STORY AT-A-GLANCE
- Recently, Australian researchers discovered an enzyme that can be used to produce electricity out of thin air
- The enzyme, called Huc, is produced by a common soil bacterium Mycobacterium smegmatis
- While the research is new, according to the scientists, there is a possibility of producing the enzyme on a massive scale allowing production electricity from air
- The way it has often worked in the past, as soon as a widely available natural commodity became a “resource,” its wide availability cane to an end
- Our breathing may be the next commercial frontier, and clean air may become the new bottled water, if we don’t stop this trend
Making Electricity Out of Thin Air
Bad news, folks. The scientists have discovered an enzyme that can be used to produce electricity out of thin air.
This was just discovered, so we don’t know yet whether this can be scaled as easily as they hope, but it so — this may very well be very good news for the “owners” controlling the energy industry — but for us, useless breathers, this is not good news at all. After all, up until now, we’ve been breathing air. Just air. But now we are suddenly breathing a “natural resource,” and we all know how stingy the owners of everything are about those!
Hey, if you were a major investor in BlackRock or similarly minded self-appointed owner of “assets,” would this new discovery not motivate you to consider limiting the free inhaling capacity of the peasants? Those pesky peasants have been taking their breathing privilege for granted but really, should they not be a lot more considerate about their usage of a valuable resource that you turn into solid profits?
So, would you, as a dedicated BlackRock investor, not find it irksome that over nine billions freeloader breathers and carbon exhalers — whom you don’t really like! — habitually suck up your air into their useless noses, without paying you a dime for the privilege of using air? Would you not, in the face of this exciting business opportunity, seek to change “the way people think about breathing”?
And maybe, right now it is an exaggeration. Maybe I am being dramatic. But my concern is not facetious at all because this is exactly how the owners of everything think about everything — so why breathing would be an exception?
Come on, come on, the Blue Ocean Strategy! Come, new markets! Come, new income streams for the BlackRock investors! And away with irresponsible, unlimited use of air resources, formerly known as breathing!
Anyway, here’s the science. On March 7, 2023, Nature published a paper titled, “Structural basis for bacterial energy extraction from atmospheric hydrogen.” The paper is a little dense, so here is a popular rendition:
The researchers looked at a common soil bacterium, Mycobacterium smegmatis. This bacterium uses hydrogen from the atmosphere as an energy source, especially in nutrient-poor environments. They found that the “machinery” that allows the microbe to turn atmospheric hydrogen into energy is an enzyme called “hydrogenase,” or Huc for short. They have also found that the process produces an electrical current.
The researchers were able to isolate the enzyme by genetically modifying the bacteria. They found that even when isolated from the bacteria, Huc could consume hydrogen at concentrations far lower even than the tiny traces in the air. They also found Huc was uninhibited by oxygen, a property not seen in other hydrogen-consuming catalysts. Here is a press release by Monash University:
“Australian scientists have discovered an enzyme that converts air into energy. The finding, published in the top journal Nature, reveals that this enzyme uses the low amounts of the hydrogen in the atmosphere to create an electrical current. This finding opens the way to create devices that literally make energy from thin air.
The research team, led by Dr Rhys Grinter, PhD student Ashleigh Kropp, and Professor Chris Greening from the Monash University Biomedicine Discovery Institute in Melbourne, Australia, produced and analysed a hydrogen-consuming enzyme from a common soil bacterium.
“We’ve known for some time that bacteria can use the trace hydrogen in the air as a source of energy to help them grow and survive, including in Antarctic soils, volcanic craters, and the deep ocean,” Professor Greening said. “But we didn’t know how they did this, until now.”
In this Nature paper, the researchers extracted the enzyme responsible for using atmospheric hydrogen from a bacterium called Mycobacterium smegmatis. They showed that this enzyme, called Huc, turns hydrogen gas into an electrical current.
Dr Grinter notes, “Huc is extraordinarily efficient. Unlike all other known enzymes and chemical catalysts, it even consumes hydrogen below atmospheric levels — as little as 0.00005% of the air we breathe.”
Laboratory work performed by Ms Kropp shows that it is possible to store purified Huc for long periods. “It is astonishingly stable. It is possible to freeze the enzyme or heat it to 80 degrees celsius, and it retains its power to generate energy,” Ms Kropp said. “This reflects that this enzyme helps bacteria to survive in the most extreme environments.”
Huc is a “natural battery” that produces a sustained electrical current from air or added hydrogen. While this research is at an early stage, the discovery of Huc has considerable potential to develop small air-powered devices, for example as an alternative to solar-powered devices.
The bacteria that produce enzymes like Huc are common and can be grown in large quantities, meaning we have access to a sustainable source of the enzyme. Dr Grinter says that a key objective for future work is to scale up Huc production. “Once we produce Huc in sufficient quantities, the sky is quite literally the limit for using it to produce clean energy.””
Selling Air; a Hoax or a New Business Model?
I have been pondering the topic of air as a new market for a few years. It seems to me that “scarcity of breathable air” is a new monetization frontier. For example, up until a certain point, no sane person would seriously consider paying for still bottled water, and yet today, we often do that (even though the quality of bottled water can be debated). I think that air is next.
And besides, scarcity of breathable air can work very nicely with smart masks that would also have an in-built air purification filter, monitor your air intake in the name of watching your breathing privilege, and of course, send your biometric data back to the mothership.
Not to mention the fact that the transhumanist crazies view the entire planet as their sandbox and are itching to play with things like the planetary processes and the composition of the atmosphere — and don’t get me started on the carbon removal, including with asbestos!
And selling air IS the next frontier, we are just not quite there yet. Air is the new bottled water.
— Tessa Lena a.k.a. Tessa Fights Robots ❤️ (@TessaMakesLove) February 18, 2021
I'm going to leave a seemingly controversial tweet here and see how it unfolds. I posit that certain measures, which are forced upon us with lots of anger and frothing at the mouth, have nothing to do with health but rather with Big Tech's upcoming major push for face wearables.
— Tessa Lena a.k.a. Tessa Fights Robots ❤️ (@TessaMakesLove) September 24, 2020
However, I was kind of surprised to find this 2016 story by the CNN titled, “The smell of success? $115 bottles of British air sold to Chinese buyers.” Evidently, a few companies are now selling literal air in jars.
British entrepreneur Leo De Watts, 27, has made thousands of dollars selling bottles of British country air to Chinese buyers, but the price alone — £80 ($115) per bottle — could knock the wind out of many customers.
De Watts says the 580 ml (about 20 oz) glass jars have been flying out the door, many headed for pollution-plagued Chinese cities such as Beijing and Shanghai.
Since launching late last year [2105], his air farming company Aethaer has sold hundreds of containers of clean breeze from windswept locations across Britain — including Dorset, Somerset, and Wales. […]
De Watts, originally from Dorset on the southern coast of England, now lives in Hong Kong where he can be found selling his bottles of fresh air at local street markets. The businessman appears to have chosen his market wisely. In December, Beijing issued its first ever red alert because of poor air quality, closing schools and restricting traffic.
Back in Britain, De Watts’ team of air farmers continue harvesting away from roads which might pollute the precious produce. Hoping to cash in on Chinese New Year festivities, the company is now promoting a 15-jar gift set for — take a deep breath — the discounted cost of £888 ($1,200).
Funnily enough, for those dismissing the unusual business model as just a bunch of hot air, it is in fact Britain’s “cool air” which gives buyers the most bang for their buck. “The colder air means we can fit more in the container,” De Watts said. “When it’s warmer, we can’t fit quite as much in.”
Aethaer follows in the footsteps of the Canadian company Vitality Air, which recently started selling canisters of fresh air from the Rocky Mountains to Chinese buyers. Though at between $14 and $20 per canister, Canadian air seemingly costs a fraction of British breeze.
Now, personally, I think that selling air in small glass jars has a Theranos vibe to it in many ways. However, while I am very seriously doubting the viability of a product like this, I am not doubting the notion that there will be an attempt to turn our breathing into a commercial affair. Somehow, even the canned air companies got … wait for it, air time in the mainstream news (BBC, CNBC, etc.).
Plus, to be fair to the creative air merchants, the world has been not very sane for a while, and I would take canned air from the mountains (geoengineering be damned) over shady experimental therapies any time!
Smart Masks
In the meanwhile, the desire to stick smart face wearables on us is palpable. The World Economic Forum, for example, has been excited about a reusable mask that “can filter and kill off COVID-19.”
“This is a completely new mask concept in that it doesn’t primarily block the virus. It actually lets the virus go through the mask [ha, ha], but slows and inactivates it,” says Michael Strano, the Carbon P. Dubbs Professor of Chemical Engineering at MIT.
Btw before this whole thing unfolded, I joked that selling air was the next frontier, and soon we'd need wearable air purifiers to stay healthy (exactly how billionaires want us). Today, I believe that creating a habit for smart wearables is a big factor.https://t.co/DzjBUpLsjO
— Tessa Lena a.k.a. Tessa Fights Robots ❤️ (@TessaMakesLove) February 18, 2021
Tokenization of Nature and Transfer of Value
And, if you had any doubt about why I expressed a concern about air as an energy-making resource (as opposed to something we simply breathe), this is what we are up against.
To the crazy ones, nothing is sacred. Life is not sacred. The spirit is not sacred. Nature is not sacred. Our bodies are not sacred. To the crazy ones, the only thing that matters is their dead-eyed power. To the crazy ones, everything is a resource. They would gladly make energy for sale using GM bacteria, and they would also gladly make batteries out of human bangs.
And any time they can, they hurry to “tokenize” what doesn’t belong to them and “transfer” the profits into their pockets. What we are up against is the Midas touch.
Michael Sheren, #UNDP Senior Advisor, G20 Chair:
"… because the #Southern part of the world has value far greater than large elements of the Northern []. And we start thinking about & putting prices on water, on trees, on #biodiversity, we find, where does that sit?"#COP15 pic.twitter.com/rcQm3DrDOx
— Cory Morningstar (@elleprovocateur) December 15, 2022
To find more of Tessa Lena’s work, be sure to check out her bio, Tessa Fights Robots.
Bypass Big Tech Censors
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.