Greencheck.nl

We schrijven meestal over duurzaamheid en het fossiele machtsbolwerk dat we moeten verslaan, maar ondertussen zijn er ook andere onderwerpen waar we onszelf, of waar de economie ons weerhoudt van de juiste acties.

De vergrijzing is een feit, niet alleen in Nederland. De werkgevers maken zich zorgen, er zijn te weining mensen om het werk te doen en het aantal lijkt zelfs af te nemen. Tegelijkertijd stijgt de ‘last’ van de ouderen die pensioen genieten. We vinden die framing als ‘last’ onterecht. Het is waar dat ouderen niet veel produceren, maar dat is een gevolg van de wens van de economie om te produceren met fossiele energie, en niet met hernieuwbare energie. Daardoor zijn er altijd mensen die denken “Die fossiele energie zou ik zelf wel willen gebruiken”, er is concurrentie om de energie, en dan worden ouderen weggezet als ‘last’.

De medische wetenschap ontwikkelt zich echter voortdurend. Er is tegenwoordig zogenaamde stamcel therapie. Daarbij worden stamcellen gemaakt, dat zijn cellen die zich nog in elk celtype kunnen differentieren. Deze maken we normaal gesproken zelf ook, in ons beenmerg voor bloedcellen, maar ook in onze longen en hersenen. Bij hersenbeschadiging worden nieuwe cellen gemaakt die zich automatisch verplaatsen naar de plek van het letsel en daar functie herstellen.

Stamceltherapie is een onderdeel van regeneratieve geneeskunde en kan gezien worden als een nieuwe tak in de medische therapeutische benadering van ziekten en traumata waarbij de basis idee bestaat uit de transplantatie van – al dan niet gedifferentieerde – stamcellen ter vervanging van afwezige of defecte cellen, weefsels of organen.

Veel werknemers zouden wel langer willen werken, maar zijn gewoon te oud en gebrekkig om dat te doen. Stamceltherapie wordt vooral gepromoot met beweringen over herstel van algemene gezondheid. Gezondheid op hoge leeftijd is niet alleen iets dat ‘marktwaarde’ heeft, maar ook economisch belang. Wat zou het voor de werkende medemens betekenen als hij/zij nog een aantal jaar in gezondheid zou kunnen doorwerken?

Stamcel therapie hoeft niet duur te zijn. Het zijn tenslotte levende cellen die bij 37 graden Celsius op een beetje agaragar prima gedijen (niet dat we er het fijne van weten overigens). Met een warmhoud kast en een paar petrischaaltjes ben je al een heel eind. Niet om het te bagataliseren, maar toch is het vooral het checken van de cellen en het steriel houden van het proces (de cellen worden in het bloed getransfuseerd) het meeste werk.

Stel : Stamceltherapie werkt zoals veel mensen getuigen. Dan zou het geen slecht idee zijn om deze behandeling algemeen te vergoeden. Dat zou niet alleen de kosten van medische zorg beperken (en van verzorging), maar ook de levenskwaliteit van ouderen verbeteren, en daarmee ook de kans dat ze nog deelnemen aan het arbeidsproces. Grotere arbeidsparticipatie is goed voor de economie.

Het lijkt ons dat een politieke partij die niet te knus is met de farma-ceutische industrie dit zou kunnen voorstellen. Als de baten kunnen worden bepaald (door onderzoek naar de voordelen voor de levenskwaliteit van behandelde patienten) dan kan blijken of mensen de keuze gegeven moet worden : behandelen of pensionado blijven. Het lijkt ons dat als mensen uit het arbeidsproces vallen door kwalen die met stamcel therapie verholpen kunnen worden, zo’n behandeling zeker te motiveren is.

Around the word rainfall is decreasing. This has the effect that in coastal zone salt water percolates upward, no longer kept down by new fresh water. This is ruining land for farming across the globe, many crops can’t grow as well in salter water and production is decreasing. With modern methods of plant breeding new species of plants can be created that actually thrive on saline soil. Below a number of examples.

A nice consequence of being able to grow high caloric crops on saline soil is that it could open much more land to farming, even in remote areas where only seawater is available. With partial desalination crops can grow and store CO2 with the efficiency of 5% or 50Watt/m2 (which is the approximate solar conversion rate of plants). That is 500 kW/hectare or 50 MW/km2. The rice in the above example can be managed by robots. The yield could be used to run the equipment, so that the investment in energy sources like solar panels can be low. This could be part of an extraeconomic carbon capture operation.

Battery tech is developing fast. New types are entering the market, and leaving if they disappoint (or are to disruptive such as sodium batteries). The race is on for more kWh/kg, energy density and more cycles. This post is about Lithium Titanate batteries, and a quick recap of their capabilities is :

• Nominal cell voltage: 2.3 V
• Specific energy: 60–110 Wh/kg
• Energy density: 177 Wh/L
• Cycle durability: 6000–20000 cycles

The efficiency of these cells is not great, about 80%, but the cycle life is off the wall. These batteries will last 30 years! If you build storage for your solar installation you only have to buy them once. The search code for this battery chemistry is LTO, you can find them on Alibaba.

There are two main formfactors, the cylindrical and so called prismatic cells. The round are shown in the above video. because the Cell voltage is 2.3 Volt you need 5 or 6 of them to make a 12 Volt cell. You can get 5S BMSes to charge them on Aliexpress (5S) but 5S causes the battery voltage drops too low. Now there are 6S BMSes for sale (link to the BMS from the video). The balancers need further development, but balancing doesn’t need to be a problem.

LTO cells can discharge deeply, don’t mind low temperatures and don’t catch fire. Compared to Li-ion cells they are much safer, so if they are used in vehicles or machine and remain unattended for long times they won’t suddenly cause a fire.

New LTO batteries are more expensive, but this is because they last longer. Second hand LTO batteries are cheaper, but because of the many cycles they can be as good as new. Its funny because AliExpress can be a wild west market, so whatever you buy you need to test and check to see if you got what you bought.

Discharge rates for LTO cells can be 10C! This makes it a good option for starter batteries, but lighter and smaller.

We are looking for european manufacturers. Now with the Coronavirus logistics from China are under pressure. The risk to the world of being dependent on airfreight or 45 day logistics for essential goods (if they are even being produced) is not a smart thing. We hope more batteryfactories will be build in the EU soon!

Timmermans is Europe’s climate Czar, even if names refering to Russia may not be in vogue. Fossil Europe is preparing to utilize gas from Russia, and Holland, the country Timmermans is from, maintains a balance between criticism and expressions of friendship to Russia (and most if not all other countries). Timmermans is an EU machine. A worker that committed to the EU and its democratic processes. Now he has presented an interesting carrot and stick to get climate action moving : A Trillion Euro fund.

The trick works like this : Many will say “How can we reserve such vast amounts of money”. But in the back of their minds they will think “Wow, that is a nice fund. If we lobby to create it, we can also take money out!”. Member states will find themselves arguing how to pay for it while also fantasizing what to do with the cash! We hope that will work!

At the same time we know that the economy can not fix climate change. The simple reason is that the economy is based on fossil credit, carboncredit as we call it. If you want to produce something, a car for example, you need energy to make machines work, to heat the homes of your workers, to melt the steel. And that energy is distributed through our Euro. The Euro is still 75% Nuclear/fossil credit in Europe. If you say “We will reserve a trillion for climate action” you are taking an enormous cut out of the fossil reserves and allocate it towards fixing climate change. But of course you will burn those fossil fuels. So there are three problems with the 1 Trillion :

1. It represent fossil fuels you don’t want to burn
2. Banks influence the value of that trillion by printing more money
3. Companies want the money to go towards business as usual

So the likely scenario in the current economy is that there will be about 400 Billion to dole out at first. Maybe less. Then that will be doled out towards fossil intensive projects (they are always preferred by banks because they generate more cashflow). Infrastructure builders will be on the first row with some mega project. Massive amounts of CO2 will be emitted. Little will be achieved in time to have true effect. The economic doctrine is deeply ingrained in so many that there really needs to be a clear alternative approach, that takes a little time to grasp. Back to school so to say!

If you take a Tesla approach, and you are mentally paving a road over greenfields (or grayfields) because you consider the fossil based system obsolete, you need to create the conditions for speed in the future now. Like Tesla started a Giga factory because it understood batteries would be the limiting factor, the first order for Timmermans is to establish a calculation of battery solution feasibility for essential industries (not GDP essential but real economical!) and plan construction of battery production, solar panel production, wind turbines for a massive growth curve. This will give bankers a heart attack, it makes their carboncredit obsolete, but it also ensures execution can be fast and living standards can remain high.

As the above happens the search must be for ZERO fossil input ways to deal with climate change. You can’t support CCS, it is a temporary measure and the transition to renewables is for eternity. Solve the problems in one step, not in economically attractive (cash flow generating) non- solving ministeps, such as moving from coal to gas, from gas to gas-hydrogen. That’s just the fossil banking system wanking.

The transition to organic farming, soil carbon sequestring methods, ways to capture carbon at sea, etc. have to be rolled at scale, while solutions are found for the increasing droughts and floods. Scientific institutions can prove worthless if they are kept afloat by fossil industry money, or if they have been put into debt by banks. They will sell ideas they get handed by those banks. Looking at the basic research though is not expensive and so it makes sense to create young teams to figure things out. Let them use models to simulate the effects of choices, in fact we think the EU should reach out to Microsoft to develop an Earth Sim, based on the new MS flight sim that has real time weather and hyperdetailed maps.

So how do you really sequester large amounts of CO2 without using a lot of fossil fuels? We think the solution can be found offshore, in growing seaweed or other plants. This needs to be given a real budget, with the aim not to be profitable but to be self sustaining and effective. This is possible because if seeweed will grow (water not to hot), the yield per hectare is considerable. Processing it at sea means the BCS (Biomass Carbon Sequestration) effect can be optimal. The size of this operation has to be as large as possible. A 1 billion Euro fund can really get this going.

But to get to the title of this post, we thought about how to extricate the activities from the influence of the carboncredit system, the banking system. We wrote about this in 2012.

The Euro is fossil fuel credit. Its ability
to buy fossil fuels is key to its value

The basic idea is that money is meant to make asynchronous trades possible. That means that if you have a loaf of bread, and I have a piece of chees, I can first sell my piece of chees, get a Euro, then use the Euro to buy your loaf of bread, and you can use the Euro to also buy a piece of cheese. The amount of money has to somehow follow the ability to produce goods and services to avoid inflation. Not to little or people get stuck with stuff, not to much or paying will be a hassle. This use of money is the most important for the real economy.

The question then becomes, what are the dynamics of different sources of productivity. you have human labour, fossil energy, renewable energy (and others of course). In principle each should have their own currency. The big problem with loss of jobs and income at the moment is partly because people get payed in the same currency as machines : Fossil fuels, but machines need much less! Humans compete with fossil fuels for the same money (an automation company can say “Our machine does the job of three humans, it’s value is at least one human times five years!”).

There should therfore be a separate currency for human labour, the Auro. The amount of which should track the true productivity of the population. This way humans do no longer compete with machines, and there is no dependency on fossil credit to exist at all.

The Auro is named after gold, because historically the amount of gold was relatively constant, just like the population and its productive capacity

The same goes for renewables. The productive value of wind turbine electricity depends on how far away you are from the turbine. It has no storage so the line losses mean that if you sell 1 kWh you need to produce more the further away you sell it. Even if a gas powerplant in the South of Holland needs to power a factory in the North it has to produce more MegaWatts than the factory will register. Also renewables can be bought and payed for. Then the energy can be sold by the owner, no bank debt or credit should be involved. That means there should be a currency for such renewables : The Joule.

Renewable localised energy is traded in Joules. The Joules are allocated by the tax office because the calculation needs to be precise. It is then up to the owner of the RE source to ‘sell’ them. Of course the government or EU can have a Joule bank based on EU RE sources

Now if Timmermans wants to create a new RE based economy, he is wise to also create a new bank, the Joule bank. He can then organize the mass production of RE energy sources, to be owned by memberstates, and introduce a Joule based credit system that is run by the same. To by the new RE one needs Joules. This way the new system does not feed into the existing fossil banking system, with all kinds of deleterious effects.

The use of the Auro is a more complex matter, basically anyone will have three balances, for the Euro, Auro and Joule, and apply them in combinations. For instance a european flight costs Euro for kerosine and Auro for the stewardess and ground crew.

Even if the above seems complex, there is truth in its necessity. It makes no sense to keep mixing the trade of fossil energy (the price of which is arbitrary because production of one barrel can cost between 1 and 10 barrels of oil) with that of renewable energy. Like with human labour, fossil fuels is unfair competition.

The way a carbon tax works can then be translated into Euro’s from the fossil economy being made available to the Joule economy. Fossil energy resources that can be used to make Renewable energy sources. That means that the transition has a steady control over fossil resources, even if banks decide to try and inflate the CO2 cost away. To be continued!

If anyone wants to create a virtual currency we own realcarboncredit.com and climatecoin.nl 😉

People are becoming increasingly aware of the cost of bad air quality. Recently it was determined that pollution from cars and trucks can cause acute medical conditions suck as cardiac arrest as well as loss of balance. About 500.000 of people die prematurely in Europe every year because the air is too dirty.

Of course raising awareness would cause resistance, and the fossil fuel sector has considered it part of their business to sway politicians to ignore, underestimate or deny any harmfull effect. Highways, being cashcows for for gasoline and diesel sales, have been build with only crude models of what it would mean in terms of pm2.5 exposure to whoever lived around them. The “concrete maffia” had their own interest in pushing project through in spite of damaging effects.

Today there are options to make logistics nearly pollution free. The brake dust and tire dust remains, but is much reduced if you drive an electric car, truck or semi. Even if they burn Hydrogen or Ammonia, they will be cleaner than they are today. The irony is that this comes out now, it becomes an issue today, but it has an issue for decades, or even more than a century, from the first use of coal in cities.

 It only lasted five days, but by the time it was through, the Great Smog would be responsible for injuring approximately 200,000 people and killing 12,000

Still even today people are kept at arms lenght. In Holland there is a government program to measure particulate matter, it is called “Samen meten” or “Measure together”. Even though the RIVM, the institute that is concerned with the measurement of air quality, supports citizen measuring, there is no legal status of any measurement. This means that one can not use these to show air quality standards aren’t met in a certain situation. This is weak, measuring pm2.5 is not rocket science as we will see.

We also read in their review of options for public monitoring, that “calibration of sensors are still being developed” that can only be bullshit. Of course there are calibration methods. We tried to measure gasses in our appartment and borrowed a true CO, CO2, CH4 measuring device from an official company. It had to be calibrated before we took delivery. That took all but 10 minutes or so.

The now braindead EPA (due to Trump) even warns about pm2.5 from wood smoke :

“These microscopic particles can get into your eyes and respiratory system, where they may cause burning eyes, runny nose, and illnesses, such as bronchitis” (forgets to mention CANCER)

Still even if calibration is off by 10% the data can be usefull. Especially now that wood burning has been identified as a major cause of lung problems (due to its cancer causing constituents). Some groups in Holland take a serious approach to the measuring task. When sensing devices are linked to the internets it is possible to constantly track pm levels and correlate them with evens such as fireworks being set of at newyears eve.

TNO a renowned Dutch reseach institute, has ran a project since at least 2015 to measure “personal exposure to fine particulate dust” called TOPAS. These people are usually reliable and seem to be going about this measuring proces thoroughly. They even produce a map, but it is not very dense. Below is an example of pm2.5 and apparently the modelled contribution of each country to the levels measured in The Hague in jan 31st 2020. It is most likely a model though, the absolute amount of pm2.5 is measured, then the contributions of countries is based on their output and wind direction etc.

The government initative also has a data portal. It has two sensors close to where we are located. We see that pm2.5 rose to 750 µg/m3 in the night of 31. The below measurements are from a place about 500 meters from where we are. You can request more information on how to contribute on this page.

You can see the actual pm2.5 tracks the graph by TNO quite well, and exposure of 44 µg/m3 occurs of wich a lot comes from France and Belarusia. In the graph below the pm2.5 even reaches 55 µg/m3. The peak earlier in the month is also more pronounced. If anything the graphs show that there are days you might want to keep your windows closed. You can find the map here.

From the above we see the risk to health is not imaginary. The need to push back and find and shut down sources is important for public health. In the province of North Holland where Tata has its steel mills graphite rains (in spite of fines) down on its cities, and people wanted to know more about it and measure it. We presonally could see the soot on the windows in IJmuiden, which for us was a reason not to hang around there. Tata is moving to electrolytic processing of steel, which will both cut cost and reduce air pollution.

But what measuring devices are there? There’s a list of them here. A sensor that even the RIVM considers fit to make real measurements is the Shinyei PPD60V. Its cost in Holland is € 100 while its cost in a US overview of sensors is $760! Maybe thats what you get if you make profit seeking the guiding principle in your society (sorry moral finger waving)! Send us an email if you want us to send you some! 😉

We have yet to discover how to become a contributer to the Measure Together network (sent us an email at info@greencheck.nl). Scalpeler sells a sensor suitcase, kind of diy for fans of Raspberry PIs. It uses the Sensirion family of sensors, which can be bought here. These are laser based sensors, and they can mix up pm2.5 soot and car dust with moisture and cooking aerosols. They can be +/- 10 off, according to this long term study , that showed that some cheap sensors can give a good indication of what the expensive sensor picks up, and sometimes do better in terms of local short term events. You can order one with a good sensor for about 30 Euro here.

We think it would be cool if we could have our pm2.5 measuring device on standby measuring, but then it would have to be online, a IOT device or connected by GSM. The closest we could find is this combination of an acceptable sensor and USB connection.

This is our main criticism at the moment : Where can I buy a ready to go reporting sensor to add my data to the map?

In other news, NASA will lauch an air quality monitoring satelite soon. It will provide hourly updates for North America. Would be nice to have the same for Europe!

Monitoring is not the end of the story though, and we found that you can easily filter air from pm2.5 although it uses up energy, in a way that is cheaper than normal HEPA filters. One option we thought of was to build a centrifuge, which works as shown by studies. But the official RIVM measuring method involves sucking air through tubes, which directs the airflow, to then force the air to make a rapid turn upwards. The faster the airflow, the harder the turn, and the particles that can’t make it end up in a layer of grease.

This seems like an easy device to build, and it confirms our idea of using oil to capture dust instead of a HEPA filter. Much cheaper! We build a centrifuge, but it seems that the above design is better, we are not entirely sure. Below a picture of our centrifuge setup, which did not perform in any measurable sense. We found a study that calculates the speeds needed for separation, but haven’t worked on it yet, mainly because the above design seems more easy to build with off the shelve parts. We will update this post as we learn more about how to start a measuring station and whether we can build a grease based filter. It would of course be wonderfull if we could actually control the pm2.5, not only suffer from it.

To capture bigger dust particles, from stone grinding for instance, we build a simple filter by the same principle as the grease filter. This one uses oil, which we hope doesn’t evaporate too much. It consists of a ventilator, a tube and a barrel. We put the oil in the barrel, and the ventilator blows air into the oil (there’s about 2 cm between the tube and the oil). Any heavy particle will have trouble making the right angle turn and ends up in the oil. Let us know what you think through info@greencheck.nl

To use grease the speed of the air must probably be higher. This setup won’t catch pm2.5 but it should catch sand dust or cement dust we think. After running it for a while in a room with dust we notice it actually works. The simple principle of shooting the dust into the oil only needs to be sped up to capture pm2.5 as well.

We made a second version, because we wanted to increase the speed of the airflow and didn’t like the barrel, the result is not pretty yet, but it also works. As you can see we created a wide tube to house the ventilator, but the bottom has a relatively small square hole with a piece of square tube in it. This is done to speed up the air and somewhat direct the flow. We will stuff it with straws tomorrow to further ‘laminate’ the flow. This will have the effect of all small particles being shot straight out of the bottom.

We replaced the barrel by a RVS dish, we could use a bigger diameter, that may have a positive effect on airspeed because of the lower pressure. Its a noisy machine, but it does catch dust evidently as the picture below shows.

To be continued, this may become a fixture if the noise can be reduced because the improvement is noticable. Below another incarnation of the system, with a way more quiet ventilator. Still needs either a tower or a cover to make sure the air is blown to the side and taken from above. Now it wil circulate a couple of times but it seems to work.

Scientists have been trying to achieve stabile energy producing nuclear fusion for decades now. The dream to use the same process that produces energy in the Sun on Earth has been hard to reach because the Sun has a lot to help it do what it does. The massive star has gravity pushing its atoms together and incredible high temperatures as well. We can’t generate a gravity well similar to that of the Sun on Earth, if we could do it at all, it would probably crush our planet into elements heavier than iron instantly.

To date the solution has been to hold a plasma, which is a kind of super hot gas in which atoms are stripped of their electrons and behave a bit differenty, in a magnetic field. This requires enormous magnets and other precautions to hold the plasma in place. Ze germans have started to build so called Stellerators to deal with some inherent instabilities of the conventional donut design (shown above).

The plasma wants to twist around like a moebius strip, and rather than fight this the german researchers choose to go with the flow (literally) and build a more complex shape. The next generation of this hopes to twist the plasma four times, resulting in a nice square shape. There are other ways to do fusion but these are the two most published ones today.

Rolls Royce is readying to sell small conventional fission reactors. We better avoid that by presenting a safer fusion alternative!

The problem is that with both designs the heat generated has to go somewhere. If fusion takes place (usually not between to Hydrogen atoms but between tritium and deuterium prepared earlier), this will generate surplus heat, which radiates to the walls through the magnetic containment field holding the plasma. The wall will heat up and this heat needs to go somewhere or the wall will melt and the containment field will fail. Good thing about fusion reactors is that if that happens the reactor shuts down.

Until now, the reactors had to be pretty big, because if the heat leaves the plasma for the walls and doesn’t return the plasma cools and this inhibits the fusion process. So you can only have a fusion process in the center of the plasma that is hot enough, the likelyhood tapers off with distance from that center. A clever solution seems to have been found now, which is to use wall that is already molten.

The idea is to use Lithium, the metal also used to make some of the fuel for the fusion, as some kind of absorber. The plasma would come very close to the lithium, the hydrogen and other fusion constintuents could actually hit it and be absorbed. Importantly, if the Lithium evaporates it would not be much of a problem for the fusion proces.

The idea is to use the Lithium as some kind of cooling fluid that constantly flows along the outside of the reactor. This can be achieved by inherent effects of metals, namely the effect that two metals that touch, when hot, generate a potential, and that liquid that has a potential and thus a current through it will move in a magnetic field. This would assumedly keep the Lithium flowing along a stainless steel structured wall.

The beauty of this approach is not only that you end up with a way to contain the plasma and extract the produced heat, but also that you increase the space that is hot enough for fusion. The plasma would almost touch the Lithium. This in turn allowes for fusion reactors that are 20 times smaller! That is not only cheaper but probably also more simple to manage.

If you have learned anything about nuclear power, fussion or fission, it is contained in the above image. It shows the energy that nuclei have, and it shows that lighter elements like to fuse, and heavier elements like to fiss (split up). It turns out however that you can split light atoms, and nuclear fusion reactors need this to be possible. This is because hydrogen fusion is much more difficult than other related types of fusion. Lithium 6 and 7 are such light atoms that are easy to split, and are being split to produce Tritium. Funnily this produces quite an amount of energy.

Fun fact ” Tritium has leaked from 48 of 65 nuclear sites in the US. In one case, leaking water contained 7.5 microcuries (280 kBq) of tritium per litre, which is 375 times the EPA limit for drinking water.” “God damnit nuclear power!

Splitting Lithium has been propsed as a way to build a rocket engine. So much energy is released if Lithium is split that you have quite a lot of force at your disposal. The question is how to do it. The experts thought about it and one proposal is to have a cavity with Uranium in it, this would produce the neutrons necessary to split the Lithium. The Lithium would then be pumped into the cavity where it would split and enormous amounts of energy would heat it up, it would expand and blow out the back of the cavity.

“The advantages over conventional rockets are stupidly high specific impulse and thrust” perhaps a quicker way to get to Mars?

The above shows the rocket engine design. It would be quite safe but not on Earth. It seems that once there is a use for Tritium in fusion reactors one could also produce more of this gas from Lithium reactors. The simplest way to do this would be to add Lithium to existing nuclear reactors. It would heat up and the turbines would run as the Lithum 6 and 7 break up. This has actually been proposed but probably because of the risk of Tritium gas, which is harmfull when inhaled, we have not seen any real world implementation.

We don’t know the details so we asked the professor if the Lithium in the fusion reactor would pose a risk, that is of splitting. We hope he has an encouraging answer 😉 The US did a test once where they exploded a Hydrogen bomb, of which Lithium an essential part. They thought they only had to worry about Lithium 6, the other was supposed to be inert. That proved not to be true and the explosion was 2.5 times larger, scaring the hell out of everyone involved, documented in the video below..

Fusion reactors are being held out like a world saving carrot sometimes, being clean and safe and indepletable. The Stellerator tests, with or without Lithium walls, will continue this year, and promises to be the cheaper option. If it can be downsized it will be even more convienient. It would be nice to see the real deal some time soon. If we can use carbon free energy sources to build theoretically infinite amounts of solar panels and do whatever we need to for our oceans, that would be a blessing.

To travel requires energy, we are used to that, because we are used to moving our flexible and unstabile body over uneven ground step by step. But in reality moving does not require energy. If we wheren’t in Earths and Suns gravity well any effort (expending energy) to move would set us moving on a new course for (practically) ever. If you make a very stiff vehicle, like a train on rails, you can eliminate a lot of the loss cars and trucks experience as they move over bumpy roads on airtires. Trainwheels, car, truckwheels and suspensions get hot as they absorb energy meant to move the vehicle through the other major obstacle : The air.

The resistance of the air increases rapidly as you speed up. As you go faster the air that is in the way has to accelerate faster out of the way. It also gets compressed, and it sticks to your vehicle so there is drag. So a fast vehicle needs to help the air out of the way, move as little as possible and be as slippery as possible. This determines the usual shapes of ‘aerodynamic’ vehicles.

If you remove the air form the equation moving requires a lot less energy. The only energy it will require is the resistance as you fight gravity as well as the cost of changing direction (against the rails or road) which can be very low if your vehicle is very stiff. This is what inspired Elon Musk to propose the Hyperloop.

The idea of Hyperloop is to create a vacuum, through which a vehicle can move without air resistance. This requires airtight tubes and vehicles, a lot like planes (all large passenger planes maintain an internal pressure and oxygen level that is higher than that of the air they fly through). Until now this has been achieved using steel or concrete tubes.

Most concept are of an electrically driven pod for a small number of passengers so that there is a lot of flexibility in using the actual vacuum tubes. To us this seems a harder approach to start with. Why not have services at specific times, just like airlines. Universities working on concepts like this usually embelish and certainly the TU Delft is deep in bed with fossil, so they sell H2 cars and will slow down competition for airlines through endless research.

One of the scary aspects of this mode of transportation is that you are sealed stuck inside a vehicle for the entire time of any hyperloop leg. Nothing can go wrong or you are likely to suffocate in the tube. Fire on board is a major concern. New batteries are much safer than the well known lithium ion batteries. They also burn against oxygen when you puncture them outside, but which is not available in a hyperloop tube. New batteries (Lithium titanate f.i.) don’t have this problem. We assume no fire hazard battery tech will be used in any case. There is an answer to the vacuum risk as well, as you will read below.

We assume any trip would involve travel from normal pressure tube sections to lower pressure tube sections (full vacuum may not be necessary). The lowest pressure sections should be as straight and long as possible. Our vehicle would be the maximum size that can still follow the curve of the tubes. Tubes would have to be extremely tough. Legs would be 350 km long with 50 km sections, the less the better.

The current test track hyperloop tubes are made of steel. This may have been the choice because it is easy to open then up or cut through them if a test vehicle gets stuck. This however is not the safest option if the tube is going to be left outside (where people can interfere). In some artist impressions you see the tube on high pilons, this is because people who mean harm can’t get to it easily that way (and it can move above build areas).

A great way to use Hyperloop, if it delivers on its promise to allow travel at 800 km/h, is to build tubes along the European and Mediterranian coasts, under water. They could either float from anchors of be suspended form surface pontoons. Then you would have very little problems to build the routes fast. Conceptual work has been done on a transatlantic maglev connection based on a similar idea. Still, laying 5000 km of underwater concrete tubes seems a titanic undertaking, estimated cost : $12 Trillion. The hyperloop seems easier 😉

Lets consider the options of laying tubes along coasts under water, some underwater trajectories, assuming no stops..

• 1600 km track from Rotterdam to Bilbao, 2 hours
• 750 km track betwen Barcelona and Genua, 1 hour
• 1700 km track Venice to Athens, 2,5 hours
• 750 km Marseille Algiers, 1 hour
• 350 km Marseille Barcelona, 30 mins
• 350 km Barcelona, Valencia, 30 mins
• 2500 km Quatar to Mumbai, 3,5 hours

These are absolutely enormous distances and one has to assume a vehicle that can power itself for 4 hours straight, as we said it would have to be large, we don’t see any problem there. To deal with any accident where the vehicle has to stop or gets stuck one can imagine a safety system where two big baloons are inflated in front and behind the vehicle, sticking to the outside of the tube, to block the vacuum (a bit like a stent). These could operate on compressed air carried along. Any rescue vehicle could come in and do the same so a pressurized section of tube can be created to move people to safety.

So we assume a featureless tunnel and propulsion to be integrated in the tube lining or vehicle. Then the question becomes : How do we make these tubes sections quickly. One option is to make them out of laminated glass. Thin glass can be bend and vacuum laminated and achieve incredible strength while also being flexible. Thin glass can be fabricated on large rolls and then used to laminate tube sections almost in situ.

Of course glass bend for the diameter of about 4 meters the tube will be won’t have to be so thin. New ways of processing glass can make it incredibly strong. A continues process could mean seamless tubes.

Still it would be possible to have emergency/maintenance stations every 50 km or so. Glass could make it possible to use static leviation, where the glass and the vehicle have the same charge and work like static bearings. Using glass this way could even make it feasible to have windows in the hyperloop pod, so people can see themselves move under the surface of the ocean at mind blowing speeds, now that’s a future we like!

Another innovative way of using glass to realize the hyperloop involves using sand directly, where it is found. This would be a great way to build the tube sections in the desert areas, to cross the Sahara, acros Saudi Arabia. Sand can be melted using sunlight and turned into tube sections. These would be opague and much heavier and tube sections would have to be connected. The production of the tube sections could be done in parallel by multiple solar powered installations along the route. One of the challenges to deal with climate change is that our transition itself needs to have the lowest possible emissions.

There is a great need for speed in the development of emissions free logistics but also building technology. There is a need for new techniques to build roads, buildings etc. because using concrete is quite CO2 intensive. The fossil industry is still pushing for its own interests, and always mentions cost and efficiency as criteria for good ideas. Both are irrelevant if we move into the ‘roboeconomy’ which is the fully renewable powered automated economy. Because cost is a function of resource scarcity, and renewable energy can be made very abundant. Efficiency is also related to resource scarcity. We don’t need 99% efficient wind turbines if we have a ton of them, nor does anyone reject solar panels because they are only 15% efficient. What matters is that we can enjoy the products and services we desire.

Most of us live in an economy that is still largely powered by fossil fuel. The golbal production chains can be spread out over large areas, mostly to source labour from places where its cheapest. If you try to make a “living” you are facing a challenge, because most of the things you do have an impact on the climate. What jobs are absolutely off limits?

Working at a fossil fuel company is obviously a bad idea, at least as long as the company is private and trying to sell as much of the stuff.

Working at a bank is also suspect, because most banks invest in projects that drive fossil fuel consumption. Credit is fossil fuel credit, because if a bank invests and the entrepeneur buys machines and other parts of his business, this usually involves using fossil fuels.

If you work at a logistics company rail seems to be the best choice, this can become wind/solar electric freight logistics. Electric semi’s trucks will replace the diesel ones soon, they are simply more cost effective. But working at an airport or any place where planes take off is both unhealthy and indefensible. Flying is not for the elite, but for those that absolutely need to, the number of which is quickly shrinking. Jeff Bezos should make an Earth to Earth hydrogen spaceliner.

If you work in an abbatoir, you might as well go home. Killing animals is bad karma and if you refuse maybe less people can afford meat.

Stores that sell a lot of plastic? Don’t work there. Don’t sell dumb products like diesel cars or BBQ sets. There are so many jobs that are really off limits for anyone that wants to put his conscience first. what are the obvious winners?

A job that you can’t fault would be that of biological farmer, or someone that farms sheep without abusing the animals. You can build EV’s which doesn’t mean you don’t emit, but you do reduce emissions by taking IC cars off the road. If you build solar panel parks you obviously reduce emissions. If you organize logistics so the distance stuff travels is reduced you also have a positive impact. Maybe you run a clothing altelier using fabrics that didn’t come from dried out child slave labour using cotton farms..

Most workshops could be fine to work in if the energy they use was from renewables. Steel and aluminium are energy intensive materials, both in terms of mining, production and logistics, but companies like Tata Steel are moving towards using renewables to cut cost. Maybe a good way to look at your job is in terms of EROI, or Energy Returned on Energy Invested. Many of our activities could be ranked in terms of distraction or fossil cashflow value, because they return no new resources in the form of energy or otherwise. Of you are an organic farmer you produce more calories than you consume. If you run a solar park you produce more kWh than you consume, and stuff can be made that could not have been made otherwise.

Because our economy serves the profit and cashflow of the fossil credit banks, and NOT the wealth or happiness of the general population, so many jobs are merely to cause more cashflow, without producing anything of value. Adding raw materials or resources is NOT what the fossil economy does. Therefore most jobs are just a distribution of credit and waste of people’s time (even if they enjoy it). The fidget spinner ratio of many products is large, the entertainment industry is absolutely enormous. For example, we could all gave our non streaming collection of music and play them using a small solar panel and no emissions would result, but the economy arranged it so we all stream from servers that are still very inefficient. How to deal with that if we want more responsible jobs.

Conservatives say “We don’t want any loss of luxury, we need to act smarter, more innovative”. This is just french for “Go piss off for a while, we don’t want change!”. Of course this goes for all fossil fuel lakeys. The people that do want change have to accept that at least in the short term it means NOT having all the luxury. You actually can feel devine luxury using very little energy. Sit on a mountain top or by a lake in Italy with some cheese and a glass of wine. That reality is a balm, and it is there for the taking for free (lucky italians!). The thought process on how to make our environment more pleasant WITHOUT constantly paying and feeding the beast that is destroying us will hopefully start and bear fruit soon..

You have to be blind, deaf and dumb to not have catched a glimpse of what many believe is coming. You may be a sceptic or denier, but you have to worry about the massive number of people who believe in climate action in some degree. One group is Extinction Rebellion, which is driven by a farmer who just didn’t manage to grow crops anymore with the variable weather, it is now branded an “extermist ideology” by UK law enforcement.

The trouble is that climate action related crime is unavoidable. This is because our laws protect activity that is harmfull to our population. This in turn is because laws have been frequently if not nearly always proposed by industrial lobby groups and not by local popular representatives that bring forward a desire from the voters. We have the expansion of airports, no voter lobbies for that. Basically all demonstrations in the streets could be avoided by a functioning democracy, including those of extinction rebellion, but they are not.

What is a decent person going to do if prominent figures say things like this:

“Just think for a moment, what good is all the extra wealth in the world gained from business as usual if you can do nothing with it except watch it burn in catastrophic conditions” (Prince Charles)

You would think that local politics can change the local situation. If this was the case then a country would be a patchwork of different styles of living. In reality local politics (in holland) is mostly dead, killed by creatig larger regions with central decision taking. If local governance is alive it can only rearrange the furniture. Rotterdam or its suburb Overschie can’t decide to store energy in batteries or deal with its electric infrastructure the way it wants, that’s partially because the grid is semi-privatized, and partly because rules apply that can’t be strayed from locally.

Meanwhile as you see above the predictions become more dire by the day, and they are always right. We can not keep doing what we are doing! The problem is that if you decide you don’t need to fly, there are still a large number of people who consider that they should, or who’s only reasoning is “Its for sale so I can buy it”. That in fact is the general mindset that is destroying us : “I can make profit if I sell x” vs “x is for sale so I can buy it”. No ethics required. You can’t cooperate with people that have zero ethical sense!

Company CEOs are chosen to protect the company and you can not expect them to shut them down. Banks are not helping either.

So we think that breaking the law is going to happen, that it is only fair if it happens, and that companies that are hurt will likely be the ones that don’t show ethical boundaries or care for the environment in their activities. We can wait a long time for laws to change, and sometimes they do, and they create a precedent for more stingent laws, but we are also told we haven’t got the time to wait. Public discouse, when backed by the opinion of thousands of experts, is that industry is not moving because it hasn’t got the resources, but it is still hurting us. It does not stop by itself, so it needs to be stopped by someone else.

Now the dynamic will be that the police can get a lot of cash for fighting terrorism, and if people with a desire to protect their own futures start breaking laws to do so, the police has a choice to benefit from the increase in funding or push back and accept the damage done to companies that are hurting the public interest. The latter can only occur if funding of the police is somehow restricted. The new york banks gave millions to the NYPD, which meant that the “Occupy Wallstreet” movement went nowhere. Of course those people where wrong to occupy in a non-hindering way.

It is, we expect, unavoidable that rich individuals will start sponsoring criminal climate activism. Only criminal because the law forbids damaging private property. A lot of rich people understand the problem and want to see more effective action. This covers a wide range, you are talking about people who meet very few obstacles in their wealthy lives. The idea that rich people are always assholes is simply not true. Not all exploit poor people or have had to shut down their moral compas as have the likes of Rupert Murdoch. The mistrust and anger against the rich is partly due to the few rich tat are assholes, and partly because angry people are useless to themselves, which makes them easier to control.

When Holland was occupied by Spain the merchants and leaders became increasingly unhappy about the taxes Spain extracted. This caused them to revolt. The key moment came when William of Orange took leadership over the revolt, basically said revolutionaries could act in his name. It made him the founding father of the Netherlands. Winning the country from Spain was also a result of the dwindling supply of gold in the hands of the spanish, and as shown above a consequence of the desire of the dutch to enjoy the fruits of their own labour. So simply a desire for a better life than was allowed under spanish rule. We expect people to seek a better life than is now ahead of us under fossil based industrial rule. And it will likely take the same kind of revolution, directed against those that persist in being assholes.

We had a business idea : We would rip the windscreens from cars in the street, and then open a big store to sell the windscreens to the car owners that now needed them. Its a guaranteed cash cow because we create the need ourselves, almost like selling drugs like coffee, wine or sigars. Sadly we ran in a problem : It was illegal. Why? Because its not allowed to take windscreens from cars in the street. Even though you can take a coin from the pavement.. Anyway, bummer.

This little episode shows that when someone wants to start a business there are rules. For starters there’s common law. Protection of privatly owned goods from theft (even though that protection is weakening as police are increasingly unable to respond). Now we had another idea, we would make poison, cyanide, and sell it to shops to kill mice. Just a theebox with little sachets of the stuf, we hired an intern to make it (a little like Fukishima Tepco hired temps to clean up the radioactive waste). Made a nice candy colored box to catch the eye of the buyer, with an image of a screaming mouse with red eyes, like MGM’s logo.

We had to burry one intern, and build a fume hood for the next. When we had to attend to the funeral of a couple of kids that thought we sold funny tea (It clearly said “Mouse candy” on the package) the police came to arrest us. We where working so hard and stimulating the economy, getting rid of a nuisance (we don’t mean the kids!). Its a good thing we didn’t make too much money or we would have been stuck with claims forever. That would have been sad!

Ok, this never really happend, but what happend was that kids all over europe played and sucked on toys made of poisonous plastic, drinking from mugs with lead containing paint. Dutch conservatives don’t want to ban sale of greenhouse gas nitrous oxide, that is sold to kids to get high, which they breath in such quantities they get brain damage from anoxia. Guys like us are everywher, all over the world, all the time, selling stupid dangerous products or profiting from stupid dangerous processes.

The point of the above is that rules have to exist to make our lives safe. They are there because the easiest way towards profit for some is not the way that allows all people to have a reasonable life. So all those people that want a reasonable life came together and created a government and laws to be protected, not only from each other but from industry. Because (as we say) industry does not care about human lives.

We decided the cyanide business was too good, we sold a lot, so we tried to sell some to the local environmental protection officer. He didn’t die accidentaly and this made it easier to go back to the shops with or product (the dead shopkeeper we didn’t mention hadn’t slandered us). In the EPO was replaced by a more cautious individual, so we decided to propose a law to make our company exempt from prosecution, calculated the country wide profits, promised 5% of the next 10 years revenue as speaker fees to one of the members of parliament (for speaking jobs he would get after he left politics) and on his advise hired two other members on our board of directors. This did the trick. Then we sold our company to a big pharmaceutical company who wished to branch out.

That company by the way had been looking into new party drugs. They figured it would be a billion dollar market if you can sell pills that made you feel funny or laugh uncontrollably. Because this is also the effect of now legal cannabis and Nitrous oxide, who would object if pink funny pills popped up in grocery stores next to the candy?

Anyway, we digress. It is clear the people that want to make money will try anything and do anything to keep making money and make more money. There should be barriers to the crazy ones, but there is one sector that consistently lobbies and pleads for less barriers. This is the banking sector. They just want to borrow to profitable businesses, they don’t give one flying fuck what the effect is. All the insurance for Soy from Brazil, the leases for the heavy equipment and diesel used for logging, money for the bullets that are used to kill forest protection activsts, it all comes from and is handled by the international banks.

In Holland banks invested in plans for farmers, plans the farmers didn’t think of themselves, but which where highly likely handed to them by the biggest meat trader (there’s more or less a monopoly on meat farming in Holland) who of course developed the plans in cooperation with the same banks. Problem was that the pollution, as was known at the time of the making of the investment, did not allow for farms of the intended size. The Banks did not check this. Now the farmers are halfway to profitability and they are not allowed to expand anymore (because an EU ruling made it so that the rules had to be enforced).

Banks are the ones that should be given more responsibility and should be held more accountable for the investments they make. This is just their duty as part of society, to protect society from harm. If you let someone get murdered you are partially guilty of that murder. Your duty is to prevent harm to your fellow citizen (by allerting the authorities f.i.).

In the financial world there are even people who pride themselves of having no ethical consciousness when it comes to investing. These people sell arms to countries until civil war erupts, at which point they sell even more weapons. We are not even talking about the fraud happening in the financial sector itself, the front running, quantum trading. It is insane. Loans and investments should be vetted for their impact, before banks go ahead and grant them.

Even though some investment banks now say they will divest from fossil projects, coal first, they only do this because they can see that renewables, batteries are exploding and are the future drivers of production. Still all banks expect fossil fuels to be available when they extend credit or create a loan. What would it mean to have 1000 Euro in your hand if there was no way to produce the products (or ship them) you want to buy. This is why we call the bankingsystem the carboncredit system. This tells you that banks are 100% married and dependent on fossil fuels for the way they lend and invest today. Even the climate funds, soon one trillion in the EU, essentialy means 1,000,000,000,000 Euro worth of fossil fuels will be made available towards fighting climate change. This is a lot of extra pollution!

If the money system is fossil fuel dependent, and the people that create the credit don’t take care to think the consequences of their actions through, rules are needed. It will have as much effect to introduce or change rules as it will to build a giant solar park. In Holland the nitrogen rules are now stricktly enforced and this means building activity can only go through if the required impact assesments check out safe. Enforcing these rules causes two things :

1. Acceptance there are rules, all parties including banks will do more due dilligence on any rules.

2. Lobbying starts against any new rules that restrict high cashflow activity like building (high cashflow also means high emissions, and high profits for banks).

The socialist voters have to add a respons nr. 3

3. A new framework for restictions on loans and investments should be introduced that prioritizes climate beneficial activies over harmfull activites, where the welbeing of humans is taken in consideration.

This may include :

• No investment in fossil or biomass power plants
• No investment in fossil exploration
• No investment in long range logistics
• No investment in all but the top 5 most low carbon renewable energy technologies
• No investment in grids when batteries can solve the challenges
• All new factories must have their renewable energy supply included
• How much does the product or service actually add to the wellbeing of people?
• Etc.

Of course there is a huge amounts of grants and subsidies available for anyone who wants to start a business, also in the renewable or climate related industry, so the main purpose of these rules is to give direction to investments against the opportunistic mindset of entrepeneurs with weak ethical sense. These are of course found in abundance in their service industry : The banking system. Sadly the only thing we can really do directly is shame the banks that invest in bad projects, and vote for rational socialists that have not gotten greedy yet (have not been corrupted by economism)