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For more than 10 years I have been tryin to draw attention to the role of our fiancial system in the obstruction of our move to renewables. What is more logical than living off energy that is free, local, you can own, a lot like land when most of the people where farmers. But of course this would reduce the profit and power of banks, because where does their power come from? It comes from the fact we can buy fossil fuel with our money.

To repeat my story, the oil producer has a challenge, he has black oily stuff, which is toxic, and not much else, and people could use the oily stuff to make things and do things, but they don’t have it. In the beginning oil was payed for with silver and gold, but that didn’t work because it got burned, used and the amount of gold and silver limited access to more oil. This was solved by leaving the gold standard. Banks played a crucial role in the distribution of oil and derivatives of oil, gas, electricity until today, and they like it.

Oil, gas, diesel, coal are all energy sources that are their own storage medium. Banks that can print money when they want (they have to write a promise to recoup it, a lot of work!) can thus release energy to the working population to use, at will. This is what gives banks power. No use to give a truck driver in France 1000 Euro now that there’s no diesel for sale. He can’t even buy a sandwich with it, because the sandwich shop wasn’t supplied! Europe is seeing energy price increases because there is less energy. The value of the Euro is demonstratively tied to the energy supply. Right now our bank serving governments largely want to shift blame, delay, make people suffer rather than make them choose renewables over fossil. The UK is a great example : Ex Shell economist Liz Truss seems to want to ban construction of solar farms on farmland, even though its a really good combination.

So what does this have to do with Tesla and/or even a world bank? The Roboeconomy is an economy powered by renewable energy, using artificial intelligence and robots. Because of this combination you could say all manufacturing behaves the same as crops growing in a field, it does not need any depletable energy source. Robots can of course build robots and man chip fabs and mines and trucks which can all be electric, solar , wind or wave powered. Because there is no bank involved there is no pressure to do a lot of nonsense we are doing now, instead we can focus on what improves our lives and the wellbeing of our planet.

The central question to ask when moving to a renewable energy powered, AI driven society is

“Will we all be out of a job, poor, as machines make take all our jobs, or will we be able to enjoy the products of these machines for free?”

The answer is the latter, as long as we make sure we or a public utility own the energy sources. The people that like money dependent slaves (banks) don’t like this at all!

Money will still exist in the Roboeconomy, because it is a good way to find out what people want, because it can smooth out timing issues and because resources need to be shared equally. So a basic income is a given, as if we all lived on land that not only produced our food, but also all the stuff we may like. Jobs would also still exist, but they would be the nice ones, the creative ones. We would (if we weed out the deranged despots) end up in a Garden of Eden, with at least a lot of freedom, more social life. The fossil economy is quite the opposite because it maximizes our needs.

How will Tesla become the leader in spreading the Roboeconomy? By supplying batteries, solar panels and AI systems. Tesla is a utility in the US now. It can direct electricity from powerwalls in a neighborhood onto the grid, towards charging or a place where wealth is produced (a pizzeria). This ability will grow, and of course also be grown by the exiting utilities, while being fought by them at the same time, and the result will be a still $ denominated open energy market where everyone shares and trades energy.

Eventually though everyone will increase their ownership of the energy sources, prices will drop for every part of such system, and the pizzeria will own its own storage, solar supply will become a public service, from roofs or fields. The reason wind farms are no being build out at sea is not only because the wind is stronger there, but also because you need to go through the good old banks to buy that energy. Central distribution is the old model.

So in the future we will have an app or a service we can talk to that keeps track of our energy reserves, we don’t need to talk about money anymore, although it does take some trickery, there needs to be a map showing your access to energy in every place. With our current money its hidden or ignored. So if I buy electricity 1 in 16 power plants runs to make up for the distance losses, I never notice. If I walk in the desert by Jericho, my Shekels are worthless : Nothing for sale there! We barely notice that our money is useless in most of our world, simply because we never go there.

I expect Elon Musk to add payment to his Twitter app and allow people to monitor their energy account through it, which would open up the option to invest in storage elsewhere to profit from its use and at the same time use it yourself to direct (mainly) vital energy to the production of wealth.

The Energy App

The App Tesla will build is not that complex, it just needs to know how to route power to storage owned by the person you are transacting with form a storage that you have your energy stored in. You may also be able to buy/own future energy output from energy sources. This means you can buy stored energy now from storage you hand over that future energy input to. The question will be though : Why would an energy producers give you that right. What could you give them. This is the same with oil today :Why would you be able to buy oil with money, if everything is made with oil (as a placeholder for fossil fuels in general)? This is why these sources will eventually all be government owned utilities. Either that or they will be owned by Tesla, a company that can use its robots and solar input to maintain the system at zero cost to anyone, and give away the energy into the distributive Roboeconomy.com.

Maybe it will be more about social responsibility. The norms will change, maybe there will still be people wanting to shoot each other, they can find a place to do that, as is the case now. Humans will remain humans. The super high strung work ethic forced by the banks (who increase the cost and price of everything) will not be prevalent, but some people will still want to fix the most pressing problems. Maybe a simulation can already be made of the mechanism, to be continued..

AI is becoming obiquitous, we may not notice it yet, but much of our online experience is at least guided by AI, if you count Machine Learning, genetic algorithmes in that basket (so not ARGO or real world AI). People discuss AI ethics, but that’s for region in peace and control. In regions where there’s war AI can be used to spot people, target them, guidance systems, maybe jamming of radio, encryption. But nobody will wonder about ethics.

AI is still very safe, as it is not much robust. ARGO (autonomous, robust goal, orientation) is the bad guy. That’s the machine that keeps on going no matter what you throw at it, until it found you and ripped your guts out. Current algorithms really don’t have that talent. But because ethics is an endless discussion with no teeth, a simple rule should be proposed, so this is what this is about : The no-touch rule. Simply said AI should not drive its robot or actuator to ever touch a human.

The no-touch rule is just rule nr. 1. The no-touch rule is very simple, and it is simple to implement. It is an consilidation of the object-avoidance that mobile robots with AI have to do anyway. Tesla’s avoid humans. The occupancy detector (network) assigns no-go areas for the car (and Optimus), and a child on a bike will for sure occupy a volume and be avoided. This is probably not entirely robust, but certainly compared to humans.

The trouble with most rules you could think of is that you then need the robot to pay attention to it and know what to avoid. If you say ‘a robot can not meddle with food’ which is of course a risk, then the robot needs to know food, what it looks like, what food will go into which human eventually, how it will be prepared. You can’t clean meat with bleach (although this happens in industry, and ammonia, bon appetit) but a thinking robot might. It might remove chicken from the fridge in an attempt to get to the cheese, on a warm day that’s a bad idea.

To keep this short, two main strategies to keep robots safe in the beginning. One is to keep them weak. Just make the robots arm break before it can break a human arm. Optimus has motors that can pull 500 kg, but they should be housed in a way that allows something to shear in an emergency, so maybe a visible place on the arm you can hit, where a wedge will break it if anyone is in trouble. Safety through failure. This is on a mechanical level.

On a control level the no touch rule towards humans would be a start, it would be a clearly definable one. You can have an Optimus in a cubicle handling car doors all day, they don’t look like humans. Instructions to it are, 1. don’t leave the cubicle, 2. Do your tasks thank you 3. If a human arrives in the cubicle make sure you never touch him, also not with a door in you hand (which is why for humans anything we hold on to becomes part of our body image).

Draft

Humans are born with a lot of talent, for language, manual dexterity, control of external devices. We can say that a human is a super flexible agent that can manipulate the natural world in a high degree. One could abstract this view into defining a manipulator called human and assigning skills and degrees of freedom to it. This has probably been done already.

We humans are programmed by experiences mainly, stories are secondary, they are experiences of imagination, which can make us sensitive to real experiences, allow us to predict the outcome of events, even if we never experienced them in real life before. You can say language is a way to mimic sequential experiences such that in a real experience, say a walk through Paris, we see the Eiffel Tower, then we cross the Lena bridge, then we walk along the Trocadero pond, then up the stairs to the Palais the Chaillot. You may never have done it, but when you do some time in the future, you may remember reading this text and this will help you make sense of your experiences.

In short, based on the above, we are sequence learners, but the sequences we learn are all experiences unique to us. The experiences are moments we record in our neural nets. They can be extremely short, a thing that always amazes me, how come we can remember a moment from 20 years ago, one we did not even think was that special at the time.

At the same time we are error correctors for each other. We can if we share similar experiences, tell each other to cut and pase our sequences, our procedures and stories, so that they end up being more usefull, safer. We can by listening to others transfer the benefit of our highly real experiences to people with less experience. This makes our experiences a currency, it makes it worth it more to pay attention when you know you are doing something unique, you will be more usefull to others, you can make them more safe and secure. You have something to share and will gain status.

So from the above you can say that humans are agents that are programmed by stories and experiences, and that stories can reorganize and repurpose past experiences if the human involved believes there’s something to gain from listening to the story. We are open to editing if we are expecting to become more usefull, more important, happier, healthier. This is how adds work : You can enter this world if you pay attention to it. This is how dogs learn to behave, they try to show the behavior that is rewarded and will forget what is not rewarded. Humans can have much longer sequences though.

The human mind is not stabil or infallible. One of the problems is the expected reward of attending a sequence (story). This reward can be real or unreal. Humans can learn to love things simply by imitation. A smile will make us feel happy, and make us smile, we will have the same emotion as the person smiling (usually) and this will mean a full transfer of the meaning of an experience even though we don’t really experience anything to smile about. This is also how advertisement works. In a sense humans are fully programmable, except when the emotional charge of a story is not recognized or experienced. This happens when we are internally in another sequence, another place than the person that tries to impress us is aware of. Say a thief steals your wallet and smiles, his sequence is beneficial, but you are robbed, and not smiling.

Now there are many directions I can take this story above. The one I am interested in is that where we view humans exactly as a experience based story editor, world manipulator. A complex function or agent, with varying skills and abilities to discriminate dependent on experiences with the real world. Say we view all people like this. All boys, girls, men, women. of any kind anywhere on Earth. We have a planet with a vast amount of super varied minapulators, sensors, actuators, educators, controllers, etc. etc.

The next step is to define a goal for all this capacity. What are all these people supposed to achieve. Happiness, freedom, that is what we all want. This means a life without extreme challenges, a life where what we do satisfies our needs. You could even say a life where stories don’t make us feel short changed, uncomfortable, inferior or even superior. Behavioral adequacy is what makes people happy, so the right experiences, the right stories, no need for a lot of editing.

Of course this is one of the many options for goals to choose, because the goals anyone would choose for humans to strive for will be colored by different experiences. The brits got raided by the Vikings a lot (or Normans) and got tired. The stories did not leave them alone, so they prepared. And the last time they came from the North it didn’t end well. The goal was to prepare. But other people have had other stories, and some may even had almost no stories, simply because they lived unchallenged, did not have many painful experiences. Oblivion is not scary for them because they lived in it.

If we imagine a population with a clean story, meaning they do not have emotional trauma in the past, they are not trying to deal with enemies at the moment, they have adequate behaviour, a structure that everyone accepts because everyone is accepted (or thinks he/she is, utopain scifie movies abound about the illusion, for example Logans Run), then what huamans basically do is eat, sleep, procreate, and work to make it all happen. Life is organized in a way to produce sufficient food. Our diet does not make us overly agressive if its vegetarian. This is like a stabile rural or jungle or savanna community.

In such a world it is easy to see how to error correct. If a person has a trauma or a deficiency or an obsession with a specific other person or a hatred then he/she needs to be replaced by someone with a more balanced story. The law does this in our society. The judge takes the place of the more balanced person, with a book of stories and his/her experiences. This is how in a justice based society sanity is transplanted into the stories of the people living in the real world.

Now in this case there should be no hesitation to remove a person that is unhinged, that breaks the emotional barriers, the rules. Law is often explained in terms of punishment, but the point of law is to avoid degradation and emotional trauma. The punishment is a sad aspect that most people know doesn’t do any good. It should function as a plot point in the stories of people that intent do commit a crime “if I do that then I will be hanged”, and have an emotional charge of fear so people do not follow through with plans that are deemed criminal. A person that sets fire to a house is being judged by his story, his explanation. Justice checks if he was sane, then if he is he must hate someone or be a bad person in general. If he was just being stupid its another story entirely. Maybe it was an accident and we can’t just waste a person in jail or otherwise because of bad luck.

One of the main points I want to derive from this way of looking at people is that we are all the same. We are all capable of absorbing experiences and building stories, we all do this in a unique way but society does not need to adher to specific ways of interpretation or uniqueness to function. Its processes are not that hard to master. Grow food, take care of each other, educate, build, its the level of culture that you choose that makes it more or less hard for the individuals.

What is the maning of a life if you look from this world view? It is important, preserving life is the defining motive of morality. A society that disregards life is bound to desintegrate. All members of a society can error correct each others stories. But an essential part of the error correction is to have experiences that are morally sound, in other words the person aquiring the experiences is functioning socially in society. What is not essential for a person in moral terms is their station, their status. It is not morally wrong to remove a leader that is not morally sound, that makes people unhappy. Democracy was designed to make this possible.

The above shows that as long as real experiences create stories in people, and as long as people can transfer those stories either to sensitize or correct stories of others, with a clear goal of ensuring happiness and well being for all, a society should be able to self stabilize and thrive. It also becomes clear that stories that have no relevance to reality or that have been shaped by people with some bad experience or maybe even an emotional mental condition will undermine happiness and wellbeing. In short, lying is a problem. You can say any unreal impression left on people creates problems. Entertainment is in that regard a problem, especially if it suggest a story that is mentally unsound.

Strangely if we look at modern society it is full of fake and untrue stories. It is full of series where people are killed and psychopats are acting like there’s nothing wrong. We learn history but the goal we are mostly taught is that the ‘economy must grow’. The narrative we hear from our leaders is often flawed or empty. The media is constantly distorting reality in often a divisive way. The peope writing it seem to have other stories they want us to rely upon to frame our experiences. The level of abstraction is high and most news does not affect us personally. At the same time if people make mistakes that do affect people we care about, we are often seemingly deliberately frustrated to teach us not to care. Our society looks nothing like the happy healthy society described above.

Generally speaking one can begin to weave the fabric of stories we need. Stories are not fantasy, they are not whatever you want. I mean the stories of lives that play a part in a thriving society. To enable people to tell the stories they need experiences or people that can educate them. There also needs to be an overaching story of where society is heading. What will the future hold and how do we best prepare.

Today’s (online) media landscape is like a cacophony of narratives, some fake, some entertainment, some true, some relevant, some irrelevant. Our attention, our sequence editor, is pulled left and right because our reasonable addition to productivity from the past has been replaced by a constant pressure to earn money in the economy. It is entirely the question whether realism and social integratedness are optimal in increasing one’s net worth. We are mostly impressed to ignore other people. Only for minor things are we supposed to depend on people that are physically close to us. We live in mental communities. Facebook used to be a great example of how you can have virtual communities solely for social interaction. So basically only to share stories. It is necessary because our economic ‘duties’ remove us from each other.

Economists pretend to try to get the most out of people’s desire to create wealth. They forget that there are people that only look at numbers, and the numbers have to get bigger. These are mainly banks, but also oil companies, big industry. Global corporations are created to milk predictable business models, as well as make it more efficient to manage from every perspective. The story of globalization is that you can be a global citizen and be at home at any Starbucks thus turning cultures into backgrounds, people’s as lower status ‘landlocked’, not you, flying around!

The state of the world itself, its flora and fauna, political stability. the growing nr. of desperate people, shows the stories economists believed where make believe, not realistic. The world has spend ancient energy for a century but has not become more stabil. So what should be the way forward?

Education can provide stories and experiences to shape the expectations and inform the future choices of people. It should be honest, unbiased, not contain opinions or unproven ideas. We need people that know facts and like that ideas are verified with experience, instead of taken on face value. If education is more practical, more relevant to the reality of those taught, it will also be absorbed better. Speaking, reading and writing skills create an individual that can cooperate better. This of course does not match any individuals talent, so rather than try to define higher and lower education just specialize based on talent. Of course AI will start helping with education more and more. It should not make it redundant.

If a person has shown talent in a certain direction its important not to over educate (nobody stops anyone from doing it in their free time) but find a place for the person to work. It is banks that constantly point out who is poor and who is rich and that make lives of poor people suck (for instance through depressing architecture). This should be avoided, make all environments beautifull, healty, clean. People will love to work on that.

To be continued..

The federal law to ban abortion was passed in december 2022, and the task forces where ready for it. No sooner had the ink dried on the documents or the first women where caught. This was easy, just find them in remote places, drug them, take ’em to the lab. Next came the insemination. No reason to traumatize them, touch them as lightly as possible. After insemination : release. Of course the women would be bewildered for a while. Their stories did not trigger a strong or effective response. The way it was done was clean and untraceable.

Soon after the first women noticed they where pregnant. What to do? Report a rape? No suspect, no memory, no physical signs. The pregnancies where to go through. no way to stop it anymore. Some women even thought they where unfortunate accidents. Boyfriends happy or anxious. Now it was even illegal to ask around for ways to abort the pregnancy, so just bear it and smile. A life changing event would happen, whether the women could endure it or not. A new person would be born, needing to be fed and educated..

These hard to notice pregnancies that basically happened under the radar because of legal risks to any woman even investigating abortion, they added men and women to the workforce in time. Not the best positioned one, not the ones from the most fortunate homes. Good soldiers and low wage workers though. Good for the economy. After a century of using low wage low skilled workers abroad now they could be sourced at home.

Of course the quality of the donors was carefully checked, optimized even. The deteriorated legal environment was used to perfect the ‘capture’ of unmarried women, meaning they live and operate in a bubble that gives them no way to organize help or allow anyone to connect the dots that would make the program visible to a wider audience. Some priests already called it immaculate conceptions, and some mothers where hoping their unexpected child was going to be a new messiah.

Republican control over society meant it was kept in such a state of chaos that it was impossible to detect wrongdoing and even if you did, impossible to organize effective action against it. Without even knowing it people’s lives where no longer their own. It didn’t matter because the planet was becoming uninhabitable fast anyway.

In the movie this happens to a well to do highly educated woman that happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. She turns out to have the means the friends and the wherewithal to find out what happend. What will she do though? And we are not living in a movie. What is described above can actually happen.

Earth is losing albedo, reflectance. One of the reasons for the warm year is likely to be the reduction in sulfur emissions in shipping, which means the atmosphere has been less reflective and let more heat into the oceans. Those are warming up fast.

The clusterfuck shitstorm we are in is horrible and our leaders still try to keep the fire burning, simply because the collapse of our fossil dependent money system would be a global catastrophy. Humanity would quickly be cut in half, and the problem would still exist.

Geoengineering is politicized because industry doesn’t want energy to flow into it, it reeks of solutions, and the economy hates those. So the only viable solutions involve renewable energy, organic matter, or regions where nobody wants to live. Those methods are also the easiest to realize.

The oceans can reflect light if they have foam on them, and they do a lot of the time. Ice is not even that reflective, foam is way more reflective. Water itself is almost 100% translucent, so solar heat enters it, gets mixed downward and this is why the oceans warm up.

To keep the oceans and our atmosphere cooler we can cover it. For example with bamboo rafts. Maybe only bamboo weaves are enough. The question is if they will stand up against storms. Covering the ocean increases albedo by at least 30%, which is better than nothing. It provides shade and cool water for animals to rest from the heat. Yes the oceans are enormous, nope it is not a futile exercise.

As long as there are humans to take climate action, then we stand a chance against it. This means we need to give ourselves time by taking action that is effective in maintaining reasonable temperatures.

Years ago I wrote about wind turbines that could help create ice by spraying water into the cold arctic wind. Equally we can use wind turbines to create foam, even though the wind itself creates it. We could also consider adding biomass to the water that increases foaming, even though this can be dangerous to anyone on the water.

Often the “how” is secondary to the “what” question. Setting a goal is an important first step. I think we will see settlements mid ocean, in the middle of the Atlantic, in fact on regular intervals between the US and Europe at least, because I expect there to be floating airports. But with today’s technology it is not far fetched to imagine large settlements, not even of armies of floating turbines kept in place by GPS or pulsar sensors (star observation), originating from factories on some coast. Funny to realize that a floating turbine can probably navigate itself to a destination like a sailboat if designed properly.

How may foaming turbines can we build and deploy? What else is needed? Biomass? To grow seaweed to make foaming agent (which normally consists of remnants of cells which have a hydrophobic and a hydrophilic part). This sounds like science fiction, but it may be what we do, after all we need to cool our planet and its oceans.

The UK and EU countries are struggling to provide enough energy to its economy. The problem is not in every energy source, in gasoline the price hikes have been largely accepted. In gas and electricity they are developing. We see a true price shock when it comes to domestic electricity. A kWh now costs .70 Euro where it cost .20 for the longest time. Not great if you run your whole houshold on electricity.

Russia is meanwhile burning gas because it can’t just throttle down wells and shut them. Shutting down a gas well can mean it will not start again, and it is pretty difficult anyway, Statoil had a competition to find solutions to its many leaking (supposedly closed) gasswells. There will be so much methane soon it won’t matter really.

But as the EU tries to starve Russia of cash, Russia tries to crash the EU and make it suffer in the winter. All because of a silly expansionist (or restorist) vision that Putin got indoctrinated with by Dugin (the fascist philospher, yes why not try hard core fascism again!). This is a crisis that is desirable from a CO2 emissions perspective, but the transition will be chaotic, and it seems the bank/fossil lobby is gaining power by it, not losing it. We have too little alternative energy sources!

The lakeys in the right wing parties meanwhile have no solutions, although plenty of renewable energy sources are being built and you can now borrow to install renewables with many banks. But what can they do about a tripling of the power bill. Not much apparently. They always listend to banks, and banks had to always do what the fossil industry liked, and the fossil industry is now failing. The sugar high has to end, there’s not enough sugar!

The focus is still on those with low wages, but a descent household of 2 kids in a well to do home will not like to see so much money evaporated. Companies also pay energy bills. What use is a lot of computers, lights, in a room when your clients suddenly have no money. People are losing a year’s savings or more in some cases. This will men less spending. Deflation of prices until production is depleted and then again inflation, in the EU at least.

At the same time people want to spend on insulation. Some people live in the new homes that are build to require zero energy. Because the grid is used as a buffer even they now have to pay more for electricity they take from the grid than they get for the electricity they give to the grid. The energy system is simply not prepared and has to little storage either for heat or electricity.

Check the main page AlbedoEnhancement.com

If the sun beats down on cities in a heat wave, you’d think there’s little you can do. But you can definitely reduce the heat, simply by reflecting light back into space. Its like having bright clouds overhead, the travel time of the light is just a bit longer. Like with clouds whatever is underneath does not recieve the solar radiation. Because the atmosphere is transparent to specific IR radiation it really leaves the planet, it does not warm up anything.

Above you see three materials, paper, special PTFE and plastic roof deck, and their temperatures under direct sunlight. The special PTFE is the coolest, still not the coolest possible temperature but cool enough to endure. White TiO paint will not cool like this meterial does, but I will test it. The trick is to radiate IR in the right frequency band as well. Most white paints don’t. You can see if they do by measuring their efficacy in the shade. If your paint is cooler than other paints in the shade it radiates IR in a different range.

The temperature difference can be quite large already I wonder if one can build an energy source out of a device that is actually shedding energy away from Earth?

Lakes are drying up. This is because water absorbs almost all sunlight that hits it. Especially when the wind can carry the layer right above the water away, evaporation will be continuous. Of course if it can’t that layer will be saturated with water vapor, preventing more evaporation, but then the lake will get very warm.

The air is not dry in many places stricken by drought. That’s where all the water has gone. To get it out the air needs to be cooled to the dew point. Then the water will condensate, form droplets or a puddle. You can see it happen if you have one of those cooling bars you put in the freezer. Just take one out, put it on a plate and observe the water collecting on it, which can be quite a lot.

In principle all ingredients for a full lake are there, especially when the lake evaporates a lot : sun, a basin, a flat surface. What to do? Build a floating heat or solar PV cooling installation on the lake. Heat based cooling uses collected heat energy to compress a cooling gas into a liquid that can then be used to extract heat from the air or maybe even the water. Using heat exchangers/condensers you can then grap a lot of water from the air, and allow it to flow into the lake. Of course you have to prevent water from evaporating at the same time. This you do by shading the lake with the floating solar or thermal collectors. You can apply a few tricks to be even more effective.

Especially when it is humid and hot, a dangerous combination, cooling the humidity out of the air provides both water and dry air in which we can perspire. All lakes are fit for water gathering equipment, the question is how simple can we make it, what is the most robust and low cost mechanism. Of course we can also look into ways to get the water out of our atmosphere in other ways..

Summary of article found here :

It is well known that living walls can reduce air conditioning demands on buildings during hot sunny weather, but little is known about their effectiveness at insulating buildings during cold weather. In this study we investigated the insulating effectiveness of a coating of English ivy Hedera helix covering the North wall of a solid brick-walled building in Manchester, U.K. in late winter 2012. Internal and external wall temperatures were monitored over a 36 day period on both bare and ivy-covered areas of the wall, along with the local ambient temperature. It was shown that the ivy covering increased the mean external wall temperature by 0.5 C and reduced temperature fluctuations; ivy covered walls were on average 1.4 C warmer at night but 1.7 C cooler in the middle of the day. As a consequence, calculated energy losses were reduced by 8%. The covering was more effective on cold days, but at temperatures above 12.2 C the ivy covering increased energy loss, because it shaded the outside of the wall from warming by short wave radiation. The results suggest that evergreen living walls can reduce heating costs, particularly when placed on the North of buildings, whereas on the South side deciduous climbers might be more effective.