• 3 minutes e-car sales collapse
  • 6 minutes America Is Exceptional in Its Political Divide
  • 11 minutes Perovskites, a ‘dirt cheap’ alternative to silicon, just got a lot more efficient
  • 5 hours GREEN NEW DEAL = BLIZZARD OF LIES
  • 1 day Could Someone Give Me Insights on the Future of Renewable Energy?
  • 1 day How Far Have We Really Gotten With Alternative Energy
  • 8 hours e-truck insanity
  • 3 days "What’s In Store For Europe In 2023?" By the CIA (aka RFE/RL as a ruse to deceive readers)
  • 5 days Bankruptcy in the Industry
  • 3 days Oil Stocks, Market Direction, Bitcoin, Minerals, Gold, Silver - Technical Trading <--- Chris Vermeulen & Gareth Soloway weigh in
  • 6 days The United States produced more crude oil than any nation, at any time.
$2-Trillion Funding Gap Casts Shadow over Energy Transition

$2-Trillion Funding Gap Casts Shadow over Energy Transition

Blackrock's Michael Dennis said that…

Global Climate Goals Still Unreachable Despite Record Renewable Growth

Global Climate Goals Still Unreachable Despite Record Renewable Growth

Renewable energy installations reached record…

James Burgess

James Burgess

James Burgess studied Business Management at the University of Nottingham. He has worked in property development, chartered surveying, marketing, law, and accounts. He has also…

More Info

Bill Gates and Richard Branson Back Geoengineering to Counter Climate Change

Climate change is real. Few doubt that now. Governments try to impose, rather weak, legislation to combat climate change such as imposing reductions in carbon emissions, but in truth nothing is changing. The Department of Energy reported that the largest increase in carbon emissions ever occurred in 2010, and according to the International Energy Agency the global temperature could reach a dangerous and irreversible level by 2017 if drastic, coordinated action is not taken to reduce greenhouse gases.

As time runs out for conventional methods such as emission reduction, scientists, backed by the likes of Bill Gates and Richard Branson, are pushing for a “plan B” which utilises geoengineering  to manipulate the environment in order to cool the atmosphere. The scientists are lobbying governments and international organisations for funds to experiment with the different approaches to geoengineering that could be used.  Methods include: fertilising the oceans to create blooms of algae and other plant life which would draw vast amounts of carbon dioxide from the air; or spraying reflective particles or chemicals into the upper atmosphere in order to reflect sunlight and heat back into space.

Geoengineering would be much cheaper than reducing emissions, and also much quicker to produce results. However it is considered controversial due to the potential risks, which need to be identified with funded research and experiments before any methods are implemented on a large scale. There is even the fear that technologies capable of altering the atmosphere of climate on a global scale could be used to create new weapons of mass destruction.

By. James Burgess of Oilprice.com



Join the discussion | Back to homepage



Leave a comment
  • Max on March 25 2012 said:
    Please allow me to interject a little critical thinking into the skewed and misleading public debate about Geoengineering, specifically in regard to the spraying of "reflectives" into the atmosphere.

    It is well documented that humans have been intentionally manipulating the weather for decades. Pick up any Meteorology textbook from the 1960s or 1970s and you'll find whole chapters devoted to the topic. You'll find that humans were already experimenting with steering/strengthening/weakening hurricanes back then and that the overall attitude on weather modification was filled with George Jetson Hubris.

    Weather Modification techniques have come a long way in the last century years, and anyone who digs deep into the field realizes quickly that modern weather mod capabilities appear as unbelievable science fiction in the eyes of the uninitiated.

    Mainstream dialogue about Aerosol Spray (Chemtrail) Geoengineering pretends it's not already happening -- like it's an unutilized and merely experimental option -- but people around the world are documenting artificial Chemtrail clouds daily while absurd levels of Aluminum, Barium, and Strontium are showing up in rainwater and air samples from all over the world.

    If the mainstream clearly lies about the existence and extent of these programs, couldn't it also be lying about the real intent of the atmospheric spraying of "reflectives"?

    The mainstream literature consistently states that spraying a fine dust of "reflectives" in the atmosphere will somehow cool the planet by reflecting sunlight back into space, but that assumption defies basic logic and common sense. It is well documented that Aluminum, Barium, and Strontium are the primary components of Chemtrails, which -- again -- are obviously being sprayed widely already.

    While Aluminum is a highly reflective (aka shiny) element, it absorbs more energy than the typical components of the atmosphere and is an excellent conductor of heat. Additionally, Aluminum exposed to the typical atmospheric gases is rapidly converted into Al2O3, or Aluminum Oxide which is very effective at absorbing radiation from the sun, as stated clearly on page 187 of Atmospheric Pollution: History, Science and Regulation (located here: http://books.google.com/books?ei=41JvT96oG4mO2wWg3uDwAQ&sqi=2&id=NN5S0_3dEvkC&dq=absorption+of+UV+radiation+by+aluminum+oxide&ots=W4ui6cLDl1&q=absorption+of+UV+radiation+by+aluminum+oxide#v=snippet&q=absorption of UV radiation by aluminum oxide&f=false).

    Aluminum is an excellent conductor of heat, so when it absorbs solar energy it converts it into heat... widespread spraying of Aluminum and other metals into the atmosphere surely heats it. The notion that a fine dust of metals is somehow reflecting energy back into space is laughable. Wake up.
  • Gordon Logan on February 19 2012 said:
    Gates and Branson need to know more about the climate change racket. According to the statistics of the US Geological Survey, there has been a massive increase in the number of earthquakes between Richter 6 and 8. This began quite suddenly in 2003 and is caused by a resonant frequency weapon called HAARP. These artificial earthquakes began much earlier. The first was in Alaska in 1964 and was marked by strong ionospheric heating, which a precursor of quakes caused by the resonant frequency weapon. Small quakes can occasionally be caused by tomography at low wattages. The weapon was used to cause the Sechuan earthquke, which targetted a Chinese nuclear weapons facility under a mountain. NASA detected ionospheric heating at Fukushima. The Japanese Finance Minister Heizo Takenaka has claimed that the Niigata earthquake in 2007 was in fulfillment of a previous threat. Both China and Russia have had freak weather for a few years and the Russians actually accused the Americans of using the HAARP weapon to cause 250 brush fires a day in 2010.
  • Jim Baird on February 18 2012 said:
    Guillermo Gefaell

    ``18 times more heat has been stored in the ocean since the mid 1950s due to global warming than has been stored in the atmosphere. Most of the heat trapped by greenhouse gases has gone into the ocean, not the atmosphere``

    The Ocean and Climate, Robert Stewart, TAMU http://oceanworld.tamu.edu/resources/oceanography-book/oceansandclimate.htm
  • Bob on February 17 2012 said:
    They'll probably really screw things up. Because they're rich they know whats best for us. This world will be wiped out one day by unintended consequences of garbage like this.
  • Guillermo Gefaell on February 16 2012 said:
    "About 95 percent of the heat attributable to global warming has gone in the oceans...."

    Prove that, please.
  • Alice on February 16 2012 said:
    Climate change is real. Climate change has always been real, and chaotic. That is what happens when several powerful overlapping natural cycles impact climate at the same time. Everything from snowball Earth all the way to the absence of ice caps. All at both lower and higher levels of CO2 than at present.

    Climate science is an infant science that is vastly overrated in predictive power. It has been thrust into the spotlight far too early in its development, and has been entrusted with the destinies of the world's greatest economies much before it is ready.

    This "don't just stand there and try to understand the situation, do something! Even if it's wrong!" attitude is going to cause more problems than you can possibly imagine.
  • Jim Baird on February 16 2012 said:
    About 95 percent of the heat attributable to global warming has gone in the oceans causing the seas to rise due to thermal expansion and icecap melting.

    The way to combat this is by converting this heat to energy in accordance with the First Law of Thermodynamics.


    Conventional OTEC has been impeded by the size and cost of the pipes required and environmentally by the volume of water these pipes move.

    Amongst these environmental problems are:
    • entrainment and impingement of marine life,
    • release of CO2 associated with bringing pressurized cold water to the surface,
    • eutrophication of the water column due to over fertilization of phytoplankton with massive upwelling of cold water and,
    • the potential to overturn the Thermohaline by massive dumping of surface heat to the depths.

    Nature provided the analogy for the workaround embodied in the local solution to these problems which use a closed heat pipe and counter-current heat transfer system.

    Evaporation due to overheating oceans moves massive amounts of heat in a hurricane to the edge of the stratosphere, where some is radiated back into space and the balance is absorbed by the latent heat of condensation in raindrops that fall back to earth.

    GWMM OTEC, using the counter-current heat transfer system, inverts the hurricane to overcome the shortfalls of conventional OTEC in several ways.
    • It reduces the size of the conventional infrastructure by as much as 900 per cent, using one-metre pipes rather than 10-metre pipes.
    • It increases the thermodynamic efficiency of the process by transferring heat through phase changes rather than in fluids.
    • And it maximizes energy potential while limiting environmental impact by recirculating heat back to the surface rather than dumping it to the depths.

    At a conference on Enhanced Ocean Upwelling last month, Gerard Nihous of the Hawaii Natural Energy Institute, University of Hawaii, ventured the maximum possible number of 100 MW OTEC power plants capable of being supported by our oceans is half a million. (this is 50 terawatts or the equivalent of 750 million barrels of oil per day)

    In producing this energy you eliminate carbon emissions, increase carbon dioxide absorption (because cooler water absorbs more CO2), limit sea level rise and facilitate the production of oxygen needed for our survival. This is accomplished by reducing the thermal stratification of the oceans believed to be reducing the number of phytoplankton that are the base of the food chain and the lungs of the planet.

    This is how you create wealth at the same time as you remedy the problem.

Leave a comment

EXXON Mobil -0.35
Open57.81 Trading Vol.6.96M Previous Vol.241.7B
BUY 57.15
Sell 57.00
Oilprice - The No. 1 Source for Oil & Energy News