramming one point in space into the next. If that happens you would not be able to tell where in space you where. To dig a bit deeper into ‘space time’ : If it took no time to go from one location in space to another, then how would you know these locations where different? Therefore time IS space (gets rid of a pesky 4th dimension thanks!). The fact space has to be traversed creates time, or better still, locality. Time is locality is a property of the 3d lattice of space (which may be 3d as an emergent property)..
So I propose any type of radiation ‘bangs’ the springs of space flat as it travels through space. It experiences no time, because to it it is in all the places it traverses. There can’t be a seprerate location for anything in its path, it is all one location even though its like an estafette. Surrounding this punching through space is a wake and of course the spring reverberates back. So if we study radiation we see a wave, which is the literal variation in density of space. Carried on the crest of this wave though is two points in space that have melted.
Now my claim in the title follows from the fact that photons of different energy travel as light of different wavelengths. The wavelenght can be calculated as hC/E where h is Plancks constant, C the speed of light and E the energy. The higher the energy the shorter the wavelength. This, if you follow the above view of space means that radiation of a higher frequency ‘bangs’ space together more often over a given distance it travels. This banging means that distance does not need to be covered, because during these ‘bangs’ the two locations is space become one. If two photons of different energy travel a specific distance though space, they thus will arrive at the end of this distance at different times, or you could say one will travel faster than the other.
“A telescope viewing a supernova from over 16 billion light years away recently clocked the low energy photon arriving 5-7 seconds later than it’s high energy equivalent.”
Looking for confirmation I found a lot of people repeating that the speed of light is constant (even though light travels at various speeds in different media and can even be stopped), I was looking for an example of an exception. I found one (this one) that said that gamma radiation from a super distant star arrived 5 seconds earlier than visible light.
Update: Discovered that the effect is predicted in by LQG, but the narrator here says it wasn’t observed. Who knew I’d make a prediction also made by LQG without having heard of it. My idea is more elegant though 😉
If you do the calculation for the above quote then you take 16 billion light years, calculate how many peaks of the lightwave are in that distance, divide it by the planck length (this is the ‘skipped’ space) then multiply the result with the speed of light to get the time advantage of those skips which comes out at .2894 seconds. This does not exactly match the measurements, so there may be other factors, but a delay is a delay. The speed of light is not constant.
To me it is not clear how a deformation front in space suddenly gives rise to a photon that extracts itself from the local turbulence in (literally) no time. You can imagine music fans in a crowd pushing and pulling on each other until by accident all move into one way and cause a cascade of toppeling fans. In interfering surface waves you can also have sudden peaks. The amount of energy that can be contained in space is limted by what the springs can take, so such a peak translates into a burst of photon wave peaks send out that combined contain the energy that has to be removed. Of course it can be absorbed as wel, by turbulence. possibly when the ‘bang’ reaches a spring that was just extending. This is well known and is called interference. Energy can also be contained in groups of points moving about relative to other groups, for instance as they are perturbed by turbulence (an electron for instance).
Quantum mechanics will say that you can’t tell where a photon is etc. This simple thinking does not contradict that. If you are looking for a photon, you could see the probability distribution exactly for what it is, the likelyhood that it will pop up in one place or another. The subquantal perturbations are often ignored but they make it very uncertain where the energy reaches the treshold needed for detection. This translates in uncertainty of a photons existence at any time you choose to try to interact with it. You’r trying to catch the peaks of the wave in a space that’s already full of movement.
The above thinking does imply that if you can measure the timing of light of different frequencies exactly and you know they originate from a synchnous origin, you can determine the exact distance of to that origin. Patent is pending!
There is a mysterious side to economics. It’s called “the market”. It’s as undefined as “the universe” is to new aged believers. It is assumed that consumer demand will eventually direct cashflow towards producers of the best goods and services. It is assumed this process can afford to be blind to resource reserves, including human resources and ecological ones. It is, because there are no forcing parameters for human wellbeing or biodiversity and biovolume to be found in our fincial system. Economics basically moves blindly and hopes for the best. The most important incentive for this attitude is that it maximizes cashflow and power of banks, who use that power to keep it that way.
Free market economics looks exactly like communism
Any alternative to this is always labeled “communism”. It is always associated with Stalinist industrialization, production of boots, 5 year targets for farmers living in a 1984 bland anonymous world without color. Did you catch that? The fearfull image of communism is the face of industrialization, the key outcome of free market economics. There is a simple reason for this : People are very uniform in their desires and needs. You can know exactly what they will like in advance, you can estimate that if you produce a new iPhone with x new features you will sell them to x billion users (desperate to feel unique), that you can thus manufacture them in massive factories at dirt cheap prices. Now if you only could find the cheapest “labour”, well hurray! for China’s police state! You see the Latte sipping not working person in New York managed to monetize attention, reverence and thus, through the mechanisms of free market economics, condemned a nameless chinese person to practically live on a factory floor, exposed to chemicals, working 14 hour shifts. That 0,004% of people in NY (living in blissfull denial) are no better than Kim Yung Un running his detention camp.
But what is the real process of a person living in a western society, if you for a moment trace his/her effort and try to relate it to what such a person consumes? So for a moment lets pretend we had to plan exactly what needs to happen to keep a city dweller in Holland alive..
Now our view of economics is that everything depends on three factors : Energy, Raw materials and Skills. Those factors can be renewble, non-renewable, human, robotic, natural or synthetic, its always the same formula that is involved in producing anything.
Greta Thunberg has done a great job mobilizing the next generation, the youth who will live a larger part of our shared future. She read the IPCC reports and they are pretty clear, we need a cut in oil consumption (and emissions) like we accidentally see today, and more. Because emissions are down does not mean the past emission have been neutralized. Emissions will need to be negative for a long time to get back to pre industrial CO2 levels, and this is very hard, because the CO2 has diffused all over our atmosphere. Best is not to cause CO2 emissions, stop them ASAP.
The trouble is that kids haven’t got much power. They would if they took up arms, weapons and started killing, but of course that would end in slaughter. It sounds crazy, but you know now that people that understand their lives are at risk can do pretty radical stuff (like practically locking themselves in their homes for weeks). Banks are no help, because banks live off the fossil “economy” they created. The fact is kids don’t have cash nor credibility (except if they become students, then banks will gladly push them into debt, after first having upped the cost of education by putting the universities into debt). How is the will of the next generation going to triumph over the will of the banks and fossil economists?
The answer is really as simple as the violence mentioned above, but its actually non-violent. It is radical : Create a currency for the kids to sell. Banks have feared this move and have been fighting cash in order to increase control over citizens (this is perfectly demonstrated in China already). You see, a currency is also a tool to create organized effort. The reason is that when you reward labour with some kind of currency, and the labour results in some kind of product, you can give the workers the right to buy the product with the currency. That way you have had their help at a time you had nothing! A perfect example is a farmer who pays planters of crops with IOUs for a piece of the harvest. A variation is a farmer that sells grain futures to get money to pay his workers,
But to get back to Greta, she has no cash, the kids have no cash, they can’t initiate any usefull project or start institutions. Maybe with some donations but when will that run out. And in fact they want real older people to do stuff to help them NOW. How can this inability to reward people now be solved? The answer is simple. Create a currency, the ‘climatecoin’ (just a name). Accounts could be administered by any bank, or a stock market could do it. Banks will likely not cooperate, in fact you can only create crypto currency freely these days, anything else and you find yourself opposed by bank regulators. We are not sure if crypto is the best option but a blockchain could be used to safely store information of account balances for sure, even if the balances themselves are not blochchains. A coin can be started with a simple ledger, even one on paper. The coin could be sold for Euro, treated to be equal to a Euro. There is however also another way to look at how the coin is backed.
If you compare the coin to a IOU handed out by the farmer, so really an UNBACKED promise, and not exchangeable with Euro, then what would be the promise implied? The promise would be political dominance of the “Greta movement”. With political dominance the coin/currency could be given value by changing the law. The coin could be a bit like a 10 year bond. It would be similar to the paper dollars once created by (broke) Boston to pay of roughneck furr trappers, incidentally the origin of paper money in the US of A.
With Greta there are a lot of other young and older people who understand reality and desperately want action. All these young people would have to work together to gain REAL poltical control. This would take time, but of course their number is huge and growing. The mission would be to make up a deciding part of politics in about 10 to 15 years from now. They would have the goal of becoming the stewards of society and then they could -by law- assign value to their currency. It is a modern version of a Napoleontic war made possible by the promise of its spoils. It would require Greta and those that share her motivation to fight climate change to reach political dominance in the next 10 years or so. This is a certainty.
The Greta bank would finance the construction of renewable energy projects, the money could be used to take climate action. The mere plan to give the currency value by conquering political positions would be enough to enable her to use it to sway people that are now being corrupted by the banks. Her demand is : “How fucking fast can you change the emissions curve” “How fucking fast can you start doing things that increase the chances of a better future”. If you are a poltician and you know this movement is real and determined to rule then wouldn’t you be smart to act along its lines, along its principles? The reality is that this is SUPER EASY once you don’t care about profit anymore and banks are forced to help with the climate transition. However there is really no time to wait until all bankers have died, all those living of fossil cashflow have left the system.
A young girl will give you 1000 climatecoins, and you wil act as if its 1000 Euro, and in time you will be returned this value for those coins, because the girl has made it law. Thus the girl becomes climate banker and all euro’s in Europe can make a choice to move towards fighting climate change, or back into the coffers of the fossil industry and banks.
This approach requires carefull choice of how many coins to emit, with clear record of the purpose they will be used for. This would have to be based on shared models of outcomes of actions, not profit based business plans but real world practical goals, but also to get rid of fossil lakeys and help people that get the climate threat.
Salps are gelatinous animals that live in our oceans, they move up and down the water colum sometimes 600 meter, spending nights at the surface and days in the dark depths. They are interesting because they eat planktomn and other ocean greens and turn them into pellets. The pellets sink to the ocean floor and thus sequester carbon, take it out of the atmosphere.
It is not enough to capture CO2 by algae in our oceans, to promote that capture by iron fertilization or deep ocean upwelling fertilization. This is because the biomass created tends to be metabolized back into methane or CO2 as long as it stays near the surface. Cell particles are nutritious to animals, so you capture CO2 in the biomass of various organisms, but you really want a pump of carbon down to the deep ocean floor.
Obviously the biological web in our oceans is still complex. Acidification and deoxygenation and warming are changing that. We need this web however, both to generate oxygen and to capture and sequester CO2. Right now there are no large scale plans, especially not out of economically driven regions. We need more experiments that aim to keep oceans or part of them cool enough and oxygenized and pH neutral enough for life.
Keeping our oceans alive is a challenge we need to meet, we need that carbon sequestration capacity online.
Our minds desire to identify a simple easy to circumscribe action in order to build its drive to actually go ahead and try to achieve it. The best motivator is to hit a target, a moon shot, for SpaceX it’s reaching Mars. We need such a goal for our oceans. What would that be? If you have a suggestion send it to our @climatebabes account on Twitter.
