Harry Braun

Harry Braun

Harry Braun is a democrat candidate for the 2016 U.S. Presidential election.

2016 presidential campaign

The 2016 Democratic Presidential Campaign of Harry Braun began with his formal registration as a Democratic Presidential Candidate with the Federal Elections Commission (FEC), which was verified on May 29, 2015, and the Braun for President Campaign Committee’s registration with the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) which was verified on May 28, 2015. Braun’s formal presidential announcement to the American public and the national news media is expected to occur during the month of August 2015 in a video address that will be posted on Facebook and the BraunforPresident.US website after his Wikipedia and Facebook postings are completed.

Braun’s political career began when he ran unsuccessfully for the U.S. Congress in Arizona’s First Congressional District in 1984 against the popular incumbent Congressman John McCain. Braun's objective was to inform the voters of the critical need to shift from an Oil Economy to a solar-sourced Hydrogen Economy, where renewable and pollution-free hydrogen fuel is made from water with electricity that is generated from the wind and other solar energy technologies.

The World According to Braun

Doug MacEachern, writing for The New Times in Phoenix, Arizona made the following observation of Braun’s campaign in an article titled: “The World According to Braun.” “Wouldn’t it be great to find a candidate for the U.S. Congress who had a solution to all of the catastrophic problems of our day? The list of those problems is long, but let’s look at the top few: impending nuclear holocaust; pollution; (exponential) depletion of energy resources, and economic instability spurred on by vast deficits. A solution to any one of these fearful crises would undoubtedly merit bags full of Nobel prizes for whoever offered it. Well, someone does have a solution. At least he sincerely believes he does. Harry Braun, Democratic opponent of John McCain in District 1, is convinced that his solution – a worldwide conversion to hydrogen power, from power now supplied by fossil fuel and nuclear plants – represents the difference between an idyllic future and doomsday.”

Joel Nilsson wrote in the Arizona Republic, “A key element of Braun’s energy platform is what he calls the “Phoenix Project,” a plan to mass produce hydrogen with electrolysis by using solar power to produce the electricity. . . Liquid hydrogen, when burned produces pure water vapor, and is pollution-free, he said. Braun said that the technology already exists for a hydrogen-based energy system. . . Everything that is now burning fossil fuel will work – and work better – with hydrogen. This is not a technical problem, Braun said. This is a political problem.”

The International Association for Hydrogen Energy

The world’s largest hydrogen peer-review scientific and engineering society is the International Association for Hydrogen Energy (IAHE.org), which was organized in the 1970’s. The IAHE has the most extensive library of technical papers on hydrogen production, storage, distribution and use as a fuel and chemical feedstock, that is used to make everything from computer chips to potato chips. Braun was invited to become an IAHE Advisory Board Member in 1981 by its president and one of its original founders, engineering professor T. Nejat Veziroglu, who also serves as the Editor in Chief of the IAHE International Journal of Hydrogen Energy.

The Phoenix Project

Braun’s paper, “The Phoenix Project: Shifting to a Solar Hydrogen Economy by 2020,” published in 2008 in the Chemical Engineering & Chemical Industry Quarterly, calculated that less than five million, two megawatt wind-powered hydrogen systems, operating with a 30 percent capacity factor, would displace all of the fossil and nuclear fuels now used in the United States, which is approximately 100 quads (i.e., quadrillion Btu’s of energy annually). Moreover, if the 60 percent of waste heat from existing fossil fuel power plants is factored into the equation, the number of needed wind hydrogen systems is reduced to approximately 2 million units.

As Braun wrote in his 1992 paper that was published in the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, “Many of the most serious global environmental and economic problems are related to the fact that the industrialized world is based on a fossil fuel (i.e., petroleum, coal, methane, etc.) energy and economic system that does not factor in the extensive environmental costs that are inevitable with such a system. Fossil (and nuclear) fuels have a negative environmental impact from the point of exploration, drilling, recovery, and transportation to their final end-use as a highly-toxic and non-renewable combustion fuel . . .” “The burning of fossil fuels results in significant urban air pollution, acid deposition, and greenhouse-effect gasses, principally carbon dioxide. Given the exponential increase in these environmental contaminants, there is a strong incentive to move as rapidly as possible to energy resources and systems that can operate in balance with the Earth’s biological life-support systems. Such an energy system does exist. It has been referred to as the solar hydrogen energy system, but given the more comprehensive implications that are involved, many scientists and engineers refer to this system as the “hydrogen economy.” “Hydrogen is not just another energy option like petroleum, coal, nuclear or solar. Rather, it is an inexhaustible “universal fuel” that can unite virtually all energy sources with all energy uses. It is the primary fuel for the sun and other stars, and can be economically manufactured from a wide-range of sources, including virtually all biomass feedstocks, such as sewage sludge or paper, as well as hazardous wastes, or from water by the process of electrolysis.”

One gallon of water has a hydrogen energy content of approximately 52,000 British Thermal Units (Btu), compared to a gallon of gasoline that contains from 114,000 to 120,000 Btu. Thus, about 2.4 gallons of water will be required to extract enough hydrogen to equal the energy contained in one gallon of gasoline. By comparison, it takes approximately 1 to 2 gallons of water to make one gallon of gasoline from crude oil.

World Energy Consumption

According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, world energy consumption in 2011 was approximately 520 quads, and given roughly 60 percent of that energy was lost as waste heat, approximately 12 million two-megawatt wind-powered hydrogen production systems, operating with a 30 percent capacity factor, would permanently replace the use of all of the fossil and nuclear fuels now used worldwide. Given wind-powered hydrogen production systems include major components like gearboxes, electrical generators, brakes, and computer control systems, they are very similar to automobiles from a manufacturing perspective. And given that over 16 million automotive vehicles produced for the United States in 2014, the wind hydrogen systems needed to replace all of the fossil and nuclear fuels now used in the U.S., could be built and operational in less than five years, assuming there is presidential leadership to coordinate the effort, similar to when FDR organized the War Production Board in World War II.

Wind Hydrogen Production Costs

The estimated cost of the electrolytic hydrogen produced by state of-the-art wind systems was calculated in 2005 investigators at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, and in high-volume mass-production, the cost of wind-sourced electrolytic hydrogen was calculated to approximately $2.12 per equivalent gallon of gasoline.

Hydrogen History

It was in the year 1800 that an Italian physicist and chemist, Alessandro Volta, first demonstrated how to produce a predictable electrical current from a battery he made by soaking paper in salt water, with zinc and copper electrodes on opposite sides of the paper so the current could flow from the chemical reaction to the electrodes.

Three weeks after Volta demonstrated his battery in the highly-publicized World’s Fair, Sir Anthony Carlisle, an English surgeon and his colleague William Nicholson, an English chemist, duplicated Volta’s battery. They then passed the electrical current through a beaker of water, a process now called electrolysis, at which point they discovered that the water molecules, which are made up of two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom, were being separated into individual gases at the terminals of the battery.

Seven years later, the world’s first automobile with an internal combustion engine was built and operated in Switzerland by François Isaac de Rivaz, and the engine was not using gasoline as fuel but electrolytic hydrogen, which was relatively easy to make from water, compared to gasoline that was highly-toxic and difficult to refine from oil, and was unavailable at the time. Thousands of vehicles have been modified to use hydrogen fuel since that time. BMW, Mercedes Benz, General Motors and Ford took the lead in developing hydrogen-fueled vehicles in the 1970’s and 1980’s. Hyundai, Toyota and Honda have subsequently developed hydrogen-fueled vehicles, and Honda has also developed a community or home hydrogen production and pumping station, which only requires water and electricity.

Gasoline is also made up of mostly hydrogen. Note that a common molecule of octane (C8H18), has 8 carbon and 18 hydrogen atoms, which is why such fuels are referred to a “hydrocarbons” (i.e., containing hydrogen and carbon).

Hydrogen Safety

Hydrogen is the simplest, most abundant, and lightest element in the Universe. Hydrogen is also a non-toxic substance and fuel, in contrast to oil-based fuels like gasoline that is both highly-toxic and dangerously explosive in the event of leaks or accidents because of its high molecular weight, which causes liquid or burning gasoline to adhere to and be absorbed by surfaces, including clothes and skin. Hydrogen, by contrast, being the lightest of all of the elements, harmlessly dissipates in a matter of seconds in the event of leaks or accidents.

There is a common misconception that hydrogen is especially dangerous due to the Hindenburg accident in 1937, where 35 people died. But according to the Hindenburg accident report, two-thirds of the passengers and crew (97 people) survived the Hindenburg accident, and of the 35 people who died, 33 chose to jump out of the dirigible and they died from the fall. The remaining 2 individuals were not burned to death from the hydrogen fire that was moving up and away from the passengers, but from the diesel hydrocarbon fuel that was used to power the Hindenburg’s Mercedes Benz engines. Thus the Hindenburg accident demonstrates how safe hydrogen is when a major accident occurs. Decades of field experience in the U.S. Space Program also verified the safety of hydrogen, compared to hydrocarbon fuels, when NASA engineers used liquid hydrogen fuel in all of the Saturn V Moon Rockets and Space Shuttles because it has the greatest energy to weight ratio of any fuel.

Hydrogen is often referred to the “Holy Grail” of energy because it is involved all energy sources, including the Sun and other stars, and hydrogen is also the only non-toxic, carbon-free “universal fuel” that can be used in virtually any existing appliance, engine, or power plant. Moreover, all photosynthetic proteins, microbes and plants have been successfully extracting hydrogen from water with sunlight for 3.4 billion years.

Exponential Growth

Physics professor Alpert Bartlett’s paper: “The Forgotten Fundamentals of the Energy Crisis,” published in the American Journal of Physics in 1978. explains the extraordinary impact of exponential growth on both the problems and the solutions that are evolving simultaneously. Buckminster Fuller, an architect, engineer and mathematician who coined the phrase “Spaceship Earth,” also lectured extensively on power of exponential growth, and in 1970 he wrote a book “Utopia or Oblivion,” which investigated the enormous challenges facing humanity due to the simultaneous exponential growth of both the problems and solutions facing humanity, and the possible technologies that could be developed and deployed to avoid extinction. Alvin Toffler’s book “Future Shock,” argued that the exponential acceleration and change can and does overwhelm people, leaving them "future shocked.” Toffler wrote that the majority of social problems are symptoms of future shock, which he also referred to "information overload."

Defining Oblivion

The doomsday scenario Braun warned about in The New Times article about him in 1984 is now taking place exponentially worldwide. Scientists refer to this “oblivion” scenario as the sixth mass-extinction event in the Earth’s 4-billion-year old history, which is now entering its final exponential stages, where the exponential curves spike sharply upward until they collapse,[3] which means it is almost over. “The smoking gun in these extinctions is very obvious, and it’s in our hands,” co-author Todd Palmer, a biologist at the University of Florida, wrote in an e-mail to The Washington Post.

In 2003, The New York Times reported on scientific paper’s published in Nature on the largest study of its kind, which counted the number of fish in the fisherman’s nets for the past 100 years, determined that over 90 percent of the fish in the global ocean ecosystems had already been lost. The oceans have been used as a toxic chemical dumping ground for many decades. The bees, which pollinate the fruits and vegetables are disappearing, as are the major forests in the Rocky Mountains and the Cascades.

State of Emergency

While none of the existing presidential candidates are discussing the fossil fuel-induced Sixth Mass extinction event that is now underway, which is certainly a “State of Emergency,” William Heronemus, an engineering professor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst (now diseased), who served as the former superintendent of ship building for the United States Navy, developed state-of-the-art sea-based “Windship” hydrogen production systems. Heronemus stated that from a technology perspective, windship energy conversion systems could have been built in the 1800's by simply replacing the sails on the masts of existing ships with rows of wind turbines, which would produce the electricity and hydrogen from the seawater, and store it below the water in the ship's hull.

Pictures of these windship systems were published by The National Geographic Society in 1975, and in The Washington Post in 2004 as part of a news report on Braun’s 2004 presidential campaign in Washington D.C..

Braun's 2004 Presidential Campaign

As The Washington Post reporter Joel Achenbach wrote: “Eleven of the candidates on the D.C. ballot are Democrats ... Among those running is Harry Braun, the only candidate whose slogan is “Making America Energy Independent & Pollution Free with Windship Hydrogen Production Systems.” “I’m talking about making hydrogen from water,” Braun said in a phone interview Sunday. “President Bush wants to make it from coal and nuclear power. That’s not clean hydrogen, that’s filthy hydrogen, and that’s nonrenewable hydrogen.” The Braun plan is to build “windships,” which he describes as 500 to 1000 feet tall, with the (spherical) “hull” anchored under the sea just off the coast. A large mast would hold wind turbines. A crew, below water, would run the machinery to convert ocean water to liquid hydrogen. Each windship would cost (approximately) $10 million. How many of these enormous windships would Braun need? “About a million,” he said. The project would cost $6 trillion total, in his estimation.

Braun participated in a Presidential Candidates Forum in 2004 in New Hampshire that was covered by C-Span

Braun’s second Presidential Campaign in 2012

Given President Obama was unopposed in 2012, Braun and his wife Dorothy ran as a Democratic alternative to Obama, but neither the Democratic party officials Iowa or New Hampshire or the major newspapers or television news networks would acknowledge Braun’s campaign, in spite of his focus on passing a Democracy Amendment that would empower the majority of citizens to approve all laws, legislation, presidential executive orders and judicial decisions that impact the majority of citizens. However, the University newspapers and television reporters did cover Braun’s campaign.

An Editorial by The Daily Iowan included the following observations: Democratic presidential candidate Harry Braun’s solution to the nation’s problems is a constitutional amendment only 26 words long: “We the people, hereby empower the majority of American citizens to approve all federal legislation, executive orders and judicial decisions that affect the majority of citizens.” Enacting this as the 28th Amendment would effectively institute a direct democracy in the United States, allowing the citizens to directly vote on all legislation that has gone through the Congress. Braun’s Democracy Amendment . . . should be considered as a way to empower the American people to beat back our entrenched citizen apathy.

“We have never been a democracy,” Braun told the DI Editorial Board Tuesday, “We are a republic.” This is true: The American legislature is representative, and American citizens have no direct way of proposing or approving legislation. Braun’s democracy amendment would change that. Congress would still write laws, he said, but every law would face a referendum by the citizens; in other words, no major change would occur in the country unless it was supported by a majority of the public. Braun is correct about the increased need for democracy in this country, and the popular discounting of direct democracy as valid political procedure is unfair. (Note Switzerland has had a constitutional democracy since the year 1291.) …

The vision of a democracy is that the people, sufficiently educated and invested, are capable of governing themselves. This is fundamentally opposed to conceptions of elitist rule, including those advanced by (some of) America’s Founding Fathers. …“By the rules that I define as a democrat, we don’t have any democrats,” Braun said. We have republicans who call themselves Democrats, but if you look at the way our government works, it’s not of the people by the people.” That’s a shame. And Braun’s idea, while radical, is a welcome addition to the popular discourse.

The Article V Democracy Amendment

Article V of the U.S. Constitution is a relatively short paragraph that deals with amendments, and it contains specific language that clearly empowers the majority of citizens to bypass the Congress and State Legislatures, in order to both pass and ratify amendments in what are referred to as “Constitutional Conventions.”

Given this insight, Braun has organized his 2016 presidential campaign as a Constitutional Convention that is specifically focused on the ratification of the 28-word Democracy Amendment he has written and proposed on the Democracy Amendment USA.net website, which reads as follows: “We the People, hereby empower the majority of American citizens to approve all laws, federal legislation, presidential executive orders, and judicial decisions that impact the majority of citizens."

While most Americans assume the United States is already a Democracy, one only needs to consult a dictionary to know that the USA is, and always has been, a lobbyist-based Republic, which is responsible for the completely unnecessary contamination and destruction of the Earth’s global ocean ecosystems and atmosphere, which is a major factor of the mass-extinction event now taking place. As such, it is imperative for the majority of Americans to “take action now” to ratify the 28-word Democracy Amendment with the Article V Citizen Ballot that can be downloaded as a verifiable paper ballot from the DemocracyAmendmentUSA.net website.

Once the Article V ballot is filled out by a registered voter, it can then be sent to their Secretary of State where the ballots can be verified, counted and archived. And as per Article V of the U.S. Constitution, when the majority of citizens in 38 states send in their ballots, the amendment will be ratified. And given such a paper-ballot voting system is convenient and completely verifiable, one can only wonder why all voting in the U.S. is not accomplished in this way.

It is important to note that none of the national U.S. elections in recent years have been verifiable, and few Americans actually know who is counting the vast majority of the votes. It is not the federal or state governments that count the votes in public, but a private corporation, Election Systems & Software (ES&S), which has approximately 4,500 localities in 42 states that sell computer voting systems that allows ES&S to count the easily hacked computer votes in secret, and then announce the results. This brings to mind a quote from Joseph Stalin, “It’s not the voters who count, but who counts the votes.”

Indoor Food Production Systems

Indoor food production systems have been successfully used for over three decades in Denmark’s most severe winters, and if such systems are powered by off-grid, modularized wind-powered hydrogen production systems, they will be able to operate in spite of the climate chaos, while creating millions of jobs by producing poison-free food and fuel in every community. This would be a dramatic improvement over the existing refined sugar junk foods now being consumed that that are causing epidemics of obesity and disease.

Details are provided in the book “Wheat Belly” by William Davis, M.D., who states that wheat is “among the most consumed grains on earth, ... but it has changed dramatically in the past fifty years under the influence of agricultural scientists. . . and small changes in wheat protein structure can spell the difference between a devastating immune response to wheat protein verses no immune response at all.” And “despite dramatic changes in the genetic makeup of the wheat and other crops, no animal or human safety testing was conducted on the new genetic strains that were created.

Test animals that were fed glyphosate-tolerant soybeans (known as Roundup Ready) show alterations in liver, pancreatic, intestinal and testicular tissue compared to animals fed conventional soybeans.”

Background

Braun was born November 6, 1948 in Compton, California and he and his wife Dorothy now reside in Canton, Georgia. He is a graduate of Arizona State University, and the founder of his company, Mesa Wind LLC, a wind project development company. Braun is the founder and senior scientist of the Phoenix Project Foundation (PPF), a non-profit 501-C3 organization that is based on Braun’s Phoenix Project book that was initially published in 1990 and again in 2000, which deals with the interrelationships of exponential growth, molecular biology, photobiology (i.e., the biological impact of sunlight on humans and other animals), regenerative medicine and Braun’s 5-year Phoenix Project plan to shift from an energy and economic system based on oil, coal and other highly-toxic and unsustainable fossil and nuclear fuels, to a wind and solar-sourced “hydrogen economy” that is both poison-free and inexhaustible.