Alternate Energies

In response to my thoughts about the environment, I received this very interesting thought-provoking response from a friend in Beijing. I requested permission to publish it, and so here it is:

I think climate change is real but I question the validity of a proven corrupt body of the IPCC which is not previously even headed by real scientists. Then there are all the many other scientists who openly question the current climate theories.

But regardless…Climate change is real but it’s questionable just how much humans have to do with the big trends. No doubt we should take care of mother nature but my feeling is that putting the onus on the people will not result in a identifiable change as we are living in a construct formed by the top level government agencies down.

They and their more secretive military and energy agendas do far far worse in a calculated manner than the people ever could.

To me the green movement is simply another distraction to create another catholic type system in where you generate more fear and self guilt than anything else.

The only way to fight properly is to open source and DIY alternative energy generators and demonstrate their effectiveness.

The few who have done this have either been jailed killed or bought out which gives us all an indication who were pushing the real buttons.

So in the end i believe the real green movement should be about truly understanding how why and the methods by which inventors of liberating energy methods have been silenced.

As a true magician, understand you are only shown what u are meant to see. The truth lies in the misdirection.

The green movement and its guilt trip (really..  What can the regular folks really do to make a difference?) is the misdirection to funnel attention away from the more sinister but plausible truth.

In this angle I guess u can say climate change is indeed caused by man and his inability to accept the fantastical truth and quantum natures of reality.

I basically agree–although I am not as cynical about the political impotence of regular people, nor am I as confident in the ability of the hegemonic power (military / political / financial complex whatever you want to call it) to be so capable. Regardless, I can certainly accept that hegemonic owners of energy sources will certainly try to buy out, marginalize and/or destroy outright any perceived threat.

Fortunately it appears that Sir William Robert Grove, Francis T Bacon, Harry Karl Ihrig, and more recently Y.H. Percival Zhang have managed to slip through the cracks. Grove invented the hydrogen fuel cell, the middle two demonstrated its practical applicability and the latter just this year pioneered a new way of extracting large amounts of hydrogen from biomass without recourse to fossil fuels. From the perspective of oil companies, Y.H. Percival Zhang should be a very dangerous man. I’ll drop him a note today to see if 1) there has been any commercial interest in his breakthrough and 2) whether he perceives any threats directed toward his research.

And then what about the researchers at Kyushu University’s Research Institute for Applied Mechanics who’ve recently pioneered a method for significantly increasing energy generation from wind turbines with a simple addition of a sculpted shroud surrounding the rotor? Curious if they are under threat or have had sizable monetary offers to kill off their research.

Regardless of what transpires in the future, the knowledge is out there now accessible by one simple Google search for “alternate energy breakthroughs which have been silenced”. The irony there is obvious.

My friend’s call to refocus the green movement on a quest for truth is understandable because ultimately it is demand for social justice. We can certainly identify cases where inventors of radical technology have been victimized by hegemonic powers and good investigative reporting would be great. But what would it lead to?

  1. Hollywood film
  2. Nice piece in Rolling Stone with optioned screenplay film rights
  3. Promises of political reform and book deal plus optioned movie rights

In the best case scenario, revealing the mechanics of suppression would spark generalized outrage and create momentum for social change. In the worst case scenario it would be a simple reminder of the tautology: power is power.

As Zizek and others point out, capitalist political / ideological structure is necessarily predicated on lies, and more importantly on the perpetual interrogation of lies, including the occasional unmasking of lies. In other words, the anxiety over truth / authenticity is the glue that keeps capitalist society together and the crisis of truth is what sparks reinvention / adaptation of that capitalist system. I feel that the call to refocus the green movement on interrogating truth more or less plays into maintenance of the capitalist political / ideological structure. Plus, it is difficult.

What is much easier is simply paying more genuine attention to the advances being made in applied energy science which are very clearly out there and very accessible–a simple internet search away. There are people doing interesting things, driven by their own curiosity and ingenuity, which have huge implications for, well, everything. Want to roll back climate change in a year? Hydrogen fuel cells powered by hydrogen extracted from locally available excess biomass would do it. And as a consequence of that shift, culture and ideology would shift as well.

Again, the bogeyman in this scenario is big media which promotes talking head stories over more interesting stuff and moreover, replays the same talking head story on every big media news outlet. UPI covered Y.H. Percival Zhang and his breakthrough, but did you see it anywhere on any big media homepage? The secondary villain here is your own media consumption habits which are, to be honest, remarkably lazy. I’m not excluding myself, but I am trying consciously to improve them.

So how does a body “pay more genuine attention” to these stories? It’s disgustingly simple: share them on the social networks. If you have enough mind power, then follow up. In six months, check back in on the state of hydrogen fuel cells or the Japanese wind lens see where it’s gotten. It really is that simple. Big media is created by people and these people get their bearings anymore from simply checking the social networks to see what people are chattering about.

If enough people chatter about it, it will add up to a tsunami of social change.

Something Extra

Analysis of why alternative energies are really less cost competitive than fossil fuels would be very nice especially if delivered from a business perspective, not from a policy wonk perspective. If anyone knows any good articles on the subject, would be really interested to read.

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