Feb. 12, 2002 - Art Bell
02:10:31
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| Friday night. | ||
| Nothing but open minds. | ||
| Anybody wishing to submit a suggestion for what they think would be a good theme is welcome to drop it on me. | ||
| My email address is artl at mindspring.com or artl at aol.com. | ||
| Who is interested in any of your suggestions? | ||
| In the next hour, we're going to finally get down to the brass tax on energy. | ||
| And the real brass tax involves hydrogen. | ||
| Now, I had a guest not long ago who said, well, you cannot produce hydrogen without fossil fuels. | ||
| You may recall that, but my guest tonight says, Baloney, sure you can. | ||
| And he's going to tell us how. | ||
| I already know. | ||
| You may too. | ||
|
unidentified
|
If you don't, just wait. | |
| Well, as you know, the Attorney General, in really kind of an unprecedented statement, said there was likely to be or could be terrorism today. | ||
| Now, today here in the West is not over yet or within a day or so of today, so I guess we still have to wait really to find out. | ||
| But they're thinking that 16 men, possibly linked to Osama bin Laden, and his terrorist network, are believed to have planned an attack against the U.S. or its people in Yemen. | ||
| The FBI said today it based an unusually detailed public warning on information from interviews by U.S. officials with detainees in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and in Afghanistan. | ||
| That's pretty interesting. | ||
| In other words, they've got more than one source, so I wonder what they have planned. | ||
| Terrorism right here in the U.S. of A. A former student claimed to have a bomb and held nearly two dozen students and associate professor hostage on Tuesday before finally releasing them, thank God, unharmed. | ||
| At one point, there were 23 people inside the Fairfield University classroom. | ||
| The suspect, identified only as a recent graduate, freed the hostages, a few at a time, throughout the evening. | ||
| Three Palestinian police killed Wednesday when Israeli troops seized three Palestinian towns in a refugee camp in the Gaza Strip. | ||
| So that one just goes on and on, of course, as you might imagine it would. | ||
| Vilified by lawmakers as a con man who betrayed Americans' trust, former Enron chairman Kenneth Lay expressed, quote, profound sadness, end quote, today about the impact of Enron's financial collapse on investors and employees, but rejected pleas to testify about it. | ||
| He conceded his silence may cause some to believe that, quote, I have something to hide, end quote, by asserting his constitutional rights under the Fifth Amendment, which he did. | ||
| there's just nobody at Enron that's talking. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hmm. | |
| Al Gore, re-entering American foreign policy debate, accused the Bush administration today of showing, quote, impatience and disdain toward U.S. allies in the war in Afghanistan, said that military force alone would not win the long struggle against terrorism. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hmm. | |
| So that's Al Gore. | ||
| Now, somebody called yesterday about a woman who had sold driver's licenses. | ||
| Do you recall this yesterday in open lines? | ||
| To terrorists or people at least of Middle Eastern origin. | ||
| And now I've got the story. | ||
| Listen to this, and it's hardly anywhere. | ||
| Associated Press, the headline is, woman charged in driver's license scheme died the day before her court appearance. | ||
| Now, listen to this. | ||
| A driver's license examiner charged in a scheme with some Middle Eastern men to sell fraudulent licenses died the day before her first court appearance in a fiery car wreck prosecutors called, quote, most unusual and suspicious, end quote, forensic tests were being performed on Catherine Smith's car to determine exactly what caused the fire. | ||
| FBI spokesperson George Bond said Thursday, investigators were looking into the possibility that explosives were used. | ||
| The FBI said it is investigating whether Smith's five co-defendants have any connections to the September 11th attacks or other terrorist ties. | ||
| Smith 49 killed early Sunday. | ||
| The 92 accurate legend she was driving ran off the road, struck a utility pole just north of the Mississippi state line. | ||
| Smith's car was immediately engulfed in flames, but authorities do not know whether the fire started before or after the crash. | ||
| A Vegan said the body was so badly burned it took authorities until Tuesday to confirm Smith's identity. | ||
| Really bad. | ||
| FBI agent J. Susan Nash said the gas tank did not explode and the car was only slightly dented from the crash. | ||
| A prosecutor, Tom DeSenza, called the crash most unusual and suspicious, his words. | ||
| Oh, my. | ||
| So, on the very day before her court appearance, her car just sort of ignited mostly where she was, apparently burned, they're saying beyond recognition, and yet the gee whizzy, the gas tank in the car did not explode. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hmm. | |
| Interesting. | ||
| I've got a story or two for you more, and we'll get to that in a moment. | ||
| This is kind of an interesting letter that I received from somebody who I'm tempted to actually call, although it's probably late for them. | ||
| It's an email. | ||
| During the course of the four years my family and I lived on the island of Granada, Grenade at Granada, we accumulated 12 chihuahuas. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Compliments of their parents, Tahoe and Baram. | ||
| Oh, I see, so they kept all the puppies. | ||
| When the communists came, we were forced to leave, so we packed up all we could, left our home to the natives, and with our little zoo, we came to Virginia to spend the remainder of our days. | ||
| Our babies, in quotes, all lived to be 17 years old, and all died in the same year. | ||
| As the last one was dying, my daughter and I wrapped him in a baby blanket and carried him into the bathroom where he could die in peace. | ||
| As we sat on the floor trying to comfort him and trying to keep from crying, our little old dog, we had named boy, took a deep breath, looked deeply into our eyes, and literally gave up the ghost. | ||
| From his little body arose a substance that resembled a puff of smoke. | ||
| It raised straight up for about three feet and then faded to nothing. | ||
| My daughter and I were dumbfounded over what we'd seen. | ||
| We took his little body, placed it in a casket we'd made for him, then buried him beside his brothers and sisters in the little cemetery behind our house. | ||
| All of the caskets are in vaults. | ||
| As soon as the burial was over, we called Casey's ARE in Virginia, Virginia Beach, actually. | ||
| I told them what had happened and what we had seen. | ||
| I was crying as I tried to describe the event. | ||
| I truly didn't expect to be believed, as I told my story, but not only was I believed, I was told we had been truly blessed and that the boy had granted us the privilege of seeing him leave his body. | ||
| Do I believe animals have souls? | ||
| You bet I do. | ||
| I know for a fact they do. | ||
| I saw one. | ||
| And she gives me her name and phone number, but you know, I think that says it pretty well, don't you? | ||
| Now, I've never seen any such thing, but I sure would like to. | ||
| Just one more note. | ||
| I got an email from a nine-year-old. | ||
| Actually, the grandparents sent it along. | ||
| Our nine-year-old grandson wrote you a note on index cards last summer, and I just found the cards and wanted to pass the query on to you. | ||
| It just simply says, this is from a nine-year-old, folks. | ||
| Dear Art, I've never been in a hurricane, but I hear they are bad. | ||
| I also heard in the eye, that'd be the eye of the hurricane, of course. | ||
| I also heard in the eye, everything stands completely still. | ||
| But what I want to know is, does time ever stand still? | ||
| That was from Cody. | ||
| Cody was with us, it goes on, in Houston when Tropical Storm Allison landed, which explains why he was into hurricanes. | ||
| We listen to you regularly, which explains how you captured his interest from Hannah. | ||
| Thank you, Hannah. | ||
| Well, hmm. | ||
| Does time ever stop? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I, uh... | |
| I don't... | ||
| I don't think so, unless you can refer to a time before there was something. | ||
| Before the let there be light moment or the explosion of that which is so small that we can barely imagine its size. | ||
| Smaller than a cork, it is said, is now everything that is. | ||
| So does time ever stop? | ||
| Yikes. | ||
| That's like, you know, how high is the sky? | ||
| I have not even a clue how to answer that one. | ||
| Maybe someone out there does. | ||
| Does time ever stop? | ||
| I don't think so. | ||
| I don't believe so. | ||
| Not since it started. | ||
| But that's only just my best guess. | ||
| Here we go. | ||
| West of the Rockies, you're on the air. | ||
| Hello. | ||
| Yeah, I wanted to give you a theory on UFOs real quick. | ||
| A theory on UFOs? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| It seems to me that every time somebody spots a UFO or whatever, they make no sound whatsoever. | ||
| Mm-hmm. | ||
| No, that is not true. | ||
| Oh, it isn't? | ||
| In fact, I've had people send me recordings of a really weird humming sound of a UFO on CD. | ||
| But the problem is it's so deep, the frequency is so low that when I play it on the air, people with normal radios can't hear it. | ||
| Oh, really? | ||
| Yeah, to me, it's really obvious. | ||
| I was just going to say, I think, you know, maybe they make a lot of noise. | ||
| We just can't hear it because it's on a frequency so high or so low that human ears can't audibly hear them. | ||
| That's an excellent theory, sir, and goes with the same one that suggests when a UFO blinks out, you know, they're said to virtually blink out, sort of. | ||
| The same theory would apply there as well, wouldn't it? | ||
| In other words, if they rise to a frequency that is beyond our ability to see, and that's not all that hard to do, frankly, for an advanced civilization of some sort, then poof, they're gone. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| Well, also, real quick, I got a suggestion for a guest. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| His name is Dr. Carl Baugh, and he has a television show on TBN. | ||
| It's called Creation in the 21st Century. | ||
| I'm going to have another creationist, sir, on very shortly. | ||
| I'll put him on the list as well, but I've got a creationist, one of the better ones who's been on the program, who I will not name right now, who makes a very, very strong argument that man has only been on earth for 6,000 years and that everything happened precisely as stated in the Bible. | ||
| Now, I know that's a very conservative position, we'll say. | ||
| But it makes for very, very interesting arguments. | ||
| And who knows the real truth? | ||
| Personally, I think the real truth is being uncovered all around the world right now. | ||
| Whether or not in our lifetimes it'll be recognized and taught, you know, as a real truth, I think that one's up for debate. | ||
| First time caller line, you are on the air. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Yes, sir. | ||
| Where are you? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I am in Wisconsin. | |
| Okay. | ||
| That's a good start. | ||
| What's up? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, I just had a story. | |
| Is this art? | ||
| Yes. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, okay. | |
| Well, I just turned out my radio. | ||
| I'm the only one out there. | ||
| It's the only possibility. | ||
| It could only be me. | ||
|
unidentified
|
All right, great. | |
| Well, I was listening to your show last night with the medical examiner. | ||
| Yes. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And, well, I guess I sort of had an out-of-body experience in a sense. | |
| Kind of jogged my memory yesterday. | ||
| I was in a dentist's office. | ||
| I was about seven years old. | ||
| And back then... | ||
| Get me out of here. | ||
| I can't stand the dentist. | ||
| I just can't stand the dentist. | ||
| Proceed. | ||
| Proceed. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, back then they used to use nitrous oxide quite frequently. | |
| Oh, yes. | ||
|
unidentified
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And, well, the dentist, I guess, put just a little bit too much nitrous to the oxygen mixture. | |
| Oh, yes. | ||
|
unidentified
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And they had said that I started turning pale. | |
| Well, at the time that I started turning pale, I remember myself being in the corner of the dentist's office, in the upper corner, like in the ceiling area, looking back down and watching them look at me. | ||
| There are so many stories like this. | ||
| And so you're convinced you were. | ||
| I mean, your vision was seeing it from that perspective, actually. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Very much so. | |
| I could see them. | ||
| I remember him calling for the nurse to his dental assistant to come in. | ||
| And her name was Luann. | ||
| And so you were in some kind of trouble? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| And he was shaking me, trying to get a pulse. | ||
| He couldn't find the pulse. | ||
| Oh, my God. | ||
|
unidentified
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He kept shaking me. | |
| They started the dial 911. | ||
| And I noticed that the dental assistant was dialing it. | ||
| And that's when I came back in, and I popped right awake and looked at him. | ||
| I said, don't worry, I'm all right. | ||
| Holy smokes. | ||
| Holy smokes. | ||
|
unidentified
|
They looked at me and they were like, but you didn't have a pulse. | |
| And I was like, well, I saw everything you were doing. | ||
| It was just, I don't know, there was something wrong with what you were giving me. | ||
| And he checked the nitrous, and that's when he saw that he had just too much on. | ||
| That's quite a story, sir. | ||
| It's quite a story. | ||
| I really appreciate it. | ||
| Thank you very much. | ||
| There was a cartoon somebody sent me recently. | ||
| I can't recall just what it was, but it was kind of cute. | ||
| It showed an operating room, you know, and the doctors and the assistants and the nurses and all the rest of it, and a patient, of course, on the operating table. | ||
| And up above the operating table, way up at the top, where you just could not see it no matter where you were in the room, unless, of course, you were floating on the ceiling, was a sign that simply read, if you can read this, you're dead. | ||
| If you can read this, you're dead. | ||
| I guess a little bit of humor there and maybe a little bit of something. | ||
| If you rose up and you went to the ceiling and you saw a sign saying, if you can read this, you're dead. | ||
| Welcome to the Rockies. | ||
| You're on the air. | ||
| Hello. | ||
|
unidentified
|
All right, this is Thomas in Mace, Arizona, 550 KFYI. | |
| Yes, sir. | ||
| Well, I have another NDE experience for your files. | ||
| Oh, you do? | ||
| All right. | ||
| Yet another one. | ||
| Go right ahead. | ||
| Well, anyway, my contribution is this. | ||
| Friday, my mother requested 911 service to Desert Samaritan Hospital. | ||
| Right. | ||
| She was taken to ER between her advanced stage four cancer and her stomach bleeding, intestinal bleeding. | ||
| She bled out four pints. | ||
| Oh, my God. | ||
| Over the course of the weekend, this previous weekend, Sunday morning, she was shuffling in bed trying to get herself comfortable as she related to me. | ||
| And turns out all the staff, the floor, had arrived in her room. | ||
| She said she'd seen the light from, well, I guess some people would call it the hereafter or stove a core or the other side or however. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And her heart had stopped for eight seconds. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Now, I have another thing I'd like to relate to you. | ||
| Before you do, though, that's very interesting. | ||
| Only eight seconds. | ||
| Some people seem to have a lifetime of experience. | ||
| In eight seconds or five minutes or ten minutes or an hour, they seem to experience an entire lifetime of things. | ||
| So it's like there's no relationship between time there and time here. | ||
| Trude. | ||
| That's very interesting observation. | ||
| Listen, I would like to hear the rest of this, and I will after we're coming up toward the bottom of the hour if you can afford to stick around. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I can hold. | |
| Can you? | ||
| All right. | ||
| I'm sure that you heard the story about the lady who was dead for, what, three hours or something like that. | ||
| She now has since, by the way, passed away, and I meant to pass that fact on to you. | ||
| But after three hours, she simply came back to life. | ||
| And believe me, she'd had no pulse and she was ice cold to the touch. | ||
| That's what they said. | ||
| Those were the words. | ||
| Ice cold to the touch. | ||
| From a beautiful little town in the high desert called Verup. | ||
| I am indeed Art Bell. | ||
| Great to be here. | ||
| Talking about anything you want. | ||
| We're in open lines right now. | ||
| And again, I remind you: as we will be Friday all night long till Saturday morning, the early hours of. | ||
| If you've got a suggestion of something you think would make a good theme, send it off to me at artbell at mindspring.com or artbell at a-ol.com. | ||
| And who knows? | ||
| We just might pick yours. | ||
| All right, back to our little guest here. | ||
| Hello there. | ||
| You're back on the air again, sir, and you said there was more to tell. | ||
| Well, Art, like I said, the Mesa Desert Samaritan staff had recorded that her heart had stopped for like eight seconds. | ||
| This is about 10 a.m. | ||
| Sunday morning. | ||
| And she said she saw the light from the hereafter. | ||
| And she'd been seeing it quite some time, a lot recently, both unconscious and conscious. | ||
| But I also share a frustration with technology with you to go to a separate topic, if I may. | ||
| Well, all right, very briefly. | ||
| Very briefly. | ||
| Even with the best of radios that include TV audio, there's no coverage above channel 13 audio. | ||
| I'm a licensed ham, so I can understand an explanation if there is one. | ||
| Well, of course there's one. | ||
| There's always one, sir. | ||
| That would require a completely different band. | ||
| In other words, a radio that carries television audio, like the CC radio, for example, covers the VHF spectrum of television. | ||
| To cover the UHF spectrum of television would take a whole new gigantic new spectrum because, as you know, television in UHF goes up very, very high, indeed, very high. | ||
| So it would be hundreds and hundreds of megahertz. | ||
| And to give it to you straightforward, sir, that would cost a very great deal of money to cover all of that spectrum. | ||
| However, you never know, and you might see it in a future edition of the radio. | ||
| It depends. | ||
| Technology is changing all the time. | ||
| First time caller line, you're on the air. | ||
| Hi. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, Bill. | |
| It's a pleasure to speak with you. | ||
| And you, where are you? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm listening to you on KFI, and I'm calling from the high desert in the Mojave. | |
| Excellent. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Welcome. | |
| I wanted to speak to you just briefly on your, we're talking about can time stand still? | ||
| Well, that's ruled by that nine-year-old's thought. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And I happen to remember a quote in the Bible that in Joshua, you know, I'm just saying what this scientist even quoted this, and it's found in Joshua 10, verse 12. | ||
| And I'll just read the one verse. | ||
| It says, Then spake Joshua to the Lord in the day when the Lord delivered the Amorites before the children of Israel. | ||
| And he said in the sight of Israel, Son, stand thou still upon Gideon and thou moon in the valley of Elegion. | ||
| And scientists have looked at that and gone back in our calendars and a lot of things, and they've come up with thinking, you know, the Earth actually slowed or stopped on its axis, or there was a prolonged eclipse, or a hailstorm. | ||
| Well, they've definitely looked into because they believe that it stood still for approximately a certain amount of time, and they can record that missing time. | ||
| All right, I've got it. | ||
| It's like the day time stood still movie, wasn't it? | ||
| Indeed, if the sun relative to Earth and the moon remained suddenly stationary, then there would be an argument that time really had stopped. | ||
| Maybe God had something he had to get done. | ||
| And so it's like in some of the old twilight zones, remember those? | ||
| Where everybody was frozen. | ||
| You know, if they were eating, they were frozen with a fork midway to their mouth. | ||
| Entire towns, cities, the world was frozen, and then like one guy would be unfrozen. | ||
| And he'd be walking around seeing all this going, oh my God, the world stopped, all except for me. | ||
| Well, in essence, without the rotation of other bodies around us or us around them, one could argue that that would represent a stoppage of time. | ||
| Interesting. | ||
| Wildcard line, you are on the air. | ||
| Hi. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, Art. | |
| Hello. | ||
| Glad to talk to you. | ||
| I've been trying to get through, and just finally have. | ||
| All right. | ||
| I recently sent you a photo. | ||
| I emailed it, and it was of a ghost in a graveyard. | ||
| And I was just wondering if you had received it. | ||
| I get a lot of ghosts in graveyards. | ||
| So I'm not sure how to answer that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| This particular one was, it had a cross in it. | ||
| And I sent it last month. | ||
| So I don't know. | ||
| Oh, wait a minute. | ||
| You sent it last night? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Last month. | |
| Oh, last month? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's a long time ago, sir. | ||
| That's a lot of ghosts ago. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, I know. | |
| And I've been trying to get through ever since. | ||
| But we hunt ghosts. | ||
| Oh, you do? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, we do. | |
| Why? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm calling from Indiana. | |
| Yeah, I understand it. | ||
| You can't originally be from Indiana, not with that accent. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, yes. | |
| I've lived here all my life. | ||
| You have? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, I have. | |
| Yes, I have. | ||
| I've lived in Boondo, Indiana, all my life. | ||
| Oh, I'll be darned. | ||
| I didn't think people in Indiana had accents like yours. | ||
| You sound more like you're from like Tennessee, perhaps, or somewhere in the South. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No, I go to the South a lot, but I was born and raised right here in a little town. | |
| Okay. | ||
| A few months back, we went to a mansion, and I actually had an entity to move through me. | ||
| And I was listening to your show one night as a man described what it felt like he had one to move through. | ||
| And he said that it was like ten times the best pleasure that he had ever felt. | ||
| And what do you say? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, the time that I felt it, it literally chills you to the bone. | |
| Huh. | ||
| What makes you think it passed through you? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well in this particular house we had smelt this woman's perfume and it was lilac and I went into another room and this was on the third floor of this mansion. | |
| Right. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And I stopped and it hit me and it just, it was from the inside out. | |
| I just turned like to an iceberg. | ||
| Cold as cold as ice. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It moved through me and when it left me, you just, there was, the hair stood up all over my body. | |
| It was something else. | ||
| Oh, better you than me. | ||
| I very much appreciate the story, sir. | ||
| I don't know entities moving through you. | ||
| I don't know for sure that represents exactly what we just heard. | ||
| It could be he walked into a room and there were entities there and he could have hit a cold room. | ||
| You know, there are cold rooms. | ||
| But I'm not sure how you would really know an entity had moved through you unless you had some visualization of it. | ||
| Otherwise, how can you be sure of the effect? | ||
| It could have been an effect on you that did not involve something moving through you. | ||
| The idea of an entity moving through me gives me the GBs. | ||
| East of the Rockies, you're on the air. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hello. | |
| Hello. | ||
| Yeah, hello. | ||
| Hi, turn your radio off, please. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay, hang on a minute. | |
| That's very important when you get on the air, folks. | ||
| Have it handy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, this is Chris. | |
| Yes, Chris. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, I was going to ask you, do you know when the space shuttle comes back into orbit, the way it makes the sonic boom? | |
| You mean when it deorbits? | ||
| Yes, it kaboom. | ||
| As a matter of fact, we've had it here in the desert. | ||
| Occasionally, we've been able to watch it headed toward Florida, and what a spectacular sight. | ||
| Just starts zooming out of the west, and you see this fireball coming, and it just streaks across it very quickly, and you hear a big kaboom. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, and I was wondering if UFOs would make the same sound, or if it was just the shape of them, because even that satellite that came down, it made a boom, too. | |
| Sure. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And so I was just wondering if there's any way that UFOs would. | |
| Well, I think it would depend on exactly how they're traveling. | ||
| If they're traveling in some conventional sense in this dimension, then you would think they would. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Otherwise, perhaps not. | ||
| So I'm not sure exactly how to answer that. | ||
| If they travel as our planes and the shuttle and anything else that DORBITS does, then yes, yes, yes, they'd make a big kaboom. | ||
| But if they're using some other mode of propulsion, perhaps not. | ||
| That's best, that's closest you can get to answering that one, I think. | ||
| West of the Rockies, you're on the air. | ||
| Hello. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, good morning. | |
| This is Phil in Downey, California. | ||
| Hey, Phil. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, I just was wondering if you realize it or not, that your voice seems to be getting deeper. | |
| I've noticed a very distinct difference in your voice within the last year or so. | ||
| You think so? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, it's getting deeper and deeper. | |
| And you used to do a real mean David Brinkley. | ||
| It seemed like when you were going, when you were at the first part of your show, you would give all the news events of the day, and you sounded amazingly like Dave Brinkley. | ||
| I've been told that, yes. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And so anyway, that's about all I want to say, except that I still haven't heard Philly down. | ||
| He still hasn't heard from Hoagland about that film. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| I just wonder if he's okay. | ||
| I mean, you know, I try to get another... | ||
| I spoke with him. | ||
| Yesterday? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I tried to get another fax out to him, and the operator said that his fax machine was turned off. | |
| Well, I'm certainly not surprised. | ||
| In view of what he offered, my guess would be that he received an absolute landslide of faxes, probably to the degree where you were seeing trees fall in the forest every day, you know, millions of pages of faxes coming in. | ||
| I had that experience, and it simply became overwhelming. | ||
| I, too, used to give a fax number out on the air. | ||
| However, I found that there was no machine up to the job. | ||
| There was never enough paper to keep the job done. | ||
| People tended to send, you know, 126-page faxes to me, and it's just not tenable. | ||
| Nothing you can do about it. | ||
| It's so overwhelming that you just, you cannot continue it on any number of fronts. | ||
| You just can't do it. | ||
| That's, I guess, the downside of having an audience as large as we do, one fax number, try and imagine it. | ||
| If only one or two or three percent of those listening decide to send big faxes, imagine, try and imagine the result. | ||
| First time call a line, you're on the air. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hello. | |
| Hello? | ||
| Yes, hello. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Is this Art Bell? | |
| It sure is. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, I'm calling because I had an experience back in Rome. | |
| And what happened was I was in the hotel room. | ||
| Did you say in Rome? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right, in Rome? | |
| Rome, Italy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right, Rome, Italy. | |
| Okay. | ||
| And I was sitting down late at night. | ||
| I was packing and getting ready to go somewhere else. | ||
| And all of a sudden, a flash of light just hit across the back of my buck. | ||
| Uh-huh. | ||
| And I didn't know what to do, so I just quickly went to bed. | ||
| And the next day, everything went really weird. | ||
| What do you mean? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, I had like visions, and I started hearing things. | |
| Now, are you sure you didn't have some sort of medical event occur to you? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Um No, I don't think so. | |
| Well, what do you think this light was? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm not sure what it was, but it was strong and it wasn't something electrical. | |
| Oh, well, I wouldn't have any idea. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm not sure either. | |
| I'm sorry, I'm not an expert on all of this. | ||
| I listen to these things, but I'm far from an expert. | ||
| So, you know, other than suggesting some sort of medical event that might have occurred to you that you interpreted as a light, followed by whatever effects it had on you, on the other hand, it could be something totally alien, who knows? | ||
|
unidentified
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Well, because after, like, I had like some psychic thoughts on it. | |
| You began to get psychic ability, you're saying? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| As in what, being able to read people's minds? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, for instance, like this past week, I knew that I would be late to work because I saw a car accident in my mind. | |
| Right. | ||
|
unidentified
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And on the way there, I saw a car accident. | |
| And you were late. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right? | |
| And you were late. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And I was late. | |
| I don't know what said all that. | ||
| As I suggested, it may have been some sort of medical event. | ||
| It's just one possibility. | ||
| And something may have happened in your brain. | ||
| I wonder if that happens to people, you know, just normal people kind of every day, going to work or whatever, and then suddenly some connection in their brain, some neuron suddenly makes a connection it had not made before. | ||
| And all of a sudden, things change and you begin to move in this world and another. | ||
| Gordon Michael Scallion might be an example of that. | ||
| Stood up, you'll recall, to give a speech. | ||
| I think it was a very important business speech he was going to give to a group of business people, investors, that sort of thing. | ||
| And he got up on stage and not a word would come out. | ||
| He totally lost the ability to make any sound whatsoever, was taken to the hospital, and then began to have a series of experiences. | ||
| So a lot of geometric shapes and colors and changes and all kinds of really interesting things, and then began to have a great psychic ability. | ||
| So it sounds a lot like that, and it may well be that there is no specific event that keys something like that happening. | ||
| That just occasionally it happens to human beings. | ||
| That, you know, that all of a sudden some neuron makes a strange little connection in that 90% of the part of the brain we don't use. | ||
| And away you go. | ||
| East of the Rockies, you're on the air. | ||
| Hello. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, hi. | |
| Got a little story about quantum computers. | ||
| Yes, sir. | ||
| They do exist right now, as we know. | ||
| My close family member of mine is a computer research scientist and has told me some information about quantum computers themselves. | ||
| And what did he say? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, the scientists seem to believe that quantum computers can time travel. | |
| And that's how they obtain the information so fast that the present computers kept on. | ||
| Well, what I've heard, you know, those experts that I have talked to, is that a quantum computer might be able to discern information from the next dimension and the dimension preceding ours, that it might actually access some sort of greater records. | ||
| Yes, I've heard that. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yes, yes, and I find it very interesting and a hard concept to fathom. | |
| Well, it's a concept, sir, that could lead, once communication with another dimension would be established, even if it's just the acquisition of information, that would be the first step. | ||
| And the next step, or four or five down the line, would be time travel or dimensional travel. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Exactly. | |
| I have a firm belief that that is what the UFO sightings are, in fact, is dimensional travel, not just a means of propulsion as we know it today. | ||
| I wouldn't disagree with you for a second. | ||
| It's entirely possible. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, that's the way I look at it. | |
| And I think within the next few years, we're going to find out something along these lines that's just going to blow the socks off of everybody. | ||
| Well, the socks are coming off right now. | ||
| Thank you very much. | ||
| There was an article that I read the other night on quantum entanglement. | ||
| And what's being suggested is that they have now managed to have quantum entanglement, which means that they can perhaps soon take a thing, a desk, a lamp, | ||
| a clock, something or another, and move it from point A to point B, which could mean, if finally developed, and in other words, a Star Trek transporter, something that would break down the elements, transmit them, and then reassemble them on the other end. | ||
| Can you imagine what that would do to the airline industry if that should come to pass? | ||
| Quantum entanglement may be the first step that we're taking toward the Star Trek transporter. | ||
| I don't know that we'll ever see that in our lifetimes, but I do believe we'll see it. | ||
| Our children or our grandchildren will see it. | ||
| Wouldn't that be something? | ||
| Want to go to Sydney, Australia? | ||
| All right, set the coordinates. | ||
| Okay, locked in on Sydney. | ||
| You step into the device, and you go poof. | ||
| And you step out of the device, and you're in Sydney, Australia. | ||
| Probably still cost a lot of money to do anyway, huh? | ||
| We'll be right back. | ||
| Ladies, Good morning, everybody. | ||
| Well, not long ago, I had a guest on who said that hydrogen power wasn't viable because hydrogen power would have to have fossil fuels to create it. | ||
| So, you know, we trade one devil for the other. | ||
| That's what he said. | ||
|
unidentified
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Other good luck. | |
| Tonight's guest says, basically, baloney, and here's how we're going to do it. | ||
| He's Harry Braun, and he's coming up in just a moment. | ||
| Harry Braun has worked as an energy analyst for the past 25 years. | ||
| He is author of the Phoenix Project. | ||
| That's a good name, you know, rising from the ashes, right? | ||
| Shifting from oil to hydrogen. | ||
| He is currently chairman and CEO of Sustainable Partners Inc., a diversified energy and publications company that's involved in the development of a number of renewable energy technologies and projects. | ||
| Hmm, wonder if it's a division of Enron. | ||
| Probably not, huh? | ||
| We'll ask. | ||
| We'll see if he can recall. | ||
| For the last two decades, Harry's worked in cooperation with senior engineers Boeing, Lockheed, BMW, BMW, Shell, NASA, and the U.S. Department of Energy, oh my, in the development of both state-of-the-art and advanced solar, wind, and hydrogen production, storage transmission, and end-use technologies. | ||
| His specific focus has been to identify the most cost-effective and renewable energy technologies that could be mass-produced for large-scale hydrogen production. | ||
| Hydrogen is the only zero-carbon emission universal fuel that can displace fossil and nuclear fuels on a worldwide basis forever. | ||
| Oh, that's a strong word, forever. | ||
| This shift from oil to hydrogen is being advocated by hundreds of scientists and engineers from over 82 countries, as well as many major oil companies, including Shell, Chevron, Texaco, and BP. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| The Phoenix project also provides key insights into exponential growth, photobiology, molecular biology, and the inevitable evolution of designer genes. | ||
| We'll soon be able to switch off the biological mechanisms of aging and disease. | ||
| Well, well, we can do that. | ||
| We're going to need a lot of energy. | ||
| Harry is a graduate of Arizona State University where his academic interests evolved from, get this? | ||
| History to anthropology to evolutionary biology. | ||
| Oh, do I have a question for him? | ||
| Molecular and photo biology, protein evolution, and nanotechnology. | ||
| Woohoo! | ||
| Lots to talk about with Harry. | ||
| He's been an advisory board member of the International Association for Hydrogen Energy since 1981. | ||
| Coming right up. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Here is Harry Braun. | ||
| Am I pronouncing your name correctly, Harry? | ||
| Yes, that's correct, Art. | ||
| Welcome to the program. | ||
| Great to have you. | ||
| Thank you very much. | ||
| I notice in what I just read that you have been to some degree studying evolutionary biology, so I've got a question for you. | ||
| Yes, please. | ||
| I read an article about Wu a week ago, less than a week ago. | ||
| Now, this is a scientist in Great Britain. | ||
| It's an article in The Observer, and basically it says, for those who dream of a better life, science may have some bad news. | ||
| This is the best it's going to get. | ||
| Our species has reached its biological pinnacle and is no longer capable of changing. | ||
| That is the stark controversial view of a group of biologists who believe that a Western lifestyle now protects humanity from forces that used to shape Homo sapiens. | ||
| If you want to know what utopia is like, just look around. | ||
| This is it, according to Professor Steve Jones of University College London, who's suggesting that things have simply stopped getting better or worse for our species. | ||
| That in the West, we really now have stopped the old process of natural selection with technology and medical advances and all the rest of it. | ||
| Natural selection is not what it once was. | ||
| And if natural selection is the mainstay of evolution, then he might have a point or he might be all wet. | ||
| But since you're in the area, I thought I would ask what you think. | ||
| Well, I think he's, I use the word all wet, but it's hard to imagine anyone in an evolutionary context thinking we have reached the epitome of where we're going. | ||
| Well, I know it's hard to think about, but what about the contention that, well, sure enough, here in the West, we really don't have that going for us as much as we once did, natural selection. | ||
| We have heroic medical techniques. | ||
| And how about that aspect of it? | ||
| What do you think? | ||
| Well, no matter how heroic the medical techniques we have right now, we still age in a rather depressing kind of way as we get older. | ||
| Our body essentially starts coming apart on a molecular scale. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And that is all going to change probably within the next even five to ten year period. | ||
| there's been so much progress in the whole area of the Human Genome Project. | ||
| What do you think is going to... | ||
| Most of us are going to make that. | ||
| So what might happen in that period? | ||
| Well, I think we'll usher in the designer gene era, which simply means we will be able to select with atomic precision the genetic structure that makes us up. | ||
| In the same way that you change a document in a computer and then resave the document with the improved corrections that you've made, you can do the same thing with your genes. | ||
| So in other words, by the time we get to be, say, 60 or 70 years old, we could just more or less do a reboot. | ||
| Well, exactly. | ||
| You could regenerate all of the tissue in your body and be biologically 18. | ||
| Be biologically 18 at 70? | ||
| Yeah, that's correct. | ||
| You would regenerate your organs, your heart, your skin, your eyes would all be regenerated within your body. | ||
| This isn't something that comes in foreign. | ||
| It's a matter of just switching on your own DNA, your own enzymes and hormones, which regenerate tissue. | ||
| And all that happens on a molecular scale, and that's what's so exciting about molecular biology today. | ||
| Isn't that plain God? | ||
| Well, some people might think so. | ||
| However, you have to also look at the perspective that this has been the direction that technology has been heading ever since we crawled out of the muck. | ||
| That we have been in more control. | ||
| You are convinced we crawled out of the muck. | ||
| Well, actually, not we. | ||
| You might suggest our ancestors, which were the microbes that live on the planet. | ||
| Well, I mean, no, as opposed to Adam and Eve being plucked down. | ||
| Yeah, tossed out. | ||
| Generally, most people in the scientific community buy into the evolutionary perspective of things. | ||
| Remember, evolution simply means change. | ||
| That's all it means. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| And every time a baby is born, it has half of the genetic complements from its mother and half from its father. | ||
| You bet. | ||
| Therefore, different. | ||
| You bet. | ||
| And that's all we're talking about, is change. | ||
| Well, but again, I now circle back to my argument about change. | ||
| Surely natural selection has played a big part in evolution. | ||
| Wouldn't you agree with that? | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| You would. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| So then if natural selection is perverted in some way, maybe that's the wrong word. | ||
| Well, it's now becoming biocybernetic selection. | ||
| Then are you not possibly tampering with the evolutionary process? | ||
| Oh, absolutely. | ||
| We're taking evolution in a biological sense into our own hands. | ||
| Ah. | ||
| And natural selection is now giving way to our ability to manipulate our genetic structure with a high degree of precision and actually pick the types of genes that we want to remain active and the ones that we want to retain at all. | ||
| Harry, how fast are we really going in that direction? | ||
| I mean, what you're projecting here is pretty incredible that this could happen in the next 10 or 20 years. | ||
| That's absolutely incredible. | ||
| That gives me great hope. | ||
| Well, let me give you a quick analogy. | ||
| The progress in medicine, in biology right now is accelerating exponentially. | ||
| And to give you a kind of feel for exponentials, and our listeners a feel for exponentials, if you just arithmetically add a penny a day, at the end of the month you have 31 cents. | ||
| But if you exponentially increase a penny every day, which means that on day one it's one cent, on day two it's two cents, day three it's four cents, and then it's eight cents, at the end of 31 days you don't have 31 cents, you have over $10,700,000. | ||
| Well, I'm not good for very many days. | ||
| Well, I'm just making the point, though, that there's a huge difference between regular growth and exponential growth. | ||
| And all of the advances in molecular biology and computer science today are happening exponentially. | ||
| Exponentially. | ||
| Well, it's got a lot of implications. | ||
| If people virtually begin to live forever, if what you just said is true and it can be done in 10 to 20 years, then a lot of people, even most people, not most, a majority living right now will live to take advantage of this and remain alive. | ||
| And then, of course, just remaining alive for a short period of time longer will allow that exponential growth to continue. | ||
| So everybody living today might possibly make it to immortality. | ||
| That is correct. | ||
| And even if you die, you could still theoretically get frozen and still make it. | ||
| Okay, you really do believe that? | ||
| Oh, absolutely. | ||
| Incidentally, by the way, I did mean to ask, Sustainable Partners Inc., not a division of Enron, right? | ||
| Not a division of Enron, right? | ||
| Are you following that story? | ||
| Oh, yes, of course. | ||
| You have any comments on that story? | ||
| Well, I've known Enron a long time. | ||
| I've always had, having been closely associated with them in the past, you always kind of roll your eyes when they come into the room. | ||
| It couldn't happen to a nicer group in many respects. | ||
| But I think it's a classic example of if you let people get away with murder, they will. | ||
| All right. | ||
| If we achieve immortality in our span of lives now, those of us that make it, it's going to change a lot of things. | ||
| I mean, right now, for example, we have, what are they saying, six over six billion people on the planet. | ||
| Isn't that about right? | ||
| It's about right. | ||
| And we already have too many in many respects, if you look at it in just the global carrying capacity of the Earth. | ||
| Well, I remember when I was 18, Harry, I was really in a reproductive mode. | ||
| Now, if we all get to go back to a physiological 18, we're going to be like a bunch of bunnies. | ||
| And if there are 6 billion of us already, and we've got polluted cities, we've got palls of awful stuff hanging over the cities because of the cars we burn and the fuel we use, the fossil fuel we use, what's going to happen if we stop dying and continue multiplying? | ||
| Just out of curiosity. | ||
| Yeah, you can't do one without the other. | ||
| And there's no question that if you switch off the biological mechanisms of aging and allow cells and organisms to continue to regenerate, then you're also going to have to switch off the reproductive components of the DNA until such time as we're off the earth and heading off into space somewhere on large spacecraft that can accommodate large numbers of people. | ||
| You say now switch off the biological ability to reproduce. | ||
| That is what you said, right? | ||
| There's just a few genes that you can switch off, and then you can have all the sex you want, and you won't be reproducing. | ||
| Boy, where was that when I was 18? | ||
| Anyway, so if you do that, well, then you would get to the point, of course, there would be so many people that such a gene switch would be, I guess, would have to be mandatory if you wanted the rest of the genetic benefits. | ||
| Is that what you see occurring? | ||
| Yes, I do. | ||
| I think that if you're on a limited resource like the Earth and you want to continue to stay here indefinitely, you have to acknowledge that you can't keep reproducing as you normally did. | ||
| And you also have to understand that if you're not aging in a typical 70, 80-year lifespan, if you have an indefinite number of years, the whole purpose behind having children changes. | ||
| I mean, you can reproduce yourself through cloning as many times as you would want if you're just looking for backups, so to speak. | ||
| Yikes. | ||
| Then how would you imagine, and I'm really asking you to stick your neck out here, but how would you imagine, I mean, still some babies would be born. | ||
| It wouldn't go to zero population growth, I wouldn't imagine, or would it? | ||
| I doubt that it probably would go to zero, but you would be working towards developing a stable state, economic, and societal systems that could be stable over many centuries. | ||
| And the whole point of shifting from oil to hydrogen, incidentally, does the very same thing. | ||
| Taking care of all the pollution and the diminishing resources. | ||
| All of that can be resolved simply by this transition from using hydrogen instead of oil to run our energy and transportation sector. | ||
| Well, I have a million questions about hydrogen. | ||
| Let me, I guess, begin by saying that I did have another guest on the program not long ago who poo-pooed the idea of hydrogen. | ||
| Why? | ||
| Because he said, yes, you can produce hydrogen, but it costs energy to produce hydrogen, said he. | ||
| And that's generally going to be fossil fuel energy. | ||
| And so you're going to continue to burn fossil fuels in order to produce hydrogen. | ||
| So he called it, you know, a zero net gain. | ||
| The whole concept just simply won't work. | ||
| What do you say to that? | ||
| Well, I would say that clearly, if you just think about making hydrogen from fossil fuels, he's right. | ||
| But we're not talking about that at all. | ||
| In fact, what we're talking about doing is, in terms of shifting from oil to hydrogen, is what every green plant on the Earth, in evolutionarily biological sense, has been using hydrogen ever since life has been on the Earth. | ||
| Hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe. | ||
| It's in water, and about 3.5 billion years ago on the Earth, the primitive organisms like blue-green algae figured out how to extract hydrogen from water with sunlight. | ||
| That is a photosynthetic process that's been successfully working now for over 3.5 billion years on a global scale, and nothing ever gets used up. | ||
| There's no pollution. | ||
| The trick is to do it with water. | ||
| Well, the question is, how much money in energy does it cost to convert hydrogen, water to hydrogen that we can use as fuel? | ||
| How expensive in money or in kilowatt hours or however you want to measure it is it to make that conversion? | ||
| Well, 45 kilowatt hours of electricity that you can have in your home, the gas station, wherever you are is what's required. | ||
| That and about 2.3 gallons of water will make you an equivalent gallon of gasoline. | ||
| 45 kilowatts of energy? | ||
| That's it. | ||
| But Harry, that's a lot of energy. | ||
| Well, if it's a penny per kilowatt hour, that means it's 45 cents in electricity costs. | ||
| 45 cents in electricity cost and one gallon of water to produce the equivalent of one gallon of gasoline. | ||
| 2.3 gallons of water are needed. | ||
| Roughly, there's 50,000 BTUs in a gallon of water, and a gallon of gasoline has 120,000 BTUs. | ||
| So you need about 2.3 gallons of water. | ||
| Well, the water part is no problem at all, right? | ||
| Well, that's right, because if you make gasoline in a refinery, you need 18 gallons of water to make a gallon of gasoline. | ||
| Well, I mean, but either way, we do have a lot of water. | ||
| So the water part of this equation is almost insignificant, right? | ||
| That's correct. | ||
| Right? | ||
| Because you get the water back anyway. | ||
| But what is significant is the 45 kilowatts that it takes to produce the equivalent to one gallon of gasoline. | ||
| That's what I want to know. | ||
| We're going to break here at the bottom of the air, and that's exactly what I want to talk about when we get back. | ||
| I want to understand very thoroughly the economics of this. | ||
| 45 kilowatts of electricity is quite a bit of electricity. | ||
| I'm Art Bella, and this is coast to coast, just one little biological genetic switch. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And you're 18 again. | |
| Well, actually, it would take several of those, but it's doable, Harry Brown says, in next 10 to 20 years, and that means we could all live forever. | ||
| Immortality. | ||
| Well, we are going to need a lot of energy. | ||
| I've got some really hard questions about this. | ||
| 45 kilowatts of electricity equals along with water, one gallon of gasoline. | ||
| 45 kilowatts of look, that's a lot of electricity. | ||
| Questions coming up. | ||
| All right, once again, here is Harry Braun. | ||
| That's B-R-A-U-N, by the way. | ||
| Harry Braun. | ||
| Harry, welcome back. | ||
| Thank you, Arch. | ||
| May I ask you a straight-out question, like with a yes or no answer? | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Is it a fact or not that hydrogen today takes more power to produce than the power gained from it? | ||
| It does. | ||
| That's correct. | ||
| It is correct. | ||
| Yes, but by the way, so does every other energy source take more energy than you actually get from it. | ||
| Presenting free lunch in energy. | ||
| Well, all right, then the only other way to look at this is dollars that I can see. | ||
| You're talking about 45 kilowatts of power, couple and a half gallons of water or whatever to produce the equivalent of one gallon of gasoline. | ||
| What does it cost to produce that 45 kilowatts of electricity right now? | ||
| Forget the alternative side of things for a moment. | ||
| Let's just stay with the economics of this as it is today. | ||
| 45 kilowatts, what's the rough cost of that? | ||
| Well, that depends on when you use electricity. | ||
| If you use it in the middle of the night, for example, when power plants are mostly sitting idle, you can buy electricity for less than one cent per kilowatt hour, all night long. | ||
| That's really cheap. | ||
| In fact, the first hydrogen refueling station at Phoenix was actually built by the largest utility company in Arizona. | ||
| That would make sense, wouldn't it? | ||
| It does. | ||
| because it allows the utility companies to use their capital assets much more productively if they're making hydrogen than if they're not. | ||
| Of course, during the time when they've got to produce They've got much less draw late at night on their utility. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| But it's... | ||
| Hmm. | ||
| It should cost the same thing at midnight or at 6 a.m. | ||
| And in reality for consumers, it does, correct? | ||
| No, it doesn't. | ||
| There's different rates in the middle of the night than there are in the daytime. | ||
| It's off-peak or on-peak. | ||
| Oh, really? | ||
| Oh, yes. | ||
| And you pay a big difference if you're buying electricity on-peak versus off-peak. | ||
| Is that reflected in the average consumer bill? | ||
| Well, it is in the sense that most, that's all been adjusted and factored into their bill. | ||
| That's the general use habits that people have. | ||
| So it's averaged out then, and that's why we don't see the difference. | ||
| That's exactly right. | ||
| Gotcha, okay. | ||
| So you're contending, then, that paraplants at night could produce hydrogen at what sort of rate? | ||
| I'm trying to get some idea of exactly what this would really cost. | ||
| Well, it would certainly be in the one to two cent per kilowatt hour range. | ||
| And in many cases, it would be less than that. | ||
| But it's important to point out, Art, that we can't, I don't want to mislead you that the existing power plants can carry the day. | ||
| They can't. | ||
| And your point about do we need a lot more electricity is right on the money. | ||
| You're exactly right. | ||
| It does mean that to shift from oil to hydrogen, we would have to literally triple our electrical production output in this country over what it is now. | ||
| What? | ||
| The master of three more power plants. | ||
| Oh, my God. | ||
| Well, that's not practical, Harry. | ||
| Well, now, wait a second, Art. | ||
| Think about this for a second. | ||
| If you are talking about nuclear power plants or coal power plants, well, yeah, you're right. | ||
| Then we have huge problems that we're going to encounter. | ||
| And if you had to depend on, let's say, nuclear power to make all this electricity, we wouldn't have much of a program because you'd have to build thousands of nuclear plants. | ||
| Well, nuclear plants just went up and out of sight in cost anyway because now they're terrorist targets and they're going to have to be protected and the cost of that is really going to they already were on the margin. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| Economically, this is going to drive them right over the cliff. | ||
| Well, and it's just not a viable option, of course. | ||
| But if you talk about something as simple and elegant as a state-of-the-art wind machine, the most successful renewable energy technologies are windmills. | ||
| wind machines. | ||
| They've been around actually for centuries. | ||
| But the ones in service today produce power competitively with anything else, with coal plants, nuclear plants. | ||
| And the thing about a wind machine is that the reason they don't make much of a contribution to our energy needs is because the wind is intermittent, which simply means it doesn't blow all the time, even at a very good site. | ||
| It may only blow one-third of the time, and the rest of the time, well, it may be blowing in the middle of the night when you don't need the power, and so that lack of dispatchability is why utilities don't have wind units, for example, making most of our power. | ||
| But if you make hydrogen with that wind machine, then the intermittency issue goes away. | ||
| So if the wind's blowing in the middle of the night, it doesn't matter. | ||
| You're making hydrogen with it. | ||
| And you can make enough hydrogen to run the entire United States. | ||
| All of our energy needs in this country, we consume 95 quads. | ||
| That's a quadrillion BTUs. | ||
| My God. | ||
| And if you want to know what a quadrillion is, it's a one followed by 15 zeros. | ||
| So we use 95 of those every year in terms of our oil and coal and nuclear. | ||
| And we're big consumers with regard to the rest of the world. | ||
| Big time. | ||
| Big time. | ||
| But literally 10 million one megawatt wind machines could make 95 quads easily. | ||
| Now, how long does it take to build 10 million wind machines? | ||
| How long? | ||
| Well, as it turns out, the inside of a wind machine has the same kinds of components as the inside or under the hood of your car. | ||
| There's a gearbox, a generator, a brake. | ||
| Yes, I should tell you, I have wind generators up here at my house as well as solar power, a rather large array. | ||
| So I can talk to you about this. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| They're stators. | ||
| They're really nothing more than motors. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yes, that's exactly right. | ||
| And we even had a person who was being interviewed by Peter Jennings at ABC News more than 10 years ago, who had never hooked up to the utility. | ||
| He had run a wind machine on his property all of his life. | ||
| He was 82 years old. | ||
| Had a sixth-grade education. | ||
| And when you walked into his barn art, there was this barrel of water, and he had the two electrodes from the wind machine inside the water making hydrogen. | ||
| And he, this guy, modified his own pickup truck on his farm to use the hydrogen fuel. | ||
| Oh, and this was a sixth-grade education. | ||
| You're kidding. | ||
| And in what manner did he modify? | ||
| What did he have to do to the car to convert it? | ||
| Do you knowhand? | ||
| Yes, essentially you have to change the carburetion from a liquid fuel carburetor that uses gasoline to a gaseous fuel carburetor, very similar to what you do to use natural gas. | ||
| So that's not really a gigantic conversion, is it? | ||
| It's not. | ||
| You can modify any automobile to use hydrogen fuel. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| As a matter of interest, if you were running your car on hydrogen, what differences would you note from using gasoline in the normal internal combustion manner? | ||
| Well, the first thing you'd notice is that there are zero carbon emissions. | ||
| The air coming out of the exhaust is pure water vapor. | ||
| Water vapor. | ||
| Yeah, you get the water back out the exhaust. | ||
| What about horsepower? | ||
| Americans love horsepower. | ||
| They do. | ||
| Now, how would the hydrogen fuel compare in horsepower in the exact same car, let's say, to gasoline? | ||
| Well, in the work that BMW has done, and they are the leader in the world in this area, since they've been modifying cars to use hydrogen fuel now for 25 years. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| They are in their fifth generation cars. | ||
| According to their specifications, a liquid hydrogen fuel car performs every bit as good as a gasoline-fueled car. | ||
| In fact, they actually estimated the acceleration time to be one second faster than with gasoline. | ||
| Oh, we'll like that. | ||
| That's exactly right. | ||
| And their cars are. | ||
| Their hydrogen fuel cars have both gasoline tanks as well as hydrogen tanks. | ||
| And you can flip the switch when you're driving the car, and you can't tell the difference which fuel you're using. | ||
| Well, that's pretty good. | ||
| That's pretty good. | ||
| Let's see, no emissions. | ||
| Again, going back to the cost of it, again, the startling thing is you said to switch to hydrogen, we'd need three times the production of electricity we presently have. | ||
| Right. | ||
| That's an astounding thing to contemplate. | ||
| And it would take, you believe, you think the way to go would be millions of wind generators. | ||
| 10 million is what we need. | ||
| 10 million. | ||
| That would be hooked up, I presume, to the grid in all of the places where you would put wind generators because there's a good amount of wind, right? | ||
| Well, all through the country, all through the Midwest, and there's good wind sites almost in every state. | ||
| And you can put wind machines offshore, too, but the state-of-the-art systems, you could easily, just in the Midwest, you could run the country and much of Europe. | ||
| Let's talk for a second about one current state-of-the-art the art technology wind generator. | ||
| All right? | ||
| Okay. | ||
| In a windy area at, say, 15 or 20 miles an hour, what will that produce? | ||
| How much will it cost to make? | ||
| And as it turns, what will it produce? | ||
| Well, wind machines today, if they're the large kind that utilities use, megawatt-sized machines, are about $1,000 an installed kilowatt. | ||
| So if you put up a one-megawatt wind machine, which is pretty standard for today, that cost is about $1 million for that machine. | ||
| That gives you the rough numbers. | ||
| And that will generate electricity in today's market for maybe $0.3.5 per kilowatt hour. | ||
| Yeah, I had heard that, about $0.3.5. | ||
|
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Yep. | |
| And that's competitive with coal plants, nuclear plants, anything out there. | ||
| All right. | ||
| I've been to visit in California very large wind farms. | ||
| And there's something to see, but people object to them as eyesores. | ||
| Environmental groups suggest that birds are shredding themselves in the blades and have successfully stopped some of them. | ||
| And we've got lots of those kinds of problems. | ||
| What do you say about that? | ||
| Well, those are really not serious problems. | ||
| For example, the bird kill issue had to do with small wind turbines typically you might put on your property because the blades go around very fast and the birds can't quite see them and they fly into them and get chopped up. | ||
| But if you look at the utility scale wind machines where the blades are about as big as a 747 wing stand, the maximum RPM of that wind turbine is about 23 rotations per minute. | ||
| So a bird would more or less just get a ride. | ||
| That's about it. | ||
| I mean these blades are so big, moving so slow, there isn't a bird on the planet that couldn't see this thing and avoid it. | ||
| So bird kills are no longer an issue. | ||
| The only big problem with wind is that it's intermittent, that you can't know when the wind is going to be blowing. | ||
| Sure, but if you've got a grid arrangement the way we do, then you can simply draw from those areas. | ||
| I mean, there's always wind someplace. | ||
| That's exactly right. | ||
| But the other important point is, if you make hydrogen with the wind energy, you can then put hydrogen into a pipeline instead of a high voltage line. | ||
| And that's important because, as you probably know, most of the transmission lines in this country are saturated. | ||
| They can't get any more power on them. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And so we have to build a whole bunch more new ones. | ||
| Trouble is, nobody wants to allow them across their property. | ||
| Okay, you would then put the hydrogen production plants, no doubt, right next to the electrical producing plant, whatever it is, whatever kind of energy is coming. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| Your industrial scale electrolyzers, which is what they're called, a device that you run electricity through and add water, that's an electrolyzer. | ||
| And yeah, you can put those wherever you want to along the grid or the system. | ||
| You can put them on the seacoast. | ||
| You can put them anywhere. | ||
| I can envision that. | ||
| Is hydrogen safe? | ||
| Well, it's much safer than gasoline or natural gas or propane or any hydrocarbon fuel. | ||
| Okay, that's fair. | ||
| It's not as dangerous as, say, propane. | ||
| Oh, much less. | ||
| And the reason is very simple, Art. | ||
| It's the lightest element in the universe. | ||
| So if you have an accident with a hydrogen tank, your fire event will be over in seconds or fractions of a second. | ||
| Whereas if you've probably seen these movies where a person's walking around all on fire and the fire looks like it sticks to them like glue, that's what gasoline does. | ||
| The carbon in gasoline is what causes the fuel upon an accident to literally stick to you like glue and burn your skin off. | ||
| What would happen if an industrial-size hydrogen plant blew up? | ||
| Just as a general question. | ||
| Yeah, it's very hard to get hydrogen to blow up, per se, as an explosion. | ||
| It's one thing to try to get it to catch fire, and that's even difficult to do because it's so light. | ||
| The minute you have a leak in a pipeline or a tanker truck overturns, and many have, the hydrogen dissipates from the scene in a matter of seconds and is gone. | ||
| So in every instance where there have been major failures with hydrogen systems, and it's important to realize that NASA has been using tons of hydrogen for all of the moon rockets, all of the space shuttle programs, every one of those things. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| Uses tons of hydrogen. | ||
| They've had accidents over the last 35, 40 years of all kinds. | ||
| Well, as a matter of fact, they have had a seemingly disproportionate failure of hydrogen fuel cells. | ||
| You hear them talking about it all the time. | ||
| And you'd have to imagine these hydrogen fuel cells would really, really, really be state-of-the-art, the very best that could be made. | ||
| You would put on the shuttle, right? | ||
| Right. | ||
| So they've had quite a few failures, as I recall. | ||
| Well, actually, the fuel cells have been pretty stable. | ||
| They've been used ever. | ||
| It goes clear back to the Apollo missions, where the astronauts would get both their electricity from the fuel cell and, of course, their fresh water they'd get from the fuel cells, too, because when the hydrogen and oxygen come together in the fuel cell, they make electricity. | ||
| They also make fresh water. | ||
| Well, when one fails on the shuttle, they never tell us, of course, technically what occurred, but what likely occurred? | ||
| Why have they failed? | ||
| Oh, that's a good question, Art. | ||
| I don't have the answer to that. | ||
| I wasn't aware that any of the major fuel cell programs on the shuttle had failed, at least to jeopardize any mission. | ||
| Oh, no, it hasn't jeopardized missions. | ||
| They've always had, that I'm aware of, you know, other fuel cells that they could power up. | ||
| But they have announced quite a number of failures, and I was just wondering in the process what could most likely fail? | ||
| Well, it's a good question. | ||
| It's a very relatively simple device. | ||
| In fact, when we were just talking about electrolyzing water, which is where you take electricity and split water, the fuel cell does the exact opposite reaction. | ||
| In other words, you now have the gaseous hydrogen and oxygen. | ||
| You bring them together and you form electricity and water. | ||
| And there are devices that do the same function. | ||
| Can you make hydrogen at home? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Describe to me how you would do that. | ||
| A glass of water sitting on your desk. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Next to it is a dry cell battery that you pick up at Radio Shack or any little battery will do. | ||
| So you're using DC voltage, right? | ||
| That's correct. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| You just put the two wires in the water. | ||
| The positive and the negative. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| It's nice if you put a little bit of a pinch of salt in the water because that makes the water more electrically conductive. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| And that accelerates the reaction. | ||
| And you're making hydrogen on the spot. | ||
| It's just, of course, dissipating into the air. | ||
| Is there any way to make something at home that will capture the electrolyte? | ||
| Oh, yes. | ||
| Electrolyzers have been in commercial use for 100 years. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And they're about 80% efficient. | ||
| So when you say, well, does it take more energy to make hydrogen than you get from it? | ||
| Yes, that's true, it does. | ||
| But every energy source requires energy in order to use it. | ||
| Even oil that you find, you have to go find it. | ||
| You have to refine it. | ||
| You have to drill it. | ||
| You have to get it to the market. | ||
| All of that takes energy. | ||
| Well, I'm still stuck On having to triple our electrical output to begin switching to hydrogen, to switch the whole country to hydrogen. | ||
| I'm really stuck on that. | ||
| Yeah, here's the important point, though, Art. | ||
| Those 10 million wind machines could be made in a year. | ||
| And the reason I know that is because we make, in this country, every year, 17 million cars and trucks. | ||
| And the inside of a wind machine is no different than what's under the hood of a car and a truck. | ||
| Well, if it makes economic sense, Harry, then why aren't we doing it? | ||
| Well, it's an education problem, Art. | ||
| More than anything, is that we haven't got anybody in the hill right now even considering this. | ||
| Why not? | ||
| Well, we have an information gap that people, when they think about energy, they either think it's got to be coal or nuclear or oil. | ||
| And they generally dismiss the renewables like wind and solar because they're intermittent and far from where you need them and more expensive. | ||
| And so they're locked into this scenario. | ||
| If you look in the Congress today, there's two schools of thought. | ||
| There's the school of thought that says drill our way out of this, find more oil. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And that simply won't work because the U.S. only has 3%. | ||
| Well, in the immediate, we really do have to do that. | ||
| I mean, we've probably got to go to Anwar up in Alaska. | ||
| I mean, even if your idea began to be implemented today, Harry, we'd need short-term supplies, right? | ||
| No, we wouldn't. | ||
| What? | ||
| It will take 10 years, all right, to get that oil, and there's not much of it in Alaska. | ||
| There's not enough oil in Alaska, all of it, to even run the U.S. for a year. | ||
| So we just keep sucking from the Middle East. | ||
| Well, maybe. | ||
|
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No, no, no, no. | |
| We don't want to see that. | ||
| I know, but Harry, hold on. | ||
| We're at the top of the hour. | ||
|
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We'll pick up right here when we get back. | |
| Harry Braun is here from Sustainable Partners Inc. | ||
| We're talking hydrogen, the viability of hydrogen, the switch actually to hydrogen, how it would be done, what it would take, and what kind of world we would have if we did it, whether it's really viable. | ||
| We'll continue with that. | ||
| In a moment. | ||
|
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In a moment. | |
| Once again, back to Harry Bond. | ||
| Harry, welcome back. | ||
| Thank you, Ark. | ||
| So, in other words, you envision, we were talking about the Alaskan oil, and I thought, gee, in the short term, really the short term, we're going to need that oil to continue the economy in its present state, which isn't all that great, actually, at the moment, but at least keep us going until we can get the switch made. | ||
| You're envisioning some sort of immediate switch? | ||
| How immediate? | ||
| Well, the Phoenix Project assumes a Manhattan Project effort similar to what we just did in Afghanistan, where we get organized and get focused. | ||
| In that case, we could be on the hydrogen economy in a five-year period. | ||
| Five years? | ||
| We could have every car, every aircraft, every train, every ship all running on hydrogen fuel, and we could have all of the wind machines we need to build. | ||
| That'll only take about one to two years once the tooling's in place. | ||
| and you'll put probably ten million americans to work uh... | ||
| All right. | ||
| What about the oil companies? | ||
| The oil companies will be leading the charge. | ||
| They already are. | ||
| They're running full-page ads in major news magazines, including the New York Times, etc., promoting hydrogen. | ||
| In other words, the oil companies are going to be able to make the conversion and be the producers of hydrogen. | ||
| That's correct. | ||
| That is correct. | ||
| They will become hydrogen companies. | ||
| Well, they're going to like it if they're not locked out of the picture with this energy. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| And that's a very important point, that not only will they not be locked out, but when their hydrogen tankers have accidents, hydrogen is completely non-toxic. | ||
| So if you lose all, if you, the Exxon Valdez had been carrying hydrogen, it would have been a great big non-event. | ||
| All right. | ||
| A lot of people, when they think of hydrogen, recall the Hindenburg, of course. | ||
| And as you pointed out, the fire was very quick, but it was nevertheless very devastating, right? | ||
| Well, relatively speaking, Art, let's talk about the Hindenburg for one second here. | ||
| Oh, Kidoki. | ||
| The Hindenburg, most people don't realize that two-thirds of the passengers and crew lived. | ||
| They didn't die. | ||
| And of the 35 people who actually died in the Hindenburg accident, 33 of them died because they jumped out of the Hindenburg when it was more than 100 feet in the air, and they died from the fall. | ||
| Really? | ||
| There were only two people who died from burns, and they were not burned by hydrogen. | ||
| They were burned by the diesel fuel that the Hindenburg carried in large tanks to power its Mercedes-Benz engines. | ||
| Well, then, the move away from hydrogen for dirigibles was stupid and unneeded? | ||
| That's exactly right. | ||
| Is it really? | ||
| It is. | ||
| In fact, NASA investigators further found that it was not even the hydrogen that caused the fire in the Hindenburg. | ||
| It was the aluminum-powdered skin that had been painted on the Hindenburg to protect it from ultraviolet rays from the sun. | ||
| And that chemically, that aluminum-powdered fuel, is rocket fuel. | ||
| And even if the Hindenburg had been carrying helium and not hydrogen, it would have had the same accident. | ||
| So hydrogen got a bad rap. | ||
| Well, bad rap, I mean, that's a total rearrangement of history. | ||
| Well, it's in the accident report, though, those numbers. | ||
| Hydrogen, if you're going to have an accident, is the safest fuel you're going to be around. | ||
| Tab on with. | ||
| In fact, if the airplanes that flew into the New York World Trade Center had been fueled with hydrogen, those buildings would still be standing today. | ||
|
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Wow. | |
| Because it was not the collision of the planes into the building that caused them to collapse. | ||
| It was the heat from that carbon-based fire that melted the steel and caused the buildings to collapse. | ||
| Highline could not have done that. | ||
| How much money, Harry, would it cost us roughly to build a million generators of the sort you speak of? | ||
| $5 trillion. | ||
| $5 trillion? | ||
|
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Yes. | |
| At $1,000? | ||
| Well, you assume if we're at $1,000 and installed kilowatt now in small production, if you mass-produce wind machines, those capital costs will drop down to maybe $200 to $300 and installed kilowatt. | ||
| So you're talking about systems that you would probably spend roughly $5 trillion on that, plus you've got an interstate hydrogen pipeline system that has to be laid. | ||
| That's going to be probably another trillion dollars. | ||
| Well, what about existing pipelines? | ||
| You can't use those to transport hydrogen. | ||
| You cannot. | ||
| And you certainly can't use them to transport electricity with the hydrogen because they're not state-of-the-art pipelines. | ||
| They're old-fashioned pipelines. | ||
| Okay, so you've got a big infrastructure problem that goes beyond just the building of the wind generators. | ||
| That's correct. | ||
| You've got to get the hydrogen to the market. | ||
| What about trucking it? | ||
| In other words, you see trucks going down the road with natural gas and regular gas and all that. | ||
| Yes, but there's one thing about the hydrogen pipeline, Art, that's very important to understand, that if it's a cryogenic pipeline that's buried, you can also send electricity through that pipeline with virtually no loss. | ||
| Okay, well, yes, but again, the question is, can a truck carry hydrogen and deliver it to hydrogen gas stations? | ||
| Yes, they do that today. | ||
| There's liquid hydrogen trucks all over the highways. | ||
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Okay. | |
| Have been for 30 years. | ||
| Well, doesn't that at least lessen the need for the pipelines a little bit? | ||
| Or why don't you foresee trucking in America, which is a really big business, as able to deliver the hydrogen to the places it's needed, just like we get natural gas today or the gas we use in the cars? | ||
| Oh, you can, absolutely. | ||
| And that's an important point to understand. | ||
| But the other important element is that electricity is also an important part of this equation. | ||
| And you've got to be able to get it around the country, too. | ||
| And since people don't want to build new high-voltage transmission lines that they see, the only other alternative is to put that electricity into a hydrogen pipeline and send it that way. | ||
| You imagine this to be a cryogenic affair, huh? | ||
|
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Yes, uh-huh. | |
| Simply meaning it's ultra-cold. | ||
| Oh, I know what that means. | ||
| That would be a very expensive affair as well, wouldn't it? | ||
| Well, not really. | ||
| It's about $3 per million BTUs to liquefy hydrogen. | ||
| That's another commercial process that's been around for 40, 50 years. | ||
| And then you would use that pipeline to deliver electricity in what manner? | ||
| In other words, now, to deliver electricity, we have two lines or three lines. | ||
| Probably, right? | ||
| We can all look up at the poles and see the three lines. | ||
| Some underground, but not much. | ||
| Most of it is still above ground. | ||
| We've got those three lines. | ||
| How does a pipeline deliver electricity? | ||
| It is a single entity. | ||
| Yeah, those lines are up in the air aren't because they're hot. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And that's why they can't bury them, really. | ||
| It's a practical standpoint. | ||
| That's why they're all up in the air. | ||
| Yes, okay. | ||
| Fine. | ||
| Now, if you, and the reason they're hot is because they're leaking so much electricity. | ||
| That's why they're hot. | ||
| That's why we have so much damn noise on our radios. | ||
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Yeah. | |
| Yeah, I know. | ||
| Now, if you take that electricity and put it into a hydrogen wire that's embedded in a liquid hydrogen pipeline, the hydrogen wire becomes a superconductor. | ||
| Right? | ||
| So you can now drop electricity in that hydrogen wire in the pipeline and send it across the country with virtually no energy loss. | ||
| And we are not concerned about the mixing of the hydrogen in the pipeline and the high voltage line taking advantage of the cold atmosphere. | ||
| We're not worried about the two of them mixing and going kaboom? | ||
| That's correct. | ||
| Well, because it just requires quality engineering like we do in everything else in life. | ||
| Like in NASA. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Or NASA or just driving down the road. | ||
| I mean, if you look at an average automobile today, it's a pretty sophisticated piece of equipment. | ||
| But if you did mix the high voltage and the hydrogen, you could potentially, of course, have a big problem. | ||
| No, actually, if you're thinking about an explosion, it's very difficult to get hydrogen to explode. | ||
| You have to have very specialized circumstances, including being in a vessel that can build pressure, like the cylinder of an engine, for example. | ||
| That's a perfect place to get hydrogen to explode. | ||
| But to get it to do that outdoors is virtually impossible. | ||
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And this could be... | |
| How much money would it cost in mass production to convert today's automobiles, or even most of the automobiles on the road today, that's even a better question, to hydrogen? | ||
| Well, if you look, it would be very similar to what it cost to convert the car to natural gas from gasoline. | ||
| And those conversion kits have been around for quite some time now. | ||
| You're looking probably in the range of $1,500 to $2,000 per vehicle to convert the vehicle. | ||
| $1,500 to $2,000, huh? | ||
| Now, if you have to produce that, of course, those numbers will come down. | ||
| Would you require that that switch be made mandatory by the time you had full production of hydrogen? | ||
| Well, I would certainly advocate tax credits to individuals as an incentive to get their vehicle modified so that it can use both gasoline as well as the hydrogen. | ||
| All right, that makes sense. | ||
| To me, it makes sense. | ||
| The only problem I see is that we've got to build three times the electrical capacity in the U.S. with wind or whatever in order to get this done. | ||
| That's right, Argyll. | ||
| That is such a tremendous project. | ||
| I don't know how you politically get that done. | ||
| How do you do that? | ||
| Well, you first off acknowledge that our economy is in a recession. | ||
| Sure it is, yes. | ||
| And this is a way to employ millions of Americans, and they wouldn't be raking leaves. | ||
| They would be building the new hydrogen infrastructure, which involves the local gas stations, pipelines, ships, airplanes, Boeing would have to hire back all the people they laid off because they've got to modify the existing airplanes plus build a new generation of systems, ships, transport trucks, etc., in order to undertake this transition. | ||
| And so the first thing you're going to realize is that even though it may cost $5 trillion, we spend a trillion dollars every year on energy. | ||
| So the numbers are very large in any case. | ||
| We spend a billion dollars every week to buy oil from the people in the Middle East who despise us. | ||
| We could shut them off fast, take that billion a week, put it into our own country, and start paying farmers in the Midwest to put wind turbines on their property where they make more money with the wind turbine than they do farming. | ||
| The farmers love the wind turbines. | ||
| They are lining up to get them on their property. | ||
| And so you talk about the fact that, yes, if you're going to make nuclear plants, well, then we have a real problem here. | ||
| But if you're talking about something as simple as a wind machine, we can have them all built in a couple of years, have them deployed, and we're energy independent, 100%. | ||
| We don't have to import anything from anybody. | ||
| I'm looking for the holes in this, Harry. | ||
| There must be some holes. | ||
| So since you so fully understand this technology, be absolutely honest with me and tell me what is the biggest technical criticism of your idea, or the idea, of doing exactly what you're talking about. | ||
| What would you say is the biggest critical opposition you face? | ||
| Well, that's a good question. | ||
| That's probably not a fair question for me to try to answer, Art. | ||
| Sure it is. | ||
| I mean, you can say you don't recollect. | ||
| No, I'm just trying to make the point that anybody who looks at the wind machines, who's familiar from an engineering standpoint with that equipment, knows it's easy to build. | ||
| This isn't exotic technology. | ||
| It's no more difficult to build than cars and trucks. | ||
| It's just a matter of getting focused. | ||
| In World War II, for example, our country retooled every major industry in less than 12 months, from peacetime to wartime. | ||
| Now, we could do the same thing now if we were focused. | ||
| If George Bush says we're going to shift from oil to hydrogen, we're going to do it with wartime speed. | ||
| Everybody's going to get involved. | ||
| The oil companies, the utility companies, all of the major industries in the country are all going to understand that's our objective. | ||
| We're going to get there in five years. | ||
| We'd be there in less than five years. | ||
| Now, on a scale of one to ten, with 10 being absolute, how likely do you think it is George Bush will make such an announcement? | ||
| Would that be a one, a four, a five, an eight, a ten? | ||
| Well, he's not going to make it today, but thanks to your program, Art, more people are going to hear about this and get on the phone and get him and Mr. Cheney up to speed. | ||
| Probably be more like about a negative five, right? | ||
| Well, I'll make this point about our president. | ||
| He has just initiated one of the largest hydrogen fuel programs in the history of the country. | ||
| Now, I did hear that. | ||
| As a matter of fact, that was news about three or four weeks ago. | ||
| Yeah, big news. | ||
| The president himself and his senior advisors know that hydrogen represents the genuine solution, but they just don't see it in the larger context of getting here from here to there in a five-year period. | ||
| Well, they're on the 50-year plan. | ||
| But with the amount of money and the size of the project you're talking about, it's not exactly an immediate economic alternative, a viable alternative, is it? | ||
| Well, if you consider we're spending the honest answer is no. | ||
| It's got to be no. | ||
| It's not in the immediate, a very attractive economic. | ||
| Well, let's talk about that for one second, Arnold. | ||
| Let's talk about a fair accounting system here. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Because when we talk about what's economic, I heard and senate testimony that our country's spending a billion dollars a week to fight the war on terrorism. | ||
| I'm sorry, a billion dollars a day. | ||
| Again. | ||
| That's a lot of money. | ||
| It is a lot of money. | ||
| And we spend billions on medical costs because we have millions of people live in cities like Los Angeles and Houston, and their kids grow up breathing this terrible air. | ||
| I know. | ||
| Listen, you don't have to sell me, Harry. | ||
| I'm saying that... | ||
| I'm your side. | ||
| We subsidize gasoline, and that's why we're addicted to it, because our tax policy subsidies. | ||
| Okay, let's try this question, Harry. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| If we had the program you envision going right now and we bought the equivalent of a gallon of gasoline, we bought a gallon of hydrogen or its equivalent, what would the price be? | ||
| About $2 per equivalent gallon of gasoline. | ||
| About $2, huh? | ||
| And I can tell you also that the price of hydrogen will always be getting cheaper in the future, whereas the price of gasoline will always be getting more expensive. | ||
| Expensive, yes. | ||
| Because one's running out and one isn't. | ||
| Okay, but again, I know you didn't particularly want to answer this, but the true answer is that in the short term, and Harry, we are short-term thinkers. | ||
| We are. | ||
| We are. | ||
| In the short term, it's not an attractive, viable economic idea, is it? | ||
| Well, it all depends if you want to factor in the price of clean air every day, if you want to factor in our military costs that we have to incur. | ||
| I'm willing to factor those in. | ||
| If you do, then hydrogen's cheaper than gasoline. | ||
| Yeah, but. | ||
| But, but, but, you know, the truth of the matter is, those who lead us and ask for our vote, were they to do this in the short term, would be thought of as economic lame-brains. | ||
| Harry, hold on. | ||
| We're at the bottom of the hour. | ||
| I'll be right back. | ||
|
unidentified
|
An American. | |
| Only an American deed. | ||
| It certainly is. | ||
| Good morning, everybody. | ||
| How unsettling. | ||
| One side of my headphones has decided to expire. | ||
| So no doubt some little wire Somewhere has separated. | ||
|
unidentified
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Nothing can go wrong, right? | |
| Harry Braun is my guest. | ||
| We're talking about hydrogen, and it's absolutely fascinating. | ||
| Stay right where you are. | ||
| More to come. | ||
| This is going to be interesting. | ||
| I'm going to get a soldering iron, and as I continue to do the show, I'm going to attempt to repair what I can see is wrong here, having taken this connector apart. | ||
| So technical work while the show goes on. | ||
| Harry, welcome back. | ||
| Thank you, Art. | ||
| Now, I want you to know, Harry, I'm not intentionally being hard on you. | ||
| I'm simply, I mean, what you are saying is such a big deal and it is so important for all of us and for civilization that I feel compelled to shoot any hole in it I can find because it's too important not to. | ||
| I mean, if you're right, if you're right, Harry, it's the answer to everything. | ||
| If you're wrong, and again, I'm going to try this with you one more time, Harry, and that is. | ||
| Please give me what your biggest critic would say, the biggest hole that anybody has ever shot in your arguments. | ||
| I want to know what it is, because maybe I haven't thought of it. | ||
| Well, the reason that's difficult to answer is because if you, this is like looking at the pieces to a puzzle. | ||
| And if you don't see enough of the key pieces in the puzzle, you don't see the big picture. | ||
| So people that shoot holes in things tend to do so because they haven't seen enough of the key pieces in the puzzle. | ||
| For example, that gentleman you had on before who said, well, hydrogen isn't really any answer to anything. | ||
| You've got to make it from oil or fossil fuels. | ||
| You're not solving any problems. | ||
| And he's right if that's all you know. | ||
| It's just like we have a professor in California at Stanford University who did an elegant paper on how to convert all the cars in California and trucks to run on hydrogen. | ||
| Except he assumed you would have to build 400 nuclear power plants to make all the electricity to make all the hydrogen. | ||
| And therefore he said, see, this is going to take at least 50 years to get all these nuclear power plants built. | ||
| And if nuclear power plants are the way you're going to go, he's right. | ||
| But when I mentioned to him wind machines, he said which is something that's very common. | ||
| PhDs know a great deal about very little. | ||
| And he knew a lot about nuclear reactors, but didn't know anything about wind machines. | ||
| And so his understanding, and he's an expert. | ||
| He's a professor of engineering at Stanford University, well-published author in the technical literature. | ||
| Yet he didn't have important pieces to the puzzle understood. | ||
| And therefore, he arrives at a very different conclusion. | ||
| So you've got to have the right facts. | ||
| So your real answer is, other than that comment, which I agree with you was uneducated, other than that, there is no hole to shoot in this idea. | ||
| Not only is there no hole, there is no other energy option that could do this. | ||
| That could run our entire civilization as well as the rest of the world forever. | ||
| Without any pollution, using nothing more than solar energy and water. | ||
| Forever, huh? | ||
| Forever. | ||
| In fact, I know that because hydrogen atoms were created when the Big Bang happened, 15 billion years ago. | ||
| The very first thing that distilled out were protons and electrons, and that's what hydrogen is. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Uh... | |
| All right. | ||
| So then, how do we apply pressure? | ||
| Because everything in this world is political, as you know, Harry. | ||
| How do we apply enough pressure to get this done? | ||
| Well, it's the Fair Accounting Act legislation that needs to be passed in the Congress and in state legislatures, which affects tax policy of fuels. | ||
| We need to stop subsidizing oil, which is running out. | ||
| It's highly polluting, and we have to import it. | ||
| And if we're going to be subsidizing something, it should be something that can be non-polluting. | ||
| We make it in our own country, and it never runs out. | ||
| That's what, if we're going to be subsidizing something. | ||
| So, sorry, so if I'm hearing you correctly, what you want to do is stop subsidizing gasoline. | ||
| And oil products. | ||
| Which would drive the price of gasoline up to, I'm sure from your point of view, a realistic, what, four or five bucks a gallon? | ||
| Easy, yeah, right. | ||
| Like it is in Germany, like $4 a gallon. | ||
| Like it is in Germany, that's right. | ||
| And then if hydrogen is $2 a gallon, everybody will go, gee, that's cheap stuff. | ||
| I'm going to get my hydrogen. | ||
| And, okay. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| What about this? | ||
| Let's think for a second about what would happen if it went to, say, $5 a gallon for some period of time. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure. | |
| When we had a gas shortage and when prices went way up here recently, we slipped into a recession. | ||
| And prices haven't really gone up at all compared to what you're talking about, right? | ||
| Well, they were as high as gasoline was $2.30 a gallon in some parts of the country. | ||
| Yes, sir. | ||
| I saw it myself. | ||
| So we were getting, and I remember all of the analysts that we were talking about, yeah, it's getting right where it needs to be. | ||
| Yeah, that's right, but you're talking about doubling that, Harry. | ||
| And if you were to double that, the impact on our economy, would you care to elucidate? | ||
| Well, yeah, let's talk about Germany for just a second because that's happened. | ||
| It's happened more than 10 years ago. | ||
| And let's talk about Japan because it's happened there. | ||
| We are the only major industrialized country that basically does not tax fuels on a scale that puts them at about $3 to $4 a gallon. | ||
| Every other country is at that level. | ||
| And the last time I checked ours, I was in Germany not too long ago. | ||
| Their economy is doing just fine, thank you. | ||
| And you can't, there's so many cars on the road, you have a hard time finding a place to park. | ||
| That's all true. | ||
| So I don't believe for a minute that there's some magic thing that says, well, if it's $2 a gallon, the economy's going to fall apart. | ||
| No, I don't think that's true at all. | ||
| What's going to cause the economy to fall apart is being, if you think the price of gasoline is cheap now, and it is, relatively speaking, it won't be for long because the whole world, there's a billion Chinese that want to have SUVs and live the good life like we do. | ||
| I know they're on their way. | ||
| They are. | ||
| And the thing is, they can have that if we all shift to hydrogen. | ||
| We can all drive big vehicles with big engines and lots of power and not be polluting anything and not running out of anything. | ||
| But only if you shift to hydrogen. | ||
| If you stay addicted to oil, suddenly the prices for oil are going to spike. | ||
| You're going to see oil at $100 a barrel. | ||
| And then when you go to build the wind machine that you needed to build, it's going to be a lot more expensive because you didn't build it when you had cheap oil. | ||
| You waited till everything got critical and expensive and then decide to make the flip. | ||
| Very, very well put. | ||
| So you're saying it should be done at today's prices and it should be done now. | ||
| With wartime speed. | ||
| With wartime speed. | ||
| That's exactly right. | ||
| So in the process, we would eliminate our dependence on oil from the rest of the world. | ||
| We would become completely independent. | ||
| We would have all the power we wanted. | ||
| We could run big cars. | ||
| Our airplanes would traverse the skies with a cost similar to that which we have right now with zero pollution. | ||
| A little bit of water dripping out the back of a jet engine. | ||
| Is that about right? | ||
| That's about it. | ||
| Zero pollution. | ||
| If you can imagine, I get into L.A. and Houston on a regular basis. | ||
| Millions of people live every day of their lives in horrible conditions in these big cities. | ||
| I know. | ||
| And every day, Art, if all those cars and trucks were running on hydrogen, it would be like living on a mountaintop in L.A. What's that worth? | ||
| Would you imagine that the... | ||
| How would you imagine my house would run in a hydrogen world? | ||
| Well, GM builds a little fuel cell that they're already developing. | ||
| You put it in your house, and then the basic hydrogen you can make at night, in the middle of the night, you buy a little electrolyzer, which is the fuel cell that works backwards. | ||
| Goes in your garage, for example. | ||
| And in the middle of the night, it makes hydrogen and then fills up the tank. | ||
| And when you get up in the morning, you drive off with your car filled up. | ||
| Now, you make hydrogen from... | ||
| But using electric company power? | ||
| Mm-hmm, yes, huh? | ||
| Good old electricity. | ||
| And every gas station has electricity and water. | ||
| And they would be able to turn out, for example, for example, a gas station, there's a good example. | ||
| A regular old neighborhood gas station you're claiming could turn out enough hydrogen at night to service all the customers that would arrive probably in Washington. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| And the utility companies, shareholders, benefit because they're part of now providing transportation fuel to you that produces zero pollution. | ||
| And you don't have to send the money to the Middle East. | ||
| Send it home instead. | ||
| Where is this now being done, even if in a microcosm? | ||
| It's being done in Phoenix. | ||
| The first hydrogen refueling station was just built by Arizona Public Service Company. | ||
| And they have a whole fleet of hydrogen-powered cars, and they love showing them off. | ||
| And there's, of course, a major refueling station at the Munich Airport in Germany, where that was the first one that I was ever able to see and see work that was a commercial hydrogen plant. | ||
| But at Los Alamos National Laboratory, more than 10 years ago, 15 years ago, they had self-service liquid hydrogen pumps filling up cars up there just to prove the point that anybody can do it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's remarkable. | |
| There's got to be a hole in all of this somewhere. | ||
| Well, there's one more thought, Art. | ||
| Yes, sir. | ||
| Hydrogen is the only option that can not only run your car, your home, your power plant, your spaceship, or a Coleman stove sitting on a mountaintop. | ||
| Hydrogen is the only energy medium that's a universal fuel that can run everything. | ||
| And we have enough of it forever. | ||
| Forever. | ||
| Forever is a very interesting word, forever. | ||
| Well, you have to remember, the universe is all made up of hydrogen. | ||
| Our bodies are mostly hydrogen. | ||
| Water is mostly hydrogen. | ||
| And you can't use it up. | ||
| Does your company, Sustainable Partners Inc., I mean, what do you do? | ||
| Are you in the business of hydrogen conversion? | ||
| Are you in the business of just lecturing about it? | ||
| What do you do? | ||
| Well, we have actually a number of projects. | ||
| We have a major 185-megawatt wind project we're developing in New Mexico with a major utility company. | ||
| We are also doing research. | ||
| Some of the more exciting areas of hydrogen production have to do with making it from algae. | ||
| The kind of con scum kind of little organism. | ||
| Scum? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Really? | |
| Oh, this is exciting stuff because these little algae have an enzyme in them called hydrogenase, which is hydrogen with an ASE at the end of it that makes it an enzyme. | ||
| And these organisms have the potential to make hydrogen for a lot less cost than the more traditional electrolysis approach. | ||
| And the only reason I don't focus on them more is because they're still in the research and development stage, and I can't give you any hard numbers on what the production costs are going to be. | ||
| Too bad I was just about to ask you for hard numbers. | ||
| I can do that with a wind machine. | ||
| Can you tell me how much more efficient or by a factor of what you imagine such an algae would produce, 100? | ||
| Well, if we were talking $2 a gallon with a wind machine, we're talking maybe 60 cents a gallon, maybe 50 cents a gallon with algae. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| And that's because they use solar energy to split the water directly, and you don't have to make electricity first. | ||
| And that's something you could also do in your backyard. | ||
| You could have a little algae-covered pond that captures all the hydrogen gas, and it feeds into a fuel cell to make all the electricity for your house. | ||
| Is that anything like swamp gas here? | ||
| Well, swamp gas is actually methane, where the little microbes take hydrogen and bond it to carbon. | ||
| And the carbon is what we're trying to get away from because it's what causes the pollution, global warming, and it causes organic acids inside your cars or engines when you burn it. | ||
| So we want to get carbon out of the fuel and just straight hydrogen. | ||
| Then your engine will last as long as you do, forever. | ||
| Politically, how would you characterize yourself, Harry? | ||
| Conservative, libertarian, liberal? | ||
| Where are you in the spectrum? | ||
| Conservative, I would say. | ||
| You see, when you... | ||
| Does that surprise you? | ||
| No, it doesn't. | ||
| And that's some people feel that same way about nuclear power, that if you're not supporting nuclear power, you're automatically a liberal. | ||
| But I'm an energy analyst is what I do, and I'm only making the point that there isn't enough oil in Alaska to carry this country for very long. | ||
| Perhaps you can answer. | ||
| I hear so many estimates of how much oil there really is. | ||
| Let's see what Harry thinks. | ||
| In other words, I remember being told a few years ago, in 40 to 45 years or less, at present rates of usage, present rates, mind you, not once the Chinese get their BMWs, but present rates, all the oil will be gone, gone. | ||
| Now, what do you know about that? | ||
| Well, this is what I know for sure, Art. | ||
| When we started this program, we talked about exponential numbers and the difference between arithmetic consumption and exponential consumption. | ||
| Yes, sir. | ||
| And we are consuming oil globally, exponentially, and the facts are today that we are consuming four barrels of oil for every one barrel we are producing. | ||
| you cannot continue with that for very long. | ||
| Well, but with present discoveries, All the major discoveries are old. | ||
| There are no big new discoveries. | ||
| Okay, well, with what we know about that's in the ground, Harry, how much longer can we continue pulling it out of the ground and using it? | ||
| That's the question. | ||
| Well, I certainly think it's something that will be happening over the next 25, 30 year period. | ||
| The oil isn't going to suddenly run out. | ||
| But what it is going to do is go up in price sharply, exponentially at some point when supplies tighten worldwide, as they're going to do. | ||
| And most of the analysts who look at global oil reserves have been doing this for a long time, and nobody really debates the numbers. | ||
| In this country, for example, the U.S. has 3% of the known oil reserves. | ||
| That's it? | ||
| And our friends in the Middle East, our enemies in the Middle East, depending on how you look at it, they have most of it. | ||
| And why are we enriching them at our expense? | ||
| So you can't really give me a number of years that we could continue to use oil at present or even the exponential rates you're talking about of increase. | ||
| How much longer could we use oil? | ||
| How much is left? | ||
| Oh, I couldn't begin to do that. | ||
| The only thing I could tell you is that it's a question of price. | ||
| The reason I ask that, well, sure it is. | ||
| It's a question of price. | ||
| You're absolutely right. | ||
| In how many years, Harry, will the price destroy our economy as we now know it? | ||
| Well, that's a good question, and I don't have that answer. | ||
| You see, I'm asking this because, again, we are short-term thinkers, and as long as the oil is economic and the present system that supports its refinement and distribution remains in place, the reason to go and do what you're talking about as a Manhattan-type project ain't going to get done. | ||
| And I'm afraid I'm just a realist, a hardcore realist. | ||
| It's all a matter of economics. | ||
| Now, when the price goes up on gasoline to the point where everybody gets really pissed and the economy really begins to tank, then your idea stands a pretty good chance because that's how we legislate in this country. | ||
| That's how we address things. | ||
| We don't do anything until we have an emergency. | ||
| When we have an emergency, we act. | ||
| That point is not today. | ||
| So what I'm asking you is, when do you think it is? | ||
| Well, it's a question of when the public gets this issue in focus, whenever that happens. | ||
| And with the media, that can happen quickly. | ||
| Well, but they're not going to focus on that, Harry, until their gas is costing a lot of money, and they're really pissed. | ||
| That's when it'll happen. | ||
| Well, there's other issues that work here, too. | ||
| When we talk about the air quality that people breathe every day, I know in the city of Phoenix, air quality is a huge issue in the legislature. | ||
| Yeah, but it's still the slowly boiling frog syndrome. | ||
| the air gets pushed by the day and you hardly even notice. | ||
| It's all a matter of when the price... | ||
| And I'll tell you what, when we get back, I'm going to do a little more. | ||
| And then, incidentally, I took a whole connector apart, re-soldered it, and put it all back together and taped it back up during the time we did this last segment. | ||
| Now, is that efficiency of energy or what? | ||
| Really did. | ||
| Put the soldering iron away. | ||
| in the electronic self-help book. | ||
| Oh, rolling and running It's been a pleasure to smile When we get back, it's your turn with Harry Braun. | ||
| My guest is absolutely fascinating. | ||
| Absolutely fascinating. | ||
| Harry Braun, currently chairman and CEO of Sustainable Partners Inc. | ||
| We're talking about Conversion of our economy, our energy industry to hydrogen. | ||
| A complete, absolute conversion. | ||
| And it's absolutely fascinating. | ||
| I've got a couple of good questions coming up, and then he's all yours. | ||
|
unidentified
|
The End Well, all right. | |
| I'll tell you something, Harry. | ||
| Conceptually, on the viability of what you're talking about, you have sold me. | ||
| How's that? | ||
| Well, aren't that significant? | ||
| We're halfway there now. | ||
| We're halfway there. | ||
| Here's something, though. | ||
| You have said that in order to implement this, we would have to, in some way, get the price of gasoline about where it is in Europe, say up to $5 a gallon, and that would push us into doing this. | ||
| The problem is that in order to get the gas up to $5, that would mean raising the tax on gasoline roughly that amount. | ||
| That's the only way you could really do it, right? | ||
| Well, actually, only $2. | ||
| If we even had $2 a gallon gas, I think we'd be there. | ||
| And so $1 a gallon tax in effect on gasoline, which would go into a fund that would then go back to the taxpayers to incentivize them through tax credits to modify their homes and their cars and their motorcycles so that everything will run on hydrogen as soon as possible. | ||
| Are you familiar with the phrase political suicide? | ||
| Yes, I am. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Now, President Bush, having taken the step he has recently, it's commendable with respect to hydrogen, but it's not the big step you're talking about. | ||
| If the president were tomorrow to go on the air, unless he gave the speech of his life, convincing everybody it was a do-or-die situation, and there'd be a lot of argument about it, he would be committing political suicide. | ||
| You raise gasoline by a dollar a gallon in America tomorrow, and well, there'll be lynch mobs after you. | ||
| So what do you think about that? | ||
| Well, I think that's why we've set up the Hydrogen Political Action Committee, and we are going to put this on through initiative efforts on the ballot. | ||
| If we have to, if we can't find anybody in the Congress with a stomach enough to bring this issue to the attention of the voters, what we are talking about is a fair accounting system. | ||
| That's all we are talking about. | ||
| Stop subsidizing oil. | ||
| And if you stop subsidizing oil, hydrogen will be the least expensive fuel in a free market system. | ||
| That's a tax policy issue. | ||
| And it's a voter issue. | ||
| And they've got to understand you're paying a much higher price. | ||
| You're just paying it in the medical bills. | ||
| You know, when you get the lung cancer and the respiratory disease, you don't pay that at the gasoline pump. | ||
| You pay that through your health care costs, which are in the billions of dollars in the country, too. | ||
| Sure, sure, sure. | ||
| Or the military costs. | ||
| And if we have a fair accounting system, and only the Congress can give that to us. | ||
| All right. | ||
| All right. | ||
| I want to turn you over to the audience now. | ||
| West of the Rockies. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hello there. | |
| Turn your radio off, please. | ||
| You're on the air with Harry Braun. | ||
| Hello. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hello? | |
| Yes, sir. | ||
| I didn't know which line I was on. | ||
| Well, now you know it's you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thanks. | |
| This is James from Phoenix KFY. | ||
| I was wondering on the way to California, all them windmills are so pretty. | ||
| Well, I got a couple ideas here. | ||
| I was wondering why they don't have solar flats and even maybe solar water pipes on the south side of them. | ||
| And we have this pool and you don't use chlorine that separates it from the salt. | ||
| And you know, I heard you talk about salt water for fusion. | ||
| And I bet if there's enough hydrogen, there'd be a lot of people interested in the fusion playing around with it. | ||
| Maybe they can get that donut working. | ||
| Oh, in Arizona, we use part of the year some it's a vegetation. | ||
| Well, maybe we could use a hempahoe. | ||
| You know, it's a natural or corn, cornaho. | ||
| We use that with our gas. | ||
| Yes, we do. | ||
| But still, it's emissions that we're concerned about. | ||
| One aspect is emissions. | ||
| How does what you're talking about compare to fuel produced from corn or from other sources? | ||
| I guess you're maintaining, are you not, that it is the most universally available fuel that we could use forever? | ||
| And that none of these other things compare to it or even get close? | ||
| That's exactly right. | ||
| You can actually make hydrogen from crops, of course, such as corn, but the net investment is higher. | ||
| It's actually more energy efficient to just, for example, use a wind machine, do wind farming to make your electricity and then use that to split water than it is to actually grow crops and fertilize them and water them and get them to grow and harvest them. | ||
| It's actually simpler, just to electrolyze water. | ||
| Recently, I drove through Temecula, California. | ||
| My wife and I did. | ||
| And we'd been told that those windmills had been shut down because of the bird problem. | ||
| Well, as we drove through Temecula, and I took photos of it that I have on a website somewhere, Zillions and zillions of, my God, there's windmills covering mountains just as far as the eye could see. | ||
| It's an incredible photo. | ||
| Keith, if you're listening, put it back up. | ||
| And the thing, though, was, Harry, that about, I'd say a third or a fourth of them were not operating. | ||
| In other words, having some sort of technical repair or adjustment or something was going on with about a third or a fourth of them. | ||
| Do you know what the deal is there? | ||
| Well, I'm not familiar with their particular units at that farm, but I can tell you this, Art, that the units today are so reliable that bankers will finance virtually all the installed Cost of wind units. | ||
| Really? | ||
| And bankers do not risk money. | ||
| No, they don't. | ||
| They're very cautious folks. | ||
| If you have a well-characterized site, the equipment that's up today is so reliable that utility companies right now are that's the main stay that they're investing in renewables is wind. | ||
| And you're telling me that banks don't blink if a well-heeled utility company with a good rep goes in and says, look, we want, I don't know, $200 million to develop this wind farm, and here's the economics of it. | ||
| It's an easy deal for banks to do. | ||
| The wind machines, it's not like financing a car, which never produces any income. | ||
| That wind machine produces revenue virtually every day. | ||
| Well, if the banks will go for it, then again, I think you're probably on to something here. | ||
| First time caller align, you're on here with Harry Braun. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hello. | |
| Hi, how are you doing? | ||
| Okay. | ||
| I had a question about something in the beginning of your show. | ||
| Sure. | ||
|
unidentified
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I think it was about the immortality. | |
| Yes. | ||
|
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As far as the cells and, I don't know, regenerating or doing something too. | |
| Right, right, right, right. | ||
| Why would anyone want to even live for that long here when who knows what's after you die? | ||
| Well, that's an awfully separate kind of question. | ||
| How old are you now? | ||
|
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I'm 20. | |
| You're 20. | ||
| Well, at 20, you kind of think you're going to live forever anyway, don't you? | ||
|
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I would hate to do that, actually. | |
| I kind of think of it like The Brave New World, that book. | ||
| You know, but at 50 or 60 or 70, you might find your view would be modified. | ||
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I don't think so. | |
| Okay, it might, but I mean, just my whole view about life and things like that. | ||
| Well, let me ask you a question. | ||
| If you have a tooth cavity, do you let the tooth run its natural course or do you go to the dentist? | ||
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I go to the dentist. | |
| I've let mine run naturally. | ||
| It's not good. | ||
| I'm playing with Mother Nature. | ||
| The natural course of this is to let that tooth rot out. | ||
|
unidentified
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Well, no, but see, but there's a huge difference. | |
| Oh, why is it a huge difference? | ||
|
unidentified
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It's a huge difference. | |
| In what way? | ||
| In what way? | ||
|
unidentified
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A tooth is a tooth, but like you're messing with life and death. | |
| A tooth is alive? | ||
| Well, should be. | ||
|
unidentified
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Okay, well, see, things are the way they are for a reason. | |
| And it's my understanding that if you mess with one thing in the body, that there has to be repercussions. | ||
| Okay, she's making the, you know, God's work argument here, really. | ||
|
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Right, but also scientifically, if you do something, there's always side effects, just like how Art, you were talking about the reproduction thing. | |
| There's always something, things are connected. | ||
| There's always a catch. | ||
|
unidentified
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Exactly. | |
| There's always a catch. | ||
| But would we stop all medical research? | ||
|
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No, I'm not saying stop medical research, but tell me, can you tell me more what you would think the side effects would be? | |
| How could this affect everything? | ||
| Well, we're talking about being able to correct diseases like cancer, for example, on a molecular scale that doesn't involve chemotherapy, that involves very precise molecule against molecule kind of approaches, which fundamentally eliminates the disease from the body. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right, but what is the catch? | |
| Because there's always a catch. | ||
| Well, the catch is, for example, you would not be able to bear children at the same rate that you do if you die every 60 years. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| That's the catch. | ||
|
unidentified
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Okay, and what about this whole... | |
| How is getting rid of disease, of which aging is one of the most, and when Art asked you the question, I mean, I know you're 20, but believe me, when you get older, the thing that happens is you get a lot of pain in your life. | ||
| And this pain becomes overwhelming. | ||
| And to say that if you can get rid of that pain, most people don't even have to think about it. | ||
| They just say, get rid of it. | ||
| Yeah, probably until the point where you say, I welcome death. | ||
| Take me, Lord. | ||
| I'm ready. | ||
|
unidentified
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Exactly. | |
| That's what I'm saying. | ||
| And that's the way you want to go. | ||
|
unidentified
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That is the way that I want to go. | |
| Lord, let it be naturally, huh? | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| I don't think I want to, you know, belong here too long. | ||
| But on the other hand, if everybody around you, as you're getting into your 70s, is getting young and looking about like you do now at 20, you'd be thinking real hard about it, wouldn't you? | ||
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Yes, I'm going to be thinking that, well, I don't think, I really don't think I'll be thinking of doing the same things they're doing, but. | |
| All right. | ||
| Well, you call me in 50 years, all right? | ||
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unidentified
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I will. | |
| I will say the same thing. | ||
| All right, all right, very good. | ||
| Yes, we'll look for you in 50 years. | ||
| Wildcard line, you're on the air. | ||
| Hello. | ||
|
unidentified
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Steve in Phoenix. | |
| Hi, Steve. | ||
| You're on with Harry Braun and Art Bell. | ||
|
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I'll give you one quick difference there. | |
| It's 10 or 20 years of family get-togethers over the holidays at your in-laws house versus 20 or 30 generations of doing it. | ||
| I welcome death. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah, really. | |
| Anyway, you went to ASU down here, sir. | ||
| You're familiar with the greater Phoenix area? | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
|
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We've already talked about wind power and solar power, which work really well down here in the southwest. | |
| But are you familiar with temperature inversion generators? | ||
| We have a warmer temperature naturally below a colder temperature? | ||
| Sure, like ocean thermal power plants. | ||
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unidentified
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Right, or up in the Arctic Circle where it's 55 below ambient air temperature and 55 degrees underground? | |
| Sure, uh-huh. | ||
| Why can't you take that liquid hydrogen, put the tank on top of this temperature inversion tank, and generate electricity that way using the solar and the wind power as a backup? | ||
| And then that way you only have to use the grid work for minimal amount of use? | ||
| Well, that's a good question. | ||
| I'm not qualified to answer that particular question because I haven't studied what exactly you're proposing. | ||
| But I can assure you that as the country moves from an oil economy to a hydrogen economy, you're going to have all of the engineers that work in the automotive and aerospace and energy industries all focusing on how to optimize that system. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah, well, with the liquid nitrogen or hydrogen on top, it seems to me you'd have below zero temperatures with 55 degrees underground. | |
| You've got to dig the well anyway to get that water supply. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And if you connect your heat pump into the cold temperatures from the liquid hydrogen and go to a solar hot water heater, you basically wipe out all your electrical needs. | ||
| And you're almost creating a perpetual motion electric generator plus your fuel for your car. | ||
| Now, the power companies are not going to like that. | ||
|
unidentified
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Well, that was bringing me to my last point. | |
| If that is true. | ||
|
unidentified
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That was bringing me to my last point is under NASTA and GATT, Chapter 11, anytime you interfere with a foreign government's ability to create money, they have the right to sue the United States government and the state who passed that law for trillions of dollars in lost revenues, which means they'll never pass this law. | |
| It has to be on a house-by-house, individual, new construction basis. | ||
| Thank you very much. | ||
| Well, ask me how much I care about the Arabs' income. | ||
| I mean, come on. | ||
| There may be, are you familiar with such a treaty and law, Harry? | ||
| I'm not, no. | ||
| No? | ||
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No. | |
| If there is one like that, we need to junk it. | ||
| But I do know, Art, that this whole oil Middle East situation has been dominating our foreign policy for the past 40 years. | ||
| Hell, it could be the end of the world, Harry. | ||
| Yeah, they say that's where it's all going to end anyway. | ||
| It's going to be in the Middle East there. | ||
| And the way things are shaping up, it does look that way. | ||
| Well, it's a mess over there. | ||
| And one thing is for sure, we don't need to depend on it. | ||
| Well, I would like that. | ||
| And if there's a law against it, then to hell with them. | ||
| East of the Rockies, you're on there with Harry Braun. | ||
| Hello. | ||
| Hi, Art. | ||
|
unidentified
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How are you doing? | |
| Okay. | ||
| Hi, Harry. | ||
| Joe from Boston, W-R-K-O. | ||
| Hi, Joe. | ||
| Hi, Harry. | ||
| I want to pick a couple bones with you. | ||
| I know we're getting near the break. | ||
| I can maybe wait after. | ||
| Bone pick quickly. | ||
|
unidentified
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Okay, Harry, I hope we can get in touch with you. | |
| Tell us an address after. | ||
| My bone pick is the oil companies aren't going to do what you want to do. | ||
| There's a man, Dr. Greer, and other people who have had make hydrogen. | ||
| There's a unit that makes oxygen with water and hydrogen, and they're already fighting about it with Medicare. | ||
| There are tanks that you can build with stuff like this, with beads and drying processes, and they don't like it because they're not going to make money. | ||
| We still need some oil. | ||
|
unidentified
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It's not politically correct. | |
| They're going to do everything they can to stall, Harry. | ||
| And I just want you to live in the real world and realize this. | ||
| Well, do you, Harry, realize that? | ||
| Well, I know oil companies are spending hundreds of millions of dollars buying big ads in major news magazines to promote hydrogen. | ||
| And they wouldn't be doing that if they were opposed to it. | ||
| And they would be opposed to it if they didn't think they could make money at it. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| They're going to make money for their shareholders. | ||
| In fact, they'll make more money in the hydrogen business than they can in the oil business. | ||
| Oil should be used for lubricants, for medicines, for fertilizers. | ||
| There's all kinds of important uses for oil. | ||
| Oil is all around us. | ||
| And if we want to keep it that way, we'll stop burning it up to create energy, that's for sure. | ||
| I'm Artell. | ||
| This is Coast to Coast, AF. | ||
|
unidentified
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I know you can see me. | |
| Now he is a surprise. | ||
| I know that you have a bad magic in my eyes. |
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