Art Bell welcomes Ed Dames, who warns of a NASA Space Shuttle "kill shot" from unprecedented solar activity—potentially collapsing Earth’s magnetosphere and killing 20 billion people within six months—while Jim Bell introduces his renewable energy model, retrofitting San Diego County’s buildings with solar panels to achieve 18% self-sufficiency. Bell’s free 50-page case study outlines a fossil-fuel-free economy, citing $7M monthly losses from gas price hikes and criticizing nuclear waste risks. Callers highlight global examples like China’s 5-9 month energy payback systems and off-grid solar solutions, while Bell dismisses unproven "zero-point energy" but insists practical tech—like solar paint—must replace oil dependence to avert geopolitical conflicts tied to dwindling resources. [Automatically generated summary]
The Bell, to update you, the Bell family barnyard is well.
Our little bird, Tower, thrives and is a beef eater, among other things, and feeding it about eight times a day, of course, is Ramona.
But Tower's growing, tower's happy, tower is flying, tower's.
In fact, Tower escaped the cage during a cleaning yesterday, and my cat, Yeti, went running in as if to swallow that bird in one bite.
And so I gave him a swat on the backside, and he promptly pouted and was depressed for two hours.
Just a little.
I mean, I've done it playfully harder, but he knew that I was saying, don't eat the bird.
Now, we've tried water guns.
There's a swat on the tail end.
So these cats, I tell you, they have personalities that really make you wonder.
Our little new cat, Dusty, is the subject of tonight's webcam photograph.
You will see a listener made that giant panda bear for our cats, and we had no takers.
But then along came Dusty, and you can see how Dusty has grown.
That's a big panda, let me tell you.
And that's one long Dusty bell.
So all are well in the barnyard.
NASA, actually, the headline is kind of worrisome.
What exactly is the headline?
It's discovery may need unprecedented repair.
That might be a little strong, but NASA is saying it's discovered yet another problem on the space shuttle discovery.
Engineers are still trying to determine what kind of repairs to make.
They're looking at a couple of dangling strips on the belly of the shuttle.
The strips are filler material of a felt-like material and ceramics.
They fill the space between thermal tiles.
Now flapping loose, the strips present a big potential risk of overheating during reentry.
So everybody's scared.
NASA Flight Director Paul Hill said Sunday, such material has come loose on previous flights and posed no harm then, but there's a lot of sensitivity at NASA right now.
They say Eileen Collins, the commander, says it's definitely not a big concern to me right now.
On Monday, NASA is going to decide whether to have two spacewalks, cut the dangling strips, or perhaps shove the material back into the cracks between the tiles.
Such fix could involve the Canadian-supplied arm and would mean an astronaut standing at the arm's end to reach the underside of the shuttle.
And, you know, there are complications in possibly doing that.
In other words, they could actually do more damage with the arm.
So, yes, this strange confluence of events, and that'll have that names here shortly.
There was a downpour that struck Bombay Tuesday.
500 people died.
Did you know it?
This is from Whitley Streebers, unknowncountry.com.
500 dead, maybe more.
Parts of the state of Masharada received 37 inches of rain over a very short time, and Bombay got 26 inches of rain.
Can you imagine that?
It was, of course, a record rainfall for India and one of the great deluges of history.
Very strong monsoon storms.
And by the way, here in the desert, we're also now experiencing the monsoons at their height.
Every single day we wake up to crash, boom, lightning everywhere, and big thunderstorms.
And yet the 13 bell towers to date, despite many close hits, remain as yet untouched.
But it's bad.
We're really getting monsoons here.
Now, apparently, our government is considering changing daylight savings time.
The idiots.
They're going to change daylight savings time by a month.
And I got somebody who sent me an email who points out, doesn't anybody realize, there are probably going to be hundreds of millions of gadgets, including, for example, VCRs, computers, digital clocks that automatically change their time setting for DST.
None of these change according to some mystical vibration from the ether.
Well, there are a few VCRs that do that, you know, but otherwise all are programmed to change the readings on specific dates.
And so there could be, I suppose, a mini Y2K type disaster.
These will all show the wrong time and for at least a month each year, causing much confusion.
Missed appointments showing up late for work.
And now there's a good excuse, actually, if you do show up late for work, blame it on the government.
The United States would like to end the link between time and our sun.
So time again is in the news.
Time to change the way we measure time, according to a U.S. government proposal that businesses favor, astronomers abominate, and Britain sees as a threat to its venerable Greenwich mean time.
Word of the U.S. proposal made secretly to a United Nations body of figures, right, began leaking to signed as earlier this month.
Plan would simplify the world's timekeeping by simply making each day last exactly 24 hours.
Right now, that's not always the case.
Every now and then, you'll recall, they add a leap second to correct things.
Also, they want to change all of this so they don't have to add the leap second anymore.
So we're going to mess with time.
Great.
Oh, word from Susan.
You remember, our older lady in a sailboat alone in the Pacific?
Susan writes to me, really surprised to hear you, Art, on 3840.
That's where we hang out on shortwave.
I tune in quite a bit, but never hear a signal.
But tonight at 11.30 in the morning, it came up out of nowhere very strongly.
And then you're hearing me on 40 watts and a backstay antenna on 75 meters from Hawaii.
Wow.
Propagation from Hawaii, she says, is terrible.
Can hear the mainland only from 5 to 8 p.m. on 20 meters.
All bands dead otherwise.
Ham radio here is big on Saturday because everybody's working.
Now, she goes on to say, I should be leaving here.
Now, this is a surprise.
As soon as my autopilot is returned from repairs on the mainland, I normally sail with the wind vane, but to raise and lower my sails, I use the autopilot to keep headed into the wind.
My next destination is an atoll in the Marshall Islands, hopefully, to teach basic electronics and tutor in navigation at their high school.
So be looking for you, Susan, as you leave Hawaii somewhat earlier than I think you had planned for the Marshall Islands.
That lady, you know, at 70-something.
Taking off by yourself across the Pacific in a sailboat, leaving your home, going to find a new home somewhere in the South Pacific.
Can you imagine that?
Hey, we found a tenth planet.
Well, I guess it is.
You know, it's supposedly bigger than Pluto.
Haven't named it yet.
But there's another one out there.
It's in the Kuiper belt, along with a lot of other stuff.
Only it's a lot bigger, big enough, I guess, to be considered to be a planet.
We just had an X-class flare.
As a matter of fact, a couple of days ago, Sun Let Go with a giant X-Class flare, writes Jim in Riverside.
It was Major Danes, wasn't it, who warned of the kill shot, said that we should be on the alert when a solar flare is emitted around the time of a scrubbed space launch.
Both conditions have now been met.
How about a little word from Ed?
In light, here's another one.
In light of the fact that we're having extraordinary solar activity, coupled with the fact that the shuttle is going to be returning around the time of the annual meteor shower, I would rather think that you should have Ed Dames on for at least a short time Sunday to get his view on that.
All right.
In a moment, we'll do exactly that.
Major Ed Dames, indeed, has predicted an awful lot of what appears to be going on right now.
So at the beginning of the week, I called him.
I saw it all, and I called him, and he said, eh, no, maybe not.
And then he called my producer and said, well, no, maybe we should do an hour.
So he's got something on his mind coming up in a moment.
He would appear on every single list of the loved, most loved, and most hated guests that I ever have on the air.
The world's foremost remote viewing teacher, Edward A. Dames, Major, U.S. Army, retired.
I've got his complete military record.
It's all real.
He's a decorated military intelligence officer, original member of the U.S. Army Prototype Remote Viewing Training Program, served as training and operations officer for the DIA's collection unit, intelligence collection unit, currently serves as executive director for the Matrix Intelligence Agency, a private consulting group, the technical consultant for the feature film Suspect Zero, a good movie.
Tom Cruise, you may have seen it.
Ed coached Sir Ben Kingsley for that, played the role of an FBI remote viewing instructor in the movie as well.
I'm curious, from my own curiosity, Ed, I did place a call to you, you recall, and you said, no, you know, no.
And then I found from my producer, you apparently had changed your mind and decided you did want some airtime tonight for, I guess, to sort of update people because of this confluence of events.
You had remote-viewed catastrophe involving a space shuttle which would be caught in some sort of meteor shower.
And should we see that space shuttle returning to Earth or being forced down by a meteor shower, that would indicate the kill shot, this awful life-extinguishing event from the sun, was close at hand.
I mean, as a predictive tool, remote viewing can be pretty powerful in the hands of professionals.
And as you know, for the last eight years, we've been looking at this thing over the horizon.
remember we called it discontinuity because we didn't really know what it was it just It was like the great darkness or something that really put the kibage on cultural evolution on Earth.
And over the years we checked and double-checked and triple-checked and found out that it was our own sun that does something and this something is.
It begins to produce some very catastrophic solar flares.
In terms of catastrophes, you might remember on your January 1st show that I predicted that there would be yet another earthquake in Indonesia.
The shower peaks on my birthday, August 11th, 12th.
And it begins, though, a couple of days before that, every year.
So it's so close temporarily and approximately to what we've been seeing as the Harbinger event, the beginning of the kill shot sequence, and because of the very, very interesting solar activity last week on the backside of the sun, very severe solar flares.
Remember the event that we described as the predictive event, the Harbinger event, the event that's closest to this sequence is this ensemble that you see now.
It's not the Indy 500.
For instance, last year I did a show for Japanese TV.
They wanted to know when the next catastrophic earthquake would be in Tokyo.
And the event that preceded that, the closest recognizable event, was an international kite festival in southern Japan.
In this case, for the beginning of the kill shot sequence, we have these elements in place.
We have a meteor shower, we have a shuttle up, and we have a shuttle coming back down.
But remember, I didn't say it lands.
I said it's coming back down.
That's where I'm going to pull a punch on this show.
But this ensemble, the danger, the danger to both the space station and the shuttle, if it's still docked, is that we may have unprecedented solar flares.
And remember, the shot across the bow that I predicted would happen two weeks prior to its prediction, to its occurrence at the end of 2003, was something that NASA could never predict.
Scientists who had satellites up there with equipment to measure what they thought could be the largest event from the sun ever, it went right off that calibration, maybe by double or even more.
We have no idea.
That was such a big flare.
If it had come toward the Earth, Ed, we'd have been pretty well scorched.
Possibly, because what we know as remote viewers looking over the horizon is the worst does not occur until the magnetosphere of the Earth collapses, and then we get the full brunt of any solar flare.
That's when it really, when many, many people die, actually die.
Prior to that, you have atmospheric heating and a lot of climate change, drastic climate change, very rapid, but none of this instantaneous rotisserie effect that we're going to get when the magnetosphere collapses and the Earth can't protect itself and us from very, very dangerous protons and X-rays.
Well, the kill shot, we've got many, many remote viewers over a number of years, as you know.
But in terms of putting dates on the very, very big flares, you've only got three people who are really experts that can do this.
And the reason, Art, is because the techniques are proprietary to us.
And we haven't taught them to other people.
However, I'm going to sit down with my business partner and suggest that maybe now people will use these techniques to look At their own survival sanctuaries and places like that, because the techniques can pinpoint not only places in time, but places in space geographically, where an individual should go to be safe.
Yes, I knew that you had certain, oh, I don't know, specific proprietary techniques for nailing down dates and times.
His very dire prediction.
A prediction that we appear to be possibly very close to being right in the middle of.
You know, he called it, he called it, and now he's calling it, and I'm a little worried that it's a little close to what he's calling.
But I never remote view, and I don't do that because I don't want to know what's coming.
I really don't.
There are a lot of people who do.
I'm hoping for the error.
I'm hoping to be able to talk to Ed in a month or two or a year and say, hey, Ed, you got that one wrong.
What happened?
So that's me.
I don't want to know, and I'm hopeful.
And so if you need a little bit of cheer in light of the news that he's giving us, that's about the best I can do.
Let's try this approach.
Ed, look, enough has already happened with the sun and the shuttle and the timing and the meteor shower and all the rest of it that we could call this some kind of a hit.
Is there any possibility that it's like close but no cigar, that events might not unfold exactly and the shuttle might come home just fine and for some period of time everything would be okay because you had it wrong?
I would put probably an 80 to 85 percent likelihood, based upon my own 21 years of experience in error rates, I'd say there's a maximum of 15 percent that it would be wrong.
Is there any, assuming that these events continue to unfold and the shuttle is forced down, worst case by a meteor shower or there's a catastrophic event, is there anything that we can do collectively to prevent it?
Well, based on just that statement alone, there's plenty of people who will begin concentrating, whether I tell them to or not, on averting this event.
I wonder, Ed, if time travel was real and you could do whatever it took to prevent the shuttle situation, such as whatever it's going to be, from happening, whether that would then prevent the rest of the it would stop the rest of the events that otherwise would unfold or change the timetable in some way.
What we would then come up with as remote viewers is another event that would be the closest preceding recognizable event, and that might be anything, this particular Art Bell show or a presidential election of some type, that kind of thing.
The geophysical sequence is so big.
It's such a huge cosmic thing that I just can't see, and at least using my puny brain to look ahead, any way to prevent it.
That's why remote viewing can see these geophysical events so clearly.
The signals are so big.
And unconscious does its best to protect its ward, the human being, the body.
So anyway, I'm kind of getting close to retirement, too, so I would encourage a lot of people to learn remote viewing, really, really learn it and keep themselves safe.
I mean, what is the point of somebody buying remote viewing materials if you have just told Them that the size of the catastrophic rotisserie eventually in the Kill Shot DVD that I put out with all the detailed information, it outlines the survival zones, the eminently very good survival zones, because the entire earth is not going to be cooked.
It's just belts that will be cooked at certain times.
The general areas are outlined there, but learning remote viewing for yourself, and it's easy to learn, it's just that you have to practice it.
What I'm doing is, and the reason I looked at the next global catastrophes, earthquakes and things like that, is to be able to act as a herald, to tell people to get ready and trust your own consciousness.
Learn how to use it, trust it, or at least find somebody that knows how to use it and tell you where to go to save yourself and your family.
That's all.
Or to get out of the way.
For instance, you know, predicting an earthquake.
Not everybody's going to leave their home next to an, let's say, a volcanic eruption.
We've got one scheduled for North Island, New Zealand.
But a few people might, and that saves a few lives.
Let's say I was teaching you how to ice skate, and you look at those ice skates, and you say, there's no way that anybody can stand on slippery ice with those skinny little things.
And then a good coach can say, yeah, you can believe whatever you want, but you'll still be ice skating.
And I was wondering if you might consider a roundtable thing about terrorism and al-Qaeda in general, perhaps with Steve Wynn and Michael Schuer, the guy that was head of the Osama bin Laden unit, the CIA, and maybe even your next hour's guest.
When the atmosphere really begins to heat up and when protons start coming down to the deck and x-rays in the out years, you have to be underground for periods of time.
Not forever, but you have to sit out storms.
Also, you're going to have vicious winds, too, because the atmosphere is going to transjaculate.
I think what's fair is that we will probably see something solar-wise in the next, I'd say, max month and a half to two months, but possibly as early as the next two hours, depending on what's going on with SunSpot 0762, I believe.
Within two weeks, it's obviously going to be resolved one way or the other, right?
Correct.
So if I have you on in two weeks and the shuttle has returned safely without any problems, no encounter with meteors, not driven out of back to Earth by a meteor shower or whatever, in two weeks would you come back on and say, well, look, maybe we're headed in a slightly different direction because it didn't happen?
That is an analytical call because when, as viewers, we saw a meteor shower and the shuttle flying, that was my call saying it looks like it's in trouble.
And we felt that it was in trouble, but I jumped to the conclusion that it was trouble because of the meteor shower, which I think is incorrect now.
On all kinds of subjects, renewable energy, the way we make it through, if we make it through, and so much more.
Jim Bell actually is an internationally recognized expert on life support sustaining development and has more than 40 years experience in the design and construction industry.
He attended Palomar College, Long Beach State University, and graduated from SDSU with a bachelor's degree in art and art sciences.
He speaks to many groups each year, is often interviewed rather on television, radio, and written press.
He's the author of Achieving Economic Security on Spaceship Earth and numerous other articles and papers on creating sustainable economies.
Jim currently serves as director of the Ecological Life Systems Institute and the San Diego Center for Appropriate Technology.
He also is board member of Ocean Beach People's Food Co-op, has recently been working with the San Diego Apollo Project.
During the late 60s and early 70s, Jim became concerned about the impacts of human activities on the environment and our quality of life.
He became increasingly convinced that there were smarter ways to conduct our lives, smarter ways to build our communities that would just simply minimize negative impacts, making it at least a little bit better.
Yeah, and I've been hearing about, well, we've been having some pretty high temperatures in the backcountry, but, you know, nothing compared to what you guys are dealing with.
It's like we're numbed, we're almost like numbed to them.
And what I decided to do is say, hey, look, obviously, if we continue as now, we're going to damage our planet's life support system so severely it's going to fail in some fundamental way.
I mean, whether it's global warming or soaking up too much pesticides or whatever it happens to be, I think the point is, well, gee, if we haven't reached that point yet, let's redesign how we do things so that we have good, strong, prosperous economies.
You're familiar with many of the theories that I'm familiar with, and there's all kinds of things that seem to be able to happen, reverberations of the weather.
You start going one way and it turns the other way because of climatic effects and stuff like that.
But I just said, well, we can get all involved in those things and wonder about them and all that.
But really, if we do have time, the best thing to do is develop life support sustaining economies.
Well, you know, I've been in this field for over 30 years, and I think when I first got in it, I was like, you know, young or younger anyway, and, you know, like, wow, look how bad things are.
But our planet's life support system has been remarkable in terms of its ability not to collapse under the constant onslaught that humans, you know, it's not just like pointing fingers because, you know, we were born into this.
I know, but there's, I mean, they're actually in our society, because I talk with a lot of young people, and most of them are pretty pessimistic, you know, and there's...
Yeah, yeah.
But, you know, well, as long as we're kicking and breathing and we can communicate with each other, and, you know, I think there's still hope.
And the human family has done amazing things when it understood what was necessary and how we had to get together and pull together.
Well, there's a really good question all by itself.
And that is, if it's not too late, are we, in fact, waking up en masse to the fact that it, well, gee, either could be or might be too late, or we better do it.
Well, I think that's true, too, but maybe a better word is bruised.
We all feel so beat about the head and shoulders by the life that's coming at us that this area in San Diego is sort of a high income, though the cost of living here is certainly going up.
But I think people here are working two jobs or three jobs or they got fired or whatever, and people are living with other people in houses.
Even in my own building here, it's a 2,500 square foot building, got two people living here.
We had a big fundraising party last night.
We're working in the community and we're trying to shed light instead of heat.
That's what I'm addressing in the book as a plan where, you know, people are going to pay money, but instead of having to come up with upfront money or going to Hawk or something like that, all they would have to do is just continuing paying their utility bill, and the bill would actually gradually start going down, and the solar might not even be on their roof, but it might be on a parking lot over a shopping center down the street.
But their house would be made as energy efficient as possible, maybe even putting in the most efficient refrigerator and better lighting and skylights where it made sense to take advantage of daylighting.
Well, and that's the wonderful thing about your show, is that every night, practically you and George and whoever else you have on, you're basically saying, hey, we're all trying to wake up.
And I don't have all the answers, but let's wake up.
There's a theory now, Jim, that the oil, the first easy-to-get half of the oil is now gone.
And we're at a point where we've got still a lot of oil to get out of the ground, but it's the second half, the hard-to-get, very expensive-to-get oil.
I think there's definitely an excellent case for it, and there's been a lot of people who I respect who have talked about, including some Republican.
Sorry, I can't think of his name off the top of my head, but he's back east.
He's a Republican representative, Roscoe Bartlett, I think it is.
And he's been talking about peacoil for a long time, trying to get the Republicans to, you know, hey, get it.
We've got to do something quick.
So this is, on one level, it's kind of mainstream.
And I've even seen Exxon studies where they're saying, you know, it's coming, it's coming.
And I'm hoping it doesn't come as fast as a lot of these people are saying, because if it does, it'll make what I'm proposing more difficult as we lose the energy or the fossil fuel bridge we now have to move to the next way.
I mean, let me just give one example.
If we covered only 18% of existing buildings and parking lots in San Diego County, we could be completely energy self-sufficient.
I mean, replace gasoline, diesel, natural gas, all imported electricity.
Well, I'm planning to live out my life here, so I'm going to work toward it.
And we have the Apollo Project, which I've been working with.
And it's a group of, it consists of labor, community groups, and environmental groups.
And we're actually meeting in the Electricians Hall here in the United Brotherhood of Electrical Workers' Hall.
I apologize to Paul.
I don't know what the number is.
And the whole idea behind the Apollo project is to put the same kind of muscle we did in trying to get somebody to the moon into making our country renewable energy self-sufficient, starting community by community.
I mean, if the situation is as we have described, then why isn't there some kind of Manhattan-style emergency project to make America, not just San Diego, but America energy sufficient?
To put solar cells and wind machines up everywhere?
No, you're definitely right, but there's sure a lot of I mean, like there was, I just saw something in the news reports about the governors, no, it was the mayors, the National Association of Mayors, had come out supposedly unanimously to try to reduce global warming in their own cities.
And here, I'm in San Diego.
San Diego's done some pretty good things.
As you say, and I agree with you 100%, if PCOL happens, they won't matter who, because they're just not significant enough to really make any difference.
But we have the capability, if we recognize it as a real danger and we got our businesses and our military and really everybody on board with doing it.
And actually in San Diego, the military, the Navy has a 750-kilowatt solar system over a parking lot.
Right.
So there's things happening.
People are dabbling in it.
It's kind of like the Emperor's New Clothes story where I guess I'm like the little kid who's saying, hey, the Emperor's naked.
But this plan that I'm proposing and that I'm working with the Apollo Project more or less on basically says, hey, look, there are companies out there called Energy Service Companies.
Well, they'd just love to bid a proof-of-concept project, say, for the city of San Diego that would match the energy profile use of the city of San Diego.
You know, some commercial, some industrial, some of the things.
Well, they invest, they do their business right now.
They'll come into your factory, they'll come into your hotel complex or whatever, and they'll invest the upfront money to do the retrofit, and then they share in the savings.
So then you're telling me going in and doing these steps to, say, a factory, whether it's doubling windows or putting solar cells on or working.
To get really green, you're saying it's profitable enough that this company will come in, change the factory around, based, and do all the capital investment for just a share of the savings?
I think what happens in these deals, well, in every experience that I have had with it, is that what the Energy Service Company guarantees the Police Department or whoever they're working with, a positive cash flow day one once things are installed.
And they're real conservative about it, too, because they're looking mostly to get the low-hanging fruit.
I don't know specifically in that deal, but according to our local utility, that energy services building has been generating a 25% return per year since it was put in place.
I have no illusions about energy in any way at all.
I've taken a number of steps myself, as many of you know.
I have enough solar power and wind power here to power my house.
I have batteries, inverters, you know, I went the whole Megilla.
And I know, and I can tell you that when I did it now several years ago, and so the situation might have changed, and we'll ask Jim about that, but when I did it, it was so expensive that I really wouldn't see the return in my lifetime.
So obviously, I did it for other reasons.
I wanted uninterruptible power.
I wanted pure power.
I wanted, there were a lot of reasons that I did it, not all of which are necessarily green.
They're just things that I wanted.
And I wanted to be able to see if I could do it, frankly.
But it costs far too much money, and I'll be dead and gone by the time the payoff occurs.
And that's just fact, or was a fact, when I did it.
Now, Jim, you should know that as I do the program and people are listening to you, and they listen, believe me, to every word you and I say, I get computer messages from the audience.
The audience can be cruel.
Jim, Don in Tallahassee is a little cruel.
He says, look, how can your guest say he's an expert in the field and yet not be specific on anything?
He can say that so-and-so company saved X number of dollars or percent of money or something, but he can't give any specifics.
I also cannot find any company named Energy Services Company.
Well, energy service companies actually get their money.
I don't know if they get it from BP, but they get money, their upfront money that they invest comes from a utility consortium.
And basically, they use that money.
But I did give the example of the energy services company here in the city of San Diego.
And this is the city of San Diego record.
And according to San Diego Gas and Electric, which has no vested interest in showing the wonderful performance of this building, but there's good people in SDG ⁇ E, too.
I believe it was in the newspaper because it's been a big deal.
It's actually been one of the frustrating things, because I've been somewhat involved in politics here, and one of the frustrating things is they had this building showing this wonderful return, and I was asking the mayor, why aren't you doing all the buildings?
Well, but, you know, I guess what I'm trying to say is there are ways.
I mean, for example, in the economic model that I present in my book, and it's there, and it's all footnoted and everything else, it basically shows that initially you would invest 97% of the money that an energy service company would put up, or even if the city was going to put it up, it's actually better if the city did, because they can get a lower interest rate than the energy service company and do some kind of private public partnership.
And that would be more lucrative for everybody, really.
But basically, puts the money up and begins investing in efficiency.
And the parameters are that you're going to save every kilowatt of capacity that you can save per $1,000 per kilowatt of capacity saved, assuming buildings being used 10 hours a day.
Maybe there's some energy service person out there in that business listening who will fast-blast your email because this is a, I mean, there's actually a National Association of Energy Service Companies.
You know, I think the best thing is just to listen to what I'm saying.
When I say we could be completely renewable energy self-sufficient in San Diego County by covering only 18% of existing buildings and parking lots, I'm assuming, and I've got data for this, 500 square miles of buildings and parking lots and two square meters per day per kilowatt hour of energy produced, and then basically doing the math.
But no, whereas we need two square meters per kilowatt hour per day on average, you know, for production, and we only get five hours of sun to light a day.
So that's why the energy savings is so much better because you get to save energy longer.
You see, in areas where it gets to be 117 degrees, you depend on a compressor operating properly, Jim, and that sucks energy just like a cow does whatever it is a cow eats.
Well, like in your area, though, like doing something underground would make perfect sense because you're not going to have to worry about water getting into your basement.
But down there, the earth will help keep you cool.
But, you know, if you do it with a little attention, like, you know, I mean, what I do professionally is I'm an ecological designer, so when I get my paid job, when I have one, is basically helping people do whatever they're trying to do in ways that are as non-polluting, non-toxic, non-you know, even designing buildings so that when they wear out, they're going to be relatively easy to recycle.
And then the title will come up, and there will be a click here under that title, and it'll come up in the PDF format, which is 50 pages, including the covers.
And if you're on the dial-up, it's going to take a while to get it to go down.
But if you're on cable of some sort, it doesn't take very long at all.
Yeah, and like I, you know, I, you know, like if somebody would maybe look at my life and say, well, I don't think I would, you know, like to live there, but I do like to live where I live, and it's actually comfortable, and I have good friends, and I think we're doing some important things, and I have a lot of fun.
I mean, people, even regular residential people that are doing this, if they were really going to pay the whole freight without the subsidies and things like that, it would be at least $20,000.
But my question to you is, today, right now, if I lived in California where they do have some kind of program, although they might be ending it, I heard rumors, by the way, they were ending the subsidies.
Because it basically makes a free market argument that if you, see, initially when you, you know, say you were going to do float a medicine bond or something like that to fund this for your city or for your region, you're still going to have to pay some interest on it, you know, but you probably get something less than 5%, which is a pretty good interest, whereas the energy service company is probably going to get 12% on their money.
So it means some opportunities are not going to be as cost-effective as they would be if the money was cheaper.
But you invest in the efficiency initially, that pays back very fast, so you get completely out of debt.
And now you're basically rolling that money over and continuing to invest it.
You have economy of scale production, you have crews that are trained that are basically just going right down the block.
So a lot of people believe that one little thing, like the butterfly effect, will be done just sending everything over the top and causing some terrible climate catastrophe or something ecologically that will really hurt us.
I mean, there's probably 10 things going on that we don't even know about yet.
But it's like we, you know, that's what happens is maybe part of our malady as human creatures is we get stuck there.
And what I'm trying to say, you know, let's not get stuck there.
Let's go to the next level.
Let's, you know, as long as we're kicking and breathing, you know, like if we were attacked by, you know, some people in our community, we definitely would defend ourselves and do all those kinds of things.
Going to the next level, Jim, is going to absolutely require either a plan like yours that is so obviously profitable that people just do it because people do what saves them money.
Or it's going to, and no doubt it would also, since it's probably so late, it's going to require some very difficult decisions by our national politicians.
Well, how I first met Dr. Jen was he had a, it was quoted in the newspaper of that every 10-cent rise in the price of gasoline meant $7 million left our county economy each month.
And in my first book, I cited some scientists who were saying the very same thing.
I guess people that feel that way are a minority, but when you look at a waste that's going to be around 10,000 years and there's never been peace on the planet in two days, it's like, well, you think, well, we're taking that risk for future generations just to power our televisions.
Well, no, it was definitely a wonderful, wonderful little, you know, and I'm six foot four, and there's more room for me to sit in that car and, you know, drive than there is in most.
I mean, a car that goes a couple hundred thousand miles, a car that gets 40 or 50 miles or even 60 to the gallon, well, I guess we just can't have that.
Right now, in the United States, what percentage of our energy is derived from alternative methods, anywhere from solar to wind to geothermal to whatever?
Hopefully in the book, they'll read it and look at it, and they'll see that they can make a lot more money doing the right thing than doing the wrong thing.
Yeah, well, I've had a lot of guests on the program, Jim, who recognize the trouble we're in, but they say realistically, our only understood workable savior right now is the nuclear power industry.
No, I think it's just like it almost shows, you know, we're a very clever species, but we're not very wise.
And this was one of the least wise things we've ever done.
Because when you start leaving things behind after you're dead and gone and long forgotten, that are going to be dangerous to people for, you know, maybe 1,000 generations or 10,000 generations, not to mention it's going to be moving through the food chain.
And once you put things like that into the world, there's really no escaping them.
And we should not be doing that.
We should be more humble or more cautious or try to become wiser.
let's just start with nine eleven because that was the big emotional thing that happened i'm not sure nine eleven yeah it was emotional you're right uh...
but i'm not sure that nine eleven is any sort of reason for the iraq war well i you know are you well i thought the what i thought about this, you know, and I thought, you know, and what I was kind of hoping that President Bush would do was to treat this as a criminal act as it was.
It was a murder.
It was a, you know, 3,000, it was a murder of 3,000 people.
So all of these things, Iraq, let me back up a second and give you what I think is the succinct view of this.
First of all, if we had been doing what we should have been doing to become more, just forget about the renewable development, just energy efficient, we would have basically pulled all the energy, economic energy out of the Middle East that can be used for war.
I mean, this was reported by the Rocky Mountain Institute.
All kinds of different groups reported this.
Like even if we made cars an average of 32 miles per gallon.
And typically, many times it's not necessarily one technology such as solar or a transition from regular lights to fancy lights, things like that, that make it.
It's the companies that are offering a combination of new technologies and programs combined on a performance contract.
Yes, it's a very enlightening experience, isn't it?
unidentified
It is a very enlightening experience.
And I tell you what's going on over there is that the politics play a part, but when it gets to the point where you don't have enough energy, period, and you're turning off skyscrapers for three or four hours a day, and the power is not there, that's when they start looking for alternative things.
I mean, China's got probably the largest coal production in the world, or at least some of it, and yet it's still not enough.
And so they're looking for solar answers.
They're looking for, well, six nuclear reactors, I guess, is what I've been told.
Things of that nature.
So it is politics.
We'll take a back seat to whatever's going on if desperation becomes strong enough.
Yeah, like I said before, it doesn't really matter who does it first.
It's like somebody has to step up to the plate and say, hey, look, we're in a very dangerous situation, on a lot of different levels, and we need to develop a real, practical, cost-effective plan to get out of the mess we're in.
And energy security plays one role in it.
I mean, it's like we say, oh, gee, my payback is a long time.
But what happens when your computer crashes because you don't have energy coming from the normal source?
What does that cost?
And what happens if you don't have energy and it's 117 degrees for five days because you don't have solar?
It's almost like the poison is so cheap we have to keep taking it.
People are kind of aware, but we get lulled, like you said before, with the gas price.
They go up and they go down a little bit, and what a relief.
And then they go up a little higher.
They always keep going a little bit higher.
And we kind of get lulled into it, and it didn't devastate our life, so we put up with it.
And with peak oil and things like that looming ahead of us, peak oil is basically the point where there's not enough energy on a day-to-day basis to supply everybody's demand for it.
Well, but it sort of results in the same thing, that once you reach that point, then it's like you're up kind of up against two things.
One is the amount of energy that's required to get the oil out of the ground and process it and deliver it versus the amount of energy that's in the oil.
So that's another peak that we're heading for that will happen close after the other one, I'm afraid.
I mean, I looked into my heart and I said, you know, when I see little kids and I think about the future and I think about, you know, all the generations of people that had to live and die and have kids and raise them long enough to, you know, so they could have kids and all that.
But I think, you know, when I talk with people, it seems to me that everybody cares, but they're kind of, you know, their lives are, you know, in a way they need care too because the average person is working more than one job or something like that and trying to make the rent and they've got a problem with their, you know, with their other paramore or whatever.
And like all of us, life is what happens while we're making plans.
And I'm projecting economic plans to make regions energy self-sufficient.
But nevertheless, I still think it's possible.
And if you present a hopeful vision, practical vision, cost-effective vision, why not?
I don't think we're quite that stupid not to take advantage of it, if we really understand it.
Well, first of all, look at slavery and look at women having to vote.
I mean, that wasn't like all of a sudden 51% of the people signed up and said, yeah, this is a good idea.
And it was actually a relatively small number of people, and it happened almost like faster than anybody imagined when it finally did happen.
Well, that's true.
So big things happen.
And I think when you really present a good idea, and like when I say I'm presenting this idea, I'm presenting this book and all that, take it, my truth, with a small T. And I think we all should present our truth with a small T. You know, it's the best we come up with so far.
That's all I'm sharing.
I think there's some good ideas there, and I'm hoping people will give it a fair look.
Well, if I can cover only 20% of my buildings and parking lots with solar panels and get all the energy I need with no danger of anything, you know, no 100 million degrees centigrade temperature to hold.
I mean, magnetic bottles don't hold neutrons.
I mean, yeah, maybe you can contain the positive and negative charges, but you're not going to contain the neutrons.
So the result will be the whole plant will become radioactive.
The Green Party there has had some influence on it.
But I think, though, I'm more focused in my own neighborhood, but I think people are making good arguments that, hey, this makes more sense in terms of security, in terms of surety of energy, in terms of pricing.
I mean, solar energy, once you have the capacity to collect it, the energy part doesn't go up in price.
Well, like when you're like if you're net metered out, like a lot of people, you know, they put in enough so that they're actually pushing more kilowatt hours into the grid each year than they're using.
Right.
That you can measure.
But when you're like a business and you're producing 30%, it's like, well, energy prices are going up and down, like we said before.
So it's kind of hard to keep track of what is that system doing.
And we actually have four systems because we wanted to avoid the net metering costs, or not the net metering costs, but if you're not on smaller meters, you're over 200 watts, if the price of energy goes up, then they ding you for that increased energy cost.
So we insulate ourselves by doing it that way.
But it's a little, it would be better to be able to understand exactly what's happening on a more moment-by-moment basis.
Well, if they focus on efficiency first, really just do everything to, you know, I just want to focus on economics.
Well, but I mean, but see, that's where the economic comes in because you can save energy much less, you know, for much less money than you can produce it, no matter how you're producing it.
And so the first step is that you put in that new refrigerator, you put in better lights, you do the things that are going to cut down your, you know, going to give you the same energy service, but you're not going to need very much energy to supply it.
Then you size your system.
if you do that you know your may probably talking about maybe nine eight nine ten year payback there are some actually some companies though that that will do That should be enough.
You really feel as though the average household could replace the hoggy appliances with good and efficient ones and then scale it and go out and get the solar and the wind and the rest and have a payback in eight or nine years.
I mean, if you do the solar by itself, you know, like in your situation, it's probably a little more severe, but you're looking at maybe a 20-year payback.
You know, at current interest rates, it's not too bad, but when you throw in the security and all that sort of stuff, you know, it sort of makes sense even economically.
But the efficiency improvements is the key.
Because if you can get the same energy service for a lot less energy, you don't have to pay very much for those panels.
And this is reflected in most of the solar companies are like doubling our price.
And also, even though there is the pressure, I've talked with some local installers here, and they're still getting panels around 3 to 315, maybe a little under 3 per peak watt, which is, you know, when you bought yours, it was much higher than that.
Well, the last time I checked, they were getting on their money, and I think it's probably come down a little bit now because the interest rates in general were higher at the time.
But they were getting something like 14% on the money that came from the utility consortium.
In the spreadsheet that's in my book, we assumed a 15% profit energy.
If we were going to have to borrow the money, it would be the energy or whoever's borrowing it, it doesn't really matter, would be 15% return on the money and on top of that profit to basically do the plan where the work is done first and you just keep paying your utility bill and it gets paid off.
And then you click on Jim's new book, which is the first page that comes up on the left-hand side.
There's something at the top.
I mean, that's the opening page.
And then you click on Jim's new book.
And then the title comes up, which is Creating a Sustainable Economy and Future on Our Planet, the San Diego Tijuana Region, a case study.
So this gets into the nuts and bolts of how to do this.
And really, to a certain degree, it's almost like a perspective to sell this to the public, to sell this to the average taxpayer and voter, that here's a wonderful opportunity that not only we can take advantage of, but pretty much anywhere in the planet, short of Antarctica.
Listen, I've got five lines here sitting here blinking at me and people that want to talk to you.
So no, it's not over.
You didn't put them to sleep.
Don't worry about it.
I do want to quickly, though, just give you this latest from CNN.
Saudi Arabia's King Fahd, whose reign was marked by unprecedented prosperity, but whose close ties with the United States stirred the passions of Islamic militants, has died.
The Saudi monarch had been in and out of the hospital in recent months, most recently suffering from pneumonia-like symptoms.
Fahd yielded day-to-day control of the kingdom a decade ago after suffering a stroke.
So with that in mind, one might imagine that not very much is going to change, but I guess that tells you how important energy is to us when the king of Saudi Arabia dies.
It flashes across the world as a gigantic bullet.
I guess it would for any king.
But I mean, the king of Saudi Arabia is very, very important.
And Saudi Arabia is very important to us, isn't it, Jim?
I've heard some good things recently that they're actually installing a lot of solar in Saudi Arabia, which would, you know, why not keep your oil reserves and get your energy in a different way?
i haven't done any exhaustive research but i know i get a lot of emails along these lines and i i know i just read something recently and i was saying that uh...
that that they were doing it and and i i think it's a it's very what you know that that's what they should be doing in iraq as well and in iran instead of building nuclear power plants you know it's just They may be more interested, Jim, in the byproduct.
The byproduct, of course, would be enriched plutonium, which could be used to make atomic bombs, which could be used against us, which may be used against us.
And really, a lot of it centers around United States policy in the world.
And that policy is shaped to a large degree by our needs, our energy needs.
Well, if you look at it this way, if we were completely renewable energy self-sufficient in this country, which we could easily could actually accomplish, and we were helping those other countries do the same in their own countries, I think most of this conflict would go away.
I don't think that's really true, you know, Because I think we hadn't gone to war and we would have treated what happened in 9-11 as a criminal act and we would have done the investigation and arrested people when we got them, like we did in Sarajevo and places like that.
Once they really got down to doing the legal thing and trying an abstentia and all that, we haven't tried Osama bin Laden in abstentia.
We haven't even tried, now that we have Saddam Hussein, we haven't even tried him.
I thought it was, as tragic as 9-11 was, it would have been a wonderful thing if we would have actually used that opportunity to show how a country run on a constitution with a free society that's run under law treats crime.
Instead of we seem to, like politically, we sort of regress to the very same tactics that the people we call so evil are using.
And the other thing is that if we would have just left it alone, we were already winning the war just through television and I Love Lucy and music and all the cultural things that were happening, what we did is we created the environment where, say, the individual allies in these countries were subdued or less enthusiastic, and we emboldened the radicals.
If China makes a move on Taiwan right now, do you think the United States should stand behind Taiwan, risking nuclear war over Taiwan, or step back and say, okay, China, she's yours?
unidentified
No, it had to be a United Nations deal, but I think we're going to have to step in and not let China do as they do.
I don't believe a nuclear conflict will come about.
So as bad as the situation may be in the rest of the world, this whole China thing is coming up faster than anybody thought, having more of an effect than anybody thought, and driving up the price like crazy.
So I suppose from your point of view, it'll just hasten the development of everything you've been talking about this morning, yes?
Well, you know, if it happens too fast, we won't have time.
I mean, even in the book, I lay out a very aggressive plan to make San Diego County renewable energy self-sufficient, and even that plan would take 27 years.
And that's spending more money than would really make sense to spend initially, and we don't even have enough trained workers.
You know, it's like the way I look at it is the closer any region or country comes to becoming renewable energy self-sufficient, the better they're going to be able to withstand whatever comes our way on the energy front.
And actually, I wanted to say hello to my friend Jim Bell.
We're a fellow alumni from Claremont High School in San Diego.
Oh.
Yes.
Hi.
And hi, Jim.
It's great to hear you.
It kind of blew me away when I heard earlier that you were going to be on the show.
And I would like to say in your defense that I know you know what you're talking about.
When Art was pressing you earlier for companies to name that are in the energy conservation service and that kind of thing, if you look in the current San Diego yellow pages, you will find 14 companies under energy conservation and energy consulting and documentation.
Well, it's unusual that my callers are more unwilling than myself to name names.
unidentified
Well, no, there are over two dozen energy companies here that provide code generation, home energy conservation, as you have done with your place in Perrump and so on.
And it has everything to do with solar panels and the rest.
I mean, if you have a, you know, like you actually have leadership in a community on the political level, and you do this efficiently and you set up the parameters.
I mean, like the energy service company is not interested in your home because it's too small of a project by itself.
But if it's a whole neighborhood, then they're totally interested.
I mean, like, if you're a bigger, you know, if you're like a more middle class or more affluent family, it's probably going to work better for you.
I mean, if you're like a, you know, you're like you're a low-income and it's going to take, because you're not using so much energy, so the amount of money you have to actually make the payback over time is less.
Yeah, sure.
That's why you want to average it together.
Instead of having these companies just pick the low-hanging fruit, we want you to have a good return, but we want you to maximize the efficiency improvements because that's what really improves the economic picture of the local economy.
I am very impressed by your I don't have internet access or email or anything like that.
I live on the ocean.
But I have a friend who is living in a sprayed concrete seven and a half feet underground.
It is a constant 14 degrees Celsius, no matter if it's rainforest winter or summer.
He has set my vessel up, fully solar, fully wind, and he's working on energy for a propulsion system that is completely magnetic electric.
And eventually I hope to get it, but I'm just calling basically to tell the world and whoever else is listening that it's about time someone came up with this kind of concept just to say it to the rest of the world.
And that's the inventive spirit of the United States.
And really everybody has that in them.
And we're the leader of that.
And if we do the right things, there'll be so many ideas.
Like the things I'm proposing will seem quaint.
unidentified
Well, I'm from Canada myself, but he also has water troughs and reserves for people if it ever came necessary.
So he's got waterfalls and reserve tanks, and he's got a hot water heater built on my vessel, which is the simplest thing you could possibly imagine.
A little bit of black spray paint, a piece of glass, and a nice small little unit that gets the water temperature in 15 minutes on a sunny day up to 140 degrees Celsius.
I live in Leighton, Utah, previously a resident of Northern California.
And many of the things that you've been talking about, it's like I've seen different attempts with people in cities.
One, I believe, was Colfax, Northern California, where the city was so tired of their high utility bills that they actually went to using, cycling their sewage and producing methane and other forms for the municipal buildings.
Well, you know, we can produce all the energy we need with solar, but sometimes electricity isn't the best energy source to get the job done that we want to get done.
Jim, Joe from Richfield Springs, New York says, all right, you know, one thing always avoided when anybody, any of your guests talk about oil, not just energy use, is the fact that most products, most things, are made of petroleum one way or the other or their compounds.
Thus, although there are other energy sources, we cannot and will not eliminate oil.
So President Bush or any other leader for national security right now has got to have oil.
And I just noticed that for some reason we've lost Jim again.
Maybe Jim, once again, thinks the program is over.
I don't know.
We'll call him back and find out.
Maybe he didn't know how long his stay on the air would be.
Yeah, what those, I mean, he's right, but in terms of the oil and other fossil fuels we use for energy, even the plastics industry is pretty small potatoes in the bigger picture.
And anything, I mean, since oil is ultimately made out of plants, anything made from oil can ultimately be made out of plants.
First time caller line, you're on the air with Jim Bell.
Good morning.
unidentified
Hi.
Good morning, gentlemen.
Hi.
Good to hear you all talking about this.
I just, through being part of a family who's worked in the energy industry, have, I don't know, just absorbed some knowledge through dinner table discussions.
And my father was talking about something that I thought I wanted to hear your comments on, which was he thinks the future is certainly solar and renewable energy sources combined with whatever is left in the older grit.
But the whole idea is the way we have distributed computing today, he thinks the best way to go about integrating more power with less environmental impact would be integrating small fuel cells, solar cells, and a sort of like a distributed network.
I mean, well, now, you know, there's the Western Strait grid and there's other grids, so we're not necessarily completely connected to the whole country, but we're connected to Canada, so it's a pretty big grid.
And initially, we would be basically pushing energy into the grid and then buying it back at nighttime.
But eventually we'd want to get completely free of fossil fuels, and that would mean we'd have to develop some storage.
And there's some excellent storage processes, like pump storage is used in the hydroelectric industry right now because they don't like to change the speed of the generator or the turbines.
So at nighttime, they're still producing the same amount of power, but nobody wants to buy it.
So they use it to pump the water from the bottom of the dam back into the dam.
Well, initially with the Holes the Zero Power idea, I think we should keep researching, but it's kind of hard to beat a 25-year warranty with solar panels.
And even in a way, a longer warranty for double-glazed windows and insulation and skylights and things that will last the life of the building.
Let me make an attempt at making these two relate to each other.
Any civilization capable of exceeding the speed of light to get here, to visit us, Jim, would have to have a source of energy that would be thousands years ahead of where we might be right now.
I bet hundreds at least of years.
And in other words, there's leaders in ufology who are taking this angle that the science we would learn from visitors would save us in terms of energy.
Well, you know, the way I look at it is until these people, beings, whatever, who are, if they are there and who are visiting us, either start helping us to create a life support, sustaining economy and way of life, or get in our way, I think it's just titillation.
That we need.
We're the biggest threat to our planet's life support.
Probably about as much as you have, but I just say bring it on.
We're clever.
All we have to do is mesh that with some wisdom, and we're home free.
I think, you know, like I said earlier, I think what I'm presenting is probably going to seem quaint.
You know, once more people start putting their mind and, you know, instead of thinking about how horrible it is and we're hopeless, they start going, well, gee, what can I do to contribute to solving the problem?
unidentified
My second question actually leads to that.
How can one get a job being an ecological designer is what you are?
Well, you know, it's a little bit of an engineering feat in a way, but just so everybody knows, I eat regular, really good food, and I have a warm place to sleep and dry place to sleep and have a lot of fun.
Well, in a way, if you just look at it from a selfish perspective, giving the book away will probably get me more money than if I tried to sell it if that was really my interest.
I'm actually also in Canada and I also live on Vancouver Island.
And I was just wondering if I could ask your guest's impressions and if he's aware of this new, I guess, process that they've been going through with local, like there's a company in Canada called Canadian Tire, and they've been putting out these integrated power packs that they sell in addition with solar cells.
I mean, if you are very efficient at using energy and getting whatever you need to get done, I talked with a guy a few years ago.
He was up in I think in Vermont or Maine or something like that, and he was like bragging to me about how he basically ran a computer business and he ran it all on solar.
And I'm going, well, gee, we're here in San Diego.
And he was using a relatively small number of panels.
Well, and these, but see, these are the positive things that are there, and it's almost like all I'm talking about is integrating them so that we look at it as a whole community, as a whole region, or even as a whole country.
I mean, like right now, I don't know what the exact number is, but I would bet it's in excess of $100 billion a year that we export out of our country just to pay for imported oil.
Very quickly, East of the Rockies, you're on the air with Jim Bell.
Hi.
unidentified
The energy spent on World War I was three times all previous history.
World War II was seven times.
I'd like your guests to estimate what the Cold War costs up to the Berlin Wall.
And even if we're getting more efficient at killing one another, as long as the competition between people is violent, it distorts all other priorities that this man wants us to work on.
Well, you know, it's kind of like I figured out a long time ago, the only person that I can change is me.
And so I'm working on it.
I figured, hey, life is short, and I care about the future, and I think most people do too.
They just have kind of lost track of it.
And, you know, because I care, I look at the world and I say, well, what can I do?
And so I try to do what I can do.
And if I, you know, if me trying to fix myself or improve myself, help other people do the same for themselves, you know, that's what we have to go to.
Everybody has to really get in the driver's seat of their own life.