"Garbage Dreams" Trashed by thugs posing as Army: Egyptian security forces murder family member of Solar CITIES Zabaleen colleague and destroy the family workshop

Moussa Nazmy Zekry, Solar CITIES colleague with Adham Fawzy of "Garbage Dreams" fame, stands on his roof next to his self-built ARTI-style Biogas System which he feeds with dried mouldy bread waste and other organic garbage he gathers from the streets, keeping the Zabaleen tradition of turning an environmental hazard into a community benefit.

Friends and Supporters of the Solar CITIES Egypt Green Collar Job Training and Renewable Energy Initiative, please read the quoted email below.

We received this heartbreaking appeal for assistance yesterday from our Coptic Christian Solar CITIES colleague Moussa Zekry who has been building solar hot water systems and biogas systems on his own roof, at the Zabaleen recycling school and throughout the neighboring Muslim community of Darb Al Ahmarfor the past few years and has been innovating with us since the beginning in 2006.

If you've seen the documentary film "Garbage Dreams" you have already met Moussa's community and friends and family.

Moussa has been a bridge of peace and cooperation between the Christian and Muslim communities of Manshieyet Nasser and Old Cairo, and has always sought to use sustainable development education as the path toward full integration of groups, regardless of race, creed, religion or social class.

Now, just as the (r)evolution in Egypt starts to offer prospects of hope and economic sustainabilty for "Green Collar" job entrepreneurs like Moussa, a peaceful demonstration by his community of trash recycling heroes turned into a bloodbath when state security thugs and people posing as soldiers and pretending to represent the Muslim community started shooting in the predominantly Christian area of Manshieyet Nasser. This was a tactic used by Mubarak in the past to create the impression of a sectarian powder keg that needed a dictator to control, and seems to be continuing in the aftermath of his departure.

In this tragic bid to "divide and conquer", Moussa's family lost its chief bread winner and their workshop and, beyond their grief, are now destitute. If anybody can help Moussa and his family with assistance, employment, micro-credit, help to rebuild their workshop, or opportunities for further education, please contact us, or contact Moussa directly. His phone number is +20 0183493671.

His email is smailegyption@yahoo.com and he can be found on facebook as Moussa Nazmy Zekry.

Your support, either directly to Moussa , or through the Solar CITIES Cairo Iniitiative, will make a real difference in the struggle to bring democracy, hope, dignitiy and environmental sustainability to Egypt.

Moussa Nazmy Zekry March 16 at 10:54am Report

Dear Thomas, i am in troubel,

I need help, I need all the help I could have,

I lost my brother Samaan, the army shot him in the conflict this week.

People from my area made a peacefull demostration on march 9, it went very very wrong.

They were demonstrating because a muslim group atacked and completely destroyed a church the saturday before. People from my area are angry and scared , when they went demostrating they got atacked by  armed muslims. they tacked us with guns, knifes and swords, we were completely unprepared and had no weapon. It turned into a bloodbath. Army came, 10 tanks rolled into our area but instead of protecting us they atacked us also, they shot my brother Samaan in in his heart and his back.

Life is very difficult, my sister died last summer because the doctor in the hospital made a mistake, now I lost my brother.

Life is also difficult because I am the only one to take care of my whole family now, parents,my little sister,my older brother and his wife and his 4 children, my brother Samaans wife and his 2 children. My older brother cannot work because he has a heartproblem and my father lost his garage, his workplace in the fighting, they burned all of it to the ground.

I need all the help I can get, this is very very serious, do you know someone who can help me?????

Do you know someone whom i can tell my story to and who can help me in my very difficult times?Please pray for me,your Moussa PS Christian, my friend from Norway helped me to write this message.

Thomas Henry Culhane March 16 at 11:39am

Dear Moussa,
I am so very very sorry to hear about these horrible tragedies that have afflicted you and your family. Thank you for reaching out and sharing the burden of your pain with us. We hope we can help lighten it Sybille and I both cried reading your message. We must figure out a way to help you and we will. We are having financial troubles right now so we are limited in what we can do in that regard, but we have a large network of people and I think we can make an international appeal, particularly because there are many people now who want to help Egypt develop a green technology economy and you are one of the heroes of that movement. Your story will inspire action and involvement.
Let us think of how to go about getting you the help you need. The first thing perhaps is if you will allow me to post your message to me in my facebook network and in my email network and blog so that the green technology media can report about it. From there we can look at ways of getting you support so you can work. Do not lose hope -- you are a part of the Solar CITIES movement and there are growing opportunities. We will not only pray for you, but work toward getting you those opportunities. Please let me as soon as possible if I can post your words and story so we can move immediately on this! Much love, TH and Sybille

Moussa Nazmy Zekry March 17 at 7:38pm Report
Thank you and Sibylle, thank you for your words, of course you can post any of my messages, post it on u r facebook, anything that can help my case. I m really gratefull for any help i can get. Thank you my friend, thank you so much, your brother Moussa

Moussa Zekry, Solar CITIES hero from the Zabaleen, whose family workshop was recently burned down and brother murdered by the Army in what should have stayed a peaceful demonstration for civil liberties, is shown on the right during happier days when NPR came to visit (Davar Ardalan, Egyptian journalist Sara Abu-Bakr, Laine Hansen, Ned Wharton, Hanna and Moussa on the old Ayyubid Wall between Al Azhar Park and Darb Al Ahmar, looking at one of the Solar Hot Water systems Hanna and Moussa have just finished building)

For those of you who can help, or for those people you may know or who contact you who are interested in helping Moussa Nazmy Zekry, his family and Zabaleen community or the Solar CITIES project he runs with Hanna Fathy Rostom, below is a link to the transcript from the piece that NPR did a couple of years ago that mentions him (his name is transliterated in it as "Musa Nusmee Zachrabahi(ph)"

Hopefully Aid agencies and philanthropists and potential employers can see this as part of a portfolio of recommendation as he builds his CV, so that he doesn't remain one of the voiceless un-named victims of the army and assailant brutality. One of the hopes we have when people from marginalized communities get involved in International efforts is that they will no longer "disappear" when conditions get bad. As we know, the disenfranchised and impoverished suffer disproportionately because they are off the radar of the wealthier people on this planet and have very limited opportunities to exercise their rights or get their voices heard. And as we've seen, their attempts to organize peaceful protests are brutally put down with murder and violence, as happened to Musa's brothter and his family livelihood.

In Cairo Slum, the Poor Spark Environmental Change : NPR

www.npr.org

In one of the city's poorest areas, residents who recycle trash by hand and a handful of environmental activists are slowly improving their community. Their efforts serve as an unlikely model for environmental change in an age of global warming.

Coptic Christian Solar CITIES colleague Moussa Nazmy Zekry builds a solar hot water system on the roof of a textile business in the Muslim community of Dab Al Ahmar near the Abu Hureyba mosque above the ancient public baths, where he also built a system. Through Solar CITIES Moussa has worked hard over the years to bring Muslims and Christians together through shared goodwill environmental projects like this.

Moussa (front right) and the guys (including his Solar CITIES colleagues and neighbors Adham Fawzy and Nabil, featured in the prize winning documentary film "Garbage Dreams" that Al Gore helped bring to audiences in the US) pose in front of a finished solar hot water system at Am Hussein's house in the neighboring historic Islamic community of Darb Al Ahmar. Moussa worked as part of the team renovating old Cairo with the Aga Khan Trust for Culture.

Moussa Nazmy Zekry arranges the delivery of animal dung into the neighborhood for the inoculation of a Biogas system he built for the Roh El Shabab (Spirit of Youth) NGO office to demonstrate the effectiveness of the ARTI India Home Scale biogas system in Urban Cairo.

Watson Fellow Kelly Maby works on a biodigestor on Moussa's roof under Moussa's tutelage. Moussa not only trains members of his own community, but trains interns and volunteers from other countries. He also helps Hanna and Sabah Fathy run the Solar CITIES Urban Eco-Tour of old Cairo. With the revolution, the unrest and the recent killings in their community, the prospects to earn even part of his living doing this have dried up.

.

We need the world to know that the area is safe again, and bring more tourists and sustainable development trainees for Moussa to train, and we need AID and Development agencies to hire Moussa to share his expertise outside of his own community so he can earn a decent living.

Moussa also needs a sponsor to bring him to other countries to increase his own training opportunities in environmental technology. Please help!

Moussa spends his time helping other people turn "shitty situations" into value added experiences; as he demonstrates here. He is a gentle, humorous hands-on guy who isn't afraid to get his hands dirty doing good works (like putting animal manure into a neighbors biogas system that he taught them how to build). Let's help get Moussa and his family out of "the shit they are in" due to the miserable medical conditions in Cairo and the brutal security forces and thugs that murdered his family members and burned their plastics recycling workshop to the ground!

.

Terrorist Training Camps or Sustainable Development Training Academies? The choice is ours...

by Thomas Henry Culhane on Saturday, December 18, 2010 at 10:47pm

 

Can we create a non-violent  "green mujahideen" instead?

The Westdeutsche Allgemeine newspaper WAZ had the following front page article today (English translation follows):

El Kaida wirbt verstarkt
Junge Deutsche und Migranten im Visier

Dietmar Seher

Karlsruhe.  Das Terrornetzwerk El Kaida wird fur junge Deutsche oder in Deutschland lebende Migranten immer attraktiver, "weil es uber Geldmittel verfugt".  Davon geht die Bundesanwaltschaft in Karlseruhe aus.  In den letzten Monaten hatten im Bundesgbebiet mehrere Terror-Organizationen, die El Kaida auch "Kampfer fur den Heiligen Krieg" zuleiten, ihre Anwerbungen verstarkt.  Im Visier der Ermittler stehen dabei besonders die "Deutschen Taliban Mudjahedin" und die "Islamische Bewegung Usbekistan". Derzeit laufen gegen zehn mutmasliche Islamisten Verfahren der obersten Anklagebehorde, weil sie sich in Lagern im afghanische-pakistanischen Grenzgebiet fur den Einsatz als Attentater schulen liesen.

(My Engilsh translation:)

"Al-Qaeda amps up its promotional (recruitment) activities
Young Germans and Immigrants are the target

Dietmar Seher

Karlsruhe. The terrorist network Al Qaeda is becoming more and more attractive for young Germans or for immigrants  living in Germany, "because it offers funding (i.e. a way to make a living). " says the Attorney General in Karlseruhe. In recent months, several Bundesgebiet terrorist organizations that are involved with al Qaeda  "fighting for the Holy War" , amplified their enlistments. Investigators here are especially concerned about  the "German Taliban mujahedin" and the "Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan".  There are currently  about ten suspected  Islamists being prosecuted because they enrolled in  training camps on the Afghan-Pakistani border area to be used as bombers."

While this news is disturbing ex facie, the  article disturbs me on a more personal level too, as a social entrepreneur trying to run a non-profit organization (Solar CITIES) that seeks solutions to the poverty trap and to environmental injustices in developing countries and who seeks to start a  training academy for young Germans and  immigrants living here in Germany.  I realize with not some small measure of anger that Al Qaida and its sister organizations are stealing our potential clients.  I also realize that while we struggle to create a convincing business plan and get funding for our "Green Collar Job Training Academy" that can give disenfranchised youth and migrants a dignified and profitable way to get involved in "The Great Conversation" that societies are  having about how to raise living and health standards and sustainability for their members, Al Qaida doesn't seem to have any problem getting money to attract its clients, its students, its members, its potential warriors to join its ideologically bankrupt cause.

It incenses me to be told yesterday when we presented our business plan "this is a great idea, but our chief concern is where the money is going to come from to support the education of jobless immigrants in sustainable development techologies" when at the same time  the terrorist networks, if the WAZ article is correct, seem to be in awash in money to snatch these same people up for their nefarious brand of "education".

We were told, "for your business model to succeed you will need enough high paying clients to operate at a profit so that you can subsidize the poor to learn how to build these low-cost solar and biogas and water pumping systems, but we doubt there is enough interest in or demand for learning about low-tech environmental solutions to attract paying clients here in Germany". Yeah, sure -- if we were trying to create an academy to train people how to build apps for Iphones or sophisticated RF tracking devices, new generation computers or even hi-tech weapons systems (or even simply "business English"), we would probably have no problem recruiting and attracting both paying students and jobless immigrants in search of a better life.  But would such a training academy really help the other 90%? And would it have any resonance with the people most likely to turn to the "free scholarships" now offered by Al Qaida?

On the following pages of today's newspaper another article discusses the "Spatfolgen eines Drohnenangriffs"(After-effects of a Drone Attack):saying "Wuppertaler Islamist starb bei einer amerikansichen Militaroperation in Pakistan. Bundesanwaltschaft pruft , ob gegen US-Truppen ermittelt wird" (An Islamist German from the Wuppertal region died in an American Military Operation in Pakistan. The Attorney General is investigating whether he was involved in operations against US Troops).

It is easy to dismiss young Germans or immigrants living in Germany who get sucked into the spiral of terror activities and end up going off to Pakistan to get "schooled in terror" as "crazies", but after almost a decade working with gang kids in Los Angeles, and a  stint working with Hollywood film-composer BT, I read instead "a misplaced desire on the part  of the disenfranchised to re-enfranchise, to join a cause and fight against the machine, to  try and use aggression and terror (the currency de jour of frustrated social action that we learn to mimic from Hollywood films)  to counter one's own reaction to perceived aggression and terror."

Most relevantly I had a very small part in BTs great score for the prophetic Rob Cohen action movie "Stealth" where technology (and the human military machinery behind it) gone amok makes Hollywood heroes of those who fight against the drones and rage against the machine --  as long as they are Americans.  Mine is the Near Eastern sounding voice of bewilderment and pain wailing in the background  of the haunting music that accompanies each drone attack's effects  on Uzbekistan villagers who get no glory as collateral damage and certainly don't get the girl in the end if/when they try to resist.  As in the movies "Star Wars" and "Avatar" and "Iron Man"  and "V is for Vendetta"  and a host of other stories we tell our children (like the textbook version of the American Revolution) there is always  a tension over who the real aggressor is and how aggrieved parties should act or react.

The bottom line for me: Almost everybody who is able wants to belong to some movement bigger than themselves, and when you add a financial incentive on top of the possible glory of membership, and top it off with a confused perception of "justice" reinforced by generations of "David vs. Goliath" narratives, it isn't hard to see why young Europeans, particularly those with emotional ties to places where suffering and degradation are occurring, would want to "go back to school" in foreign camps where tuition, room and board and living wages as well as a supportive ideological atmosphere are guaranteed, particularly when there is no alternative offered at home.

 I think I understand what motivates people here in Germany to join what I consider the "dark side" (especially when they think they are actually in the right;  the use of impersonal Stealth drone aircraft certainly gives both Pakistani and Afghani villagers as well their quite rightful sympathizers in Europe, the impression that perhaps the  real threat lies in the lands where people are trained in camps (called universities and businesses)  to build increasingly destructive and impersonal weapons and not in the remote desert and mountain camps around them whose organizers claim to be the only antidote to their suffering).

What I don't understand precisely is how to create the counter-narrative and its supportive institutions and make it appealing to funders.

Transformative Action and the potential to inspire a non-violent, spiritually awakened "Green Mujahideen"

The idea of flipping Al Qaida's strategy on its head and creating an "anti-villain institution" more compelling than their fantasy reinforced "anti-hero" narrative seems plausible because it involves much more than  mere inversion yet can also be viewed simplistically:

Set up training training camps in developed countries and regions that take the marginalized youth and jobless immigrants Al Qaida is now targeting and turn them into a wholly different kind of "mujahideen" if you like (since mujahideen doesn't literally mean "warrior" but "one who struggles in the way of God" and a "jihad" is not a holy war, but an internal struggle to conquer ones inner frailties and live a more spiritually sound life.).  The "green mujahideen" would be also sent to other countries after their training , but sent to do good rather than mischief and sow seeds of bounty rather than terror.  The same Margaret Meadic faith that a small number of dedicated people can change the world would be the guiding principle, but in absolute contrast to the terrorist networks the joyous network of green collar ambassadors would truly be returning home in their stints abroad to spread the benefits of what they learned "in camp", raising living standards and improving environments.

If it sounds like the Peace Corps (started in the Kennedy Administration in the 1960s), well, it should.  The Peace Corps had great and similar ideas and did great and similar things. Where it was incomplete (as Ivan Illich is fond of pointing out, and made famous in his essay, 'To Hell with Good Intentions") is that its target group for recruitment was college educated white kids; in that sense it reinforced colonial and imperialist stereotypes for the most part . One notable exception was my Iraqi-American cousin, Yasmine Rassam, now a human rights lawyer, who spent her two years of Peace Corps duty in Mauritania where being of Arab heritage helped her win the confidence of the people.

The example of my cousin Yasmine subtends our idea for the Green Collar Immigrants Job Training camp. By building capacity for our immigrants and then allowing  them to do their work and share what they learn in countries of their historical origin (or with similar cultural characteristics)  we definitively end the claim to "meddling" that so many development organizations from the North and the West encounter (and perpetuate). By training those who have little or no formal education and are socially marginalized or are in poor paying, unsatisfying jobs or who are jobless we create a group of people who can more effectively  bond with those in developing countries whose challenges they will better understand (this has certainly been the result of my experiences living in poverty, living and working  in slums,  living as an immigrant, and trying to survive under foreign and uncertain conditions).

If our idea sounds a bit like Bunker Roy's "Barefoot College" in Tilonia, Rajastan, it should, because we also drew inspiration from our visit there and our conversations with him. But where Bunker's laudable vision focuses primarily on illiterate women between 35 and 55 years of age from rural villages who come to his institution for six months to be trained in sustainable development technologies and are then sent home with micro-loans to start green business, ours fills another gap in the development landscape by focusing on primarily urban immigrants in European cities who can serve as environmental technology ambassadors for development to the immigrant sending regions, building credibility and strong international relations between countries and strengthening both areas.

My gut feeling is that we can out-class Al Qaida and co.  My gut feeling is that people prefer to be super-heroes rather than super-villains, even when the back-story paints a sympathetic vision of the villain, explaining  where he/she "went bad"  (he was abused as a child, his family was raped tortured and killed, she was reduced to a mere number or a slave etc by unfeeling forces).  I believe that if there were places where the disenfranchised and marginalized could go to get trained in a different art of resistance, a place where they could come together as full participants in The Great Conversation and where their voices could be heard and improvisational and innovation talents developed for game changing social and technological systems, they would flock there.  But all of this only IF there was also a financial incentive as large or larger than what the terrorist groups are currently offering German youth and immigrants.

So there is another antidote, a real antidote in my opinion, and I believe it holds much more appeal than going to some remote mountain camp and learning how to build explosive devices and carry and gun and mimic poorly understood out-of-context verses in a different language from the same holy books we have in our libraries back home.

The antidote is a Sustainable Development Training Academy where those who feel powerless and pushed aside can now take center stage as innoventors and solution providers, learning the verse and vocabulary of development in a wide range of tongues, learning how to build not dirty bombs but water pumps, and how to handle not weapons and guns but biogas and wind-generators.  It is a place where people can "rage against the machine" by taking machines apart and rebuilding them in a more human image for more humane purposes, and place where the real fight is against poverty and ignorance and intolerance.

It seems obvious to me. We can easily compete with Al Qaeda for our youth and our immigrant brothers and sisters.

The real question is still, "where will the funding come from?" and that leads of course to the auxiliary question "where does Al Qaeda and Co. get their funding?"  Doubtless they will end up being similar entities. So perhaps our job is really asking those with capital "where would you really rather invest - in the dubious perpetual warfare of Nobel Laureate Kenneth Boulding's "Cowboy Economy"  that keeps production of industrial goods constantly increasing but at great human and environmental cost, or in building capacity of all human beings for participation in what he called the "Spaceman Economy" with its infinite potential for expansion through movement toward the vast unknown?

The former requires merely training people to destroy life and property, the second requires training people to nurture and protect life and create new property, and involves understanding the depths of ecological economics and not just simplistic reductions of life's complexities and the creation of more opportunities to buy low/sell high.  Our youth and jobless immigrants are now dying to see where the incentives and opportunities lie.

The choice of what we can  offer them is ours.

The world is in our hands

All of our children deserve to grow up in a world where we all work together toward health, dignity and prosperity for all.

 

Thonda Semako Emmanuel This is a wake up call to action by various Government. The whole thing about terrorism has foundation on crude oil and until we shift focus from fosil fuel the struggle continue. Can any tell me another source of founding from for Al qaeda network? The young population today determine the future of any society tomorrow so let us with all that we have surpport the green movement.

December 18 at 5:20pm

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Hind R Culhane Well written and to th point ,as always .
We just have to keep marching on.Perhaps this should be sent to some of these donners, like the head of Virgin Atlantic and Bonno.
Keep up the good work.

December 20 at 7:04pm 

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Of Heat Pumps and Heat Dumps

Here in Germany we have a friend, Dirk Roland, who spends his working life on construction sites in places like Ghana and the United Arab Emirates (formerly Iraq and Nigeria), managing teams of builders and budgets on projects where hundreds to thousands of people's lives and millions of dollars are at stake.

He is a no-nonesense kind of engineer, the kind who comes home from his hard working trips abroad to spend his weekends with a backhoe digging up and landscaping his own backyard. I've seen him transform a dirt lot into a green paradise, replete with Koi ponds and fountains, rolling lawns, a beautiful deck and a massive sandbox playground where his 2 year old son, Anton, is already learning to drive a miniature tractor.

Dirk will be putting in his own swimming pool and jacuzzi soon, and it will be heated, and when his son gets older, and inherits the house that dad built, he says, he won't pay a penny for anything. Especially not energy.

This, in a luxurious house in Northern Germany that you can walk in barefoot all winter because even the floors and the walls are all heated, for God's sake. But there are no ugly block heaters hissing and clanking throughout the house -- the entire place is ingeniously insulated and designed with capillary heat tubes so that it exudes heat -- where and when it is needed.

When it isn't, in the hot summers, the house is deliciously cool. Fully air-conditioned. And always will be, no matter what happens to the price of oil.

Anton will grow up oblivious to the rising costs of fuel.

And during that journey, says, Dirk, his energy costs will just keep going... DOWN.

Dirk has run the numbers -- that's one of his jobs as a construction supervisor. And it made sense to this hard-hat wearing hard-talking guy to put a 7 KW solar electric system on his roof and a ground-source heat pump in his basement. "So that Anton will never have to worry about what happens in this crazy world. As a father it is my duty to provide for my son".

Installing the heat exchange pipes for the heat pump required drilling a couple of bore-holes over a hundred meters deep in the back yard with the kind of rig they use for oil exploration. You can't see the scars -- landscaping has turned the evidence, all of it underground except for a circular maintenance hatch, into the site of a beautiful flower display.

The balance of the system, in the basement, takes up no more room than a traditional boiler, but is silent and sleek and high tech looking and emits no fumes or odors and needs no venting; outside there are no noisy, unsightly air-conditioners, coolers or fans. The ground-source heat pump that provides both heating and cooling for the house uses at most 3 KW of his beautiful building-integrated 7 KW Photovoltaic Array, leaving him plenty of surplus power for the massive brushed steel refrigerator and cuppocino machine and other hi-tech appliances in his elegant kitchen and home-theater graced living room. And for the mood lighting everywhere. And for the constantly gurgling Koi pond -- they just sold a prize Koi to a collector for a couple thousand Euro! And Koi isn't the only thing Dirk and his wife sell from this investment -- he takes me to look at the electric meter which, characteristically, is spinning backward.

"Money I can put toward Anton's college education".

The whole adventure did cost a lot up front -- it cost near 35,000 Euro. But unlike similar investments in creating a luxurious looking and year-round comfortable home that are only cosmetic, this one has created a home for Anton's future that is all but impervious to climate changes and market fluctuations. The earth and the sky provide all the energy this family needs.

We often hear about solar energy these days, and the words naturally conjure up images of the technology giving Dirk's roof its beautiful deep blue, sleek, multi-crystalline look.

We don't often think of solar energy as also being "that portion of the sun's heat that has been sequestered and distributed in the ground beneath our feet, creating the dependable, constant and comfortable delta T that can heat and cool the air and water in our homes, using a fraction of the electricity that our roofs produce."

I saw my first ground-source heat pump in Geyser California when utility consultant Frank DiMassa and I were producing an educational film for Roseville Electric called "Ben and Joe's Electric Adventure". In the film Benjamin Franklin comes to the future and takes Joe Roseville on his magic kite to explore our energy options. One of those was the ground-source or geothermal heat pump.

Frank DiMassa also showed me new housing units under construction in Sonoma County where all the new luxury lots were having heat pumps put in. Because much of California still has a lot of land available, the pipes for these heat pumps were being run horizontally, in loops a mere 2 meters beneath the house and the lawn. This makes construction particularly cheap.

In Germany, as in England where the technology is also popular, space is at a premium and the necessary surface area needs to be won by installing the pipes vertically (this was also done in the "Foundation House of New York" a demonstration apartment building on the island of Manhattan). This means bringing in a drilling rig, and this is what makes the installations so expensive.

Despite this expense, the numbers are so favorable that Germany has become a leader in heat pump technology ("one of the most efficient residential heating and cooling systems available today, with heating efficiencies 50 to 70% higher than other heating systems and cooling efficiencies 20 to 40% higher than available air conditioners"1) and you can see heat pumps advertised in ordenary shopping malls, not just in specialty stores.

It is a sensible technology -- the planet Earth is bathed in sunlight every day as it turns, and much of that sunlight is absorbed by the step-on-it earth. The dirt beneath your feet retains the heat of the sun and stays at a relatively constant temperature all year round. That is where the fun comes in -- while the earth maintains a constant temperature, the air above it is quick to gain or lose heat. In the winter the air in Germany is frigid, and the ground is relatively warm. In the summer the air in Germany is sweltering and the ground is relatively cool. That persistent temperature difference, or "Delta T" as engineers like Dirk like to call it, drives the heat pump (technically it is the compressor, which is driven by photovoltaic energy from Dirk's solar panels, that drives the pump, but the heat exchanging that does the work of cooling and heating the house, is done by the Delta T.)

It is a very smart system: On the sunniest summer days the PV panels are putting out the most electricity and the air temperature is the highest relative to the ground temperature -- this makes the heat pump produce the coolest air conditioning. The hotter the ambient air outside, the cooler Dirk and his family are inside. Similarly, but in reverse, the colder the air gets outside, the warmer they can make it inside. That is the magic of the Delta T. Ironically it works best where the differences in temperature between earth and sky are at an extreme.
This means that no matter what the climate change throws at them, Dirk and his family stay comfortable...

When we came home from a barbecue at Dirk's double-plus comfortable home, I was ashamed when I read the newspaper and discovered that Angela Merkel, normally a staunch champion of sensible climate change initiatives and environmental technologies, is considering caving in on the nuclear issue because other EU countries, like Italy (whose politicians are so corrupt they can't even keep toxic waste from getting into domestic garbage and can't keep the garbage from piling up on the streets and highways, turning Naples and the Campania region into "the triangle of death") are panicking about the effect of rising energy prices on their poorly planned and outdated infrastructures and are using this excuse to get everybody to go back to boiling water with uranium (we won't even begin to talk about the French nuclear mafia!).

But in Dirk Roland-land you don't worry about rising energy costs when you crank the air conditioner or turn up the heat. And you certainly wouldn't ever consider risking Anton's precious life by condemning him to a nuclear endangered future. In a nuclear future he not only has to worry about the power being disrupted because it has been centralized again and is in the hands of profiteers who can manipulate prices every time supply and demand mismatch (as they inevitably will when climate change makes ambient temperatures chaotic and unpredictable all year round) but also has to worry about terrorist threats and radioactive toxins in his air and water.

A child like Anton will say, "But Dad, why do we need to live with these threats, when we already have all the energy we need and all the comfort we desire, without hurting anybody else? How come we were able to build our own simple but efficient and effective energy infrastructure right here on our own home a system that uses only the sky above our heads and the earth beneath our feet to make us live like kings, and threatens or bothers nobody, while other people are building massively complicated atomic time bombs to get the same luxuries we enjoy?

How would YOU answer a child who asks a question like that?

Let's see how Anton might answer his own question when the long term cost savings his Dad's investment in Solar Powered Heat Pump technology enables him to take his first economics course in college. I paraprhase here page 35 of Krugman, Wells and Grady "Economics: European Edition; Economic Models, Trade-offs and Trade":

"Suppose that policy A (investing in renewable energy) makes everyone better off than policy B (investing in Nuclear Energy) -- or at least makes some people better off without making other people worse off. Then A is clearly more efficient than B. That's not a value judgement: we're talking about how best to achieve a goal, not about the goal itself... when policies can be clearly ranked in this way, then economists generally agree".

Certainly Anton's Dad would agree. This is the concept of "Pareto optimality" in Economics and Vilfredo Pareto started out as an engineer, like him.

"Why don't we all have a consensus on this issue", Anton will ask, "given that the numbers make sense"? Again he will read in his textbook,

"If nearly all economists agree on an issue ... reporters and editors are likely to conclude that there is no story worth covering and so the professional consensus tends to go unreported...It is also worth remembering that economics is, unavoidably, often tied up in politics. On a number of issues, powerful interest groups know what opinions they want to hear; they therefore have an incentive to find and promote economists who profess those opinions, giving these economists a prominence and visibility out of proportion to their support among their colleagues."

The horribly expensive and dangerous nuclear plants the EU wants to build, even if they start building them today, will be just beginning to come on line and produce electricity when Anton graduates from college 20 years from now with his economics degree -- and a healthy dose of skepticism.

He will have lived with free and abundant electricity and comfort his entire life. He will come home from college to his luxurious home in the country and Anton's Dad will show him the old spreadsheets. The numbers will do the talking -- he will say, "hell son, it made sense to invest in our solar powered ground source heat pumps way back in 2006 when you were a baby and oil was less than 100 dollars a barrel, to say nothing of today. Even with all their artificial subsidies, they can't make nuclear power as cheap as solar power -- Our investment was paid up 5, 10 years ago, and for the rest of your life you will continue to pay next to zero -- you'll pay no financial, and certainly no environmental or social costs. It's a shame others didn't understand that."

And Anton might say, "Hey Dad, I figured out that our house is actually working to mitigate climate change, to make things better for everybody."

Dirk will say, "but of course we solar powered families are creating positive externalities; using solar power and heat pumps we have never contributed any greenhouse gases to the atmosphere and we are helping society by contributing "green electrons" to the electron pool when we sell our surplus electricity back to the grid".

And Anton will say, "it's not just that, Dad -- the kids at school who are in favor of nuclear power say that radioactive source of energy doesn't produce carbon gases either. No, I mean our house and houses like ours are actually helping to cool the climate, to remove the excess heat..."

"How do you figure that"?

" Well, the way I see it, during the day, we capture the sun's light and heat and put it to work, making our lives better. At night, when the sky becomes a infinite cold heat sink, we let the heat return to the environment, but at the time when it has the best chance of escaping back to space. Energy always moves from hot to cold, right? In effect, if we engineer things right, our solar powered houses could act as heat pumps that could actually reverse global warming! That is, if only we could get those nukes that are now adding heat to the earth to be shut down. I haven't proven the theory, but I'm writing a paper about it now for my grad course in environmental engineering..."

(And as the sun sets on another beautiful day in the SolarStadt of Northern Germany, we fade to black, leaving Anton's theories about heat pumps and heat dumps for another blog post on another sunny day...)