Richard Heinberg warns that the last 150 years of cheap oil—fueling cars, planes, and globalized agriculture—are ending, with U.S. production already at 1940s levels and 24 of 44 major oil nations past their peaks. The Iraq War’s $150B cost and OPEC’s debt-funded reconstruction by Halliburton/Bechtel underscore oil’s geopolitical role under the Carter Doctrine. Gas prices could hit $3+ at the pump by 2020, while food costs rise due to grain production peaks and natural gas shortages threatening $100B in power plants. No alternative—hydrogen, renewables, or suppressed tech—can replace oil’s growth engine soon, forcing economic collapse within two to ten years unless radical lifestyle shifts and triage-like energy prioritization occur. [Automatically generated summary]
With you all, good evening, good morning, good afternoon, whether you may be in the world's balloon zones, all covered one way or the other by this program, Coast Coast AM, the weekend version of the Way of Martel.
You know, I've got to do something with this, so I don't know what.
A week ago, after, I don't know, beginning to get reports, I asked the audience to illuminate me with any paranormal sexual encounters they might have had.
And the reason I did this is because I've had quite a few expert guests on there, almost all of whom, you know, the out-of-body people and the remote viewers and just about every one of them allude, some of them more strongly than others, to the sexual content, the paranormal.
Not easy to cover, not easy to discuss, but I've also concluded, not possible not to discuss.
Now we're going to try and do it without becoming salacious at all.
By the way, I just read a relevant book, and boy, was it a good book.
There's quite a bit of salacious sex in it, though pretty good, I must add.
It's called Body Rides by Richard Lamond.
You might want to check into it.
It's out on the current, you know, wherever you grab your paperback books.
I'm a continual, as my wife is, consumer of books, just one after another after another.
Adira, when you first put out the call for reports of astral sexual experiences, I ignored it.
Although, after listening to guests on your programs, I realized that I probably had had several of these experiences that I previously dismissed as vivid dreams.
I thought they were too unremarkable to share.
They occurred with either a former boyfriend of 25 years ago or with someone who I didn't know during waking life, but who seemed to know me in his state or, in quotes, nice enough to get to know better.
However, when you stated last night that you were overwhelmed with reports of negative experiences, that's actually not quite true.
I said experiences.
Now, I do admit, over half are negative.
But she goes on, I felt that as an MA cognitive psychologist, I have to point out that your sample of reports is skewed toward those who have had negative experiences.
I think that's right.
Those who have had negative experiences are highly motivated to share them since they're frightening.
And probably many folks who have shared these stories with friends, family, and helping professionals have had their experiences minimized.
They need the cathartic experience of telling their story to someone who will listen to them and believe them.
On the other hand, those of us who have had pleasant experiences don't really have much of a story to tell except it happened.
It was great, refreshing, and nice to wake up to.
Any further rapturous descriptions would be highly of a personal nature, and the majority of folks would not feel compelled to share as they don't shout about their waking sexual experiences from the mountaintop.
So I wouldn't take the large sample of negative reports as an indication that most astral sexual experiences are negative.
I certainly agree with her.
I do support further exploration of the topic, though, on your program.
I don't see a problem with airing these topics on late-night radio.
After all, Howard Stern can use profanity, discuss his outrageous topics during morning commute time, and we've all been exposed to the mainstream news media using phrases like oral sex during the Clinton administration.
I think we can address this topic in a dignified manner, and I agree.
I just want to emphasize again to my audience, I've been used to looking at responses for years now on various topics, some of which have had gigantic, like the shadow people, for example.
But I'm telling you right now, the response to this topic, to the sexual aspect of the paranormal was just way out of the norm.
I mean, thousands of emails.
So this is a big thing that not many people are willing to talk about.
In fact, I'm going to have a lady on in a moment, a doctor who will be incognito.
And so she's chosen to call herself Dr. Incognita.
The female version, I guess, of being incognito wouldn't be sexually specific anyway.
Well, anyway, so she's going to call herself Dr. Incognita.
And she's going to, a few words to tell us about all of this.
She's one of those who, one of the thousands, thousands who responded to me.
And here's, I guess, a plea I would make.
The paranormal investigators who are out there, for obvious reasons, probably kind of shy away from this topic, I hope that a few of you, and I know you're listening this evening, will decide to headlong, rush into this topic, and see what you can find out, see how really common it is.
wishing to remain anonymous then here is our Dr. Incognita cute welcome to the program well hello it's a pleasure to be here and thank you for the opportunity to express my viewpoints on this subject I'm happy for you too you were one of the I'm telling you land slide of emails that I received thousands and thousands doctor are you at all surprised that I had such a gigantic response
Well, my thinking when I was finished being shocked by the wave after wave that came in was, well, you know, sex is a big part of life in our waking moments, in our non-paranormal moments, in our very normal moments, and why wouldn't it be a big part of life everywhere?
In other words, in the paranormal or in, I don't know, in the whole paranormal world, why wouldn't it be?
Well, I guess the answer to that might be, well, because you don't have a body, and so you wouldn't think that sex without the body, without the physical aspect of everything, would play much of a part.
But wrong, I guess.
unidentified
Well, the way I look at it, the sexual energy is creative energy.
And the first creative energy came in when the physical universe started, which was the big thing.
And that energy is orgasmic energy.
And so the spirits that then were formed, because spirit is light, and that is when light started, when the starting of the spiritual creation came energy first.
And with that explosive energy, there was a sensation there that was more than just a sensation.
So the fact they call it the Big Bang is simply coincidental.
unidentified
Yes, but you know what?
There are many coincidences.
We say, oh, they carry the weight of the world on their shoulders.
And it's true.
If your shoulders are hurting you, you are overburdened with certain things.
So we often pick words that are very descriptive of what's going on.
And so I find that the energy that's there, we all crave to be one.
So we might crave to be one in a physical union, whether it be heterosexual or homosexual or bisexual.
It is still a craving to be one.
And it duplicates then that orgasmic energy or reproduces that energy at the beginning when everyone was one without all these divisions and differences that cause us to fight one another with a physical.
I mean, I interview people who talk about out-of-body experiences and other aspects of the paranormal.
Is that one way that these sexual encounters are occurring?
Is it people having out-of-body experiences or what?
unidentified
Well, my feeling on it is that the people that experience this have allowed the stress of life to burden them down so much that it does affect the glands and the organs of the body, the systems, the cells.
Every part of the body is affected by the inability to handle physical and mental stress.
And when things start getting out of balance, the organs and the glands start to malfunction, the hormones are not then balanced, then the body starts to become weakened and vulnerable and makes itself then available for outside attacks of this nature.
So you're saying that people who are stressed, people who are weakened, are more available for invasion?
unidentified
Exactly.
A person who's able to handle stress well, basically have a positive nature.
We all get negative facets that hit us.
But if you can learn how to let it go, ground it, then you're going to remain more healthy than someone who just gets absorbed in grief or anger or resentment.
All right, well, what about this lady who wrote me the email?
I mean, she was saying, look, I'll bet you that a good healthy percentage, if not most of the responses you got, were negative.
And they were, but not by much.
Fully half of them were from people who were saying, you know, it wasn't bad.
So they're not all negative.
And you were sort of drawing connotation there where the weak is taken over by somebody who attacks them.
But I guess in some cases it's not necessarily unwelcome or whatever.
unidentified
Well, now, that's a very interesting concept that I hadn't taken a look at until you mentioned that, lady.
But I actually know of a woman who also expressed the same feeling.
She didn't talk about being attacked in an unpleasant way.
She just said this very sensual feeling would come over her.
And I know from the way she was saying it that it was an orgasmic feeling.
And she did enjoy it.
But the way she got this, she even would experience it right in front of people.
And then she's not going to brag about it or show it off.
And then she said, you know, she's not going to be a person.
And she was in a certain religious group that was more along the spiritualistic, a different, a point of view that I could say would be more related to the occult or,
or the darker side spiritualism and not to hurt anyone it was just that somehow this track of thinking that that also and she had a health problem so you know not that we don't all have health problems at time but hers was rather serious and had caused her not to be able to paint and so on, which she had done before.
that's a big one all right um do you think it's one of these vastly under report i We're prudish compared to the rest of the world, frankly.
And right, wouldn't you agree?
unidentified
I definitely agree.
From what I hear about other countries, we are very, I mean, you know, over in Africa, they think nothing of walking around with no clothes on, you know.
I mean, the attitude towards sex is very different in the media and everywhere else than it is in America.
We're actually kind of brutish.
So people would tend not to talk about this kind of thing.
And so I guess I'm asking, how common you think it really is?
unidentified
Well, from what you're gathering, the information you're gathering, it sounds to me like it's very common.
We have a lot of unhealthy people in the world who do make themselves vulnerable for multiple entities within them.
In other words, basically when a child is born, take in the breath of life, and that is actually spirit, to become a living soul after you take the breath of life.
And what enters is the spirit.
So technically, there's a difference between spirit and soul.
The spirit is what you breathe in.
And if you look that word up in the dictionary, the word is wind.
And so when you breathe in the air or the wind, why you will receive the spirit, which then enlivens the body, which is not really a full human being until it takes in the breath.
So all babies come into the world with one spirit.
But eventually, because of the negativity and the actually it's a materialistic outlook.
So what is the negativity that causes us to become ill?
It's materialism and putting spirituality down, which would be kindness and goodness and peace and trying to get along and tolerate one another.
The things that would make the world a utopia.
We resist those things, and that causes us to be sick and to die.
We wouldn't have to die so soon.
We would not have to be sick like we are if we learned how to get along and be cooperative with one another.
And I really agree with the lady who wrote me the first email.
A lot of it, more than you would imagine, was viewed by the emailers as a positive experience, actually.
Many more than I would have expected.
I would have expected the great negative landslide.
You know, after all, it's an invasion.
It's a sexual experience not wanted nor solicited.
So it's viewed as, you know, rape.
Anyway, I'm far from done with this subject.
And I guess perhaps I should speak to some of these out-of-body people, shouldn't I?
Let's look very quickly at what's going on around the world.
We're going to do some open lines coming up here in a minute.
Supporters of an anti-American cleric rioted in four Iraqi cities Sunday, battling coalition troops in the worst unrest since the spasm of looting and arson immediately after the fall of Saddam.
At least 22 Iraqis, eight U.S. troops, and one Salvadoran soldier dead.
Despite escalating violence, that's escalating, that killed 10 U.S. service members over the weekend, the Bush administration is sticking with its timetable to turn over power in Iraq.
The chairman of The Senate Foreign Relations Committee Sunday raised the prospect of extending the Bush administration's June 30th deadline, that's the day we're supposed to turn it over, questioning in his mind, and I suppose we should question, whether the country would be ready for self-rule.
What do you think, are they?
It doesn't seem that way.
The suicide apartment house blast that killed the alleged ringleader of last month's Madrid train bombings and four other terrorist suspects left the core of that terror group either dead or in jail.
Not a bad resolution when you think about it.
Hey, the U.S. Department of Energy is planning to give so-called cold fusion, we've talked about that a lot here, another look despite years of controversy over the technology.
Isn't that nice to hear?
Finally, they're going to look again.
James Decker, deputy director of DOE's Office of Science, said the review actually began last fall, I guess quietly, when he met with scientists to discuss the state of cold fusion research.
Quote, they told me about a lot of research on cold fusion that's been going on and done since the last review that was conducted about 15 years ago.
And he said, looking at all the facts now, a full new review of cold fusion is warranted.
So there you go, folks.
What was once dismissed as just sort of unrepeatable craziness, how Kahn's and Fleshman was at going to Europe to proceed with the research is now going to be looked at more carefully.
The Department of Energy, ours, now feeling that cold fusion might have a few answers in it.
Certainly something better have.
That's reminding me of tonight's topic, The Party Is Over.
unidentified
The Party Is Over Don't you love her badly?
Don't you need her badly?
Don't you love her, wait and tell me what you say?
Don't you love her badly?
Wanna be her day?
And don't you love her, faith?
Don't you love her as she's walking out the door that she did one thousand and before Don't you love her way?
Tell me what you say Don't you love her as She's walking out the door.
Coming up in the next half hour, it should be a very, very interesting guest, if I can find his information.
I think, here it is.
The Party is Over is the name of his book, Oil, War, and the Fate of Industrial Societies.
That would be us, of course.
Richard Heinberg, and we all know that at some point, the resource in the ground that we call oil, which, by the way, we're paying a damned pretty penny for right now, the pumps, is apparently an endangered species.
Let's find out how endangered.
What Richard sees.
That's coming up in the next half hour.
Right now, first time caller line, you are on the air.
unidentified
Hello.
Hello, Mr. Bill.
That's me.
Hi, I was wondering if you would consider, sir, a possible answer to the paranormal sexual encounters, this invisible force.
And it actually was recorded some 3,500 years ago in a document that is probably in everyone's home.
So you also think then that it's tantamount to an attack?
unidentified
Yes, and the point that your other guest was, Nia, mentioned about being weak, it is very important that we do become Strong so that we can ward off these paranormal spirits, if you may.
Okay, all right, you know, I'm willing to accept that.
It certainly could be that, it could be an attack.
What about the large percentage of them, and almost half, I would say, even in responses to me, where they said it was okay?
unidentified
Yes, well, there was genuine attraction.
The scripture points to the fact that they liked the women.
So, you know, these were good guys at one time.
And until they were given the boot, where did they, you know, when they followed the bad leadership, you know, but they were good guys for a long time.
What about the people having out-of-body experiences, either voluntary or involuntary?
What about those?
Those are not fallen angels, right?
So the whole subject could use an awful lot more research, and I sincerely hope that some of my experts in these kinds of areas will allow themselves to do that research.
Yeah, that boat is very serious, very serious impact.
unidentified
Yeah, it was very creepy, and if you had never seen it, I wanted to throw it at you because it did delve into that subject.
My question about John Lear and the fabulous guest that you have.
I love him every time he's on the show.
He tells him about wheels spinning.
Well, I always wanted to call in and ask him a question, and maybe you could jot this down, that possibly the experiment with the containers here on Earth.
I've always believed that maybe it's carbon-based forms, life forms, that they are experimenting with.
Souls being in carbon-based forms is the experience, is the experiment that he is discussing.
Hopefully next time he has John later on, you'll remember to mention that if it's a possibility that we don't know souls of existing in any other form except carbon-based life forms, and maybe that's what the experience is.
Good for you, and congratulations on getting your ham license.
A net, by the way, is sort of a thing where amateur radio operators all sort of check in, and they're held for various purposes.
Emergency communications.
We drill, you know, for emergency communications.
We hold drills.
And by the way, emergency communications across America is exactly what's threatened by DPL, that horrid little noise you just heard.
So write to your congressperson, your senator, and urge them to take a wait and see and study this kind of attitude before authorizing it across America.
And when she said that, I just went, wow, it just connected.
And if you ever get a chance to play that for maybe some of your bumper music, I think people might get an opportunity who might not have been exposed to Pink Floyd, although that's been around since 73, Dark Side of the Moon.
They'd be interested in maybe hearing a little bit of that to see how that kind of music might do it for them or whatever type of music.
I personally like saxophone like you've mentioned and a guitar.
Okay, well I think I've got, And I don't know exactly what we're going to do about that.
I mean, there are, what she said was very salacious, and there's probably a place for it, but I don't think in this discussion, I really want to keep this discussion on the up and up.
And I don't know how you do that.
I really don't, because the proclivity is to get specific, and people are going to do that, and I don't know what to do about it.
It's a big, important topic, and it's really hard to talk about right now.
There's a really poisonous atmosphere.
I mean, in some ways, I understand.
I'm worried about the American airwaves, both on television and radio, and what's being said and the things that are allowed to be said and all the rest of it.
But on the other hand, I'm also worried about keeping our airwaves relatively free.
And it sure is a delicate balance that the regulators try and walk.
West of the Rockies, you're on the air.
Hello.
unidentified
Hi.
Hi.
My name's Patrick.
I've been wanting to get a hold of you for quite a while, actually.
Okay.
And there's a, wow, so many things.
But one thing that's come up since the one big thing is this whole thing with the broadband over the power lines.
But the big thing I wanted to call you about is, you know, I've got to admit, when I first started listening to your show years ago, I thought some of these people were kind of wacky, but in the back of my mind, I kept my mind open because of something that was my own personal experience that I've never really talked about.
But since I was a very young man, I had not really premonitions, but kind of, I don't know, like these salient dreams.
And they get cues from things that I hear about.
And then I have these dreams.
It's not really, I wouldn't say that it's like foretelling something or anything like that, but it's just like little bits and pieces all falling together.
And I'll hear some information or read something or see something that makes more things come together.
And there was something that I saw, it's actually on a public broadcasting show that triggered a whole series of those.
And it has to do with our planet's magnetic field, which the folks at NOAA and the folks at the USGS have been suspecting for years, and there's data to support this, that our field is collapsing.
And PDS did a special on this guy who's running around right here in Oregon out in the Steens Mountains.
He's taken geological samples.
And he's shown that they can look at rocks from specific periods of time and see that this has happened before.
And when it's happened before, it's pretty much coupled with the run-up of global warming that leads to an ice age.
And what's gone on in these dreams is that we, for the first time as a species dealing with this anomaly, have within our grasp the ability to kind of set up an artificial field and to stave off the effects of this so it doesn't destroy everything that we've built for the last 15 or 17 years.
And it does produce a very large magnetic field, but I can assure you, it wouldn't be anything to replace the Earth's magnetic field if we get in trouble with that.
If you want to know what would happen, or at least in one great piece of science fiction, I thought it was going to be rather shoddy, but it wasn't.
It was called The Core, a movie called The Core.
And, you know, it's got a little bit of the inevitable stuff they put in science fiction, but basically it was pretty cool.
And if you get a chance to see it, it was out not long ago, called The Core, about what would happen if we lost the Earth's magnetic field.
And he said, you know, when I first began to listen to the show, I thought there were some certifiable, nutty people on there.
And we do have some.
But there's an awful lot of things that sound on the surface crazy when people tell them.
The trouble is, like that man, I too have had several experiences that it's not a guessing game with me.
I know the paranormal is real.
I know that we have many abilities in our living brains that we don't know how to control, we don't know how to initiate, and we certainly don't know how to repeat, or it wouldn't be called the paranormal.
If it was repeatable, we would call it science.
And maybe we're approaching that day, too.
Anyway, when we get back, the party's over.
The oil party is over.
From the high desert, I'm Art Bell, and this is Coast to Coast AM.
unidentified
I'm going to be here for you.
Want a time travel?
Go back to Past Joe's on Streamlink.
Sign up online at coasttocoastam.com.
What a life you never can but a dirty promise you ever win again.
It's a judgment, it's a judgment It's a judgment Inside of the sand, the sound of a touch of the sun pink inside the beams of cheap.
The sight of a touch or the scent of the sand, or the strength of an earth leaves deep in the ground.
Some unloading flowers to be covered and then to burst up to tarmac to the sun again.
Or to fly to the sun without burning a wing, To lie in a meadow and hear the grass sing, How the world are you things in our memories, From the useless to the colorful new time.
Yeah!
I, I'm not a door, take this money, I'm not a friend, you're so old me.
I, I'm not a hero, I'm not a hero, I'm not a hero, I'm not a hero.
Wanna take a ride?
To talk with Art Bell, call the wildcard line at area code 775-727-1295.
The first-time caller line is area code 775-727-1222.
To talk with Art Bell from east of the Rockies, call toll-free 800-825-5033.
From west of the Rockies, call 800-618-8255.
International callers may reach ARC by calling your in-country spring access number, pressing option 5, and dialing toll-free 800-893-0903.
From coast to coast and worldwide on the internet, this is Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell.
Richard Heinberg is the author of The Party's Over, Oil, War, and the Fate of Industrial Societies and the forthcoming Power Down, Options and Actions for a Post-Carbon World.
He is a journalist, Educator, editor, lecturer, and a core faculty member of New College of California, where he teaches courses on energy and society and culture, ecology, and sustainable community.
His monthly newsletter, that's with an Muse as in using, was nominated in 1994 by, I guess it's UTME Reader for an alternative press award has been included in Utme's annual list.
I hope contain that right of best alternative newsletters.
His essays and articles have appeared in many journals, including The Futurist, Earth Island Journal, Wild Matters, Alternative Press Review, and The Sun.
Well, the party I'm talking about is basically the last 100, 150 years of cheap energy that has fueled the Industrial Revolution that we're still living in.
We have created the most opulent and fast-paced society in the history of the world by far.
And it's all because of cheap energy resources, primarily oil.
We started using coal before that, first in Britain and then elsewhere.
But it's really when we started using oil as a primary energy source that the Industrial Revolution really got jump-started.
And of course we found ways of using this cheap energy, cars, planes, and cell phones, and computers, on and on.
And we've transformed everything about our way of life, how we live, where we live, what we eat.
It's all, and this is really true of everyone who's alive now.
I mean, occasionally I meet someone who's old enough to remember the first car in their town.
But for the rest of us, you know, this is what we think of as normal existence.
And yet from any kind of historical, cross-cultural perspective, it's far from being normal.
It's an extraordinary moment in time.
And what I'm saying in my book is that this party is likely to come to an end in the century that's now begun.
And we'll see the beginning of the end probably within just the next few years.
I also heard recently, Richard, that we're filling our oil reserve, meaning we're taking some of the oil that would normally come in and be available off the market, right?
There's a great deal of controversy, Richard, about when we're going to run out of oil or effectively run out of oil, when it's going to become so expensive that we're essentially out at that point.
Why so much controversy about it, and what do you think the answer is?
And actually, since we have a fair amount of time this evening, I think we can look at this from a number of different angles.
But basically, it's a controversy between people who look at the total resource base and then assume that we can produce that oil, or extract it really, is what we're talking about, at any arbitrary rate.
And say we have a trillion barrels of oil in the ground, which probably isn't that far off, and we're using it at the rate of about 75 million barrels a day.
Well, at that rate, we should have plenty of oil for at least 50 years.
But the problem is, and this is where the other side of the debate comes in, it really isn't likely to be possible to extract that oil at any arbitrary rate.
There are geological factors that will limit the rate of production in the future.
You know, we tend to think about oil using the metaphor that's most familiar to us, which is the gas tank in our car.
And, you know, when you fill up the gas tank, the car runs fine.
When you're down to a quarter of a tank, the car still runs fine.
It's only when you actually run out that you notice a problem.
Well, we're not going to run out of oil in the sense of using the last drop for decades and decades, maybe centuries, maybe never.
But the problem is that we're likely to come to a point where it becomes impossible to continue increasing production.
And in fact, oil production will peak and start to go downhill regardless of the amount of effort we put into the project or how much investment we make in the process.
Well, there are, as you can imagine, many, many scientists who are working on this question, literally dozens of petroleum geologists and petroleum economists and physicists and so on.
And the emerging consensus seems to be that a global peak in oil production is likely sometime between about 2006 or 2007 at the earliest and something like 2016 or 2020 at the latest.
As much as we groan about the price of gasoline in America right now, certainly Europe, Canada, other parts of the world have it, most of them, much worse than we do.
But there's also the matter of the pricing of oil exports.
Most oil that is sold on the international market is sold for U.S. dollars.
And this really goes back to the mid-1970s after the first oil shock when the U.S. made a deal with its good friend Saudi Arabia to price all of its oil exports in U.S. dollars.
And that rule was soon spread to the rest of OPEC.
And what that means is that effectively the U.S. pays less for its oil.
Actually, in effect, it pays less for almost all of its imports because other countries have to get U.S. dollars to pay for their oil.
And how do they get U.S. dollars?
Well, the U.S. has a monopoly on those things.
And so countries have to either take out loans denominated in U.S. dollars or sell their products to the U.S. And, of course, they'll be motivated to do so because they need to pay their energy bills, so they'll likely sell low.
Or they'll drive their currencies down in value deliberately in order to be able to earn export capital to afford the oil imports.
So this has been a strategy of Japan, for example, which has kept its yen very low in value for a long time, which keeps those Toyotas and Hondas affordable for Americans and allows the Japanese to pay their energy bills.
The Japanese don't have any indigenous oil or natural gas reserves.
But the fact that other currencies are artificially kept low then keeps the dollar more valuable, which means that it's cheaper for us to buy oil.
Now what's happening right now, one of the reasons gasoline is so expensive, is that the U.S. dollar is falling in value, primarily because the U.S. has such a tremendous debt, exactly, that other countries are less willing to invest in U.S. dollar-denominated investments.
And so as the dollar falls in value, gas gets more expensive because we have to import almost 60% of it, of the oil that we use.
Well, after that point, there will be less oil available.
And that means because population is continuing to grow and demand for oil is continuing to grow, therefore there's going to be more and more competition for what's left.
Obviously, it takes months and months and a lot of investment, but that's doable.
But when the peak in global oil production arrives, nothing we can do, no amount of investment will change that.
We'll be on the downhill side.
And we know this is going to happen because it's already happened in country after country.
The United States is the best example of that.
The U.S. is where the oil industry started back in 1859 with the first commercial oil well in Pennsylvania.
And for decades, the U.S. was the world's foremost oil-producing nation.
In fact, we were the world's foremost oil-exporting nation.
We were the Saudi Arabia of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
The U.S. became the most mature oil-producing province in the world, which means there were more oil wells drilled in the U.S. than in the rest of the world put together.
All right, well, here's something that you can clarify for me.
Right you are on all of that.
But then we started capping a lot of wells, and here too is a great deal of controversy.
I've heard it said that we have capped a lot of wells, and perhaps wisely so, in that we are now using up the rest of the world's oil, the Middle East oil, the oil coming from wherever, and that if necessary, it's like a sort of a strategic reserve that's still in the ground.
Oh, there may be some truth to that, but basically the U.S. is past its production peak and will never produce oil again at anywhere near the rate that it was doing in the 1960s.
And this happened in the U.S. oil peak happened in 1970, 71, and U.S. production now is about the same level as it was in the 1940s.
And since then, country after country has followed suit.
So out of about 44 principal oil-producing countries in the world, about 24 of them have experienced similar oil production peaks, and their oil production is headed downward, and there's virtually nothing that can bring it back up to former levels.
Well, there's no energy source on the horizon that will permit a simple and easy transition to running our cars, our 150 million cars on something else other than petroleum.
So we're in for a major change in our way of life.
I don't think there's any way around that.
People talk about hydrogen cars, for example, but there are no hydrogen reserves anywhere.
You have to make hydrogen from something else.
And right now, virtually all commercially produced hydrogen is made from fossil fuels, from natural gas or oil.
But that's a very expensive way of making hydrogen.
And while I'm all in favor of solar and wind, I think actually we'd be better off spending our R ⁇ D money directly on solar and wind rather than spending it on hydrogen development because we just don't have that much energy from solar and wind right now.
Yes, and our governator here in California has made similar noises.
But I think they do these things without ever talking to a single engineer because the reality of hydrogen is that it will be useful in niche applications.
I'm not saying that hydrogen will have no uses whatsoever in our future energy mix, but the idea that we can simply and easily transition to a hydrogen economy, I'm afraid, is so much hot air.
Yes, but it's going to be a very different future.
You know, we're using only about twice as much renewable energy in the U.S. economy today as we were using in 1850.
There's a lot of reasons for that.
Meanwhile, non-renewable energy has soared.
It's skyrocketed.
We're using hundreds of times as much now as we were in 1850.
And the reason for that is that non-renewable energy resources like oil and natural gas and coal are kind of like winning the lottery or having a rich uncle that dies and leaves you a fortune.
You can spend that at any arbitrary rate you want.
And you can buy a penthouse and a fleet of Rolls-Royces, but sooner or later that's going to run out unless you have some other way of replenishing the bank account.
Whereas renewable fuels are kind of like working for a living.
You have a job and you have a budget and you have to live within that budget or you run into trouble.
Nature can only supply us with so much energy on an ongoing basis.
Now it's true we could increase the energy we're harvesting through photovoltaics or wind power considerably over what we're doing now, but it's never going to be the kind of windfall that we've enjoyed over the Industrial Revolution with fossil fuels.
I've generally gotten excellent feedback on it, and I was very gratified to say that I get phone calls and emails quite regularly from engineers and petroleum geologists who are saying, well, you know, this is stuff that we've known for some time, and we talk about it amongst ourselves, but we've never really been allowed to come out in public and say these things, and good for you for doing that.
All right, well, let's see if I can get you in some trouble here, and I assure you I can.
What do you, I mean, we're involved now in this horrid thing in Iraq, which, I don't know, when we went into Iraq, we said it was because we thought they had weapons of mass destruction.
Now it turns out that intelligence was flawed, according to our Secretary of State.
That isn't why we went.
My suspicion is that you imagine we went because of oil, Richard.
Yeah, you know, there's almost nothing that happens in the Middle East that doesn't have something to do with oil.
We've spent, what is it, over $150 billion so far with this war in invasion of Iraq.
And I can't imagine the U.S. spending that kind of financial capital and also human capital on something that wasn't absolutely essential to our national interest.
Well, I notice that we say we're doing this for the people of Iraq, so they might have freedom, and then we're protecting their oil assets, and we're doing that for them as well.
Now, other people make the argument that we are dying in Iraq, and we are.
Our men and women are dying in Iraq.
And you know, I'm with you.
I think it's all about oil, but we keep saying it's their oil.
Well, in a sense, but you see, Iraq has immense foreign debts to repay, something in the order of $150 to $300 billion.
And so much of that oil revenue, and really Iraqi oil production is still pretty low.
It's just barely gotten up to pre-war levels, if that.
So most of that revenue is going to repay Iraqi debts, which are becoming ever steeper because, of course, we're helping them out by rebuilding the country.
Yes, I've even heard we've talked of forgiving the debt and having international meetings For others to forgive the debt so they might get back on their feet.
But meanwhile, most of the rebuilding that's going on is being done by American corporations like Halliburton and Bechtel.
That's right.
In fact, I think the Iraqis themselves would be quite capable of rebuilding their country.
After all, they've done so before after the Iraq-Iran war in the 1980s.
They had to do a great deal of rebuilding.
And then in 1991 on.
So in fact, I think a lot of this money from Iraqi oil sales and also money from the U.S. defense budget is basically being filtered back into the U.S. economy via a number of corporations.
Well, almost every U.S. president in my memory, and it's a pretty good long one now, has reiterated the fact that the United States would be willing to go to war to keep the Straits of Hermoz open and the oil flowing.
And when they say go to war, they mean nuclear war, if necessary.
It's not just the current administration's policy.
This goes back at least to the 1970s when it became apparent that U.S. oil production had peaked, the U.S. would be ever more dependent on foreign oil, and that oil could be used as a weapon.
After 1973 and the Arab oil embargo, it became clear that the U.S. was vulnerable to the oil weapon.
And so this has been really the centerpiece of American geostrategic policy ever since.
I mean, Shell, for example, is a major solar PV producer now.
Also, the industry is starting to sort of leak out the message that the oil peak is approaching.
For example, John Thompson, who's vice president of ExxonMobil Exploration Company, has basically said that by 2015, we'll need to find, develop, and produce a volume of new oil and gas that's equal to eight out of every 10 barrels being produced today, and that's going to cost a lot more than the oil that's being produced now.
For people in the industry, you know, it's a coded message basically saying we're in trouble.
So the message is leaking out, but fundamentally, I think they realize that what oil is left is going to be that much more expensive.
I think the oil-producing countries see that too, and that's one of the reasons that OPEC is willing to sit on its oil, reduce production, and wait till prices go higher.
They weren't doing that back in the 90s.
They were producing full bore.
But now I think they see that the peak of production is within sight, and that oil is worth more in the ground than it is if they just pump it cheaply.
Taking in mind, all right, I'll make it even harder for you, then taking in mind the normal economic cycles that history has presented us with and then projecting 10 or 20 years, surely you can come up with some kind of guesstimate.
Well, it's hard to say because it's possible that there would be an actual panic following the peak with the general realization, you know, that the era of cheap energy is over and what's left is limited supply and therefore whoever gets there first effectively owns the pile.
So there could be considerable competition for supplies at that point, including international competition between consuming nations, the U.S. and I think China is the most likely candidate.
Unfortunately, that's the path that we're on right now.
I think the only way to avoid that outcome would be to have some very effective international agreements for cooperation and allocation of the remaining resources.
And that's going to be a very difficult thing to do.
And I think it can only happen if the U.S. and China are both on board.
Do you think there's any chance that between now and then we will come up with some alternative, a source of energy that either is not so dangerous that it kills us?
I looked at some photos of Chernobyl the other day that stood the hair up on the back of my neck, or that we'll come up with something that won't kill us and that we can cheaply or reasonably at least produce and keep the world going.
My research so far has not supported the likelihood of any of them being able to take over from oil in a way that would permit our economy to continue at its current pace and continue to expand.
And by that I mean they're now having big get-togethers where people with claims and even machines that they claim are over unity and they make all kinds of claims, but nothing that I've seen truly yet.
And then there's the problem of bringing a potential energy source up to the point of actually supplying 100 quadrillion BTUs of energy, which is what the U.S. uses on a yearly basis, which is just an immense amount of energy.
And that requires building a huge amount of infrastructure.
You just can't do that in a couple of years.
It will take literally decades to replace our present energy infrastructure.
As long as I've been alive, there have been claims of carburetors and claims of lots of other things.
But the end of all those stories is always the government rushes in, the inventor disappears, and or the patent is bought out by a large oil company and put up on the shelf.
And they've got lots of this kind of stuff waiting for the day when the oil really runs out.
Well, you know, there may be some truth to some of these stories, but my sense of it is that most of them are in the category of urban legend.
One of the reasons I say that is the story of the patents being bought up by the oil companies just smells really fishy to me because I've been to the U.S. Patent Office to research patents.
And really patents are not a way of keeping something secret.
They're a way of publicizing inventions.
So if anything has been patented at any time in history, you can find that patent and read about it.
And so it's literally impossible for a patented device to be completely suppressed.
Although secrets have been held, so it could be there's a secret by some energy company out there that it might be in their interest, since you pointed out yourself that even if we had such a source to actually get it out there and market it, you know, if you need a million new equivalent to gas stations or whatever, we're not ready for that.
And so wouldn't the propensity on the part of the large energy companies be to hold it and wait until it was financially the right atmosphere?
Well, the Middle East, on paper, has over 60% of it.
Now, I say on paper Because what is officially reported by the OPEC countries, particularly the Middle East, is a matter of some controversy.
Back in the 1980s, they changed their policies of reporting so that countries could base their export on what they said they had in the ground on their reported reserves.
So it was in their interests to report larger reserves so that they could export more and earn more income.
So within a couple of years of this change in the rules, all of these Arab oil exporting countries reported reserve increases on the order of 50 to 100 percent.
Oh, that's cooking the book.
That's cooking the book.
There's no evidence that they were actually finding much new oil during that period.
He's written a book about it called The Party's Over, Oil, War, and the Fate of Industrial Societies.
In this particular industrial society, Richard, although I don't drool over SUVs, I mostly, 90% of the time, drive around a little geometro, to be honest with you.
But a lot of Americans right now are real hung up on these tanks, these great big vehicles, SUVs.
Would you say that from your point of view, it would be a wise investment to buy one of those now or not such a good idea?
I can recall the 70s oil crisis, and an awful lot of really big American cars went on the market for a very small amount of money, and we all fell in love with small Japanese cars, and that happened until the oil came back.
And what I've always wondered is, maybe you're in a position to tell me, if America converted and took out all the old damn light bulbs, put in all new ones, got a car that didn't use quite so much gasoline per mile, all the rest of it, if we clamp down, how much difference would it make?
Well, I hate to keep dragging you into politics, but it's inevitable.
Jimmy Tarter, like a Merhatum, had a lot of at least pretty good ideas about the future of America and what we would have to do to be part of that future.
But, you know, presidents we've had, we've got ourselves an oil president right now.
Now, in the rest of the world, there's still a lot of natural gas.
But in North America, production is going downhill.
That's true of Canada, U.S., and Mexico.
And natural gas is different from oil in that while it is possible to transport it around the world in ships, it's very expensive to do so, and there aren't that many liquid natural gas tankers.
And most of the available international supply is already spoken for by countries like Japan and South Korea.
So as our natural gas production goes south, as it were, it's unlikely that we'll be able to make up for that just by importing natural gas by LNG tanker.
Well, since the Pacific Plowers B are not going to push us in this direction for a while yet, you know, you've got the ear of an awful lot of people right now, Richard.
Let's talk about practical, real-world, okay, folks, here is some individual recommendations for you that will not only save the nation oil, but maybe more importantly, your own power bill will go way down or you won't pay as much for gasoline.
I still drive, although I live within walking distance of where I work, and I walk whenever I can.
And, you know, we have two computers in the house and a TV set that we occasionally use for watching old movies.
And we enjoy our life.
Now, one thing we do is we grow a fair amount of our own food.
My wife and I live in a suburban neighborhood, but we've converted the backyard that we have to food production.
We have fruit and nut trees, a vegetable garden, and I think this is a good recommendation for anybody who can possibly do this.
Start growing as much of your food as you can, because right now the average food item on an American's plate has traveled 1,300 miles to get there, and those are 1,300 fossil fuel miles.
Life will be, as energy begins to become very expensive, that's going to change life.
It's going to change our economy.
I mean, do you foresee, for example, you're not an economist, but do you see us going into another depression or something as serious as that over it seems to me if anything could cause a depression, it would be this.
Historically, high energy prices have correlated very strongly with economic recessions.
And we're looking at the mother of all oil shocks coming our way.
And further, our whole modern economic system is based on the idea of endless growth.
Economic theory and the whole market economy have all grown up within the last 500 years of continuous growth of population and growth in availability of energy resources.
When those trends change, when global population levels off and starts to decline for whatever reason, it certainly will within this century, and when available energy per capita and total available energy begin to decline, then the basis will no longer be present for conventional economic growth.
And we'll really need a different kind of economics at that point.
Well, either we will undertake measures to flatten population increase and then gradually over time reduce population levels, and I don't mean killing people off, I mean reducing reproduction.
Either we will do it voluntarily or nature will do it for us by the usual means of famine, war, and pestilence.
Again, we've been living in an extraordinary period of time, historically speaking, in the last century or so, particularly those of us in North America.
We've never seen a real famine in North America.
But you go back even three or four centuries in Europe, even the wealthiest and most privileged countries had famines quite regularly.
This is a normal part of human experience, particularly in agricultural societies.
We've been spared that by the regime of cheap energy, with tractors replacing draft animals for agriculture with ever-increasing supplies of pesticides and herbicides and fertilizers.
But all of that is about to change as we run out of topsoil, as we run out of fresh water, and as we run out of cheap energy to supply the energy.
And it appears that the ocean currents that keep countries like Britain and the rest of Northern Europe relatively warm, much warmer than they would be if you look on the map.
They're actually very far north, about the same latitude as British Columbia and Alaska and so on.
If those ocean currents were to change, we could be facing, ironically enough, a new ice age.
We talk about global warming, but in fact, one of the effects of global warming is that the ocean currents are noticeably altering.
And if that trend continues, we could see really catastrophic climate change.
Yeah, what I was wanting to ask him was, according to Tesla's writings and everything, was electricity, are you able to broadcast it like a radio wave?
In all the things that Tesla did patent, nowhere did you see a free source of energy.
Nowhere did you see a patent that describes a tower that rises into the air and plucks from the atmosphere power that would drive our cities and our vehicles.
He brings up some very interesting points that one is that our economy is being undermined from a lot of borrowed money and the energy crisis is symptomatic of the whole borrowed energy, borrowed money syndrome.
And I'm wondering if Mr. Heinberg has a different model, a different social model.
I was lucky enough to go overseas and live as a military dependent when I was a juvenile and then again as a soldier.
And I saw the European system which was oil, you know, gas was $4 or $5 a gallon and people used mass transit more.
They still do.
We haven't adapted that model.
We probably can't adapt that model just because of our social things.
You did mention the earlier points, Richard, which were farm your own food at home, something I strongly believe in, walk whenever possible, use less fossil fuel, use less energy consumptive.
But my question is, what social model could you pick out of anywhere in the world to say they're doing it right or they're doing it so well?
And here the question is, why has our government, our current government, made such a colossal failure of not only of wasting our money, but of wasting all the energy?
A different social model, that's a tough one to address.
Well, one thing I would say is a different monetary model could help a lot.
Right now we have money that is essentially created by banks in the process of making loans.
And that kind of money, fiat paper, well it's not always even paper, it's usually electronic money, carries interest because the only way it can be created is through the making of loans.
And as a result of that, the economy has to continually grow or the whole system will collapse.
Because if the economy doesn't grow, if more people aren't taking out loans, then there won't be the extra capital to pay back the existing loans with interest.
And we've seen historically when that happens, the economy doesn't just go on in a steady state, it collapses, as happened during the 1930s.
I'm afraid we're entering into a historical period where conventional economic growth, as I said earlier, is not going to be possible because there won't be the cheap energy to fuel it.
So what we really need is a different kind of non-debt-based, non-interest-based money to enable our economy to continue.
One of the tragedies of the Great Depression was that people still wanted to work, the factories were still there, they still needed all the same stuff that they needed before, but there just wasn't the money available to enable the system to run.
I think the same thing is possible in the very near future where we may enter into a deflationary kind of spiral where there just won't be the money, the capital available to enable the system to run.
So one thing I think we need is a different kind of monetary system.
And again, I don't think it's likely to be solved before we actually arrive at a crisis situation.
But when we do, I think it'll be important for there to be models available.
Are you enough of an economist or would-be economist, Richard, to forecast when that crisis, when we're going to have the gates come tumbling down there?
Well, I'd shy away from making any specific predictions as to dates, but it may not be that far away because the levels of debt in the U.S. right now are just unsustainable.
However, I suppose from a historical perspective, Richard, in some ways, you have to give credit to those who have managed our economy so far.
They have put us in a sustained period with little ups and downs of the most prosperous, continuously prosperous period of time that almost anybody's ever experienced.
Yeah, except that for the past couple of decades, we've basically maintained that degree of prosperity by borrowing from our children and grandchildren.
Those of us who are sort of in the baby boom generation, especially, you know, we have lived during the most prosperous, wealthy period of time in all of human history.
And it's a two-seat sports car that weighs 2,800 pounds.
And we have announced on the radio here in San Diego or on TV that we're going to drive it from San Diego to Daytona Beach, Florida on one tank of gas on the 4th of July.
Well, that'll lead to, I guess, a bigger discussion.
Richard, let's assume for a second what he's saying is all true, and they have this vehicle that can do exactly as he said.
Why would you imagine that anybody would turn their head, the Japanese or the Americans or anybody else for that matter, why wouldn't somebody immediately grab onto that, ah, the future, profit, money, let's rock?
First of all, if we could take away the subsidy that's being given to SUV buyers by the federal government and change that to a subsidy that is directly related to vehicle efficiency, that would certainly help.
Then if the American public, the world, for that matter, could be alerted to the fact that, in fact, energy resources are limited and that we are necessarily going to have to restrict our appetites for abundant energy and become more efficient.
You know, right now we have the most effective propaganda machine in the world here in the United States.
It's called the advertising industry.
People base their behavior on what they're told.
I think we pride ourselves, particularly the intelligent people, that we don't pay attention to the advertising.
But it's effective, otherwise billions of dollars wouldn't be spent on it.
So that propaganda stream needs to be altered.
It needs to be telling us in some ways almost exactly the opposite of the message that it is giving us now.
The message we're getting now is buy, consume, waste, like there's no tomorrow.
And the real message is if we continue to buy and consume and waste the way we are now, there will be no tomorrow.
Well, I'm going to be honest with you, and I was being honest with you when I told you 90% of the time I'm driving a GeoMetro, but out in one of my other garages, Richard, I have a Firebird Trans Am.
That baby kicks butt.
And I remember the Super Bowl a few years ago, 1998, actually, and in it they debuted this Firebird Trans Am.
And so even though the first couple of guests may have wandered to the door and be on the way out, the party's ending, for how much longer can we have a general expectation of the party rolling on?
Electricity, for example, will become more expensive.
We're generating a lot of our electricity through natural gas, mostly through coal, but we've ordered about $100 billion worth of natural gas-fired power plants over the last few years.
And because, of course, natural gas burns clean, and we were told that there were limitless supplies of it.
But now that natural gas production is declining rapidly in North America, there's a real question as to where all that gas is going to come from to generate the electricity.
He's Richard Heinberg, who's written a book called Parties Over the Oil War and the Fate of Industrial Societies, and it's something we're going to have to face up to.
There's no question about it.
It's coming.
It's here.
And soon, it'll be gone.
wonder when we start planning Richard Heinberg, once again, The Party's Over, his book.
Richard, your book, The Party's Over, in your book, did you, in what way did you lay it out?
Was your main intent exactly that, to have your readers understand the party is really over?
Is it documenting that, or does it go forward into other areas like where, or all areas, how people can conserve themselves?
And by the way, I have questions wanting you to go further than you did with the personal advice.
Well, I got to tell you, I'm pretty hot to talk to this guest tonight because this is my favorite topic.
We are insane in this country.
I mean, everything that you're talking about, we've known about since the 70s.
Yet the country has not done what it needs to do.
We just keep, you know, we're just so, we've had this lull of low prices, and, you know, we haven't had the motivation or the leadership at the government level to start, you know, decentralizing some of the local electric grid power so we don't rely on all these huge plants.
We had this crisis, and people began to change the way they think and the way they acted.
And all kinds of things happened back during that gas crisis, but boy, did we forget about it fast.
I mean, whoo, woo-hoo.
unidentified
Well, it's almost, I mean, it really, the behavior of the industry in terms of supply and pricing, I mean, it makes me believe every conspiracy thing I've ever heard.
I mean, it's almost like as soon as we got on track to getting away from the petro economy, they cracked the valves open and dropped the prices down, and everybody kind of forgot about everything.
The tax credits on renewable energy expired.
They didn't get, you know, Congress let them lapse.
I mean, I've got a 25-year-old Grumman, a stainless steel solar water heater that still works to this day.
But who in their right mind is going to spend a grand on a water heater, even if it lasts 25, 30 years?
It's still going great.
I don't know how long it's going to last.
When you can go to any big, you know, appliance depot type place and, you know, get a gas water heater for, you know, $200.
The government has to get behind and put some incentives so people will make good choices for our long-term benefit.
As soon as those dollars start to drop at the pump, you know, when the prices got back down to like a buck 20 a buck out here, everybody started getting the behemoths again.
And I'll tell you, I've spent most of my career in professional commercial horticulture.
And there are many, many callers, I'm sure, that could back me up on this.
Good old-fashioned ag school crossbreeding has already produced some killer fuel seed crops that grow on transition soil, marginal soil that were not in use now.
I mean, I myself have witnessed some of the Michigan State's test crops up in Michigan here, just north of me, where they had a whole field of 25, 30-foot hemp plants that grew in one season that were just like a giant tree the size of a small apple tree, solid seeds.
Yes.
Now, you tell me, marginal, marshy land where this stuff grows without even any fertilizer.
Yeah, well, needless to say, I agree with everything the caller has said.
We've suffered from really the curse of cheap energy in a lot of ways.
I mean, cheap energy has given us amazing mobility and freedom and power, but it's also made us addicted to a way of life that is ultimately unsustainable.
unidentified
Oh, you said it.
I mean, thank you.
Thank you for somebody saying it.
I mean, we are just no better as a nation than some crack addict busting into people's cars to steal some money to support their habit.
Now, we can't support our own energy habits, and we've got to send our boys and girls all over the world now to go kick ass and make sure that the pipelines keep running.
I mean, as a truck driver, when you hear Richard saying the things he's saying, how do you feel about that?
unidentified
Well, I have a feeling after many years of listening to you and also just where I'm going, hoping to go spiritually, none of this that he's talking about in the last caller, I love the guy.
You know, the truth of the matter is he's right.
This nation is a nation of addicts of more than one kind.
And the bottom line is, without a spiritual awakening, it isn't going to happen unless, and this is my question for you, Richard, do you believe that the only way this is going to happen is what we've talked about, or I should say you are, have talked about, is we're going to have a big reduction in population.
Because you alluded to it earlier.
You said nature will take care of it.
Well, we're not going to stop.
If you look out here right now tonight, there's hundreds of trucks going into California to deliver, and there's hundreds of thousands of us doing this job.
Well, quite frankly, I think it's going to be a combination of the two.
I doubt if we are going to make the kinds of drastic efforts that will be needed short of necessity.
And that necessity is probably going to come in some pretty nasty forms.
Beyond that, I dread to make more specific predictions, except to say that I think your caller is absolutely right, that there's a spiritual dimension to this in that, well, spirituality has a kind of ethical dimension to it.
And I think as we awaken to the fact that we are dependent on a force greater than ourselves, namely the Earth, we will find that the ethical path is a kind of eco-ethics where we acknowledge that the Earth has its own consciousness,
its own rhythms, and we are here to serve that rather than it to serve us, ultimately.
Well, maybe I'm fortunate in where I live and the students that get attracted to New College, but most of the students that I have, I think, are already on the path.
Maybe they're attracted to my program because they already have this sense, but they know that the world is about to change in profound ways, and they want to be out there in front leading that change rather than having their lives destroyed by it.
There are so many of these things, different energy efficiency devices, different kinds of motors and so on out there.
What we really need, I think, is a blue ribbon commission to look at all of the energy alternatives, everything from nuclear to solar thermal and solar PV and evaluate all of them across a range of consistent and transparent criteria to see what we should be investing in.
Because we need to be investing not just a billion here or there, which is what the current administration is doing, but literally hundreds of billions of dollars in this energy transition.
I have spoken with local government and also members of the House of Representatives, a couple of senators, but I would like to get the message out to as high a level as possible.
And the reason I'm calling is back in the 70s, I was about during the gas shortage, I was about 16, 17 years old.
And my stepfather, he owned some oil wells in West Virginia.
And the government at that time and the company, I'm not going to mention it, the oil company that he was selling oil to, they subsidized him at that time to quit pumping oil.
And also, I don't know if Richard knows much about that, but also they do the same thing with crops up here in Ohio.
They subsidize farmers not to grow corn and that type of thing.
We actually produce enough food to feed everyone, but the problems of distribution and economics keep it from getting to the people who need it.
So it's a complicated situation.
And of course, there are a lot of marginally producing American oil wells where it actually costs more money to get the oil out of the ground than the oil is actually worth.
Now, maybe when oil gets up to $40 a gallon, well, that's, or $40 a barrel rather, that might be the trigger that would Enable that particular well to be produced.
But we may be talking about a well that would only produce 5, 10, 20 barrels a day.
There are literally thousands of wells in the U.S. that only produce a few barrels a day.
Well, I live near one of the country's biggest geothermal stations, the geysers, here in Northern California.
And it supplies a certain percentage of California electricity.
It's not a large percentage.
It's down in the single digits.
I'm not quite sure what the exact number is.
Geothermal is site-specific.
There are only certain places that have the resource.
And then it's actually not renewable, unfortunately, because once you sink the pipe down and get that hot water up and take the heat out of water to turn turbines and generate electricity, well, that resource of hot underground water tends to deplete over time.
And most geothermal sites are exhausted within a matter of a few decades.
We have, well, several currently at least viable technologies, including the sun and conversion of that energy.
People have had thoughts about putting up satellites and capturing energy in space at a much larger efficiency and then transmitting it to Earth with microwaves.
What else is possible with the wind?
Certainly, in fact, the wind, I understand, is actually per kilowatt, the cheapest right now.
First time caller line, you're on the air with Richard Heinberg.
unidentified
Hi.
How you doing?
I'll tell you, you know, I'm Paul from Glen Mills, Pennsylvania, Art, and I started listening to you in 96 when I went to Vegas, and I've been listening ever since.
There's going to be a lot of guys out there like him.
Yeah, I think actually that's pretty close to the game plan.
But, you know, here we might learn a little lesson from history.
There was a big empire around a couple of thousand years ago that also had its military garrisoned in far-off countries and was dependent on resources from far away.
Would that be the one where the sun never set on it?
Yeah, well, the Roman Empire is what I'm thinking about.
And the tendency of empires is to collapse because after a while, they start spending more on garrisoning their colonial troops than they're spending on infrastructure at home.
I think that's what's happening with the U.S. right now.
We're actually starting to spend more on keeping our military going abroad, keeping the resource flows going, than we are on our people and their needs.
And that's when a society reaches that point, I think it's a dangerous situation.
Wildcardline, you're on the air with Richard Heinberg.
Good morning.
unidentified
Good morning, Art.
Hi.
Richard, it's a pleasure to be on.
Good.
Getting back into the old days in the Industrial Revolution there, there was a fellow that invented a machine that was unlike a cotton gin, separating cotton, etc., etc., what that did to that industry.
He invented a machine that separated the fibers from hemp.
Oh, yes.
And hemp being the fastest renewable biomass plant on the planet.
The caller too back about that we should just go take over everything and get rid of OPEC and all that.
You know, that seems to be the typical kind of muttonhead American idea.
You know, people don't realize, you know, yeah, we do need to conserve and everything.
But I think a bigger thing is everybody talks about, you know, I mean, what we're in the middle of right now, you know, we're sending over, you know, people, young people, they're dying and all the money that's wasted.
And, you know, when this all happened in the 70s, when all of a sudden the squeeze was on and everything, I don't understand, you know, if OPEC or whoever it is, whoever they are over there, if they want to charge us $100 for a barrel of oil,
let them charge us $100 for a barrel of oil, but just economically escalate, you know, put the price of all the food that they have to, you know, import from us over there, just jack the price of that way up and say, you know, how much of it do you want?
Yes, although, on the other hand, I think they've seen how the invasion was handled and the incredible ineptitude of many aspects of the invasion and how the U.S. is, in a sense, mired in place now and really not in any position to invade any more countries.
We're having a tough time just handling this one country that we've had.
Although I have a sort of a theory about that, and it's maybe just grasping at straws, Richard.
But my theory is that now that America is in Iraq, literally every terrorist organization from the entire world is probably pouring their assets into Iraq.
So in a way, it puts them all in one place where we can do what we're doing.
So it's, you know, a two-edged sword is what I'm saying.
In a sense, perhaps we can have the battleground there.
And the reason being with their current state of political affairs and our war on terrorism, you've got to think about this for a moment.
If we had Joe Schmuckelli with some type of free energy system or a real efficient power plant, you've got to think about the freedom of mobility and the choke points.
We're talking about you have to stop and get fuel.
We have to go to the airports.
We have to use our waterways.
But if you have something that you don't have to stop for fuel, and you could put it in a car that could fly or an airplane, how are our world political powers going to put up these choke points, roadblocks, and stop our freedom of mobility?
And I don't see that happening.
And besides, even if you have the technology available to drive a tank round trip from coast to coast, it wouldn't make much difference because the world political power structure and the current infrastructure would cost enormous amount of money.
It would take years to put it in the infrastructure.
And meanwhile, we would rely on the oil to shift the magic bullet to the processing plant to produce something that's more efficient.
It was sort of a, I guess, damned if we do and damned if we don't kind of thing.
And if we come up with something to change the infrastructure, is itself going to be traumatic and expensive and energy consumptive.
There's probably, well, you know, Richard, in the old days when we had piston aircraft, even now jet aircraft, really, you have this point when you're crossing the ocean, for example, to Japan, when a little red light comes on in the cockpit and it says, point of no return.
Or it means point of no return.
And what that means is, come hell or high water, baby, you just used up over half your fuel.
Now either you're going on to your destination or you're going into the water.
Now, if that's true, that last trillion barrels of oil is very valuable, and we should be using it for the most important life-sustaining purposes rather than just guzzling it down.
We should be using it to fund the transition to renewable energies.
We should be using it for absolutely essential purposes.
And that's the kind of thing, those are the kinds of hard choices we need to be making, triage, in a sense.
In the book, I try to inform the reader just how important oil is to our way of life and give the scientific arguments for why oil is about to peak in production, and then discuss all the various alternatives from nuclear to solar and wind.
And then just in the final chapter, talk about the choices that people can make in their individual lives.
There's something called energy return on energy investment or energy profit ratio.
It takes energy to get energy.
And with nuclear power, historically, when you add up all the energy required to build a nuclear plant, operate it, process the fuel, and then decommission the plant at the end of its cycle, it's actually not producing a very high energy profit.
What he just said should be required listening in Congress and the Senate.
Some committee has got to call this man and let him tell the truth and let them digest this information and see if they really want to do anything about it.