Mark McLaughlin joins Art Bell to dissect alternative energy’s potential, citing U.S. pollution costs of $50B–$100B annually and GM’s flawed hydrogen vehicle announcement relying on fossil-fueled production. He warns of oil depletion—extraction efficiency dropped from 50:1 in the 1950s to 4:1 today—predicting a peak within 20 years, while Bell questions military motives in securing Middle Eastern oil like Iraq’s reserves. McLaughlin debunks "free energy" claims, including Dr. Randall Mills’ hydrogen research, attributing setbacks to flawed science, not conspiracies. Despite wind’s near-nickel-per-MWh cost and solar’s promise, Bell highlights economic barriers, like utilities refusing wholesale payments for excess power, while callers propose fringe solutions—hemp biomass, compressed air cars, and saltwater power—all stymied by fossil fuel dependence or feasibility gaps. Ultimately, the episode underscores that no single fix will replace oil, demanding efficiency, conservation, and costly, gradual shifts toward sustainable energy. [Automatically generated summary]
The British did, but if they're doing it, we're doing it.
So I wonder how much money it's going to cost us to rebuild Afghanistan.
Now, it was in pretty bad shape before we began, which should be taken into account.
I mean, when I first saw shots of Afghanistan, the ones that they showed, you remember, before the bombing began, it looked like the bombing had already happened.
So are we supposed to put it back into the state that it was prior to our arrival?
Or are we supposed to restore it totally so they have nice shiny cities?
I'm not clear.
Military officials said today that U.S. forces in Afghanistan are focusing now much more on attacking all remaining Taliban and al-Qaeda members and less on the hunt for Osama bin Laden and other individuals.
Well, let's think about what that one means.
We're back to attacking al-Qaeda and we're not looking for Osama.
That means, translation, we can't find Osama, so here's what we're doing.
That's basically it, and they can't find him yet.
So I guess, you know, you've got to say what you're doing.
And if you're sort of not finding him, then you shouldn't be looking for him.
And if you're not looking for him, you should be doing something.
So they're back to bombing.
And I want to say that, well, let me finish up what news there is.
The Red Cross is saying that a lot of people who donated blood after September 11th are reneging on their deal.
And they're not coughing up the promised blood.
So blood banks are in trouble, which seems incredible to me because when the September 11th thing occurred, there were, I thought, giving immediately, just hundreds and thousands of people, just giving blood immediately.
So you would think they would have it, but no, I guess they just collected.
They probably had so many they had to just collect chits.
You know, blood chits.
And when the chit got turned in, why there was, you know, no blood, no blood tonight.
And then there's this teenager who crashed his airplane into the building.
A skyscraper at Tampa.
You know, it's just you shake your head.
Here's a story about he was remembered as a patriot.
He used to sing patriotic songs.
And I've heard everything, I've heard everything about this fellow like you have over the weekend.
And I don't know, I can't quite put it together.
He had sympathy with Osama bin Laden is the one story, right?
And the other story is he was a patriot and sang, sat around singing patriotic songs.
And then I hear he was saddened by what happened September 11th.
But then I hear he, in his note, praised and was in sympathy with the attack on September 11th.
So I don't get it.
I don't know.
I don't know what you do with this story.
I guess we're going to have to wait until we hear what the real deal is.
Listen, my radon earthquake guy is predicting something slightly.
He says a 7.2 earthquake near LA within 14 days.
Now, this is just a guy who predicts earthquakes by measuring radon levels in his well.
And he's been sending me these or calling them in.
Used to be easier to get in, you know, so he'd call them in.
Now I get them by email, and I've got a code on here, so I know it's him.
And he's been terribly accurate.
Sometimes a little off in the magnitude one way or the other, but in terms of accuracy within days, awfully good.
Things to think about.
It seems as though we're going to have a very close encounter.
I don't know if you've heard about this yet or not.
These things are not widely known, you know, past my program.
If you didn't listen to my program, I doubt that you'd get this at all.
Maybe you would.
But just in case you don't have it yet, an asteroid discovered just one month ago is, in fact, making a very close approach to the Earth, though there is no apparent danger of colliding with it.
The astronomers say that its proximity reminds us just how many objects are out there in space and ones that could strike our planet with devastating consequences.
Moving closer to the Sun, the asteroid is passing less than twice the moon's distance from us.
That's not much.
370,000 miles they calculate at 0737 greenwich mean time on 7 january which is you know close in cosmic terms it is now get this it's 300 meters in size it says here actually uh large enough to wipe out any given entire country country I
if it should hit Earth.
It's 2001 YB-5, if you want to go check on it.
Discovered early December by the Near Earth Asteroid Tracking Survey Telescope at Mount Palomar in California.
Astronomers add it is potentially hazardous, meaning there is a slim chance that it may strike the Earth sometime in the future.
So, it circles the sun every 1,321 days.
Now, that's really interesting, isn't it?
That's a real short-term big mama, and it comes by us very frequently.
And it's coming...
I wonder if they've calculated out the orbits from the one they're talking about, missing the Earth by two moon...
That's not very much at all.
That's really, really, really close.
And I guess, you know, they can certainly calculate that it will be...
will miss Earth by that much, and be right, I hope.
that'll be Mark McLaughlin later you hear about him he's been doing writing on this for a long time all right let us take a very quick break and then we will continue open lines oh tomorrow night Richard C. Hoagland will be here in the second hour and he has a a big announcement for you he told me to tease you with exactly that line that he's
got a big announcement for you coming up tomorrow night well all right I'm considering the implications of what happened Friday night, Saturday morning, on Friday night, Saturday morning show, I asked what I thought was a somewhat controversial but nevertheless interesting question, and it has set off an avalanche.
I have been getting email by the thousands.
This really is going to interest you over the weekend, thousands of emails.
On Friday night, Saturday, just for the heck of it, I asked my audience, what would you do if you were the devil?
What would you do if you were the devil?
The evil one himself, Lucifer.
And I'm trying to figure out, and I went into some big rap about, hey, look, really put yourself in his shoes.
Before you answer your question, really put yourself in his shoes.
And it provoked such a response.
I'm trying to understand why it provoked such a gigantic response.
We've been flooded with responses to this question.
Maybe it's because no one ever asked it before.
I don't know.
I don't know.
It's one of those questions that just somehow caught everybody's attention.
So I guess it's a cool question.
We'll probably get more of it.
You know, the phones prior to the beginning of the live show were ringing off the hook.
Just flat ringing off the hook.
And it was trying to respond to exactly that.
So prepare yourself.
I imagine this half hour you're going to see some, hear some responses to that.
It's been overwhelming.
Why, oh, why, oh, why is this such an interesting question to respond to?
Why are so many of you responding to it?
What does it mean that so many of you are responding to it?
Does it mean that we, you know, is there some general sense of people understanding really well and fast, if they were evil, what they would do and how they would subvert themselves virtually, right?
The late John Blank and his friend, the late Sal Blank, of the great state of Washington decided to attend a local Metallica concert at the George Washington Amphitheater, having no tickets.
But having had 18 beers between them, they thought that it would be easy to hop over the nine-foot fence and sneak into the show.
They pulled their pickup truck over to the fence, and the plan apparently was for a John, who was 100 pounds heavier than his friend, to hop the fence and then assist the friend over.
Unfortunately, for the late John, there was a 30-foot drop on the other side of the fence.
In other words, he thought he was going over a rather short fence and would hit the ground right away.
He didn't hit it for 30 feet.
Having heaved himself over, he found himself crashing through a tree.
His fall was abruptly halted and broken, along it might be added, with his arm, by a large branch that snagged him by the shorts.
Dangling from the tree with a broken arm, he looked down and saw some bushes below him.
Possibly, figuring the bushes would break his fall, he removed his pocket knife and proceeded to cut away his shorts to free himself from the tree.
Finally free, John crashed into holly bushes.
The sharp leaves scratched his entire body, and now, without the protection of his shorts, a holly branch actually penetrated his backside.
To make matters worse, on landing, his pocket knife penetrated his thigh.
Now, Sal, seeing his friend in considerable pain and agony, threw him a rope and tried to pull him back to safety by tying the rope, get this part, folks, by tying the rope to a pickup truck and slowly driving away.
Good plan?
However, in his drunken haste or state, he put his truck into reverse and apparently crashed through the fence, landing on his friend and killing him.
Police arrived to find the crash pickup with its driver thrown 100 feet from the truck and dead on the scene of massive internal injuries.
Upon moving the truck, they found John under it half naked, scratches on his body, a holly stick where it ought not to be, a knife in his thigh, and his shorts dangling from a tree branch 25 feet in the air.
So, according to this article, congratulations, gentlemen, you win.
It is indeed, and I wish you a good morning.
We're going to throw the lines wide open to all of you here in a moment, and it's going to be very interesting to see what it is you're calling about tonight over this next segment.
But I think I know.
In a moment, we'll find out.
All right.
Into the night and the unknown we go.
East of the Rockies, you're on the air.
Cheerio.
Hello.
unidentified
Hello, Art.
Hello?
Yes, if I were the devil, first of all, I would just deceive everybody's mind.
Yes, I would make them believe that everything in the Bible is a lie, and I would make them believe that the Roman Catholics are the only ones in the world that have the truth.
This has attracted a tremendous, just a tremendous amount of response.
People answering it sometimes in exactly, in my opinion, the wrong way.
I mean, if I ask you to get into the devil's shoes, you're not supposed to say, well, Fouse devil, I get down on my hands and knees and pray to God and Jesus and everything.
Because the devil's a bad dude.
And he's not interested in doing any of that stuff.
Not at all.
He's interested in subterfuge, killing, Armageddon, and harvesting of human souls.
So if you're truly putting yourself in his shoes, I mean, you've got to move out of character a little bit.
I think that I would deceive everybody by letting them know the truth about everything.
And then they'd start thinking, and then the front part of their mind would start rationalizing, and their intuitive part would come to get lost.
And after the centuries, thoughts would become darker and less light from creation would get through, and then he'd be able to surface closer to the surface.
But can I add one to something else?
I believe that hell is like in a black hole.
That's the only way that you can have eternity and burn forever.
But the reason I called was over the weekend on Discovery Channel, one of the Discovery Networks, Digital Cable, they interviewed the assistant director of the Pope Scope in Arizona.
Yeah, and it actually went beyond what I would ever have expected them to even announce at this point because it's got what might be called an independent platform, which could be adapted to sports cars, vans, all kinds of vehicles.
And it's just a basic platform with four wheels and a hydrogen power system in the bottom, and you can snap bodies on the top of it.
Yep, yep, yep.
And I tell you, the guy that you really need to have on your show in these days, I don't ever heard you actually talk about him, maybe you have, but a guy named Amory Lovins from the Rocky Mountain Institute.
And I, first thing I did is I zoomed in because it said you can't see a wire.
And sure enough, you know, I'm thinking, well, somebody could have modified this still.
And, you know, it could have been a double exposure or something.
I don't know.
But I don't know enough about this software.
But one thing I found that was really interesting is I started playing around with this picture and putting flames on it and doing all kinds of funny stuff.
So, if you're saying that you have found something in the photograph that is not there until you apply a particular effect, I'll be willing to look at that.
However, once you have a picture like the one he's working with in digital form, you can do anything to it.
I mean, you can modify it, and he was just at the beginning of learning how to use his photo program and amazed.
But I would suggest that, well, maybe you never know.
He might have found something, so send it along, and I'm willing to look.
But it's likely an artifact of what you have done.
What I would think would be distinctive about the devil is that the devil would be motivated to actually destroy as opposed to just kind of torture or provoke.
I think furthermore that it would be doing this by tempting people, particularly getting to acting ways that would be a weakness for them.
Are these things you would do if you were the devil?
unidentified
I would try to create circumstances where people would act along, would hurt each other with full knowledge that they were doing the wrong thing.
I think it's important that the devil would also go after people, since, as far as I understand, people and who they are is much more precious to God than institutions or worldly power.
He's been a writer for 10 years, more than 200 articles published.
Mark McLaughlin trained as a historian and cultural geographer at the University of Nevada, Reno.
His work appears regularly in California and Nevada newspapers, was awarded the Nevada State Press Writing Award five times.
Author of three books, McLaughlin frequently writes historical articles for magazines like Sierra Heritage, Nevada, WeatherWise, and his work will appear in the Grawl Your Education 2002 Science Annual.
McLaughlin is a professional lecturer, frequent guest on regional TV and radio programs, and consultant for the History Channel.
That must be fun.
As lead writer for the Alternative Energy Institute, Inc., a nonprofit educational organization, he spent two years researching material for turning the corner energy solutions for the 21st century.
Mark McLaughlin owns Mick Mac Printing, publishing rather, which I guess puts stuff into print, right?
Located at Lake Tahoe, California.
And in a moment, he's up, and we'll talk about energy.
And now, here is Mark McLaughlin.
Mark, where are you?
unidentified
I'm located at North Shore Lake Tahoe, Northern California.
Personally, first of all, I'm an environmentally concerned person, and I think that's what's the most compelling issue about energy today.
It's polluted the biosphere.
The U.S. spends between $50 billion and $100 billion a year on health costs from air pollution.
But just from the very beginning, even as a young person, to see the rivers polluted, I grew up back east and the rivers were polluted and the refineries and everything.
What is your, in other words, I guess I want to understand the depth of your feeling about this.
If everything continues as is, how much environmental trouble are we in and are we causing with what we're doing?
unidentified
I think that we're in very serious environmental trouble.
And of course, I'm not the only person.
I mean, besides the pollution aspects, we have the very severe threat of global warming, you know, from greenhouse gas emissions, increasing the carbon dioxide, changes the weather patterns, has a very strong potential for rapid climate change, which would have tremendous ramifications for people all over the world, and mostly the people who probably can least afford it.
You know, I have a new scientist article here somewhere.
I don't know where it is.
I'll find it here in a minute.
It just came out, the new scientists talking about global climate change.
And they're talking about the Gulf Stream specifically.
And they're talking about new measurements that show the Gulf Stream seems to be slowing up and stopping what it's doing.
And if that happens, Europe is going to freeze, period.
unidentified
Yeah, that's a very major, that's a big trigger.
I did not read that article, but I'm familiar with the situation.
It has things to do with salt density in the water and temperatures.
The Gulf Stream is part of a very deep water conveyor belt that brings much more energy and disperses it from the equator to the north than does the atmosphere itself.
And Europe is the beneficiary of that warm stream because it has a very mild climate.
And if those salt densities and temperature changes and affect the stream flow, it could really change the way.
Western Europe, it may be, you know, really under the gun if that kind of a situation came about.
And they do believe that other rapid climate changes that have occurred in the past have been fundamentally affected by that very thing.
Yeah, that's all that keeps Europe mild, is that flow.
That's right.
And things are really changing.
So these are pretty interesting stories.
I wondered how really concerned about all of this you are.
I mean, do you think it's a ultimate terminal issue for the world's population if something is not done?
unidentified
Ultimately, yes.
But the most important thing to think about is that we've been producing these emissions for a long period of time.
The carbon age has been going on for quite a long time.
So we've put and pumped a lot of gases into the atmosphere.
And the one thing I think it's important for us to understand that to address this issue will be a multi-generational thing.
And it will also have to be an international community effort.
This isn't the kind of thing if you knock out a coal plant here and you knock out an oil refinery there and okay, everything's looking rosy.
It's going to take time to turn it around.
But the beautiful thing about it, if you think about it, I mean, addressing these emissions, first of all, will not change the CO2 concentration, will not change the possibility for global warming and those ramifications.
But the immediate benefits will be healthier air and less health issues impacted by air pollution.
And they've got an inversion going on right now, an air inversion.
And what's to be seen there is incredible.
The air hanging over the city is seen from a distance is a dark brown cloud.
And I mean dark brown.
That's what I saw earlier today.
unidentified
It was like that today.
Reno is frequently like that.
And that's actually a situation.
Climate and topography in the Intermountain West and in the West in general dictate stagnant air and especially in the winter where there's very little mixing.
So any of the exhaust that's coming from your vehicles, because hey, let's face it, we all know Las Vegas is not an East Coast industrial city.
You're looking at a lot of emissions from automobiles exhaust.
How much do we know about breathing in air in Los Angeles or Las Vegas or any of the other many cities where it gets that bad, when we have inversions, when it really gets bad, and they start advising other weather, this is unhealthful.
There is a campaign out there, and nearly every death you can imagine is, if anybody's ever, you know, walked within 10 feet of the cigarette, they declare it smoking-related.
You hear a lot about smoking.
So to put it in scale, people are breathing that air every day.
How do they compare with regard to health risk to those who smoke?
So you would think there'd probably be no risk at all compared to smoking.
Right?
I mean, that would...
unidentified
Not necessarily.
Not necessarily.
I certainly don't rely on the government or state governments or the federal government to give me all my knowledge or information that I need to protect myself.
This is a writer's story that broke today, mentioned by a caller earlier.
I'll just read a little bit of it.
After 100 years of making gasoline-burning cars, General Motors Corporation sees a not-so-distant future when vehicles powered by hydrogen will revolutionize the industry and make transportation more affordable for the world's population.
GM, the world's largest automaker, unveiled at the Detroit Auto Show on Monday a fuel cell vehicle that it said could rewrite the laws of how automakers design cars and make them much cheaper to build because fuel cells consume hydrogen and emit only water and heat.
Automakers have talked for years about the arrival of the cleaner technology over the next decade as a way to make cars more environmentally friendly and curdale the need for foreign oil.
GM said its so-called autonomy fuel cell car, which it says is the first vehicle designed exclusively for the fuel cell, could have a far broader impact.
It's a long story.
It's a skateboard-like chassis between four wheels, and I guess you can make it into anything you want.
So this sounds like a really big step for General Motors.
I mean, GM, I mean, they are the ones, and if they're introducing a hydrogen fuel cell vehicle, that's a big, big, big story.
Yeah, well, yeah, I mean, it will be something we're going to see.
Most important, I think the most important thing to think about here, first of all, because we live in a world of soundbites, and one of the problems with living in a world of sound bites, you never get the story.
They're going to use that hydrogen, run it through a membrane, separate the hydrogen out, burn the hydrogen, and the remaining water and heat are just dissipated.
The whole key here is we're going to get the hydrogen from.
They're stripping those hydrocarbons, the hydrogen out of either natural gas or gasoline or other or coal.
They're using fossil fuels to power these things.
Hydrogen is the ultimate coup.
If you can run something on hydrogen, yeah, that would be great.
It would be a non-polluting thing, but how are you going to generate the hydrogen?
It's not found free in the atmosphere.
It's not found free like oil.
You know, you go to Iraq, you stick a straw on the ground, and oil shoots out.
You know, you're going to have to use, well, the way they're doing it now is they're using fossil fuels.
Well, excuse me, first of all, they're getting the hydrogen primarily from fossil fuels.
Then if you said, okay, I want to run the vehicle on hydrogen, you're going to use that coal plant, that natural gas plant or a nuclear reactor to generate the power, to electrolysize water, separate the hydrogen out of the water molecule, and then you're going to have the hydrogen to distribute.
Okay, that's all great.
So if you think about it conceptually, you have just taken the pollution and the emissions from the tailpipe of the vehicle and put it back into the power plant.
And we would need many more of them.
And the emission problem would still be there today.
Why is it a great technology if you can't get fuel?
unidentified
Because I think over time, as we develop better energy sources, power generation sources that are carbonless, we will be able to generate quantities of hydrogen.
You know who's doing it?
Here's an example.
Iceland.
Iceland is a very small country, a lot of geothermal activity there.
So they're really tapping into that.
They're using that geothermal heat to create power, to separate the hydrogen, and they want to become a hydrogen economy.
And Iceland could probably pull it off.
But Iceland is Iceland.
And the U.S. is the big boy and has a lot greater demand on those kinds of sources.
So if you, now let's just follow this one step further.
The fantasy will be to use clean renewable energy like solar power or wind power or biomass to make the electricity.
To make the electricity and then create the hydrogen.
And when the wind dies and the sun goes down, you burn the hydrogen.
Well, that's what it's going to come down to, though, isn't it?
In other words, if you're going to manufacture hydrogen and you have to do so in burning fossil fuels, conventional fossil fuels, you're going to have to know what the ratio is.
It's got to be economically feasible or it's an idea out the window.
In other words, when they look at prison supplies and what they could anticipate, they could still find, I hear these claims of 40 years, 35 years at present rates of consumption.
unidentified
Consumption, yeah.
Well, you know what's kind of happening?
Think about it this way.
Like in the 1950s, for every barrel of energy you use, let's say you take the energy worth of a barrel of petroleum for the drilling and the pumping to find other oil.
In the 1950s, you'd use one barrel's worth of energy and you'd pull in 50 barrels of oil.
Now you use one barrel of energy, you're pulling in four barrels of oil.
Mark, they're going to, look, even if what we all hope happens happens and they dive into alternative energy as fast as they can, unlikely as that is, they're still going to have to go up to Alaska and get that oil.
They're going to need that oil.
There's no argument about that.
The only argument is whether they're going to start down the road at the same time, isn't it?
unidentified
Well, I kind of agree with you there, even though, you know, the argument is if we just improve the nation's fuel efficiency standards, we won't even need the juice.
And the other part of it is, it's not like when are we going to run out?
It's when you reach this peak of production in any finite resource.
And, you know, all these things that we're talking about are really explained in our energy book, which is available at our website at aughtenergy.org.
And, you know, we've got a lot of testimonials and things for your viewers.
If you can produce enough oil for yourself, hey, that's all well and good.
But Asia doesn't have any oil.
They're going to need it from somewhere.
The U.S., we suck up, we have 4% of the population of the world.
We suck up 25% of the oil.
And, you know, bring China in, Asia in, and who's going to have it?
The politically volatile Persian Gulf.
That's where the oil is going to, the conventional, easily accessible, inexpensive oil in the next couple of decades is going to be primarily located in the Persian Gulf.
The whole mess over in the Far East, or in the Near East, rather, Middle East.
God, I'll get it.
Middle East is really the worst.
Every president has said it.
We'd go to war to protect the oil flow.
unidentified
Well, you know, you think that the U.S. would have put together that coalition to protect Kuwait if Kuwait didn't have any, if they weren't worried about the stability of that area and everything?
You know, Iraq has 10% of the oil, the oil-proven oil reserves.
And sometimes I make the joke, I say, yeah, we bomb them into oblivion.
That way it's like the 51st state.
I mean, they have all the oil underground.
It's just sitting there waiting for us to get it when we need it.
Well what it is, he takes hydrogen, which is really the most simple atom kind of thing, and what he says is using chemical action, he reduces the state.
You have the electron, the proton spinning around, he reduces their orbit.
It makes it, if you can think about it, kind of denser, and by collapsing it a little bit like that, it releases tremendous amounts of energy.
Now, when I, and I really try to approach this idea as a journalist and as a responsible researcher, and when I come upon this and I see people saying that can't be true, this is all baloney, it's a scam, and then I have other people willing to line up and buy in and other professional type people.
I don't know what's going on with him.
There was something happening where he was trying to get some patent work, and the U.S. Patent Office is a pain already.
You're probably familiar with some of the things with them when it comes to these, let's say, breakthrough energy situations.
Okay, so now there's a million people out there who say, of course it slipped off the map.
Their attitude is the big oil companies in some way squished, broke, bought, otherwise acquired, stopped any news of this, took control of the situation.
A lot of people believe that conspiracy theory.
Are you one of them?
No.
unidentified
I believe I can see easily why.
Let me throw a caveat out there.
I'm sure that things have happened, illegal, violent, and other things, small things.
I don't believe there's this giant orchestrated thing.
What it is, I think a lot of it comes down to R ⁇ D. When you get into R ⁇ D with the product or this potential innovation, you run into the obvious things that your data were flawed, you set the experiment up incorrectly, and things happen, you know.
And as you mentioned before, is the economics about it too.
If you can't get any money, then effectively you are shut down.
And so things do happen, but I don't believe in this grand conspiracy idea.
The only way you could know for sure would be to have the black box that worked, and then you'd find out.
unidentified
Hey, I'll tell you right now, you get a black box that works, people are going to be lining up.
I mean, if you can get...
And one of the things that happens with a lot of these people, either individuals or outfits, professional labs who are working in this field, very reluctant to share information.
Well, you know, I have a little bit of skepticism in me, you know, but it's hard for me to buy that, but it wouldn't surprise me if things like that do happen at certain levels.
And of course I know that the government will come in, and under national security, the laws are on the books if they believe that you have something and they think it's going to upset the balance of the status quo.
Yeah, and so these two technologies, where do we stand with wind and where do we stand with solar, the cost of solar panels and the cost of manufacturing solar panels, by the way?
Manufacturing them would be a monstrous job that would require a lot of fossil fuels.
So how about what we do have now, wind and solar?
What do you say?
unidentified
Wind is by far the best one right out there now.
Solar is actually the most expensive.
Wind power in some areas of the country, and this country has a lot of wind potential.
It's coming down to near nickel for a megawatt, and that's what you're getting for a megawatt hour or whatever.
That's what you're getting for coal-produced electricity in some areas.
So wind power really has a lot of potential.
And that's why the Europeans have now taken over.
The U.S., it wasn't even that long ago, the U.S. led the world in solar photovoltaic technology development and wind power.
Now Western Europe's all over it.
Japan's blowing us away in solar.
These countries see that the future economies, even though we know that these decentralized renewable technologies are inadequate to replace oil, they will be part of the growing economy and there's jobs involved and everything else.
But you know what's interesting?
You just said, you're down in southern Nevada.
Nevada ranks 21st out of the 50 states for wind potential.
And the other is I'm also in an extremely high, although our weather right now would defy what I'm about to say, husbandifying it, but we have generally cloudy days you could count on maybe three hands if you have three hands.
In fact, when power failures occur in the neighborhood, I don't even know they've occurred.
I actually don't know they even happen until I happen to look and I see all my neighbors gathered around, you know, looking up here and wondering why there's light up here nowhere else.
unidentified
Does the Nevada utility allow you to have your meter run reverse when you have enough power to put back in?
In the nighttime, it's coast to coast A.M. It certainly is, and I certainly did screw up, so you're going to get treated to a little bit more commercial activity than you normally would in the next hour.
My fault.
And here we go.
Okay, let's talk about this for a second with Mark.
And what they said was, yes, there is provision for this, but it would require that we come out and install a new meter, another meter, which, of course, you have to pay for it.
Sure.
And then they would pay me wholesale.
In other words, as I sold power to them, they would pay me the wholesale price, the same price they pay other people who sell them power.
That's what they would be willing to pay.
And so I balanced that.
These are the things you do if you really have a system like mine.
So I balanced that against just instead using the power myself, and I would, in effect, then be offsetting their retail rate.
So for me to sell it to them wholesale is really stupid.
Instead, I'd be better off using it, which I am myself at what amounts to the retail rate.
So you can't say that what I did was smart economically or any other way.
You just have to sort of imagine that I'm a little bit of a geek and I thought it'd be cool and I had the resources and so I went and did it.
But I couldn't recommend to anybody that it's a great idea economically because it's not.
it depends on where you live in the Sacramento area they have the Sacramento Municipal Utility District they'll fork out 50% of the cost of a $10,000 solar array and really what they're using are shingles that are actually you know you've seen them and they'll come out and they'll lay them on your house and everything they will put up the five grand to pay for the first for the ten thousand of the cost of the system and then give you a low interest loan for another ten years to pay off the balance uh-huh and why are they doing that they're the
most aggressive utility in the world for solar power.
You know, if you pay a surcharge on your fuel bills and your energy bills, and part of that money goes towards the utilities'public awareness campaigns and things of that nature, see, I think it's the wrong...
I mean, it's the nuts and bolts of a capitalist society to look at it economically.
And if it doesn't make economic sense for them to do that, I mean, to applaud them for doing it and so forth.
but it's not going to be widespread.
Right.
So this kind of thing isn't going to
to be financially feasible or is not financially really feasible except in a special case like that yet so how's anything going to change one way you get congress all right i know this is a bad start you get congress to mandate that the u.s government which is the largest consumer of energy in this country mandates that they have to buy 20 percent of their juice from renewable power sources once you do that that
unidentified
That means companies are going to start ramping up.
This is what they did with the microprocessors and the silicon chips.
That's just going to cost the taxpayer money, though, right?
I mean, you're going to be subsidizing something that really ultimately isn't profitable right now.
Well, maybe initially, and then it becomes economically feasible as they start to pump them out and the prices come down, the effectiveness of the technology becomes better with the investment.
unidentified
You know, it's what they did with the silicon wafer for the computer.
Okay, so then what it comes down to is you're saying that this generation and maybe even the next generation is going to have to pay for the future of a couple of generations, at least two or three down line, where it finally becomes economically feasible, what's been done.
Until then, we're going to fork over the bill for the fact that it's not really economically feasible at all.
If we start on that path.
I'm sorry to be hitting you with such tough questions, but I mean, that is a truth, isn't it?
That doesn't mean that it's economically feasible.
And my larger point here is, and it really is the larger point, that if all of this is not economically feasible, to talk this generation into forking over big dollars, to subsidize something that's not going to pay off for two more generations, brother, good luck.
I know, but we're really living comfortable lives.
Oh, you bet we are.
at the i kind of think we're at the apex you know at the pinnacle uh-huh i don't know but uh you know there's yeah when if you get if you just want to make it into dollars and cents and you're not willing to address you know trying to compensate for like the well-established fossil fuel industry is already in there.
So now you've got some up-and-coming good, clean, decentralized renewable power sources, technologies that do work.
And maybe it's not as cheap as it seems that coal is if you if you you know if you don't consider all the other ramifications But it doesn't mean it shouldn't be implemented.
Yeah, I know.
I know.
unidentified
I mean you're playing devil's advocate and that's fine with you.
The international community has shown that they have been able to hammer out some kind of international agreements to redeal with greenhouse gas emissions.
Which we promptly bowed out of.
unidentified
We walked away.
We're going to be back.
You know, you can't just be the only, we're the largest polluter, and here we are not even paying attention to the game.
In his plan, by 2020, the U.S. will be generating, renewables will be generated, non-hydro renewables will be generating 2%.
And I had to write a critique for our outfit for that.
And I opened my critique saying, you know what, it's a very pragmatic plan.
I mean, but some of that's unacceptable, and that's one of them, I believe.
You know, I just think that that's just, I don't know, it's just not willing to address the issues.
And I know, but if you just want to talk about the money, then geez I mean what are we you know is it all just money we are what we are yeah I know but I I do think there's a lot of people that care and and why do you think GM's so fired up about putting out that vehicle I don't know after hearing what you said about hydrogen I don't have the slightest idea I felt like I burst the bubble there you know plus the fuel cells themselves use you know platinum and things are very expensive metal and
Then they will use some batteries to run little electric motors that will maintain your momentum.
And then when you want to come to a stop, you will use low-resistance rolling tires.
And then when you bring the vehicle to a stop, the brakes will convert that momentum back into electricity to put back into the batteries for when, when you start you're on your way again.
Sounds smart.
Yeah, and the beauty of it is, all right, is the fact, and I sound like a chauffeur.
No, no, go right ahead.
I want to know about these things.
Yeah, no, the thing about them is it's basically a hybrid of the kind of technology that we've been using for 100 years, and they've just tweaked it up a little bit by making it much more energy efficient with the electric backup system.
Okay.
And I think that I've driven the Toyota Prius, and I thought it was a very nice car.
I've heard that sometimes those regeneration braking systems can be a little bit clumsy or clunky kind of, but I didn't find that to be a problem with this one.
ever have to plug this car in, in other words, if somehow You don't.
So in other words, it's totally independent, using only that much gasoline, and then all of the energy that's collected in the various ways is dumped right back into the batteries and used at cruise speeds.
Well, they're out there now, and I think over time they're going to become mainstream in a lot of ways, I think, because it's too easy to do it, I think, in that sense.
See, the one thing about my job is I'm going to have a broad, I can paint a broad stroke, but when we get into specifics, and I mean, I wrote the book, the Turning the Corner Energy book, and it's, I mean, I know pretty much what's in here, but I didn't go into the specifics about each an individual thing because you can't get too bogged down.
But that is one really important point.
Batteries will take generally X number of charge cycles.
So do me a favor between now and whenever we might talk again and find out how long the batteries last and what they cost, because that's got to be factored into it.
Yeah, anyway, we were all caught up in this thing that happened in California.
You know, they get a cold, Nevada sneezes, so I guess we see you get something by default.
I thought it was ironic from a personal level that, because in California, the rolling back out, and I understand businesses, I mean, that's some businesses, and this may be a really, really big deal, but for the average guy to have the power go out for one hour during the course of the day is such a whipout mode?
Absolutely catastrophic.
What countries in the world get electricity for one hour a day?
It was catastrophic for a lot of businesses in California.
It really was.
It was especially young.
Oh, man, it was incredible.
Anyway, my question is, what do you know?
Is this going to happen again this coming summer?
Is this going to be a common occurrence?
Or since all the news about all of this has dried up, does that mean it was an aberration and it's not going to happen anymore?
unidentified
No, but also California was kind of a special case.
Now, okay, now see, now what's happening is they're going to be building, and of course these things take time, but they're going to be building natural gas generation power plants.
It's very interesting when you read the Bush-Cheney energy policy for the next 20 years.
Of course, their administration, whoever, well, they'll be here for, you know, they'll get their shot, maybe one more who's going to be able to do that.
He says that by the time these natural gas plants are put online in the United States over the next 10 years, there won't be enough gas for a third of them.
And if you look at the Bush-Cheney plan, he doesn't talk about natural gas very much because of that very reason.
You figure natural gas shadows oil.
President Bush is doing a fabulous job.
Most Americans think as President of the U.S. We're talking about Adams.
I know he's got very, very high marks right now as a president.
They were reflecting, one, the providers' spikes because they weren't controlled.
Two, the cost of natural gas went through the roof, and California generates its electricity through natural gas, a lot of it, a lot of it hydro too, but a lot of it natural gas.
And when the natural gas spikes in temperature, that goes right into the cost of the electricity.
Of course, we're not talking names or anything, and he has a gizmo that he uses on an internal combustion engine that he pours soda into it, and it runs, or different kinds of non-hydrocarbon fuels.
And what was really funny because a friend of mine, when he got back from the conference, and we all watched the motor run for a little bit and this kind of a thing, but he went back and says, you know, I went to my local store and root beer is way more expensive than gasoline, which was pretty funny, I thought.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, what about other out there sort of things right now?
I don't know.
People are working on, in other words, if we, for example, did something with gravity, if we learn some secret about gravity there's got to be an energy source there somewhere right absolutely and more specifically I think propulsion systems and such are we working on that NASA's got their NASA's spending money on it you know there was this guy from Russia who started working as in a as a grad student in Norway a guy from Russia we'll pick it up there after the top of the hour all right you got it good
There was this guy from Russia.
I'm Art Belt.
All right, as a quick little addendum to our conversation about these hybrid cars coming up, you know, I'm pretty attracted.
John in Colorado Springs says, Art, they use, according to the Ford HEV website, nickel metal hydride batteries, and they are amazing batteries.
He goes on to say, it'll last the life of the vehicle.
Toyota says battery can be charged tens of thousands of times.
Now, I make very heavy use of nickel metal hydride batteries.
They're amazing, amazing batteries, but I have never until now heard of tens of thousands of charge cycles.
I tend to doubt that, but if it's on their website, maybe it's true.
And if it is true, if the manufacturer of nickel metal hydrides of that capacity doesn't in itself cost environmentally dearly, then we're really on to something here, and a vehicle like this really would be a gigantic jump for all of us.
And so maybe, you know, I guess I'm looking down the right road.
I mean, we're really thinking about buying one, so it sounds cool to me.
Mark, maybe it is the answer for the most immediate future, huh?
It was published jointly with Congress and Vatican.
It had a model of world events leading up until now.
It was published in 1967.
For a population model, there are only a half million people out, but for the fuel consumption, the white book said we're only about eight years away from total petroleum exhaustion.
Do you see any future for new sources that are viable in the near future?
I think one of the big problems that happens in any field, but as energy becomes more and more of a critical topic and such, you get all this, just like this is happening kind of with the global warming thing.
You have all these competing and contrasting media that I think they really tend to confuse the picture and they kind of make the regular person feel like, well, what can I do?
unidentified
Or is this guy true?
Or is this guy real?
Is that right or not?
But I can't go with the eight years.
But what was the second part of the question?
I'm forgetting that now.
The second part of the question, I was just asking, what do you see as the most viable part of fuel for the future?
very interesting thing and it actually does exist it's just the state of low energy that's in the vacuum and they believe it's just produced by the you know the fluctuations of the you know electromagnetic and gravitational force fields that's throughout the universe that energy does exist it's a true thing now how do you tap it and there are people working on different things of that I know a guy I know in Bodega Bay is Ken Shoulders he's he has the first patent actually that the U.S. Patent
trade office gave him that apparently does get energy out of the ZPE, out of the zero-point energy.
He has this thing called high-density charge clusters.
such and it doesn't even melt so and and he actually got a patent for that from the and but see and I know Ken I've met him many times he's been to my He was at my house just about three months ago.
And I may not be saying his name correctly, Eugene Potkludnov, but really what he did, he was working in Norway, and he took these special kinds of ceramic discs.
He chilled them to near absolute zero, stacked them, rotated them.
unidentified
I mean, how are they going to figure all this out?
They're looking at this and trying to figure out what's really going on.
You know, something that's really very exciting is that there's a small group in the DOE, the Department of Energy, and they are trying to put forward this new program where they are going to make a national database and go out and get all of these disparate results of phenomena,
look at what's most close, look at what looks like makes sense, and start looking at it instead of just always crossing your fingers and walking away like it's some kind of pariah.
I was wondering why we stay Neanderthal when it comes to energy.
I mean, yeah, we need to produce and get the better technologies.
But I mean, like, I live here in Florida.
Why don't we try out wind power with the large windmills like they have over in Norway?
Yeah, over in Germany for heat at night where it's cold.
They have those, I'm sure you've heard of them, Mark, where it's like bricks and they've got them in a metal heating container.
Well, through the night, when the factories are shut down, the frog heats up and then through the day there's no electric at all except for the factories.
I don't tell you, he's been telling me all night, it's because you can get cheaper power from fossil fuels in Florida than you can from any other source.
That's exactly what it is.
And it's also because companies, countries like Germany and other countries in Europe are mainly sort of socialistic and they're willing to take taxpayer money and, gosh, money that comes from incredible tax on gasoline.
It pushes it to $4 and $5 a gallon.
Well, I think they can manhandle the private sector much more there.
I really enjoy the conversation that Mark McLaughlin and you are having on the subject, but I've got a couple of points.
One is I would hesitate to suggest that you purchase a gasoline hybrid or gasoline electric hybrid since there's probably in the background, I think GM is showing that regarding the hydrogen car.
You know, there are hydrogen conversion kits that are available commercially.
As a matter of fact, there is a high school in Arizona that has, as a class project, conversion of a gas car to a hydrogen car.
I don't know where they get their hydrogen, but that's the problem.
That's the economics and we're going, kind of going back to hydrocarbon sources for the hydrogen.
unidentified
But it's, I understand from a prior guest on the Coast to Coast program over the weekend that was with one of the other people that handled the weekend program.
Roy McAllister, who is the president of the AHA, the American Hydrogen Association, was there and very knowledgeable about the entire process.
One of the callers called in and says, oh, I want to do this.
I'm an engineer.
I've got all kinds of facilities.
I want to be able to convert my house to generate electricity since he was talking about a device that would be about the size of a refrigerator or smaller.
Yeah, it's a conversion process that's at question here.
Right, Mark?
Well, also the fact is what he's using to create the hydrogen in his house is the natural gas or the electricity coming from the centralized fossil fuel power plant.
But I think it's important to understand the whole picture and not just look at the little plugs of good news and such.
Okay.
First time call our line.
You're on the air with Mark McLawson.
Hi.
unidentified
Hi, I'm Chris, and I'm in Virginia.
I would just like to go back to talking about biomass.
First, I would like to apologize.
I didn't hear the first half an hour of the show.
And if you guys have covered this already, I don't want to we didn't talk about biomass.
Yeah, go ahead.
Okay, specifically about hemp as fuel, because it's very easy to sow.
It burns efficiently.
As a matter of fact, there's a car right now called the Hemp Car that they have actually made a slight modification to a diesel engine where they can burn hemp as biomass.
I think it was the Wall Street Journal published an article that said that if we simply legalized hemp and utilized it for clothing and energy sources, this gentleman is talking about, even marijuana for people to smoke tax at all, it would be a half trillion dollars in immediate tax benefit revenue.
You know, it's funny, we're starting to get a lot of questions about hemp and such, and I haven't looked into its specific qualities as far as using it as a biofuel.
My general feelings about and the way that it's the research and the way it's been presented to me is agricultural crops, whether you're going to get ethanol from corn or whatever, are kind of like an end-loser.
When you think about you've got to take large amounts of land to grow crops, that's going to take fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides.
And of course, you can use the product of the field if that's how you're going to do it.
And I actually know a gentleman in Australia who's working in this too.
But all the impact on the land, the variety of things, it seems that the way it seems to me is that the end result of using an agricultural product on the scale of replacing conventional oil.
Very quickly, we're at a break.
unidentified
Yeah, it doesn't seem to work on that level, on that size, that scale.
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It doesn't seem to me that any conversation like this could be complete without some discussion of nuclear energy.
The Russians, of course, have Chernobyl, which more or less melted down, is now in a big casket thing that they're afraid is going to explode and poison a good portion of the world there again.
We had Three Mile Island and some other interesting incidents that have occurred with nuclear power.
It is sort of stalled in this country.
The Europeans are abandoning nuclear power for wind power and other sources.
And then, of course, there's the problem of the fuel rods, which they're trying to put in my backyard in Yucca Mountain, where we're only going to have to be custodians of it for a few hundred thousand years.
So we haven't really touched on nuclear power.
What's your take, Mark, on nuclear power?
The big picture is nuclear power is uneconomical, which should make you feel good because we're talking about money.
If you take into consideration the construction of the plant, the operation of the plant, not That big of a deal.
But then you get into the decommissioning of the plant and the long-term storage of high radioactive waste.
But the main crux of it will come out to if they can do that transmutation of nuclear waste like they think they might be able to, they can stabilize it and possibly generate power again from it.
Well, when nuclear plants do emit gases, they're far worse in the immediate than greenhouse bylaws.
Can you help him understand, Mark, why is hydrogen going to cause fossil fuel to produce?
Well, back to the two main principles.
Either you strip the hydrogen from a hydrocarbon, which is a fossil fuel, we know the ramifications there, or you're going to use another power source to create the hydrogen, which is just an energy carrier.
And until you can replace that power source with something other than fossil fuel, it just doesn't seem to make sense yet.
It seems cleaner for the end user, but for the environment as a whole.
And my question falls under the category of whatever happened to.
Okay.
I remember I heard a, I actually saw a TV report in the ABC News where they interviewed a fringe engineer who had perfected a car that ran on compressed air.
You didn't tell us anything that we didn't discuss.
Yeah, that's exactly the way it was laid out.
Now, any engine that's going to take you 0 to 60 in five seconds or something, or six seconds, is going to take a hell of a lot of horsepower.
And during that time, you're probably going to be utilizing the piston engine, you know, the good old gas engine, to do it right mark that's how i understand it yes sir and so to perform as today's cars advertise everybody loves them to perform 0 to 60 and whatever it is you know that's your trip then it's gonna it's still gonna use gasoline folks um western the rockies or on the air uh i'll try to be quick uh but
unidentified
but I have a question and a comment.
First of all, do you know in this country we use 5% more power each year?
So maybe solar power isn't such a bad idea anyways.
And maybe, have you ever heard of saltwater power?
Ocean thermal is very isolated areas, certain areas.
You know, a lot of these applications, and the one thing I do want to say, Art, and I think you know this, and I just want everybody to know this, I mean, I support solar power.
I just don't think any particular thing, and even with these agricultural biofuels, I don't want to push everybody down and squish them and say none of this works, but none of these are the panacea that will replace the vast consumption of fossil fuels that we're talking about.
And I think it's going to be a whole variety of energy sources that we're going to be using to help us cut back.
Efficiency and conservation is really kind of the first steps.
And I think there are quite a few viable things, and they all should be slowly done and slowly implemented.
But as you said, money is an issue, and like you said again, the average guy can't really afford to go out and set his whole house up so he can unplug from the grid.
No.
No, he can't.
And if he could, he's still not doing something that's necessarily profitable for him.
I've just been listening to your dialogue, and I'm feeling kind of some sympathy for this guy, Mark, because he seems to sometimes can't get his rebuttals in order quick enough for you, Art.
And you were talking about California being paying because they're clean.
I think, I believe I said that California acting in probably what a lot of Californians consider to be an environmentally friendly way have paid for it with what's happened to them now.
Yes, yes.
Yes.
Because they didn't build the plants.
Yes.
unidentified
Right.
But it's not actually environmentally sound because like your guest said, they're drawing this from non-environmentally sound sources out of the state, actually.
was available you could darn well bet they'd be using it because that's a big part of their operating costs and because i agree with the caller i mean i understand and i'm not trying to pick on any particular sector it's uh it's a very large and it's a very intricate and complex situation all right most of the Rockies, you are on the air now with Mark McLaughlin and Art Bell.
But the carbon dioxide from human sources is such a puny part of the total carbon dioxide that's going eventually into the water.
The real problem is one of getting the coral reefs back to good health because they are the ones that are tying up the carbon dioxide that winds up in the water, which is nearly all of it.
Understand, but it's still going to take, and this is what we're recovering, that he apparently didn't listen to very carefully, a long period of time for it to become financially viable to do and to transfer our society, which is now absolutely dependent on fossil fuels and will be for our lifetimes.
Yes, I agree with you.
I mean, this is something people have to understand.
East of the Rockies are on the air.
Hello.
unidentified
You were talking about numbers a little bit ago, and the one time that you mentioned numbers, it sounded like that it might be less time than you talk about the rest of the program.
I mean, you said $10,000 would be about what the solar energy would cost, but that ought to be payable within eight years, I would say.
You know, everybody always says, oh, geez, when the sun goes down, the solar power is over.
You think about it in the West specifically, but also in the East, too.
The greatest electricity use, it's peak power usage, summertime afternoons when the air conditioners are just blowing their doors off.
And that's when the solar panels are working the best.
People, though, don't understand or even begin to understand how much power it actually takes to run home with air conditioning, for example, and all the appliances.
Yeah.
They just don't have a clue until you start trying to actually do it.