Art Bell’s Coast to Coast AM explores the 2005–2010 peak oil warnings from James Howard Kunstler, noting U.S. reliance on imports and $4/gallon gas triggering societal collapse—suburban depopulation, agricultural breakdown, and potential violence. Callers debate conspiracies (alien fusion tech, suppressed Halliburton water-to-gasel methods) vs. real scarcity, with China’s 30% oil demand straining global supplies, while farmers face $8–$9/gallon diesel costs crippling debt-dependent corn/soybean production. A European film producer highlights $7/gallon prices and zero-point energy research, but Bell dismisses it as impractical, underscoring the crisis’s inevitability without leadership or infrastructure shifts. [Automatically generated summary]
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
They won't, the government, and it always boils down to the government.
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.
Do you think that Americans and Canadians, I'll add Canadians, can accept the kind of reality that was in that story?
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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yeah, we would kill each other if it came down to 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.
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.
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.
There's all kinds of energies available right now that we could be using to reduce the amount of fuel that we're consuming.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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 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.
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.
But they have hydrogen fusion technology from alien craft that has been secured underground subterraneanly.
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.
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.
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.
So the question is, how far would it have to go up before it would be untenable for you?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
And then they start adding fuel on, and the rates just aren't keeping up.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Well, I would imagine that the research in the Stanford pods show us that we're going to have to basically create a miracle.
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.
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.
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.
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From coast to coast and worldwide on the internet, this is Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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, 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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
We need to work together instead of having to go to the other option.
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, 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
And by the time it gets to the consumer, it's going to be out of sight.
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.
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.
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.
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.
And only a fool would steal or kill for food or oil and damn his soul to hell forever.
Well, I understand that from your point of view, that's absolutely true.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.