Buckminster Fuller is het meest bekend van zijn zogenaamde Buckyball. Hij was een wetenschapper, een van de soort mensen die nooit werd verteld hoe de wereld in elkaar zat, maar die altijd zijn eigen concepties vormde. Zulke mensen zijn tegenwoordig zeer zeldzaam, mensen worden min of meer geselecteerd op basis van beinvloedbaarheid en capaciteit magie te accepteren, of het nu van Apple, Nike of Walt Disney is..

Does this remind you of something?

Buckminster schreef ongeveer 4000 publicaties, was chemicus en architect, en voor een tijdje een ‘lult de oren van je kop’ figuur, namelijk ter promotie van zijn inzichten tav het klimaat, welvaart. Eigenlijk heeft het volstrekt geen nut aandacht aan knappe koppen als Buckminster te geven, maar het is fascinerend hoe weinig mensen tot zijn correcte conclusies komen. Dit geeft temeer weer hoe weinig mensen zelf hun werelbeeld vormen.

Malthus was WRONG

Net als dit blog al enige tijd doet was Buckminster geen gelover in de een bezwijkende aarde, Malthus, die bedacht dat de mensheid sneller zou groeien dan de ondersteunende capaciteit van de planeet zat er naast, ten eerste omdat de groei bij hoge educatie meevalt, en ten tweede omdat we bronnen kunnen gebruiken die niet opraken!

Welvaart = Skills x Materiaal x Energie

Buckminster identificeert net als ondergetekende het zou doen een evolutie van de mens van landdier tot navigerend zeedier, de zeevarende mens als ongelofelijk capabel individu, een met ongekend lef, kennis en kunde, en een fragment van waanzin. Vandaag nog zijn het de meest arrogante, voortvarende mensen die aan het hoofd van de fossiele sector staan, met een roekeloze verachting van de toekomst, zoals de rover-kapiteins van onze Gouden Eeuw.

“Operating Manual For Spaceship Earth”

Buckminster maakt ook een correcte analyse van ons welvaartspotentieel. 1. Er is genoeg, 2. De bron van welvaart is Kennis, Materiaal en Energie.  Er is geen gebrek aan energie, en dus is welvaart onvermijdelijk. Zo niet onze dan die van ander leven. Stelt u het zich zo voor : Als de mens uitsterft en de Aarde herstelt (duurt inclusief volledige klimaat extinctie ongeveer 4 miljoen jaar), dan zal zich een weelde van leven over haar oppervlak bewegen, van de koudste tot de warmste gebieden. Dat is een hoop vlees, hout, veren, vet, lijm, huiden, etc. etc. Ergo : Een toenemende welvaart is natuurlijk! Bent u er bij of houdt u zich vast aan de fossiele ondergang.

Solar gebaseerde welvaart is onvermijdelijk, met of zonder u

Het is een feest van herkenning, hoewel Buckminster natuurlijk een multidimensionaal perspectief op de wereld heeft, dus zijn boeken lezen is leuker als je op een zelfde natuurkundige, bijna quantum niveau manier naar de wereld kijkt. Zijn boodschap is hierboven simpel samengevat, het is de correcte conceptie van welvaart. Wie die doorgrond weet dat we niet aan de rand van de afgrond staan, maar op de drempel van de hemel. Het enige dat we hoeven te doen is binnengaan.

P.S. De ‘hemel’ waar de zon in hangt, waarvan de RK kerk ons al eeuwen de goedheid als beloning in het hiernamaals verkoopt, maar die een goedheid is die we vandaag de heerschappij kunnen geven. Solar will rule!

Maak Generatieve Welvaart De Politieke Prioriteit

De winter is tot nu toe erg mild geweest, hoewel het weer vooral lastiger te voorspellen is met de opwarming van de polen. In ieder geval heeft dit al geleid tot een record productie van wind energie.

“The Platts Continental Power Index (CONTI) fell 0.4% in December 2013 to €46.80 per Megawatt hour (/MWh) compared to the November 2013 rate of €47.00/MWh, when calmer winds and colder temperatures suppressed wind power and boosted electricity prices. Year-over-year the index was up 8.8%.”

In de quote hierboven worden positieve prijzen voor energie genoemd, maar steeds vaker komt het voor dat prijzen negatief zijn. Dat betekent dat afnemers van de stroom GELD TOE krijgen, omdat de markt simpelweg geen behoefte heeft. Henk Kamp spreekt zich hier negatief over uit, en een niet oplettend publiek kan daar per ongeluk mee instemmen, met het resultaat dat onze kikkerlandpolitiek de standaard handhaaft “Energie mag goedkoop zijn, maar het mag niet gratis of zelfs overvloedig zijn”.

Zie ook : Omgaan met negatieve stroomprijzen en

Duits Wind Energie Surplus Leidt tot Negatieve Prijzen

Als iemand zo stom zou zijn om negatieve prijzen voor iets als iets onwenselijks te zien, dan kan nog worden gesteld dat deze kunstmatig zijn. De markt kan de stroom van de wind turbines echt wel accepteren, maar de kolen en gas gestookte centrales wensen hun productie niet terug te schroeven. Die kunnen dat eenvoudig doen (kern centrales iets minder makkelijk), en dus is het probleem kunstmatig. De hele energie markt is kunstmatig.

De complicerende factor is de monetaire stromen die met onze energie huishouding te maken hebben. Voor fossiele energie zijn die vanzelfsprekend, omdat voor die energie een hele keten nodig is, waarbij bij elke stap fossiele energie wordt verbruikt, die moet gekocht worden met het geld dat voor die stap wordt betaald.

Cheaper, better Technip turbines

Windenergie heeft momenteel geen valide monetaire context. Wel een kunstmatige, in de zin dat er geld (fossiele energie) wordt geinvesteerd als een turbine word gebouwd, en dat die energie wordt teruggeeist door de turbine energie voor een periode te verkopen. Maar als de turbine is afbetaald is er geen algemene regel om te bepalen wat de stroom moet kosten, behalve dat er vaak voor een marktprijs wordt gekozen. De enige echte kosten zijn die van het onderhoud van de turbines, en de soms belachelijk hoge heffingen op het gebruik van het netwerk.

Wind energie is net als kernenergie op den duur spot goedkoop. De strijd die wind nu vecht kan het niet winnen zolang de industrie het toestaat zich te laten kaderen in de fossiele energie markt. De goedkope stroom is namelijk wel waardevol, er kan tenslotte van alles mee geproduceerd worden. Door het geforceerd concureren met fossiel zouden wind projecten in de problemen kunnen komen, terwijl ze in feite een economische motor zijn.

De kadering ontstaat vooral door ‘economisch denken’ en het de aard van ons geld : fossiel krediet dat ook bij duurzame projecten wordt toegepast. De reden dat deze capture zich voortzet ligt in het nog niet breed uitgerold zijn van energie opslag voor electriciteit. Met die opslag (waarvoor in Duitsland extra geld is uitgetrokken) zou stroom met een negatieve prijs onmiddellijk worden opgeslokt door de opslag faciliteiten om deze op een later moment te verkopen.

Opslag van electriciteit (en warmte) maken echter een eind aan veel dure faciliteiten die de fossiele energiesector nodig heeft. Een stad met voldoende electriciteitsopslag hoeft geen enorme verbinding met centrales in een Europees net. Dus opslag is een directe bedreiging voor en zo’n net en de bijbehorende energiemarkt.

Iets om op te letten voor politici die verandering willen is of windturbines uit de greep van kredietverstrekkers raken. Het is heel makkelijk om een turbinepark eeuwig in de schulden te laten door regelmatige dure upgrades. Wat de verandering brengt is een windpark dat slechts met marginale kosten (onderhoud) vele Megawatts het net in stuurt en deze zeer productief aangewend ziet, dan wel verstandig geconsumeerd bv door huishoudens die het bij stroom opslaan en later gebruiken. Dan breekt wind misschien geen records meer, maar heeft het fossiele paradigma gebroken.

In the UK the big energy companies stand accused of ripping off consumers at the tune of 4 Billion Pound. It is no secret the government is totally infiltrated with people from either the banking or energy sector, simply because those two sectors are so important in our fossil based economy.

“Toothless regulator Ofgem ‘can’t investigate’ claims energy giants skimmed £50 from every household in pricing scam”

“Big Six’ firms too close to ministers, says Ed Miliband”

We will read more of these type of newsitems in the near future. The reason being that banking is losing grip over the energy sector, and tries to regain it by letting the public fleece it’s financial position. Even if you are enraged by the high prices or a 50 Pound scam perpetrated on you, you will be doing the bankers job and not what you need to do to help yourself to a better future.

“The so-called big six – British Gas, SSE, Eon, EDF, npower and Scottish Power – paid £4 billion more for power than the market rate by buying energy produced in their own power stations, according to shadow energy secretary Caroline Flint.”

The force field between politics, banking and energy is one that always drives us to a worse outcome. This is because banks and energy companies can provide immediate solutions to the needs of people, and politicians can’t have a carreer if they do not meet those needs, the sooner the better. Hardship can only be dealt to those that are irrelevant voters, or if it really needs to happen, for some reason of constructive sacrifice. Of course the sacrifice never serves anyone else but the banks and energy companies. It can’t simply because sacrifice is unproductive, only be producing more we get into a better position.

There is never a rip-off if you get something you can not produce yourself. Don’t want to get ripped off? Produce your own energy!

When one tries to keep the old energy producers in power it serves well to have discussions about irrelevant topics. One of them is the taxes and subsidies for fossil companies. One would think these are relevant discussions, depowering the fossil energy sector by taking their cash, but it isn’t unless that cash is never spend. If it is it will be spend on fossil energy, and end up with the fossil energy companies anyway. The way to turn the energy supply to one that knows no scarcity is to force banks to invest in them, or by adopting specific currencies to separate out fossil fuel credit, labour credit etc (See Euro Auro Joule).

Better not rage about ripoffs, but focus on real wealth production factors

The discussion needs to turn away from money and towards real produtivity, quota, tonnages and reserves of vital commodities. This way production, the determinant of our wealth can be monitored without bias or extraneous control, and technologies can be applied that will secure it and consolidate it in strategically invulnerable ways. With renewables that can be easy.

Switching away from fossil requires laws combining simultaneous changes in the credit and energy sectors

Of course there is another agenda, which is to push energy companies to part with their gas faster, so shale gas from the US and UK (UK made a 20 year deal for the insanely polluting crap) will be introduced causing an economic boom, damaging the UK environment but benefitting the financial sector. You say an economic boom is good, we say a wealth increase is good and economics is fundamentally incapable of delivering secure wealth.

http://www.theguardian.com/business/2013/oct/10/sse-raises-prices-average-annual-bill

http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/big-six-energy-firm-bosses-2654687

One can check many news sources, some with clear political agendas like the BBC, some with counterintelligence agendas like Alex Jones, some with asset pumping agendas, like Max Keiser to name a tiny few. The pervasive philosophy that is transmitted is based on economic free market theory, with concepts like debt, GDP, investment. A few will talk about other systems, like Bitcoin, a virtual digital currency that has recently exploded on the scene, or talk or be part of an intentional community, a cashless society (not meaning that all money is 100% virtual).

All these opinions are cute. They may not get along at times, but one really is no threat, much sooner a precondition for the other. A country has to have an aggressive oil based military industry to protect all the people that want to have alternative lifestyles. You need a fossil based banking system to make Bitcoin work (not forgetting a fossil fuel based energy infrastructure). It is amazing what diversity can be achieved without changing the fundamental dependence on a fossil fuel based banking system. The reason for this is simple : Economics.

Economics as most people understand it (and it is intentionally complex and intrinsically counterintuitive) is about finding valuable investments. It is about book keeping on a country by country, continental and global scale. It is about equitable exchange of goods and services between people, to their mutual benefit. It is a pretty myth, in fact only a salespitch for fossil fuels.

So if kids in India glue your shoes together and can scrape a rupee as they damage their nervous system that is fair to you who pays 80 Euros for them? Can’t you glue shoes? Would it not make more sense to give your local shoe maker a job than kids locked in basements, or girls saved from prostitution? Even then, what happens between the 4 Euro your shoe costs and the 80 Euro you pay? Why should all these intermediaries make so much money? Still worse is that cheaper shoes can also be bought, but they are painfull to wear, so someone has been glueing their butts off in some toxic sweatshop and the result is hated.

Of course the resulting product is sold not at it’s price but at what the average consumer can spare in his/her budget. Its price conforms to the perception of value because profit is a major goal in economics. Profit means the extraction of money over and above the amount needed to run the business, making money more scarce and driving people into debt. More profit means more people need banks. Its a power thing see. 

Although the result of fossil fuel based economics in the short termis positive, the long term effects are devestating, ones we are now faced with around the world. It is no surprise that the denial or deminishment of global warming reality runs across all things financial, bar perhaps marginal green investment initiatives that allow the generation of a lot of credit (used to sell oil) or turn out to be devestating to the environment and habitat of endangered species, like soy and palm oil plantations. Can Europe feed its cattle? Sure! But let’s get it in Brazil, so it makes the GM, shipping, farming fertilizing, clear cutting etc people good clients of the oil companies. Even the massive protests against deforistation mean massive sales of feul to airlines and what not. If everything runs on fossil fuels, every movement will mean better business.

The problem is that our mythology, what we believe about economics, is wrong. How is it wrong? Why doesn’t it work? What is not true about an investment cycle that is part of a network of supplying companies all adding to the ‘economy’? Of course the answer can’t feel like a real answer, or we would already feel like our economies are hairtriggerable death traps. The answer is dead simple : The fuel supply. It is almost never an issue. It is never adressed as such. Economics is not about the fuel supply, it is soley about the rate of fuel consumption. That is because economics is about selling fuel (but we already stated that).

How can you speak of a viable strategy to run billions of lives if you know for a fact two things : The fundamental resource needed (fossil fuels) to run it is running out, and the use of fossil fuels is causing the dissapearance of almost everything you need to keep going, at a growing rate and ever more fundamental level. We are losing the chemical conditions for life in our oceans for instance.

Attacking mainstram mythology is a cardinal sin. If you choose to do so you will interfere with the trust of so many that it could lead to a revolt. The highest figures in society, carefully groomed to spout specific nonsense most convincingly are of course wrong. But we would not even have such central figures if it wasn’t for fossil fuels. We would have no media and consumer culture  if it wasn’t for fossil fuels. Even with thousands of wind turbines and solar panels all around we still think about them in economic terms. How much do I make with them. Money is the key, because money is our only way to access those things produced on the other side of the globe.

The series The Dome show our reality. We have cars, but not for long if we exhausted the local fuel station and could not reach any other. This seems such a practical and insignificant problem, perhaps because even when it happens, or a region is cut of off fossil fuels for a while, you won’t hear from these people except perhaps see shots of rescue choppers bringing in supplies. True fuel cuttoffs are usually reported as economic downturns, the eggs dissapear, what happened to the chicken is ignored. Also, usually when a country has to make due with less fossil fuels, it descends in to chaos and war. We have seen this in Egypt and Lybia recently, the Lybian situation being a oil grab, the Egyptian something similar. Poverty in Egypt was driven up because the US inflated the value of the dollar, pushing the country off the the international oil market for which it is a supplier!

We are just seeing the total surrender of Venezuela, selling its oil and gold to the US now that Chavez is dead. We are seeing the surrender of Iran, abandoning its plans for nuclear energy making it impossible for it to protect it’s reserves, which it was already selling to China anyway. Great news for all those young Iranians that can now enjoy the (expected legal) revenues of Irans oil and gas to buy products from around the globe! Due to millions of years of carefull photosysthesis and decay economics remains sound as long as you can pop the lid of ever more fossil fuel deposits, or last long enough to pressure others in making reserves available to you (the function of the canadian tar sands). 

There is so much at stake for the people keeping this economic mechanism alive, and so many do so without seeing they are mere salesmen and women for fossil fuel companies, that almost nobody thinks about whether it is the most we can get out of our planet. Whether we are not suffering in many ways without reason, because  the energy we threaten lives for and make our lives depend upon is but a fraction of the energy we could exploit if we choose to enable ourselves to do so at the cost of economic principles. We can eliminate energy cost and as a result of that all cost from society by adopting renewable energy as the only source of energy. We don’t have to stop at 100% of our current energy use, we can easily go on to harvesting 15000% of what we use today. In doing that we will eliminate the need for much cashflow and therefore eliminate the need for a large part of our ‘economy’. 

People rather live in their myths, suffering and competing over the use of a dwindling reserve of totally unnecessary fossil fuels than abandon them to taste the wealth and abundance of renewables, solar, wind, wave and geothermal under a non economic model, one that does divide resources on markets, but one that doesn’t maximize the utility of fossil fuels like our present one. For that to happen we need to purpose fossil fuels primarily to achieving replacing renewables, and renewables to replace renewables.

Using the mechanism of economics as we understand it now will never work, and will surely not work fast enough. If you expect all renewables to be made with fossil fuels you are introducing a limiting factor as well as suggesting we make a choice between renewable sources, because obviously one of them is has the best multiplier (relative to fossil invested). Anything else would mean a loss of future wealth. Look for renewables to make your renewables and you remove the limit of fossil fuels, you no longer have to ask for the use of fossil fuels, and you are free to produce the renewable energy sources of your choice. Economics will never suggest this option. There’s no money in it. 

The highest cost on our societies is that of distrust. Distrust is economic to a point, namely to where it leads to war. War can be economic, but also to a point, namely where the fighting parties become unbalanced, where people get serious about winning. But back to distrust. If we trusted our neigbour with all our tools we could share them, and we would not buy them each individually. This goes for many things we could share. However there is a clear reason for distrust in some cases, namely where it concerns things we have been doing egoistically before we had societies with all its complex dependencies. Clearly there are places in our lives where trust could be increased to drive down cost, and places where we will never trust everyone or even our closest friends to have influence.

NSA 

Because a large part of our economy depends on distrust we are exposed to reasons to distrust on a daily basis. Crime is everywhere, fraud is everywhere, relationships are not reliable, the economy is a sickly child. All this leads people to buy more stuff and be anxious inbetween. You want to build a fence around your house, a gate at the end of your street. Of course the politics of the right is all about creating demons and foes and a societal risk that creates reasons to justify investment in more gates, prisons etc. Also because these investments create a rightless underclass that can certainly perform usefull services.

Trust systems are systems that increase trust. They are not systems of reckless trust. We see an explosion in those systems due to right wing politics, which is about keeping the fossil fuel valorisation cycle going (between banks and fossil fuel companies). The idea is that anything that diverts us from fossil fuel dependence is terrorism. Primarily countries that want to sell their oil on their own terms are terrorist nations, if not then maybe some people in those countries get together and form an Al Quaida cell to try to achieve the same, and are branded terrorists.

At home people that do not want to participate in the carboncredit economy, organic farmers, communities etc. are targeted by goverments that are populated by politicians that know their carreer will be set when they serve the interests of fossil fuel. The model we are tranding towards was described by Max Keiser as the casino gulag society, which means you either consume but have to gamble at every step, or you produce, and work in a dead end job in a captive environment. Your life is no more than tool to serve the lives of more fortunate and less empathic people. This all gets real creepy real fast, no surprise if you create two classes of people. It is a simple rule that people only love their own tribe, and don’t really care about the lives of individuals outside it, that’s the way it has been for as long as  humans exist. Humaism, human rights is not an identity promoted by the right, so they are not a member of that ‘universal tribe’ that could make everyone on earth love each other enough to not want to exploit or destroy their existence. 

Like with all systems we see today trust systems are top down while they should be created bottom up. The should help hand over trust to people without the aid of computers, not work to make people dependent on computers. Once you trust computers you have become an extention of them, and you will follow orders from whoever controls the computer, or even worse, from nobody but the person making the rules. If those rules are made by an oxigen deprived right wing fossil fuel lakey the world will eventually look like a nightmare.

The alternative is not to join hands and circle the world singing kumbaya, it is not living in a communist community (or intentional) although those things don’t do any harm in itself. The communist philosophy led to a totalitarian state, very similar to the casino/gulag model mentioned above. The similarity that is the cause in both cases is lack of ownership. In the communist model the state owns everything, in our present economy the banks own everything. Even if they own 80% or 60%, that gives them leverage to influence any transaction that occurs if they have to. Of course their intent is to have power but make people think they do not, the best defence is preventing/not evoking an attack.  

From the above one can deduce that we think ownership is the road to bottom up trust. It makes sense, because who do you trust primarily? Yourself. Secondarily the people you interact with, the things you use to do stuff. Of course also the law, the police? But trust in the ability of others grows as you observe them handling themselves well. Real trust is only local, and it trust has to exist on a wider scale the impression of being neat is one of the first requirements, neat, boring, well behaved. Like a banker.

Instead of building trust systems in the digital realm, in voice and visual recognition, tracking and attempts to predict behaviour we should reintroduce it to the physical realm, the personal space of people. This requires them to be owners, to be productive in a sense that others depend on it. This is against the trend of centralizing production, which makes economic sense (it increases the fossil fuel burden of bread production chain). Of course as we make this move we also introduce renewable energy so we can have our local ownership and production independently of centralized distribution of energy.

The top down trust systems could be watching a small team that plans to blow u a bus, or a similar team intending to sink a container ship in the Strait of Hormuz. There’s a difference. One affects consumer confidence, tourism and a few hundred lives (depending also on the coverage). The other can throttle the world economy on a massive scale. The latter is the reason for the gigantic investment in trust systems. Keeping American (banker)s Safe. Homeland security and the NSA/PRISM are both a profitable enterprise and the guardians of the top down carbon credit system. It keeps making sense only if you assume that the driver is to continuously sell fossil fuels. Suppose the US powered itself (as it could) from solar power plants on unused federal land then who cares what happens in the Middle East, blow it up if you want! 

EU deal would give companies the same rights as nation states 

Today governments are realizing more and more how these top down trust systems themselves become tools to achieve financial gain. Tools for industrial espionage. This is not fiction but fact, as a study of the University of Bath showed most multinationals employ semi legal intelligence services from the likes of Blackwater/Xe/Academia. This includes Shell, Exxon, Starbucks etc. The NSA is rumoured to sell info to the highest bidder. The attack on private encryption services is a fact. Nobody should be able to communicate in private except the US and its industry? It’s no surprise if you realise that most governors are very rich and can legally speculate on Wallstreet with insider information. Its not a government, but an legal buffet.

That is another reason to localize trust by localizing ownership. It makes the fuckups less dangerous. As scientist advised the russians to weld the ICBM silos shut to introduce a delay of about 10 minutes in their lauch sequence, to cover immense risk of false alarms and accidental lauches, so the localization of trust is a failsafe against people unable to be humbled by their power. The Cheneys of this world may be succesfull using the principe ‘You ain’t got power unless you use it’, they don’t belong in their positions. There should not have been an atom bomb, or a military industrial complex. The fear of centralized power is old, even Bismark worked for a long time to prevent the armies of the german states to unite, fearing war would be the inevitable result (what is such an army going to do but feel superior and start a war?).

If you don’t want people to do something, take away the instruments, the opportunity. If you want them to change change reality. If you want to trust them ask yourself ‘with what?’. A gun? Don’t make guns. A bomb? Don’t give them the chance to contemplate it. Relax them, give them ownership of their environment, create abundance using renewable energy, remove the fossil fuel drive from their economies. Top Down Trust Systems are not a solution to a problem, instead they are a safeguard the problems persist, because they secure an economic system that creates the problems. The price of acting on that insight is loss of (carbon credit) economic opportunity, and that is why we need renewable energy to dominate to get rid of it.