Art Bell

All Episodes

Previous Next

March 27, 2005 - Art Bell

02:54:27

Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell - Open Lines - The Coming Gas Crisis

Participants

Main voices

01:22:23

Large

Audio Only |

Scroll

Show episode speakers

Speaker	Time	Text
art bell ▲ ● ▼		From the high desert in the great American Southwest, I bid you all good evening, good morning, good afternoon, wherever you may be in the world's time zones.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I'm Mark Bell, and this is Coast to Coast A.M., that program that covers all those time zones like a great, soft, fuzzy blanket.
unidentified		Well, maybe not so fuzzy tonight.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		It's going to be a rough show, actually.
		It's going to be an extremely interesting program tonight, and I'll tell you why.
		Number one, it's going to be open lines.
		Sort of.
		Let me go ahead and get a couple of world things out of the way here.
		Their hopes fading and legal opinions now exhausted and all the options, Terry Shiva's parents appeared quietly resigned today, Sunday, to watching her die, but could claim one Easter victory.
		The severely brain-damaged woman received a drop of communion wine on her tongue, her only sustenance in nine days.
		After her husband allowed her to receive the sacrament outside the hospice where Shaivo is being cared for, five protesters were arrested.
		About a half dozen people in wheelchairs got out of them, lay in the driveway shouting, we're not dead yet.
		The word I've received is that Terry Shaivo is now really past the point where even heroics would help her.
		And the family itself seems resigned, has asked the protesters to go home.
		In other words, I guess they feel it's over for Terry.
		Or they've stopped wanting intervention at this point, I guess.
		And so maybe with that from the family and knowing it has reached that point, perhaps we could ask the same of you tonight.
		In other words, whichever side of this great war, this moral war that you were on, it's ending.
		It's going to end.
		Now, if you look at some websites, you'll see that they're fighting over the body that isn't even a body yet.
		Pope John Paul II delivered an Easter Sunday blessing to tens of thousands in St. Peter's Square, but the ailing punt of unable to speak and managed only to greet the satin crowd with the sign of the cross, bringing tears to many eyes.
		Al-Qaeda in Iraq released a video Sunday claiming to show the murder of an interior ministry official, and indeed Iraq says one is missing, so I guess that was him.
		Declaring himself completely innocent of child molestation charges, Michael Jackson said Sunday he is the victim of a conspiracy and asked fans around the world to pray for him.
		He apparently was interviewed by the Reverend Jesse Jackson.
		All right, now in a moment, I'm going to read to you a portion, I don't know, a fair portion, I guess, of a Rolling Stone article just printed called The Long Emergency by James Howard Kunstler.
		And I want you to absorb what I'm about to say, or as much of it as you can, because I have questions.
		I have some doozies.
		I really have some questions that I've cooked up for all of you out there.
		I'll share those with you after you listen, and I really do want you to listen to this coming up in just one moment.
		Again, it'll be by Howard Kunstler.
		It was published in Rolling Stone.
		It will frame what we're going to do tonight.
		Stay right where you are.
		Originally, I was seeking a guest for this program, maybe to talk about peak oil and the economic impact on America and when it would happen and all the rest of that.
		But there was really nobody qualified that we found.
		Somebody who could talk about peak oil only, but not the economic impact, and what the world is doing geopolitically right now.
		So I finally said, the heck with it.
		I don't need a guest.
		We'll do this show ourselves, and we will.
		Let's begin this way.
		Here it is.
		Again, this was Howard Kunstler, actually, in the Rolling Stone magazine, just published.
		A few weeks ago, the price of oil ratcheted above $55 a barrel.
		Now, it's about $20 a barrel more than a year ago.
		Next day, the oil story was buried on page 6 of the New York Times business section.
		Apparently, price of oil is not considered significant news, even when it goes up $5 a barrel in a span of 10 days.
		That same day, the stock market shot up more than 100 points because CNN said the government data showed no signs of inflation.
		Note to clueless nation, call planet Earth.
		Carl Jung, one of the fathers of psychology, famously remarked that people cannot stand too much reality.
		What you're about to hear might challenge your assumptions about the kind of world we live in, and especially the kind of world into which events are propelling us.
		We're in for one rough ride through uncharted territory.
		It's been very hard for Americans, lost in dark raptures of non-stop infotainment, recreational shopping, and compulsive motoring, to make any sense at all of the gathering forces that are going to fundamentally alter the terms of everyday life in our technological society.
		Even after the terrorist attacks of 9-11, America is still sleepwalking into the future.
		I call this coming time the long emergency.
		Most immediately, we face the end of the cheap fossil fuel era.
		It's no exaggeration to state that reliable supplies of cheap oil and natural gas underlie everything we identify as the necessities of our modern life, not to mention all of its comforts, its luxuries, central heating, air conditioning, cars, airplanes, electric lights, inexpensive clothing, recorded music, movies, hip replacement surgery, national defense, you name it.
		The few Americans who are not even aware that there is a gathering global energy predicament usually misunderstand the core of the whole argument.
		The argument states that we don't have to run out of oil and gas to start having severe problems with industrial civilization and its dependent systems.
		We only have to slip over the all-time production peak and begin a slide down the arc of steady depletion.
		The term global oil production peak means a turning point's going to come when the world produces the most oil it's going to ever produce in a given year.
		And after that, yearly production will inexorably decline.
		It is usually represented graphically in a bell curve.
		Peak is up there at the top of the curve, the halfway point of the world's all-time total endowment, meaning half the world's oil will be left.
		It seems like a lot of oil it is, but there's a very large catch.
		It's the half that's a whole lot more difficult to extract, far more costly to get, much poorer quality, and located mostly in places where the people hate our guts.
		A substantial amount of it will never be extracted.
		The U.S. passed its own oil peak.
	Did you know this?
	About 11 million barrels a day in 1970.
	Since then, production has dropped steadily.
	In 2004, it ran about 5 million barrels a day.
	Got a tad more from natural gas, yet we consume about 20 million barrels a day now.
	That means we have to import about two-thirds of our oil, and that ratio is going to continue to worsen.
	The U.S. peak in 1970 brought on a pretentious change in geoeconomic power.
	Within a few years, foreign producers, chiefly OPEC, were setting the price of oil, and that in turn led to the oil crisis of the 1970s.
	In response, frantic development of non-OPEC oil, especially the North Sea fields of England and Norway, essentially saved the West's ass for about two decades.
	Since 1999, these fields have entered depletion.
	Meanwhile, worldwide discovery of new oil has steadily declined to insignificant, that's an important word, insignificant levels in 2003 and 4.
	Some cornucopians claim that the Earth has some kind of creamy nugget center, oil, in other words, it's going to naturally replenish the great oil fields of the world.
	The facts speak differently, of course.
	There has been no replacement whatsoever of oil already extracted from the fields of America, or for that matter, anywhere else in the world.
	Now we're faced with the global oil production peak.
	Best estimates of when this will actually happen have been somewhere between now and 2010.
	In 2004, however, after demand from burgeoning China and India, and they want a lot, shot up, and revelations that Shell Oil wildly misstated its reserves and Saudi Arabia proved incapable of goosing up its production despite promises to do so, the most knowledgeable experts revised their predictions and now concur that 2005, now, is apt to be the year of the all-time peak global production.
	It will change everything, everything about how we live.
	To aggravate matters, American natural gas production is also declining at 5% a year.
	Despite frenetic new drilling and with the potential of much steeper declines ahead, because the oil crisis of the 1970s, nuclear plant disasters at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, and the acid rain problem, the U.S. chose to make gas its first choice for electric power generation.
	Result was just about every power plant built after 1980 has to run on, guess what, gas.
	Half the homes in America are heated with gas.
	To further complicate matters, gas is not easy to import here in North America.
	It's distributed through a vast pipeline network.
	Gas imported from overseas would have to come to us compressed at about minus 260 degrees Fahrenheit in pressurized tanker ships, then get unloaded at special terminals.
	Very few of those exist in America.
	Moreover, they're tempting targets for terrorism.
	Some other things about the global energy predicament are poorly understood by the public and even our leaders.
	This is going to be a permanent energy crisis, and these energy problems will synergize with the disruptions of climate change, epidemic disease, and population overshoot to produce higher orders of trouble.
	We'll have to accommodate ourselves to fundamentally changed conditions.
	No combination of alternative fuels will allow America to have the kind of life we've become accustomed to, or even a substantial portion of it.
	The wonders of steady technological process achieved through the reign of cheap oil have lulled us into kind of a Jimmy Cricket syndrome, leading many Americans to believe that anything we wish for hard enough is going to come true.
	These days, even people who ought to know better are wishing ardently for a seamless transition from fossil fuels to whatever might replace them.
	The widely touted hydrogen economy is a particularly cruel hoax.
	We're not going to replace the U.S. automobile and truck fleets with vehicles run on fuel cells, for one thing.
	The current generation of fuel cells is largely designed to run on hydrogen obtained from natural gas.
	The other way to get hydrogen in the quantities wished for would be electrolysis of water using power from hundreds of nuclear power plants.
	Apart from the very dim prospect of our building that many nuclear plants soon enough, there are also numerous severe problems with hydrogen's nature as an element that present foreboding obstacles to its use as a replacement for oil and gas, especially in storage and transplant.
	Make that transport.
	Wishful notions about our rescuing our way of life with renewables are also rather unrealistic.
	Solar electric systems and wind turbines face not only the Enormous problem of scale, but the fact that the components require substantial amounts of energy to manufacture, and the probability that they can't be manufactured at all without the underlying support platform of a fossil fuel economy.
	We will surely use solar and wind technology to generate some electricity for some period ahead, but probably at a very local and small scale.
	Virtually all biomass schemes for using plants to create liquid fuels cannot be scaled up enough, or even a fraction of the level they're going to have to run things on now.
	What's more, these schemes are predicted, predicated rather, on using oil and gas inputs, fertilizers, weed killers, to grow the biomass crops that would be converted into ethanol or biodiesel fuels.
	This is a net energy loser.
	You might as well burn the inputs and not bother with the biomass products.
	Coal is far less versatile than oil and gas and is less abundant in supplies than many people assume, fraught with huge ecological drawbacks as a contributor to greenhouse global warming gases and many health and toxicity issues ranging all the way from widespread mercury poisoning to acid rain.
	You can make synthetic oil from coal, but the only time this was ever tried on a large scale was by the Nazis under wartime conditions using very impressive amounts of slave labor.
	If we wish to keep the lights on in America after 2020, we may indeed have to resort to nuclear power with all its practical problems and eco-conundrums.
	Under optimal conditions, it could take 10 years to get a new generation of nuclear power plants into operation, and the price may be beyond our means.
	Uranium, incidentally, is also a resource in finite supply.
	We are no closer to the more difficult project of atomic fusion, by the way, than we were in the 1970s.
	Kunzler goes on, suburbia, American suburbia, will come to be regarded as the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world.
	And, he says, it has a tragic destiny.
	The successful regions in the 21st century are going to be the ones surrounded by viable farming hitterlands that can reconstitute locally sustainable economies on an armature of civic cohesion.
	Small towns and smaller cities have better prospects than the big cities, which will probably have to contract substantially.
	The process is going to be painful and tumultuous.
	In many American cities, such as Cleveland, Detroit, St. Louis, the process is already well advanced.
	Others have further to fall.
	New York and Chicago face extraordinary difficulties, being oversupplied with gigantic buildings out of scale with the reality of declining energy supplies.
	Their former agricultural hinterlands have long since been paved over.
	Still, our cities occupy important sites.
	Some kind of urban entities will exist where they are in the future, but probably not the colossi of the 21st century industrialism.
	Some regions of the country are going to do better than others in the long emergency.
	The southwest will suffer in proportion to the degree that it prospered during the cheap oil blowout of the late 20th century, I predict.
	Sunbelt states like Arizona and Nevada will become significantly depopulated, since the region will be short of water as well as gasoline and natural gas.
	Imagine Phoenix without cheap air conditioning.
	Unimaginable, actually.
	I'm not optimistic, he says, about the Southeast either for different reasons.
	I think it'll be subject to a substantial level of violence as the grievances of the formerly middle class boil over and collide with the delusions of Pentecostal Christian extremism.
	The latent encoded behavior of southern culture includes an outsized notion of individualism and the belief that firearms ought to be used in the defense of it.
	This is a poor recipe for civic cohesion.
	The mountain states and Great Plains will face an array of problems, from poor farming potential to water shortages to population loss.
	The Pacific Northwest, New England, and the upper Midwest are somewhat better.
	They have better prospects.
	I regard them as less likely to fall into lawlessness, anarchy, or despotism, and more likely to salvage the bits and pieces of our best social traditions and keep them operational at some level.
	These are daunting, even dreadful, prospects.
	The long emergency is going to be a tremendous trauma for the human race.
	We will not believe that this is happening to us.
	That 200 years of the modern world can be brought to its knees by a worldwide power shortage.
	The survivors will have to cultivate a religion of hope, that is, a deep and comprehensive belief that humanity is worth carrying on.
	If there is any positive side to stark changes coming our way, it may be in the benefits of close communal relations, of having to really work intimately and physically with our neighbors, to be part of an enterprise that really matters, and to be fully engaged in meaningful social enactments instead of being merely entertained to avoid boredom.
	Years from now, when we hear singing at all, we will hear ourselves and we will sing with our whole hearts.
	So the words of Howard Kunstler, not necessarily mine.
	However, I buy into it sufficiently.
	I've had any number of guests on the subject of peak oil.
	And so clearly I think I believe that.
	And I believe the basic tenets of this article, perhaps not some of the social conclusions toward the end that he had.
	And by the way, I skipped portions of it, some rather substantial portions of it, so I definitely recommend that you go to Rolling Stone, read the whole thing.
	Still, it kind of sets up the criticality, the degree of criticality of the situation.
	So I've come up with a number of Questions for you.
	And I would only ask that you answer them honestly.
	That's all.
	Five simple, well, not so simple questions.
	One, do you believe what you just heard that the crisis, the oil crisis just described, is real?
	Do you think the thing is real?
	Are we really facing, or is it just all some sort of grand conspiracy?
	Is it not real?
	We've got boy, hell, we've got more oil than we could ever use.
	I don't care about Japan and India and China and what they're telling us.
	Is it real?
	That's the first question.
	The second question is, do you think most Americans can accept the amount of reality that you just heard?
	Assuming that you do accept it as real.
	Do you think most Americans can accept that level of reality?
	Three, at what pump price would, and I want you to think about this.
	At what pump price would your current lifestyle be unsustainable?
	It's already getting high out there.
	It's already getting expensive out there, folks.
	So at what pump price would your current life, as you lead it, become unsustainable for would you, if it came to it, would you steal or even kill to feed your family?
	That's number four.
	And number five is like number four.
	Number five is, do you support the United States going to war to obtain additional energy supplies?
unidentified		Now it's kicking.
		Now I'm back at one.
		Heels and pins.
		Why that you've done?
		Watching back on.
		Till you return.
		I'm signing back for it.
		And watching you burn.
		Now it begins.
		Day after day.
		This is my life.
		To keep the way, the way to...
		To keep the way, the way to...
		To keep the way, the way to...
		To keep the way, the way to...
		Want to 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 to the Rockies, call toll-free 800-825-5033.
		From west to the Rockies, call 800-618-8255.
		International callers may reach ART by calling your in-country sprint 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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		It's not really easy for me to accept, you know, everything in this article, because if I do, the American Southwest, I mean, remember, folks, you're listening to somebody right now who's 20 miles from Death Valley.
		Death Valley, one of the more unsustainable places in the entire world, along with Phoenix, I guess, without a lot of power, so that you can be cool enough to live because it gets to unlivable temperatures.
		Of course, you know, Vermont is not exactly any treat either in the middle of the winter.
		We'll be right back.
		The End Be aware that whether or not you call about this, I still may pummel you with these questions.
		I am really, really curious about these questions.
		How much reality sort of the American people can accept?
		This may be beyond what they can accept reasonably.
		I really have considered it.
		Anyway, here we go.
		To the phone lines, we go.
		First time caller line, you are on air.
		Good morning.
unidentified		Hello.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Hi.
unidentified		Hi.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		What's your name?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		First name, please.
unidentified		This is James.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay, James.
unidentified		Winona, Minnesota.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes, sir?
unidentified		Yes.
unidentified		One question, or the answer to your question is gas price?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		The question was, at what pump price would your life, as you have it now, be unsustainable?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Maybe you wouldn't be able to get back and forth afford to get back and forth to work, whatever.
unidentified		I would say roughly around $4.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		About $4, huh?
unidentified		Yes.
unidentified		I'd say at that time I would be working with my family, and we would try to pull together and try to do all our chores and shopping and all that?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Let's go backwards a little bit.
		Because the first question, I guess, is the most relevant.
		Do you think the crisis, as I outlined it through that article, is real?
		Is it real?
unidentified		I don't really think so.
		But I don't have enough information to really determine.
		But I don't think there is.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Meaning you think that there's enough oil in the ground to go round?
unidentified		For some time.
unidentified		I mean, obviously I don't know what's down there.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, as the price of the pump goes from $4, say, to $5, you know, then things begin to happen on their own, sort of, right?
		Yes.
		And so it could really get rough out there.
		It really could.
		And it could get to the point where people, I guess, get down to whether they would steal or even kill to feed their family, or would they see their family starve to death?
unidentified		No, I wouldn't think so.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Probably not, huh?
		And then the question then shifts to the whole country and whether, as a nation, you know, most presidents we've had, in all my memory as an adult, have said that we would, in a second, go to war to protect access to the Persian Gulf so the oil could keep coming.
		We would go to war for that.
unidentified		Yes, I think we would.
		There's a lot riding on it right now, I would say.
		Once these alternatives come around and are, you know, we can afford them.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, this council article is pretty rough on the alternatives.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		It was like saying there's none that really will work, not to replace what we're losing.
unidentified		Right.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		It'll be a different world.
		All right.
		Thank you very much for your responses.
		I appreciate it.
		It would be a very different world.
		You know, he's sort of, I'm not sure that I'm as pessimistic as Kunsler is in this article.
		He is pretty pessimistic.
		And you know me, I can be very pessimistic and cynical and all the rest of it.
		And I don't think it's going to get, I hope it's not going to get down to that.
		But one can see that if anything could do it, this would be what could do it.
		Wildcard line, you're on the air.
unidentified		Hi.
		Hi, excellent topic you have tonight.
		Arts, Robert from Los Angeles.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes, sir.
unidentified		Yeah, I mean, this is sort of a no-brainer.
		Our government's being run by the oil corporations.
		I mean, Ronald Reagan was funded by Arco Oil, and the Bush administration, the mobile, ExxonMobil, was hiding deep with.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And all this is just, sir, oil is propelling our nation.
		These presidents have to be oil presidents right now, anyway.
		Until it's gone, and then we're going to need somebody else.
unidentified		You remember when the artificial prices went up really quick, and everybody wondered, why is oil going up so high?
unidentified		And the barrel is still only $21 a barrel of oil.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I remember.
unidentified		And then they go, oh, my God, you know, we forgot to raise the price of oil.
		So they dropped gas down for a couple weeks.
		And then they tried to figure out how to manipulate it again.
		It raised up, and they're investigated.
		And they investigated it four or five times.
		And they said, okay, let's raise the price of the barrel of oil.
		So you get some manipulation.
		They're just taking advantage of the stealing, doing the same thing.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		With China and India now, it's up to $55 a barrel.
		There's no such thing as local oil really anymore.
		I mean, it's all world spot oil, so it's the world price.
		You know, whatever.
		It's a demand market.
		We want the oil.
		We'll pay X number of dollars.
		We'll get it for now.
		But at some point, there won't be any sell at any price almost.
		Or at least before we ever get to that conundrum, we get to the we can't afford it anyway price.
unidentified		Yeah, yeah.
		But, you know, everybody's heard this.
		They're intentionally holding back oil to drive the price up.
		And then they're coming back to say that we need to stock our military surplus and reserves and all this and that.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay, so you don't believe that the crisis is real at all.
unidentified		The crisis is in the White House.
		If we were to have accidentally a Democrat and a president, there would be lawsuits and people in prison like Enron.
		There would be people in jail right now.
		Gas would be, there would be a lawsuit settled, and the gas price would be adjusted to about 59 cents a gallon of compensation from the...
		Due to a lawsuit.
		Yeah, they would say, well, offset the price.
		This is how much you've gouged everybody, and 59 cents for approximately two years.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		I accept what you've said, but I think it's delusional.
		I don't think any lawsuit's going to bring oil down to 59 cents a gallon.
		None of us are going to live to see that again.
		I'm sorry, I don't buy into that because it is a world price.
		It's not just the U.S. that wants oil anymore.
		It's not just the U.S. buying oil.
		Hell, some of our oil from Alaska goes to Japan, right?
		And then we import oil from elsewhere.
		And so this is a world oil price.
		It's not a U.S. oil price, even though I'm sure our oil companies manipulate the hell out of prices sometimes.
		You know they do.
		We all know they do.
		Summertime comes, we drive, they raise the price of gas.
		But this is kind of beyond that.
		These questions that I'm asking go beyond that.
		Go beyond the little annoyances and misdoings that they might have done.
		This goes to the world's supply of oil.
		And that's out of even their hands.
		East of the Rockies, you're on here.
unidentified		Hello.
		Is this East?
		Yes.
		Oh, okay, Art.
		It's Diane in Southwest Florida.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, good morning, Diane.
unidentified		Good morning.
		I think it's all a conspiracy, and I'll tell you why.
		57% of our oil comes from Mexico and Canada.
		We don't even get that much from the Mideast.
		When boots first touched down in Iraq, the soldiers, if you'll remember, when it was live on the news nationwide, their boots were being soaked with oil just walking on the ground.
		And they were worried about the one huge oil well there in Takrit because it has enough oil in it, they said right on the nation's news, to do every man, woman, and child out of that one oil well alone for the next 300 years.
		And then now, all of a sudden, two years later, they're forgetting that this was on the TV.
		OPEC does not set the prices for oil the mercantile up in New York does.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, it's a world spot price.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		It's not just the U.S. It's the same price China pays, everybody else.
unidentified		And as for food, I would grow my own, and if somebody come to steal my food, I would kill them.
unidentified		But I would not go out and kill someone else for their food.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Even if it came down to your family starving.
unidentified		I would not let my family starve.
unidentified		I would go out, plow the ground.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		When they came to take your lettuce, you'd riddle them, fill them full of lead.
unidentified		Yes, I would shoot them.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Got it.
unidentified		All right.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Thank you very much for the call.
		And take care.
		It's going to be, I think, instructive for many of us to listen to what people say this morning.
		Don't take everything you hear as gospel.
		You know, people hear a lot of things.
		It doesn't make them so.
		Certain statistics regarding, for example, the amount of oil in Iraq may or may not be true.
		I don't know about supplying every man, woman, and child for 300 years.
		I'm not sure all the known reserves are going to do that.
		West of the Rockies, you're on the air.
		Hello.
unidentified		Hi there.
unidentified		It's Sean in Vancouver, Canada.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Sean, you're going to have to raise your voice a little.
		You'd not hear that.
		Much better.
		Close to the phone there.
unidentified		All righty.
		Yeah, I think there's a lot of contravesty with pricing and delirium about what's out there and what's not.
		And I think, much as I hate to say it, I think there's just too much decadence in our politics and too much, how can I say, corruption given Iran-Contra.
		I mean, I don't know how you feel about the Marines' participation in that.
		my son and I are fourth and fifth generation armed forces up here and we just think that a lot of lies are being told, a lot of lives are being wasted and you've got the Cheney News Network or the Carlisle News Network being one thing for Bush.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right, so you think this whole oil thing is baloney?
unidentified		I think they're leading us into a global tyranny scenario where they want to lock us down based on all sorts of diversions and strife.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You're saying a lot of words, but you're not answering the question yet.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Is the whole oil crisis real or not real?
unidentified		I think more than likely it's not real and their profit margins prove that.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, their profit.
		That's an interesting comment.
		Their profit margins are pretty incredible, all right.
		They're making tons of money.
		I've got article after article after article here and I've got something or another somewhere on what the you know their record profits.
		I can tell you right now without reaching the article.
		Yeah, here we go.
		All right.
		This is in pounds.
		The announcement of world record profits for both Shell and BP in recent weeks has sparked a debate in the UK over the need for a proposed windfall tax on oil company profits, a windfall tax.
		BP enjoyed annual profits of £8.7 billion.
		Oh, baby.
		A rise of 26% on the previous year.
		Shell recorded profits of $9.4 billion for the year, around a million an hour.
		A million pounds an hour.
		So they're making a lot of money.
		There's no question about that.
		International line, you're on the air.
		Good morning.
unidentified		Good morning.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Hi.
unidentified		How are you?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I'm fine.
unidentified		Great.
		Thank you for allowing me to answer the questions, Mr. Bell.
		First of all, I'd like to say.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay, this is art.
		There's no one else here.
		I'm the only one.
unidentified		Well, thank you.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So you want to try them, huh?
unidentified		Yeah.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Do you think the crisis is real or baloney?
unidentified		I actually think it's quite real, or it's starting to obviously grow into something that's going to make our eyes wake up.
		Maybe look at going to, you know, Soya Bean for gas.
		I think that might be a good option also to, you know, for our environment.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay, so you think it's real?
		I do.
		That means that you think, well, you're going to have to have a lot of other opinions then.
		For example, every day now we go to the gas station and, oh, man, oh, baby, there's a lot of shock there.
		I mean, really, a lot of shock.
unidentified		Every Monday morning.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, you've got it.
		So, I mean, it just rises like crazy.
		At what price?
unidentified		Well, I'm in Canada, so right now we pay approximately, well, tonight it was 83.5 cents a liter, so there's four liters in a gallon.
unidentified		So for American viewers, we're currently paying in London, Ontario, $3.34 a gallon.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yikes.
		We don't have viewers in either country.
		We have listeners, though.
unidentified		Oh, yes, I have.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And so, so $3.34 or so per gallon.
unidentified		Yes, per gallon.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		Where would it have to go before it began truly negatively impacting your life?
		Or is it already?
unidentified		It actually is.
		I mean, that's a lot of money.
		And when you drive, you know, every day to work, and some of us here in our community have to drive more than half an hour.
		So, you know, it's not putting $20 in the tank every week.
		It's now going up to $40 a week.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That's right.
unidentified		And all these people that are buying these huge SUVs and hummers that live in a huge city, I don't think they require those kind of vehicles.
		And I get a little bit upset.
		I know it's a stigma that, okay, great, you've got tons of money.
		Do it in a better way.
		Donate some money.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, something really weird happened to us.
		I mean, back in the 70s, the old boat anchors that were getting no mileage to speak of at all, they all went up on the market when gas got short, along with people's tempers, I might add.
		I lived through that time.
		Man, they were fighting at gas stations.
		Fist fights were breaking out.
		It was terrible.
unidentified		It really was.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And we latched onto the Japanese economy car, and then all of a sudden, oil got plentiful again, and the big cars, even bigger cars, bigger than before.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		They came back, and now we've got great big boats out there.
unidentified		And why aren't we tapping into our oil lines here in Alberta?
unidentified		They won't, the government, and it always boils down to the government.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, I always had a kind of a cool, I think it's a cool theory that, say, Canada and the U.S. working together, and we probably do, that it was smart to keep our oil in the ground and buy other people's oil because eventually we're going to need that oil, so why not?
		It's cheaper.
		We don't have to transport it.
		It's sitting there in the ground.
		It's not going anywhere.
unidentified		Exactly.
		And I mean, with what's going on between the President and the Prime Minister, that's their story.
		I know that the Canadians and the Americans, I would hopefully think, would come together and say, let's work on our oil together and sell it to each other only.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Do you think that Americans and Canadians, I'll add Canadians, can accept the kind of reality that was in that story?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That's pretty hard stuff.
unidentified		I absolutely do believe in that.
		Myself, I'm only 20.
		I'm ready for reality.
		I think this whole world needs a reality wake-up call and maybe take a step back.
		I do believe the government is always hiding information.
		We can take that even from John F. Kennedy.
		They won't allow his files to open up for 75 years.
		Why do they have to hide things from us?
		Why is not only the Canadian government, but the American government, putting these ideas in our head that we're all five-year-olds and that we don't know how to look after ourselves with them shielding us.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Maybe because they don't know the solution themselves, and what's the point in panicking us if they don't know what to do?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I don't know, that's only one possibility.
unidentified		You know what, and I agree with that statement 100%, but I think they need to say, you know what, maybe not in our lifetime, Mr. Bell, but in the next lifetime, I think we really need to make our governments know that we all have the right to know exactly what's going on, whether it's going to hurt us.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Maybe in the next lifetime, like that guy was talking about, gas will be 59 cents, but we're not going to get to it in this lifetime anyway.
unidentified		Unless we go back to Star Trek ways, right?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That's right.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Now, if it came down to it, this is a zinger, you know.
unidentified		It is.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		It came down to it, would you steal or kill to feed your family?
unidentified		I would steal.
		I would steal enough for my family and my neighbor.
		I would not kill.
		And if someone came to my door and I had food, I would not kill them.
		I would share with them.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		If it got down to the point where the whole country was going into a deep depression, people were losing jobs, this country was going to hell in a handbasket, would you support the United States going to war to obtain energy supplies?
unidentified		No.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You would not.
unidentified		I would not.
		I would ask that the Canadian and the American government work together and let's get some farm fields going and let's support our farmers.
		I mean the farmers in America and Canada.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		But what if that wouldn't?
		This biodiesel thing, I'm all for that for what little it can do.
		Or maybe it can do a lot.
		We should immediately start on that.
		But what if that's not enough?
		What if our country was headed for Chin Pan Alley and, you know, on our knees and some country was preventing us from getting Mideast oil?
unidentified		Right.
		That's great.
		I just feel that, you know, how many more innocent people do we have to kill for a liquid in the ground?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Some people would say as many as it takes.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		But I hear you.
unidentified		I'm a young hippie.
		I was born in the wrong time.
		I really think, you know, this Lagine, ethanol fuel.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
unidentified		I really think we need to focus more on that.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		But if it's not enough of an answer.
unidentified		I know it's not.
		I see these smart cars.
		There's a few here in London.
		They look great, but I don't know.
		I guess I can.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Listen, we're out of time.
		I got to go.
		Thanks for calling.
unidentified		We love you.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yep, take care.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		At moon rising at least.
unidentified		I see trouble all the way.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		If you have a comment, here we are.
unidentified		I see earthquakes of lightning.
		I see bad times today.
		Don't pour out the night, but it's time to take your side.
		There's a bad moon on the rise.
		I hear hurricanes are blowing.
		I know the end is coming soon.
		I hear hurricanes are blowing.
		I hear hurricanes are blowing.
		I hear hurricanes are blowing.
		The warning's on them beer can't get buried in them landfills.
		No deposit, no bad stones, and no return.
		Yeah, it's only going to take about a minute to tell them factories both turn out and you don't have to turn your lights on just to see.
		The lights are going to be neon.
		They apply our death to paradise.
		and the whole damn world's gonna be made of styrene.
		So listen, will the brothers, when you hear the knife inside, and you see the water flying through the great polluted sky, there won't be no country music, there won't be no rock and roll, cause when they take away our country, they'll take away our soul.
		Oh, oh, oh, oh.
		To talk with Art Bell, call the Wild Guard 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 at 800-825-5033.
		From west of the Rockies, call 800-618-8255.
		International callers may reach ART by calling your in-country sprint access number, pressing option 5, and dialing toll-free, 800-893-0903.
		There's gonna be no rock and roll When they take away a country They'll take away Good morning, everybody.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		We're talking about oil, gas, and whether it's all coming to an end.
		Really, that's the first and most important question.
		You believe this whole crisis is manufactured a real.
		It is a crisis.
		Now, I think it's real.
		I must tell you, I do think these peak oil things are real.
		There's less than there was, and worldwide, the year 2005, that's what dropped me.
		year that's peak oil for the world You know, I've had plenty of guests on about peak oil and about the crisis and the economic side of it and all the rest.
		None seem to fit entirely tonight.
		And so I told the producers, forget it.
		You know, forget it.
		Stop trying.
		We'll just go to the audience and talk about this.
		That's what we're going to do.
		First time caller line, you're on here.
unidentified		Hello.
		Hello, Art.
		Hi.
		My name is Brian.
		I'm in Tucson, Arizona.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yo, Brian.
unidentified		I want to answer five questions as concisely as we can.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Let's take them one at a time, man.
unidentified		Okay, number one, do I believe that the oil crisis is real?
		I do believe it.
		I don't necessarily agree with the predictions.
		I mean, you had a guest, I don't know if it was you or George the other night, had a guest about climate change and the erroneous predictions they have about the timeline of specific events.
		I don't necessarily know that we understand when certain things are going to come to head.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Actually, sir, I think that with climate, just you know, stick with that for a second, Kilimanjaro is sticking its bare self up to the world right now about 15 years before they thought it was going to happen.
		So if they're wrong, they seem to be wrong on the conservative side, not the other side.
		And anyway, you do think there is a crisis.
unidentified		Oh, I certainly do.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		At what pump price would your life not be sustainable at current levels?
unidentified		I have never owned an automobile, so at this time, it doesn't concern me.
unidentified		Or maybe I don't know in which ways it concerns me, but I don't actually own a vehicle, so I don't worry about that.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Wow.
unidentified		Wow.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, I bet you buy stuff at a store, don't you?
unidentified		Sure do.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You know what, sir?
		There's all these truckers.
		I got a friend of mine, Tim.
		He's a ham operator going out.
		He does it five days a week.
		He goes from like Kansas City to Utah and other places, and he carries all the stuff that you buy at the store.
		And he keeps stopping and putting like 190 gallons of diesel in his truck every few hours, you know?
unidentified		Yeah, I guess from catching your drift, I suppose that does affect me.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		As prices go up, even if you're walking to the store.
unidentified		Yeah.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So if it came down to it, would you kill or steal to feed your family?
unidentified		I mean, the most apocalyptic kind of view of things, I could certainly see myself stealing.
		And having said that, I sure as hell hope that I would never have to kill.
		But, I mean, at what point?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		But you're not ruling it out.
unidentified		I'm not ruling it out in the sense that, you know, at what point do you say when you're looking out for number one, you turn the other cheek?
unidentified		I mean, really, it's hard.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That's you personally, and it is.
		That is me hard.
		All right, it's much harder, sir, for you personally to say what you just said, and I appreciate your honesty.
		But what about nationally?
		If the U.S. was on its knees and had to have oil, would you say the U.S. would go to war to get oil?
unidentified		I would not feel good about it.
unidentified		I mean, it would leave really lousy feeling in my belly.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Nobody ever feels good about war, though, huh?
unidentified		I just don't think it's the right thing.
		I think we really do need to pursue renewable energy.
		And I don't care the article you read, I don't really believe that it is that dismal for renewable energy.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I hope you're right, and that the person who wrote the article is wrong.
		Honestly, I hope you're right.
		I hope there is a ton of oil on the ground that we don't know about.
		I hope that the panacea that he described, the soft, refillable areas, will just suddenly magically fill up again.
		I hope all of that's true.
		But in my heart and in my mind, I know it's not.
		Wildcard line, you're on the air.
		Hello.
unidentified		Oh, hi, it's Jim from Cupertino.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes, sir.
unidentified		Yeah, well, yeah, we can go to the five questions.
unidentified		I forget if one of the questions deals specifically with whether it's a cartel or conspiracy, because I have conversations.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You know, in a way it does.
		In other words, do you believe the crisis is real?
		What was described in the article I read?
		Is that stuff mostly real?
		Are we running out of oil?
unidentified		Well, two quick comments.
		You know, one, I think the crisis is real.
		I think what's completely discounted in all the discussions is the technology that we don't know about yet.
		You know, a lot of these past in the 70s they said we were going to run out of food, and in the mid-90s, it didn't happen maybe because of genetic engineering.
		But, you know, some of these things don't turn out to be true because of technological changes.
		As far as conspiracies, you know, I think it'd be more of a conspiracy as to why every real estate sale in California goes for 6%.
		I mean, there's so many markets we can point to that are so much more tightly controlled than oil.
		So my comment on that is people forget how the dollar has slid on the world markets.
		Seriously.
		I mean, the cost of having a hotel in Paris right now is 50% higher than it was two years ago.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, that gets me.
		I stayed there.
		I love this.
unidentified		Did you get to Amsterdam on that trip or not?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, on another trip, yes.
unidentified		Okay.
		Well, yeah, regardless.
		So, you know, people forget that the dollar has slid.
		Of course, nobody needs to go to Paris, and people do need to drive to work.
		But let me just make sort of an unemotional economic point that it doesn't take into account personal pain, but all the cities and counties are strapped for cash right now, and all of the transit systems are just about bus.
		And so as gas goes up in price, not only do people use less of it, it's good for the environment, yada, da, but people are going to ride the public transit more.
		So in a strange way, this is good for the city's empty coffers.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		In a lot of areas, though, there is no mass transit to be riding.
unidentified		True.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And so anyway, the second question actually was at what pump price do you think your lifestyle would be unsupportable?
unidentified		Well, you bought gas in Europe.
		I mean, we were happy to cruise around at $5 a gallon a couple years ago, right?
		So, I mean, I'd have to peg it over $5 a gallon, you know, because for my lifestyle, if you look at Europeans, they've been doing it for a long time.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		But at $5 a gallon, your lifestyle would radically begin to change.
unidentified		Mine wouldn't, but it doesn't depend on a lot of driving in the first place.
		I have a bad back, so I've, you know, but I will say it'll make everybody happy to hear that my Chevy Suburban is parked right now.
		You know, partially because, you know, I have another car to use.
		It's cheaper when I need it.
		It has effects, but no, my lifestyle is not everybody's lifestyle.
		People really are pinched on this.
		You're right, you know.
		especially people that are on assistance or something.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, how do you think your brothers and sisters will behave when, you know, You're old enough, right?
unidentified		I remember.
		I was a kid.
		I remember the gas lines.
		Do you?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And the fights and all that stuff?
unidentified		Oh, yeah.
		It was 70-something, and I was a little kid, and I remember sitting in the car going, wow, why are we waiting so long?
		Oh, yeah.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		People were punching each other in the gas.
unidentified		We had odd days and even days in California.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yep, yep.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right, so, you know, are your brothers and sisters, if this really gets rough, going to protect themselves?
unidentified		Well, let me be comparative again.
		I mean, the latest hot sale at Macy's wasn't so clean either, you know.
		So, I mean, people are competitive, and the realistic answer to your question is, yeah.
		When there's a total economic breakdown, there'll be a total moral breakdown, and people will kill each other for resources.
		I mean, people kill each other for resources today in the form of armies.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Would you steal a kill to feed yourself or your family?
unidentified		Well, I mean, yeah, I mean, yeah, absolutely.
unidentified		I mean, to say it realistically, in that situation.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, that's all I want.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And then to extend that to the entire nation, if America was on its knees and someone somewhere had oil, which they probably will, the Saudis, whoever, would you support the U.S. going to war?
unidentified		Well, my promise I'll make this concise, but it's a bit of an answer because it's a comparative economic point again.
		If the U.S. is at its knees, then in the global economy, the world is at its knees.
		So if we continue our existing policy of working in concert with other nations to have military conquest to secure safe oil for everybody, then yeah, I support it.
		You know, our Alaskan oil goes to Japan.
		A lot of the Iraqi oil also goes to other places than us.
		True.
		So we are actually right now fighting for the rest of the world to keep oil.
		That's right.
		And so a final quick point.
		A 2% reduction in oil supply would cause the economic chaos that everybody's fearing.
		So people don't understand how critical it is to the world's functioning.
		Now, can we change our consumer habits?
		That's the answer.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That's a good question.
unidentified		I mean, look, we have 30 trillion in private debt.
unidentified		Everybody's worried about a government debt.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I know.
unidentified		So, you know, we could go on and on about this, but I hope I've been able to be a good guest and answer some of the questions and answer the final one honestly.
unidentified		Yeah, we would kill each other if it came down to it.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Thanks for the call, sir.
unidentified		You're welcome.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Thank you.
		Thank you.
		Take care.
		This is a pretty interesting study, isn't it?
		And people are obviously being very honest, which I very much appreciate.
		I really do.
		This is some crisis we face, and it's coming real quick.
		Not the part where we actually run out of oil.
		The point that a counselor was trying to make with the whole article was that, you know, all of these things that are going to start happening that are not so pretty are going to start happening soon much before we run out of oil.
		It's when it gets to an unsustainable point for y'all.
		That's when we're going to run into real trouble.
		East of the Rockies, you're on the air.
unidentified		Hello.
		Hi.
		You talking to me?
		Yes.
		Yeah, this is Kevin from Wilkesbury, Pennsylvania.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes, Kevin.
unidentified		Yeah, you know, I'd just like to point out something that I think is real obvious and how pathetic we are as a society these days.
		We've been around in existence as human societies for thousands of years.
		We've only depended on oil for 100 years.
		And why there's a crisis and why people would kill or steal or whatever because we can't find, we can't be more futuristic and look into other opportunities is pathetic.
		It shows how pathetic we are.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That's pretty general.
		Be more specific.
		We are dependent on oil now.
		Look around you, sir.
		You're telling me.
unidentified		We only have been for 100 years.
		For thousands and thousands of years, mankind has existed without.
		I agree with you.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I'm with you.
		Except even the phone you're holding in your hand is petroleum, sir.
		We're dependent on it now, so we can say 100 years ago, yeah, you're right.
		We didn't depend on it or more, but now we do.
unidentified		So because we've gotten ourselves brainwashed into using one energy source, we'll kill each other and destroy all society because we can't have the vision to look into other sources of energy such as nuclear or solar or whatever.
unidentified		There's all kinds of energies available right now that we could be using to reduce the amount of fuel that we're consuming.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I'm with you there.
unidentified		And why aren't these oil companies, see, I believe it is a conspiracy, and even if it's not, even if there is a genuine oil crisis, then why aren't the people who are making all this profit using that money to invest in other technologies for their children and their children's children?
		It's all about greed.
		It's all about making money.
		Why are we the people letting all, why are we just letting our lives be ruined by the few that are the only one who's not the only person?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I love you.
		You answer your own questions.
		I mean, you did that very well.
		You're right.
		Why aren't we having visions of wonderful, putting money in all these different technologies?
		Because we're greedy.
unidentified		Where's Congress on these issues?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		They're greedy too.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		They're greedy, too.
unidentified		Well, maybe they shouldn't be there.
		Maybe the people need to start voting for other people and getting these people out of office.
		Because, I mean, they have no vision.
		They're just going to drag it all down.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Remember the who, new boss, same as the old boss, right?
unidentified		Yeah, that's right.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, okay, that is right.
		And so I'm not sure that that, I'm not sure that's going to work.
		West of the Rockies, you're on the air.
		Good morning.
unidentified		Good morning, Alec.
		Scott, Anaheim, California?
		Yes.
		I myself believe that it is a conspiracy.
		I'm not one of those people who think that everything's a conspiracy.
		But three years ago, as I stated, I'm a resident of California, three years ago when we were having those rolling blackouts and brownouts.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, I know.
unidentified		And all of a sudden, if you would have told me, do you think it's a conspiracy, I would have said no and fought you tooth and nail on it.
unidentified		And then the Enron tapes came out.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I know.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I know.
unidentified		We were talking about shutting down a grid for the sole purpose of raising the price.
		And from that point on, yeah, absolute conspiracy.
		It really is.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, I'm not sure that the Enron debacle, and I read all the same stuff you did, it was sickening, but I'm not sure that that means that we're not eventually going to run out of oil.
unidentified		Well, they said it in the 70s.
unidentified		And again, I was 16, 15, 15, living in Pennsylvania at that time, but I've seen the news reports, the long lines right around the corner and everything.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, it was artificial, though.
		I mean, we were cut off.
		And so, yeah, it was a crisis, but it was because we were cut off, not because it didn't exist.
		I'm asking about a different question.
		What if it doesn't exist?
		What if we actually are running out of oil to the point Where it's going to get so expensive that people start beating the hell out of each other and worse.
unidentified		Right, indeed.
		And then the question is: would I kill or steal?
		Oh, yeah, indeed.
		Provided that that is the common norm.
		And you've got to understand, in an anarchy society, if that's a common norm, lest we forget, you know, there was people before guns came out, we were out there with big huge swords slicing them up.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So in a Mad Max world, you'd be maxized.
unidentified		Absolutely.
		There, yes, sir.
		Absolutely.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		What about the whole U.S.?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Would a war be justified if we need to go get oil?
unidentified		No, the United States will never do that.
		Really?
		Try to understand.
		Look at the common trend of the United States.
		We're the world's belief.
		We are the world's keeper.
		We are the, you know, we're all virgins in the United States.
		And so for us to go out and we would have to be the martyr.
		We would have to be the, we want oil.
		We're going to take your land.
		We should have taken Mexico a long time ago.
		Everyone says that.
		We should have taken Iraq a long time ago.
		Okay.
		We leveled Japan, as you will, Hiroshima and Nakasaki.
		And then they say, no, we're giving a bunch of money to build.
		Now there are threats to us in the marketplace.
		So we should have done a lot of things.
		For years, the United States has done nothing but the world police and nothing but a world's passing.
		You know, that we were supposed to go out and land and boy, you know, like this.
		So I cannot imagine a United States going to war over oil.
		I mean, it'll set us back years and years for what we try to do, you know, being how great we are.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I almost didn't get past where you said we were all virgins.
		All right, well.
		We wouldn't, huh?
		We wouldn't do anything like that.
unidentified		Not the U.S. We're too good.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		We're the world's caretakers.
unidentified		We would never, ever do such a thing.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Look at the guy down the street.
		He's got six apples I need.
		Boom.
		International line, you're on the air.
		Good morning.
unidentified		Good morning, Art.
		This is Jeff.
		I'm calling from Toronto.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Hey, Jeff.
unidentified		I don't want to appear for some of your American Patriot listeners to be American bashing or slagging you as a country, but the thing is, is that as an outsider looking in, I'm really getting sick and tired of you guys not walking the walk as opposed to just talking to talk.
		You always present yourself as being the world leaders.
		I would like to really genuinely see you guys doing something from an entrepreneurial standpoint of being the leaders that you always purport yourself as being.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Give me an example.
unidentified		Well, the thing is, is that it's so difficult for us here in Canada, knowing that we've got so much natural resources that you guys are just clamoring for because you're not prepared to bite the bullet and be conserving in your consumption.
		Now, unfortunately, because we are more of a Nordic country than you are, in as much as we have to deal with the meteorological conditions, we actually consume on a per capita basis more energy than you guys do, only because we have to heat our homes.
		Now, the thing is, is that you've got the automobile industry that we know in North America runs everything.
		Virtually the whole economy.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You began your call by saying we need to walk the walk.
		What do you mean by that?
		You want us to do what?
unidentified		I want to see you guys coming out with technology.
		Don't go around the rest of the world throwing your mite around, trying to show, you know, induce people into participating in democracies if they don't want to do it.
		For instance, Iraq.
		The amount of money that you guys have spent just being there is the amount of money that your own guests that you and George Norton have had on would be more than sufficient to turn that corner and get you guys going into solar energy, into wind energy, to get you off of the dependence on non-renewable fossil fuels.
		And it just, you know, like it just really, really hurts me as a human being when I see just the squandering of resources.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		We're squandering things, sir.
		Okay, listen, I got a break.
		We're at the bottom of the hour.
		I appreciate your call, sir.
		You're a Canadian call.
		We'll be right back.
		From the high desert in the middle of the night, if you can't tell already, this is going to be one rock and roll kind of night.
		I'm looking for something.
unidentified		Some of them want to use you.
		Some of them want to get used by you.
		Some of them want to abuse you.
		Some of them want to be abused.
		Some of them want to be abused.
		talk with Art Bell, call the wildcard line at area code 7757271295 The first-time caller line is area code 775-727-1222.
		To talk with Art Bell from East to the Rockies, call toll-free at 800-825-5033.
		From West to the Rockies, call ARC at 800-618-8255.
		International callers may reach Art Bell by calling your in-country sprint 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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You can believe this if all of this is true.
		maybe even if it isn't the big king of the road in the future you're definitely going to have to be a man of memes the the the
		By the way, if you're up to taking my little test when you call, all you have to do is indicate that, and we'll go rolling right through the questions with you, believe me.
		First time caller line, you are on the air.
unidentified		Hello.
unidentified		Yeah, Art?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes, sir.
unidentified		This is Scott Collin from Lake Mead, Nevada.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, hi, Scott.
unidentified		How you doing?
unidentified		Love your show.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes, sir.
unidentified		And anyway, you were reading the Rolling Stones article, and he was talking about alternative energies.
		And for some reason, whenever I hear people talk about alternative energies, they always talk about solar and all that stuff.
		But I never hear anyone say how we could vastly increase, and I mean vastly increase, the hydropower of the United States.
		There's two great books out, Cadillac Desert and Water Wars.
		Everyone ought to read them.
		They're mainly concerned, maybe you've read them, I don't know, but they're concerned mainly about water usage and things like that in the southwest.
		But they also talk about hydropower and how it can be increased.
		And, you know, and real quickly, first off, the capacities of all of our existing, now I'm 60 miles right now from one of the biggest hydro dams in the entire world, the Silver Dam.
		And that baby powers up a lot of stuff.
		And, you know, and it can be increased like double capacity with modernization and everything.
		And there's a lot of dams that could be done with that, applied.
		Secondly, Army Corps, and on these books I mentioned, the Army Corps of Engineers has a list of almost 2,000 dams and levees that could be, that are just strictly for irrigation now, but that they could, and they already exist.
		They don't have to be built or anything like that.
		All right.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Point well taken.
		There's hydroelectric power out there.
		It should yet be yielded.
		We still need oil.
		And do you believe this crisis over oil is real or fabricated?
unidentified		Well, I believe it's both.
		I believe that there is a conspiracy.
		But however, eventually the oil is either going to run out or it's going to be too expensive to extract.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, and at what price would your life change?
unidentified		Roughly $4 a gallon, I would say, vastly.
unidentified		I would have to do it.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		We do a lot of commuting in this country.
unidentified		Yes, we do.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		If necessary, and it came down to it, would you steal or even kill to feed your family?
unidentified		I wouldn't want to, but you know what?
		The important thing isn't what I would do.
		It's what the guy next door would probably do.
		See, I might be a peaceful guy, but he's going to kill me, so I'd have to kill him to protect myself.
		So it doesn't matter what the, you know, what I'm saying, I'm hearing the callers say yes or no.
		But, you know, if half the country is going to kill the other half, well, the other half has to kill them to protect themselves.
		You know what I mean?
		Yes.
		And so, and that's why, Art, the bottom line is, yes.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I got it.
		It's yes.
		Look, that's why I'm asking the question.
		And I understand it's not an easy question to answer, but I think I am getting honest answers.
		And so no matter whether it's some great conspiracy or it's really an oil shortage or both, as he said, when it finally gets down to it, it's going to be the Mad Max world that everybody feared.
		And you're going to be drawn into it whether you like it or not, was his point.
		If he should be of the half that wasn't intending to be violent, he would have to end up being in self-defense.
		Wildcardline, you're on the air.
unidentified		Good morning, Mr. Bell.
unidentified		How are you doing, sir?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I'm doing all right.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And where are you?
unidentified		i'm calling from kentucky i wanted to talk about Okay, is that better?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Ever so much, yes.
unidentified		Okay, very sorry.
		I've got several points or several questions that I have about the oil situation.
		Number one, I don't think it's as bad as it's being made to seem.
		I don't think it's as big of a crisis as we're being led to believe.
		Now, I know there's a crisis.
		I have a crisis every time I go to the gas pump and look at the price, and they have to come out and revive me because I've fainted.
		But I don't think it's as bad as they want to make it seem.
		If it is as bad, if they are running out of oil, like another caller asked, why aren't they looking for alternatives?
		They want to make money, so if they run out of oil, aren't they going to run out of money?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Maybe there isn't a viable alternative yet.
		I mean, there's a lot of things we can do.
		The last caller talked about more hydro dams, fine.
		Solar power, fine.
		Wind power, fine.
		But these are kind of local.
		And when you think of the scale required, not getting anywhere near what we need.
		And so if it gets down and dirty.
unidentified		Well, that's something else I wanted to talk about.
		If it does get down and dirty, if we're talking about the mad max world where it's just complete anarchy in the streets, I don't think it'll get to that point.
		The government, if you listen to the guests that you and George have on the show, we talk about the government wanting more control.
		They want to control our internet traffic, monitor it.
		They want ID tags.
		I mean, depending on who you listen to, they want to know where we're at every second of the day.
		So if you go by that idea that the government Wants more control, which we're being led to believe, do you think they're just going to turn the country over to anarchy, or are they going to have an answer for it?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I don't think anybody ever turns something over to anarchy.
unidentified		Well, that's true.
unidentified		I didn't necessarily meant that they're just going to step back and say, okay.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		No, I think they would do everything they could, but if real anarchy broke out, there aren't enough police or military to stop it.
unidentified		Right, and so what I'm thinking is perhaps they'll do something before it even gets to that point, that they will try to prevent that situation from ever arising, to squash the problem before it presents itself.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		One would hope.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I don't know what that would be.
unidentified		Do you?
		No.
		i do think that somebody's already got the answer it's been by i believe that it's more of a air and then Will you pass along my number?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Because I want to have that person on the show.
unidentified		I will do that, but I believe that in some dark CEO boardroom, there's probably somebody with an answer saying, okay.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, we know what it is, but let's use up all the oil first, and then we'll pull this one out of the bag.
		Man, I hope that's true.
		I know it's a popular opinion.
		It's very popular that there is some secret Magic bullet, but it will not be employed until the very last drop of extremely expensive oil is gouged from our bleeding pockets.
		I hope that's true.
		But I don't know.
		East of the Rockies, you're on the air.
		Hello.
unidentified		Yes, how are you, Mr. Billock?
		Listen, my name is Sla.
		I'm calling from Brooklyn, New York.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Your name is Sla?
unidentified		Yes, Sla.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That's a very unusual name.
unidentified		It's West African.
		Okay.
		Anyway, the Department of Energy has.
		I know you have these guests on your show talking about alien technology, but they have alien technology that we can use the water in the ocean as an energy.
		They have a function in.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		There's no proof of this, though.
unidentified		Well, of course, they're not going to say it exists because they don't want foreign countries to copy the technology, so they're going to deny its existence.
unidentified		But they have hydrogen fusion technology from alien craft that has been secured underground subterraneanly.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		well I hope you're right well you have these guests on the show Mr Bell so I'm I'm sure it doesn't sound I do but none of them have proven to me that underground somewhere lies you know alien technology that will save us from the whole It proved the government will not allow this information.
unidentified		Well, there's going to happen.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay, mine is that proof then.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Why do you believe this?
unidentified		I read the book.
		There's a book called Behold the Pale Horse that documents these subterranean alien propulsion systems that the government has.
		You see what they're waiting for?
		They're waiting for the world to reach a point where it's like anarchy.
		But this is one of the reasons why they did the assault weapons, man.
		They want to take the weapons away with the New World Order conspiracy with the United Nations and certain elements within the government.
		And then they want to go into the third world and take all their resources.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And take all the stuff away from the poor people.
		Alien technology, huh?
		Buried in the ground, just waiting for the moment.
		Well, again.
		I hope so.
		But I wouldn't bet my butt on it.
		And I don't think you ought to bet yours either.
		It would be nice.
		It really would be nice.
		But I just don't think it's so.
		And I don't think there's any proof.
		And short of that proof, we have to operate as though it's not there.
		West of the Rockies, you're on the air.
unidentified		Yes, Mr. Bell.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
unidentified		Good evening.
unidentified		It's a pleasure to talk to you.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And to you, sir.
unidentified		Yeah, I hear you on 3840 now and then.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		The handmade, yes.
unidentified		Hey, you know, I was, I think it was Alex Jones on his website.
unidentified		I was reading that the biggest user of petroleum in the United States is the Department of Defense.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes, probably true.
unidentified		And he quoted, I believe it was something like 2.1 million barrels a day that they use.
		And I thought that was rather interesting because, you know, you talk about going to war over oil.
		I think we, depending on who's in office, who the president is, I think they do it in a heartbeat.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So do I. I honestly do too.
		And most people, you know, I guess don't morally support such thing.
		But look, if it came down to the U.S. on its knees, and it could, if there really is an oil shortage, then I don't know.
		Countries go to war for economic reasons, and I think we would.
unidentified		I do too.
		And, you know, I guess Canada, you know, they have a tremendous amount of oil shale.
		And from what I understand, they've come up with some pretty good economical ways of separating it.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Still in all, though, shale is like a secondary oil resource that's in the category of that oil which is harder and more expensive to get to.
		So let's just say, for example, that we had to depend on shale right now as our only source of oil.
		What do you imagine the price per gallon of the gas station would be?
		Just a guess.
unidentified		Probably around $8 or $9 a gallon.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And if gas costs $8 or $9 a gallon, what do you think the economic condition of the United States would be?
unidentified		Oh, not good.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		We would be in a deep depression.
unidentified		Oh, yeah.
		Well, you know, we'd have to change some things, like go back to paper bags and, you know, stuff like that.
		But, you know, Stephen Greer is really, he's got contacts.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And from what he says, he's got contacts.
		So far, I really, nobody has more respect for Stephen Greer than myself.
		But I've hosted him on the show now for years.
		And he has been in search of the holy grail of energy, whether it has something to do or not with some sort of alien technology or just some new technology that somebody in their basement has invented.
		He's been talking to people.
		He's had leads.
		He's been hot.
		He's been cold.
		He's had leads that have fallen apart.
		He's come on the show so excited he could hardly speak and then been disappointed.
		And the Holy Grail has not yet appeared.
		International Line, you're on the air.
		From where are you calling, please?
		If I push the button.
		Now you're on the air.
		Hello.
		Where are you, sir?
unidentified		Actually, I'm calling from Canada.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Canada, okay.
unidentified		And I would like to say that I'm a supporter of the U.S. troops and think that they're, you know, doing a good job.
		Not like all Canadians here.
		Otherwise, probably.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, let's qualify what you're saying.
		I don't think too many Canadians think the U.S. troops are doing a bad job.
		I think some Canadians don't think the U.S. policy is right.
		Big difference.
unidentified		And I'd like to also comment on the oil crisis.
		I do believe it is an oil crisis.
		I believe in the 70s we had an oil crisis.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You're going to have to speak up good and loud.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So you don't think that it's real or you do?
unidentified		No, I do think it's real, yes.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes, uh-huh.
unidentified		Especially when China buys up 30% of the oil last year.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
unidentified		That puts a tremendous amount of pressure on the global.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Do you own a car?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Do you drive?
unidentified		No, I don't, actually.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, you don't own a car?
		No.
		How incredible is that?
		At one hour, I've got two people that don't even own a car.
		Wow.
		How do you get around?
unidentified		Well, I use the transit system.
unidentified		It's pretty good in Vancouver here.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Uh-huh.
unidentified		Okay.
		And it's kind of a necessity.
		I've been a student for the last three years.
		You can't afford the parking here in Vancouver, basically.
		Huh.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		How much do you pay to participate in the transit system on a regular basis?
unidentified		a bus transit ticket would run Canadian about $69 a month.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		sixty nine dollars a month how far would that go before Everything's going to go up.
unidentified		Oh, yeah.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		If this is really true, what we're talking about, this shortage, this next hard part of the oil to get to that's going to be so expensive, everything will go up in price.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So the question is, how far would it have to go up before it would be untenable for you?
unidentified		I don't know.
unidentified		I think it has to be compared to cigarettes then.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Cigarettes?
unidentified		I'm a smoker.
unidentified		I think I said, well, $3, they'll get up there, or $5, or $7, or, you know, they're like $10 Canadian.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		What, a pack of cigarettes?
unidentified		Yeah.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		A pack of cigarettes is $10?
unidentified		Yeah.
		And I'm still smoking.
		So that's a mackerel.
		Money comes from somewhere.
		I don't know.
		And I see a lot of hummers up here and a lot of big vehicles too.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, yes.
unidentified		It's not all so conservative up here.
		But in 1979, I used to work for an oil company for St. John B.C. And basically, there was a lot of natural gas fields that weren't on the books.
		So whatever that company, however it was in their books, it did not show as good fields.
		They were classed as dead fields.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, you know, we were kind of talking about this a little bit earlier.
		Domestic supplies, whatever the U.S. has left in the ground, we did peak, we'd gone past peak oil, like in 1970.
		But we've still got a fair amount of oil in the ground.
		I'm all in favor of leaving it there, and yours too, pretty much leaving it there and using up other oil around the world.
unidentified		No, that sounds good to me.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Seems wise.
		It seems wise.
		I had heard, for example, that long before we would hit $55 per barrel, that the pumping in California and all around the nation would be going full-tilt boogie, but it's not yet, really, is it?
		I mean, we're already at $55 a barrel, and you don't seem cranking up yet.
		So maybe that's the wrong price.
		Maybe it's got to be $75 a barrel, $100 a barrel, before it becomes interesting and productive to start our own wells up again to get what's left.
		I don't know.
		First time caller align, you're on the air.
unidentified		This is Stephanie from Delmar, California.
		Hello.
		Hello.
		I'm also an organic farmer.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, really?
unidentified		And I really like this talk of anarchy.
unidentified		If you've ever traveled on Southern California roadways, I think we already have anarchy on our roadways.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes, well, we do.
unidentified		Yes.
		And in terms of national food security, when I give talks on organic gardening and how to self-sustain yourself, the best thing that you can do for national food security is to buy local and grow local.
		And in Southern California, we now have only two farms left on coastal San Diego that actually produce food.
		I am one of them.
		The other farms in the area are not organic, and you must go far east in San Diego County to find farms anymore.
		And when those farmers, when their cost of transportation gets so great that they can't even take it to their local farmers' markets anymore, they will supply food to their community.
		What will these bedroom communities do without any local food sources?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		What about me out here in the desert?
unidentified		That's exactly right.
		It is a problem.
		And that article directly addresses the subject of agriculture.
		And if you realize that the reason that we have surpluses and that we're feeding the world is that it's a petroleum-based industry.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Absolutely.
unidentified		All of the maturity of the food throughout the world now is all produced with petroleum.
		And as that petroleum goes up in price, so will the average cost of every single item in the department store.
		The cotton that people wear on their backs, it takes almost a third of a pound of chemically produced products to produce a pound of cotton.
		Our whole world is based on petroleum.
		And unless people can take back more control of their lives, do without a little less, cooperate with their neighbors more, create community gardens, I mean, even if you take two people that have completely different points of view on ideology or religion or whatever it is, if you have one neighbor that's responsible for growing tomatoes and he may hate the guts of his other neighbor, but that neighbor is the one that's producing lettuce, don't you think those two people are going to get along a lot better?
		It has a lot of social implications to it in terms of local production of food and cooperative production of food.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		In the same sense that firearms make for a more polite society.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Hey, listen, you want to hold on through the break here?
unidentified		Yes, I will.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right, good.
unidentified		Hold on.
		Only in America can a guy from anywhere go to sleep a horror and wake up a millionaires.
		Only in America can a kid without a cent get a break and maybe grow up to be president.
		Only in America can a little opportunity for a classy girl like you or a poor boy like me.
		Only in America can a kid who's watching cars take a giant and retry.
		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 at 800-825-5033.
		From west of the Rockies, call 800-618-8255.
		International callers may reach ART by calling your in-country sprint 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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		From the Detroit Free Press, March 25th, gas prices, the headline, Count yourself lucky, but push for real solutions.
		Here in Car Country, it's near impossible to see a silver lining in the eye-popping prices at the gas pump these days.
		But a glance around the globe makes it pretty clear that Metro Detroit motorists and Americans in general are more fortunate than one might believe.
		As this nation screams about paying an average $2.13 a gallon, gas is through the roof in places like Italy, $6 a gallon.
		France, $5.60 a gallon.
		This tale of two continents is in no way dismissing the impact on the U.S., where people are driving farther in larger cars that demand big gulps of gas.
		And in this region, the increase is hurt even more because there is no other option to driving.
		Reliable mass transit remains a motor city pipe dream, but it's well past time for all American motorists to understand just how much of a bargain they've enjoyed.
		Prices are only going to get worse as the popularity of cars grows in more populated parts of the world.
		In other words, the price concerns of U.S. drivers will continue to take a backseat to the growing gas-guzzling places like China and India.
		The newly minted middle class, which numbers in the millions in those countries, is snapping up cars fast as automakers can roll them out.
		Well, that's good for Detroit, I guess, right?
		And each of their purchases only drives the cost of crude oil, already in short supply around the world, that much higher.
		Combine that with a federal regulation requiring most states to switch to cleaner-burning summer gas blends in April.
		And that explains why gas prices are moving up so fast lately.
		Like it or not, America's days of being in the driver's seat when it comes to gas prices are history.
		In Metro Detroit, motorists would be better off pressing government leaders to embrace mass transit than to expect a return of prices of, say, $175 or even $190 a gallon.
		It's certainly an easier route than holding out hope that President Bush will come to the defense of drivers with an energy policy that amounts to more than efforts to drain the nation's reserves while walking a rather diplomatic tightrope with oil-producing countries.
		unfortunately the kind of forward-thinking american needs seems to be about as hard to find as a cheap gallon of gas uh...
		Rodney in San Luis Obispo, actually not a bad part of California, kind of farming country there, but nevertheless, he says, and it might resonate with this young lady, hey, Art, scary to think what will happen here if the food supply should happen to the supermarkets, would stop for more than a few days, Art.
		Look, most of us produce absolutely nothing here anymore.
		So he's right, isn't he?
		I mean, that's what you were saying, that you grow your own, so you'd supply locally, but people further away, they'd probably be out of luck.
unidentified		That's absolutely right.
unidentified		And if you consider that the average item on a supermarket store has to travel somewhere around 1,400 petroleum miles to get there, you can just do basic math and figure out what food prices are going to be going to get.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, you see, I didn't know that.
		Is that true?
		The average item travels 1,400 petroleum miles?
unidentified		That's correct.
unidentified		That's correct.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Holy mackerel.
unidentified		Well, when you consider how NASA and our globalization has brought down barriers for importing food into the United States, if a merchandiser can buy, for example, corn at much cheaper coming out of Mexico, where we do not even have the same regulations in terms of the chemicals that can be applied to it, that merchandiser will buy it from there, import it with subsidized cheap petroleum products, and bypass the local farmer.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So about this crisis, you think it's real?
unidentified		I definitely do.
unidentified		You do.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		At what pump price, I'm assuming that you have a car or vehicles and do buy gas occasionally?
unidentified		That's correct.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And at what price would your life begin to get?
unidentified		I would agree with another one of your callers that it would be somewhere around $5 to $6.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		In other words, where Europe is now.
		Would you steal or kill if you had to feed your family?
		I mean, your answer is going to be I'd grow my own.
unidentified		Well, actually, it's the other way around.
unidentified		I have taken great precautions over the years To make sure that I am not identifiable from the road as a food-producing farm, and I have made landscaping precautions against what I fear is going to be coming.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, my God.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
unidentified		But I'm not the only one.
unidentified		We farmers that talk speak this language among ourselves.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I'm very thankful you came on the air this morning.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Do you think the United States, if it needed to do so, would go to war in a second for energy?
unidentified		Well, I think we have been.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Good answer.
		Thank, thank you so very much.
		What a good call.
		He's right.
		We already have been.
		I suppose there are other geopolitical reasons to be in the middle of the Middle East, but you can bet oil is definitely one of them.
		That was a good call.
		Wildcardline, you're on the air.
		Hello.
unidentified		Hi, Art.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Hi.
unidentified		This is Jim in Colorado.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yo, Jim.
unidentified		Hey, Art.
unidentified		Do you ever feel like that guy on the movie Network that you're mad a second you're not going to take this anymore?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes, sir.
unidentified		Well, you know what I'm angry about?
		Is the fact that, yes, this energy crisis is real, but it's actually coming upon us like 20 or 30 years premature.
		And the American people, and obviously your show hasn't had anybody on to say anything about what the real true problem is, and it's not the availability of crude oil.
		It is our ability to refine it and ship it in pipelines around our own country because our refinery systems and our pipelines are in disrepair.
		And there was a Saudi Royal on TV just the other day that said, look, it's not a problem with the availability of crude.
		We can send you as much as you can handle, but it's the fact that you cannot refine it.
		So what's the use?
		He said that right on national TV.
		We are not able to refine enough oil, which is the fault of who knows who that is.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, nobody wants a refinery in their backyard, sir.
unidentified		Right, but that's the reason, Art.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Not my backyard.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Build it over there behind me.
unidentified		Yeah, but Art, the existing refineries that we have in our nation have been allowed to be just going to like a third world condition, Art.
		That's the reason why we are in this energy crisis.
		Not because the crude oil is not available.
		And yes, the peak oil thing and everything you read from that article is true.
		And it would eventually grab a hold of us.
		Everything you said was true.
		But it's premature.
		It should not have happened to us for 20 or 30 or who knows how long.
		We should be able to.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And yet the effects of it are beginning now.
		I mean, look at the gas prices.
		We go two or three steps forward, one step back, and everybody goes, shh.
		And then we go two steps forward again.
		Gas prices are very quickly going to be to the point where, you know, it's causing people to go bust.
unidentified		But am I ringing through here?
		It's the number one problem, or I hope someone that has, you know, authority in this, and I'm just a layman, but from what I've heard, the number one problem is our inability to refine the crude that we could be sent.
		Saudi Arabia could send us as much as we could ask for.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, inexplicably, we haven't built new refineries.
		The ones we have are getting old.
		In fact, the explosion they had down in Texas the other day, part of it, I guess, was safety and old stuff.
		And I don't know, they'll make some determination, but it is old stuff, and there's not much of it.
unidentified		And I heard just several years ago, just on a sideline story when I really wasn't even paying attention to the energy crisis, you know, particular, there's some problem somewhere around Illinois and the Mississippi River where there's broken pipes.
		There's like a flow problem of our oil in this nation.
		All right.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, no matter what it is, if it comes down to Mad Max time, would you kill or steal if necessary to feed your family?
unidentified		Oh, yes, I would, but not people.
		I'd kill animals.
		It depends on if you're talking about people who are going to be stuck in their suburban homes or people who are willing and are planning on being nomadic.
		In Colorado, I would just head to the hills and be a hunter and a gatherer, a fisherman.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		A hunter or gatherer, huh?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Right back to the old Stone Age or something.
unidentified		Well, if I had to.
		But my personal goal as a Christian is to have an underground communication with my fellow Christian brothers and we can survive with each other.
		But, you know, that's a totally different subject.
		But if you're talking about just the average suburban person in their house, if they're going to stay put, they're going to be forcing themselves to be in a position where they're going to have to kill or defend themselves and kill.
		You know what I mean?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
unidentified		You know, the right thing to do is to plan ahead like that lady, the previous caller, you know, preparing her farm.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, but you heard her attitude, though.
		I mean, her attitude was she's already taken steps to hide what she's doing.
		Because she knows what it's going to come down to.
unidentified		Mark, oh, yeah, that's what we have to do.
unidentified		But if people are going to sit in their suburban homes and depend on the two boxes of water that they buy from King Supers every month and they think they're doing good and stocking up and everything, if they're depending on that, they are going to live in the Mad Max scenario.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Appreciate your call, sir.
		Thank you very much.
		Most people are going to stick it out in their suburban homes, right?
		One of the points made in the article was about suburbia.
		Forget exactly what he said, but he said it's going to be regarded as one of the biggest tragic things that America ever did was build suburbia.
		I forget the exact, let's see.
		He said, suburbia will come to be regarded as the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world.
		It has a tragic destiny.
		East of the Rockies, you're on the air.
unidentified		Hi.
		Hi, Erd.
		It's Larry from Schenectady, New York.
		Hi, Larry.
		The other guy kind of spoiled my thunder about the refineries there, but I don't think a lot of people realize how environmentalism is actually affecting the price of oil and the price of gasoline.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I wonder how much it actually is.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Do you know?
unidentified		Actually, I'll give you a good example here.
		I'm a truck driver and an independent truck driver.
		I had a 1994 truck, and I was getting approximately 7 miles a gallon.
		I bought a 2003, and I was getting 5.7.
		So when I took it into mechanic, because that just didn't seem right because it was an identical truck, he told me that in order to pass the environmental emissions, They had to set the truck up so it would not completely burn the fuel.
		And instead of blowing smoke out the stack, it makes soot and drops into your lubricating oil.
		So now you're burning more fuel, and you're changing your lubricating oil twice as often.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And, you know, as a trucker, especially as an independent trucker, that means you buy your own fuel, right?
unidentified		Yeah.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, baby.
unidentified		And I pay for my own lubricating oil, so they've upped my expense pretty well 25%.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		25%?
unidentified		Pretty close.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Are you able to pass that on, or what do you do with that 25%?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That's a hell of a big bite.
unidentified		I'm able to pass on probably 35 to 40% of the 25%.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, that's still a pretty big bite out of you.
unidentified		It is still a pretty big bite.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And if it doubles and triples that, at what point do you have to park your truck and say it's over, baby?
unidentified		I'm getting close to that point now.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You are?
unidentified		Yeah, it's, well, between the taxes that we're paying and everything else, it's just they want your income tax, they want your fuel tax, they want your highway tax, which adds a lot onto the expenses as well.
unidentified		And then they start adding fuel on, and the rates just aren't keeping up.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, that's frightening.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Do you think that most independents are in the kind of place you are?
unidentified		I think a lot of them are feeling a pinch.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And I really shouldn't limit it to that.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I mean, even the big trucking companies, they're really by scale facing the same thing.
unidentified		Well, if you took a mile per gallon and multiplied it by 100 trucks, you can just imagine what they're spending extra.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I can.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		The independence, you guys, are going to fall first, of course.
unidentified		Yeah, we'll end up driving for the big guy.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Is that the decision you would make?
unidentified		That would probably be the only decision I could make because, to be quite honest, there are manufacturing jobs that aren't around anymore that pay what I can make out here.
unidentified		Even driving for somebody else.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Do you think this whole thing's real or put on?
unidentified		I think pretty well put on.
		And the proof being, like he said, the refineries are running right now at near 100% capacity.
		Right.
		So if you pumped another 20 million barrels of oil a day, well, we can't refine it.
		It can't get to the stations.
		It can't get to the pumps because they can't refine it fast enough.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, no matter whether it's a big conspiracy or not, if it gets down to the Mad Max place, would you steal or kill to feed your own family if you had to?
unidentified		Oh, in a heartbeat.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay, I really appreciate your call.
		Thank you in a heartbeat.
		That's what he said, in a heartbeat.
		And I would say, I don't know, what, 50, 60% of the people have basically said that, maybe not in a heartbeat, but said the same thing.
		That's a pretty sobering thought, isn't it?
		Very sobering thought, actually.
		Well, let's do the Rockies.
		You're on the air.
unidentified		Good morning.
unidentified		Oh, good morning, Art.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Hi.
unidentified		This is Easter.
unidentified		What a day, huh?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes, what an Easter.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		What is your first name?
unidentified		They call me the Mercury Man, basically, Art.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Why?
unidentified		I'm out here in Seattle, Washington.
		And about seven years ago, you had a guest on Dr. Randall Eaton.
		Yes.
		And that night, it was like the orchestra sent a message to you basically saying that we had pretty well, you know, trashed the planet.
		And from that time on, kind of this theme started running through the show.
		And so we started to see that the guests and everybody who worked on brain research and so on and so forth never really brought up the issue of mercury when it was all around us.
		And it's listed as the ultimate neurological poison.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		What does this have to do with gas and oil?
unidentified		Well, because it's all loaded with mercury.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That's true, I guess, huh?
unidentified		Yeah, and when you, the article you just read, he mentioned mercury.
		So you're burning the mad adder's disease, plus, it's the ultimate carcinogen.
		So you're burning like so many gallons of cancer per mile.
		And what we're griping about is how much we have to pay a gallon for cancer.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I suppose you could make the argument that way.
unidentified		So we wrote a book based on this from what the guests were saying and tried to bring it to the end so we had some way to have some hope for getting out of this because mercury as a poison has a shelf life.
unidentified		It's listed as eternal.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, what is the way to get out of it?
unidentified		Well, I would imagine that the research in the Stanford pods show us that we're going to have to basically create a miracle.
unidentified		And so when you were interviewing Dr. Eaton, you had a couple callers call in that said that orcas had the ability to heal, like with autistic children.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, you know, I should say I remember now all of that, the orcas and all the rest of it.
		And I think it's all wonderful and warm and fuzzy feeling, but I don't think that it really addresses the question we're dealing with here.
		And I don't think the orcas are going to save the world for us, nor make the decisions about petroleum and wars and all the rest of that for us.
		So as interesting as Dr. Eaton was to listen to with respect to that subject, I think that it's completely separate from this.
		International line, you're on the air.
		Hello.
unidentified		Yes, hi, I'm calling from Montreal.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Montreal?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay, welcome.
unidentified		One of the reasons I'm calling, I have to be honest with you, Mr. Bell, is there was an earlier call from Canada.
unidentified		I believe it was Toronto.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes, you're going to have to yell at us.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You're not too loud.
unidentified		Sorry, I'll speak to you.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		From Toronto, yes.
unidentified		Yeah, there was an earlier call from Toronto, and you responded towards the end saying thank you for your Canadian call.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
unidentified		With a sarcastic tone.
unidentified		I'm wondering what exactly you meant by that.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, exactly.
		There was intended to be a little bit of sarcasm there.
		He was coming down on us.
unidentified		I'm asking you.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And I'm telling you.
		He was coming down on Americans pretty hard.
		So I simply mentioned that thank you for your Canadian perspective call.
unidentified		Okay.
unidentified		Yeah.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		But if you want to echo what he said, go ahead.
unidentified		No, to be quite honest, it's not exactly that I want to echo what he said because I don't necessarily support everything he said, but I do, living in this country, obviously with an outsider perspective in terms of the United States, I understand where he's coming from.
		And quite frankly, I think that people in your country miss out on opportunity to look at the big picture, if you will.
		I mean, Europeans have that advantage, Asians have that advantage, and Canadians, and I guess Mexicans have that advantage.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You're so hard to hear.
		You're going to have to yell, sir.
		Yell at us.
unidentified		Okay, I'm sorry.
		I'm saying that unfortunately sometimes for citizens of the United States, you don't have the advantage of being able to see the big picture.
		That's not necessarily your fault.
		Like I say, the advantage that other Canada, Mexico has, Europeans have, and Asians have.
		And I'm not calling because I'm anti-American at all.
		That's not the point.
		And I don't think that's what the other caller was trying to get across.
		But I do think that it's a problem for the entire.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right, I'll tell you what.
		I'm at a breakpoint.
		Would you do me a favor and hold on there in Canada?
		Can you hold on?
unidentified		I can do that.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right, good.
unidentified		Hold on.
unidentified		Hold on.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, baby.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		From the high desert, this is Coast to Coast AM.
unidentified		The mountains high and the valleys so deep You can't get up to the other side Don't you give
		up, don't you cry Don't you give up to me Reach the other side I don't know me, baby, I couldn't see you The night that you killed, come on, come on White lightning, mound and battery wild.
		Mama, baby, my heart hurts for the boat.
		You're tender, you can cry in the house.
		I'm going to be the truth of wanting more, eating and longing more.
		Black velvet, I've got a teeny voice line.
		Black velvet, I've got a small southern sky.
		A new religion that'll bring you to peace.
		Black velvet, if you please.
		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 at 800-825-5033.
		From West of the Rockies, call ART at 800-618-8255.
		International callers may reach Art Bell by calling your in-country spread 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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Black velvet, huh?
		New religion.
		Black oil, strolling, black gold.
		It might become a new religion indeed.
		Hold it right there.
		will be right back to our very patient canadian man Remember the other day I had Willie Nelson on the show?
		Well, CNN Headline, bless their hearts a week later, had, I don't know, a four or five-minute piece on Willie.
		I wonder if you've seen that.
		They're running it currently on CNN Headline News, and I'm kind of proud of that because I think it probably sprang from what we did on the air the week previous.
		Now, back to our extremely patient Canadian caller.
unidentified		You refer to me as patient, yet if you only knew how fast I was pacing back and forth across the room.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Were you pacing?
unidentified		Yeah, no, I'm kidding.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right, well, listen, you were saying basically that in America we don't get the big picture.
		And so lay it on us.
		What is the big picture?
unidentified		Well, that's a lot of pressure to put on me, but I can do the best I can.
		Essentially, you kind of gave an example of that when you kind of responded to that other caller.
		And I think what he was trying to get across was that, you know, in a lot of ways, like it or not, the rest of the world is frustrated with the United States.
		And that is a fact.
		Now, not to sugarcoat things, but with being the most powerful nation on earth comes tremendous responsibility, not just from your government, but also from citizens.
		And we are at a crucial point now.
		We are approaching the end times.
		And when you, and I don't want to kind of lay this all on you, but I did happen to respond to that little, you know, our Canadian caller, Donald Trump.
		And it's exactly that kind of, and I'm not touchy, not at all, but that kind of attitude for too long has been prevalent in the United States.
		And that's exactly what's getting you into the trouble that you are in now and that you have been in in the past.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Our ugly Americanism.
unidentified		No, no, well, you.
		Well, yes.
		And I'm just, and again, I'm not anti-American.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		No, that's okay.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Don't hold back.
unidentified		No, I'm not intending to, otherwise I wouldn't have phoned.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		But I mean, that is what you're saying.
unidentified		I can take it a step further.
unidentified		Okay.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		No doubt.
unidentified		I mean, you take a look at the Shiva case.
unidentified		This is a tremendous precedent.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Now, look, don't do this to me.
unidentified		What's that?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		If you start us on the Shiva case, I'm doomed.
unidentified		No, no, no, no, no, no.
		This isn't what I did happen to hear last evening.
		I don't listen to the program all the time, But I did happen to hear some of the things you were speaking about, and it has absolutely nothing to do with where I'm going.
		The reason that I bring that up is that, like I say, with power comes tremendous responsibility.
		And like I say, outsiders looking into the United States are frustrated because we don't feel that there is enough being done in terms of the citizenry.
		If you look at where we are now, like I say, essentially the United States is Babylon.
		That's where we are.
		And when I bring up the Shiva case, I only reference it because the precedent is being set, the euthanasia precedent, is, I mean, this is New World Order.
		We're progressing down that path.
		And that's exactly what this is.
		And aside from three or four protesters outside of that hospital, there's nothing.
		Yet when O.J. Simpson is convicted, let off a murder, there are riots.
		And I realize they're two entirely different things.
		But that illustrates exactly what is going on and how far citizens are completely.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		In other words, something like this could never happen anywhere but the U.S., huh?
unidentified		No, no, that's not what I'm saying at all.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, it is sort of.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I mean, you're pointing that out as an example of what we're doing here in the United States.
unidentified		When I speak of the New World Order and one world government, you know, that doesn't just have to do within its state.
		But what I'm saying is that Bush and his cronies and the entire Congress are all in on it.
		That's what I'm saying.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		Thank you very much.
		For one thing, you know, if you really want to look at what President Bush has done, he's been on the side of life here.
		Not on the so-called new world order population reduction.
		Let's just whisk-em-away side.
		He hasn't been on that side at all.
		So I don't know why you're coming down on him for that.
		All right, now look.
		Biodiesel, the last time, when I had Willie on, I got a lot of fastblasts saying, oh, yeah, but what will it do to the environment?
		I mean, it seems so reasonable, doesn't it, biodiesel?
		But, oh, it'll just screw up the environment.
		They said, well, that's wrong.
		Here are the facts.
		Here are some facts.
		Biodiesel reduces carbon dioxide exhaust emissions by up to 80%.
		Biodiesel produces 100% less sulfur dioxide than petroleum-based diesel, and sulfur dioxide is the major component of acid rain.
		Biodiesel reduces exhaust smoke, particulates, emissions, up to 75%.
		So the usual black cloud associated with diesel engines, gone.
		The smell of biodiesel, far more pleasant than petroleum-based products, sometimes smelling like popcorn or doughnuts if the fuel is made from a waste vegetable oil feedstock of some sort.
		Biodiesel smells better than diesel fuel, so it is a pleasant experience.
		Refilling the vehicle's tank.
		Mmm, good.
		Biodiesel is much easier to handle, does not require mechanics to use barrier cream on their hands to protect their skin from cracking or redness.
		Biodiesel is much less dangerous to put in a vehicle's fuel tank, as a flashpoint of biodiesel is about 150 degrees centigrade, 300 Fahrenheit as opposed to petroleum diesel, which is at about plus or minus 70.
		Hmm.
		Biodiesel degrades about four times faster than petroleum diesel after spillage, with most of a spill broken down after 28 days.
		That's interesting.
		Biodiesel provides significant lubricity improvement over petroleum, and so forth and so on.
		So those are a few stats about the reality of biodiesel.
		I just thought you ought to know.
		i didn't have that information for you at the time but even all of that being true biodiesel according to the article is not uh...
		by howard cussler is not going to sufficiently He says that the amount of petroleum and energy required to do the farming and the, I don't know, the fertilizer and everything, that's all petroleum-based.
		So you might as well burn that product first to transport yourself.
		First time caller line, you're on the air.
		Hello.
unidentified		Hello?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes, hi.
unidentified		Yes, hi.
unidentified		I'm Nick calling from Shoveville, Indiana.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes, sir.
unidentified		I've got a couple comments real quick.
		I will get off here and let everybody else get a chance.
		My first comment is that I don't want to say that I'm a believer in a conspiracy theory, but absolute power, corrupt, absolutely.
		And when you get people in there and they want to decide what kind of price they want to make for the gas and the oil and everything else, then we as middle class or as just consumers, we have to pay for whatever they decide to do.
		And I just want to answer your questions.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, do you?
		Okay, good.
		Let's go through them then.
		One at a time, all right?
		Do you believe the crisis is real?
unidentified		Yes, sir.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You do?
		Okay.
		By the way, a slim majority, but definitely a majority, does believe it's real.
		All right, number two, do you think that most Americans can accept this much reality, that we're facing this size of a crisis?
		Can they be told the truth?
unidentified		I would say no.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		At what pump price?
unidentified		$4 a gallon.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And things begin to go south for you?
		Yes, sir.
		If you had to, would you steal or kill to feed your family?
unidentified		I don't believe in stealing or killing to feed your life.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes, but well.
unidentified		Go ahead, go ahead.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes, but if your family was starving to death.
unidentified		Yes, I would.
		You know, that's the truth, because I would have to protect my children.
		And I'm sure that every father out there would do the same for their children.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I'm pretty sure, too.
		I've been getting a lot of really good, honest answers like yours this morning, and I appreciate it because it means something.
		Now, what about the bigger picture?
		Would you support the United States in a war to obtain energy if we were on our knees?
unidentified		You know, I have to be honest with this one and say yes, too.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
unidentified		Yeah.
		And I just, I have to say yes, and I hope that we as human beings can start thinking outside the box and come up with a different energy source other than what we're currently using because it would just be tremendously awful if we can't because we're not going to ever get anywhere using hydrocarbons.
		We're surely never going to do space travel or anything else using hydrocarbons because it's just we're going to have to think outside the box and think with different physics.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, I don't care what people say and they can interpret this as bushbashing if they want, but I'm not a bushbasher.
		I'm really not.
		However, whatever government, whatever president we have, right now, we should be doing the hell out of this biodiesel thing.
		We should be doing wind power and solar power.
		We should be doing this new paint that you can paint on homes for solar power that comes from nanotechnology and all of these other things, this new spark plug that I'm hearing about.
		Now, there's a million different things we could be doing.
		And it's government's job because this is all a matter.
		You know, when I get answers from somebody like you about, yeah, I'd steal or kill if I had to, then it's a national security issue to keep this country ticking.
		And that makes it the government's job to do what it can do in its realm to start pointing us in a new direction now.
unidentified		Absolutely.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Thanks for the call.
unidentified		Thank you.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Take care.
		That's what I think.
		And yes, I'm complaining about the current administration's lack of apparent attention to something of this magnitude.
		But I promise you, I kind of like President Bush in most ways.
		To be honest with you, I'm not a Bush basher.
		This would apply to any president who would be in office right now, and it applies to those who have been in office previously.
		Some gave lip service, a few put solar panels on the White House, others came along and had them taken back down again.
		The direction for our nation as a matter of national security, the highest priority has got to be to start doing these things to mitigate the coming crisis, and I do believe it's coming.
		So we need to start mitigation right now.
		Wildcard line, you're on the air.
unidentified		Hi.
unidentified		Good morning, Art.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Good morning, sir.
unidentified		Let me give you a quote from a movie and see if you can tell me what movie this come from.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I'm not good at that, but sure.
unidentified		Well, you will get this one, I believe.
unidentified		Money, not morality, is the principal commerce of all civilized nations.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I have no idea what movie it came from, but...
art bell ▲ ● ▼		But I was going to say it's absolutely true.
unidentified		It is true.
		You know, the Genesis Project, which was actually called the Genesis Project, was what the Germans were doing during World War II.
		And that was the formula for synthetic petroleum.
		And, you know, I'm sure you've heard, of course, you've been doing this business for years.
		You've heard many people say, and many of your guests say, that there is a formula for synthetic petroleum.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Maybe.
unidentified		Well, look here, on your question.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I've heard a lot of things said, man.
		i've heard about the hundred and fifty mile carburetor i've heard about all i've heard Hey, we're talking gas from regular water.
		I've heard all that, yeah.
unidentified		The crisis is real.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I haven't seen it, though.
unidentified		No.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Have you?
unidentified		Probably never will.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, okay.
unidentified		Well, look here, the crisis is real.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right, then.
unidentified		As far as reality goes?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, it's real.
		Can the American people accept that?
		No?
unidentified		No.
		No.
		Pump price.
		Yeah.
		I'm up late this evening doing my income tax.
		Last year I spent $16,000 on fuel with my business.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You're not in a good frame of mind at all, then.
unidentified		Oh, no.
		I had to write a check or two tonight.
		Steal and kill, people are doing that already.
		But it will get worse.
		And support the war, we've gone to Iraq twice to protect our oil.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		It's already going on.
unidentified		And let me ask you a question.
		You had a guest on that said the reason that we went into Iraq was because of the conversion from American dollars to Euro dollars.
		Do you remember that?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I remember.
unidentified		What do you think of that?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I don't think that's the reason we went to Iraq.
unidentified		Well, no.
unidentified		Do you think that's one of the reasons?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Maybe.
		It may be one of them.
		I don't know.
unidentified		Do you think if the U.S. dollar went to the Euro, in other words, instead of using the United States dollar and go to the Euro dollar, which is $1.38 today, I believe, that would really affect us, wouldn't it?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
		Yes.
		And, you know, I live in a narrow little world, right?
		I'm a ham radio operator.
		I just watched one of the best-selling radios in the world for a ham radio operator.
		It's kind of an entry-level medium.
		Actually, one of the best radios ever made.
		Go from a price that was, well, it was a transceiver.
		And it was made, it was made, is made in Japan.
		At the low point, it was selling for $706, a clue to its manufacturer, perhaps.
		The price just went up to $950.
		$950.
		And the stories are legion that we're getting, that it's the yen versus the dollar versus the Euro, but specifically in this case, the yen versus the dollar difference.
		So prices are already taking leaps and bounds and jumps, and it's incredible.
		East of the Rockies, you're on the air.
		Hello.
unidentified		Yeah, that's really wild that you had this guy on about this fuel situation, chemical, because that's exactly what I was going to talk about.
		Well, suppose there was a guy in the 50s that lived, and he was a chemist, and this guy worked for Halliburton, of all things.
		And the kids around the neighborhood, this guy was always tinkering around at his garage.
		And we had motor scooters, and the guy says, come over here.
		I'm going to show you something.
		And he takes some water and some Chemicals and puts it together and it fuses around, and then all of a sudden it smells like gasoline.
		And he pours it in the motorcycle and says, Now ride your motorcycle.
		And it ran on it.
		And after some more refining, when we progress to where we have a 55-shivy, he says, yeah, let's try it in your 55-shivy.
		So we fill up the tank.
		Of all things, it runs on it.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		What happened to this man?
unidentified		That's another story.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, let's hear it.
unidentified		This guy is a single guy.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So what became of him?
unidentified		Well, he got to do something with this, and they come in and confiscated all of his stuff and took it away and all.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Do you believe all this?
unidentified		Do I believe it?
		Yeah, I believe it.
		And they made threats on him.
		So he put out.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		They can't kill you.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You're on the phone.
unidentified		Two different sets of the manuals made this.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay, so did you get one of them?
unidentified		I don't know who has them.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You don't.
		I know they all.
		So in other words, somewhere out there there's a way to turn water into gas.
unidentified		Yeah, they exist.
unidentified		I know they exist, okay?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, well, you know, you don't know that because you don't have a manual.
unidentified		He said if something was to happen to him, hang on to it because as long as there's plenty of fuel, this will never let you go to the service.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You don't have it, though.
		So who did he tell this to?
		Not you?
unidentified		Well, he told it to a group of us.
		A group of you.
		And we still know who each other are.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You do.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		But you don't know where the manual is.
unidentified		Oh, I know where I'm going.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, you do know where it is.
unidentified		I do.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You must have a death wish.
unidentified		Yeah, right.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Calling a talk show like this with a story like that.
unidentified		How do we get that out without dying?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I imagine a big oil truck rolled over him or something, right?
unidentified		I don't know what happened to him.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		He'd be the equivalent of that.
unidentified		Ceased to come home and he sold his house.
		Somebody sold his house.
		We never saw him.
		I don't know.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You know, I have to be skeptical about these kinds of currency.
unidentified		But how would you get something like that?
unidentified		That was my question.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		In other words, assuming you had the manual.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Assuming you had the manual, how would you get it out?
unidentified		Somebody has a manual.
		How would you get it out without in the same scenario that he wound up in?
		Do you have an answer for that?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		No.
		No, I don't.
		I don't.
		Given a little thought about it, then maybe.
		I mean, we've got the Internet.
		I suppose publicizing this manual worldwide, well, that would be a good start.
		I mean, just publicize it worldwide.
unidentified		How about that?
unidentified		I guess that could possibly.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Go to an Internet cafe somewhere?
unidentified		But then you tell me.
unidentified		You don't make anything off of it.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, don't you want to save the world?
unidentified		Well, both.
unidentified		I'd like to make something, too.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, I would imagine if verified, such a thing would be worth a very great deal of money.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Of course, you know, when you went up to Larry King or whoever and said, look, yeah, right.
unidentified		So.
unidentified		I'm just to hear what you would say when Larry King.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I don't know now.
		How would you...
		Look, I got to go.
		I'm on the top of the air.
		You want to make money with it.
		If you didn't want to make money, then fine.
		Publish it on the internet.
		Give it to the world.
unidentified		I've been where the eagle flies.
		Rolled his wings across autumn skies.
		Kissed the sun, touched the moon.
		But he left me much too soon.
		His lady bird, he left his ladybird.
		Ladybird, come on down.
		I'm here waiting on the ground.
		Ladybird, I'll treat you good.
		Lady Bird, I wish you would.
		Lady Bird, I wish you would.
		Lady Bird, I wish you would.
		Thank you.
		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 at 800-825-5033.
		From west of the Rockies, call 800-618-8255.
		International callers may reach ART by calling your in-country sprint 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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		It is, and if you're just tuning in, we've been hours on oil.
		And I've got a number of questions which I'm fully prepared to hit you with, and they are in order.
		Do you believe the crisis, as outlined, And I did that in the first hour of the program.
		You might not have heard it if you just joined us.
		But basically, the bottom line is we're running out of oil.
		Do you believe that's true?
		Number one.
		And if you do, at what pump price would your current lifestyle be unsustainable?
		Do you think most Americans can accept this kind of reality, this harsh reality, if they were actually told about it?
		I mean, I'm only Art Bellik and say, hey, you have Hoguy, he's crazy as a loon.
		None of that's true.
		If it was really announced by somebody in authority that we were in fact, the world is in fact running out of oil and the people believed it, could they accept that kind of harsh reality?
		Would you steal or kill to feed your family if it came to that?
		And then finally, do you support the U.S. going to war for energy supplies, which is the same as question number four, would you steal or kill to feed your family?
		It's just applying it to the entire nation.
		Back in a moment.
		radio I can get away with discussing this kind of thing on national radio exactly because Art Bell's a UFO guy, right?
		That's my typecast burden to live with, and I'll always have it.
		Which makes it easy for people to say, well, yeah, the UFO guy.
		And to some extent, I mean, even Rolling Stone Magazine, it's where this article came from.
		Brilliant article, in my opinion.
		And, you know, I want to take a second to officially invite its author, James Howard Kusler, on the program as a guest.
		Absolutely would make a superb guest, wouldn't he?
		I didn't read you all of the article.
		I left lots of good parts out.
		You should go to Rolling Stone and read this article.
		In the meantime, he's officially invited.
		My words, as a guest, love to have him on.
		This is one hot mama of a topic.
		There's no question about it.
		And it provoked these questions that I cooked up.
		Hard questions.
		First time caller line, you're on the air.
		Top of the morning.
unidentified		Yes, good morning, Art.
		This is Joe in L.A. Yes, sir.
		Fantastic topic, Art.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		It is, yes.
unidentified		You know, one thing that I think sometimes gets missed, you know, we could look at the problem differently.
		I remember as a kid, you'd get an electric train set or a racing car, a slut car, and why couldn't we change the transportation system so that we had an electric grid in the road and then our cars could be electric and basically zip between LA and Vegas?
		You know, right now we're trying to do it with fuel cells.
		We're hauling around thousands of pounds of batteries and so forth.
		Why not change the entire infrastructure?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay, I see where you're coming from, but still you've got to propel car A, B, C, and D millions of them from here to there, and that's going to cost a lot of energy, right?
unidentified		Yes, it would.
		But we have a lot of coal in this country.
		We have, you know, there's still a lot of oil.
		But we could generate electricity using it more efficiently, use, you know, pollution controls, you know, millions of dollars worth of pollution controls to really get it clean, electricity, and just be more efficient.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		According to this trucker that called a little while ago, every emission control they put on a car reduces the mileage that it gets.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Or truck?
unidentified		Yes, yes.
		And I think on, but if we use this on coal plants or electric generators, that would be one thing.
		I think it really comes down to pound for pound.
		Why don't we move 1,000 pounds, two persons in a small vehicle, at 1,000 pounds instead of 5,000 pounds?
		It takes five times as much energy, basically, to do that.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All of these things are things I guess we ought to be getting our butts busy with right now.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Do you believe the energy crisis is real?
unidentified		Yes, absolutely.
		Right now we're in a bit of a crisis, but we're on the downward slope.
		We have maybe 20, 30 years of oil left.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That was the thrust of this article.
		But the other thrust was that even before we get to the end of the oil, the real usable oil, we're going to be well into crisis.
		In other words, pump prices.
unidentified		Yes.
		And the Canadian who was talking about how they got to heat their homes with oil.
		I mean, they've got to do that or freeze to death.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		They admitted per capita they use more.
unidentified		And we just need to be a lot smarter.
		We need to, you know, in World War II, people were able to get organized.
		They saw it as a crisis, and it was a matter of life and death, and that's what this is going to come down to.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		In a lot of ways, we've forgotten those kind of hard times a long time ago.
		At what pump price would your current lifestyle be turned to dog poop?
		Wow.
unidentified		Well, I think $5.
		I have four cars in my household now with insurance and just keeping them running.
		But, yeah, $5 a gallon, we're going to start riding bikes or something.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		If it came down to a Mad Max kind of deal, would you be prepared to steal or even kill to the future?
unidentified		In a heartbeat.
unidentified		To protect my family, I'd do what it took to protect my family.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		As you hear more and more people honestly admitting that this morning, we've got to figure out a way not to get to this place or it's going to be exactly what we're hearing this morning.
unidentified		Exactly.
unidentified		We need to work together instead of having to go to the other option.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Thank you so much for your call.
		You know, you have to listen to these people and what they're saying.
		You have to understand the gravity of what you're hearing.
		I know it's a hard question, but you are getting honest answers.
		And what it means is that either we figure this out one way or the other, or that is what is dead ahead for all of us.
		Dead ahead for all of us.
		Think about it.
		Wildcard line, you're on the air.
		Good morning.
unidentified		Good morning, Art.
		This is Sean in Alabama.
		I'm listening on XM Channel 165.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Good old XM, yes, sir.
unidentified		Yeah, if it wasn't for that, I wouldn't be able to listen at all.
		Right.
		But I think what we're getting ready here in the short term to have to face up to is the result of short-sightedness on the part of humanity as a whole.
		You know, back 100 years or so ago, when the combustion engines and the world started getting itself addicted on oil, and we're all in love with the power and the way that it eased our lives and everything,
		and no one ever stopped to consider what the long-term ramifications of building up a world economy that depends on this fuel source would be.
		And I mean, it's not just, you know.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, let's take what you've said.
		We're not long-term thinkers, and I don't know how we change that.
		Our CEOs can't think past the next quarter.
		Our politicians, most part, can't think past four years, max.
		So how do we develop long-term thinking?
unidentified		Well, honestly, it's at the point now, I don't know if we have enough time left to be able to develop long-term thinking.
		It's not just our cars that depend on gas or the lights.
		I mean, the food supply itself.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I know.
unidentified		And, you know, the only reason we have 6 billion plus people on the planet is because of the power that we get from oil to be able to transport foods quickly to keep them cold, to keep them from spoiling.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Dead right.
unidentified		And at any given time in this country, we've only got about, what, three days worth of food on reserve?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Something like that.
unidentified		And, you know, I think that the crisis is real, and it's not looking good because I don't see any people in the world just quietly going back into the Stone Age.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I don't either.
unidentified		And so if they don't, you know, barring some technological miracle that solves the crisis here in the next 15 years, you know, it's not looking too good for the future.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		If it came down to it, the very hard question, whether you'd steal or even kill to feed your family, if it came down to that.
unidentified		Well, I mean, the honest answer is, you know, yeah.
		No one likes to think about it, but you're not going to sit there and watch your family and your loved ones starve and die.
		You're going to do what you have to do.
		And the same goes with countries.
		Countries aren't going to sit by and watch their way of life and their economy completely collapse and fall down around their ears.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That's right.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That's why countries go to war.
unidentified		And the thing is now that thanks in part to the power that we gain from oil, we've got the ability with weapons that can completely destroy the planet.
		And if we do hit that pinch and we don't find a way out of it, those weapons are going to be used.
		And, you know, God help us if it gets to that.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, that would be in the name in use, all right.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Thank you very much for the call.
unidentified		All right, you have a good night, Ark.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Right, you too.
		And I hope this is sort of sinking in.
		It certainly is to me.
		In other words, what would occur?
		Is there really any question about what would occur if the pinch turned into a grab, if the oil began to dry up from an economic point of view, what, at $5, $6, $7, $8, $9, $10 a gallon, wherever it's ultimately headed?
		Each one of those dollars would bring with it millions of Americans who would be homeless or would not be able to feed their families or would not be able to make their mortgage payments or whatever.
		East of the Rockies, you're on the air.
unidentified		Hello.
		East of the Rockies?
		Hi, Art.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes, hi.
unidentified		This is Ron, and I'm calling from Murrayville, Illinois.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes, sir.
unidentified		90 miles north of St. Louis, listening on the good old KTRS Big 550.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		It's big art.
unidentified		Fantastic program.
		And I'm in the middle of farm country here.
		Right.
		Right on a farm.
		I can't say that I am a day-to-day farmer myself.
		I'm not.
		But in just a few weeks, all the guys around here are going to be out putting in the crop for the coming season.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Sure.
unidentified		Corn, as far as you can see, and of course soybeans.
		Sure.
		Now, if gasoline suddenly went to between $4 and $5 a gallon tomorrow, and we're talking really diesel fuel for the farm implements nowadays, it's going to hit these guys hard.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Real hard.
unidentified		And it wouldn't be too long that, well, they're all going to tell you that the greatest thing that they'd like to see is a lot less corn in the country because everybody's got corn and less corn would mean higher prices.
		But think of all the debt that a lot of these guys are carrying.
		Some better off than others.
		But when you've got to pull up and suddenly double your cost just to get it in the ground, all right?
		Now we're just putting it in the ground.
		Now you're thinking about down the road, next fall, you've got to go out and bring it out.
		What's the price going to be then?
		What's going to happen?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And that's not all.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I mean, assuming you get it out of the ground at some great golden price, you then have to get it over the road and to the stores.
unidentified		Well, sure.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And by the time it gets to the consumer, it's going to be out of sight.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And this whole thing could ratchet up so quickly and in such a terrifying way that the kind of horrible questions that I'm asking could be the operative questions.
unidentified		I think it's there now.
		You know, you've got...
		Okay, and years ago, it was, well, everybody, probably every other house might have been a farm, or they had something to do with the farm, even though they lived in the little town, but not today.
		All right.
		Now, where I'm at, I'm really an anomaly, I guess.
		I'm not a farmer.
		I still have a connection to a farm that I grew up on.
		My brother's just down the road, and he's handling all the operation, really.
		But everybody gets in their car or truck and goes at least five miles down the road, mostly ten, to get whatever they really need.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I'm sure.
unidentified		Okay.
		And it'll bring things to a halt, I would think, pretty quick when we get into, well, above $3 a gallon.
		And it's $2,220 around here now.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I know.
unidentified		Okay.
		You know, you're just a bit older than I am, and I can barely remember President Eisenhower, but the 1950s, you know, it's like everything happened in the 50s, some people will say.
		Okay?
		I got to believe that if this same scenario was going on, and if it was the 1950s today, I think that the president would be on television pretty quick addressing the nation.
		Of course, television was brand new back then.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Maybe so.
		Do you think that a president today could go on television and say, I'm here to address the American people and tell them the truth about our immediate energy future, and then just lay out the whole truth?
		Could he do that?
		Could the American people take that kind of blunt reality?
unidentified		I think, yes, I think we could take it, but more of the problem is we don't want to take it.
		We don't want to hear it.
		I would like to think that President Bush has got the guts to go on in front of the nation and lay it out straight like that.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And then start a Manhattan-style project for alternative fuels and all the rest of that.
		Yeah, wouldn't that be wonderful to even contemplate?
		But why do I not think it's going to happen?
		I don't think that's going to happen, do you?
		We operate by crisis in America, and until there is a crisis, rarely do we do anything.
		West of the Rockies, you're on the air.
unidentified		Hello.
		Yes, sir.
		Danielle in Los Angeles?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
unidentified		Anyone who steals or kills for food or oil in an apocalyptic Mad Max scenario is a spiritual fool.
		Because physically, you can run, but you cannot hide spiritually.
		You will be judged.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, perhaps so.
		But there would be, even you must admit, you can know there will be many of them.
		And you heard them on this program this morning.
unidentified		Well, hopefully they'll change their mind after hearing this because under this scenario, the sooner you surrender to the new totalitarian military, new world order and are executed for refusing the mark of the beast, the better for you then and for the eternity of your soul.
unidentified		And only a fool would steal or kill for food or oil and damn his soul to hell forever.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, I understand that from your point of view, that's absolutely true.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		But person man after man after man and some women have come on here this morning and said in a New York second.
unidentified		But to prolong your, even if they're not spiritually minded, to prolong your life under that scenario is to prolong your own agony, pain and suffering.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yep, I've got it.
		All right, sir, I've got it.
		Thank you.
unidentified		I know.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		But it's not going to matter.
		That's something you have got to understand.
		It's not going to matter to these people.
		So it has to matter to you.
		I don't know.
		Americans are.
		what are we were probably I'll leave that for all of you.
		There are many words that I could conjure, but I'll refrain.
		International line, you're on the air.
unidentified		Hello.
		Hello, Art.
		Yes.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Hi.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Where are you?
unidentified		Actually, I'm west of the Rockies.
unidentified		I'm in Chico, California.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, I can't take your call on this line, bud.
		I'm sorry.
		That's the international line reserved for those out of the country, mostly.
		First time caller line, you're on the air.
unidentified		Hello.
unidentified		Art?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
unidentified		I'm in Tennessee, Morristown, Tennessee.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Morristown, Tennessee.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay, sir.
unidentified		Listen to you a long time.
		First time caller.
		I've been waiting about an hour now to get on.
		And I've got to put my two cents worth on this energy crisis.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Fire away.
unidentified		I'm in my early 70s.
		My father said 50 years ago that before I died, before the end of my life, we would see an energy crisis that would really set this world back.
		And I think that we're approaching that.
		And the real thing is I think we are too eager to go out and waste our natural resources at all costs.
		And we've got hundreds of thousands of cars on the road that are driven by teenagers running up and down the road that are going nowhere, accomplishing nothing.
		We have tractors and trailers sitting on our parking lots at these sleeping places where they rest with their motors running all night long.
		They never shut them off.
		We waste more energy just for nothing.
		And we're too blinded, I reckon, because we've had it too easy to face up to what the real problems are.
		And I would be happy to make some big sacrifices to save our energy program.
		But if we don't do something real quick, you know, we take like race car drivers.
		I love to go to races.
		But how many millions of gallons every week where these cars are racing?
		These people drive from one end of the country to the other to go to racetrack.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, I was going to articulate some things about the current state of the American people, but you did it very well for me.
		Thank you very much.
		We're at a breakpoint here.
		He's right.
		It's not serious, and it's upon us right now.
		And so you may want to ponder, if not, grab a telephone and answer some of these very, very difficult questions that I'm asking this morning.
		Do you think it's all real, or do you think it's fake?
		Beyond that, does it really matter?
unidentified		Beyond that, does it matter?
		Beyond that, does it matter?
		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 to the Rockies, call toll-free at 800-825-5033.
		From west to the Rockies, call ARC at 800-618-8255.
		International callers may reach Art Bell by calling your income free spread 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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		It is indeed, and we're talking about, actually about an article that launched all of this.
		What a night it launched, huh?
		Oil.
		But basically, we're running out of it.
		What's that gonna mean?
		Oh, it's gonna mean some pretty serious things if you've been listening carefully to what people have been saying to me this morning.
		Would you like to join us?
		Those are the numbers.
		stay right there All right, back to it.
		If you are fortunate enough to have a radio station that replays the first hour, many of them do.
		Just in case you missed what launched this program that produced all of these comments, you know, it'll go into repeat in about 20-something minutes.
		So hang in there.
		If not, sorry you missed it.
		International line, you're on the air.
		Where are you calling from, please?
unidentified		Yes, I'm calling from Paris, France.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Paris!
unidentified		Oh, my God, Gay Paris.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I love Paris.
unidentified		Wonderful.
		I live in Mamart.
		Right near Sacri-Coeur.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, my goodness.
unidentified		You've been there?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, I've been near it.
unidentified		I'm in a similar business to you.
		I'm a film producer, and I'm a Canadian.
		Oh, my God.
		Another Canadian.
		Oh, my God.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Another Canadian.
unidentified		Just to share a little bit of my, before I go into my major diatribe, I've lived in New York.
		I've lived in LA.
		I've lived in Atlanta, London, Milano, and Paris.
		So I'm here basically to give you a little bit of insight into perhaps the European perspective on the energy crisis.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		By all means.
unidentified		We've adapted quite well to prices that the American people haven't even yet realized.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That's true.
unidentified		And research and development in Europe is one of our priorities is to basically look into means of producing energy-efficient cars.
		And we've accomplished that to a certain degree.
		And the public seem to be seem to accept that state of affair.
		I'd like you to ask me specific questions because I'm a little bit nervous.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, all right.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I just read a little earlier a Detroit Free Press article said the price of gas there is about $5.60 a gallon.
unidentified		Let me do a quick calculation.
		It's about $1.50 a liter.
		It's actually more expensive.
		It's closer to $7.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, my God.
unidentified		It's fine.
		We have cars.
		We have cars.
		I understand.
		It must be native.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You've really gone native.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You've gone native, haven't you?
unidentified		Well, I've been here since 87.
unidentified		Yeah.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, well, then you are native.
unidentified		Yeah.
		Well, Arn, really, you've been here, and you've seen the cars.
		They perform well.
		Oh, yes.
		Highly efficient.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		But all of that said, sir, there's a world demand for oil.
unidentified		Absolutely.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And there's every probability, according to what I've read, that we actually are beginning to run out of cheap oil.
unidentified		Absolutely.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So it's going to get real expensive.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And this is going to bring on certain changes.
unidentified		You have some logistical problems in America.
		Yes.
		And the logistical problems I'd like to refer to are the whole infrastructure that was set up around the car and the automobile, as you know, starting in the 50s and the 60s.
		You have freeways, you have an infrastructure that is basically designed around the automobile.
		And in Europe, for example, we have specific laws that do not allow cars into the major city centers.
		You're allowed to keep your car outside in the periphery around the cities.
		And you are given specific, I guess, incentives to either, one, leave your car at a free parking spot just outside of the city and use rapid transit to enter.
		Our rapid transit system, as you know, our TGV is incredible.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		It's incredible.
		I agree with you.
		But look, again, all of this said, we're running out of oil.
		And so what we need to be talking about is, I guess, more serious.
		All these things that you're doing, we should be doing, and even more.
unidentified		May I interrupt you for one moment?
		I think it's important, if I may.
		I understand you have a lot of listeners.
		We, and I'm speaking generally in Europe, we have very specific R ⁇ D going into, number one, minimizing the use of gas in terms of consumption.
		It hasn't, as you know, the lifestyle in Europe is on par with America, at least.
		We basically are going into alternative energy research and development.
		We're doing biodiesel.
		We're doing a mix of electrical.
		In fact, I just did a photo shoot this weekend for EEDF, which is Electricity of France.
		It was very interesting.
		All of their service vehicles are electric.
		Now, I'm not saying that that's the solution.
		In fact, we're drawing, obviously, where do we draw our power?
		As you know, France is 85% nuclear.
		And as you know that, and of course, the nuclear refined factor, we're building more and more.
		But we are looking at, and this is going to cause a major controversy on the air, we are looking at zero-point energy possibilities.
		The Germans at Mercedes, for example, as you know, are developing hybrid cars that may be going into that possibility.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That's really getting out on a limb.
		I thank you for the call all the way from Europe.
		I do appreciate it, but that's zero-point maybe.
		But there's no zero-point riding around on our roads right now or yours in France.
		So that's pretty far out on a limb.
		As for the rest of it, sure.
		Europe has adapted to higher prices.
		But look, the traffic clogs in Paris are pretty bad.
		I was there and I remember.
		Pretty bad indeed.
		So this is a worldwide problem.
		And I'm not suggesting we ought not.
		In fact, I'm sort of pleading with the powers that be to, yes, go ahead and let us begin doing all of these things that will mitigate this and may push it a few years further away if we start doing them now.
		But I'm pointing out that we're not.
		We're not doing these things.
		And we have got to start, and we've got to start soon, and it's got to be done.
		This is one thing that, one place where I think the federal government does have a responsibility for all the things they get their fingers into where they ought not.
		This is one area where they should be very, very, very much involved because it is a national security issue.
		Our national security is at stake.
		So it is an appropriate place for our government to be.
		And where are they?
		First time caller line, you're on the air.
unidentified		Hello.
unidentified		Hello?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Hi.
unidentified		Hi, Art.
unidentified		How are you?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I'm just Spiffy.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Where are you calling from?
unidentified		Alaska.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All the way up in Alaska.
unidentified		Yes.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Ah, yes.
unidentified		I just wanted to put my two cents in.
		I've been listening all night, and these people have been calling, and I can concur with everything they're saying.
		But the thing is, the world population is growing at a rapid rate, and I do believe it's going to come down to a crisis.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Sure, it is.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		It's obvious.
unidentified		Yeah.
unidentified		And I think people's attitudes have to change.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		How does that come about?
unidentified		I don't know.
		I mean, I guess maybe it has to come to where we're actually fighting over food.
		Hopefully before that.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, people left no doubt in my mind about the fact that they would fight, steal, or kill for food if necessary.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I mean, a lot of people have been very honest this morning, but that's where it would be if it gets that bad.
unidentified		Yeah, I hope not.
		I really hope not.
		But I think attitudes have to change now.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, you're going to have to tell me more.
		I mean, describe a changed attitude to me.
		What is a person with a changed attitude?
unidentified		Well, the technology.
		I mean, we've got to look at this now.
		I mean, the changes have to happen, you know, to have to start going in that direction that different technologies for our power and start steering away from using petroleum.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Seems like it ought to be underway right now, doesn't it?
unidentified		Yeah, I'm glad that you actually have to show this is really, this is very important.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I think it is important, too.
		And yes, we should be doing all of this stuff now.
		But even that said, all it's going to do, I think, if this article is and other articles like it are correct, it's going to push the date of the real reckoning a few years away.
		So I'm not saying we shouldn't be doing it.
		We should.
		But it might only be pushing it a few more years away.
		We really need more than just sort of what we can do right now.
		I mean, we can do solar panels.
		We can do wind power.
		We can do ocean power.
		We can build more dams.
		We can do more, even nuclear plants.
unidentified		I mean, the stuff is out there.
		How come we just haven't grabbed onto it?
		Is it because of the people that are in control?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, I don't know.
		It's a lot of things.
		I've given that a lot of thought myself.
		Nobody wants a nuclear plant in their backyard.
unidentified		Right.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Right?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Nobody wants waste in their backyard.
unidentified		And you think our demise is inevitable?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I wish you hadn't asked me that.
		Probably.
		You know, unless, as you say, there's a complete attitude change.
		And frankly, I don't see that happening.
unidentified		Right.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So thank you very, very much for the call.
		It is indeed a very, very, very important show.
		If you absorb it, if you understand it, then you understand the dire situation that is presented.
		Wildcard line, you're on the air.
unidentified		Hello.
unidentified		Good evening, Art.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Good evening.
unidentified		It's Jim in Los Angeles on KFI.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes, sir.
unidentified		And a few of your guests that you've had on the past make me wonder if things aren't, I mean, things could very easily be bad, but I wonder if they're going to get better than we even imagine.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Which guests are you particularly referring to?
unidentified		Well, a couple of weeks ago, you had a guy on talking about nanotechnology.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
unidentified		And solar getting down to under a buck a lot.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, yes.
		And the solar paint and all the rest of it.
		I suppose there's a bit of a race on.
		I mean, technology could save us, but we almost have to proceed here as though it won't.
		Even though it might.
		Then again, it might not.
		And so a prudent, careful, conservative person proceeds as though there might not be a miracle.
unidentified		No, I would agree, and I've been acting along those lines personally.
unidentified		I was a little kid during the two oil shops in the 70s, and I didn't like the way things were.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Man, it was awful.
		I mean, people were not at all civilized with each other.
		They were fighting.
		They were short-tempered.
		It was pretty bad.
		And it seems to me that society since then has become less tolerant, less civil, right?
unidentified		Yes, I would agree with that too.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		People are more likely today, by a big margin, to tear each other's throats out than they were then.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So.
unidentified		Well, I guess to answer one of your questions, I would, as an individual, I would take extreme measures to act in my defense or that of my family.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You would steal or kill to feed your family?
unidentified		Well, no, as a matter of personal defense, but not as a matter of convenience.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, I don't know if a question of that magnitude fits into the word convenience.
		It's not convenience.
		If your family is starving to death, you have serious decisions to make, right?
unidentified		Oh, I agree.
unidentified		I'd rather grow potatoes in a dirt-filled tire than bump someone in the head to steal theirs.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Got you.
		All right.
		Thank you very, very much.
		And that was an exception to the way that question rather has been answered all through the evening.
		Pretty rare exception.
		East of the Rockies, you're on the air.
unidentified		Hello.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Hello.
unidentified		Talking to me now?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I am.
unidentified		All right.
		Thank you.
		I want to talk concerning the oil thing.
		You say there's a big concern here in the United States, and not just the U.S., but all over the world about oil.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		What I said was that oil is now a world commodity.
		The price of oil is determined by the entire world, not just what the U.S. is willing to pay.
		China, India, all these other countries, they're bidding for the same barrels that we're using, sir.
unidentified		For some years, like the man said, for 100 years before, we have been depending on oil.
		And if we've learned anything from history, we must have learned from the Indians, but we don't steal, kill, we take the animals out in the forest, which we would survive by, but we wouldn't need necessarily oil for that, but we would need horses.
		I mean, that's what we started off with.
		That's what George Washington drove in on.
		I mean, he was the first president of the United States to be able to do that.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So are you ready to saddle up?
unidentified		Saddle up?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
unidentified		It's not that, but we're just too dependent on oil.
unidentified		I mean, it's like we're taking something.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		If you're ready to saddle up, are you ready to get on a horse and do your daily?
unidentified		I'm just saying that we should adapt because that's what we have been doing over the years of technology.
		And we should adapt to something new.
		And there's always going to be something new because it even says that in the Bible, there shall be new things.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		It guarantees new stuff.
		Well, right up until the last day, right?
		West of the Rockies, you're on the air.
		Hello.
unidentified		Yeah, all right.
unidentified		Hi, I was just thinking that with this new LED technology, I think even when your ad says that if everybody switched to LEDs, you'd have an extra power plant kicking around.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, absolutely.
unidentified		And I think conservation would be very helpful for a lot of folks.
		And Krezen Eisenhower, I think, really shed a lot of light on what we're up against as far as the global military complex.
		I think 9-11 was contrived by them.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		The military-industrial complex was what he warned against.
unidentified		Yeah.
		And I think that these draconian beasts that have been conjuring up and distorting our politics for the last several decades and creating wars and strife and stuff are the problem.
		If you took a few percent of your black project funding, you could build new refineries, you could fund fuel subsidies and technology for green energy.
		You could help everybody with the amount of money that those guys consume, free and clear of any congressional, it seems, discretion.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		How many of the rest of you think that if we diverted some of that black money, you know, the money that goes for the very secret projects, that, by God, there'd be a panacea of energy.
		If we just took the money that went into those black projects and all those neat airplanes that we have and developed at Area 51 and elsewhere, why, the world would be a better place with energy to spare.
		I don't think so.
		But I do think a project, a Manhattan-like project, to begin to mitigate what's coming is in order.
		And I'm wondering day by day by day, when is it going to be announced?
		When is somebody going to show us the kind of leadership we know we need?
		Because this is coming.
		International line, you're on the air.
unidentified		Hello?
unidentified		Hello?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
unidentified		Yeah, this is Mackenzie.
		I'm calling from Fort St. John, B.C., Canada.
		Welcome.
		Welcome.
		Thanks.
		I think one of the questions you should ask your listeners is would any one of them be willing to give up their automobile?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		To give up their car?
unidentified		Yeah, which you know they wouldn't.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I think most, yes, if most answered honestly, they'd say that you'd have to rip it from my cold, dead hands.
unidentified		So unfortunately, we live in a society that's totally dependent on fossil fuels worldwide.
		And it doesn't matter if it's the United States, Canada, France, wherever.
		It is a problem.
		And we have no backup.
		We have no other system to go to.
		That's correct.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		We don't.
unidentified		And that's where people got to start thinking.
		You hear this phrase, you don't think outside the box.
		Well, we more or less got ourselves in a box.
		And if we don't start thinking about it, it's going to come down to mayhem.
		It's going to come down to people getting desperate.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That's why I did this program.
		So that everybody could kind of listen to everybody else and understand the length to which people would go if they were pushed that far.
		You can only push people so far.
		And I kind of wanted to understand how far people would push before they'd start to push back really hard.
		And I think we've learned that this morning.
		The answer is they'd damn well push back.
		People would be short-tempered and very unlikely to behave well.
unidentified		No, all the rules of conduct and social well-being and all that would go out the window.
		No one would listen to anybody or reason or anything like that.
		It would be just total chaos.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Then that makes this a really serious situation, right?
unidentified		Absolutely.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Appreciate your call, sir.
unidentified		Thank you.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Take care.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		First time caller line, you're on the air.
unidentified		Hello.
		Yes, Art?
		Yes.
		My name is Brian.
		I'm in Glossford, Illinois, which is near Peoria.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes, Brian.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Not a lot of time here.
unidentified		Okay, my biggest point is that had we spent the $300 billion that we spent on the war in Iraq, had we spent that on developing alternative fuels, we would have solved our problem.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I wonder if that's true.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I mean, I wonder if just throwing money at something, even $300 billion, whether it can make it happen.
unidentified		I think it can.
		And the question that you're asking, would we kill for oil, is a rhetorical question because that's exactly what we're doing in Iraq.
		There's no way that we would be there if the oil were not there.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, you're about the fifth person this morning, at least, to tell me that.
		You're absolutely correct.
		I happen to believe that also.
		We are doing that.
		But it's going to get a lot worse.
		It's going to get a whole lot worse.
unidentified		It seems that Bush's energy solution centers around Anwar, which the stories differ.
		The estimates differ.
		Is it six months worth of supply up there or a couple of years?
		Regardless, I think that we should conserve that for national emergencies, primarily war and protection of our country, rather than just squandering that as we do much of the other.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I absolutely agree with you.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Listen, thank you so very much for calling.
unidentified		Thank you.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Have a very good morning.
		It's been a wonderful weekend.
		This has been a particularly excellent program, in my opinion.
		And I now return you to the weeknights, and I'll see you next weekend.
		Until then, this is Crystal Gale, The Perfect Words.
unidentified		Good night in the desert, shooting stars across the sky.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Good night.
unidentified		This magical journey will take us on the ride.
		Filled with belonging, searching for the truth.
		Will we make it to tomorrow?
		Will the sun shine on you?
		The night in the desert.

▲