Global Warming: The Ultimate Maker Project
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Eric Hunting
May 4, 2012, 4:50:13 PM5/4/12
to Open Manufacturing
Here is one of my latest harebrained schemes, something I've been floating around lately to see what sort of feedback I can get.
I've been interested in starting a Kickstarter project for a couple years now but I've always been stymied by the same Catch-22; the need to raise money just to show people what I intend to raise money for. This is because so many of my projects--usually book projects like the TMP2 and Utilihab books--revolve around the need for technical illustrative media I'm never sufficiently talented to produce alone and can never find collaborators for because these days people in the art and design community aren't very interested in science, space, and the future and are generally disinclined to collaborate with anyone outside their own subculture. So I've struggled for ideas that could be effectively communicated without such apparently difficult illustration. Noting the recent wave of remarkable successes with Kickstarter, I've hit upon a counter-intuitive notion. What if you deliberately tried to create the most successful failure in Kickstarter history? A relatively simple to communicate idea but so grand in scale that its audacity brought it great attention?
What if you created a billion dollar Kickstarter to end Global Warming?
Through my work on TMP2, I've long known of a relatively straightforward, albeit grandiose, solution to Global Warming integral to the renewable energy infrastructure it seeks to develop. It's an elaboration of the proposal Dr. James Lovelock has long made. Some here may know that, in 2007 James Lovelock and Chris Rapley proposed actively fighting global warming by accelerating a natural ocean carbon sink based on the lifecycle of phytoplankton and the planktonic turnicates (salps) that feed on them. Salps are vertical migrators. They feed on algae by night and by day sink to a depth of around 2500 feet where they excrete the remains of their food as dense carbon pellets. At this depth this is not consumed by other animals, and so sinks to the sea floor--a natural carbon sink pulling carbon from the atmosphere through surface waters. This process is most intensive at ocean upwellings as are found in places like Monterey CA, where undersea currents are forced to the surface carrying deep ocean nutrients that induce algae blooms and a general profusion of marine life. Thus Lovelock proposed the deployment of numerous wave-powered sea pumps to create artificial upwellings amplifying this natural process. He's teamed up with the company AtMocean in Santa Fe on the development of these pumps.
But there's one critical problem with this concept. The pumps, though simple, must number in the many millions to have any significant effect and, since they can't pay for themselves, must have their mass production financed by public money--and no government in the world today is having that.
Enter OTEC. (Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion) OTEC is a Rankin-cycle system driven by the temperature differential between cold deep sea water and warm surface waters. Though little known to most renewable energy advocates, this well proven (since at least the 1930s) technology is one of the most powerful sources of renewable energy in existence. It is a key element in the logistical scheme of TMP. If we are to be a spacefaring culture, we have no choice but to advance renewable energy because such a culture--where we are putting spacecraft into orbit almost as frequently as we fly airliners today--would have far more energy demand than we collectively have at present. There are no free lunches in physics. No matter what form of propulsion we ultimately use, the energy cost of getting to orbit is about the same. So imagine the situation if we launched rockets as frequently as we fly airliners. The latent thermal energy of the ocean could support a civilization ten times the scale of ours currently before even beginning to have a negative environmental impact from its exploitation. And there's no Chicken Or Egg dilemma to that development as with space solar power.
OTEC does the same thing Lovelock's wave powered pumps do, but with two key differences. It does it at a much larger scale and it pays for itself. An OTEC plant not only produces electricity, it can produce copious amounts of fresh water, a host of industrial gasses, chemicals, and fuels extracted in degassing phases, and its nutrient rich discharge can be exploited as a basis of industrial scale polyspecies mariculture producing a variety of seafood at about 5 times the usable protein per hectare of conventional farming--and without the chemical fertilizers and pesticides. Additionally, a large OTEC industrial facility can produce carbon-negative concrete through the Calera process (http://calera.com/index.php/technology/our_process/) that it can also use in its own construction and even mass 'culture' biochar from mariculture wastes with rooftop farming as a soil abatement product--all of this done right at sea adjacent to this OTEC.
A 100MW will, by my crude calculations, directly sequester 25,000 metric tons of carbon per annum via Lovelock's process. (and that's very conservative. I don't have enough knowledge of marine biology to know what the additional impact of the deeper water sourcing and its higher nutrient levels would be) Its added mariculture and industry can potentially offset millions of tons per annum. (not counting the systemic impact of supplying biochar and carbon-negative concrete to the world market) The cost of such an OTEC and its companion facility would be about one billion dollars. But it would potentially generate an annual revenue of about a billion dollar per annum--and that's not counting carbon credits. That means this facility could self-replicate, using its own income, exponentially. Thus, starting with one demonstration facility and reinvesting its profits, one can fairly quickly expand to enough operating OTECs to literally stop Global Warming cold in a couple of decades. At the same time you accelerate the transition to a renewable energy infrastructure, provide a massive new renewable carbon-neutral food supply to a hungry planet, revitalize many natural marine ecosystems, create millions of new jobs, and some interesting new places for people to live. Enough of them in one area and they will even work as a hurricane barrier--just as Bill Gate's scheme for that was supposed to work. This is, roughly, what I imagine such a facility looking like; (though smaller, as this version was intended to host 3-6 OTEC plants)
http://images1.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20081203140709/tmp2/images/8/8e/LuzAzulStudy.jpg
What if Lovelock is wrong? His proposal, naturally, caused much controversy at the time. There have been suggestions that bringing up deep sea water releases as much carbon as it might sequester, though this has never been noted in any of the many past OTEC deployments nor have I read evidence of carbon dioxide plumes associated with any natural upwelling zones. (OTECs do collect methanol and ammonia in their degassing phases) But I don't see this as a problem. The concept can only be proven or disproven by experiment, and only one of this scale at the very least. If it doesn't pan-out, well, the complex is still offsetting more than a hundred times more carbon pollution than it is hopefully directly sequestering. It can't lose. Either way, this remains the single-most powerful anti-Global Warming machine we can create today. It would still be perfectly justified without the carbon sequester.
Aside from being a straightforward plan to stop Global Warming, this idea also has the important benefit of not needing a lot of new media to explain it. This technology is all off-the-shelf. For every element of the construction of this facility we can point to several current manufacturers/developers. So, with permission where Fair Use isn't sufficient, their ad media can be repurposed to illustrate this project. Kickstarter wants very specific things and objectives. We can list this thing out like a recipe on Instructibles. The only hard part--for me--is a pitch video. My voice is shot from too many years of NJ and I'm about as photogenic as an elderly orangutan. So this will definitely need a better spokesperson and some practical video production experience.
Obviously, a Kickstarter for a billion dollar project is almost certainly going to fail. It's not completely implausible that it might succeed given the size of the audience, but it's highly unlikely. But that's OK. The goal of the project is not just to raise the money to do this but to propagate the idea that, maybe, the principle of crowdfunding isn't limited to gadgets, games, and comic books. Maybe it can be a way for society to get big important things done in spite of their recalcitrant politicians and corporations. If it fails, maybe the attention garnered by that will lead to philanthropic or entrepreneurial support to pick up the ball and carry it on. You hear a lot of people complain about the lack of action about Global Warming, especially by government. Well, they're, rather obviously, the root problem and they're not ever likely to become the solution. We need another way. But if someone came to you with a straightforward solution based on principles devised by the world's most well known environmental scientist in hand, would you put some money into it as an experiment? This is certainly cheaper than an LHC by a long shot and the issue far more important. It's said that Internet responds to obstacles by routing around them. Can the Internet route around the establishment and its oil-stained politics to address the single greatest challenge of our age? We'll see.
So what do people think?
Eric Hunting
erich...@gmail.com
I've been interested in starting a Kickstarter project for a couple years now but I've always been stymied by the same Catch-22; the need to raise money just to show people what I intend to raise money for. This is because so many of my projects--usually book projects like the TMP2 and Utilihab books--revolve around the need for technical illustrative media I'm never sufficiently talented to produce alone and can never find collaborators for because these days people in the art and design community aren't very interested in science, space, and the future and are generally disinclined to collaborate with anyone outside their own subculture. So I've struggled for ideas that could be effectively communicated without such apparently difficult illustration. Noting the recent wave of remarkable successes with Kickstarter, I've hit upon a counter-intuitive notion. What if you deliberately tried to create the most successful failure in Kickstarter history? A relatively simple to communicate idea but so grand in scale that its audacity brought it great attention?
What if you created a billion dollar Kickstarter to end Global Warming?
Through my work on TMP2, I've long known of a relatively straightforward, albeit grandiose, solution to Global Warming integral to the renewable energy infrastructure it seeks to develop. It's an elaboration of the proposal Dr. James Lovelock has long made. Some here may know that, in 2007 James Lovelock and Chris Rapley proposed actively fighting global warming by accelerating a natural ocean carbon sink based on the lifecycle of phytoplankton and the planktonic turnicates (salps) that feed on them. Salps are vertical migrators. They feed on algae by night and by day sink to a depth of around 2500 feet where they excrete the remains of their food as dense carbon pellets. At this depth this is not consumed by other animals, and so sinks to the sea floor--a natural carbon sink pulling carbon from the atmosphere through surface waters. This process is most intensive at ocean upwellings as are found in places like Monterey CA, where undersea currents are forced to the surface carrying deep ocean nutrients that induce algae blooms and a general profusion of marine life. Thus Lovelock proposed the deployment of numerous wave-powered sea pumps to create artificial upwellings amplifying this natural process. He's teamed up with the company AtMocean in Santa Fe on the development of these pumps.
But there's one critical problem with this concept. The pumps, though simple, must number in the many millions to have any significant effect and, since they can't pay for themselves, must have their mass production financed by public money--and no government in the world today is having that.
Enter OTEC. (Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion) OTEC is a Rankin-cycle system driven by the temperature differential between cold deep sea water and warm surface waters. Though little known to most renewable energy advocates, this well proven (since at least the 1930s) technology is one of the most powerful sources of renewable energy in existence. It is a key element in the logistical scheme of TMP. If we are to be a spacefaring culture, we have no choice but to advance renewable energy because such a culture--where we are putting spacecraft into orbit almost as frequently as we fly airliners today--would have far more energy demand than we collectively have at present. There are no free lunches in physics. No matter what form of propulsion we ultimately use, the energy cost of getting to orbit is about the same. So imagine the situation if we launched rockets as frequently as we fly airliners. The latent thermal energy of the ocean could support a civilization ten times the scale of ours currently before even beginning to have a negative environmental impact from its exploitation. And there's no Chicken Or Egg dilemma to that development as with space solar power.
OTEC does the same thing Lovelock's wave powered pumps do, but with two key differences. It does it at a much larger scale and it pays for itself. An OTEC plant not only produces electricity, it can produce copious amounts of fresh water, a host of industrial gasses, chemicals, and fuels extracted in degassing phases, and its nutrient rich discharge can be exploited as a basis of industrial scale polyspecies mariculture producing a variety of seafood at about 5 times the usable protein per hectare of conventional farming--and without the chemical fertilizers and pesticides. Additionally, a large OTEC industrial facility can produce carbon-negative concrete through the Calera process (http://calera.com/index.php/technology/our_process/) that it can also use in its own construction and even mass 'culture' biochar from mariculture wastes with rooftop farming as a soil abatement product--all of this done right at sea adjacent to this OTEC.
A 100MW will, by my crude calculations, directly sequester 25,000 metric tons of carbon per annum via Lovelock's process. (and that's very conservative. I don't have enough knowledge of marine biology to know what the additional impact of the deeper water sourcing and its higher nutrient levels would be) Its added mariculture and industry can potentially offset millions of tons per annum. (not counting the systemic impact of supplying biochar and carbon-negative concrete to the world market) The cost of such an OTEC and its companion facility would be about one billion dollars. But it would potentially generate an annual revenue of about a billion dollar per annum--and that's not counting carbon credits. That means this facility could self-replicate, using its own income, exponentially. Thus, starting with one demonstration facility and reinvesting its profits, one can fairly quickly expand to enough operating OTECs to literally stop Global Warming cold in a couple of decades. At the same time you accelerate the transition to a renewable energy infrastructure, provide a massive new renewable carbon-neutral food supply to a hungry planet, revitalize many natural marine ecosystems, create millions of new jobs, and some interesting new places for people to live. Enough of them in one area and they will even work as a hurricane barrier--just as Bill Gate's scheme for that was supposed to work. This is, roughly, what I imagine such a facility looking like; (though smaller, as this version was intended to host 3-6 OTEC plants)
http://images1.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20081203140709/tmp2/images/8/8e/LuzAzulStudy.jpg
What if Lovelock is wrong? His proposal, naturally, caused much controversy at the time. There have been suggestions that bringing up deep sea water releases as much carbon as it might sequester, though this has never been noted in any of the many past OTEC deployments nor have I read evidence of carbon dioxide plumes associated with any natural upwelling zones. (OTECs do collect methanol and ammonia in their degassing phases) But I don't see this as a problem. The concept can only be proven or disproven by experiment, and only one of this scale at the very least. If it doesn't pan-out, well, the complex is still offsetting more than a hundred times more carbon pollution than it is hopefully directly sequestering. It can't lose. Either way, this remains the single-most powerful anti-Global Warming machine we can create today. It would still be perfectly justified without the carbon sequester.
Aside from being a straightforward plan to stop Global Warming, this idea also has the important benefit of not needing a lot of new media to explain it. This technology is all off-the-shelf. For every element of the construction of this facility we can point to several current manufacturers/developers. So, with permission where Fair Use isn't sufficient, their ad media can be repurposed to illustrate this project. Kickstarter wants very specific things and objectives. We can list this thing out like a recipe on Instructibles. The only hard part--for me--is a pitch video. My voice is shot from too many years of NJ and I'm about as photogenic as an elderly orangutan. So this will definitely need a better spokesperson and some practical video production experience.
Obviously, a Kickstarter for a billion dollar project is almost certainly going to fail. It's not completely implausible that it might succeed given the size of the audience, but it's highly unlikely. But that's OK. The goal of the project is not just to raise the money to do this but to propagate the idea that, maybe, the principle of crowdfunding isn't limited to gadgets, games, and comic books. Maybe it can be a way for society to get big important things done in spite of their recalcitrant politicians and corporations. If it fails, maybe the attention garnered by that will lead to philanthropic or entrepreneurial support to pick up the ball and carry it on. You hear a lot of people complain about the lack of action about Global Warming, especially by government. Well, they're, rather obviously, the root problem and they're not ever likely to become the solution. We need another way. But if someone came to you with a straightforward solution based on principles devised by the world's most well known environmental scientist in hand, would you put some money into it as an experiment? This is certainly cheaper than an LHC by a long shot and the issue far more important. It's said that Internet responds to obstacles by routing around them. Can the Internet route around the establishment and its oil-stained politics to address the single greatest challenge of our age? We'll see.
So what do people think?
Eric Hunting
erich...@gmail.com
Nils Hitze
May 4, 2012, 5:08:28 PM5/4/12
to openmanu...@googlegroups.com
tl;dr count me in
I actually read it but since it's 11 pm already: let's start a shared
doc for the script and think about a good person to make this video
(bre pattis maybe?)
--
Nils Hitze
Email: nhi...@gmail.com
Mobil: +49 179 9429701
Blog: silberkind.de
G+: silberkind.de/+
Twitter: @kojote
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I actually read it but since it's 11 pm already: let's start a shared
doc for the script and think about a good person to make this video
(bre pattis maybe?)
--
Nils Hitze
Email: nhi...@gmail.com
Mobil: +49 179 9429701
Blog: silberkind.de
G+: silberkind.de/+
Twitter: @kojote
> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Open Manufacturing" group.
> To post to this group, send email to openmanu...@googlegroups.com.
> To unsubscribe from this group, send email to openmanufactur...@googlegroups.com.
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Giovanni Lostumbo
May 5, 2012, 8:26:37 AM5/5/12
to openmanu...@googlegroups.com
Ocean Carbon sink/pump was mentioned on an NPR discussion: https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=127245606
"best bad idea"
"best bad idea"
Eric Hunting
May 7, 2012, 1:18:22 PM5/7/12
to Open Manufacturing
OK, I've made this starter document on Google Docs to explore a script. It's just a quick breakdown of the sections right now and some resource links. Let me know if it looks like a useful starting point.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Lzcg5dmjxGHOheKrGJYgMsGOGRsc22CRoRD2XVaxaxA/edit
Eric Hunting
erich...@gmail.com
On May 5, 2012, at 6:04 AM, openmanu...@googlegroups.com wrote:
> Nils Hitze <nhi...@gmail.com> May 04 11:08PM +0200
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Lzcg5dmjxGHOheKrGJYgMsGOGRsc22CRoRD2XVaxaxA/edit
Eric Hunting
erich...@gmail.com
On May 5, 2012, at 6:04 AM, openmanu...@googlegroups.com wrote:
> Nils Hitze <nhi...@gmail.com> May 04 11:08PM +0200
Nils Hitze
May 8, 2012, 5:49:16 AM5/8/12
to openmanu...@googlegroups.com
Anything speaking against sharing the idea on G+/the OpenSourceEcology Mailinglist?
2012/5/7 Eric Hunting <erich...@gmail.com>
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Kostas
May 23, 2012, 6:20:08 PM5/23/12
to openmanu...@googlegroups.com
Hi Eric, I stumbled upon the following challenge:
http://www.greenchallenge.info/Competition/Overview.htm
http://www.greenchallenge.info/Competition/Overview.htm
A small excerpt:
"The competition calls on creative, innovative thinkers from around the world to submit business plans for sustainable products and services. Entries should directly reduce CO2 emissions, score highly on design, user-friendliness and quality, and ready to be in the market in two years."
I thought it might be of interest as you could submit your idea and potentially draw attention.
Regards
Kostas
Eric Hunting
Jun 8, 2012, 9:07:56 PM6/8/12
to Open Manufacturing
Thanks for the suggestion. I'll check this competition out. I did once
try to use this concept as the basis of a Buckminster Fuller Challenge
entry, but that competition proved to be largely all about who had the
prettiest pictures. Many of these competitions seem to come down to
that as they're more about drawing media attention to their own
organizations than actually accomplishing anything. But you never
know. Maybe this is one that actually takes what it's doing
seriously.
try to use this concept as the basis of a Buckminster Fuller Challenge
entry, but that competition proved to be largely all about who had the
prettiest pictures. Many of these competitions seem to come down to
that as they're more about drawing media attention to their own
organizations than actually accomplishing anything. But you never
know. Maybe this is one that actually takes what it's doing
seriously.
ecar...@gmail.com
May 24, 2015, 10:28:50 AM5/24/15
to openmanu...@googlegroups.com
This sucks. This isn't going to solve the problem.
This is like the Mafia telling you that you are going to be tortured 24 hours/day for 2 days and then get two in the hat, but you are able to negotiate it "down" to being tortured for 12 hours/day for 4 days and then get two in the hat. It doesn't solve the problem. The problem here is too many people or, for a more reasoned, elegant statement, see
And it seems the problem cannot be fixed. It's baked into the economic system.
To sum up, "Don't worry, be happy."
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