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April 30, 2002 - Art Bell
02:35:55
Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell - Energy Efficiency - Donald Wulfinghoff
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Music.
From the high desert and the great American Southwest, I bid you all good evening, good morning, good afternoon,
wherever you may be in this wide world of ours with 24 time zones covered by this program which is Coast to Coast to
Coast to Coast AM actually.
Spreading and getting larger all the time.
I'd like to welcome a brand new affiliate.
It would be WMEQN.
Stay with me on this one, folks.
Menonomy, Wisconsin.
Yeah, I think I did it.
I got to close anyway.
Let me try it again.
monotony men on
many many anonymity about the pre-op three-fold i think we've got it
Someone will call me up and tell me the right way to do it.
880 on the dial.
I'm very, very happy to be on there.
The GM there, Rich Hensley, and the PD, Mike Cushman.
Certainly great to have you on board.
Listen, something has really irritated me big time, and I want to vent, and then we'll move on here.
I told you last night, when I brought Hal Lindsey on, that we had an incident here in Franklin, which a young man with a sword commandeered a school bus, and I drove it down toward California, ended up rolling the school bus in a 70-mile-an-hour chase, and when they arrested him, they found plans that indicated that he might have designs on bombing the high school here, and they evacuated the high school.
Pretty awful story, of course.
But, you know, then I observed, I noticed that Drudge picked it up, and then I noticed that it was the lead story in Las Vegas, of course.
And the way one of the stations in Las Vegas handled it, I thought, well, it just really pissed me off, to be frank with you.
They essentially interviewed somebody, which they, you know, decided they've got editorial right to put on what they want, but this man took the opportunity to come on and say that Pahrump is the dumping ground, you know, for the worst of Las Vegas.
And that really annoyed me.
I mean, you know, cities and glass houses ought not, especially cities that have had 50 homicides before the middle of the year, shouldn't be throwing stones at their sister town over here in Pahrump.
This is a beautiful, quiet, getaway kind of place to live as a general rule.
And those kind of incidents, those head shakers that did happen here, happened in small towns all across America.
It's as likely or as unlikely to happen Here, as anywhere else, fact of the matter is, it happens everywhere now, but to see, you know, a sister city take an opportunity to slam us in such a, obviously, intentionally, in my opinion, vicious manner, well fine, go ahead, but my comment would be
Look, the only reason Las Vegas is where it is because that's where the godfather of Las Vegas put his foot down and said, OK, it's going to be here.
And that's how it got there.
Well, frankly, the valley over here is twice the size.
It doesn't have the pollution problems because we have an open-ended valley.
And we also have really good water.
I don't know why they took such a shot, decided to take such a shot by allowing such an interview, because it's just, I thought it was a poor, poor thing to do.
Poor, poor thing to do indeed.
This can happen anywhere, and if there's anything we've learned since all of these head-shakers began, it's that this kind of thing can happen anywhere.
Big towns, small towns, good families, bad families.
They just happen.
Otherwise, let's see what's going on in the world.
An Islamic charity and its director were charged with perjury today and accused by the FBI of supporting terrorists who plotted to assassinate the Pope, tried to obtain nuclear weapons for Osama bin Laden.
Wow!
Federal agents said the Benevolence International Foundation had links to bin Laden that go back decades and moved sizable amounts of cash for his Al-Qaeda terrorist network during the 1990s.
So, in other words, this charity, supposed charity, was going toward finding nuclear bombs for Osama Bin Laden and so forth, as charged by the FBI.
Oh boy.
My goodness.
26 Palestinian civilians and police emerged Tuesday, finally, from the Church of the Nativity.
The largest group to leave one of Christianity's holiest shrines since the month-long standoff between Israel's army and a group of armed militants.
Of all places, you know, to occupy the very spot where Jesus was born.
I stood there.
It was amazing.
It's an amazing thing to do.
Whatever you think, you know, of religion in general and whatever you think of However religious you are, or are not, when you stand in that spot where Jesus was born, you can feel it.
You can feel something really serious and profound.
I stood there, my wife stood there, she cried.
and it's an amazing place and to see that occupied with men men with guns
here's an interesting story One in five new drugs has serious side effects that do not show up until well after the medicine has received a government approval, according to a study that exposes what one researcher is calling an alarming game of medical Russian roulette.
Wow.
The researchers went so far as to suggest that doctors should subtribe older drugs when possible, unless a new one is truly superior.
My, my, my.
Isn't that interesting?
That would be one in five that actually make it through.
You know, a lot of people complain the FDA process to get something through is just absolutely burdensome and too much.
And yet here we find maybe it's not enough.
Where one day you hear one thing, next day you hear another, right?
Rejecting pleas of mental illness, a jury has sentenced a man to death today for the shooting deaths of two young daughters.
What prosecutors call the ultimate revenge against his ex-wife.
The very same jury last week convicted John Battaglia of murder, capital murder that would be, for killing the girls ages six and nine.
Our Senate is about to take on the issue of cloning.
The headline is Senate Cases Fiercest Fight Cloning.
The Senate is gearing up for a historic decision on human embryo cloning that could affect everything from medical research to how the sanctity of human life is defined and which party controls Capitol Hill in 2003.
It's one of the most emotional, morally fraught issues this Congress has taken up thus far.
Lobbyists on one side Led by the biotechnology industry promised breakthrough medical cures for millions of people facing all kinds of debilitating injuries and diseases, that is the upside, maybe.
The other side, which includes an unusual coalition, this is very interesting, of right-to-life conservatives and pro-choice liberals, oh brother, when do they ever get together, warns of a bleak new world where babies are designed Poor women are exploited for their eggs and human embryos are bought and sold to produce spare parts for others.
At the heart of the policy debate is a distinction between reproductive cloning, using cloned human embryos to produce babies, and therapeutic cloning to develop medical cures, both Use the exact same techniques and a firewall between the two is not very easy to define or enforce.
So we'll see.
What do you think we ought to do?
I too think this is one of the biggest questions not only the U.S.
but the entire world faces right now.
Look at this story.
I mentioned it last night briefly with Hal Lindsey.
But the story is from Italy, Rome, An Italian fertility specialist who said, you'll recall, he intends to create the first human clone, told a television show on Wednesday that not one but three women were pregnant with clones.
Earlier this month, a Middle East newspaper whipped up a storm of controversy by quoting that same doctor as saying that a woman in his program was pregnant, But gave no details, making it clear whether it was the result of cloning.
The Italian doctor has refused to confirm or deny the story, but told State TV on Wednesday that three cloned pregnancies exist in the world at the moment.
Said he, there are three pregnancies.
He said two of the three pregnancies were developing in Russia and one in an Islamic state And that they were six to nine weeks along.
So... Flash, folks.
This is not so much an academic debate anymore.
We've got... The clones are on the way.
The clones are in the cooker.
However you want to put it.
The clones... The clones are certainly on the way.
So whether we like it or not, The world is proceeding with this technology, and we're going to have clones.
Now, what will they be?
Well, some people argue they'll be nothing, essentially, but, you know, exact twins.
In other words, you would have a little twin o' yourself, an exact twin of yourself, right?
But there are going to be monsters.
Everybody that I've talked to on this subject agrees on one thing, and that is there are going to be monsters.
There are going to be mistakes.
There are going to be all kinds of things that happen that are not good, that are potentially not good at all.
So, something for us all to think about.
I wonder how you feel about it.
Is this the point where we truly are playing God?
Boy, are we playing God!
Holy smokes!
I don't know, you know, I don't know myself.
I have been turning this over and over and over and over.
I guess I understand the potential upside.
But I think science sometimes can go too far, too fast, before we understand what we're doing and we may create something the world may not like so much.
Now I don't know if I ought to read this or not, but I guess I will.
all.
I haven't had any such dream, but, uh, Christie writes, uh, hey Art, here's one for you.
About a month ago, I had the same dream three nights in a row.
Now, the dream was that Chinese soldiers were invading the U.S.
This past Saturday, I was out with a girlfriend who told me the following.
About a month ago, six different people that she works with had exactly the same dream on exactly the same night.
They dreamed of Chinese paratroopers invading the U.S.
I told her, I had the same dream.
Could you possibly see if anyone else out there in radio land has had the dream?
It would be worth knowing, don't you think?
Yes, I do, actually.
As unlikely as I think it is that the Chinese will march into Los Angeles, spreading east, rapidly, east and north from L.A.
probably, right?
Actually you'd land across, probably have to land up toward San Francisco and Seattle and, you know, have several fronts and then move east, but... Any country crazy enough to invade us by land Well, they just couldn't do it.
The Chinese couldn't sustain that kind of logistical effort, you know, to keep their troops supplied, even if they had the will and the intent.
It seems to me they would be picked off rather quickly by Americans who are probably in no mood to be fooled with right now, but so in all, if anybody's had that dream, it would be interesting to hear about, wouldn't it?
This comes from Great Britain, the Sunday Mail in Great Britain.
Bosses at Radio Clyde, that's apparently a big, you know, radio deal in Great Britain.
Bosses at Radio Clyde have been forced to close one of their studios after scared DJs said it was haunting.
Sunday Mail astrologer Frank Pickledin says that he was attacked He suffered mysterious scratches on his arm during his regular phone-in slot in Studio 3.
He and presenter Bill Smith, they call them presenters over there, were also plagued by technical faults and falling microphones.
Frank said, something strange has happened here in the past, I can feel it.
Bill and Frank have vowed never to work there again, never.
But they took Glide's eye-in-the-sky girl, Sharon Oakley, along yesterday for a final look.
Bill said, we'd only been there a few minutes when equipment began to start playing up.
Then microphones came tumbling down on top of us.
Next thing I heard was a yelp from Frank, and he said something had attacked him.
Now, that'd do it.
You know, that really would do it.
I mean, you can have technical plagues that go on.
But technical plagues, followed by microphones falling down on you, And then followed by an actual physical attack.
That would do it for me too.
So they're not going back.
Unless there's some sort of exorcism or something.
So that's it.
I mean, this group has actually been driven out.
Completely driven out of a studio there by... That's incredible.
By a ghost or by something they surely do not understand.
And then one other thing that I touched on last night that I really do want to mention again.
You know, we were sort of ticking off a list last night of things that are going to spell out the end of history.
I think is the way Hal Lindsey put it.
And one of them was this.
And I could read stories like this just about every night.
Greece's health ministry On Tuesday, ordered all schools, all universities, closed.
That's very serious.
Through the end of the week, after 13 people appeared to be suffering from some unidentified virus that has now killed 3 as concern grew, As you might expect, lines of people fearing they might be infected got much longer at hospitals and medical clinics as concern mounted experts at the Ministry's Special Infections Control Center.
I guess that's like our CDC, right?
Met to discuss how to deal with infections.
As they awaited the results of tests to identify the virus, they expected to have those by tomorrow, Wednesday.
So right now, they have absolutely no idea what they're up against.
Here's an interesting BBC story.
Always got to go to the BBC to get these things.
I wonder why that is.
The headline is, uh, a UN warns of looming water crisis.
It says more than 2.7 billion people, 2.7 billion, that's damn near half the people on earth, are going to face severe water shortages by the year 2025 if the world should continue consuming water at the same rate.
That's from the UN, folks.
A new report released to mark the World Water Day, I didn't know we had it on Friday, says another 2.5 billion people will live in areas where it will be difficult to find sufficient fresh water to meet their needs.
That's another 2.5 billion.
So, 2.7 billion will face severe water shortages.
Another 2.5 billion, at this point you're well over half the population of the entire world, will not have sufficient fresh water.
That's pretty heavy stuff when you consider it, and we talked about that a little last night, too.
There's going to be water wars.
And going on all across the U.S.
right now is an incredible drought.
I mean, the news is bubbling under.
Soon you're going to see more and more stories about the drought that we're undergoing, certainly here in the desert.
Yes, I know, it's a desert, but the monsoons we've been getting every year just have not been showing up.
As they normally would, as our weather continues to change.
So we're in drought.
Even for here!
But we're not the only ones.
It goes a corridor of drought all across the United States.
So... Anyway, listen, we're near the bottom of the hour.
A couple of things that I want to hit you with.
Go to Artbell.com, my website.
I'm very proud of this.
You know, I've won or been nominated for a lot of awards in my radio career.
But this one, I'm really proud of it.
I'm really proud of this.
I guess it was issued by the Las Vegas Weekly.
Las Vegas Weekly, you know, it's paper in Las Vegas.
And it's a Cabbies Choice Award.
You know, all the cab drivers out there that are driving in the nighttime, the Cabbies Choice Awards for 2002 awarded me Best Radio Host by Las Vegas Cabbies.
I've got the certificate, which I got today.
I'm very proud of it.
And I scanned it and put it on the website, so it'd be under What's New First Item, and I'm very proud of that.
Really, very proud.
And I don't know why, it just... There's something about this that really hit me as, oh gosh, I'm really proud of this.
You know, just because all the cabbies out there, I know the cabbies in Las Vegas, and if they're listening to you, I...
If they're voting your best, then it means something real serious.
We're going to break here at the bottom of the hour, and we'll be back and do some open lines.
Coming right up.
I'm Art Bell.
This is Coast to Coast AM.
Raging to you in the nighttime from the high desert.
The mountain's high and the valley's so deep.
Can't get enough to make brothers laugh.
What else was there for me to do?
Call Art Bell in the Kingdom of Nye from west of the Rockies at 1-800-618-8255.
East of the Rockies, 1-800-825-5033.
First time callers may reach Art at 1-775-727-1222.
the Rockies 1-800-825-5033. First time callers may reach out at 1-775-727-1222 and the wildcard
line is open at 1-775-727-1295. To reach out on the toll free international line, call
your AT&T operator and have them dial 800-893-0903.
This is Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell from the Kingdom of Nine.
Oh, and by the way, coming at the top of the hour, we've got a really interesting guest.
His name is Donald Wolfinghoff.
I get, well, I get some names.
Donald Wolfinghoff, I believe is correct.
And he has written a book.
He spent, in fact, 20 years writing this book, and this is the Bible.
It is, worldwide, considered to be the Bible, I guess, of the ways to save energy.
Energy savings.
And, oh my God, in fact, if you look at my webcam picture tonight, I'm holding the book up.
It says, easy to use for everyone, complete, up-to-date, quick payback.
In other words, all these things you can do to save energy.
And this is a pretty cool book.
I've heard it's a $200 book, and I believe it.
It's gigantic!
It took the guy 20 years to write this.
He's going to be on tonight.
And I am very interested in this sort of thing, in terms of my own home, and what I can do to save energy.
So, you know, if you're interested in that, and if you're not, you better be, because we've got trouble coming in that area.
Go take a look at my web, just, even if you're not going to consider buying it, look, take, trust me, take a look at my webcam picture, and you will, this thing weighs about, oh man, must weigh 15 pounds, and it is monstrous!
So, he's been, you know, worldwide, this book is regarded as the Bible of how to save energy, so, that'll be coming up at the top of the hour.
All right, back into the night.
Open lines this night, folks.
There is just one more thing.
This is kind of an interesting story.
Headline, Scientists Find New Predator Insects.
New!
This is a new insect, folks.
Scientists have discovered, indeed, a new order of insects.
The first in nearly a century.
This is an entire new order of insects.
And it's in Africa.
They've got it in some museums now in Europe.
Researchers later discovered an actual living population of the insects in the southwest African nation of Namibia.
In fact, all of this has been being reported this week in the journal Science.
The insects described as a predator That resembles a mix between a stick insect and a praying mantis.
We're placed in a new category I don't care to try and pronounce.
The scientist said, these creatures are some of the last witnesses of the time when Africa and America were part of the same land mass.
Isn't that interesting?
The insects are just under an inch long, and two of the examples under study in laboratories came from tropical Africa.
An additional example was found encased in amber from Europe's Baltic region.
So, can you imagine that?
This insect, I guess, never went away.
Or, either that, or you might speculate it has come back.
Either way, pretty interesting stuff, huh?
First time caller line, you're on the air.
Good morning.
Hey Art, this is Buddy.
I'm over here in middle-of-nowhere Iowa.
Okay.
On a cell phone to boot, huh?
Yes, sir.
Okay.
I was just, you know, wanting to throw something out as a possibility.
You know, last night y'all were talking about how things are happening more and more and more.
You know, these bad things that are going on.
Could that be a function of the fact that we're more and more interconnected?
No, 50 years ago.
Yes, it could be.
I haven't, uh, I absolutely have not given up on that.
There's a number of people who have that exact theory, sir, and it may, it could be true.
Who knows?
Yeah, that's all I had.
I was just curious about that.
All right.
Oh, yeah.
Okay.
Well, thank you very much.
Take care.
Yeah, sure it could be.
That an idea, a concept of something evil or bad, Once it's done, there was a time in the world... I mean, this is a theory.
It may be totally out of luck, right?
It's a theory that a negative idea of some sort becomes injected in the consciousness virtually of the world by the connectivity of the Internet.
Sure, it's as good a working theory as any other for what's going on.
I don't have any idea.
What I do know is that what I've said is absolutely true.
There is.
Pardon the plug.
If it's one of those, it's really not.
It's the quickening.
In every single aspect of human endeavor, life is quickening.
And that means socially, economically, politically, from a weather point of view, the ecology.
Every aspect of human life is quickening.
And I don't think there's any more doubt about that.
Do you?
A wildcard line, you're on the air.
Hello.
Art, you know, the thought of the Chinese paratrooping in to take this country is a real possibility.
Well, you know, I hear people saying that, but... Well, wait.
Stop and think about it a second.
Well, you too.
You too.
Think of the logistical nightmare.
Okay, but let's make it real easy for them.
If the Liberals in this country could disarm Americans the way that they've disarmed the Canadians and the Australians... Well, they're not going to disarm America.
Oh, come on!
That's the goal!
We're no more going to give up our guns and the man in the moon.
That's the agenda, Art.
I mean... I know it's the agenda of some, but it ain't going to happen, sir.
The Second Amendment is there for good reason.
Yeah, but they're getting ready to do away with it.
They're trying.
They're not going to do away with it.
People have to stop them.
They're not going to do away with it.
They're going to try and interpret it to weaken it and weaken it.
But even that, look, Americans are just not going to give up their protection.
I hope you're right.
Hey, I'm with you.
But you know, that's the attack.
That's the agenda.
And people have to stand up and voice and say, we want our rights.
You know, we're tired of politicians attacking our freedoms in this country every single day.
If it's not one thing, it's something else.
They are trying to attack.
They're trying to take it away.
I know.
I know.
I appreciate the call, sir, but right now, the concept of the Chinese swarming over the west coast and moving east, you know, something to think about, I suppose, but they'd be shot down like dogs.
There's a lot of guns in America, don't kid yourself, and Americans are not going to give them up.
I know there's always a worry about it, always a concern about it, and rightfully so.
You've got to keep your eye on all the amendments, including number two, as well as number one, All the rest of them, they're there for a reason, and two is there for no less of a reason than any of the others.
But I'm not seriously worried about it, because people have the right to protect themselves, and they're not going to see that taken away from them.
In fact, out west here, out west, and in some parts of the east as well, The pendulum actually has gone the other way, and they're issuing carry permits, allowing citizens to carry guns now, concealed weapons.
Now, when that first was proposed, everybody said, oh, there's going to be Dodge City, there's going to be people killing each other in the streets.
Well, guess what?
It hadn't happened at all.
In fact, there's been almost no documented incidents that anybody even knows about in all the states where they've allowed this to happen.
You know, Decent Honest Citizens carrying guns hasn't worked out badly at all.
It's worked out very, very well and is a pretty good deterrent to crime, frankly.
I mean, if you think you're going to walk into a restaurant out here where people carry guns and just start shooting, you've got another thing coming because somebody's going to shoot back.
So it's, you know, that's a natural deterrent.
You fear for your own life.
You're less likely to do something stupid.
East of the Rockies, you're on the air.
Good morning.
Hello, Art.
This is Jonathan calling from Missouri.
Yes, sir.
I just wanted to add something, Art, but do you still have that song, Flowers on the Wall?
You used to play that one a lot.
The Stadler Brothers, yes, of course.
Yeah.
Anyways, I was calling about the cloning.
Okay.
You know, as far as playing God and all that kind of stuff, I think it would be a great contribution to the United States to have cloning.
And how would you see it used?
Well, you know, if God is all-powerful, then it don't matter what we come up with, we're not going to stop him.
So I think that this is just a A new thing, and it's going to bring a lot of good things in the future.
Yeah?
You're not worried about the fact that with animals that they've cloned, they've had a lot of monsters so far, you know?
Well, I just think if we were playing God, that, you know, if God's all-powerful, we're not going to be able to stop him, and it don't matter what we come up with.
Well, let me ask you this, sir.
Let's imagine the lab where all of this is going on for a second, alright?
Wherever that turns out to be.
If a monster is born, and that's just going to happen.
I mean, they're not going to know right away, just like the problems with Dolly showed up later.
If we start birthing monsters, then what would you do with the monsters?
I don't know what I'd do, Art, but there is time.
Wait a minute.
You think of this poor creature strapped in a bed or whatever that we've created, would you kill it because you made a mistake?
No.
Or would you care for it for the rest of your life, sir?
I would care for it for the rest of my life.
But wouldn't you like to have your own clone?
No.
I would.
There's times that I'd like to disappear from my life and just have a clone and nobody know I'm gone.
Well, that's a somewhat self-serving reason, sir, but okay, I'll accept that.
Love your show, Art.
Take care.
Sure, okay, well.
Just make your clone do the work.
I mean, that's what he's saying, right?
Make your clone do the work.
Yes, I know.
I've considered that aspect of it, and believe me, when I've surveyed my audience on this issue, people would accept clone servants, when it really gets right down to it, to have somebody who would do the drudgery, wash the dishes, without complaint, be a happy little camper, you know, a clone, who would do nothing but that kind of drudgery work, get the dishes done, and gosh, wash the cars, Do the drudgery work, take care of all the weeds and do it all day long with no complaint.
In fact, they would be happy doing that.
The people would just swarm to get hold of such things.
And that's the truth.
And that's why we're never going to stop cloning.
But boy, the place it's headed, you've got to worry a little bit about where it's headed.
I think.
First time caller line, you're on the air.
Good morning.
Good morning.
I have a biblical question.
I don't know if you can... Oh, I'm no biblical expert, so I probably... Well, you know what?
I was wondering if perhaps you'd heard this before, and maybe you could help me.
It has to do with Genesis chapter 6.
It talks about the sons of God coming down and taking the daughters of man as wives.
What is that about?
Well, that's all about the Nephilim.
I don't know what that is.
Well, the Nephilim were cast out, and then they came down here and decided they liked earth women.
And pretty soon, these non-human and human combinations began to have offspring.
And as the story goes, God got very upset about that, and caused the big flood.
And the Nephilim went gurgle, gurgle, and all the clones went gurgle, gurgle, and Noah floated.
That's the way the story goes.
I've never heard that story before.
Oh well, do a little reading.
I've been reading and I can't make it out.
I can't see what they're trying to tell me.
That's a good question.
Alright, I appreciate the call.
Thank you.
And even I know certainly did not do it justice.
It could be done precisely in how Lindsay could have done it for you last night.
I'm not the guy to do that.
But I mean, that's roughly the way it went, I think.
They were tossed out.
They came down here and messed around with our earth women.
Next thing you know, God's displeased.
You kind of have to wonder why He... Now, consider what we're doing with cloning.
What if God decides that this is like the Nephilim, you know, that they're now playing in my ballpark and He decides to have another flood or something?
Not that we couldn't use the water.
Wild Card Line, you're on the air.
Hello.
Hey, how you doing there, Art?
I'm alright, sir.
Where are you?
Oh, well, unfortunately, Las Vegas.
No.
Hey, Art, as far as cloning goes... You know, I can't believe they took the kind of shot they did.
Well, perhaps they did that because...
You know, Las Vegas, I mean, gets a lot of bad rep.
The only reason Las Vegas is where it is is because Bugsy Siegel came out here, put his foot down in the desert and said, we're going to make it here.
Yeah, right.
But, you know, they get a little jealous because you guys got those little prostitution houses that are legal.
Yeah, whereas you just have girls on the street.
Exactly.
But AR, you know, as far as cloning goes, I think basically whenever you see something such as You know, just like brand new or just on the verge of.
Usually, I think you can just estimate just based on the fact that the military probably used it 30 years ahead of anyone else before it even came out to be used in public.
And I find that you don't bring that up much.
Well, the fact that it's probably been going on for so long anyway.
Well, the reason I don't bring it up is because I don't know it for sure.
Right, but I mean that's the same thing with a lot of UFO things that you do talk about, so in the future I think... Okay, sir, if this helps you, if this helps you, I have speculated forever and ever that I'll bet this is being done in secret labs All over the place.
Well, here's an example of something I saw on TV once.
It was on a commercial television show called 3-2-1 Contact.
It was on public television.
Yeah.
And I can distinctly remember them showing, suppose it, I don't know, some kind of experiment, biological experiment, where they somehow mixed a cow and a large pig.
A pig and a cow.
And this thing looked absolutely phenomenal.
I never saw the show repeated.
It had, like, spines going down.
It just looked kind of like a Tansmanian devil, but it was huge.
And it had very small back legs.
They never showed that again, and that thing made a strange noise, and it was alive and everything.
Now, if you can pull those archives up and put them on your website, I'd be very amazed.
I'll see what I can do.
Okay?
All right.
All right.
Bless you.
All right.
Thank you.
Take care.
East of the Rockies, you're on the air.
Good morning.
Good morning, Art.
Hi, where are you, sir?
Memphis, Tennessee.
Memphis, okay.
Ray Bell.
They know me as Brother Sky Blue down around world-famous Beale Street.
Okay.
You know, the lady called about the question about Genesis.
Yes, uh-huh.
The book of Genesis are uh... it's completely uh... parables or allegory
yeah but i saw it i basically kind of right about the nephilim and earth women
in the flood and the rest of that right well emmanuel swedenborg's writings explain the uh...
the real meaning behind the allegories and uh...
parables in the stories in the book of james Well, he has an explanation.
Now, see, these are allegories, so they're open to interpretation.
I don't know.
When people say, hey, you know, this guy has the real true meaning.
He wrote the real true meaning of the allegory.
You know, he took his own shot and he put it in print is what he did.
That doesn't mean it's better than anybody else's.
What you should do is read and decide for yourself.
West of the Rockies, you're on the air.
Hello.
Good morning, Mr. Bell.
Good morning, Mr. Bell.
Where are you?
Salt Lake City.
Okay.
I have a little... I was watching the Fox News report this morning.
Mm-hmm.
And they were talking about Hollywood Squares, how they're raising money for all the women in Afghan.
Yeah.
And I don't know about anybody else in America, but I'm pretty concerned at the fact that We're raising money for people in other countries, but we can't help our own.
Well, you know, every time we give any kind of foreign aid, that's an argument.
I mean, when we send money overseas, anywhere, for anything, you really have a pretty good argument when you say, why aren't we spending it here at home?
Well, there's so many women, especially single women, you know, that have been divorced or You know, whatever.
Well, they've had it pretty rough over there, sir.
I'm sure you've seen the thing CNN is running, my God.
I agree.
So I've got nothing against helping them.
You know, we are a rich and powerful nation that can't afford to probably walk and chew gum at the same time.
That means take care of our own and occasionally help out around the world as well.
Well, I guess that's just the way we are.
We're the world's police.
And it bothers me that we're also the world's social worker.
Exactly.
That's the word I was looking for.
We are that.
Sometimes it makes you really angry, I understand.
But I guess we have some responsibility, as rich and powerful as we are, to help out the less fortunate around the world.
And those women had a rough go of it.
Real rough.
Yeah, that's true.
Thank you, sir.
You have a good evening.
You're very welcome.
You too.
First time caller on line.
You're on the air.
Turn your radio off, please.
I understand.
Turn your radio off.
I just did.
Okay, good.
Can barely hear you, but go ahead, sir.
Yeah.
Is this Art Bell?
Yeah.
And here comes another example of the wonderful step forward for mankind of cell phones.
Where are you?
I'm in California, but I live in Denver.
I'm in a truck.
I'm listening on XM radio.
You know, I get better connections from across the Atlantic.
But anyway, sir.
I just wanted to ask if you've ever done a show on that... I'm trying to read the name here... Majestic?
The book, Majestic?
Majestic.
Have I ever done... Well, sure, yes.
Thank you very much.
We've done lots of shows on what is said to be Majestic 12.
The control behind the government, that sort of thing.
Did you hear that connection?
Did you hear that connection?
2525.
Maybe they'll have real telephones that are wireless and work like telephones and don't sound like that.
If man is still alive.
Good point.
If woman can survive, they may fall Here come the clones
In the year 3535 I'll hide myself in sorrow while you play your cheating
game To reach Art Bell in the Kingdom of Nigh from west of the
Rockies, dial...
East of the Rockies, 1-800-825-5033.
1-800-825-5033.
First time callers may reach out at 1-775-727-1222 or use the wildcard line at 1-800-825-5033.
To reach out on the toll-free international line, call your AT&T operator and have them
dial 800-893-0903.
This is Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell on the Premier Radio Network.
Certainly is.
Top of the morning, everybody.
I'm Art Bell, and tonight we're going to talk about energy and ways that you can save money, big time money.
My guest, Donald Wolfinghoff, is one of the world's top experts on energy conservation and alternative energy sources.
This is going to be very interesting.
He came to Washington, D.C.
In response to the oil shock of 73, remember that?
He came to serve as a consultant to government and business.
His work led to much of our present understanding of energy issues, such as it is.
He spent 20 years, 20 years, writing the Energy Efficiency Manual, the primary guidebook for energy conservation.
It is used on every continent in the world.
That's really something.
It's the Bible of how to do it.
This thing is awesome.
In fact, if you'll go to my website, artbell.com, and just go to my webcam, you'll see me holding it up.
It is, it's not actually, it's about 8 pounds, not 15 pounds.
This book is, it's incredible.
And so I held it up, it was so incredible, I held it up.
He presently, ...serves on the ASHRAE, I guess it is, A-S-H-R-A-E Standard 90 Committee, which writes the National Energy Conservation Standard for the U.S.
and several other countries.
He was an organizer and judge of the ASHRAE Energy Awards Design Competition, a leading efficiency design competition here in the U.S.
In 1978, he started the formal education of energy professionals with courses at George Washington University.
Don Woltinghoff introduced the Profit Center concept of managing energy costs, which is now applied around the world.
He started his company, Woltinghoff Energy Services, back in 1978.
It has improved the efficiency of buildings of all kinds, including the White House.
He is a Professional Engineer in Mechanical and Electrical Engineering, is a Licensed First Grade Stationary Engineer, a Certified General Automobile Mechanic, and FCC First Class Broadcast Engineer.
Oh my!
Listen to this!
He is an arbitrator of the American Arbitration Association.
He has testified as an expert witness in construction, safety, automotive, and shipbuilding issues.
He received a B.S.
in physics from the University of Louisville and an M.S.
in physics from the University of Florida.
He has graduated the U.S.
Navy Engineer Officer School.
He served in the U.S.
Navy on several ships and was a project officer in a special unit.
He builds and flies experimental aircraft as a hobby.
This is going to be a very interesting interview.
you stay right where you are
alright uh... my guest again is donald are wolfenhoff and i hope i'm getting that uh...
uh... name correct or am i close at least uh... donald You're right on target.
Oh, good.
Welcome to the program.
Thank you.
Glad to be here.
It's very important for me to have people like you.
I am very, very energy conscious, but I'm smart about some things and really stupid about some things, Don.
I went out and spent a whole lot of money.
And not to solar panels and wind generators.
I'm actually off the grid entirely.
Yes.
But I realize, and I know, that with all the money I spend, I'm not going to recoup it.
I'm just probably not, probably not going to recoup it.
Now, if energy prices go high enough, I will.
And I'm not suggesting this is what everybody should do, because really, it's too much money to put out.
I'm intensely interested in using less power, in using more energy-efficient devices, and I know my home is like a wasteland.
I mean, I burn up the amps in here.
Well, I think it's people like you who are responsible for progress.
The fact that you're willing to experiment with wind and experiment with solar gives us a baseline on what's possible and what can be done.
Yeah, but we've got to make it affordable.
Yes, we do.
Somehow we've got to make it affordable, and is that going to happen?
Well, let's make a clear distinction between two things that are generally confused.
The one is energy conservation, which we could call energy efficiency, and the other is alternative energy sources.
That's right.
Energy efficiency, or energy conservation, is very economical.
Alternative energy sources, by and large, are not economical for individuals, but they are best applied at large scale.
I think that we still tend to think of windmills and solar and that sort of thing as being something you would put on the roof of your house.
We've been doing it long enough that we know that, really, unless your house is in a very isolated location, that's not the place for a wind generator.
These things have terrific economies of scale, which means that the cost of the energy they produce falls dramatically the bigger the machine is.
So the best place for wind energy is in big machines, meaning a couple of hundred kilowatts each, and large wind farms where you have hundreds of them.
All right, well let's back up a little bit.
The world is quickly digging up, pumping up the oil from the ground, and there is going to come a day I don't know when that day is.
Maybe you do.
I ask everybody like yourself who comes on, when conventional energy sources will either run out or become too expensive.
I guess one will occur before the other.
What do you know about that?
When will we essentially use up what's economically viable?
I think we have a fairly good handle on that.
There is controversy about it because of course you don't know When you're going to run out until you actually run out.
However, starting in the 1950s, a very respected man named Dr. M. King Hubbard, who worked for the Geological Survey, developed a predictive method for when a resource gets depleted.
And that resource could be oil, petroleum, or buffalo chips.
Could be anything.
And King Hubbard basically drew a curve and said that our availability of oil is going to follow this curve.
Or I'm sorry, I said that a little bit wrong.
Our production of oil is going to follow this curve.
And when that production peak is reached, when we are at the maximum production rate, we will have at that point used up half the resource that ever existed.
Wow.
Since the 1950s, Hubbard made predictions about when certain things would happen.
For example, he predicted that the U.S.
peak of production would occur in 1970.
He said this back in the 50s.
Everybody said, you're wrong.
We have enough oil to go forever.
Well, indeed, it peaked in 1970s.
So you have very little oil production now in the United States compared to the boom times.
So his curve has held up pretty well.
And basically what it says is that by about the year 2010, and that number floats.
Some people say as early as 2000, other people say out by 2015.
But sometime around now, between now and the next 15 years, the world will use up approximately half of all the oil and gas that ever existed.
Now let me emphasize, I'm talking about oil and gas.
Not coal, not uranium, not other things.
Now, the trouble is this.
If you look at a curve of consumption of oil and gas, which are our primary energy sources at this point, you see that it started out slow and built up exponentially as automobiles were invented, as gas was used for home heating and so forth.
So it was a rapidly rising consumption.
Well, we're at about the halfway point approximately now.
The remaining, now we took just about one century to get to this point.
It was in the late 1800s that Colonel Drake first drilled for oil in Pennsylvania and then got natural gas as a nuisance product.
I assume the peak years that you spoke of would also be, probably when we look back at it historically, the cheapest years.
Correct.
Absolutely.
I like to use the analogy that oil is like water in a sponge.
You start out with a sponge full of water and then you squeeze the water out.
Well, squeezing the first half of the water out of the sponge is pretty easy.
But then, as you want to get more and more water out of the sponge, it gets progressively harder.
And I think, unfortunately, that analogy will follow through with petroleum.
It'll be pretty easy to squeeze the sponge until you get to the very end, when, abruptly, it'll get much harder.
And when will that occur?
Well, we don't know, but with pretty complete certainty, I think that it's going to happen, oh, probably, we're going to have a severe energy, we're going to run out of oil and gas as a commodity that you can burn, certainly within this century.
My guess is that those of us who aren't too old will live to see it, and for sure, our children will live to see it.
By the end of this century, oil and gas will be gone.
Right now, it's headed back up.
What about the price of gas in our lifetimes?
What do we have to look forward to in the next, say, 40 years, gas price-wise?
Well, I don't think that you can predict that.
Because, while there's still a lot of oil in the sponge... Only the oil companies know for sure, right?
Well, they don't know either.
The problem is that the price of gas is a function of temporary fluctuations.
For example, we just had...
A coup in Venezuela, which is our third largest oil supplier.
That's right.
If that coup had gone a different way, oil prices would have spiked up.
If it had gone a different way, the prices would have stayed down.
Or perhaps if we attack Iraq with a full on, you know, half million men, something or another, that's probably going to affect oil prices.
It certainly will.
And so oil will be a function of, oil prices will be a function of politics.
More than it will be a function of geology.
Well, in that case we should all be thankful the Middle East is so stable, huh?
Yes, right.
The Middle East, of course, is where most of the remaining oil remains.
If you look at I have some figures in front of me right here.
If you look at where the remaining oil mostly resides, it's in Abu Dhabi, Iraq, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia.
All our best friends.
All our best friends.
And a very bad place to have to put an aircraft carrier if you've got everybody shooting at you.
Well, there's going to be shooting.
There's no question about that.
We have plans, I'm sure of it now, they're talking about it, to take out Saddam Hussein.
And that could spark, you know, the entire region, really.
It will.
No question about it.
And what the effect of oil prices will be, we don't know.
Well, I remember the 70s.
I remember the gas lines.
You know, I lived through that.
That's right.
God, it was awful.
And I guess that's what started you on all this, isn't it?
Yes, it is.
That occurred in 1973.
That was for younger members of your audience.
What sparked that was basically something very similar today.
It was the Arab nations, the Arab oil suppliers, being very angry with the United States about their policy toward Israel.
And what they decided to do was to clamp down on oil supply, which had never been done before.
And I'm in the northern suburbs of Washington, D.C., in the Maryland suburbs, and people couldn't get to work.
And they had various silly rationing schemes and long gas lines.
Well, the trouble now is it isn't 1973 any longer.
I'm still sitting in the same place that I was then, but now the suburbs have moved out 40 miles.
And where people back in those days would commute perhaps four miles to work, Now they may commute as much as 40 miles to work.
If we had the same disruption of energy supply, it would completely shut us down.
What would it do to the economy?
I mean, completely shut us down.
Sort of lay out what that would do to our economic situation.
Well, visualize a situation In which you can't, well, you don't have to drive to work, you're at work right now.
No, but most people do.
But most people do.
Visualize a situation in which people can't get into their vehicles and go to work.
And that's it.
Well, that's Armageddon.
Economic Armageddon.
It would be very catastrophic.
And so what we have to do before is anticipate.
That even if politics doesn't bring an end to our available conventional energy sources, geology will.
Well, you watch what's going on with Saudi Arabia, for example, which The United States paints as a great ally, but I'll tell you something.
They're no great friends of ours, and frankly, they're probably as ultimately committed to the extinction of Israel, in my opinion, as any nation there.
They're just a little more sophisticated about it, and if you look very closely at the relations between the U.S.
and Saudi Arabia right now, they stink.
Well, I think that's true.
But it almost, in the long term, doesn't much matter what the motivations are politically.
Not in the long term, no.
They have basically one commodity to sell, and that's petroleum.
Right.
And they are in debt.
Their economy is not in great shape, like any windfall economy, which is all the economies that derive their income primarily from petroleum.
They have to keep selling it.
They can't stop selling it.
So my concern is not so much about political instability or ideology.
My concern is what happens when those who have the oil have pretty well used it up and it's gone from the crust of the earth.
And that, I think, is going to happen as a practical matter sometime in the mid-century.
That's really pretty soon.
Yes, it is.
Pretty soon.
I mean, that's our children's, if not ours, and certainly our children's direct problem.
Yes.
And I mean, what kind of world is that going to be?
Are we ready for it?
Do we, as far as you know, have alternative energy sources, be it, I don't know, fuel cells or whatever all is out there right now that's going to suddenly jump up and take the place of petroleum?
Well, we have lots of options.
The problem is they aren't going to jump up.
We have to make them.
We have to make that transition ourselves.
And the problem is that it will take energy to save energy.
The time to make the transition to conservation and to alternative energy sources, which are our two primary options, is right now because if you're going to, for example, make a photovoltaic array, To collect the sun's energy.
It takes energy to make the photovoltaic array.
I bet it does.
And it takes energy to make the wind generator.
We have other sources.
We have plenty of coal, for example.
Well, I say for example.
It's actually one of a kind.
We've got plenty of coal.
But it's almost as if the man upstairs is testing us to see how wise we are.
If, in fact, the global warming issue is as serious as most scientists are saying.
We can't use it.
Well, we can all see the weather changes going on now.
It appears that we can't.
You know, I don't know if that's the hand of man or just a cycle which may be sort of pushed along by the hand of man.
Yeah, you're right.
I mean, you know, burning coal in Nepal over the cities now is bad enough.
So to turn to coal, coal from oil would worsen that situation for sure.
Certainly would, because coal is the primary, is the worst in terms of the carbon dioxide problem, which is the main greenhouse gas.
Because of course, coal in terms of its combustion energy is mostly carbon.
Sure.
So you burn it, you get carbon dioxide.
There's conjecture as to how severe the problem is, but then if you ask the question, is the problem of global warming real?
I can answer it this way for you.
Go to Las Vegas, which you've been talking about tonight.
Stand there downtown, and then go 30 miles east into the desert.
Yup, that's right.
See what the temperature is.
And look back at the city.
Just looking back at the city will do it.
Listen, we're at the bottom of the hour.
Hold tight just a moment.
We'll be right back on Art Bell.
Call Art Bell in the Kingdom of Nye from West of the Rockies at 1-800-9-4.
East of the Rockies, 1-800-825-5033.
First time callers may reach Art at 1-775-727-1222.
of the Rockies 1-800-825-5033. First time callers may rechart at 1-775-727-1222 and
the wildcard line is open at 1-775-727-1295. To rechart on the toll free international
line call your AT&T operator and have them dial 800-895-727-1292.
This is Coast to Coast AM with R. Phil from the Kingdom of Nine.
And everyday people is really what it's all about.
I mean, the larger global picture of our running out of energy, you know, there's simply no question about it.
We're going to run out of energy.
And it's going to get real expensive before we do run out of energy.
Real expensive.
There's going to be wars and all kinds of things fought about it.
But in the meantime, you know, I'd really kind of like to concentrate on everyday people.
By that I mean, how's your power bill every month, huh?
Gas prices are once again soaring, and your electric bill every month is getting out of control.
It certainly is here and everywhere else.
It's getting out of control, and people are getting shocked.
I mean, it's a real shock to open that bill sometimes.
There are ways that you can stop that, and at least, you know, cut it way, way, way down.
And that's what I hope we can talk about some tonight, because I know the global crisis, but you know, eyes glaze over a little bit.
And people go, uh, you know, right.
It's going to be awful.
GR, poor kids.
In the meantime, you've got to pay a big electric bill, and it's going to get a lot bigger, and a big gas bill, and all the rest of it.
And there are ways right now that you can change that.
And that's what this book really is all about.
Energy Efficiency Manual.
I want to know how to change that now.
And even though I'm perhaps stupidly off the grid, I know how much it costs, and it's nice to be off the grid.
Still, I know that I'm an energy pig, and I've got computers everywhere, and lights, and I've got a washer and a dryer that's ten years old, and a refrigerator that's just as old, and, you know, I know there are new ways to do things, and you just have no idea how much energy you're using when your wife goes and turns on that dryer.
I mean, there's 20, 30, 40 amps suddenly going out the door real quick.
I mean, big-time electricity.
There are ways to change things in your home right now and cut your electric bill way down, and so you can be ahead of the game.
And I want to talk a little bit about that.
My guest is Donald Wolfinghoff, and he'll be right back.
Earlier today, I went out to my solar wind room, you know, where the electronic controls are, and I look, and one, I've got a pair of dual trace inverters, really nice, big, gigantic inverters, and one's drawing 39 amps, and the other's drawing 37.
And I asked my wife, what are we doing?
And she said, well, I'm drawing some clothes.
Oh my God, that uses a lot of electricity.
I'm really very interested in what we can all do in our homes to cut our electric bills.
Well, there are lots of things we can do.
Fortunately, it's a good news, bad news situation.
The good news is that you probably can reduce energy consumption in buildings, that's both residential and commercial buildings, to about 10 to 20 percent on average of what we presently use.
Oh my God!
Down 10 or 20 percent?
Or do you mean down to 10 or 20 percent?
Down to 10 or 20 percent.
Holy moly!
Yeah.
That's real serious.
That's real serious.
Now, good news, bad news.
The good news is it doesn't take a lot of advanced technology, in fact no advanced technology, to do that.
The bad news is you can do it only in new houses.
If you have an existing house you can probably cut your Well, there's nothing wrong with that.
bill or oil bill down to perhaps a third in an extremely favorable case maybe half
of what you're currently doing. Well there's nothing wrong with that if my electric bill
if I had one went to half that would be really good.
Yes it would.
Really good.
Half or even a third?
Oh my, that's gigantic.
And that's for existing homes.
Alright, well let's bore in on that one then because, and then we'll talk about new homes, but not everybody's, most people don't have one.
They've got whatever they've got right now.
Okay, so let's back away and have a little perspective first of all.
Had someone asked me recently, should I save energy by unplugging my appliances?
And the answer is, no.
Don't bother with stuff like that.
What we need to start out with is a sense of perspective.
The biggest energy users in your house and in apartments are heating and cooling.
So that's where you want to concentrate your effort.
Right.
The second biggest thing, although a distant second, is refrigeration and water heating.
And then a distant third behind those are lighting, cooking, laundry, dish washing, electronics.
You mentioned that your wife When she turns on the clothes dryer, it has a heck of an electric draw.
However, that's for a relatively short period of time.
That's for the length of time that she's washing your laundry, which is a couple of minutes every week.
Whereas cooling and heating goes on forever.
Alright, well try this exercise.
We're near Death Valley.
Summertime temperatures go to sometimes 117, 118 degrees during the worst part of the high summer here.
Yep.
So you can't live without cooling.
You have to.
You must.
You must have cooling.
Absolutely.
And the key to cooling is insulation and shading.
Those two things more than anything else.
Now if you've got an existing house, what can you do?
Right.
Insulate the attic.
Insulation is extremely important.
And most houses, you can upgrade the attic insulation.
Unfortunately, wall insulation, your walls may already be insulated.
Well, they've also got this new thing where they punch a hole in the wall and they fill it up with foam.
I just heard about it.
It's a doggone thing.
Yeah, it's been around for a long time.
Don't go there.
No, huh?
No, because imagine what that foam is doing on the inside.
Foaming?
I don't know.
It's having trouble getting down in there.
Because your wall is full of obstruction, so you get a very partial fill.
The other thing is, I want to talk about foam insulation.
In my opinion, it doesn't belong in houses.
If it's any part of a house, it can burn.
Really?
I hear so many people touting, in fact a lot of people out here in the desert are using this foam insulation.
Because it has such high insulation properties, but you're saying it's trouble?
It is, because when foam burns, and all foam insulation will burn if you get it up to its ignition temperature, it gives off copious fumes that kill you real quick.
Now, the only place I have foam insulation in my home, which I build, is around the exterior of the foundation where it's buried
under soil.
It's never going to catch fire.
But foam, in my opinion, has no business being in a wall or being in a roof,
because if the house catches fire, the foam first of all liquefies.
It flows, so it will flow right out of the wall, through the baseboards,
into your house, ignite.
And human beings, when they're sleeping, unfortunately, are not awakened by fire.
They tend to sleep through it until it kills them.
People, by the way, get mad at me for saying that, and it's controversial.
It's controversial, of course, because if you walk around a new housing development, you will see that it's very common to use foam for exterior sheathing on houses, which I think is bad for several reasons.
I don't like the idea of foam in a house that can burn.
You have foam, for example, in aircraft because it's light, it's rigid, it does have a high R-value.
In fact, foam is one of those temptations that you've got to stay away from because it's wonderful in all respects.
Except that it'll kill you.
Except it'll kill you.
Well, that's brand new to me.
So, okay.
What about the roof?
Is it insulated?
The nice thing about attics is that typically you can pile the stuff as high in your attic as you want to.
You've got lots of space.
So exploit that.
And probably if I were out in Death Valley, I'd want to have, oh heck, maybe 20-30 inches of insulation in the attic.
Stuff's cheap.
It would be glass or mineral fiber insulation.
Right.
I would stay away from cellulose insulation because rats and vermin love it.
But plain ordinary glass and mineral fiber insulation that's been around forever, that's the ticket.
You don't need that technology.
What kind of R rating can you end up with?
The stuff doesn't have a particularly high R value per inch, so you need lots of inches.
So figure about R3 per inch.
So if you want to get up to R30, 10 inches of it.
That much?
I get the idea.
Yeah.
The other thing, if you're out there in a hot climate, make sure that your attic is very well vented because the heat is driven into your house by a temperature difference.
Right.
Now, if the temperature inside your attic is 150 degrees and it can get that hot if it's badly vented, that's a big driver to drive the heat down through the insulation of the house.
One thing that we do not do in conventional construction practice nearly well enough is venting the attics.
Indeed, if I were building a residential house that had an attic, I would completely open the ends of the attics.
In other words, they would be decorative louvers, rather than your typical one foot by foot and a half vent, which is way too small.
The other thing that is now becoming very common, and it's good, is that every attic should have a ridge vent.
That used to be rare.
Now you'll get a ridge vent just about every time you get your shingles replaced on your roof.
Make sure that ridge vent is installed properly.
Now, the hot air in the attic comes out of the ridge vent.
It flows upward.
Well, it isn't going to do any good unless air can come in somewhere else.
And in the typical attic, the air has got to come in from the ends.
So, open up the ends of the attic.
You mean to the body of the house?
No, no.
To the outside.
Just to the outside.
Yeah, but what about the inflow of air to the attic?
It should be free.
In other words, your roof should be essentially a tent.
So that all it's doing is keeping sunlight off the insulation.
You want as free of breathing into the attic as possible.
You want to reduce the temperature in there.
That's really interesting.
Most people go the other way and want to seal it up.
Well you would do that in a cold climate, although you're asking for trouble with moisture problems if you do that.
An attic should always be vented.
It should be vented modestly if you're in Minnesota.
If you're in Death Valley, the ends of the gables should be wide open.
Oh, right.
Extremely interesting.
Now, I want to ask you about something else that's really been on my mind.
Someone told me that no matter where you are, even in the hottest climate, where I am here, Uh, that if you dig down in the ground, uh, to a certain level, there's going to be a constant temperature down there and a pretty cool one at that compared to the above ground temperature.
And that this is true everywhere under all circumstances.
If you dig down X number of feet, I'm sure you'll tell me, you get to this cooler temperature and you can, you could put heat exchange device in the earth and really get away with something.
Is that true?
Yes, that's the principle of the geothermal heat pump.
It isn't quite as simple as just putting a heat exchanger down there, but if you go down about 12 feet, anywhere in the United States, 12 feet roughly, the temperature is going to be about 55 degrees.
It doesn't matter whether you're in Minnesota or Florida or where you are, it'll vary by a couple of degrees.
But not much?
But not much.
It'll be about 55 degrees.
Now, we're going to have to get a little bit technical here, but a very popular thing these days is what's called a ground source heat pump.
And where we have to get technical is to mention that the energy efficiency of an air conditioner or a heat pump, and a heat pump is simply an air conditioner running in reverse.
Okay, so just to make it simple for everybody, basically, how does this work?
It pumps air down through this exchanger, through this 55 degree area and cools the air and brings it back?
Is that the rough idea?
it just to make it simple for everybody basically houses work it pumps air
uh... down through this exchanger through this fifty five degree area and
cools the air and brings back is that the rough idea usually not
uh... the problem is that the air that the that the fifty five degrees isn't
cool enough for cooling Okay.
You could do that.
The trouble is that what would happen is very quickly as you're circulating warm air down through that heat exchanger down in the ground, you're going to warm up the ground.
The ground acts as an insulator.
Right.
So that technique would work for about 12 hours and then it would cease to be any good for you anymore.
What you have to do, there are two things you can do.
One is you can lay down a heat exchanger field that may take, oh, a fraction of an acre or about an acre for a typical house.
Yes.
In which you lay pipes in the ground horizontally or alternatively you can, and that takes a lot of surface area, isn't any good for heavily populated areas.
The other way you do it is you drive the heat exchanger straight down.
In a well typically three or five hundred feet deep and you have a series of these wells and then you run a heat pump off of that.
Now the problem with that is obvious.
It's expensive.
The horizontal fields, that whole business of the ground source heat pump is a great idea.
Unfortunately it's typical of a lot of things.
Great in concept, valid concept, but in execution It tends not to work very well.
The problem is that there's too much opportunity for the contractor to cheat.
Huh.
If you go down 12 feet, you get 55 degrees.
Right.
But you can't cut a 12 foot trench three inches wide into the ground.
It'll collapse.
Right.
There's no practical way to do that.
Right.
So what happens is the contractor cheats.
He buries it three feet in the ground or just below the frost line.
Well, you might as well not bother if you're going to do that.
Right, you've got to get down to that point.
You have to get all the way down there.
All right, but assuming you've got an honest contractor, I guess my question is, could this work?
If you had the better part of an acre to do this, and you could do it horizontally, which would not be too prohibitively expensive, would it work?
Oh yeah, and it's done.
How well would it work?
You can't bury it 12 feet deep.
It's not practical to do that.
So the best they typically do is 4 to 6 feet.
It works moderately well.
And the problem is that even with an acre of heat transfer, if you're in a place like Nevada where you're cooling all the time, what you're doing is sucking heat out of the house and putting it into the ground.
After a couple of years you warm up the field.
So with the passage of time, The efficiency of the system gets less and less and less until ultimately you're just as well off with a window air conditioner.
Oh, jeez.
Yeah, yeah.
What's a mother going to do then?
What you're going to do is instead of spending a lot of energy to cool an inefficient house, you're going to make your house efficient.
And you do that with insulation.
And let me just mention some other things you can do to reduce your cooling load.
But you're not against the concept of compressors and air conditioners in general.
You just say, don't make them work so hard.
That's correct.
OK.
Yeah.
You've got to have at some point, you're going to have to have some air conditioning unit to suck the heat out of the house.
But what you want to do, most of the heat that you're sucking out of the house in a warm state, Is heat that isn't generated inside the house.
It just leaked in from the outside.
So don't let as much leak in from the outside.
The way to prevent that is insulation.
The other thing that's very important in warm climates is shading of the windows and shading of the whole house.
Now it's tough out on the desert, but trees are just wonderful things.
And the only problem with trees is they take a long time to grow.
But if you have a house that is surrounded by trees, and in fact if you go in the Midwest, What you will see is your farmhouse out on the prairie, and the prairie is dead flat.
There's the farmhouse, and the farmhouse is totally surrounded by this little forest.
Absolutely.
That the family planted there.
And they did that because they like to be cool in summer.
And how much difference does that make to the energy usage in the house?
Lots.
I'm gonna, and we don't have good numbers on this, the energy efficiency manual has a little section on tree shading.
And explains the pros and cons and how much it'll save you.
If you're out on the prairie and the wind is not blowing, you'll save a lot.
You might have a 15 degree temperature difference, which is enough to cut your cooling costs to a small fraction of what it would have been.
You make a good point about the wind, though.
If it's blowing, then obviously... That's right.
All bets are off.
But shading is an excellent thing.
But it's very dependent on your geography.
If you can't plant trees, shade your windows with awnings.
Or, if you can't afford awnings, put in good reflective roller shades.
They are remarkably effective.
Put in a $5 roller shade in your window and that will keep the heat from coming in.
We use solar screens here, and we use double pane glass, and we have these mini blinds behind that.
Right.
Which just seems to help a lot.
Right.
And the important concept is generally try to keep the shading as far outside as possible.
Because once the heat comes in from the sunlight, you have a tough time getting it back out.
Now, all the things you're saying about hot areas like mine, what about the cooler areas where they're concerned about heating?
Because, my God, heating oil, the price of heating oil, is going to go just like gasoline and everything else, right?
Here's the good news.
The very same insulation that saves you money for cooling also saves you money for heating.
So, either way, the answer is basically the same, huh?
Absolutely.
And if you're starting with a clean slate, if you're going to have a house built, let's take the ideal case.
You can afford to design your own house.
A brand new house.
Hold that thought during the break.
We're at the top of the hour.
We're talking about energy.
We're talking about how you can save big time money.
money. It's something you're going to want to listen to.
It's something you're going to want to listen to.
in the kingdom of Nāi, from Wastavaraki's Dial 1.
East of the Rockies, 1-800-825-5033.
1-800-618-8255, east of the Rockies, 1-800-825-5033.
First time callers may rechart at 1-775-727-1222 or use the wildcard line at 1-800-618-8255.
1-775-727-1295. To reach Art on the toll-free international line, call your AT&T operator
and have them dial 800-893-0903. This is Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell on the Premier Radio
It certainly is.
We're talking about energy and how to save money on your bill right now.
Donald Wolfinghoff is my guest.
He's written a Bible on this, and if you doubt that, go take a look at my webcam picture.
I'm holding a picture of his book.
It's like a $200 book.
Anyway, that's what I've heard.
We'll ask.
Maybe it isn't.
The network says it's a $200 book, and I believe it.
It's gigantic.
And it's used on every continent around the world with regard to energy.
So if you want the Bible, here it is, you know, on this subject.
And believe me, a lot of people are going to begin to get religion on this subject very shortly.
I'm Art Bell.
don't move.
Once again, back to the man who wrote the Bible on energy, Don.
Wolfinghoff, Don, welcome back.
Thank you.
Alright, so whether it's cold and you want heat or whether it's hot and you want cool, either way, number one for everybody out there is insulation.
That's right.
What else?
What else can we do?
You started to say, you know, I was going to build a new house.
Well, I said earlier that you could build a house that would use 10 to 20 percent of conventional energy consumption.
So let's do it.
And we'll notice that none of the following involves new technology.
As you said, insulation, that's the single most important thing you can do.
About 20 years ago, there was a concept out called the super-insulated house.
I just hated that term because there was nothing new about it.
It's just that instead of having walls that are 2x4s, you have walls that are 2x10 or 2x12 or whatever.
When I built my house, instead of using 2x4s, I used 2x8s and it just worked wonderfully.
Much more insulation everywhere on all four sides going down in the foundation and in the ceiling.
Insulation is cheap.
It won't cost much to do that.
Next thing is we want to heavily shade the building to reduce the cooling load and we're going to do that with a conventional roof that is extremely well vented as we were discussing earlier.
Essentially the roof is going to be nothing more than a sun shade.
And something to keep the rain off.
It's just a parasol.
So we have a heavily vented roof.
And then we want to, in a warm climate such as yours, make the roof highly reflective on top.
So we don't absorb the solar heat.
We just bounce it right off.
Right.
The other thing that we do is we're very careful about where we put glass.
Because just as insulation is good from an energy standpoint, glass is bad.
And there's no way around that.
Unfortunately, Back in the 70s, we were being promised that new, high R-value windows would be developed.
It never happened.
How come?
Well, they didn't figure out how to do it.
They were promising magic they couldn't deliver.
So the window today, the so-called super window of today, in fact, has an R-value that isn't even twice as good as it was 20 years ago.
Oh.
So we want to minimize our glass area.
So put glass in where you want a view.
And where you don't want to view, don't put glass in.
Shading is extremely important, particularly over the glass.
And the ways to shade is to use deep roof overhangs, particularly on the south side.
And if you're going to be on the east side, awnings are very effective.
You don't, basically, you don't want direct sunlight ever to hit any glass.
Now, people say, gee, that's extreme.
No, it isn't.
You can make that happen.
Yes, you can.
Just a nice, long, southern-type porch.
That's what I put in here.
That'll do it.
That's right.
And, in fact, you mentioned southern-type porches.
I'll digress a moment, because people know how to build, for warm climates, people know how to build low-energy houses.
We spend our winters down in Key West.
We spend about a month down there every year.
And Key West is warm.
It's the southernmost part of the continental United States.
And humid.
And humid.
And just walking around Key West, fortunately they still have the old architecture.
And the secret is, as you said, deep porches everywhere, heavily vented attics, and trees everywhere.
So your typical beautiful Key West house won't ever have any direct sunlight hitting it.
And they were designed to operate without air conditioning and indeed they can be quite comfortable.
They also use, which isn't practical in the rest of the United States, I'll just mention this as a footnote, they also use free ventilation from the outside so that there are a lot of Key West houses where two of the walls on opposite sides are just louvers.
But that's not practical for most of the rest of the country.
Okay, to continue.
Then the next thing that we want to do is to install heating and cooling systems that allow for separate heating and cooling of each room.
The biggest source of energy waste in heating is the standard forced air furnace, where you have a furnace in the basement and it distributes heat through ducts to every room in the house.
Well, you don't live in every room in the house.
You only live in one room at a time.
That's right.
So, just heat or cool one room at a time.
And you say, well, gee, isn't that uncomfortable and primitive?
No, because if you insulate the house real well, none of the spaces are ever going to get uncomfortably hot or cold.
Too radical either way.
Right.
And so my ideal house would have baseboard radiation, which is totally quiet, totally conventional, with a separate circuit and thermostat for each room for heating.
For cooling, You want a separate cooling system, subdivided as much as you can.
I have these wonderful split system air conditioning units that just started to become popular about 15 years ago.
And sadly, the best ones are Japanese.
I don't know why we can't make those units in this country.
Yeah, I'm just about to install one.
They're really interesting.
Yeah, and they're wonderful.
We have one Um, where the condensing unit, which is the noisy part that has the compressor and the fan.
Although it ought to be said, they're getting very quiet compared to the way they were.
Oh, they're very quiet on an absolute basis.
When we're at one end of our deck, which is 30 feet long, we can't hear the condenser running on the other end.
Yeah, there you go.
And so, those are super.
And so, subdivide the heating and cooling.
Then, next item is simply select high efficiency models of all your appliances.
Okay, I understand you can really make a big difference that way.
I mean, a refrigerator like the one I have made 10 years ago, as compared to what is available today, how much difference is there in energy?
Let's not compare it to a 10-year-ago refrigerator.
Let's compare it to a 30-year-ago refrigerator.
Maybe a third as much.
A third?
Oh yeah.
A third.
And guess what the main efficiency difference is?
What?
Insulation.
A refrigerator is just a box.
Well, of course that's right, isn't it?
It's just an insulated box.
So they really made all that change.
Did it take it down to a third from that long ago just by insulating it properly?
Mostly insulation and some improvements in the compressor system, but the basic compressor didn't change it all.
In effect, the basic insulation didn't change it all.
They just used a reasonable amount of it.
So the answer again is insulation.
Yes, indeedy.
Magic stuff.
Alright, what about washers and dryers and that kind of stuff?
Every single appliance that you have in your house, including your computer on your desk, comes in a high-efficiency version, and there are ratings for those.
You can go on the internet, or you can call various consumer bureaus, or you can subscribe to consumer reports, and every appliance that you buy for your house, whether it's a water heater, or a washing machine, Whatever, a refrigerator, freezer, stove, everything comes in a high efficiency version these days.
Furthermore, there are mandatory labeling laws.
You walk into the department store, you go to the appliance department, and there are these big yellow labels on them.
Just read those labels.
It's remarkably easy to do.
That has probably been the biggest success story.
Since the energy crisis began in 1973.
Alright, alright.
Personal question then.
Again, I've got things that are about ten years old.
That's how old this house is.
A little better than ten years, actually.
And so, my refrigerator, my washer, my dryer, these sorts of... Would it be economically feasible for me, at this point, Yes, you would if it were propane.
new high energy efficient appliance. In fact, another question. For example, a dryer.
I have a wonderful source of propane gas here.
And I've considered the fact that we could probably use a dryer
using propane gas instead of electricity. Would I save doing that?
Yes, you would if it were propane. However, you're not saving energy, you're saving cost.
The propane dryer has an advantage simply because it's a cheaper energy source than electricity is.
So that's an economic thing, not an energy thing.
Well, that's okay.
I'm willing to be, if I can save money.
Okay, that's a way to do it.
I'm going to react like most people react.
You'd be better off with a propane dryer.
Yeah, probably.
But bear in mind that drying, clothes drying, laundry, is not one of your big energy users in the house.
Well, okay, hot water usage though is... and what about these... I mean, people go around selling these things you put on your roof that heat your hot water and at least to some degree lessen the amount of electricity you might use to get the water to temperature or either that or eliminate it all together.
Do they really work?
Oh, they work!
And indeed, if you remember Back about 20 years ago, the federal government had a heavy subsidy for those in your income taxes.
You could deduct the cost of putting those things on.
Can we still do that?
No.
That program has gone away.
Unfortunately, that's one of the really... Appliance efficiency ratings are the good news.
The bad news is how badly botched that whole solar program was.
Most of the systems that were installed under that program have since gone away.
And the reason isn't that there's anything wrong with the technology.
It's perfectly valid and it's perfectly simple.
The problem is they would do dumb stuff like having the collectors facing north.
Or if you had a house that was heavily shaded with trees, you can't put one of those things on the roof, and they would do that.
So and they took a little bit of maintenance and they tended to be installed wrong.
So that was a microcosm of the major problem that we have with energy efficiency, which is really dumb application of good technology.
All right.
The payback period on that, by the way, is 10 to 20 years, depending on what your local energy costs are.
As I told you at the beginning of the program, I'm off the grid.
When the power around here goes out, People in my neighborhood are out walking around wondering why the hell I've got power up here.
They can see the lights up here and they're going, oh, why's he got power?
Well, I've got power because I spent a ton of money to make sure I have power.
Is it a good idea or not a good idea?
Are you behind the concept of going off grid or not?
How do you feel about that?
Don't worry about my feelings.
I feel that going off the grid is essentially a hobby.
Yeah, there you go.
If you can afford it, that's in the same game as having a Lexus instead of driving a Chevrolet.
Yeah, that's right.
Now, you could also have emergency power by going down to the hardware store and buying a $200 generator.
Well, now wait a minute now.
Hold on.
Okay.
Not really.
You're an engineer.
You know that a $200 generator isn't going to provide you even a fraction of the power that you need to run your home.
And if you doubt that, go look at the amount of energy you're actually using.
A $200 generator wouldn't do that.
You know that.
None if you're heavily electrical with heating things.
Electric heat, electric dryer.
Most people are fairly heavily electrical, frankly.
And if you doubt that, just go turn off the breaker outside your house and you're generally living in a tomb.
Yeah.
Dark tomb.
Here's the issue on going off the grid.
Alternative energy sources.
What do you have?
Wind or photovoltaic?
Yes.
Both?
Yes.
Okay.
Both of those technologies, which are the leading candidates for being our future free energy sources, are by far most economical in huge scale.
You know that over in the next state, California, you have these huge wind farms.
That's the economical way to do wind energy.
Well, I'm lucky.
I live in an area where we have both lots of wind and lots of sun.
The number of Sundays we have is astronomical here.
So it's a particularly good area to do that sort of thing, which is one of the reasons I went ahead.
How noisy do you find your wind generators?
The first ones I had They were horrible.
I mean, oh my God!
You'd get 30 or 40 mile an hour winds out there and it sounded like the devil was coming down on the neighborhood.
I scared people in the neighborhood.
Now I have new composite blades and a very different kind of generator.
And these new composite blades are just as quiet as you will.
The other ones would go supersonic.
And when they went supersonic, Oh my God, what a noise!
I mean, people would come out of their homes and go, oh my God, what's that?
So these newer composite blades are very quiet, is the answer.
So they're not bothering the neighbors?
Absolutely not.
Okay, great.
As I said earlier, people like yourself are the ones who create progress because you're willing to be the pioneer.
But still, I think the truth of the matter is that the future of alternative energy isn't highly centralized.
Yeah.
sources now for that you need a great so what's going to happen is the great
itself isn't going to go away was going to go away
is the fossil fuel power plant and so the greatest simply means of distribution of energy
nuclear nuclear is not doing so well either at the moment and nuclear is a wild card
we don't know whether it's going to go up or whether it's good to have
Well, as difficult as nuclear was before 9-1-1, now it's even more difficult because obviously there's going to have to be additional security.
Everything is a money thing, and security costs money.
So now nuclear plants will be even more expensive.
So as controversial as they were before, they're even worse now.
I agree entirely.
And in fact, if we're looking at our big resource picture as we were at the beginning of the program, People say, well, gee, we've got lots of coal.
Don't we also have lots of uranium?
And no, we don't.
Uranium is not a terribly plentiful commodity, and the wrong people have it.
It's in Russia and South Africa.
And then they say, well, how about breeder reactors?
And breeder reactors, what they do is they take the fraction of uranium that is not fissionable Which is about 99% of it and turn it into plutonium.
But plutonium is stuff you don't want to have floating around because terrorists can make bombs out of plutonium, whereas they cannot make bombs out of uranium very easily.
Right.
So, yes, I agree with you.
9-11 didn't help the future of nuclear at all.
You asked about going on the grid.
I think the grid will remain.
But what pumps energy into the grid will change.
Yeah, I actually asked about going off the grid, but I mean, you're saying that whatever it is that puts energy on the grid is going to change.
What is that going to be?
Wind, photovoltaic, hydro.
Hydro, of course, we have.
Now, there's good news and bad news about hydro.
The bad news is that our hydro capacity in the United States is actually declining because the big dams, like Hoover Dam near you, And the other big power dams are silting up, and so we're looking at 100 years from now of those dams operating at only a small fraction of their current capacity.
The good news is Canada has vast hydro resources.
They haven't been tapped yet, so the Canadians are going to be making their money a century from now selling us their hydropower.
All right.
Well, I like Canadians.
Hold on.
Don, we'll be right back.
Canadians, you're our good friends up there up north, right?
You wouldn't have any objection to sending us copious amounts of hydroelectric power, now would you?
Eh?
We do.
We're consumers down here.
The Canadians, well they can take advantage of that.
Maybe the Canadians are going to be the future Arabs.
I hold the power to America.
And you will rule.
I'm Art Bell and this is Ghost to Ghost AM.
Don't touch that dial.
East of the Rockies, 1-800-825-5033.
First time callers may reach Art at 1-775-727-1222.
1-800-825-5033. First time callers may reach out at 1-775-727-1222.
And the wildcard line is open at 1-775-727-1295. To reach out on the toll free
international line, call your AT&T operator and have them dial 800-895-727-1222.
This is Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell from the Kingdom of Nile.
Well, I have with me tonight a man who's written the Bible on energy savings.
It's called Energy Efficiency Manual.
It's about $200 a gigantic.
In fact, I've got to ask about that price.
See if that's really right.
It's a monster of a book.
You can see it at artbell.com.
I'm holding it up on my webcam.
You know, I've had a lot of energy experts on in the past.
I'm going to ask Don what I've asked a lot of the others.
About hydrogen fuel cells.
Now, I had one man who came on and said, hydrogen fuel cells are going to be the salvation of our energy needs, brothers and sisters.
They will save our butts.
Then I had somebody else come on and say, what a bunch of baloney.
Hydrogen fuel cells are going to take petroleum products to burn to make.
And so it's not going to save our butts, and I don't know what the real answer is.
We'll try Don on this one in a moment.
Keith in Toronto, Ontario says, hey Art, no effing way.
Your president never remembers to mention us.
Plus our anthem gets booed at every hockey game I've seen.
No power for you.
Anyway, welcome back Don.
Thanks.
There's our answer from Canada.
Yeah, I guess, huh?
Listen, I have had people on who have sung the praises for hours on end here of hydrogen fuel cells.
They are the answer.
They will save our butts.
Others have come on and said, what a total bunch of garbage.
They're not going to save our butts.
Ultimately, to make hydrogen fuel cells, you need lots of power.
I'd just like to make solar cells or whatever all else, and they're not going to save our butts.
It's not the long-term answer.
What do you say?
Well, the hydrogen economy, so to speak, is a misunderstood concept.
First of all, hydrogen is not an energy source.
Unlike solar energy, or wind, or coal, or oil, or uranium, or whatever, there is no hydrogen resource in nature.
Hydrogen is basically a transmission medium or a storage medium.
Now, where does the hydrogen come from?
There are two places you can get it.
There's obviously two hydrogen atoms in every water molecule.
So you can expend energy, any kind of energy, nuclear energy, wind energy, whatever, to break down water and create hydrogen, free hydrogen.
Or you can take a fossil fuel, such as methane, which is one atom of carbon and four atoms of hydrogen, and you can split out the hydrogen atoms.
But in either case, does hydrogen function as an energy source?
It's something you have to make.
So it's a storage medium.
It's not an energy source in and of itself.
That is correct.
Now, why are we interested in doing that?
The answer primarily is fuel cells.
Fuel cells are a device that produces Electricity directly from fuel at a substantially higher efficiency than do most electric generators.
For example, a diesel engine or a steam turbine produces electricity with an efficiency of more or less thirty percent.
Fuel cells, the best ones, can do it at about forty percent and for theoretical reasons they offer even better efficiency in the future. So the whole thing
that drives the hydrogen economy is the possibility of using fuel cells as an efficient
source of electricity.
Good idea, bad idea?
It's kind of a wash because the efficiency advantage that you have in the fuel cell
you lose in the production of the hydrogen.
I mentioned that hydrogen is a transmission and storage medium.
Well, it's really kind of troublesome in both capacities.
I remember back in the 70s, before there was a Department of Energy, we were working with their predecessor agency on that.
The problem with hydrogen is it's a very small molecule.
So if you compress it and put it in a steel tank, it leaks out through the walls of the steel tank over time and it embrittles the steel at the same time.
So you go to all sorts of contortions to try to contain hydrogen for whatever you want to use it for.
And I remember the most bizarre thing was a metal matrix called lanthanum pentanickel.
And this is basically a molecular sponge that would soak up and hold hydrogen.
You can make canisters out of it.
Instead of your car being powered by gasoline, it would be powered by a canister of hydrogen.
Right.
And the advantage, of course, is that if you burn hydrogen, what's the combustion product?
It's water.
So back at the end of the process, you get no pollution.
Unfortunately, at the front end of the process, you have the pollution that it takes to make the hydrogen.
So it's unpredictable.
One of the things that's clear about technology is you can never predict the future.
For example, I remember that when I was a kid, Popular Mechanics was saying, in 20 years, all our cars will be powered by gas turbines.
Well, that never happened, because gas turbines are horribly inefficient.
What will be the future of fuel cells in the hydrogen economy?
I don't know right now.
However, if you run the numbers, it's a wash.
It's a wash.
So you're basically then agreeing with my one guess.
In other words, other fuel sources have to be used to create this.
It's not a panacea within itself.
Well, there is no free hydrogen source in nature.
All right.
I want to read you a bit of an article here from abcnews.com that I pulled that I find fascinating.
Get your comments on at least this, all right?
Listen very carefully.
It's from abcnews.com.
Maybe I'll get it up on the website.
It's entitled Moon Power.
Scientists propose harnessing solar energy from the moon.
It's not that he particularly wants an energy shortage.
He's just excited about the alternative drawing solar energy from the moon.
Oil in Alaska is nothing compared to what you get from the moon, says Criswell, a physicist at the University of Houston Institute for Space Systems, who's been promoting the idea steadily now for 20 years.
This kind of energy, he says, would be available as long as the sun shines and the moon's up there.
Goes on, plugging into the moon.
In this month's issue of The Industrial Physicist, Criswell lays out his plan to build solar panels and microtransmitters from lunar materials and begin beaming the solar energy to Earth.
Solar panels would convert the sun's rays to energy and transmit it through buried wires to microwave generators.
The generators would then convert that energy into harmless microwave beams.
Controversial there.
Which would be aimed at collecting stations on Earth.
At Earth, they'd be converted back to electricity.
The 2040 lunar power bases, 20 to 40, would be stationed at the east and west edges of the moon, so that one or the other would always be sunlit as the moon travels around the Earth.
Earth-orbiting satellites and mirrors could also help aim the beam toward the terrestrial antennas.
None of the Moon-based solar units, he says, would be visible with a naked eye from Earth.
It would be like having an electric cord stretched across the solar system, he said.
Comments?
Well, that's not as goofy as it sounds.
But people may wonder, why would you bother with all that?
And here's the reason.
Sunlight is Probably going to be one of our major ultimate energy sources in the future if we do it soon enough to keep our civilization alive.
The trouble with sunlight is it's a very diffuse energy source.
It's about 200 BTUs per square foot per hour which isn't much energy.
I mentioned earlier that most of the solar collectors that you put on your roof have a payback period of roughly 20 years on average.
And gee, that's a long time.
How come?
Well, it isn't that there's anything wrong with the technology.
The problem is that the amount of energy that that collector can collect is very small.
Per square foot or per square meter or whatever.
So, people have said the obvious.
Well, gee, the thing to do is to have huge, cheap collectors that can then focus sunlight on something like a photovoltaic array or a water heater or what have you.
But the trouble is that collector has to be cheap.
Sunlight is such a weak energy source that even the cost of mirrors, just plain, ordinary, old, cheap mirrors, and the steel structures you'd have to mount them on become prohibitive.
So then people said, ah, but what if we put them out in space?
In space, there is no gravity.
So we don't need massive structures.
So the original idea was, the predecessor to the moon idea, was the idea that we'll put huge orbiting reflectors out in space.
The only reason for doing that is that we think we can make them cheaper per square foot than we could on Earth because they don't need a structure.
Absolutely.
That ran into some problems and so the notion of installing the collectors on the moon was an alternative to having them as orbiting in space.
So actually the moon idea is about a halfway compromise between orbiting reflectors and just collecting sunlight on Earth directly
and skipping all that.
But is it a good idea overall or not?
My guess is the economics won't work out.
There's another problem also.
Let's say that you just reflect sunlight and don't convert it into microwaves or anything.
So you've got this big array up in orbit, and it's punching a tremendous number of kilowatts down
through the atmosphere to a point on Earth.
Microwaving, probably.
Well, you could convert it into microwave energy if you wanted to.
Right.
Or you could just run the sunlight down straight in the form of light.
The trouble is, and that's supposed to focus on a point on Earth, what happens if that thing starts to slide and instead focuses on Los Angeles?
Well, then you burn up people like ants with a magnifying glass.
That's correct.
And so... You know, you are... I've got to tell you, you're getting some comments on my... I get these comments on a computer as we go through the program, and some people are regarding you as kind of anti-technology.
And almost everything we're running by you here sort of doesn't work.
Well... Is that an unfair assessment?
Would you say of yourself you're kind of anti-technology?
Oh, not at all.
In fact, if you look at my book, the thing is 1,500 pages of technology, but it's proven technology.
Okay, so you're just a realist.
I'm an engineer.
Okay, that's being a realist in my opinion.
Yes.
In other words, you're looking at everything from an economic perspective and seeing what's economically viable and what's not.
That's correct.
It's got to work.
If you build a bridge, the bridge is not allowed to fall down.
If you build a building, the building is not allowed to burn, and it has to be economical.
So I'm looking at things through the standpoint of an engineer.
Now, there's another strong prejudice I have, and people who are sending you the messages are seeing my prejudice.
My prejudice is that we're making a major societal mistake now by continually looking to the future.
There's a thing in psychology called displacement behavior.
Displacement behavior means that you go and do something that's less important as a way of avoiding something that's more important.
What's important for our society right now is to immediately convert to efficiency and alternative energy sources.
But instead of doing that, we use sort of a displacement behavior, and we are continually fascinated by stuff that is in the future.
Okay, well, let's say we embark on an immediate program.
That means going back to government subsidies for alternative energy, heavy government subsidies, so people will find it financially attractive to do it, even if it's not really economically attractive.
Our government can make it economically attractive.
We've done that before.
I've had very long conversations about this, for example, with Dennis Hayes, who is the head of the Earth Day program, a very brilliant man.
He is very much in favor of a massive program to say, we are going to spend $1,000,000 on Photovoltaics.
And you?
And I'm thinking that's probably a fairly good idea.
It's probably better spent there than some of the other places.
By the way, did you mean a million or a billion?
Billion.
Billion.
I thought perhaps you did.
I may have misspoken.
I meant billion with a B. A million won't get you very far.
And yeah, I think there's merit.
Now, a billion dollars is one power plant.
Yeah, I know.
It's not that much.
It's not that much.
In the overall scheme of things, how much would that do?
Well, Dennis Hayes' notion, which I think is perfectly valid, is that what you want to do is to drive down the cost of the photovoltaic, or the wind, or whatever.
Yeah, sure, sure.
You want to drive down the price curve by volume.
And in photovoltaics, there is still I think considerable opportunity for driving down the price on photovoltaics.
Wind, I'm not so sure.
But wind is starting to be economical on its merits already.
On a scale, it's like three cents a kilowatt hour, isn't it?
That's correct.
Provided that you put the wind generators where there is, in fact, wind.
Unfortunately, right now, About 70% of all wind generator installations are put in under mandates from public utility commissions, typically who are folks that have very little technical grounding.
And you end up with silly things like putting in wind generators in central Pennsylvania where there is no wind.
So what happens is, and this is where Dennis Hayes and I disagree.
And it's worth noting that there is disagreement among people about this.
I say, Dennis, the largest single thing that's holding us back in our going to alternative energy is this continual doing of stuff that's not economical, making stupid mistakes.
We can't afford stupid mistakes anymore.
We could afford it 30 years ago when we were in the exploratory stage.
But wind energy, for example, isn't exploratory anymore.
It's here.
And as you were saying, with your wind generator, we've even got them to the point where the noise doesn't drive people out of the neighborhood.
That's absolutely true.
And so, we're ready to get serious about this.
Now, we can't be just treating this as... The trouble is, we take valid technology and we treat it as if it were snake oil, which makes people think, gee, that's snake oil.
And therefore, we shouldn't support that.
Well, yeah, but it could still be described as sort of a present economics snake oil, in terms of you're going out to buy it and saving money.
That's true.
And at this point, I think there is merit in a federal subsidy, for a limited federal subsidy, a billion dollars here and there, for things like trying to drive down the price of photovoltaic.
Okay, well, the question is, how much would it do?
If you took a billion dollars, or even a few billion, And applied it to subsidies and started putting up wind and solar everywhere, or in many places where it's useful, how much difference would it make?
It would make the difference that when the crunch comes, we would have the infrastructure to know how to put those things in place, and we would know how much it would cost, and we would know how to do it, because we had done it successfully.
Okay, why are we not doing it?
Economics, primarily.
And the other reason is what I mentioned a moment ago is we tend to do things in the area of alternative energy in such a dumb way that among intelligent people it discredits it, like putting windmills where there is no wind.
The other thing is there needs to be a clear distinction between alternative energy, which is very important but is somewhat in the future, and energy conservation, which is right now.
And energy conservation requires no subsidies at all.
Energy conservation pays for itself and it generally pays for itself quickly.
And in fact, my book, which weighs 8.5 pounds, as you have mentioned, and has 1,500 pages,
There's nothing in there that won't pay off now.
By the way, is your book $200?
It's $199.95.
So it's a nickel less than that.
$200.
The homeowner doesn't want to buy it.
The homeowner wants to go to the local library branch and say, please order this book and put it on your shelf.
There you go.
Well, I sure appreciate my copy.
My God, what a book.
This is 20 years, huh?
20 years.
I started it and made the decision to do it.
In 1980, and it was finally published in the year 2000.
And it's used on every continent in the world?
Yeah, we know where they're sold, and they're all over the world.
And it's been accepted.
It is now, in fact, what it was originally intended to be.
It is the primary reference in energy efficiency.
And it's being put to use.
In other words, you are able to look at places where your suggestions and ideas have been implemented and are working?
I know where we're selling the book, which is, as I say, all over the earth.
Yeah, but what about implementation of what's in it?
Well, as I say, it was published in the year 2000, so it would be nice to get feedback from people, and I invite people who have the book.
To get back to me and tell me what they've done with it.
All right, hold tight.
We're at the top of the hour.
We'll be right back.
From the high desert, I'm Art Bell.
And this is Coast to Coast AM.
this energy thing it's some controversy on right once again uh... here is donald
Donald, welcome back.
Thank you.
Okay, well, gee, we've been all over the place.
I understand you build experimental airplanes as a hobby?
Yep, sure do.
Really?
What do you build?
Well, right now I'm working on a two-place lightweight plane.
It'll come out to be about 440 pounds.
It's based on It's based on a fairly standard design called a Challenger.
There's actually a very widespread hobby of building experimental airplanes.
The Experimental Aircraft Association has many members.
I just came back from their meeting in Lakeland, and in fact, an interesting Factoid is that over half of all the aircraft built in the United States are built by home builders.
Now, these aren't the big ones, but they do account for more than half of total aircraft registrations.
Well, that's absolutely incredible.
I had no idea that was true.
A lot of experimental planes also have a habit of crashing, though, right?
Well, no.
The safety record on experimentals is very good.
The reason being that the person who builds them really doesn't want to die.
Well, no, of course not.
But there's a message about experimental aircraft.
You can't make mistakes if you want to survive.
And I think that relates to energy and alternative energy efficiency and alternative energy sources.
You have to know the engineering, you have to avoid dubious concepts, and you have to build it carefully.
And that's the message I've been trying to get across.
Not that I don't like technology.
I love technology, just like I love airplanes.
But I want them to work.
And if it doesn't work, it doesn't count in energy.
It's got to work or it doesn't work.
I so agree with that.
I mean, we're going to hear them this hour.
There are going to be a million people coming on saying, free energy!
I know!
Free energy!
Tesla stuff!
It's out there!
It's hidden!
It's secret!
You get that all the time, right?
Yeah.
Yeah, I do.
Well, I tend not to believe that the oil companies have squirreled away the carburetor that will make a car run on water.
I tend to doubt that notion.
What about some of the newer concepts being explored, zero point, that sort of thing?
Zero point energy, at this point in time, let me answer that on two levels.
First of all, as you've heard me say repeatedly, I'm interested in stuff we can do to protect our civilization right now.
And zero-point energy at this point in time is a very conjectural concept.
It is, yes.
Zero-point energy, as you mentioned in the introduction, I studied physics before I became an engineer.
And basically zero-point energy takes off on what appears to be true.
That empty space isn't really empty if you get deeply into the theory.
Now, for example, you can create matter out of nothing.
You can take an electron and a positron and make them out of empty space.
But, of course, the fact that you can do that shows the space wasn't empty.
There was some energy there.
And so there is conjecture That you can tap into that zero point energy and indeed there has been an experiment that I think still is a little bit dubious but it seems to show that you can create an extremely slight force
That is correct.
I have a differential.
plates that is correct uh... because you have less uh...
energy between the plates than you do on the outside of the plates which tends to
push the plates together they have a differential
precisely uh... but uh... that's not ready to power cities that isn't ready to power
that's not ready for prime time well i i appreciate your uh...
pragmatic uh... approach to this and i i'm kind of the same way and that doesn't
make me anti technology either I'm really interested in what's true and what's BS, and there's an awful lot of BS out there right now.
And we need things we can do right now.
What's your position on drilling up an ANWR?
While we all, I hope most of us agree, that we've got to start down the alternative energy road quickly, we also have short-term needs between now and when we can get enough alternative energy in place.
So one possible source is ANWR.
I think that as a political issue rather than as an energy issue, it's stupid.
Because if you're going to be In a world where you need negotiable bargaining chips, you're better off having a big oil reservoir than having nothing and being naked to the world.
So you're saying leave it in the ground for now?
Leave it in the ground.
I have no doubt that humanity will not respond in time, and they will dig oil out of every pore of the Earth's surface eventually.
But let's not do that right away.
And I think this notion of hastening up to Alaska And sucking oil out of Anwar is about on a par with a man crawling across the desert with his last canteen and saying to him, open that canteen and drink it as fast as you can.
I think that's dumb.
So, you're not against eventually pulling that oil from the ground, but right now, continue to import.
You're not necessarily against the level of import right now.
It's a danger on the one hand, right?
Well, it's a matter of we don't really have a big choice.
At this point in time, frankly, I'd rather be dissipating Saudi Arabia's oil than dissipating our own.
Yeah, I understand that point of view, too, and that does make sense.
I'd like to take some calls.
Would you mind?
Yeah.
All right, here we go.
East of the Rockies, you're on the air with Don.
Hello, Don.
Hi there.
Yes, sir.
I was going to ask you something about Tesla, and you kind of put the kibosh on that, but since you have a physics background in that, and I know that on several of the shuttle missions, That they were trailing cables behind it, and they were producing electricity from that.
In fact, a lot more than they thought they were going to.
Exactly, until the cable broke.
My question is whether or not that technology could be transferred here to Earth.
You have an advantage over me in that I know nothing about that.
Alright, on one of the shuttle missions, Don, They trailed a cable sort of up into the... a tether, they called it.
You may recall the tether.
Right.
They trailed that down into sort of the upper lighter atmosphere.
I think that far down.
And they generated so damn much electricity that it broke at the junction point to the shuttle.
All the breakers went.
The cable actually burned through.
Very interesting motion.
In other words, motion around the Earth, obviously.
Uh, for example, if you put, uh, you're a first class FCC license, right?
Right.
So am I. If you put up a big antenna with lots of bare wire and a windstorm comes along, oh boy, do you generate a lot of electricity and that windstorm comes right down the wire and it'll draw an inch-long arc to a ground.
Right.
So that kind of theory, I think.
I have to confess that that is one of many things that I don't know about.
Okay.
West of the Rockies, you are on the air with Donald Wolfinghoff.
Hi.
Hi.
Where are you, sir?
Me?
Yes, you.
I'm sorry.
I'm up in California.
Okay.
Hanging upside down listening to my CC radio.
Okay.
Have you ever heard of Reflectex?
It's like aluminum coated bubble wrap.
It's almost like mylar with bubbles in between it.
Yeah, it's a form of insulation.
Yeah, it's supposed to block out 99% of radiant heat.
How do you use it?
Have you ever used it before?
Sure, it's a very common form of insulation.
Heat is really transferred in two ways, by radiation and by conduction.
We also say convection, but that's a derivative process.
What that insulation is, is really a composite that protects both against radiant heat transfer and the bubble wrap is just a form of conductive insulation.
How would you use it?
Would you put it on the roof or on the ceiling of that building, on the inside?
Well, I wouldn't use it in a house because it's a plastic material and it deteriorates over time.
One of the philosophies that I have about building, whether it's residential or commercial buildings, is that whatever you put in that building should either last as long as the building is going to last or be very easily replaceable.
Insulation ought to last as long as the building, and that is relatively short-lived stuff.
I flame tested it, and it doesn't burn or anything, and it seems like if it didn't have any UV hitting it, it would last a long, long time, but I do agree with you that urethane... I've worked with urethane foams in yacht construction and mold building, and it's terribly dangerous stuff, but I didn't realize Reflectix was not a good... I cannot speak to that trade name, but there are many people who manufacture that kind of product.
You're a yacht builder?
I used to build yachts and race ships for quite a few years, so I appreciate your experience with airplanes and light construction and so forth.
It's fascinating.
I think we have a lot of downside, too, when it comes to actually working with the material.
But I guess that was my question.
I really appreciate it.
And thanks for being here.
You bet.
Thank you very much for the call, sir.
And take care.
I guess when you get right down to the engineering of building something, you begin to learn a lot.
And that would certainly be true of light experimental aircraft, huh?
Yeah.
It doesn't count if it doesn't work right.
First time caller on the line.
You're on the air with Don.
Hello.
Hello.
Yes, sir.
Yeah, I'm Southern California, calling from San Bernardino.
Okay.
And we were discussing, or I heard Don, this is extremely interesting.
Don, you're a real top lad.
I enjoy your program.
Now, you were speaking of wind generation.
Yes.
Now, out here in the Old Palm Springs area, the reason they put those things in originally was to There was a big tax incentive for people with money to put them in and they would get a big tax write-off.
Right.
So they came in, they put them in, and they got the tax write-off, and they walked off and left them.
That's why you see some of them dumped out there in the desert.
Nothing, just a propeller or some of the stuff is gone.
They tried to give it to Southern California Edison.
I worked for Edison for quite a number of years at the time all this stuff went in.
And it just was not economical to generate things.
It cost more kilowatts to generate power with wind.
Well, that was then, though.
Well, I don't know.
But I know that the state, state of mind or federal government, I don't know.
But somebody required Edison, PG&E, and the other utilities that before they could buy Yeah, that was the California Public Utilities Commission.
That's a very common story, and that's a very interesting little window into history that you've given us.
down to where you have to buy power you have to buy the wind generation first
yeah that was the california public utilities committee yeah and that's very
very common story and that's that's a very interesting little uh... window
into history that you've given us that that is correct and uh... and it proves a couple points
uh... one is that if you are if your economics are artificial
you better sustain it forever or people will walk away from it
Oh yeah.
The other thing is that those early generation wind generators were basically too small, and they weren't very well engineered.
So in that valley, which is currently the largest concentration of wind energy in the You have what you always have.
You have new units and you have old units, and the new units are supplanting the old ones, and the old ones just continue to sit there.
Well, that's a fact.
Now, I know a lot of the other ones are much larger, the new material that's on the field.
Yeah, they've found much larger sizes as being economical.
I don't know whether the utilities are required to buy wind generation first.
But now, as they were, but before it was a total disaster because utilities were forced to buy it, they had to charge the customer, the customer had to eat it all.
Yeah, as I said, about 70%, at the present time, about 70% of all wind generation in the United States is the result of a mandate, not the result of economic analysis.
And you're not against the concept of additional mandates reinstating them and beginning to move again?
Because we're not moving right now.
That's correct.
The mandates are a two-edged sword.
On the one hand, you don't want to be telling people to do stuff that doesn't make economic sense.
On the other hand, what I would be happiest if the government were to say, look, this is an experiment.
It's a development project, so we're going to pay for it as a development project.
And treat it that way, and since it's a development project, we're going to stick with it as long as these generators continue to make sense, and we haven't yet built better ones.
I'm not happy about trying to hide the economics.
I think the economics should be visible.
I agree with you.
What about the Bush energy plan as it is now?
It looks like he's shifted to hydrogen And, of course, Anwar, how do you grade the Bush energy plan right now?
It's cosmetic.
He has an energy plan because he was criticized for not having one.
So he ginned up an energy plan.
In fact, I have a copy on my desk right here, and I've looked through it.
Basically, the plan is oil-driven, because I think Bush and the Bush family are oil men.
And Dick Cheney, the vice president, used to be chairman of Halliburton, which is the brains of the petroleum industry.
They're the people who do all the high-tech stuff and actually finding the oil and increasing well capacity and stuff like that.
So between the president and the vice president, you've got this tremendous concentration of oil interest, which is not to say it's a bad interest.
It's just what those guys know.
The plan seriously underestimates the potential of conservation.
As I said earlier, in the buildings sector, which is slightly more than one-third of our total energy consumption, you can probably, with good construction, reduce energy consumption to about 10 to 20 percent of what it currently is, if you do it right.
And that isn't recognized at all.
In addition, the Bush Energy Plan Lacks an emphasis on achieving efficiency now, it continues to call for developments that are in the future.
Well then, why aren't you in front of a Senate subcommittee somewhere, huh?
Well, I've been slightly in contact with Congress, but I'm not sufficiently a star in their eyes that they call me to testify much.
Alright, Don, hold on.
In many eyes out there, you're a star.
I'm one of them.
This is a pragmatist.
Good pragmatist who got on the air with us this morning, and I appreciate it.
I'm Art Bell.
This is Coast to Coast AM.
Good morning.
It's gotta work or it's no good.
And there's a cop on the east side of Chicago Back in the U.S.A.
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This is Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell from the Kingdom of Nine.
Oh, that'd be me, all right.
A creature of the night, no question about it.
That's me.
Anyway, we'll get back to Don.
Don, actually, it's Wolfinghoff.
W-U-L-F-I-N-G-H-O-F-F, pronounced Wollinghoff, and if you want to see his book, which is considered to be the energy bible for the world, worldwide, actually, you can see me holding a copy of it on my webcam, and you can, of course, follow tonight's guest material to, no doubt, Amazon.com and other places where you can actually get the book.
Somebody suggested, look, those who can afford it, go buy it, build your house, and then donate it to your local library.
Not a bad idea, actually.
You know, I think here's a question, a big overall question that I think I'm interested in.
If we are going to be running out of energy as the wet sponge is squeezed harder and harder, moving into the next 40 or 50 years, then there is an earlier line that we need to talk about.
In other words, there is A sort of a point of no return.
You remember that movie, right?
Whatever it was called.
It's a great movie.
You get over halfway across the Pacific and a little light comes on in the cockpit.
It's a point of no return.
And you've got no choice.
You've got to go forward to Tokyo.
You can't go back to San Francisco.
If you do, you're going to go into the ocean.
So that's like the point of no return.
So at some point between now and when we're squeezing so hard, we're not getting much out of the oil sponge anymore.
Somewhere between now and then, there's going to be like a point of no return.
When do you think that'll be?
That's unpredictable.
Excuse me just a second.
That's unpredictable.
A coup in some government somewhere could set off a chain that gives us a continuing series of shocks.
I don't think that we'll just hit the wall at one particular point.
Well, I'm referring to if we don't get started on alternative energies, there is going to be a point where we're going to have an economic train wreck.
That answer is we have to start on conservation.
There are two things, conservation and alternative energy.
We need to start on conservation yesterday.
The time is right now.
The government, for example, is failing to set an example with its own buildings.
We have a national energy code, and we've had one since 1992 requiring certain energy standards be met.
And that code isn't being enforced at all.
We need to do that.
With respect to alternative energy sources, which we've spoken more about really than we've spoken about conservation, I think we need to make that transition openly and as soon as possible.
Now, wind energy, we're actually ahead of photovoltaic because, as the last caller mentioned, We have the huge wind farms in Southern California, which is a logical place to put them.
So we've got already a good example of how to tap into wind energy, although we've got a lot of bad examples scattered around the rest of the country, and I wish we didn't have those bad examples.
Photovoltaic strikes me as being something worth considerable investment, as we mentioned before.
The government, instead of building yet another Navajo power plant, out on the desert should spend that amount of money and make a photovoltaic plant.
So, that needs to happen right away.
So, in answer to your question, when should we begin?
Right now?
Well, actually my question was, where is that point of no return?
Now, obviously you couldn't answer that precisely, and I understand that, but somewhere between now and when it gets either too expensive or there's too little oil left, there is going to be that point where if we haven't Preceded, as you suggest we need to do right now, it's going to be too late and we're going to have an economic train wreck, a big time one.
The best answer I can give you is that it's going to occur sometime between tomorrow morning and the year 2050.
And I know you'd like a more firm answer.
Now, something we have to understand, there's quite a dispute among two camps.
You have the one camp Which you might call the Julian Simon camp, the economist Julian Simon, who says, no need to worry.
We will continue to adapt and the cavalry will always arrive in the nick of time, because the market will respond to need.
You have a different camp, which we might call the, oh shucks, I forget his name, but the Paul Ehrlich camp, who's been predicting doom and gloom.
uh... for a long time and he's been proven wrong so people say well g uh...
julian simon has been proven right all our luck has been proven wrong so we don't need to
worry the fact is they're both right
uh...
there is tremendous elasticity in the energy market
uh...
if prices rose or scarcities occurred uh... we would conserve
There's a certain amount of conserving ability right now that we have.
We wouldn't drive as much.
We would be more careful about turning off lights, that sort of thing.
We wouldn't leave the windows open when we air conditioned the house.
That flexibility is maybe somewhere around 10% to 20% of our current energy consumption, I would say.
But beyond that, we have to make serious changes.
We can no longer, starting now, build buildings the way that we used to.
We just can't do that anymore.
Now, when will the crunch come?
Unpredictable.
I understand it could come early with a coup or shut off of the spigot from the Middle East, whatever.
The wild card is the third world.
Throw the wild card away for a second.
Let's assume, which it won't, that everything goes smoothly and we simply continue to consume at present levels and we don't move ahead with alternative energy encouragement.
Then you can sort of predict an economic point where all of a sudden it's a disaster.
I don't think so.
I think that the Julian Simon faction is correct In that you can continue squeezing the sponge.
Energy won't suddenly become absent.
It will become more expensive.
Its price will rise and people will respond to that rise in price.
What I am concerned about is that Our ability to respond if we don't start doing things right won't be there.
We have the 70s, it was a terrible crisis.
Long gas lines, all of a sudden Japanese come along with small cars, energy efficient cars, compared to what we had been driving.
Then it all loosened up again and now we've got big cars again.
And big, big, low mileage type cars, you know, that 8, 10, 12 miles per gallon, they're out there.
And we're allowing them to be out there again.
And we're kind of getting loose on the regulations that we said we were going to impose about gas mileage and all the rest of it.
So it's like we don't react except to crisis.
That is correct.
And that's my big concern.
I wish that we would do what is already required by law, which is to build our buildings in accordance with the energy codes that already exist throughout the United States.
All right.
We've got a lot of people who want to talk to you.
Wes of the Rockies, you're on the air with Don.
Hello.
Yeah.
This is James from Washington.
Yes, James.
I love your show, Art.
Thank you.
Don, I'd like to get back to the conservation issue.
Energy conservation field with state low-income energy programs.
Right.
And one of the things coming from private industry into the business I am now, I noticed that what I was doing when I was building the houses is totally different from what I'm doing now.
One of the things that I see that needs to happen is that we need to take that energy code It is in the building codes, actually.
I happen to sit on the committee that writes the energy code for the United States, and here's how it works.
building codes actually.
I happen to sit on the committee that writes the energy code for the United States.
And here's how it works.
In 1992, Congress passed a law that requires every jurisdiction in the United States to include energy
efficiency in its building codes.
And if it doesn't have a building code, to have one that, if nothing else, includes energy efficiency.
So there is no city, town, or county or state in the United States that does not have an energy code.
By law, an energy code exists everywhere within the United States.
The problem is that with The exception of very few jurisdictions, it's not enforced.
Right, exactly.
And I guess that's more to my point.
And one of the things that you were talking about earlier, that we need to build our houses and do the insulation and so on and so forth, and I don't know if this is a factor that you just didn't get into, but it is indoor air quality, especially when we start adding insulation into the homes, where that's actually sealing them tighter.
Yep.
In turn, get that air exchange a quarter per hour, depending on the size of the building.
Man, that's a very good point.
As you insulate, you also insulate against air flow, and air quality inside tends to deteriorate, Don.
Yeah, but I think that that is pretty much of a red herring.
First of all, insulation doesn't influence air flow.
Weather stripping and the tightness of the building affects that.
As a generality, talking about residential houses, not commercial buildings, I defy anybody to build a house so tight that you would actually have an indoor air quality problem, provided that the furnace in the kitchen is properly vented.
That's done.
You have such a low occupant density in most residential houses, I don't think you have an indoor air quality problem.
Now, you can always get I believe it's a false link.
by cracking the window open a little bit.
Or if you want to go high tech, you can get a heat exchanger, which is now an off-the-shelf
item where the incoming air picks up the heat of the outgoing air, and you ventilate that
way.
So indoor air quality, sadly, has been linked to energy conservation.
I believe it's a false link.
Inaccurately.
Okay.
You're on the air with Don.
Thank you.
Hello.
Hi.
Hello.
Yes, hello.
Hello?
Yes, proceed.
Me?
You.
Oh, uh, yeah, yeah, uh, this is Don.
You got on the phone there with you?
Yes.
Okay, uh, I'm just curious here because you're talking about energy, and this is the first time I've gotten through ever, but, um, have you ever heard of the magnetic generator they got going now?
Well, all generators are magnetic to some extent.
Well, they've got a magnetic generator right now that they're bringing out.
I think the close of this is they gave, they had to have 1.6 million people to get this thing passed.
Yeah, okay.
Caller, hold on.
I'm sure you've seen the ads, Don, haven't you?
No.
Oh, really?
You haven't?
They've got these ads out saying that you invest, how much is it, Caller?
Well, it was $9.
First, it was $10.
They brought it down to $9 for the first 1.6 million people, and then now they're giving it to them free, because they're called a gifting that they give, and then the gifting helped the people that didn't get the generators to get them now.
Yeah, well, who's got one now?
They haven't brought it out yet.
See, that's the thing.
Okay, what we're talking about here, Don, is In my estimation, and I know I'll get a lot of flack for it, but in my opinion, it's just a pipe dream.
And they're talking about these generators that have more output than input.
Same old story.
I mean, if one were to be demonstrated for me, and I've invited people over the years to bring me even an over-unity toy, something that'll hop around on the floor endlessly, Whatever it is, any over-unity, anything, deliver it here, let's see it, let's rock and roll, and it never comes.
But we get lots of talk, you know, like this fellow we just had on the air about these devices that will do the impossible.
Well, the U.S.
Patent Office gets so many of those things that it has a unique requirement for perpetual motion machines, which is that unlike other patents, you have to come in with a working copy, and no one's yet done it.
Nobody comes in.
Nope.
But there's a lot of talk.
Oh yeah.
This is a function more of our educational system than it is energy technology.
Well said.
Wildcard Line, you're on the air with Don and Art.
Hello.
Good evening.
Good evening.
How are you?
I have to take exception with a couple of things that your guest has said.
First of all, let me First address his comments about indoor air quality.
Okay.
Because that is a specialty of mine.
I work for a company that has provided, we have proven our technology.
You can't get enough air flow in a home to affect the air quality through ventilation.
There's a number of situations that take place in a home where the chemicals, the dust, everything else, people react to that.
We have proven technology.
In fact, the Pentagon has used our technology to clean up their environment after the fire.
So, indoor air quality is a real issue and the tightness of the home has, and they've proven it, the asthma rates in third world countries where people are living more outside are much, much lower than they are here in the country.
But because I have a couple of things I wanted to address real quickly.
Let me ask if the guest has ever heard of a product called Spar-Fill.
I've been in a home in Longboat Key, Florida.
The electric bill was extremely low to keep it heated or cooled off.
It's styrofoam permeated concrete that is extremely fire resistant, easy to work with.
I've been in a beautiful home down in Longboat Key, and they build homes in upstate New York out of this product.
Alright, one thing at a time.
First of all, the technology you talked about, Uh, that cleans air.
What is this?
What's going on?
Absolutely.
We, uh, have duplicated this.
No, no, no, no.
What is the technology, sir?
It's ionization and oxidization.
Exactly what happens outside.
Yeah, I use that in my own home.
Okay, uh, that's very good.
It works.
Uh, ionization does work.
And, uh, then, then the, um, the, uh, About the buildings with the concrete, I was curious, and I'm not saying an exception with that, I was curious if he was aware of that, but the other thing I wanted to... Well, just hold on now, please.
Styrofoam, we addressed that earlier.
What about styrofoam sort of within the concrete, you're saying?
I think that's pretty safe, because the styrofoam is encapsulated in the concrete.
How much of an R-factor can you derive from such a combination?
It's not good, but it's better than concrete.
It's extremely efficient, and there are homes, as I say, down along Boquete, Florida.
I've been in a beautiful home.
You'd never know it was built that way.
The other thing I wanted to ask about real quickly is if your guest is aware of an item called a wind tree, which will, with five miles an hour or more, a turbine-generated power generator that will be coming out with a company that I represent.
Uh, and we have working prototypes in North America, also in Germany, of five miles an hour or more that will produce about, uh, two kilowatts per hour.
Now, it's not expected to replace completely, uh, one need for using electric on the grid, but it will tie into the grid.
Yeah.
And certainly reduce if... Alright, well that's not sufficient.
Uh, you're talking, thank you, about efficient wind generation, and I think we've already said quite clearly tonight that that is probably, right now, the best economic, uh, Alternative at about three cents per kilowatt hour with the modern stuff, that's probably what we should be looking at first.
Yes, Don?
Yeah, I think we're there with wind.
Regarding the efficiency in any particular type of wind generator, there's a thing called the Betz coefficient, which is, as I recall, it's been years, but it's about .67 or something like that.
The Betz coefficient is the maximum fraction of The kinetic energy of air that you can suck out of it with a wind turbine.
And the machine that you've got at your place approaches the Betz coefficient.
So the good news is that the efficiency of wind turbines is approaching the theoretical maximum.
And since it is a theoretical limit, not a practical limit, I don't expect anything radically better is going to come out.
You know, though, the companies that are selling this stuff, including the one that sold me mine, are struggling incredibly, economically struggling, just having one hell of a time of it.
And we're waiting for something large to emerge that is successful.
But, boy, they're really struggling, most of them.
Well, they will be, because at the present time, fossil fuels can still undercut them.
So that's just straight market economics.
The choice is clear.
If wind energy is going to pay off in an area where you have competing fossil fuels that's cheaper, you have to subsidize it at this point in time.
Listen, my friend, we're out of show.
But boy, what a good one it has been.
I really appreciate your being here tonight, Donald.
Is your book available on Amazon.com?
Yes, all the usual places, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, off our website.
It's an awesome book.
Thank you very much.
So those who can afford it, I think the suggestion is to go out and buy it, build your house, and then donate it to the public library.
How's that for an idea?
That's a great idea.
Good night, Don.
Art has been a real pleasure.
Thank you very much.
That's Don Wolfinghall.
I'm Art Bell.
Hi, Desert!
Y'all have a good night out there, and I'll see you tomorrow night.
It's going to be an interesting night tomorrow night, by the way.
Somebody you can, well, you wait until tomorrow night.
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