Harry W. Braun III

Harry Braun

Harry W. Braun III is the founder and senior scientist of the Phoenix Project Foundation, a non-profit 501-C3 organization that is based on Braun’s 365-page book, “The Phoenix Project: Shifting from Oil to Hydrogen.” which fully indexed and has 147 citations. Chapter’s include, Exponential Icebergs, Fossil Fuels, Nuclear Power, Hydrogen, Renewable Energy Technologies and Utopia: From Here to Eternity, which refers to the developments in molecular biology and regenerative medicine.

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). . And if the 60 percent of waste heat that is generated from existing fossil fuel power plants is factored into the equation, the number of two megawatt wind hydrogen systems is reduced to approximately 2 million units. And given such systems are no more difficult to manufacture than the 16 million automotive vehicles that are sold the U.S. annually, Braun’s Phoenix Project plan to shift to a wind and solar-sourced “hydrogen economy” that is both non-toxic and inexhaustible, could and should be implemented within five years to mitigate the exponentially-worsening climate change problems.

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.

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. Climate Change and Stratospheric Ozone Depletion Catastrophic food production failures are already taking place worldwide due to fossil fuel-induced abrupt climate change, which has already passed the point-of-no-return with respect to the exponentially worsening polar melting, droughts and superstorms, that scientists have reported are also destroying the Earth’s protective stratospheric ozone layer by injecting vast amounts of water vapor into the stratosphere that is normally dryer than a desert.

Given the increasing depletion of the Earth’s protective stratospheric ozone layer, which filters out the deadly short wavelength radiation from space, such as x-rays and gamma rays, this event alone could make the surface of the Earth uninhabitable.

This is why Braun’s Phoenix Project book discussed the developments of indoor agricultural systems that will be able to operate regardless of the climate change disruptions that will only intensify with time. However, such system must be able to operate without relying on the existing electrical transmission grid, thus they must be powered by wind and hydrogen-powered systems both on small home scale, or larger “Arcology Ark” systems that need to be mass-produced in each community. Without such system, it is hard to believe that the U.S. and civilization itself will survive the climate change chaos that is now inevitable.

The Poisoning of America

Replacing fossil fuel and nuclear energy systems with a solar-sourced hydrogen energy system and economy, will fundamentally solve the most serious problems related to the economy and environment, including climate change and health care that is now profoundly impacted by the global chemical contamination of every person and animal worldwide due the immutable process in physics referred to as “diffusion,” which occurs every time cream is poured into coffee.

This “Poisoning of America” was documented in an investigative report that was featured on the cover of Time magazine in 1980, and again in 1985, by journalist Ed Magnuson, who wrote in 1980 that: “Belatedly, the campaign begins to control hazardous chemical wastes. In the last 200 years, and with staggering acceleration in the last 25, the power, extent and depth of man's interventions in the natural order seem to presage a revolutionary new epoch in human history, perhaps the most revolutionary the mind can conceive.”< Ed Magnuson, “Environment: A problem that cannot be buried,” Time magazine cover story, October 14, 1985</ref> And while the U.S. Chemical Safety Board (CSB)was established in January of 1998 to control such hazardous chemicals, it has done virtually nothing to regulate or reduce the production of trillions of gallons of oil-based chemical poisons annually, that have been mass-produced in every larger quantities since the Oil Age began.

“On September 5, 2013, the EPA Office of Inspector General sent Congress a “Seven Day Letter” regarding CSB. Such letters are rare and signal a severe problem at an Executive Branch department or agency. The Oversight and Government Reform Committee and the Science, Space, and Technology Committee launched an investigation after CSB leadership refused to cooperate with the EPA IG’s investigation into whether an employee in the U.S. Office of Special Counsel (OSC) revealed the identities of CSB employees who filed complaints with the OSC. If these allegations are true, the OSC employee could be subject to criminal prosecution.

The Committee’s investigation has revealed serious management problems and heavy-handed tactics at CSB, including evidence that Chairman Rafael Moure-Eraso, General Counsel Richard Loeb, and Managing Director Daniel Horowitz have mistreated employees and created a toxic work environment. Through its investigation, the EPA Inspector General also discovered that CSB leadership used non-official email accounts to conduct official business. CSB leadership may have also used non-official email accounts to avoid the investigative scrutiny of OSC and EPA OIG. The deficiencies uncovered during the course of the investigation and outlined in the joint staff report led the Oversight and Government Reform and the Science, Space, and Technology committees to conclude that CSB is failing to fulfill its mission.”

This explains why most of the chemical and radiological poisons, including the highly-toxic herbicide Round Up, now arrive in the wind and rain. Research published in the journal Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry reveals that both the air and rain are contaminated, exposing potentially hundreds of millions of people to perpetual doses of hidden chemical poisons, which have been increasing exponentially in the environment since dawn of the Oil Age and Nuclear Age.

In April 1995, the United States Geological Survey began a study to determine the occurrence and temporal distribution of only 49 pesticides, of the tens of thousands of pesticides and other toxic herbicides that are in the environment, and pesticide metabolites in air and rain samples from an urban and an agricultural sampling site in Mississippi. Every rain and air sample collected from the urban and agricultural sites had detectable levels of multiple pesticides. The magnitude of the total concentration was 5-10 times higher at the agricultural site as compared to the urban site. More than two decades since DDT was banned from use in the United States, DDE, a metabolite of DDT, was detected in every air sample collected from the agricultural site and in more than half of the air samples from the urban site.

In the year 2010, medical professor Sanjay Gupta produced a two-hour “Toxic America” documentary that was aired on CNN, which included an interview with Lisa Jackson, the current administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), who acknowledged that over 85,000 of the most toxic chemicals known were secretly made legal prior to the EPA being established during the Nixon administration in 1970’s. And the mass-production of these chemical poisons since the 1900’s has made these chemical poisons “ubiquitous” in the global environment. And due to the laws diffusion, a toxic brew of these poisons is now in the blood of every man, woman and child, worldwide, including the unborn who now soak in these poisons from the point of conception.

Braun points out that once such hydrocarbon poisons are in the blood, they travel to every cell in the body, where they can easily dissolve the body’s critical proteins on contact into super-sticky "amyloid plaques," just as gasoline is used to dissolve the grease and oil from engine components. And on a molecular level, amyloid plaques are found in a wide range of degenerative diseases, including Alzheimer’s, Autism, Parkinson’s, cancer, and heart diseases, which are bankrupting the U.S. with trillions of dollars of unfunded liabilities. This is clear evidence that such dreadful diseases are, in fact, the result of the fossil fuel and nuclear-induced chemical contamination of the Earth’s global atmosphere, environment and ecosystems.

In addition to the fossil fuel and nuclear-induced chemical contamination and climate change chaos, and human overpopulation that is rapidly making the Earth uninhabitable, there are also two supervolcano’s in North America that could erupt at any time at Yellowstone and Mammoth, California, which will emit so much ash in the atmosphere that there will be no direct sunlight or growing seasons for years. Given such mass-extinction considerations, without indoor organic “Lifeboat” and “Arcology Ark” food production systems in each community, civilization will vanish and there will be few, if any, survivors.

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 is octane (C8H18 ), which 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.

The Holy Grail

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.

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.

As Braun stated in his 1992 paper 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 . . . “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.

Henry Ford’s Cannabis Cars

As Henry Ford demonstrated in the 1920’s, the least-expensive hydrogen and/or hydrogen-based ethanol was made from cannabis crops that were four-times more efficient to grow than corn (or trees) as a biomass crop, without the water, and toxic fertilizer and pesticide requirements.

While Henry Ford was a remarkable individual and farmer who pioneered the mass-production of automobiles, few Americans are aware of his even more remarkable vision and efforts to replace all of the oil and other fossil fuels, that were highly-toxic and expensive, with an agricultural-based energy system that would transfer the vast wealth that was flowing to the oil and coal companies, to the American farmers, a concept referred to as “Chemgury.” Francis Garvan, an eminent chemist, noted the problem in a speech promoting alcohol fuel at the Dearborn, Mich. “Chemurgy” Conference on Agriculture, Industry and Science in 1936.

The fuel of the future, according to both Henry Ford and Charles F. Kettering, was ethyl alcohol (i.e., ethanol) made from farm products and cellulosic materials. Kettering was the head of research at General Motors and a highly respected inventor in his own right. When Henry Ford told a reporter for The New York Times in 1925 that ethyl alcohol was ‘the fuel of the future,’ he was expressing an opinion that was widely shared in the automotive industry. "The fuel of the future is going to come from fruit like that sumach out by the road, or from apples, weeds, sawdust -- almost anything," he said. "There is fuel in every bit of vegetable matter that can be fermented. There's enough alcohol in one year's yield of an acre of potatoes to drive the machinery necessary to cultivate the fields for a hundred years."

Cannabis Supercapacitors

Chemical engineers had also produced industrial-quality automotive plastics from cannabis, wheat straw and sisal, which were 10-times stronger than steel, and there are numerous films now on YouTube showing Ford’s cannabis plastic cars being repeatedly struck with a large axe with no damage. The cannabis fibers that are the strongest of all the natural plants, were also used for the interior upholstery and carpets of Ford’s cannabis cars, which Ford claimed could simply be buried when they were worn out.

Cannabis-based materials are now being used by BMW, Mercedes Benz and Ford. The American Chemical Society also reported in 2013 that ultrafast cannabis-based “supercapacitors” have been developed that promise be a thousand times less-expensive than capacitors made from Graphene, which is the gold standard for ultrafast supercapacitors. Electric cars and power tools could harness this cannabis technology, said Dr David Mitlin of Clarkson University, New York, who describes his device in the Journal American Chemical Society Nano, "We're making graphene-like materials for a thousandth of the price - and we're doing it with waste. China, Canada and the UK now produce, cannabis that can be grown industrially for clothing and building materials. But the leftover bast fibre - the inner bark - typically ends up as landfill. Dr Mitlin's team took these fibres and recycled them into supercapacitors - energy storage devices which are transforming the way electronics are powered. Conventional batteries store large reservoirs of energy and drip-feed it slowly, whereas supercapacitors can rapidly discharge their entire load in seconds, which makes them ideal for electric cars that utilize regenerative braking.

Oil Baron Andrew Mellon

While Henry Ford’s mission was to replace oil and other fossil fuels with cannabis and a wide-range of other agricultural crops, a formidable coalition of oil and chemical companies, led by Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon, the wealthiest man in America who was also CEO of Gulf Oil, who had no intention of having his oil empire displaced by cannabis.

Other corporations that were threatened by the cannabis economy included the DuPont Chemical Corporation, whose principal banker and investor was Andrew Mellon. DuPont’s chemists knew all about the chemistry of cannabis because nitrating the cellulose from cannabis to manufacture high-explosives for the War Department made DuPont wealthy. DuPont was also making plastics from cannabis, but in the 1930’s DuPont acquired a patent to make plastics from oil and coal. This greatly enhanced the value of each barrel of Mellon’s oil, except the oil-based plastics were significantly more expensive than the cannabis automotive plastics that Henry Ford was using, which were non-toxic and completely biodegradable.

Oceans of Plastic Pollution

This decision by private corporations to remove cannabis from the market in order to mass-produce highly-toxic oil-based plastics since the 1930’s has now had a catastrophic impact on the global ocean ecosystems. According to University of Georgia environmental engineer Jenna Jambeck, the lead author for study being published in the journal Science, who was interviewed on NBC News, approximately 13 million tons flow into the global oceans every year. And this this amount is expected to increase by a factor of 10 over the next 10 years.

As the plastic is continually broken down into smaller and smaller pieces, some of it is consumed by the remaining fish and other marine organisms that are being driven into extinction, but vast amounts of the plastics have formed into vast islands in all of the global oceans. Thus, one generation, a 3-billion year old ocean ecosystem is being destroyed by overpopulation and mindless “free market” practices of replacing cannabis with oil and allowing unregulated ships to drag weighted nets the size of a football field along the seafloor, utterly destroying the vast forests of corals and fish habitats.

Gib Brogan, the fisheries manager at Oceana, a New England environmental organization, wrote in The New York Times that since the 1600s, the Atlantic cod were abundant, but no longer. Fisheries tried for years to rebuild the fish populations from decades of mismanagement and overfishing, by initially issuing quotas, and when that was unsuccessful, the fishery was closed. But while recent estimates place cod recovery at only 3 to 7 percent of their target levels, two new proposals from the New England Fishery Council now threaten to undo years of work to save one of the last remaining areas by drastically reducing the protected habitat by up to 80 percent. The plan will also allow increasing bottom trawling and dredging, which are two of the most destructive fishing practices known.<Gib Brogan, “For All The Fish in the Sea,” The New York Times, July 7, 2015, p. A19</ref>

The hydrogen and cannabis-based energy, economic, chemical and medical system would end the highly-toxic ecologically damaging coal industry and its of strip mining of mountain tops, as well as the highly-toxic fracking of oil and natural gas, all of which increases the chemical contamination and incalculable climate change issues that have been caused by the unnecessary use of fossil fuel and uranium.

The alcohol and tobacco industries, both of which produce highly-toxic products, also had an interest is having cannabis removed from the market. But the largest financial sector that was threatened by the use of cannabis and natural morphine, which have been the gold standards for medicine for thousands of years, was the major pharmaceutical companies that were being financed by two of the largest oil barons, David Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie.

Oil-Based Pharmaceutical Drugs

The new pharmaceutical drugs were advertised as so-called “modern” medicine, but they are toxic synthetic substances that are much more expensive because of the need for corporate profits and “commissions” to the doctors who prescribe these drugs that have questionable medical benefits. Indeed, according to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) pharmaceutical pain medications alone caused over 16,000 deaths in the U.S. in 2013, and nearly two million Americans, aged 12 or older, either abused or were dependent on opioids in 2013. Even aspirin is a concern.

Nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, including aspirin, are referred to as NSAIDS, are assumed to be well tolerated and are widely used as an initial therapy for common inflammation and pain. These pharmaceutical agents constitute one of the most widely used class of drugs, with more than 70 million prescriptions and more than 30 billion over-the counter tablets sold annually in the United States alone.

However, a statement from a July 1998 issue of The American Journal of Medicine states the following: “Conservative calculations estimate that approximately 107,000 patients are hospitalized annually for nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drug (NSAID)-related gastrointestinal (GI) complications and at least 16,500 NSAID-related deaths occur each year among arthritis patients alone. The figures of all NSAID users would be overwhelming, yet the scope of this problem is generally under-appreciated.”

And in June 1999, The New England Journal of Medicine made a similar statement: “It has been estimated conservatively that 16,500 NSAID-related deaths occur among patients with rheumatoid arthritis or osteoarthritis every year in the United States. This figure is similar to the number of deaths from the acquired immunodeficiency syndrome and considerably greater than the number of deaths from multiple myeloma, asthma, cervical cancer, or Hodgkin’s disease. If deaths from gastrointestinal toxic effects from NSAIDs were tabulated separately in the National Vital Statistics reports, these effects would constitute the 15th most common cause of death in the United States. Yet these toxic effects remain mainly a “silent epidemic,” with many physicians and most patients unaware of the magnitude of the problem. Furthermore the mortality statistics do not include deaths ascribed to the use of over-the-counter NSAIDS.”

DEA Judge Andrew Young

In 1988 after extensive hearings on the toxicity of all drugs, including cannabis and prescription drugs, DEA Administrative Law Judge Francis L. Young declared that “cannabis (i.e., marijuana) in its natural form is one of the safest therapeutically active substances known to man," and that while nearly all prescription medicines have toxic, and potentially lethal side effects, “marijuana is not such a substance.” Indeed, “There is no record in the extensive medical literature describing a proven, documented cannabis-induced fatality,” Judge Young acknowledges that “this is a remarkable statement.” But given the evidence presented on over 5,000 years of human experience with cannabis, plus the fact that cannabis is now used daily by an estimated fifty million Americans, “there are simply no credible medical reports to suggest that consuming marijuana has caused a single death.”

This overwhelming scientific and medical evidence verifies that cannabis, or morphine for that matter, have never been “dangerous drugs that cause insanity,” but rather they were a fundamental threat to the economic survival of the multi-trillion dollar oil, plastics and pharmaceutical corporations that are now killing millions of Americans with their toxic foods, fuels, plastics, and so-called medicines and thousands of other products, which are making the Earth uninhabitable.

However, with trillions of dollars at stake, oil baron Andrew Mellon, who had been appointed Secretary of the Treasury by President Hoover, hired his son in law, Harry Anslinger, a former police agent for the alcohol prohibition era where the prohibition officers were on commission, to head up the new Narcotic Bureau of Investigation (NBI) that changed the name of cannabis (and/or the common name hemp) to an unknown Mexican slang term “marihuana,” (spelled with an “h”) so this so-called “new” and “deadly drug that caused “criminal insanity and death” could then be made illegal in 1937 with the passage of the Marihuana Tax Act of 1937, which took place with no recorded vote in either the House or Senate -- much less the Constitutional amendment that was required to make alcohol illegal, and in spite of the objections of Henry Ford and the American Medical Association (AMA).[4]</ref>

The AMA’s Congressional Legislative Council, Dr. William C. Woodward, who was also an attorney, objected to being excluded for two years from the secret meetings on prohibiting cannabis, as well as the U.S. Treasury department’s use of the new slang word, marihuana, which Woodward objected to using, referring to the word as a “mongrel” term that had no place in medical science or in his Congressional testimony.

According to Woodward, the AMA opposed the prohibition of cannabis because “there was no evidence that it was an addictive or dangerous drug” and the new tax would place a severe economic burden on physicians, and especially the American farmer. He also made the following observations: “The newspapers have called attention to it (i.e., cannabis) so prominently that there must be some grounds for their statements. It has surprised me, however, that the facts on which these statements have been based have not been brought before this committee by competent primary evidence. We are referred to newspaper publications concerning the prevalence of marihuana addiction. We are told that the use of marihuana causes crime. Yet no one has been produced from the Bureau of Prisons to show the number of prisoners who have been found addicted to the marihuana habit. An informed inquiry shows that the Bureau of Prisons has no evidence on that point ... The bureau of Public Health Service has also a division of pharmacology. If you desire evidence as to the pharmacology of cannabis, that obviously is the place where you can get direct and primary evidence, rather than the indirect hearsay evidence.”

THC is a 500-million-year old neurotransmitter

According to a paper published in Scientific American in December of 2004 “The Brain’s Own Marijuana” medical professors Roger Nicoll and Bradley Alger found vast forests of cannabis protein receptor’s for tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), which is just one of the 65 cannabinoids that are in every person’s brain, regardless of whether they have ever consumed cannabis or not. The authors explain that this is because the cannabis protein receptors for the THC neurotransmitters have been in the brains and bodies of all vertebrate animals for the past 500 million years. While it is now known that the human brain also makes its own version of the THC molecule, which is referred to as an “endocannabinoid,” it does not stimulate the protein receptors as well as the THC that is produced in cannabis plants.

These discoveries understandably surprised the investigators, given that 500 million years goes back to a time before living organisms had left the seas. For these and other reasons, the editors of Scientific American in 2004 referred to the existing cannabis laws as “absurd.”

Cannabinopathic Medicine

Harvard Medical School Professor Lester Grinspoon, spent much of his career studying cannabis and its use in medical history, primarily because he found it to be the only non-toxic and highly-nutritious medical substance known, which has been used for thousands of years to successfully treat a remarkably wide-range of medical problems and diseases, including many different types of cancers and neurological seizures in both adults and children. Grinspoon has written numerous books on the subject, including Marijuana: The Forgotten Medicine, and a paper in 2013, "Cannabinopathic Medicine." which makes the case that cannabis deserves its own category in medical science.

Grinspoon and his friend and colleague Dr. Carl Sagan both suspected cannabis was cultivated in Central Asia more than 10,000 years ago, and was the catalyst for agriculture and civilization because it provided a fast-growing and extremely nutritious food, medicinal herb and the strongest known fibers for clothes, ropes, and weapons. According to Grinspoon, the first written records of cannabis being used as a medicine ware published during the reign of the Chinese emperor Chen Nung 5000 years ago. Cannabis was recommended for malaria, constipation, rheumatic pains, "absentmindedness", and "female disorders." Chinese herbalists also recommended a mixture of cannabis resin and wine as an analgesic during surgery. In India and Africa cannabis was used to “quicken the mind,” lower fevers, induce sleep, cure dysentery, stimulate appetite, improve digestion, relieve headache, and cure venereal disease, dysentery, malaria, and other fevers, and snakebite and many women smoke it before childbirth.

Both the AMA and American Cancer Society websites verify that cannabis has been used for thousands years to treat the remarkable range of medical conditions listed above, as well as, angina, intestinal disorders, cholera, epilepsy, gout, rheumatism, insomnia, vomiting, tetanus, coughs, gonorrhea, bronchitis, absent-mindedness, whooping cough, depression and asthma.

Cannabinoids are shown to prevent the death of injured neurons, and neurological seizures in adults and children. In the film documentary, The True History of Marijuana, which is available online at no cost, video-taped clinical studies document that cannabis cannabinoids will kill a wide-range of cancer cells by cutting off their blood supply, while leaving the surrounding normal cells unharmed.

This is in contrast to the traditional highly-toxic drugs like antibiotics or those used in traditional cancer therapy that do not distinguish between healthy cells and cancer cells, or pathogenic bacteria vs. the vast majority of good bacteria that are critical for human health. Indeed, if any new drug was developed that was able to successfully treat so many different conditions as cannabis, it would be called a “superdrug,” and it would make the vast majority of the toxic synthetic pharmaceutical drugs unnecessary. This explains why it was critical for the lobbyists from the oil and pharmaceutical industry, which is now the largest component of the U.S. Economy, to remove natural herbs like cannabis from the market by making them illegal as so-called dangerous drugs.

Grow Hemp for the War

Because of the cannabis prohibition that began in the U.S. in 1937, a major effort was undertaken by the new Federal Narcotics Bureau of Investigation to remove the true history of cannabis from textbooks, and other news media, including a U.S. Department of Agriculture (DOA) film produced in 1942, “Grow Hemp for the War,” that is now be viewed at no cost on online, that encouraged farmers to grow hemp for the war effort.

The U.S. had been cut-off from many of its sources of hemp in the Far East during World War II, and given hemp was a critical and strategic material for the War Department, the DOA established a public company to grow and harvest hemp near the railroad lines the Midwest. The film provides a world history of hemp usage worldwide, including hemp products, how hemp is grown, and how hemp is processed into rope, cloth, cordage, and other products. The following information comes directly from the film that encourages ‘patriotic American farmers’ to grow 350,000 acres of hemp each year for the war effort:

“When Grecian temples were new, hemp was already old in the service of mankind. For thousands of years, even then, this plant had been grown for cordage and cloth in China and elsewhere in the East. For centuries prior to about 1850, all the ships that sailed the western seas were rigged with hempen rope and sails. For the sailor, no less than the hangman, hemp was indispensable…Now with Philippine and East Indian sources of hemp in the hands of the Japanese, American hemp must meet the needs of our Army and Navy as well as of our industries…American hemp will go on duty again; hemp for mooring ships; hemp for tow lines; hemp for tackle and gear; hemp for countless naval uses both on ship and shore. Just as in the days when Old Ironsides sailed the seas victorious with her hempen shrouds and hempen sails. Hemp for victory.” What the film fails to mention is that the primary need for the cannabis was to send it to DuPont, which was secretly using it to make high-explosives for the War Department.

The Cannabis Economy

As a result of this oil-lobbyist inspired government misinformation campaign, few American are aware that the United States and virtually all other civilizations were all founded on a Cannabis Economy. “Hemp” was the common term for cannabis in Early America, which is of German and English origins, and the scientific term cannabis was descended from the ancient Greeks, who called the plant “Kannabis” and whose city state in Athens established the first known democracy.

As Jack Herer documented in his book, The Emperor wears no Clothes, along with Rowan Robinson’s book, The Great Book of Hemp: The Complete Guide to the Environmental, Commercial and Medicinal Uses of the World's Most Extraordinary Plant, cannabis was a catalyst for civilization because it provided a number of critical items, including highly-nutritious food, medicines, and the world’s strongest fibers that were used for thousands of items, including shoes, clothes (which could last a lifetime), paper, weapons (including high-explosives) and all of the ropes, rigging and canvas (a Dutch word for cannabis) sails that were used by virtually all of the ships at sea prior to the industrial revolution.

Hugh Downs

Hugh Downs, a journalist and television anchor for ABC News, made the following commentary after reviewing the work of Jack Herer’s book: “. . . Some pro-marijuana organizations, in fact, tell us that marijuana, also known as hemp, could, as a raw material, save the U.S. economy. That's some statement. Not by smoking it--that's a minor issue. Would you believe that marijuana could replace most oil and energy needs? That marijuana could revolutionize the textile industry and stop foreign imports? ...

But the reason the pro-cannabis lobby wants cannabis made legal has little to do with getting high, and a great deal to do with fighting oil giants like Saddam Hussein, Exxon and Iran. The pro-marijuana groups claim that hemp is such a versatile raw material, that its products not only compete with petroleum, but with coal, natural gas, nuclear energy, pharmaceutical, timber and textile companies. It is estimated that methane and ethanol production alone from hemp grown as biomass could replace 90% of the world's energy needs.

If they are right, this is not good news for oil interests and could account for the continuation of marijuana prohibition. The claim is that the threat hemp posed to natural resource companies back in the thirties accounts for its original ban. At one time marijuana seemed to have a promising future as a cornerstone of industry. When Rudolph Diesel produced his famous engine in 1896, he assumed that the diesel engine would be powered by a variety of fuels, especially vegetable and seed oils.

Rudolph Diesel, like most engineers then, believed vegetable fuels were superior to petroleum. Hemp is the most efficient vegetable. In the 1930s the Ford Motor Company also saw a future in biomass fuels. Ford operated a successful biomass conversion plant that included hemp at their Iron Mountain facility in Michigan. Ford engineers extracted ethanol, charcoal fuel, tar, pitch, ethyl-acetate and creosote. All fundamental ingredients for modern industry and now supplied by oil-related industries. The difference is that the vegetable source is renewable, cheap and clean, and the petroleum or coal sources are limited, expensive and dirty. By volume, 30% of the hemp seed contains oil suitable for high-grade diesel fuel as well as aircraft engine and precision machine oil.”

The nutritional benefits of consuming cannabis (i.e., hemp) as a food are notable. Cannabis seeds are a high-protein food source, providing 73% of the Daily Value (DV) in a 100 gram serving. The hempseed amino acid profile is comparable to other sources of protein such as meat, milk and eggs, and the seeds are also a rich source of the dietary minerals, including magnesium (160% DV), zinc (77% DV) and iron (53% DV), and a good source of dietary fiber (13% DV). Approximately 73% of the energy in hemp seeds is in the form of fats and essential fatty acids.

Ending the cannabis prohibition

Given that the THC molecules in cannabis are not a “drug” that impairs and destroys brain cells like alcohol, but a 500 million-year-old neurotransmitter that activates a two-way communication and switching system in the brain, which has completely redefined the science of neurobiology; and given that the Oil Age, which replaced the Cannabis Age that existed long before civilization began, is in now in the final exponential stages of making the Earth uninhabitable, cannabis and other non-toxic substances should be legal, while simultaneously releasing all of the existing individuals who have been arrested or are serving prison sentences for such absurd non-violent crimes with no victims.

Photobiology: The biological impact of light

The Phoenix Gazette published a photobiology article about Braun’s photobiology research in 1982, titled: Quality of light held important to your health. “Harry Braun is turned on by the idea that the quality of light people are exposed to will contribute as much to their state of health as what they eat and drink.” He cites dozens of articles in medical journals connecting all sorts of illnesses with prolonged exposure to conventional Cool White fluorescent lights, which were invented in the 1930’s to optimize light quantity and not light quality with respect to simulating sunlight.

Duro-Test Corporation (North Bergen, NJ) had engineered fluorescent lamps that simulated the natural outdoor electromagnetic daylight environment, which had been used in dozens of medical and clinical studies.<Kitty Macinnis, “Quality of light held important to your health,” The Phoenix Gazette, November 17, 1982</ref>

Although photobiology is the study of the biological impact of “light,” it is more precisely the study of not only the visible wavelengths of light in the intense sea of electromagnetic energy that is found outdoors, but the non-visible ultraviolet (UV) wavelengths found in natural sunlight down to 290 nanometers, that all humans and other vertebrates have evolved with for millions of years. Yet this primordial factor in human health and productivity has been fundamentally reduced starting in the 1930’s when architects began designing buildings with windows that could not be opened – or without windows at all.

This is a significant concern because ordinary window glass filters-out the UV spectra of daylight. W. F. Loomis, a professor of biochemistry at Brandeis University after acquiring his B.S. and M.D. degrees at Harvard University, authored a paper published in Scientific American on Rickets. “Although it is still widely regarded as a dietary-deficiency disease resulting from a lack of “vitamin D3,” it results, in fact, from a lack of sunlight.” As Loomis explains …”rickets is caused not by a poor diet but by a deficiency of solar ultraviolet radiation, which is necessary for the synthesis of calciferol (i.e., vitamin D3), the calcifying hormone released into the bloodstream by the skin. Without calciferol, not enough calcium is laid down in growing bones, and the crippling deformities of rickets are the result . . . The children must sit indoors . . . which ends in death or if they continue to live, they develop thick joints, cease to be able to walk or have deformed legs. The head becomes large and even the vertebral column bends. It comes to pass such children sit for many years without being able to move.”

As early as 1888 the English physician Sir John Bland-Sutton found unmistakable evidence of rickets in the London zoo as a result of the pall of coal smoke over London, which disabled chimpanzees, lions, tigers, bears, deer, rabbits, lizards, and many other species. A team of eight medical investigators at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston published a paper in Nature in 1971, which documented that ordinary window glass absorbs essentially all radiation of the wavelength necessary for the in vivo synthesis of vitamin D3 – between 275 and 310 nm. “Millions of people work behind glass, underground or in the extreme north, travel to and from work in closed vehicles, and venture outdoors only in the early morning or late evening when ultraviolet radiation is minimal.<Hollaender, A (ed.) Radiation Biology, Vol. 2, No. 113, McGraw-Hill, New York, 1955 </ref>

Incandescent bulbs emit little ultraviolet radiation; and the small amount from ordinary fluorescent bulbs is usually absorbed by the fixtures in which they are mounted. We have examined changes in calcium absorption after exposure to ‘Vita Lite’ (Duro-Test Corporation, North Bergen, New Jersey) a commercial fluorescent lamp of conventional geometry and loading, designed to duplicate Sun and sky radiation at a colour temperature of 5,500 K (CIE D-5500), between 290 and 380 nm.

Our data suggest that illumination which simulates natural (outdoor) light significantly increases calcium absorption in people who receive no ultraviolet light from the Sun.”

Richard Wurtman, a professor of endocrinology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, published a comprehensive photobiology paper in Scientific American in 1975, “The Effects of Light on the Human Body,” where he summarized the many biochemical reactions that are catalyzed by sunlight exposure. “Each of the various effects of light on mammalian tissue can be classified as direct or indirect, depending on whether the immediate cause is a photochemical reaction within the tissue, or a neural or neuroendocrine signal generated by a photoreceptor cell. Sunburn is largely an affliction of industrial civilization. If people were to expose themselves to sunlight, for one or two hours every day, weather permitting, their skin’s reaction to the gradual increase in erythemal solar radiation that occurs during late winter and spring would provide them with a protective layer of pigmentation for withstanding ultraviolet radiation as the summer intensives.” Overexposure is never advised. Sunlight is like water, it is critical for life, but too much exposure can be fatal. It is a question of balance.

While vitamin D3 is formed in the skin with ultraviolet radiation, Wurtman’s paper also mentions a related compound found in milk and other dairy products, vitamin D2, (i.e., ergosterol), a natural plant sterol that has been converted to D2 by exposure to ultraviolet radiation. However, in a study done by the Washington School of Medicine, up to 90 percent of the vitamin D activity in blood samples was found to be accountable to D3 and not D2. Thus “the investigators concluded that sunlight was vastly more important than dairy products as a source of vitamin D3.” Moreover, in Britain and several other European countries, “the fortification of foods with D2 has been sharply curtailed because of evidence that in large amounts vitamin D2 can be toxic, causing general weakness, kidney damage and elevated blood levels of calcium and cholesterol.”

Wurtman also describes the second biochemical pathway for the UV spectra, which is the stimulation of the neuroendocrine system that lies deep in the brain, with a super highway of nerve cells that originate in the retina’s of the eyes. Yet sunlight deficiency is now epidemic in the U.S. According to Boston University medical professor Michael Holick, who has written: “... most tissue and cells in the body have a vitamin D receptor ... However, vitamin D deficiency remains common in children and adults. Of great interest is the role it can play in decreasing many chronic illnesses, including common cancers, autoimmune diseases, infectious diseases, and cardiovascular disease.”

This vitamin D deficiency is due in part to lifestyle changes where most humans now spend most of their day indoors, and ordinary window glass reflects or absorbs the biologically active UV spectra. Since the 1940s, architects and engineers began designing energy efficient buildings with windows that cannot be opened -- or without windows at all. Thus most urban inhabitants have been inadvertently sealed-off from the intense sea of electromagnetic energy that humans and other primates have evolved to for eons, which is made worse by the wide-spread use of sunscreens, which has profound health and financial implications for the U.S.

Most American’s now avoid sunlight exposure, and when they do venture outdoors, they cover themselves and their children with sunscreens that block the critically important 290 nm ultraviolet wavelengths in sunlight that are needed to produce pre-vitamin D3 in the skin. Without sunlight exposure, millions of Americans are taking so-called vitamin D3 pills that are made from the ultraviolet radiation of 7-dehydrocholesterol from lanolin, a waxy substance derived from sheep’s wool, except according to a paper published in the Annals of Internal Medicine, a multi-vitamin study funded in part by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) entitled, “Enough Is Enough: Stop Wasting Money on Vitamin and Mineral Supplements” documents that most mineral and vitamin supplements, including vitamin D3, “have no clear benefit, and might even be harmful in well-nourished adults, and should not be used for chronic disease prevention.”

Ultraviolet energy and infection control

While the highly-energetic 290 nm spectra is critical for many biochemical functions in humans and other animals, a study by investigators of the Life Sciences Division of Arthur D. Little, Inc. in Cambridge, Massachusetts, also found that the same 290 nm spectra emitted from the Duro-Test Vita Lite sunlight-simulating lamps also killed 90 percent of the Staphylococcus aureus, which has now evolved into a highly-toxic “superbug” that has developed a resistant to antibiotics, but not the 290 nm spectra found in sunlight or lamps that simulate sunlight.

In conclusion, extensive clinical and medical research worldwide has clearly documented that a lack of exposure to natural sunlight, or lamps that simulate sunlight, routinely induces profound pathological conditions in humans and other animals, as well as microorganisms and green plants. Moreover, the highly-energetic ultraviolet wavelengths down to 290 nanometers that are now avoided by millions of American’s, are, in fact, critical for the for their health and well-being. However, the very nature of sunlight is now being altered by the increasing depletion of the stratospheric ozone layer, which will no longer filter out the lethal short wave radiation that includes x-rays and gamma rays, which underscores the need to mass-produce indoor food production systems and to include sunlight-simulating lamps in all homes and buildings.

Braun believes a re-industrialization from an oil economy to a solar hydrogen economy will be able to finance and power the indoor “lifeboat” and larger arcology “ark” food production systems that will be able to operate in spite of the fossil fuel-induced climate change chaos and fossil fuel and nuclear chemical contamination that is already destroying major food production systems worldwide, as the Earth’s sixth mass extinction event in its four-billion year-old-history enters its final exponential stages.

Utopia or Oblivion

If one does not understand exponential growth, and the concept of 11:59, as it relates to human population growth, one cannot understand why humanity is simultaneously accelerating towards a technological “utopia” of regenerative medicine that is already beginning to eliminate aging and disease, as well as an ecological “oblivion” scenario that is the direct result of human overpopulation and the use of highly-toxic oil and other fossil and nuclear fuels.

Albert A. Bartlett, a professor of physics at the University of Colorado since the 1950’s, has spent much of his career studying and lecturing on the exponential function, and he has recorded several of his extraordinary lectures on YouTube , including “Arithmetic, Population and Energy,” a “must see” video that every registered voter should watch as though their life depended on it – because it does.

Harry Braun

Harry 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, a former high school anthropology and history teacher at Thunderbird High School in Phoenix, Arizona. He is the founder of Mesa Wind LLC, an Arizona wind project company that was the initial developer of the 120 megawatt San Juan Mesa Wind project in New Mexico, which was completed in 2005. Braun was the Democratic unsuccessful candidate for Congress in Arizona's First Congressional District in 1984 against John McCain, and in 1986 against Jay Rhodes, and he was a presidential candidate in 2004 and 2012.