Harry Braun, CEO of Sustainable Partners Inc. and a 25-year energy analyst, counters claims that hydrogen requires fossil fuels by detailing cost-effective production via wind electrolysis (45 kWh per gallon equivalent) or algae, with potential prices as low as 50-60 cents. He argues hydrogen’s safety—dispersion in accidents, no toxic leaks—outperforms gasoline and oil, debunking myths like the Hindenburg disaster’s cause. A $5T transition could replace all U.S. energy needs, Braun asserts, with stable costs and declining oil reserves forcing inevitable change, positioning hydrogen as the future’s pollution-free, limitless solution. [Automatically generated summary]
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Well, because after, like, I had like some psychic thoughts on it.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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, 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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, 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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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, 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.
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%.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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, 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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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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.
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.
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.