The Usefull Human

When you see politicians use nazi tactics again, looking for angy people to enlist in quests against imaginary or innocent enemies, it makes sense to try to innoculate for the discourse that is likely to follow. When resources are scarce as they where in the runup to WO II, people will talk about who deserves to be fed, who is usefull. In those days there was open discussion of this topic and some scary thinkers where not to shy to share their views.

Too many? Disclaimer, we are not communists

Usefullness of humans is not a thing. Of course the basic ‘utility’ of a person is to keep him or herself alive. If there are kids those have to be kept alive. That would be the bare minimum. But usefullness is not really defined as something towards the individual, but towards others. The use of a person is not determined by the person but by the people that person is usefull to. If that is the case then the question can be “what kind of relationship gives others the right to determing a persons usefullness”. There are two kinds, one is that the person loves the others and is usefull to them. The other is that the person is made artificially needy.

In the case of love the others will not really think about it much, although a tweeting chick in a nest is clearly trying to make its parents usefull. Love causes an individual to consider the other part of him/her self, and so the use of that person grows when viewed from the outside, but not in the experience of the person. Life becomes a bit harder, but there is more to live for.

Before WO II some writers said that if a person can not explain his/her usefullness it would be kind to them to euthenize them

In the case the person is made artificially needy others are usually actively involved, but it can also be the person him/herself who becomes passionate about a life goal that is demanding. The most basic artifical need is the avoidance of pain inflicted by others. These are slave labourers and prisoners, but also employees in companies that have to work ungodly hours to retain the approval of the boss. There is no love for that boss, although the Stokholm-Syndrom may set in, there is existential fear which hinges on the feedback from the boss.

Other artficial needyness is caused by programming, this can be advertisement or movies or imprints left by social media use. The invidual may not be aware of a stimulus placed specifically to create an itch, and this itch (usually a social threat of exculsion) has a life of its own in the persons mind and will start to shape his/her thoughts and dreams until the person wants something. The artificial need is created. Modern life is a constant battle against these kind of impressions.

Most of our needs are artificial

The question of a persons utility, meaning whether he/she does something to reduce the needs of others, except in case of love, seems entirely forced. And one can ask where that forcing originates. One thing is clear, that forcing is external, brought on by other people with needs. Today it is clear most if not all people in the western world experience artifical need, the need for money. This need is created by keeping opportunities and freedoms from them. You could say that the need is created by the cost of things, but that’s not the essence, the essence is that the person can not access the thing he/she ‘needs’.

For example : There is land, it produces food, but there’s a fence, and you are not supposed to take the food. This makes sense but on the other side there is this : If you want to own land, you need money, and not a little bit, but a lot. So even if land is available, you can not get to that land and use it. This then creates an artificial need in you to somehow make money (more on this mechanism below).

This means : You wil have to do things you didn’t think of for people you don’t know to get money, and then you will not earn enough to buy land, but only to buy produce from someone that does have land. But, and that is so strange, you are not necessarily usefull to that someone. You may even be harmfull to that someone. So in order to meet your basic needs you have to be usefull to someone, but not to the people that actually help you satisfy your need, and this process can be endless!

Debt is an artificial need induced to force you to be usefull

The same mechanism of artifical need described for money was invented by the church a long time ago. Their mechanism was to tell you you needed redemption from sin. They held the keys to that redemption as representatives of the punshing God, and if you obeyed their rules you would be redeemed. When the printing press was invented this turned into an actual cashcow for the churches, they printed indulgences, letters of redemption, that you could buy with money, and so the church became insanely rich, and the people in the end revolted.

If you take the example of your need for food, and find that you may be a seller of some material that poisons the land yet by that usefull role you can attain food your usefullness can not be towards the farmer but has to be towards someone else. It is of course whoever is in control of the money system, or to whom that money system is usefull. Its simpel to spot who those are, those are the people that are not in the real world manipulating real things. They are the ones that create the ‘order’ that generates the ‘need’ that forces you to be usefull.

Now this post is not an attack on that order, it is in its best form an order born out of love. Today it is not born out of love, the economic world order is born out of fatalism and lack of imagination. Slowely we are seeing a change there, but the bankers, CEOs etc are still mostly looking at money, which means they are blind to the actual utility or even harm of actions they enable to fellow humans. We say that industry does NOT care about human lives.

This post is an attack or a warming to people who want to define the usefullness of others. There is none. You are not allowed to. If you are a strong person and you grow a lot of crop you can’t eat yourself, naturally you have to share it. So people who can not grow that crop because you are strong and monopolized the land, you can not say they are useless. In todays economy if people are excluded because they are not needed, they are not useless. They should not be penalized. They should be included and resources should be shared. If you think these people have a low desire to be usefull to themselves, inspire them to that desire. Uplift them. Why isn’t that the norm?

Uselessness is not a problem if there is no real neediness

In the current economy people are not being uplifted. They are being made more needy all the time. Not only mentally, by presenting them with images of a life only a few could ever actually live (in terms of resources), but also physically, by keeping common medical treatment from them. (It is 100% true that medical care is a miracle of cooperation and actual care. It is surprising that the people who are the key to making that work earn so little.). Today in our economy there is one need most of us have, and that is the need for fossil energy. We share that need with companies that run trucks, machines, produce plastic or cook food etc. We find ourselves forced to need money by the creators of the economic order, and then we have to compete with machines in terms of usefullness towards company CEO’s.

In today’s economic order, when it has been destilled to its money based essence, you find your life is in danger when you are not fighting to be usefull. Not to your fellow human beeings, because voluntary work is NOT rewarded, but towards the economic order. It is a lossing battle because you compete with machines running on fossil fuels that are made increasingly intelligent and potent. The people that want utility will soon make it more clear that some people are useless. But they forget that the means to be usefull are kept from most of us (the cost and inaccesibility of land is the main culprit), and the utility of whatever they find usefull can be questioned (do we need running shoes or toasters?).

Our point is not to be useless and happy, our point is that until all resources are put at the disposal of people who want to be usefull (to themselves primarily) nobody has the right to start talking about it. You say I am useless? Give me a piece of land! Stop telling people they can’t be happy without an enormous villa! As natural resouces are being rapidly destroyed by an army of articially needy workers in the fossil economic order, the discussion will soon start.

We think the only and most powerfull defence is to build renewable energy sources so that usefull things can be done at a lower price or for free. Others have said that the drive for more renewable energy is in its heart socialist (but we are not communist!).

How to Deal With Climate Sceptics

We read a lot about how to deal with climate sceptics lately, mostly suggesting we should politely present our views in response to that of the denier or sceptic. This is a lofty ambition, but frankly, there is no time for that. It is not smart to waste your time as a climate activist or climate action driver or simply a sensibel private person to tolerate climate sceptics and deniers. Here I will try to outline your reasoning to have no patience with these kind of people.

Climate deniers and sceptics always want you to prove your claims, or they present evidence they believe is relevant. It is like talking to an economist, all you say is only helping them to hone their arguments, because their position has two origins, either it is ignorance or political. You can’t argue with either of them.

Say a person is ignorant and only wants to provoke a response and vent their point of view. Don’t argue with them because clearly this individual is not using logic to come to their point of view, only anticipating the effect it will have on others. If suchs a person is in a panel discussion leave the discussion or try to shut him/her up. This is not polite. Don’t be polite. Tell them they never doubted whether the Earth was round, why should they doubt the climate science ? The fact with these people is that even if you motivate them to take another point of view (which you don’t do with arguements) they are useless to your cause.

You can tell these people they are dumb because a basic education should be enough to understand the science, specifically that CO2 block heat radiation. This can even be demonstrated if needs be. It is no crime to think climate change is a hoax, but if you profess it openly as if you can teach others about the world you are dumb.

Google and Youtube and Facebook are complicit

If a person is not ignorant but chooses to be a sceptic to create an illusion of uncertainty this is more repulsive than if a person is dumb. These kind of deniers are slick as grease, they will have excellent debating skills. If not its a bit sad. Don’t argue with them. The are even less likely to be of any use if you (in some imaginary world) convince them. Usually these people don’t respond to any type of reasoning, because they are the original deniers, working by the same playbook als the nuclear promotors that also worked for the tobacco industry. This has been described in the Merchants of Doubt by Naomi Oreskes

If you are in some panel with a political denier don’t argue with them, but tell them they are displaying signs of madness by rejecting the help of so many scientists, who they will readily trust if they get a medical test. So many times in life they trust others who are experts, when they get their car fixed or heating installed or someone cooks for them in a restaurant, they don’t doubt its ok. But with climate for some reason, in spite of armies of normal respectable people telling them they have doubt. That is crazy. They are deranged and you wish them a quick recovery.

Those sceptics and deniers who are telling others how the world works, like Lord Monckton who in the above video claims to have references on something that is simply not true. He talks jibberish but mentions a lot of details which convinces people that he must be sane. Such liars, need to be kept from speaking except to small groups of the ignorant. Never on a public platform, it is a climate activist duty to prevent it.

Some famous climate sceptics who probably hope you forget about them

To his point in the above video : our oceans have now absorbed so much extra heat that if the same heat was added to the lower 10 km of our atmosphere (which is about 16 km high) it would warm an additional 36 degrees Celsius. So it would not be 12 degrees which is already rediculously warm in Januari, but 48 Celsius. This also means that the oceans will get very warm and as they cover 90% of our planet we are in very very deep shit, and amongst others, because of dickheads like Monckton. So shut these types up!

Sodium-ion and Potassium-ion Batteries

Litium ion batteries are causing a revolution around the world. The energy density of batteries of this type is still increasing, and prices are rising as production capacity of new batteries is not keeping up with demand. But to anyone with a basic science education its pretty strange to see this intense focus on Lithium, while there are plenty of other metals to choose from that are more abundant and cheap. Two of them are Sodium (called Natrium in Europ) and Potassium (called Kalium in Europe). Sodium or Na is part of what we know as common table salt which is NaCl. Potassium is in all life because it actually stores energy in plants and animals.

We may be looking at an economic effect in the sense that the battery that generates the most cashflow is invested in more, because banks rather loan for projects that generate a lot of cashflow. Sodium and Potassium batteries as you can see below have mega potential and the fact we aren’t using them widely yet is hard to explain.

Sodium-ion batteries or NIB

Sodium batteries are about as easy to make as lithium ion batteries, but they require a different kind of electrode, because sodium does not ‘dissolve’ in grafite as lithium does. Sodium-ion Batteries Market is expected to exceed more than US$ 1.77 Billion by 2024 which is tiny compared to what it could be if we started way earlier. These batteries are amongst other uses expected to be replacements for lead-acid but with better characteristics. There are different ways to build a sodium battery, so with either a liquid electrolyte or a non-aqueous one, with sodium as cathode or only in the electrolyte. More information can be found here. We will list some companies that are working on Sodium-ion batteries.

Source

AMG batteries is a cooperative with Renault working to create sodium-ion batteries for use in cars. The energy density can be as high as Lithium also because there is no need for copper electrodes. A lot of patents on sodium batteries are held by Faradion. Above you see a graph that shows the different electrolytes being tested and how they perform (the dots not the formulas).

A Sodium sulfur battery

Chinese NIB producers are HiNa Battery Technology, Wuhuhaili (Sodium-sulfur), Qintang New Energy, Liaoning Hongcheng (Liaoning Xingkong), NGK, Zhejiang Lvming Energy (Durathon), Sodium-sulfur batteries have been applied for large scale energy storage, but they are high-temperature (300-350 Celsius), now room temperature variants are being developed which is promissing.

Other projects around Sodium batteries are the Naiades EU project. Interestingly there is a spinoff towards desalination because sodium is one of the main ions in seawater, and sodium batteries separat the sodium towards or away from the electrodes. Once you have a positively charged membrane that repulses sodium you can use it to filter water. This electrochemical approach to desalination is usually less energy intensive than the market dominating (and aggresively monopolizing) reverse osmosis filtering method.

Natron Energy makes Sodium-ion Batteries for utility scale power for now

Australia will have a 30 kWh sodium ion battery pack in a trial led by the University of Wollongong’s Institute for Superconducting and Electronic Materials (ISEM). It seems this project could be copied quickly and widely.

About the 30 kWh Sodium battery in Australia

Many universities research Sodium Ion batteries, but seem to give them less priority. We hope to see more examples and wider attention soon.

Potassium-Ion or KIB (also PIB)

Potassium-Ion batteries seem to be even easier than Sodium yet get even less attention. The battery potential of KIB batteries will be closer to that of Lithium-Ion batteries, making them an easier replacement than NIBs. The challenge seems to be smaller which makes it puzzling why we don’t see them offered much more yet.

“Potassium batteries can accept a wide range of cathode materials which can offer rechargeability lower cost. One noticeable advantage is the availability of potassium graphite, which is used as an anode material in some lithium-ion batteries. Its stable structure guarantees a reversible intercalation/de-intercalation of potassium ions under charge/discharge.”

A common mistake that is being made is to strive for high energy density right away, high performance of KIB batteries is not needed as long as the cost/performance is attractive in the market. The article that the above image comes from was more negative than one would expect. It may be that lower cachflow alternatives to Lithium-Ion are not that welcome, so then people say “more research is needed”. This is the “go look for a solution” strategy when the solution is not desired by the banks that control the market.

It is certainly great to read this in the press “Skoltech researchers led by Professor Pavel Troshin have made significant advances in the development of sodium and potassium batteries based on organic cathode materials” and ” sodium and potassium batteries that charge in 30 to 60 seconds while retaining their energy storage capacity after thousands of charge-discharge cycles”. So apparently these scientists tested things for all three metals Sodium, Lithium and Potassium (and alloys!). They tried different polymers and found that a dihydrophenazine-based one had great characteristics.

The world is not an island, so it seems we are about to see a rapid growth of Sodium and Potassium batteries to replace and augment the current Lithium capacity. As these metals will never run out (and are actually an undesired by product of desalination for example), the development of batteries will certainly be exiting in the next decade!

For a Cash Free Politics

The problem is corruption. In Holland we see one minister after another pushing the interests of the fossil industry, only to reverse course after they lose power. Leaders of parties land attractive jobs after their tenure and promote gas or nuclear or airtravel or some other fossil intensive activity. It is “pay later corruption” (as explained by Herman Scheer below) where people with influence get hired to speak for exorbitant amounts. It happens all over the world.

His talk with Democracy Now is worth a listen

We need to get money out of politics. Profit, in many cases is bad, especially when it incentivises wastefull use of energy. In politics time and again we see the abuse of power because politicians can gain money now or later, take from cashflows they have access to. Our democratic leaders should be entirely cashless and maybe be income restricted for the rest of their lives. They are leaders of the dutch population, not hobbyists or creatives invited to have entertaining ideas. We seem to have forgotten that leaders are there to protect us, why else would we hand control over our lives to them?

Governments like that of the US but also of Holland have become completely corrupt. You don’t even have to see money end up in the hands of politicians, it is simply that money dictates policy. Police find they don’t have enough cash to deal with crime because they are not supported, meanwhile the ING bank is laundering billions in drug money for drugs traded in Amsterdam and gets away with a fine. It’s perfectly clear why (according to the minister of justice) “politics” meaning his corrupt party “has been sleeping for 10 years”. As long as we don’t wonder why these representatives move around at banks (one former prime minister, one minister of finance) and energy companies (one party leader) we are not awake.

Now with the salaries and “waiting salaries” for members of parliament that are waiting for something (they still get payed) some politicians have to be exposed to get double income they don’t need. The atmosphere is “who makes the most money” and at the same time the right wing unegalitarian policies create a big pool of corruptable people. This pushes us all into what we think is the universal cause of destruction of civilizations : everyone becomes corruptable, every action and object becomes for sale. Nobody moves anymore unless they are payed. The internal motivation is replace by indignation that one is not getting payed enough to have the same.

The solution is that anyone choosing to become a member of government is also choosing to earn a specific amount annually for the rest of their lives. Total net worth can not rise above a certain level at any time or it will be taxed away. Simply said if there is a reward for being in power, that reward is owed to the voters who granted the politician that power. Its not to say a person needs to live in poverty, but certainly the goal is to make it impossible for extraneous (corrupting) incentives to work. To become a leader you have to put others above yourself, and you can’t do that if you are trying to find the most lucrative job. Our parliament has at least 3 members who are there by lying and misrepresenting and saying what their (industrial) sponsors want them to say. They make a nice buck doing it.

The left wing party lobbied for more cash for assistants to MPs, that makes a lot of sense, and it means you produce/vet/develop your knowledge “in house” instead of getting it offered by industry to adopt in return for future speaking jobs. We want to see more moves towards demonlishing the value of being a MP, more limits to mobility between industry and politics (which have been put in place). Everyone knows what the problem is. Sad thing though is that its likely the right wing parties would completely evaporate. But the goal is that leaders work for an ideology (which implise reward for all), not only for own reward!

All Problems we Face are caused by Banks

This is a bold statement, but let’s analyse. First off, we have banks who seek profit. This is the root of all evil so to say, because what does it mean to make profit? It means you earn more than you need, even for your plans. Banks borrow money to citizen, and the less money citizen have, the more banks can borrow out, and so there is a double incentive for banks to make profit: If they do people need to borrow more!

But lets take the housing crisis, where does it come from? Well, banks taught poeple that if you buy a house its an investment. The price of the house will rise (apart from it becoming your property so being a savings account). Banks had the incentive to make this true so they could lend more. They lobbied for 1. lower rates 2. bigger lending share (so les smoney up front), creative instruments (once people started to believe their story, you got investment mortgages that where payed by the hous price rise), they made renting more expensive (in holland), they arranged special loans for ‘starters’ (which drove up prices), they reduced social housing by putting these cooperations into debt and forcing them to sell their real estate, the now have lobbied for a rule so that couples can lend more (1+1 = 3), and of course at the same time they reduced construction.

The result? People are stuck in their homes, they can’t move to job opportunities. New homes being build are all expensive. People are forced out of their cheap homes by semi-criminal investment groups who want those high prices. This leads to homelessness, crime, probably abuse and poverty. This is shown on TV, the sad man that could not find a place to rent, and if you don’t rent (or buy) you can’t get social security or a job. In the US we know houses where kept off the market, because for a while the opposite was true of what happens in Holland, anyone could buy a house. Why, because banks lowered their lending standards to create investment instruments (credit default swaps) and this resulted in what? Misery, the 2008 financial crash. Who suffered? so many.

How about medicine? That used to be a sad profession when you want to believe Celine (Voyage au Bout de la Nuit), but of course that all changed for the better with the discovery of Penicilline and other breakthrough, now it really is a vibrand industry that does incredible work, not to mention the incredible care given by nurses and staff, who have to constantly deal with their humanity and that of the patients.

But how about health care cost? How about insurance. Why do people in the US pay ten times as much as in the EU for the same healthcare. Why can pharamaceutical companies keep renewing patents or even repatent expired ones? How can a company Pfitzer sell a heart health pill for 10 years making hundreds of billions while its effect is a 1% improvement over placebo? This all happens because of the financial context created by banks, because shareholders need to see profit, and profit is unnecessary squeezing of customers (because profit is all you have after you payed all your cost, including reservations for your plans). So banks have lobbied for privatization, always looking for ways to make more money.

And what is the result? Suffering, early deaths, broken lives, time spend by political players like Obama to fight it, but guess what, the US electoral system is now based on how much cash you can collect from your voters, The US shows in extrema what total surrender to banks leads to. Still anyone in congress can trade with insider knowledge. Does that create a way to bribe? Of course! Who do that? People in the banks. The same who create the financial instruments that the whole economy crashes on.

Just to give this a break, what happens if a country is not financialized to the extend the US is. We mean poor countries. They can have good healthcare, good education (we will get to that) good housing all good, the only simple rule is that you make lending difficult, and of course you need energy sources. In poor countries that energy comes from manual labour. India and Brazil for a while didn’t care about patents. They rebelled and made medicine themselves, at much lower cost. This is now happening in Europe as well, companies are making rare and less demanded medicine themselves, and escape the normal pricing policies this way. Of course there is a lobby to stop that. Health should cost you all you have at the end of your life, so that your children will need to work for the same things all over again.

How about education? Holland tried the US system because we have had 9 years of US-lakey goverment and every trick tried in the US was also tried here, including prison labour. So students had to borrow money to study, and cost went through the roof, Universities liked it a lot, it caused a building and renovation boom which was a way for banks to capture the institutions because now how could the pay their debts if not by increasing cost of tuition etc. Luckily sanity is returning somewhat because we in the EU are more social, so it is likely this system will be reversed, but a least 10 generations of students are deep into debt and will be. For whom? THE BANKS.

The suffering this causes is not small, not only will you see people doing jobs they hate, jobs that are harmfull others, in an world where you need to pay, but of course some won’t make it and end up destitute and who knows kill themselves. Students don’t even protest anymore because of course they changed into a group of willing slaves that believe that if they work hard they will get a great job. But like in the US the courses proliferated, more students where allowed in, and many come out not knowing what they should be doing. Stuck in the homes of their parents (which should be fine by the way) not able to make enough to buy or rent.

Soo who else, farmers? Of course farmers have been in the news a lot lately because the EU decided Holland should limit its Nitrogen emissions. Builders, farmers, airports, cars all emit NOx and NH3/4 (which for the sake of confusion is being bunched together), and so all these have to reduce emissions. The farmers have been investing in intensive cattle farms, of which at least 3 burn down with all the souls in them every summer (or all animals die because the ventilation breaks down). Why these farms? Not for Holland, we only consume about 20% of the meat we produce. So its for export, for cashflow, from the Amazon soy fields, grains etc. back to the world. Dutch is a meat hub. The farmers have been allowed to borrow to grow their business, to such an extend that the businesses arn’t even profitable yet, they need to grow more. The banks allowed them to get started and did not do their due dilligence on what farmers where actually allowed to build. Now with the enforcement of the Nitrogen limit the farmers see their future destroyed, and they are payed by the feedstock suppliers and dominant meat exporter to disruptively protest this situation. Who is served by this? The banks. Who suffers? The farmers.

We can go on here about how banks have ruined everything. This constant need to compete, not on quality but on volume, this drive to automate and destroy jobs people enjoy, and replace them with jobs people hate. From income you can have a nice life off to income you can barely get by on. A key to the suffering is not only that banks want to make profit, but that the credit they give is consumed by buying fuels, energy. All the money ends up with the energy companies. No matter how low the interest rates, this system is causing ‘hypertension’ where we could all get along fine with a couple of companies like this and a couple like that. We actually see this in some sectors, like soda drinks, which in itself is a rediculous racket that generates such enormous amounts of cashflow for banks : Hauling sugared water half across the globe for the ephimeral superior experience or just for the sugar high.

Banks thus cause obesitas, banks ruined nice cities because they fund flights and they lobbied for plane fuels to be tax exempt. All because the supply of fuels was much bigger than demand, and people will spend at their destinations even if they are super crowded and expensive. Bank. Cashflow. Not human enjoyment. Monetization of everything ensures banks control everything.

So our claim is this : All problems we Face are caused by Banks

We have not even mentioned climate change, but you can easily see that selling more cars, more fuel, more plastic more food was all done to generate more profit to pay the loans of the banks. They have caused it, and it makes total sense, banks loan out carbon credit, credit that buys you fossil fuels, and thus their business is based on the expansion of fossil credit cashflow and as a consequence of carbon emissions. They have no alternative. They renamed fossil credit “Capital” which it isn’t.

We already wrote about how to beat this cancer to our societies, and this is by building renewable energy sources. They will allow for renewable energy credit to be distributed, not by banks but by the owners of those installations. Of course right now the ‘market’ is being developed such that you never own renewable energy installations and don’t easily think about this option because you have to repay your debt for your installation, but given time and price drops the fact that a renewable energy installation in your hands means you own production capacity, means you can distribute it through credit. And there will be more credit of this renewable kind than there ever was of the fossil kind. Hopefully then the suffering caused by banks will stop.

Prey Hypnosis

As former neuroscientist we have a fascination with human psychology and cognition, and are amazed at how well some forms of influencing work. For instance the suit, a neat suit, can protect the most horrendous people. Neatness, looking clean and untouched, seems to have a hypnotizing effect on people such that they think they can never touch the individual that is neat.

Where does this reverence and respect come from? We think, we will propose, that most animals including humans have a mental state that we could call prey hypnosis, there must be a better name for it. It is the passive attitude when we find ourselves captured by a superior force. It happens in animals who are calm when they get captured by a predator, it has been described in humans who where mauled by lions and tigers and bears.

The truth is, death is not horrible, you don’t experience it. We can fear a predator when we can outrun it, we must fear it then, and do our best, but when we are caught the fear loses its purpose and is only likely to evoke aggression and thus pain. Pain is something all animals try to avoid, and if they can’t avoid it try to hide and ignore. In short we would be inclined to believe all animals including humans have a pleasant passive behavioural/mental state between fear and death, and we can be tricked into believing we should enter that state.

The only think that can save us in that state is beauty, youth, and perhaps pleading. Tigers have been known to capture young animals and let them go and even try to care for them. Pleading has of course helped in humans, but animals also plead, cry, and this may also help them escape this limbo between life and death. Often if a human captures a falcon or eagle that got stuck, the bird will do nothing as it is handled. This calmness and surrender rings a bell. How would one evoke it in humans, and what will humans do in such a situation?

First example is the church, what does the Roman Catholic Church do? It traches us to fear hell and hope for heaven, as we place ourselves in the hands of its ministers. There we can pray, plead, for mercy, forgiveness and help, but we also experience comfort and peace of mind as we navigate our way -in that state of submission-. By whom? The almighty and his dressed up minions. Our mind is shocked by the frock, it goes blank, and if we believe we in God we believe we are captured and destined to suffer or be shown mercy depending on how we interpret and follow the minions or the word.

When leaders project weakness they inspire their followers to feel weak, which makes it even more easy to keep them in their prey hypnosis (hint : Corbyn)

Second example is the economy, how does this economic system present itself? It shows itself by people in suits who everyone believes wield great power, who manage and control a beast that can build and destroy our lives. We hear them speak about “this will stimulate the economy” or “this will hurt the economy” as if they are feeding and taming Baäl. They are already superior to us, they fight the fight for us, we are not in the hands of the monster but in the cradle of those that fight it. We are asked to do our part : Work hard.

Sanity by one definition is the state of mind in which we respond only to actual cues in our internal or external environment in relation to our needs. A man who starts singing the national anthem loudly in the toilet or starts to undress in the kitchen we think is crazy. We’d ask : “Why?”. It is actually almost impossible to do something without any cause, our physical body has no inclination to suddenly commit to random behaviour, and rightly so. This means that we have to be cued to do most things we do. We can be hypnotized by situations that do not provide us with a cue, internally or externally, and then we will wait for one to occur. Fear can make us reject cues, so it is easier to hypnotize a fearfull person, and believing we are in a situation where no action is needed will also desensitize us to cues.

Our mental state is : We are not predators, we are cared for in our predicament, we should not show initiative, we would only hurt ourselves. Those who do are “Risk takers”, not like us!

The people that want to keep earning income from fossil fuels, that want us to be hard workers, are using all the means at their disposal to keep us in the submissive state, the state in which we are waiting for cues. Of course they will never provide them, they will not remind us of something that may trigger exploration or action. We see this with Scott Morrison in Australia, he only talks about money, his body language projects nothing, his internal state must be one of resentment of people and their idiotic worries, and when you hear him speak you really don’t hear anything else but calming pragmaticism in his voice. His facial expression is one of oblivion and torture, he is suffering more than you yet he’s not aware of anything to worry about.

At the same time people are pleading him to do things. The citizen of Australia believe they are in the hands of this government and need to plead, ask for help. They can not overcome the belief that they are in the hands of their government, that the system of neat calm people has power over them. They think it has. The fires in Australia have devestated many lives, people who are now in need of help. Morrison has allied with the fires by not showing any emotion of compassion other than with his own fate. He has used the fires like a religious leader would use a solar eclipse. It is said he believes the fires fit in his system of beliefs about an end time and rapture, a process where individuals will suddenly disappear because God took them up to heaven. The irony would be that Morisson himself is a hypnotized submissive person.

We need to snap ourselves out of this hypnosis, there is no force field around neat people in suits, they are not more powerfull than you and me, they should not stop us from responding to our reality, which will become a lot more harsh if we decide to explore it. The economy is not going to save us, not one that builds infrastructure and only looks at money, not human lives, as a measure of achievement. Why do those banks with neat people manage our money? What gives them that right? On every level we need to decide if we still need to be passive, if we need to pray, plead or take other measures. Who is served by our passive attitude, what can we do to improve our chances today. Because only when we are actually in the claws or a tiger or lion or being mauled by a bear, we should be passive.

The Roboeconomy

We have written about the Roboeconomy, this is the economy that aknowledges automation and robotics as a means of producing our wealth, but does not want humans to keep competing with those machines. This is achieved by making the machines run on renewables, so that humans and they do not compete for the same fossil fuels, but each has their own energy sources that are not on the market.

This type of economy is not compatible with the current economy because the current economy tries to maximize bank cashflow by expanding the use of fossil fuels and creating markets for everything. More trade means more cashflow and more dependence on bank credit. Fossil fuels have had a major role in establishing the power of banks we see today, fossil fuels are stored energy and they can and have been made available to people through credit, and every money transaction we make shifts the access to fossil fuels to the producers of wealth (if they use fossil fuels).

Its extremely hard to get away from the fossil fuel economy because we are so indoctrinated to respect banks and see them as allies in our quest for wealth. In fact they are a major obstacle, they need our dependence on them and to that end they drive up the price of anything we are interested in. Flying is a exception because flying generates cashflow in the destintation and drives greed there, so people with money are encouraged to spend it on holidays, not on anything that reduces the power of banks.

How to reduce the power of banks? The best way to do that is to build renewable energy sources without going into debt. If you do go into debt to realize say a solar farm, you are pricing the debt into the solar energy you produce, and that causes the price to reach for the fossil based energy price, and thus you undo any advantage to wealth creation due to using renewables. Banks always force you to increase the price to the ‘market price’ (one they usually control through fake trading on exchanges).

The way to reduce that power is to build renewable energy sources and use them for wealth creation without going into debt. Alternatively you could realize that solar farm by selling ownership to individuals, not investors or investment banks. You then repay in energy (kWh). The same goes for machines that make stuff. As a town you could own your own bread factory (even though bread is not a healthy food) or farm with electric equipment. You could provide for your own community from local sources. Banks will not support that, because such local economies do not need credit and do not participate in the market. To prevent those kinds of economies from developing banks and other big agro companies try to restric local farming, trading, credit creation etc. and they force the price of food down so it out ‘competes’ the local or biological or organic farming produce (at a cost to f.il the amazon and the environment).

We have to get to the Roboeconomy though, and this is a war of attrition. While our food security is collapsing we need to untie ourselves from the market matrix that becomes increasingly unreliable. We need to own the land (that has been priced up by banks so we need them for mortgages) and the real estate (that has been priced up by banks so we need mortgages). we need to come together and find the cash to do these things. Banks at the same time try to lower our income to the level where we can exist but not develop any initiative. They also lobby for rules that make anything we do without them hard.

It seems the western world is sinking in a sea of dispair due to financialization. The pest of bankers that are involved in anything and everything. Why is a house 500.000 Euro that was 40.000 Euro 20 years ago? What value does it bring to the owner? Is it like a machine in a factory that increases productivity 4% yielding 100.000 Euro extra on an annual basis so it can be written of in 5 years? No it is a money sink that banks created so you can’t do anything to free yourself from their grip. Working with this economy is like fighting with other fish to swim deeper into a net. The ones deepest are often helped to drive the others crazy “the good stuff will happen to you when you are rich!”. Its a simple marketing trick.

Eroding the need for credit by building renewable energy sources is the best way to forge ahead to a society where needs are taken care of, houses are owned, people can rely on their jobs and machines are not our enemy. Less bank power will allow politics to propose laws that make machines serve the entire community, not just the competing producer. Producers will compete over quality, not cashflow and turnover. Life will be so much easier. The lazy bankers will have to find something to do that is less leechy though.

When we can use all inventions and common sense because there is no more pressure to create fossil cashflow for banks, we can create renewables that generate much more energy than fossil does now, 2500 times more. We will have so much solar and wind that we can cool our farms to grow crops, we can oxygenize the oceans, we can grow biomass to capture CO2 and store that Carbon back into our Earth, all using machines, robots, AI and techniques like low pressure desalination that is no pushed out of sight by the high pressure and cost reverse osmosis lobby. Banks and their economic philophy that assumes infinite resources and drives people to behave like locusts needs to go. Now you know how.

How to get rid of CO2 and Save our Oceans at the same time

Our oceans are losing oxygen. This is because they are warming up, and warmer water can contain less gasses. Nitrogen, CO2 and O2 are dissolved (along with other gasses like methane) and will gas out as our oceans warm. The warming is hard to prevent as only a small percentage of sunlight that hits our oceans is reflected. Large parts of our oceans are already anoxic, and fish can’t live without oxygen, even if they only need very little.

We have to do something about our oceans, because gradual acidification due to absorbtion of CO2 from the atmosphere is a problem for its oxygen generating plantlife, as well as all other life. Acidification inhibits growth, especially in cell processes during procreation, in other words, acidification makes it harder for many species to procreate.

Any CO2 that is turned into O2 and sugars through the well known photosynthetic process is a win against acidification. We have written that to achieve more photosynthesis we can pump nutrients from deeper water to the surface, to fix the nitrogen shortage. Another limiting factor is iron. Many people have looked into this and its actually a viable way to increase oxygen production and stimulate life in the oceans. Sadly companies involved in this have been obstructed or have failed.

A paper considering deep ocean fertilization was against it on the grounds that it would help (in several ways) but if we stopped we would have warmed the water more. Of course there is only one thing our oceans are going with current CO2 levels and emissions : Warmer! Due to above described problems from acidification there actually is a window in which we can try, of about 30 years some estimate.

So what can we do? We could start growing seaweed near the surface on a gigantic scale, fertilized by deep ocean water we pump to the surface using wave pumps. That’s an idea. We could increase ocean albedo in some way, by creating something reflective that floats well. We have seen enormous pumice islands, these have prevented warming of the ocean below it. We could create something artificial with the same effect. We have written about floating islands of biomass, grown at sea for instance. We could use plastic as well, that would still be a good tradeoff against boiling oceans.

So what would it take to actually capture carbon at sea and adding oxygen to the deeper oceans so fish an trhive (and capture carbon as well). It would in fact be a matter of generating electricity, then using that to split water down below, then burning the hydrogen (or using it as fuel) at the surface, while leaving the oxygen dissolved in the deep water.

Then you would have to have a CO2 reactor at the surface, the availability of water would be a plus. You use the H2 in the following reaction

CO2 + 2 H+ + 2 e → CO + H2O

Then you are left with highly reactive CO, which you can turn into C and O2. Of course the available Hydrogen can also be used to make hydrocarbons, methan and even oils, which can then be sunk to the ocean floor and stay there. This process, which removes Carbon and H2 from oils and gas from our atmosphere have gotten a lot of attention.

Even though its kind of the premise of this post, using oceanic real estate to fight climate change makes a lot of sense, because it is much easier to traverse, is extremely vast so there is plenty of room. Here are a few more methods we found :

Recently more direct methods of turning CO2 into Carbon have been developed using liquid metal as a cathalyst. This method works at room temperature.

” Cerium-containing LM were utilised as an electrocatalytic system, successfully converting CO2 to carbonaceous and graphitic products at room temperature. “

Another way is to use Magnetite, which can be primed using H2 to cause the decomposition of CO2 into Carbon.

” The oxygen-deficient magnetite, which is obtained by flowing H2 gas through the powder magnetite at 300°C for 2h, efficiently decomposes CO2 into C at 300°C.  “

Methods using lower cost metals have been developed, using Copper and Tin. Of course we should not be surprised about the possibility of splitting CO2 back into its constituents or even making methane with it, after all plants do it all the time. The metals available to them are mainly Iron, Zinc, Copper and Manganese. As rust can be photoactivated oxygen evolution may even have occured without life. Once life harnessed the water splitting ability of iron, binding CO2 into cellulose and sugars became an option that provided much needed and lighter protection than Calcium.

Of course the easiest way to return CO2 back to the deep ocean would be to use a floating plant that can stand the acidification and spread long enough. According to geologists this happened when an ancient version of Duckweed covered an enormous sweet water lake close the the North Pole (can’t find source). There is no salt water version but we can certainly create sweetwater basins to grow duckweed in our oceans!

When sequestering CO2 we should really look at the option of also providing more O2 to our oceans. Oceans are a better source of CO2 than our atmosphere because the CO2 dissolve to higher concentrations. This may make the ocean the best place to capture and sequester carbon and return hydrocarbons back into our Earths crust.

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albedoenhancement

Covered Streets and Farms

We will need to deal with the heat of summer, we will need to find more room to generate solar energy. The solution is not complicated : We need to cover our streets. Dense cities are excelllent places where we can create close to domed environments. We van eventually, when we are only using EVs or banned internal combustion cars (including hydrogen) from our cities, even condition our ‘outside’ air. The ease to do this will become an attaction of cities.

We are facing a prospect of rising CO2, loss of O2 and increase of gasses like methane and H2S in our atmosphere. The loss of O2 will be caused by the death of our oceans due to acidification and rising temperatures, as well as the forest and brush fires we are now witnessing. We need climate resilient technology to capture back the CO2, but the changes will take place so fast we will also need to build places where we can live in a stabile and safe manner.

To keep it real, if you live in a street with a span of about 30 to 50 meters, you could cover it with metal or other beams and put solar panels (and solar thermal panels) on top of them. Still leaving in enough sunlight (using a dynamic system) you could create a light pleasant environment on the ground, conducive to plants living and animals thriving. At the same time solar light could be reflected back into space, the best thing to do. The solar energy captured at height could be used to cool the air (solar airconditioning) and charge EVs and homa batteries. Maybe even reduce CO2, as our brains are not really adapted for this level of CO2 in our air.

In cities in southern Europe, more and more cities are covering streets to reduce the sun beating down on pedestrians. The big advantages of them is that the heat stays close to the shades, and the cooler air can stay near the ground. This means that in narrow streets airconditioning can actually work.

We did some experiments this summer because of the concept of “radiative cooling” this is an ancient way of cooling against space. The idea is simple : Without our atmosphere and the Sun our planet would be a frozen ice ball. This is because space is very cold, and heat radiates from hot bodies (as you can see in infrared images). Our planet witout atmosphere or sunlight would very rapidly radiate away all its heat cooling down. In day to day life that means that if you are in a shaded place and you can see a blue sky, your heat has the chance to radiate into space, and because you are in the shade no heat from the sun is added. You will be cooling down.

As you see above scientists have looked into this mechanism. You can experience it yourself if you feel the roof of your car as it was parked in the shade on a really warm sunny day. The roof will feel colder than the air.

The nice advantage is that the type of radiation a hot object generates passes more easy through our atmosphere than the heat of the Sun. Real cooling effects can be achieved, so much that one could in create ice in the desert. Of couse as our atmsphere is getting more humid the clear sky deserts cool less.

What the above makes clear is that we can have double advantage of covered streets if we can uncover them at night. We can also cool without cost if we create more shade, and actually cool our planet if we reflect more sunlight back into space. A sunny city could do best with a highly reflective flexible cover for the time being.

We will also have to contemplate the advantage of cooled farms. Soon the peak weather will destroy crops, dry them out and cook them. Trees and plants have a limited capacity to pull water out of the ground to cool themselves, once that limit is reached or the root system is not able to cope, the tree dries out and dies. Plants only need about 12% of the sunlight they get on a normal day. Farmers should work on the cheapest way to cover the largest area with sun reflecting shielding. This will reduce evaporation and humidity in hot areas.

We hope to see the first autonomous domed city to be developed in some desert soon, because this will be a stabile environment to work from. Our unprotected outside existence is sensitive to all kinds of calamities. We will not be able to count on environmental stability for long anymore.

Climate Vengeance

We are living in a world divided by people who want to keep using fossil fuels and nuclear and those that want to tap the vastly bigger potential of renewables. Renewables have 2500 times more potential, you can run 2500 more world economies on solar and wind than you can with fossil fuels.

But for now fossil fuels really have a grip on our economy, because it is so convenient, the fuel is its own storage medium, you can (if you are a bank) create credit and whoever you give it to can go out and buy products and services all generated for a large part with fossil fuels. We call that the carbon/credit cooperation between banks and oil companies. It drives incredible corruption of our politics.

But soon countries will stop using fossil fuels entirely, many already have targets of net zero emissions in 2050 or earlier. This is unavoidable, and for as long as humanity will continue to exist we will create zero carbon economies. Many will be happy about that but that happiness will be killed (quite literally) by the heat and unbearable climate we will see around 2060 but also before. A few days at 40 degrees with high humidity will have a serious impact everywhere, especially where there are no airconditioners.

It is unavoidable people will try to trace back what happened, just like many of us are doing right now. We can point to australian PM Morrison who sabotaged the COP25 to protect his life and that of his wife at the cost of millions of others. We can point at many politicians who simply deny climate change exists or aknowledge it but don’t accept the cause. All these liars and their comrades will be known and many will be alive when we find out there is no easy way back.

We sometimes talk to the mostly right wing confabulators, who simply say “well, you know the Sun gets brighter and dimmer” or “well you know our planet will survive” (but their children will suffer and they don’t care, imagine the egotism). They think like Giuliani who said something to the effect of “I don’t give a fuck about my legacy” because of course he’ll be dead and won’t suffer under the consequences of his actions.

There are some who actively piece together the future, but almost everyone likes to piece together the past

We expect there to be a sizable group of people who want to bring the pain to those that caused it. We are not saying this should be done, but this has been the norm for a long time. Even after the wars those in the wrong have been punished, later. We know about the Neurenberg trials, about the abduction of Eichman. These german officers may have operated with impunity during the war, after the war they became exposed. Still many of them left to places where they lived in peace for many more years. This is a testament to the desire of humans to live peacefully, not exact vengeance at all cost.

There are list being made, some are quite public, of people that have knowingly misled and lied and bend the truth to serve themselves or some sick political agenda when it comes to climate. Not only oil companies themselves who spend billions on lobbying while they already had models of the disastrous effects of their products, but also politicians and pundits, scientists and IPCC and COP panel members who clearly did not respect the outcome of flawless sciencific research. They are know.

It is time to hint on this eventuality in conversations, because there is no better way to expose the fact these people know damn well they are committing a crime than to see their faces when they start feeling like someone may come back to them to settle the score. They instantly show their deep understanding of the climate problem, the risks and that they are exposing themselves. They now expect distractions and climate chaos (and death) to shield them, they should feel like we are on to them.

For them there is a simple rule : The truth will set them free. We can warn about climate change, but out of empathy for these people, we should start warning them about climate vengeance.