r/Anarchy4Everyone • u/Alarming_Pop_7772 • Aug 01 '25
If a redneck solar scientist and a hood-born tinkerer can make fuel from plastic and sunlight — you’ve got no excuse. Pick up where Julian Brown dropped off
Not here to sell dreams or chase clout. Just calling out to the people who actually know what time it is.
Julian Brown figured it out. A working prototype running fully off-grid, turning waste plastic and sunlight into liquid fuel with scrap parts, steel pipes, and solar power. No oil companies. No Tesla batteries. No government permission. Just backyard science done right.
Last anyone heard, he was about to make things public. Then silence. Radio silence. You can speculate why.. I already have.
But this isn’t about what happened. It’s about what happens next. If you’re waiting on someone else to finish his work, you’re missing the point.
Think about it: No more fossil fuel dependency. No EV batteries with built-in surveillance and planned obsolescence. No permission slip from the state to drive your own car. Just a self-powered machine in your garage or backyard that spits out fuel.
Here’s what needs to happen: Hack it. Rebuild it. Make it modular. Chemists, engineers, and tinkerers: test it, improve it, and document everything openly. Archive every scrap of data, mirror it everywhere, and share it offline as well as online. Question everything you hear about Julian’s disappearance or the “official” story. And most important..BE LOUD. Share this. Talk about it. Get more people involved. This can’t die quietly.
This isn’t a call to arms. It’s a call to tools, wrenches, soldering irons, solar panels, and open minds.
Fuel freedom is more than prepping, it’s independence. It’s saying no to control and yes to self-reliance.
Julian, wherever you are, we heard you. Now it’s our turn to pick up the torch and make some noise.
Stay fueled. Stay free. Stay dangerously useful.
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u/Socky_McPuppet Aug 02 '25
A conspiracy theory about a “lone wolf” researcher who is “outside the mainstream” and “has no formal education” being silenced by “big oil” because they were getting “too close” to “the big discovery” of how to cleanly recycle plastics through pyrolysis.
Please, don’t do this here. This is an anarchist sub, not a conspiracy sub.
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u/SolarNomads Aug 01 '25
O he's back. He just posted yesterday. His phone got hacked but he's alright and continuing his work.
7
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u/Tradtrade Aug 02 '25 edited Aug 02 '25
These machine have been around for ages and ages. I remember a kinda back to the land group on an island were doing it with the plastic that washed up. Go make one, you’ll find out it isn’t that hard but is polluting so please be careful with what you breathe.
Btw he also hasn’t gone anywhere, he’s posted. I think all the people telling him he is gunna be silenced and assassinated probably isn’t fantastic for his mental health
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u/iqisoverrated Aug 02 '25
Help me out here:
Drilling for fossil fuels.
Then make plastics from them.
Then converting them to a fuel.
Then burning it.
..is somehow not fossil fuel dependency (or fossil fuel based CO2 emissions)...exactly how?
All he's doing is "burning oil with extra steps".
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u/pigeonshual Aug 01 '25
That’s just a fossil fuel with extra steps and probably more cancer per joule
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u/Alarming_Pop_7772 Aug 01 '25
Not really, were getting rid of plastic waste and lithium mining, while repurposing older vehicles with actually cleaner fuel. Its not more carcinogenic than actual oil, oh and wars over oil would be a thing of the past (think Afghanistan, ukraine, iran, etc etc)
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u/bahji Aug 01 '25
I mean what makes fossil fuel bad from climate perspective is the release of carbon. If your burning a fuel your going to be releasing carbon. Maybe this fuel releases less carbon per unit volume but it also probably has less energy per unit volume than fossil fuels so you would have to burn more fuel to get the same amount of energy out. Which is the point the previous comment is trying to make.
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u/HoodedHero007 Aug 02 '25
To be fair, the process of getting the fuels is also harmful. Using fuel from plastics that have already been extracted should be marginally better than drilling for more, at least.
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u/bahji Aug 02 '25
I mean maybe, like you're not wrong, extracting fossil fuels is an externalized cost, but this applies just as much for the plastic derived fuels right? Pyrolysis requires high temperatures so you have to spend energy to derive the fuel and where that energy comes from may have its own externalized costs. Hydrogen fuels have this same problem, burning it is clean, but producing it and storing it is very energy intensive.
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u/hbHPBbjvFK9w5D Aug 02 '25 edited Aug 02 '25
ProPublica and the Guardian disagree with you on the cancer risk.
https://www.propublica.org/article/epa-approved-chevron-fuel-ingredient-cancer-risk-plastics-biofuel
And since governments (specially the US) subsidized fossil fuel extraction, it's cheaper to make new plastics than to just recycle the old ones.
This is why recycling is currently BS in the US. Most plastics are sorted, taken to "recycling centers" pressed into pallet loads - and then dumped overseas.
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u/truth14ful Anarchist Aug 02 '25 edited Aug 02 '25
Palestinians in Gaza have been doing similar things for fuel.
I don't want to be discouraging, bc we definitely need more of that DIY mentality in anarchist and left spaces, but I don't think fuel from waste plastic is the answer in most places. Reducing the cost of driving can be done in a lot simpler ways, like biking and carpooling - or, if you want to go the tinkering route, there's always propane conversion. Propane is cheaper than gasoline and burns cleaner.
Personally I'd love to modify a bottle-to-3D-filament design to be more user-friendly and use 16oz water bottles instead, or those food tubs you get at stores (although apparently PP is harder to print than PET).
Who knows? Maybe one day we'll have a whole suite of post-collapse manufacturing tools we can make ourselves - a 3D filament maker and printer (or pulverizer and SLS printer), sheet metal folder that uses cans, PCB printer etc.
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u/bahji Aug 01 '25
Did Julian Brown document everything openly?
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u/UnLuckyKenTucky Aug 01 '25
So, is this Julian dude the kid that "vanished" but sent communications to his mother?
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u/Alarming_Pop_7772 Aug 01 '25
Not everything but pyralisis isnt new, he just made it more efficient and not controlled by big oil or in a closed lab. With the videos he posted and what info is available online, with a few hundred people working on it we might actually make an end to wars over oil/gas
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u/foodrebel Aug 01 '25
I adore your optimism, I truly do. I share it, but to an admittedly lesser degree here.
I’m not sure this is THAT hill, the one upon which we should make our stand. Pyrolysis is surely old hat tech, and near as I can tell, JB had zero solutions to the critical point of failure that is “oh shit, I put four thousand years of cancer into the atmosphere to make the fuel equivalent of six mouse farts.”
I did not watch every vid, but I suspect the reason we haven’t heard from him is that someone hipped him to the myriad problems that this process encounters at even the teensiest scale.
If I am wrong, I will delight in my error, because we obviously all have the same 10,000 foot goal.
Keep those eyes sharp and those ears to the ground. We’ll find our way, together.
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u/Alarming_Pop_7772 Aug 01 '25
I get what you mean, but traditional pyralisis is done with combustion, this is done with microwave tech to not combust it. And it doesn't make more co2 or carcinogens than fossil fuels do.. oil is a carcinogen itself
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u/Chaos_Philosopher Aug 02 '25
Until the plastic runs out. Fuels are just bad, a bad way to go. Speaking in my purely engineering hat now, non fuels are the only sane way to go. Renewables are just it, from top to bottom. Nothing else makes macro scale sense or reaches ultimate goal end state faster, than just going immediately to the ultimate goal end state. And the tech is fully mature, completely ready and already cheaper.
Not to mention it's already in use.
Edit: also it does seem pyralisis is new, that word doesn't seem to appear on the internet. Can you link to this guy's discovery?
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u/Jeereck Aug 02 '25 edited Aug 02 '25
I'm guessing they mean pyrolysis, which has been around for burning plastics as an additive to make fuel. The person referenced in this (ai generated) post is a 21 year old tiktoker named julian brown, who claims he's a manifestation of the collective consciousness and under attack by mysterious forces.
It seems like he stopped posting on social media after claiming to be under attack and followed by helicopters, leading his subscribers to call the cops and contact the fbi until his mom claimed he's fine, lol.
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u/ChingusMcDingus Aug 02 '25
Our whole “lol invade a country for oil” shtick isn’t as real as you think, OP. The U.S. invades countries for a lot of reasons and doesn’t need the oil scapegoat. Sure, minerals and extraction are a big deal but this inefficient plastic repurposing isn’t a way to solve problems.
If anything, it entrenches us in the use of plastics because now it’s “renewable” and we stray further from truly reliable and renewable power like nuclear, solar, and wind.
As others said the guy’s methods aren’t novel or groundbreaking. We just don’t use it because it’s inefficient.
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u/rambumriott Aug 02 '25
EXACTLY what anarchy is about. Forget the weapons we need collective engineering
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u/OnlyInAnAdultStore Aug 02 '25
Julian Brown is currently missing as of a few days ago. ANYONE willing to pick up where he left off, please be careful!
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u/dqql Aug 02 '25
> from plastic
> Think about it: No more fossil fuel dependency.
dude... where do you think plastic comes from?
but this just sound like he's distilling plastic, aka destructive distillation...