The Brussels Lobby

By Van Campen

The race for limitless energy takes a dramatic turn. The International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER), under construction in France, aims to replicate the sun’s helium fusion process using a Tokamak. However, the project faces significant delays.

Amidst these delays, a French start-up achieves a ground breaking feat by successfully fusing hydrogen and solar heat. This innovation leads to the creation of Hysoplasm, or HSP – a cheap, abundant and sustainable energy source.

But this development doesn’t sit well with those invested in traditional energy sectors. Key players in the Oil, Gas and Finance Industries in Brussels are alarmed. To counter this emerging threat, they turn to Chris Towers, a formidable and unscrupulous lobbyist. Towers finds himself in a clandestine meeting with EU Commissioner Manuel Rojas, responsible for Climate Action and Energy Union, in an obscure café in Brussels.

This is a story about the high-stakes world of energy politics, where technological breakthroughs clash with entrenched interests, whilst the future of global energy is at play.

‘Which interests stand in the way of real climate solutions? This eco-thriller tells a story of the fight of a start-up against the fossil industry. It introduces HSP as an abundant, renewable energy for a cleaner future.’ Pim van Galen, journalist at Dutch Public Television.

‘A fascinating and well-timed story.’ Ton van Uffel, energy and chemistry expert.

‘This book convinces with the sincerity of the plot and the richness of the details. It deserves a wider audience than just environmental geeks. Captive reading.’ Jochem Visser, lawyer.

‘Fighting injustice is tempting and honourable but not easy.’ Roberto Bastida Caracuel, port development manager.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Austin Macauley Publishers
• Release date: Feb 2, 2024
• ISBN: 9781035839889

Van Campen

Van Campen looks at our disorderly (entropic) society through the lens of information. As an Information Theorist, he understands that life and the non-harmful functionality of all living systems depend on cognition i.e. the processing of all relevant information. Any man-made system that ignores or suppresses information is going into entropy which means disorder. Entropy can be understood as the unavailability of information. Only those systems that use all relevant information survive. This is a law of physics and biology. Information can’t be separated from our reality by force. Lying, deceit by censorship is therefore not condoned by nature, without severe consequences for everyone, including the liars. The main question remains: Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Who guards the guards? An overlooked science is information theory. Information is not just a message, knowledge or an idea, but an actual part of our physical reality. Information is both DNA and the code. Try to ignore information when you drive your car or cross the road? This science makes it possible to understand that information is an essential component of reality and cannot be separated from it. Information builds order into all living systems and sustains them. The chance element is called entropy, the driving force of chaos, which tends to mix the un-mixable, to destroy meaning. The non-random element is information, which uses the uncertainty behind the entropy principle to generate new structures, to ‘in’form i.e. give our physical reality its form. People are bound by the limitations of reality. We can’t walk through a closed door or jump twenty feet high. There are limits of reality or boundaries of functionality. Sense and order, says the theory, can triumph over nonsense and chaos. Information theory suggests that order is perfectly natural. Information Theory demonstrates that lying or deceit are not tolerated by nature and cause entropy (disorder) and stress due to remorse which can’t be switched off. Lying is however acceptable, but only when survival is at stake. People are not blind, but refuse to see. New, unfamiliar information has always been unwelcome and regarded as dangerous. This is the perception problem the famous physicist Fritjof Capra talks about. Nature can no longer be seen as matter and energy, but must be interpreted as matter, energy and information (adapted from the book ‘Grammatical Man’ by Jeremy Campbell 1982).

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About the Author

Van Campen looks at our disorderly (entropic) society through the lens of information. As an Information Theorist, he understands that life and the non-harmful functionality of all living systems depend on cognition i.e. the processing of all relevant information. Any man-made system that ignores or suppresses information is going into entropy which means disorder. Entropy can be understood as the unavailability of information. Only those systems that use all relevant information survive. This is a law of physics and biology. Information can’t be separated from our reality by force. Lying, deceit by censorship is therefore not condoned by nature, without severe consequences for everyone, including the liars. The main question remains: Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Who guards the guards?

An overlooked science is information theory. Information is not just a message, knowledge or an idea, but an actual part of our physical reality. Information is both DNA and the code. Try to ignore information when you drive your car or cross the road? This science makes it possible to understand that information is an essential component of reality and cannot be separated from it. Information builds order into all living systems and sustains them. The chance element is called entropy, the driving force of chaos, which tends to mix the un-mixable, to destroy meaning. The non-random element is information, which uses the uncertainty behind the entropy principle to generate new structures, to ’in’form i.e. give our physical reality its form. People are bound by the limitations of reality. We can’t walk through a closed door or jump twenty feet high. There are limits of reality or boundaries of functionality. Sense and order, says the theory, can triumph over nonsense and chaos. Information theory suggests that order is perfectly natural. Information Theory demonstrates that lying or deceit are not tolerated by nature and cause entropy (disorder) and stress due to remorse which can’t be switched off. Lying is however acceptable, but only when survival is at stake. People are not blind, but refuse to see. New, unfamiliar information has always been unwelcome and regarded as dangerous. This is the perception problem the famous physicist Fritjof Capra talks about.

Nature can no longer be seen as matter and energy, but must be interpreted as matter, energy and information (adapted from the book ‘Grammatical Man’ by Jeremy Campbell 1982).

Dedication

This book is dedicated to my fellow people, everyone ever lived, alive now and future generations, to nature and the universe. It addresses our contemporary societal crises, but it attempts to offer plausible, logical and scientific solutions to protect human and non-human life and wellbeing, social cohesion and the environment. You may understand Hydro Solar Plasma as a symbol of the unlimited creativity of mankind as long as people use all relevant information, which are called ‘reality’ and ‘truth’. Very simple and easy indeed.

Copyright Information ©

Van Campen 2024

The right of Van Campen to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by the author in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

Any person who commits any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

ISBN 9781035839872 (Paperback)

ISBN 9781035839889 (ePub e-book)

www.austinmacauley.com

First Published 2023

Austin Macauley Publishers Ltd®

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E14 5AA

Acknowledgement

I’d like to thank Eleonora for her love and support. I also want to thank the people who proofread the manuscript and gave me feedback which I used to improve the story; Jochem Visser, Ton van Uffel, Carl Gustav Bjertnes, Pim van Galen. Thank you Walter Smaalders for designing the book cover. A big thanks to Sue Zimmermann who helped me edit and correct the text and Austin Macauley Publishers for making this book possible.

Prologue

There’s no way out. No one’s really interested in solving these problems. They all plan to do something, cooperate, but exactly when, nobody knows. Sometime in the distant future.

Why’s that?

Well, because very few people see the whole picture. They just look at the parts and while they do that solutions remain further away than ever. They say, ‘let’s shut this journalist up and throw him into jail. We don’t want the public to know that we murder innocent people who oppose our ulteriorly motivated goals.’ Information that does not suit a pre-planned policy is immediately censored by complicit media. No one seems to be aware, or cares about the fact that erasure of information increases entropy, better known as disorder. This is an inescapable law of physics. Look around, do you see order? Dangerous times, my friend.

It reeks of fascism when Internet companies are demanded to share their data with secret intelligence agencies or when face-recognition software is linked to an automated personal profiling system that indiscriminately judges people to be either friendly or hostile. Context and social environment are totally ignored. Organisations are constantly plugging holes in their systems, but won’t redesign them so they can stay viable. Industries, governments and political parties don’t understand that repairing parts, but not the whole, does not work. So, they continue pushing flawed designs, trying to make them right, but instead making them wronger, or even worse, and it’s always controlled by the same, but dangerous people. It’s exactly what George Santayana once said; those who can’t remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

I don’t understand.

Well, it’s like this; to understand the whole, you can’t just analyse the system, but you must synthesise it, which means that you have to look at the whole thing and all its relationships and the network of which it is a part and dependent. When you then realise how such a network operates, you’ll understand the whole. It actually means that we can’t just remove some of its parts to repair the whole, no, we have to get rid of the whole system.

Thus, er, all of them?

Yes, my old friend, all of them! Their ideological purpose and hierarchy are just too harmful to us all, to life itself! Plus, we have an obligation to protect those who are being crushed.

But how are we going to do that? Jos asked, shocked. Are you telling me that we’ve got to track every single one of them down? Then what?

Dear Jos, yes, you’re right, we’ve got to create a plan, a systemic plan. Look here, I’ve already drawn a map of their organisations and their key players in the form of a feedback loop network. Here it is.

I took him to my desk and pointed at the wall behind it where I hung up a map on which I had drawn figureheads and their names with links to others. See, there they are, names, locations, addresses where they work, live, eat and so on. I’ve made it easy to find them, all of them.

Alright, I can see that now too. But where to start? Who’s first?

I’m working on that. For now, it should suffice for you to know that this plan has been made. Your silence is crucial. You’re the only one on this planet who knows about these ideas. One word, and you and I are dead. Do you understand?

He looked at me, hesitated and answered: Yes, I see. I’m starting to realise the severity of the consequences if I should ever talk about this, but I vow that this secret will die with me, I’ll carry it to the grave.

Thanks, my old friend. I can’t do this alone. That’s why I asked you to come here. I’ll be needing you shortly. For now, please go home, work, live, and carry on doing what you usually do. Teach physics, love your wife and children, drive carefully and eat healthily. I’ll be in contact with you soon.

He nodded, stared at the map once more, turned around, shook my hand and left the room.

I sat down at my desk, opened a drawer, found a bottle of Scotch and a glass, poured some out and took a large swig. Cheers, I mumbled, to the plan.

I found a notebook on my desk which I used to write down my thoughts. It was just about full. Starting at page one, I re-read my own words for the umpteenth time. They were written during the last year and were about the events that happened in Congo after I had taken over the mining and distribution company from Aldhabi Alombong, who had died in an airplane crash. I shook my head, still unable to grasp the reality of it, when I read: My beloved wife, my best friend Pauline, was taken ill. She was visiting one of the field hospitals run by MSF and contracted Ebola. Despite having her flown back to Brussels, it was too late. My woman died from complications.

I hadn’t told Jos, but he knew I was hurting. He understood that the reason why I’d made this plan was that I felt so terribly alone, desperately lonely, lost. I had confided in him that my lust for life had diminished, my reason to live and my purpose in life had both been taken away from me. I found a passage that I had once written, edited and read to her, which I liked very much: The weather is good and I love sitting on the couch with you, watching the sun go down. I found a letter to you which I don’t remember writing, but that doesn’t matter now because we’re here, and I’m looking at you, thinking, Everything’s alright. But sunsets change into dawns, and dawns change again into dusk and the sun will set and rise again, with or without all of us … I am trying to remember the words, but the hand-written letters are dancing in the haziness of the evening, so I keep looking at you and that is enough to finally comprehend.

I read it again and slowly closed the notebook, laid it carefully on my desk, sighed and emptied my glass. Tears welled up in my eyes. Aldabi was dead. Pauline was dead. Many thousands were dead because politicians had decided that life was expendable and an acceptable loss due to politics. No, of course, politicians’ lives were not dispensable, it was only the lives of others who were deemed unessential. Soldiers didn’t kill people, politicians did. Not much had changed in Congo. The bloody conflict fought over mineral resources continued as if those who died for it did not matter one bit. Death was cheap.

The price for a machete had not risen very much after the 1994 Rwandan genocide, bullets were made available by some dealer or manufacturer who just didn’t care. The number of disgruntled, marginalised people, who had no moral compass preventing them from shooting a gun had grown, because that’s what poverty does. Poverty, desperation, survival: three words that were interconnected and interdependent. A moral compass? What was its definition? I had looked it up on the Internet and found this, which I believed was the most appropriate explanation: a person’s ability to choose right from wrong and act accordingly.

It was all about doing the right thing, but who on earth could decide what the right thing to do was? Was it right to kill a man who you believed had done the wrong thing? Would a wrong man kill a right one? Was doing the wrong thing right, right or wrong? Peter Drucker, the famous professor of management and a consultant, put this distinction dramatically when he said there is a difference between doing things right (the intent of reformations) and doing the right thing (the intent of transformations). He wrote: The righter we do the wrong thing, the wronger we become. If we make a mistake by doing the wrong thing and correct it, we become wronger. When we make a mistake and do the right thing and correct it, we become righter. Therefore, it is better to do the right thing wrong than the wrong thing right.

Doing the right thing does not automatically make it moral. My ideas of right and wrong had become blurry. I killed people when I was a soldier and killed again to free the workers in the Coltan mines. I killed because if I had not killed, I would have been killed myself and others would have been murdered because these killers would have kept on murdering.

The right to defend one’s life was in my view morality, administered by our brain and heart, which made the choice for us, even before a person himself could make it. Survival has a natural priority. Survive! it shouted. Survival was nature’s message to all living species. Continuation of life was programmed into the DNA of every lifeform on earth. Adapt, adjust, overcome and ultimately continue living!

I kept looking at the feedback loop map hanging on my wall. I counted three faces, names and locations. The first location was here in Brussels, an apartment, not far from the European Union building.

Unexpectedly a beautiful face appeared on my retina; Pauline, she had tears in her eyes, she was crying and smiling at the same time and I understood that she was trying to ask me why I had made such a foolish and dangerous plan. I didn’t hesitate to answer her and mumbled, because since you’ve been gone, there isn’t much I want to live for any more, except to finally do what I believe is right, her face faded again. We still spoke as we used to. We conversed as if she had always remained at my side. It was the sense of this surreal relationship that dragged me through each day without her actual presence, giving me a virtual certainty that I was not totally alone.

That was the only reason I could bear the feeling of loneliness and disconnectedness which I had revealed to Jos. She was there with me, though in another form, and if I tried hard enough, I even could pick up her scent. I inhaled it and instantly some glow of her spiritual existence penetrated my body and mind. I smiled, because it warmed me.

It was almost midnight when I switched off my desk lamp and decided to go to sleep. The whisky helped, but triggered a dream, some kind of foreseeable future. The plan I had written and mapped started to be played out in front of my eyes. The first step ahead became a vivid projection in my mind. I felt I was agreeing with this vision and even became aware of an excitement I had never experienced before during REM sleep. I had read about such living dreams phenomena in the book Memories, Dreams and Reflections by Carl Gustav Jung. Next morning, I found the book on my bookshelves and read some of the passages that I had almost forgotten about, about his research in understanding possible messages and premonitions that were presented in dreams.

I was convinced that my dream had been a final rehearsal of a play that I was going to act in. I was the action figure who would portray the leading character, the protagonist if you like, in the theatre of life. A task was given to me to change history and mould the future of mankind. Someone would have to do it, because no one else had the resources, the wit, the guts, or would be stupid enough. It had to be someone who had already lost it all and wouldn’t even care too much about losing his own life. I am already dead, Pauline, and will probably see you soon in the afterlife. I just have to do this one last thing.

She appeared and blew me a kiss. Strengthened by that confirmation I started that day in happiness. My destiny was shaped for me by providence. Was I crazy? Most people would agree, but craziness had its merits, because they weren’t going to believe that this crazy person would be able to do what he was about to do. I was living a retiree’s life at fifty-one. Money was no object. After I had sold my assets, houses and Aldabi’s mining company, my net worth was a few million short of one billion Euros. Yet, I just rented a simple two-bedroom apartment in Brussels, used my bicycle to beat the murderous traffic going to work, took the bus when it rained and sometimes used taxis to get from A to B. I didn’t live an opulent lifestyle, so I did not need a garage large enough to park ten cars.

I worked in an office for Sustenance4all, a thinktank, earning a moderate salary. No, I hadn’t told them that I was rich, although it was not exactly a secret either. Anyone who tried to check me out, would find that I had been CEO of Metalore in Switzerland, a commando in the Belgian Army and that I had sold Aldabi’s company for an undisclosed sum to a large investment fund right after Pauline died. My Maserati, IWC and Four Seasons Hotel times were over, but I had kept my Subaru and G-shock.

Introduction

Climate change is a serious issue. We are burning fossil fuels, and the CO2 emitted into the atmosphere may be heating up our planet. What if, as from tomorrow, we were able to use a much better, cheaper and abundant type of fuel to energise our world? What if, suddenly, someone could produce Hydrogen Solar Plasma to run industries, cars, planes and the economy? What do you think would happen to our oil- and coal-dependent global industries and nations? Would they survive or collapse?

A new start-up company has been developing and testing products that could revolutionise the energy supply industry by rendering the traditional oil and gas industry obsolete within a decade. They seem to not only have created a clean and renewable fuel to power industries, homes and factories, based on a unique combination of solar-injected hydrogenic water, but they have also created a method of storage and transportation, using existing oil and gas infrastructure such as tank storage terminals, tankers and pipeline systems.

Their engineering department has also designed a synthetic-based material copied from nature by the art of biomimicry, enabling them to reach the required heat to produce their product, which they have baptised Hysoplasm, short for Hydrogen-Solar Plasma or HSP.

Brussels

I was back in Belgium where I was raised. I was currently working on a range of diverse projects on sustainable renewable energy at Sustenance4all. That morning, after I had showered, shaved and eaten breakfast, I left my apartment on Rue Belliard to cycle to my office at Onderrichtstraat 28, not too far from the Berlaymont European Commission building. As usual, the terrible traffic prevented me from going as fast as I would have liked. Some streets were in permanent state of reconstruction, now and then causing me to get off my bike and walk through sand. Trams whizzed by, motorcycles passed me with screaming exhausts, honking cars with impatient drivers whose stress levels, even on this fine Monday morning, were already reaching a danger level.

Anger was a destructive state of mind which had led to an unreasonable world, where humane reason seemed to have vanished. Marcus Aurelius came to mind, who once said, How much more harmful are the consequences of anger…than the circumstances that aroused them in us; and Seneca wrote in his book, On Anger: No plague has cost the human race more dear. You will see slaughtering and poisonings, accusations and counter-accusations, sacking of cities, ruin of whole peoples, the persons of princes sold into slavery by auction, torches applied to roofs, and fires not merely confined within city-walls but making whole tracts of country glow with hostile flames.

A nice early morning in June, the weather fine and sunny. A black Mercedes tried to squeeze itself between me and the sidewalk, almost throwing me off balance and making me put my right foot down on the tarmac to prevent myself from falling. Domoor, I mumbled in Flemish and thought: Probably one of those European MEPs urging his driver to speed up because he’s late for a meeting. I sighed, sat on the saddle again and cycled on to my office. I parked and chained my bike up in the entrance hall of the building, where a bicycle stand had been erected for that purpose. No one in their right mind would come to this crowded capital by car during the week. Traffic into the city would be queuing up all the way to Zaventem airport and halfway up to Antwerp. It could easily take two hours to enter Brussels from one of its connecting highways at that time of the morning.

Bonjour, a lady who came through the door said. I responded and kissed her three times as was custom in Belgium and France: Bonjour Julia, ça va? It was one of my colleagues, a young and very bright ecologist.

Oui, tout va bien, she responded. I let her climb the stairs before me. I know, I should have gone first. Old-fashioned decency and respect for women would have demanded that, but with all those issues about gender neutrality, I probably lost my graciousness because it had become confusing not knowing how to behave amongst women anymore. Before you knew it, you’d be considered a sexist pig. These were dangerous times indeed.

However, following her was immediately rewarded by the pleasing vision of her magnificently rounded derriere. Supposedly, men were now equal to women. Women were paid as much as men, woman demanded as much respect as men, but I asked myself if women really would like to be treated like men? I doubted that very much. My perhaps outdated belief was that men and women had to remain different. God forbid that we should all be identical. Nature had provided us with the masculine and feminine forms which could unite and thus keep our species alive. Dr Jung would agree. Woke was a false perception.

Our office was on the second floor. The building was erected in the early 1900s and was beautifully shaped with high ceilings and an abandoned fireplace. Mains gas central heating had taken over the wood heating function years ago, but today, there was no need to burn hydrocarbons, because the sun had already begun to shine through the windows.

That had become my task, my job. I was working with a team of experts to come up with a clean, non-harmful, cheap and sustainable form of new energy to mitigate climate change and end our dependence on the three fossil fuels: oil, gas and coal. That was no easy task, because whatever we tried to come up with, the only solution so far was a combination of available energy sources, which was also known as the energy mix. Only so much wind power was available, only so much nuclear, solar or hydroelectricity. Gray, blue or green Hydrogen was not cost efficient enough, whilst the largest part of energy was still based on the ruthless exploitation of hydrocarbon deposits that had been formed during billions of years.

Since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution about two centuries ago, people had consumed hydrocarbons relentlessly, but only recently admitted that CO2, methane and sulphuric emissions caused by burning this stuff was endangering life and heating up the earth’s atmosphere. Climate change had become the buzz word and sustainability had become the focus point of many organisations, corporations, political parties and governments. Universities offered degrees such as Sustainable Leadership or courses on Corporate Social Responsibility and Business Ethics. Climate change or sustainability were regarded as corporate and operational risks which needed to be controlled by an avalanche of new rules, regulations and an increased compliance demanded by the European Commission and the US Government.

Since the banking crisis in 2008, enormous fines had to be paid by companies who did not comply with this modern form of extortion. Once more, the negative effect was that fear of being caught prevented the much-needed moral restructuring of companies or organisations. The game had become how to get away with processes harming the environment or social cohesion, not how to redesign or transform damaging processes into non-harmful ones. At S4all we understood that regulating to prevent Climate Change would never work. Climate Change was a complex, systemic problem, not an isolated one, plus its cause was moot. Everyone in our team was aware of that. We were working frantically to come up with solutions.

We focused on redesigning so called negative interdependent processes or products, or in other words, processes and products that would benefit some but at the cost of pollution, poverty and CO2 emissions, etcetera, into positive interdependent products or processes which would benefit everyone. Oil benefited many, but the costs to keep using it, known as externalities, had become unaffordable, and more importantly, unsustainable. The other problem with hydrocarbons and also with nuclear energy was that they produced toxic and poisonous waste, endangering life. What we concentrated on was the collection of information to build order from chaos.

Where was Nikola Tesla when we needed him most? Would someone like him save us from doom? Was electricity created from a Tesla turbine an answer? And what was taking place in Caderache, France at the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, known as ITER? What this Intergovernmental organisation, which was established in 2007, was trying to build was nothing less than a sun on earth. I learned that the light we see and the heat we feel on earth is the result of fusion reaction in our sun. Every second the sun turns 600 million tons of hydrogen into helium, releasing an enormous amount of energy.

The problem is that the necessary gravitational forces which make this possible only exist in space. The ITER was being designed and built to copy the workings of the sun in order to harvest its potential, hydrogen fusion energy, which would be abundant, clean and renewable. However, it was still untried, because not one of the scientists could be sure that the process would work. The ITER’s greatest challenge was to mimic the solar core temperature of 15 million degrees Celsius, for which it developed different methods such as Neutral Beam Injection, Ion Cyclotron Heating or Electron Cyclotron Heating, because the temperature needed for atomic ionisation was ten times higher, at 150 million degrees.

I had been looking into this exciting and promising technology for a while and, ever since I started working for S4all, I had been learning more and more each day, by following this mammoth construction challenge. I was not just amazed, but truly flabbergasted by the massiveness of this project. The initial investment estimate was ten billion Euros, but as usual, an ambitious project such as this one would probably exceed its original cost price. About thirty thousand people were working there from several nations. The idea to build this alternative energy plant originated at a meeting between the Russian President Gorbachev and US President Ronald Reagan in Geneva back in 1985.

At that time the two nations agreed to cooperate on alternative energy research and development. They ended the cold war, but unfortunately, at present, a new hot war had commenced, involving all NATO members, causing an overall haemorrhaging of money due to stupid, unfair and unsustainable sanctions imposed by the US and their serfs of the EU including the Prime Ministers of England, France and the Netherlands. When anything bad happened in the world they all shouted, It’s the Russians who are behind it! or, China has become too competitive. A new arms race was the result, endangering all life on earth once more. George Santayana would be turning in his grave.

Julia brought me a cup of coffee. I was sitting at my desk. Three other colleagues were seated at the meeting table in the centre of the room and were speaking in Flemish, which was the language we used in the office. I overheard them talking about a politician who was elected as the European Commissioner for Climate Action and Energy Union. They agreed vehemently that this man was not a man from the energy sciences, but a lawyer turned politician. He was someone who was merely politically driven to oppose cooperation with Russia and who was trying to prevent dependency on Russian Gas. He didn’t seem to be very motivated to search for alternative sustainable resources without having to implement sanctions dictated by US Liquefied Natural Gas interests. To us it was clear that politicians were often used as tools to protect vested business interests by the wining and dining tactics of about 25000 lobbyists who had chosen Brussels as their hunting grounds. These damn lobby firms make it very hard on us, spoke one of them. But they are paid handsomely to manipulate weak politicians.

Julia, who was sitting down with them, remarked, Yes, I’ve researched this and made of list of lobbyists and the firms they work for that are involved in energy policies, and I’ve noticed that one of them has the closest ties with the current commissioner because of the historic relationship with the former one. They are opposing just about any alternative option that could jeopardise their monopoly, which I have named hydrocarbon hegemony or HH.

Good abbreviation, Julia, I like that HH expression.

She smiled and said: Our task is to create public awareness and to try to convince the public not to buy harmful products any longer.

So, let’s start with those lobbyists, I heard.

They talked on. I listened until my phone rang and I could not concentrate on their conversation any longer. I picked up and answered: Erik Luyts.

Hi, it’s Jos. Listen, I was awake most of the night thinking about your plan, and I’ve decided not to participate. I’m sorry, I’m just too anxious, er, I have to think about my children, the wife, you know?

I grimaced slightly, but as an experienced man, I had foreseen this and was not surprised, just a little disappointed. Of course, I hadn’t told him everything, because that would’ve meant suicide, but I had had to test him sometime, and now it was clear that he hadn’t passed his exam. Working alone would perhaps be better, wiser and probably safer.

"Ok mate, if that’s the way you feel, I can’t make you change your mind.

Thanks for letting me know, see you around, I may call you one day."

Yeah, please do.

I pushed end, walked out of the meeting, sat back at my desk and typed in my password on my computer. I continued writing my academic paper on alternative energy solutions that I was going to present at the next conference about UNSDG’s in Geneva. At least some important decision makers were listening to me after the events in Congo and my appearance at the World Economic Forum in Davos. My input was generally appreciated. Unfortunately, my suggestions were not yet commonly implemented to save the world from its dependence on a harmful hydrocarbon based economic system. Politics didn’t work that way. Even at the World Business Council of Sustainable Development they were polite enough to listen, but no true action could be expected from a council that was financially dependent on funding from exactly those corporations who profited from unsustainable, path dependent industries. The World Economic Forum and ICMM, the International Council on Mining and Metals, were merely operating as disguise mechanisms to promote some form of sustainable impression rather than a proven sustainable strategy. What they did was talk, teach perhaps, inform, but no real action could be expected. Plastics, chemicals, oil, gas, polymers, herbicide, fertiliser and, don’t forget, arms producers, wanted to stay in business and were not really redesigning their harmful products to help humanity. The Pharma Industry preferred people to be ill rather than healthy. Their objective was to make profit wherever they could from their products, even though they knew these could be harmful. They would stop only if they were forced by politicians, but which of the UN or EU politicians would have the guts to stop those who were earning money from keeping their organisations funded? A vicious circle indeed. A merry-go-round. Perhaps improvements were made to operate more responsibly, but maximum profitability remained priority while externalities were deliberately being ignored and charged to the public. Negative interdependent business methods remained the first cause of inequality and exploitation of the masses and of the destruction of the environment. I had observed non sustainable mining and oil exploration during my years at Metalore. I was aware that Ogoniland in Nigeria had become uninhabitable due to oil pollution. I had felt the heat of gas flares burning millions of dollars’ worth of gas in Gabon causing acid rain, because oil companies were too greedy to invest