In Holland people have been advised not to wear facemasks. This seems to have had its origin in the right wing desire to create herd immunity, even though they say that the reason is to reserve face masks for nurses etc. There was a claim that masks don’t work -for this reason-. Of course basic logic defeats this advice, because 1. Masks do work against spreading and 2. Even if there is a masks shortage, people could improvise their own. One reason to prevent the use of basic masks (for building for example) is that these can contain anti-fungal toxins (to protect agains mold during storage) that are also toxic for humans. The general consensus is that wearing a mask is beneficial.
A masks is a very unreliable thing though, a piece of cloth will catch aerosol droplets in its pores, so then the virus lives in the cloth, until you touch it and then touch your face and so the risk of contamination is still there. We are a bit puzzled why there are no suggestions to wear better gear, a backbreather as we call it (maybe not the best name sowwy), that more or less eliminate all risk of aerosol contamination except from the hands or skin. The idea is simple, don’t get the air at face height, use a big filter so the pressure drop is low, and wear it around your waist. Can be run on Lithium batteries. Mouth, nose and eyes are covered by the breathing mask with overpressure. Should be fairly easy to heat mold masks like this.
The basic advantage of this mask is that you can let people hang out with each other, especially if you screen them for fever and infection with fast methods (10 mins is possible) what will be the risk of spreading the virus then? Keeping distance is great but unreliable. Many filter products don’t cover the eyes, so this is a small change to make them usefull. Time to innovate in this field. We need ways to move about freely and we need them asap.
If you don’t believe in any god, not in a force that acts through everything, not in anything sentient with a will and powers that influences our lives, then you are probably an atheist. There is as wide a variety of atheists as there are people who do believe in a god or gods. Even within followers of religions, like for example the Roman Catholic church, there are atheists. This is because some people see the benefit of catholicism but don’t see any evidence of the existence of a god and don’t deem it necessary to even assume it. The core of Judaism has no god. It assumes ‘god’ is ‘in everything’, which speaks more about how a person sees the world. The god of the old testament is for the ‘dumb’ jews.
If you are an atheist you have expectation of entering heaven or hell after you die. You don’t have to hope or fear during your life, and your behaviour can be motivated by your own experiences and judgements. If you judge by how few people listen to warnings (about climate change) you can expect that even a very ‘religious’ person indoctrinated from birth will in the end just follow his/her heart. Crime rates are not lower in religious countries as far as we know. People are only happier in religious countries that have a thriving economy.
When it comes to the corona pandemic atheist seem to be better of than believers. The response ranges from outright denial of vulnerability to the virus by both muslim and christian leaders, to pretending to cure or protect against it to rationally advising physical distancing. An atheist can see that only when the best medical advice is followed, and one listens to the science (and allows medical professionals to do their job) you can expect the least suffering or risk of death during this calamity. Having been indoctrinated to believe in a god increased your risk of death on average.
There is a middle category one could identify within the religious realm, which is people that try to follow the behaviours of their god or religious figure. People that do that can definitely be atheists. If you follow the new testament teachings of Jezus, you may or may not believe he is the son of god, you can still do as he did. This is different even from following rules set out by a god (or prophet) of which there can be many that can never be lived by one individual (say rules about what men should do and women should do). It is way easier to make rules than to live by a specific set of rules. Some christian priests followed the behaviour of Jezus and visited the sick to console them, and died from being contaminated with the virus.
As atheist you can conclude that religions are a risk, that its priests can turn into dangerous charlatans causing many deaths. If you wished to protect yourself against religious denial of what seems safe to do on an empirical basis, its not sure how to go about it. The same argument holds if you consider other believes a risk, for instance the believe that economic growth is good, or the belief that everyone should be a muslim. Dangerous beliefs are everywhere, and time and time again the people that follow reason and empirical evidence have to fix things for them, that is atheists.
We have written often about the nature of our economic system, which is a carbon credit system. The reason was that our economic system incentivises the use of fossil fuels because it tries to maximize cashflow for banks. At the same time banks object to development of privately owned renewables because they own the monopoly on fossil credit creation, and renewables reduces the need for this credit.
The mindfuck the world is conditioned to believe, very similar to religious believes is that this kind of economics is a good system, and unavoidable system, one in which hard work payes, one in which the rich with lots of cash are king. Of course banks are king. In fact oil companies should be king. The big mindfuck is that oil companies sell their oil to pay bills to banks, and countries like Saudi Arabia today is in trouble because they recieve so little money for their oil. But their oil IS what gives our money its value. They should just only sell the oil in Riyal, like Iran. They should forget about any debt to Wallstreet. If they did you’d see what keeps the system as it is : Military power.
Because of people’s misunderstanding of their own power banks are now buying up oil resources. “Whit what?” you could ask. Well, with money. Banks can create money out of thin air. If you spend the money you expect people to be producing stuff you can buy. The value of your cash completely depends on what people are producing. Without oil, no production, shipping, mining. Renewables only cover a small portion of this. So why not just keep the oil and trade it for goods and services? Because banks made everyone crazy.
Going back in history it all began with lack of trust and insecurity, people who accumulated wealth but had no use for it basically got mugged into entrusting it to someone else. This is the less romantic view. The Medici where bankers and maffia, quite a number where killed, but their backup was that they also held the papal position, so they had a bigger army to help them from Rome in times of need. Coercion and distrust are the basis of banking. The best strategy about banks would be to take away their privilige to create money. All banks should be nationalized under governments simply because governments have different objectives than private banks. Banks depend on governments to secure the oil that gives thier credit value, but then they run away with the profit!
The goal of a government, when it is supported by the people will be to serve the interests of the people. Keep them healty, secure vaccines against coronavirus, work on it in advance etc. It is a clear sign our governments have been hijacked by banks because both Trump and the dutch government did not see the use of preventive action against pandemics. Obama and GW Bush understood the threat. We could have a bubonic plague killing 50% of people instead of 3.5%, we would not be able to respond. We are very lucky. The bankers say “How can you prepare for such a rare event”, but this is exactly what you should perpare for! An example in history is Englands defeat of the vikings when they came raiding -again- because the leader had prepared the island for years.
One conclusion could be “The web of bank dependence is to wide and its succes is to reliable to defeat it”. That is the truth. Fossil fuels are being delivered very reliably for bank created credit, and if banks are allowed to hoax people into selling their wells for paper this will remain the case. Banks become the ones that distribute the power of their own fossil fuel assets, and people that need power will borrow from banks. This would lead us to inevitable climate chaos and death for almost everything alive on Earth. I saw a book about the end of civilizations, f.i. the Easter Islanders, why did they vanish, and then think how little we know about what kind of racket they where stuck in. Competing tree cutting clans? Compare to Yemen, that is about to run out of water. You don’t see it when you open the faucet until it happens, why would you respond?
The other conclusion could be “We need to compete with banks”. This starts with ownership of land, and control of politics. This can not be done without developing power. But power is for sale, solar, wind geothermal, wave energy all kan be a source of real power. Farmers can use wind energy to power the vehicles, work the land, generate fertilizer. This would cut them loose from banks as they would earn ‘carboncredits’ by selling their produce, but their cost would be close to zero. Banks have made sure not to fund projects that make farmers independent. This is one of the ways to take power back.
Any renewable energy project that is not debt loaded, where banks are not involved (even though they can increase the size of your project) is a candidate for true power. These are of course fought on every scale. Banks know this very well. This is what banks are terrified of. A super big renewable energy project owned by the state. It will be fucked with by banks until it lands into deep debt with the same banks. You could have Italy funneling all tourist tax into state owned solar, to be sold only by its central bank. Of course that central bank has a much larger interest in selling fossil credit so that would not work out.
Extraeconomic Nuclei
The only viable strategy is to look locally and invest in renewables to power local business that really produce something. Not a tanning salon but a car factory or bakery for example. The investment would have to be community cash, and the community would recieve dividend from the baker or factory. This would be an example of an extraeconomic system.
An extraeconomic activity is one that does not lend itself to economic exploitation. No debt can be loaded on it. This can be because it is fully owned by someone or a group or people while being debt free. Usually the energy requirement quickly ties an activity into the wider economy, because if you run a bakery for instance, you need gas or electricity for the stove, and to buy this you need Euro or USD and so you have to sell into the Euro/USD (or other carboncurrency) market. Of course your income from selling bread doesn’t only go to your gas/electricity but also to the supplier of flour who passes it on to the farmer who uses it to buy the diesel for his machines. Your bakery is only really extraeconomic if it bakes with owned energy sources, if the flour was milled with owned energy sources, if the farmer owns the field and the equipment was run electrically or with biodiesel from an owned source, e.g. if there was no wider fossil based economic system you depended upon. This means bankers that can simply print money can not grab what you own or created.
It seems the gas sector is trying to become indispensible as part of district heating solutions around the world. It reasons only with its own potential and a methane shortage is not on the horizon. Sadly banks are not making a choice for this industry, in fact banks seem to see it as their refuge now that coal is losing its Salonfähigkeit. What is someone who really wants to cut CO2 emissions to do?
Don’t start about Hydrogen please. As things stand Hydrogen is going to be produced from methane through steam reforming. In the unlikely case it is going to be produced from wind energy or solar it will waste nearly 60% of the energy, so your solar panel now has a yield of not 18% but 8% or your windpark is not generating 10GW but effectively 5GW. There is a Nitrogen infrastructure, for NH3 ammonia, but not any real one for H2. It is more efficient to ship power in batteries by rail to where it needs to go than to convert it to H2 and pipe it somewhere. H2 is a so called “Delay strategy” to protect Methane sales.
So what then? Heat, where do you get it? We say : Wind. How? Mechanical friction. Heat is the easiest thing to produce in the world, its has the lowest entropy of different kinds of energy. Compare these ideas :
Wind -> Friction -> Heat. Then Move heat to consumer.
Of course it’s not that simple, especially when your turbines are at sea, the question is if they need to be but ok. We have a trick up our sleave and a role for H2 to play as well!
Heat storage in N2/H2
The above image is from a project run in Australia almost a decade ago, we came across it then. It was about storing solar heat by splitting ammonia into N2 and H2, to then recombine them later to generate heat. We have not calculated how you could do this with fricion heat from wind and how practical it is, but your heat can be generated and stored.
We made this mock up of a VAWT generating heat in a box below ground, where the heat can not escape. Its easy to calculate the yield.
Another way to do it is to have smaller turbines by the coast (for The Hague for example) ones you place there only in winter when nobody is on the beach. There’s a lot of wind, you can use the mechanical force to generate heat in underground water basins (water is an excellent heat storage medium) and then pipe it to the city from there. We wrote about wind heatning systems here.
There are other examples of this idea and its execution. The major reason to do it is that it is very cheap. It does not require complex electrical systems or intricate mechanical parts. There are people who use a hydraulic pump or comperssor instead of a direct drive axle, which may be more cost effective and versatile (because now you have hydraulic pressure use any way you like). The major obstacle is the ability to place wind turbines on land against the right wing political will, but these turbines have no gears, so
Now if we are not mistaken the planet is heating up at a scary pace. So cooling solutions are likely more welcome in many parts of the world. Sadly hot air doesn’t usually have much wind, but you can have a Mistral or some kind of desert wind in specific places you can utilize for COOLING. Simply drive a heat pump with the mechanical or hydraulic force and you’re done. It is easier to store ice underground (or super cold liquids) than heat, as the cold naturally doesn’t cause upward convection but creates an insulating layer of cold air on top of it.
A wind turbine that cools air so water comes out..
Another source of heat and cooling energy remains the Sun. We think the high efficiency solar thermal panels have not had a fair chance. These panels that maintain an ultra high vacuum are capable of reaching 500 Celsius in the dead of winter. But commonly, in most solar thermal applications in the middle of summer the panels are not used because they generate -too much- heat. For that period we need to see more cooling conversion systems.
The Coronavirus is a challenge to the system, one we would never invite but which the globalized economy kind of did. Many have said it would not be a question if, but when this kind of disease would break out of some biological niche. Now it did, and the origin is still uncertain.
Across the globe we have seen right wing dominated goverments being reluctant to respond adequately to stop contamination. The main reason is that in these governments people that think money is more important than human lives are in charge. Industry does not care about your life, this is a fundamental thing to understand. If human lives are not a factor in the bottom line, that bottom line can drive a lethal machine, as we have seen in the case of tobacco, DDT, Glyphosate, fossil fuels..
Now that right wing politicians realize they can not hide behind walls to protect themselves, in fact, their job and their denial of its seriousness exposes them almost maximally to this disease, they have come around with more sensible measures. Still loopholes are left, like in the UK somehow people should still visit pubs. in other places schools remain open. In Romania people recieved the holy communion en masse in spite of a lockdown.
But the production of goods and services is now seriously impeded, not only the frolicking around consuming fossil fuels (flying to sunny destinations for example). Production needs to restart somehow. As that is done contamination has to be checked because the disease can resurge when people start mingling again. We have not yet seen proposals on how to do this.
It seems a good test for immunity needs to be developed, so that immune people can be identified. There are alot of them, and they can commune and interact without problems (as far as we understand the situation). Creating a large group of uninfectuous immune individuals was behind the botched choice for “Herd immunity” of Boris Johnson and also the dutch PM. “Herd immunity” has to be build up by carefully and stricktly seprating the most vulnerable from the rest, and this is not what happened in the UK, there the assumption was that everyone would become infected so no use to take measures. Johnson can blame Cummings but ultimately he suggested to “take it on the chin”.
But “Herd immunity” is a thing, and in many places, at the cost of lives, it is developing. We hope the disease doesn’t mutate as regular flu does. If it doesn’t then immune people can be “let loose” to work again. It makes sense to us to make a plan on how to do that, but maybe this is even overkill. The main steps are:
Test people for immunity and certify them
Allow groups of immune people to work together
Keep separating the elderly and make strict rules on interaction
Perhaps select immune people to deal with the elderly as a “shield”
“Grow” uninfected communities around supermarkets or places they commune
One could look at “supermarket” communities in cities to test people. Great place to collect tests as well. Send an SMS code to people if they are tested which they can use to show they have been tested (rechallenge). A simple APP with photo id linked to the phone number will do.
It is shockingly clear that the industrially motivated policies that weakened the police, fire department, hospitals and care givers have increased the risk to the population, and those that drove these weakening policies are now known. Heads must roll. Also deep respect for those that are still risking their health because their work forces them to be close to infected people.
The economy has shown its true face, we don’t need to work for money, our debts don’t need to be payed, banks don’t contribute to society, as long as there is energy there is production of the essentials. Manual migrant labour shortages will become a problem and this calls for solidarity, we will need to work our own fields. Holland risks having to eat 7 times as much meat because of export restrictions (a joke of course), nobody will toil in the fields to produce for unnecessary exports. We hope some globalist aspects of the world economy will be reconsidered. We advise to prohibit any company to be affiliated or supply to customers beyond the real world horizon.
Dogs have an exceptional sense of smell, many animals are better than humans in this respect, even though mothers can usually pick t-shirts worn by their children out of a pile. We all know dogs have been trained to detect heroin and other drugs, promting smugglers to hid them in coffee for instance.
From talking to dog training experts we learned that dogs can be trained for a lot of jobs, but always one job at a time, unless its natural behaviour. They trade performance on a detection job for play and attention, and what they will do shifts constantly dependent on what you reward with play.
Dogs can smell pathogens and diseases, some diseases cause our body to produce ammonia or aceton which is easy to detect, but diseases with less dramatic effect have also been detected, amongs others the flu. When we looked into this we found that dogs have been trained to detect bird flu (H1N1 or avian influenze) and could do it quite reliably:
Cancers are growths that are developing blood vessels and may be distressed causing them to emit a smell. It may be that the process of infection of the coronavirus also produces specific chemicals and protiens a dog can smell on our breath, or even from further away. The virus is breaking into cells, the cell will start making the virus and burst releasing the virus into the air.
There is a risk though that dogs actually contract the virus themselves. The question is then how contageous and affected would they be. Its also a question how long it would take to train a dog if it where possible or what the dog would be trained on, a real virus or a patient or a destroyed virus? It may not be as easy as we like but we think dogs may be a great patner in detecting infected people and help us stop the spread from infected but not sick patients.
Many people are calling for the fleecing of Billionairs. They are precieved as unjust hoarders of money that should be distributed amongst the people. They are made suspect as if you can’t earn a billion no matter what you do. Bloomberg is a billionair and buying the election! We think there is a good reason for this sentiment, and it is not because people are hurt by them, but because banks don’t like them. They make the world unpredictable for them.
“Nobody earns a billion” is a common way to make billionairs seem suspect. But of course this then goes for any business owner who has employees.
First of, what is a billionair exactly? Seems like a stupid question, its supposed to be a guy with a billion dollars or more. Not quite, is the money in his/her company or in the bank in cash? Elon Musk owns a billion dollar valuated company, 35 Billion to be precies, but can he access all that cash? Does he have any other plans than make more cars and rockets? It is common knowledge he made a high risk bet on the growth of Tesla, which would if not met mean no reward for him after all the hard work (and all the people he gave an exciting job).
“Those holdings may be difficult or even impossible for Musk to quickly sell for cash, meaning it’s quite possible that he could face a liquidity crunch.” (source)
But maybe Musk is a bad example. Michael Bloomberg’s empire is said to be worth $62 Billion. That is also the value if he sold it, but of course he won’t. He’s running for president now and seems to have a lot of cash to spend on media, his expertise.
But there are other billionair companies, the poorest of the top 100 has $98 Billion. Apple is worth about $800 Billion. They are not considered Billionairs as far as we know. Why focus on a few individuals that have more than a Billion to allocate or have companies with such value, and not on the other hundreds of them?
We think the reason there is no riot against Apple to share some of its wealth with society, but there is a riot against (known) rich individuals, is that the whole movement is orchestrated by banks. This is because banks fear billionairs. Billionairs don’t need banks. Just like with all the hate that is incited, against immigrants etc. the hate against billionairs has a different purpose, it is the mob helping the banks get rid of enemies.
Elon Musk had about 160 Million in cash around 2009 and decided to build an electric car. Electric cars where demonstratively destroyed earlier in the 20th century, they existed, they made the owners happy, but they did not use fossil fuels. They reduced cashflow for fossil fuels. That is why the did not exist. A workshop of an EV builder was mysteriously burned to the ground. EVs where not hip then, nobody believed in them but a few and Elon Musk.
Banks destroyed this car, It threatened their cashflow
The money Elon had earned he put in Tesla, and SpaceX, until almost all of it was gone and there was nothing left. He did not get any help from banks, but the banks could not stop him. NASA and Mercedes helpt Tesla survive in the last minute. He is now ripping apart the entire industry, with brands admitting they can never catch up, dumping internal combustion engines and so sunsetting vehicle fuel cashflow which is a steady business for banks, reducing the need for maintenance, lubrication, brake fluid, brakes, etc. etc.
If Elon Musk did not have that money in cash, he could not have done this. He would have been discouraged by banks. We have followed the renewable industry for more than a decade now and heard first hand stories about banks trying to kill projects that meant less energy cashflow, like a personally owned wind turbine.
Do fossil cashlfow banks kill alternatives for fossil fuel cars? Listen around 2 minutes 11 seconds!
If a billionair had the mind he could build a giant floating solar power plant in the middle of Holland, and suddenly he would be selling energy against Euro’s, he would not be in debt, he would earn and earn and elsewhere owners of power plants would see energy prices having dropped, cashflow through banks would dry up. It would destroy the system of control over society banks have.
Billions give power that can break through harmfull barriers
A company could probably not do that, because a company is loaded with debt to the max already, it competes with other companies that have done the same, all so banks can both control and profit from them, a lot like a parasite. You can say “Now wait a minute, banks do the complicated stuff”. But who made the stuff so complicated? Who designed the ‘credit default swaps’ and other products that caused the crash in 2008? The essence of what banks need is control, and they have an incredibly powerfull tool to excert it, which is the right to create credit.
Robert Mercer and his daughter funded Trumps fake news presidential campaign
Whereas companies are beholden to shareholders and continuation of bank loans, as well as ratings by ‘independent’ rating agencies, flat out billionairs are not. Technically they control a tremendous amount of resources which they can direct towards a specific goal. If those billions where spread out in the hands of say one million people, these people would spend it on predictable things, things that would be unlikely to change the situation for banks. Elon Musk spend all his millions on the cars and rockets (and SolarCity) and he needed to to get going. He seemed to have worked to the top of his capacity and this created a change in society car companies, oil companies, banks fought hard to avoid.
So we should cherish the millionairs and billionairs that can think for themselves and have freed themselves from the clutches of banks. There are evil ones as well, such as the Koch Brother (one left) and the Mercers (father and daughter who sponsored Trumps fake persidential campaign using illegal Facebook data). If billionairs are the target, then so must be billionair companies who evade taxes, and probably those first. However, banks don’t like you to distub their racket, so they want you to focus on those they have no use for or feel threatened by.
Het is nationaal nieuws, Shell en de Gasunie doen een poging om de gas/fossiele economie langer te laten duren. Ze stellen voor langzaam 10 Gw windpark te bouwen op de Noordzee, en daarvan meteen 5Gw weg te gooien door er waterstof van te maken. Dat zal dan voor verwarmingsprocessen in de industrie gebruikt worden, daarbij nog eens 50% verkwistend.
Waterstof zal overwegend met Gas gemaakt worden, waarbij CO2 vrijkomt
De uitvoering is langzaam, en er zal dus eerst waterstof van aardgas worden gemaakt. Dat is al jaren de wens van de gasindustrie, om van CH3 H2 te maken, de C aan O2 te koppelen en die dan op te slaan (de belofte van CCS die al jaren wordt uitgesteld en mislukt). Gas-Waterstof met emissies dus.
Waterstof synthese met hydrolyse is niet erg efficient
Het ultieme doel is om onze economie afhankelijk te houden van processen waar we zelf geen grip op hebben. Dan kan de bank waterstof krediet uitgeven aan industrie die de gasstrategie steunt, en veel risico zien in industrie die wil verduurzamen. Zo houdt de fossiele sector ook na fossiel de macht, en dat in een proces zo traag dat we de strijd tegen catastrofale opwarming zeker zullen verliezen.
We moeten van het machtsbolwerk van centrale distributie van energie via krediet af. Het is een fossiel systeem!
We zien sodium en kalium batterijen, perovskiet zonnecellen als techniek vertraagd worden door de bank/fossiele weerstand (de link tussen die twee is dat geld fossiel krediet is). Dat terwijl die technieken voor goedkope batterijen en zonnepanelen zouden kunnen zorgen, vandaag al! Hoe lang laten we die fossiele macht nog de dienst uitmaken.
Zo’n 10 GW windpark moet er zo snel mogelijk komen, en verwarmen doe je dan liever met stroom, want dan kun je de warmte vasthouden omdat je niet de hele tijd (in het geval van waterstof) waterdamp moet laten ontsnappen (water neemt een hoop warmte mee!). Daarbij zou een zonnecentrale op het Markermeer een betere match zijn voor een vrij en welvarend Nederland, vergelijk:
Wind op zee en Waterstof :
Ver weg Afhankelijk van bestaande banksysteem Gooit 60% weg door waterstof conversies Heel duur (waardoor eigendom van banksysteem) Aardgas gebruik blijft lang hoog dus ook CO2 emissies Heeft CCS nodig wat nog niet werkt
Dicht bij Deelnemende gemeentes worden bank Sla op in batterijen, 5% verlies Kan vandaag beginnen, kan met contant geld Geeft ruimte aan NL zonnepanelen/batterijen fabriek Stroom en warmte kan gewonnen worden
We need to capture more CO2 fast. There are many fast growing plants, one of them is the Ivey plant (or Hedera helix). It sprouts new fingers each year and tries to get into every crack it can find. It is low maintenance, you plant it, it starts to grow. A lot like the vines of wine actually, which is also a great plant. Where to put it? Against the walls or your home.
We propose that as a clear attempt to create negative emissions, we all plant Ivy plants against our homes. As a child we studied the tiny feet they make against the briks of a wall, and they are glued to it quite strongly, but they don’t break down your home, and can be cleaned off without a problem. You will have to trim them as they try to crawl through your windows in spring.
Beautifull way to capture carbon and clean your local air
In most cities you own at least 50 cm of pavement from the front of your house. You can remove tiles and plant your Ivy. It is easier than other plants because they are more sturdy, so you won’t have to worry about people stepping on it, yet you will be contributing to capturing CO2 in a real visible way.
Just remove a tile and plant our Ivy
Plants cause evaporative cooling, they breath the air and as a result clean it as well of NOx. The biomass they create as they grow up buildings can be considerable, Ot could be a way to collect and dispose of biomass from inner cities to capture the leaves in fall (if fall is still a thing). Join the Ivy League, we set up a facebook page and invite you to post pictures of your Ivy plant. Go Ivy with your street.
We face climate change, we face plastic pollution, we face many problems caused by the use of fossil fuels, but also many problems caused by humans that use those fossil fuels to make other things, to mass produce, industry.
A refinery?
Industry is visible, you can see it, but it has no real identity to us, it’s a bunch of pipes and blue lights at night. You hear humming and see flares. It smells weird. The above picture could be of an installation who’s waste polluted dutch waters for years, because one company took in all the waste and pretended to pump it onto a barge, but in fact dumped it in the water next to the barge. This happened on a non descript terrain in a sparsely populated area by people that lived private lives. That did not want to be known.
Truth : Industry does not care about human lives
We read in the news that German chemical factories are once again polluting the Rhine, which ends in the North Sea and supplies the dutch with drinking water. They used to pollute the Rhine much worse, but then they where forced to clean up, but now new chemicals are being produced that do not fit the restrictions. It is an endless process of running after companies that just dump their waste through the route of least resistance.
Golden rule : Be boring and inconspicuous
The people in the polluting industry are not world news. They are smarter if they remain inconspicuous. High pay of CEOs is less in companies that want to offer no grip for resistance, critical judgement or even agression. If you earn 200,000 Euro in Europe you can have a nice life, with your family. Only in highly competitive jobs, like in banking, something many people can do, you see that pay rises to insane heights. This is also a result of the fact that there is no oversight on contracts, or very little. We worry about banks, and we should, because they finance industry that may as we speak introduce another chemical or product that will damage lives for decades if not centuries to come.
