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Henk Kamp wordt gegrild omdat hij voorstelt gas te gaan winnen in de Noordzee (een idee dat hij ongestraft mag aanprijzen bij Jinek). Het is ‘onrendabel’, en natuurlijk een klap in het gezicht van elke klimaatbewuste burger.  Jan Rotmans schrijft een stuk in de FD dat alleen averechts kan werken. Hij snapt niet dat een Financieel Dagblad (DF) lezer die leest “Er is no x miljard kuub gas” niet meer verder leest, maar denkt “Top, halen die zooi!”, want elke FD lezer snapt dat de economie voor een steeds groter deel op gas draait, en dat meer gas dus nog steeds meer banen (en dus meer winst) betekenen.

De tweede typische fout die Rotmans maakt is om ten eerste het woord duurzaam te gebruiken. We hebben het over mensen die op geld lette in het FD en dat het woord duurzaam uit duur (bleh) en zaam (samen, delen) bestaat helpt echt niet (en dat is zeker zo als mensen het uitspreken als duur-zaam).

De laatste is om een van de oplossingen, energie neutraal bouwen, onsignificant neer te zetten, nl 1000 woningen. Er zijn 2300 gemeenten dus dat is peanuts. Op wereld schaal zal het nummer al hoger zijn. Maar ook : WTF, je kunt dus een huis bouwen dat geen energie nodig heeft? En je kunt huizen die dat niet zijn ook achteraf energie neutraal maken? Wie bouwt er dan nog een huis dat niet energie neutraal is? Is het een soort grondrecht om energielasten te hebben?

Een VVDer bedoelt met de ‘Energie transitie’ de Kolen/Olie naar GAS transitie 

Maar ook : Waarom gebruik je als Rotmans die ruimte in het FD niet om het te hebben over de concrete oplossingen. Als het om bedrijven en hun activiteiten gaat wordt natuurlijk melding gemaakt van nieuwe processen en technieken die het bedrijf een voorsprong of unieke waarde kunnen geven. Wat zijn deze voor Gasloos NL BV? Hier een overzicht:

• Besparen is belangrijk zoals hieronder ook via isolatie, maar zonder een push waar het om opwekken van warmte gaat blijven de kosten hiervan hoog. We moeten die industrie op gang brengen, en ten behoeve daarvan fossiel krediet ‘confisceren’ dwz vette subsidie op hoogwaardige warmte oplossingen.
• Bouwen van alleen goed geisoleerde en optimaal van zon gebruik makende en tegen wind beschutte woningen. Energie neutraal danwel met zon of wind of geothermische bronnen gecompenseerd moet de norm zijn.
• Renovatie van bestaande woningen met de beste technieken, dus vacuum glas, vacuum isolatie panelen. Dit in eerst bij de grootse vergieten die nog het langst zullen worden gebruikt voor de niet fossiele economie, dus woningen voorrang geven op bedrijfspanden.
• Gebruik van wind en zon voor warmte. Dat kan nu met twee producten voor zon, nl de NVP en SRB vacuum solar collectors. Dit zijn collectoren die temperaturen tot 500 Graden Celsius kunnen bereiken, en dus zeer nuttige warmte produceren. Als het om proceswarmte gaat is dit het go-to alternatief!
• Hoog vacuum zonnecollectoren kunnen ook voor koeling gebruikt worden, het zijn energie bronnen, en die energie kan voor koeling, aandrijving etc. worden benut. Dus een overslag met allemaal koelcellen kan op het dak de energie genereren om zichzelf te runnen!
• Zoals hierboven gezegd kan een windmolen ook warmte maken. Een windmolen die een warmtepomp aandrijft kan zelfs een veelvoud van de windenergie aan warmte opleveren (onttrekken aan de omgeving). Deze techniek wordt alleen gebruikt door bedrijven die ongezien door banken zijn opgekocht en in financiele stasis worden gehouden. Inderdaad ons bank systeem beschermt de fossiele cashflow. Big surprise!
• Opslaan van warmte in de zomer voor gebruik in de winter. Is een kwestie van de straat openbreken, een vacuum geisoleerde cistern bouwen, waar in de zomer warmte in wordt geladen door collectoren op omliggende daken. In de winter kan de warmtepomp dan starten bij 25 Celsius ipv 10 Celsius, en dat spaart weer electriciteit.
• Gebruik van het gasnet voor vervoer van andere brandstoffen zoals bv. Ammoniak
• Ontmoedigen van slechte investeringen, bv in slecht geinstalleerde warmtepompen en nieuwe gas infrastructuur.

German scientist ‘develop’ material that stores heat indefinitely, four times the capacity of water : Zeolite (already known by the Greeks)

Duur = het Fossiel/Bankair systeem wil het niet.

De kosten van bovenstaande effectieve maatregelen doen niet ter zake. Zoals het nu gaat bepalen banken wie onze fossiele energie mag gebruiken door krediet ter beschikking te stellen om deze te kopen. Het fossiel/bankair systeem is een monoliet, het is een en hetzelfde ding, wat ze zelf ook mogen beweren. Zonder fossiel geen banken, en zonder banken zou niemand toegang hebben tot fossiel. Als iets ‘duur’ is betekent dat twee dingen:

1. De banken willen niet dat je het doet en hebben al lang in het productie proces van het ‘dure’ alternatief gepushed voor meer economische integratie en vooral een prijs die ‘markt conform’ is dus niet concurrerend. Dit kan op honderd duizend manieren. Banken kopen patenten, drijven grondprijzen op, maken grondstoffen schaars, kopen mensen uit, maken ideen zwart, doen ze in de media verdwijnen, lobbyen voor regels, subsidie, alles met mooie excuses en verhalen over risico en de economie. (Marjan Minnesma kan hier over meepraten toen ze haar eerste zonnepanelen project deed en van geen enkele bank krediet kon krijgen om de panelen uit China te transporteren, ging om een garantie van 1 miljoen Euro, op een route die dagelijks voor vele miljarden door dezelfde banken wordt verzekerd).

Water tanks zijn vaak goedkoper dan grond opslag.

2. Als iets duur is betekent het dat andere dingen goedkoper zijn, dus Wind versus Gas, Wind is duurder gemaakt, wordt op elk niveau bestreden door de banken. Gas krijgt overheids subsidie en is een van de goudmijnen voor banken omdat zoals we zien het vermoeden van een gasbel al tot torenhoge waarde ramingen leidt, dat is allemaal krediet dat banken gaan verstrekken!! Zelfs als een gasbel waardeloos is zijn banken (zoals bij schaliegas) geneigd deze waarde te overschatten, want het krediet dat ze op basis van deze schattingen (van zichzelf) mogen creeren kan ook aan reeds in de markt aanwezige olie, gas en kolen worden besteeds. Wie oplet zal zien dat het fossiel/krediet bankboekje ver overhelt naar krediet, iets dat we onze zn. ‘schuld’ noemen.

Het is geen toeval dat ik banken aanval als het gaat om het ondermijnen van hernieuwbare energie, want banken en fossiel zijn niet samen een systeem dat zichzelf met alle mogelijke middelen beschermt.

Duur zou moeten zijn : Een zwaardere last op hulpbronnen

Natuurlijk zijn er alternatieven waarbij je voor de ene meer hulpbronnen nodig hebt dan voor andere, bv. een Windmolen die de fossiele investering in 5 maanden compenseert, en een kerncentrale die daar een decennium over doet. Maar dat soort waardering wordt niet door banken gehanteerd, want hernieuwbare energie ondermijnt hun macht : De afhankelijkheid van fossiel.

Gas kwijtraken is dus eenvoudig. Laat zuid europa met veel zonne energie onze zonneboilers en collectoren maken, en laten wij warmte opslag en isolatie serieus nemen (door bv een nederlandse vacuum isolatie panelen fabriek te bouwen) en die Gasexit wordt een banen motor waar we allemaal gelukkiger aan zullen kunnen meedoen.

Kunstmest en brandstof voor tractoren met een windmolen maken? Dat kan

We all know about cryptocurrencies, we don’t usually understand what they are, but the name Bitcoin rings a bell for anyone intersted in economics or finance. Bitcoin is one of the many hundreds of different virtual, cryptography based currencies now circulating and exsiting through the internet. One of their characteristics is that without internet they can not exist.

Cryptography, or the art of hiding information in a cloud of noise, is a growing industry. It is becoming a more important aspect of computing and internet as we desire to trust these systems more. Not only do we change text into unreadable and unreconstructable jibberish, we protect text that anyone can read from being changed by a third party by sending along a thumbprint of it, using an encryption algorithm. This is called signing, and if you check your own computer you can find many certificates that are used by applications on your PC to make sure information that is transmitted over the internet is not being tampered with.

The financial system is quickly learning that it can rely on transactions only if they are send with cryptographic security measures in place. Communication by medical devices, some operations critical control signals in factories, networks in airplanes, even engine part maintenance documentation, all these kinds of data are seen as threatened and requiring security. The growing frequency of larg scale hacking events with millions of credit card details drive a perception the internet is a wild place, and there’s truth in that. The trouble with internet is that signals traveling through them leave almost no trace. They have barely any physicality or presistence. That is why NSA has all these datacenters, to create a visible history of events, messages, visited locations etc. to possibly string together as evidence in the future.

In reality all these security systems boil down to  a single principle : It is highly unlikely a criminal can be in several places at once. Take message encryption. The criminal is not supposed to be able to read your screen, he’s not supposed to be able to read your encryption key pair. Then as the message is send and verified by the reciever he is not supposed to be able to fake the certificate authority that the reciever uses to verify you send the message. It is about places a maliscious person can and can’t be. The ultimate security of any cryptosecurity system is thick concrete walls and distance. There is no other security really.

This type of security works with most possible threats, but of course in the small world of cryptography theats evolve. What about a network of actors to envelope people that know about cryptographic systems. Imagination can run wild. The flip side of this thinking is : What if there is water tight digital security, then what? It is clear that the US does not like citizen or ordinary people to have any kind of truely hard to crack cryptography. All standards are US dictated and have unknown real security! Really. In the cryptographic manuals it is advised to use US dictated hashing and encryption standards. But nobody knows how secure they are. True encryption is a real threat to everyone, including the ‘state’.

In this world transparency is already under threat. It is non-existent in the banking system. It is weakened by media that distract us and tell us outright lies or make us doubt. How about econoic entities that suddenly communicate in encrypted ways, disabling any ability to read the messages. We are already hindered by the complexity of for instance the banking system from fully understanding what goes on there. Now we would be faced with encrypted communications of which the key could be lost, renderinging information unreadable, the basis of decisions untraceable. Worse still, if a system becomes inpenetrable by outsiders, how can it be stopped or interrupted if this is necessary. Our view of the digital world is already very limited, what if we can’t possibly read what is going on between semi autonomous systems.

There are several examples of document contents being changed in transit, from the US congress to the European Parlaiment. You would have people talking thinking they saw the same text, but in fact the didn’t. In the US it is quite common laws get passed, then gutted and changed! What is passed is a black box, and how the texts change can remain a mystery. Here there is serious need for encryption. But if there was this encryption and someone had control over it outside our knowledge, then we would totally lose the plot as to where our laws come from.

Just like the threat of a few terrorists has siphoned trillions into unproductive defence and surveillance instituteds (under who’s control god only knows), the threat of cybercrime can push all of corporate internet behind encryption layers, out of sight of anyone without the necessary computing power. This not only makes our world less transparent, it makes it more inert. How can we stop harmfull practices if we can’t monitor them, how can we know what corporations who evidently lie and fake science and bribe politicans are doing if we can’t read their emails, not even in court. What kind of control do we have over a system that only shows itself to its minions who are carefully selected to be too insensitive to judge the info they are exposed to. Cryptography may become a steel wall around a system that is damaging and a threat to us, as we know the carbon industrialized economy is.

The alternative is to disarm, disband, stand down amries, go local. Go transparent. But this is hard without a source of wealth like land in the hands of those that want to return to a simpler life. The idea is not that there can only be trust on a small scale, the idea is that that trust, when betrayed, does not have consequences for more people that the ones involved. With renewables the local activities of people are plenty to keep them safe and healthy. Why have enormous international financial systems in the first place? Why have world destoying military installations at all. It seems that we are either going to see these systems go dark through encryption or we will discover we don’t really need them if we use renewables to generate enough wealth.

Not knowing what your opponent is doing is only a problem if you have an opponent. Not being able to see what other people are doing can actually create an adversarial atmosphere. Just like Donald Rumsfeld started the cold war by saying the russians had weapons the US did not know about based on calssified information (where did we hear that before). The examples of exagerated threats to fund existing security institutions is endless (Sin Beth for example). It’s a tried and tested method to justify agression to accuse someone of a crime. How difficult will it become when information of those crimes becomes hard to trace, or verify, and we are forced to trust ‘trusted channels’.

If we end up in a Cryptonomy, where we all function more or less with minimal information we get from media and emplyers without being able to verify it, if this is the nature of a financial system that nobody can peek into because all communication is encrypted, if this is the nature of industrial trading systems that send prices that can not be verified through any other channel, or a medical system that makes doctors tell you there is no cure, but in fact you lost in a secret lottery for expensive treatment that could have saved you. The opportunity for abuse in a system of maximal secrecy are unlimited. Not to mention the cost and possible damage when encryption keys get lost.

We should instead work towards robustness based on a 100% sustainable system, with minimal dependence on anything beyond the horizon. The point of all economic activity shifted from keeping the general public alive to keeping the fossil/banking elite alive, since they could leverage its dependency on oil and money. Keeping the general population alive is almost a side effect today. We should not allow this distorted system to consolidate using encryption, because it will steam on even with only robots in factories and peope starving in the streets, and it will be very hard to find a place to start controling it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A pretty cool version of an earlier design called the Aptera that got killed by the car industry.

The Rathracer is classified as a motercycle, the Aptera was classified as a car. It seems that the Rathracer has at least as much potential to look cool as the Apteray obviously had.

We are drilled daily to think that economic growth is what we need. It is said to mean more jobs, more wealth and a better world. Lately however we have been able to see that after a century of chasing the economic paradigm our society is not stabile or consilidated at a certain level of wealth. We instead see increased joblessness due to automation, which is of course due to economic pressure on manufacturers. We are told the future will see even more jobs replaced by machines, meaning few people with normal incomes. Ok, now does the economy stimulate jobs or does it cost jobs?

What is economic pressure anyway? It is the need to increase revenue, profit in order to sustain loans made by central banks, in a competitive environment created by the same banks. Not only do companies need to make more money than is necessary to run them, they need more money than all other companies that try to do the same thing. All these other companies are as much in debt as them, with the same banking system. This banking system is itself looking to make a profit, and that is exactly where it all goes wrong.

If you are a bank you make money off of loans. This means you are looking for people that need money. There are two reasons why people need money: 1. They want to do a thing that cost more than they saved. 2. They need money because they don’t have any. In both cases banks ask more money in return than they loan out, so through loans they actually create demand for more loans. With non commercial banks this would be fine, because the interest on the loans would be reasonable, but today banks are commercial, big and costly, so they ask for more money out of society than it would cost to make the loan. In fact they compete to extract as much money as they can. Thus they create their own market, and then some.

Commercial banks extract money from circulation by putting money into circulation. As such they are responsible for a constant need for money in society. They do this for their own profit, and this happens to be ideal for a society run on fossil fuels. As long as new activity requires constant renewal of loans, banks can adapt spending to the availability of fossil fuels so that prices don’t fluctuate too much and people keep believing in this system. It is a carefull game of carrot and stick. You borrow money and enjoy spending it on fossil fuels, then you become dependent on them, then you will need money again as the banks are always extracting as much as possible to maintain their power.

This is economic capture. Spain is suffering from it big time. They consumed gas and are 26 Billion Euro in the hole. This consumption was of course driven by loans. Now they are forced to undermine the growth of solar to ensure that money will still be spend on gas, and banks that set up the investments in them keep the return on investment. A whole nation has to suffer because (obviously foreign) banks demand it. This is economic capture. Spain will do things against its own interest and that of its people. It will keep consuming gas even though it and its people don’t want to.

Economics is the marketing message of the banking system. So many people are now caught in costly lifestyles that force them to 1. Consume fossil fuels and 2. Remain captive of economic factors, more than ever before. This is what was meant at the Davos meeting several years ago, that there was still 100 Trillion in debt load that could be heaved on the shoulders of world citizen, thus turning them into oxen for the banks (who of course pretend they are just doing their jobs).

We wrote earlier about how our money should be split into three kinds, 1. Auro for labour, 2. Euro for fossil fuel and 3. Joule for renewble energy. How the role of banks should be divided between nobody (Auro be a gold coin), the state (who determines who gets to consume fossil fuels) and the people (who produce renewables individually or as a group). This alternative to the current system would deal with this job and environment destoying nature of the commercial banking system, and free us from economic capture.

 

 

The spanish government has 26 Billion Euro debt to fossil energy companies, so it allows itself and its people to become a slave to it.

Solar is a saviour for Spain. It has large solar power plants, solar towers and really amazing potential. On top of that it is hot and dry, it suffers from the higher average temperatures so that it should be strongly against the use of more fossil fuels. However it has shown weakness politically in the past, and has been forced by the banking system to take the actions that sustain the financial sector at the cost of the country and its people. For instance it has been forced to shut down solar power plants as to protect the value of gas based power, in order to repay the cost of building new gas pipelines!

“The situation is naturally upsetting for the utility giants that invested in the plants. According to published figures, they are paying €13,000 per megawatt for operations and maintenance of the facilities, plus a further €24,000 per megawatt in pipeline tolls. But it is also distressing for the rest of the country, since Spain is currently shelling out €1.5 billion a year in capacity payments to have the plants contracted to stay on the grid, says elEconomista.”

So the suggestion is to shut down up and running low maintenance and zero fuel price solar power plants!!

Yes, this energy system is really smart. NOT

Royal decree to protect gas/grid based electricity

Now in another blow to the advent of solar wealth the government has decided to tax energy storage. The motivation is that it interferes with ‘net-balance’. Net-balance is the process of having to match the power delivered to the grid during the day with fossil fuel generated power in the evening, because solar production doesn’t match electricity consumption. This is exactly the problem solved efficiently by storage, for instance in new Tesla Powerwall. People now have to connect to the grid or pay tax.

“With the reform, who install solar will take 31 years to repay it , according to the Spanish Photovoltaic Union (UNEF).”

Spain has about 7 million citizens unable to pay the energy bill, so it should work to drive renewables and storage because that is the most cost effective way to generate electricity at least. 4 million spanish people say they can’t keep their houses warm enough in the winter. It also has solar dependent airco demand, just like California, for which solar power plants have been used for more than 30 years now. Instead, now, by royal decree (sounds pretty undemocratic as well) it sends itself back to the dark ages of fossil fuel.

This undemocratic royal decree is fought by the political parties:

“the majority of political parties have signed their commitment to the development of consumption without discriminatory barriers and have pledged to repeal the Royal Decree of consumption currently in process of being approved.” (source)

What this has to do with renewables or sustainability? Perhaps that we need to return to a less globalized way of life, one we need to believe is good for us through a shared narrative..

In a world where marketing and advertisements constantly take liberty with our emotions, where we get exposed to behaviours that are clearly damaging to our mental and physical health, it is logical we try to find something to recenter our minds. Sports, yoga, meditation, new age religions all help to do that. Older religions can also play that role, and it is strange how most of us today reject f.i. the notion of ‘god’, but do believe that we can all become millionairs. The class system is still in place which prevents that with rare exceptions so such convictions are as unfounded as one could have that (a) god exists.

If we need a mental template to ground ourselves, it sounds wierd to choose religion to do that, after all, they are fairly tales. But if you calculate the cost of -really- understanding things, which takes years of education and an keen mind, then religion comes out as a good second option, one that is practically achievable for the masses. We all tell stories, we try to relate our experiences so others can learn and benefit. Let’s infuse that body of narratives with some that create a moral reference, that guides our behaviour if we could be tempted to harm others or reduce security, and lets not to forget economic prosperity of the community. Today we hear the ‘economy is in crisis’, as if our mother is in labour and fighting for her life. We hold our breath, we take the pain, we love our mother/economy. It is those kind of deeper analogies that drive our motivation to behave according to the wishes of those that (in this case) run the economy. It keeps us in a child like state of mind, it treats us as children, tells us stories, it is a mother to us.

A complex story of a man that lived like a guru and died on the cross for our sins, how does that work then, and why doesn’t it work now? What other story would work (except f.i. the economic drivel we read in the financial press)? It seems one aspect of christianity has been overlooked, and that is that it speaks of war. Imagine that you still live in a time where there is no police, no guns, no security for anyone except when they are able to build a castle or create armed militias. In a time where there are many small fights and feuds over resources because agriculture is not yet developed. In a time where there is much poverty. What went wrong in those times (and still goes wrong today) is that the poor where shamed for their position, that they are demotivated to keep them out of sight. Jesus as a guru changed that by telling them to not feel guilty, that they where forgiven by ‘god’. He could have said that  ‘An enlightened mind would forgive you for your poverty and crimes, because it would understand that whatever you have done in the past and whatever situation you are in now, this can change easier if you don’t feel like you need to punish yourself, and that if it improves it is a benefit to all of us’. But people wheren’t enlightened or enlightenable, so therefore : god.

But the other story, the dying at the cross, what was that all about? It was about war. The model of a man dying for your sins can be mapped to the strong men from your small village going out to protect it, fighting and dying so you can live a free and happy life inside it. Christ did not die on the cross for our sins, he died because it would make us feel safe. It would make us feel like somebody died for our security, which is what Jesus claimed to do, because he protected the believers from going to hell. In a way he exemplified Sartes quote “Hell is other people”, because battle was hell, and the ones killing you where the “others”. A story can only work if it maps concepts we already know.

But of course ‘god’ forgives, because all ‘god’ wants is people that go about organizing their lives as if they where newly born. The underlying war analogy of the christian story may be the reason why it has been such a good tool to bring peace. Not always, but one can easily trace back the crusades to abuse of the the stories (hell was really bad and Jerusalem was really important) and the desire of lords etc. to live exciting lives. Today wars like the ones of the US in Iraq can be understood as levers to release extreme amounts of cash, so according to that mechanism war is unavoidable, and you better not offer an opportunity or you’ll get stamped out.

Today we don’t need to hear each week about who died in the local war (it’s always Jesus) while we can be safe in our church, we don’t fight that much, we have so many stories to choose form (soap opera’s, movies, economic news) that this one that quells the fear of having to stand up and protect your territory yourself doesn’t offer much anymore. It is a story of irresponsibility also associated with childhood, of course, the same abandon we see promoted to drive the economy today (go shopping!). Today we don’t rest knowing we sacrificed Jesus to be free of guilt. We sacrifice our income to buy products that allow us to use them (a freedom) but also show we made the sacrifice. The same village analogy still underlies the behaviour, and the more power we can demonstrate the more the community can feel at ease. Thus driving a huge SUV has replaced Jesus dying at the cross. Economics recreated a polytheistic environment for us to worship in but never feel completely at ease.

It seems the best solution to handle human insecurities is to return to the village, to once again make the enviroment our main constaint. But as fearfull consumers in the church of economics we lack the courage to make such a move. If we did create a patchwork of self sufficient villages I would say christianity could work once more, although it would make as much sense to adopt the narrative of a different guru, as long as it freed us from our guilt and fear..

When I was a young kid and about 7 years old I attended a school play, it was a Grimm Bross. story where the princess had somehow fallen asleep and a prince was trying to save her. That’s when I first encountered the concept of death even though I didn’t realize it. The prince had to make a deal with a devil to abdicate his royalty and this deal was ‘onherroepelijk’, a word I had not encountered before. It means ‘irrevocable’. It stuck with me until today, I had to really think about it. If I had understood the word right it meant something that is ‘onherroepelijk’ could never be undone. This was quite a shock to my playfull existence. The moment I was introduced to that word is still a mental picture of me sitting watching that play amongst the other pupils. A loss of innocence and the start of sensing the dreadfull possibility of irrevocable change. Of failure perhaps, of death.

Today I am reminded of that moment when I read about climate change. It is that concept of irrevocability that my mind uses to graps what is written about the current trajectory we are on. I learned enough about human nature to see that local, egocentric interests are likely to defeat communal interest and no that significant action will be initiated in time to withdraw from the treshold to a world of irrevocable climate change, and subsequent extinction of nearly all life on Earth. It seems today many are watching what goes on around them and imagine it to be a fairy tale, inconsequential. It seems most people do not grasp that things can go seriously wrong and that when they do there will be no way back. Something will have died, the soul of our planet will have been destroyed and even though it may take another thousand years, life as we know it will leave its stage forever.

We can read that scientist warn that there is no “technofix”, geoenigneering solution to reduce CO2. Even if CO2 levels where reduced by planting trees and burying the carbon by 2150 (extravagantly late to take action, but ok), the oceans would have absorbed so much CO2 that they would remain acidic = dead for centuries. It is the dead oceans, that become toxic and emit toxic H2S gas that will eventually kill us.

“It turns out that after ‘business as usual’ until 2150, even taking such enormous amounts of CO2 from the atmosphere wouldn’t help the deep ocean that much – after the acidified water has been transported by large-scale ocean circulation to great depths, it is out of reach for many centuries, no matter how much CO2 is removed from the atmosphere,”

We are no techno-optimists such as idiots like Ray Kurzweil and others quoting him. Let’s mention Bjorn Lomborg, just to remind us he’s an asshole that needs to get kicked in the nuts, but he also pleaded to not go all out on reducing emissions and simply trust there will be a solution. We also don’t agree with the scientists above that there is no technofix, there are several, and we have written about them. But we know that making them reality requires an organized society that can allocate resources to creating them. We still have that now, we won’t have that if f.i. the US is starving (as much of its food comes from now three year drought stricken California). Therein lies a serious risk. Tree planting should be a global ongoing activity right now, dedesertification, biomass plants on the oceans to grow seaweed and keep the water and fish stock alive should be build now. Instead the opposite is happening, a race to the bottom of depletable resources. If we reach a point where order collapses because of lack of food (imagine Greece without the bailouts) or water (California in a year or two) then there is no hope for organizing the kind of action we need. Our demise will be irrevocable.

“it won’t blow up and disappear, it’ll just look ugly for a thousand years…” (Zappa) Make that a million..

The last time our planet went to a CO2 global warming convulsion it erased all oxygen breathing life except some burrowing rodents and the reptiles that where to become the dinosaurs. The route through global warming events always leads through a period where the Earth returns to swamp like conditions and most animals die. The ocean and atmosphere turns toxic to oxygen breathing life for a million years or so. This is where we are NOW headed (if you don’t believe us watch the video below).

The death of humanity is at stake

We need to wake up to the possibility of our actions today having no undo option. We need to aquaint ourselves with the concept of the irrevocable consequences of our actions. Small things matter. We say “fuck it, lets fly”, we turn our planet over to a new generation species. If we find we are forced by our economic constraints, work to free yourself (not by making money as you do now, but by making having money unnecessary, even if it upsets some suits and lawmakers). Human history ends somewhere in the next fifty years, even if we won’t think it does. Nobody will care about our historic records until some future descendants of our rats or cats have developed the intelligence and interest to dig them up and reconstruct them.

OR you accept the meaning of the word irrevocable.

Disclaimer

Most people view the economy we live in as a viable mechanism to sustain our society for the long term. Let me begin by alerting those that this is not the case. Economics as we know it today has no lifespan beyond that of our fossil fuel reserves.

Dutch basic income activity, colors left to right : almost implemented, planned, interested

An economy that doesn’t want to serve all

What will remain true is that people can share, they can trade or they keep stuff to themselves. This is what we usually see as our economy, the network of people and institutions sharing, trading and keeping stuff to themselves. Today, in that system, there is a slow decline in the willingness to share because of several factors. First the main productive resource, fossil fuels, is increasingly hard to come by (even if it is cheap, it is about who owns them first and about not being dependent on oil from others, so the price is low because of reluctance to buy). Second the manner of production requires less and less human intervention, and because humans have a higher fossil fuel cost to maintain than machines, machines are pusing humans out of a job.

At the bottom of our economy you see the jobless with no income. They should be considered economic anomalies as will be explained below. They are painted as useless eaters because of the greed for said fossil resources amongst those that run companies and are able to drive politics. Some now say that the ones without income should have a basic income so they can live decent lives, a bit like social security in Europe and the US, but permanent and without the shaming. This seems a good idea but it runs in a fundamental political problem : You are suggesting using fossil fuels to sustain economically ‘unproductive’ lives. That fuel could also be used to produce goods for higher earing people, thus the lobbying companies lose income due to such programs. They object! This is in fact a repeat of humans competing with fossil fuel against machines, but this time without them actually trying to do the work of the machine.

Sustaining ourselves requires energy, not jobs necessarily

We think that the above is the correct context to view autonation, joblessness and basic income. You have to look at it in terms of energy/resource efficiency and recognize that people want to attain more neatness, cleanliness and luxury in their lives and sharing resouces with people that don’t supply anything one needs to attain luxury is not desired, in fact it is fought strongly.

This perspective also provides the answer : Energy has to be more abundant and cheap, then people can receive credit to buy stuff made with the abundant and cheap energy and nobody complains, like nobody did when oil was super abundant and we had a luxurious social system in place (in Holland for example). Where do we get cheap and abundand energy? From renewables!

Renewables can sustain much more lives and jobs than can fossil fuels

Renewables are already creating jobs, but jobs are not what we need, we need the resources to take care of the people that make up our society, whether they have jobs or not. Renewables allow us to do that much easier than fossil fuels, because the price of renewables is highly predictable. Renewables can be added far beyond the capacity needed to sustain our present population, in fact, we can sustain many hundreds of times more people with the renewable potential. That is times, a factor compared to oil. We can have more than 2000 Americas with solar energy, exactly as bustling as the one we have today.

The current news and opinion items about robots taking more jobs and people becoming powerless and useless eaters is nothing more than fossil fuel propaganda. If we stay with fossil fuels, then  it becomes hard to sustain people that do not help those that have the most power in the system, namely those that turn over most fossil fuels. If we abandon any ambition to use fossil fuels but instead focus on using renewables (as this is the more permanent solution to the energy need) we suddenly see that automation is not a problem, that sustaining people that do not help produce things we need is not a burden on anyone except the machines.

Can the poor drive the needed transition?

To transition one needs to have some ability to change things, and the people that are out of work and don’t earn and are made to feel ashamed that someone replaced them with machines, or outcompeted them with help of big financiers, is incapable of initiating the growth in renewables. That growth is necessary to make the cheap and reliable energy available that can sustain a basic income. So slows down the transition.

Can the transition succeed in a globalized economy?

Another factor that slows down the transition to renewables is their local nature. So for instance a solar powerplant of reasonable size only serves a small town. It is unlikely that food is being produced in that town because that can come from all over the planet due to  economic forces that always try to increase interdependence and lengthen supply chains. So how is that village going to use the renewables to sustain a basic income locally? The way it should work is that the energy generated locally is allocated through basic income credit to the producers of food and other stuff people need. But if those producers are far way this is not possible.

Can the current economy transition gradually in the renewable one?

We are in an economy in which the dominant (fossil fuel inspired) political view is that the poor are a burden. Simply demanding to make fossil fuel available for the poor is no solution, because it increases fuel scarcity it only strengthens the lobby against it. Also because the current economy still maximizes the use of fossil fuels (because this maximizes cashflows) any intitiative within it can only remain marginal and temporary. The bigger the need for remaining fuels the easier to rally political support against alternatives. This leads us to conclude we can not use the economic system to transition to a renewable based economy. They are fundamentally at odds with each other.

The basic income economy

There are no doubt countries that can introduce basic income under a fossil fuel driven system, but they won’t last long as they will be theathered to the fossil fuel markets and fought by climate restrictions. To introduce a renewables based basic income some principles of economic thought can’t be sustained (without negative consequences for anyone by the way). New rules are :

• Generate energy resources locally
• Produce goods and services locally
• Enable people to allocate (energy) resources proportial to how much can actually be allocated.

To make this work the normal currency system can’t be used. This is because this would require banks or people to make credit available from the fossil fuel economy. The renewable or as we call it Roboeconomy has to use a different currency with one differentiating quality : It is created with the producers of fundamental resources like energy (if the energy source is privatly owned), or in the hands of people as basic income if the energy source is communally owned.

If you create money with those that need it and let it disappear when it is ultimately spend on energy you create a system where there is always exactly the right amount of money (as it is related to actual local renewable energy capacity). You eliminate banks as first owners of the money who can determine to whom they lend it, something that gives them a huge amount of power over what happens in society. We think it should be a task of the tax office to create this type of money, call it the Joule. This has the added advantage that tax can be deducted right away, so nobody has to pay them later. Like governments have done for ages, the tax office simply creates money for itself that can be used to buy renewable energy.

Ultimatly, if enough renewable resources are build this money  created by local tax administrators can become a basic income that nobody has to sacrifice for, one that is born out of the ability of the local area to support people through its solar and wind potential (and geothermal etc.).

 

 

There is a well kept secret in our food industry : Food influences our behaviour. It is easily seen if you consider food that is addictive. Food with a nice ration of fat and sugar (1:1) makes us come back for more. That returning it is behaviour. But fat food does more than that. It causes mild eurofia because it restricts oxygen to the brain, it makes us sedative because it messes with our metabolic system, it also makes us more flexible because the fat is used in the brain to give new pathways a speed advandage (by isolating the axons).

The influence of food on our behaviour becomes even more clear when we look beyond basic calories, fat, sugar, carbohydrates (which we think is the reason these categories where created). Proteins (or their constituents amino acids) are very important in our diet, all the important stuff in our body is protein, the cellular mechanism, the structures of organs, the muscle. You can’t make them out of fat or sugar or carbonhydrates. It is like there’s the fuel and the machine. The fuel is sugar etc. the machine is protein. It is amazing how little protein we need each day, only grams. There are Vitamin category proteins, ones we can’t make ourselves. Then there are non-vitamin proteins we still need plenty of but can be lacking in our food. They can alter our mood, change the way our neural system functions, make us feel energetic, and if they are lacking in our diet we may suffer from all kinds of ailments.

Our diet is not only determined by what we choose to eat, but also by the nutritional value what we can choose from

We are triggered to write about this because we read that Roos Vonk, a professor at the  Radboud Universiteit has been allowed to look into the effects of eating meat on the (male) sense of superiority. It is strange to us that this kind of hypothesis and testing it is such a challenge. If eating meat didn’t have a certain effect on men (and woman, but the idea is that men are especially sensitive) then why would they in some cases insist on eating it? In a tribal setting it makes sense that whoever brings in the meat feels superior, because meat is such powerfull food compared to scrubs etc. in a food poor environment. Also we observe that our psychology has a habit of making us adapt to whatever situation we are in. So if there is meat we must feel like hunting, if we are physically weak we must lay low. My own research into emotions and cognition showed that for complex reasons we psychologically adapt to our real capabilities, so we become less bold if we are weak, more bold if we are strong, yet the strongest individual will be layed back.

“That’s the meat to fat ratio you want!”

This reseach is significant because it can open up a can of worms in terms of the influence of our environment on our behaviour. One example is the bromide fire retardants in computers we wrote about early. They are hormone disruptors. Being very sensitive to them I notice them in every office. Especiall laptops that get very hot produce a lot. They cause neural damage and screw with your manhood/femhood. Why is there so much of that stuff and why is information about it so rarely brought out? Is it because the subtle effects make us behave in a desirable way? Does it produce less manly men, less feminin females? We can all see women have suffered from bad hormones or they would all have a real waist. You can also recognize women coming from outside the western world because they have one!

A diet that makes people egocentric is economically desirable. People will all want stuff for themselves and not share, increasing the number of things sold.

Another example is the rise of autism. Whatever the cause, some say it is disturbance of gut bacteria by Monsanto Roundup/Glyphosate, it is happening. It is not natural that is for sure. Does it change our decision making and behaviour? Of course! What to do if really in 2025 50% of all children is autistic? We can go on and on with examples of how food influences us, and how we are told to enjoy it so that our behaviour changes. Example : Chocolate. It makes us love what we know, so in fact it makes us more egocentric. Coffee : It makes us more focussed and it serves as a mini achievement, status symbol in our otherwise inconsequential office lives. It is the Soma of choice that allows corporations to get to our cognitive capacities. Lots of choices there.

Zinc is low in most foods, but very important for brain function. Breakfast cereals however contain lots of it. So eat cereals or be dumb.

The meat industry is one that drives a lot of economic activity, it sells a lot of fossil fuel and thus it is a pillar of the fossil fuel economy. It also brings forth (by its fat and actine which helps our brain to function) men that are arrogant and unapologetic about eating lots of meat, especially bacon (which if full of carcinogens). These are often depicted as superior and owning everything men want. How convenient! If meat eating makes men feel superior they want to have MORE because they think they deserve more, which is ideal because it makes them economically mobile. They are not content and will spend money on stuff that they feel entitled to. What would our economy look like if we didn’t have all kinds of dudes feeling they should be upwardly mobile? Meat eating may be a significant driver of our wastefull consumer economy.

Of course this has relevance for climate action and climate change. The meat industry is a major factor, almost 30% of emissions are caused by it. Water use is shocking. The abuse in modern US meatfarms is soul destroying. We should get rid of it asa-fucking-p. But if all this industrial activity that largely takes place outside the control of any voting citizen, that is regulated into the system (for instance in school nutrition) over years of lobbying the now 100% corrupt congress (and of course in Europe the EU/EC) it is part of a wider control system. If it sets an important course of society (the impulse to ascent in the meat eater) then fighting it and ‘freeing’ consumers from its influence will be very politically impossible.

The basic question that is ever harder to answer is : What would a normal person do. Because what we eat can change us and we should certainly find out how.

 

 

 

We are back to the pre world war two mental state. Due to climate pressure, automation, fossil fuel scaricty some are once again talking about how people can remain usefull, and even openly if we should have as much people as we have right now. Yuval Noah Harari, who talks about human cooperation as the cause of its rise from the animal kingdom (a weak talk with several flaws), asks the question in his book “What do we need humans for, or what do we need so many humans for”. In his case the premise of his talk is to justify religion and apparently lead to regurgitation of the century old thoughts that inspired fascism.

There is a good reason to think of usefullness in humans. We come from long lines of farmers, hunters and traders, and not doing anything has always meant a quick exit from the population. Usefullness however can be defined in several ways, one can be usefull to ones self, to others, by keeping them healthy and fit, by providing them with what they want (which may be of no importance to their survival at all).

Making money is not necessarily usefull, but economic thought almost defines it as such

Today usefullness is almost exclusively defined by economic factors. This means that if you can make money doing something it becomes usefull. Our lives are organized in such a way that we can not easily produce our own food, we can not provide ourselves with shelter (land prices are adopted to involving builders to build a normal house). The flipside of this lack of freedom is that the government (which usually contains some socialist members) tries to control the economy so it offers opportunities to all. It doesn’t because it tends to offer opportunities to those that are easy to control, those that promote it’s ideal of consumption. Not everyone is born to be vrivolous enough to go for the full economic ideology.

Economics takes morality and puts trade in its place. It doesn’t want you to be attached to anything of potential value to someone else.

A well functioning economy will always repair flaws in its own system and continuously does. Economists constantly debate to find how out how to present the core principles so that people will cooperate with it. In some countries like the US this has resulted in even the election cycle being economically driven (a total and complete success). Companies pay for propaganda that makes people support their chosen candidate. There are left oriented socialist companies that will support the left wing candidates, and right wing fossil fuel serving companies that will support the right wing candidates. Obviously the usefullness meme comes from the right, and there is a good reason.

On the left side we find people that try to reason with reality. They try to see what is there and wonder how it can help us survive and thrive. If there is solar energy the left is all for using it. If there are people in need the left will recognize there are ample resources to feed them and try to do so. The left does go wrong when it thinks that we can have universal basic income without riding ourselves of having to deal with the fossil fuel sector. A basic income implies that you take fossil fuels from people who work very hard to get it and have almost everyone to sell it to.

On the right we find people that reason with their ambitions. What they want is most important. They want above all to be strong and clean, not dragged down by trash and filth (easily disgusted people tend strongly to be on the right side of the political spectrum). To the people on the right reality is of no importance, what is important is that they get what they want. They usually exclude filth and poverty from their vision of the world so in extrema they don’t want poor or filthy people to exist. A slight variation of not wanting people to exist is to want them to be usefull. This is the minimal requirement for the right because if you are not usefull you don’t contribute to what anyone wants, and the people on the right don’t bother with people that don’t play a role in what they want.

Marylin Monroe plugging Shell (1:35) in Some like it Hot

The right side of politics may once have been predicated on a superior sense of neatness or ability and desire to achieve. Today it is predicated on protecting the fossil fuel industry and the banking system which is a derivative of it. Without fossil fuels there would be no banking system as we know it today. Credit would not be that easily generated. Since Nixon money is fossil fuel credit and this system only works if there is enough fossil fuel to go around. US superiority has come mostly from it’s control over fossil fuels through their dollar printing press and Wallstreet banks. The fossil fuel sector had the biggest cookie to lure the right in and make them be their posterchildren. Neat, clean fossil fuels in neat clean cars in neat clean houses using neat clean plastic etc. etc.

A fossil fuel driven society is a zero sum game

The most important aspect of modern right wing’s subservience to fossil fuel interest is that to them running a society has to be a zero sum game. There is one common resource : fossil fuels, and its supply is limted, so through the management of credit you can manage where it goes. If someone gets it another person will not. The challenge is how to distribute fossil fuels so that most of the right wing servants will keep helping the fossil industry do what it does while still realizing their personal ambitions. It is a challenge to manage the mutual dependence between banks, neat people and oil with a crumbling ecosystem and climate in the background.

In order to manage that dependency the neat people need effective tools to deal with demand for oil rising beyond the ability to supply it. That would definitely lead people to go for renewables and undermine the political power of the right as well as the fossil fuel sector. So in order to reduce demand an ideology has to be created that justifies rejecting people (and sending them to an early grave through deprivation), which has been happening by undermining education, by cutting social services and by allowing automation (although this is a whole other related topic). Now we are reaquainted with the property ‘usefullness’ of a person.

If a person can not find a job he is not usefull?

The first mistake most people will make is to start arguing why people are usefull or not, or how they can be usefull. The first thing to say is that this “how usefull are you?” is an invalid question. Usefull to whom? The answer is usually that a ‘useless person’ takes from the collective, he/she is a parasite. What that implies is that others that are working do not take from that same collective. That people that work are somehow a benefit to us. Most of the times they are not. A divorce lawyers’s work is no use to me, a bakers work in another country is no use to me. In fact, most other jobs are depleting resources that I could have enjoyed more easily if those jobs didn’t exist. This is the whole ‘competitive free market economy’, the reason why we work so hard. ‘Useless people’ that just eat and drink and hang out are exactly what we want!

How usefull is a shoe salesman in Karachi to you? But he has a job!!

If a job today is only viable if there is enough fossil fuel to do all kinds of things to make the job possible, than such a job is a cost of resources, and in 99% of cases people in other jobs do not have any benefit from it. Who does have benefit is the seller of the fossil fuels, who likes to enjoy the revenue in return to giving people lives they like, with some work during the day and relative luxury in their spare time. They would have that if they worked the land and owned their own home, but the fossil fuel economy inserted itself in every activity and brought it under control of the fossil fuel/banking system.

You are not usefull if you don’t create more resources than you consume

As a result most jobs are a burden on resources, and most working people are useless. Picking on the non working is just the most efficient thing to do because it 1. doesn’t affect cashflows 2. It reinforces the notion work is valuable 3. It scares people into their useless jobs. 4. It fits the rights preconception that poor people are filthy (especially when the right ‘useless’ people are shown, the ones with dirty dreadlocks and shabby clothes).

Usefullness can be a local social quality, not a general economic one

Renewables totally change the above dynamic. The first reason why is that solar panels/collectors and wind turbines generate resources, electricity or heat (or cooling) that can be used in many ways to support human lives. The group of people to represent local renewables can not be gathered from the elite of all neat people, because a local wind turbine or solar power plant doesn’t serve people on the other side of the country (even if the fossil fuel economy tries to make this the case). There is no problem with useless people if they are kept alive by systems that have no first owner or require hard work to make available. Renewables break the same sum game. They create a game in which the amount of people our planet can sustain increases by a factor of more than a thousand.

When the productivity or a region no longer depends on whether it is integrated with the fossil fuel distribution system the role of the people in it changes from being either a ‘deserving’ or ‘undeserving’ fossil fuel consumers. Everyone can have a role. The smartest people can still be doctors and the hand ones can maintain the energy infrastructure, but the less intelligent or agressive can simply be and exist off of mostly mechanized food production. Jobs like that of a farmer don’t have to be squeezed to death for the benefit of traders or intermediates, because there is no fossil fuel based economy on top that has many lazy neat people. Instead farmers hold the cards themselves as they are autonomous. This either leads to more people farming or to some kind of communal cooperation when in comes to food production.

Clearly the use of a human is up to him or herself. We are entering an era in which supporting large numbers of ‘useless’ people will become easier, but also in which giving people something to do to ‘justify their existence’ becomes easier. Now it is almost baked into the cake that for those outside or unwanted by the carbon-economic system there is no job that can redeem them (except escape and fight it). Anyone supporting both economics as usual and this notion of usefullness is thus building towards world war II style genocide.