International Law

Bitcoin not E-money Under the EU Electronic Money Directive

Posted on May 22, 2013
One of the strategic questions for Bitcoin is how it will interact with regulation. I recall that E-gold has been shut down by the American government under allegations of money laundering and operating a Money Transferring Business without the necessary licenses...

IAEA Finally Stops Hiding Bad Nuclear Numbers

Posted on May 21, 2013
I recall that I tried without success in February to find out how much nuclear energy was produced in 2012 from various nuclear lobby sites. Apparently it was more than they can manage to call up the less than 400 remaining electricity producing reactors and find out their numbers...

The ?Pump Six? Antinuclear Argument

Posted on May 21, 2013
“Pump Six” is a story by Paolo Bacigalupo, which is part of the collection published under the same name. I have reviewed this collection here. The basic theme of “Pump Six” is a world full of lazy and stupid people. They depend on technology developed by previous generations...

Virtual Autograph Using Bitcoin

Posted on May 19, 2013
I started this blog in January 2003. One of my first posts ever, published on 7 January 2003, had this to say under the title “Virtual Autograph”: Anyone can buy PGP 8.0 Personal Edition from Phil Zimmermann, the original author. I don’t know if there is a market for the idea, but instead of selling exactly [...

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12.2 GW of New Solar Approved Until February in Japan

Posted on May 17, 2013
The Japanese Ministry of Economy, Industry, and Trade just published figures for renewable energy under the new feed-in tariff law in force since last July. Thanks to this tweet by Hiro Matsubara for the link. To state the result in very short terms, wind is struggling even with the very high tariffs in place, and [...

Misleading Anti-Desertec Propaganda by Craig Morris

Posted on May 15, 2013
Craig Morris just posted this nonsense. He really did: Over the weekend, Deutsche Welle published a report that went almost unnoticed ? the Desertec project “has been shelved.” Yet, when the project was announced, there was a lot of attention...

Seizure Warrant Against Mutum Sigillum

Posted on May 15, 2013
The United States District Court in Maryland has issued a Seizure Warrant against a company called Mutum Sigillum (which seems to be Latin and mean something like “silent seal”). The Warrant authorizes to seize funds of Mutum Sigillum stored at the Dwolla account No...

Book Review: The Catcher in the Rye, by J.D. Salinger

Posted on May 14, 2013
This is a very strange book. How come this got to be a best seller? There is nothing at all happening in the whole goddam book. The plot is boring as hell. I was always waiting that the goddam story would actually BEGIN some time. But it didn’t...

German Bundestag Against Software Patents

Posted on May 14, 2013
As the FFII reported last month, a large majority of the parties in the German Bundestag (Parliament) want to do something about the stinking software patents. That includes the ruling CDU, CSU, and FDP, but also the opposition SPD and Green parties are on board for a draft resolution asking the government to introduce the necessary [...

My New Bitcoin Address

Posted on May 13, 2013
I got myself a brand new shining Bitcoin address that starts with my name as the first six characters after the initial “1″. Here it is: 1KfLenzmpCEjNhdNs2Y6txuaJAFLUNzfjZ And here is a QR code for this: I used the great service at “Bitcoin Vanity” for finding this particular address...

400 ppM CO2 Irrelevant

Posted on May 10, 2013
There are multiple people on my Twitter timeline mentioning the fact that CO2 levels have passed 400 ppM for the first time. Let’s just point to this well informed and interesting explanation by Peter Gleick on Scienceblogs, titled “The Last Time Atmospheric CO2 was at 400 parts per Million Humans Didn’t Exist“...

Living One Week On Bitcoin Final Party Youtube Video

Posted on May 10, 2013
Forbes journalist Kashmir Hill has tried the experiment to live one week paying for everything only with Bitcoin. The first blog post of this series is here, and it has links to the remaining posts (one for each day of the experiment). I have enjoyed reading this and recommend it...

Print Money for Renewable Energy

Posted on May 09, 2013
Germany has been very successful with its feed-in tariff. It has deployed a lot of solar. And brought down prices for everybody in the process. Now Adnan Al-Daini proposes a different way to finance renewable energy. In this article published at Huffington Post in February he calls for printing money and investing it in renewable [...

Print More Money For Renewable Energy

Posted on May 09, 2013
This is a follow-up to yesterday’s post “Print Money for Renewable Energy”, which discussed Adnan Al-Daini’s proposal to use “quantitative easing” as a source of finance for renewable energy. I neglected to mention Al-Daini’s newer article on the question, which was published with the title “Climate Change: Governments Must Act To Reduce CO2 Emissions” at [...

Bitcoin Kanji Draft

Posted on May 05, 2013
Okay, here is a very rough draft for a new Kanji with the meaning Bitcoin: The left part is of course the radical for gold, which should be the obvious starting point for anyone designing this. The right part are just the numbers one and zero. There is a slight problem with the fact that [...

Book Review: Forty Signs of Rain, by Kim Stanley Robinson

Posted on May 02, 2013
I found “Forty Signs of Rain” by Kim Stanley Robinson over the list “Climate Change Fiction” I recently started at Goodreads. Please consider adding to that list if you know of some fiction book with a global warming theme not yet on the list...

Craig Morris Retires Fossil Nuke German Coal Myth

Posted on May 01, 2013
Craig Morris just posted at Energytransition.de with the nice headline “Germany builds minus six coal plants after nuclear phaseout”. Based on this source by the German NGO “Deutsche Umwelthilfe” (PDF), he looks in detail at which coal power plants projects were started and finished exactly when...

Global Warming and Prostitution

Posted on May 01, 2013
Lucia Graves at Huffington Post reports about a new consequence of global warming I was not aware of until now. Barbara Lee, a Representative from California belonging to the Democratic Party has introduced a resolution stating that poor women become more vulnerable as a consequence of global warming...

President George W. Bush’s Great Contribution to the Fight Against Global Warming

Posted on April 25, 2013
I just read this tweet by Dave Winer: I’m sure President Bush is smart, in some ways, but invading Iraq was crazy-ass stupid. And the economy! Oy This was in reaction to this blog post by a former Bush adviser, who writes that actually Bush is much smarter than usually assumed...

VDE Trying To Delay Deployment of Plug&Play Solar in Germany

Posted on April 24, 2013
Franz Alt at the excellent Sonnenseite just published a release from VDE, a German private organisation active in the field of safety standards for electricity. The VDE has published safety standards for small scale electricity generators, DIN VDE 0100-551...

Just Made My First Bitcoin Paper Wallet

Posted on April 24, 2013
Here is a Youtube video that explains the process: Thanks go to Canton Becker and his site bitcoinpaperwallet.com, where the necessary software to do this is provided for free. It was very easy to do. Even I could do it immediately. For later reference, here is the public paper wallet address: 13MXmkYzMzKfbAaQWwCHUA71wNbjdCk8ki And here is [...

New Category “Bitcoin”

Posted on April 24, 2013
Having solved the problem of global warming, the next paper I will be writing (in Japanese) will be about the relatively new Internet currency Bitcoin. This is a fascinating topic. I have been posting a couple of comments to the Reddit Bitcoin community and plan to post some of my thoughts here as well...

Google “Renewable Energy Tariff” White Paper

Posted on April 23, 2013
Google has released a White Paper titled “Expanding Renewable Energy Options For Companies Through Utility-Offered “Renewable Energy Tariffs”. Thanks to this blog post by North American Windpower and this tweet by Chris Young for the link...

Do the Math Movie

Posted on April 22, 2013
Posted at 350.org: Bill McKibben and his friends shown in the movie understand the problem. Unfortunately, they don’t understand the solution. Any solution needs to get the fossil fuel companies on board. That is easily done once you do the math on prices...

My Global Warming Science Fiction Novel ?Tasneem? at Free-Online-Novels.com

Posted on April 22, 2013
Free-online-novels.com is a site collecting links to books available for free on the Internet. They kindly added my second global warming science fiction novel Tasneem (FREE PDF here) to their “Science Fiction” category. Many thanks for that...

How To Keep Coal Power Plants Working in Germany

Posted on April 21, 2013
Platts reports in a blog post that renewable energy makes coal and gas power plants in Germany unprofitable.  They note that with more renewable in the mix wholesale prices go down, which cuts into the profitability of fossil fuel power plants. This of course not news...

Altmaier and Rösler Renewable Energy Brake Proposals Failed

Posted on April 20, 2013
FAZ reports that the proposals of German Environment Minister Altmaier and Economy Minister Rösler to change the German feed-in tariff system have failed definitely. Chancellor Merkel has decided to abandon efforts to get the opposition on board before the elections later this year...

Carbontracker ?Unburnable Carbon 2013? Report

Posted on April 19, 2013
Carbontracker has published a 39 page report titled “Unburnable Carbon 2013″. Thanks to this article by Damian Carrington in the Guardian for the link. I agree with some of the conclusions. For example, they note that most of the fossil fuel needs to stay in the ground if global warming is supposed to be kept [...

Clean Energy Ministerial 2013

Posted on April 19, 2013
The “Clean Energy Ministerial” is an informal cooperation project where once a year energy ministers of the major industrialized countries meet. Topics are renewable energy, energy efficiency, and access to energy. This year’s meeting just finished in India...

Very Tiny Small Minimal Program for Batteries in Germany

Posted on April 19, 2013
Zachary Shahan at Cleantechnica already reported that Germany will start a subsidy program for batteries used with small solar power from May 1st on. Now there has been an official news release from the German government on the matter. People will be able to get low cost financing from the Kreditanstalt für Wiederaufbau, the government-owned [...

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