Power to the People

This book could begin in any number of ways, but let’s start with what the world needs – an inexhaustible, renewable source of clean fuel, food, fertilizer and electricity, that actually pulls carbon out of the atmosphere, can be “scaled up” to the industrial level, “scaled down” for remote villagers with very limited means, and is completely open source… belonging unconditionally to everyone. Do you want to improve on it and put those modifications into open source as well? Do you want to develop a proprietary technology that builds on this one? Go for it!

Later we can discuss why the above features are important, but for now let’s lay out the invention in question. Rest assured what follows uses several very simple long-established techniques, that just happen, in this case, to be working together to give us what we need.

The tools in question boil down to gravity, photosynthesis, air pressure, bacterial action, and sunlight. There’s a solar-concentration option for larger operations, and some charcoal burning if you want to lock up more carbon in the soil. But those first five resources are widely available.

Let us address some of the key objections experienced renewable-energy hands may instinctively have to the system we are about to discuss. They are important – in particular, because each one is a strength of this design, as opposed to a weakness.

First let’s list, and then we’ll go over each in turn as we describe the invention proper.

Is the real EROEI – the Energy Return On Energy Invested – positive? In other words, is the energy gained after the process of finding, extracting or manufacturing, refining and transporting it to market a net positive, especially if you count the energy required to make all the machinery and infrastructure in your system, and everything required to replace its parts and keep it in good repair?

Yes, and dramatically so. That’s one of the advantages of getting the natural elements of the system to do virtually all the work. And of having a system that can be built on the small to moderate scale with little more than scrap.

If there’s biomass involved, isn’t your system inherently limited by the amount you can find and transport to it?

Technically yes, but not if you’re creating even more biomass on site.

Aha! But how much can you realistically produce on site, or right around it?

Absolutely ludicrous amounts, especially at the industrial scale. Any biomass that doubles itself even once in a day, much less multiple times, is growing at a rate adequate for your needs. The theoretical, exponential daily increase in the feedstock in question is naturally limited by the inputs fundamental to its production – which is why our ability to supply those, essentially for free, at a phenomenal scale is so critical. That factor is why this particular innovation is a turning point with regards to the production of food, fuel and organic fertilizer, and a primary reason why it can absorb so much carbon out of our ecosystem.

Does this solution render everyone else’s work in, say, conservation or renewable energy pointless?

Not at all. In fact, quite a few techniques become even more powerful when joined to this open-source method. We’ll get to those as they come up, but having experience in anything from concentrated solar to waste treatment to algae harvesting to aquaponics would not only be useful in using this system but also in developing your own open-source or proprietary applications. If you are running a business, such advantages may give you a considerable edge in what has just become a vastly larger market for your skills.

Will this push conventional farmers out of business?

The kind of food produced directly, while eaten extensively in some parts of the world, will more likely be used as feed, feedstock or fertilizer and thus contribute to our food chain slightly less directly than if we ate all of it ourselves. Then again, given how much food, fuel and fertilizer are consumed by virtually all forms of agriculture, that isn't much of a drawback. Rather, it's something we need. And for farmers, this will reduce the cost of key resources needed for their work.

Will a few large corporations simply move in and dominate this field, pushing out smaller competitors?

While large organizations could easily set up major operations producing methane, fertilizer and other products, suppliers are apt to be much more of a patchwork presence, even in instances where intrepid companies carve multiple, highly profitable niches. Why? Two reasons. Natural gas has many benefits, but its greatest “drawback” is that it is both hard and dangerous to transport. As a gas, it can be moved around within a city or other locality, but liquefied natural gas is both tricky to process and very perilous if detonated, and pipelines have a distressing tendency to leak, if they even exist in a region in the first place. Further, large organizations with the greatest reason to generate huge quantities of extremely cheap methane are those who have a guaranteed market that directly benefits from very low costs, themselves. Power plants, some foundries, and other manufacturers are obvious candidates. These groups may produce some excess methane for the local market, and other associated products, particularly fertilizer. But for the most part, it will be other, higher-value products they ship to distant markets, if anything. Closer to home, electricity will be a more mobile resource, within the limits of the regional or national grid.

Process Overview

The technique for doing all this is simple, though it involves several elements, which we shall overview before going into greater detail on each one.

Biogas digesters are a method for reducing organic waste into methane, and can be used to turn animal manure into natural gas, or as a productive part of a city’s sewage-treatment system. Various types of digesters exist, but this book is primarily concerned with a version that combines organic waste, usually manure, with water in a slurry in which materials break down as they slowly flow through the system. In theory, up to 75% of organic waste being treated can be reduced to gas, roughly 40% of which is carbon dioxide while 60% becomes methane. Now, while this would yield up 45% of an organic mass as methane (and another 30% as CO2), getting close to the theoretical limits in a reasonable period of time is a bit more complicated, and most industrial efforts go through considerable effort to keep the slurry at the ideal temperature for the bacterial action involved, and to keep it periodically stirred up so that organisms can feed and break down organics more efficiently. Ironically, given the degree to which this system recycles all of its elements, maximizing gas production each time your organics pass through this digester will probably be one of your lowest priorities, for reasons discussed below.

As they stand, biogas digesters have many virtues, especially when you have large quantities of relatively safe organic waste that is easily reduced to gas and a remnant mass of fertilizer. But they are limited by the amount of usable biomass available.

Enter a potential solution many have explored in different ways – algae. Under ordinary circumstances, algae reproduces very quickly. For example, “Chlorella double in cell count every 8 hours or less if they have adequate nutrients and light, for pond temperatures in the range 20-35 °C.” As most forms are autotrophic, those varieties use photosynthesis to combine CO2 and water and fix nitrogen without demanding complex organic molecules as a food source. Most also do not require any kind of soil, fertile or otherwise. But their conventional pace of reproduction, while impressive, is less than what we would like, as is the density of the algae we would normally be harvesting.

Yet there are obvious ways to improve algae’s growth rates. Other land-based crops have been grown very successfully and at greatly enhanced rates in water, using aquaponics. Certain plants thrive under the aquaponic technique of suffusing the water around their roots with nutrients, while keeping them under light of greater-than-normal intensity for a period exceeding normal daylight hours, if not continuously. Ironically, while sustained lighting will prove helpful, determining ideal light intensity may actually be counter-intuitive. Research by Sorokin and Krauss on five varieties of algae found that lighting less than that of full, direct sunlight was most productive on their samples growing in a medium which was set in a water bath – with chlorella pyrenoidosa doubling just over 8 times in a day at 39 degrees Centigrade with illuminations ranging from roughly 1,000 to 4,000 foot-candles. Whether or not this full rate of growth can be achieved in normal water, or even water treated with our byproduct nitrates as described further on, the information that some varieties may in fact do much better in less than direct sunlight is very promising for operations taking place in less sunny parts of the world, and for any location dealing with inevitable cloud cover and so forth. Ultimately, you will want to test whatever varieties you have available to see which ones operate best under local conditions. Someone in a desert may want algae which makes fuller use of very intense sunlight, but an operation in temperate zones or under normally cloudy weather may be very happy with a species which favors dimmer conditions. Whatever your chosen crop, you will want an energy-efficient means to expose great masses of algae to roughly their ideal illumination.

The solutions here seem to present themselves. First, simply increase the time in which your algae is exposed to its ideal illumination, and the volume of algae thus exposed. Remember, normal algae in a pond or pool, for all its productivity, is limited not only to its daily allotment of sunlight, but by how much of the algae mass can be fully exposed to it. But what would happen if your algae were in a tank with at least two transparent walls on the sides facing the east-west daily path of the Sun? And what would happen if you used inexpensive mirrors, such as reflective mylar, to shine that light not only into the top of your tank but, by way of these walls, throughout it? Or if you “backscattered” direct or reflected sunlight using a bright white or moderately reflective surface, such the bottom of your tank or sheets of material (such as aluminum flashing) beside it? This backscatter can let you direct lesser or greater intensities of light onto that “lesser,” “imperfect” reflective surface, giving you a greater ability to control the exact luminosity. You can therefore shade a tank from harsh, direct sunlight while leaving your incoherent reflectors partially or fully unshaded, thus providing adjustable lighting. Reflectors around the tank could kick in, either manually or automatically, during substantially dimmer daylight conditions.

Energy-efficient LED bulbs, especially red and blue bulbs such as are produced cheaply for Christmas trees, would enable even a modest operation to sustain this light during the darkest days or nighttime hours, if it were so inclined. Some aquaponics practitioners have found that artificial red and blue light seems to be more effective than normal full-spectrum light. If this proves to be the case with algae, filtering sunlight into those wavelengths might an efficient way to blunt the full intensity of the Sun while allowing only the most useful light through. But there is no data on whether a normal filtering material could do this properly or how the algae would respond. Either way, the energy efficiency of simply using existing sunlight, especially in sunny regions, is hard to beat. Still, more than a few large operations are apt to have excess electricity, especially at night, a problem still endemic to most grid-supplying power plants. Hence, LEDs, at least, will be a viable option for many, if not all producers.

Some will argue about just how efficient algae are in terms of the percentage of sunlight they convert to useful energy in photosynthesis. This question is interesting, but for our purposes, somewhat beside the point. Our real concern is how much of the solar energy that falls in a particular area we can use in this process. When dealing not with a single cell or single layer of cells, but an entire, three-dimensional mass of algae more or less floating in a tank of water, you have to realize that a beam of light passing through one thin layer of organisms travels on only slightly occluded to the next. Which is why we are more concerned about not overloading exposed algae with too much light, and surrounding any mass we are nurturing with a more ambient light at an intensity it can make the most use of. In most brightly lit regions, the full light of day will actually be more energy than this process can really make use of, except in exceptionally optimized and high-density operations.

Now, you might reason that, even if you could fully illumine all the algae in your tank, for as long as possible, there is only so much CO2 available in the air to convert, much less in the water, and if you are not adding nitrates, the richest source of nitrogen will be the air as well. Even if you were effectively growing algae in three dimensions, would effective limits to these inputs limit growth in the depths of your tank as well?

They would, if we were only working with the CO2 present in the atmosphere, and only the gases available at the top of the tank. But we aren’t.

Remember that your biogas digester has two primary gaseous products – CO2, and methane, which we burn, and which converts to water vapor and CO2 in turn. I suspect that in many less advanced biogas systems, the methane and CO2 often mingle significantly despite their different density. For our purposes, it does not matter if there is some dilution of the methane we burn on site, as we will be “sequestering” all the carbon produced by turning it into our feedstock – whether for the digester, as actual food, or as fertilizer. Algae, you see, is eaten in many parts of the world, though more heavily in the Far East, and most commonly in forms such as kelp. Direct production of food is one option for this system, but many algae varieties best able to absorb CO2 may work best as the feedstock for our biogas digester and as organic fertilizer (either as a dead mass or as the solid remnant left after being processed the digester). In all likelihood, biogas methane and fertilizer will be the dominant, basic products of this system.

For sequestration, we can bubble carbon dioxide and some ordinary air into water as very small bubbles, as can be created through air pressure in submerged “leaky hoses” and other, more advanced methods. Ideally we will dissolve some of this CO2 into the water going into the algae tanks ahead of time, without reaching a concentration that becomes acidic. As with many aspects of this system, the larger your production becomes, the more effort you will have to make to keep everything in balance. A huge, rapidly growing algae biomass may require more and more carbon, but you can only pre-load so much, and you can only bubble in so much at a time to be sure that you do not overwhelm the algae’s capacity and risk acidifying the water.

But the best form algae can take for the sake of raw production is probably a loose mass, essentially a slimy cloud of floating, photosynthesizing life, preferably made of many very small, discrete units, if not individual cells. Micro-bubbles caught in this mass can slowly filter up through it, being used by each algae in turn, which being small and semi-independent will have that much greater surface area to be exposed to the carbon dioxide, nitrogen, water and sunlight. Similarly, you can make sure the tiny bubbles entering your water encounter a barrier that forces them to move a great deal as they rise, such as a slightly tilted sheet along which they slide to the highest edge, from which they spill over and rise to… the next sheet, tilted in the opposite direction. You could have several of these, folded together a bit like a deck of cards frozen in mid-shuffle. Alternatively, you could pass your bubbles through a mesh such as a screen or mass of fibers which helps to break them up further as well. Or you could possibly do both. And of course, considerable CO2 will already be dissolved into the water flowing into the algae tanks of operations burning significant methane on site, as we will discuss further below.

But remember, this system can be optimized in terms of photosynthesis by doing more than extending the length of its daily exposure to sunlight. Now, of course, there is no chart of how much light all your various, local varieties of algae can use at various temperatures, especially when given full access to all of the CO2, nitrogen and water they may need to use with it. Obviously, you will eventually want to test these properties, especially if you are moving beyond those varieties about which there is some established information (such as those tested by Sorokin and Krauss). The simple technique would be to begin by using the best known, optimal luminosity for extended periods if not all day long, and then to slowly vary each critical input – light, CO2 and any nitrates you choose to add (the system can produce and recycle these in excess) – and to note at what point you seem to have maximized your productivity. As you appear to reach practical limits, be sure to keep track of how much CO2 and even air (mostly nitrogen) that you are using, and then vary those amounts to see if your algae mass needs more (or less) of those resources rather than having reached the limit of how much light it can employ. Also be aware that other factors can affect a mass’ ability to process sunlight, such as becoming so heavy and thick that the central core is more heavily shaded, and so forth. Regular harvesting of excessive growth should limit such problems.

Some who have noticed algae blooms of chlorella in the presence of fertilizer may wonder if, say, nitrates should be added as an accelerant in the process and, if so, whether truly rapid increases in your supply of algae are sustainable without correspondingly significant supplies of fertilizers. We should remember, therefore, that the biogas digester digesting the algae produced will only convert a maximum of 75% of the organic mass fed in into gas. The “solid” remainder is, in fact, a fertilizer. Again, if you add any of this mass to your algae tanks, you will want to be very judicious in how much you add, and in confirming this digester fertilizer is sufficiently safe in whatever form you use it. Ideally, you will want professionals who can vouch for either the safety of any fertilizer going into your algae tanks – even if only into tanks used exclusively for digester feedstock – or who can vouch for the system you consistently use to treat that material. (A standard feature of these systems, as we shall see, is the ability to reduce this remnant to charcoal, even in most technologically-limited environments, so a reasonable degree of sterilization should be readily available.) You should also watch each variety of algae you are working with to see how it responds. As chlorella is apparently apt to create a bloom in the presence of only small amounts of fertilizer, excessive use may prove counterproductive, more so with some algae than others.

But we should also remember that the “normal” pace of algae growth can be extremely impressive. The earlier cited figure, that chlorella can double within eight hours or less given proper conditions, is no small detail. Three doublings in a 24-hour period is in fact a tremendous expansion. Remember that a mere two doublings per day will, in five days, give you ten doublings. How much is that? 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, 1,024. In other words, if you have “the room” in terms of space and resources, ten doublings means slightly more than a 1,000-fold increase in, say, five days. In ten, at that pace, you would have an over 1,000,000-fold increase. Obviously you will reach limits on all of this, but your key inputs are mainly water and sunlight, with CO2 and nitrogen being easily added and easily recycled from the most obvious uses of the algae you are producing. And the water will, to a degree, be recycling as well. You will reach limits on space, but depending on your situation – particularly in the case of certain large organizations and governments – there are some very impressive options available to you, even if you want to ramp up a massive operation quickly. As we shall see. But maintaining balance in all of this will, of course, be a key concern the faster you put these forces into motion.

Now you might ask, given water’s capacity to store heat and to convert light into heat, how hot your water will get if you are both concentrating sunlight and venting the exhaust of burning methane into your tanks. Clearly this would be an issue, but there are several factors that will help keep your tanks viable, even in warmer climates, though obviously environmental conditions may complicate the situation.

The first and most obvious step is to keep your water from getting too hot in the first place. One step with clear benefits is to sequester your CO2/water vapor exhaust from methane combustion in a separate tank where it can cool – preferably by bubbling the gas as often as practical through water waiting to enter your main algae tanks, where it can dissolve. As with your algae tanks, you can break these CO2 bubbles up as they enter the water so that they hopefully dissolve a bit more efficiently. Remember, within limits, carbon saturated water will actually transfer the CO2 more effectively to your algae. As with many inputs in this system, you simply have to avoid overdoing it – the water will eventually turn acidic if carbon is constantly added and rarely removed. Keep an eye on the situation. If you can not measure the presence of carbon (as most remote villagers can not) practice moderation, spread out your distributed carbon, and see how your algae does as you change each factor in turn. If you can measure this input, then – as with sunlight, nitrates and phosphates – we will shortly discuss methods for automating these sensors and your system’s reaction to them.

The second most obvious method is to circulate and refresh your water – removing excessively hot liquid and replacing it using a much cooler source. You could simply include an overflow pipe at the top of your tank at roughly the water level you want to maintain. Warm water will spill out on this side to be stored or used in other parts of your system as you choose. Meanwhile, on the other side of the tank, allow cool water to flow in, for example from just above the water level. Obviously, in very large tanks, you may have more than one inflow pipe and more than one overflow pipe. A “caveat” to the overflow pipe method is that some forms of free-floating algae will rise to the surface of your tank water and then want to flow out through your pipe. But as you will discover as we discuss conventional biogas digesters, the normal “slurry” is a 4-to-1 water-to-manure mix. If you are using an algae easily “skimmed” off the top, you may not want to filter it out, but rather position a long, flat opening to take in a high algae-to-water concentration, and use this liquid as your slurry water, thus minimizing labor, complexity and processing. (Setting this overflow pipe at 45 degrees and in a corner, or anywhere else that might serve as a crude funnel may prove useful with masses apt to get tangled upon the edges of a normal opening, especially if your algae is slowly drifting out of the tank. Apertures that are large as well as flat may prove advisable as well.) If you find you still have too much water, you can simply flow that water/algae mix into a flat, shallow evaporation “tank,” covered by glass, and use sunlight, concentrated or not, to vaporize as much water as necessary. A dark bottom to this segment will help, but if you have decent sunlight and a lot of reflective material around for concentrated solar, reducing the water content should be simple. If you have a lot of excess water and a great deal of algae production going on at night, you may want to evaporate an extra measure of liquid during the day to offset what you are not doing at night. Alternatively, you may have other sources of heat on site, such as any natural gas being burned, which may even be able to handle this process as a side-effect of the excess heat they are generating. Fortunately the digester will probably prove more adaptable to changes in temperature, both because most biogas systems will be dug into the ground (which naturally stabilizes the temperature at a lower level), and because there are other means of regulating their internal heat, to be discussed further on.

Now, to keep water cool as efficiently as possible, the best method for both industrial scale operations and smaller, village-level projects is to simply have an underground water tank, using the ambient temperature of the Earth to cool your water (a bit over 50 degrees Fahrenheit in most of America, as an example). If you can arrange it, putting a shaded, underground tank in a nearby hill and then flowing water down using gravity is particularly efficient for this aspect of the operation. Further, methane is notably lighter than air, so you could conceivably allow your biogas to flow up to an uphill tank, an advantage if you are planning to burn the gas beside that water and then filter your CO2 and water-vapor exhaust through it. On the other hand, in terms of collecting water for your overall system, other locations may prove more practical, even if you have a hillside handy.

Fortunately, there are other options. For the village-level operation, we will discuss various alternative water pumping options shortly. But in terms of water cooling, remember that not only can you shade your tank and bury your tank, but you can reduce ambient temperature around your site by a number of means, the most obvious of which is to alter the amount of sunlight absorbed everywhere other than your algae tanks and any other key, solar-driven processes. Aside from any convenient shade you may have which does not interfere with your algae’s lighting or the operation of your mirrors, you also have the very simple option of painting rooftops, asphalt roads and other dark inanimate infrastructure white, thereby reflecting considerable sunlight and helping to break down your local “heat-island effect.” This may seem trivial, but remember that simply using passive means to reduce your site’s temperature by several degrees during hot months of the year will help considerably in keeping everything cool, while using much less energy.

And, of course, there are various refrigeration, air-conditioning and water-cooling systems powered by natural gas available – a power source you will obviously have in considerable supply, though one which you should make a point of conserving for practical reasons, as well as on principle.

For the water used in your system, collected rainwater and, for the biogas digester in particular, greywater should prove adequate. Care in recycling usable water will always be useful, for numerous reasons. Ironically, collecting water in urban areas, given the number of rooftops available and the greywater accessible, may prove easier than anywhere other than major freshwater sources such as lakes and large rivers. Rainwater collected from rooftops and stored in rain barrels can also be stored up at higher stories and use gravity to help pump that water supply. But large reservoirs and natural bodies of water may be the most realistic alternative for remote, low-tech rural systems, though we will eventually discuss some passive desalination techniques for seaside operations and ways of moving large quantities of water without pumps in case your operation is far away from your nearest large freshwater source. And, obviously, we will be recycling water as well as creating it in the exhaust of any methane burned on site.

Now finally, your biogas digester will be producing two main components – gas, and the solid remnant of the organics broken down within it. The gas mainly consists of CO2 and methane. Nitrous oxide, another common greenhouse gas produce by organic decay, is volatile and unless separated out deliberately for sale, will likely burn up with the methane or break down when dissolved when cycled back into the algae tanks with the CO2.

The solid remnant, however, is normally used as a kind of fertilizer. Of course, you may recycle some of this material back into your system to spur algae growth, but in all likelihood you will at some point have an excess supply you want to deal with. Could you use the raw remnant directly as fertilizer? Well, so long as you abide by any regulations and there is nothing of health concern in the material, yes. But as there is presently a serious concern regarding the impact of human-released carbon on the climate, let us consider a form less apt to break down into greenhouse gases once put in the ground or spread over it.

Dr. James Lovelock, originator of the Gaia hypothesis, has suggested reducing agricultural waste to charcoal before using it as fertilizer. The operation described above, given its capacity to produce huge amounts of fertilizer as a by-product of its main work, is an obvious candidate for such a procedure. Charcoal making has been around for a very long time, and amounts to a low-oxygen burn which slowly reduces the material in question. The temperatures do not have to be terribly hot, and if you have a lot of unused solar-concentration material on site during bright, sunny days, you can concentrate light on the steel barrel or tank you are using for charcoal making. Anyone using concentrated solar to squeeze out more free energy from the Sun in very dim conditions will probably have at least some unused reflectors during full sunlight, given that you will not be using all the light available for your algae production anyway.

Operations that are burning methane on site may also be able to tap that excess heat as well, but if you can not do so in an absolutely safe fashion, do not bother. You will have plenty of energy available in most climates if you plan your charcoal burning carefully and make full use of the free energy on hand and, failing that, you can use your spare methane directly as a fuel. Still, technically adept and creative operations will want to make use of all of their resources rather than wasting them, especially since raw heat is one factor you will want to contain in any industrial-scale project.

We will discuss a number of unusual ways the above system could be brought online, especially in areas with very limited resources. But governments and companies dealing economic crises and other challenges might wonder how they could ramp up this kind of production on short notice, given the time it would take to build even this relatively simple system on a very large scale. They should remember that many elements of this design may already be in place and near at hand.

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A Brief Disclaimer

The material in this book is for informational purposes only. Please seek appropriate technical, legal, financial and/or medical advice as appropriate before attempting to use any of the concepts discussed herein. Future Imperative is about sharing ideas and possibilities rather than prescribing any specific plan of action. The author expressly disclaims responsibility for any adverse effects that may result from the use or application of the information contained in this book.

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The above piece is the partial introduction to Future Imperative: Power to the People that you can also read for free on Amazon, as well as the disclaimer. This part of the book is here only because many readers may not have the free program to read Kindle ebooks on their Mac or PC, and because you can get a good sense of the invention from this section, even if you don't get or can't afford the book.

Global Warming Threatens Many Region's Agricultural Viability

Rising global temperatures imperils long-term food production not only in southern Asia and Africa, but within two generations, China and Latin America as well. Meanwhile, substantial ocean acidification could threaten oceanic aquaculture, especially in sensitive species.

Of course, the series of agricultural disasters which have hit the world in the last 15 months have already been epic in their regional impacts. As I have said in the recent past...

"The droughts in Russia, the flooding in Pakistan, the drought in western Australia and the floods in eastern Australia, the desertification of cropland in China, the collapse of the "fossil" water tables in India... combined with more minor events, such as the Midwestern ice storm affecting winter wheat in the U.S., and major damage to vegetables in Mexico and southern China, these suggest a planet whose agriculture is already in crisis. In many less wealthy nations, people normally spend up to half of their income on food, and food prices have risen dramatically in the last year."
A number of the "potential, long-term impacts" of climate change already seem to be upon us, whether agricultural disruptions or wildly unpredictable and often dangerous weather. As individual harvests are destroyed on a national basis, and events such as half-mile-wide tornadoes hammer American towns, perhaps we should remember that according to the scientific community, climate change has still barely made an impact compared to the effects that a global heat-up of another degree or two would create.

Given how harsh these -- relatively mild -- events have been so far, perhaps we should change our path before we can find out fierce nature can be when she means business?

The World Bank and the World's 40 Largest Cities Reach Climate Deal

The World Bank has reached an agreement with the C40 Group (the mayors of the world's 40 largest cities) to help finance their efforts to adapt to climate change. These cities, which represent 12% of global human greenhouse emissions, would be able to more easily access the up to $6.4 billion in funds the Bank is making available for climate relief.

Bank President Robert Zoellick suggests that private initiatives could increase that number up to $50 billion.

This agreement is an important one. $100 million, much less $1 billion, well spent can make a tremendous difference in places like Jakarta, Rio de Janeiro or Mexico City. But in terms of getting the ball rolling on critical projects -- such as breaking the "heat island" effect raising temperatures in all major urban areas, using methods as simple as planting trees or painting rooftops or road asphalt white -- simply getting the money flowing to meaningful operations can make all the difference, especially in the present economic climate.

Further, these cities are seen as leaders in their countries, and when major changes take place in their environs, particularly changes for the better, people take notice. Their ability to lead by example can not be underestimated.

Further Impacts of Climate Change on Grain Productiion

Given the recent string of agricultural disasters the world has experienced over the last year, climate change's impact on global food production may be much more pressing than many realize. Here, however, is an article taking into account the overall global trend over the last several years. This piece is useful, but may regard the changes underway as more predictable than they really are.

Twin Meltdowns: Saving the Japanese People & the U.S./EU Economies

Japan, as is becoming increasingly clear, is facing an incredible crisis as one of the most powerful earthquakes ever recorded, followed by a massive tsunami, has led to critical damage to several reactors in the quake-stricken region, including as many as three reactor meltdowns and a risk to several hundred thousand spent fuel rods at the Fukushima Daiichi site.

Meanwhile, in seemingly unrelated economic news, high-risk national bonds sold by a number of European economies are now rolling over and have to be refinanced, in spite of the fact that a few of the countries offering them appear to be on the verge of bankruptcy and that the Japanese government -- the main buyer at the last round of European national-debt sales -- will now need to sell a great many assets, such as bonds, to deal with its staggering problems at home.

Neither situation can really be overstated at this point. Radiation from a multi-reactor meltdown, combined with the meltdown of most of the spent fuel on site (most of which was apparently stored directly above the reactors, including the four now either immediately threatened or in meltdown) could release enough radioactive isotopes to force the evacuation of a relatively nearby city -- greater Tokyo, with a combined population of 35 million -- and an unknown area of the home island of Honshu.

The European Union, on the other hand, is looking at a devastating economic and financial picture, with no effective way to roll over its national debts and an unstable currency. Though slightly less acute, the United States is also faced with major financing problems related to its debt, which the Treasury and Federal Reserve have generally managed to paper over.

Private-sector financial institutions in the U.S. and EU have mostly suffered great losses as a result of the meltdown of their real-estate industries and in many cases hold title to large numbers of "non-performing" mortgages (that no one is paying off) and foreclosed properties. And because the U.S., Britain and most other nations involved in the real-estate bubble now have considerably more properties than they can afford, there is no reasonable way to dispose of these properties without taking a massive loss.

Which brings us to one partial solution to these seemingly unrelated crises. Japanese who need to be resettled can have homes and certain goods purchased for them, by their governments, in countries around the world, though in particular in Europe and North America. Whole developments of McMansions stand empty in even some of America's relatively viable large cities, and more to the point, whole towns in the fading counties of the Great Plains stand practically empty, and the city of Detroit, despite its favored position beside a Great Lake and its grand industrial history, has vast swaths of all-but-deserted neighborhoods.

But generally a host of homes, large and small, are available across the North American and European landscapes, so shopping for a few good properties should be relatively easy to accomplish. Also, a sudden injection of funds into all of these economies, from whatever source, and by whatever financial path, should create at least a temporary boom in most local economies.

Personally, I would emphasize the development of independent, mostly self-sustaining local economies in these settlements, whether free-standing or part of larger towns or cities. Given the extreme issues the world is now facing with regards to food and energy, as well as its overall economic and environmental crises, an emphasis on frugality -- both monetary and energy-wise -- and the local, sustainable, high-intensity production of sustenance, seems prudent. A mix of methods could be used to provide both food and energy -- low-impact farming, gardening, greenhouses, aquaponics and the planting of fruit and nut trees on the one hand, and geothermal, solar thermal, solar electric, and wind and micro-hydro turbines (among other tools) on the other. These options, obviously, could also be funded by the sale or barter of bonds.

And who would be willing to accept these national bonds in exchange for real estate and other goods of some presumed cash value? Well, in the U.S., the Federal government, the Federal Reserve and pretty much every bank in the country. Given a choice between dumping assets that in the present market and given the present size of the population have considerably less than their face value, and recovering something from what is otherwise a dead loss -- while staving off general economic catastrophe for the institutions in question... well, that will probably look like a good deal to quite a few organizations.

If I were managing such an operation, I would start quickly but do it in stages. If a relative trickle of people went out who were relatively mobile and ready to go -- like just about every college student with a vague grasp of English and a desire to visit an English-speaking country some day -- I would sweep those people up, send them off to their newly purchased apartments in the university towns where they might be taking classes, acquire for them some food stores -- purchased at bulk rates as a massive coop, with all the economic advantages that offers -- and shuffle them around later, if they end up studying or working somewhere else in their destination country. In the meantime, they can work on their English. And gardening, and/or other potentially useful skills, such as Arduino.*

Other obvious candidates would be farmers from stricken regions, who could not only help kick start new farming in relocation towns in, say, the Great Plains, but work with local farmers to learn about local conditions, and help direct other workers who showed up later to help expand these new farms. Translators, permaculture and aquaculture experts would be other obvious first arrivals.

Given that metals in irradiated areas can be washed free of fallout, trains (and some of their tracks) might also make an appearance in new host countries, perhaps deployed wherever they would make the most difference -- such as giving Detroit something it badly needs... a decent mass-transit system.

I should add... Many Americans have a very high opinion of the Japanese and their culture in general, and there is a wide familiarity with many products of Japanese mass culture, in particular manga and anime. While language would initially be a barrier, well-translated anime movies might be a way to help students of either language pick up the basics of the language faster than through study alone -- although obviously full immersion would probably be most effective, were many people not already shocked and overwhelmed by recent events.

Whatever path the Japanese choose to take, I wish them all the best. Like so many in the rest of the world, my heart goes out to them, and they remain in my prayers.

Because the Future Is Coming Fast

I am reactivating this Future Imperative blog for a number of reasons, but most importantly because the future itself seems even more pressing, more imminent and more radical than it did five years ago. There are many powerful forces at work in the world today, and this blog will be looking more and more at the currents that are seemingly invisible, but which can rise up like a surfer's wave or shift into a deadly riptide. And unlike the tides you find at the seashore, these powers are neither charted nor widely understood.

Indeed, many people do not even realize some of them exist. This blog will be about more than just enumerating the problems, however, but ways they can best be dealt with. But in order to meet these challenges, we must first know that they exist, be able to take their measure.

So to begin, we have...

Peak Energy

Peak oil is a straightforward concept -- we have a limited amount of oil and other non-renewable fuels, and one day each of these resources will run out. Peak oil tells us that at some point in the process of exhausting those resources, we will hit a moment in which we are extracting the most of that material (per day or per year) that we ever will. This turning point (particularly for oil) usually comes at roughly the midpoint of extraction, when only about half that resource is left. Worse, the first half of that resource -- be it oil, coal or natural gas -- is invariably the easiest half to extract. The latter half always takes more time, energy and raw materials (such as drilling rigs and pipelines) to tap, and in the case of oil and coal becomes increasingly dirty as well.

What most people do not understand is how heavily dependent the world is on its three key fossil fuels: especially oil. Oil not only provides the overwhelming majority of modern transportation fuel, but is raw material behind plastics, pharmaceuticals and most synthetics. Natural gas, on the other hand, is the source of most of the world's inorganic fertilizers.

The world is almost certainly near, at or just past this point of peak oil production, with coal and gas getting ever closer to peaking as well. While I am generally an optimist, very little in the way of renewable-energy alternatives are in place in most of the industrialized world, and after an initial slow drop or plateau of production after peaking -- as seen again and again in the peaking of oil production in every nation that has experienced it -- the drop off in production becomes quite precipitous. Our world, on the other hand, lacks the skills and infrastructure to simply go back to a low-energy lifestyle... among other problems, many regions are far more heavily populated than they were in pre-industrial times. Britain, for example, has around ten times its pre-industrial population.

Which brings us to our next concern...

Climate Change

There are a number of dire threats related to climate change, from rising sea levels to species extinction to a fatal acidification of the oceans to an outgassing of methane that could drive us into a runaway heatup of the entire planet. But for now, I will only discuss one situation -- food production.

For some time, climatologists have warned that shifts in climate and unstable weather could severely hurt crop production worldwide. These predictions, however, were usually set sometime in the nebulous future -- if specified at all, then typically indicated as being years if not a few decades away. And yet if the series of horrendous weather events we have seen in 2010 and early 2011 is any indication -- and not merely a bizarre confluence of highly improbable events -- then this time of faltering and then falling food production may already be upon us.

The droughts in Russia, the flooding in Pakistan, the drought in western Australia and the floods in eastern Australia, the desertification of cropland in China, the collapse of the "fossil" water tables in India... combined with more minor events, such as the Midwestern ice storm affecting winter wheat in the U.S., and major damage to vegetables in Mexico and southern China, these suggest a planet whose agriculture is already in crisis. In many less wealthy nations, people normally spend up to half of their income on food, and food prices have risen dramatically in the last year. Some will point to financial speculation as a culprit, and I will not try to unravel how much of the price of rice or wheat is work of investors and how much is driven by underlying conditions. What is clear is that underlying conditions have become dire, and need to be either dealt with, or grimly endured.


The Economy

Needless to say, the disastrous consequences of radical financial speculation are only aggravated by factors such as rising energy costs, resource depletion, an inflation in food costs combined with a drop in its availability, not to mention dealing with large-scale natural disasters from Haiti to Russia to Pakistan to Australia, and the existence or threat of war, terrorism and/or violent revolution in many unstable regions.

The economy is an odd beast, and very often becomes healthier when "starved" of its excesses. But all too many people seem to feel that the food eaten by others, or the clothes on their backs, are an egregious excess, rather than a necessity, or do not think about such issues at all. Hence, unhealthy forms of competition are all too prevalent. And, of course, the economy needs a certain level of resources to operate lest its existing structures all collapse catastrophically. And many individuals and organizations resist radically reforming or shutting down wildly inefficient industries and practices until it is too late to do either gracefully.

Yet as the dangers posed by energy, environmental and economic threats have become impossible to ignore, a host of tactics and strategies have emerged in response to them. Further, some forces already in motion have been responding to the global crisis (or crises) as it has become more pressing, whether due to foresight, inherent flexibility, or some combination thereof.

Crowdsourcing, Opensource, DIY Technology, Ebooks, Artificial Intelligence and the Internet

These six could each be their own category, but together they symbolize something larger than what they are today. Crowdsourcing -- letting the public complete tasks for you on their own initiative, such as creating smartphone and other software apps -- and opensource -- a conscious cooperative effort to create software, often major software such as Linux... these are forms of cooperation which have transformed software research. Google, Apple, Microsoft -- the titans of the computer industry have all embraced crowdsourcing for creating phone apps, because having potentially thousands of bright, talented programmers lending you hand for little or no money and with no gatekeepers to keep them from initiating a project... Well, that quirk alone is transformative.

But you could argue quite a few breakthroughs today have been opensourced, from peaceful revolutions in North Africa to SETI@Home's use of private PCs for breaking down and processing masses of data to DARPA's open competitions for key technological achievements. The more minds that can be effectively and intelligently leveraged, especially to a constructive end, the more powerful this technique becomes.

Similiarly, opensource research has produced some formidable projects, most notably computer operating systems other than either Windows or Apple's OS. Indeed, this technique is a subculture in itself, wherein pride in one's contribution and private recognition are typically the only rewards available.
Do-it-yourself technology, featured on sites such as Make and Instructables, has also tapped a pool of volunteer gadgeteers, inventors and experimenters to make physical technology and scientific research available to individual creators, tinkers and visionaries as never before. Whether using Arduino pre-programmed microcontrollers or DIY biotech data archives and prepared "bio-bricks" of standardized biological feedstocks, or simply using websites or YouTube to show how to use these or other tools to build innovative technologies... the DIY technology movement has gotten the painstaking details out of the way so that you can go ahead and be creative, and accomplish whatever you are trying to do.
Speaking of getting things out of the way, Ebooks have become a major new force in the publishing world. As one writer told me, "You sell each book for less money. But the writer gets much more per sale than they ever got for a paperback. It used to be that of all the people making money off of a book, the writer always got the least. With Ebooks, you get almost all of it." This change is interesting for any number of reasons, but in addition for cutting out the "middlemen" who absorb so much money with each conventional sale, while adding very little of value, the other profound change is an elimination of "gatekeepers." Or rather, once you can get your book out in front of the public, every individual who might get a chance to buy it becomes their own gatekeeper. The change is profound, in part because it is symbolic. I will discuss this factor further in other posts. But for now, it worth realizing that as individuals and organizations become more empowered, there are fewer and fewer gatekeepers to tell them "no" when they work towards something constructive. Which means the limits to your accomplishments have more and more to do with the resources available or accessible to you, and the talent and drive with which you use them.

Which brings us, of course, to the Internet. So much has been said about the Web that little more needs to be discussed here. Suffice to say that it is making a host of new interactions possible, not just a narrow spectrum of pop-up ads and global outsourcing. But in the end, it is only a tool. The quality of what is said upon it, and the degree to which the better ideas it transmits get noticed, in the end means everything.

Still, remember that all the crowdsourcing, opensourcing, DIY movements and Ebooks would be far less potent or even impossible without the medium of the Net, a power which also feeds the fierce competition between a host of long-standing and newly emerged tech giants, and the startup operations to follow. So long as it remains with us -- and there are plenty of ways to keep it up even in dire regional or global circumstances -- it will continue to foster this competition of ideas, and its own strange quest for human attention.

I have discussed IBM's Watson project elsewhere, but AI is one more tool that will be empowered by the Web. Watson appears to be a basic artificial intelligence, or something close enough. In essence, Watson or its immediate descendant will be able to follow orders. A machine that can understand the vague, imprecise language of a human and respond to it in a consistently intelligent way will be able to take the host of designs and tools and apps we have already standardized for human use and increasingly be able to use them at the spur of the moment for its human owner. Which is yet another force clearing away the detritus that slows useful human activities, especially many of the most productive ones, which once again changes the game for us all.

And that brings me to those most affected by, and those who will most effect, all of the above resources...

Human Enhancement and Human Augmentation

Essentially two phrases saying much the same thing, human enhancement means techniques and technologies that help human beings become better -- healthier, smarter, stronger, faster, better -- whereas human augmentation does much the same thing, only with an emphasis on methods that physically intrude upon and significantly alter the human body. But these two fields are incredibly fuzzy in terms of what truly makes them up.

For example, almost any medical research can be plausibly described as having human enhancement as a secondary use, because in understanding things well enough to heal them, we also learn how they can be improved. Meanwhile, arguably almost anything profoundly helpful could be described as "enhancing" a human -- what do you call an incredibly enlightening teacher or education, or the elite training of modern Olympic athletes?

But here is where human enhancement and human augmentation, however strictly defined, come to impact on us all. We already have humans of extraordinary conventional abilities, including no few geniuses within their respective fields. What happens if those people can be substantially enhanced in terms of their intelligence, their creativity, their ability to learn new information and new skills?

What happens if not just the elite scientist, or the rare genius can be enhanced, but if powerful enhancements become widespread? What happens to all those "common folk" -- whether common or brilliant -- who are out there developing smartphone apps or DIY technologies? What happens to the speed with which they do so, the quality of the technology they produce... and the significance of the problems they choose to address in the first place?

What happens then?

Tim O'Reill once wrote of author Frank Herbert:

One of his central ideas is that human consciousness exists on--and by virtue of--a dangerous edge of crisis, and that the most essential human strength is the ability to dance on that edge. The more man confronts the dangers of the unknown, the more conscious he becomes. All of Herbert's books portray and test the human ability to consciously adapt. He sets his characters in the most stressful situations imaginable: a cramped submarine in Under Pressure, his first novel; the desert wastes of Dune; and in Destination: Void the artificial tension of a spaceship designed to fail so that the crew will be forced to develop new abilities. There is no test so powerfully able to bring out latent adaptability as one in which the stakes are survival.

The truth is that our age is now a test, one in which the stakes are survival.

Now we must decide whether to consciously adapt, or to fall into rage or despair or oblivion... until oblivion claims us.

Carbon-Offsets that Keep On Giving... Energy and Food – The Low-Hanging Fruit

For those who missed it, my last article described -- a new, public-domain innovation -- how charitable foundations could dramatically impact climate change, peak oil and the credit crunch while taking the sale of conventional carbon-offsets and turning them into immense profits. How? By picking financially stable cities in areas with a surplus of renewable energy sources and offering them loans at incredibly favorable rates -- 2% interest on loans repaid in the first few years, 0% if repaid in a year to 18 months, and 10% of the loan would be forgiven if repaid within one year. Given the time horizon on peak oil and climate change, we also allow for the forgiveness of 20% of loans repaid within nine months and of 30% of loans repaid within six.

How does this give a charity, but not a for-profit corporation, immense "profits"? Because unlike normal carbon offsets, you're not buying the renewables or energy efficiencies outright, but loaning governments the money to make the necessary changes, quickly.

And if you loan these funds to support projects which "pay for themselves" in the grace period that a government has to repay you, then they make these profitable changes using money that is never "on the books" in terms of tying up their their own cash flow. In effect, for the governments, these changes are free. But only if you choose "low-hanging fruit," improvements of such remarkable value that a mere 12 months, nine months or six months is enough time to repay you for your investment.

Your charity, on the other hand, was obligated to take one ton of carbon emissions out of the atmosphere in exchange for a fee (usually $4 to $40). But once your loan has accounted for the tons you have committed to eliminating, you get to keep the 70%, 80% or 90% of the principal when it is paid back to you. In effect, you are being given someone else's money to offer as a loan, and when most of the money is paid back to you, your organization gets to keep that remainder. And only a charitable foundation, plowing its earnings back into its good works, can get away with such egregrious profit margins. Indeed, if you keep putting the money into such loans, helping cities and towns reach the goals of these "low-hanging fruit," you may well become celebrated for your accomplishments, as you use those original carbon-offset funds over and over again.

What are the low-hanging fruit? Well, we will be discussing some of these in later columns, including a simple, inexpensive, scalable, solar-based method for desalinating water, and two renewable-based techniques for moving water (one integral to this desalination system, the other capable of functioning independently and requiring almost no resources whatsoever). These innovations will be useful both in the undeveloped world and in places like California, where the water pumps supplying Los Angeles with water are apparently the biggest energy expenditure in the state. Imagine being able to supply most if not all of that demand with almost no energy expenditure, and using extremely low-cost equipment to do so.

But in the meantime, let’s look at some other options that qualify as this low-hanging fruit. One of the most obvious is to simply paint the roofs white on buildings in cities and towns in most temperate and all equatorial regions. This simple change will dramatically reduce energy spent on air conditioning for those buildings that have that equipment, and make those which do not far more livable. You will be increasing either your energy efficiency or overall productivity either way. Because most asphalt roofs, in particular, are dark and absorb heat, you will also be having a significant impact on global warming by reducing the overall albedo effect (absorption of sunlight) in your cities, not to mention the world. This will help reduce the warming of the planet, without even considering the carbon emissions that will no longer be required as you reduce the need for air conditioning.

Alternatively, the first thing you do when installing a renewable-power system in any home or business is to do an inventory of the location’s energy expenditures. Regardless of whether you are putting solar, wind, geothermal, tidal and/or micro-hydro sources, in order to avoid buying a system two or three times greater than you really need, you have to look over the building to find ways of tightening up your energy use. In particular, you have to look for "energy hogs" and eliminate them.

Realistically, everyone controlling any sort of an organization, be it a business, a government or a non-profit, should take the above step as soon as they can. Why? Because whether or not you have the resources to add a single renewable power supply, every bit of conservation you undertake as a result of this energy inventory will save you energy and thus money. These extra funds can be turned to acquiring renewable power, but even without those devices, you will have lessened your exposure to energy price spikes and begun conserving critical resources, as well as having done something to slow peak energy and climate change.

A third tactic is to hire (or otherwise motivate) large numbers of people to do work that reduces energy demands and climate change using extremely inexpensive techniques that generate dramatic benefits for their communities. For example, imagine that you hired a small group of people who knew a great deal about gardening and planting orchards, and others familiar with work such as energy audits, renewable installation or simple painting. What if you then hired a large number of part-time high school students and other people willing to work for a modest wage, and then went around planting community gardens and fruit-and-nut-bearing trees, painting roofs, energy auditing buildings and organizations and installing renewable energy sources (such as solar panels, wind turbines or micro-hydro turbines). You could use this method to mobilize quite a few people to make rapid changes that might otherwise take a very long time, while reducing unemployment. You would also be training your employees in many useful skills, and those who were interested could be promoted to full-time status as supervisors teachers (especially if you expanded the program) or else seek employment in other organizations, with some useful training and experience on their resumés. And the work they would be doing could enormously impact the "carbon footprint" of your city or town. (We will discuss the full value of gardening and food-producing trees later in this series, but rest assured, it’s considerable.)

A fourth option is eventually loaning to a broader class of customer, businesses marked by the sustainability of their operations – in particular offering microfinance or microloans to support initiatives that will notably reduce atmospheric carbon. For example, most of the work just described "planting community gardens and fruit-and-nut-bearing trees, painting roofs, energy auditing buildings and organizations and installing renewable energy sources" would be suitable for carbon-offset funding. This can be trickier to support if you have absolutely no experience in this field, and may work best in partnership with credible microfinance operations such as the Grameen Bank.

A fifth possibility is taking certain critical infrastructure "off the grid" even if the cost of installing renewables is not less than the savings returned before the loan is repaid. Normally renewables that offer such dramatic savings are very easy to promote. But there may be circumstances in which the population sees a clear need for the upgrade in and of itself because of past crises.

For example, during the recent Florida blackout, CNN was showing pictures of a city whose transportation grid had almost immediately shut down. Imagine promoting LED stoplights, even solar-powered LED stoplights, in such a city. Not only would your relatively cheap, financed solution be extremely welcome, you could probably tap into other government disaster-relief/preparation funding, and perhaps even local, private contributions. And even if such funds were limited, the local government’s motivation to avoid being immobilized again would make such an offer extremely attractive.

As a further example, during the California wildfires, Reuters and others reported that the city of San Diego was nearly cut off from the rest of the nation's power grid, a situation that would have made the municipality vulnerable to major blackouts. Given that San Diego, as the southernmost city in California and one positioned on the seacoast, has ready access to at least two major sources of alternative power (solar and tidal), the area could easily be an ideal place to initiate the kind of renewable-power-upgrade program described in this series.

On Dedicated Power:
Why build this emergency capacity into your core infrastructure? First, if your grid goes down, then obviously you want the functions most critical for the survival of your city or town to go on unimpeded or at least somewhat effectively. But second, one of the ironies of our present power-distribution network is that it fails to discriminate between users. This seeming democratization of power usage means that blinking neon lights at a local strip mall or a kid’s Playstation receive power at the same priority level as hospital incubators or pumps supplying a municipality with water.

Now while the latter equipment may have backup generators keeping them online in a blackout, the fact remains that in the event of sustained disruptions of power and fuel supplies, they go out right along with more frivolous uses.

To be blunt, we can not save every strip mall, videogame console and giant SUV on Earth from blackouts or fuel shortages, nor should we want to. But as local and national leaders survey the question of how to deploy renewable-energy resources, they should not be paralyzed by the unanswerable question of how to instantly provide unlimited power to every single user in their country, no matter how indiscriminate. Instead, they should focus on the most absolute needs – providing water, food, medical care and other basic necessities in livable quantities to their populations.

Further Notes:
In doing this work, it is important to avoid the appearance of "greenwashing" – making a project, product or business seem environmentally sound when it is not. Remember that your most likely pool of donors will tend to be well-informed about environmental issues, and that you can’t afford to alienate them. They will also be aware of other potential problems, such as bio-fuels that produce no net energy, or planting monoculture orchards instead of encouraging bio-diversity.

Another variation on this plan is to allow for a form of earmarking – permitting donors to specify that funds should be used first in a local area of their choice (but in which the organization is already operating or planning to operate) for any credible projects in those areas. After one or two or more cycles through that area, the remaining funds can be moved into other projects as needed. This earmarking should be something the donor checks off on a form (with the above conditions clearly specified). The donor will also write in the name of the county or municipality (or province or country) where they wish for these earmarked funds to be used.

This variant should extremely useful when seeking the donations of people who are deeply committed to the welfare of their community or of a recently beleaguered area (such as New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina).


I make no claims for any of these concepts, only to tell you they are here and they can now be used by anyone. Thank you for listening.

Ralph Cerchione

Renewing the Earth: Public Domain Inventions for a Sustainable Future Solar desalination, solar steel, reversing global warming, etc.
Future Imperative -- A broad look at human enhancement, from gene therapy to accelerated learning, from neural implants to smart drugs, from posthuman evolution to the wildest flights of human imagination.