How We Win

[J GOODWIN]

How we win

We're unfortunately a planet of good liars. If you can't tell Fearless Leader that he's magnificent then you'll end up in a dungeon, and so Darwinian selection got rid of most of the bad liars. All democratic lobbying still has serious limitations because flat out lying to the peons is pre-built into the heart of every government on earth.

What works worldwide and forever going forward: innovations. Wind and solar power are so cheap now that oil-rich governments are implementing wind and solar simply to have more spare oil on hand to sell abroad. Wind and solar are slowly eating the fossil fuel industry's lunch. The U.S. Government forced primitive solar panels into existence. Denmark forced offshore wind into existence. California forced electric vehicles into existence.

I propose that small, nimble public interest companies can affordably force more climate tech innovations into existence. For example, one of the roots of curbside recycling was a tiny group, Ecology Action for Rhode Island, that ran a newspaper recycling route in one Providence neighborhood for several years. They took their successful recycling prototype's results to the State of Rhode Island and things grew from there. The first prototype offshore wind turbines off of the East Coast of the U.S. were off of Block Island. These prototypes were a bit expensive but they successfully proved out the idea.

Initial prototypes typically need innovations, testers, mechanics, a fairly honest board of directors and an adequate if somewhat modest source of funding. Then we need lobbyists and public support to get a state or regional government to try the first official prototype.

Alternatively, DARPA invented the Internet. A single guy wanted to try it. His boss had no idea what the guy was doing but the guy had an ok track record and seemed to know what he wanted.

I'm an inventor.

I see heat seasonally stored in hills as fundamentally different than electricity stored in big battery arrays because every battery will soon run out of power. Also, heat stored in hills gets exponentially cheaper with size. “Exponentially cheaper with size” is a death knell for all competing technologies, always, every single time.

I expect a revolution in above-street transit. People can keep their own private pods in the garage at night, but the transit system will lift these pods the last mile and then load them onto longer distance commuter trains. I expect vastly fewer traffic fatalities, 90% fewer lifetime kilowatt-hours per passenger-mile, far better disability access, overall quickness, as far advanced over the modern urban traffic jam as the car is over the horse and buggy.

I see lots of potential horses for polar cooling. Creating Arctic Ocean pack ice with robot submarines should be ridiculously more expensive than using drones that regularly relocate wind turbines and pipes around the freezing edge of the pack ice. SAI works and is quite cheap but sulfur dioxide has two expected side effects: asthma and acid rain. Will the asthma side effect be reduced if factory fishing ships burn high sulfur oil fuel in the Southern Ocean? Such questions will be mission-critical for the use of sulfur particles. The nuclear waste and paramilitary sabotage problems will continue to be mission-critical for any development of nuclear power, unless Fearless Leader chooses to throw away his disposable peons.

At the very least we should spray long lines of water ice across the tundra to stop tundra megafires. The more water, the longer into late summer the tundra stays reflective.

Drones and not human pilots should fight megafires. They should drop thin sheets of ice not water on fires if that's possible, because comparing kilogram versus kilogram, ice puts the fire out better.

Higher-tech fire hoses will have electrical wiring built into them so that water can be pumped from a deep stream or from a well pre-drilled by the roadside, then pumped hundreds of feet up a hill by a series of several pumps.

I can't tell, for any particular climate technology, whether the innovation will be profitable in a short period of time or whether the government simply needs this tool to protect lives and property. The latter will be nonprofit inventions. ARPAnet, the precursor of the Internet, was a nonprofit useful research tool at the time.

If you look up my name in a search engine you'll find my sketches of the major inventions listed above.

Yours in Hope,

Paul Klinkman