We live in a world divided into entities called ‘countries.’ 

Each country is run by an organization called a ‘government.’  Each government tries its best to convince the people that it is on their side, a kind of father to them all, taking care of them and keeping them safe. 

This isn’t always the reality. 

Governments have certain needs that we may think of as ‘governmental needs.’  These needs often conflict with the needs of the people of the planet Earth, in general, and even, in a great many cases, with the needs of the people who live inside the borders that that government claims is a ‘country.’

For a simple example, governments need to maintain militaries that are well trained, well equipped, and able to act quickly and do things that most people will consider to be immoral (their primary job of the military is to kill people).  These things are expensive and any resources devoted to the military can’t be used to do things that bring direct benefits to the people, like build and maintain parks, libraries, schools, roads, infrastructure, and provide services like healthcare. 

Governments don’t always do things that are designed to make life better for the people of the world, or even for the people of the entity the governments call ‘their own country.’ In many cases, governments do things that bring great harm to the people of the world and they often do many things that cause great harm to the people of their own borders, the people who often believe that the governments are there to protect them and keep them safe.

As we will see, most of the structures responsible for destruction in our world today are unique to certain types of societies.  We live in a type of society that is built on a certain premise:  the people who created this society, when it was first created, decided that it was possible mountains, rivers, lakes, and other structures that existed long before humans to be owned by humans, provided those humans did certain things.  If these people decided to call themselves by a certain name (like a ‘country’), create certain icons and symbols, compose songs and create fancy documents claiming that they stood for wonderful things (freedom, for example, and liberty and justice for all), they could then claim that a certain part of the world belonged to the entity they claimed to be, the ‘country’ or ‘nation’ or ‘sovereign state,’ if these were the worlds they used.  Societies that are built on this principle will naturally evolve in certain ways. For example, the people who run the countries will want extremely productive land and large caches of resources (like gold, copper, and oil) to be inside of their countries.  Once countries have come to dominate various parcels, they will compete to get control of these areas using whatever tools are at their disposal.  They can use force and will look for ways to bring more force to bear than their competitors.  They will organize whatever they can organize to make this possible. 

The leaders of the countries who don’t do this will quickly be conquered by those who do and, eventually, life in these systems will be dominated by the leaders who have created systems that have the greatest advantages in forceful conflict.  (This is a very brief description of a complex evolutionary process.  You can find details of the way the societies that we have now came to exist and then involved in the book ‘Forensic History.’)    

The leaders/governments of countries can make the people more willing to sacrifice for their people (including to work hard as many hours as they can stay awake to keep the military complex functioning and to kill when ordered to do this) if they can convince the people that the governments are instruments of good.  The governments control key variables including the schools and they can use this control to create systems that are designed to create the advantageous state of mind in children, so they will carry it forward to adulthood. 

But it isn’t always true. 

In fact, the people who come into power in the entities called ‘governments’ are often people who have needs that they can meet by advancing policies and doing other things that cause great harm to a large percentage of the population of the countries, and to the planet around us.  We will see that the problems that now threaten the human race could not exist and would not exist if not for fairly aggressive action on the part of the entities we call ‘governments of countries’ to create them.  We need to understand this if we are to understand what we must do to deal with the problems.

We can’t depend on governments to step in and fix things just because we want them fixed, under the assumption that governments are and always were entities whose only propose is to advance the interests of the people in the countries those governments rule. 

Often, governments are actually doing the opposite. 

If we want to really understand what steps would be required to actually reduce the levels of destruction, we need to decouple our thinking from the myths we were raised to accept (particularly about the goodness of the entities called ‘governments’) in school.

We need to accept reality.  We need to understand that the entities we call ‘governments’ of the worlds roughly 200 ‘countries’ are not the only tools the human race has to deal with the problems that threaten us. We need to understand that, often, the governments of countries will do everything they can to prevent changes that can reduce the level of destructive problems or eliminate them.

For the people of the world to run to the entities called ‘governments of countries’ and expect them to fix the problems the human race faces would be like the global population of sheep going to the leaders of wolf packs and other predators, who each have a territory which they control and where they harvest sheep, to bet the predators to protect them from predation in general.  This doesn’t mean that there is no hope.  It doesn’t even mean that there is nothing we can do to turn governments into true allies of the human race and get them to quit fighting each other to increase their territory long enough to help make the human race better.

It just means that the simplistic methods commonly used to try to solve destructive problems aren’t very likely to be effective, at least not without taking other key steps.  It means that, if we really want to solve the problems that threaten us, we need to be realistic about the nature of the entities called ‘governments of countries’ and understand the role they play in the destruction.

The easiest way to understand this is by looking at examples. 

The energy industry is a good place to start because a large percentage of the world’s destructive problems are related to the use of power.  I want to narrow it down a little and focus on a specific power industry first, because the relationship between destruction and government involvement is very easy to see in this particular industry.  Although governments were supporting destruction long before practical electrical devices were invented, the electrical age has let to support for destruction in a scale that would have been hard to even imagine for people who were born and raised before this age began.  We can see that the support for destructive power use has been extremely effective and the combined effects of profit motivated destroyers and governments have led to more obvious and measurable destruction in the last century than in the entire 350,000 years that humans lived on this planet before the electrical age began. 

It makes sense to start our analysis of destruciton with this example, so let’s start at the beginning of the electrical age:

 

Electric Power Plants

 

In 1879, Thomas Edison patented the first practical and safe electric lighting device. 

In fact, when Edison made his ‘light bulb,’ it wasn’t just the only safe and effective electrical lighting system, it was the first safe and effective lighting system the human race had ever had.

Before the light bulb, most light was created using fire.  This wasn’t safe because fire can spread rather easily and burn down entire cities. Many cities were destroyed because a cow kicked over a lantern or a candle came too close to a sleeve, leading to uncontrollable fires. 

Other electric lighting devices existed in 1879, but they weren’t safer than fire.  They used a process that worked a lot like modern arc welders: they burned very brightly for a few minutes and then needed the replacement of the terminals (just as a welder needs replacement of the welding rod) to burn for a few more minutes. They threw very hot sparks of molten metal everywhere, creating horrific fire hazards.  They could be used for theaters and shows, with a small army of firemen waiting with extinguishers to put out the inevitable fires, but they wouldn’t work for offices, residences, or stores. 

Edison’s new device a, ‘light bulb,’ didn’t burn anything.   It heated a filament inside of a glass bulb that had all air removed from it.  The filament glowed white hot, but it could not catch fire and burn because the bulb had no air and air is needed for combustion.  Edison’s light bulbs could produce light hour after hour, day after day, and were very safe.  He could make them for a few cents each and they only used a tiny amount of electricity compared to the former system.  A generator that could only run three or four of the old-style electric lights could run thousands of the new bulbs Edison had created.

Edison’s invention changed the world. It basically doubled the amount of time that humans could do productive things. 

Of course, everyone wanted electric lights.  But Edison had to deal with money and find a way to produce them.  He also had to find a way to generate electricity to power the bulbs. This latter problem turned out to be harder to solve than the former one.  He could build factories to turn out lots of light bulbs.  But he couldn’t produce large amounts of electricity in any way that made it usable for the people who wanted it.

You see, Edison was using a rather primitive kind of electricity, the kind we call ‘DC electricity’ (direct current electricity).  DC electricity is not ‘bad’ electricity in any way; in fact, it is generally more efficient and far safer than the kind of electricity we use today, which is called AC electricity (alternating current).  But DC electricity had a very serious flaw back in the late 1800s compared to AC electricity:  it couldn’t be ‘transformed.’  This means that it had a fixed voltage. 

 

The Transformer Problem

 

Why is this a problem?  The voltage of an electrical current may be compared to the pressure on a water hose:  If the pressure is very low, the water just trickles out.  There may be a lot of water that could be moved, but you can’t move more than a tiny amount at an extremely low pressure.  If you want to move a lot of water quickly, you need a high pressure. 

The problem here is that the high pressure is dangerous.  If have ever used a cleaning machine called a ‘pressure washer,’ you will know that high pressure water is extremely dangerous.  High pressure water will strip paint easily; if you should happen to let the stream touch your skin, it can strip the skin from your body.  Low pressure water doesn’t cause any real problems.  High pressure water can kill you very quickly.

The same is true for electricity: low pressure electricity (low voltage) is pretty safe.  You can touch both terminals of a 1.5 volt battery (standard voltage for the old style AA, AAA, and other batteries in remotes and toys) and you won’t notice anything.  You can put a 9 volt battery (standard for electronics) onto your tongue:  it will tingle a little but won’t hurt you.  A 120 volt shock, from a standard household receptacle, can burn you very badly.  A shock from an overhead power line, which normally runs about 10,000 volts, will almost always kill you if you touch it and it is life. 

If you are going to have electricity in a home, you need to make sure it is at a low enough voltage that it won’t kill people if they should happen to touch a life wire.  But this brings up another problem:  if the voltage is low, you can’t transport electricity very far. If you have a very low pressure water hose, it won’t deliver water over a very long distance.  If you want it to move enough water to make a difference, you need to have a higher pressure.

The people who eventually solved this problem did it by using a technology that Nicola Tesla created, called a ‘transformer.’  The transformer could start with electricity at any pressure/voltage and either step up or step down the pressure/voltage by any amount desired.  You can start with a generator that creates electricity at a voltage of 400 volts.  You can increase the voltage to 250,000 volts to send it a long distance.  (You can easily send electricity across an entire continent at this voltage).  When it gets where you need it, you can reduce the voltage down to 10,000 volts, a practical voltage for distribution, like the overhead lines you see in cities. Each building will then have its own transformer to transform the electricity from 10,000 volts to 120 volts, or whatever voltage you need for the home. 

Unfortunately, Edison couldn’t use this technology in 1879, for two reasons. The first was that it didn’t exist. Tesla hadn’t invented the transform. The second was that transformers only work for AC electricity, and AC electricity didn’t exist yet.  (Tesla didn’t invent it but he created the first AC generators.)  The simple electricity that Edison used, DC, is the same kind of electricity that is in lightning, the same kind that can be created by chemical batteries, and was the only kind of electricity understood in 1879. 

So, Edison had a serious problem: he couldn’t make very high voltage DC electricity because it was too dangerous to use in homes and businesses. He had to produce electricity at a voltage that didn’t kill people.  The maximum distance he found he could transport the electricity at this voltage was about a half of a city block.  

This meant that, if he wanted every block in a city to have electricity, he would need a power plant in the center of each block.  At the time, the best way to make electricity was to have a coal fired furnace boil water to steam and run it through a steam engine to turn a generator. (This is the same way most electricity is produced in the world today.)  Coal smoke is black and thick and foul, full of toxins that harm the lungs and everything they touch.  People wouldn’t accept a plant like that on every block so Edison couldn’t produce power for more than a tiny number of people.  Since he made his money selling light bulbs, he couldn’t sell many bulbs: people won’t buy light bulbs if they don’t have electricity to run them.

This problem was eventually solved, but its solution required creating extremely large and powerful new governmental organizations (which, we will see, by necessity encouraged and still encourage destruction) that had never existed before.  These organizations are now massive and work very hard through multiple channels to make sure that solar and other non-destructive technologies don’t take over, even though the non-destructive technologies are now significantly cheaper than the destructive technologies being used. 

If we want to understand what we can do about this particular part of the destruction problem, we need to understand the reason these government organizations were created, they way they evolved, and the way they work now.  Again, to do this, we have to go back to olden days. 

 

Edison and Tesla

 

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In 1882 electricity was new and governments hadn’t created any significant regulations involving its use. In most places, anyone could make electricity.  In business districts, store owners could get together with their neighbors, go in on a generating system to power lights for several stores, and share the costs. 

Some cities allowed private companies to build mass transit systems and electricity worked very well for this. The mass transit companies had their own generators.  Factories had both electric lights and electric motors.  They had their own generators.  There were a lot of generators because people wanted a lot of electric devices. 

In 1882, Edison’s light bulb factory in Schenectady, New York was producing at full capacity.  He was selling the bulbs as fast as he could make them. 

He held the patent so he was the only one who could make them. 

His patent rights extended to Europe and he wanted to sell a lot of light bulbs there, but he couldn’t produce enough to take care of both markets in his Schenectady plant.  Edison wanted to build a factory in Europe to make bulbs and sell them there.  He decided on Paris for this new factory and began to hire engineers to design this plant.

Nikola Tesla had just graduated from the Higher Real Gymnasium in Karlovac, Germany.  He had a reputation there as a kind of genius, able to do complex mathematical problems and solve extremely complex engineering problems in his head.  He had finished the university’s four-year engineering program in three years, graduating at the top of his class.  He applied for a job on the Paris design team and was accepted. 

Tesla gained a reputation as a kind of genius on the design team too.  The managers reported the prodigy to Edison.  Edison wanted to meet the man and, when he did, he was very impressed. He asked Tesla to come to New Jersey and work directly for him in his research lab. 

While at the Gymnasium, Tesla had been one of the first people to be exposed to work on a new kind of electricity, AC electricity.  Before he met Tesla, Edison had never even heard of AC electricity.  The kind of electricity Edison understood, DC, is very simple and logical, at least compared to AC:  electrons flow through a wire.  Electrons have a negative charge.  Negative and positive charges (opposite charges) attract each other, just like the negative and positive ends of a magnet attract each other.  The magnetism pulls the electrons through the wire.  When they hit a light bulb, they have to go through a very tiny wire and the resistance of a lot of electrons going through this wire causes heat.  Since there is no air in the bulb, the heat can’t make the filament catch fire  so it causes the thin wire (the filament) to glow very brightly once they get through the light bulb, the electrons continue going down the wire toward the positive terminal of the generator or battery. 

This is very simple.  Edison had spent his life studying it.  He understood it very, very well. 

 

 

AC Electricity

 

AC stands for ‘alternating current.’ Alternating current is the type of electricity that you have in your house.  AC is so complicated that, toward the end of his life, even Edison admitted that he didn’t really understand it.  I won’t even try to explain it here:  you could spend years on the internet learning about it and still probably not understand everything there is to know about it.  AC electricity does several things that DC electricity doesn’t do.  Because of these special characteristics of AC, it is possible to make an extremely simple and very cheap device that transforms electricity from one voltage to another, as described above. 

Tesla had come into contact with some of the earliest research done on this knew kind of electricity.  He learned about it in college when his mind was still flexible enough to understand new ideas and he figured it out. It made total sense to him.  He began experimenting and found that he could do things with AC that couldn’t be done with DC, including solve the critical problem that Edison was trying to solve:  it could be transformed so it could be transported. 

Tesla told Edison about the new electricity and showed him it could do things that the simpler DC electricity could not do. 

Tesla thought both AC and DC electricity were useful. 

He wanted to work with both. 

 

How Tesla and Edison Became Enemies

 

Historians have come up with many theories about why Edison was so adamantly against AC.  Many claim that Edison just didn’t understand it.  Since he didn’t understand it, he didn’t trust it.

Some say his problem wasn’t with AC electricity, it was with Tesla, personally.

Tesla was young and arrogant. He knew things the ‘Wizard of Menlo Park’ (as Edison was called) didn’t know.  Tesla was patronizing and made Edison feel like Tesla thought he was an idiot. 

Other historians claim that Edison was against AC for the reason he claimed to be against it:  he thought it was too dangerous to use. 

AC is far more dangerous than DC. A tiny amount of electricity—an amount that would only give you a mild shock if it were DC electricity—can kill you if it is AC electricity.  (See text box below for more information.) 

Edison told Tesla he didn’t want any AC electricity generated in his laboratory. 

Period. 

 

Why is AC so dangerous?

It took scientists a long time to figure this out, but this is now well understood:

Your body controls its muscles with electrical signals sent through your nervous system.  DC power doesn’t interfere with these signals, but AC does. 

This problem is particularly serious for the heart muscles because the contractions of these muscles have to be synchronized in a very complex way for the heart to pump blood.  AC electricity confuses the signals that go to the muscles and sends the heart into convulsions called ‘ventricular fibrillations.’  While the heart is convulsing, it will not pump blood.  If it does this more than about five minutes, your cells won’t have oxygen and will start to die.  After about 15 minutes, so many cells will be dead that you will not be able to recover, even if the fibrillations can be stopped.

 

Tesla didn’t like this policy. 

He tried to get his boss to change it, but Edison wouldn’t budge.  Tesla was working on some AC devices at the time.  He didn’t want to stop.  He finally decided that he would keep working on them in spite of the ban.  If Edison didn’t like it, he would have to fire him. 

When Edison found out that Tesla had defied him, this is exactly what he did.  He told one of the most brilliant inventors the world has ever seen that his services were no longer required.

 

Westinghouse Electric Company

 

At the time, the wealthy venture capitalist George Westinghouse was looking for new opportunities. 

Tesla arranged a meeting.  He told Westinghouse that he wanted to build an electric company to compete with Edison’s.  Historians paint both Tesla and Edison as vindictive against each other. They claim that Tesla didn’t just want to compete with Edison, he wanted to drive him out of business.  He would do this by taking advantage of AC devices that Edison refused to use. 

Together, Tesla and Westinghouse formed Westinghouse Electric Company.  Westinghouse would provide the money; Tesla would provide the brains. 

 

The Electric Chair

 

When Edison found out that Tesla was going to compete with him, he tried to crush Tesla by trying to crush the idea of AC electricity.  He set up many demonstrations for the press where he demonstrated the extreme danger of AC electricity.  He started with small animals, giving them shocks with DC and showing they were only a little bit surprised.  Then, with the same voltage and amperage in electricity in AC form, they went into violent seizures (indicating what Edison claimed was horrible suffering) and died.

Edison was hoping the reporters would tell stories of this horrible system and incite public protest that would eventually get AC electricity banned, putting Tesla and Westinghouse Electric out of business. 

When this didn’t have the desired effect, Edison tried it with larger and larger animals.  He electrocuted a horse and then bought an elephant named ‘Topsy’ from the Forepaugh & Sells Brothers Circus.  Then he electrocuted Topsy, filming the event to show the misery of the animal as it died.  (To see this, go to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NoKi4coyFw0. Warning:  the killing of the elephant is gruesome.  Viewer discretion advised.) 

But even this didn’t have the effect that Edison wanted.  No one started any kind of movement to prevent people from using AC electricity. Finally, Edison decided the only way to show how horrible and painful of a death people suffer with AC electricity was to use it to kill a human being in front of an audience.  

Edison didn’t have to invent the machine that would do the killing:  a dentist named ‘Alfred Southwick’ had seen a drunk fall onto the terminals of a running AC generator and go into convulsions and die.  We live in societies built on war and, in these societies, people who invent killing machines can get rich beyond the dreams of Midas.  Southwick was hoping the military would find a way to use electricity in war, and he would get a royalty on every electric killing machine sold.  His first device was a simple chair that had straps that held the arms of the victim in contact with electrodes. 

He called it ‘the electric chair.’

Southwick’s patent took a little of the moral burden off of Edison:  he didn’t have to design and put his own name on a machine to kill people with electricity; it already existed.  He got a license from Southwick to build an electric chair and made the rounds of prisons around his home in Menlo Park, New Jersey, to see if he could find a warden who would be willing to use the machine to kill one of his prisoners. 

Warden Charles Durston of the Auburn penitentiary in New York had an execution scheduled for August 6, 1890. The prisoner to be executed, William Kemmler, was particularly vile: he had murdered his family with a hatchet. Durston didn’t feel any compassion for this man and was willing to make him Edison’s example. 

The first attempt to kill Kemmler with electricity failed. 

To put the heart into fibrillation, the electricity had to have the right frequency:  it needs to confuse the nerves that trigger the heart muscles. (See text box above.)  The technicians used the wrong frequency and the shock left Kemmler shaken up, but his heart was beating normally.  The engineers couldn’t fail, however, so they turned up the machine as high as it would go and left it on.  Kemmler’s body went into violent convulsions, as the current stimulated his muscles.  After 5 minutes of this, his body began to smoke from the heat generated by the current. The engineers left the current on for another 3 minutes, until Kemmler’s arms (the part in contact with the electrodes) caught fire. 

There was now no doubt that Kemmler was dead.

George Westinghouse had gone personally to see the killing. 

He claimed it was the most gruesome thing he had ever seen.  He was quoted as saying, ‘They would have been more merciful if they had used an axe.’

The great age of AC electricity had begun. 

 

Why We Use AC

 

In almost every way, DC is better than AC.  It is much safer, for one. It is also significantly more efficient.  It is also much more useful: a great many devices use DC that can’t use AC.  If you are reading this on a phone, tablet, computer, or television, you are reading on a DC device. All electronics run on DC, all batteries produce DC, solar systems generate DC power, and any motor that has a variable speed runs on DC.  DC is versatile, efficient, safe, and fairly simple to understand, create, and use. 

But there is one very important thing that AC can do that DC can’t.  AC can be ‘transformed’ from one voltage to another voltage very easily with a cheap, reliable, and very efficient device that Tesla had invented called a ‘transformer.’  By transforming it, you can transport it over large distances.  Edison’s DC plants could only power, at most, a city block each.  Then as now, coal fired plants produced most of the electricity.  People don’t want to live right next to coal fired power plants. If they used DC electricity, they would have no choice.

 

In the late 1980s, new technology called ‘integrated circuits’ were able to switch DC back and forth to create the alternations in current that allow it to be transformed.  DC can start at one voltage, be turned into AC using the integrated circuits, transformed, and then be changed back into DC by other integrated circuits, creating DC electricity of a different voltage. 

These devices use very complicated electronics. They didn’t exist before the electronics existed.  As the prices of electronics fall, the prices of these devices falls and they are becoming cheaper, but they are still far more expensive than the simple AC transformers that Tesla invented. 

Because DC can now be ‘transformed,’ it would be possible to convert to a DC system. This would give us the far more efficient and safer DC power system.  Since the non-destructive power systems like solar generate DC power, we would find it far easier to incorporate solar into our system if we had a DC system.  As we will see, the power companies don’t want this to happen and have very powerful tools that they can use to keep this change from taking place. 

 

At the time, there were no laws against competition. 

Westinghouse and Edison were competing against each other.  Edison could only compete in situations where people were willing to put up with generating stations right next to the places where they would use the electricity. Generally speaking, this meant industrial applications like factories, machine shops, and transit systems. 

Edison did sell some electricity, but he couldn’t compete in residential and office markets.  This business went to the AC system that Tesla had designed and that Westinghouse Electric used. 

 

Samuel Insull And The Idea Of Monopoly Power Producers

 

The father of the model that now dominates the world was Edison’s plant manager in his Chicago office, Samuel Insull. Insull had an idea that he thought would give their company a great advantage over the competition and would basically allow them to drive Westinghouse completely out of the Chicago market:  He would build one giant plant at the center of the city and supply every single business and residence in the city. 

This kind of system could not use DC power. 

To make it work, Edison would have to allow Insull to create an AC system.

Insull was a brilliant man and we will see illustrations of his brilliance shortly.  He basically created the electric utility system that now exists globally.  This system required new kinds of corporations, it needed new investment tools, and it required a legal framework that had never existed before.  Insull built all of these things.  Although his business success provides evidence that he was a very intelligent man, I think that the main evidence of this comes from his ability to convince Edison to switch to AC.  Since Westinghouse owned the patents on the AC devices, Edison would have to do more than just swallow his pride:  he would have to actually pay his arch-rival massive sums of money to use the products that Edison had banned from his laboratory when Tesla tried to make them there. 

Here is the logic behind Insull’s plan: 

At the time, the city had hundreds of small generators to run its power systems.  Most of the time, these generators were shut down.  They still had to be paid for, but weren’t producing any electricity.  For example, the mass transit system used its electricity during the rush hours. The rest of the time, its generators were mostly idle, and at night they were shut down entirely.  The streetlights used generators only at night: during the day, they were shut down entirely.  The stores only needed light during business hours and the main residential use for light was in the morning before work and in the evening after work.  All of the generators had to be paid for all of the time, but they were all shut down most of the time.  If there were one giant plant that ran 24 hours a day, it could be fully utilized almost all of the time, providing much, much lower costs than the network of tiny stations could provide.  These lower costs could translate into lower electricity prices, which would benefit everyone.  

We don’t know what arguments Insull used to convince Edison.  They must have been good:  Edison had been on a crusade against AC since the first time he heard about it. Accepting AC would require that he back down and admit he was wrong.  He would have to go back on many things he had been saying for years. Worst of all, he would be essentially making a public admission that his rival, Tesla, had been right all along, and then giving money to Tesla to use his products. 

But money is an incredibly powerful motivator.  Insull’s plan was eventually put into place and quickly made Edison’s company the largest and most profitable corporation that the world had ever seen.  (It was the largest corporation on Earth until the 1990s.)  Perhaps, Insull had worked out projections of the way his new system would affect the industry and these projections convinced Edison.  Whatever the arguments, they worked.  Edison gave in and allowed Insull to begin planning the giant power plant, to be called Fisk Station. 

The year was 1900.

 

Fisk Station

 

At the time, neither the city of Chicago nor the government of Illinois had any regulations about electricity. Anyone could make it and sell it. A lot of people built power plants to use for specific purposes.  Insull’s plan would lead to much greater efficiencies which could be translated to much lower prices for electricity in Chicago than anywhere else on the planet. (This would happen through the regulatory system that Insull set up, described below.)  Cheap, reliable power would attract industry and cause Chicago to grow and turn it from a swampy shipping center for grain (as it was before Fisk Station opened) into a giant global industrial and manufacturing powerhouse (as it became shortly after the electricity became available).  

But he couldn’t supply this cheap power in a situation where he had to compete with other providers.  He could only provide cheap electricity to the city if he could build a giant station.  He could only build a giant station if he had some sort of guarantee that it would be utilized at a high enough level to make it profitable.  To produce cheap electricity, he would need the city to pass a law prohibiting competition in the power area. 

They would have to give him a government-protected monopoly.  That is the only way his plan would work.

Insull’s plan would require investments on an unprecedented scale.  He would have to wire the entire city for electricity, and this would require thousands of miles of expensive copper wire.  He would have to put up dozens of distribution centers (called ‘substations’), thousands of transformers, build a gigantic organization to manage everything, bill everyone, and make sure the utility could meet its financial obligations, in addition to building the largest power plant the world had ever seen.

Insull told the city planners he could get the money and the city wouldn’t have to pay any of these costs.

But the investors would only supply the money if they knew they would make money, and this required legal protection.  Since this was a new venture, untried before, he wanted a guarantee:  he wanted the city to guarantee him that his investors would make money as long as the city used his power system. 

To make this work, he set up a new system:  the city would create a regulatory body called a ‘public utility commission’ or PUC.  The PUC would set the rates for the electricity.  The utility would not be able to determine what it charged.  It would simply submit its costs to the PUC.  The PUC would then calculate the rates that would have to be charged to provide the profits to the investors that Insull promised them. Chicago electricity users would all pay this rate, with no exceptions. 

They would not have any other choice.

They couldn’t even produce their own electricity.  This would be illegal (and still is, as we will see). 

The utility would be a monopoly.

Why did the city planners go for this?

The types of electricity production facilities that were being used at that time had giant economies of scale. This term means that large-scale facilities could produce electricity for much, much lower costs per unit of electricity than small facilities.  (Imagine if everyone had a backyard power plant that burned coal to heat water to steam, then used the steam to run a steam engine that turned a generator. Obviously, this would be incredibly inefficient and expensive, compared to a single, giant plant.)  Because the economies of scale are very, very high, the cost savings from a single central plant would be very, very great.  The plant operators would submit the costs to the PUC and the PUC would set the rates, in accordance with a formula that Insull created that provided guaranteed profits for the investors and the company. 

We don’t know the exact words he used to convince the city officials. 

But we know they worked. 

Chicago approved the plan and the city banned all power production by anyone other than the Western Edison Light Company.  Edison’s company had a monopoly on power production. 

Insull quickly raised the money and built the required facilities.  The Fisk Electric Power Station started production on October 2, 1903.  It was the first protected monopoly power station in the world. 

 

Government-Protected Monopolies

 

No business had ever existed like the company Insull built for Edison.  It and all of its investors were guaranteed profits.  Chicago was soon to become an industrial powerhouse.  There was only one electricity supplier and everyone in the city had to pay whatever rates it charged.  The company didn’t set its own rates, it merely submitted its costs to the PUC.  The PUC was then required to use a formula to determine rates that started with these costs and added in the guaranteed profits that the investors had been promised. 

All Chicago electricity consumers paid this rate. 

As long as the city had electricity, the investors were guaranteed profits. 

They couldn’t NOT make profits.

No one had ever had a company with this kind of protection before.  Even Rockefeller’s giant monopoly, Standard Oil Company didn’t have it:  he had to keep people from competing with him by other methods.  (Some say Rockefeller hired people to persuade his competitors to close and sell their operations to Rockefeller by breaking bones and burning homes of those who refused.) 

Insull had the full power of the government behind him. 

If people tried to compete, he could get a court order to stop them.  If they didn’t obey the court order, the police could bring in force and take whatever action was needed to stop them. 

Other monopolies existed at the time and many monopolies had existed in the past.  But none of them had a government guarantee that they would make a predefined profit on every single unit of product they sold.  These other monopolies still had to provide value for their customers and keep their costs low.  If they couldn’t do these things, they may still lose money, even though they were the only provider available. 

This could not happen for the regulated electricity utilities. If their costs were high, they would submit high costs and the PUC would set rates that would allow them to fully recover these costs plus the guaranteed profit that the investors would make.  The more they submitted in costs (as long as they were legitimate costs), the higher the rate that the PUC would set for customers and, because the profit was a fixed percentage of this rate, higher costs translated to higher profits.  This is, as you might imagine, a very good business to be in. 

There is no doubt that the shareholders and other investors love this system.  They are guaranteed profits and they know that these profits will get to them every quarter, no matter what.  (Utility stocks are considered to be the least risky stocks available.  In fact, their risks are so low that many people consider them to be more like government guaranteed bonds than stocks.)

Suppliers of the regulated monopoly utilities love the system.  How great is it to sell to a company that wants its costs to be as high as its managers can justify to government regulators?  Utilities never complain about high prices.  The more they pay for inputs, the more profits they make.

Workers love it too.  How many companies want to pay workers as much as the regulators will let them pay?  How many companies want to provide the most expensive package of benefits they can find? 

Imagine how great it would be to run a company like this:  you never have to fight or argue with your suppliers or workers.  Just give them what they want, declare your costs to the government, and get the money back from customers who have no other choice: there is no competition.  If people want the product your company makes, they have to buy it from you, at a price that provides guaranteed profits for your investors.  Workers, suppliers, investors, and the people who ran the utilities loved this model. 

The city government loved it too.

 

The Chicago Boom

 

Insull was right in a very important aspect of his system:  the types of plants they built at that time had massive economies of scale.  The giant power plant could produce each KWH of electricity for a fraction of the price that small producers had to pay for the electricity.  Even when it paid much higher rates for its labor and materials than anyone else, the Fisk Station’s costs per unit of electricity were far below those of the power systems that were then in use everywhere except Chicago. 

Consumers of electricity in Chicago were very happy about this:  they had the cheapest electricity in the world. 

Chicago also had the only truly reliable power system in the world.  Since it had giant facilities, it could afford to pay people to make sure its system worked virtually all the time and that it had backup facilities in place to supply electricity if the main facilities should have problems. Smaller producers just can’t afford these kinds of backup systems.  Chicago had the first cheap and reliable electric power in the world.

 

Chicago is known as the birthplace of the skyscraper and you can understand why: skyscrapers need elevators and elevators need totally reliable power.  People will not want to get into an elevator if they think the electricity may go out while they are in the car.  Chicago was the only place with reliable power, so it was the only city that built skyscrapers, with a monopoly that lasted until other cities copied the system. 

 

The System Spread

 

Samuel Insull was clearly a very persuasive man.  He managed to convince Edison to switch to AC, in spite of his crusade against it. He managed to persuade the city of Chicago to give him a monopoly, in spite of massive anti-monopoly sentiment that was sweeping the globe at the time.  (Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Company dominated oil markets and had given Rockefeller the ability to set fuel prices around the globe at any level he wanted.  He could rape the people who needed fuel and there wasn’t anything anyone could do about it.) 

Insull had managed to persuade investors to pour incredible sums of money into an investment model that had never been tried before.  He had created new legal systems, designed new kinds of corporations, and built investment vehicles that had never existed before. 

And it all worked perfectly. 

He was right:  his system brought the benefits he claimed it would bring.

Other city managers saw how well the Chicago system worked and wanted it for themselves. 

Insull and Edison were happy to help them out. 

Each service area would have its own monopoly electricity provider.  The monopolies would all be individual corporations, regulated in ways that guaranteed them profits.  Edison’s lawyers created a new kind of corporation, called a ‘holding company,’ which would be the owners of the individual corporations that held the individual monopolies.  This holding company was first named ‘Edison General Electric;’ later the name was changed to just General Electric.  It quickly became the largest and most profitable corporation the world had ever seen. 

Westinghouse didn’t get left entirely out of the picture.  It got a share of the pie too.  But Westinghouse and Tesla basically had to get their share by copying their rival. In the next few decades, copycat companies were created in other parts of the world and got their own piece of the pie. 

The model was always the same: each service area would grant a monopoly to supply power.  The monopoly would submit its costs to a utility commission and get them back plus guaranteed profits for the investors.  This is the system that is in place today.  It is how the electricity business works.

 

A Threat to the System

 

The government-protected monopoly system works fairly well as long as enormous plants are needed to supply electricity.  If we need enormous plants, people will have to make enormous investments; they will not make these investments without some assurance they are going to make back their money plus a reasonable profit.  We all know that technology is advancing rapidly.  What if a retirement fund puts billions of dollars of its pensioners’ money into an investment and then, a few years later, someone discovers a new technology that makes the existing system obsolete?  If this happens, the new technology will quickly replace the old one, the old system won’t be able to compete, the utility will go out of business and the pension fund will lose its money.  When it comes time to pay pensions, the fund simply won’t have the money.  The people who worked their entire lives expecting pensions will not get them

In 1903, technology was advancing quickly.  In fact, by 1903, patents had already been filed on solar photoelectric systems and many other electric systems were in the works.  The people asking to invest would only do so if they could get guaranteed protection: the government had to be there to make sure that no one could compete with them, no matter how good the alternative system happened to be. 

The system set up in Chicago had some tradeoffs.  The people of Chicago would have to put up with a monopoly.  Most of us have worked with monopolies and realize that they take advantage of people.  They have no need to worry about providing good customer service, because none of their customers can go anywhere else.  Corruption is a part of these new kinds of monopolies:  there is no reason to work to keep prices low because you can always recover your costs, plus a profit margin, no matter what you pay for supplies.

Suppliers realize this. 

They realize they can charge a lot more than they would to people who cared about costs.  The people at the top realize that they can make deals with suppliers:  they will work with them and allow them to charge as high of rates as the PUC will accept, provided the suppliers kick back a little of the windfall to the buyers at the utilities. Any excuse to add extra costs leads to extra profits.  (Remember, to determine the rates, the PUC boards take the costs, add in a fixed percentage profit margin, and then calculate the rate that needs to be charged to generate that profit.  The profit is a percentage of the costs so the higher the costs, the higher the profits.)

The power companies can profit by doing things that cause damage that is costly to fix.  For example, they can literally throw monkey wrenches into turbines. Now the turbine has to be fixed, the workers all get extremely generous overtime, the suppliers need to step in for emergency supplies (which will be charged at more than the normal exorbitant rates), the investors will get larger dividends (paid out of profits, which are higher because of the higher costs) and everyone will be happy. 

Except, of course, the rate payers: they will pay for the inefficiency, corruption, and waste, in the form of higher rates. 

In this particular case, however, the monopoly system actually provided extremely low rates.  Even with the corruption, waste, and inefficiency, the total costs of the central station power system were far lower than the costs of a lot of little power stations.  If you have a little power station, you need to hire horses and wagons to haul the coal in, a wagon load at a time; you need to hire laborers to shovel the coal and you need a repair crew standing by all the time waiting to fix something if it breaks to ensure a dependable power supply.  If you have thousands of plants, multiply all these costs times the number of plants to get the total cost of the system.  If you have one giant plant, you can build train tracks to haul coal in 10,000 ton loads; far more efficient than the 10,000 wagons, 40,000 horses (each wagon can haul about a ton with four horses pulling it), and 20,000 teamsters needed to haul the same coal.  Four giant steam engines are much cheaper to maintain than thousands of small engines. 

Reliability is much easier with a large plant:  if you need a maximum of three steam engines to produce all required power, build four. If one should break down, you switch on the spare and keep going while mechanics fix the broken engine.  If you always have at least one spare of everything (easy to do with a large plant; very difficult for thousands of tiny plants) you can always supply power.

The system Insull put into place had tradeoffs.  The people of in the monopoly service areas couldn’t benefit from competition as it was not allowed.  Corruption, inefficiency, and waste are inherent parts of systems where people don’t have to respond to competition.  The customers pay for this.  But the incredible economies of scale of the large system gave them extremely low prices anyway.  In fact, it wasn’t until the 1960s that new technologies came along that could produce power for significantly lower prices. By this time, the central power system had been around for more than 50 years.  It had made incredible profits and was still making incredible profits. (Remember, its profits are guaranteed:  the agreement with the government requires the government to set rates that will always provide profits to the company.) 

Obviously, the people who were involved with this system wanted it to remain in place. The suppliers knew they could get much higher prices selling to these monopolies than to anyone else.  The workers got fat contracts with great pay, great pensions, great benefits, and no chance whatever that their plant will close and lay them off.  The investors loved it; it is wonderful to get profits, returns, interest, and dividends that are essentially guaranteed to be paid to you, every quarter, on time, without having to take any real risk.  The people who ran the businesses knew that there was no pressure on them to do good jobs: as long as they could keep their costs high (something most other businesses would see as bad), they can keep their jobs. 

These people knew that, eventually, there would be pressures that would push to change the system.  They were doing well and willing to set aside some of the money to make sure that the system lasted as long as possible.  They built lobbying arms that became truly massive and incredibly powerful.

 

Non-destructive Power and Government-Protected Monopolies

 

The monopoly system works as long as coal is used for fuel, because large coal plants are much, much more efficient than a large number of small coal plants.  The term for this is ‘economies of scale:’  large plants have lower unit costs than small ones.  If you scale up the plant, the cost per unit of output goes down. 

What if someone invents a new technology that does not have economies of scale? 

What if the massive investments are not required? 

What if people could make the same thing—electricity—at the same price as big producers, but they didn’t have to build massive plants to make this happen?

If we don’t need the massive investments, we don’t need monopolies protecting the utilities.  The only reason they asked for and got the right to form monopolies was that they needed to get enormous amounts of money very quickly to take advantage of the economies of scale.  If the same electricity could have been produced at the same cost with small investments, there would be no reason to have monopolies. In fact, monopolies would be horrible if electricity could be produced with small plants, because competition would quickly create an extremely efficient system (small producers who were not efficient could not compete) and innovation would bring new products to market that could do everything better and cheaper. 

Solar provides a very good example because solar has absolutely no economies of scale.  A lot of tiny devices use solar panels to charge their batteries.  The cost of producing a watt of capacity in these tiny devices is identical to the cost of producing a watt of power in the largest solar plant that exists.  I have solar panels on my roof and am writing this on a computer powered by solar.  I paid $4,000 for the system in 1994 so it has been running for 26 years.  It has produced all of my power.  I have never had to touch it in 26 years.  I don’t shovel sunlight onto the panels in the morning.  I don’t even clean them: the rains do a good job at that. 

As we will see, it is illegal for people to put solar panels on their roofs and sell the power to other people.  The monopoly makes it illegal within the service area of my utility and special laws like the Public Utilities Regulatory Policy Act (PURPA, discussed later) make it illegal to sell to people outside of this service area.

Just imagine, however, what the world would like if the laws protecting monopolies didn’t exist. 

Anyone could do what I do.  They could produce electricity for a tiny fraction of the costs of fuel-based power plants.  The utility industry knows all about this.  They work very aggressively to make sure it doesn’t happen.  Solar is not the only non-destructive option available:  there are many others.  As a general rule, however, any system that doesn’t destroy any fuel in production (wind, geothermal, tidal energy, to name a few) is likely to be cheaper than any fuel-based system, for this simple reason: if the system doesn’t use fuel, the producers don’t have to pay for fuel.  Fuel is necessarily expensive and it is, by far, the greatest expense for all fossil fuel plants. 

The destructive (fuel-based) systems can ONLY continue to function if they have governments standing behind them and protecting them from competition.

I think it is easier to understand how difficult their task has been if we step back and examine their most dangerous nemesis:  the thing that frightens the destructive industries the most is simple solar photoelectric energy.  Let’s step back a little and look at this energy source to see why it is so dangerous to the destructive industries.

In 1839, a French physicist named Edmond Becquerel discovered that he got a shock from a certain material if it is sunlight, but he didn’t get the same shock if it was not in sunlight.

Electricity was being created from light.

In 1879, the American inventor Charles Fritts produced the first practical device. He doesn’t appear to have understood how or why it worked. (Einstein figured this out in 1905 and we will go over it later.) In 1883, Fritts installed the first practical solar photoelectric system on the rooftop of his New York City lab.

He spread a wide, thin layer of selenium onto a metal plate and covered it with a thin, semitransparent gold-leaf film. This selenium module, Fritts reported, ‘produced a current that is continuous, constant, and of considerable force, not only by exposure to sunlight, but also to dim diffused daylight, and even to lamplight.’ Fritts predicted that ‘we may ere long see the photoelectric plate competing with coal-fired electrical-generating plants.’

Fritts did not patent the device.

But Nicola Tesla heard about it and decided that it had commercial applications. On March 21, 1901 he applied for a patent on the process and his application was granted Patent No. 685,957 on November 5, 1901.’ The system that Tesla had built was not very efficient. Modern experimenters have built devices like the one he patented and found that they are able to convert about 1% of the energy in the sun directly into electricity. Tesla had no idea how the system worked. (He speculated that tiny particles of light were turning into particles of matter: electrons. It took Einstein to figure out what was actually happening.)

After he got his patent in the United States, Tesla filed in several other countries to protect his rights there.

In 1904, Albert Einstein was working at a patent office in Geneva Switzerland. He came across Tesla’s patent application and tried to figure out what was happening. He wrote and published a paper titled: ‘Concerning an Heuristic Point of View Toward the Emission and Transformation of Light,’ commonly referred to as ‘The Photoelectric Effect.’ This paper explained what happens and why the light literally turns into electricity. We will look at it a little later in the chapter; it shows that we can have all of the electricity we could ever want if we take advantage of this process. But before we look at this, look at the history a little more.

In February 1953, scientists at Bell labs named Daryl Chapin, Calvin Fuller, and Gerald Pearson began looking for a device to produce power in remote locations. At the time, battery technology was pretty primitive and no batteries had been found that would hold a significant charge in very hot and humid climates. The scientists at Bell Labs wanted something to produce electricity to go into the battery to replace its losses due to heat and humidity.

At the time, other researchers had been working on transistors, which were made with silicon. (Silicon and the selenium that Fritts and Tesla used are semiconductors and these are what is needed to turn sunlight into electricity, as we will see.) They found a similar effect with silicon: it produced electricity when hit by sunlight. Chapin found that even a simple silicon device produced significantly more electricity than the selenium systems that had been used before. He was able to make a device with an efficiency of 2.3%, more than double the efficiency of the best system so far, within a few days.

He talked to management, saying he had a potential new commercial product. He wanted funding. The company analyzed the costs and potential market and determined that if they could get efficiency up to 6%, the device would have enough uses to justify marketing and trying to sell it. Chapin said he could make that happen and got his funding. He met the goal later that year and, on April 25, 1954, Bell labs held a press conference to announce its ‘Bell Solar Battery.’

This was a panel of cells that relied solely on light power to run a 21-inch Ferris wheel. The next day the Bell scientists ran a solar-powered radio transmitter, which broadcast voice and music to America’s top scientists gathered at a meeting in Washington, DC. The press took notice. U.S. News & World Report speculated excitedly in an article titled ‘Fuel Unlimited’

 

The silicon strips may provide more power than all the world’s coal, oil and uranium.

 

The New York Times stated

 

The work of Chapin, Fuller, and Pearson, which resulted in the first solar cell capable of generating useful amounts of power, may mark the beginning of a new era, leading eventually to the realization of one of mankind’s most cherished dreams — the harnessing of the almost limitless energy of the sun for the uses of civilization.

 

How Much Does it Cost?

When the technology was new, these cells cost a lot to make. They required silicon in a perfect crystal and silicon does not grow into perfect crystals in nature. They had to create a machine to produce these crystals. The devices they built, called ‘crystallizing furnaces,’ were extremely expensive.

The raw materials for the cells were dirt cheap. This was because they were made of dirt: silicon dioxide, the main component of solar cells, is the cheapest and most abundant material on earth. (About 87% of the Earth’s crust is silicon dioxide.) But the machines needed to process this into silicon wafers had to rearrange atoms one at a time. Although Bell Labs produced a few crystals in a test machine, it didn’t create a machine that was capable of manufacturing enough crystals to sell. Bell had never intended to be in the business itself: it only wanted to create the technology, license it, and then make back its investment through royalties and license fees.

The company licensed the technology to Leslie Hoffman of Hoffman electronics. This company made and sold televisions and had become one of the largest television manufacturers in the United States. After Hoffman bought the first license to make the new silicon wafers from Bell, he changed the name of his company to Hoffman Electronics and began to make silicon wafers to be used both for transistors and for solar panels.

He built the world’s first crystallization furnace. (I will explain what this does and why it works below.) Generally, the first devices made to create something isn’t very efficient and Hoffman’s furnace wasn’t very efficient. But it didn’t have to be because no one could compete with Hoffman: he had the patent. If you wanted solar photoelectric device, you had to go to Hoffman.

The machine took about a week to ‘grow’ a crystal in the form of about a five inch ball. He would then cut it into tiny ‘wafers’ with a diamond saw and turn the wafers into solar cells by a process described below. He didn’t produce many of the solar cells but a lot of people wanted them, so they were very expensive.

His first sale was recorded at a price of $1,760 per watt of capacity.

 

 

This price has nothing to do with the cost of making the devices.

If you had the right machines, you could make them for almost nothing (the raw material costs were basically free.) It was all about an extremely limited supply and a great demand.

One of the very first uses of photoelectric electricity was to provide power for satellites.

The first satellites didn’t have any power systems except batteries. These were only useful for a few days. The world’s first man-made satellite, launched October 4, 1957, had batteries only; it was able to operate for 22 days, until 26 October 1957. It had orbited the Earth 326 times. The satellite orbited without doing anything until Jan 4, 1958, then it burned up in the atmosphere.

The United States government launched its first satellite on January 31, 1958. It was also powered by batteries and broadcast only a short time, with its main batteries giving out after 31 days. Space explorers wanted satellites that would send out signals much longer, allowing them to get more information. In the United States, Hoffman had the patents so this was the only place to go: the government bought 2 watts in solar panels (6 panels, each slightly over 2 inches square) to keep the batteries charged that ran the transmitters in the transmitters in the next satellite, the Vanguard 1, launched in March of 1958. With these solar devices charging the batteries, the satellite was able to send signals to Earth for six years, with the last signals received in May of 1964. The government didn’t release the price it paid for these first solar cells, probably the first commercial sale of solar power equipment by a manufacturing company. Over the first 18 years or so of solar use, there are no records of manufacturing or costs. Presumably, governments were the only buyers and paid prices that would be staggering compared to modern prices.

The first year we have records of manufacturing and costs is 1976. By then, a lot of companies were making the basic wafers that could be used for solar. We will look at the way the manufacturing process works a little bit later, but the same basic process is used to make silicon chips that are used to make microprocessors (for computers and other smart devices) that is used for solar. Silicon chips for computers are extremely valuable and are probably more valuable, gram for gram, than just about anything else on Earth. (A chip that weighs in at about a gram can easily sell for $10,000.) Factories would turn out a lot of wafers for computer chips, but not all of the wafer material could be used to make chips. The extra material, like the shavings, the outlines from chips that were cut out of the middle of a wafer, and the wafers that had defects that made them unsuitable for computer chips, could be used to make solar panels. As more and more companies began to make computer chips, there was more and more material available for solar. (You can still buy the waste from computer chip makers and turn them into solar panels; there is a lot of information about how to do this on the internet.)

In 1976 solar cells sold for about $76,000 per kilowatt (1000 watts) of capacity.

That worked out to an array of panels about 4 feet by 50 feet, at the time.) The chart below shows the price history until 2020; as I write this in 2021, I am buying for $240 per kilowatt. Due to the much higher efficiency, the new panels take up less than a third of the space, or about 4 ft by 12 foot per kilowatt.

 

Qqqq chart of prices

 

 

 

How much will this produce for you?

To figure this out, you need to know how much sunlight your location has each year. The map below gives a rough figure for this.

(You can call your local solar company for more detailed information.) Qqqq map solar radiation what does this work out to in money?

To figure this out, you need to know how much electricity costs in your area. The best way to figure this out is to look at your electricity bill and divide the total charge by

The Utilities React

The analysts at the utilities knew that the prices of solar were going to fall.

Here is why solar worries them so much:

The justification for having monopolies that are protected by the government and guaranteed profit by the government is that enormous plants are needed to produce electricity in any way that can get it to the people. Giant plants required giant and well coordinated investment. People won’t make these kinds of investments if there is a very good chance that competing technology will drive them out of business within a short time. They need protection. As of the early 1900s, the only way we could have even reasonably cheap electricity was to give them this protection.

However, if people can produce electricity at the same cost as the large plants, but in a tiny plant that doesn’t pollute and can therefore be placed anywhere, there isn’t any reason at all to have government protected monopolies. As of 1976, the utility analysis could clearly see that, if they didn’t do something quickly to prevent a transition to solar, their businesses would become useless relics; as soon as their monopoly periods were over, they would lose their rights and lose their guaranteed profits and returns on investment. They obviously didn’t want this to happen.

By the late 1970’s, the people who ran the investment departments in public utilities realized their model was in trouble. They began to take steps to protect themselves. If you have billions of dollars a year in guaranteed profits if you can find a way to keep the destructive businesses operating, and compare this to zero if you fail, you obviously have powerful incentives to work very hard to find a ways to keep competition under control.

They found some very powerful tools. One of them involved monitoring solar developments very carefully. When a new device was patented that has a significant impact to make solar more practical, they can buy it and kill it. Only the owners of patents can use the technology. If the owners don’t use it, and don’t license anyone else to use it, it can’t be legally used. We will go over some of the key solar patents that were bought up and shut down to prevent the technology from becoming available shortly. Their efforts in this area have been very effective.

Another tool involves manipulating the political system. They could and did build massive action committees all over the world to make sure that people friendly to their cause would be in governments. In governments with elections, they could use their vast resources to work for the defeat of any who oppose them and to make sure that the others were extremely grateful for the help they got when in office. In other areas, where government officials are appointed and not elected, they could use their political action committees to help the people who appoint officials know who to best appoint and make sure they are well rewarded if they make the right choices. In cases where unfriendly governments are in power, they could use their political action committees to support groups that were friendlier to their cause and needed money to take over control of the government. We will look at examples and see that these efforts were extremely successful: you can do a lot to mold the political climate if you have trillions of dollars a year in income to use for this end.

A third tool involves public education.

They can offer free ‘education’ services that provide information friendly to their cause. They can send guest speakers out to “educate” school children about energy options and make sure that whenever children hear the word ‘coal’ it is preceded by the word ‘clean’ and whenever they hear about destructive options they hear ‘conventional’ or ‘normal,’ whenever they hear about any non-destructive option they hear something like ‘someday we may be able to do this’ or ‘it may be practical someday’ so they are led to believe it is not practical now.

They can run advertisements that claim that they are ‘working to make sustainable options practical,’ to create a mental image that these things are very far from practical and there is no real reason to think about them now. They can program computers to identify both friendly and unfriendly comments on social media and have responses ready that make people who want non-destructive options to be able to compete with them to be unpatriotic, anti job, or members of unrealistic cult or clique that should be ignored, while reinforcing the favorable comments with thousands of computer generated ‘likes,’ making it seem popular. They can promote confusion by having people called ‘experts’ criticize the non-destructive options, claim any who believe in them are uninformed idiots, and making it appear that there is ‘controversy’ (the facts are not in yet, so we can’t say) in areas where, in fact, there is no controversy, at least among informed people with access to objective analysis.

I actually saw something noteworthy on TV in March of 2021: an expert came on television and said that anyone who buys solar is actually supporting slave labor and keeping people enslaved who wouldn’t otherwise be slaves. This was such a strange statement that I had to look it up to see how he could make it. On his website, he talks about the Uigher people in Xinjiang province in China. He claims that their wages are so low that, for practical purposes, they are slaves, making only enough to buy the necessities of life. He points out that there are a lot of factories that make solar decices where these people work, so the factories are enslaving the Uygur people to make solar devices cheaper. If you buy Chinese solar therefore, you are giving the factory owners money that they will then use to enslave more Uygurs.

You are supporting slavery. The man said that there may come a time when it is safe to use solar energy, but that time is not now: Using solar drives up the prices for solar devices, encouraging people to make more and leading to more slavery. Until this changes, we all have to stay away from solar of all kinds: it is socially irresponsible to use this unconventional power system.

People are now collecting trillions of dollars in revenue selling fossil fuels that wouldn’t be sold if people switched to sustainable systems like solar. They have a lot to lose from this change. It makes sense for them to spend billions—many billions if necessary—to make sure people don’t use systems that will end your multi-trillion dollar revenue stream, if this has a chance of working.

They have a lot of tools that they can use to prevent people from using the non-destructive technologies. One simple tool is to make them think that the non-destructive options are far more complicated, troublesome, expensive, and unreliable than they really are. They can make people think that the non-destructive options are unproven, unreliable, bizarre systems that only fanatics that are out of touch with reality even consider. From one perspective, it seems like the non-destructive systems must have some hidden problems: they appear to have characteristics we were told nothing could ever have: they appear to give us something for nothing. This is particularly true for solar photoelectric systems: you just put a panel in the sun and get electricity. You put nothing in. We have all been told that there is no such thing as a free lunch. If people tell you that you can get something for nothing, they are trying to trick you. Burn coal or gas and you know that there is no magic: the coal disappears as the electricity appears. It is something for something. Nothing goes into the solar so it must be something for nothing and this is, as I was told, impossible.

If we want to understand that it really is possible to have electricity without destroying something to create it, we have to understand a little more about how the non-destructive power systems work.

In order to really understand what is going on, we need to understand that solar power is not magic and not any kind of trickery. We have to understand that it works as it does because of the immutable laws of physics:

What Happens:

People have wondered what ‘light’ was from the earliest of times.

Different people had different ideas.

Some people thought it was a wave of energy that flowed through a medium like waves flow to the shore on the ocean. Other people thought each bit of light was a tiny particle. The scientists seemed to have data that showed that light didn’t really conform to either of these things. Before 1905, this was a hotly debated topic among physicists, but the majority of the people were leaning toward the idea that light was a wave which had no mass. This principle didn’t fit certain observations. (For example, light could generate electricity and electricity is moving electrons—particles. Something without mass couldn’t use something with mass, so light turning into electricity seemed to indicate that light must NOT be a wave with no mass.) But it was the best theory available at the time. When Einstein went to school, he was taught that light was a wave with no mass.

Einstein had a reputation in school of arguing with the things he was taught are true. This was one of the things his teacher told him that he just couldn’t accept. There had to be more going on than the teachers understood. He told them they were wrong.

This led to serious problems for Einstein when he got out of school. You see, when graduates went to get jobs, prospective employers would contact the teachers for letters of reference. They would want to know if the person they were thinking of hiring would be good fits with the employers. Einstein had told the teachers that he thought they didn’t know what they were talking about. When the time came to write the letters of recommendation, they remembered and they didn’t give him good reviews.

In fact, Einstein found it impossible to get any job in his field when he graduated. This wasn’t a problem for most of the graduates: The Polytechnic university he had attended was an one of the best in the world and Einstein had gotten excellent grades. Top universities should have been clamoring for him to teach their students; corporations should have been knocking at his door to get him to do research for them.

But none of the best universities or companies seemed to want him .

He didn’t know why.

But he needed a job badly: he had a new baby on the way and had to go to work to support his family.

He decided to lower his standards. He applied for jobs at a middle-tier schools. To his surprise, these schools rejected him also. He then tried to get a job at the German equivalent of community colleges. Again, they turned him down. He then tried to get work teaching high-school science. They wouldn’t hire him either. The corporations rejected him too. He couldn’t find anything in his field.

Much later, after Einstein had astounded the world with his new insight into physics, historians tried to reconstruct the events of his early career to figure out how he could have gotten turned down for any job at all in his field. Some of them went to the places that had rejected Einstein to ask the people who had rejected him why it happened. Eventually they found the reasons:

Einstein’s professors had universally recommended that the prospective employers NOT hire this candidate. They said that Einstein didn’t accept the laws of physics that were taught in school. He kept proposing to his teachers there that he knew more than they did, that the science they were teaching didn’t fit together properly and that he was right and all the people who had come before him in the field had to have been wrong. They should not let Einstein teach students, because he would teach them the nonsense that he believed, not the true science everyone else accepted. They should not hire him for research, because nothing he did could ever amount to anything: he wouldn’t be able to make anything practical, since he just didn’t accept even the most basic laws of physics.

He finally just gave up. He had a friend with government connections and his friend set him up as a clerk in a government office. He wouldn’t be able to work in physics, but at least he would have money coming in.

His job was in the ‘Federal Office for Intellectual Property,’ commonly called the ‘Patent Office.’ He had to review patent applications to see if they met the requirements to be filed for patent protection. While he was there, Tesla’s patent for a solar electric power device crossed his desk. Tesla’s simple analysis clearly conflicted with the standard principles of physics. But he wasn’t trying to say anything about the physics, he was merely trying to explain the things he could see with his own eyes: sunlight was turning into electricity. It was happening. The laws of physics that Einstein was taught in school held that this was not happening and could not happen. But it clearly was happening. And Tesla had a proposal for the reason it was happening.

Einstein and Tesla

Here are the words from Tesla’s application, the one he submitted in the United States:

 

Be it known that I, NIKOLA TESLA, a citizen of the United States, residing at the borough of Manhattan, in the city, county, and State of New York, have invented certain new and useful Improvements in Apparatus for the Utilization of Radiant Energy, of which the following is a specification, reference being had to the drawings accompanying and forming a part of the same.

It is well known that certain radiations such as those of ultra-violet light, cathodic, Roentgen rays, or the like-possess the property of charging and discharging conductors of electricity, the discharge being particularly noticeable when the conductor upon which the rays impinge is negatively electrified. These radiations are generally considered to be ether vibrations of extremely small wave lengths, and in explanation of the phenomena noted it has been assumed by some authorities that they ionize or render conducting the atmosphere through which they are propagated.

My own experiments and observations, however, lead me to conclusions more in accord with the theory heretofore advanced by me that sources of such radiant energy throw off with great velocity minute particles of matter which are strongly electrified, and therefore capable of charging an electrical conductor.

This phenomenon, I believe, is best explained as follows: The sun, as well as other sources of radiant energy, throws off minute particles of matter, positively electrified, which, impinging upon the plate P, communicate continuously an electrical charge to the same. The opposite terminal of the condenser being connected to the ground, which may be considered as a vast reservoir of negative electricity, a current flows continuously into the condenser, and inasmuch as these supposed particles are of an inconceivably small radius or curvature, and consequently charged to a relatively very high potential, this charging of the condenser may continue, as I have actually observed, almost indefinitely (Link to source, United States patent application 685957)

 

Einstein read the application and considered it.

His professors had taught him that light consists of waves with no mass. Electrons were mass and it takes mass to move mass. If the things that his professors told him were right, the device that Tesla was patenting should not work. Yet it did. Einstein already knew this: light can generate electricity. He had argued with his teachers about this: they said it couldn’t, and he said it could. Tesla’s patent application didn’t have any real theory in it. He just saw what was happening and explained it the best he could. Einstein knew that many people had done research and found that different wavelengths of light produce different amounts of electricity. (We perceive wavelengths as ‘colors.’) Tesla said that, at least when the light hit something, it was in the form of minute particles of matter. (Much later, these ‘minute particles of matter would be named ‘photons.’)

Einstein basically claimed that light can change from energy to matter. (He eventually worked out that energy and mass had a very specific relationship: e=mc². This holds for all energy matter translations, including the translation of the energy in a beam of light into the weight of a photon; we will see how this works shortly.) The light starts out as what we may think of as a wave with no fixed location and no mass. When it hits the semiconductors in Tesla’s device, it turns into energy, in the form of the particle now called a ‘photon.’ The photon is incredibly tiny with such a small amount of mass, when it hits an electron is pushes the electron out of it orbit and, in the process, gives up its mass: the mass that had been a photon becomes energy in the form of moving electrons. ‘Electricity’ is another word for moving electrons. The light becomes electricity.

In 1905, Einstein wrote what the Nobel Prize commission considered to be his most important paper. Formally, it is called ‘A Heuristic Point of View Toward the Emission and Transformation of Light.’ It is commonly called ‘The Photoelectric Effect.’

 

 

If Einstein’s paper had just explained things, as Tesla did, it wouldn’t have really been much different than other work before it. But its difference involves the math. Hertz had done experiments where he related the wavelength of the light (what we see as color) to the amount of electricity produced when the color hit the plate. He didn’t know why different colors produced different amounts of electricity, he just knew it did. Blue light generted large amounts of electricity. Green light generated less. Red light, still less.

You could therefore think of a photon (a single particle of light) as like a ball with a certain amount of mass. A blue ball would have a lot of mass; you might think of it as like a bowling ball. This could move an electron with great force (the ‘force’ of a moving electron is called the ‘voltage’) and generate a lot of electricity. You could think of it like a baseball. It could still move a electrons pretty far and still produce a lot of electricity, but not nearly as much as the larger and heavier blue ball. A photon of red light would be very tiny and light, like a ping pong ball. It could only barely move the electron, creating only a tiny amount of electricity. If you get to light that is even further down the spectrum, into the infrared, you will eventually get to a point where the photons are so small that they can’t even move electrons out of their orbits or push them to move through wire. These smaller photons can generate some heat in the objects they hit, but they can’t produce electricity.

Einstein started with a theory that was designed to explain how light turned into electricity. He then came up with the mathematical relationship that would have to hold if that theory was correct. He then used this math to calculate the amount of electricity that would be generated if light of each different wavelength (color) hit the device Tesla had patented. If his theory was right, the numbers that came from his theory should match the numbers experimenters had found.

This is where Einstein’s work stood out from that of former physicist: his theories produced numbers that could be tested and, when they were tested, they worked. (Remember, before his analysis, physicists claimed that the things they saw were impossible because their theory held that light could never turn into electricity.)

Einstein wrote up his findings and decided to submit them to a scientific journal to see if the journal might be interested in publishing them. Normally, journals put any submissions from people without backgrounds into the trash without even considering them.

 

 

But Einstein’s paper must have caught someone’s attention.

The publisher forwarded it to some researchers in the field and they were amazed. Einstein had put together a new way of looking at the two most important things in the physical world, energy (in the form of light) and matter. His results would allow them to solve problems and understand results that could not be solved or understood otherwise.

On March 17, 1905, a German journal published Einstein’s paper ‘Concerning an Heuristic Point of View Toward the Emission and Transformation of Light.’ The world had known that photoelectric energy was practical for several decades. Now they understood why and how the process worked.

Details

Einstein showed that light turns into photons whenever it hits anything solid. The photons are moving at a fantastic speed; it isn’t long before they hit electrons. When a photon hits an electron, the photon disappears: its mass has been converted back into energy in the formula that always holds: e=mc².

There is no loss in either of these translations: they are exact: the energy in the light is converted directly into energy in another form, as kinetic energy in the form of a moving electron.

This is the very definition of electricity: electricity is ‘moving electrons.’

Einstein showed that this always happens. Every bit of light that hits the Earth changes into photons; these photons travel until they hit an electron and push it. Normally, the electrons move around in all directions. If they are going in all directions, they eventually bump into other electrons and make all of the electrons in the object move faster.

When all the electrons in the object are moving faster, we say that the object is ‘getting hotter.’ In other words, normally the electricity turns immediately into heat.

 

 

Light always turns into electricity whenever it hits a solid object.

Always.

Normally, we can’t use this electricity however.

Electrons are moving, but they are moving in all different directions.

If we want to use the electricity, we need to get all of the electrons to move in the same direction. Tesla’s device created a kind of ‘one way gate’ that allowed some of the electrons to move in a single direction, creating a current of electricity that could be used.

A Little More Technical

Solar devices need two different kinds of materials touching each other. This creates a kind of one way gate: the electrons get excited by the sun. They move all around. Some of them go through the gate. The gate is constructed so the electrons can’t get back across. Over time, more and more electrons are on one side of the gate and can’t get back. Electrons are negatively charged. The other side, the side with depleted electrons, have more protons than electricity. Protons are positively charged. The electrons want very badly to get back to their protons, but they can’t get through the gate. You can create an easy path for them to get back by running a wire from the negative side to the positive side. The electrons will go through the wire. If the electricity has a lot of pressure (voltage is pressure), they will want so badly to get back that they will do work, if necessary, to get back. Run the wire so, to get back, the electrons have to go through a light bulb. They will light up the bulb. Run the wire so that, to get back, the electrons have to go through an electromagnet that is a part of a refrigerator motor. The electricity will run the refrigerator.

Electrons are stupid. Once they get home, they forget that they had to do a lot of work to get there. They go out and play in the sun. The sun pushes them across the barrier again (the one way gate is called an ‘NP barrier,’ where ‘N’ stands for negative and ‘P’ stands for positive). This will keep happening as long as the sun shines.

The One Way GATE (NP Barrier)

For example, the solar cells Tesla built started with a thin sheet of selenium and covered it with a microscopically thin (so thin as to be almost invisible) layer of gold. The different materials have different inherent electrical properties. One side has atoms with negative electrical charge. (It tends to have more electrons than protons; this happens for very complicated quantum mechanical reasons that I won’t go into here.) The other has atoms that tend to be positively charged. (The atoms tend to have more protons than they have electrons).

The place where a negatively charged materail meets a positively charged material is called an ‘NP barrier.’ An NP barrier acts like a one-way gate for electrons. If you push an electron out of its orbit so it is wandering free through the material, it may go easily from the negative side to the positive side: it has a negative charge and the positive charge on the other side attracts it. But it can’t get back across the barrier: it has a negative charge and is repelled by the negative charges on the other side of the barrier.

It will stay where it is.

If you leave the panel in the sun for a few microseconds, billions of electrons will be pushed across the barrier. If you have a volt meter (a tool used to measure electricity), you will find that there is a ‘voltage,’ or electrical potential, between the two sides of the object. One side will have a lot of electrons that ‘want’ to get home to their protons on the other side of the barrier, but can’t, because the barrier is in the way.

This side will be negatively charged. The others side will have a lot of protons who have lost their electrons and want badly to fill back up their shells. They would like to get the electrons but they can’t because the electrons can’t cross the NP barrier.

However, if you want, you can help them get where they want to go. You can put a wire around from the negative side to the positive side. There is no barrier between them now. The electrons can get back to their protons to balance out the electrical circuit easily, but only by going through the wire. They are willing to go a long, long way, if necessary, to get home.

In fact, if the panel has been in the sun for a few seconds and billions of electrons have been pushed across the barrier, there will be a mad rush for them to get back. (If you hold the wire from the negative terminal to the wire about an inch from the positive terminal of the solar panel, you can watch them fly across the gap, with a very powerful spark.)

You can put resistance in the middle of the circuit—say add a light that they have to turn on, a television they have to play, or a refrigerator they have to run—and the electrons will slow down a little (they have given up part of their energy) but they won’t stop. Eventually, they will get home.

Once the electrons get back to their protons, they could stay there. If they were smart they wouldn’t let themselves get knocked around by the sunlight anymore. But they have no brains and don’t remember that they had to do the work; they don’t try to avoid doing it again. Once they get all the way around the circuit, and back home, if the panel is still in the sunlight, another photon will knock them across the NP barrier again and they will do it all again. This will keep happening as long as the sun shines.

The sun is providing real energy that we can measure. It produces 1,000 watts of energy for each square meter of the Earth’s surface it illuminates as long as it shines. Without a solar panel there, this energy is still there: it hits electrons and gets them to move faster than they otherwise would have moved, creating heat. However, if you put a solar panel there, a part of the energy turns into usable electricity.

What ‘part?’

That depends on the efficiency of the panels. Early panels, like the selenium system Becquerel discovered, Fritts used for power, and Tesla casemented, were not very efficient. The light produced the same electricity it always did, but the panels only made between 1% to 2% of electricity usable, by the process described above. The early silicon systems like the one the government used on the Vanguard I satellite, had efficiency of about 6%. This means that 6% of the 1000 watts per square meter of energy turned into usable electricity, so they generated 60 watts of usable energy per square meter of panel area. The other 94% of electricity that the light generated was wasted: it turned into heat and dissipated into space.

Modern solar panels have efficiencies of about 23%. They turn 23% of the energy in light into electricity. A square meter of panel will produce 230 watts of electricity. A 100 square meter roof (about 1100 square feet, a small house in America and a large house anywhere else) will produce 23,000 watts of electricity when the sun hits it. In average, this works out to between 100 and 160 KWH per day. (The lower figure is at 4.5 hours of sunlight, the lowest in most places, and the highest is at 7 hours of sunlight per day, about the highest.) This is between 2 ½ and 5 ½ times the amount the average home uses.

Why Solar Cells are now So Cheap We Can Almost Ignore the Price

The very first practical silicon photoelectric cell ever sold, a device with a one watt capacity, is claimed to have brought $1,760. This is a lot of money.

The material costs were insignificant. The cell used nothing but ordinary sand, the cheapest and most abundant material on Earth. Labor (for this particular device) was also basically nothing: the device was made by a machine: the operator simply had to turn it on. Why was it so expensive? There was only one machine; it had only made one cell (so far). A lot of people wanted that cell. People who wanted it had to go to its owner (Hoffman electronics) and bid on it. After the bidding was over, the price ended up at this number.

The machine kept operating. After the next cell, the number of cells on Earth doubled. Then it kept going up. People made more machines. The supply went up.

The demand remained astronomical. Certain devices couldn’t run on any other system. This included satellites, which governments needed very badly to monitor their enemies to determine their capabilities to make nuclear war. If you are worried about such matters, money is no object: you will pay whatever you have to pay.

At no time was the cost of raw materials a significant factor in the price. Similarly, labor isn’t really a big issue. The machines do use electricity, but not much more than the average household. The machines made crystalline silicon in a kind of long, fat, cylinder. (About 10 inches around and 3 feet long). Once this cylinder exists, the manufactures slice it into wafers with a diamond bladed saw. Each cylinder makes thousands of wafers. Once the wafers exist, anyone can easily make a solar panels out of them. (You can buy the wafers on Ebay and the sites that sell them have links to instructions about how to make the panels.)

The machines needed to make the early crystals were incredibly large and expensive. In fact, the machines cost so much that only people with government support and government contracts could make them. But a change that happened in 1958 in a different field ultimately led to incredible demand for silicon wafers and this pushed people to build more and more of the machines, and look very hard for ways to make the silicon wafers cheaper. This enormous demand for silicon wafers of very high quality has led to thousands of giant factories operating around the clock in many places, churning out thousands upon thousands of tons of crystalline wafers each year.

Let’s consider where this demand came from:

In 1958 an employee at Texas Instruments named Jack Kilby realized that the silicon wafers had an important alternative use. The entire wafer could be used as a giant transistor. If you take etch a line across wafer (using hydrofluoric acid), you turn it into two transistors that can operate independently. If you etch a second line in the other direction, you end up with four transistors. The more lines you etch, the more transistors you create.

You can basically do the etching with a specialized printer. You can start with a wafer of crystalline silicon. You can then ‘print’ a set of wires (with metallic ink) and gaps (with acid) onto the wafer and end up with a complex electronic circuit. The better the printer, the more complex of a circuit you could make. You could put many, many transistors onto a very tiny chip, making a complex electronic circuit on a very tiny platform.

Kilby presented his idea to the executives at Texas Instruments on February 2, 1959. The company patented the process on February 6 and began making circuits immediately. The first circuits were designed as guidance circuits for nuclear missiles and had been designed, built, tested, installed, and were put out with nuclear missiles built on 1962.

The company had machines to make these circuits and could stamp them out by the thousands. In 1967, Kilby built the world’s first electronic calculator out of an integrated circuit for Texas Instruments. The company began selling calculators in 1971 and they could them as fast as they could make them. The ingredients used to make the wafers were dirt cheap: silicon, again, is sand.

The first calculators could only add, subtract, multiply, and divide. But as TI and other companies made better and better chips, the calculators became more and more capable. They could do square roots, trigonometry, and make calculations with many variables, all stored in memory and used whenever needed.

Computers

In 1968, Gordon E. Moore and Robert Noyce formed Intel corporation. Intel is an acronym for ‘integrated electronics.’ The company used the same general process that Kilby had pitched to TI a decade earlier to make electronic circuits. Its first integrated circuits (called ‘chipsets’ or just ‘chips’) were specialized devices designed to add on to other circuits to increase the amount of variables they could hold in their memories. In 1972, Intel began building integrated chipset that had both processing and memory functions, with the 8088 product line. In 1976 it introduced an extremely complex chip with an enormous memory called the ‘8086 chipset.’ It was not designed for a ‘personal computer.’ Personal computers did not exist yet. Intel had designed and built the chip to run a pocket calculator.

Two Stanford students, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, thought the chip could be used for a calculating device that would do more than just process numbers: it could actually process words. Jobs went to a local electronics supplier and told him he could make a device that that would process words on a screen and make calculations. IF he could make these devices, would the supplier be interested in buying them? The supplier didn’t believe Jobs could actually make them, but he said that if Jobs could provide devices that did what he claimed, the supplier would buy them. Jobs had a firm offer to buy the computers that didn’t yet exist. He talked to several people about getting the money needed to build the first batch. He met Mike Markkula who provided the necessary $80,000 in exchange for a third of the company.

Wozniak ran the project. Both Jobs and Wozniak knew a lot of very smart people at Stanford and they actually built the devices in Jobs’ garage. They hired another computer enthusiast, Bill Gates, to design the instruction set that would be fed into the chip to turn it from a lump of silicon into a computing device.

The new devices worked as Jobs said they would. Millions of people wanted them and bid for them. Other people got into the field. The silicon ‘chipsets’ that were the heart of the computers were a big bottleneck: they had to be made of silicon wafers and there just weren’t a lot of machines to make the wafers. But people found they could sell a fingernail sized bit printed silicon wafer (the chipset) for thousands of dollars. There was a lot of money available so a lot of people built machines.

To work as chipsets, the wafers had to be virtually perfect. (Specifically, the impurities have to be less than 1 part in 100 billion.) Most of the wafers they produced were not this perfect. Solar systems don’t require perfect wafers. In fact, wafers with relatively high levels of impurities (one part per million) work fine for solar panels. (See https://matmatch.com/blog/making-cheaper-silicon-for photovoltaics/ for technical specifications.) Most of the wafers produced for the purpose of making computer chips got rejected for chips. But there was no reason to throw them away. They were fine for solar. People began fabricating these ‘garbage’ wafers into solar cells. The cost of these solar panels began to fall very rapidly.

In 1976—the first year these ‘garbage’ cells were available for solar production—panels sold for $76 per watt of capacity. Each watt is an area about 4 inches by 4 inches. The chart below shows the extremely rapid decline in the price of solar.

Qqqq solar price chart.

By 1987, when I bought my system, the price was $10 per watt of capacity. By 2010, solar photoelectric systems were selling for $1 per watt of capacity. As I write this in 2020, the average market price is 30¢ per watt (plus tax) of capacity.

 

 

How does this compare to other energy systems?

Later we will go over the cost of fuel-based energy systems (called ‘conventional’ systems, they include nuclear, coal, oil, and gas) in detail so you can see where the costs come from. But even if we just consider the construction cost alone of conventional plants, you can see that solar is significantly cheaper. If you try to search for this on the internet, you will see that whoever is arranging the search engines has been able to make this information extremely difficult to find. The most recent information I could find I could find was from 2008. This report shows that the cost of building fossil fuel powered plants runs between $1.40 and $2.25 per watt of capacity. Nuclear construction costs range between $4.40 and $6.20 per watt of capacity.

Even if these plants had no other costs other than building costs—in other words, if you could build then and set them in the sun (as you can for solar) and they would produce electricity whenever the sun shone; even if everyone who worked there worked for free, if they got their fuel for free, if they lasted forever without any need for repairs or maintenance, they would still cost a minimum of 5 times more than solar.

This next part may seem strange, but it is true: As I write this in 2020, utilities are building fossil fuel power plants at a furious pace. (You can find here: http://sierraclub.org/sites/www.sierraclub.org/files/uploads-wysiwig/final boom and bust 2017 (3-27-16).pdf). They have ramped up production for nuclear plants and nuclear plant construction is now at a 40 year high.

Why is this happening?

How could it possibly be happening, considering that solar costs are only a tiny fraction of the costs of these other power systems?

We have already looked at this issue from one perspective: we have seen that utilities are regulated in such a way that makes it unnecessary for them to worry about competition and can therefore use high costs methods of production if they want to do this. They can buy fuel from whoever they want and generally they buy their fuel from groups that are owned by the same groups of people who run the utilities. (In other words, each day the destructive plants operate, the managers of the planets make millions of dollars in windfalls that they wouldn’t make, if the plants didn’t use fuel-based processes.) We know why they do it: for the money.

But there is another important question we have to ask when looking at this issue:

How do they get away with it?

Why hasn’t there been a kind of global revolution, with people demanding that the utilities have their advantages taken away so that they can take advantage of the far lower costs of the non-destructive methods?

To understand this, we need to take our analysis in a different direction.

We will see that there are two factors that are responsible for the things we observe. First, people are now getting immense amounts of money that they would not get if we used the non-destructive methods. These people get a total of more than $2.36 trillion a year as payments for the things they dig up from the Earth and sell to keep the plants running. (Not a single one of the people made these things: all of the fossil fuels and all of the uranium on Earth that now exists existed before humans evolved.)

This is such a staggering amount of money that it is hard for the human mind to even comprehend it. If you had this much in the form of a stack of $100 bills, the stack would be 1,600,000 miles high, more than 5 times the distance from the Earth to the moon. We need to keep using the destructive systems for them to get this money. The production who get this money know that they have to spend some of this money—perhaps a lot of it—for lobbying, political action, public relations, and advertising, and on various other things, if they are to keep the system that enriches them in place. But even if they had to spend half of this money, or $1,180,000,000,000 a year for these things, it is better for them to spend it and be left with the same amount themselves than not spend it and get nothing.

The first factor that keeps the destructive system in place is the network of persuasive methods that the people who benefit from destruction have built to make people think that the destruction either is not happening, or it is not really very bad, or that non-destructive options don’t really exist, or that non-destructive options are actually incredibly dangerous (I have heard coal advocates claiming that wind power kills millions of birds and that solar puts pressure on the sun that can make it go ‘supernova,’ destroying the earth), or too expensive, or any of dozens of other messages that make people think it is better to leave the existing system in place. It may seem hard to imagine how anyone would believe any of these things but if you have more than a trillion dollars a year to try to convince them, you are going to convince a lot of people. Some of these people will be legislators and government officials: if they believe these things, they will make sure that the laws favor the people who destroy.

The second reason involves military needs. We live in societies that divide the world and human race into entities we were raised to call ‘countries.’ These types of societies have powerful forces that push these entities to build weapons that are as destructive as possible. It is not possible to make some of the raw materials for some of the more important weapons—at least not in the quantities required to keep weapons systems functioning—without certain destructive power systems. In these systems, if a certain structure is necessary for the military to build weapons its leaders feel are critical, they will make sure that structure exists, even if they have to lie to the people about key aspects of the system, even if they have to distort figures and hide them, even if they have to do things that lead to millions of deaths that otherwise wouldn’t have happened, to make sure they have their weapons.

If we want to solve the problems, we need to know the anatomy of the systems that are behind the problems. In this case, the problem is destruction: we need to understand the anatomy of the destructive problems.

Why? If you understand the way the agents that cause the problem work, we may be able to see that there is something about their anatomy that makes them vulnerable. For example, we know now that bacteria—agents that cause many diseases—compete with molds for their food. Molds have evolved certain tricks to help in this competition: they produce chemicals that kill bacteria. Once we realized that bacteria were vulnerable to these molds, we began growing molds and extracting the chemicals that kill bacteria (antibiotics). We now have cures to many diseases because we understand the anatomy of the agents that cause these diseases. We can take the same approach to the problems that threaten us, including the horrific environmental problems we now face. Rather than screaming at people, throwing tantrums, or having governments arrest and punish some of the worst offenders, we can figure out the anatomy of the destruction. We can figure out the tools that the people who have been able to keep the destruction going use to prevent any who may try to end the destruction from succeeding. I think you will see that, if the people understand these tools, if they know they are being tricked, and if even a small percentage of the people trying to solve the problems know about the limits in the tools used to keep destruction going, the prospect of solving the problems will take on an entirely new dimension.

Let’s look at these two issues one at a time, starting with the tools that the people who get the immense amounts of money digging up and selling the fuels used by the fuel-based systems use to protect their business model. They have some incredibly powerful tools and they use them extremely well.

 

The people who run destructive industries make profits with a very simple model: They go to the governments and gain rights to the land containing the items they wish to destroy. (Coal, for example, gas, uranium, or anything else that will be destroyed in use.) They then dig up these items and sell them.

This is a nice business to be in: you don’t have to make anything, you simply collect things that have been on Earth since long before humans evolved and sell them. But it has no long term security: eventually, people will either figure out how to make the same items without destruction or the world will run out of whatever is being destroyed. When these things happen, there is nothing they can do to save their businesses. People who supply the things being destroyed can make a lot of money very quickly. But they know these flows of value aren’t sustainable.

They will naturally do whatever they can to make sure that they get as much money as they can from their rights to the world while times are good for them. If people start switching to non-destructive systems, they will set aside part of the money they get to try to buy up the patents or other rights to these systems so they can shut them down and prevent them from being used. They will use part of their incomes to pay for lobbies to try to get governments to pass laws that protect them. They will use ‘information services’ (another term for propaganda) to try to convince people that it is immoral, unpatriotic, or otherwise wrong to use the non-destructive options and that it is totally moral and patriotic to support destruction of the world around them.

There are many tools that people who get rich destroying the world can use to keep the money rolling in. We all realize that the fuel and other destructive industries are working hard to keep the destruction going. They are behind a lot of legislation and get their way almost always. They know that we all live in a society with a very serious defect: the great majority of the people of the world don’t share in any way in the bounty of this bountiful world and only get even the basic necessities of life if they work. There is never enough work to give these people total security so they are always afraid jobs will disappear. The people who benefit from the destruction can and do play on this fear and make us think that if the destruction even slows down a little, our babies will starve to death or have to do without necessities. They hire professionals to work out the exact things to say, and to have the politicians say when they increase the subsidies on oil or increase the taxes and restrictions on solar and other non-destructive systems.

The tools discussed so far in this book are relatively unsophisticated. But the people who benefit from destruction have such massive amounts of money on the line that they can’t afford to simply take the easy path and leave other paths to higher revenues unexplored. Now it is time to look at some of the more sophisticated tools they use to keep the destruction going. We will see that some of these tools are designed to fix problems which, if not fixed, would have caused non-destructive systems to take over and eliminate destruction (also eliminating the incomes of the destroyers) long ago.

The truth is that the destroyers are fighting a battle that can’t really be won. One way or the other, their incomes are going away: either we will switch to non-destructive systems, we will run out of things to destroy, or we will destroy beyond the level of the planet to heal itself and all perish. No matter which of these three things happens, the gravy train will eventually be over for the destroyers.

If we understand this, we will see that there are pressures on the destroyers all the time. They are constantly facing threats to their business model and they need to work very hard to find and fix these threats to keep their business model operating. Just as it isn’t easy for those of us who are working to save the world, it isn’t easy for these who are working to destroy it. If we understand that these people have to fight an uphill battle, and we understand the tools they use to get over their obstacles, we can take advantage of this knowledge to make their jobs harder and our jobs easier. If we do this as part of a long-term strategy, we can build a system with an extremely high likelihood of moving to a destruction neutral system in a period of time that is short enough that the great majority of the people in the world today will see it happen.

As a first step, we need to know what tools the destroyers are using to prevent the non-destructive systems from taking over, how these tools work, and what we can do to prevent their efforts from working.

The System Spreads

Samuel Insull designed the system for the city of Chicago.

He took a map of northern Illinois. He drew lines to create an area where he intended to provide electricity. This would be his ‘service area.’ His company, Chicago Edison, would be the only company allowed to provide electricity in that area. The company would be required to provide electricity to everyone who wanted it in this area, provided they paid the fees. He wouldn’t set the fees personally and he wouldn’t even have any control over them. He would work out the cost of providing each service he wanted to provide (meter reading, for example, running the wires, hooking up the service, billing, electricity production, and so on.) He would add in his profit margin to come up with a rate schedule. Everyone who wanted electricity could get it for these rates.

The law would back his monopoly. If someone tried to compete, he would take them to court and the court would order the competitor to stop and to pay damages to Chicago Edison for any lost revenue they suffered because of the competition. No one inside the service area could buy electricity from anyone outside the service area: this violated the monopoly: if someone got caught, he would be sued and have to pay damages. There would not be many suits of course: The rules were clear. No reasonable person would invest money into projects that violate the law knowing they would be sued, would lose, and have to pay damages.

The service area was defined by a clear line. All land inside the service area was served only by Chicago Edison. Other land was a free-for-all: anyone could supply electricity there. It would have been possible for large factories to simply move their facilities just outside of the service area. They could then have provided electricity for themselves. Perhaps, if it were possible for them to produce cheaper (using solar, for example, as is available now), there might have been a lot of factories opened outside of the area. But, at the time, there was really only one way to make electricity: burn a fuel (generally coal) to boil water to steam, run the steam through a turbine to turn a generator. This method of production has very high economies of scale: this basically means that a large plant can produce for a far lower cost per KWH of electricity than a small plant. A large plant that runs all the time is even better. Even large factories couldn’t produce their own electricity for less than the regulated prices set by Chicago Edison. There was no reason for them to move outside of the service area.

Chicago was the first city with this system. Other city managers wanted it and the system spread. Eventually, everyone wanted it. Europe, the United States, and Japan, the most highly industrialized nations, moved quickly to divide their entire countries into service areas. Other countries adopted the system inside of large cities. Industry that didn’t use electricity couldn’t compete with industry that did use electricity. If the leaders of a government wanted industry, they needed electricity, and they had only one real option, the system that Insull had created. Other companies copied the model without any real change. The largest power companies in the world, including Edisons GE, Westinghouse’s Westinghouse Electric, the massive global company (based in Germany) Seimans, and Tokyo Electric, all got a piece of the pie.

The central station idea was based on the idea of a monopoly. No one could compete. As long as no one could compete, the system was great.

At first, no one could compete for practical reasons. The only practical way to make electricity involved very large plants. A massive furnace would burn gas, oil, or coal. The heat turned water into steam which turned a turbine to turn a generator. Everyone had the same technology. This technology had massive economies of scale, which meant that small plants couldn’t come close to competing with large plants.

More recently, the practical realities have changed because most other—and virtually all non-destructive—power systems don’t need large plants to be efficient. You can have as small of a plant as you want and the cost per KWH is the same. (The energy is free. This means that the energy per KWH is 0¢ per KWH, regardless of the plant size. For now, the fact that it happens to be free isn’t the important issue: what is important is that there is no advantage to having a large plant.

If you don’t need large plants, you don’t need the monopoly. There is no advantage to it. All monopolies have disadvantages: monopolists have no incentives to work hard to be efficient. (As we have seen, utilities have the opposite incentives: they are guaranteed profits that is a fixed amount times their costs. The higher their costs, the higher the profits.) Monopolies have no incentives to innovate. They don’t have any incentive to provide good customer service: If the employees are rude to you, if they miss their appointments, if they hang up on you, you can’t respond by going to another company: there is no other company. All monopolies have disadvantages. The utility monopolies that Samuel Insull set up had these disadvantages also. But they had advantages that offset the disadvantages.

Now, with solar, the advantages really aren’t there anymore. (This isn’t strictly true: the large monopoly utilities can play an important role in the transition to a non-destructive system and we can set up a rate structure so that they continue to make profits during this time and have incentives to help speed this process. But eventually, after the transition is complete, the massive, bloated, unresponsive money trains that now provide our power won’t be needed anymore. It takes effort to figure out how to meet everyone’s needs during the transition and make sure that it goes smoothly. But if we understand how things work now and have some idea how we want things to work in the future, we can build a system that is designed specifically to get from where we are now to where we want to be. The systems that are now in place have a role in the transition, as we will see, but they won’t be able to sit back and rape the world with rights to collect guaranteed profits doing this forever.)

The First Responders Realize The Risk

Who stands to lose if things don’t keep working as they do?

Obviously, the owners of the utility companies stand to lose. They are guaranteed profits. But they aren’t the only ones. The gas  drillers make money because they have markets for their gas. Natural gas is sold by the ‘therm,’ which means that it is sold by the amount of heat that is produced by burning it. The more gas gets burned, the more money they make. No one now alive has ever made any of the natural gas being sold to utilities and burned for energy. Nature made this gas, billions of years ago, by burying and compressing plant material, which then decayed to natural gas. The same is true for coal and oil. No one made it. But if you can get the government to give you the right to do this, you can dig it up and sell it. It is a nice way to make money: digging up and selling things that existed before the human race. Each day, enough fuel is burned—mostly to make electricity—to fill a line of eighteen wheelers 50,000 miles long.

In some cases, it doesn’t really cost much of anything to dig up this fuel. In the part of the world called the ‘middle east,’ all you have to do is drill a hole and oil comes flowing out of it. If you are in certain parts of the world, you drive a steel pipe into the ground and natural gas will come out of it. (I know some people in China who got their heating gas that way.) In many areas, if you scrape off a few feet of topsoil, you expose billions of tons of coal that you can scrape off and put into trains. (I was raised in a part of Montana where this took place.)

In many cases, the fuels can be extracted from the ground for almost nothing. How much profit can people make selling these things? That depends entirely on the price they can get for the fuels and that depends almost entirely on the amount people burn. If people burn a lot, and they aren’t able to stop burning because there isn’t any other reasonable way to get the energy, the price can be very high and people can make fantastic profits. For example, it is possible to remove oil from the ground in Saudi Arabia and transport it to markets for about $10 per barrel. As I write this, oil is selling for $60 a barrel. The Royal family of Saudi Arabia removes and sells about 11 million barrels a day. They make about $50 per barrel in profit on this, so they make about $550 million per day. Obviously, they want demand for oil to be as high as possible.

The coal that can be scraped from the ground in West Virginia and transported to furnaces for a total of $10 a ton can be sold to the utilities for $60 a ton. That’s $50 per ton profit. The coal is shipped in trains and it takes about an hour to fill up a train with 10,000 tons of coal, so each train load makes somebody (whoever has the right to remove the coal) $500,000. In profits. In 24 hours, the people who make these profits get $12 million. That is after all costs: it is the amount they keep.

A lot of people have a lot of money with this system. They want it to remain the same. They know that there are threats to the system. People can use solar. Every KWH of solar-generated electricity is 1.13 pounds of coal demand that is destroyed. (Data is from https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=667&t=2.) Lower demand means lower prices. The people who mine the coal don’t want the change to solar to take place. The people who own the train companies don’t want this to happen.

The people who benefit from the system get together and talk. They know solar is dangerous for them and know they will all lose if the destruction stops. They aren’t going to sit back and wait for the end to come. They are going to put money into a fund and use this money to deal with the problem at the earliest possible stage: before things get too serious to stop.

A Big Threat and a Preemptive Policy to Head it Off

A little aside from important events that took place before the electrical age began:

The people who formed one of the largest countries in the world, the United States, couldn’t agree on certain matters. Before the government was formed in 1789, the land was divided into entities they called ‘colonies.’ Each colony consisted of the land grants that had been given to one country or corporation.

For example, Virginia had originally been land that had been colonized by a company called ‘The Virginia Company.’ This company had been chartered in London and raised money there. The people who created the company had connections in the government of England. They promised the government of England a share of the money they made if the government would protect them from companies chartered in other countries (mainly Holland and France) that were trying to do the same thing. The Virginia company could do pretty much anything it wanted on its land. If the company wanted to remove the local residents (called ‘Indians’) from their homes by force, and then sell the land these people had inhabited, it could do so. (The company generally couldn’t ask for help from England for this: The British government would defend the company from France and Holland, but it wouldn’t help it remove the locals.)

Some of the things that the Virginia Company wanted to do were illegal in England. For example, the Virginia Company wanted to use slave labor. There were two main ways to get slaves. The first involved going to Africa and kidnapping people, then enslaving them. These slaves were called ‘property slaves’ and were property to be bought and sold; their lives depended on their masters whims and their children would be slaves along with their children. The second method of obtaining slaves involved going to debtors prisons and buying people’s contracts. (Debtors prisons were generally death sentences: conditions were horrible and few people lasted even a year there.) The companies would have the people sign an indenture contract and would own these people for a given period of time (generally between 5 and 30 years.) People bound to service in this way were administered under the Roman laws of Jewish slavery: their masters had certain obligations to feed and house them under the law; the slaves had to serve the masters faithfully for the duration of their counteracts. Their children were not slaves and the slaves themselves would be freed after the contract was over.

The Virginia Company used both kinds of slaves. Neither kind of slavery was legal ‘on British soil.’ The term ‘on British soil’ had a strict legal definition: it applied only to the home island and certain other land that had been granted national status. It did not apply in India, America, the Caribbean, and other areas that had colonial status.

The Virginia Company made its own rules. If it wanted to use slaves, it used slaves. If it wanted to remove ‘Indians,’ and found it easier to remove them if it had burned their villages and contaminated their water supply, it had the legal right to do both of these things: it made its own laws and didn’t have any obligation to follow the laws of England. (North America was granted national status in 1763, under the terms of the Treaty of Paris. This led to certain dramatic changes as the Americans were forced to bring their laws into conformity with the laws of England. Many of the changes were not acceptable to the Americans—the elimination of slavery for example—and they rebelled against them to keep the right to make their own laws. The book Forensic History goes over these matters in detail.)

The Massachusetts Company was granted large amounts of land in the northeastern part of North America. Its land was corporate land the company could make its own rules. Other land was granted to individuals. William Penn got Pennsylvania; Lord Baltimore got Maryland, for example. All of the 13 colonies were either private colonial estates, run under rules created by the owners, or corporate colonies. None of them had national status (again, until 1763) and none had any obligation to follow the rules and laws of England.

The treaty of Paris was signed in 1763 by all major European Powers. This treaty transferred ownership of New France from France to England. (It was to become Canada). This land was to become a part of England: it would now have national status with the specific rights this entailed.

The war that the Treaty of Paris had ended had been mostly about the status of New France. The majority of the war had been fought in Europe and India. the people who drew up the treaty concentrated on the areas that had been in dispute. They wanted to make sure the new borders were right in these areas. They didn’t give a great deal of thought to the status of the land in North America that was south of New France. New France (now ‘Canada’) had become a part of England. It was a stroke of the pen that caused the rest of the eastern part of North America to gain the same status.

As soon as this happened, the British government issued a proclamation, the proclamation of 1763, to create a smooth transition from colonial status to being a part of England.

Forensic History explains what happened next: Certain people who were high up in the two largest corporate colonies (Virginia and Massachusetts) didn’t want to submit to national rule. They had always made their own rules. They had always used slavery. They had always raped the land without any restrictions. They had always dealt with the natives as if dealing with lower animals, exterminating them when they became nuisances. The proclamation of 1763 required the colonies to respect the natives and consider them to be humans with human rights. They couldn’t just be killed when they became nuisances. Certain land had been granted to them forever. The national government of England would require that this land remain free of the influence of non-native cultures forever. The corporations couldn’t even send people to walk on these lands without getting written permission from the native leaders.

Slavery, both white and black, was a key issue. The corporations wanted to use slaves. Slavery was not legal on British soil. The proclamation required that the colonies bring their laws into conformity with the laws of England. They wouldn’t have to get rid of slavery right away, but they would have to begin to make plans to phase it out.

Another key area of contention involved the government. The corporate colonies didn’t really have governments. Corporations ran everything. The highest body in both Virginia and Massachusetts was the board of directors of the corporation. They made all policy decisions. The next level was the executive branch, consisting of corporate officers (president, vice president and so on).

To encourage people to buy large amounts of land, the companies had allowed people to buy their way into high administrative positions. If you bought 50,000 acres or more, you bought your way into a board seat. You could become a member of the board of directors yourself, or hire someone you favored to do this. If you bought smaller amounts of land, you would buy a vote for someone in the executive branch of government, what eventually came to be called the ‘lower house.’

The proclamation of 1763 addresses this issue in detail. None of the colonies had representative government. They would all have to create one.  The corporate colonies didn’t want to have to follow the requirements of the proclamation of 1763. If they kept their national status, and remained a part of England, they had no choice. The national government would force them. Their only choice was to secede from the country. After 13 years of preparation, they declared independence from England in 1776.

The war was a complex affair, but only a few battles—and most of these minor—were fought in America. It was mostly a naval battle between France, Spain, and their allies and England and its allies. When the war ended in 1784, England was still in military control of a large part of America, including New York and New England. Under the terms of the ‘Second Treaty of Paris,’ signed 1784, the British had to withdraw from these lands.

There had been no fighting in America for 6 years. Suddenly, the rebels who had controlled the corporate colonies (again, manly Virginia and Massachusetts) had ‘won.’ The British moved out and told them they could do whatever they wanted.

What could they do?

Logic told them that they had to work together if they wanted the freedom to make their own laws. If they tried to remain small, private corporate and private enclaves, foreign powers would take them over one at a time. They had to create a federation. But they wanted to keep their own policies. The Virginia Company did things differently then the Massachusetts Company. William Penn did things differently than Lord Baltimore. The next few years involved a struggle between two competing philosophies for creating a new political organization. The Federal administration would have to be given some power.

At the very least, it would have to defend the individual colonies/states (or whatever they were called) from possible reconquest by England, conquest by France, Spain, Portugal, Holland, or other threats. There had been two global conflicts in the last generation (the war of 1756-1763 and the war between 1776 and 1784). How would the global powers align in the future? There is no way to know. If the Americans wanted to keep their own rules, they would need to make sure they were able to hold their own, form alliances, and be able to defend their claims. This would require a military. It would have to be strong and that means it would have to have the ability to raise money and organize the union around military goals. It would have to be strong.

But a strong federal government would not suit their interests either. Virginia and other southern colonies depended heavily on slave labor. Massachusetts and other Northern areas relied on ship building and resource extraction for their revenues. They didn’t need slaves and some of them had already started moves to abolish slavery. What if there was a strong federal government and the majority of the people in it didn’t want slavery? The people who controlled the areas that needed slaves might be forced to give it up. In fact, wouldn’t they be basically doing the same thing accepting strong federal laws as by accepting administration by the British government?

In the end, they decided to create the tiniest federal government they could. (Later administrations, particularly the first Adams administration, created mechanisms that would create an enormous federal administration. But the original intent, clear by the constitution they created, was to have the tiniest possible Federal administration. The individual land grants would no longer be called ‘colonies.’ They would call themselves ‘free and independent states’ under the premise that they had the same natural rights as England, France, Holland, Spain, Portugal, Russia, and the other European ‘states.’ They could do anything they wanted, except for interfering in the very limited powers originally granted to the federal government.

They had one big worry: they were worried that the federal government would take advantage of its position of power to prevent states from doing the things the state leaders wanted to do. They wanted to make sure this could not happen. One of the key provisions of the document they created prohibited any interference in the rights of the states to trade with each other. It prevented any interference in ‘interstate commerce.’

Power and Interstate Commerce

States could make their own laws.

If they didn’t want competition inside the states, they could prohibit it. That is what they did when it came to electricity. No competition was allowed within states. Period. What if someone had a totally non-destructive system that produced electricity without burning or destroying anything? Since people wouldn’t have to buy whatever was being destroyed on a continuing basis, this system would be cheaper than the destructive system. But it could be prohibited within the states. The states had all the power.

But what about competition between states?

That was a different matter.

Within a decade after the central station systems started to operate, the different service areas began to buy and sell electricity from other service areas. Some service areas would have excess supply while others had excess demand. It only makes sense for people to transfer power from areas where it is abundant to areas where it is short.

By the early 1970s, the people who watched the system looking for threats to the business model could see one coming: Solar costs were going down very fast. In fact, the costs of all non-destructive systems were falling fast. The costs for destructive power systems were going the other way: as the resources they destroyed got more scarce, they got more expensive. It was clear that it wouldn’t be long and non-destructive systems would be cheaper than destructive systems.

This wouldn’t be a power within service areas. Each one was owned by a monopoly utility. The people who ran the utility wanted the highest costs they could justify. The greater expense of coal, oil, gas, and nuclear served them perfectly: the higher their costs, the higher the base used to calculate their profits, and the more profits they made. It wasn’t really a problem within states because each state had a utility commission that made sure all the utilities followed the same rules. But, over time, utilities had begun buying power from a great many providers all over the country. Many of the utilities had split off some of their power plants and operated them independently, selling electricity to the highest bidders. As long as these plants only sold inside of the state, they had to follow utility commission rules. The utility commission could prevent dangerous plants (plants that used solar and other non-destructive systems, and were a danger to the utility system in that state) from existing.

But what if someone wanted to open a solar power system in one state and then sell only to utilities outside of that state? Then the utility commissions had no power. There wouldn’t be anything they could do to stop it: They have no right to interfere in interstate commerce.

The reason that this is such a dangerous issue for the utilities. You or anyone could open up a solar power system in their own state, make electricity, and sell it anywhere except in their state. Other utilities would pay the market price for it; this is the same price they pay for nuclear, coal, or other destructively-generated fuel. But because you aren’t burning any fuel, your costs are lower and your profits are higher. Each square meter of solar surface in a sunny area (like Southern Arizona) would produce 200 KWH per year. (You can find the calculations in many places on the internet. I got this info from https://www.solarreviews.com/blog/what-is the-power-output-of-a-solar-panel.) There are 4,000 square meters in an acre so if you cover half the land with solar panels an acre would produce 400,000 KWH per year. At a wholesale price of 5¢ per KWH, you could make $20,000 per acre selling this electricity.

Anyone could do this.

Land in this area is very cheap: you could literally buy the land itself for so little money you could ignore the cost. It is true that back in the 1970s, solar panels were quite expensive, but the people who were watching could see that the prices were falling fast and would eventually get to about 20¢ per watt of capacity (where we are now, in 2012). This means that to produce this much electricity you would have to invest $80,000 in panels, plus about another $70,000 to put them up, wire them, and put up your connection system and meter, giving you a total investment of about $150,000. You would then make more than 15% on your investment.

Why This is a Threat that Will Destroy the Entire Gravy Train for Destroyers

Electric utilities make money by utilizing their equipment as fully as possible. If people in their service area demand exactly the same amount of electricity as they produce, they produce their own electricity. But most of the time, this exact balance doesn’t exist. They either produce more than their customers need or less. If they produce more, they sell the excess; if they don’t have enough production at a given time, they buy. This basically turns the entire country into a single electrical system where the supply and demand are always in balance. The utilities can therefore operate as if their local service areas were also in balance all the time. (You see, they wind up buying the same amount they wind up selling and, since the prices are more or less the same, the amount they pay balances the amount they get selling electricity.)

What if some outside supplier—a non-utility that only sells across state line and therefore doesn’t have to follow the same rules as utilities—started selling electricity produced by solar? The utilities would need to buy power from time to time. They would have to pay market prices: the utility commissions won’t allow them to recover their costs and make profits if they are paying prices that are high above market prices. (They can only recover their costs with the guaranteed profits if the costs are reasonable and necessary. It is never necessary to pay more than the market price and it isn’t reasonable either.) If solar producers only sell across state lines (where states can’t interfere) they can sell for whatever price they want. Their costs are far lower than conventional producers, so they can sell for far less and still make money.

The utilities need to be able to utilize their equipment fully in order to operate and make profits. (Recall that this is the argument that Insull used to convince the city managers at Chicago to accept a monopoly.)

They won’t be able to sell excess electricity from their nuclear, gas, coal, or other destructive plants when they have more electricity than their customers need, because the utilities that would have bought it will buy the lower-cost solar. (Fuel alone for destructive power plants costs more than the price that would prevail if solar provided a large part of the energy.) When their customers don’t need as much as they can produce, they will have to shut down their equipment. Once this happens, the advantages of the central station concept no longer exist. There is no reason to allow monopolies. But, far more important to the destroyers, the destructive systems won’t be profitable anymore. They will have to pay for excess electricity when they need it but won’t be able to recover the money they pay from other utilities by selling their excess to them. Their costs will go up and up and their revenues will stay the same. The more solar gets produced, the greater this imbalance.

The business model of the destroyers depends on deception of the people. The people have to be convinced that the monopoly destroyers are necessary or they will not sit back and let them rape both the world and the people they serve. If anyone can see that the wholesale price of electricity is 5¢ (and it would have fallen to this level a long time ago if not for the laws discussed below, which prevent solar), and the utilities are charging 25¢ per KWH to their customers, just to avoid using the non-destructive systems, the people are going to be upset. They aren’t going to sit back and let the destroyers operate. As a result, the destroyers have to play a delicate game. They have to trick the people into believing things don’t really work the way they work.

If the people could see with their own eyes that solar works and makes profits, the utilities would have a much harder time tricking them. By the early 1970s, they saw the risk and began to take steps to prevent solar and other non-destructive systems from taking over. They used a lot of tricks, which I will discuss below. But the most effective, the one that is kind of a keystone of the other tricks to keep destruction alive, is a law that was first passed in 1978 in the United States called the Public Utilities Regulatory Policy Act, or PURPA, and then exported to the rest of the world over the next few years.

Who Makes the Laws?

This next part may seem crazy. It is crazy that we should have laws that specifically prohibit people from selling any electricity that is not destructive across state or national boundaries. But as long as we continue to use fuel-based systems, more than $2 trillion a year goes to the people who dig up and sell the fuel.

They want to protect this massive income stream. They have a lot of money to make this happen and, as strange as it may seem, they actually found a way. To understand why they have been able to do this, we need to understand a little bit about the way laws are passed:

Some of the laws that are passed come directly from legislators without any help from lobbyists or other vested interests. Simple laws like the shape of a stop sign or whether we should have a holiday for Martin Luther King are examples. Legislators aren’t generally divided about whether murder or rape should be illegal. As long as the matter is very simple (and can therefore be totally understood by someone without any significant technical skills), and there are clear political advantages to supporting it, legislators can pass laws without help from lobbyists.

But most laws don’t meet these requirements. It is easy to see by reading these laws (or attempting to read them: most are written with such complex legalize language that few people can understand them without teams of attorneys to explain the terms) that they were not written by the people who have gained office and are in positions of authority over legislation. Companies want government to protect them so they will be able to make more profits than they otherwise would make. They hire professionals to write bills that will lead to this protection. They then pay these professionals to lobby the government officials: essentially, to do whatever they have to do to get the bills that benefit the corporation passed into laws.

Different countries have different laws about what lobbysist can and can’t do. In most countries, lobbyists can’t to go to government officials and offer them cash for a vote. However, in some countries, the right to try to influence legislation is called ‘free speech’ and is guaranteed by the highest laws in the land. The United States is in this category. Even in the United States, it isn’t legal to go to a legislator and offer cash for votes. But it is perfectly legal to give cash donations to election campaigns, to create political action commissions which assist the legislators in various different ways that can lead to the legislators getting large amounts of cash, and then telling the legislators that they will continue to get this money provided they are ‘friendly’ to the legislation. (It is totally legal to pay people to be friendly to legislation; you just can’t pay them to vote for the legislation.)

Not every country allows this simple trick. (It is called ‘bribery’ in some countries and people say that claiming they are being paid to be ‘friendly’ to the law, not to vote for them, is totally transparent.) But making things illegal doesn’t stop them from happening. Legal or illegal, it happens.

The corporations start by having their legal teams write the ideal bill, one that will give them everything they want. They then pass this bill onto the lobbyists with instructions to turn the bill into a law by any means necessary. The lobbyists are then given massive amounts of money. (In the United States, corporations don’t have to disclose the amounts they pay so we don’t know how much it is, but it is certainly an enormous amount of money.) The lobbyists can do just about anything they want. Their job is to get the bill signed into law.

They then find a legislator who they know is on their side and get her to put her name on the bill, or ‘sponsor’ it. The sponsor introduces the bill and pushes for it to be put up for a vote. The lobbyists know that different legislators have different needs. They have other legislators asking them to support their legislation. The legislators are offered support for their bills if they agree to support the bills of other legislators. They trade favors.

Most of the time, the legislators don’t even really understand the laws. In fact, some of the bills are written to hide their meaning and make it extremely difficult for anyone to really understand what they do. The laws that prohibit the sale of energy from renewable sources, including solar, across state and national boundaries, are a kind of super example, as we will see: I defy anyone to read this entire law and then piece it together in their heads in a way that makes sense.

The original law that prohibited the sale of solar and other non-destructive energy across state/provincial/national boundaries was a United States law, passed in 1978. This law, called the Public Utilities Regulatory Policy Act (commonly known as ‘PURPA’) became a model for the world. I want to go over this particular law but bear in mind that the issue is not just a United States issue: this particular law is just an example. Once the utilities found this would work, they were able to copy it in other parts of the world.

I have presented an excerpt from PURPA below and a link to the full text of the law. If you read the excerpt below (or try to) you will see that it is incomprehensible gobbledygook. You won’t get any greater clarity by going to the law itself and starting from the beginning: from the very first word, the law is incompressible.

What is it trying to say?

What is it trying to do? You can comb through it for the rest of your life and never get it, at least not by reading the law itself.

 

 

The ambiguity and difficulty in reading was clearly intentional.

The people who wrote it would have been able to make it comprehensible if they wanted to. They could have included plain English translations of the legalize so we would know what the law was designed to do.

I don’t think anyone in the world could actually figure this out by reading it from one end to the other. The law is very long; with ammendements it is more than a thousand pages. The stated purpose and claimed purpose is to require that utilities buy renewable energy from any producers. But if you actually offer to sell electricity produced by renewable facilities, you will find that the rate that you get paid (which is determined by formulas that are set forth in PURPA is basically nothing at all. I have solar systems in Arizona and Oregon and in both cases I get far, far less than 1¢ per KWH for excess electricity I sell. (In Tucson, the rate is $0.00134 per KWH, roughly 1/7th of a cent per KWH, with a cap of $7.50 per month. Because the charges for paperwork always exceed $7.50 per month, the company is required to ‘buy’ this electricity for a negative amount of money.)

This requirement to ‘buy’ the electricity (for a price that is either zero, negative, or so close to zero that any difference is not significant) hides the real intent of the law, which is a requirement for all ‘plants that use renewable energy’ that are smaller than 80,0000 KWH in capacity to sell their electricity to the utility for the rate specified. In other words, this law makes it illegal for producers of renewable energy (except those that own enormous facilities like massive hydroelectric dams, most of which are owned by governments) to sell electricity to anyone other than the regulated utility in their area.

Before PURPA was passed, this was already illegal within states.

Only monopolies could produce and sell electricity.

But PURPA closed a loophole that would have allowed it to be sold on markets. If not for PURPA, companies that have large warehouses or other buildings (like superstores) could cover their roofs with solar roofing materials. They could then sell the solar-generated electricity for market prices, making $20,000 per year (at 2021 market prices) for each acre of roof they have. If you fly over a city and look down, you will see that about 30% of all the land is covered by roofs. Perhaps many home owners wouldn’t use the solar because they wouldn’t run the numbers and realize it makes sense to do it. But you can be sure that all of the commercial and business roofs would be solar.

My home’s roof produces 100% of the electricity I use both for my home and my electric car with coverage of only 30% of the surface. What if all of the roofs in the cities produced at the same rate? This would lead to production of billions of KWH of electricity from solar. The solar would replace the destructively generated power. (It isn’t possible for fuel-using systems to compete with those that don’t use fuel.)

As early as the mid 1970s, the people who profited selling fuels realized this was a significant danger to their business model. They needed to prevent it. They weren’t afraid to use trickery to make it happen. They called the law they created to make this happen a law to encourage solar, but anyone can see it is designed to do the opposite.

Over the years, the destroyers have gotten bolder and bolder. They got away with it the first time. Why not go further? As solar costs plummet, they to push for more and more restrictions. They have their lawyers draw up bills that will give them what they want. Then they hire another team of lawyers to make the bill language as incomprehensible as possible. (There is always a chance that someone will try to read it; this has to be so difficult that, if anyone does understand it, she won’t be able to explain it to others in the amount of time people are willing to listen.)

They then advertise it as a pro-solar or pro-renewable bill. They are helping the world. Only those willing to look up the details will know otherwise. You can find lists of the revisions on https://eelp.law.harvard.edu/2019/09/public-utility-regulatory-policies-act-of-1978-purpa/. Note that the comments on the revisions make it clear that each revision had the effect of making solar less competitive.

As the Harvard website points out PURPA is the only federal law that deals with the relationship between private solar providers and utilities. If you go to state websites, you will see that the state governments are far more active. The legislation is continuous. Again, lobbyists write the bills themselves and they make them so difficult to read that anyone who attempts to do so will drive the person who attempts it insane.

But the laws can be understood by calling the power companies and asking their billing people. Ask how much money you can actually get by putting up solar and selling it to the utility. (When I did this, the rep laughed at me. People don’t actually get electricity checks from their electricity company.) The tricks change from country to country, from service area to service area, from company to company, but in the end, people who produce more electricity than they use with solar don’t get enough money to justify the trouble. You don’t have to know the details to know that this is true, all you need to do is fly over a city and look down:

The truth is that solar is cheap, cheap, cheap. If people could sell solar-generated electricity for market prices, everyone who cared about money would produce and sell as much as they could. Perhaps many home owners wouldn’t be smart enough to figure this out, but you can be sure that if the electricity could be sold for market prices, there wouldn’t be a Safeway, Walmart, Walgreens, Home Depot, or shopping mall of any kind that wasn’t roofed with solar electricity-generating roofs. The proof that laws like PURPA (as amended numerous times) is able to prevent interstate sales of electricity from producers is everywhere: if it were not true, the destruction wouldn’t be taking place.

Misdirection And Sleight Of Hand

When the government passed PURPA in 1978, I was living in Bozeman Montana. The industry groups saturated the airwaves with radio ads, interviews, moderated forums, and lectures extolling the virtues of this law. In fact, you couldn’t go more than a few minutes without some media source repeating the talking points used to promote PURPA:

Here was the message: ‘the environmentalists have finally won.’

The utilities are now required to buy renewable electricity at a regulated price. People will begin selling renewable electricity in competition with the gas and coal power plants. Since the renewable plants don’t have to pay fuel costs, they will be able to produce for less and the utilities are required to buy it. The ads implied that the price was basically the same: the ads implied that the utilities had to pay the same (or at least close to the same) price for renewable energy as they now pay for non-renewable energy.

But the truth was entirely different. Utilities pay a regulated rate that is set by the utilities, called the ‘avoided cost’ for renewable energy. The ‘avoided cost’ is a made up number that is so low it seems almost silly: In most places, it is far, far less than a penny per KWH. Utilities have to pay market rates when they buy electricity on the market. The market rate depends on the market, which depends on supply and demand. If demand is high (say a hot summer day or in a very cold winter storm) the market price can get very, very high. Quite often, the market price for destructively generated electricity is more than a hundred times the price paid for solar, under the formulas presented in PURPA.

Why the advertising? Why did they say it was a pro-solar and pro-renewable bill, when they are lobbying for passage, when it really wasn’t. Who paid for the constant, 24 hour barrage of ads that told everyone this was a great victory for environmentalists? Advertising is expensive. Someone has to pay for it.

Whenever I hear about someone spending truly massive amounts of money to advertise something by a group that has nothing to gain by advertising, I suspect a trick. What about when British Petroleum advertised itself as ‘Beyond Petroleum’ and claimed it was now a solar company that was phasing out oil. (After the Deepwater Horizon disaster, one of the worst oil-related disasters in history, reporters showed that the claim to be a solar company was a sham: the company had merely bought some shares in solar companies to make it appear they were involved in solar, while virtually all of their revenues came from oil. After the Fukishima disaster spread radiation around the globe, I noticed a very well funded public relations campaign with people claimed to be experts telling us that radiation is good for you. How much money do you think they had to pay the media to write stories like this?)

What if this advertising didn’t work? What if people saw right through it? What if they were intelligent enough to figure out they were being tricked? What if the legislators knew that the laws against renewable energy were really not laws encouraging renewable energy, as the advertisers claimed? What if they saw through the tricks and realized that their constituents saw thought the tricks?

If this were the case, laws like PURPA would not exist. If your company needed a warehouse, it could pay a little extra during construction to get a solar roof. You could then go through a company that consolidates power from these warehouses and sells it. You would get a check each month that might well be more than the amount you make from warehousing operations. The stores and malls would do the same thing and most homes would be built with solar roofs. (Which would you rather buy: a $250,000 home that gets a $200 monthly electric bill, or a $260,000 home that gets a monthly $200 electricity check?) Solar would flood the market.

I want to make it clear that I am not saying that we can consider this issue in isolation. As noted earlier, we have to look at the big picture. Millions of people around the globe make their living digging up coal, pumping oil, piping gas, mining uranium, and doing other destructive things. If someone were to seriously propose a law that actually allowed people to sell solar-generated electricity at market rates, the destroyers would come back fighting and would get a lot of allies from the people who depend on destruction for their jobs.

But this doesn’t mean that we need to bury our heads in the sand. If we want to create a system that will cause the rates of destruction to fall, we need to understand the forces that are keeping the destruction going. If there is trickery happening, we need to know that people are trying to trick us and we need to understand the tools they use. We need to understand what is really going on.

The truth is that the destruction absolutely relies on trickery. If the people who benefit from destruction couldn’t trick us—if we understood the tricks, raised our children to understand that there are many people trying to trick them and raised them to think through and figure out the tricks—the people who take advantage of these laws wouldn’t have this protection. They wouldn’t be able to get away with the things they do now.

It is hard to think of anything that would have a greater impact on the destruction in the energy industry than having a law that did what the people who promote PURPA claimed it was designed to do: Even if it is illegal to sell renewable energy at market rates within a state, if it could be sold for market rates anywhere production would skyrocket. Each KWH of solar produced means 1.313 pounds of coal that doesn’t have to be burned.

Buying Patents to Kill Dangerous Technology

Over the past few centuries, rich people have formed corporations to buy up the rights to the fuels that nature produced and that exist under the ground. The people who bought these rights didn’t buy them in the name of ‘the people.’ They started out rich. They wanted to get richer. Once they owned the fuels, they intended to use their wealth to drive up the amount of fuels used, any way they could, so they could get the highest possible prices for the things they own. As long as we keep using destructive systems, they get richer.

They use a lot of different methods to make sure the destruction takes place at the most rapid possible pace. The monopoly system, reinforced by state/provincial utility commissions and backed by national and international laws like PURPA, are just one of the tools they use to make this happen.

They have a lot of other tools.

One of the most important and powerful involves the patent process.

Many countries have national laws that protect the rights of inventors: if inventors create something, they have exclusive rights that last for a certain number of years (in the United States, it is 20 years). During this time, no one may use that invention without the permission of the patent holder.

This kind of policy was designed to encourage innovation and invention. If people put money into inventions, they want rights to sell the items they invent for very high prices, at least for a certain period of time. But it can also be used to prevent certain technologies from being used. If a group of people with a lot of money don’t want a certain technology to become available, they can go to the owners of the patents and offer them far more money for their patents than those people would have been able to make by actually building the device they patented. They can then shut down the technology and make sure it never becomes a workable system. If anyone tries to use any technology that is in any way related to the technology they own the rights to, they can call the police. If another company tries to use this technology, they can get a court order requiring the company to stop and then sue for damages. The largest awards in all of history have been for patent violations. Many companies that were very large and co discovered and used technologies that some other company had already patented have been drive to bankruptcy by these suits. Once a technology has been patented, no one may use it, even if another person has discovered it entirely independently and had no idea it had even been discovered before.

The patent route gets used along with other routes to kill dangerous technology, including some of the most promising solar technologies. Let’s consider a few examples:

Thin Film Solar

Tesla patented the first solar panels more than a century ago. The basic theory behind them was the same as the theory behind most modern solar panels: an NP barrier acts as a one-way gate for electrons. The sun hits the material, drives the electrons across the barrier, and they can’t get back. The first devices made the NP barrier by coating a layer of selenium with an almost invisible layer of gold. Modern solar panels create this barrier by using special properties of silicon wafers.

This is a very old technology.

It is older than dial telephones. It is older than radio. It is older than gasoline engines. Over the generations, people have come up with new technologies that can produce electricity from sunlight far more efficiently.

The people who profit from destruction don’t want people to even know about these processes.

They want them to disappear.

They have tools they can use to make this happen.

To understand this, we have to understand a few of the problems that are generally associated with conventional solar panels.

One of the problems seems almost silly, until you understand how effectively people have been exploit the perception of it to prevent solar: the solar panels are ugly. The industry groups funded by the destructive industries can send people around to homeowner associations and other groups that are active in neighborhood politics. They can show them pictures of truly ugly solar installations. They can tell the people in these groups that there is no law against people putting up these systems, and the people might put them everywhere, ruining the view and making the neighborhood look like a dump.

The homeowner associations help to solve this ‘problem’ with a few simple steps. First, they can pass rules within their association requiring extensive (and therefore expensive) review by the homeowner association before people in the development can install anything on their roofs Second, they can be active in their local communities to promote zoning that will keep the rooflines of their communities clean; in other words, keep them free from solar panels. These efforts can be quite effective. They can create an ‘us against them’ mentality among the people in an area: they are trying to keep their neighborhood clean and pretty, and avoid the clutter. The people trying to put up solar are their enemies, trying to create a trashy neighborhood where anything goes; as the junk goes up on the roof, the home values fall. People who care about an uncluttered and pleasing neighborhood have to move somewhere else.

You would be surprised how successful these campaigns can be: Most upscale homeowner associations, in many parts of the world, have special rules that either prevent solar panels entirely or make it onerously expensive to put it up. Another problem with traditional solar panels is their fragility. These panels are printed with large printers. Then, once the electronics are printed, a layer of glass is placed over the top to protect the electronics. The printed parts of the solar panel are durable and will last many centuries. But the glass is fragile and can break, which will then break the printed electronics below it. A hailstorm can destroy the entire installation. A powerful wind can shake it until it breaks, or throw debris against it causing it to break. Glass is a liquid and will slowly ‘run.’ (Look at a century-old window and you can see this.)

In fact, solar doesn’t have to have either of these ‘problems.’ Inventors have developed processes to print or deposit the photoelectric coatings onto ordinary building materials, in a way that leads to photoelectric systems that you can’t even tell are photoelectric (they look like regular roofs) and don’t have the glass surface to get destroyed.  There are at least two very important technologies that have been created that don’t have these problems:

 

1. Micro spherical solar blankets

2. Painted on thin film solar

 

They both use that are extremely cheap, far cheaper than the standard solar panels (which, as we have seen, are already very cheap). In both cases, the patent rights for the process were purchased by anonymous buyers for fantastic amounts of money; in fact the prices of these patents are the highest and second highest (to date) prices ever paid for any patent ever sold. As soon as the buyers had the rights, they shut down production, canceled all licenses, ended research, and had any equipment capable of making the new solar systems shredded and sent to scrap yards. This is not a ‘conspiracy theory,’ and doesn’t represent wild and unsubstantiated allegations that a few rich people are working to do things that prevent solar. It is a fact, easy to verify for yourself.

The Solar Blanket

In 1983, Texas Instruments (‘TI’) invented a new way of processing silicon to make solar photoelectric ‘blankets’ or ‘mats.’ These were flexible fabric solar producers with extremely tiny glass spheres attached to a flexible metal foil fabric, a lot like the old time chain mail. They were processed in a way that made the outer layer of the spheres operate as photoelectric cells. (Here is a link to the TI brochure explaining the product.)

When the sun hits the mat, it produces electricity. The mats don’t have any of the brittle crystalline silicon, so they are extremely durable and would be likely to last thousands of years. They are flexible and can be laid out over any surface.  If it were legal to make this material and people did make them, you could buy a mat large enough to cover your roof, roll it out in an afternoon, hook up two wires, and have your roof generate all of your home’s electricity from then on. If you move and don’t want to leave the mat with the home, you could roll it up and take it with you. If you are in a remote place and want electricity, you could simply roll out a mat over any surface (it doesn’t even have to be flat) and hook it up. If you have a lawn or hillside nearby, it could generate all of your electricity. If you don’t want to use ground space, you could put up a clothesline and hang it from the line; it would generate electricity.

This is not a mythical material that may someday exist if scientists keep working on it; it is a proven technology that has already been invented and perfected.  The main advantage of the spherical solar system is that it is cheap. The process doesn’t need a crystallizing furnace and there are no volleyball-sized crystals to slice and polish. In fact, if it were made, it would be made entirely by machine. Turn on the machine and it would churn out thousands of square meters of photoelectric mats each day, 365 days a year, with nothing but silicon and aluminum (first and second most abundant solid material on Earth) as inputs.

When I heard about this technology in 1984, I wrote to the shareholder relations’ department of Texas Instruments for more information. They sent me a huge manila envelope with all of the technical specifications, engineering reports, and telephone numbers of the engineer in charge who could explain anything I had questions about. (Remember, shareholders are owners of corporations. All large companies have ‘shareholder relations’ departments which work very hard to provide information investors need to decide if they want to invest in the company.) After I read the reports and talked to the engineer, I thought that this product could revolutionize energy and eliminate the need for destructive power plants worldwide. I didn’t have much money, but I raised all I could and put it into TI stock, expecting them to turn this the spherical solar system into one of the largest money-making operations in history.

I was very surprised when the next shareholder report had a paragraph hidden deep within the text that explained that the spherical solar division had been sold.

A group of anonymous investors wanted to buy the patent. They had hired an investment firm to talk to the board of directors of Texas Instruments. They directors didn’t want to sell initially, but when the offer got up to $1.1 billion, they decided that the up front cash would be a greater benefit to the shareholders than the discounted present value of the expected future cash flows from licensing the technology. In other words, they would get more by getting the cash NOW than by investing hundreds of millions of dollars to monetize the technology and collecting the returns later.

 

 

I guess I shouldn’t complain: this windfall provided a huge boost to the company’s earnings. Investors thought they had substantially undervalued the company, considering how much money it was able to make selling its patents (the patents were worth a lot more money to the buyers than the company had calculated) so the stock skyrocketed. I had my money invested in the company so I made a lot off it. As soon as I found out about the sale of the spherical solar patent, of course, I sold everything: I only wanted the rights to that technology. I tried to find out who had bought it so I could invest in their company and wrote them about it. But the shareholder relations department said that the buyers wished to remain anonymous. They had worked through intermediaries and even the company executives didn’t know who they were.

The letter also pointed out that the new owners had ordered TI to stop work on the technology and take steps to avoid any further research on it (this would infringe on the patent) so TI was out of the business forever.  Spherical solar blankets never went into production.

The buyers had very deep pockets. Not very many people can come up with $1,100,000,000 in cash to buy something, and then do nothing with it. But someone clearly did.

Sunfab

In 2005, the silicon manufacturing company ‘Applied Materials’ came up with a way to make machines that sprayed a coating of silicon, which came from sand, over any substrate to make it capable of producing electricity. The company formed a division called Sun Fab to market the machines.

 

 

Sun Fab was designed to build and sell machines that would spray the silicon coating on to substrates. The machines were to sell for $500,000 each in what is called a ‘turn key operation.’ A ‘turn key operation’ means all the buyers have to do is provide the space. Sun Fab will provide the machine, set it up, get it operating, and test it. The buyer can walk in, ‘turn a key,’ and start using the machine the next day. To use the machine, feed the substrate onto a conveyer belt and sand into a hopper. The machine sprays the special silicon coating onto the substrate making it photoelectric. This process produces super-cheap solar, expected to cost not much more than the cost of the raw materials (silicon and aluminum), far less than $1 per watt.

In their initial advertising, Sun Fab salesmen claimed that if 1/3 of the roads in the United States were coated with silicon coating from these machines, the roads would produce 100% of the electricity needs of the United States, making all destructive plants unnecessary.  In 2010, the company announced that it had sold its Sun Fab division for $1.5 billion. The buyer was not disclosed. As soon as the sale was complete, the buyer shut down the plant and had all of the machines in the factory that made the Sun Fab machines dismantled, with all of the parts shredded so they couldn’t be reassembled or reverse-engineered. The Sun fab division of Applied materials had already sold a few dozen of the machines. The new owners of the patent rights canceled their licenses then teams of buyers to buy back these machines.

I wanted to buy some of the thin film solar sheets while they were still available. I found an owner of one of the Sun Fab machines in Montreal Canada. I called him and told him I wanted to buy some. He said that he had sold his machine (to buyers who wished to remain anonymous for what he said as a ‘boatload of money,’) but he had forgotten about some sheets of coated material that he had made on a test run and put into his garage.

The picture below shows me holding one of these sheets, which is slightly smaller than a letter sized piece of paper. Note that the volt meter says it is producing 7.2 volts and the amp meter in the next picture shows .22 amps, meaning the sheet of metal the size of a letter sized sheet of paper is producing 15 watts of electricity. The third picture shows my computer screen showing that the computer I am writing this on, including monitor, uses only 14 watts of electricity, so this single sheet of flexible solar film produces enough electricity to power my computer.

SunFab is no more.

Someone was willing to pay $1.5 billion for the company to get the patent rights, and then immediately shut it down. These buyers don’t want anyone to know who they are. But you don’t have to be too smart to figure it out.

Qqqq me sun solar slide here

 

Conspiracy Theorists

People who claim that there are large numbers of people working together to harm the world and others are called ‘conspiracy theorists.’ The term has negative implications. A conspiracy is another way of saying ‘people with evil intent.’ A theory is another term for a ‘uninformed guess’ The term ‘conspiracy theorist’ implies that the person making the claim has no real information about the topic, and is making things up. It implies that the person believes there are such things as evil forces and evil people, and these evil forces/people hate goodness and are trying to destroy it. People who are defined as ‘conspiracy theorists’ are basically being defined as ignorant, fanatical lunatics.

I claim that certain people gain great benefits from destruction and wouldn’t get these benefits if the destruction didn’t exist. I claim these people work hard to protect their cash flows and prevent any attempts to end the destruction from working. It is easy for people who have been convinced that ‘conspiracy theorists’ are ignorant, fanatical lunatics to dismiss any who claim that profit motives are behind the destruction: they can be classified as ‘conspiracy theorists.’

But the term ‘conspiracy theory’ really distorts what is happening to encourage the destruction. in destruction.

It is not a ‘theory.’

There are people working to prevent non-destructive systems from becoming reality. It is not a theory, it is a fact.

Here is a link to the website of the American Clean Coal Coalition. They are a coal advocacy group. If you want to call them, their number is (202) 459-4800. They don’t work in secret and are happy to tell you why their organization exists: the coal companies want us to use more coal. Their job is to help make this happen.

Here is a link to the websites to 30 separate ‘Clean Coal Industry Education’ groups. If are a teacher and want someone to come out and give lectures to your class to help the children understand how clean coal is and why solar is impractical, you can call them. They will be happy to arrange for someone to come out and help them understand these truths.

Want free information about clean coal to distribute to your friends? Merely type in ‘clean coal brochures’ and you will get thousands of results.

Here is another link; this one goes to a list of 762 lobbying companies that are registered as working for the oil and gas industry.

Need someone to help you get pro-oil or pro-coal or pro-gas or pro-uranium legislation through the government? They are waiting by the phone.

These people do not work cheap, but they are very good at their jobs. If you need a coal fired or nuclear plant approved, if you need increases in subsidies to oil, gas, nuclear, or coal, if you need your facility exempted from pollution standards, call them. If you have enough money, I don’t think you will have any real problem getting your legislation approved.

The table to the right shows the amounts that leading oil and gas companies pay their lobbying divisions, from opensecrets.com. Lobbying costs often run more than $1,000 per hour for the lead lobbyist and another $200 per hour for assistants. And that doesn’t even count the value of the free homes, cars, yachts, and junkets that the lobbyists offer to get government officials on their side.

 

Company	Amount
Exxon Mobil	$3,440,000
Chevron Corp	$3,270,000
Koch Industries	$3,200,000
American Petroleum Institute	$2,690,000
Royal Dutch Shell	$2,340,000
BP	$1,720,000
Phillips 66	$1,440,000
Marathon Petroleum	$1,370,000
Occidental Petroleum	$1,329,450
Tesoro Corp	$1,018,221
Anadarko Petroleum	$880,000
ConocoPhillips	$790,000
Noble Energy	$630,000
American Fuel & Petrochem Manufacturers	$592,914
Valero Energy	$450,000
Cheniere Energy	$440,000
Enbridge Inc	$420,000

 

Here is a link to a long list of trade associations for the oil industry. These companies don’t hide their goals: they want to increase the use of oil and make it easier for oil companies to do what they do. Here is a link to a list of 40 of the larger nuclear power industry trade groups who do the same thing for uranium-based processes.

These organizations are huge, they have massive budgets, and their only job is to work to make sure that we keep using (meaning ‘destroying’) resources. The people who pay these organizations have somehow gained the right to treat the plant as their personal cash registers. They can extract wealth, convert it into money (by selling it), and use the money for anything they want. All they really have to worry about is that, someday, we may be able to live our lives without using their product.

In fact, this day came sometime during the late 1970s. That was when the total costs of solar fell below the total costs of fossil fuels. Since then, prices in solar have declined by a factor of roughly 200: (As the chart above showed, in 1976, solar photoelectric was $76.76 per watt of capacity and now it is 36¢ per watt of capacity).

Qqqq solar cost chart

Taxes

In countries with effective tools to enforce patent laws, like United States and EU, industry groups for destructive industries have been able to use various tricks like the ones above to keep production capabilities for solar very low. Almost all solar systems now are manufactured in countries that don’t have these same tools; their courts don’t let people buy patent rights just to prevent processes from being used, for example, and they don’t enforce patents from outside of the nation that they believe are harmful to their own people. In these countries, production of solar has soared and people are importing these panels in vast numbers. The industry put their lobbyists and public relations departments to work.

The PR departments started advertising that these other countries were ‘dumping’ solar panels in the United States and EU, in an attempt to harm domestic industry. (‘Dumping’ means ‘selling for low prices.’ What is wrong with that? The PR people love this term because it makes something that is actually good sound bad.) The ads said that the United States would have to take steps to protect its industry against this unfair competition.

A the same time, their lobbyists went to work. They drafted a law to create the highest import taxes that existed on this product. October 10, 2012, the United States government passed an import duty on imports of solar panels of 249.96%. (Link to source.) On June 6, 2013, the EU passed similar duties to keep the inexpensive solar out of the European Union. (Link to source.)

At the same time governments were doing their best to make solar more expensive, they were passing additional legislation to make destructive energy more profitable. Here are two recent increases in subsidies on destruction, from the Analytical Perspectives section of the federal budget: (Note: where it says it will ‘cost $6.9 billion’ this means it will cost the United States government $6.9 billion, so this is the amount of the increase in the subsidy.)

 

Excess of percentage over cost depletion, fuels. Under normal income tax rules, producers of oil, gas, and coal would be able to recover the costs of their investments in wells and mines every year in proportion to the share of the resource extracted (cost depletion). But current law instead allows independent producers to deduct a percentage of gross income from production (percentage depletion), subject to certain limits. The excess of percentage of cost depletion will cost $6.9 billion between 2013 and 2017.

 

Expensing of exploration and development costs. Under normal income tax rules, exploration and development costs for oil and gas wells and coal mines would be capitalized and recovered as resources are extracted from the property. But current law allows independent producers to deduct immediately intangible drilling costs (IDCs) for investments in domestic oil and gas wells (Integrated producers may deduct 70 percent of IDCs and amortize the remaining 30 percent over five years.) Businesses may also deduct exploration and development costs of surface stripping and the construction of shafts and tunnels for other fuel minerals. Expensing of exploration and development costs will cost $3.0 billion between 2012 and 2017.

The utilities have a multi-trillion dollar stream of income to protect. They know it will go away if we switch to solar. They need to prevent this.

Will they succeed?

We can’t really tell what will happen in the future, but we can look at what has happened in the past and get some idea how successful they have been so far. According to the United States government report quoted above, solar has been cheaper than coal or nuclear since 1984, or 30 years now, during which time thousands of megawatt hours of facilities have been put online. The chart above shows that, as of 2013, 0.06% (or 6/1000th of 1%) of all energy used on Earth is solar photoelectric, while slightly more than 90% comes from fossil fuels. Past results are no guarantee of future results, but they give us a pretty good picture of what the power companies have been able to do so far. They have the money and the power. Their lobbies write the laws and make the rules. So far, they have been able to keep us using destructive power.

Whenever a monopoly company with no competition starts spending heavily on advertising, I get suspicious. In 1978, giant utilities companies started to advertise that they were going to go green. They were going to save the world. They had proposed legislation that would cause us to convert to non-destructive energy, primarily solar.

Back in those days, there were only three stations on television and televisions cost a lot of money. Most people didn’t watch a lot of television. I was going to college and had no time for TV. But the radio was always on in the background. There were no satellites or computerized Ipod shuffles for stores and restaurants. There were only a few local stations. All the owners of the stores and restaurants picked a station and played it constantly. The car music systems that used tapes were 8 tracks. They didn’t work very well and it was only a matter of time before the tapes were trash.

Vinyl records were treasured heirlooms. People kept them inside of paper wrapping which was inside sleeves. They often cost a half day’s pay each. We were careful with them, only taking them out carefully, wiping them off (a bit of dust makes the record skip), and playing them on expensive turntables. Most people didn’t have the time or money for this. We listened to the radio.

The radio stations all made their money from advertising. They could play records without paying licensing fees to the record companies and playing the records was a form of advertising. (If you heard a song you liked, you would consider buying the album that contained that song.) They sold advertising. It was how they made their money.

Normally, ads were for local stores. There is always a sale going on somewhere. The radio tells you where. But in the winter of 1978, the radio ads started to talk about strange things. They talked about how regulation of the power industry has led to destruction. The power company executives were sick of this. They wanted to deregulate so that people could make profits selling solar. They were proposing new laws that would require people with and other renewable energy to sell to local utilities and require the utilities to buy the energy.

This would be a national law.

Now, anyone in the country could put up solar and sell solar to their local utility. The local utility would have to buy it. It wouldn’t have any choice.

They were talking about PURPA.

Why would a monopoly spend money on advertising?

They don’t do it to attract customers from competitors: If you are in their service area, you have no choice: you have to buy from them. They don’t do it to expand their business. They get everyone anyway.

They don’t do it to get rid of money.

Any money they don’t spend on advertising goes directly into the hands of shareholders as dividends.

To advertise that they were ‘going green’ they would have to take money out of their own pockets. When time came to buy a new yacht, they would have to buy a smaller model. They would have to buy the cheap cocaine; they wouldn’t be able to afford the good stuff like before. Why would they do this?

When I first heard the ads, I believed them. A wonderful thing: the bad guys were gone, the new people were good and wanted a better world. Then I started checking. I found out that they weren’t really paying anything for the electricity. The new law didn’t help make the world greener. It wasn’t a ‘deregulation’ that removed regulations. It was a new regulation, added to the rest, that was designed to prevent people from selling electricity in markets that they could have sold before the regulations.

In 1999, I lived in California. The radio people were talking about the wonders of a new system, total deregulation of the electricity system, to make way for solar and other non-destructive competition. The giant utilities were 100% behind it: they were a new generation, not the old bandits from the 70s that created smoke screens. The giant utilities wanted us all to know that, from now on, we would all have choices. They wanted us to know that they wanted us to be their customers. They were now lean, green, highly competitive companies: all they cared about was their customers.

Scam Deregulation

I was going to college in Berkeley at the time. I was in the PHD program in environmental economics. A lot of people were studying the system. I talked to them. They said it wasn’t really deregulation. It basically left all of the regulation in place and added in new regulations that any reasonable economist could see would lead to catastrophic collapse of the system.

The old monopoly system that Samuel Insull had put into place was to remain in place. No competition was allowed between service areas. PURPA was not affected: people still couldn’t sell renewable energy in markets to other states, to other service areas, or to other customers within their own service area.

There was no deregulation.

It was a scam.

Under the old system, the utilities could buy and sell electricity from and to any other utility in the country. If Southern California Edison had extra electricity, and Chicago Edison needed electricity (perhaps because of cold weather), SCE could sell electricity to CE. If CE had extra and SCE was short, SCE could buy. Destructive plants, anywhere in the country, could sell to whoever was wiling to pay the highest price. (PURPA only prohibits plants that generate with renewable energy from selling for market rates; anyone can set up a natural gas generating station and sell into the national grid at market rates.)

In the new system, which was called ‘deregulation’ over and over again, the press, this was no longer legal. California producers were required to sell to a government run central power authority. They could not sell to other companies. The companies that distributed electricity to customers were required to buy from this central system.

First, it is important to understand that this is NOT deregulation. In deregulation, you eliminate regulations. The new system left the old regulations in place and added extremely restrictive new regulations that prevented the limited markets that had operated before (the markets between the utilities themselves and the markets between independent energy suppliers that had natural gas and other small generating systems and utilities) from operating. Now, big brother was in charge.

To the economists at Berkeley, this seemed almost as if it was designed to fail. The system allowed private companies like Enron (created specifically to take advantage of the new system) to manipulate the supply of electricity in the state. Enron bought up large numbers of power plants in California. It owned so much of the capacity that it could manipulate the supply. On hot days, the demand for electricity goes up. If there isn’t enough supply, either people will have to live without power or the central power authority is going to have to offer higher rates to suppliers to induce them to turn on more power plants.

Once Enron (and other companies, created to do the same thing) owned enough capacity, it could simply close down its power plants on hot days. In the old days, with the old regulations, producers would do the opposite: they had customers to supply and power plants to provide the electricity. They were guaranteed profits on each unit of electricity they sold so they wanted to sell as much as they could. It wouldn’t make sense to shut down power production when the demand was high.

In the new system, however, Enron and the other energy producers could operate as a cartel. They could work together to manipulate supply to drive up prices. (This is the same thing OPEC, DeBeers, and other cartels do). They then sell slightly less of the product they are selling than they would if not for the restrictions, but they get far, far higher prices. As a result, they make far more money than they would if they didn’t restrict the supply.

As soon as the new regulations went into effect, Enron and other energy companies moved in to take advantage of the new opportunities. Electricity prices remained low during times of normal demand, but when the weather turned hot, the prices skyrocketed. The cartel companies all had great excuses for their failure to supply electricity: they had scheduled maintenance on their plants well in advance (for the middle of the high demand season); they had labor problems, they were waiting on parts, there were communications problems; the list goes on and on. If this had also happened before the regulations went into effect, we might be able to believe them. But if there is a policy change that allows people to make massive amounts of money if power plants break down, and then plants that had never broken down start breaking down, this is suspicious. (As soon as the new regulations were removed and replaced with the old less-regulated system, everything went back to working as it had before.)

In the summer of 2000, electricity prices went through the roof, with an average increase of 800% and spikes during times of key demand driving up prices by hundreds of times the pre-regulation price. The state power authority wound up paying the prices. The utilities couldn’t pass the higher prices on to customers so they had to borrow to buy electricity. The utility commission had to provide massive loans, in amounts of billions of dollars, to the utilities to allow them to buy power. (This didn’t harm the companies because the old regulations that guaranteed them profits were still in place. Remember, their profits were a fixed number times their costs. The higher their costs, the higher their profits. The money borrowed to pay for power meant higher costs, which meant higher profits.)

The buyers of the electricity paid immediately. Enron got its money at the end of the day. The people who had invested in Enron and other cartel companies got fantastically rich.

Who Was Behind the New System?

The advertising in favor of ‘deregulation’ (the new regulations) started in the early 1990s. We needed to get rid of the old regulated system and bring in markets. This was necessary to promote solar and other non-destructive power systems. Lobbyists started to present bills that they wanted passed to make this happen. These were new energy companies like Enron.

They were going to save the world.

Their only goal was to promote competition so that green energy could have a chance.

In the end, the managers at Enron basically skipped with the money and faded into the woodwork. A few were put on trial and put into jail, but the big money people hid behind corporations and there was really no way to trace the money that went to them. They got rich. The taxpayers and ratepayers of California would up on the hook for roughly $45,000,000,000 in loans taken out to pay the bill.

The people at Enron and the other energy companies got two things out of the crisis. The first was cash, enormous truckloads of money that they could use to buy larger yachts, bigger airplanes, and hire more servants for their mansions. This is nice and, at first glance, it appears to be the main benefit to them from the crisis.

But there is an even bigger benefit to them, one that lasts indefinitely and involves trillions of dollars a year, not just the tens of billions they got from the crisis itself. They CALLED it ‘deregulation.’ They started advertising for deregulation in the early 1990s. They hired experts to create ads that were designed to make the listeners think that they were working for deregulation. When they wrote the new regulations, they made sure to call them ‘deregulation’ and made sure that the opening lines of the regulations (that tell why the regulations were made) specified that their purpose was to create competition and end regulation. These parts are easy to read: anyone can see by its title that it is a ‘deregulation’ bill and that it was it was created to deregulate the market. The hard parts to read deal with the specifics. They talk about the creation of the new regulations and the end of markets. Casual readers would problably not even realize they were being tricked. The governments love us. The new power companies like Enron love us and even the old monopoly utilities love the world and want to save it. They are finally on the same page, working together to create a better world, by ending the regulations that prevent the non-destructive systems from taking over.

The truth is this: this was NOT deregulation. By calling it deregulation, and advertising heavily to convince people it was, and then designing it to fail, the destroyers got a benefit that was far greater than the short-term cash they got manipulating the market: they created the impression in the minds of the public that deregulation had failed. The people who created this system—loving caring people who wanted only a better world—had tried everything they could do. But it had failed. Deregulation was a horrible thing. It couldn’t work.

As soon as the system had failed, the advertising began again. Here is a quote from the ‘consumerwatchdog.org’ website. (No one checks to make sure that a group buying a website name is actually what the website name implies. Anyone can buy names like ‘consumerwatchdog.org’ and hide their identity. By their text, it appears pretty clear that this site is run by one of the industry groups.) Here is the text from https://www.consumerwatchdog.org/newsrelease/lesson-enron-electricity-deregulation-disaster:

 

When I read this, I think that the author of the piece can only be people hired by Enron. (Enron had already collapsed by the time this piece was written; the money it had been paid by the California ratepayers and taxpayers had all disappeared.)

The California disaster didn’t entirely put an end to the talk about deregulation. There was still money to be made by exploiting the system. Lobbyists had pushed through a similar system, on a much smaller scale, in Texas. In February of 2021, a winter storm rolled through Texas and the power grid failed in the state, leaving 45 million without power.

Those who still had power often got fantastic bills for it: they had signed documents (often without realizing it) to opt out of the regulated power market. They had to pay market rates. In some cases, people whose electricity bill was normally $40 a month got bills of more than a thousand dollars.

Who got the blame?

The energy industry was qwick to point fingers.

First, they blamed renewable energy. They said that the wind turbines that the state had put up recently, in response to the drive for clean energy, had frozen in the storm. They stopped providing electricity. Solar panels got covered with snow and stopped producing.

Second, deregulation. It had failed in California. But Texas didn’t learn the lesson. They tried it again and, predictably, it failed again. When Texas started moving to a market system, the people who owned power plants stopped maintaining them. They could make more short-term profits by simply putting their plants together with chewing gum and bailing wire. The plants were on the edge of failure before the storm. The storm pushed them over the edge.

The lesson: We must never allow deregulation. Don’t let the deregulators fool you. Regulation is essential. Anyone who says otherwise is a conspiracy theorist who is out of touch with reality.

Real Deregulation

 

The sham deregulation is NOT deregulation.

Deregulation involves removing regulations, not leaving the existing regulations in place and adding new regulations.

What if we wanted a way to remove the regulations that specifically favor the destructive industries and support destruction?

1. Eliminate Laws that Prohibit Market Sales of Renewable Energy:

 

In the United States, the law called PURPA requires utilities to buy and requires generators to sell to local utilities at a rate called the ‘avoided cost.’ This rate is so low that it is virtually zero. (Normally, the fees for paperwork are greater than the amount paid for the electricity so the price is actually zero.)

People with non-renewable energy systems—in other words destructive systems—don’t have this restriction. They can sell to anyone they want (as long as it is outside of the state where they produce energy) for any price they can get. If the market price for electricity is 10¢, which is a normal price, they can sell for 10¢. If prices go up, due to bad weather or other factors, they can get more.

Lets consider how this would work, using the United States as an example:

 

People who produce renewable energy would be able to sell it the same way people now sell destructive energy: they would be able to sell it as long as they sell it outside of their own state. (Remember, the states regulate electricity inside of their state and don’t allow competition in their state. But they have no authority to prevent electricity sales across state line, if these sales involve destructive energy. Only producers with plants that use renewable energy are prohibited from selling it.)

This change won’t have any impact on anything on a day-to-day basis within service areas. You can still only buy from your local utility and it will continue to set rates as it does now: it is still guaranteed a profit on any electricity it sells. The factories and malls will pay the same electricity prices they pay now. We won’t undo any of the regulations that Samuel Insull set up for Thomas Edison. (Insull died in 1938; PURPA became law in 1978; he had nothing to do with it.) All these regulations can remain in place until a new electricity system (described below in section marked ‘Bielectric power’ ) has been put in place to provide competition.

The only difference is that plants that use renewable energy will be able to sell electricity the same way that destructive power plants do now: they can to utilities in other states for market prices. People with lots of land or lots of roof area can collect sunlight there, turn it into electricity, and sell this to utilities in other states for whatever prices they are willing to pay.

What will this do?

It can only do one thing: it can increase the supply of electricity in the system as a whole. This will drive down nationwide wholesale electricity prices.

The monopoly utilities will still be guaranteed profits. But their profits depend on their costs.

What about the small print? Can’t utilities find ways to insert some small print into the deregulation bill that allows them to profit? The old saying is ‘the devil is in the details.’ The lobbyists write the documents themselves. Can’t they take advantage of this?

There is a way to make this impossible: When we eliminate regulation, we don’t have to have any small print. The law can have four words: “PURPA is hereby repealed.”

2. Eliminate Regulations that Pay Corporations to Destroy

If we want less destruction, we don’t want to give people who destroy resources free land. Land is infinitely valuable: it will last forever and create value forever. Most countries have laws modeled after the laws of the United States, which allow anyone who ‘stakes out’ land containing resources and removes the resources for a certain amount of time to get a ‘patent’ on the land for free. In other words, as long as they are willing to rape the land, they can have it.

Depletion allowances are cash payments (made directly in some countries and applied as offsets to taxes in others) made to destroyers based on the amount of resources they remove from the land. The more they rape the land, the more money they get. These allowances are intended to and designed to encourage removal of resources. If we want less destruction, we can accomplish this by merely reducing and eventually eliminating depletion allowances.

If you are paying someone to beat you with a stick, and you don’t want them to keep hitting you, the first step you might consider taking is this: stop paying them to hit you.

Although this seems so incredibly simple, it isn’t really simple in practice. The groups that designed the systems that pay people to destroy have incredible political power. They also have incredibly sophisticated public relations teams that know what pushes the buttons of the people in the public. They know that we live in societies where the great bulk of the people depend on jobs for a living. If jobs disappear, the unemployed compete for the limited work by offering to work for less so wages fall and everyone suffers. Destruction creates jobs.

Because the destroyers have such great power, we probably aren’t going to have a great deal of success, at least right away, reducing the payments to destroyers. But if our education systems are able to (or parents are able to) give correct information to children about this issue, and they realize we really are paying corporations to destroy our world, and the money we pay people to destroy the world could be used for things that benefit the people (roads, parks, schools, for example), they will create pressure to get rid of these payments. The more people understand this problem, the more pressure they can apply and the more success they will have.

If parents in the previous generation paid people to hit all members of future generations (their own children, grandchildren, and so on) with sticks, but the members of previous generation pass on or lose control over wealth, the members of the current generation may decide they don’t want to keep paying people to harm their loved ones. They may look at the policies of the past, decide they were ill advised, and get rid of them. Perhaps the payments to those who harm future generations provide a lot of jobs and even members of the current generation may want to keep these jobs. But they can change from hitting us with sticks to hitting us with feathers. They can reduce the harm done and, eventually, when they find solutions to the structural problems that cause use to need the strange things called ‘jobs’ they can stop paying people to harm us.

Nothing we can do will have a greater impact than this.

3. Cancel Patents That Kill Non-Destructive Technology

The United States is the world leader in protecting patents. It pushes for protections that meet its standards around the world. The United States government gets its authority to protect patents from Article I Section 8 | Clause 8 of the constitution. It states:

 

The Congress shall have power to promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries.”

 

Does the Congress have the power, under this clause to prevent the progress of science by securing patents? Clearly, this is the opposite of what the clause is intended to do.

What if people who wanted to manufacture solar blankets and make the machines that ‘paint’ surfaces to make them produce electricity could do these things? What if they could apply to the patent holders through a stated process for licenses to do these things and, if the patent holders refuse to grant licenses, or grant them only on terms that are clearly intended to kill the technology rather than generate revenues for the patent holders, file to have the patents invalidated?

Once the patents are invalidated, the technology is in the public domain. No one has any right to prevent others from using it. Anyone who wants to make the machines that Applied Materials invented that spray paint the photoelectric coatings onto roads, roof shingles, and other materials can do so. Anyone who wants to make the solar ‘blankets’ that Texas Instruments invented and patented can do so.

The people who bought these and other patents to kill the technology paid truly massive amounts of money for them. The amounts paid for these two patents exceed the entire GDP of some nations. They exceed the amount spent on food in an average year by all the people in of a nation, in most nations of the world. People don’t spend these amounts of money lightly. They expect to get value in exchange.

They aren’t getting value in the form of royalties or license fees. They aren’t making money manufacturing the products and selling them for profit. They are getting value somewhere else. In this case, they get it through protection of the destructive business model. They are making money destroying the world. The new technology would make this destruction unnecessary. They bought it to kill it. They wanted to prevent the progress of science and the useful arts.

If we invalidated these patents, we would do two things:

First, we would allow people to manufacture the devices that allow us to create energy without destruction. People could build machines to spray coatings on the roads so the roads produce electricity. Then, using inductive charging systems, the roads could charge the batteries of trucks and cars that drive on them.

 

 

As people build the non-destructive energy systems, more electricity will be produced. The supply of electricity will go up. People will compete to sell the electricity by offering it for lower prices and the price of electricity will fall. Eventually, electricity prices will fall below the cost of fuel used in destructive power systems: the destructive plants will not make profits because they won’t be able to get enough from the sale of electricity to cover their fuel costs. The destructive plants will close and we will have more electricity than ever, at prices far below the prices that prevail when people aren’t allowed to use the non-destructive technologies.

Second, invalidating these two patents will send a message to the people who buy patents to kill the technologies behind them: you may well be wasting your money. If the courts invalidate the patent by ruling that the government had no authority to protect patents if the ownership of the patent is designed to kill a technology, people who consider using this tool will realize that they may well be dumping billions of dollars down the toilet when they buy these patents.

The people who benefit destroying our world use certain tools to help them. If we understand these tools, we can take them out of their toolbox one at a time.

3. Reduce and/or Eliminate Taxes And Other Punitive Regulations That Apply To Non-Destructive Power Production Systems

Lobbies make nearly all laws in the world today. The companies that produce electricity are regulated monopolies that are guaranteed profits. They don’t want anyone to compete. They hire lobbyists to help them create laws that protect them. They want the highest possible taxes and most significant penalties they can have to prevent non-destructive processes from possibly gaining a foothold.

If someone is trying to help you, and you want help, you shouldn’t punish them or charge them money to help you. If a person is hitting you with a stick, and you want her to stop, and someone interferes and tries to help, you shouldn’t go up to them and say that, if they want to interfere to prevent the people from harming you, they have to pay massive taxes and follow highly restrictive regulations to do so.

If we reduce taxes on non-destructive power systems like solar, the costs of solar will fall. As we have seen, solar is already extremely cheap. But it would be far cheaper if not for the taxes.

The raw materials that are used to make solar are the cheapest and most abundant materials on the planet. Literally, the panels are made of sand and rocks: sand and rocks are 87% silicon dioxide (the raw material needed for the glass where the photoelectric coating is printed and the photoelectric coating itself) and 8.3% aluminum (the material used for the ‘ink’ that makes up the printed wires, the frame of the panel, and the wires themselves). These devices can’t be made by hand: the atoms have to be manipulated individually and this can only be done with machines. Once the machines have been built, the only real inputs needed to make panels are dirt (generally sand) and electricity (which can be produced with solar energy).

The machines can then be turned on. Dirt will be put into one end (by machines that scoop up sand) and finished solar panels will come out the other end. The makers of the panels will offer them for sale. More panels means more supply and, at any level of demand, more supply means lower prices. Prices will fall. They will have to continue to fall until they reach levels that are so low that people can’t justify turning the machines on, because they don’t make enough selling panels to pay for the dirt they put into the machine to make the panels. In other words, solar devices must sell, eventually, for the same price as dirt. They must be dirt cheap, literally.

As I write this in 2021, I am putting up some solar systems for friends. I am paying $72 for each 315 watt panel. Over a course of a year, each panel will produce 630 KWH of electricity. (This is .315 KW times 2000, the number of ‘full sun equivalent hours’ in most of the world per year.) This means that each panel will produce $63 worth of electricity per year and costs $72, so it will pay for itself in less than two years.

About 2/3 of the price of these panels is tax. What if the taxes didn’t exist? The panels would sell for $24 each. They would pay for themselves in 4 months; after that, the electricity they produced would be free.

4. Deregulated Direct Current Islands

Lets go back mentally to the conflict between Edison and Tesla over DC versus AC. Edison didn’t want AC because it was dangerous. A shock (volts and amps) that a baby human could withstand if it is DC would kill an elephant if it is AC.

DC is better electricity. There are a lot of technical reasons for this, but the fact is that DC appliances are far more efficient, quieter, they run cooler, they are cheaper to make, they last longer, and they are far easier to use. (Many appliance companies are building ‘inverter’ appliances; these ‘invert’ the AC to DC and then build DC appliances. Look for the word ‘inverter’ on the appliance to see if it falls into this category. Generally, the most expensive component of these appliances is the inverter and if we used DC anyway they wouldn’t need inverters.)

The utilities could supply DC energy. But they don’t. They have invested heavily in AC. Their infrastructure runs on AC. The electric lines that carry power can only carry AC or DC; they can’t carry both at the same time. The AC transformers (there are billions of them) are useless for DC. The AC ‘substations’ that you see all over the place that are used to restore the AC sine wave (which gets distorted in transport) aren’t necessary or useful for DC. Their generators all run on AC; their grid management systems are unique to AC. If they want to move to DC now, they would have to basically start from scratch and build from the very beginning. Everything they have done so far would be wasted.

Obviously, they don’t want to get involved in DC. As we have seen, the only reason to have monopolies in the first place involves the specific advantages of AC. Their business model depends on it. Since this model gives them trillions of dollars they wouldn’t get if the model changed, they don’t want anything to do with DC.

So, if we want to deregulate, we don’t have to tramp on their turf at all. We can let them have the entire AC market, with monopolies that guarantee them profits on every unit of AC electricity they sell. We can allow other companies to provide DC, if the customers want it, as an entirely separate service.

Practical DDC Systems

It doesn’t make sense to do things that threaten the business model of the AC utilities within their service areas until there is a well functioning alternative in place. The AC utilities make their money providing electricity in cities. It costs the companies more to provide electricity to households than to large businesses but they charge basically the same rates for everyone. As a result, large businesses pay more than the cost of supplying electricity to them while households pay less.

If we did something that damaged this system, without any alternative in place, the utilities would not be able to provide electricity to residences and still make profits, or they would have to charge much higher rates to residences than they charge now. As a result, for practical reasons, it would make sense to leave their services protected in places where people live.

However, there is no reason to provide this same protection everywhere. If we want to move to DDC systems (Deregulated Direct Current), we could do this gradually, starting with areas where no one lives. For a simple example, say the federal government created something called a DDC district on federal lands in the desert of central Nevada, where literally no one lives.

Clearly this wouldn’t harm anyone. Utilities in cities would have the same protection they now have. Since no one lives inside the DDC district (to start) no one is affected by the deregulation initially.

However, electricity is a huge percentage of the operating costs of certain businesses. Aluminum, for example, is available everywhere. Almost all of the cost of aluminum is the cost of electricity. (That is the reason that aluminum plants are almost all located in areas with extremely low electricity costs. The five largest producers in the world are China, India, Russia, Canada, and the UAE, all countries with areas that have enormous surpluses of electricity in certain areas. (China, India, and Russia all have massive hydroelectric facilities in areas that are remote from cities; Canada has abundant energy with a very low population and the UAE has massive gas reserves and can burn them to make electricity for almost nothing.)

In fact, we would expect the price of electricity to be a factor in more and more factory locations. For most of history, things were made by hand. Factories had to be in cities which had the people to make the items. Now, most things are made by machines. Machines run on electricity. Factory planners only need large crews for construction; after that, labor costs become so low they are irrelevant and the only really important cost is the cost of electricity.

A business could decide to build a new factory inside of the DDC district.

Outside of the district, all competition in electricity is illegal. There is a regulated price of electricity. These areas all have a minimum price for electricity. The price may get higher (utilities can add extra charges if their costs go up) but they aren’t going to go down.

Inside of the district, people who want to buy AC electricity can buy it for the regulated price, the same price that they pay outside of the district. No one will bother to invest in DC electricity unless they can sell it and they won’t be able to sell it unless they offer it for less than the AC price. This means that the AC price, which is a minimum price outside of the district, will act as the maximum price inside of the DDC district. It means that, by necessity, electricity prices will be lower inside of the district than they will be outside of the district.

Imagine you are working for a large company and trying to decide where to place an automated factory. Since the factory is automated and doesn’t need any significant amounts of labor, you don’t have any reason to locate in a city or even close to a city. Land in cities is expensive. Cities have massive bureaucracies that will make it hard to do anything. Everything costs more in cities than in the country. You can choose between:

 

1. An area where there is a maximum price for electricity and the market price will always be lower than this; or,

2.An area where there is a minimum price for electricity (the same as the maximum price inside the DDC district) and prices will always be lower.

 

If you choose option 2, you have another advantage: you can partner with a power provider to provide energy. You have control over a cost that you can’t control outside of the DDC district.

A lot of companies find advantages from something called ‘vertical integration.’ This basically means that the company controls the manufacture of the intermediate items it uses in production. When Willie Durant created General Motors to compete with Ford’s company, he decided to take advantage of vertical integration. He bought Delco so he could make his own spark plugs, distributors, batteries, and other electrical parts for his cars. GM owned Delco so Delco parts always fit GM cars. Delco also made parts for Ford, but they weren’t designed to fit Ford cars and didn’t work as well. GM bought Bendix so it could have control over automobile starters. (Ford owners had to get out and crank the engines to start them.) GM bought the company that made power steering, automatic transmissions, and automotive air conditioners. GM was ‘vertically integrated’ and this made it possible for GM to gain on and then eventually overtake Ford in nearly every market it served.

Electricity is a key component in everything produced on Earth. Yet no company today can efficiently vertically integrate power production into its business model. The power companies are monopolies. They set the rates. Regulators prohibit companies from building any kind of power plant next to their factories and then selling the electricity it produces to the factories. (People can build destructive plants and sell the power outside of the service area or, in states and provinces that are entirely regulated, outside of the state or province, but not to people inside the state or province.)

Inside the DDC, this constraint won’t exist, at least for DC electricity. (The rules protecting AC producers will still exist, even inside of the DDC districts; only the one monopoly will be allowed to sell AC electricity.)

Inside of the DDC, companies can set up massive solar arrays. They can build storage systems, including the very simple ‘pumped water storage’ to keep this energy available when they need it.

 

 

The people inside the DDC districts won’t be able to sell AC electricity to people inside their districts. However, they can convert any surplus DC electricity they have to AC and sell it to other utilities in other states or provinces.

Deregulation Conclusion

Some people own the rights to get the guaranteed incomes provided by regulated utilities. These people collectively split trillions of dollars a year in money that they will only continue to get if the destruction continues.

These people are terrified by the idea of truly deregulated market.

From the time of Insull to today, their business model has depended on and still depends on regulations.

Since the mid 1970s, the utilities have realized that this business model couldn’t compete with solar and other non-destructive energy systems. they need regulations that are specifically designed to prevent the non-destructive systems from competing with them, to drive up the costs of the non-destructive systems as much as possible, to transfer as many of the costs of destructive systems as possible to taxpayers (through subsidies like the ones listed above that transfer tax revenues to the destroyers), that expand their monopolies to areas where they weren’t intended to apply (like DC power) so they can prevent safer and more efficient energy systems from existing, and by protecting their rights to prevent people from using non-destructive technologies by protecting rights to buy patents with the purpose of preventing superior technologies from being available.

Ending these special regulations would destroy their business model. In fact, they need to keep up a coordinated effort to keep these regulations in place and expand them if they are to continue to get free money.

They have a lot at stake. They can afford to hire the very best lobbyists. They can afford t hire the very best public relations people to convince the people to accept the regulations. They can afford to spend billions of dollars to create plans designed to bankrupt entire states or nations and destroy economies, if necessary, to simply plant the idea in people’s minds that ‘deregulation’ is a bad idea that can never work. (The plan that was called deregulation in California bankrupted this state and drove the governor and many other key officials in the government out of office. It was not deregulation but I couldn’t find any references to it that call it anything other than deregulation.)

These plans depend on ignorance on the part of the people to work. If the people only know what their television sets and the paid search results tell them, they won’t know that any of these things are happening. They won’t realize that they—along with the great majority of the people on Earth—are being tricked into accepting an alliance between the governments that enforce the regulations that prevent non-destructive systems from taking over and the destructive industries that write all the laws, pull the strings that get them into place, and run the PR campaigns designed to get the people to be passive.

If we only knew what really happened, they wouldn’t be able to get away with any of this.

We don’t need to eliminate all four of the categories of regulations listed above to end destruction. If any one of the above categories of regulations could be eliminated, competition and market forces would quickly work to drive electricity prices down so low that no company that used fuel to generate power could compete.

The market would stop the destruction.

Common sense tells us this must be true: if two people make something, one using a process that requires them to purchase and destroy large amounts of fuels or other inputs, while the other doesn’t have any destruction so it doesn’t require this expense, the non-destructive option will take over.

We did not choose the conditions of our birth. We didn’t choose which of the billions of billions of planets likely to be home to life would be the place of our birth. We didn’t choose the spot on this world where we would be born, the millennia or century, and the wealth condition of the people around us. We didn’t choose the type of society into which we would be born and which we would be raised to believe was normal.

We got what we got.

The societies that we ended up with had been around for a while. Forensic History goes over the forensic evidence that shows that the specific type of society into which we were born, a type I call ‘sovereign law societies,’ has been here for slightly over 6,000 years. Although this is not really a long time in an objective sense: it is less than 1% of the time humans have existed on Earth, and it is a flash if we think in geological terms. But it is a long time relative to a human lifespan (these societies have existed for about 750 human lifetimes and about 2,000 generations), a very long time in terms of generations, and an extremely long time in terms of the impact that the highest beings on Earth, humans, can have on the world around them.

We—the currently living generation of humans—came here at a crucial time.

The people who built the structures of these societies didn’t think things through before they acted. They created defective structures. We inherited TWO problems from them.

 

First, we inherited the disease.

Second, we inherited very serious and escalating symptoms.

 

These symptoms include at least two that currently threaten to destroy the human race. These problems are growing at such a fantastic rate that babies being born today are almost certain to witness cataclysmic catastrophes, as a result of these problems, during their lifetimes and there is a good chance that their last moments on this Earth may be the same as the last moments of the human race and possibly of the Earth itself.

The problems discussed in Part One are very serious. Our attention is called to them each day that passes because the changes they cause are self-evident. We already have to plan for them. We already do plan for them and people already die because of them. Because we see this evidence every day, but we don’t see evidence of other problems, it is easy to focus on the problems throwing themselves in our faces and lose track of other problems which are, objectively speaking, even more dangerous and more immediate. (This is particularly true if highly-skilled and extremely well-paid public relations experts work to manipulate the news so that the more serious problems sort of fade into background noise, as happens here.) But, if we want to survive as a race, we need to broaden our focus to include at least one additional problem, because it is so serious it could literally destroy us all in a few seconds and make any hope for the future impossible.

I want to introduce this other problem with a story:

Sadie and Dixie

When I was going to school at UC Berkeley, I had a friend who was looking for a pet for his daughter. One day he told me he was going on an interview to see if he could adopt two black Labrador retrievers and asked if I wanted to come with him.

The couple putting their dogs up for adoption was moving to the east coast because of a job change. They couldn’t take their dogs with them. They thought of the dogs as their children and wanted to make sure they wound up in a good home so they set up interviews for prospective adaptors.

My friend was very good at interviewing. He had a good home, good job, a stable family, and a young daughter who wanted pets. He had owned black labs before and showed the interviewers many pictures of the dogs in the wonderful places where he traveled. He told them the dogs would have good lives.

Shortly after we got back from the interview his phone rang and he was told he had been approved and would be allowed to adopt the dogs.

We went to get them. We came in, put leases on the dogs, and got ready to leave.

I felt awkward about the situation. These people clearly loved their dogs and would feel a great sense of loss after they were gone. I thought we should at least make some small talk to delay the obviously emotional parting for a few minutes.

Qqqq Sadie and Dixie picture here.

I asked where they were from.

The woman said they were from Kiev, in the Ukraine.

I knew Kiev was affected by the Chernobyl nuclear accident so I asked if they were there at the time. The woman was totally unemotional when she said she was there.

I was then taking a class in environmental policy at the university. I was interested in policies relating to nuclear plants and had studied the things that can go wrong. The government of Russia has not released much information about the events that took place in Chernobyl and we don’t know much about the response to the accident. People who had been there would know details that would help put some of this together. I had a very simple question that I thought would reveal how well the response teams had reacted to the disaster:

I asked how long it took the authorities to ban milk.

You see, response planners have to ban milk and make sure none gets sold because of iodine. When uranium atoms break down in the reactor, they often become iodine atoms, because iodine atoms are roughly half of the size of uranium atoms. The newly-created iodine atoms are highly radioactive and extremely dangerous. The reason for this is that iodine is a key element in our bodies and certain people (mainly growing people) take in a lot of it. This radioactive iodine then becomes incorporated into their bodies. In the accident, tons of radioactive iodine had spewed into the air. It had settled onto the grass surrounding Kiev. Cows ate the grass and their bodies concentrated the radioactive iodine in their milk.

Milk gets to stores quickly. Within hours after the accident radioactive milk was on store shelves.

This milk is very dangerous, particularly for children. If they drink it, their bodies incorporate the iodine into their growing bones. (Iodine is needed to incorporate calcium into bones.) The radioactivity from the iodine atoms tears apart the DNA of bone marrow cells, causing leukemia; the thyroid gland tries to remove the cancerous cells and gets infected; because thyroid cancer advances much more rapidly than leukemia, most children who drink the milk die of thyroid cancer.

To prevent very large numbers of cancers in children, the response teams have to make sure people don’t drink milk after a nuclear accident. They have to issue warnings immediately: do not drink milk, it is dangerous. They then have to make sure that the milk is banned, pulled from the shelves, and destroyed. They then have to shut down the dairies so no more milk gets into stores. This is one of the most serious problems related to radioactive releases so we would expect the response teams to be ready for problems and have a plan in place to get milk banned.

The people who build nuclear power plants know all about iodine. Long before the Chernobyl plant was built, the designers planned for things that could go wrong. They then created response plans. I was curious about how efficient the response teams had been. If they had a good plan and implemented it well, they would have sent out a message over the television and radio within hours or perhaps even minutes after the iodine release. They didn’t have to say anything about the explosion and meltdown of the plant; they would just have to tell parents that there might be problems with milk contamination and they should not let their children drink any milk until notified that it is safe. Then they would have removed the milk from the shelves. Children would drink powdered milk, or milk brought in from unaffected areas, for a few months, until the iodine broke down naturally. No one would have to lose their children because of contaminated milk. I had looked for information about this issue in the journals and couldn’t find any. The media didn’t provide details. The people giving up the dogs had been in Kiev at the time. They would probably be able to tell me about this detail of the event. I didn’t even expect them to realize the significance of the question; I had learned about the issues involving nuclear releases this way in a PHD level class.

I certainly didn’t expect an emotional response.

But I got one.

Both of them had looks of panic and fear on their faces.

The woman held this look for a few seconds; then she started to cry.

It turned out that I had hit a very deep nerve.

Through the sobs, she was able to tell me that they had not removed milk from the shelves at all. She tried to go on but emotion overpowered her. Finally her husband stepped in to finish the answer:

He said no one told them anything about the danger of drinking milk. Fresh milk kept arriving in the stores and they kept buying it for their two sons. They didn’t know anything was wrong with this. A few months later, both boys got cancer; it spread quickly to their thyroids and both boys died.

The parents were well educated and didn’t accept the standard response. (The standard response: ‘these things happen’). They did their own research and came to understand the calcium metabolism and the role iodine plays in it. They realized that radioactive milk had killed their sons.

They also realized that the deaths were totally unnecessary. All the authorities would have had to do is tell people not to drink milk.

This did not happen.

They realized that the nuclear officials had killed their children.

They didn’t want to live in Kiev anymore. He worked for the university and had connections; he was able to land a job in California and moved to Berkeley.

One of the first things the couple did was get the black labs. They used the dogs to fill the emotional hole left by their dead children. They poured all the love that would have gone to their sons onto the dogs.

Several years had passed.

Budget cutbacks at UC Berkeley had eliminated his job.

He had to get another job in the United States quickly to keep his visa. He couldn’t find one in California so they had to move to the east coast. They couldn’t take their dogs to their new place. That is why they put them up for adoption.

He was stoic as he told us these things. He went to the piano and got a picture of the two kids, standing on the lawn in front of their home in Kiev. He had kept his composure until then but couldn’t hold on any longer. When we left, they were both on the couch, sobbing in each other’s arms. We didn’t want to bother them to say goodbye and let ourselves out, leading the dogs on two leashes, a red one for the girl and a blue one for the boy.

According to the official accident report issued by the Russian government, 30 people died as a result of the Chernobyl meltdown. The two children were not on the list. In fact, none of the cancer deaths were on the list. The Russian government has never officially estimated cancer deaths due to the meltdown. Unofficial estimates, like the 2009 by Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment by the New York Academy of Sciences say 985,000 had died of cancer, as a direct result of the melt down, by the time they collected the data.

Cancer kills for decades. The report said that the final toll would be far higher. Updates are still coming in. Millions have died.

The God of Hades

Just about anyone you ask about nuclear energy has something bad to say about it. Even its most adamant advocates don’t try to pretend it is safe. They acknowledge it has risks and dangers.

Most people wouldn’t put iodine at the top of the list.

Most of the people who understand the issue are far more worried about plutonium. Plutonium is named after Pluto, the Greek god of Hades; the equivalent in the Greek religion of the devil. Plutonium is the most toxic substance on the planet. It has killing powers that are so great they defy comprehension. A single gram of this material (less than the weight of a US dime), properly distributed, would kill everyone on Earth. After the people were dead, the plutonium would kill the wolves, vultures, and other creatures that ate the dead bodies; it would kill the maggots that got what was left; it would kill anything that ate the wolves, vultures, or maggots, it would keep killing and killing anything that got this substance inside its body for roughly a half million years.

Nature does not make plutonium.

None existed before the first nuclear plants started to make it.

According to the Union of Concerned Scientists, roughly 5,500 pounds of this material are in storage, mostly in waste ponds adjacent to nuclear reactors. It is considered to be garbage.

The Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) has many concerns about nuclear power. One of the biggest involves plutonium. Plutonium is not only highly toxic, it is very dangerous because if you know how to do it, you can use it to make nuclear bombs. The members of the UCS tell us that about 30,000 nuclear bombs could be made just out of garbage plutonium. They claim that this waste plutonium is not being safeguarded, because, well, people just don’t safeguard garbage.

But the risk of nuclear bombs is only one of their concerns about this incredibly dangerous substance. There is a lot more:

During the roughly half million years plutonium takes to break down into something safe, it will have to be kept refrigerated so it doesn’t melt into a critical mass and explode spontaneously. People found out this was necessary the hard way: on 29 September 1957, a nuclear waste dump containing plutonium in Kyshtym Russia got too hot; the plutonium melted and collected into a critical mass at the bottom of a storage tank. The result was an unintended nuclear explosion, called the ‘Kyshtym disaster.’ The map to the right shows the area affected. Now, after 70 years, thousands acres are still too contaminated to visit.

Qqqq kyshtym map

Luckily, the Kyshtym dump was in an extremely remote place. Since this disaster took place very early in the nuclear experience, only a small amount of plutonium was in the waste tanks and the nuclear blast was small. Many decades have passed and reactors have created plutonium for thousands of reactor years. Modern nuclear ‘dumps’ are not placed in remote locations anymore, for political reasons: Plutonium is so dangerous that the authorities won’t allow it to be moved through their jurisdictions at all, regardless of safety precautions taken. All nuclear plants produce plutonium: it is a necessary byproduct of the bombardment of uranium atoms with radiation. Since authorities have generally been able to prevent it from being moved, it is being kept, ‘temporarily,’ in refrigerated waste ponds adjacent to nuclear power plants. Many of these plants are very close to massive cities. One example of a site with large amounts of nuclear waste is the Indian Point Energy Center in New York, which is 23 miles from Manhattan. The plant has been operating since 1962. It has produced many tons of plutonium. None has been removed, at least not through legal channels.

If the plutonium stored in the open ponds was to somehow get into the environment surrounding the plant, the surrounding area would be uninhabitable for about a half million years. We can be thankful that the 9/11 hijackers wanted to make a political statement and hit populated areas, rather than going for long-term damage that wouldn’t make spectacular TV, but would go a long way to destroying their target: If the planes had hit 23 miles away from the places where they hit, land that currently has about 23 million inhabitants may now be too radioactive to support life.

Qqqq Indian point map here.

The public relations departments of the nuclear companies know that many people have concerns about safety, and they have their answers ready. They claim that all of the problems related to plutonium are in the process of being solved. The waste that could potentially be used to make nuclear bombs is being guarded better than before. Secure facilities are being built with multiple refrigeration redundancies to keep the waste cool under all possible circumstances. The authorities are developing protocols to allow the waste to be moved to uninhabited areas. The plant owners are covering the ponds with concrete roofs to make contamination less unlikely. Technology is advancing rapidly and, within a few decades, scientists will have found a safe way to deal with the waste.

Its all good and getting better.

No need to worry.

But groups like the Union of Concerned Scientists point out that the people who claim we will one day figure out how to solve plutonium-related problems are speculating. Objectively, we really aren’t any closer to solutions to these problems now than on December 14, 1940, the date the first plutonium ever to exist on Earth was created. Until we have solutions in hand, we need to accept that we are taking too great of a risk by making plutonium.

We need to stop making more of it.

Plutonium will always be produced in nuclear reactors where uranium is present, and all nuclear plants use uranium, so nuclear plants must be shut down until the solutions are in place. If they solve the problems related to plutonium, together with the other problems related to nuclear reactor operation, we can reopen them. But without proven solutions to the problems of plutonium contamination and nuclear explosion risk, we are taking too big of a risk operating reactors and we need to stop.

Other Problems with Nuclear

Others people believe the greatest problem with the nuclear process is not the radioactive materials at the end of the fuel cycle, which only has killing potential (and may possibly not kill anyone), it is known death that results from the beginning of the cycle.

Nuclear power plants use uranium as a fuel. Uranium is a trace metal and the Earth’s crust only has tiny amounts. It isn’t concentrated veins like gold and sliver; it has to be removed by crushing millions of tons of ore. The left over material after extraction is called ‘tailings.’ These tailings are the rock that surrounded the radioactive uranium. It is all radioactive. If the rocks containing the radioactive uranium had not been dug up, the radioactivity would still exist, but it would be buried under non-radioactive rocks that would protect the living things on the surface. The people who mined the first uranium were in a great hurry: they needed uranium to make nuclear bombs and were in a race to get as much as they could get. They used explosives to break the rocks into gravel exposing large amounts of radioactive materials to the air. One of the most dangerous of these materials is radon, a ‘noble’ gas that is emitted in large amounts from the tailings. Breathe it in and you are being contaminated from the inside. Radon contamination is the second leading cause of lung cancer, after smoking. Almost all radon in the atmosphere comes from tailings around uranium mines, including thousands of abandoned uranium mines.

The United States has a law that requires mining companies to calculate the deaths that result from their operations and report this figure to government agencies. This law was originally intended to protect miners from dangerous working conditions by giving mining companies incentives to create safe conditions so they could report lower numbers. But over the years, various lawsuits have expanded the scope of this law. Courts have ruled that they have to report ALL deaths due to mining operations, including cancer deaths of people who aren’t anywhere near the mine and died by breathing air contaminated by radioactive debris that blew off of the tailings. Over the years, mining companies have conducted studies and calculated that there will be 394 cancer deaths from tailings for each reactor-year of uranium mined. Almost all of the people who die will not be employees of the mine and most actually live hundreds of miles away from the mine. These deaths are what military planners call ‘collateral deaths.’ The deaths are a side effect of the operation of nuclear reactors.

If you multiply the number from their calculations by the number of reactor years of operation of power plants so far in the United States (roughly 15,000) you get 6 million cancer deaths. This means that, in the United States alone, 6 million people who wouldn’t have gotten cancer otherwise either have already gotten cancer or will get cancer due to the tailings emissions.

Qqqq Tailings images

If you live in the United States, and you happen to have chosen one of the 50 states where uranium is mined (uranium is mined in all states), you are playing Russian Roulette with every breath you take:

Will you get the atom that kills you in your next breath?

Probably not.

But breathe long enough, and you will get it eventually.

The only way to stop playing this game is to stop breathing.

My mother died from lung cancer. The second leading cause of lung cancer is radon, most of which comes from tailings. She was raised in Carbon County Montana and there are 63 uranium mines in this county, three of them within walking distance of the cabin where she was raised. There is a very high probability that she is one of the 6 million casualties.

Military Costs

Others would say that the environmental threats of nuclear power plants are actually insignificant compared with the military threats. They say no government or military can effectively defend a nuclear plant. Enemies can send new weapons like cruise missiles can fly under radar at five times the speed of sound into the reactors and blow them up. There is really no way to protect nuclear plants against all of the possible military threats.

As of 2021, there are 450 commercial nuclear reactors in the world, with an additional 60 under construction. They are all well marked on maps and pictured in satellite images. They can’t really be hidden: everyone knows where they are. Each of these plants contains enough radiation, according to Atomic Energy Commission in its report titled WASH-740 (a government report on the dangers of nuclear power, discussed below), to ‘destroy an area the size of the state of Pennsylvania.’ Opponents of nuclear power say that no country that uses nuclear plants to generate electricity power is safe. It can never be made safe. The military risks are unacceptable.

Electricity that is Too Cheap to Meter

Why do these plants exist?

We will see below that the stated reasons for their existence are lies. Initially, the people who proposed nuclear plants claimed that we would have to build them because we needed energy and nuclear power was cheap. It cost practically nothing. The first advertising presented by both the government and corporations that made nuclear technologies proclaimed that, with nuclear power, electricity would be ‘too cheap to meter.’

We will see that the truth is that nuclear power is, by far, the most expensive electricity production method in use in the world today. It would not exist without fantastic subsidies; the governments of the nuclear countries (actually the taxpayers) pay the huge majority of the actual costs and the people of the planet Earth are going to pay risk costs for the rest of the time the human race exists. These costs are so high that, if the power plant owners had to pay them, they would never even consider using nuclear energy to produce electricity.

Why do these plants exist?

The reason is structural. Our ancestors created societies built on a dangerous principle. They decided that humans could own mountain ranges, rivers, lakes, islands, parts of continents, and continents themselves, as long as those humans form into groups that are called ‘countries’ and go through certain rituals to convince their people that these countries are real things. Societies that start with this premise evolve in ways that lead naturally and necessarily to conflicts: We all depend on the Earth for the necessities of life and, if groups claim to own and have the right to take everything, other groups will be forced to fight them to avoid death for themselves and their loved ones.

Conflict is inevitable.

Once societies built on this premise get started, they will evolve in certain ways that lead to more and more powerful weapons over time. (The book Forensic History explains how this evolution took place in our past.) Logic and reason don’t enter into the calculations made by the people who believe the underlying premise of these societies. they will keep developing more and better weapons. Once the techniques of atomic bombs become understood, the leaders will make nuclear weapons. The most versitle kind of nuclear weapons made in the world today (called ‘fission, fusion, fission’ or ‘thermonuclear’ weapons) requires plutonium produced specifically for the weapons. (This ‘weapons grade plutonium’ is created intentionally, unlike the garbage plutonium discussed above that is produced as a byproduct of nuclear reactions.) The larger the reactor, the more weapons-grade plutonium it can make. Plants large enough to make significant amounts of this material can’t be hidden or operated in secret. They are fantastically expensive and governments must have some excuse for having them. There is significant evidence (discussed below) showing that nuclear power plants exist simply to create an excuse that allows governments have these enormous reactors, so they can make more nuclear weapons.

This means that, if we want to solve the problems related to nuclear energy, we can’t do this superficially. We have to understand the structural realities of the societies our ancestors created and that we inherited. They have powerful forces pushing toward war. We need to understand that these forces exist, why they exist, what steps we can take to reduce their strength, and what steps we can take that will eventually eliminate these forces. Once the forces that push us toward war are gone, we can start to dismantle the mechanisms of war. We must remember that war is really nothing other than organized and intentional murder and destruction on the largest scale within the capabilities of the people involved. We can’t expect to deal with war-related destruction problems one at a time while the foundational forces remain in place.

However:

Structural change takes time. Other books in this series, explain that there are other ways for humans to organize their/our existence (this is the main purpose of the book Possible Societies). Some have far weaker forces pushing toward war and some don’t have these forces at all. The other books in the series explain that, once we understand the other options, we can analyze them and compare them to the type of society we inherited. We can then choose a path that takes us from ‘a type of society that has powerful forces pushing toward war’ to ‘a type of society without forces pushing toward war.’

Unfortunately, a practical change to this type of society will take time. We can’t wave a magic wand. Almost everyone in the societies we have now depends on destruction related structures in some way. We can’t end the destruction without first creating structures to replace the harmful ones and put them into place.

In the meantime, we are faced with very serious threats. One of the most serious is related to nuclear reactors. The largest nuclear reactors on Earth—by a huge margin—are operated by utilities to produce electricity, and the right kind of accidental or intentional act at one of these facilities (people may use these reactors as weapons, just as the 911 hijackers used jumbo jets), could cause such devastation that we would lose our ability to do anything at all while suffering. This is one area that we need to look at individually.

The best place to start is by looking at the costs. What does nuclear energy really cost?

The True Costs of Nuclear Energy

Nuclear power plants are dangerous.

Risks translate directly into costs.

Most industries that are dangerous have to carry insurance. The riskier the operations, the more insurance costs. The companies want to reduce their costs so they take steps to manage risks. This reduces their costs and increases their profits.

This doesn’t apply to nuclear energy.

The reason it doesn’t apply is a law called the Price Anderson Act, which allows nuclear power plants to operate without any significant amount of insurance. (They have to carry about the same amount of insurance as truck drivers do, but not nearly enough to cover even a minor accident.)

Long before the Atomic Energy Commission (The AEC) issued its first license for a nuclear power plant, its members did a study to answer the above question. Businesses that expose the public to risk normally have to have insurance. They expected nuclear power plants to get insurance and wanted to figure out what this would cost.

This report was commonly called ‘The Brookhaven Report.’ It had the official designation of WASH-740. The Brookhaven report was supposed to have been done in secret, only for release to the AEC. Although we don’t know exactly why it was supposed to have been done in secret, Karl Grossman, author of ‘Everything you aren’t supposed to know about Nuclear power,’ includes documents with his book from the AEC that indicate that the agency already knew that nuclear energy was far to dangerous to insure (in other words, it would not be possible for the operators of nuclear power plants to afford insurance, even if they paid all of their operation revenues to insurance companies) and expected the Brookhaven Report to confirm this.

The AEC wanted to know about the risks. But they knew that the government would almost certainly push the AEC to start building plants and they didn’t want the public to know about the risks. Whatever the reason, the report was supposed to be done in secret. The people who did it signed documents that acknowledged that if they disclosed the results of the study, they could be tried for treason. The penalty for treason is death.

After they completed their work, many of the scientists who did the report saw that the governments of leading countries (USSR, England, France, and the United States) were pushing to build nuclear power plants even though the scientists had found that this was basically suicide on a planetary scale. They wanted the results of the study released to the public. They asked the AEC to release the results but the AEC administrators refused. Several of the scientists risked a possible death penalty to ‘leak’ the report.

You can read WASH-740 yourself. You can see that the government knew all about the risks of nuclear power before any plant was ever built. They knew that no insurance company could ever afford to insure for the risks of these plants. Even if a group of insurers could put together a package that would allow them to cover their costs and make money providing insurance, no utility could ever afford to pay for it. If utilities had to pay for insurance, they would never be able to build nuclear plants. No plants would ever exist.

Consider the example cited in the study: They calculated that an accident at a large nuclear reactor (actually small by later standards) could destroy an area the size of the state of Pennsylvania. Pennsylvania has 12.8 million people.

Who could afford to pay the full replacement cost of every inch of land in Pennsylvania, replace all of the buildings, universities, city centers, industrial facilities, and homes, together with the cost of burying millions and treating the survivors for radiation and cancer? Even if the utilities devoted 100% of the revenues of the plants to insurance, they wouldn’t have enough to pay these costs.

The government of the United States realized there would not be nuclear power plants if the utilities had to pay these costs, so they passed a law called the ‘Price Anderson Nuclear Indemnity Act.’ This law basically says that nuclear power plants don’t have to buy insurance. (They do have to carry a token amount of insurance, meeting the same standards as truck drivers have to meet, but the insurance coverage they have is trivial comparison to the damage they could cause.)

There is a pretty obvious reason that nuclear power plants are allowed to operate without insurance: they would not be able to operate if they had to buy insurance.

 

 

And certain world governments have determined that we absolutely must have nuclear power plants. (Again, the reason we must have them is described below; it is very clear and compelling.) They can’t get insurance. So, the governments have decided they don’t need it.

Other Costs

We will see, when we go over the costs below, that nuclear power is the most expensive power system that exists on this planet. This stands to reason: if you destroy a lot to operate a facility, you have to pay a lot. You, the owner of the power plant, may not have to pay all of the costs. Someone else may pay them. But this doesn’t eliminate the cost. The cost is still real. If we add all of the costs of nuclear power and then divide this by the number of KWH produced, we get a staggering number, one that is many, many times the cost of other destructive options and millions of times greater than the cost per KWH of solar.

I want to go over some of the costs that nuclear power plant owners don’t have to pay so you can see that the claims that many people make about nuclear power are not correct. (They claim that nuclear power, while dangerous, is at least cheap; this is NOT true.) Power plant owners don’t have to pay most of the costs of nuclear power. But these are real costs. Let’s consider them so we can get some idea how much this option (which is claimed to be ‘too cheap to meter’) really costs:

Nuclear plants use uranium for fuel. Uranium is an incredibly rare element. You don’t go to the supply store and buy uranium. It isn’t found in veins like gold, silver, and other metals. You have to dig up hundreds of thousands of tons of rock to get a pound of uranium. How much does this cost?

The truth is that we don’t know.

Governments need uranium because they need the plants to produce plutonium for nuclear bombs. (This is discussed below.) They don’t want the people to know the cost, so they do most of the mining themselves, at government expense. They don’t tell us how much this is. Private mines are heavily subsidized with free land, special depletion allowances, indemnification from insurance and liability for cancers caused by the mines, and government clean up (or indemnification from clean up requirements; most of the sites are never cleaned up). So, we don’t know. As of 2017, the price of uranium oxide from ore (the raw material that comes directly from the mine) was about $100 per pound. I have a hard time getting information more recent than this (it seems pretty clear that people are monitoring visitors to websites that give this information and they block them from access by any but registered users) but I have to assume it costs more now.

The uranium oxide is called ‘natural uranium.’

Plants can’t use natural uranium as fuel.

Natural uranium contains only 0.7% of the isotope U235, that is required in nuclear reactors. To run reactors, the uranium has to have at least 3% and most plants require 4.35% of this isotope to run. The uranium has to be ‘enriched,’ a term used to refer to the process that increases the U235 percentage.

How much does this cost?

Again, we know it is expensive, but we don’t know how expensive. The governments of the nuclear powers do the enrichment in government controlled plants. Governments pay all of the costs of these plants and they hide these costs in their budgets so that no one can get any real objective idea how much this costs. The reason they do this is that anyone with enriched uranium can make nuclear bombs. They don’t want people to know how to enrich uranium. Even explaining the costs would provide information that governments don’t want people to know. Governments are afraid that if they give any information about the process, including information about the costs, people could reverse engineer the process and make their own private nuclear bombs.

We don’t know how much governments have to pay for enrichment. But we do know that fuel enrichment facilities are among the largest industrial facilities on Earth. If you want to build one of these plants you need an entire city. (Two new cities were created for the plants used to generate the materials needed for the first nuclear bomb in the United States.) These plants also use staggering amounts of electricity. (Two river valleys dammed to make the electricity for the first nuclear bombs in the United States: the Columbia basin and the Tennessee Valley. An undisclosed but extremely large portion of the electricity generated by these dams still go to uranium enrichment.)

Who pays these costs? Not the nuclear plant owners. They aren’t even told how much these costs are.

Many claim that the largest costs, by far, of nuclear plant operation are in the future: Governments handle waste at taxpayer expense. Part of the reason for this is military: The waste contains plutonium and enriched uranium. People who know how can process it and get materials to make nuclear bombs. Governments don’t want private companies handling the waste because, if this happens, a little money will buy enough waste to build a bomb. But another reason governments do this is economic. It costs a LOT of money to safeguard thousands of tons of waste and keep it refrigerated for a half million years. (This is the time needed for plutonium; other waste takes longer to break down and has to be guarded longer.)

How much would you have to charge someone to safeguard a ton of waste, which people are trying to steal or destroy, and keep it refrigerated for a half of a million years, fully insure it for this time, and still make a profit from the contract? How about 5,000 tons? Do you really think the plants would exist if they had to pay these costs, up front, before they could operate?

Then we have the cost of ‘decommissioning’ the plants.

Paul Grossman’s book, described above, goes over the subsidies for building and shows that, in the United States at least, the government paid the great majority of these costs. The plants only last a short amount of time. Radiation weakens concrete and steel. After about 50 years, radiation will have caused so much damage to key components of nuclear plants that even the best maintenance crew won’t be able to keep them in repair. The plants will have to be ‘decommissioned.’

If you have a coal plant that is worn out and no longer worth operating, you can tear down the structure, haul the steel to a scrap yard, hall the concrete to a dump, plow up the top 10 feet of topsoil and remove it to a dump (it is contaminated with arsenic, mercury, and other toxins), and sell the land. If scrap steel prices are high, you might make enough from the sale of the steal to cover the disposal costs and decomissioning the plant might cost you nothing at all.

You can’t do this with a nuclear plant.

It has steel, lots of it. But the steel is radioactive. You can’t sell it to a scrap yard to be melted down and made into new cars. The concrete is radioactive. Thousands of tons of radioactive waste are stored on site and can’t be moved because the authorities won’t allow it to be moved. What do you do with it?

Again, we are in the unknown here. Governments of nuclear powers don’t want people to know about these things. Only a few plants have been decomissioned so far and there just isn’t a lot of information available about how this happened. we don’t know who paid the costs, but we do know this: the utilities that owned the power plant didn’t pay them. (If they had to do this, they would have to report them on their K1 shareholder reports. These reports are public information and I couldn’t find any evidence of these costs in the reports of the few utilities that have decommissioned plants.)

We don’t have the numbers. But common sense tells us that they are very big. We have one example that can’t be hidden, the cost of decommissioning the one Chernobyl reactor that melted down. It was too radioactive for anyone to actually go inside and tear anything down, so they covered it with concrete. This project alone cost over 3 billion Euros.

What if the companies that operated these plants has to post a bond to cover the full cost of decommissioning the plant before they could open one, to guarantee that it was done properly? These costs would almost certainly be far higher than the cost of building the plant. What if they had to pay this, plus buy insurance for any possible accident, plus pay the full cost of enriching fuel, plus pay the full cost of guarding and refrigerating the waste for a half million years, and post all this money as a bond, up front, before they could get a license to operate the plant?

Do you think there would be any nuclear power plants?

Obviously, the answer is ‘no.’ these plants don’t exist because profit-motivated people sat down and analyzed the costs and determined they could make profits building nuclear plants.

They exist for other reasons.

What are these reasons?

The next chapter goes over this information.

On February 11, 1939, the German periodical Die Naturwissenschaften published a one-page article that changed the realities of existence for the human race forever.

The English translation of the title is ‘Disintegration of Uranium by Neutrons: a New Type of Nuclear Reaction.’ The author was the Austrian physicist Lise Meitner and her nephew. She had analyzed the results of experiments conducted by Enrico Fermi and determined that the atoms of uranium could be split ‘like a droplet of water,’ turning them into other elements and releasing truly staggering amounts of energy.

Here is the relevant text of the article:

 

On bombarding uranium with neutrons, Fermi found that at least four radioactive substances were produced.

At first sight, this result seems very hard to understand. The formation of elements this way has been considered before, but was always rejected for physical reasons, so long as the chemical evidence was not entirely clear cut. However, new ideas about the behavior of heavy nuclei suggest an entirely different picture of these new disintegration processes. On account of their close packing and strong energy exchange, the particles in a heavy nucleus would be expected to move in a collective way which has some resemblance to the movement of a liquid drop. If the movement is made sufficiently violent by adding energy, such a drop may divide itself into two smaller drops.

These two nuclei will repel each other and should gain a total kinetic energy of c. 200 Mev., as calculated from nuclear radius and charge.

(Link to full text of article.)

 

Meitner was saying it would be possible to cause the nuclei of atoms to split. If this happened, the starting elements would no longer exist and different elements would take their place. Energy would be released. She then gave information needed to calculate the amount of this energy release.

It was immense.

It was far beyond any energy release of an ordinary chemical reaction.

When this article was published, Albert Einstein had recently moved to the United States. He read the article in German. (No one had translated it into English yet.) At the time, the United States didn’t have any expertise in the kind of physics that Meitner understood.

Einstein appears to be one of the few in America (the only one, as far as I could see) who realized the importance of Dr. Meitner’s discovery. The next day, Einstein wrote a letter to Franklin Roosevelt, the President of the United States.

He warned that the United States would have to start learning about physics, and fast. Here is the relevant information from his letter:

 

In the course of the last four months it has been made probable that it may become possible to set up a nuclear chain reaction in a large mass of uranium, by which vast amounts of power and large quantities of new radium-like elements would be generated. Now it appears almost certain that this could be achieved in the immediate future.

This new phenomenon would also lead to the construction of bombs, and it is conceivable that extremely powerful bombs of a new type may thus be constructed. A single bomb of this type, carried by boat and exploded in a port, might very well destroy the whole port together with some of the surrounding territory.

 

The United States was still a pretty backward nation scientifically.

Although its corporations produced the best conventional weapons in the world, its people were restrained by laws like the Butler Act that prohibited teaching certain aspects of science. As Meitner herself pointed out in her research documents, no United States physicists, other than Einstein, even had the background to understand the concept of ‘uranium disintegration.’

This changed very rapidly.

Einstein later said ‘I made a great mistake when I signed the letter to President Roosevelt recommending that atom bombs be made.’ Link to source.

He believed his letter ultimately led to the horrible consequences described below.

Nuclear Bombs

The very same day Roosevelt got Einstein’s letter, he formed the S-1 Uranium Committee. The committee immediately hired the Hungarian physicists Leo Szilard, Eugene Wigner, and Edward Teller, the leaders in the field Einstein had discussed, to begin creating a bomb. The committee wanted to recruit Meitner for the project, but they researched her work and realized she was a pacifist. Pacifists are security risks. They didn’t want her and didn’t ask her to work for them. They rejected Einstein for the same reason.

They worked at lighting speed, damming up two massive river valleys (the Columbia and the Mississippi’s tributaries) to generate the incredible amounts of electricity needed to make the products needed for the bomb. They created cities—in secret—to supply the scientists with the necessities of their jobs. They built new sciences and created new elements. On 6 July 1945, the first bomb was ready to try. They exploded it and the test was successful: everything worked exactly as Meitner and Einstein had predicted.

It took them another month to put together two additional bombs, organize the plans to move then bombs (which were then extremely large) to the war zone, and begin using this incredible new weapon in war. The second nuclear bomb ever deployed was used to destroy the Japanese city of Hiroshima on August 6, killing an estimated 166,000 people. Three days later, on August 9, the military used a third bomb to destroy the city of Nagasaki, killing another estimated 90,000 people.

Hydrogen Bombs

The bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki were far more powerful than any chemical bombs that had ever been built. Weapons experts measure the destructive ability of bombs on a standard called ‘TNT equivalent.’ How much TNT would be needed to create the same explosion? The Hiroshima bomb had an explosive ability equivalent to 25,000 tons of TNT.

To put this into perspective, a fully loaded semi-truck can carry about 20 tons of payload. To carry enough explosive to match the Hiroshima bomb into the city would require, a convoy of 1,250 trucks, or a line of trucks fully loaded with TNT parked bumper to bumper for a distance of 14 miles. Then, they would have to all be parked pretty much on top of each other and then exploded at the exact same instant to create the explosion that destroyed Hiroshima.

You might think that, after having this technology, the military planners would rest for a while. The would should digest this: we can now use a single bomb to destroy an entire city. But it wasn’t enough for them. War is not a limited affair where the participants are satisfied to kill a few hundred thousand people a day. Sovereign law societies (the type of societies we have now) put everything on the line. The victors of wars can take everything they want from this world. They need to create the most powerful weapon possible. Although the new weapons were very powerful, the scientists had made new discoveries in the course of building them. They had discovered nuclear reactions that were even more powerful than the reactions in the first simple bombs. They realized that they could make new bombs that would make the bombs that could only destroy a single city and its surroundings seem like firecrackers by comparison.

The Vaporization of Elugelab, a (Former) Island in the Pacific

Under the terms of ‘Operation Blacklist’, the governments term for the military occupation of Japan, the United States could claim, and Japan would have to turn over, anything the United States wanted from Japan.

The United States government wanted to control the immense South Pacific. Japan had conqured it, the United States had conquered Japan, so it now belonged to the United States: all the planners had to do was draw up the documents and sign them.

The United States parceled off roughly 3 million square miles (an area slightly smaller than the continental United States) in the Pacific Ocean and named it the ‘United Nations Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands.’ The Trust Territory had about 2,100 islands which were home to roughly 150,000 people. These islands were some of the most remote places on Earth.

By 1952, United States military scientists were working on a new type of nuclear bomb that they expected to be so powerful it would not be safe to test it anywhere in the actual United States: it might destroy a large part of the country when it exploded. They wanted a place that was as far as possible from the United States to test it. They picked one of the islands that they had taken from Japan, Elugelab. They relocated the people of Elugelab (under the same laws that the government had used to remove the American native people from areas they wanted for whites on the mainland) and converted it into a nuclear test site.

The government called the first hydrogen bomb ‘Ivy Mike.’

Hydrogen bombs are also called ‘two stage nuclear devices’ because of the way they work: The first stage is a nuclear explosion created by a plutonium ball that gets ‘imploded’ on itself to create a nuclear reaction that compresses a tiny, tiny ball of lithium hydride, a solid salt of hydrogen, with the hydrogen having been converted into ‘heavy hydrogen’ (deuterium) inside of a nuclear reactor. The intense pressure at the center of the exploding inward-focused nuclear reaction is enough to cause the hydrogen atoms to combine to form helium atoms, the same kind of reaction that gives stars their energy. This reaction releases immense amounts of energy and creates an explosion far more powerful than the explosions of the simpler ‘atom bombs’ that were used to destroy the Japanese cities.

Military contractors scheduled the test for November 2, 1952. Scientists had estimated the damage the bomb would do, but there were a lot of unknowns. One reason to test it so far from the United States was that they just didn’t know what was going to happen: this kind of reaction had never existed on this planet. They expected it to produce a very large crater on the island. They set up instruments on the island far away from the test site to measure the destructive power of the bomb. In case the explosion should be larger than they anticipated, and destroy the test instruments, they brought in a large number of ships and put instruments on them, with the ships anchored at various distances from the island, some far out at sea.

Shortly after midnight on November 2, they pushed the button and the bomb exploded. The exact strength of the explosion, if they know what it was, is still a military secret, but the bomb turned out to be far, far more powerful than the scientists had estimated:

It vaporized the entire island and blew it off of the Earth into space.

The island where the test took place, Elugelab, no longer exists. None of the landed instruments survived; they were also vaporized, along with most of the ships put in place to measure remote effects, all of the personnel operating the instruments, and all of the crews of the ships that were destroyed.

Scientists tried to figure out what had happened.

Why was it so much more powerful than they had estimated?

They analyzed debris from the explosion and eventually found that a massive flux of gamma radiation (the most powerful radiation there is) was produced as the hydrogen fused. This gamma radiation caused metals that were not normally able to undergo nuclear reactions to react just like the plutonium at the center of the bomb.

They realized that they had not actually created a two stage bomb as they expected, they had created a three stage bomb.

The first stage was the plutonium. This compressed the hydrogen causing a second stage of a fission reaction, like the reactions that take place in our sun and on other stars. This released massive amounts of gamma radiation that turned normally stable metals into fissionable materials with the same power to explode as plutonium. The third stage, they found, was, by far, the most powerful part of the explosion.

The discovered this by accident.

These other metals had been present in various parts of the bomb and had exploded with great force. If there had been more of these particular metals in the bomb, or around the bomb site, we would not be here today: a three stage nuclear device, properly configured, can explode with enough force to destroy the planet.

Within a short time, nuclear scientists were able to build additional test bombs and confirm this theory. They made and tested several additional bombs and soon realized they could make them of any size. The biggest bomb ever built had the explosive capability of 70,000 kilotons, meaning it was equivalent to about 2,000 Hiroshima bombs. But this is by no means a limit. The scientists realized that even testing a larger bomb risked destroying the entire planet, so they didn’t test anything larger.

The United States government eventually built its arsenal around these three-stage bombs, which are also called ‘thermonuclear’ bombs.’ they did this for practical reasons: the thermonuclear bombs don’t have to have very large first and second stages. They only need to be large enough to produce the intense gamma radiation needed to ‘ignite’ the third stage. As a result, these three stage bombs can be made extremely small, so small that dozens of them could fit into the warhead of a missile and sent to targets on the other side of the world.

In the United States, these three stage bombs have the designation ‘B1’. People in the field call the B1 bombs ‘dial a bombs’ because they can adjust the destructive ability of the bomb through an enormous range. They can make it a tiny bomb, one that produces a tiny ‘pop’ like the simple device that killed 166,000 people in Hiroshima. Or, if they set the dial to a very high setting, they can destroy everything.

Why We REALLY Have Nuclear Power Plants

Thermonuclear bombs absolutely require plutonium. They can’t work off of uranium or any other nuclear material. We can’t get plutonium from mining because nature does not make plutonium and none exists. We need nuclear reactors to make plutonium. If we compare the amount of weapons-grade plutonium that has been made in nuclear power plants with the total amount that weapons makers need for the existing weapons, we get a very close match.

 

 

Early bombs required 8 pounds of weapon’s grade plutonium each. Later, the designers were able to reduce the requirement to about 6 pounds. Although we don’t know the exact number of bombs that have ever existed, we know that, as of 1990, about 40,000 of them were in declared arsenals around the world. This means that an absolute minimum of 240,000 pounds of plutonium, or 120 tons of plutonium were needed to make the bombs that existed as of 1990.

In 1999, Washington Times journalist Bill Gertz found a source that had information about the amount of plutonium that had been produced by all nuclear plants until that time. Almost all of this plutonium was made in nuclear power plants because these plants have the largest reactors, by far, of any nuclear facilities. He contacted several scientific groups to verify his information and they confirmed that it was consistent with the estimates that the experts had made. His figure showed 260 tons of weapon’s grade plutonium had been created in nuclear plants globally, since the nuclear industry had begun. This figure is about double the amount that would be needed to make all of the bombs that were declared to have been built as of that date.

They made 260 tons and they had 120 tons in the bombs that we know existed, because they declared them. We wouldn’t expect that they would make bombs with zero loss. Some material would be wasted or lost. We would also expect that some bomb cores would have to be replaced with new cores for one reason or another. We must also account for the plutonium in the 2,476 bombs that were tested prior to 1999. After we put these numbers together, we basically come to the conclusions that the nuclear powers of the world absolutely needed every single pound of weapons-grade plutonium the world’s nuclear power plants produced to make the weapons they have. If these plants had not all existed, they wouldn’t have been able to make some of the nuclear bombs they made.

From a certain perspective, we can easily understand the reasons nuclear power plants exist. The military needs them. They call them ‘power’ plants as a smokescreen: A lot of people don’t like the idea of taking immense amounts of wealth that could be used to benefit the people and using it to make tools of murder and destruction. A lot of people don’t like the risks the weapons factories impose on them. (Any bomb factory can explode; this happens all of the time in fact. But ‘conventional’ bomb factory explosions only kill a few hundred people, at most; nuclear bomb factories—which is what nuclear power plants are—can kill millions of people.)

People will be more likely to accept the nuclear systems if the builders can convince them that they are building them for some reason other than creating tools of mass murder and destruction. Their best explanation, so far, involves the need for the electricity.

Lies My Corporations Told Me

 

We are being lied to about nuclear power.

It doesn’t exist for the reasons we are told.

It exists for military reasons.

In sovereign law societies (the type in place when we were born; the same type we have now) military needs take priority over everything else.

If the military needs it, nothing else matters.

It doesn’t matter if the tools needed to make the materials for the weapons will kill millions of people ‘on our side.’

Military needs have priority.

It doesn’t matter if the tools needed to make the materials for the weapons will render immense parcels of land uninhabitable for thousands of generations after the weapons themselves are withdrawn or obsolete (if this ever happens), or have been used to destroy a target on some other side of the world.

Military needs have priority.

It doesn’t matter if the tools needed to make the materials for the weapons can blow up with the power of a nuclear explosion with the potential to destroy the country that builds the weapons.

Military needs have priority.

It doesn’t matter if the tools needed to make the materials for the weapons can destroy the entire world and kill everyone on it.

 

Because the nuclear power plants don’t exist for the stated reasons, any protests that are designed to prevent them that are based on facts are unlikely to succeed. The public relations departments of the military contractors and people in the military who want these systems can overwhelm the people with false information. They don’t have to convince everyone. They merely have to convince enough people to allow the police and military to be accepted as doing their jobs when they remove and arrest the people who understand the truth and refuse to accept it.

In the long run, if we want to rid of these extremely dangerous activities we have to understand the root cause. We have to understand the forces that push toward war and the reason that military needs trump all other needs and requirements for the human race. We need to understand that not all societies have these forces and figure out what steps we must take to move toward societies that don’t have them.

But that is the long run.

What about the short run?

The truth is that a great many people already understand how dangerous nuclear reactors are. They work hard to generate awareness of the problems we face in the hope that eventually enough people will be aware, and resistance will be so serious, that governments simply won’t be able to continue to build new nuclear facilities and will have to gradually shut down the facilities that exist as they wear out.

Military contractors and zealots who want these technologies to be available have tried various different things to prevent people from opposing the technology. They have worked to a varying degree, but they all have weaknesses.

Too Cheap To Meter

The first idea involved telling people that nuclear power plants were cheap, because they only used small amounts of fuel. Massive ad campaigns told of electricity that would soon be ‘Too Cheap To Meter’ due to nuclear energy. A lot of people fell for it. They saw the people protesting nuclear power as holding back progress and trying to harm society by depriving us of cheap energy.

 

qqqq illustration too cheap to meter

 

The ‘too cheap to meter’ campaign eventually failed because it became impossible to sustain the illusion of low cost. Even with the government paying virtually all of the costs of building the plants, providing free insurance (through indemnification and the Price Anderson Act, described above), paying all of the cost of processing fuel in government run facilities, and taking on all responsibility for risk, the nuclear plants couldn’t come close to competing even with the incredibly expensive fossil fuel plants.

We Love You So Much We Will Do Whatever You Say

Next came the ‘we are listening, we hear you and we are getting rid of nuclear in response.’ The public relations people said over and over again that there were no new nuclear power plants. They tried to create the illusion the amount of nuclear power generated was falling and, soon, it would be at zero.

But this was also a trick. In fact, nuclear capacity increased very rapidly during the period that the companies and governments behind the plants worked hard to create the opposite impression. In the United States, we were told: ‘No new nuclear plants have been licensed since 1976.’ The rest of the world either used the same trick or simply didn’t tell the people what was happening.

The truth is capacity was growing almost everywhere. This could happen even with no new nuclear plants being built by defining the word ‘plant’ to mean the facility that housed nuclear reactors. The companies made sure that, when they got their licenses, they got a lot of extra space in the ‘plant.’ They could build new reactors inside of these plants, and capacity could grow without any new ‘plants’ being licensed.

The chart below compares 1985 and 2020 production in countries that use nuclear power. Note that two countries have gotten rid of nuclear: Italy and Lithuania. Four countries that didn’t have nuclear power developed facilities: Mexico, Romania, China, and Iran. A few countries have reduced their nuclear capacity. (Germany and Japan). The rest have either kept their nuclear generation capacity the same or increased it dramatically. In the United States, nuclear energy production increased by 196% during a period when a large percentage of the people of the country believed the nuclear energy was being phased out, Pakistan increased its nuclear electric generation by a massive 2541% (and it is heard to even pretend that this was to power industrial production) and China went from zero to having the second large nuclear capacity on the planet.

Most countries that had nuclear power in 1985 slowly and steadily increased it and with more than 60 nuclear power reactors under construction as I write this, the expansion continues.

 

Table 8.1	1985 production TWH	2020 production TWH	change	percent
Italy	7.02	0.00	-7.02	-2%
Argentina	5.77	10.01	4.24	173%
Mexico	0.00	11.34	11.34	na
Romania	0.00	11.48	11.48	na
South Africa	5.32	11.53	6.21	217%
Brazil	3.38	13.15	9.77	389%
Slovakia	9.38	15.44	6.06	165%
South Korea	16.75	153.14	136.39	914%
Hungary	6.48	16.06	9.58	248%
Bulgaria	13.13	16.64	3.51	127%
Russia	99.32	202.44	103.12	204%
Finland	18.93	23.23	4.30	123%
Switzerland	22.40	23.28	0.88	104%
Czechia	2.40	30.04	27.64	1252%
Taiwan	28.73	30.27	1.54	105%
Belgium	34.60	33.79	-0.81	98%
France	224.10	355.19	131.09	158%
China	0.00	366.20	366.20	na
Netherlands	3.90	4.08	0.18	105%
Japan	159.58	43.03	-116.55	27%
India	4.51	44.55	40.04	988%
Iran	0.00	5.87	5.87	na
Sweden	58.56	50.23	-8.33	86%
United Kingdom	61.09	51.82	-9.27	85%
Spain	28.04	58.31	30.27	208%
Germany	138.64	64.30	-74.34	46%
Ukraine	53.31	69.87	16.56	131%
United States	403.88	789.92	386.04	196%
Pakistan	0.39	9.91	9.52	2541%
Canada	60.52	93.24	32.72	154%
total	1470.13	2608.36	1138.23	177%

 

(Data from: https://ourworldindata.org/nuclear-energy.)

During the past few decades, the public relations departments of the nuclear companies have been working hard to convince the people of the world that nuclear power is going away. They love us. They listen to us. We don’t want it, even though they assure us it is totally safe and can’t possibly harm us. But their love for us is so great that they are getting rid of it just because we don’t want it.

When I talked to people during this time about the problem I almost always got anger. I was living in the past. The nuclear protests of the 19702 and 1980s had worked. Nuclear was going away. It is ridiculous to waste time dealing with a non problem when there were so many real problems. The fight was over and the good guys had won this one. It is time to take our victory lap and go on to something else. The corporations really do care what we think. The governments really do love us and do what we want them to do. I am trying to beat a dead horse here and therefore nothing I have to say about the matter means anything.

But the truth was and still is entirely different: nuclear power production was skyrocketing this whole time. The people who thought the corporations and governments loved them and only wanted what they wanted were tricking them.

The Carbon Solution

There comes a time the companies and governments simply can’t maintain the illusion anymore. They have to admit the truth: the nuclear plants are there. They want more of them.  They begin to change their strategy. They tell us that some other problem is so much more serious than the nuclear problem that they have to increase nuclear to solve that problem.

Nuclear plants don’t burn carbon-based fossil fuels.

Therefore, they don’t emit carbon dioxide.

Carbon dioxide emissions cause climate change. We need to commit to definite limits on carbon emissions to save our planet. The only way to meet these commitments, at least over the short run, is to expand nuclear energy. Yes, nuclear is incredibly expensive. They admit this now. Yes, the nuclear plants that have operated so far have had some very serious problems and expansion of the capacity will create further risk.

But we have no choice.

We need more nuclear.

Of course, this is so transparently untrue that even the nuclear industry is treading lightly on this issue. If someone says nuclear is the answer, they will say that they agree and have the data to help the nuclear advocates make their point. (Call a few of the nuclear companies and tell them you are a grade school teacher trying to help your student understand global warming. Ask if they have any materials to help make this point. They will be happy to help.)

We can compare the idea of using nuclear power to solve the carbon problem to the solution to communism proposed by Lt William Calley. Calley had been arrested for a massacre of more than 500 women and children in the village of Mei Lia in Vietnam. His defense was that the orders to wipe out the village came from his superiors, but he agreed with their logic. Communism was taking over village after village. The standard methods of dealing with communism were not working. There was only one way to save these people from communism: kill them. Calley was a great humanitarian. He was saving these people the only way possible.

The argument that we can save the world from carbon emissions by using nuclear power is just as ridiculous as Calley’s argument. I think the miltiary and power companies are being circumspect about this for the same reason that oil companies no longer claim to be solar companies: it may blow up in their faces at any time.

But what can they do?

How can they keep the people accepting the nuclear option?

The truth is that, over the long run, they can’t. Each twist they try to keep us believing will fail because they are lies and, eventually, enough people will understand the truth to make their jobs impossible. They want us to use nuclear power. Eventually, they won’t be able to make this happen.

But this is going to take time. In the meantime, we can recognize that they are lying to us and make it clear that we are going to continue to resist expansion of nuclear power and going to continue to push for closure of existing nuclear facilities just like always. We can help the people who believe that the companies and governments that push for nuclear power don’t really love the people of their country more than they love profits and military strength and get them to either come over to our side and help us get rid of this problem, or, at the very least, stop supporting the side that is eventually going to lose.

Summary of Part Two

We didn’t choose the conditions of our birth. We were born into highly destructive societies. The only long-term fix involves coming to understand the way societies are put together, coming to understand the anatomy of these systems to see how their structures create destruction, and either fixing these structures so they no longer push us to destroy ourselves or replacing them with other structures that work differently.

This is possible.

But it will take time.

In the meantime, we need to look at our world objectively to identify threats that can’t wait. We need to take action to mitigate the risks and try to keep them from destroying us while we are working on solutions to the structural problems. I believe that the great majority of the people of the world have failed to see how very serious the nuclear threats are. When I was a kid, I got it pounded into my head, with drills about what to do in the event of a nuclear attach, tests of the sirens, and large signs on the radiation shelters. As part of the campaign to make the public believe the nuclear threats are going away, the authorities have stopped these campaigns, but this doesn’t mean that the threats are less severe than they were in the 1960s. They are far more severe.

We can’t solve the problems related to nuclear reactor use as long as we have inherently destructive systems. But it makes sense, as we are working on the other issues, to do everything in our power to try to reduce the severity of this threat as much as we can. The people of two countries, Italy and Lithuania, have succeeded in getting their governments to end nuclear power. The people of two other countries, Japan and Germany, have been able to substantially reduce the nuclear energy usage. This tells us that it is possible to have some effect. It tells us that there is a chance.

I wish I had something to add to the tools that could be used to reduce the risks from nuclear. I wish there were a magic trick that the others didn’t think of. But the main tool we have in this regard is the same tool we have to reduce the risks of fossil fuel use: switch to solar or other non-destructive options as much as we can personally, push for regulators to legalize solar and other renewable (allow them to be sold in the same markets as destructive energy) and other renewables, push for ends to punitive taxes on renewables, push for an end to the supportive subsidies on destruction, and push for deregulation of DC electricity in unpopulated areas, to encourage companies to move to these areas and begin large-scale production of non-destructive energy.

There isn’t much that is specific to nuclear except awareness. Nuclear energy is complicated and it is easy for people who want it to use the complications to trick us. It isn’t cheap. But there are tricks they can use to make it appear to be cheap. It isn’t safe. But they can point to the rarity of accidents and make it appear to be not harmful enough to worry about. It isn’t going away on its own. But reactors are wearing out and, once they wear out, they will have to be shut down (at least until they can be refurbished and put back into service). The standard stories are either lies or present intentionally deceptive information. If people understand this, they will realize that their governments are tricking them so they can have more of the things that every reasonable person realizes we already have too many of: nuclear weapons.

The new strategy involves telling people we need nuclear to buy us time to phase out carbon-based fuels. This is not only wrong (we can easily meet all our needs with solar) it is an insane proposal. It makes as much sense as playing Russian Roulette to provide some possible rapid relief while waiting for your headache medicine to work. Even if our choice were between using nuclear energy or cutting back because we don’t have enough to live as we want to live, we would be better off to cut back. But this isn’t our choice. We have plenty of good, clean energy: all we need to do is get rid of the laws that prevent us from using it.

 

 

AOD LANDING PAGE

 

It is easy to get emotional about certain realities of our existence. When people are destroying the world around us, pouring poisons into the air we breathe and water we drink, causing disease and killing the people we love, how can we keep from getting mad? When we get mad, we tend to gravitate toward a certain response: we want to find someone to blame and inflict pain on them to help balance out the pain they have caused for our loved ones. If we find ourselves thwarted in these efforts, we want to tell the world about the injustice, carry signs, write letters, go on television, or otherwise protest the things we see.

Unfortunately, the people who benefit from the destruction and want it to continue have figured out all of the measures that may be taken against them and created countermeasures. They gain almost unimaginable benefits if the destruction continues, generating trillions of dollars a year in revenues that they would not get if we used non-destructive alternative technologies. They have a lot of money and can afford to put the people they want into the government and make sure the laws favor them. They can put armies of bureaucrats in front of anyone who wants change, to make sure the change is so costly it will never happen. Not only do the problems continue without interruption, we don’t even get the satisfaction of seeing someone—anyone—punished for the harm they cause. The standard approach to the problem gives us nothing.

Anatomy of Destruction is about a new approach based on a different perspective. Rather than getting emotional, we can look at the root causes of the destruction using logic, reason, and the same scientific tools we use to solve problems in physics and engineering. If we do this, we can see that we have options that the people who benefit from the destruction have intentionally tried to hide. They have tried to make us believe we are helpless so that we won’t even look for solutions to these problems that may take them outside of their comfort zone.

We are at a unique point in time. We have tools that people in the past have never had. We can use these tools to solve problems that have been able to withstand assaults using lesser tools. The problems relating to destruction of our world can be solved, we just have to look at them from the right perspective to make this happen.

Anatomy of Destruction is about this new perspective.

Link to Anatomy of Destruction