I would like to think we are entering a saner time with the second Trump presidency, a better energy policy, perhaps a chance at reeling in the insane Federal deficit, some respect for the constitution and the rights elucidated in said document, and perhaps we can end some of the homelessness and poverty and the general death cult that has enveloped not only our nation but the world.

The biggest challenge I see in our future though isn’t global warming or poverty, or freedom, it is polarization.  People are so polarized now that we can’t even communicate the areas we agree upon and perhaps act favorably upon those.

My concern for the future of humanity is less that we’re going to fry ourselves in an overheated planet, more than we’re going to run out of commercially viable fossil fuels and not have a replacement.  Then we won’t be able to grow distribute food let alone do all of the other activities necessary to our survival.

Let me discuss a few myths, and explain how I’ve come to the conclusions that I have.  First, you often here quoted that 97% of Scientists agree that human caused global warming by our emission of greenhouse gases is an existential threat is a falsehood.  It is a lie spread by those with heavy investments in these fuels to create artificial scarcity thus driving up prices and enriching themselves.  It is probably true that 97% of scientists would agree that global warming is in part exacerbated by human activity, and that we play at least a minor role, but probably less than 3% agree that it is an existential threat or that it is anywhere near that which mainstream media portrays.  I am inclined to agree with this view though I also would say it is a source of unnecessary disruption that could be largely avoided.

Let me explain some of the reasons for my beliefs.  First, there is a lack of good data.  Oh you can say yes we have direct temperature readings going back more than 100 years, and these records show significant warming.  What most people don’t know is that almost all land weather stations are in heat islands, near busy airports or in busy metropolitan settings that are on average 3-10 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than average temperatures.  And satellite temperature readings tend to suggest a decrease, and it is argued this is because they are measuring the upper atmosphere above where the heat is trapped.  Both of these things are true, and the result is we do not have good reliable temperature data.  Thus we have nothing to test models against that is reliable and thus we can not determine how reliable models are.

And then there are psychological factors.  Every year somewhere we beat all time temperature highs.  But by the same token every winter somewhere we break all time temperature lows.  Psychologically this feels threatening, but the truth is that weather is a fractal pattern sitting on top of cyclic variations, and thus the longer the sample time the greater the excursions.  There is also much media hype suggesting an increase in the frequency and strength of tropical storms and of forest fires, neither is true.  If you look at data that only goes back to 1980 you can see a rise, but if you look back to 1900, you’ll see 1925-1935 is the absolute worst period by a wide margin for both.

So let’s talk about physics for a minute.  First, methane though it might be a much stronger greenhouse gas in terms of the spectrum it can trap, it only lasts on average 12 years in the atmosphere, this means it is NOT a long term threat.  It is claimed carbon-dioxide lasts hundreds to thousands of years, again not born out in the data, there is considerable variation between summer and winter in the Northern hemisphere because three fourths of the worlds lands masses are in the Northern hemisphere and thus there is significant differences in photosynthesis over the course of a year, and since these variations make a significant difference in only a fraction of a year, one can surmise that the lifetime of carbon dioxide is much shorter than advertised, especially since increased CO2 has resulted in radically increased photosynthesis removal of CO2, but photosynthesis is only a minor removal of CO2, the majority removal mechanism is marine life.  Marine life uses CO2 to build it’s calcium-carbonate shells, these creatures then die and their shells fall to the seafloor.  The seafloor eventually subducts under a another crustal plate and with the exception of a small amount of CO2 returned to the atmosphere when a small portion of that crust melts and returns to the surface via volcanism.  This process is in fact what is mainly responsible for the decline of carbon dioxide levels from 3000-5000 parts per million near the beginning of the time of dinosaurs to the 280 parts per million around the beginning of the 20th century.  And this process ultimately will be what terminates life on Earth.

Another reason I believe that the cause for CO2 caused warming is exaggerated is the physics involved.  Gases do not absorb radiation over a broad spectrum, they absorb along narrow spectral lines.  When those lines fall near the maximum wavelength of black body radiation for the Earth’s temperature, they have maximal effect.  When the temperature rises or falls such that the peak of the black body radiation no longer corresponds with the absorptive spectral lines, then they have less effect.  And carbon dioxide is already at a level where these lines are saturated by approximately 12 feet off the ground.  Adding more carbon dioxide will slightly broaden these lines but it will not increase their depths.  It is for this reason that adding additional CO2 is NOT a linear but rather a diminishing effect.

There is much talk of a “tipping point”, a point beyond which there will be a runaway green house effect, and Venus is actually often referred to as an example, but there are gross misrepresentations here.  First, Venus receives 50% again as much solar radiation per square meter of atmosphere than Earth does.  Second, Venus has an atmosphere approximately 100x as thick as the Earth’s, no matter what it’s makeup that’s a much thicker insulating blanket.  Lastly, Venus has no plate tectonics, no photosynthesis, and no marine life to remove CO2, and no water cycle to remove it via mineral weathering.  So this is an Apples to Watermelon comparison, two entirely different systems.  Venus didn’t runaway, it NEVER had any method of removal.  All fo the CO2 EVER put into Venuses atmosphere is still there.  Earth on the other had started out with mostly nitrogen, then CO2, and then a small amount of argon in it’s atmosphere and over time has become 78% nitrogen, 1% argon, 21% oxygen, and just a smiggin of CO2.

All that said, the Earth is very good at homeostasis and there are mechanisms that somewhat counter the effects of the increased CO2, for example, there is 15% MORE area that has green plants since 1900, this is because plants have little pores called stomata to take in CO2 which is their food, and when CO2 is sparse they have more of them and they are opened longer.  This results in greater water loss resulting in no survival in arid regions, but as CO2 increases, they produce fewer stomata and they do not keep them as open as long.  This results in better water retention and better survival in arid regions.  As a result we see greening of what used to be deserts.  We also see more CO2 dissolved in oceans which up to a point results in marine life removing it faster, and we also see faster weathering of rock, also removing it faster, all of these mechanisms means the CO2 we put into the air will be removed at a higher rate than it has in the past.

Now there are some aspects of the Earth’s systems that are negatively affected, and these are greater concern I think than warming per se’.  For example, you hear of Arctic ice, especially Greenlandic and Icelandic glaciers being removed at a faster rate, well it is true they are calving at a higher rate but also there is more snow being precipitated resulting in a net glacier growth.  This might seem to be a good thing but where Greenland is concerned it is not, because the difference in salinity is what drive the so called Atlantic circulation belt, and all the fresh water being added is slowing that belt, this means, less warm water is being brought up from tropical regions into the subtropical, temperate, and arctic zones.  So what we get is not global warming but global heat redistribution.  Particularly we get a cooling not warming of Western Europe.  But because of the increased precipitation of snow we do not get the huge global warming people predict in the near future.

This is undesirable, this is a point I think we can all agree upon, but then there is the question of solutions.  The most extreme solutions is what the World Economic Forum is pushing for, lock us all into 15-minute prisons, forbid travel, forbid the use of the majority of the Earth’s land masses, have us all eat even less non-nutritious artificial food so we’ll die sooner, and if that doesn’t kill us, generate some deadly diseases and introduce them into the population, and if that doesn’t spread naturally enough to kill enough of us, inject us with it.  Not a solution I would favor.  The next favored solution is to produce all of our energy with wind and solar and electrify all of our transportation, this is better but not economically viable, and not viable from a standpoint of the mineral resources required both for production and storage of energy this way, primarily lithium and rare Earth’s, neither can be obtained in sufficient quantity economically.

So what is left?  Well, start by cutting out waste.  If we didn’t waste so much energy on military that would be a big plus right there.  Next thing, we need new base load energy sources.  We are on the cusp of three potentially viable new sources, one source and one I would want to see developed for reasons beyond energy, is molten salt breeder reactors.  These can burn thorium indirectly by breeding it into Uranium 233, but they can also burn all the actinide waste from existing spent fuel, and this is the long term nuclear waste.  You burn it up and it leaves only short term fission products that only need to be kept isolated for about 300 years rather than 100,000 to a million.  Three hundred years is realistically doable, 100,000 isn’t. Thorium is 3x as more abundant in the Earth’s crust than Uranium and 100% of it is usable not just the .6% of Uranium that is U-235, also with this technology the other 99.4% of uranium that is U-238 would become usable.  Yet another advantage of molten salt reactors is that molten salts also being used as the heat exchange mechanism, these can be stored in tanks when power isn’t required and then used to provide peak power beyond the reactors capability when load demands it.  This makes them a perfect adjunct to intermittent sources like Wind and Solar.

Another technology that has been in the works for a long time is nuclear fusion, and for many years we were unable to reach scientific break even let alone commercial break-even.  But Wendlestein-7x stellarator recently achieved a gain of 320, that is it produced 320 times as much energy from fusion as that which was required to initiate the reaction.  Now there is still engineering work to be done, but the science is there.

And yet another technology involves a new form of drilling that involves a megawatt maser microwave source.  This new technology makes drilling holes deep enough to reach geothermal resources virtually anywhere viable.  But even without this technology, here in the United States, we have a huge national resource of geothermal energy near enough the surface to easily tap known as Yellowstone but federal law prohibits tapping it.  This is beyond ludicrous.

At any rate; if we cripple our economy in order to “save the planet”, we cripple our ability to put in place these new technologies and ultimately make the problem larger in the long run, or we guarantee our extinction and fix it that way.  Neither seems desirable to me.  But one thing I am sure of, we can’t get to a better place by constantly fighting each other.  We need to be willing to discuss, determine what things we can agree upon and at least pursue those.

I don’t mean to be disrespectful to those who think they are environmentalists and trying to save the planet, but I do at times have difficulty controlling my anger because they know not what they are doing.

First, let’s consider the history of the Earth. It started with hardly any atmosphere, and then at the crust formed and volcanoes vented CO2, SO2, and H20 an atmosphere formed, a rather hellish atmosphere similar to that of Venus. During that early time of the Earth, the Sun’s output was about 15% less the current, or about 1350 watts / square meter verses 1500 of today (by contrast Venus receives around 2350 watts / meter). Because of that lower output, even though the Earth had a CO2 atmosphere with a lot of water and sulfer dioxide (and as a result sulfurous and sulfuric acid) the temperatures were still low enough that liquid water could form.

Over time the weathering of rock thinned the largely CO2 atmosphere, nitrogen gradually became a larger share of the atmosphere largely owing to it’s much lower reactivity with the surface minerals, and as the atmosphere thinned, the heating caused by CO2 declined, but the solar output increased, still not as fast as the atmosphere thinned so there was a period of at least 100 million years, perhaps several hundred million where the Earth was entirely frozen pole to pole, not great for life.

Eventually this thawed, and scientists still today do not totally understand why, but at some point enough water accumulated and enough crust thickness accumulated that we began to have plate tectonics. This was crucial, because now CO2 taken out of the atmosphere was taken back into the Earth as the plates subducted under one another and the rate of decline in the atmospheric pressure increased.

Around 500 million years maybe sooner some ancient forms of bacteria emerged but they did not use oxygen in their metabolism, in fact oxygen was highly toxic to them, instead they mostly received their energy by reacting sulfur with hydrogen. If humans could have survived, the atmosphere would have smelt like a giant fart because it would be full of hydrogen sulfide, one of the primary stinky components of farts.

Around two billion years ago some bacteria developed a primitive form of photosynthesis, this gave it essentially an infinite food source, solar energy, and so it thrived. Over time it released oxygen into the atmosphere and aided in the removal of carbon dioxide. By this time the solar output had increased maybe 7-8% and somewhat compensated for the reduction in the thickness of the atmosphere and in it’s carbon dioxide content.

By around 300 million years ago, the CO2 levels had dropped to somewhere around 1000-3000 ppm, depending upon which model you use, there are at least a dozen with a fairly wide error bar, and with this CO2 rich atmosphere relative to today there was really an ideal atmosphere for life. There was enough oxygen in the atmosphere for a robust ozone layer and at the same time enough CO2 for robust plant growth, perfect conditions for dinosaurs to thrive. But as the time of the asteroid impact that finished most of the non-avian dinosaurs off, the CO2 levels had fallen to levels approximating those of today. Plant growth had become much less robust and already dinosaurs where dying off, especially the larger species.

One of the things that began to contribute to further reductions in CO2 were not just the weathering of rocks, but now marine organisms that incorporated calcium carbonate into their shells. These organisms then died and were swept under the crust at subduction zones. The asteroid was really just the final blow, the dinosaurs would have starved to death soon anyway.

By 20,000 years ago, the Earth reached it’s minimal CO2 level of about 200ppm, this level only C4 plants could really do well and these are the minority of species today. C4 plants can tolerate levels down to about 150ppm though their growth at that rate is greatly reduced, C3 plants require more CO2 because they lack the cellular CO2 concentration mechanism of C4 plants. Reducing our atmospheric CO2 concentration back to 180PPM would leave us basically with two food crops, sugarcane and corn and neither would be abundant enough to feed today’s population.

None the less, without human intervention, CO2 would in a relatively short time frame, fall below those levels and life on Earth would cease to exist, save for some hydrogen-sulfur reacting bacteria near hydrothermal vents in the ocean.

Crop production has increased significantly as CO2 levels have risen from around 240 ppm to todays 420 ppm. Given the population today this is NOT a bad thing. Further, plants use water more efficiently when higher CO2 levels exist because they do not have to open their stomata, tiny poors through which they acquire CO2 from the atmosphere, as far, their opening also looses water through evaporation. This is why increased CO2 levels have caused extensive greening of the Earth.

So for the sake of ALL higher life forms on Earth, it actually behooves us not to allow nature to take the CO2 level down to pre-industrial levels. Also, as the Sun continues to increase it’s output, the Earth will get warmer and it’s natural response would be to reduce CO2 but that WILL extinguish all life if allowed to happen. If we do not allow it to happen, then in about half a billion years, the Earth will boil away the oceans and life will become impossible anyway.

Given that global warming is inevitable for the next half billion years (and beyond for that matter because the Sun will continue to expand until it eventually envelopes the orbit of the Earth), we best find ways to deal with it in the short term and develop the ability to travel to distant solar systems in the meantime because that is the only hope for long term survival of man.

Now that said, at some point hydrocarbons, be they of fossil or mineralogical origin, those that we can economically recover will exhaust, and besides, our need for denser energy sources for a robust and prosperous future require greater (not lesser as the greenies would have it) energy sources.

Right now we have two possibilities for much more robust energy sources, nuclear fission and fusion. Conventional boiling or pressurized water reactors have several substantial problems. First, at best they use only about half a percentage of natural Uraniums energy potential in one pass. Two they create very long term radioactive waste. Third, because fission products aren’t continuously removed during their operation, a shutdown does not stop heat production immediately, that continues for a long time as fission products decay to more stable isoptopes. So they require active cooling. Further, operating at pressures of several hundred atmospheres, they are prone to failures in which these fission products are spread over large areas.

But there is another type of reactor called a molten salt reactor, and a close cousin, liquid metal cooled reactors in which the coolant is either sodium or lead, that are much safer because they do not operate under significant pressure, thus if a plumbing problem occurs pressure isn’t instantly released resulting in a huge steam explosion dispersing highly radioactive fission products.

Of these two I favor molten salt reactors because the salts are not reactive in air and thus do not start fires if you have a plumbing leak, unfortunately this IS a problem with sodium cooled reactors. The reason some designs favor sodium is that it is easier to find container materials that are corrosion resistant to sodium verses salt, but corrosion with the wrong choice of materials can be a problem in either case. Still, the Soviets have been operating a 800 mw sodium cooled breeder reactor for many years successfully and an experimental liquid metal fast flux reactor ran successfully for ten years at Oak Ridge and was even run 24 hours control rods out and cooling systems shut off to demonstrate the self-regulating inherent safety of these reactors. These reactors have the fuel dissolved in the liquid metal or salt coolant, and as a result, as the temperature increases the medium expands reducing reaction rates, thus causing them to be self-controlled and limited.

Because these reactors can “burn” the actinides (the products that result when a uranium or plutonium atom capture a neutron rather than fissioning become a yet heavier nucleus) these reactors produce no long term nuclear waste. The fission products decay back to radioactivity levels equal or less than the ores that were mined within 300 years. This can transform a million year storage issue into a much more manageable 300 year problem and even many of these fission products have uses like medical isotopes for cancer treatment or imaging.

So for the short term (and estimates of how long the Earth’s Uranium and Thorium plus existing actinide nuclear waste could provide our energy needs vary from 10,000 to a million years depending upon our rate of energy use growth), this is a viable option for electrical and process heat energy needs.

In the longer term fusion is our next go to, this has seemed like an impossibility for years but two recent developments have changed this immensely, first is the invention of RebCO, Rare-Earth Barium Copper-Oxide ribbon super conductors. Superconductor magnets are necessary for sustained controlled nuclear fusion because the currents required to produce the necessary magnetic fields would melt conventional conductors after anywhere from 15-300 seconds of operation. But superconductors don’t have resistance and thus do not heat up. However, superconductors lose their superconductivity above some magnetic threshold, the old style ceramic superconductors lost their superconductivity at around 8-10 Tesla, but these new RebCO superconductive ribbons can produce fields up to 40 Tesla, and in addition lend themselves to being wound into complex shaped coils much better than the old ceramics. Because confinement of hot plasmas scales with the cube of the magnetic field strength, 40 tesla can confine plasma 64 times better than 10 tesla can. So right there is a 64x improvement. Then add to that the way a plasma wiggles makes it prone to escape but recent advancements in computer neural network AI has allowed the magnetic fields to be adjusted in real time to counter this wiggling tendency. Between these two things I think we will see fusion as a power source sooner than later.

Now both of these sources are good for generating electricity or process heat, but not so much for liquid fuels like gasoline or aviation fuel, however, recently the US Navy has invented a process where by they can take carbonic acid from ocean water (dissolved CO2) and water and combine them with the use of electricity and some catalysts to produce O2 and hydrocarbons of any desired length, they invented this technology to allow aircraft carriers to have a supply of jet fuel without having to put tankers at risk in a war zone. But with adequate supplies of energy from nuclear fission or fusion, we can produce these fuels in abundance and they are carbon neutral because they are taking carbon from the air.

I am concerned that the direction that Bill Gates, Klaus Schwab, and other psychopathic globalists are taking us is in the wrong direction. It’s going to lead to the death of already impoverished people, impoverishment of the middle class, and a great reduction in exactly the innovation we need to succeed as a species long term. This is why I get angry at the greenies who believe we can subsist on solar and wind. It is not a viable path long or short term, but especially long term.

As a people, as a species, we need to innovate as much and as fast as we can to allow us to meet our energy needs and adapt to a naturally changing environment over the long term, and eventually to migrate on interstellar terms in the long term because that is the only viable path for our long term survival as a species.

There seem to be two groups at odds, one group says we need to kill seven billion people and relegate the remainder to living in economic squalor in order to prevent the entire destruction of our planets ecosphere. UN Agenda 21/2030 and the World Economic Forums plan falls into this category. The other group says drill baby drill, we need to bring the world out of poverty.

What we clearly need is a clean and essentially infinite source of energy, and I am convinced that eventually controlled hydrogen fusion will be developed IF and ONLY IF we don’t destroy our civilizations ability to progress through plans like UN Agenda 21 and 2030 and Klaus Schwab’s World Economic Forums which are basically massive global genocide and posterity programs. If we do follow the paths of these “green” folks, we will never have the resources we need to develop a truly clean and sustainable future, we will only have a very scaled down limited dirty future that will eventually exhaust resources and then we’ll all go the way of the dinosaurs.

I believe there is a third alternative and that is to rapidly grown and use alternative energy sources that may not be sustainable forever but are sustainable much longer than fossil fuels are, while we develop and perfect controlled hydrogen fusion.

I believe a big part of that mix has to be fission reactions, but we haven’t enough Uranium to depend upon scaling up light water reactors, their safety issues and waste issues also make this solution untenable.

Enter the liquid fluoride molten breeder reactor. It can take fertile fuels such as Uranium-238 that is 99.3% of natural Uranium and Thorium-232 which is 3x more abundant in the Earth’s crust than is Uranium, and breed them into Plutonium-239 and Uranium-233 both of which are fissionable fuels that can then burn. Further, it can either breed otherwise not easily fissionable transuranics (the long lived waste products of conventional light water reactors or fission then directly) leaving only short term fission products as waste and living a much smaller waste volume, and most of those waste products have industrial uses.

Liquid Fluoride Molten Salt reactors use a salt of fluorine as the primary coolant and in which the fuel and fertile material to be breed are dissolved, fission products are continuously removed in an on-site reprocessing plant. This allows 100% burn-up of the fuel which is why you don’t have long term radioactive byproducts.

Because the fuel is liquid to start with, melt-downs are impossible. Overheating is also very difficult because the salt expands with temperature thereby reducing the reaction rate so it is thermally self-limiting, but there is a passive safety device which consists of a melt-plug, this is a plug of material which can be melted if fuel temperature rises too high that drains the reaction tank into a much larger tank that is sufficiently large to spread the fuel out enough to stop the chain reaction and to dissipate all the heat generated by the fission products (which is little because they are continuously removed from the liquid fuel during operation) without any active cooling.

Because of the inherent safety of this type of reactor, they can be located near population centers where waste heat can be used for things like building heating and transmission losses are less. Because they generate 1/100th the volume of waste and that waste is not long term, they do not create the million year problem that conventional light water reactors create. Lastly because they can burn the actinides from existing waste, they can eliminate our existing long term nuclear waste storage problems, and lastly because all reprocessing is done on site, there is no danger of a transportation accident releasing radioactive isotopes into the environment.

These reactors are safe because 1) They rely solely on passive safety measures, no mechanical mechanism failures or electrical supply failures can result in accidents. 2) Because the salt used as a medium for the fuel and coolant has a very high vaporization temperature, they do not have to be pressurized like a light water reactor, this makes plumbing failures much less likely, 3) Because they do not use water as a coolant, the water is not split into hydrogen which can then explode like it did in Fukashima. It is said that we could produce 10,000 years of electricity on existing nuclear waste without mining another gram of Uranium, but when we’ve used that up it can use 100% of Uranium not just the .7% U-235 isotope, and it can use 100% of Thorium which is 3x as abundant in our planets crust so even if we increase our energy needs significantly, which bringing the remainder of humanity out of poverty requires, there is plenty of fuel to go many thousands of years and that is plenty of time to complete the development of hydrogen fusion, and no doubt future physics discoveries will give us new options during that time.

    One belief is that time, the past, the future, everything in the universe already exists.  It is only our biological nature that forces our experience of the universe to be one of moving through time with the future gelling and then solidifying into the past.

Another is the more common believe that we exist in a point in time and create the future as we go along through our own decisions.

Even the Bible seems split on this topic, do we have free will or not?  I would suggest to you that free will is merely a frame of reference.  From a reference outside of time, in which you can see all of time, there is no free will, the universe is just fixed, all of past, all of future, and in every direction.  But from our biological perspective absolutely we do.  And so we must make decisions and take actions that create the future we desire.

     The things in the upper right quadrant of this photo, I happened across a video of this on my television and these things were moving about and flashing on and off before the transformer went which leads me to wonder if they weren’t some sort of electromagnetic pulse weapon.

     Last night I had a dream in which my job was to identify abandoned nuclear reactors, fuel rods, waste, for clean-up and reclamation.

     In the dream, I was particularly looking in Africa because many African governments had created reactors and because they were unstable they were abandoned when the government fell apart or was replaced.

     At this point in our history, we had developed a technique for removing waste from soil and most other things and packaging it in a shipping container for treatment.

     The treatment involved first extracting all the actinides from the fission products.  The actinides would be burned in a fast reactor leaving only relatively short-lived fission products.  The fission products would decay to safe materials in about 300 years versus a million years for waste containing actinides.

This is essentially the same as molten salt reactors.  It will not burn Thorium directly as Thorium 232 is NOT fissionable.  So it requires a fissionable isotope of Uranium or Plutonium to get things started.  Thorium 232 then absorbs a neutron to become Thorium 233, and then beta decays to Protactinium 233, which beta decays again to become Uranium 233 which is fissionable.  What is not stated in this video is that these reactors can fission most actinides because actinides are fissionable with fast neutrons generated in these reactors so the waste products that are left are only fission products and these all have half-lives that are short transforming a 500,000 year waste problem into a one or two hundred year waste problem and a waste volume less than 1/100th that of a conventional light water reactor.

     Some time ago I wrote advocating tying together the three major US power grids with DC inter-ties. I am happy to see today that that has in fact been done.

     DC inter-ties are more efficient over distances greater than about 300 miles,immune to the effects of solar induced or nuclear induced magnetic interference, and do not require the networks be phase synchronized.

     This allows load peaks to be distributed over a wider geographical area, flattening the peak somewhat because of the varying time zones.