Rethink Waste, and Help Save a Promising Green Technology

John Perry Barlow, left, on stage with Larry Harvey at Black Rock City

John Perry Barlow, left, in a panel discussion with Larry Harvey at Black Rock City

JohnPerryBarlowJohn Perry Barlow has been a fixture at Burning Man since 1994. That makes him a founder in my book. Recently he starred on stage with Larry Harvey in a session called The Founders Speak at Columbia University. He’s also a founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (with Burning Man lawyer Terry Gross), the Grateful Dead (he brought them to Timothy Leary’s castle in 1967 and wrote 57 of their songs) and WIRED (he was on their masthead when it launched).

Burner Barlow has given a lot over many years to our communities: Burners, Techies, Deadheads, and particularly the large Venn Diagram intersection of them all. Now he could use our help in return. For the past 6 years, he has been working with a company called Algae Systems, which has developed some amazing technology. The low oil price has made their investors jittery, and so they are now in a last-ditch effort to save the company and keep their breakthrough inventions alive.

Cutting a long story short, they can turn raw sewage into clean water and fuel, without wasting energy.

If ever there was a time for Burners to come together to support a positive environmental impact, where what we give will actually make a difference, it’s here and now. Their Indiegogo fundraising campaign is open for 8 days.

Barlow says:

Become a Better Ancestor: Save Our Technologies So They Can Save Your Descendants…

For the last 6 years, my colleagues and I have pursued a dream to address the most dangerous environmental problems we believe our descendants will face: poisonous drinking water, insanely variable weather, the end of the green revolution as we run out of mineable phosphates, offshore “Dead Zones” as more and more nitrogen and phosphorous is lost to the sea. 20 million dollars later we have proved it can be done. And done in a way that is consistent with our vision of closing the loop to turn wastes into resources.

Furthermore, we developed a method of photosynthetic energy capture much more efficient than solar cells and able to stand on its own without federal subsidies and using no land currently used to grow food.
But we have reached a surprising impasse with our strategic investor, the oldest company in Japan. They believed, with good reason, that they were investing in a company that would produce a green fuel that extracted more CO2 from the atmosphere than it returned when burned. But crude oil is now so cheap that they lost faith in their investment.

Moreover, we discovered that we had developed technologies along the way that could revolutionize wastewater treatment. As I’ve said, we recognized that we had created a sewage purification process that produces more energy than it uses. In addition, our unique HTL (Hydrothermal Liquefaction) process could transform noxious sewage sludge, currently being hauled to landfills at 30 million tons a month, into fossil equivalent crute oil and a nutrient rich biochar that can restore the millions of acres of depleted topsoil our grandchildren will confront.

But our strategic investor got out of wastewater treatment a decade ago and was unwilling to get back in, no matter how game-changing the technology. Our interests no longer aligned and they decided to withdraw support.

They offered us an opportunity to buy our company, including our plant and IP, for pennies on the dollar.

We saw this coming and had three investors lined up to cover the buyout, as well as the amount necessary to jump-start our operations in Alabama and commence building HTL skids we believe we can sell to enough wastewater treatment operators to make us profitable by 2017.

But one of our prospective investors developed cold feet and withdrew. Upon which the other two did as well. So we suddenly found ourselves looking at a January 17 buyout deadline to come up with the money. We decided to go long. Yeah, it’s nuts to think that we can raise this kind of money in a week, but we’re fresh out of alternatives. It’s a real Hail Mary, but we’ve been successfully hurling Hail Mary passes into the foggy future through the history of our company.

I pray you will look at our tech and see, as we do, the genuine prospect of a planet with life-support systems sufficient to provide for 7 billion passengers as they hurtle through space. We’ve developed an integrated system that can handle that. I personally endured this Sisyphean quest because I wanted, as ever, to be a good ancestor. My devout hope is that many of you will as well.


Please support them, this is aligned to Leave No Trace, Civic Responsibility, Communal Effort, Gifting, Radical Self Expression and Immediacy. This could be an amazing example of how Burners do care, are capable, and can make a difference. I urge BMOrg to get on board and promote this campaign too, perhaps they can find it in their hearts to give something back to this Burner who has contributed so much to us all – and this beautiful, beat-up planet.

More on Algae Systems:

Official web site and Twitter

Seeing Purpose and Profit in Algae – New York Times, 2014

Pilot plant in Alabama produced exemplary results – Al.com 2015

algae systems


 

From Indiegogo (emphasis ours):

Planet Earth has no externalities. As Bucky Fuller told us 40 years ago, it truly is a spaceship. We need solutions that recognize that waste is either a verb or a squandered resource, since all flows are in a closed loop.

Our team spent nearly every waking moment of the last 6 years of our lives, approximately 394,200 hours, dedicated to developing our waste treatment technology.  We’ve had numerous successes and exceeded our expectations.

We figured out how to transform raw sewage into energy-positive clean water and carbon-negative, water-positive green fuels. In the process of growing biomass and turning it into fuel, we discovered something much more valuable. We can purify wastewater without wasting energy.

We are excited about the viability of our technology and the benefits it can bring to a world where millions of children are killed every year by dirty water.

However, our primary investor, a large Japanese corporation who initially funded our small startup, isn’t interested in wastewater.  They are no longer willing to provide funding to us as our interests no longer align.

The truth is, we are in a tight spot. 

 

We have until Jan 17th to raise enough money to buy back our company and continue operating.  If we do not raise enough capital, our technology and IP will be shelved indefinitely, its benefits never brought to light.

To our knowledge, there is no other process that can provide the benefits we can and do so at a profit.

We are in a position to invite people like you to help us continue developing our waste treatment system and deploy it at a commercial scale to bring its benefits to communities.

Let’s harness the power of the crowd to support existing technology and is so critically needed on this planet. We hope that you are inspired by our work and that you see the benefits it can provide.

WE KNOW IT WORKS!

In Alabama’s Mobile Bay we successfully built and tested a demonstration facility that takes a community’s raw sewage into one end, and outputs carbon-negative fuel, clean water, and fertilizers from the other end.  Unlike most water treatment strategies our system generates energy while producing clean water. A community using this method could get energy back while treating their water.

Learn more about the science behind the system here.

When Alabama Governor Robert Bentley visited our facility, he had this to say:

“This took a lot of knowledge in biochemistry and the ability to take wastewater and use natural ingredients like algae and be able to produce clean water and oil…it’s a great system.” ~ Robert Bentley

AlgaeSystems CEO Matt Atwood (left) speaks with Governor Robert Bentley (right) on a tour of our Mobile Bay facility.

It is our hope that you will decide to support our campaign and empower us to continue on this path.  Every little bit helps. Please donate and share. Together we can change the world. One city water treatment plant at a time.HOW YOU CAN HELP
With your contribution, we will be able to:

  • Obtain full control of our science and patents by buying back our company from our current investor
  • Jumpstart our Mobile Bay facility to get it running again
  • Reinstate our dedicated employees who want to contribute to the success of our waste treatment system
  • Develop existing relationships for already selected sites to deploy HTL skids + photobioreactor bag technology
  • Scale up to an economy of scale that makes our waste treatment system competitive in the marketplace

STILL NOT CONVINCED?

Technologies like ours that generate new solutions to climate change, ocean warming, topsoil depletion, and greenhouse gas pollution are needed immediately. The world needs more resilient and resource-efficient infrastructure. That’s what we provide.

Our cities are in need of help.  Some municipalities use up to 30-40% of total energy for water systems ( EPA). We need more energy-friendly water production.
In the United States, we use about 40% of all water for fossil fuel energy production (DOE).  Negative implications of this practice include competition for water supplies among agricultural uses and human consumption. Additionally, warmed water coming out of thermoelectric plants has adverse impacts on local aquatic habitats.
This wasteful system is ripe for innovation. We need more water-friendly energy production.
 

Algae Systems disrupts traditional wastewater treatment with a more resourceful, systems approach. Our technology pushes wastewater treatment and energy production into new territory that is far more beneficial for humans and other living systems than current practice.

Solar and wind have grown leaps and bounds, but they aren’t going to get us all the way there, experts say.  Bill Gates recently announced the creation of a private equity fund to invest money in 20-30 companies with existing technology that can be scaled up to become commercially viable.  Algae Systems is the type of tech Bill Gates is talking about.  It is viable technology that needs financial support to scale up. As the deadline of Jan 17th looms ahead, we are working as hard as we can to capture the attention of the crowd to meet our crowdfunding deadline.

Algae Systems is a valid solution for a more resourceful water-energy nexus. You have the power to help us create a more sustainable world for future generations.

IN THE NEWS
People are excited about the potential of Algae Systems.
Visit our press room here.

MEET OUR TEAM
We are a group of professionals united in our efforts to apply an entirely new approach to solving some of the most basic problems impacting our communities, our environment and our public utilities. We are entrepreneurs, chemists, engineers (civil, marine, and aeronautic), utility operations managers, vanguards of more sensible futures. Click here to learn more about our team.

[Source: IndieGogo campaign]

 

General Principles

by Whatsblem the Pro

General Wesley Clark (retired) - PHOTO: R.D. Ward

General Wesley Clark (retired) – PHOTO: R.D. Ward

The news spread far and wide: John Perry Barlow, of Grateful Dead and Electronic Frontier Foundation fame, tweeted to the world that he “spent much of the afternoon in conversation with Larry Harvey, Mayor of #BurningMan & Gen. Wesley Clark, who is here.”

Earlier today, my colleague Burnersxxx commented on Clark’s alleged presence. What Burnersxxx didn’t know was that as he was publishing that story, I was on the phone with John Perry Barlow, verifying his tweet heard ’round the world.

“It wasn’t a prank,” said Barlow directly to me, just hours ago. “It happened. Larry Harvey and I spent a perfectly lovely afternoon with him and his thirty-year-old Mongolian MIT graduate girlfriend.”

John Perry Barlow’s word is good enough for me. I have no doubts left about it: Wesley Clark, former Supreme Commander of NATO and a 2004 Democratic Party nominee for President, did indeed attend Burning Man this year. . . but the question of whether or not General Clark (retired) really and truly attended Burning Man 2013 or not seems less interesting than asking what it means that he did.

I asked John Perry Barlow what he thought it meant, and his answer was short but sweet:

“What does it mean? That life is even weirder than you think. That Wesley Clark has no more or less reason to be there than anyone else. He liked it.”

John Perry Barlow - PHOTO: Bart Nagel

John Perry Barlow – PHOTO: Bart Nagel

For many people these days, one or two soundbites worth of information is enough on which to base an ironclad opinion. . . and the common view of the United States government being what it is among most artists and other people with a countercultural bent, the soundbite “retired general visits Burning Man” may be a disconcerting one. In service of our own best interests, however, we should perhaps take a closer look.

In the context of counterculture, the obvious connotation of Wesley Clark’s status as a former NATO Supreme Commander who prosecuted the war in Kosovo is that the man is a hawk, a war-head, and therefore an imperialist evildoer with blood on his hands who should not be trusted or tolerated.

It is, however, axiomatic that nobody on this Earth hates war with more passion than an experienced general. For those not aware of that fact, it may come as a surprise that some of the most vocal critics of war throughout history have been successful military leaders at the highest levels; in fact, Wesley Clark himself was vocally, visibly against George W. Bush’s war in Iraq. His dissent does not make him an outlier; historically speaking, he’s the rule and not the exception.

The strong distaste that generals develop for war goes back thousands of years. That most noble of Romans, Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus, did his duty with ruthless efficiency when called upon to serve Rome as temporary dictator; when the crises he was called upon to deal with had passed and he was covered in glory and the gratitude of his nation, the man was surprisingly quick to lay his cudgels down and go back to his plough. Cincinnatus, the strongman who brought the ferocious Aequi under the Roman yoke, the man who conquered the Sabines and the Voiscians, despised war and wanted nothing so much as the peace and quiet of his farm and home.

Historical quotes from war-hating generals abound; William Tecumseh Sherman is an especially rich source of such quotes, a fact that stands as testament to the particularly savage horror and cruelty that marked the American Civil War. “War is Hell,” said Sherman, often. Even the Saint-Gaudens statue of Sherman in Manhattan’s Grand Army Plaza bears that dire motto, in the form of a poem by Henry Van Dyke:

This is the soldier brave enough to tell
The glory-dazzled world that “war is Hell.”

“You cannot qualify war in harsher terms than I will,” said Sherman. “War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it; and those who brought war into our country deserve all the curses and maledictions a people can pour out. I know I had no hand in making this war, and I know I will make more sacrifices today than any of you to secure peace.”

Hardly the words of a war-mongering hawk, yet General Sherman had a demon’s reputation on the battlefield; he was feared and hated by the enemy for his bloody-handed ruthlessness, and even roundly criticized by his own side on occasion for his scorched earth policies. Where Sherman passed, nothing that might be of any value or use to the enemy remained.

General Sherman, the rigors of Hell etched into his face

General Sherman, the rigors of Hell etched into his face

More from William Tecumseh Sherman:

“There is many a boy here today who looks on war as all glory, but, boys, it is all Hell.”

“I am tired and sick of war. Its glory is all moonshine. It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood, for vengeance, for desolation. War is Hell.”

On the other side of the Civil War, General Robert E. Lee expressed a similar sentiment, famously saying that “it is well that war is so terrible, else we should grow too fond of it.”

In more recent times, General (and later President) Dwight David Eisenhower remarked that “I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity.” Eisenhower went on to warn us, in his last speech as President, of the rise of the military-industrial complex, and of its thirst for endless warfare in pursuit of profit and power. His prescient wisdom has largely gone unheeded in America.

Perhaps the most poignant and dramatic example of war-hating military men in the service of the United States has been given to us by Major General Smedley Darlington Butler, who at the time of his death was the most decorated Marine in U.S. history. Butler capped off a brilliant military career that took him from the trenches of World War I to every American theater of operations of his time with speaking tours promoting his book, entitled WAR IS A RACKET. In his speeches and writings after his retirement from the Marines, Butler characterized his activities with the U.S. military as those of “a gangster for capitalism.”

“War is just a racket,” said Butler, who gave over 1,200 speeches on the topic in more than seven hundred American cities. “A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of people. Only a small inside group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few at the expense of the masses.”

Butler continues:

“I believe in adequate defense at the coastline and nothing else. If a nation comes over here to fight, then we’ll fight. The trouble with America is that when the dollar only earns 6 percent over here, then it gets restless and goes overseas to get 100 percent. Then the flag follows the dollar and the soldiers follow the flag.

“I wouldn’t go to war again as I have done to protect some lousy investment of the bankers. There are only two things we should fight for. One is the defense of our homes and the other is the Bill of Rights. War for any other reason is simply a racket.

Old Gimlet Eye: Smedley Butler denounced war as a racket

Old Gimlet Eye: Smedley Butler denounced war as a racket

“It may seem odd for me, a military man to adopt such a comparison. Truthfulness compels me to. I spent thirty-three years and four months in active military service as a member of this country’s most agile military force, the Marine Corps. I served in all commissioned ranks from Second Lieutenant to Major-General. And during that period, I spent most of my time being a high class muscle-man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the Bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism.

“I suspected I was just part of a racket at the time. Now I am sure of it. Like all the members of the military profession, I never had a thought of my own until I left the service. My mental faculties remained in suspended animation while I obeyed the orders of higher-ups. This is typical with everyone in the military service.

“I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China I helped to see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested.

“During those years, I had, as the boys in the back room would say, a swell racket. Looking back on it, I feel that I could have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.”

It’s easy to dismiss Wesley Clark as an enemy and a tool of the worst elements of the Establishment, but his personal history and the history of warfare itself cast that perspective into serious question. Should we not welcome this visitor from Hell into our circle? Should we not show him our ways, demonstrate for him that we are not just a bunch of dirty hippies getting high in the desert, and introduce him to the nobler aspects of our culture, in the hopes that he’ll join us and be further encouraged to be vocal about his reservations regarding American military adventurism?

History shows us that nobody hates war like an old warrior; I for one would like to publicly give Wesley Clark the benefit of the doubt, and welcome him, burner to burner, to our world. . . provided he brings his own cup, of course.