Art Bell and Richard Perez of Home Power Magazine (since 1987) discuss how rising electricity costs, California’s 2001 blackouts (40–200 hours affecting millions), and $25B in PG&E subsidies expose grid inefficiencies—modern solar systems now cost $6K–$15K, cutting bills by 25–50% while reducing coal emissions. Perez criticizes the Bush administration’s energy plan as reckless, citing $3/gallon gas predictions and Europe’s $4/gallon prices, while Nancy from Toll House showcases her evaporative cooling "upducts," maintaining 75–78°F indoors despite 105°F heat. Callers share eerie phenomena—shadow figures, ghostly TV messages, and China’s dust storms—while Bell muses on demonic possession and the unsettling Hive Theory, suggesting humanity’s future may hinge on unseen forces reshaping society beyond mere energy crises. [Automatically generated summary]
From the high desert in the great American Southwest, I bid you all good evening or good morning wherever you may be across this great land of ours and beyond commercially from the island of Guam, the rock, out there across the Baitline, where it's a different day altogether.
It's kind of time travel, actually.
Eastward to the Caribbean and the U.S. Virgin Islands, south, into South America, north, all the way to the Pole and worldwide on the internet.
This is coast to coast to coast to coast A.M. Indeed, all around the world on the internet.
And I'd like to welcome yet another new affiliate, KVEC, in San Luis Obispo, California.
Simple Coast.
Nice place, beautiful place, KVEC.
They're 920 on the dial in San Luis Obispo, California.
Welcome.
Glad to have you on the network.
Let's wait and see what you're in for.
Listen, every night, like clockwork, prior to the beginning of the live show, which is right now, we prefeed to all the stations on the network three hours of the previous night's program.
So some of you may be already getting it.
Some of you may want it.
Stations, be aware.
We do prefeed three hours every night.
All right.
You know, I think the first thing I want to talk to you about, I got an email here from John Menendez, or Mendez, I guess it actually is.
Simply says, Art, it's getting hotter every year.
Today, May 30th, 2001, was the fourth hottest day in San Francisco history.
It's 101 degrees.
The three hotter temperatures were 102, 103, and 103.
Each of the three hotter days were either in late June or July.
But this is May, Art, and it's 101 degrees here in San Francisco.
The quickening is here, said John.
Yes, John, it's certainly underway.
Our weather is changing, and I think at this point, the argument about whether or not it's changing should just about be dropping.
And we should instead be preparing for what the change is going to bring.
In other words, I think that generally temperate climates are not going to be so temperate anymore.
And it's going to make a big difference in the short term.
Forget the long term.
That's probably fairly grim.
But the short term, the next few years, there's going to be, I think, a significant continued change in the weather.
This is not a prediction of change because the change is already occurring.
Earlier today on CNN, they were running a headline at the bottom of the screen that said, shrubs are beginning to grow in the tundra.
Things are growing in the tundra that never were growing before and shouldn't be growing at all.
This is a ground that stays frozen, or at least did stay frozen.
CNN also did a very interesting piece showing global pollution and what it's doing and how it's tracking around the globe.
I don't know how many of you got to see that, but it was a graphic, a computer graphic, not a prediction, but present a reality about how pollution is moving.
And it's pretty interesting.
Here in the West, recently, a couple of weeks ago, we had a dust storm from China.
That's right.
For about three or four days, everything got almost foggy.
Only it wasn't fog.
It was very fine dust particles from the desert in China.
And clearly, temperatures are warming.
So at this point, my advice to people who make policy would be to begin to make policy that would include the changes that are now occurring.
I don't really think we're going to do a whole lot about changing it, modifying it.
I think it's going to continue on its trek to getting warmer.
Now, this is going to have meaning for us.
And at some point, we've got to sit up and say, okay, so how do we play it?
If the heat is moving north, then that's going to move farming in some way.
And it's going to create ultimate difficulties for our farmers at present latitudes.
Looks like we might have to consider this stuff pretty soon.
Otherwise, let's see what's going on in the world.
McVeigh may indeed now file a request to block his execution for the Oklahoma City bombing.
The request would be based on about 4,000 documents the FBI turned over to McVeigh's attorneys earlier this month, just days before he had been scheduled to be executed for carrying out the blast that killed 168 people, injured hundreds more.
It's odd that he wanted to be executed, and then the FBI found these documents, and then all of a sudden he didn't want to be executed.
So I'm not sure what's going on there.
Our Treasury Secretary, now here's some good news for you.
Paul O'Neill said today he will seek to speed delivery of the checks, that's right, Up to $300 for individual taxpayers and a maximum of $600 for couples in the first such national tax refund in 25 years.
Refund, I said.
Most of the 95 million taxpayers eligible for rebate checks probably will see them in their mailboxes in September.
So they're actually going to give a little bit of your money back.
The Bush twins are in Dutch.
The 19-year-old twin daughters of the president apparently tried to buy illegally some alcohol at a restaurant.
Police responded to a 911 call last night from the manager of a restaurant in Austin who said miners were trying to buy alcohol.
So they're in Dutch, but you know, they're twins, they're 19, and most of the parents out there, I think, probably are not altogether too shocked at this.
Remember when you were 19?
Here's a little interesting tidbit.
Computer users across Europe should encrypt all their emails to avoid being spied on by a United Kingdom slash U.S. eavesdropping network.
Say Euro-MPs.
The tentacles of the Echelon network stretch so far that the UK's involvement could constitute a breach of human rights, say they.
The Euro-MPs have been studying echelon for about a year now.
After allegations that it has been used by the U.S. to commit industrial espionage against European firms, they conclude that echelon, whose existence is not officially acknowledged, kind of like our Area 51 here, is reading millions of emails and faxes, that's right, faxes sent every day by ordinary people.
That would be you and me.
But the committee says ordinary individuals and companies are now being spied on and they should routinely encode their emails and faxes if they want them to remain private.
Sending an unencrypted email, they say, is like posting a letter without an envelope.
The report says the UK could fall foul of the European Human Rights Commission, which guarantees privacy to all individuals.
So the non-existent Project Echelon is perhaps a human rights violation in Great Britain.
What about here?
What about the good old Fourth Amendment?
We do have in America these rights to privacy, don't we?
Do they not extend into the realm of electronic communication?
Emails?
Faxes?
Whatever method you might use to send a message to your friend or enemy or whatever.
Don't you have a right to privacy?
Now, on the one hand, you could say, and I do, you know, who cares?
I don't care who reads what I write.
I talk about on the air most of what I write or read for that matter.
So what's the big deal?
And of course, that's really true.
But the principle is, we have this Fourth Amendment, and it really should extend to our private communications.
So I wonder how you all feel about that.
Do you agree with me that, you know, on the one hand, who cares?
Because they're really, you know, I'm not doing anything wrong.
I do certainly discuss some very sensitive subjects on the phone with people.
But even at that, I don't really care.
I don't really say anything that I would have anybody that I would be concerned about anybody hearing.
On the other hand, you know, there's private family matters, and it's none of anybody's damn business.
And so there is this Fourth Amendment side that says, well, let's put it this way.
One might imagine this to be justifiable under the guise of national security.
But are they limiting what they're using the information for to national security?
We have no way of knowing because it's all secret and it's very real.
60 Minutes did quite a piece, you'll recall, on Echelon.
And it's got to get you thinking a little bit.
The government itself in the UK is saying, look, everything said ought to be encrypted.
Well, I would think that even Echelon, for example, if you were to get PGP, pretty good privacy, and you encrypted your email and you set it off, that would be more likely read, wouldn't it, by Echelon?
Do you think Echelon can break PGP?
I would suppose they can.
I know there are some claims that the earliest versions of what's called PGP, pretty good privacy, can't be broken, but everything that can be made, so far as I know, can be broken.
So I wouldn't think even that would guarantee it.
In fact, it would probably flag it.
You know, if they got something obviously encrypted, they're going to be all the more curious, right?
So, I don't know.
Your comments certainly would be welcome.
We're going to do open lines first hour and then next hour, particularly in view of how the weather is going and the power situation, the present power situation.
You might stick around, and if you do, you're going to save some money, a serious amount of money, perhaps, and you're going to learn some things you didn't know.
Because we've got Richard Perez, who is the publisher of Home Power Magazine, on tonight.
And we're going to talk about the power crunch, but probably for you more importantly, we're going to talk about how you can save a lot of money.
I'm serious about that.
A lot of money.
Power bills now are getting to be not such a joke.
Talked to a man recently who has a business in San Diego, and his monthly power bill has gone from about $20,000 to $40,000 to $60,000, and he thinks it's going to top $100,000 and potentially put him out of business.
Can you imagine that?
In San Diego?
Anyway, open lines.
Coming up shortly.
unidentified
Stay right there.
You're listening to Art Bell, Somewhere in Time.
Tonight featuring Coast to Coast AM from May 30th, 2001.
So you go to one of the search engines, enter that, and I'm sure you'll get all the world's information.
That's what's good about the Internet.
If you don't have the Internet, wonder why you ought to get it.
That's the answer.
Any subject you care to know about can be discerned, boom, like that.
You can go to one of the many fine search engines on the web, enter a single word or a phrase, and literally have in front of you all of the information possible on that subject, including the one you just mentioned.
So, if you've been iffy on the internet, you know, should I really get a computer and get involved?
Yes, you should.
It is a resource that in today's world you can't do without.
You really, I mean, you could do without it.
You could say the hell with it.
But if you really want good information, the internet is the only way.
If you're on that planet and you're looking at the face, it would be basically straight up and down with the orientation of the planet.
When the planet goes into, or the Mars rotates and has a shadow that crosses the planet, the shadow itself is going to divide that face in half twice a Martian day.
And so at certain times, from the vantage point of this planet, you're going to have half of that face covered and it's going to look like a lion or a feline face and give the impression that the entire face is a feline.
And the other Shadow crossing, it will cross and give the impression that it's a hominid face in the entirety.
Because you'll have one face in full sun and one face in full shadow.
In fact, if you were listening last night, the invasion's underway and has been for some time in modern times.
Not that long, said the good doctor.
Not that long, but in modern times, it's been underway for a while now.
Wildcard line, you're on the air.
Hello.
unidentified
Well, thanks, Art.
I'm calling near Sequoia tonight.
And you know who is over there too, son of a Bush himself.
Art, my question is, did you happen to have the opportunity, because you do have a busy schedule, to see the last of the seven-year Star Trek Voyager quite good.
Well, there are a lot of parallels, and a lot of what's going on right now in modern cutting-edge science and physics is beginning to approach what was originally on Star Trek.
So, yeah, Star Trek has been a pretty reliable predictor so far of the future.
I guess science fiction in general has.
unidentified
Is life imitating art or is it the other way around?
The high side of that you just named, 100 millivolts, would be what?
It would be a tenth of a volt.
Right?
A tenth of a volt.
So interesting but bonk.
Correct in what you suggested with regard to the experiment, wrong with any sort of application, even the smaller one that I mentioned regarding the house.
No, no, no.
First time caller line, your turn, you're on the air.
We don't have a lot of time, so just sort of lay it out.
unidentified
Okay, well, what happened was I woke up in this dream.
I don't know how else to explain it.
It was kind of a lucid dream.
And I was in this rickety old bed.
It was like a really worn-out mattress, and I was kind of sinking down in this bed.
And I looked over in the corner, and well, first I must mention that it was like, when I woke up in this dream, it was like it was just a fear permeating this room.
And I wasn't sure what I was even afraid of.
I just, I woke up in this dream, and it was like this fear.
Well, I've had a number of guests, sir, who have suggested that these creatures, whatever in God's name they are, or maybe we shouldn't associate his name with them, either way, they feed on fear.
unidentified
Yeah, I didn't exactly have a name for it until I heard that one guest on your show who said how they did feed on fear.
Okay, well, as this figure approached me, it got closer and closer, and this fear was just increasing exponentially.
I was never so scared in my life.
And this figure came over to the bed, and it got, like, I had this big quilt on top of me, and I was like pulling it up to my eyes, and I was just peering over the top of the covers.
And this figure actually laid down on top of me.
And I was looking right in its face, and there was no eyes, no features on the face, just darkness.
What do you think, since I've got you here and your guess is every bit as good as mine, what do you think is happening?
unidentified
Well, I've been listening to your show for a long time, but trying to call you, and I was just getting excited from this other person, but I hear everybody has their dreams.
Top of the evening, morning or afternoon, depending where you are in the world, I suppose, to you.
And no matter where you are in the world, it doesn't matter.
I've got a bulletin For you.
Our weather is changing.
Not, I predict our weather is going to change.
Our weather is changing.
And I could sit and cite evidence all night long, the latest of it simply being the 101-degree temperature in San Francisco today.
Never happened, not all our record-keeping before, not in May.
We've got shrubs growing in the tundra, according to CNN's headline news today.
They did a pollution track that showed pollution going around the world in vans.
And, you know, I don't think there's any question, as I said last hour anymore, about whether the weather is changing, but rather how we begin to adjust to it, because I don't think we're going to be able to stop it.
Whether you imagine it to be cyclical or with the hand of man, with the aid of the hand of man, no matter how you imagine it, I think the predictions of weather change and the beginning of serious weather change are no longer an argument.
I think it's here.
It's changing.
We are the frogs.
We are getting warmer.
The pot is getting warmer.
There are going to be a lot of things that are going to result from this, and that's going to be stronger storms, more severe storms, and areas that were temperate becoming not quite so temperate anymore.
It's going to change the farming.
It's going to change the disease, emerging diseases will begin to, as they are doing, emerge.
And we're entering a sort of a different time.
Another thing that we're looking at that's very serious for all of us is the power.
Coming up in a moment, I've got Richard Perez.
Richard Perez is the editor-in-chief and publisher of Home Power Magazine.
And there are two reasons that you should stay tuned.
Reason number one is kind of worldly and esoteric.
Oh, we're screwing up the planet.
There's no doubt about it.
We are.
And he can tell you how to do less of that and begin to do something individually because a collective thing is going to only happen, you know, beginning with the grassroots with all of us.
The best reason for you to stay tuned is to save money.
Really?
Serious amount of money.
Every month.
If you begin doing things that will conserve power, if you begin to tap into some alternative power yourself, forget the damn government.
They're not going to do anything of substance about it because they're worried about the economy and the next election.
So forget them.
It's got to happen at our level.
Now, you say, well, I can't do very much.
Yes, actually, you can.
And we're going to tell you exactly what you can do tonight.
So stand by for that coming up immediately.
unidentified
Holy shit.
Holy shit.
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And so we went through with these more modern technologies and reduced the cost of operating that generator to less than 10% of what they were spending.
I see the lights going out routinely in widespread areas.
Depending on who you listen to, somewhere between 40 and 200 hours of blackouts in California.
And these are going to be affecting anywhere from a quarter of a million people to 4 million people, depending on which expert you happen to listen to.
And the interesting thing about this is that it's really kind of a death spiral, if you will.
The increased temperatures cause us to use more electricity.
And the number one producer of carbon dioxide, the major greenhouse gas, is, guess what, coal-fired and natural gas-fired power plants.
So the more electricity we consume, because the hotter it gets, the worse the problem becomes, so the more electricity we consume.
The problem is that appealing to people on that basis probably doesn't work.
You know, it's the big picture and they go, sort of.
You know, I mean, my lights are on.
I'm okay.
But now that the power bills are going through the roof, it's like you've got their attention.
So when you were publishing in November of 87, I'm sure it was to the fringe.
And now that you're publishing in 2001, I think you probably have everybody's attention.
They've looked at their power bill lately and they've said, hey, and you know, there's some people down in Southern California that have businesses that are going to go out of business.
I told the story of a guy who had a $20,000 power bill last year.
Then it went to $40,000, $60,000, $80,000.
He thinks it's going to top $100,000 shortly, and he'll be out of business.
And it'll produce 100 watts of DC power, 12 volt Power, just like in your car.
And it'll do it as long as the sun is shining on it.
And it'll do that for, well, they're warrantied for 25 years.
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, who torture tests and accelerated life cycle tests these modules, says that they'll be making probably 75% of their energy 50 to 60 years from now and quite possibly half of that energy 100 years from now.
But they come with a 25-year warranty, and that's really the big news, isn't that the photovoltaics have gotten substantially more powerful or substantially cheaper?
They're still pretty expensive items, but that they are lasting an incredibly long time.
I mean, this is an energy source that your kids are going to fight over in your will.
Well, up until lately, there has been no openness to conserve or even to be efficient.
I mean, you have to take a look at a very, very big picture here, and that's America's utility structure.
These power plants are enormous devices watched over by crews of technicians and lots of money and capital invested in here.
And when they spin up, they're very similar to that home generator we were talking about earlier.
When they spin up, they want to use it all.
And so there has been no impetus to save because when we spun them up, we had enough.
And the utilities are definitely into selling all they possibly can.
And the government is financially supporting them, propping them up, particularly in the case of nukes.
And so what we have here is sort of a mild loose collusion to use all we possibly can generate.
And interest in this has only been sparked lately when we've been using more than we can possibly generate.
And compact fluorescents are available from a number of utilities now.
Pacific Gas and Electric is one.
Pacific Power, area of Oregon is another.
With your electric bill, they'll send you a little card to fill out, and they will sell you compact fluorescents at ridiculously cheap prices.
Why?
Because they don't want the lights to go out.
And I would disagree with you that it's the big utility bills that are causing people to become interested in something else, you know, whether it's renewable energy, solar energy.
That was Art Bell hosting Coast to Coast AM on this, somewhere in time.
What you have'cause there's magic in my eyes I can see for miles and miles and miles and miles and miles Oh yeah!
If you think that I don't know about the little tricks you play I never see you and deliberately put me in my way Well here's a poke at you, you're gon'What happened?
When you find a new that you love the future behind You gotta do another don't you care of Then you gotta be aware of What happened?
One day you look like me We turn around You find the world It's coming down It happened to me And it can happen to you I was sure I felt the joy I was a lot of joy You run around the world It's happening to me
Somewhere in time with Art Bell continues courtesy of Premier Networks.
The Bush administration has said the blackouts will likely roll across the country all the way to New York, all the way to the northeast part of the country.
Yeah, and what you said about the necessity of air conditioning in hot climates, I recently spoke to a 78-year-old lady outside of San Diego who was experiencing blackouts.
And what she wanted was very simple, and she couldn't get it.
She wanted a fan that ran on some flashlight batteries and wasn't able to find it.
We were able to hook her up with a 12-volt RV fan and a little rechargeable battery, and that was fine.
We sort of semi-solved her problem.
But, you know, electricity, 100 years ago, it didn't exist.
Now it's an essential element.
We can't store our food, we can't cook our food, we can't communicate, we can't light our house, and in many, many cases, we can't do any work.
I'm in a very rural area, and we used to have power failures here that would last two or three hours.
And you sit around in this empty tomb of a place.
It's really disconcerting.
And most modern Americans aren't used to their power just going out.
They're just not used to it.
And it really is a shocker when it happens.
Anyway, the secondary reason certainly is bills.
I mean, you know, power bills are getting pretty outrageous in California now and rolling across the U.S. as well.
Heating bills, all the rest of it.
So aside from these bulbs, which we all know about, which could do so much, what other little things could people do around their homes to cut down a little without pain?
Well, in off-grid homes, it's done a whole lot less.
Absolutely.
But that's the obvious.
A less obvious thing is if your refrigerator is more than five years old, consider replacing it.
The federal government has tightened up considerably on standards for refrigerators, and manufacturers are finally hearing the word that we want more efficient refrigeration.
Well, you can get a, if you follow the ENERGY STAR guidelines, you can get a 19-cubic foot refrigerator freezer that will consume about 1.3 to 1.4 kilowatt hours of electricity a day.
And this is approximately a third of the units made five to six years ago were consumed.
Extremely, because when you consider that that refrigerator is plugged into the grid 24 hours a day or plugged into your solar electric system 24 hours a day.
Better insulation, more efficient motors, more efficient design.
I mean, they've gone back to the design of the 1932 Kelvinator.
Let's put the evaporator on the top of the refrigerator so that the waste heat, which is dissipated as hot air, rises away from the refrigerator rather than underneath or in the back.
You know, people are watching them go up and they're going up substantially, but what most folks are not aware of is that what they're seeing on their electric bill is only about half the cost of that electricity.
A lot of the people listening to me right now, because we're being heard across the entire nation and well beyond, are saying, ah, well, yeah, that's California.
And they did, you know, I've heard they did something wrong with deregulation.
And so there's not really going to be a parasquez everywhere.
You put a collector up on the roof and it absorbs the sun's thermal energy and transfers it into the water.
And this water is heated and stored in a tank downstairs there in the service area or wherever your hot water is.
There are a number of different systems.
The most common is a batch heater.
And this is for locations like Florida or Southern California where it doesn't freeze.
And there we actually pump the water up to the roof into a tank that's in an insulated enclosure with glass in the front and we warm up the whole tank.
And the area where I lived in Oregon is not possible because we get numerous hard freezes in the winter.
So what we do is we have a flat plate collector.
It's about 4 by 10 feet on the roof.
It's about 4.5, 5 inches thick.
And we have a glycol and this collector, what is it?
Oh, it's made out of aluminum with tubing inside it and a glass face on the front.
And it's painted black inside to absorb more thermal energy.
In the solar world, we have two distinct groups, the solar electric people and the solar thermal people.
And the solar thermal people not only handle hot water, but they'll also heat your home.
These same collectors can be used to hydronically heat floors or radiators so that a home can back off on whatever the fossil fuel or electric heat source that it's using and use more sun.
And then you can go one step further and have a passive solar home, which is generally super insulated with properly placed windows and whatnot.
Our home on Agate Flat, we normally get wintertime temperatures many, many nights below zero, sometimes as low as minus 10 Fahrenheit.
And we only have a wood stove for backup, and we only burn it during the winter every two or three days for about four to six hours.
Richard Perez, who is editor-in-chief and publisher of Home Power Magazine, is here, and we're talking about real ways that you can save energy and money.
And if we didn't do a program like this with the environment around us today, we would be only part of the problem as far as I'm concerned, not part of the solution.
unidentified
if you want to be part of the solution and you want to save money then you will keep listening the the Coast to Coast AM sure sounds great in the middle of the night.
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Now, we take you back to the past on Art Bell Somewhere in Time.
Art Bell Once again, the guy who was doing it long before it became popular or, I might add, profitable to do what you can do today with regard to Home Power.
The editor, in fact, in chief and publisher of Home Power Magazine is here, Richard Perez.
Richard, welcome back.
Thank you, Art.
I want to give your magazine a really good plug.
Home Power Magazine obviously covers in its pages, what, every month, right?
In terms of home power people, these are people who are making most or all of their electricity using renewables, not just solar, but also wind and micro-hydro.
We have names and addresses for 51,000 of them inside USA.
And I estimate that there are approximately 180,000 independent systems already in the States.
Now, I've heard that solar is not yet, what's the right word, financially feasible if you're looking for immediate returns, but that wind power actually comes in at about 3 cents a kilowatt or something crazy like that per kilowatt hour or something like that.
Have you heard that, that wind is actually more efficient?
The 3 cents a kilowatt hour figure that you're quoting is in industrial strength systems like wind farms for utilities.
But in a home-sized system, it'll be between $0.7 and $0.15 a kilowatt hour, which makes it currently competitive with sticker price on electric power in many states and many areas.
And the solar is expensive, but when you asked me in the previous hour, how much is it going to cost to do the average American home?
And I told you about as much as buying a luxury Mercedes.
That's because we're talking average home.
Now, if we start in with an efficient refrigeration, the compact fluorescence, the solar hot water, if we eliminate things that we call phantom loads, these are appliances that you think are off but really aren't off.
If we eliminate those things, then the price on a solar system comes down to between $6,000 and $15,000 for an average home.
Yeah, the rule of thumb is every buck that you spend on an efficient appliance in a renewable energy system will save you $3 on system components.
So we start and we give the house an efficiency job, and then that $40,000 to $50,000 bill for a solar electric system will drop to $15,000, and we've seen them go in as low as $6,000.
We have the appropriate air conditioning, but the air conditioning here is measured in tons, and you better have, if you live where I live and want to be comfortable, about five tons of it.
It's just a matter of how much of it you want to put in.
And that's pretty much limited by how much you need and how big is your pocketbook.
But an efficient home, $6,000 to $15,000, less than $10,000 for a wind system.
If you're fortunate enough to have a creek in your backyard with some falls, some drop to it, you can get off for as little as $4,000 or $5,000 for a micro-hydro system.
But most folks don't have that.
Solar is the dominant renewable energy source for folks making their own electricity because the sun is freely and democratically delivered to us all daily.
They think because you have made a comment like you just made that half of them will throw out half of what you said or all of what you said and get mad and stomp on the radio and write a threatening email or whatever because they're knee-jerk political reactives.
And they think that means that you hate George Bush.
As a matter of fact, I believe the Bush administration, correct me if I'm wrong, did cut the research money for alternative energy in half or something like that.
I don't know if I would have used exactly the words.
Well, actually, I did use a stupid word, I guess, the S-word.
When I was commenting on the energy policy.
However, there's one aspect of it that I sort of agree with, and that is that in the short term, because the kind of changes you and I know have to be made, aren't being made, in the short term, if we don't get more coal and oil, if we don't go to Anwar, then really awful things are going to happen to us and to our economy in the short term.
So what I wanted to see was, I sort of thought, well, they've got to go get it because we really need it in the short term.
But at the same time, they should be coupling that with almost a Manhattan-type project to change this country's energy habits and requirements very quickly, or else the future is very dim indeed.
I guess I said that if the government isn't going to do it, and it doesn't sound to me like they are, then we have to do it.
And if we don't do it, it simply isn't going to get done.
And the net result is going to be pretty awful.
It's going to be really awful for the economy and for the people.
So that's how important all of this is.
But I don't know how we drill it in because people tend to sort of, I don't know, they trust the fact the lights are on now, and they trust somehow the government will take care of it.
You know, I don't see folks getting a raise to pay their electric bills.
So there's got to be an end to it somewhere.
And when you can't pay the electric bill, well, the lights will definitely go out.
And even if you can pay the electric bill.
And I've been talking to folks in California who are, by and large, pretty hip to conserving energy and compact fluorescence, efficient refrigeration, all that stuff.
And they're hopping mad because they're getting blacked out with their neighbors who are energy pigs.
You see, so it's very, this blackout thing is very non-discriminating.
The utility doesn't care if you're running an efficient scene or not.
Well, wasn't there some sort of legislation that would lay even a heavier bill percentage-wise, per kilowatt hour or whatever, on what they deemed to be an energy pig?
The only problem I had with it, in California, there is.
There's going to be a tiered electric rate.
The more you use, the more expensive it gets.
The only problem I had with it was it went neighborhood by neighborhood.
So if you're living in the barrio, you have one standard.
If you're living in Beverly Hills and the houses around you are, by and large, all energy pigs, then the tiering is keyed to the neighborhood, if you will, which I thought was entirely undemocratic.
And the thing that I like about this system is that when you've got it done, you're halfway there to being energy independent.
All you have to add is some solar on the roof.
And then, all of a sudden, you don't need the utility anymore.
Or an even better scenario for the grid is while you're at work during the day and that solar system is pumping out energy, if your batteries are full, your excess energy goes onto the grid and you sell it to the utility.
And California is one of the states with a net metering law that mandates that the utility has to buy it back from you.
And also, the California Energy Commission and the PUCs there have ruled that if you have net metering, you can also have time-of-use metering, which means that you're paying very high prices on peak during the day, mostly in the afternoon, and very low prices in the middle of the night.
And when we do, we'll take some calls from all of you out there.
Richard Perez, editor-in-chief and publisher of Home Power Magazine, is our guest.
If you have questions, they're up next.
unidentified
The trip back in time continues with Art Bell hosting Coast to Coast AM.
More somewhere in time coming up.
Come walk me I'm gonna die A day away Come walk me Jenny was me.
She don't smile for the people that you need on trouble and drive.
I don't know the way you're looking at life I don't know the way you're looking at life I used to feel a roller dungeon.
If the calls are right, I need to find an answer on the road.
I used to feel heart beating for someone.
Cause the time to change.
So there's a stable I work ever done.
Cause I'm feeling free to live still and still need a freedom From the day that I was born away from time Then I got your feeling took me knee high to a man Give me peace all night but
daddy never has I'm feeling free to shine on me I love you, shine a light Through the eyes of the one left behind Premier News.
Networks presents Art Bell, Somewhere in Time.
Tonight featuring Coast to Coast AM from May 30th, 2001.
Boy, I'll tell you, Art, I'm sure glad you're apostolizing the alternative powers.
And Richard, I'm glad that you also are doing this.
I've been kind of an alternative person for quite some time.
I've been a denizen of the deep, living on boats of one kind or another for the past 20 plus years.
I'm currently living in Hawaii, and I have a 47-foot sailboat, which is solar-powered.
You look in around the harbor, and I see that probably more than half the boats have either wind generation or solar power, or a combination of both.
Now, this is a tropical climate, so you have to think in terms of air conditioning and whatnot.
I have gone through a lot of effort to take apart panels on my boat and insulate everywhere I could and trying to make sure that the heat was kept out from inside the boat.
I've gotten to the point where I'm not even using air conditioning at all in the boat.
And that's just from making a major effort to insulate very thoroughly.
Now, I think that my impression is that a lot of people live in houses that are way too big.
We seem to have a status symbol.
The bigger the house, the more powerful the person, or the more prominent the person.
And I think people need to scale down the size of their houses and think in terms of if they're going to build a new house, make it more user-friendly as far as the amount of square footage they're actually going to use.
No extra rooms, no unnecessary space that you have to heat up or cool off.
There's no point in having space that's not necessary and unused.
But I think maybe key to that is exactly what you've been doing to your boat.
And I salute you.
That's off-grid living for sure.
Is insulation.
You know, if you go the code one better, and the code says R19 in most locations, if you go the code better and go like R30, R60 in the ceilings, then the heating and cooling bills drop radically.
If you spend the extra money for the dual-pane windows that are, you know, argon-filled with a heat mirror coating, then you'll save even more money.
So I'm not too much sure that it's the size of the homes that's so much the culprit as the fact that they are poorly built.
They are built with a low price tag in mind and spending an additional 4, 5% on the home.
So from their point of view, as home builders, the extra insulation only makes the home, from their point of view, less attractive to the people because it costs more.
If they spend a lot of money on insulation, the home costs more and they're not competitive.
I'm not sure whether what I've heard about this is really true or not, but here it is.
Again, I live in the desert where it gets just irrepressibly hot, and you must have air conditioning.
However, I have heard that down in the ground, not very far, maybe only three feet into the ground, year-round, no matter what, it maintains a constant temperature of, I've heard, something like 57 degrees.
Or maybe it's more than that.
I don't know, something like that.
How far down in the ground do you have to go before you reach a stable year-round temperature?
It is a bit more expensive than installing central air.
You know, I don't have the exact figures.
You have to get into the ground, and you can do this in one of two ways.
You can either go out to the yard and dig some six-foot deep trenches, put a snail of trenches out in the yard and lay the heat exchanger in there, or you can drill vertically down about 40 or 50 feet, like you would drill a well, and install this heat exchanger vertically.
And this is the more common way of doing it now, the more high-tech way of doing it, also less expensive and less disruptive.
And I never thought I'd be saying This, but I'm very happy to be within the city of Los Angeles because, as your guests may know, we are not subject at this time to any blackouts or major increases.
So, my question is, and I live in a townhouse, I can't very well put up a solar panel or anything.
So, other than minor cost savings, what would be the main benefit for someone like me of trying to get off the grid?
You know, I'm amazed that a lot of homeowners associations and subdivisions and townhouses and whatnot have all these prohibitions against putting things like solar on your roof.
Right.
My mother-in-law moved into a subdivision recently, and they wouldn't even let her put up a clothesline.
No, paying attention to your appliances and how you use electricity can easily cut your power bill by 25 to 50 percent.
unidentified
Well, that's not too bad.
My other concern is I'm very scared of our governor saying that, you know, the city of Los Angeles with its 3 million people are going away scot-free right now, and I'm afraid that he just may say, you know what, the state's just going to take over your utility and give it to the rest of the grid.
So I hope that doesn't happen, but that's a fear of mine, too.
Now, you just said 25, the appliance changes that we talked about tonight, and I suppose more, could save him 25 to 50 percent of his present electric bill.
Okay, take his situation, probably the worst, in a townhouse, in a very controlled area, but he changes all his appliances, does everything within his townhouse he can, and a quarter to a half of his total bill is going to be gone.
So that means that everybody from the townhouse to the individual home to the business, and I suppose, you know, somebody points out as writing to me that, you know, you look at a downtown area at night, you know, when the businesses are closed and they're lit up like Christmas trees.
And some people are beginning to ask, you know, in the areas where you're having blackouts, the people are asking tough questions like, why in the hell is that going on?
Then we know homeowners have to pay for it when our power goes out.
So then you could take that electricity at an off-peak time, store it in batteries, as we discussed earlier, and chop your electric bill with an inverter and so forth.
I mean, it's been laid out for you how you can cut your bill, even in a townhouse, by a quarter to a half, the bill you get every month.
Or, if you're a home, how you can get completely independent of the power company.
And as I said earlier, I know the feeling.
It's a feeling, it's just like when you rip up your mortgage, when you put a match to your mortgage, and it's the end, you've made the last payment to the bank, anyway.
It's freedom.
From the high desert, this is Coast to Coast AM.
unidentified
This is Premiere Networks.
That was Art Bell hosting Coast to Coast AM on this Somewhere in Time.
Dr. Dean Adele Dr.
Dean Adele Dr. Dean Adele Dr. Dean Adele Dr. Dean Adele Dr.
Dean Adele I can get it calling in the ear of the night.
Oh, Lord.
The night wind was over my life.
Oh, Lord.
Can you hear it calling in the ear of the night?
Oh Lord, oh Lord.
Oh Lord, oh Lord.
Well, if you told me you were coming, I would end the hand.
Somewhere in time with Art Bell continues courtesy of Premier Networks.
One is George Bush, as a president, I had a lot of reservations about.
He has pleasantly surprised me so far.
George Bush has actually pleasantly surprised me.
He's giving a lot of money back to the American people.
That's a nice surprise.
Not seeing any stupid gun legislation for a while is going to be a nice surprise.
And so in a lot of ways, actually, I think, so far, pretty good for President Bush, except in one area.
And that's energy.
In that area, he is making a tragic mistake.
And so collectively, we are making, in my opinion, a tragic mistake.
I just want to straighten that out for those of you who are politically, extremely reactive.
That really is my current state of thinking.
Not a bad president in a lot of respects, but boy, I'll tell you, not in the energy arena.
And so we better get going.
And that's why I had Richard Perez on tonight.
And that's why you need to really think seriously about what he just said.
Not just for our collective sakes, but for your own pocketbook too.
Now, there are a couple of stories that I am following as hard as I can.
I got a fax from a man who lives in Orlando, Florida.
And he says, Art, with regard to the underwater city off western Cuba, I have a Cuban friend here in Orlando.
And this Cuban friend told him that he heard on news from Cuba, actually Monday, on Spanish radio, an actual Cuban station, that Fidel Castro, you're going to find this interesting, the Cuban president is asking international help with money and technical help for deep-sea explorations off western Cuba.
But the news provided no details, nothing concerning the underwater city that we had the Reuters story about.
And still, Ms. Zelitsky is out at sea and we can't talk to her about what she says she found.
She is a very high-profile person in doing what she's done.
She unearthed, for example, the USS Maine.
She's made quite a name for herself, but she's off at sea right now, so we can't talk to her about the story that implies Atlantis may lie off the western shores of Cuba, an unspecified distance.
But isn't this interesting that Fidel Castro has requested help, both money and technical help, for some sort of project off the western edge of Cuba?
I thought I would pass that on to you.
We're trying as hard as we can to follow this for you because it's obviously a very, very hot story.
It's just that right now all leads to this story are cold.
In other words, they're solid.
We confirmed with National Geographic that yes, they're considering a project.
Had the interview on the air, but after that, the leads go cold.
So with regard to what's off the western side of Cuba, folks, everybody's shutting their mouth right now.
But I'm telling you, there is a gigantic story waiting off the coast of Cuba.
The new batteries, to answer your question, are no hassle at all.
What I have here are 20-year sealed gel cell batteries.
It is not the cheapest way to go by a long shot.
I mean, you can get lead-acid batteries and deal with the fume problem and get it, you know, make sure you've got a clean operation, and it's really cheap.
But I went for these really incredibly expensive sealed gel cell batteries.
And what I've been worried about, and what my friends tell me who are off the grid, that I need to have a bank of batteries to run the pump, and they said that I couldn't go directly, like, let's say from the panels through the inverter.
The efficient way to do it is to store the excess energy you use, as was carefully explained to you over the last couple of hours, wherever it comes from.
But to burn coal and oil to generate power is ultimately harmful to the ecology.
It's harmful to our environment.
And, you know, that's like a whole separate argument.
But in order to get you interested in beginning to change something, I don't even think we need to talk about the environment.
It's something that so serious it's not even funny, but it's not going to get people's attention.
It's not going to get them to change.
I just know it.
I know how people are.
Saving half on your power bill, that will get you to change.
For that, you will change.
And I understand that.
I'm not in any way criticizing you because I understand how people are.
So rather than approach it from an ecological point of view, although this caller is certainly absolutely correct, I don't think that's the way to sell people on beginning to really save and getting off the grid and all the rest of it.
Yeah, you know, one other quick comment on a slightly different subject with the power stuff.
I hear a lot of complaints about Bush cutting the research funding, but what I don't hear on the other side of it, and I'd really like to hear the facts, I notice in the stock market that certain companies that are related to fuel cells and solar power and wind power, their stock prices doubled in April.
So to me, if you want to see more research money go into it, maybe we should go buy some stock in those companies.
I wonder if this isn't a project that...
Well, yeah, some of that's already passed, but if things keep going the way they are, I certainly don't have a crystal ball on stock prices.
It just seems to me that any technology or many technologies that are developed in universities or the military eventually get passed off into commercial hands.
And at that point, you could look at a lot of examples of that.
And at that point, there's really not a need for us to use our tax dollars to fund the research.
And your guest said that we pretty much have solar panels figured out.
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Looking for the truth?
You'll find it on Coast to Coast AM.
Let's talk a little bit about the shadow government.
Do you believe it's there?
Yeah, we've heard that term, you know, for so many years, and I thought it was this group in the Netherlands that sit behind smoked windows and make decisions like, you know, giant players of chess.
But it isn't.
We don't have the government anymore.
What we have is a loose coalition of bureaucracies.
But we have no representation in that government.
So when I look at the Constitution, I see it as a really inspired and eternal document that has been sidestepped in almost every legal way possible.
So the process itself has been intentionally manipulated to facilitate a certain style of government.
And it's taken a while to set up.
But I think it's set up now and it's working just the way they like it.
We need a systemic change in order to let the Republic be representative of the people again.
You're listening to Art Bell, Somewhere in Time.
Tonight featuring Coast to Coast AM from May 30th, 2001.
One of the scariest ghost photos I ever saw, because I came upon it all at once, spontaneously on the air.
I was going through ghost photos.
We were doing a ghost show one night, and I was going through the recently submitted ghost photos, and I suddenly came upon this television set with a hand coming out of it.
Oh my God, look at that.
Well, somebody has taken that photo and made a front-page photo out of it.
Now, every time you go to my website, you're going to get a different front-page photo.
So don't go rushing up there right now because you probably won't see it.
They're in rotation.
But this one took that ghost photo and then wrote on the television, Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell, and a little caption coming out of the TV along with a hand.
It says, want to take a ride?
It's some of the really good art that has been provided to the website.
And all the art you see up there, all those front page photos, are submitted by all of you.
None of them are done by professional artists unless it's for the love of doing it, because they send them to us in email.
Well, you know, interestingly, at the time that you called, or shortly after the time you called, we began to have this weird, incredible dust storm from China that was carried over courtesy of the jet stream.
Well, I heard him on a talk show, and he was saying something about he's tested this, and it's a biological spray that they're using, and seven out of nine tests that he's ran on it, he's seen red blood cells in it and bury them.
And I worked with Dr. Malcolm Lillywhite up in Colorado back in 73 on various alternate energy problems up there, you know, when we were first getting started in all of this.
Yes.
And my biggest question was, did he see any future in balancing nuclear energy as a baseload against the power of the power?
Yes, well, maybe you could go back and just, I don't know, somehow suggest to whoever it is that picked out your name that they should go have a sandwich and think about it some more.
unidentified
That's good.
That's great.
Hey, let me ask you a question.
I was listening to your show.
Oh, gosh, I think it was a week or two ago.
You had that guy on that was playing the tapes of the people that were supposedly possessed.
Oh, yes.
Boy, you know what was really weird about that?
The next day is I went to a friend of mine's house and they were watching The Exorcist, which I thought was a really strange coincidence.
Well, what he said about refrigerators was that they sell ones now for about the regular price that use one-third the energy of refrigerators that are like five years old.
I mean, obviously, listen, obviously, keeping your coils clean or doing anything that allows whatever it is you have to run a little more efficiently is going to save you some money.
But what I just told you is so significant.
I mean, it's two-thirds of the total cost of running that fridge, which really means if it's five years old, you really ought to go buy a new one.
For example, yes, you could have collection in space and then you could have a microwave beam that would bring the power to Earth.
And it is perhaps a viable idea.
I read a book called Sunstroke, which talked about exactly that technology getting out of hand, and the microwave beam, and the safeties all going wrong, and then the microwave beam beginning to wander across the land, turning people into crispy critters, and as it went.
So I've always wondered about that, every time we've talked about that.
The other thing they're talking about that I am really interested in, you're not going to believe this, but there is a proposal that NASA is considering for brace yourself now.
Brace yourself.
An elevator into a geosynchronous orbit.
I'm serious.
An elevator, like the one you go into in a building and press a button.
Literally, an elevator.
They say it actually would be technically feasible and possible to build an elevator from Earth to geosynchronous orbit 22,000 plus miles up.
Or maybe even into low Earth orbit.
Maybe that was it.
I don't see how that would be possible.
The satellite would, it seems to me, have to be stationary with respect to Earth, but maybe that's inaccurate.
At any rate, there is some kind of proposal to have an elevator to orbit.
Well, it was the conclusion of my guest, after 35 years of study of abductions, that we are in the middle of an invasion, that this invasion is taking place right in front of our eyes,
that all of these abductions, and there are tens Of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands or more, are with a purpose.
And the purpose ultimately is that we all, meaning us and them, live together happily ever after.
That we will be happy.
But then you begin asking about the culture of this, of them.
And the answer is it's a hive mentality.
And the happiness that they exclaim we will experience will be as members of a hive.
You know, after listening to your last two calls, sir, I agree with you, and you should continue to take everything that you say and think with a grain of salt, if not a large boulder.
Yes, I know you only as a very popular tower, the Roan 25 and the Roan.
unidentified
Anyway.
I wanted to tell you about probably the most incredible hidden discovery.
About 25 years ago, in the Mother Earth News, there was in the magazine.
There was this guy in New Mexico who used University of New Mexico's computer to, in an attempt to build a cheaper house that could be manufactured faster and be cheaper overall to sell.
Well, the computer told him exactly what to do, and he built one.
But he didn't have the money to put in the fancy heating and cooling system, which in that part of New Mexico, it's like 130 degrees in the summer and a minus 10 in the winter.
But they did have the sensors in the house for the temperatures.