Stardust, an Israeli-U.S. startup, intends to patent its unique technology for temporarily cooling the planet.
In July 2012, a renegade American
businessman, Russ George, took a ship off the coast of British Columbia
and dumped 100 tons of iron sulfate dust into the Pacific Ocean. He had
unilaterally, and some suggest illegally,
decided to trigger an algae bloom to absorb some carbon dioxide from
the atmosphere — an attempt at geoengineering, a tech-based approach to
combating climate change. It was a one-off, the largest known
geoengineering experiment at the time, and a harbinger for more to come.
Now a startup called Stardust seeks something more ambitious: developing proprietary geoengineering technology that would help block sun rays from reaching the planet. Stardust formed in 2023 and is based in Israel, but incorporated in the United States.
Its approach is novel: Most geoengineering research today is led by
scientists in the U.S. at universities and federal agencies, and the
work they are doing is more or less accessible to public scrutiny.
Stardust is at the forefront of an alternative path: One in which
private companies drive the development, and perhaps deployment, of
technologies that experts say could have profound consequences for the
planet.
Geoengineering projects, even those led by climate scientists at
major universities, have previously drawn the ire of environmentalists
and other groups. Such a deliberate transformation of the atmosphere has
never been done, and many uncertainties remain. If a geoengineering
project went awry, for example, it could contribute to air pollution and
ozone loss, or have dramatic effects on weather patterns, such as disrupting monsoons in populous South and East Asia.
But as global temperatures rise, public and scientific sentiments are
shifting. If those temperature trends continue, governments or private
entities may ultimately use geoengineering to alleviate or avoid the
worst impacts of extreme weather, including deadly heat waves,
firestorms, and hurricanes. And whoever deploys the technology will need
to keep it up for decades while pent-up greenhouse gases gradually
dissipate or are removed.
Few outsiders have gotten a glimpse of Stardust’s plans, and the
company has not publicly released details about its technology, its
business model, or exactly who works at its company. But the company
appears to be positioning itself to develop and sell a proprietary
geoengineering technology to governments that are considering making
modifications to the global climate — acting like a kind of defense
contractor for climate alteration.
Stardust is moving ahead amid few national and international rules and oversight, and a recent report
by the company’s former climate governance consultant, Janos Pasztor,
called for the company to increase its transparency, engagement, and
communication with outsiders. The report provides rare insight into the
so-far reticent company. But, so far, Pasztor told Undark, the company
has not met all of his requests. Stardust still needs to implement his
recommendations, and “be as transparent as possible, be available
proactively to respond to questions people may have, and also to engage
with other actors,” he said, because they do not, or not yet, have a
“social license” for geoengineering activities.
Such a deliberate transformation of the atmosphere has never been done, and many uncertainties remain.
The company is led by CEO and cofounder Yanai Yedvab, a former deputy
chief scientist at the Israel Atomic Energy Commission, which oversees
the country’s clandestine nuclear program. Through Eli Zupnick, a
communications officer hired by the company, Yedvab never accepted
Undark’s many requests for an interview. But in an emailed statement to
Undark sent via Zupnick, Yedvab wrote: “Stardust is a startup focused on
researching and developing technologies that may potentially stop
global warming in the short term.” The company, he continued, is
“studying and developing a safe, responsible, and controllable solar
radiation modification” and “our goal is to enable informed and
responsible decision making of the international community and
governments.”
Despite Stardust’s low profile, the company rejects being referred to
as “secretive.” “Publishing all the products of our research without
any exception is critical,” Yedvab wrote, adding that the company is
“unwaveringly committed” to publishing results “as one of the measures
to gain public trust.” Stardust has not published any of its research at
this time, but Yedvab stressed they will do so once “scientific
validation is concluded” on all of their results.
For decades, researchers
have explored a variety of approaches to hacking the climate. Today,
the most common approach is a type of solar geoengineering that involves
flying high-altitude aircraft or balloons to release reflective
particles in the high atmosphere, well above the flight paths of
commercial planes. The technique, known as stratospheric aerosol
injection, requires deploying tiny, carefully- chosen particles in
precise amounts. In order to work well, the particles need to be
periodically replenished.
Scientists have accumulated evidence for this approach by studying
natural events that have flung small particles into the atmosphere. For
instance, after an eruption of Mount Pinatubo in 1991, sulfur dioxide and hydrogen sulfide hung in the atmosphere and measurably cooled the planet for more than a year....
TL;dr: he was right about the efficacy of what is probably the safest approach to geoengineering: sequestering CO2 by feeding nutrients to plankton. However, he was absolutely wrong to go it alone as a profit-making venture: despite being safer than say sunshielding in the upper atmosphere the risk of the plankton approach is you could start a literal ice age.*
Here's another little company that thinks they can do whatever they want:
This is why you want to be careful with the geoengineering proposals. Some links after the jump....
*****
One
of the reasons we ran Plankton Week last October—no, not as
counterprogramming to Shark Week—was to refresh memories of one of the
topics of conversation at all the better salons and soirées circa 2007.
The headline quote is from oceanographer John Martin during a 1988 lecture at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. Here's NASA's Earth Observatory archive page on the statement.
It
is a bit of an exaggeration, you may need ten of those Valemax bulk
carriers, currently the second largest ships in the world at 400,000 dwt
(Euronav's two TI oil tankers at 441,000 dwt are bigger), to make an
environmental change but what a change it would be. The orders of
magnitude of carbon the iron-fed plankton would sequester are almost
mind-boggling:
...Martin gathered the results of the incubation experiments and laid out
the evidence in support of the Iron Hypothesis together with some
back‐of‐the‐envelope calculations and presented his findings at a
Journal Club lecture at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in July of
1988. He estimated that using a conservative Fe : C ratio that 300,000
tons of iron in the Southern Ocean induce the growth of phytoplankton
that could draw down an estimated two billion tons of carbon dioxide.
Then, putting on his best Dr. Strangelove accent, he suggested that
“with half a ship load of iron….I could give you an ice age.” The
symposium broke up with laughter and everyone retired to the lawn
outside the Redfield Building for beers (from Chisholm and Morel,
Editors, preface to: What controls phytoplankton production in
nutrient‐rich areas of the open sea? Limnology and Oceanography, 36, 8 December 1991).
This
year's energy-sourced emissions of CO2 should come in at 30.6
gigatonnes ( 30,600,000,000 tonnes) of which a large part will reenter
the carbon cycle, becoming plant material etc. but it is the stuff that
remains in the atmosphere after the rest is sequestered that is
available to feed the plankton.
Make Sunsets' sulfur dioxide strategy has academics and NGOs fuming
Another day, and another weather balloon ascends gracefully into the
clear blue skies above Northern California. But this balloon isn’t
headed up to the stratosphere to predict the weather—it’s going there to
change it.
Make Sunsets
is a tiny start-up headquartered in South Dakota that is using balloons
to release small quantities of sulfur dioxide into the upper
atmosphere, in the hope of reflecting some of the Sun’s energy away from
the earth. Each gram of SO2, says Andrew Song,
one of Make Sunsets’ founders, offsets the warming from one metric ton
of carbon dioxide released by burning fossil fuels. Not everyone is
convinced by Make Sunsets’ methods, however—and many researchers and
environmentalists worry the startup’s unregulated operations are
disrupting more responsible research into geoengineering, including a
prominent effort at Harvard.
Make Sunsets’ name is a reference to the dramatic sunsets that high-altitude SO2 particles can produce, as seen following the eruption of Mount Pinatubo
in 1991. That eruption briefly depressed global temperatures by about
0.2 °C for a year, until the particles slowly returned to Earth.
The 53 kilograms of sulfur dioxide Make Sunsets has released since
February 2023 is the cooling equivalent of planting 2.5 million trees,
again for about a year, says Song, although neither he nor anyone at
Make Sunsets is a professional climate scientist. “The largest direct
air capture facility in the world can only remove about 4,000 to 5,000
tons per year,” he says. “We could do that in literally one session with
balloons, without the capital costs. We are only restricted by customer
demand.”
Make Sunsets finances its operations by selling US $10 “cooling credits” for launching each gram of SO2. Customers include both individuals and corporate customers like Numerous.ai, which was looking to offset emissions-related warming from its AI spreadsheet software.
“I believe that stratospheric SO2 injection is now well-researched enough that the risks associated with
it are smaller than the risks of the effects of the temperature rise it
prevents,“ says Mehran Jalali, co-founder of Numerous.ai. “Dealing with
Make Sunsets was very simple and their answers to my many questions made
sense.”
Not everyone is happy with Make Sunsets But although solar geoengineering promises one of the quickest routes to reducing warming quickly (if only temporarily), not everyone is happy with Make Sunsets. “There’s a lot of disagreement among folks thinking about solar geoengineering, but most agree that Make Sunsets is a bad idea,” says Sikina Jinnah, a professor of environmental studies at the University of California Santa Cruz. Jinnah was also the co-chair of Harvard University’s Stratospheric Controlled Perturbation Experiment (SCoPEX) advisory committee, one of the first efforts to design a governance framework for an outdoor solar geoengineering experiment.
“A
couple of rogue tech bros taking action completely outside the scope of
government authority or any public engagement are really embodying the
nightmare of what folks think this could be,” Jinnah says.
The
consensus among most atmospheric scientists is that we have only a very
limited understanding of how to inject particles effectively into the
upper atmosphere without triggering side effects such as damage to the
ozone layer, disrupting weather patterns like monsoons, or causing
pollution at ground level. Solar geoengineering could also lock us into
having to continue to inject particles essentially forever, in order to
avoid the “termination shock” of a sudden temperature rise....
....And the other effect, noted in the Science article above and which has been captured by painters for at least a couple centuries, is the change of color of the sky
We highlighted one contested example in a post from 2010 (contested
because Krakatoa erupted in 1883, ten years before Munch painted this
version of the painting):
...A new analysis of Edvard Munch's The Scream provides
the precise location where Munch and his friends were walking when he
saw the blood-red sky depicted in the 1893 painting, as well as an
explanation of why the sky appeared to be on fire. Through Munch's
journals, topographic analysis, and a connection to the eruption of
Krakatoa, proof now exists that the spectacular twilight seen in one of
today's most recognizable paintings was inspired by this dramatic
event.
In "When The Sky Ran Red: The Story Behind The Scream," in the February 2004 issue of Sky & Telescope
magazine, Donald W. Olson, a physics and astronomy professor at Texas
State University, and his colleagues Russell L. Doescher and Marilynn
S. Olson reveal how they journeyed to Oslo, Norway, to pinpoint the
exact location where Munch stood when he "felt a great, unending scream
piercing through nature," inspiring him to put his emotions on canvas.
They determined that Munch and his friends were walking along a road
once called Ljabrochausséen, which is now a modern roadway called
Mosseveien. It was along the railing of Ljabrochausséen that Munch
became overwhelmed with emotion. Olson and his team located a rocky
hillside overlook that precisely matches the artist's vista of
Christiania (now Oslo) harbor and Hovedø island....MORE
And from the outro of that long ago post:
While Sky & Telescope focused on The Scream, the effect can be
seen in other art of the decade following the eruption including some
Impressionist masterpieces. *** A similar size eruption in 1815 is believed to have influenced the color choices of J.M.W. Turner:
If humans are ever forced to do geoengineering the engineering we should do is feed the phytoplankton by fertilizing with iron. And the place we should do it is the Southern Ocean.
And the pace we should do it at is SLOWLY.*
From Nautil.us, May 22:
The Southern Ocean controls how much carbon is released into the atmosphere—and our warming world is changing it.
When one thinks of Antarctica,
one imagines a vast landscape in shades of blinding white, ice and snow
stretching as far as the eye can see. But to really consider Antarctica
is to consider its water.
The Southern Ocean, which encircles
Antarctica, is where the ocean exhales. It is the primary place where
the water of the deep oceans rises to the surface, mingles with the
atmosphere in a kind of embrace, and then sinks back into the depths. In
the course of this exchange, the Southern Ocean both consumes carbon
from the atmosphere and releases some of the vast quantities of carbon
stored in the deep ocean, the Earth’s largest
natural carbon sink. The Southern Ocean therefore controls the global
exchange of carbon between ocean and atmosphere, which is vital to regulating global carbon dioxide levels. But climate change may alter this dynamic.
We spoke to Elisabeth L. Sikes, a marine biogeochemist and paleooceanographer with Rutgers University who has received awards
for her research on Antarctica and the Southern Ocean, about why the
Southern Ocean is so vital to carbon regulation and how global climate
change is influencing its role.
How does the Southern Ocean work as a carbon sink?
It’s both a source and a sink. Phytoplankton in the surface ocean take up CO2,
through photosynthesis. And when they die, their bodies sink to the
bottom of the ocean and somebody else eats them. Then that carbon—that
they’ve pulled from the atmosphere, turned into organic matter, and
sunk—is released back into the deep ocean as CO2. So that CO2 is sequestered in the deep ocean. And that process is called the biological pump.
That’s the first step in why the ocean can sequester CO2. The second step is sort of why it comes back out again.
And how does that happen?
The
ocean has deep circulation that’s different from the surface
circulation, which is wind-driven. This deep circulation is called
thermohaline circulation. The main place this deep water forms is the
North Atlantic.
The Gulf Stream delivers very warm, salty water to the North
Atlantic. When you chill salty water—which is already dense from the
salt—it gets really cold and really dense. And so that North
Atlantic deep water travels around the bottom of the ocean. This deep
water is cut off from the rest of the ocean, and it’s traveling along,
and that biological pump is putting organic matter into it, which turns
into CO2. So now you’re building up all of the CO2 in the deep ocean.
One
of the reasons we ran Plankton Week last October—no, not as
counterprogramming to Shark Week—was to refresh memories of one of the
topics of conversation at all the better salons and soirées circa 2007.
The headline quote is from oceanographer John Martin during a 1988 lecture at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. Here's NASA's Earth Observatory archive page on the statement.
It
is a bit of an exaggeration, you may need ten of those Valemax bulk
carriers, currently the second largest ships in the world at 400,000 dwt
(Euronav's two TI oil tankers at 441,000 dwt are bigger), to make an
environmental change but what a change it would be. The orders of
magnitude of carbon the iron-fed plankton would sequester are almost
mind-boggling:
...Martin gathered the results of the incubation experiments and laid out
the evidence in support of the Iron Hypothesis together with some
back‐of‐the‐envelope calculations and presented his findings at a
Journal Club lecture at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in July of
1988. He estimated that using a conservative Fe : C ratio that 300,000
tons of iron in the Southern Ocean induce the growth of phytoplankton
that could draw down an estimated two billion tons of carbon dioxide.
Then, putting on his best Dr. Strangelove accent, he suggested that
“with half a ship load of iron….I could give you an ice age.” The
symposium broke up with laughter and everyone retired to the lawn
outside the Redfield Building for beers (from Chisholm and Morel,
Editors, preface to: What controls phytoplankton production in
nutrient‐rich areas of the open sea? Limnology and Oceanography, 36, 8 December 1991).
This
year's energy-sourced emissions of CO2 should come in at 30.6
gigatonnes ( 30,600,000,000 tonnes) of which a large part will reenter
the carbon cycle, becoming plant material etc. but it is the stuff that
remains in the atmosphere after the rest is sequestered that is
available to feed the plankton.
So, very, very serious business.
Don't try this at home....
*****
....Coming up tomorrow, the Pope, and a Vancouver stock promoter.
And
many, many more. If interested use the 'search blog' box, keyword
plankton and Planktos for the saga of the Pope and the stock promoter. Also whales. Huge benefits.
Huh. Of all the emergency, if we really, really-have-to-do-it-geoengineering methods, this is the one we lean toward. Links below.
From Hakai Magazine, January 13:
The controversial geoengineering technique can defer, at best, a few years’ worth of emissions. And that’s ignoring the potential side effects.
Last year, global carbon emissions from burning fossil fuels reached an all-time high. As the world heats up, many influential bodies—such as the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the governments of China and the United States, and especially fossil fuel companies—are
calling for the development of carbon removal technologies. These
techniques pull carbon dioxide, a potent greenhouse gas, out of the air
or water and lock it away in an inaccessible form. At a big enough
scale, these technologies can theoretically counterbalance emissions and
help cool things down—or at least slow the rate of warming.
That’s why, in November 2021, Edwina Tanner, a marine scientist at
the Australia-based biotechnology company Ocean Nourishment Corporation,
dumped a mix of nutrients from a boat into the water in Botany Bay, on
the south side of Sydney, Australia. As waves rocked the craft, currents
pulled the red-dyed slurry in every direction, permeating one tiny
patch of the world’s largest carbon sink: the ocean.
The limiting factor for the abundance of life at the ocean’s surface
is often the availability of essential nutrients like iron, nitrogen,
and phosphorus. So when a glut of nutrients arrives in the form of
volcanic dust, wildfire ash,
water upwelled from the deep, or a lab-made mixture, the sudden bounty
allows tiny photosynthesizing phytoplankton to flourish. Like plants,
these single-celled organisms use sunlight and carbon dioxide as fuel.
The important thing for those concerned with climate change is that when
these phytoplankton die, some of them sink, dragging the carbon in
their bodies to the seafloor where it becomes trapped.
Oceanographer John Martin first proposed the idea of manipulating the
ocean’s nutrients to store carbon in the late 1980s. There have been a
few experiments since, but in general, says Tanner, getting real-world
data on how well nutrient fertilization works is incredibly challenging.
The public doesn’t have a big appetite for large-scale climate
experiments at sea, she says.
The last large-scale attempt was a decade ago and, to Tanner’s point, it was spectacularly controversial.
So in recent years, scientists have instead turned to laboratory work,
computational models, and smaller field trials to better understand
ocean nutrient fertilization. Modeling published in 2017,
for instance, suggests that adding nitrogen and phosphorus to the ocean
could lock away up to 1.5 gigatonnes of carbon per year from the
atmosphere.
Tanner and her team at Ocean Nourishment Corporation are among the
many scientists striving to learn more. Although she hopes to run larger
field experiments, it’s difficult to get permission from the Australian
government for trials exceeding 2,000 liters of the nutrient mixture.
In the Botany Bay experiment, the researchers added only 300 liters of
their nutrient mix. Working with such small quantities makes calculating
the consequences very challenging. To circumvent the restrictions,
they’re building a bioreactor to test how different mixes of nutrients
stimulate phytoplankton growth and affect the rate of carbon storage.
Other researchers, too, are digging into nutrient fertilization. In
2023, for example, Joo-Eun Yoon, an applied mathematician at the
University of Cambridge in England, conducted experiments with a team in
the Arabian Sea off Goa, India, to find out how to best deliver
nutrients to the ocean. Maximizing carbon storage, it turns out, is not
as simple as just dumping nutrients overboard.....
One of the reasons we ran Plankton Week last October—no, not as counterprogramming to Shark Week—was to refresh memories of one of the topics of conversation at all the better salons and soirées circa 2007.
The headline quote is from oceanographer John Martin during a 1988 lecture at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. Here's NASA's Earth Observatory archive page on the statement.
It
is a bit of an exaggeration, you may need ten of those Valemax bulk
carriers, currently the second largest ships in the world at 400,000 dwt
(Euronav's two TI oil tankers at 441,000 dwt are bigger), to make an
environmental change but what a change it would be. The orders of
magnitude of carbon the iron-fed plankton would sequester are almost
mind-boggling:
...Martin gathered the results of the incubation experiments and laid out
the evidence in support of the Iron Hypothesis together with some
back‐of‐the‐envelope calculations and presented his findings at a
Journal Club lecture at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in July of
1988. He estimated that using a conservative Fe : C ratio that 300,000
tons of iron in the Southern Ocean induce the growth of phytoplankton
that could draw down an estimated two billion tons of carbon dioxide.
Then, putting on his best Dr. Strangelove accent, he suggested that
“with half a ship load of iron….I could give you an ice age.” The
symposium broke up with laughter and everyone retired to the lawn
outside the Redfield Building for beers (from Chisholm and Morel,
Editors, preface to: What controls phytoplankton production in
nutrient‐rich areas of the open sea? Limnology and Oceanography, 36, 8 December 1991).
This
year's energy-sourced emissions of CO2 should come in at 30.6
gigatonnes ( 30,600,000,000 tonnes) of which a large part will reenter
the carbon cycle, becoming plant material etc. but it is the stuff that
remains in the atmosphere after the rest is sequestered that is
available to feed the plankton.
So, very, very serious business.
Don't try this at home....
*****
....Coming up tomorrow, the Pope, and a Vancouver stock promoter.
After Nvidia's blowout numbers it appears that most, if not all of the actual profit (not market cap) has gone to NVDA. Free cash flow for the quarter was: $6,048,000,000.
From Institutional Investor, August 29:
The move from crypto to artificial intelligence has fueled the markets this year, but some are questioning how much of it is real.
By the time a dormant penny stock company known as Applied Sciences
managed to wrangle a listing on the Nasdaq in April 2022, it had
reinvented itself as a cloud hosting service for bitcoin miners and
changed its name to Applied Blockchain. But with the crypto world
crashing that spring, the stock never took off. Within months, Applied
Blockchain pivoted again — renaming itself Applied Digital.
If
its previous iteration had been too late to cash in on the bitcoin
mining craze, the company wasn’t going to miss the next big one:
artificial intelligence.
Applied Digital’s stock finally began to soar in May,when CEO
Wes Cummins announced that the company had signed a cloud hosting deal
potentially worth $180 million with an unnamed but prominent AI
customer, and another one for up to $460 million with another big player
in the booming AI space. By July, the stock had surged some 450 percent
for the year, becoming — for a time, at least — one of the big winners
in today’s AI-driven stock market.
Applied Digital is hardly alone in trying to capture some AI magic. Ever
since ChatGPT burst onto the scene last November — with its “large
language model” boasting a humanlike writing capability that at first
blush seems to ensure productivity gains for everyone from publishers
and movie studios to investment banks and hedge funds — so-called
“generative AI” has turned the markets on their heads.
Coming off the worst year in recent history for venture capitalists,
private market players like Andreessen Horowitz, Coatue Management,
Tiger Global, Sequoia Capital, and Softbank quickly redirected their
dollars to AI upstarts. Meanwhile, the stock prices of the big tech
names suspected to be the major beneficiaries of this often-called
“revolutionary” form of artificial intelligence have skyrocketed. The
2022 tech downturn became a faint memory as some five tech companies —
Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, and Nvidia — accounted for the
lion’s share of the stock market’s remarkable comeback this year, with
the S&P 500 rising 20 percent through July. Nvidia, maker of the
superfast chips that switched from powering bitcoin mining to making
generative AI possible, has gained more than 250 percent so far in 2023,
making it the S&P index’s top gainer.
In the midst of
this bonanza, Applied Digital’s CEO — who is also the president of B.
Riley Asset Management and was at one point the owner of about 25
percentof Applied Digital’s shares — posted on Twitter (now X) in June that the company had ordered 26,000top-tier
H100 GPUs, or video processing cards, from Nvidia for $40,000 apiece.
To those casting a wary eye on the company, it seemed too good to be
true. A purchase that big would allow Applied Digital to “jump to the
top of the pile in high-performance computing, alongside Google, Meta,
and [Amazon Web Services],” short-seller Dan David said in a Wolfpack
Research report that called the company “an embarrassing and predictable
stock promotion.” He noted that the cost to purchase such equipment
would run more than $1 billion — more than Applied Digital’s market cap
of nearly $600 million.
“The explosion of interest in AI after the emergence of ChatGPT has
predictably attracted the worst promoters and scumbags to peddle fake AI
wares to credulous investors,” says David, who claims Applied Digital
is one of them. (The company did not respond to a request for comment.)
Applied
Digital is one of nearly a dozen companies that short-sellers have been
eyeing this year as questionable beneficiaries of AI mania. The shorts
say their antennae are on the alert for even more. But so far, the
skeptics are fighting an uphill battle. Short interest is relatively
high in several of these stocks, and it’s been costly to bet against
them. As of August 25, Applied Digital short-sellers, for example, had
placed bets on 19 percent of the outstanding shares of the company. The
short-sellers in aggregate are down almost 30 percent this year on the
name, having lost about $10 million, says S3 Partners — although those
who shorted Applied Digital at or near its peak would have profited.
Orso Partners co-founder Nate Koppikar, who is also short Applied
Digital, has a term for what he sees going on. He calls the phenomenon
“the grift shift” — arguing that companies and venture capital funds
have pivoted from their losing crypto and tech bets to cash in on the AI
moment....
...A classic history would be a Vancouver "junior resource" company in
1979, after the collapse of the oil and gold markets became a solar deal
in '81 , an Aloe Vera deal to the yuppies mid '80's, a biotech in '86
("we're the next Amgen"or "A cure for AIDS"), then on to neutraceuticals
or spas, Indian casinos, software, then the great "i", "e-" and ".com"
gold rush. Someday I'll get around to checking if some lunatic scammer
actually went with "e-iTrade.com".The next group of parasites were the
"homeland security" companies, then land deals.
The "resource" scams never went away and became more prominent in 2002 after gold had moved off its $252 bear market low.
We're in the Green boom (happy Earth day by the way) now, who knows what's next....
...The recently re-named Homeland Security Network, Inc. (Pink
Sheets:HYSN), doing business as Global Ecology Corporation (GEC)
announced today that it has received their initial order from its soil
remediation project in Juarez, Mexico. The total value of the purchase
orders, involving several of the partnership’s soil-based products, is
$2 million with delivery to begin this June....
A year ago, Andreessen Horowitz general partner Arianna Simpson
wrote about the firm's investment into Irreverent Labs. Simpson had
joined their first $5 million funding round, and Andreessen Horowitz led
their $40 million Series A. The company had yet to produce any product,
but successfully pitched Simpson on what she described as "some sort of
chicken game".
Now, the company has announced that the project will be paused
"for the indefinite future", blaming "lack of clarity" and "regulatory
confusion" in the United States. The company simultaneously announced
"SOL 4 Cocks", in which they will repurchase the Mecha Fight Club NFTs for 18 SOL (~$380). The NFTs had originally minted for 6.969 SOL (~$290 on mint date)....
...A
classic history would be a Vancouver "junior resource" company in 1979,
after the collapse of the oil and gold markets became a solar deal in
'81 , an Aloe Vera deal to the yuppies mid '80's, a biotech in '86
("we're the next Amgen"or "A cure for AIDS"), then on to neutraceuticals
or spas, Indian casinos, software, then the great "i", "e-" and ".com"
gold rush. Someday I'll get around to checking if some lunatic scammer
actually went with "e-iTrade.com".
The next group of parasites were the "homeland security" companies,
then land deals. The "resource" scams never went away and became more
prominent in 2002 after gold had moved off its $252 bear market low. We're in the Green boom (happy Earth day by the way) now, who knows what's next....
...The
recently re-named Homeland Security Network, Inc. (Pink
Sheets:HYSN), doing business as Global Ecology Corporation (GEC)
announced today that it has received their initial order from its
soil remediation project in Juarez, Mexico. The total value of
the purchase orders, involving several of the partnership’s soil-based products, is $2 million with delivery to begin this June....
More bang for the buck (CO2 sequestered) with plankton. Plus, if the plankton is eaten by a whale and transformed into whale doo, much of it will sink into the abyss, effectively sequestered for eons.
From Maritime Executive, February 16:
Internet giant Amazon is providing $1.6 million in funding for the
development of the world’s first commercial-scale seaweed farm, which
will be located between the turbines in an offshore wind farm in the
Netherlands. Part of a larger effort by Dutch authorities to make better
use of the sea space within the wind farm lease areas, this project is
designed to test and improve methods of seaweed farming, while
researching the potential of seaweed to sequester carbon.
Know as North Sea Farm 1, the project is managed by a consortium of
scientific researchers and partners from the seaweed industry, led by
the non-profit organization North Sea Farmers. Amazon’s grant will
provide the investment required to construct a 10-hectare seaweed farm,
which is expected to produce at least 6,000kg of fresh seaweed in its
first year. They expect it will become operational by the end of 2023....
If the shallower water is otherwise a carbon desert (a rarity) it is probably a good use of the space under and between the turbines. However, as with so much of this stuff the temptation will be to claim the gross mass of the vegetation as carbon credits with no concern for any bits of the carbon cycle that is displaced, which bits would bring the net sequestration down considerably.
On the other hand....from 2021's "Searching for the Dust That Cooled the Planet": This is why you want to be careful with the geoengineering proposals. Some links after the jump....
*****
One of the reasons we ran Plankton Week last October—no, not as counterprogramming to Shark Week—was to refresh memories of one of the topics of conversation at all the better salons and soirées circa 2007.
The headline quote is from oceanographer John Martin during a 1988 lecture at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. Here's NASA's Earth Observatory archive page on the statement.
It
is a bit of an exaggeration, you may need ten of those Valemax bulk
carriers, currently the second largest ships in the world at 400,000 dwt
(Euronav's two TI oil tankers at 441,000 dwt are bigger), to make an
environmental change but what a change it would be. The orders of
magnitude of carbon the iron-fed plankton would sequester are almost
mind-boggling:
...Martin gathered the results of the incubation experiments and laid out
the evidence in support of the Iron Hypothesis together with some
back‐of‐the‐envelope calculations and presented his findings at a
Journal Club lecture at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in July of
1988. He estimated that using a conservative Fe : C ratio that 300,000
tons of iron in the Southern Ocean induce the growth of phytoplankton
that could draw down an estimated two billion tons of carbon dioxide.
Then, putting on his best Dr. Strangelove accent, he suggested that
“with half a ship load of iron….I could give you an ice age.” The
symposium broke up with laughter and everyone retired to the lawn
outside the Redfield Building for beers (from Chisholm and Morel,
Editors, preface to: What controls phytoplankton production in
nutrient‐rich areas of the open sea? Limnology and Oceanography, 36, 8 December 1991).
This
year's energy-sourced emissions of CO2 should come in at 30.6
gigatonnes ( 30,600,000,000 tonnes) of which a large part will reenter
the carbon cycle, becoming plant material etc. but it is the stuff that
remains in the atmosphere after the rest is sequestered that is
available to feed the plankton.
So, very, very serious business.
Don't try this at home....
*****
....Coming up tomorrow, the Pope, and a Vancouver stock promoter.
And many, many more. If interested use the 'search blog' box, keyword plankton and Planktos for the saga of the Pope and the stock promoter. Also whales. Huge benefits.
Sequestering carbon in the briny deep is one approach. Another is to solidify the carbon into limestone or baking soda and bury it, deep. And while some big money (and political power) says removing carbon from the air is going to be required, there is opposition from folks with a range of objections; from the most common-sense: it is expensive and the cost of avoiding 1/10 degree C of warming should be laid in front of the people affected i.e. everyone. This is a number no one is talking about, even though it is basic math.* Another objection is the very real risk of severe cooling which is probably more dangerous than warming.** And then there is the unspoken objection: "but if we remove carbon I won't have my justification for mandating financial and economic rules-of-the-road and their capital, income, and cash flows."
From MIT's Technology Review, September 19:
In late January, Elon Musk tweeted
that he planned to give $100 million to promising carbon removal
technologies, stirring the hopes of researchers and entrepreneurs.
A few weeks later, Arin Crumley, a filmmaker who went on to develop electric skateboards, announced that a team was forming on Clubhouse, the audio app popular in Silicon Valley, to compete for a share of the Musk-funded XPrize.
A group of artists, designers, and engineers assembled there and
discussed a variety of possible natural and technical means of sucking
carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. As the conversations continued and
a core team coalesced, they formed a company, Pull To Refresh, and
eventually settled on growing giant bladder kelp in the ocean.
So far, the venture’s main efforts include growing the seaweed in a tank and testing their control systems on a small fishing boat on a Northern California lake. But it’s already encouraging companies
to “get in touch” if they’re interested in purchasing tons of
sequestered CO2, as a way to balance out their greenhouse-gas emissions.
Crumley says that huge fleets of semi-autonomous vessels growing kelp
could suck up around a trillion tons of carbon dioxide and store it
away in the depths of the sea, effectively reversing climate change.
“With a small amount of open ocean,” he says, “we can get back to
preindustrial levels” of atmospheric carbon dioxide.
'No one knows'
Numerous studies show the world may need to remove billions of tons
of carbon dioxide a year from the atmosphere by midcentury to prevent
dangerous levels of warming or bring the planet back from them. In
addition, more and more corporations are scouring the market for carbon
credits that allow them to offset their emissions and claim progress
toward the goal of carbon neutrality.
Kelp has become an especially active area of inquiry and investment
because there’s already an industry that cultivates it on a large
scale—and the theoretical carbon removal potential is significant. An
expert panel assembled by the Energy Futures Initiative estimated that kelp has the capacity to pull down about 1 billion to 10 billion tons of carbon dioxide per year.
But scientists are still grappling with fundamental questions about
this approach. How much kelp can we grow? What will it take to ensure
that most of the seaweed sinks to the bottom of the ocean? And how much
of the carbon will stay there long enough to really help the climate?
In addition, no one knows what the ecological impact of depositing billions of tons of dead biomass on sea floor would be.
“We just have zero experience with perturbing the bottom of the ocean
with that amount of carbon,” says Steven Davis, an associate professor
at the University of California, Irvine, who is analyzing the economics
of various uses of kelp. “I don’t think anybody has a great idea what it
will mean to actively intervene in the system at that scale.”
The scientific unknowns, however, haven’t prevented some ventures
from rushing ahead, making bold promises and aiming to sell carbon
credits. If the practice doesn’t sequester as much carbon as claimed it
could slow or overstate progress on climate change, as the companies
buying those credits carry on emitting on the false promise that the
oceans are balancing out that pollution, ton for ton.
“For the field as a whole, I think, having this research done by
universities in partnership with government scientists and national labs
would go a long way toward establishing a basic level of trust before
we’re commercializing some of this stuff,” says Holly Buck, an assistant
professor at the University at Buffalo, who is studying the social
implications of ocean-based carbon removal.
The lure of the ocean
Swaying columns of giant kelp line the rocky shores of California’s
Monterey Bay, providing habitat and hunting grounds for rockfish, sea
otters, and urchins. The brown macroalgae draws on sunlight, carbon
dioxide, and nutrients in the cool coastal waters to grow up to two feet
a day. The forests continually shed their blades and fronds, and the
seaweed can be knocked loose entirely by waves and storms.
In the late 1980s, researchers at the Monterey Bay Aquarium began a
series of experiments to determine where all that seaweed ends up. They
attached radio transmitters to large floating rafts of kelp and scanned
the ocean depths with remote-operated submarines.
The scientists estimated
that the forests released more than 130,000 tons of kelp each year.
Most of the rafts of kelp washed up on shore within the bay in a matter
of days. But in the underwater observations, they found bundles of
seaweed lining the walls and floor of an adjacent underwater gully known
as the Carmel Submarine Canyon, hundreds of meters below the surface.
Scientists have spotted similar remnants of kelp on the deep ocean
floors in coastal pockets throughout the world. And it’s clear that some
of that carbon in the biomass stays down for millennia, because kelp is
a known source of oil deposits.
A 2016 paper published in Nature Geoscience estimated
that seaweed may naturally sequester nearly 175 million tons of carbon
around the world each year as it sinks into the deep sea or drifts into
submarine canyons.
That translates to well below the levels of carbon dioxide that the
world will likely need to remove annually by midcentury—let alone the
amounts envisioned by Crumley and his team. Which is why Pull To Refresh
and other companies are exploring ways to radically scale up the growth
of kelp, on offshore vessels or elsewhere....
*Regarding the basic question, almost childlike in its simplicity, "How much will your plan reduce the temperature? (not how much CO2 is avoided or removed)" that no one really cares to answer in a forthright manner, we have the example of the Kyoto Protocol. From 2008's "So You Want to Be a Carbon Trader...? (ASO; GRN)":
....This has helped form my personal belief that carbon trading is not going to lower world temperature by even a half-a-degree.
For example, in an October 1998 article in Nature,
Martin Parry (Co-chair of the IPCC's Working Group II) said the effect
of the Kyoto Protocol (and it's associated carbon trading, CDM etc.
[articles 6,12 and 17 of the protocol]) would be a reduction of–0.05°C by the year 2050. Tom Wigley of the National Center for Atmospheric Research estimated
that Kyoto would result in a reduction from baseline of 0.06°C to
0.21°C . (under one Kyoto scenario 0.06 to 0.11°C, under another 0.11 to
0.21).
As Warren Buffett said (in a slightly different context):
"Now I'm known as a long-term investor and a patient guy, but that is not my idea of a big move."
....One of the reasons we ran Plankton Week last October—no, not as
counterprogramming to Shark Week—was to refresh memories of one of the
topics of conversation at all the better salons and soirées circa 2007.
The headline quote is from oceanographer John Martin during a 1988 lecture at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. Here's NASA's Earth Observatory archive page on the statement.
It
is a bit of an exaggeration, you may need ten of those Valemax bulk
carriers, currently the second largest ships in the world at 400,000 dwt
(Euronav's two TI oil tankers at 441,000 dwt are bigger), to make an
environmental change but what a change it would be. The orders of
magnitude of carbon the iron-fed plankton would sequester are almost
mind-boggling:
...Martin gathered the results of the incubation experiments and laid out
the evidence in support of the Iron Hypothesis together with some
back‐of‐the‐envelope calculations and presented his findings at a
Journal Club lecture at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in July of
1988. He estimated that using a conservative Fe : C ratio that 300,000
tons of iron in the Southern Ocean induce the growth of phytoplankton
that could draw down an estimated two billion tons of carbon dioxide.
Then, putting on his best Dr. Strangelove accent, he suggested that
“with half a ship load of iron….I could give you an ice age.” The
symposium broke up with laughter and everyone retired to the lawn
outside the Redfield Building for beers (from Chisholm and Morel,
Editors, preface to: What controls phytoplankton production in
nutrient‐rich areas of the open sea? Limnology and Oceanography, 36, 8 December 1991).
This
year's energy-sourced emissions of CO2 should come in at 30.6
gigatonnes ( 30,600,000,000 tonnes) of which a large part will reenter
the carbon cycle, becoming plant material etc. but it is the stuff that
remains in the atmosphere after the rest is sequestered that is
available to feed the plankton.
So, very, very serious business.
Don't try this at home....
*****
....Coming up tomorrow, the Pope, and a Vancouver stock promoter.
Sort of like a Google doodle homage but with a bit less reach.
Our response to WeWork's valuation metrics was "Roger that, energy and spirituality. Over."
From MarketWatch:
WeWork is finally going public, after the flexible office space
company announced Friday a merger with special-purpose acquisition
company BowX Acquisition Corp. in a deal valuing WeWork at $9 billion.
Under
terms of the deal, WeWork will receive about $1.3 billion, including
$800 million in a so-called PIPE (private investment in public equity)
with investors including Insight Partners, funds managed by Starwood
Capital, Fidelity Management & Research Co., Centaurus Capital and
funds managed by BlackRock.
Shares
of BowX which went public in October, rose 3.2% in premarket
trading. It has lost 5.1% year to date through Thursday, while the
S&P 500 index has gained 4.1%.
Over the years that we followed WeWork, Mr. Neumann's bluster and blather came to resemble what you hear from Ponzi scheme promoters and other fraudsters. Really the only things missing were the stripper poles, for some reason fraudsters seem to like strip joints.
Bombast. In my experience they are all bombastic.
And stripper poles. You would not believe the number of stripper poles that crooks collect....
And my all time favorite bit o'bombast, recounted as the intro to 2007's "Planktos Highlights Real Ocean/Climate Crises & Responds to Recent Misinformation Campaigns"
about a Euro-American reinsurance scam that had reverse-merged its way
onto the American Stock Exchange, gotten onto the Fed Board's margin
list and then, rather than doing the dump half of a pump-n-dump as they
gunned it from 50 cents to $15.00, had just margined the hell out of
their brokerage accounts, requested the excess buying power be wired out
and skedaddled, picking up the remaining cash in the corporate bank
accounts on their way out the door:
...But first, one of my favorite examples of a stock scam (I told you, I
have a morbid fascination with the underbelly of the markets, it's like
watching the lions approach the wildebeest at the watering hole, you
don't want to see it but you can't look away):
...Peter
Uttley, Equisure's chairman and a former Lloyds of London executive,
took control of the company this week, assuming the chief executive
post....
...Uttley said in the press release that his chairman
role had been a "passive" one, but he now plans an active reorganization
of the company, whose reputation has been stained by allegations that
it is a scam insurance operation....
...In
an unusually emotional statement to the press, sent from an Equisure
board meeting Friday in London, Uttley told his version of events over
the summer, which eventually led to the delisting of Equisure shares on
the American Stock Exchange.
"The simple truth was consumed in the belly of deception, but now has been vomited for the world to see," Uttley began.
He then proceeded to tell a story of three men, whom he described as "liars," "cheats," and "scallywags,"
who worked with law enforcement officials and the press to spread false
rumors about the company with the intent of buying Equisure out at 50
cents a share, a tiny fraction of the stock's trading price of $15,
before AMEX suspended trading Aug. 1.
Isn't that damn fine bloviating? It's hard to research but I think Uttley et. al. got away with $100 mil.
Here's Russ George of Planktos responding (I think) to Greenpeace's submission to the recent meeting of the International Maritime Organization...
Who's going to top "The simple truth was consumed in the belly of
deception, but now has been vomited for the world to see," in a press
release?
Scallywags is a nice touch as well.
Jericho Expands Energy Portfolio with Agreement for the Acquisition of Hydrogen Technology
TULSA,
Okla. and VANCOUVER, British Columbia, Jan. 22, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE)
-- Jericho Oil Corporation (“Jericho”) (TSX-V: JCO; OTC PINK: JROOF) is
pleased to announce that it is has entered into an agreement for the
acquisition of all the assets of Hydrogen Technologies Inc. (“HTI”). HTI
holds robust intellectual property for a breakthrough high-temperature
Dynamic Combustion Chamber (“DCC”) boiler that enables zero-emissions
hydrogen to generate heat, hot-water, high-temperature steam, and
Combined Heat & Power (“CHP”) through a closed-loop process. The
closing of the acquisition remains subject to the approval of the TSX
Venture Exchange and also the approval of the shareholders of HTI.
HTI’s
patented zero emissions DCC boiler system aims to decarbonize the
nearly $30 billion global commercial and industrial heating industry
while providing best-in-class energy efficiencies.....
Now Jericho Oil may be a fine company run by fine people, your affiant knoweth naught, but the stock action has all the signs of being a Vancouver Pumpty-Dumpty of the bad old days: trading from a dime - 15¢ (CDN) for most of 2020 and then approaching verticallity on December 13, 2020. 60¢ (CDN) last on the common.
On April 22 I was rambling about Planktos and penny stock deals:
...A
classic history would be a Vancouver "junior resource" company in 1979,
after the collapse of the oil and gold markets became a solar deal in
'81 , an Aloe Vera deal to the yuppies mid '80's, a biotech in '86
("we're the next Amgen"or "A cure for AIDS"), then on to neutraceuticals
or spas, Indian casinos, software, then the great "i", "e-" and ".com"
gold rush. Someday I'll get around to checking if some lunatic scammer
actually went with "e-iTrade.com".
The next group of parasites were the "homeland security" companies,
then land deals. The "resource" scams never went away and became more
prominent in 2002 after gold had moved off its $252 bear market low. We're in the Green boom (happy Earth day by the way) now, who knows what's next....
...The
recently re-named Homeland Security Network, Inc. (Pink
Sheets:HYSN), doing business as Global Ecology Corporation (GEC)
announced today that it has received their initial order from its
soil remediation project in Juarez, Mexico. The total value of
the purchase orders, involving several of the partnership’s soil-based products, is $2 million with delivery to begin this June....
One of the people who decided that iron fertilization of plankton to remove CO2 from the atmosphere was a good idea was Russ George. At the time the European Emissions scheme was coming off the 2006 €30 per tonne price level but the tout was €50; €80; €100 per tonne and Russ wanted some of that action, no point in letting the Chinese with the 'ol HFC-23 scam (HFC-23 is 11,700 times more powerful than CO2 as a greenhouse gas, the CCP would build factories to produce it and then get paid BILLIONS for shutting them down) or the Russians with the Gazprom leaky pipes scam (unburned methane is 20x more powerful than CO2 as a greenhouse gas), the Russians were looking at $50 billion.
"I
don't know if climate change is caused by burning coal or sun flares or
what," said the Moscow-based carbon cowboy. "And I don't really give a
shit. Russia is the most energy inefficient country around, and carbon
is the most volatile market ever. There's a lot of opportunity to make
money."
Yeah we've been doing this for a while. Rio, 1992.
Here's one of our posts on Russ George:
Planktos' Russ George Is Back
One of the Vancouver denizens.
In his last incarnation we got to watch his stock go to zero.
From Pacific Standard:
In July 2012, a commercial fishing charter called Ocean Pearl
motored through the frigid waters of the North Pacific. It carried 100
tons of iron dust and a crew of 11, led by a tall and heavyset
62-year-old American named Russ George. Passing beyond Canada’s
territorial limit, the vessel arrived at an area of swirling currents
known as the Haida eddies. There, in an eddy that had been chosen for
the experiment, George and his crew mixed their cargo of iron with
seawater and pumped it into the ocean through a hose, turning the waters
a cloudy red. In early August, the ship returned to port, where the
crew loaded an additional 20 tons of iron. They dumped it near the same
Haida eddy a few weeks later, bringing to an end the most audacious and,
before long, notorious attempt yet undertaken by man to modify Earth’s
climate.
The expedition was grand in its aims and obscure in its patronage.
Funding George’s voyage was a village of Haida Indians on Haida Gwaii, a
remote Canadian archipelago about 500 miles northwest of Vancouver.
George and his business partners had gained the town’s support for a
project of dumping iron dust into the ocean to stimulate the growth of a
plankton bloom. The plankton would help feed starving salmon, upon
which the Haida had traditionally depended for their livelihood, and
also remove a million tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. (In
algae form, plankton, like all plants, absorbs CO2 through
photosynthesis.) The intended result: a replenished fish population—and
millions of dollars’ worth of “carbon credits” that could be sold on the
international market.
Back on land, in Vancouver, George and his associates drafted a report on the expedition. It claimed that Ocean Pearl
had seeded more than 3,800 square miles of barren waters, leaving in
its wake “a verdant emerald sea lush with the growth of a hundred
million tonnes of plankton.” According to the account, fin, sperm, and
sei whales, rarely seen in the region, appeared in large numbers, along
with killer whales, dolphins, schools of albacore tuna, and armies of
night-feeding squid. Albatross, storm petrels, sooty shearwaters, and
other seabirds had circled above the ship, while flocks of Brant geese
came to rest on the water and drifted with the bloom.
But George did little to publicize these findings. Instead, he set
about compiling the data in private, telling people that he intended to
produce a precise estimate of the CO2 he had removed from the atmosphere
and then invite an independent auditor to certify his claims.
If that was the plan, it quickly fell apart. In October 2012, the Guardian
of London broke the news of George’s expedition, saying it “contravenes
two UN conventions” against large-scale ocean fertilization
experiments. Numerous media outlets followed up with alarmed, often
savage, reports, some of which went so far as to label George a “rogue geoengineer” or “eco-terrorist.”
Amid the uproar, Canadian environment minister Peter Kent accused
George of “rogue science” and promised that any violation of the
country’s environmental law would be “prosecuted to the full extent.”
George, for his part, spoke of media misrepresentation, and he
stressed that he was engaged in cautious research. Amid the controversy,
in an interview with Scientific American,
he was asked whether his iron fertilization had worked. “We don’t
know,” he answered. “The correct attitude is: ‘Data, speak to me.’ Do
the work, get the data, let it speak to you and tell you what the facts
might be.” While most commenters seemed to think George had gone too
far, some expressed sympathy—or at least puzzled ambivalence. A Salon
headline the following summer asked, “Does Russ George Deserve a Nobel Prize or a Prison Sentence?”
GEORGE’S EFFORTS PLACE HIM in the company of a small
but growing group of people convinced that global warming can be halted
only with the aid of dramatic intervention in our planet’s natural
processes, an approach known as geoengineering. The fixes envisioned by
geoengineers range from the seemingly trivial, like painting roads and
roofs white to reflect solar radiation, to the extraterrestrial, like a
proposal by one Indian physicist to use the explosive power of nuclear
fusion to elongate Earth’s orbit by one or two percent, thus reducing
solar intensity. (It would also add 5.5 days to the year.)...MORE
The Outlook wasn't brilliant for the Rustville nine that day:
... They thought, if only Rusty could get but a whack at that - We'd put up even money, now, with Rusty at the bat.
...Ten thousand eyes were on him as he rubbed his hands with ore;
...With a smile of Christian charity great Rusty's visage shone; He stilled the rising tumult; he bade the game go on;
..."Fraud!" cried the maddened thousands, and echo answered fraud; But one scornful look from Rusty and the audience was awed.
...Oh, somewhere in this favored land the sun is shining bright; The band is playing somewhere, and somewhere hearts are light, And somewhere men are laughing, and somewhere children shout; But there is no joy in Rustville - mighty Rusty has struck out.
Apologies to Ernest Lawrence Thayer. Original at the Baseball Almanac After
getting shellacked by the WWF; spanked by Greenpeace and clobbered by
the International Maritime Organisation, Planktos had to go deep into
the bullpen to bring out: Il Papa.
Planktos/KlimaFa's New Vatican Climate Forest Initiative to Fully Green the Holy See
San Francisco -- July 12, 2007
-- By agreement with the Vatican, Planktos/KlimaFa is now pleased and
honored to announce that the Vatican plans to become the world's first
entirely carbon neutral sovereign state, and it has accepted
KlimaFa ecorestoration offsets to achieve this historic goal. In a
brief ceremony on July 5th the Vatican declared that it had gratefully
accepted KlimaFa's offer to create a new Vatican Climate Forest in
Europe that will initially offset all of the Vatican City State's CO2
emissions for this year.
His
Most Reverend Eminence Cardinal Paul Poupard presided at the event and
stated, “As President of the Pontifical Council of Culture; I am honored
to receive this donation from the leaders of Planktos-Klimafa. This donation means an entire section of a national park in central Europe will be reforested.
And now, Numbers 11:32
"... he that gathered least, gathered ten homers..."
but Rusty still struck out.
Of course it was just part of the stock promotion. January, 2008:
....The December 19, 2007 press release had no mention of Il Papa: ...As a result of the unanticipated events in the Canary Islands as well as the fact that the Company is presently in need of funds to support its ocean and forest-basedprojects,
the decision has been made to remain in Madeira until the
Company can better assess its priorities and funding needs.
Madeira, nice hood.
Except maybe when the Pope you are jacking around was Benedict, formerly head of of theCongregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, also known as The Spanish Inquisition
Banks target Luckin Coffee ex-billionaire's family assets to recoup $709m in losses
Lenders led by Credit Suisse Group are targeting the family assets of
Luckin Coffee Inc chairman Lu Zhengyao as they try to recoup losses on
more than US$500 million (S$709 million) in margin loans that soured
after the company became embroiled in an accounting scandal.
Credit Suisse is seeking a court order to appoint liquidators for
Haode Investment Inc, according to a notice posted in the BVI Gazette on
Thursday (May 21). Haode, controlled by Lu's family trust, defaulted on
a loan facility backed by Luckin shares, according to a statement from
lenders in early April. Spokespeople for Credit Suisse and Luckin
declined to comment.
The liquidation request adds to a long list of challenges facing Lu,
who became a billionaire after his fast-growing Chinese coffee chain
went public in the US with help from some of the biggest names on Wall
Street. Much of Lu's wealth has been wiped out by a 92 per cent plunge
in Luckin's stock since April, when the company disclosed that some of
its employees may have fabricated billions of yuan in sales.
Luckin's fall from grace has made it a poster child for concerns
about Chinese corporate governance, fueling a debate in Washington over
the extent to which US money and capital markets should be accessible by
firms from a growing geopolitical rival. Nasdaq is moving to delist
Luckin from its exchange, while the Senate approved legislation
Wednesday that could lead to some Chinese companies being barred from US
bourses.
Lu said in a statement on Wednesday that he's "deeply disappointed"
Nasdaq is moving to delist the shares before Luckin releases final
results of an internal probe into its accounting.
Banks that participated in the loan facility to Lu's investment
vehicle signaled in April that they plan to sell Luckin shares that were
pledged as collateral, though its unclear whether the banks have
started offloading the shares or how much money they'll be able to
recoup.
Credit Suisse and Morgan Stanley each put up about US$100 million as
part of the loan facility, while China's Haitong International
Securities Group lent about US$140 million....
After doing this a while you don't even need to call in the forensic
accountants to spot the weird ones. A bit of backround, Equisure Inc.
was purportedly a reinsurer based in Belgium that had, in a remarkably
short period of time gone from the NASDAQ bulletin board to the American
Stock Exchange by way of a reverse merger with a dormant shell company.
The
heart of the scam was to hype the stock by way of news releases to a)
gun the stock for the early buyers and b) get the stock on the Federal
Reserve Board's list of marginable securities.
That step is a bit
more sophisticated than your run-of-the-mill pump and dump because it
allows the crooks to borrow against the shares rather than having to
sell them. The lack of selling pressure makes it easier to maintain the
run-up until the plug is pulled.
Of course the scammers also took whatever petty cash was in the company's coffers.
I never saw a complete accounting but a fair estimate of the EQE take was $100 Mil.....
...But
first, one of my favorite examples of a stock scam (I told you, I have a
morbid fascination with the underbelly of the markets, it's like
watching the lions approach the wildebeest at the watering hole, you
don't want to see it but you can't look away):
...Peter Uttley, Equisure's chairman and a former Lloyds of London executive, took control of the company this week, assuming the chief executive post....
...Uttley said in the press release that his chairman role had been a "passive" one, but he now plans an active reorganization of the company, whose reputation has been stained by allegations that it is a scam insurance operation....
...In an unusually emotional statement to the press, sent from an Equisure board meeting Friday in London, Uttley told his version of events over the summer, which eventually led to the delisting of Equisure shares on the American Stock Exchange.
"The simple truth was consumed in the belly of deception, but now has been vomited for the world to see," Uttley began.
He then proceeded to tell a story of three men, whom he described as "liars," "cheats," and "scallywags," who worked with law enforcement officials and the press to spread false rumors about the company with the intent of buying Equisure out at 50 cents a share, a tiny fraction of the stock's trading price of $15, before AMEX suspended trading Aug. 1.
