Subscribe to our Newsletter to participate:

We need your participation to:

Become Carbon Neutral in 15 Years

Stop Global Warming

Reverse Climate Change in 40 Years

and Save Most of Earth’s Biodiversity

We can do that using a scientific and global bottom-up approach,
where participants save money while living more sustainably.

<span style="font-family: Arial, "sans-serif"; color: white; background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; bacWe do that using a scientific and global bottom-up approach,

For more details, see the sections below:

Return to Global Sustainable Conditions

We are preparing to provide the service of measuring the environmental impacts (and sustainabilities) of all products, services and individuals in a globally standardized way and at very low costs, while providing environmental conservation for every transaction made. This approach creates a large market demand for all types of conservation, including the removal of excess carbon dioxide from the air and wildlife area protection & restoration.

Once enough environmental conservation credits (for protection and restoration) become available, products and services can be consumed free of environmental damage. With these services we aim to reach the following objectives:

Objective 1: Return Earth to Global Sustainable Conditions

“Our 1st objective is to return Earth to sustainable conditions ASAP,
using a scientific and bottom-up approach”

Thus far everybody has been looking to and relying on governments to protect the world’s wildlife areas and to stop global warming. But, instead of improving, conditions are only rapidly getting worse. The rate of global extinctions is very high and rising. The global rate of species extinctions is expected to rise with every degree of global warming, while the atmospheric carbon dioxide levels continue to rise at an apparent unchanged rate.

(Carbon Dioxide | Vital Signs – Climate Change: Vital Signs of the Planet (nasa.gov) and Global species risk of extinction share 2022 | Statista)

In light of these globally failing government efforts, the above objective sounds unreachable, but it is possible using new methods developed. Recently the Environmental Impacts Measurement And Conservation System (EIMAC system or EIMACS) was developed (patent pending). This system allows buyers to select and buy products and services with less damaging environmental impacts, while neutralizing damaging impacts by automatic application of conservation. These required changes can be carried out relatively fast, since:

  • The globally standardized system allows calculation of environmental impacts and sustainabilities at very low costs for all products and services.
  • The methods are based on voluntary individual and organizational participation and are independent of governments.
  • The methods save resources and money and create a more competitive marketplace.

To return to sustainable conditions, we need to protect the environment and restore all environmental damages. Instead of relying on governments to do so, we can and need to do this ourselves (a bottom-up approach).

“Instead of waiting for Governments to take action,
you can act and reduce your environmental impacts
by participating in the EIMAC system”

All types of conservation needed are made available free of costs to individual consumers but are paid for by the seller. The neutralization of damage happens at time of purchase of the product or service. With enough environmental conservation available, the resulting product or service is purchased by the individual consumer net free of environmental damage.

 

Objective 2: Return to Year 1750 Conditions in 40 Years

 “Our 2nd objective is to reach carbon neutral conditions in 15 years,
to return the world to sustainable conditions in 40 years,
to prevent the worst damage from sea level rise and biodiversity losses”

Any slow transition to sustainable conditions is essentially a route to failure; to be successful, this change must be made fast such that most of the environmental damage can be prevented. Prevention of environmental damage likely saves hundreds of millions of lives globally. Since prevention of environmental damage also saves the cost of repair (or restoration), prevention of such environmental damage also represents lower future costs.

Picking an “easy to reach” goal for the period needed to reach sustainability is thus pointless; to be effective a challenging goal must be set. Reaching sustainable conditions in 40 years would be such a challenge. In combination with the phasing out of fossil fuels in 20 years (much easier to accomplish) this would allow Earth to return to “net carbon neutral” conditions within 15 years after the start of the EIMAC system implementation. For biodiversity conservation it would mean to protect and start the restoration of sufficiently large and interconnected wildlife areas to order to (first) minimize and (later) stop extinctions. In both cases, after reaching “sustainable conditions” it would still take centuries to cool down Earth, to restore the world’s glaciers and to allow the protected, expanded and interconnected wildlife areas to reach a resilient level of biodiversity. (See section “Return to Pre-Industrial Conditions”.)

Damaging Environmental Impacts

For all products and services sold, the damaging environmental impacts are calculated. These include:

  • Biodiversity loss due to loss and damage to wildlife areas and use of (the most damaging) chemicals
  • Fresh water use in excess of sustainable available amounts
  • Soil loss & damage (pollution, carbon loss)
  • Global warming
  • Coastal flooding
  • Damage from population growth

While six environmental impacts are mentioned above, a much larger number of environmental impacts are organized in ten environmental impact groups. In order to prevent a further slide into inhumane conditions (and to improve current human conditions), one additional impact group is added, representing human condition impacts.

Humans, the crops they grow and clean fresh water they use, all depend on biodiversity. If we cannot maintain global biodiversity, life will become very hard likely leading to large scale crop failure and starvation. Biodiversity loss is therefore the most important aspect. Excessive freshwater withdrawals from nature and soil loss & damage lead to additional biodiversity losses.

Global warming and population growth make the already dire conditions only worse.

 

Conserving Environmental Impacts

Conserving environmental impacts include environmental protection and environmental restoration. These include:

  • Protection, restoration and interconnection of wildlife areas for their biodiversity.
  • Reduction of atmospheric carbon dioxide to pre-industrial levels by removal of carbon dioxide from the air (Direct Air Carbon Capture and Carbon Sequestration or DACC&CS) and by phasing out the use of fossil fuels.
  • Protection of watersheds, limiting freshwater withdrawal to sustainable available amounts
  • Soil and sediment protection and restoration
  • Protection of coastal areas from flooding
  • All other conserving environmental impacts

Note that carbon sequestration by capturing carbon from fresh air (DACC&CS) is very different from carbon sequestration using carbon capture from smokestacks (CCS). DACC&CS would allow removal of carbon dioxide form the atmosphere and store this underground in basaltic rock formations to return to 1750 atmospheric conditions. CSS would only remove the smokestack carbon dioxide, without underground storage, but does not allow a return to 1750 atmospheric conditions. The CSS process is heavy favored by the fossil fuel industry in order to continue the use of fossil fuels.

Various technologies exist to capture CO2 from air (DACC&CS) and ample investment money is available to build these facilities when good profit margins are offered. To drive costs down and to capture significant quantities, commercial scale-up of facilities to capture CO2 from air is needed. The typical commercial capacity corresponds to 1-million-ton CO2 per year per facility. Unfortunately, there is currently no customer demand (at any price) to warrant such scale-up. Fortunately, the EIMAC system is designed to create a very large customer demand for all types of conservation needed, including biodiversity protection & restoration and atmospheric restoration (see section “How it Works”).

Paying for Environmental Damage

Before even looking at potential solutions of the current environmental problems, we should ask:

“Why should you pay for or receive environmental damage created by others?”

In our current “business as usual” system, the average consumer buys and receives a product or service with on average high environmental (E) damages. Thus far these environmental damages could not easily be determined, but nevertheless end up as “hidden E-damages” of the product or service.

The core aspect of the EIMACS system (patent pending) is that buyers no longer pay for the damaging environmental impacts of products and services purchased or received. Since this happens for each supply chain step, individuals and organizations alike only pay for the environmental restoration of the environmental damages they themselves create. It is the ultimate, most fine grained and most general applied example of the decade’s old principal “the polluter pays”.

“Using the EIMAC system, everyone pays for the
environmental damage they themselves create”

Later sections will show that the E-voucher costs paid for by the seller are initially insignificant and later (when significant) are offset by the savings made along the supply chain. This principal applies to all types of E-damage. Comparing the costs of various types of environmental conservation, the costs of removing carbon dioxide from the air (C-sequestration) are by far the highest. Fortunately, the costs of E-vouchers paid by the seller are earned back by the savings in fossil fuel costs and other savings made along the supply chain.

“Becoming sustainable thus leads individuals and organizations
from a state of higher costs to one of lower costs and higher incomes and profits”

During the purchase, the participating customer pays the regular product price but immediately and automatically also purchases the required conservation paid for using the participating seller’s provided E-voucher.
After the automatic purchase of the required amounts of conservation, all environmental damages are neutralized, and the resulting purchases are free of environmental impacts.
For sales between participating organizations, the E-voucher amounts are transferred but without the purchase of E-conservation. At full implementation, all actors along the supply chain pay their own fraction of E-conservation corresponding to the E-damage they each added. All along the supply chain, each producers/supplier thus pays for the environmental impacts he/she created. This creates a strong incentive to stop doing environmental damage all along the supply chain.

 

Purchase of Environmental Conservation

In order to buy conservation, certificates of conservation will be made available in any fractional size for all types of conservation as needed to offset the environmental damages for all environmental damage variables of all ten environmental impact groups.
Existing and new environmental conservation organizations can apply for environmental conservation certification status. This is a new type of status created by the EIMACS organization. Strick requirements apply to ensure that all conservation as paid for by individuals is indeed permanent. This includes various types of monitoring and verification as well as capital requirements to guarantee that enough capital is available to restore damage done to “restored amounts” (“certified protected” wildlife areas lost, carbon dioxide leaked from “certified systems”). Once an environmental conservation organization meets the EIMACS standards, certificates of conservation can be sold at global market prices.

For carbon sequestration the measurements are easy and accurate: measure the amounts of liquid carbon dioxide pumped underground. For wildlife area protection and restoration, the calculation of the “biodiversity value” of the various protected or restored wildlife areas differs, since increases in biodiversity depend on the quality of protection for biodiversity, on the degree of restoration of the wildlife area, the degree of interconnectivity with surrounding wildlife areas and on the resulting maturity and resilience of the species assemblies. Relative and absolute scales were developed to express such changes in biodiversity for the spectrum of global ecoregions.

 

Shortage of Environmental Conservation

Obviously, no E-conservation certificates can be purchased today because the system is not yet implemented. But even after implementation, the rate of E-certification will likely be slow due to:

  • the changes needed by the conservation organizations to meet the E-certification requirements
  • the lack of available areas needed to expand wildlife areas
  • the lack of carbon sequestration capacity
  • the lack of capacity for any other type of environmental conservation needed

Especially for a rapidly growing individual participation, there will be a shortage of environmental conservation. Even stronger, for most of the next decennia there will likely be a shortage of all means of E-conservation. For that reason, certificates of E-conservation are only made available to individuals (the end user consumers) on an equal amount per person basis (say a monthly per capita amount).

As long as enough of all types of environmental conservation are available, the full amount of environmental conservation required will be automatically purchased by the individual customer and paid for with the voucher supplied by the seller. However, when not enough environmental conservation is available (shortage) the individual will buy environmental conservation until the monthly individual available amount is exhausted. From that point onwards, no environmental conservation is available for purchase for the remainder of the month.

The seller will continue to provide the buyer with environmental vouchers, but the vouchers funds will be:

  • A. Partly paid out into an EIMACS Organization escrow account, used for future purchases of environmental conservation (likely the largest fraction)
  • B. Partly paid out to the individual consumer (as a participation incentive)
  • C. Partly paid out to the EIMACS Organization to pay for costs to run the EIMACS (likely the smallest fraction)

The percentages used for A, B and C will vary over time. The funds in the escrow account under A, are immediately available for purchase of certified amounts of conservation. The sum of A, B and C will be published as the total revenues the conservation organizations “left on the table” by not providing enough capacity. The money under B, paid out to participating individuals, could be as high as ~ 10% (but is likely lower) and create a strong incentive for individuals to participate.

Participation

Theoretically it would be best if every individual in the world would participate on day one and urge all their retailers, suppliers, manufacturers and governments to participate as well. However, practically that would be impossible. It would be more practical to manage the overall process, if the growth of global participation would be limited to about 10% per year. That would also spread the capital requirements and the construction capacity needed to build the C-sequestration facilities over a 20-to-40-year period. However, a 10% rate of new (global) individual participation would still imply a peak annual rate of new individual participants of ~ 1 billion per year, ~100 million per month or ~ 3 million per day.

Without this high rate of growth of individual participation, less carbon is sequestered and most efforts for biodiversity restoration will be ineffective, since the losses in biodiversity due to global warming may be larger than the biodiversity gains due to wildlife areas protection and restoration. In order to be successful, we are stuck with these very high numbers of annual growth of participation. Breakneck speed construction of carbon sequestration factories (DACC&CS) and reduction of carbon dioxide emissions is thus of utmost importance. We should not be intimidated by the size of the task at hand but simply and boldly carry it out. This also leads to a sustainable form of economic growth that is urgently needed, but currently impossible.

“We should not be intimidated by the size of the task at hand,
but simply and boldly carry it out.”

Participation Phases

Project implementation needs to take place in three phases.

  1. Preparatory participation
  2. Pre-participation
  3. Full participation

Once the website functionality allows this, the various types of participation can be listed on the website for individuals and organizations who request such.

 

Preparatory Participation

Before pre-participation can start, there will be a preparation period during which the EIMACS principals are communicated to a growing group of people, the website is improved, fundraising is carried out and the various organizations and scientific advisory committees are formed.

Once sufficient funding is available, people are hired, methods are peer reviewed and published, procedures and software are written, field tests are carried out and people are trained for various field evaluation tasks.

Individuals and organization can participate during this phase by volunteering their time or by making financial gifts.

Pre-Participation

During the pre-participation phase, individuals can sign up to show their interest and indicate which retailers/ sellers they would like to see participate as well. We hope for a global groundswell of individuals signing up for pre-participation.

Organizations (businesses, governments) can also sign up to pre-participate, listing the organizations they would like to see participate. For organizations, pre-participation also implies the use of the EIMACS organization provided product, service and labor classification system.

The use of this system allows the determination of the classification code by original product manufacturers (defined as anyone who prints a product label) and printing of the Classification Quick Reference (CQR) code on the product labels and on service billing and documentation.

The CQR code identifies the product or service to “same or similar” types. The CQR code may for example indicate that the product is a 500-gram jar of peanut butter and not a 500-gram pack of butter for which product classes the range of environmental impacts values may already be known. Butter has much higher damaging environmental impacts than peanut butter. The use of CQR codes thus allow the estimation of environmental impacts before accurate calculations become possible.

For any product sold without a CQR code, we need to assume that the environmental impacts are similar to the products with the highest environmental impacts sold in the store. The use of CQR codes thus on average strongly reduces the estimated environmental impacts of products and services sold.

Producers and service providers who label their products with CQR codes are pre-participating and likely have already invested in equipment and buildings with lower environmental impacts. They are thus likely already more sustainable. Therefore, even before accurate environmental impact measurements can take place, individuals and organizations alike will try to buy CQR rates supplies, products and services. This by itself will drive a change towards the use of sustainable systems and methods (“Sustainability by Selection”).

Full Participation

Once full participation becomes possible, participant sellers can request their products to be “rated” (determination of environmental impacts) for the initially limited number of environmental impact variables. Participating (= “rated”) products can then be sold by participating sellers to participating buyers while the environmental impact voucher system is first used and the first types of conservation are automatically applied.

Why Would Individuals Participate?

Individuals who would like to live under improving environmental, economic and human conditions should participate. Participation for individuals is free. Reasons to participate are:

  1. To rapidly improve environmental conditions
  2. To improve conditions of people living under inhumane conditions (slavery, child labor)
  3. To save money and increase standard of living
 
 

During the pre-participation stage, the only benefits will be those of walking the moral high-ground, by creating the conditions needed to jumpstart the EIMAC system. Once (full) participation becomes possible, individual participants will likely create very large demands for wildlife area protection, carbon sequestration and all other forms of E-conservation as needed to allow a rapid change to sustainable conditions.

 

Why Would Organizations Participate?

Aside from the moral arguments, there are five reasons why organizations should participate:

A. Customer Retention
Undoubtedly a few retailers will immediately sign-up to pre-participate once possible, since it costs them essentially nothing. By doing so, they make clear they intend to fully participate once this becomes possible. Non-(pre)-participation essentially tells the customers that the retailer does not care about the reasons listed above that are important for (pre)-participating customers. Customers are increasingly likely to buy their goods and services at pre-participating retailer and later at participating retailers.

B. Lower Costs of Utilities
A supply chain layer can significantly lower costs and thus increase profits, when all or an increasing number of organizations:

  • Install solar panels on roofs (lower costs of power, much less damaging impacts)
  • Use geothermal heat pumps for HVAC (lower HVAC costs, much less damaging impacts)
  • Use electric vehicles (running on solar and wind energy, much less damaging impacts)
  • Relocate to multi-story buildings (less cultivated area use)
  • Use grey water systems and consume less fresh water.

Note that these cost saving aspects would save money today, independent of the participation stage (none, pre, full).
Once participation becomes possible, this can be measured and will result in lower E-damages and thus to lower E-voucher costs. These E-voucher costs are further lowered when an increasing fraction of the employees in their supply chain participates each year and further lower their E-impacts.

 

C. Supply Chain Access
A small fraction of the supply chain will (pre)-participate ASAP. This means that (pre)-participating retailers will try to find and favor (pre)-participating suppliers. Narrow supply chain layers will thus be formed of organizations that (pre)-participate. However, this narrow supply chain layer of participating organizations has a limited capacity. Early adopters will already be part of this narrow supply chain layer, to which later adopters may no longer have access until the (pre)-participating supply chain widens. This makes it more difficult for late adopters to select (pre)-participating suppliers. This may effectively exclude them for buying from the most sustainable earlier adopter suppliers. Early adopters thus have a competitive advantage.

 

D. Low Costs of E-Vouchers
Due to the initial low customer participation (say 1%), the costs for participating organizations are very low. Take the case of a retailer and assume a 6% cost of E-conservation per dollar spending, with 1% customer participation and 10% participating products available. In that case, the average storewide cost increase (as needed to maintain profits) is equal to: 0.06 * 0.01 * 0.10 = 0.00006 or 0.006% of the average product list price and is essentially insignificant. At higher customer participation and a higher fraction of participating products, these costs will go up, but by then the supply chain costs savings due to (the above) savings will eclipse or strongly reduce such “extra” costs. Participating sellers will have created a lower costs position, improving their competitive position compared to non-participants.

For business to business (B2B) transactions, E-vouchers are reimbursed in “supply chain source” direction; meaning that each B2B E-voucher is only issued by the distributor to the retailer after the participating retail customer received an E-voucher from the retailer. This can only be done this way, since early on neither distributor nor retailer know which of the participating products will be purchased by participating customers. This may sound complex but is very simple to do using computers. Alternatively, distributor and retailer may make monthly estimates, after which the distributor “pre-pays” the E-vouchers and the differences are settled at month’s end.

For B2B purchases, the E-vouchers paid by business 1 are deposited in an escrow account in name of business 2 and used for (future) E-vouchers paid by business 2 to participating customers. The E-vouchers paid out are thus cumulative to the final vendor at the end of the supply chain. The “self” paid fraction of the E-voucher for each organization in supply chain would thus be a small fraction of the 0.006% of the price of product or service. Implementing environmental damage preventing improvements would drop these costs by a further 50 to 60%.

 

E. Low Seller Implementation Costs
The EIMACS process is almost entirely automated. The additional tasks needed are to run the software every night to:

  • A. Distribute the E-impacts of “running the store” over the new inventory “for resale” that came in.
  • B. Adjust the E-impacts of “running the store” over the existing products already for sale.
  • C. Audit the E-impact attribution over all products offered for sale to be within the required compliance limits.

Currently (large) retailers use software to determine the list price of all products offered for sale. The new tasks A and B could be integrated with this current software and would in that case not require additional work.

The auditing costs under C are the only truly “new” and additional cost. However, since most of the auditing is software automated and re-runs inputs and outputs calculated using A and B, this is unlikely to add significant costs.

Additional costs of running the EIMAC system are otherwise mostly proportional to the fraction of the store selling participating products. Starting with a low percentage of participating products will minimize any initial additional costs. Gradually increasing the participation product percentage will reduce the EIMACS costs per dollar revenue of participating products and services sold.

The Use of Environmental Supply Chain Steps (ESCS)

The Environmental Impact Measurement and Conservation System (EIMACS) uses specifically designed environmental supply chain steps (ESCSs) and associated calculations (patent pending) to calculate environmental impacts (E-impacts) of products, services and individuals. Three types of ESCSs exist:

  • Individual supply chain step (ISCS)
  • Product supply chain step (PSCS)
  • Rating supply chain step (RSCS).

Individual supply chain steps (ISCS) are used to calculate the net environmental impacts of an individual and represent an individual. Product supply chain steps (PSCS) are used to calculate and represent the net environmental impacts of products and services. This can either be a unique product (or service) or a series of identical products or services. Rating supply chain steps are used to determine the E-impacts of unknown inputs to ESCSs. The word “rating” here means “determination of E-impacts”.

Products, services or individuals can be non-participating, pre-participating of (fully) participating. For a product or service to be pre-participating or participating, the organization providing the product or service needs to be pre-participating or participating, but this can take place “one product or service at a time”.

Each individual supply chain step (ISCS) exists over the lifetime of the individual. Each product supply chain step exists as long as one product or service in the series is not yet sold and becomes “dormant” afterwards.
For all ESCSs, the output (the result) is calculated using the sum of all inputs minus a correction. For individual supply chain steps this correction is the individual sustainable available allowance. As a consequence, sustainable individuals, have no net environmental impacts. A different correction for product supply chain steps prevents supply chain accumulation of environmental impacts. 

Under the EIMAC system, the labor output of employees is an input to the product supply chain step. This means that the net environmental impacts of employees add to the environmental impact of products made and services provided, for which the seller paid the E-voucher costs. The seller (employer) has thus a financial interest in helping employees reduce their environmental impacts ASAP.
For participating products and services all E-impact data are public. For individuals all data are private.

 

From Crude to Accurate E-impact Determination

Currently used “Classic” methods calculating E-impacts, can only calculate product averages. For example, Classic methods can calculate the average carbon dioxide emissions for a 2 lb bread made in Germany for January of 2022. Even in that case, they exclude all E-impacts added to the production process originating from employees. In many cases, the E-impacts from employees are much larger than from any other source. Excluding employee E-impacts thus misrepresents the actual E-impacts of most products and services provided. In contrast, the EIMACS calculations are designed to calculate the carbon dioxide emissions for (say) a 2 lb bread made at Rockland Bakery in Nanuet NY, for (say) the batch of 500 loafs rolling out off the oven between 8:40 and 9:00 AM today for the employees on shift during the production period.

Depending on the availability of input data for the ESCS used, the E-impacts for products, services or individual labor can be one of three cases:

A. Calculated most accurately (between participants).

B. Estimated with significant uncertainty (using CQR codes)

C. Crudely estimated (default, without use of CQR codes)

For all cases B and C, statistical methods are used to make sure that:

  • The E-impacts calculated for case B are in almost all cases higher than for case A.
  • The E-impacts calculated for case C are in almost all cases higher than for case B.

In reality a mixture of methods A, B and C will be used at any given time, until (first) most methods C are replaced by methods B and (later) most methods B are replaced by methods A. Once most individuals and products in the supply chain are participating, the E-impacts can be calculated at levels of accurately currently impossible to reach.
The above calculations are initially applied to one or two environmental impact variables and later (one at a time) expanded to all variables of the ten environmental impact groups.

 

Sustainability Calculations

Sustainabilities are calculated for participating products and services as well as individuals and organizations. Sustainability values can be calculated per environmental impact variable or as the weighted average of all E-impact variables used.

For a specific individual, the sustainability is expressed as one divided by the number of Earths needed if everybody would have the same environmental impacts as the specific individual. Conditions where an individual would live 100% sustainable are referred to as “reference” conditions. If humanity would live “on average” 100% sustainable, we would need one world. The current average overall sustainability of the world’s population is crudely estimated to be about 10% (using my estimates). This means that based on current resource use and damage done, the world population would require about 10 planets Earth to “sustainably” support the current environmental impacts.

Sustainability values for products and services are calculated by dividing the actual E-impacts per dollar spending by the sustainable (“reference”) impacts per dollar spending. This leads to the same ~ 10% sustainability for the average product and service.

In Short

The first actions individuals and organizations need to take is to communicate the existence of the EIMAC system and to provide organizational support, either is the form of “hands-on” volunteer / pro bono or financial support (preparative participation). Following this, individuals and organizations need to sign up for pre-participation (in the EIMAC system) as soon as this becomes possible. Once large numbers of individuals sign up, retailers will soon follow. The same process will play out throughout the entire supply chain. This is what will most strongly drive the changes to a globally sustainable society.

In the meantime, the following actions can and should be taken as soon as possible.

 

Stop the use of fossil fuels, by:

  • Changing all space heating & cooling and all hot water heating systems to geothermal heating and cooling systems.
  • By installing enough solar panels on (preferably) own roofs to provide the annual amount of power needed.
  • By transitioning to electric transportation (electric trains, bikes, scooters and cars).

For single-family homes, installation of solar and geothermal systems can be done each in two to three days. While these systems earn themselves back in 5 to 10 years, most families need low interest loans to finance these systems. For rental spaces, the landlord would need to install these systems. For buildings with insufficient perimeter space to install geothermal field loops, street supplied geothermal supply and return piping should be made available (town responsibility).

 

Air source heat pumps are about 2/3 as efficient as geothermal heat pumps. Air source heat pumps need thus more power to provide the same amount of heating and cooling. Power plant efficiencies vary by country and state. On average for the USA, the use of air source heat pumps would produce the same amount of carbon dioxide as emitted by heating with natural gas. Unless the annual required amount of power for a building is generated using (own) roof mounted solar panels, the use of air source heat pumps is not sustainable.

 

In addition, individuals and organizations need to reduce their resource use and environmental damage by:

  • Reducing consumption of meat (especially beef)
  • Using buildings surrounded by a minimum of land
  • Using buildings with multiple (5 to 10) floors and by reversing urban sprawl
  • Growing crops with water requirements matching the local climate
  • Using grey water and other water recycling systems
  • Buy products and services with the highest EIMACS sustainability ratings.

It will be hard enough to sufficiently reduce cultivated area use to allow the globally required increase of wildlife areas as needed to protect biodiversity. Globally there is ample space available on rooftops to install solar panels for all power we need. Installing solar panels on land instead of roofs is thus not sustainable.

 

In General

Becoming sustainable is equivalent with the following actions:

  • Resource Use Reduction and Protection:
    • Reduce environmental resource use to sustainable levels
    • Protect environmental resources to render its use sustainable
  • Elimination of Environmental Damage
    • Prevent or minimize the environmental damage done
    • Restore any current and all historic environmental damage done

There are three environmental resources for which limited amounts are sustainably available; these are:

  • The use of surface area for cultivated purposes (cultivated area use)
    • Terrestrial area use
    • Marine area use
  • Fresh water consumption
  • Soil “use” (loss & damage)

For each of these natural resources, a per capita available amount is calculated (the “sustainable allowance”). Soil is formed by natural processes form rock and organic materials, but at extremely low rates, resulting in a very small allowance for its “consumption”. For any amount of natural resource used (say one half), a certain amount of the same resource (say the other half) must be protected in order for the resource amount used to be sustainably available. Any amount of resource used in excess of the allowance represents environmental damage done. Since no allowances exist for environmental damages, all environmental damage done must be reduced to zero by the application of the equivalent amount of restoration.

In order to become sustainable, both individuals and organizations need to reduce the use of environmental resources and eliminate net environmental damage done.

In general, global sustainability improvements are advanced most by buying the most sustainable version of the type of products or service needed and by employing the most sustainable employees. Doing so rewards the more sustainable sellers (and employees) and reduces revenues for the less sustainable sellers. This signals sellers of less sustainable products and services to:

  • Start (pre)-participation in the EIMAC system
  • Selecting (first) pre-participating and (later) participating suppliers
  • Select more sustainable suppliers and products
  • Reduce location based impacts (lower area use, less E-damage, less water extraction, etc.)
  • Making investments in E-impact lowering systems and locations
  • Provide E-impact reducing employee incentives

Note: Location Based Impacts (LBIs) are all environmental impacts originating from the location used (farm, industrial area, yard, garden) that are not yet included in products or services purchased.

Reducing Damaging Environmental Impacts

By participating in the EIMAC system and selecting more sustainable over less sustainable products and services, the damaging environmental impacts will automatically be reduced. These include the following types of environmental damages:

Use of Land and Marine Area: The total area currently in use as “cultivated area” is too large. In order to protect and restore biodiversity, cultivated area use must be reduced. Since most cultivated areas on land are used to grow feed for livestock, the consumption of meat (especially beef, mutton pork and goat) and milk products must be reduced.  Oceans are overfished and open water fishing must be drastically reduced. Farm raised fish should preferably originate from land-based aquaculture (in large tanks) leaving the local freshwater species assemblies (in rivers, lakes and ponds) unaffected.

Wildlife Area Loss and Damage: Wildlife areas are increasingly converted to farmland, leading to fragmentation and reduction of wildlife habitat.

Fresh Water Consumption: The consumption of fresh water must be reduced to sustainable levels. This means growing local climate appropriate crops (not needing irrigation more than a few days a year). Treated (cleaned) wastewater needs to be returned close to the point of extraction, such that its path through the watershed is minimally affected.

Greenhouse Gas Emission Prevention: The use of fossil fuels must be phased out over the next 20 years, by improving the building codes, switching to roof solar systems and wind energy. All low temperature heat requirements (like HVAC and hot water) should be met using geothermal heat pumps. Power plants need to switch to quick starting power generating systems that allow zero to full capacity load changes (and vice versa) in 10 minutes, to facilitate the short-term power fluctuations inherent to PV solar and wind power generation systems. 

Soil Loss & Damage Prevention: Soil loss and damage must be prevented (soil erosion, soil loss with products harvested, loss of soil carbon, other soil components and pollution prevention).

Providing Environmental Conservation

By participating in the EIMAC system and selecting more sustainable over less sustainable products and services, the required environmental conservation will automatically be applied (limited to availability).  These include the following types of environmental conservation:

Wildlife Area Conservation: Protection of remaining wildlife areas in all ecosystems. Restoration, expansion and interconnection of nearby protected wildlife areas in all ecoregions.

Atmospheric Restoration: Removal of carbon dioxide from fresh air through direct air carbon capture and carbon and sequestration (DACC&CS), where all carbon dioxide captured is permanently stored in underground basaltic rock formations. This excludes processes where carbon dioxide is removed from smokestacks and used for further extraction of fossil fuels (oil and gas).

Fresh Water System Restoration: Water flows in rivers and streams need to be restored to sustainable levels, by reducing water extraction and a switch to large-scale use of reverse osmosis (using solar and wind energy) for cultivated purposes.

Soil Restoration: Soils and sediments need to be restored by returning eroded soil components from catch basins, to the origination fields by increasing the carbon content of soils and by cleaning polluted soils.

E-Voucher Funding will Drive E-Conservation

Arguably the best aspect of the EIMAC system is its ability to generate large amounts of funding, even at relatively low initial rates of participation. This funding allows environmental conservation (wildlife areas, other), but is in particular important to kick-start atmospheric restauration (carbon dioxide removal from air or DACC&CS).  For transactions between participants, the seller provides environmental (E) vouchers paying for the environmental (E) conservation to render the overall purchase net free of environmental (E) damage. These vouchers are the source of this funding.

Using the example for carbon (C) sequestration, at 1% global individual participation and 10% availability of participating products and carbon sequestration costs of $100 per ton of CO2, this translates to the need of 44 such C-sequestration facilities, each removing 1-million-ton CO2 from the air per year. To meet this demand, one such facility would need to be completed every 8.3 days. Currently none of such facilities are built due to lack of demand.

One unknown is the rate at which these factories could actually be built? Especially; what would be the upper limit? Looking at the economic history since the renaissance; when an attractive investment return could be made, investment money could always be found, even when the risks were relatively high. For C-sequestration paid using C-vouchers, the money would first pile up in escrow account owned by the EIMACS organization well before each additional factory would be completed. These large and growing amounts of money, waiting to be spent on conservation, would reduce the investment risk of building additional C-sequestration facilities. The EIMACS organization could further reduce the actual risk by finding additional ways to guarantee the full utilization of the C-sequestration capacity available (3rd party guarantors).

Setting Goals and Removing the Bulk of Historically Emitted Carbon Dioxide

Note: The calculation model used below and the related figures are current under peer review and potentially subject to change.

We can set our goals higher or lower for returning to pre-industrial atmospheric conditions. Setting our goal lower would defeat the purpose. We could set our goal to the more ambitious target of reaching this point in 40 year. Following that scenario, and in combination with a fossil fuel phase out in 20 years, about 100,000 of such factories need to be built in the next decades. The world could become “net carbon neutral” in 10 to 15 years. Figure 1 shows that for a targeted elimination of fossil fuel C-emission in 20 years and a return to pre-industrial conditions in 40 years, global carbon neutrality would be reached in 12 years (depending on variable settings). The calculation model uses an initial cost of C-sequestration of 600 $/tCO2 dropping to 50 $/tCO2 after 20 years. Sigmoid functions are used to:

  • simulate a gradual reduction of the C-sequestration costs from 600 $/tC to 50 $/tC
  • simulate a gradual initial reduction of C-emissions, reflecting a likely slower initial societal participation.

Figure 2 shows the ramp-up of C-sequestration capacity as needed to reach pre-industrial conditions in 40 years.

Interestingly, in case the phase-out of fossil fuels would take twice as long (40 instead of 20 years), this would delay the time to reach pre-industrial conditions by only one year (to 41 years, no chart shown). The immediate and accelerated construction of C-sequestration facilities is thus essential and more important than a focus on accelerated C-emissions reductions in less than 20 years.

Figure 1: Effects of phasing out fossil fuel use in 20 years and building C-sequestration facilities to return to pre-industrial conditions in 40 years. The remaining (dropping) carbon dioxide emission and the increasing C-sequestration capacity, lead to net global carbon neutrality after 12 years. (Figure to be replaced with updated version). Source: Vincent Dert

New building codes should require all new or remodeled buildings to be carbon negative (providing more energy than they use) and sell the remainder to the local utility at market rates. Building codes should require fossil fuel-based heat generating system to be replaced by geothermal heating systems for all low temperature heating application. This means that existing heating systems can be replaced at the end of their economic life cycle (15 to 20 years).

Utility electric power generating systems (typically “Combined Cycle systems) need to be replaced by quick starting “diesel” system mostly using fuels (methanol, ethanol) made from carbon dioxide recovered form air using solar and wind energy. 

After reaching pre-industrial atmospheric conditions in year 40, most of the C-sequestration capacity is no longer needed. Only the newest and most efficient fraction of all C-sequestration facilities should be maintained to remove the remaining amounts of carbon dioxide emitted from industrial processes and to remove carbon dioxide still venting from oceans and forests until the new steady state condition is reached between atmosphere, oceans and forests. The solar and wind energy no longer needed for C-sequestration can then be used for powering reverse osmosis water plants as needed to further reduce water withdrawals form rivers and streams as needed to return their flows to environmentally sustainable amounts and to restore aquafers water levels.

Figure 2: Carbon sequestration capacity and remaining C-emissions versus time for phasing out fossil fuel use in 20 years and building sequestration facilities to return to pre-industrial conditions in 40 years. Source: Vincent Dert

From Peak CO2 to Rebuilding Glaciers

The calculation model also calculates the atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration over time, peaking at 235 ppm ten years after the model start date (see figure 3). C-sequestration is purposely continued to reach atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations lower than pre-industrial conditions. Slightly lower than pre-industrial atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations need to be maintained for decades to centuries to create modest global cooling conditions.

Figure 3: Atmospheric carbon dioxide levels corresponding to C-emissions and C-sequestration conditions shown in figure 2. Atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations slightly lower than in year 1750 are used to induce gentle global cooling as needed to cool the world’s oceans and to rebuild global glaciers and polar ice caps. Source: Vincent Dert

These slightly cooling conditions are needed to cool Earth down (the surfaces of oceans and lands) from their still elevated temperatures and to speed up the restoration of snow and ice caps everywhere on Earth. The thus increasing glacier mass will gradually restore melt-water river flows to pre-historic conditions.

A recently published detailed costs estimate for one of the carbon (C) sequestration processes shows that initial costs for C-sequestration are relatively high and estimated at 94 to 232 $/tCO2, and thus lower than the initial costs of 600 $/tCO2 used in the above model. Longer term, costs are expected to drop below 50 $/tCO2. We need to start building these commercial size plants and simply pay the initial higher price to allow their cost to come down.

The calculation model ignores the carbon dioxide absorption by oceans and forests during the first ~ 30 years. If these effects were included, the carbon neutrality condition would be reached earlier, and the atmospheric peak carbon dioxide concentration would be lower than for the current model. The overall period needed to stop global warming would also be shorter.

A similar approach is followed for biodiversity restoration and all other E-restoration variables, leading to a return to (the best approximation of) pre-industrial conditions in 100 to 300 years.

Global Support

Support Needed

The planet is running out of time. For the EIMAC system to enact the fastest possible rate of progress, we need to build our team quickly. We would like individuals and organizations around the globe with skills and experience in the following subject areas, who want to volunteer their time, to contact us. Please list areas of expertise in the email subject field. 

Contact us
Pre-Funding Stage

Pro Bono Legal Support

  • Verification and updates of legal disclaimers and policy statements for website (cookie and privacy policies, terms of use, DCMA, others).
  • Creation of a hybrid organizational structure (combined for-profit and charity organizations)
  • Evaluation and recommendation of legal and financially best international locations for the organizational headquarter.
  • Creation of charity organizations in the first few most important global regions

Website Maintenance, Improvement and Response Capability

  • General improvement of English language version (simpler text)
  • SEO optimization
  • Marketing related text improvement
  • Create email response capability (answering emails)
  • Computer translation (and language editing) to the most important global languages.
  • Newsletter functionality and regular news postings.

Scientific Community Support

  • Peer review of critical Excel calculation models
  • Proofreading, editing, peer review and (book) publication of scientific texts related to measurement of the environmental impact variables.
  • Formation of scientific advisory boards for each of the ten environmental impact groups and the human condition impact group.
Crowdfunding and General Funding Stage

Financial support (gifts)

  • Hosting costs, website maintenance and SEO
  • An 2nd generation improved website with database functionality
  • Pay for contract tasks (scientific, other)
  • Marketing and communication
  • Small scale field testing
  • Hiring of staff members
  • Renting office space
  • Software coding of the various software modules as needed for implementation
  • Implementation prior to receiving sufficient revenues
  • Global trademark protection (follow up on “office actions”)

  • Global patent approval (national prosecution phase)

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