Donald Wulfinghoff, author of The Energy Efficiency Manual, argues that while solar and wind are viable only at massive scales, conservation—like attic insulation (2x8 studs) and shading—cuts energy use by 10–20% in homes. He dismisses hydrogen fuel cells as inefficient storage and warns ANWAR drilling is shortsighted, criticizing the Bush administration’s oil-centric plan for ignoring immediate efficiency. Wulfinghoff predicts an unpredictable "point of no return" for energy depletion, between now and 2050, due to geopolitical instability, not just supply limits. Proven methods must replace speculative tech like zero-point energy or magnetic generators to avoid economic collapse, emphasizing enforcement of existing codes over reactive crises like the 1970s oil shock. [Automatically generated summary]
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.
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.
I think I did it.
I did close.
Anyway, let me try it again.
Menonomy.
Menony.
Menonymy.
That's pretty close, I think, Wisconsin.
Someone 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 P.D. Mike Fritchman, certainly great to have you on board.
Listen, something has really irritated me big time, and I want to advance.
And then we'll move on here.
I told you last night when I brought Hal Lindsay on, that we had an incident here in Trump in which a young man with a sword commandeered a school bus and 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.
It was a 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 a 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 decide they've got editorial right to put on what they want.
But this man took the opportunity to come on and say that Perrump is the dumping ground for the worst of Las Vegas.
And that really annoyed me.
I mean, cities in 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 Perrump.
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, happen in small towns all across America.
It's as likely or as unlikely to happen here as anywhere else.
The fact of the matter is, it happens everywhere now.
But to see a sister city take an opportunity to slam us in such an 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, okay, it's going to be here.
And that's how it got there.
Well, frankly, the valley over here is twice the size, doesn't have the pollution problems because we have an open-ended valley, and we also have really good water.
So 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.
Ooh, 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'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 see that i thought would 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 subscribe 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.
Well, one day you hear one thing, next day you hear another, right?
Pleas of rejecting pleas of mental illness.
A jury has sentenced a man to death today for the shooting deaths of two young daughters.
What prosecutors called the ultimate revenge against his ex-wife.
The very same jury last week convicted John Petely 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, the Senate faces 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 Lindsay, 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 are certainly on the way.
So whether we like it or not, the world is proceeding with this technology, and we are going to have clones.
Now, what will they be?
Well, some people argue they'll be nothing essentially but 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, 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 Thank you.
Now, I don't know if I ought to read this or not, but I guess I will.
I haven't had any such dream, but Christy writes, 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, land across, probably have to land up towards 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 still in all, if anybody's had that dream, it would be interesting to hear about, wouldn't it?
Bosses, this comes from Great Britain, the Sunday Mail in Great Britain.
Bosses at Radio Clyde, that's apparently a big radio deal in Great Britain.
Bosses at Radio Clyde have been forced to close one of their studios after scared DJs said it was haunted.
Sunday mail astrologer Frank Pickeledon 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 Clyde'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 the microphones came tumbling down on top of us.
Next thing I heard was a yelp from Frank, and he said something had attacked him.
Yeah, 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 Way Hal Lindsay 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 three as concern grew, as you might expect, lines of people fearing they might be infected got much longer at hospitals and medical clinics as concerned 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 is an interesting BBC story.
You always got to go to the BBC to get these things.
I wonder why that is.
The headline is, 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.
Wow.
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.
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, its paper in Las Vegas.
And it's a Cabby's 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, 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 with you some open lines coming right up.
I'm Marcel.
This is Coast to Coast AM, raging to you in the nighttime from the high desert.
unidentified
The mountain high and the valley so deep, can't get a lot to live for the love.
What else will stay for me to do tonight?
Call Art Bell in the Kingdom of Nigh from West of the Rockies at 1-800-618-8255.
East 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 800-893-0903.
This is Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell from the Kingdom of Nive.
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 webcam.
Even if you're not going to consider buying it, trust me, take a look at my webcam picture.
And 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 were 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 landmass.
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 is 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.
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, and 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 me.
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.
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 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.
unidentified
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're not worried about the fact that with animals that they've cloned, they've had a lot of monsters so far, you know?
unidentified
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.
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 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 and 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.
And even I, 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.
missing you know god's displeased you want you can i have to wonder why he uh...
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?
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.
unidentified
Right, right.
But, you know, they get a little jealous because you guys got those little prostitution houses that are legal.
But, AR, you know, as far as cloning goes, I think basically whenever you see something such as, you know, just as brand new or on, you know, 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.
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.
unidentified
Well, here's an example of something I saw on TV once.
It was on a commercial television show called 321 Contact.
It was on public television.
And I can distinctly remember them showing supposed, 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 growing down.
It's just looked kind of like a Tasmanian 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.
And I don't know about anybody else in America, but I'm pretty concerned that 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?
unidentified
Well, there's so many women, especially single women, you know, that have been either divorced or, you know, whatever.
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 not actually about 8 pounds, not 1,500.
This book is 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 Wolfinghoff introduced the profit center concept of managing energy costs, which is now applied around the world.
He started his company, Wolfinghoff 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, an 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 is a graduate of 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.
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.
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.
Well, 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 word about the halfway point approximately now It was in the late 1800s that Colonel Drake first drilled for oil in Pennsylvania and then got natural gas as a nuisance product.
Well, I don't think that you can predict that, because until, 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.
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 shall be thankful the Middle East is so stable huh yes right the Middle East of course is 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.
And so what we have to do is before is anticipate that even if politics doesn't bring an end to our available conventional energy sources, geology will.
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?
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 mean, the larger global picture of our running out of energy, you know, there's simply no question about it.
We're 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 swought about it.
But in the meantime, you know, I'd really kind of like to concentrate on everyday people.
And 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.
Now, 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, 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 10 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 windroom, 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, Don.
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% on average of what we presently use.
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 electricity and gas bill or oil bill down to perhaps a third in an extremely favorable case, maybe half of what you're currently doing.
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, kill you real quick.
Now, the only place I have foam insulation in my home, which I built, 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'll 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.
So I don't, and people, by the way, get mad at me for saying that.
And it's controversial.
And 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.
But I don't like the idea of foam in a house that can burn.
Now, 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.
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.
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 into the house.
So one thing that we do not do in conventional construction practice nearly well enough is venting the attics.
And indeed, if I were building a residential house that had an attic, I would completely open the ends of the attics.
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, that if you dig down in the ground 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 could put a heat exchange device in the earth and really get away with something.
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, is proportional to the difference in temperature between the outside, inversely proportional to the temperature difference between the inside and the outside.
The problem is that the 55 degrees isn't cool enough for cooling.
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.
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, 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 300 to 500 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.
If you go down 12 feet, you get 55 degrees.
But you can't cut a 12-foot trench three inches wide into the ground.
It'll collapse.
There's no practical way to do that.
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.
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 ground, sucking heat out of the house, and putting it into the ground.
That's correct.
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.
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.
And the way you 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.
And there's the farmhouse, and the farmhouse is totally surrounded by this little forest that the family planted there.
And they did that because they like to be cool in summer.
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?
Yes, but what is we're talking about energy and how to save money on your bill right now?
Donald Wolfinghoff is my guest.
He's written the Bible on this, and if you doubt that, go take a look at my webcam picture.
I'm holding a picture of his book.
I'm like a $200 book.
Anyway, that's what I've heard.
Well 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 Mark Bell.
Don't move.
Once again, back to the man who wrote the Bible on energy, Don Wolfinghoff.
Don, welcome back.
Thank you.
All right, 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.
Well, I said earlier that you could build a house that would use 10 to 20% 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.
Now, about 20 years ago, there was a concept out called the super-insulated house, and 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.
And when I built my house, instead of using 2x4s, I used 2x8s, and it just worked wonderfully.
So we want 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 sunshade 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 and we just bounce it right off.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
And 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.
And just read those labels.
And it's remarkably easy to do.
So that has probably been the biggest success story since the energy crisis began in 1973.
Again, I've got things that are about 10 years old.
That's how old this house is.
A little better than 10 years, actually.
And so my refrigerator, my washer, my dryer, these sorts of things.
Would it be economically feasible for me at this point to go out and purchase new high-energy efficient appliances?
Oh, 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.
I mean, people go around selling these things that 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 altogether.
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.
things on can we still do that no that that program has gone away and unfortunately that's one of the really appliance efficiency ratings are 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.
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.
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, and so it's a particularly good area to do that sort of thing, which is one of the reasons I went ahead.
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.
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.
Canada has vast hydro resources.
It hasn't been tapped yet, so the Canadians are going to be making their money a century from now selling us their hydro power.
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.
Trouble 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 pentanicle.
And this is basically a molecular sponge that would soak up and hold hydrogen.
You can make canisters out of it.
And then instead of your car being powered by gasoline, it would be powered by a canister of hydrogen.
And the advantage, of course, is that if you burn a 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 of the hydrogen economy?
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'd 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 20-40 lunar power bases, 20-40, 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 the naked eye from Earth.
It would be like having an electric cord stretched across the solar system, he said.
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.
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.
And so I mentioned earlier that most of the solar collectors, well, I mentioned earlier that solar collectors that you put on your roof have a payback period of 20 to roughly 20 years on average.
And gee, that's a long time.
How come?
Well, it isn't 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 Votable Decorate or a water heater or what have you.
But the trouble is that collector has to be cheap.
And 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 becomes 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
And the other reason is what I'd 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 1,500 pages, there's nothing in there that won't pay off now.
Well, as I say, it was published in the year 2000, so I'm still, you know, 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.
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 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 homebuilders.
Now, these aren't the big ones, but they do account for more than half of total aircraft registrations.
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, 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 between some closely spaced metal plates.
Well, I appreciate your pragmatic approach to this, and 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 at ANWAR?
I mean, 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.
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.
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 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.
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 in that windstorm?
It comes right down the wire and it'll draw an inch-long arc to a ground.
Heat is really transferred in two ways, by radiation and by conduction.
We also say convection, but that's a derivative process.
And 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.
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How would you use it?
Would you put it like on the roof or on the ceiling of that building, on the inside of the attic, on the upper part or the lower part?
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.
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I've 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 with urethane.
I've worked with urethane foams in yacht construction and mold building.
It's terribly dangerous stuff, but I didn't realize reflectix was not a good thing.
I cannot speak to that trade name, but there are many people who manufacture that kind of product.
You're a yacht builder?
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I used to build yachts and race yachts, yeah, for quite a few years, so I appreciate your experience with airplanes and light construction and so forth.
It's fascinating.
But yeah, plastics have a lot of downside, too, when it comes to actually working with a material.
Now, out here in the old Palm Springs area, the reason they put those things in originally was to get a big tax, there was a big tax incentive for people with money to put them in and they would get a big tax write-off.
Yeah, they've found much larger sizes as being economical.
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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, their rate they had to charge a customer.
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.
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.
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 have looked through it.
Basically, the plan is oil-driven because I think Bush and the Bush family are oilmen.
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 in 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.
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's an earlier line that we need to talk about.
In other words, there's 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 and the cockpit is 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.
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.
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.
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 proceeded, 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 for a long time, and he's been proven wrong.
So people say, well, gee, Julian Simon has been proven right.
Paul Ehrlich has been proven wrong, so we don't need to worry.
The fact is, they're both right.
There is tremendous elasticity in the energy market.
If prices rose or scarcities occurred, 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.
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.
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, 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.
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 want to talk to you.
West of the Rockies, you're on air with Don.
Hello.
unidentified
Yeah, this is James from Washington.
Yes, James.
I love your show, Art.
Don, I'd like to get back to the conservation issue.
I work in the energy conservation field with state low-income energy programs.
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 and introduce it into our building codes so that way they're one in the same.
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.
unidentified
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.
And we need to, in turn, get that air exchange a quarter per hour, depending on the size of the building.
Yeah, but I think that that is pretty much of a red herring.
First of all, insulation doesn't influence airflow.
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 ventilation into a house by cracking a 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'm just curious here because you're talking about energy, and this is the first time I've gotten through ever, but have you ever heard of the magnetic generator they got going down?
Okay, what we're talking about here, Don, is in my estimation, now 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.
I have to take exception with a couple of the 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 airflow 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 hear in the country.
But because I have a couple things I wanted to address real quickly, let me ask if the guest has ever heard of a product called Sparfill.
I've been in a home in Long Boat 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 Long Boat Key, and they built homes in upstate New York out of this product.
And there are homes, as I say, down along Boat Keith, 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.
And we have working prototypes in North America, also in Germany, of five miles an hour or more that will produce about two kilowatts per hour.
Now, it's not expected to replace completely one need for using electric on the grid, but it will tie into the grid and certainly reduce its.
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 alternative at about three cents per kilowatt hour with the modern stuff.
That's probably what we should be looking at first.
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 0.67 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 up.
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.