X. A philosophy of climate success

“How do we sleep while our beds are burning?” – Midnight Oil

X1. Living in covenant with our children

I regularly see people pushing specific ideas for their own side's short-term profit. That's not good enough for us. We need climate decisions made on the basis of what's optimal for all of us in the long run.

There will be inventions and research avenues where, after the government pays for research, after the government pays for extremely slow microscopic rollouts so that manufacturers get the bugs out and after the government pays for full rollout with as many companies as possible in the mix, the competitive marketplace will finally take over. Companies will then invest their own capital on research to further drive product prices down. That's how photovoltaic panels got their start. That's roughly how a number of offshore wind turbine manufacturers got up to speed. Electric cars got their start in 1999 after the State of California forced manufacturers to develop a small electric car market.

We, the part of the government that chooses to look ahead and think about climate integrity, must provide guidance for our embryo government ventures and for fledgling solar industries. First and foremost, is it likely that the marketplace will continue to drive the alternative energy product toward ever lower net costs in the ten or twenty years after launch? If no, all government funding needs to be cut off right now for this fool's errand. If yes, keep going.

I focus on geothermally stored solar heat because sunlight comes free with any property, the dirt and rocks underneath any parcel of land is often cheap and geothermal heat storage costs should plummet exponentially with size. Geothermal heat storage can't be monopolized. From our children's perspective, what's not to like in the long run? Lots of other energy storage options can probably be patented, and exactly for that reason our society should never think of developing them, because free market pressure will never drive down the cost of a heavily patented product.

X2. Delivering the news

A doctor can deliver two notably different types of bad news to a smoker. The worse news might be, “You have advanced lung cancer and you should get your affairs in order.” The better news would be “You have moderate COPD. Quit smoking now and you might live a reasonably normal life, but if you keep smoking your life will soon become permanently far worse.” I write this website in order to deliver the latter message in terms of climate change. If I had to deliver the bad message, I might not bother to write this website.

As a little kid I had a really good father, except I'm sorry to say that he kept some dark secrets. I was for the most part an innocent, obedient kid and nobody ever told me the secrets until many years later. I only knew that after a divorce my father suddenly and completely disappeared, and that my mother was lucky to land a good teaching job in another state and raise us. My mother only told me that my father didn't get along with people, and being obedient I accepted that explanation.

That's as close as I can picture a child today in a climate changing world, feeling that her/his/their parents have always loved her/him/them without reservation, except for the part about the parents leaving her/him/them and an entire generation of kids hanging out to dry someday. That part makes no sense, but maybe it will all make complete sense someday.

X3. Climate and you, the reader

Letting corporations perform all of our technical climate planning doesn't work, and until further notice it never will work. Letting corporation-dominated government agencies perform all of our technical climate planning doesn't work either. Letting corporation-dominated university professor collaberations perform all of our technical climate planning probably isn't going to work because of the intense financial pressure that billions of corporate dollars places on various professors. On pain of massive human starvation, we need relatively democratized planning.

This website is almost exclusively about climate technology moving forward from where we are, raising promising paths to solutions, sometimes focusing on relatively new climate symptoms that we want to address. If you're a non-engineer climate activist, I ask you to trust engineers but verify. Find an engineer friend or two that you can trust and ask her if many of this website’s claims, or anybody else's claims, are at least possible. If you want, also ask whether it's possible that somebody else invented all of these ideas first and if I was just copying all of these ideas down and claiming ownership. Fair enough?

If you're a non-engineer climate activist then I ask you to be a strong ally of our movement's citizen engineers. Once you know what engineers need and the progress that engineers can win us all, your activism can help them to quickly succeed.

Everybody complains about the weather, but nobody does anything about it. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Dudley_Warner]

People throw stuff away, except environmental activists tell us “There is no ‘away’.” In the same light we can let somebody else get it done, but as Henny Penny found out, there never has been a “them”. We, all types of climate activists, are often going to look around our own room, around our planet, for committees of people willing to raise their hands and take on small parts of our own cutting edge climate engineering work. Climate isn't my job as much as it's our job. Welcome to the club, dishes are in the sink, dish towels are in the drawer, I'll wash if you'll dry.

If you’re a citizen engineer, every invention in this website falls into the climate job jar. Thank you in advance for your engineering contributions. Please tell the rest of us that you're taking a job so that we don't have too much duplication of effort, because we're busy too. Please try your best not to be pushy because if everybody seizes the choice prestige jobs we'll have too much duplication of effort and nobody will do the other work.

We're the adults. We're the living. We’re our children’s parents. We’re worthy of our family names. We're going to know what's best to do and then we're going to try to do it.

We need quick results. We need a local action focus on individual projects and worldwide R&D coordination. Step 1 is to make as sure as possible that we have a well-functioning climate-stopping technological machine. What, after inhibiting and reducing atmospheric CO2 ppm levels, are our second order climate problems? Methane, NO2, megadrought and Arctic permafrost thaw? What are our most promising avenues for inhibiting each of these disasters? Who, specifically, is assigned to work on each sub-problem? When do they report back? Where’s the money? Where’s The Money?? Let’s see some real engineering here! Look at the movie Apollo 13 to see engineers getting down to work really fast. Dump the box of tools that we have on the table.

If we see any form of sandbagging, that’s when we want to be quite specific about where our technological delivery system is breaking down. Which politicians are being fully responsible, if any?

X4. On the nature of invention

Invention is by its nature a reach. “Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp, or what's a heaven for?” – Robert Browning. With climate change innovation, the reaching is everything. This website demonstrates that humanity's spectacular failure of imagination, an unwillingness to build and implement sketches already in front of us, would be our planet's penultimate technological failing.

When invention works it changes the world, and as a bonus invention takes remarkably little money at its early stages. No individual would risk her/his/their career, their health and their life on invention. The planet has two clear choices -- to roll the dice on invention at every advantageous opportunity or to become a part-desert planet. Right now the second choice is king.

In a world filled with music critics but devoid of musicians there would be no music because the average music critic can't play or sing a by-jingoed note. I suppose that it's lazier and perhaps more profitable to be a music critic than a musician. That's how I feel about a world devoid of climate inventors and stuffed to the gills with invention critics. Invention critics don't risk their careers, their health or their lives.

As an inventor and product developer I always want to examine every possible thing that can go wrong with a new concept and how the critical issues can best be fixed. I'm a good listener. I accept that any particular concept may have correctable flaws or that someone elsewhere may have also come up with the same idea. What's more important is the proof that one of these concepts won't ever work. Otherwise, why isn't humanity trying to save its own neck by developing that good concept at wartime speed?

If I'm an inventor and if you're not an inventor, then I should work full-time solely on inventing and should avoid most non-inventing details. You, for starters, are probably more than capable of finding answers to all of the other details.

I refer to the documentary, “Who Killed the Electric Car?” One large state, California, demanded that an electric car be built in 1990, and California settled for nothing less. By 1999 the technology was right there on the streets getting distributed to consumers who absolutely loved it. California soon caved due to industry pressure and in 1999 not only did every last instance of the technology utterly disappear but the industry implied that people were silly to imagine that any such technology could ever exist on this planet. I sense a whiff of an “Emperor's New Clothes” argument about what new, cheap technologies might and might not be theoretically quite possible.

“Whatever you can do, or dream you can do, begin it. Boldness has genius and power in it.” – Goethe.

As an inventor I believe that we especially need merit-driven research and development that can be rolled out fairly quickly. My job as your most accessible inventor is to be about 90% right and 100% opinionated about everything. If I should be as much as 99% right then perhaps I've failed my readers, as my readers need as much actionable vision for the climate crisis as they can find. Actionable vision is the precious commodity, the gold, that we have so little available. Below 90% correctness I have given away too much integrity, but above 90% correctness I haven't exercised my vision hard enough. I'm often drawing non-critical details into the illustrations that aren't in the text. Yes I'll change my mind at times.

“Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp, or what's a heaven for?” -John Donne??

X5. My avoidance of making detailed financial reports

I’m an inventor. My job is to explore as many possibilities as possible up to the point of order-of-magnitude financial calculations. My job isn’t to spend 2/3 of my time on financials and 1/3 of my time on invention. Look, I’m the only prolific climate inventor around, the only one available. I'm sorry if I don't work through an invention's economics. I want to know if an invention is likely to work, as opposed to my knowing, say, how much profit the invention would make in today's economy which unnecessarily subsidizes fossil fuels.

Yes we need experienced financial technologists to count the beans, and that’s not me.

When I hear the phrase “Is it profitable?” I think of some monster straight out of H.P. Lovecraft walking the streets looking for billions of people to starve to death. Monopoly corporations charge the rich people what the market will bear and then the inventions never get as far as the poor world. Too bad for the world's dead. In terms of cost-efficiency I'm typically thinking in terms of lifetime fuel budget and the costs of environmental remediation for any damage done. Monetary costs for many projects have often been wildly subsidized by ignoring environmental costs and by shifting inordinate survival costs onto the world's poor.

X6. Goodwill and standards

Much of the money power and political power in our world is now held by a few people. Within this tiny group is a range of people, some of whom are aghast that their great-grandchildren will inherit a cinder of a world, others who only worship their own greed. We need the cooperation of the conscience-stricken. Please help! At the same time we need to set enforceable minimum standards for the greedy.

X7. Integrity

Integrity is when you say that the effects of climate change are immoral and then you mean it, not for a day but for a lifetime.

We live in a world where companies, media empires and political parties all use the tobacco industry's old playbook. Too often people of good will are forced, if attacked bitterly enough, to circle their wagons and not let one dissenter speak up. Ultimately that's terrible, because occasionally a dissenter is being honest. Worse, I see people defending their collective jobs against all dissenters both in solar industry rotary clubs and in academia-wide cliques.

I see an Engineer's New Clothes phenomenon. Even an accurate dissenter is unworthy of his/her/their paid job and is also blacklisted and cut dead simply for telling the truth as they see it. I'm disappointed with such behavior, and even in cases where I'm the excluded messenger bringing the bad news, I'm at least glad that I'm not them.

This is rarely a website about what the poorest among us can do as individuals. Poor people can do relatively little other than protest the ineffectiveness imposed upon them from above, although the poor and weak of the world -- the children, people with disabilities, the single mothers, the bullied of the world -- can show surprising courage at times. Also, many people have enough common sense to see political disingenuousness when they see it. I consider the press's habit of excessively blaming the poor for human civilization's failings as an instance of the world's bad climate accounting practices. I focus on what we can do as an entire human civilization.

We live in a world full of profit-driven shading of the truth, of vastly well-funded troll farms dedicated to setting common people up as dupes, of Nigerian princes who want senior citizens to wire their social security checks to a foreign address, of Bernie Madoffs. In all climate legislation and planning I trust but verify. Please verify what I say also. If you disprove something, nake an effort to salvage the underlying concepts if possible

Our societal shading of the truth often extends to academia, where faculty won't lie about their raw data, yet they can offend the notion of academic integrity by rewriting the implied economic consequences of their work. Cases where corporate money has influenced academic pronouncements have been endemic in academia for generations. I feel that "academic integrity" shouldn't be just about maintaining the integrity of any raw data collected but about a professor's integrity of purpose. To quote Spike Lee, "Do the Right Thing."

I note that the tenured professors of the world require each other to be 99.99% right. As an inventor I grieve for this crippling character flaw forced onto the profession of college professors. Inventors need to be 90% right! I ask that the university trustees of the world back off of their unfortunate “100% correct” academic standard in favor of supporting a wider range of innovators in the world. Our planet desperately needs 1000 climate innovators and we don't need 1000 more writers of survey papers. We need the true Benjamin Franklins, Thomas Edisons, Steve Wozniaks, Buckminster Fullers, difference makers. Parents actually want their children to study under these innovators, that their children may in turn become these innovators. I approve of Doonesbury's comparison of freeway faculty to farm day laborers, disposable single-use types to be loaded into the backs of pickup trucks like so much meat.

In terms of my own personal cost-efficiency I'm not here to write one more survey paper about what many other people think. If a reader has invented or even hand-waved at a certain idea before I sleuthed it out independently, I apologize but there aren't ten more of me to write their survey paper for them, just one original inventor.

My collaborative goals are 80% to just get information out there because our time is literally short, and possibly 20% to preserve some legal rights so that an integrity-filled community of inventors and producers can form to develop further climate and solar innovation because we need full circle economics for inventors.

X8. My ground rules for invention

If an inventor is even 10% right the world wins. Let's win sometimes. If an inventor is 99.9% right, she should probably consider an unrelated field such as banking because she's not taking enough risks, and that means she's not saving as many lives as possible. 90% success is optimal. So, please forgive me my engineering mistakes on this website, even a few relative howlers, because I'm doing exactly the right thing for this compendium of newly invented climate solutions.

My writing moves quickly, jumping from each extension of an invention to another extension. Any particular reader might see a further extension, a slightly different and new way to use that invention.

I advise the reader that their discovery of a complicating side issue doesn't necessarily mean that an idea won't work. It merely leads to a new question: can the side issue be possibly solved or avoided? Most side issues might have solutions. Putting the problem aside for awhile sometimes works.

X9. Drawdown

Paul Hawken put together a team to write “Drawdown”, a seminal book of proposed climate solutions. I want to give them considerable credit for doing the right thing in the face of an impending climate catastrophe. I have a rule that if an inventor or a coalition of inventors is right roughly 10% of the time, their efforts have paid off well.

That said, I'm writing this website because I fully agree with only six of Drawdown's 100 best climate solutions, and here they are:
alternative refrigerant
refrigerant management
bamboo production
district heating
peatland protection and rewetting
tree intercropping

I regret to say that I find either fixable quibbles or show-stopping arguments with all 94 of the other Drawdown top solutions. Some rely overly on the efforts of poor people to carry the wealthiest among us toward climate nirvana. Sometimes a tiny amount of suffering by the whole of the privileged class would make a solution unnecessary. Often the Drawdown solutions are on the right general track but they don't know certain key details about implementation. Too many of the natural solutions will certainly be swept away and crushed in the climate catastrophe. Worse, “Nuclear Power” being pushed as a solution demonstrates a failure of Drawdown's decision-making methodology, and Drawdown's abject failure must serve as a stark warning to the rest of us. Nuclear power is an astoundingly expensive energy pig and has proven to be a consistent danger to public health.

X10. What is thinkable?

Humanity is faced with a massive agricultural failure problem, and most of the world's other species may go extinct. Under this scale of ecological pressure, an idea may be thinkable unless one or more other plans, more ecologically sound plans, more affordable plans, plans with fewer dangerous side issues, are available. I assume that humanity will be all-in on its own survival in due time, perhaps too late but perhaps not, and that humanity will also want to preserve their grandchildren's heritage, the natural ecology of the planet, as much as possible. In this website I try to avoid relatively unacceptable schemes.

X11. My Values

On January 21, 2020, Yale360 estimated that 20% of the planet's permafrost would be thawed by 2040. If all of the planet's permafrost is thawed, 1.7 teratons of additional greenhouse gases will be released and atmospheric greenhouse gas ppm levels will nearly triple. Unfortunately, as of 2022 approximately zero research and development funds are going into this existential problem.

Having even 20% of the planet's permafrost thaw is unacceptable for humanity's future. We can't expect most of the world's population to simply starve to death from chronic agricultural failures. Worldwide nonviolent disruption of normality is a likely outcome.

I'm inventing as if the world is going to certainly come to me on some distant day and then honestly ask me for a detailed explanation of how we can best inhibit climate change. Until that day, the best that I can do every day is continue to invent. I’ve been trying to invent climate change blueprints since the late 1990s. Eventually entire committees of people will need to seek collective wisdom.

Power cedes nothing without a specific demand. That's why we need to establish the engineering and R&D side of a shadow government for our planet’s survival. Here, we need to be the adults in the room in order to succeed.