Graphene & Ian Crossland

Ian used to annoy me.  And I was annoyed with Pool kicking Adam Crigler out.  I think Adam is a awesome guy.  But you know business stuff happens and people have disagreements so whatever on that.  But I like Ian.  Sometimes he says silly things and sometimes genius things.  He is always trying to think out the box, he cares about people and he is open to almost anything.

But his obsession with graphene I think is misplaced.  I am certain it can be a good thing but it’s not just going to solve everything.  Often times when something is discovered and it’s found that money can be made in large amounts companies jump in and they will do years of non-stop campaigns talking about it trying to reel in investors.  This often gives a false view that something is far more popular and wonderful than it really is.  Is that the case here?  Don’t know.

But anything that helps the plastic problem is good news.  “Climate change” is mostly absolute BS used to make money and control people.  However, plastic pollution IS a real issue and it can indeed kill us and overnight.  If we cause a mass kill in the ocean we all starve to death.  And there will be NOTHING to save us if we reach that point.  But no one makes money off that nor can they control people so uninformed sheep bang the climate change drum while we poison ourselves.

Ian’s idea of pulling carbon out air to “solve” climate change and to make graphene is silly.  Why would you knock down a forest to build a factory to pull CO2 out the air when trees already do that.  People assume cCO2 is an issue.  I am not sure about that at all.  CO2 is not poison in it’s natural quantities. It’s a small percentage of our air.  And as far as I know that percentage in recent times has not changed.  The only reason I have found that it’s supposedly unwanted is because it absorbs light energy trapping more heat than other components of the air.   Certainly we have environmental issues, I am not confident in the least that is one of them.

Finally, if I see one more “save the planet” banner I am gonna gag.  The planet will be fine.  This idea humans are so powerful we can destroy something 4+ billion years old that has gone through processes we cannot even wrap our minds around is obnoxious hubris. The thing we would save is our own butts.

“Flash graphene is a process developed by Rice University professor James Tour and his team that can turn any carbon source into turbostratic graphene in a matter of milliseconds. The process involves heating carbon-containing materials to high temperatures for a short amount of time, which creates graphene flakes. The resulting graphene is low-cost, high-quality, and can be used for a variety of applications such as energy storage, water filtration, and electronics.”

Just because you can create something does not mean you simply created something, this is not Star Trek replicators.  We don’t create matter, we can only transform it.  In all cases I am aware of that always takes some amount of energy.  So if you create $25 of graphene but it took $100 of energy to do so you have not necessarily made something low cost or sustainable.  For example.  We hear people talk all the time about hydrogen power.   Hydrogen is great over all and it can make sense if you use naturally occurring hydrogen.  If you have to create the hydrogen you spend more energy creating it than what you get out of it.  Another current example are wind turbines.  I am sure this is an average and not the case everywhere but a wind turbine takes decades of running to get the energy out of it you put into it to make it.

We must also keep in mind such processes are rarely “clean”.  Meaning when you transform ABC into XYZ there are typically unused components which are often unusable or harmful.  So a combustion engine creates exhaust, a fire causes smoke, and even nuclear power creates nuclear waste.  This makes me wonder what the “waste” is for this process.

Tim Pool, like him or hate him, is trying to make a difference.  He puts effort into it and also his own money.  He is investing in culture change.  And I think he is being effective.  We don’t solve the morality crisis through politics, we solve it through culture change.  The left knows this and has been doing just that since the 60’s.  But we don’t need to force people because our ideas are solid and we hand out information freely without expectation for force.

Andrew Breitbart once said “politics is downstream from culture”. It took me some time to understand that.  But it’s true.  This means that if you can change culture, that being what people expect or want, they will demand those things from politics.  Culture steers politics.  However we are very very close to that being reversed and that will be unreversible through normal means.

Ian, is what the world needs right now.  Think outside your echo chamber and always ask why.  Not so you can simply counter an idea but so that you can understand it.  But he is genuine in both pursuits.  And I find it fascinating he has gone from full on crystal hippy to talking about God and religion and entertaining many traditional ideas.  That same process happened to Adam Crigler.  I think this is a natural progression of humans.  You get older, you get wise, you take in info and see the world as it is and not as you believed it was.

This is why the government attempts to empower the young as much as possible while subduing older folks.  Young people are FAR easier to fool and control.

My annoyance is with the repetition of the lie that CO2 is a pollutant. It’s really not.  Plastic in the ocean? Great problem to work on but the source is still Indo-China’s lack of responsibility with plastic pollution.