THE EVOLUTION OF THE BLUE REVOLUTION

   From Worldometer (new deaths yesterday):

        DAY  USA  WORLD   Brazil    India    South Africa

June     9     1093     4732        1185        246        82

July    22     1205     7128        1293      1120      572

Aug    12     1504     6556        1242       835       130

Sept     9     1208     6222        1136      1168        82

Oct     21     1225     6849          571       703        85

Nov    11     1479     10178        564       550        60

           25     2304    12025         620       518      118

Dec       1     2611    11891         697       500      109

             9     3265    12342         848       337      142

           10     3107    12932         769       487      173

           11     3031    12401         652       440      205

           14     2976    12635         909       384      210

           16     3538    13535         968       357      166

           17     3387    12968       1054       342      184

           22     3376    13180         963       331      339

Summary:  Bad, will get better, but fear the first two weeks of January.  People are not listening to the CDC and are prioritizing family over health.  After nine months of this pandemic, perhaps understandable.  I would wait until taking both vaccine shots.

My Blue Revolution path began in the mid' 70's when I had a project involving a raceway to grow microalgae for the purpose of remediating global warming.  In time, the effort to produce a biofuel became more important with the energy crises.  The driving mantra was that most calculations those days showed that you could produce from two to ten times more biofuel from microalgae than fermenting corn into ethanol or gasifying biomass for catalysis into methanol.  While that initial calculation holds today, the COST of converting algae into a usable fuel remains the hurdle to overcome.  The price of gasoline today is also a factor.  Someday.  To the left is a more advanced system that Oscar Zaborsky built at our Look Lab.

Then in 1979 I was asked to work for U.S. Senator Spark Matsunaga, and the first assignment I had after Lockheed succeeded with Mini-OTEC at the Natural Energy Laboratory of Hawaii / Hawaii Ocean Science and Technology Park was to work with the Energy and Natural Resources Committee to draft the original ocean thermal energy conversion (OTEC) bill.  The legislation passed and was signed into law by President Jimmy Carter.  We indicated that 10,000 MW of OTEC power was expected by the Year 2000.  Well, it is 2020 and there is very close to zero MW of OTEC power being generated.

When I returned to the University of Hawaii in 1982, the new dean of engineering Paul Yuen and I created what we thought was lacking in the transition from research to commercialization, a technology transfer bridge.  Thus was invented the Pacific International Center for High Technology Research.  As vice president for development, from various sources, including Japan, we secured $37 million to build and operate an open-cycle OTEC facility at the Natural Energy Laboratory of Hawaii Authority.  A whole book can be written on just how this came to be, but a short story can found here.  We succeeded.

Throughout this period I was involved with a wide variety of
conferences, summits and workshops:

• Potential for OTEC Plantships to Prevent Hurricane Formation (1993)
• Next Generation Fisheries (1997)
• International Ocean Alliance Floating Platform Summit (1998)

In fact, we led the way for the following gatherings just on artificial upwelling:

• First National Science Foundation Workshop on Engineering Solutions for Utilization of Exclusive Economic Zone Resources (Hawaii, October 1986)--after this gathering I joked that if Texas and Hawaii counted our EEZ space, Hawaii was twice the size of Texas--which happens to be true
• 
  
• EPA/NOAA Planning Workshop on Mitigation of Global Climate Change (Hawaii, March 1989)

• NSF and Republic of China National Science Council International Workshop on Artificial Upwelling and Mixing in Coastal Waters (Taiwan, June 1989)
• NSF and Japan Science and Technology Agency Workshop on Artificial Upwelling (Hawaii, March 1990)
• NSF First International Workshop on Engineering Research Needs for Off-Shore Mariculture Systems (Hawaii, September 1991)
• NSF Franco-American Program Development Workshop on Ocean Engineering, Marine Biotechnology and Mariculture (Maryland, October 1991)

Several events were pivotal:

• In 1991, Hawaii State Senator Richard Matsuura and I presented a keynote address on the Blue Revolution to the First Very Large Floating Structures Conference held in Honolulu.  Our talk introduced the concept of the Blue Revolution.  Matsuura had a PhD in agriculture and worked on the Green Revolution for Norman Borlaug.
• In 1992 I was asked to draft a paper for U.S. Senator Daniel Inouye, which he published in SEA Technology as The American Blue Revolution.

• 
  That year, Joe Vadus, who was then NOAA's Ocean Technologist, and I co-chaired a workshop to develop the fundamentals for the Blue Revolution.  Our conclusion was that a 100,000 square foot (one hectare) floating platform could be built for $500 million, half the cost of a B-2 bomber, with a target date of 2000.  The driving financial motivation was that the Cold War was over and there was supposed to be a shifting of funds from war to peace.
• In 1998 the National Science Foundation provided $12 million to the Hawaii Natural Energy Institute to establish the national Marine Byproducts Engineering Center.

• 
  In 1999 we published The Ultimate Ocean Ranch in SEA TECHNOLOGY.
• In 2003 I was asked to present the case for the Blue Revolution at a gathering of UNICEF in Paris.  Interest was overwhelming.
• In 2006 we chaired a fisheries summit in Bergen, Norway, and produced the Bergen Declaration for Next Generation Fisheries.

• 
  In 2010 Guy Toyama and I met over lunch in Kona to establish Blue Revolution Hawaii.  Unfortunately, within a three-day period in 2012, both Guy and Paul Yuen passed away.  More recently, Leighton Chong and Benny Ron have been taking leading roles with this organization.

I more recently wrote several articles for the Huffington Post:

• The Dawn of the Blue Revolution
• The Ultimate Ocean Ranch
• Blue Revolution
• The Blue Revolution is the Optimal Solution for Japan
• The Ultimate Ocean Ranch
• Biofuels from Microalgae (Part 1)

Watch a 20-minute presentation I made to the Seasteading Institute in San Francisco.  Here is a posting on the birth of the Blue Revolution.  I endowed my apartment to the University of Hawaii to initiate the Blue Revolution.  There are three simple stages:

1. 
   Obtain cost matching from a billionaire of $100,000 to host a summit of specialists and other billionaires to produce a blueprint for the effort.
2. Hopefully, this plan would result in a sum of $150 million to by 2030 build an offshore technology transfer floating platform called the Pacific International Ocean Station offshore of Oahu.
3. Finally, $150 billion to build the first floating city to host the 2050 World's Fair.  This effort would be supported by a consortium of companies as the first step for an armada of platforms to circle the globe near the equator.  In time, many of these would become independent nations, something the Seasteading Institute would appreciate.

My song #4 is Freddie Aguilar's Anak.  Aguilar was studying to be an electrical engineer when he left home at the age of 18 to pursue an entertainment career.  After five years of gambling and travails, in 1978 he wrote his first song, Anak (a more recent version) in remorse and apology to his parents.  It is the best selling Filipino song in history and reached #1 in Japan.  Billboard reported that the song was the #2 hit for the world in the 1980's.  

In my travels through the Orient in the eighties and nineties there was always a group from the Philippines entertaining in the hotel bar.  I many times asked them to sing this song, and I immediately became their friend.  I now and then sing Anak  (means child) in a karaoke bar...in Filipino.  Of course I mumble through the words because I have no idea what I'm doing.   My older brother once recorded my performance and put it on his Christmas CD for gifts.  If you have one of those, burn it immediately.  

A film called Anak was released in 2000, where the lyrics of the song served as the script.  Rotten Tomatoes audiences gave it a 96% rating.  I see it is on Amazon Prime, for a charge.

In his peripatetic swings, he became especially famous leading crowds in a patriotic song, Bayan Ko--written by General Jose Alexandrino during the Philippine-American War around 1900--leading to the escape of then President Ferdinand Marcos for Hawaii in 1986.  

But Freddie is Freddie, and in 2013, at the age of 60, converted to Islam to marry his 16 year-old girlfriend.  Now known as Abdul Farid.  He is current President Rodrigo Duerte's favorite singer.

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