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May 19, 2007 - Art Bell

02:35:03

Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell - Energy Issues - Mark Eberhart

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50:01

mark eberhart

01:07:10

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art bell ▲ ● ▼		From the high desert and the great American Southwest, it is my honor and privilege to be escorting you through the weekend with this program heard in every time zone around the world called Coast to Coast AM.
		I'm Art Bell.
		Howdy, everybody.
		It's great to be here for the weekend.
		The webcam photograph tonight is Erin, and that's at nine months.
		So there you go.
		I think she looks pretty good.
		Been taking care of her.
		It's getting very close.
		The C-section is scheduled for June 1st, and Asia Rain comes into the world.
		Now, could it be before that?
		Yes, it could.
		We hope not, but it could be, you know, virtually any minute.
		So it's one of those minute-to-minute things.
		And she's really big right now, and the baby's really moving, and that baby wants to breathe air.
		So it could be virtually any time, and the nerves are getting a little frazzled around here, but I know many of you who are parents out there understand that.
		Let us look at the world.
		Never all that enjoyable, but we'll look.
		U.S. forces are broadening their hunt today for three missing comrades beyond the rural area south of Baghdad, where they disappeared, and their top commander expressed optimism, hope that at least two of them might still be alive a week after their isolated outpost was ambushed.
		At least one soldier was killed Saturday, four others wounded as insurgents attacked the searchers with guns, mortars, and bombs.
		The military reported a dozen other U.S. troop deaths in Iraq since Thursday.
		What are we going to do about this war?
		I wonder if any of you have any thoughts on that.
		And if you do, I'd love to hear them.
		Frankly, I think we have not a whole lot of choice right now but to continue to fight.
		I think the time for choice came a long time ago, and we may have made the wrong one.
		I don't know.
		A wildfire that had threatened homes and other structures in two northern Arizona forests was 80% contained Saturday, and evacuees were being told they could return home Sunday morning.
		Officials projected full containment of the six-square-mile promontory fire by Tuesday.
		Crews were working to reinforce a containment line surrounding the 4,000-acre fire and patrol for additional hotspots.
		Nearly 700 firefighters were working the blaze, which began May 13th and was believed to have been caused by a person.
		So, as Evelyn said, a lot of arson so far this year.
		Gunmen armed with rifles, grenades, and explosives climbed down from rooftop positions Saturday, and residents began venturing out of bullet-scarred homes after their leaders agreed to end a week of Palestinian factional bloodshed in Gaza.
		The truce began to take hold as Israel launched a fifth day of airstrikes on Hamas targets in the Gaza Strip, all this in reprisal for the Islamic militant group's rocket attacks on Israeli border towns.
		Former Presidents George Bush and Bill Clinton put politics aside, and that's quite a bit in their case, today, urging University of New Hampshire graduates to focus on helping others, both in their community and around the world.
		The former rivals worked together in recent years, raising millions of dollars for the victims of the Indian Ocean tsunami and Hurricane Katrina.
		Convicted Al-Qaeda supporter David Hicks returned to his hometown Sunday to carry out the remainder of his sentence after more than five years at the U.S. military prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
		Hicks, the first terrorist suspect convicted in a U.S. military commission in Cuba, was transferred to a South Australia state prison to serve the final seven months of his sentence for aiding al-Qaeda in Afghanistan.
		Thousands of spectators watched Saturday as two wayward whales swam looping half-mile laps around the Port of Sacramento after declining earlier efforts to lure them back into the Pacific Ocean.
		Crowds shrieked every time they caught a glimpse of the humpback mother and calf dubbed Delta and Dawn by the state's lieutenant governor.
		And finally, Paul McCartney is avoiding any media reports of his divorce.
		Doesn't want to read them.
		Doesn't want to hear about it.
		Is getting closer to his adult children.
		All right, listen, everybody, in a very few moments, after a couple of other items, we're going to go to unscreened, open line, anything goes, calls.
		Now, let me remind you, number one, when I tell you you're on the air, immediately turn your radio, not down, but all the way off.
		Number two, if you're going to call, then you might want to have something of general interest to just about everybody, if possible.
		West of the Rockies, 800-618-8255.
		Anywhere east of the Rockies, lots of people there, 800-825-5033.
		If you're a first-time caller, we welcome you at Area Code 818-501-4721.
		Wildcard line, folks, area code 818-501-4109.
		If you're outside the country, hey, no problem.
		We can accommodate you at 800-893-0903.
		That's 800-893-0903.
		Get hold of the international operator and tell her that's the number you want to call.
		We'll be right back.
		Well, all right.
		The following from unknowncountry.com, that's Whitley Striever's website.
		The U.S. government is trying to block sections of a U.N. resolution on global warming that is to be presented at an international meeting in June.
		The U.S. objects to resolutions aimed at keeping the temperature rise to a certain level and cutting greenhouse Gas emissions in half by 2050.
		In BBC News, which is where you have to reach out for an awful lot of this, unfortunately, Richard Black reports the U.S. has proposed the following revisions, removing sentences that say, quote, climate change is speeding up and will seriously damage our common natural environment and severely weaken the global economy.
		Resolute action is urgently needed in order to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions.
		And we are deeply concerned about the latest findings confirmed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, IPCC.
		According to Black, U.S. negotiators also want to remove from the draft firm targets for improving energy efficiency in buildings and transport and a call for the establishment of a global carbon market.
	So we don't like those words.
	The U.S. does not like those words.
	Climate change is speeding up and will seriously damage our common natural environment and severely weaken the global economy.
	Resolute action is urgently needed in order to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions.
	And, quote, we are deeply concerned about the latest findings confirmed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
	We want all that removed.
	We don't want to hear about it.
	All right, more tonight.
	I want to get to the lines.
	West of the Rockies, welcome.
	You're on the air.
unidentified		Oh, Mr. Phil, how are you doing, sir?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I'm just fine.
unidentified		All righty then.
		Well, I'm not really west of the Rockies.
		That's just the number that showed up on Egg Self here.
		My name is Virgil, and I have a little sort of like a funny Bigfoot story to tell you.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Where are you actually, Virgil?
unidentified		I'm in Austin, Texas.
		Okay.
		And anyhow, you remember when the Legend of the Boggy Creek came out back in the early 70s?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		The legend of what?
unidentified		Boggy Creek.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Boggy Creek.
		No, I don't offhand.
		I'm sorry, but that's all right.
		Go ahead.
unidentified		That's one of the Bigfoot movies.
		Anyhow, the wife and I were working a dairy down in the north of Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
		And there was one morning I had to go out and get those cows in and out of the pasture after going and seeing that movie.
		And we had no cows that were called Sleepy that did not come up.
		And Mr. Bell, it was so darn foggy you couldn't see them.
		Couldn't see your hands in front of your face.
		And I'm out there hunting those cows.
		And old Sleepy come up behind me, nudged me in the back, and said, well, I beat the cows to the barn.
		I guarantee it scared me so bad.
		I come in that barn, the wife looked at me and said, what's wrong with you?
		And I said nothing, and I just fell completely down.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, there have been a few times in my life I can say that I have been.
		How about the rest of you?
		How many times have you been scared so badly that you virtually fell down or went down to your knees?
		There have been a few times in my life.
		You know, heart attack stuff.
		Movies never really got to me.
		I've never been a person to particularly be affected by, you know, by a movie and then be scared later.
		I suppose I've had a few bad dreams, but there are several times in my life, and I'd actually make a good question for the audience, where I've been virtually scared out of my wits.
		Wildcard line, you're on the air.
		Good evening.
unidentified		Hey, Art.
		Hey.
		How's it going, man?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		It's going real well.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Where are you?
unidentified		I am calling from Denver, Colorado.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, welcome.
unidentified		Well, thank you.
		Talk to you here real quick.
		I keep having deja vu, and you had a subject on that.
		You had somebody on there earlier or sometime a couple months back.
		And I never really get a chance to get in.
		And what I keep occurring is, is for the last 15 years, every job that I've had, I get into the job, start working the job, and about a day or so go by, and I feel like I've been there before.
		And this has happened several times to me.
		I have a wife that's my witness to this.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Maybe it's just work.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You know, in other words, when you get a new job, you say to yourself, oh, my God, I'm working again.
unidentified		Oh, my God, I'm here.
		I've been here before.
		I can't put my finger on it.
		Talking to a guy, and he's a Christian man.
		And he says, well, maybe you've been showing something in your life.
		Well, this keeps occurring every time I've had the last jobs I've had.
		I don't know how to put my finger on it because every time I start to turn around, I get into the job, start working the job, and it's like, hey, I've been here before.
		I've done this before.
		Why?
		Okay.
		Friday, last Friday, not this past Friday, but the Friday before last here in Denver, I looked up in the sky and I seen UFO.
		I pointed it out to several people and they laughed at me and I said, hey, there's only one object there.
		I wonder if anybody else is seeing this.
		Okay?
		And every time that I bring any of these subjects up, everybody says I'm crazy.
		Well, I've seen this object.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, no, wait a minute.
		You said you pointed it out in the sky.
		Did they see it?
unidentified		Yes, they did.
unidentified		And they've seen two objects.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, then why would they call you locked out if they could see them?
unidentified		They turned around and they says, well, why are you seeing this?
unidentified		And I says, I'm going to get fired from my job.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You're not following me.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		If they could see the said objects, why would they call you crazy?
unidentified		Okay, because they said it was like a weather balloon or some kind of balloon in the sky.
		I turned around and I says, every time that I see these, something happens to my job.
		Something that always fails.
		I'm going from job to job to job for the last 20 years.
		I've been living in Colorado.
		I've been on the streets four or five times since, actually four times since these occurrences.
		And I don't want it to happen again.
		It scares me.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right, well, I would say stay at work.
		Now, maybe the only common recurrence is, in fact, work.
		You know, like, oh, God, here I am having to work yet again.
		That would seem to be the only really, truly common thing.
		And as far as things in the sky are concerned, well, if others can see them as well, I don't see that there's any cause for them to say you're whacked out.
		East of the Rockies, you're on the air.
unidentified		Yes.
		Hello.
		From Clinton Township, Michigan.
		Welcome.
		About the war.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
unidentified		Asked for comments.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes, I did.
unidentified		I think President Bush screwed it up in the beginning with not going in with enough troops, and this 20,000 added now isn't going to make much of a difference.
		Either, you know, there's power numbers.
		Either go over there with a bunch of guys and get it over with or pull out.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, we do have a lot of troops there.
		I don't think we're bogged down for lack of trying.
		I think that there's certainly trying.
		I just think that the other side is bound and determined to try and make this another Vietnam for us, and it certainly is shaping up that way, isn't it?
unidentified		Yes, yes, definitely.
		That's what I say.
		Either, you know, go full force or get out.
		Yeah.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		Well, I appreciate the point of view.
		I'm not sure what going full force in this current situation would be.
		I'm not sure what else we can do.
		I'm really not.
		I've given it a lot of thought.
		I'm not sure what the U.S. should do.
		There's two schools of thought, and to some degree, I kind of subscribe to both.
		One is that we never should have gone in there in the first place.
		The second, I've articulated several times, that is, we're there now.
		And those terrorists we kill there are probably terrorists we will not have to, or possibly will not have to kill here.
		The enemy is clearly putting most of their resources into battling us in Iraq.
		So I think it is fair to say that keeping them busy there probably will keep some of them away from here.
		Wildcard line, you're on the air.
		Good morning.
unidentified		Hello, Art.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Hi.
unidentified		Art, I'm at my wit's end trying to figure out how to get a book to you that was written by a contemporary author that I greatly admire.
unidentified		Is there somehow I can get this book to you, a general delivery or something?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Through the network.
unidentified		Through the network.
		Right.
		I checked on the computer screen and I can't find an address.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Really?
unidentified		Yeah.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, let's see.
		There's got to be a way on the computer, that's for sure.
		Look up Premiere Radio Network.
		Go to Google and put in Premier Radio Network, and I'm sure you will find an address there.
unidentified		Okay, thank you very much.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You're very welcome, and good luck.
		Google, boy, I depend overly depend on Google.
		I wonder how many of you are like that.
		Virtually anything you want answered, anywhere you want to go, anything you want to find, is all available on Google.
		First time caller line, you're on the air.
unidentified		Hi, Art.
unidentified		This is Gringo from New York City.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Hello, Gringo.
unidentified		Did you know that just this last week there was a major release forced by a lawsuit from the New York Civil Liberties Union and the New York Times about protests at the Republican national conventions?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		No, I did not.
unidentified		You should check into it.
unidentified		If you want to see what a police state rundown on lefty groups is very interesting documents, the federal court forced NYPD after a long battle.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right, I'll take a look into it.
		And I'm sure as a result of what you said, a lot of other people will as well.
		Welcome to the Rockies.
		You're on the air.
unidentified		Hi, Arn.
unidentified		How are you?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I'm just fine.
unidentified		Well, that's good.
		You know, what I wanted to talk to you about, I heard, I really enjoyed Evelyn Paglini on the show.
		I guess that was last week or maybe a couple of weeks ago.
		But I heard Red Elk on another show earlier today, this morning, and he spoke.
		He said that he spoke of riots just like he did happening this summer.
		But he said that if that bill passed, that...
art bell ▲ ● ▼		The immigration bill?
unidentified		Uh-huh.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
unidentified		He said if that passed, that he believed that there would be riot.
		And, you know, I just wanted to run that by you.
		But and I thought about Ellen Pat Grady on the show saying that there would be riots this summer.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		She, of course, didn't specifically say, you know, what they would be about or anything else.
		I have taken a pretty good look at the immigration bill.
		I doubt it's going to pass in its present form.
		I think that giving more weight to skills and doctors and lawyers and that sort of thing, nurses, is all a good idea.
		But taking weight away from family members for the purpose of immigration is probably going to cause a lot of trouble.
unidentified		Yes, it is.
		I mean, it's ridiculous.
		I heard in that bill that they had what they call a humanitarian clause.
		And that would, if it passed, that would mean that the illegals, which would be legal then, could bring their families, aunties, uncles, grandmothers, cousins.
		And that would be so many people coming here before you know it.
		I think that would really change our country overnight.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I kind of agree.
		And I absolutely do not favor the so-called Z, as in Zebra, visa type deal.
		And that would be for virtually everybody who's been here, what was it, five years, something like that?
		It's just another way of doing what they've done for so many years, and that is amnesty.
		In other words, those who have managed to illegally remain here and not get caught for a specific amount of time can start down the road to citizenship.
		And that doesn't make any sense to me.
		That's rewarding bad behavior, illegal behavior.
		That's rewarding those who sneak across the border and then manage not to get caught for five years or more.
		I don't see how else you can look at it.
		It's nothing but, you know, a pig with new lipstick.
		I've never understood why we do this.
		Maybe we do it because we can't do anything else.
		Once they're here, there's nothing else we can do.
		I don't know.
		From the high desert, I'm Art Bell.
		Well, here I am.
		Mike in Auburn, Washington says, hey, Art, if your wife, Erin, goes into labor while you're on the air during the show, then what would you do if that happens?
		Would you finish your broadcast?
		Or will you let the network put on a past show?
		That, Mike, would be B. And, you know, I'm a little bit worried about that.
		Hopefully, I'd have enough time to tell you all what's going on before panicking and making the drive.
		It's going to be in Las Vegas.
		She's going to deliver by C-section in Las Vegas, but every little pain, every time she goes, oh, you know, I go, ah.
		And so it's that kind of deal.
		And we'd be out of here very, very quickly indeed.
		We'll be right back.
		By the way, just as Mike and Auburn, Washington did, if you want to fire a question at me, I may well answer it on the air.
		You can do that with something called Fast Blast, which I absolutely pay attention to.
		So if you have a question, fire in.
		I'll see what I can do about answering it.
		Wildcard Line, you're on the air.
		Hi.
unidentified		Howdy.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Howdy.
unidentified		John in Houston, Texas.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Hi, John.
unidentified		I had a couple of comments.
		I believe it was either, I don't remember whether it was either you or Art that had Art, first of all.
		Oh, excuse me.
		Either you or George.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Right.
unidentified		I wasn't saying it is earlier.
		Sorry.
		Had a caller call up talking about liquid-filled cockpits and liquid breathing about a week and a half ago.
		I had a comment about that.
		I actually know what the man's talking about, perfluorocarbon, and it's used in medicine.
		I've never seen it used.
		I'm a registered nurse down here in Houston, but I have done a little bit of research into that and thought I might call up and share that information with you.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right, and what's it called again, please?
unidentified		What's that?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		What's it called again?
unidentified		Perfluorocarbon ventilation, literally liquid breathing.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Liquid breathing.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Would it, in your opinion, aid in the ability to withstand big G forces?
unidentified		It was originally developed as something to eliminate air breathing, I believe it was developed by the U.S. Navy.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That would make sense.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		In other words, for deep divers, that sort of thing, right?
unidentified		Yes, sir, yes, sir.
		The pressure of oxygen in solution can be higher than it can be in air.
		At least that's my understanding of the way for fluorocarbon ventilation works.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		Well, that makes absolute sense to me.
		And the Navy, I'm sure, would look at something of that sort.
		I suppose you could make very, very, very deep dives.
		There was a movie in which that was used, and it will come to me which movie it was.
		It was about a very deep diving platform, and then an alien, and why can't I think of the name of that movie?
		Really a good movie, too.
		Right on the tip of my tongue.
		First time caller line, you're on the air.
unidentified		Hello.
		Hi.
		Yeah, I just have a question about how they sell a legal form of LSD called salvia that's sold in smoke shops.
		A legal form or illegal form?
		They say it's a legal form.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		A legal form?
unidentified		It's called salvia, and what you do is you smoke it?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, I've got that.
		It's hard to believe that there would be a legal form of LSD anywhere.
		And although there are constantly new chemicals being developed, and I suppose it's very difficult for the Federal Drug Administration to classify a new drug as a dangerous drug until they have tested it and know all about it.
		And therefore, some new mixtures that are not necessarily good for us survive on the street, probably in a legal form for a while, until they figure out it's not good for people or addictive or whatever it is that causes them to classify them.
		And they have various classifications of drugs.
		West of the Rockies, you're on the air.
		Hi.
		Hello.
unidentified		Hello.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes, turn your radio off, please.
unidentified		Right away.
unidentified		Got it.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay.
unidentified		Hey.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Where are you calling from?
unidentified		From Vancouver, B.C. Welcome.
unidentified		Yes.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Proceed.
unidentified		How are you?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I'm fine.
unidentified		Good.
unidentified		Am I on the air right now?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That's what it means when I say you're on the air.
unidentified		I didn't hear you say it.
		Okay, a couple of things, Art.
		I just wanted to let you know that I saw a bunch of bees outside my apartment building today.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, you know, I'm getting a lot of reports from Canadians that they are seeing quite a few bees.
		Now, I had somebody send me an email a couple of weeks ago and said maybe they've gone north because of something related to global warming.
		Who knows?
unidentified		Who knows?
		Well, anyway, they were down the street.
		They were all in the yard.
		I tried to play with a couple of them, but they were very busy.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Bees usually aren't playful.
unidentified		They are usually very busy.
unidentified		And the other thing was, I just wanted to say I'm happy for you and your wife and your baby to be.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Cross fingers, knock on wood, press.
unidentified		And I just wanted to tell you that I have a volunteer job, and that involves holding brand new babies.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Really?
unidentified		Isn't that cool?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		It is kind of cool.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Brand new babies are kind of scary to hold, but you think a little bit.
unidentified		Oh, they're adorable.
unidentified		They're so soft.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And so delicate.
unidentified		They're delicate to touch.
		They're soft and all, but they're tough.
		But anyway, enjoy your beautiful baby.
		I know you will.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Thank you.
		She really should be something.
		You know, it's been something to follow along for nine months, ever since the visible double lines indicated a positive pregnancy.
		And from there to this point has been amazing to watch.
		It is an amazing thing.
		There's simply no question about it.
		It's amazing.
		Wildcard line, you're on the air.
unidentified		Hello.
unidentified		Hello there.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Hi.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Turn your radio off and proceed.
unidentified		I'm trying to call Art Bell.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You've got Art Bell.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Turn your radio off, please.
unidentified		Okay, I shall.
		I'm on the internet, so I'll turn right down.
		Okay?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Got it?
unidentified		Yeah, we're down.
unidentified		Okay.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Go ahead.
unidentified		What I was going to say is I'm from Everett, Washington.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes, sir.
unidentified		We're building the 787.
		We put one together in five days.
		We don't have the wings on it yet.
		But it's going to be perfect.
		And it's going to be splashed all over the news in about on Monday.
		The governor's coming, the senators are coming, and I think Dick King is coming.
		So really pretty over here in Boeing, you know, the biggest building on earth.
		We're just going nuts.
		I just thought I would talk to Arbell a little bit about that.
		Plus, I have a brand new wife from the Philippines.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay, I guess you didn't register the fact that I am art.
		You are talking to art.
		You are on the air.
unidentified		I'm on the air.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
unidentified		Oh, this is art.
		Okay, I'm a hearing challenge.
		Yes, we are building with a plane.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Now, you already told me, the Boeing 787.
unidentified		Five days art.
		I mean, it's this rolling line.
		You can't believe it.
		It's this composite design.
		It's all just kind of being punched together.
		This plane is, I mean, it's beautiful.
		Everybody is just in awe.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I assume we'll all hear about it on the news.
		You know, I'd like to add that he had, though he had a kind of a gruff voice, he had a remarkably good connection.
		He said he was calling probably voice over IP through the internet.
		And it's worth noting that his connection was better than 90% of the cell phone connections we get.
		Isn't that interesting?
		Now, it, too, was digital.
		It probably carried a little more bandwidth than the average cell phone call.
		I'd like to petition the cell phone companies to increase the bandwidth a little bit or do whatever they have to do to get the voice quality of cell phones up at least as high as the old analog phones.
		Boy, that would make me happy.
		East of the Rockies, you're on the air.
unidentified		Hey, Art.
unidentified		This is Chris in Tennessee.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Hey, Chris.
unidentified		Hey, I just wanted to respond to the caller who was asking about the salvia.
		I believe that salvia divinorum is an actually naturally occurring plant that the most potent psychedelic, naturally occurring psychedelic on earth.
		And lions, I think, in the Mexicans have used it, the shamans, for centuries.
		And I would relate it to like a DMC experience.
		It's kind of short-lived, but very potent, you know, 10 or 15 minutes.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Is it, has he suggested, legal to sell over the counter now?
unidentified		It is.
		It is legal.
		I think that maybe one or two states have classified it or are trying to, because recently there was a suicide they attributed to the DMC, I mean the Salvia, because a kid had discussed what he'd experienced on the Salvia and they related the suicide to him taking the Salvia.
		But I think for the most part, it is legal to sell.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, I would imagine if it gets much more publicity like this, it won't be very long.
		If it has a relationship to LSD or a kind of high associated with LSD, then they're going to make it illegal.
		That's something we could do an entire program on one night, and that is what drugs ought to be legal and what drugs should be illegal.
		And I have some perhaps fairly controversial views on that.
		I think, for example, that marijuana is, all told, significantly less harmful than alcohol.
		Alcohol is a legal drug in the U.S., has been for many, many years now.
		But I think that the cost of the economy of alcohol and the dangers, the health dangers and all the rest of it, the highway deaths, everything, is significantly higher than that of marijuana.
		And so one of these days in the U.S., I think we're going to get around to reconsidering the legality of marijuana.
		As far as the harder drugs are concerned, I have no problem with their illegality at all.
		Wild Carline, you're on the air.
unidentified		Hi.
unidentified		Hi, I have a question that I don't know is appropriate to anything, but I've been dying to ask you this for years.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, that's all right.
unidentified		Go ahead.
		My dad had a brain tumor, and he was dying.
		This was in 2003.
		And just a couple days before he died, he was laying on the couch with his head facing the sliding glass door.
		And up came this butterfly like it was trying to get into the house.
		And this butterfly was huge.
		I've never seen a butterfly This big.
		It stayed at the window, flapping its wings, long enough for me to go into the other room, get my camera, and take a picture of it.
		Well, my dad died a few days later, and I didn't think too much about it.
		And about a year and a half ago, I got it out and I was looking at it.
		This butterfly's body looks human.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Really?
unidentified		It does not look like I have showed it to so many people, and nobody can believe it.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right, listen to me.
		You've got, obviously, a photograph of this.
		So if you would, can you get it scanned?
		I'm sorry?
unidentified		I have it in my computer.
unidentified		I'd love to email it to you.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Wire it to me.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I'm artbell at mindspring.com or artbell at aol.com.
unidentified		Okay.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		And if I consider it really interesting, I absolutely will put it up for all to see.
		Now, I've considered, I don't know if butterflies come under the category or not, but I've considered birds to be the harbingers of, well, death.
		Birds are things that fly close to human beings, bring a message.
		Now, that may sound whacked out to some of you, but it's from personal experience.
		East of the Rockies, you're on the air.
unidentified		Hi.
unidentified		Hello.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Hello.
unidentified		Hello, I had a comment for Art.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I'm Art.
unidentified		Okay.
unidentified		About the Salvia Dia Via Norum.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
unidentified		You have to get the extract and put on the herb that they buy.
unidentified		And you can buy it like in malls and shopping centers.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, this is sounding like some hot new street thing.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		An awful lot of people seem to know about it.
unidentified		I think it's something that's been around for a long time and people are just picking up on.
		And as far as the Middle East, fat boys for Baghdad and Tehran.
		See you later.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		Take care.
		Yeah, that's three callers now on that in just, what, 30 minutes or so?
		So something's going on there.
		Never had heard of this drug previously.
		First time caller line, you're on the air.
unidentified		Yeah, Rich from Arizona?
		Yes.
		Yeah, you know, I've seen that movie you're talking about.
		Am I thinking the name of that movie would be a dis No.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Wait.
		Sphere.
		I think it was called Sphere.
unidentified		Yeah, the Sphere.
		Yeah.
		Yeah, I've seen that one, and I remember on that breeding with the liquid.
		But what I was going to say, I could be wrong, but I think with as far as Afghanistan and Iraq, the way it's going, I think as a last resort, vaporize them.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Vaporize them, is what you said?
unidentified		Yeah.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		No, sir, we can't vaporize them.
		Look, I appreciate the call, but sorry.
		You cannot just vaporize an entire nation or two nations full of people, hoping to get that small percentage that really is your enemy.
		Much as it would be emotionally satisfying to do or consider, you would be vaporizing millions and millions of innocent people.
		Wildcard line, you're on the air.
unidentified		Hello?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Hello.
unidentified		Yes, this is John.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Hello, John.
unidentified		Get on Art Bell.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
unidentified		I was wanting to ask him about...
		Oh, oh, oh.
		Oh, good.
		Good.
		I was listening to you talking to somebody else on the radio.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes, we have a delay system, so you need to turn your radio down right away.
unidentified		I was wanting to ask, did you ever interview Robert Heinlein?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		No, I never did.
unidentified		Oh, that's too bad.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, it is too bad, but I guess you just can't get around to everybody.
unidentified		That's true.
		That's true.
		And he was kind of hard to get to in his older age.
		Okay, well, thank you much.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You're very welcome.
		That was it, huh?
		International line, you're on the air.
		Good morning.
unidentified		Oh, hello.
		Hello.
		I'm greatly appreciative that you picked up my call.
		Yes, sir.
		Definitely patience pays off.
		Where are you?
		So I'd just like to say that I've been listening to you since 1997 today on my brand new wideband receiver.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Where are you located?
unidentified		I am in Toronto, Canada.
unidentified		My name is Jess.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Very good, Jeff.
unidentified		Just sort of adding a comment to that, Selvia DeNorum.
		First of all, I've heard it, and I would tend to be in the belief that it's probably much less much more underwhelming than people are saying it is.
		And also, I'd like to say that the past couple of months, I have been extremely pleased with the world around me, and I would attribute that to the book, The Tyler Chain.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Where did you hear about this drug?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I'm curious.
unidentified		Definitely upon the internet.
		There's a huge variety of information about all sorts of drugs and chemicals that are around here.
		And you can see a lot of user reports.
		You know, they talk about their experiences with the drug.
		And I've seen a lot of people who have been sort of unimpressed, and a lot of people who have sort of been more frightened with their experiences with the drug.
		So overall, it seems to me that it's definitely no sort of competitor to any currently illegal drugs.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay, well, the first caller likened it to LSD.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You would say not.
unidentified		I think the general consensus is that that's just not true.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		I definitely appreciate the call, and I guess I'm going to have to follow up on it.
		I just don't keep up as much as I guess I should on that sort of thing.
		Wildcard line, you're on the air.
unidentified		Hey, Arc, how are you doing today?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, sir.
unidentified		Well, listen, I've got this difficulty in trying to get through my concept to virgin earth challenge as to how to suck as much CO2 out of the atmosphere as anybody would care to suck.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And how would you think it would be done best?
unidentified		Well, simply build these gigantic crafts that are about five to ten kilometers across, big, floating, fat, for lack of a better term, what do you call them?
		You know, the UFO type, what do you call those things?
		UFOs?
		You know, the round Flying saucers?
		Flying saucers, yeah.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right, I'll tell you what, I'm going to hold it right there, and I'll tell you that I do have a story on some mitigation for our atmosphere.
		Some actual things that scientists are considering that we might do.
		Pretty crazy stuff in a lot of ways, but maybe it's going to take something crazy to clean up our atmosphere before our atmosphere cleans us up from the high deserts.
		I'm Art Bell.
		All right.
		In the cause of being accurate, the movie was the Abyss, not Sphere.
		I sort of remember them both sphere came to mind, but no, it was definitely the abyss.
		All right, coming up, we're going to talk again about energy with Dr. Mark Eberhard.
		He's the author of Why Things Break.
		And maybe he can tell me why my computer went belly up, the motherboard went yesterday.
		And another book called Feeding the Fire.
		Fortunately, it didn't catch fire.
		At age 16, Mark enrolled at the University of Colorado.
		That's where he received both a BS with majors in chemistry and applied mathematics and an MS in physical biochemistry.
		In 1979, he applied and was accepted to MIT as a PhD candidate studying materials science and engineering.
		At the same time that Mark was preparing for his move to Boston, the Iranian Revolution was in full swing in gasoline here in the U.S., you recall in very short supply.
		Undeterred by the uncertainty, Mark placed six five-gallon cans full of gas right next to all his other possessions in a rented U-Haul headed for the East.
		This trip seemed and seated an interest in energy science and policy that never faded.
		Four years later, Mark received his Ph.D., and he was one of a handful of scientists attempting to understand fracture at the quantum mechanical level.
unidentified		Wow.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		The pursuit took him from MIT to Los Alamos National Labs, there to the Premier University for Engineering in the Rocky Mountains, Colorado School of Mines, where he is now a professor teaching chemistry and material science.
		He's a consultant to NOVA, very popular show, and a popular speaker giving presentations as diverse as the role of science in society to Boston's great molasses disaster and other failures that have shaped engineering, science, and technology.
		Coming up in just a moment, Dr. Mark Eberhardt.
		All right, Dr. Mark Everhart, welcome to Coast to Coast AM.
mark eberhart ▲ ● ▼		Well, thank you so much for having me.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Great to have you here.
		Just before we delve into Feeding the Fire, I'm curious about your other book, Why Things Break.
		Tell me about why things break.
mark eberhart ▲ ● ▼		Well, actually, a number of people have noted that the thing that I don't do in the book is actually explain why things break.
		The title actually came from my questions that I started asking when I was five years old, when I was thinking about things and watching things break and wondering why they happened.
		And so the book was about how that question influenced my life, but more importantly, how it's been a question that's influenced so much of science and engineering for almost 10,000, 15,000 years.
		The question to try to deal with things breaking and how that's shaped science and engineering.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Professor, a lot of us feel that things are designed to break and that if we designed them so they didn't break, the economy would collapse eventually.
mark eberhart ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I've heard that.
		And to a certain extent, that's true.
		We can design things that don't break, that take a lot more punishment than they do today.
		I mean, one of the things that's quite clear is that today I just doled out $1,500 to replace to correct a small dent on my car.
		And you go, why should it be that much?
		When, of course, we could build cars that stood up to a great deal more punishment.
		Take, for example, when you look at the cars that they use in racing.
		I mean, they'll smash into a wall at 200 miles an hour, and by and large, the people inside come off okay most of the time.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That's true.
		But the cars are generally wrecked.
		But you're right.
		I mean, they protect the people.
		I read a recent headline that said cars may soon, sooner than later, actually be able to repair themselves.
		Bet you wish you had one of those.
mark eberhart ▲ ● ▼		Today, I wish I had one of those.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, exactly.
		And I just finished replacing a computer where the motherboard went belly up.
		No doubt some small, stinky little component, capacitor or diode or something, went belly up.
		And that's it.
unidentified		Yeah.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You know, what you find out after owning a computer for four or five years is one little tiny component goes, nothing else is compatible, and therefore you have to replace the entire thing.
unidentified		Yeah, that's absolutely true.
unidentified		So you're wondering why?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, and you're obviously not going to have the answer.
mark eberhart ▲ ● ▼		Well, but you do realize that they can build things that, for instance, computers that come up to military specifications, they are much more reliable.
		But by the same token, they're much more expensive.
		And so it's playing the game.
		I mean, how much do you want to pay for your computer?
		And you want it to last long enough that the next generation of computers is going to get there.
		But I agree with you.
		There's a lot of design that could make things much, much easier.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I want it to last long enough so that I look at it one day and say, this sucker is too slow.
		It's out.
		I want a new one.
		That's how long I want it to last.
mark eberhart ▲ ● ▼		And did it make it for you?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, no.
mark eberhart ▲ ● ▼		Okay.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		No.
		No, but I guess four years in the computer world is not bad.
		All right.
		On to feeding the fire and energy, America is certainly if you look at the gas prices, we're in trouble.
		I'm not going to go beyond that right now.
		I'm just going to say if you look at the gas prices, a lot of people are in trouble.
		Gas is expensive and going to get worse.
mark eberhart ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, it probably is going to get worse, and it is expensive.
		What one has to think about, though, is, well, there's a couple things there.
		One is that if you're looking for alternative fuels, and there's a number of reasons why we should be doing that, that one of the bright sides of having high energy costs or high gas costs particularly is that it encourages entry into the market.
		Right now, people are looking, whether it's a good idea or a bad idea, one of the things that's going on right now is biofuels, and biofuels are suddenly becoming competitive.
		Another thing that is going on Well, wait a minute.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Let me stop you.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Is it a good idea or a bad idea?
mark eberhart ▲ ● ▼		Well, biofuels, as it currently is, I think it's a bad idea.
		I think the way we are getting biofuels from corn, it is not at all clear to many people whether there is a net energy savings or a net energy loss.
		And you are driving this by basically you are taking just a little bit of the energy out of the plant, that is the corn kernels, and turning that into alcohol.
		Now, what's driving that process is farm subsidies.
		There's a huge subsidy going to develop ethanol production in the United States.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I heard a story earlier today, Professor, that said that the cost of bread is going through the roof.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And the reason is because farmers are switching to corn because corn is becoming such a cash crop because of energy.
mark eberhart ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, because of energy and because of the subsidy.
		And that's absolutely right.
		What you've got to realize, if we were extracting more energy out of the corn plant, that's actually taking the stock and the cobb and all of that and converting that to alcohol as well, then we'd have something that had some future to it.
		But the way it's going now, no.
		The technology I'm talking about is called cellulosic ethanol.
		And we cannot convert, we have the technology to do it, but we're not doing it, converting cellulose into ethanol.
		And that has some reasonable future, and that has some hope to offset our dependence on foreign oil.
		But the current situation, I don't think using just corn, that's a good idea.
		And as you said, it's forcing the price of grains up in general.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Right.
		You make a link between energy and imagination.
		And I can't figure out how you make that link.
		Tell me.
mark eberhart ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
		Well, and that's one of the things that prompted me to write the book.
		When we use energy, most, I mean, everything that's alive needs energy to survive.
		And that's what we get from food or from sunlight in the case of plants.
		Sure.
		But what humankind did is they use energy to feed the fires of their imagination.
		And that's where the title for the book came from.
		Everything that we use energy for, or almost everything, is essentially a product of our imaginations.
		Ottawa is a product of our imaginations, and books are products of our imagination.
		And all of these things are basically things that we have created, and we have used the energy to give substance to all of those things that we imagine.
		So I look at energy as the food that fuels our minds and has changed the world in that regard.
		And to talk about energy separate from imagination and separate from our progress is, I think, does a disservice to how complex the energy issue is.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I suppose you're right.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Our imagination keeps coming up with these new high-tech devices of one sort or another, and they all require energy.
mark eberhart ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, absolutely.
		I mean, you think of anything that's been created, and you'll realize that it not only relies on energy now, but it builds on things that required energy in the past.
		And so we've kind of built all of our knowledge we've acquired through the exploitation of energy.
		And so our world today is really one that we have built with our minds using energy.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Is there a way to measure how much actual energy of all forms that we're using today versus 50 years ago, 100 years ago, 150 years ago, 200 years ago, that kind of thing?
mark eberhart ▲ ● ▼		Oh, absolutely.
		You can look at the growth curves.
		I can't give you exact numbers, but that's readily available.
		And we are using energy at, we're exploiting our energy use is increasing at an exponential rate.
		And I won't even hazard to guess at numbers, but it's just an astronomical increase over the last half century.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And how would you propose to change this, and what do you imagine will occur if we don't?
mark eberhart ▲ ● ▼		Well, you know, there are two things that are really important in this country, to the world in general, but particularly to this country.
		The first is our energy dependency.
		We currently import about half of the oil we use in this country.
		Now, that, by and large, that wouldn't be a problem if it weren't for the fact that it drives the cost of oil up for the rest of the world.
		But also, it accounts for about a third of our balance of trade deficit.
		And so we're shipping money overseas, and a good part of it is going to those nations in the Mideast that we would, yeah, our enemies.
		And if there is a tremendous act of terrorism someday and we want To follow that, we pretty well can we're paying for that every time we fill up our cars.
		And then, of course, the other issue is the one that Vice President Gore has brought up: that of global warming and global climate change.
		The more we're reliant on fossil fuels, the more CO2 we produce in the atmosphere.
		And if you're not concerned about it now, you have to forecast 20 years into the future when China has doubled its energy usage, most of it in the form of coal.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I've had a couple of guests tell me recently that they expect China to pass our energy consumption within the year.
mark eberhart ▲ ● ▼		Yes, and in fact, they are now the greatest producer of carbon in the world.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Already.
mark eberhart ▲ ● ▼		Already, yes.
mark eberhart ▲ ● ▼		And so if you follow that trend backwards or forwards, I should say, we're coming to the point where climate change is an issue, and we should consider that.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		How much of an issue, in your opinion, Doctor?
mark eberhart ▲ ● ▼		I personally think the evidence is overwhelming that there is currently climate change.
		I don't think there's anybody who questions that.
		The issue that scientists bring up is can we actually attribute it to human activity?
		In my opinion, yeah, you can attribute it to human activity.
		There are reputable scientists who say that evidence is not in yet.
		Nonetheless, no one disputes the fact that 50 years from now we're going to be pumping four or five times as much carbon in the atmosphere if we don't change our ways.
		And at some point, it's going to become a, if it's not already now, then it will be shortly, humankind will be making a big change to the environment.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, many people, as you pointed out, already are saying that.
unidentified		Yes.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		The United States wants to remove some wording coming out.
		Let's see.
		Let me read you this.
		In BBC News, Richard Black reports the U.S. has proposed the following revisions.
		Removing sentences that say climate change is speeding up and will seriously damage our common natural environment and severely weaken the global economy.
		Resolute action is urgently needed in order to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions.
		And, quote, we are deeply concerned about the latest findings confirmed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
		We want to remove all that wording, Doctor.
mark eberhart ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, and that's a not just in that area, but that's a general assault on science that's been going on by the Bush administration since it, well, for the last seven years.
unidentified		Huh.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I'm not...
		I'm not a fan or a critic, really, either way, of the Bush administration, except when it comes to this.
		How long do you think it's going to be, Doctor, before we are forced by the changes that are upon us to stop removing the wording and yank our head up out of the sand and admit what's going on?
mark eberhart ▲ ● ▼		I think it's past time now.
		The evidence is superficial, and it's hard to give cause and effect in this area.
		For instance, it's hard to say that Katrina was caused by global warming, yet it's not impossible to draw the link and say more of this kind of thing will happen.
		We've had very strange weather patterns.
		It's hard to say, oh, those are a result of global warming.
		But nonetheless, the way I like to think about it is this.
		If you told me I was going to, you were going to take me and take me someplace and drop me off someplace in the world, and I wasn't going to know where it was going to be, and you gave me a half an hour to pack, well, I'd pack for the extremes.
		I'd pack for the desert, so I'd take sunscreen, and I'd pack for, I'd take a parka and gloves in case you dropped me off somewhere at the polls.
		So I'd prepare for the extremes, and I think that's what we really have to start doing, is preparing for the extremes.
		Things are happening, and we have to start getting ready.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		What made you decide to write this book?
mark eberhart ▲ ● ▼		Pardon me?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		What made you decide to write this book?
mark eberhart ▲ ● ▼		Well, part of what bothered me was the fact that we are such, for instance, as laudable as Gore's movie and book are, they still hit me with the fact that they leave people, they're trying to generate people and get people to make changes based on fear, that global warming is something that's going to happen, it's going to turn the earth into deserts, and we have to do something.
		So it's driving us on a process of fear.
		Historically, we've seen other times when we've run out of energy.
		One of those times was during medieval Europe that the forests were being cut down at an alarming rate in order to meet the needs for energy, for wood, for navies, that kind of thing.
		And what history tells us is that the change does not have to be as drastic as we think it is.
		What I like to think about is how much knowledge we have accumulated.
		And this goes back to the title of the book, We Know So Much About Energy.
		We know how to get energy out of sunlight, out of the Earth's heat.
		We know how to get energy from oil shale locked up in Colorado.
		We know how to get it from gas hydrates at the bottom of the ocean.
		We know so much about energy at this point, which at other points in history when they were facing energy crisis, they didn't know.
		And this shouldn't be a time for fear.
		This should be a time for tremendous optimism that we have the opportunity now to literally shape the world, to take this resource that we are so dependent on and put it in a form where we can control it, where it's renewable.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Professor, I'm very optimistic about the technological possibilities that are in front of us in terms of how to collect energy.
		There are many.
		We've got to get it from the sun, as you pointed out.
		Wind energy is a wonderful way to collect energy.
		They're out there, but I'm pessimistic about our political will to do what needs to be done in time to prevent a catastrophic result.
mark eberhart ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, and that's the reason I wrote the book.
mark eberhart ▲ ● ▼		The idea here is people who are afraid, who are being told that.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I tell you what, hold that thought.
		We're at breakpoint.
		I have to break right here, Professor.
		Dr. Mark Eberhardt is my guest.
		We'll be right back.
		Dr. Mark Eberhardt is here.
		He's talking about energy.
		Now, I wasn't around for the apparent wood shortage in jolly old England way back when, but I was around for the 70s when gas got rare at the pumps.
		We all had to line up.
		There was an embargo, and all they did was cut some of what we were getting.
		And, oh, it was mean out there.
		There were fist fights.
		There were long lines.
		It was unbelievable.
		Could that happen again today?
		Yes, it could.
		And pretty soon at that, we'll be right back.
		You know, Doctor, it seems to me that even if you disregard the climate changes that I think you and I agree we're going through right now, and you disregard oil and energy as a national security imperative,
		which it is, and you recognize the fact we're paying mostly our enemies, you know, in the Middle East, some in South America, all the places where the oil seems to be, we're having to pay our enemies this premium, and we're funding perhaps our own eventual doom, that it's such a matter of national security that even if it wasn't for the atmospheric problems we're having right now, we would be looking to be energy independent anyway.
mark eberhart ▲ ● ▼		No, absolutely.
		And one of the points I like to make is if this were a plot that was hatched by the Soviet Union, we would respond in an aggressive way.
		Unfortunately, it's not a plot spawned by the Soviet Union, and we seem to just kind of ignore it.
		At least our political leaders seem to ignore it and say we don't have to worry about this now.
		And to me, that's frightening.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		Let's talk about when we do have to worry about it.
		If it's not now, then here's a question I'd like answered.
		Is there going to be a point at which there's less oil available than there has been in our history?
		In other words, peak oil.
		Is there really going to be a peak oil point?
mark eberhart ▲ ● ▼		personally, I don't think so.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Really?
mark eberhart ▲ ● ▼		When they talk about peak oil, they're talking about what is called conventional oil.
		And every year, unconventional sources become more useful.
		Right now, we get most our biggest supplier of oil outside of this country is actually Canada.
		And that's coming from oil resources that 10 years ago we didn't count.
		They said they didn't exist.
		Now they do because those come from tar sands.
		Right now in Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, we have more oil shale than any place in the world.
		We have 800 billion gallons of, I'm sorry, not gallons, barrels.
		800 billion barrels of oil in the oil shale there.
		Now that is expensive to extract, but when the price gets up where it is now.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		How expensive?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		In other words, at what point will it be competitive with pick a price?
mark eberhart ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I have heard the price of $40 a barrel.
		At that point, it becomes feasible, $40 or $50.
		So for the last year or two, we have been over that amount, and that's why a number of different oil companies are up there now exploring how they're going to go about extracting that oil from the oil shale and how they can do it in an environmental manner, environmentally benign manner.
		And so I do not believe we're ever going to see the point where we reach peak oil.
		We will see a point where the price dictates how the extraordinary means we can use to get at oil and energy.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		Well, right now, premium here is around $3.30 or $3.40, somewhere in there.
		Where is it going, in your opinion, and how soon?
mark eberhart ▲ ● ▼		Where's the price going?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That's right.
mark eberhart ▲ ● ▼		The price is going up, and the price is going to continue to go up, and that's not so much because of how much oil is available, but because of the limited refinery capabilities in this country.
		We have very limited refinery capabilities, haven't built new refineries in, I believe, 15, 20 years.
		So we're operating right at about 85, 90% of our refining capability now.
		And until we build new refineries, that's where it's going to be.
		And the price is going to keep going up because demand is going up.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Will it go up?
		All right.
		No, let me try this.
		What would happen if we were cut off from oil in the Mideast?
mark eberhart ▲ ● ▼		Oh, it would be catastrophic.
		Catastrophic.
		If the same thing were to happen that would happen, as you mentioned, when Iran basically cut off 3 million barrels a day, that just threw the whole world into a tizzy.
		If the same thing were to happen now, it would be catastrophic.
		If the Saudis were for some reason to say, we're not pumping anymore, the whole world would go into a major collapse.
		That's my personal opinion.
		And I'm not an economist, of course.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, that doesn't exactly comfort me at all.
		I went through the one in the 70s.
		I remember fights and lines and all kinds of trouble.
		Did you go through that one?
mark eberhart ▲ ● ▼		And it was horrible.
		I remember going through exactly the same thing.
		And it was a horrible experience, particularly for people in this country who assumed that gasoline is our heritage.
		We're entitled to it.
		And it was a very, very ugly situation.
		And the same thing would happen again if the Saudis, for instance, or if Venezuela or the Canadians, I think we can count on the Canadians.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Perhaps the Canadians, yes.
mark eberhart ▲ ● ▼		But nonetheless, yes, it's a frightening situation, particularly that the oil is sitting in the hands of people who are not countries that I think we should be dependent upon.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		If you were the President of the United States, what would your directives be?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		What would you change right now?
mark eberhart ▲ ● ▼		Right now, I would begin by turning to our oil shale.
		I would turn to our oil shale, and I would subsidize the development of oil shale.
		I would subsidize the development of alternative sources of fuel.
		I mean, it's crazy that we have built no nuclear power plants since Chernopol, since Three Mile Island.
		That technology is very important.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Good technology, but of course we haven't figured out exactly what to do with the waste.
		They want to put it in my state here in Nevada.
		And we have to, I'm told, be good caretakers of it for perhaps hundreds of thousands of years.
		And I don't know what we've taken care of.
		We can go back to your other book, Why Things Break.
		Yeah.
		Talk about that.
unidentified		Yeah.
mark eberhart ▲ ● ▼		And in terms of nuclear waste, yeah, that's a legitimate concern.
		But one of the things that people don't recognize is that, for instance, France has a very successful nuclear program.
		They supply 80% of their electricity via nuclear, and they cope with the waste problem by recycling, by reprocessing fuel.
		In this country, or in the world actually, the most successful producer of nuclear power is the U.S. Navy.
		The U.S. Navy has operated reactors since 1955.
		It operates more reactors than any other entity in the world.
		It's done so without a single accident.
		There is the problem with waste associated even with naval reactors.
		But nonetheless, that shows what can be done if cost is not the object.
		That is, safety is the object and reliability is the object.
		We can build very safe and reliable nuclear reactors.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Let's go back to France.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		If France can do it, why can't we?
mark eberhart ▲ ● ▼		Part of it is, again, the issue of fear.
		Three Mile Island, particularly, we had a number of people who were very vocal about what would come about from a nuclear meltdown.
		Jane Fonda was one of those people.
		So there are a number of people who basically seed the fear instead of doing what I would like to do, and particularly through my book, is talk about the power of technology and that if we approach things in a logical way instead of fear-based, and if we understand the technologies we can make as a country, each and every person can help to make enlightened decisions about what we should be doing for energy.
		And it's very important that people get involved in that discussion and involved in a knowledgeable way.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, I guess my question is, if France can handle the nuclear waste and recycle it, why in the world can we not?
mark eberhart ▲ ● ▼		Well, part of that is the fact that they had a very well-thought-out reactor program where they used standard reactors.
		We didn't do that.
		So it's part of the political system, part of the planning process.
		But there is no reason we could not do that now.
		And over the last 20 years, the technologies have developed to make reactors even safer and reduce the amount of waste associated with reactors.
		And there's also programs out there, but they're far off in the future, which can actually accelerate the rate at which nuclear decay occurs, and so you can get rid of your waste much faster.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I've heard about that.
mark eberhart ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Is that what France is doing?
mark eberhart ▲ ● ▼		No, they're simply reprocessing.
		So they take all of their reactor rods and send them to a central location where they reprocess them and then use them over again.
		And so that takes care of their high-level waste.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Then why can't we do that?
mark eberhart ▲ ● ▼		We could.
mark eberhart ▲ ● ▼		And there's no reason we couldn't do that.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Why aren't we doing that?
mark eberhart ▲ ● ▼		Well, I think the biggest reason is, again, fear.
		It's been very hard to get a nuclear reactor up and running since Three Mile Island.
		Also, because we went about doing this in such a strange way where we didn't use a standard reactor design, which we improved and improved and improved, but just every different reactor was a new design, which we'd see what would happen.
		Part of that process was that we ran way over budget.
		Many of the reactors they were building in the Northwest just were extraordinarily over budget, and they walked away with them.
		They invested $20 billion in these things, then turned around and walked away and took the Northwest from the place that had the least expensive electricity in the world to, well, in the United States, to one of the places with the highest electricity bills.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So bad decisions.
mark eberhart ▲ ● ▼		Very, very bad decisions, not planned out.
		And in my mind, part of what goes on there is that we think of energy as an economic resource.
		So we leave it up to businesses to do this.
		And there, of course, they want to maximize their profits.
		So they're going to do whatever they can do to do within reason.
		They're going to do what they can do by minimizing the cost of development.
		And that's not the way to do it.
		And that's why in my book, I urge, in fact, that we take another approach.
		If we think about energy as a security issue, and think about it in the same context as we do an aircraft carrier battle group, then we don't ask the question, how much is this going to cost?
		We say, how much security is it going to bring?
		And I think that's the way we need to look at energy issues in the future.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay.
		One of the concerns with nuclear reactors, of course, is proliferation.
		Are you concerned about that?
mark eberhart ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, and I've heard a number of people talk about the possibility of proliferation, and then you're leading to nuclear weapons.
		And by the way, that's one of the things that scares me amazingly, the idea that a terrorist group would get a nuclear weapon.
		To me, that's the most terrifying thing that could happen in the way of terrorism.
		And some of the new reactors that they've developed, which are called these pebble bed reactors, they encase the nuclear material in ceramics.
		They make it very, very difficult to reprocess.
		And I think this is a surmountable problem, that there is a way to build reactors and reduce the possibilities of proliferation.
		I believe that is doable.
		It's going to be hard, and it's going to be one of those concerns we have to keep in mind at all times.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Back to the atmosphere for a moment.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You did see the movie, Vice President Gore's movie, right?
mark eberhart ▲ ● ▼		Yes, I did.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And did you believe that science was accurate?
mark eberhart ▲ ● ▼		Now, there are two things going on there.
		Yes, his science is accurate.
		That is, particularly the ice core data.
		The ice core data he shows is accurate, and that's where we can correlate the CO2 levels in the atmosphere with global temperatures over 700,000 years.
		And that shows that whenever the temperature goes up, CO2 is going up too, though it doesn't establish a cause and effect necessarily.
		And then it does show that CO2 levels are at their highest level in that 700,000 years.
		So that science is correct.
		All the science he says is correct.
		Where I disagree in a minor way with Vice President Gore is predicting what the climate will be like.
		That is talking about the fact that we're going to have deserts and this kind of thing.
		I don't believe we know that.
		And there are many very reputable climatologists who say we don't know for sure what the world's going to look like if we have global warming.
		Will it be wetter because now it's hotter and so we'll be putting out More moisture into the air and more rain?
		Will we leave deserts?
		I don't think people really know what's going to happen.
		But nonetheless, change in any form, whether we take an area like Colorado or Nevada and suddenly make it now wetter, that could lead to the same devastating effects as making the Northeast drier.
		So change is not the friend of things that are established.
		And we are established.
		The human beings are established, and the plants we live on are established.
		And any kind of change is something we don't want to see happen.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You mentioned solar dimming, and I really don't know what that is, and its effect on global warming.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		What is solar dimming?
mark eberhart ▲ ● ▼		Well, solar dimming, that's a very interesting thing because oftentimes, and I've heard this coming out of people in the administration who talk about this, in what was it, the late, the early 1970s, I think, scientists were forecasting a new ice age.
		And people talk about this.
		They say, oh, they forecasted that ice age back there, and that never happened.
		And now they're talking about global warming.
		So really, no one knows what's going on.
		But the interesting thing about that was they couldn't figure out.
		It looked like things were getting colder.
		And actually, the scientists called for a huge investigation to understand climate modeling better.
		And what they discovered was that we're pumping a lot of particles into the air, particularly sulfates from burning coal.
		And these reflect light and interact with the clouds in a different way.
		And they reflect light.
		And so actually the light falling on the surface of the amount of light that reaches the Earth now has been reduced by about 5% over the last 50, 60 years.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay, well, then in my average mind, that says that things should be cooler.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		If you have 5% less light hitting Earth, then you have a cooler.
mark eberhart ▲ ● ▼		And that's what was going on in the 70s.
		And so you've got two effects.
		You've got solar dimming making it cooler, and then you've got global warming because of CO2 greenhouse gases making it warmer.
		And what happened was in the 70s with the Clean Air Act, immediately the United States, or very close to immediately, stopped producing particulates, greatly reduced the sulfate production, and now the solar dimming over the United States diminished.
		The CO2 production went up.
		And so all of a sudden you've got the CO2 production, the global warming outrunning the solar dimming.
		Now what's scary about this is that the Chinese who are burning coal like crazy have got this huge problem with particulates.
		I've never been to China, but I've seen pictures and it's just, it looks horrible.
		It looks like the worst days in L.A. Well, it is.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I was recently there.
		I've been to Bangkok.
		Bangkok is so bad, Professor, that about 40% of the street police have lung problems, lung disease.
		It actually hurts to breathe most days in Bangkok.
		And if you go on up into the industrial areas of mainland China, same deal.
		It's beyond anything you can imagine.
mark eberhart ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, it's and the Chinese are aware of this, and they have begun to enact laws to do exactly the same thing, to reduce the amount of sulfates in the air, because it is an incredible health hazard.
mark eberhart ▲ ● ▼		It causes acid rain, and it's a health hazard.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes, but if they do what we did, and they continue to use the kind of energy you're talking about, and they stop the global dimming, or the dimming over their part of the globe, then it's going to warm there as well.
		And so we're going to double the amount of global warming, if I heard you correctly.
		Did I?
mark eberhart ▲ ● ▼		Yes, that's correct.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right, all right.
		Hold it right there.
		We're at the top of the hour.
		We'll be right back.
		Dr. Mark Eberhardt is my guest.
		We're talking about energy.
		What are our options from this point in time in America with what we're using and the rest of the world is using?
		What are our options?
		More of it in a moment.
		All right, Dr. Eberhardt, welcome back.
		Our president not long ago was talking about converting all our internal combustion engines to hydrogen to move to a hydrogen economy.
		What has happened with that?
		Is the idea good, bad, or is it what is it?
mark eberhart ▲ ● ▼		Well, it's interesting because if you look at his proposal, he gave that in his State of the Union address.
		The idea is, of course, when you burn hydrogen, you don't get greenhouse gases.
		You just get water vapor, which is very nice.
		The problem is hydrogen doesn't exist in its unburned form.
		Its burned form is water.
		So what you have to do is isolate the hydrogen.
		And the question is, where does the energy come from the hydrogen?
		And if you look at his proposal, well, that was going to come from burning fossil fuels.
		So we are going to burn fossil fuels to make hydrogen, to burn hydrogen to get water.
		Not a way to get energy independent, certainly, and probably not even a way to save energy.
		So hydrogen has some promise, but it's something that the technological hurdles there are big ones.
		That wouldn't be where I would be putting my immediate money.
		That's not where I would be doing immediately to become energy independent.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You would be going to nuclear energy.
mark eberhart ▲ ● ▼		Well, I would be going to nuclear energy, but I would also be going to burning coal and using the new technologies to sequester CO2.
		We have a tremendous amount of coal in this country.
		We have more coal in this country than any place else in the world.
		So we're like the Middle East of coal.
		And coal has some problems, but there are ways to take the CO2 and sequester that CO2 so it doesn't get into the atmosphere.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I don't think a lot of the audience understands sequestration.
		I'm not sure I do.
		So explain it to all of us.
mark eberhart ▲ ● ▼		What happens when you burn coal is you make carbon dioxide.
		And carbon dioxide is the bad greenhouse gas that heats up the atmosphere.
		And the thing is that we can take that coal and produce, as we're burning it, basically, and getting CO2, we pump the CO2 generally underground into old oil wells is the place that's preferred or sequestered into water beds underneath the ground, deep underneath the ground.
		And this keeps it from going up into the atmosphere.
		So you get the energy of the coal without the bad side effect of getting greenhouse gases and global warming.
		And this is a very logical way for us to proceed.
		At the moment, it's a bit more expensive than just burning, producing electricity by burning coal and letting the CO2 into the atmosphere.
		But nonetheless, if you think about this as the possible costs associated with generating CO2, then it's not that big a deal.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay, that might be an option for the U.S., but what about the rest of the world?
mark eberhart ▲ ● ▼		Well, what's interesting, of course, is the United States is the biggest, until recently, China also is now the biggest.
		But nonetheless, we use more energy per person than anybody else in the world.
		It seems to me that what would be right and proper is for us to basically try to reduce our greenhouse emissions.
		And the little countries that are trying to develop, you know, we develop on the back of coal and oil, and they're going to need the same thing.
		So they're going to need to have a different way to do it.
		Now, we could also use our coal and sequester it and come up.
		We can generate hydrogen in this process.
		So there is a way we could actually provide the rest of the world with a non-polluting energy alternative as well.
		So I'd like to see the United States actually be the leading producer of carbon-free technology.
		It's something we certainly could do.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		What about solar and wind?
mark eberhart ▲ ● ▼		Wind, of course, is right now the fastest growing alternative energy source.
		It's viable now.
		It can be produced at practically the same cost as burning fossil fuels.
		So wind is a way to go.
		There's, of course, people are upset.
		They don't want a windmill in their backyard, which is what's going on right now in Massachusetts, where there's a debate about whether we're going to put a bunch of windmills out in Cape Cod or not.
		On the other hand, so windmills are a way to go, and tremendous technology is going on there.
		Solar energy.
		Solar energy is, there are two kinds.
		There's solar voltaic where we make electricity directly, and there's solar thermal.
		Solar thermal is incredibly efficient right now.
		Solar voltaics can be made more efficient, can be made more economic simply by producing them.
		Every time you double the production, you decrease the cost by 20%.
		So here's a way we could just simply subsidize the production of solar cells, solar voltaics, and be driving their costs down.
		There are a lot of good programs going on in there.
		So solar, biomass, I've commented on.
		Biomass has a place.
		Wind, geothermal.
		Geothermal has some incredible possibilities in geothermal.
		So there are so many wonderful possibilities out there, things we should be doing.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		We should be looking at these possibilities with great optimism instead of And what I wonder about is, again, just take the climate for a moment, serious as I believe it to be, and forget it.
		Just make it a matter of national security to be energy independent, bearing in mind that these countries sending us the oil right now pretty much eat us.
		And there is going to come a time when they're going to cut our throats.
		Right?
mark eberhart ▲ ● ▼		I absolutely agree.
		I think the argument for becoming energy independent flies With either one.
		You can talk about the climate or you can talk about who we get our oil from.
		It doesn't matter.
		Either one of those will carry the day.
		You put them both together, and it seems to me it's a no-brainer.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, it seems to me the same way.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So, what would your opinion be about why the administration is not putting these subsidies quickly into place and moving our economy quickly into these other areas?
mark eberhart ▲ ● ▼		Well, personally, I don't understand it.
		I don't understand people who don't do that.
		The last president who really made an effort in this direction was Jimmy Carter.
		So he was the last one who really did it.
		And actually, during his administration, we saw the only time in U.S. history where we saw a reduction in our energy usage.
		It was really quite amazing.
		And then when Ronald Reagan got into office, he said, no, conservation means being too hot in the summer and too cold in the winter.
		And I think that's the attitude people have that doing this kind of thing will call upon, they'll have to ask people to sacrifice.
		And asking people to sacrifice is not a way to get re-elected.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I don't read it that way.
		I read subsidies as saving our country ultimately, that we begin to produce a lot of wind.
		I mean, you take my state, for example.
		It's 90% federal land.
		We've got a lot of wind.
		We've got a lot of sun.
		We've got a lot of vacant land where people will not complain if wind generators are erected all over the place.
		I'm in Nevada.
mark eberhart ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I know you're in Nevada.
		I honestly don't see it.
		I see it.
		I do not understand.
		I cannot put myself in the mindset of the administration, the leaders now.
		I do not understand why they aren't jumping up and down and pointing to this as the security issue of the 21st century and saying we have to move on this.
		I don't see it.
		I have no concept of why they're not doing this.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Do you think that if we were cut off from the oil supplies in the Middle East, that we would go to war?
mark eberhart ▲ ● ▼		Oh, absolutely.
mark eberhart ▲ ● ▼		With this administration, there's no question in my mind about that.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Maybe I ought to say more war.
mark eberhart ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, more war.
		There's no question in my mind about that.
		When I was researching the book, I tried very hard to avoid leaping to the premature conclusion that we had gone to war in Iraq simply because of the oil.
		I tried, I looked at all sorts of possibilities, and the only one that's consistent and consistent with what we did and what's going on now is we did it for the oil.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, and to have bases in very strategic locations.
mark eberhart ▲ ● ▼		Pardon me?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		To have bases in very strategic locations.
mark eberhart ▲ ● ▼		When you see the information about where we built the bases and they're there to protect pipelines and the whole thing, and some of the things that Bush and Cheney have said, you just come to the conclusion that this is what it was all about.
		And it's a little bit frightening because the parallels between what we did and what the Japanese did in World War II are striking in the fact that the Japanese, actually when they bombed Pearl Harbor, they weren't bombing Pearl Harbor to get to the United States.
		They were bombing Pearl Harbor to cover their flank while they made a move on the oil facilities of Indonesia.
		And, you know, the parallels are just to me a little scary.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, I think virtually every president has reaffirmed that we would go to war to prevent a choke point in the Straits of Hormuz, right?
mark eberhart ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
		So that makes it very much a national security issue.
		If you're saying you're willing to start throwing around nukes if you have to to protect the oil pipeline, then you're admitting that it's a gigantic national security issue.
		And if it's that big, then let's do something about it.
mark eberhart ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, absolutely.
mark eberhart ▲ ● ▼		And the logic not to be doing something, I do not understand.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, I kind of don't know where to go from here.
		I mean, we obviously agree, and we're both frustrated at a lack of any real action moving us in a different direction.
		I just don't get it.
		I mean, here we are trying to take words out of scientists' mouths so we don't worry people as to protect the continuing use of fossil fuels from people we hate or hate us.
mark eberhart ▲ ● ▼		Right.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I don't get it.
mark eberhart ▲ ● ▼		It's bizarre.
		And this is one of the reasons I wrote the book is I wanted other people to have the same information I have.
		And with that information, with the kind of optimism one would have about what we can do and removing a lot of the fright from it that we're going to have to sacrifice, my idea was that perhaps more people would stand up and say this is something we need to do and it's not something we should be frightened of and we should move forward on this.
		So that was part of my motivation for writing the book.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		What is it you tell your students?
mark eberhart ▲ ● ▼		My students, so remember, I teach at Colorado School of Mines and I teach a lot of chemical engineers who are going to go off and work in the oil business.
		And what I tell them is this is a very exciting time for them in that if we're going to solve these problems, it's unlike any time in history where the knowledge of the scientist and engineer is going to be essential to solving these problems.
		And they have a great responsibility to help the world solve these problems and to do it in a way that makes us good stewards of the earth.
		And I do not see the oil companies as being The menaces that I have seen them painted as, because my students are going off and working for those companies.
		They're from a different culture.
		And their desire is to treat the earth well and generate clean energy.
		And so I think it's an incredibly exciting time for the students in this area.
		And I think it's a very productive place to be, too.
		If people are looking for jobs, the energy sector is going to be a place where there's just going to be a tremendous demand for knowledgeable people.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Professor, there's a group of people out there who believe that oil is endless in the sense that when you drill and you begin to run out of oil, if you just cap that well and come back in five or ten years, like the horn oplenty, it will fill back up again and you can pump it out again.
mark eberhart ▲ ● ▼		Well, they're wrong.
		They're wrong.
		They're wrong.
		So many of the books on peak oil and that kind of thing have shown.
		I mean, we very probably went through peak oil already as far as conventional oil is concerned, as far as conventional resources are concerned.
		And so basically, you're looking to get at these increasingly harder and harder oils to get at.
		You're going to see an increase in cost.
		And there will come a time if we don't do something.
		There will come a time when sustaining the amount of oil we need to keep our society running and feeding our imaginations will be incredibly expensive.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Professor, is there any chance that there's another Saudi Arabia that we simply haven't found yet?
mark eberhart ▲ ● ▼		I do not think so.
		The world has been drilled full of pinholes at this point.
		The only possibility is that someone would come back and say we don't understand how oil was formed.
		All of our understanding about how oil was formed tells us where it's going to be.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay, tell me about how oil was formed.
		I mean, since childhood, it's been my understanding that it was the dinosaurs.
		That whatever killed the dinosaurs, they fell down dead, and they eventually turned into petroleum.
mark eberhart ▲ ● ▼		Well, not quite.
		Dinosaurs make up much of the petroleum.
		There are a number of different kinds of oil.
		Most of it's formed in seabeds where fecal matter and animals die.
		They collect on the bottom of the seabed.
		And the important part is here is that the seabed has to have a certain kind of circulation pattern which deprives that of oxygen.
		So all of this stuff builds up in that area and it can't decompose.
		And so over years, and sediments pile on top of it, all of this carbon is locked in that.
		Then you need something else.
		Then you need it to be buried deep.
		You need it to be buried about a mile deep below the surface.
		So once it's buried at that depth, it gets hot, and it basically cooks this stuff and turns it into oil.
		Well, then you need one more thing.
		Well, you need two more things now to get at it.
		You need it to be cooked in a strata of soil that allows it to percolate through so you can drill into it and pull it out.
		You also need a nice solid rock over the top of it called a cap rock, which prevents it from leaking out over millions of years.
		A drop, a one drop leak in a million barrel oil field will deplete it in geological time.
		So you need all of these conditions to be met, and we know where those conditions could be satisfied, and we've basically looked in those places.
		If in fact there is oil that hasn't been discovered, then what's going to happen is we're going to go, oh, we weren't quite right on all the stuff that needed to be there.
		We weren't knowledgeable about the geology.
		There's another way to form oil.
		But as long as oil was formed the way that all oil to this point has been formed, we've pretty much looked everywhere.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Gee, that's discouraging.
		It's also upsetting that it wasn't a dinosaur.
		Really, I believe, I'll bet you about 80% of the people or better believe that our oil has come from dead dinosaurs.
		Not true, huh?
mark eberhart ▲ ● ▼		Not true.
mark eberhart ▲ ● ▼		And in fact, there was the very nice Sinclair commercial where they showed, this was, I don't remember, in the 70s, where they showed the dinosaur actually.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I remember that.
mark eberhart ▲ ● ▼		And they said, put a dino in your tank.
unidentified		Yeah.
mark eberhart ▲ ● ▼		So they perpetrated that myth.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So it's a gigantic myth.
unidentified		Yeah.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, they may have contributed in some manner.
		What is it that put all the rock on top of the appropriate material to compress it in the way you talked about?
		I mean.
mark eberhart ▲ ● ▼		So there are a lot of things.
		So one thing that happens is that you have seasonal tidal flows.
		So, for instance, you can build up all this material, and then you have rivers that run into the sea, and they'll drop sediment each year, and it'll gradually compress it and push it down deeper and deeper and deeper.
		So it's just a seasonal process that buries it a few inches a year.
		Over millions of years, it gets down there into that one-mile-deep region where it gets hot, 200, 300 degrees Fahrenheit, and it needs to be cooked.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So we would need millions of years to generate new oil in the manner you just described.
mark eberhart ▲ ● ▼		Absolutely, yeah.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Now we can officially.
		I don't know.
		All right, Professor, hold on.
		We're at the bottom of the hour.
		Dr. Mark Eberhardt is my guest.
		We're talking about energy, and we will be right back.
		Here I am, my guest, Professor Mark Eberhardt.
		We're talking about energy.
		Dave, I think it is.
		Let's see, where was Dave calling from?
		Where is Dave?
		Here he is, Washington, D.C. says, Art, please get Ron Paul on the show.
		Did you really think it was dinosaurs?
		Well, yes, Dave, actually, I did.
		I guess not in totality, but I thought the dinosaurs had a lot to do with that compassion that eventually became oil.
		And I suppose they did to some degree, but not for the most part, apparently.
		Dr. Eberhardt, back with all of you in a moment.
		Well, okay, Doctor, so it wasn't the dinosaurs.
		Although, even you would have to admit that they probably were part, at least, of the biomass that then became oil millions of years later, yes?
mark eberhart ▲ ● ▼		Possibly, but you know, the dinosaurs is actually in coal beds.
		So your coal probably has a part of dinosaurs in it.
		They do find fossils in coal beds.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, then the process that created oil, to some degree, is always underway.
mark eberhart ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		But not enough of it.
mark eberhart ▲ ● ▼		It takes a long, long time.
		Yeah, you've got to build up just many, many feet of this organic matter and sink it deep into what we call the oil window in order to get it to turn to this.
		So it is a long process.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Bob in Colorado Springs asks, why can't we make use of a similar process that the earth itself uses to make oil?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		No?
mark eberhart ▲ ● ▼		Oh, we can.
		In fact, that's what oil shale is.
		In the oil shale, the organic matter never got buried, and so it was never cooked into oil.
		So what we need to do is take this stuff and actually heat it up and cook it to make it into oil.
		So that's exactly what we would do.
		We would take that organic matter and do that.
		The problem is, of course, you have to put energy into something to heat it up.
		And so by the time you've put that energy in, often it comes out that you've used more energy to turn it into oil than you would get back.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Nigel in Texas asks, how viable is using hemp as a fuel source?
mark eberhart ▲ ● ▼		I've heard people talk about hemp again.
		That would be a cellulosic ethanol, and that should be, if we spend more time actually exploring how to use cellulose, which would include hemp, that's a reasonable thing to do.
		That would make a large number of things we could then start using to make alcohol.
		Yeah.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Fusion.
		hot fusion and cold fusion.
		I guess cold fusion is still...
mark eberhart ▲ ● ▼		The last I saw, I do not know many people who still believe that they're seeing anything, but there are some people who are still looking, and I commend them to continue to look because if they can find a way to do that, that is wonderful.
		It would be a tremendous energy resource.
		Hot fusion is a potentially tremendous energy resource.
		The problem with it is that we've always said it's like 20 years off, and it's been that way for the last 50 years.
		There are a lot of programs now which are trying to generate fusion energy in a usable way, and they should continue.
		It's just not going to be something that's going to be producing energy anytime in the next 20 or 30 years.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		I want to take some questions from the audience.
		Dustin in Oklahoma, you're on the air with Dr. Everhart.
unidentified		Hi.
		Yes.
		I live in Broken Air, Oklahoma.
		And just east of here, there's a company called Centroleum.
		And they're already producing coal into jet fuel.
		And they've done all these testings with the B-52 for the United States Air Force.
		Now, I was just curious if you've known anything about what percentage or if they're actually going to use the fuel or an additive that would alleviate some of the oil pressures off of our energy and or gas production volumes.
mark eberhart ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, absolutely.
		In fact, producing aviation fuel and just fuels in general from coal is a process that the Nazis used during World War I and I believe Japan used also during World War II because they couldn't get enough oil.
		So they were producing basically synthetic oil from coal.
		It's a possibility.
		You can generate a good quality oil from that.
		Again, it takes a little more energy.
		You have to put a little more energy in to do this, so it's a little more expensive than pumping oil straight out of the ground.
		But nonetheless, if it was subsidized or if there were facilities to do it en masse, it would be a way to relieve our energy independence.
		It wouldn't do anything to force costs down, but it would help with our energy independence.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		On this program and others like it, Doctor, we hear frequently about somebody's carburetor that gets a million miles to the gallon.
		We hear about little boxes that will power houses.
		We hear about all these magical things that we can't really quite put our finger on.
		Have you actually heard of anything, doctor, that is in that category that is being suppressed or that has actual promise, in your opinion?
mark eberhart ▲ ● ▼		I've never.
		Part of my book goes into some detail on perpetual motion machines and our claim to make great energy strides.
		And historically, none of these have ever proved out.
		I cannot imagine why anybody would suppress such information.
		If one stumbled upon something, for instance, cold fusion, if cold fusion had in fact been viable, it would have been impossible to squelch it or to hide it.
		So I am not a conspiracy theorist as far as this kind of thing is concerned.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I'm not really either, Doctor, but I can imagine a motive.
		I mean, after all, I mean, I'm with you.
		These are not big, nasty oil companies.
		They're providing us with what we must have.
		But, but, but.
		If something got in their way, if something threatened their income, I can imagine a motive to slow it up.
mark eberhart ▲ ● ▼		Sure.
		Then I have to turn to just basic science.
		And the fact is that energy is a conserved quantity.
		And often when you hear these stories, it just they don't conform with the laws of thermodynamics.
		And so you say they're counter to the laws of science.
		And I cannot conceive of anything short of something like cold fusion that would supply tremendous amounts of energy that wouldn't be of the form of oil or coal or something like that.
		So short of cold fusion, I can't think of something that would work in that way.
		So I'm always questioning when somebody says I add this to water and I get energy out.
		That's not consistent with the laws of science.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		You obviously feel it's important for the average person to understand the laws of thermodynamics.
		Can you explain it in a way the average person can sort of grasp it?
mark eberhart ▲ ● ▼		Sure.
		It's the fact that energy is conserved.
		I mean, that's the big lesson here.
		And what happens is it's a very subtle understanding.
		And for instance, the example you gave of George Bush saying we're going to go to hydrogen, that sounds so appealing.
		And I've heard a number of people say this.
		Let's burn hydrogen, and we won't get any CO2.
		And hydrogen's everywhere.
		It's in all of our water.
		And all of that's true, and it sounds, oh, that's perfect.
		That's exactly what we need to do.
		Except no one tells you that, oh, you've got to put energy into the water to get the hydrogen out.
		And as soon as you start looking at the laws of thermodynamics and understand this kind of balance, this kind of checkbook keeping, this balance sheet keeping, it all makes sense.
		And you begin to ask the right questions when people make statements of that sort.
		And that's why I think it's very important that people understand these things so they can comment on policy and say, oh, that just doesn't seem right to me.
		And these concepts aren't hard to understand.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, our president said it, so I would assume that he had some science behind what he said.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I'm curious, how much energy do you need to put in versus what you get out when you're talking about hydrogen?
mark eberhart ▲ ● ▼		Okay.
mark eberhart ▲ ● ▼		If you're talking about water, you have to put more in to the water than you're going to get out from burning the hydrogen.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, gee.
mark eberhart ▲ ● ▼		So it's costing you energy to generate the hydrogen.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I've heard it suggested that you could use solar power and wind power to put together the hydrogen.
mark eberhart ▲ ● ▼		Absolutely.
		And that would be great.
		And there's a lot of good research going on in that where you actually use hydrogen as a storage medium now.
		What you're doing is you're taking electric power that you get either from solar voltaics or sunlight, and you're just storing that in the form of hydrogen.
		And that's fine.
		And that's wonderful.
		But in George Bush's address, what he was calling for is we're going to make hydrogen by burning fossil fuels to make hydrogen.
		Because right now, the technologies to make hydrogen from solar energy aren't very efficient.
		That's probably not the way we'd want to go.
		But there's a lot of good research going on in that area.
		And that's a long-term research.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Mike in Ithaca, New York, you're on with Dr. Everhart.
unidentified		Hi, Art.
		Hi, Mark.
		Mark, I'm going to ask you to do what you're already doing very well, but just a little bit harder, and think like an economist and a chemist at the same time.
		That is, if you use solar energy to split water into hydrogen and oxygen, and there's a lady in Seattle who wants to do this by genetically engineering an alga, you know, a green organism that's photosynthetic like a plant.
		And all photosynthetic organisms split water to start with when they make sugar, but then after they split the water, they add carbon dioxide to it to make sugar.
		And then the sugar is burned by organisms for energy, and carbon dioxide is given off.
		You get carbon dioxide, water, and energy.
		Now, if you split the water, like with this genetically engineered alga, or with electricity, and don't involve the carbon dioxide to make sugar, and just use the separated water, i.e.
		hydrogen and oxygen, as your energy source when the water recombines again, you're just not involving the carbon dioxide.
		You're just leaving it free.
		And so in a sense, if we burn sugar and just use a renewable energy source like sugar or cellulose, that's really no different than splitting the water.
		The only difference is you're leaving the carbon dioxide out of a picture and leaving it in the atmosphere.
		But if you burn sugar the way a horse does, then you just take the carbon dioxide in and you kick it out again later instead of just leaving it free in the air.
		So there's any advantage to growing a genetically engineered alga that splits water without involving carbon dioxide, or just a normal alga or a normal plant that takes up the carbon dioxide and then throws it out again, as long as we keep reusing the same carbon dioxide over and over rather than taking it out of the ground.
		I don't see what's the great advantage of genetically engineering an alga that splits water without involving carbon dioxide in our energy cycle.
mark eberhart ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, you've hit the nail on the head.
		Yes, there is, in fact, advantage of doing this with algaes.
		And in fact, one of my graduate students who just got his PhD, named Scott Plummer, was doing his research exactly on this, on mutating an algae so it would produce hydrogen.
		It's a very promising area of investigation.
		And then you could just basically set up a big bat of algae, and as it grew, it would generate hydrogen, and then you could burn that hydrogen to make energy.
		So very, very promising area of research.
		And you are right also about burning, just using the same carbon dioxide over and over and over again, and that's just carbon neutral.
		So as long as we're using biomass, as long as you're burning biomass, that biomass then take, you generate carbon dioxide, it goes up in the air, and then the biomass takes it out again in the next growing season.
		So that leaves you carbon neutral also.
		So both those are reasonable things to do.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		How about the cost of it, and can you do enough of it?
mark eberhart ▲ ● ▼		And that's the problem.
		The algae has a lot of troubles.
		It makes hydrogen, but it's not its preferred thing to make.
		And it seems to be that this is an evolutionary backwater.
		It started making hydrogen a long time ago and then Kind of stopped, and so we're having to force it to make hydrogen.
		Neat area of research could be very potentially useful.
		The problem with biomass is as soon as you start burning stuff that we're growing, then you're taking up huge amounts of arable land to produce stuff we're going to burn, which puts us right back to where we were in the 1920s when we had to feed the 25 million horses that pulled the plows on all of the fields in the United States.
		And what was happening at that point is one-third of our arable land was going to feed the horses.
		Same thing here.
		If we grow biomass to make energy, we have to turn over a huge part of our arable land to make that.
		That'll force the costs of grain and food and that kind of thing up.
		So it's an enigma as to what we should do about biomass.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		Steve in Houston, Texas.
		You're on with Dr. Eberhardt.
unidentified		Yes, great show.
		Appreciate your guest selection.
		Excellent.
		I graduated from Colorado School Lines in 71, 73 with Holvy.
		And I know Fruit of Colorado, We evaluated running oil through that plant.
		How is there going to be enough water to process all that oil shale?
mark eberhart ▲ ● ▼		Great question.
unidentified		Work conditions out there, and that's the critical resource for this whole process.
mark eberhart ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
		Yeah, it's going to take a huge amount of water.
		What's happened is that Shell has made some Shell Oil has done some interesting research which shows that they can basically process the oil shale in situ and it will not require nearly as much water.
		So they're looking at this as a potentially useful way to get the oil out.
		The water issue is a stopper if you have to do it the way we were talking about 25 years ago.
unidentified		That was in the report in 2006, I believe.
mark eberhart ▲ ● ▼		Pardon me?
unidentified		There was a report in 2006 about the insects.
unidentified		They've been talking about that forever.
mark eberhart ▲ ● ▼		And Shell seems to have found a way that they can make it economically viable.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I haven't heard a word about it, Doctor.
mark eberhart ▲ ● ▼		It's not something that they – Shell is a very interesting oil company because when the other oil companies fled Colorado, when the cost of oil dropped and no longer was oil shale viable, Shell Oil stayed around and continued to do their research.
		so they're an interesting company and have a lot of interesting things.
		This will be a very complex process where they basically have to freeze huge zones of the oil shale to keep the oil contained within that zone.
		And then they process it by dropping heaters down into it.
		And they've even talked about building a nuclear reactor to generate the electricity to heat this stuff and get it out.
		So oil shale has a lot of technological problems confronting it, but we would have made a great deal of progress if we had been addressing those for the last 25 years in a concerted way.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay, Mike in California, your turn with Dr. Everhart.
unidentified		Hi, Art.
		Hi, Doctor.
		I'm kind of curious, something we can do in almost the immediate is start looking at changing and revisiting, going back to ethers, and make use of the ethanol to make ether and make something like ETBE that is not near as polar as MTBE or alcohol.
mark eberhart ▲ ● ▼		And it would, using the alcohol, would double or triple the size of that particular additive, increase the size of the energy pool, and stabilize gasoline prices, don't you think?
		Well, certainly additives, and that's the whole idea behind the ethanol push, but certainly the MTBE and things like the ethers have the same effect in that, and they also reduce the amount of carbon dioxide emissions.
		So that's certainly one way to go.
		The greatest I've seen is like 2% or 3%.
		I guess there are some alcohols out there now that are running 50% alcohol.
		Part of the problem you get with running on alcohol is you get reduced power.
		The power per mass is greatly reduced, so you're going to have to burn about twice as much in order to get the same horsepower.
		So it's a difficult situation when you're talking about alcohols.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		All right.
		Dr. Hold Tight.
		Dr. Mark Everhart is my guest.
		We're discussing energy, and I can't think of any more important, critical, national security type topic to be discussing this night or any other nights.
		I'm Mark L. and we'll be right back.
		Here I am.
		Dr. Mark Everhart is my guest.
		And you never know.
		There might just be a mind out there that gets tweaked by something said tonight.
		One of the questions, one of the answers by the professor.
		Something that gets somebody going that will solve what I consider to be our biggest problem in the world right now.
		And that's energy, which is the topic tonight.
		We'll be right back.
		Professor Kevin, in, I believe it's Garnerville, New York, says, hi, Art.
		About a year ago, I saw a news story on TV about some people who had converted their cars to run on vegetable oil.
		How does it work?
		And how viable is it as an alternative?
		Sure enough, every now and then, Professor, you get a news story, usually run about, you know, at the end of the news.
		Somebody is running their vehicle on vegetable oil, and they go down the street, tooling down the street, smelling like french fries or something.
		How viable is that?
mark eberhart ▲ ● ▼		It's quite viable.
		It's a kind of diesel oil, and you can actually use soybeans to generate a good quality diesel.
		You come into the same problem here, though, in that you have to turn over arable land and grow the crop to produce the oil.
		And if we were to do that for all the cars in the United States, if we were all to run on biomass, we would basically have to be 75% of the United States would have to be producing vegetable matter to run cars.
		And in that sense, it just doesn't work.
		Now, someplace like Brazil, where they have huge amounts of sugar and small number of cars, there it's great.
		But the overall economics just won't work out in the United States.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Bill in Michigan, you're on the air with Professor Eberhardt.
unidentified		Yes, Professor Eberhardt and Art.
		My question is concerning geothermal energy.
		I know it's prevailing in the southwest, and they send a lot to California and everything.
		But couldn't we use the area of the caldera to drill a bunch of wells and generate more energy to remove the oil from the shale?
		Because that's reasonably close to Alberta and some of the areas that got a lot of shale and oil.
		And also, I'm from northern Michigan, and as far as the biomass goes, we've got a lot of farmland up here that's going back to brush because nobody grows hay or anything anymore.
		And we're welcoming the chance to grow grasses and stuff up here that can be converted to biomass.
		Okay.
mark eberhart ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, two questions there.
		Let me do the biomass one first.
		Yes, I mean, biomass has a place.
		And if you've got fallow land and you want to generate something to make some oil, make some fuel of some sort, that's great.
		The point is it can never, at least at current science and current needs, it will never be more than a small percentage, will meet more than a small percentage of our energy needs.
		But even a small percentage is important.
		And so I applaud that.
		I think anybody should do that.
		I think we should run, cars should run on used up oil at McDonald's.
		I think that's all great.
		And land that's been let go fallow, I say grow whipped grass and make biofuels.
		I think that's wonderful.
		As far as using geothermal energy to get at the oil shale, I have heard nothing about that.
		It's a possibility.
		Certainly, the area in Colorado, I haven't heard anybody discussing using geothermal energy to get at the biomass.
		But that would be, if we were to do that, if we were to do that and use that to make oil shells, then we would be replicating nature's technique for making exactly.
		We would be using the energy from deep in the ground to cook the as yet uncooked organic matter.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Professor, what about tidal energies?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I recall seeing a lot of stories on people experimenting with tidal energy.
mark eberhart ▲ ● ▼		Tidal energy, again, has some tremendous potential.
		You need particular kinds of tidal basins in order to exploit that.
		But it has a place, and I think we should be exploring that.
		But not only that, but ocean currents.
		There's been a lot of work done on dropping generators into deep ocean currents like the Gulf Stream and basically running electricity from those, which has a tremendous amount of potential power.
		So there's just everywhere you look, there's energy, and we have so much technology that we can use to exploit this.
		It just calls for us to develop the will to do it.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay.
		Jim in Erie, Pennsylvania, East of the Rockies.
		You're on the air.
unidentified		Good morning, gentlemen.
		We have an inventor here in Erie that is currently working on a method for treating cancer, and he invented an external RF generator.
		And just this past week on our local ABC News affiliate, they did a story involving accident, a discovery by accident, where they had a test tube sitting next to this RF generator, and it was filled with just regular salt water that they made from water and Morton salt.
		And they were able to ignite it into a flame.
		And it's baffled all of the people working on the project.
		And now they're pursuing grants from the federal government for an alternative fuel source.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Caller, do you know what kind of RF field was involved?
unidentified		All it says is that it's an external RF generator that the inventor, John Kansas, had invented, and he's using nanoparticles.
		He was in radio broadcasting for over 35 years, and he has cancer.
		And just by accident, in sitting at his house, he realized that he could heat up nanoparticles with this external RF generator, and they're able to place these nanoparticles in the cancer cells and destroy just the cancer cell.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That's fascinating.
		Can you get me something on that, an email?
		Can you perhaps get a local story that's written and forwarded to me?
unidentified		Yeah.
unidentified		Do you want the web address for the...
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Look, I'm Art Bell at AOL.com or Art Bell at MindSpring.com.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		If you can get me the story, I'll take it from there.
unidentified		All right.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
unidentified		Sounds good.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Thank you.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Have you ever heard of anything like that, Professor?
mark eberhart ▲ ● ▼		No, I haven't.
		And I would be baffled too.
		So I will look around and see if they come up with an answer.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay.
		All right.
		Greg in Phoenix, Arizona, your turn.
unidentified		Hi.
		There was a day when the diplomas were solid silver signed with the Viper tool.
		Took 200 hours to get them.
		And J.O. Ball was teaching petroleum refining in Anderson Hall then.
		So when you were on, I was interested in calling.
		And I'm wondering if there's anyone that you know of has, and there must be someone, that has calculated the amount of CO2 that's required to saturate all of the radiation from the Earth such that if you add more CO2,
		it blocks no more energy because it's fully saturated.
		And some people talk about 30 meters to block 50% of it.
		Do you know of anybody that's done work on that?
mark eberhart ▲ ● ▼		Not per se, but our sister planet, Venus, is a planet who's got 95% CO2 in the atmosphere, and the greenhouse effect there is such that the temperature on the surface is 500 degrees Celsius, I believe.
		And so I would think that you could get a runaway greenhouse effect with that there's you can continue to add CO2 as be my guess and continue to increase the extent of the greenhouse effect, just build up over time.
		But I don't know that for sure.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay.
		Mark to Mark from Golden, Colorado.
		You're on with Professor Eberhardt.
unidentified		Hi, Ark.
unidentified		Hi, Parker.
mark eberhart ▲ ● ▼		Hi, there.
unidentified		I guess my question is about the long-term viability of carbon sequestration on a really large scale.
		Seems like there would be some potential problems with mobilization of a lot of different kinds of things.
		And, you know, we've had things in the past, you know, there's been deep well injection of toxics and there are attendant problems with that.
		So I'd like your comments on that.
		And I guess another comment would be, you know, we had the XPRIZE for space flight.
		And it would seem like it would be great if there was an XPRIZE for some of the, you know, I guess you would call it maverick approaches to energy.
		And I think that would be, you know, a pretty good thing if there was such a thing.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Is there something like that, Doctor?
mark eberhart ▲ ● ▼		I heard recently, I cannot remember who it was, but it was one of the large philanthropic groups who put up a prize of multiple million dollars.
		I don't know what the figure was, but it was a lot of money.
		I mean, it was something I would not laugh at, to come up with a way to handle the CO2 problem.
		So I think that's out there, that there are people who are saying, yeah, see what you can come up with, and we'll give a prize if you do.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		What about the potential problems that you might imagine could arise from mass sequestration?
mark eberhart ▲ ● ▼		Sure.
		And this is something that has to be considered.
		I mean, you could be sequestering carbon dioxide, and then it would leak into the atmosphere and have defeated the purpose.
		What's interesting is what they're talking about doing, and what they have done, in fact, in some places, is sequester it back into the oil wells from which the oil was extracted.
		And those kind of deposits, those kind of strata, are absolutely perfect for this because that's where the oil has resided for millions of years.
		It's properly capped off.
		So there's a lot of potential here to sequester carbon dioxide.
		But yeah, everybody's right to say, let's look at it real carefully before we do it.
		Let's make sure that we don't have potentials that are going to come back and bite us.
		So that's always something important to keep in mind about what kind of things could go wrong.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Dennis in Oregon, you're on with Dr. Eberhardt.
unidentified		Art, how are you?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Just great.
unidentified		Good.
		Dr. Everhart?
		I have some information that would probably be helpful.
		I have information on the original carburetor that was developed back in the 60s that got high gas mileage.
		And the patent was bought up by Shell Oil Company.
		The carburetor was developed by an individual that worked for my father.
		And he had built two prototype carburetors, one, both of them built from original Holly carburetors.
		And he had one running on his vehicle.
		And then he retrofit one for my father's car.
		My father had a 1955 Chrysler New Yorker.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And how many miles per gallon was he getting?
unidentified		He was getting around 74 to 78 miles to the gallon on his car.
		And then Mr. Wagner, which was a developer, he was getting approximately 103 miles to the gallon on his small pickup truck.
		It was like a Ford.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Something or another.
		It doesn't matter.
		We've heard a million of these stories, Dr. Everheard.
		I told you we would hear them tonight, and there you have it.
		Shell Oil bought it up, he says.
mark eberhart ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I can't comment.
		I don't know for sure.
		Of course, I've seen, and I've actually been involved in litigation on a number of these things where people, you can get stuff now.
		You can order stuff that's supposed to increase your mileage dramatically.
		Nothing that I have ever seen that has been tested out in a scientific setting has ever come near giving the benefits that we're talking about here of going to 100 or 80 miles to the gallon.
		I'm not saying they're not out there, but the big question that always comes to my mind as soon as we start talking about carburetors having produced this, you would expect to see something along the same line with injectors because that gives you better combustion as well.
		And we see a modest improvement in mileage when we go to injectors, but we don't see this kind of major improvement we've been talking about.
		So, you know, for now, I just treat it as a skeptical scientist that I have yet to see the data.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And you haven't seen a room at Shell Oil lined with carburetors.
mark eberhart ▲ ● ▼		No, I'm afraid I haven't.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Bill in California, you're on with Dr. Everhart.
unidentified		Yes.
unidentified		Hi, Art.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Hello.
unidentified		Dr. Everhart.
		Have you heard about the electrical vehicles that GM produced?
		They called them the EV-1.
		They were produced in California, and the batteries that they had developed at that time got approximately 60 miles on a charge, which the average person drives about 29 miles.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Bill, I can even answer that one for you.
		It's a good idea that, you know, electric cars work, but they have to be charged.
		And that uses electricity that has to be produced using fossil fuels or something like that.
unidentified		Not necessarily.
unidentified		It can also be charged using solar energy or wind energy.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, the batteries themselves have to be produced.
		In other words, everything in the process uses energy.
		Is there a net gain, Doctor, with electric cars that would bear examination?
mark eberhart ▲ ● ▼		Sure, because one of the things you can do with electric cars, and the EV-1 was not particularly successful, but the new car out there, the one that's being produced in the United States now called the Tesla, which is using lithium-ion batteries, gets 250-mile range and 0 to 60 in 5 seconds, I believe.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Wow.
mark eberhart ▲ ● ▼		Quite a little sports car.
		It costs about $100,000, but still it shows you the advances that are going along.
		And I expect to see more advances in battery science in the coming time.
		I think that'll be a real area for the energy future.
		Now, what that gives you is that you can now generate your electricity in a coal-burning fire plant where you sequester your CO2 or in a nuclear plant or in a solar plant, wherever it happens to be, and then you are not, you're still using the same amount of energy, but at least you're not contributing to global warming through CO2 emissions.
		So electricity gives you a lot of features, and I think that's an area of the future.
		The other thing that electricity gives you is as batteries get smaller, now your car gets lighter, so you're not paying the cost of moving that 5,000-pound car, most of which is engine, internal combustion engine.
		So I see electricity as having some real features and electric cars being a real way to go.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay.
		Okay.
		Ernie in California, you're on with Dr. Eberhardt.
unidentified		Good morning, gentlemen.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Good morning.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		We don't have a lot of time to the break here, so go ahead.
unidentified		Okay.
		How about do you fellows remember the old rocket racer cars, dragsters in the late 60s, early 70s?
		They ran on hydrogen peroxide, about 80 or 90 percent solution.
		I'm just wondering why there's no more study on hydrogen peroxide as an alternative fuel.
mark eberhart ▲ ● ▼		Okay.
		Well, first of all, again, hydrogen peroxide has to be produced.
		It's an oxidizing agent.
		Very, very toxic.
		I shouldn't say toxic.
		Dangerous, hard to handle, hard to use, not very stable, decomposes thermally.
		So it's great for a one-time burst of power, but it's not what you're going to be using to run the family car.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay.
		So there you go.
		These kinds of questions are really good because, again, Doctor, somebody's mind out there is going to take something they've heard, and you just never know.
		Maybe they're going to be the ones to come up with something that might save our butts.
		Because so far, frankly, I've heard about several things that will help, but nothing that's going to really do the trick.
		I'm Mark Bell.
		Here I am.
		Dr. Mark Eberhardt is my guest.
		You know, the whole energy equation in the world changed very quickly.
		For a long time, we were really the energy consumer.
		We produced a great deal of energy.
		We don't produce so much anymore.
		We still consume a very great deal.
		But the rest of the world has more or less begun to catch up with us.
		If you travel to countries like China, Japan, all over the Far East, Europe, now Eastern Europe, the whole world is beginning to use energy in a way it never did before.
		So in a way it never was before.
		The whole thing is a gigantic global problem.
		We'll get right back to it.
		Doctor, I suppose that if the rest of the world had basically stayed in third world status and hadn't so quickly begun to industrialize, this would not have been the magnitude of problem that it is right now so quickly for us.
		Is that fair?
mark eberhart ▲ ● ▼		Oh, I think that's fair, yeah.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		China is just going wild.
		And so the energy pie is not just that we're using more, it's that the whole world is using more.
		And I wonder what percentage of that contributes to the larger global sort of future of doom if we don't change.
mark eberhart ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, right now we use 25% of the world's oil to support 5% of its population.
		Now, if every person in the world were to use the energy at the same rate as the average American, we would exhaust our oil supplies in a matter of 10 years.
		Wow.
		It's just staggering.
		And of course, we can't do that.
		The atmosphere, of course, could not take the load of CO2.
		I don't care who you're talking to.
		They can't justify that the atmosphere could take that load of CO2.
		And so this is a major problem.
		If we want these countries to catch up, to improve economically, then we have to find a way around this.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		We have to lead the way.
mark eberhart ▲ ● ▼		Absolutely.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		Dick in Bailey, Colorado.
		You're on with Dr. Everhart.
unidentified		Yes, this is Dick in Bailey, in the mountains of Colorado, not east of them or west of them.
		Anyway, I think you ought to have a new line there.
		Anyway, my statement has to do, hello, Doc.
		I'm really glad that you're on the air.
		Maybe you could enlighten me as to why we aren't using parabolic dish to reflect the sun's light to a focus point where we could heat water to steam and be able to use that for however we harness it.
mark eberhart ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Is there a question?
mark eberhart ▲ ● ▼		In fact, a number of, and that's what we call solar thermal as opposed to solar voltaics.
		And there are a number of power plants that basically do it that way.
		I believe located in Nevada, I believe, and Arizona as well.
		And they don't heat steam.
		What they do is they heat an oil, and that oil is then moved into a heat exchanger.
		And this is very cost-competitive right now as a way to make electricity.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So, Doctor, if we were to take a whole raft of these solutions that we've talked about tonight and implement them, how much of an impact on the current energy situation in America, instead of trying to talk about the whole world, in America could we have?
mark eberhart ▲ ● ▼		Well, I think we could have a dramatic effect.
		I think within 20 years, you could see just a total transformation.
		It begins, in my mind, by replacing the internal combustion engine with electric, because that gives us more feasibility.
		Now you can generate the electric someplace else and take it to the automobile.
		And so if we start down that road now, your average lifetime of an automobile is, I think, 15 years.
		So in two generations, you could basically change the whole thing.
		So we're talking two generations of automobile, You're talking 30 years down the line, which is the number I picked in my book to say by 2035 we could totally turn things around.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Bob in Northern California, your turn with Dr. Eberhard.
unidentified		Hi, Art.
		Hi, Dr. Eberhardt.
		Listen, this is Bob up here in Northern California, and I'm looking at an article that was on the internet, and it talks about aluminum pellets combined with gallium.
		And this Jerry Woodall, engineering professor at Purdue University, accidentally stumbled on the system.
		He was cleaning a crucible containing liquid alloys of gallium and aluminum, and he added water to the ally, and there was a violent poof.
		And so that led him to do the research, and they've actually got a patent out now.
		The Purdue Research Foundation holds the title to the primary patent, and they've licensed it to an Indiana startup company called Algi Alco LLC.
		So you might want to track that.
		That's one that I haven't heard of.
		And the advantages of it is that the hydrogen is generated on demand.
		So you only produce as much as you need when you need it.
		Have you heard about that, Dr. Eberhardt, or is that something new to you?
mark eberhart ▲ ● ▼		No, I haven't heard about it.
mark eberhart ▲ ● ▼		But what you're saying, it's an alloy of aluminum and gallium, and when you add water, it generates hydrogen?
unidentified		He had a crucible containing liquid alloys of gallium and aluminum, and he was cleaning it.
		He was getting ready to clean it.
		And when he added water to it, like he said here, the quote is there was a violent poof.
		And what's left over is aluminum oxide and gallium.
mark eberhart ▲ ● ▼		Right.
unidentified		You know, so no toxic fumes, et cetera, et cetera.
		And the beauty of it, I think, is that it's produced on demand, you know, so they talk about the storage, et cetera, et cetera.
		I can envision a whole new, we're still talking about an internal combustion engine, so we don't have to re-engineer that thing.
		But this propellant seems to me, you know, it just seems to me I can envision a tank, a process.
		I don't know.
		But it's the first I've heard about it, but it's about the most exciting thing that I've, you know, anything to do with solar and so on and so forth.
		We've all said it's just too cost.
mark eberhart ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, well, let me just throw in here.
		I mean, this is part of what I mean.
		I can't guarantee for this process, but aluminum, of course, is an extremely energy-demanding metal to make.
		You have to separate aluminum from its aluminum oxide, and that takes a tremendous amount of energy in order to do that.
		And in fact, for the longest time, Alcoa was the biggest consumer of electricity in the country, in the world, actually, to make aluminum in this fashion.
		So if what you're doing is you're taking pure aluminum or aluminum-gallium alloys and then turning it back into aluminum oxide and getting some energy back, all you're getting back is part of the energy that you've already invested in making the aluminum.
		So this is just one of the equations.
		At first blush, it sounds like there's no net gain here.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Lloyd in California, your turn with Dr. Eberhardt.
unidentified		Hi, Art.
		Pleasure to talk to you.
		My name is Lloyd, and good afternoon or evening, Dr. I hope everyone in the country is studiously listening to everything you have just said.
		It takes energy to make energy, and wow, are you impressive?
mark eberhart ▲ ● ▼		Well, thank you.
unidentified		I mean it, man.
		When I was 13 years old, I went to the Smithonian Institution in 1972, prior to the energy crisis, and Chrysler had developed 12 turbine engine cars.
		It took him 10 years from 54 to 64 to develop an alloy to dissipate the heat generated by the turbine.
		But these cars were expected to last 300,000, 350,000 miles.
		And at that time, they got 80 to 82 miles a gallon.
		Now, that's something that you can check out and investigate.
		It's just not somebody saying it.
mark eberhart ▲ ● ▼		No, I know.
		I know about the turbine cars by Chrysler.
		Absolutely.
unidentified		All right, there you go.
		So there's a high-mile vehicle, but Ford and Chevrolet sued them because they said, listen, this would put us out of business.
		Now, right there is a high-mile vehicle.
		If we could combine high-mile vehicles and drill our own oil, and it seems to me that in the interim, over the next 200 or 300 years, if we use our own oil, well, man, gas prices could come down and eventually we'd develop our own technology.
		What do you think about that?
mark eberhart ▲ ● ▼		I agree.
		The interesting thing about the turbine car is what was slowing the process down then was the turbine cars, what gives them the better mileage is they operate at much higher temperatures.
		And the temperatures at which they were operating, they couldn't find the materials, the turbine blades, to operate at those high temperatures for any reliable length of time and very expensive when they did it.
		The cost was just well beyond that of what people would pay for an ordinary car.
		However, the advances in jet turbines now may make it possible literally to get those advantages.
		So it's something worth thinking about, yes.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Tom, in Indiana, you're on the air with Professor Everhart.
unidentified		Hello, Art.
		Hello, Professor.
		I'd like to submit a proposal which I believe solves a lot of America's problems, troubling problems at the same time, including the energy crunch.
		Let me lay out some facts first.
		My thesis is that America is not oil addicted.
		America is car-addicted.
		There are 250 million registered cars, motor vehicles in America.
		There's 300 million people.
		Those cars consume about 43% of all the gasoline of all the world that's produced.
		So you have 4% of the population of the world consuming 43% of the world's gasoline supply.
		It's an impossible kind of proportion.
		And the doctor's right.
		We consume 25% of the oil supply.
		What's interesting about it Is that 64% of all the oil that America uses is from foreign sources.
		And that 64% is almost the exact amount that's used to make that gasoline that goes out of the tailpipes of those 250 million cars in the form of water vapor, greenhouse gas, CO2, some other polluting gases, and noise.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And so what would you replace these cars we're addicted to with?
unidentified		The only solution, the only way out of this box is rail.
		In 1940, we had an extensive passenger rail network.
		Not only was it heavy rail, but we had inter-urbans.
		The trolley car system extended between the cities.
		There was a way to get from virtually anywhere to anywhere else by rail.
		Now the question is, and as U.S. News and World Reports just in their May issue detailed, we have a commuter, 96% of all the Americans use the car to commute.
		Only 4% use rail.
		It was probably the opposite in 1940.
		the problem is we have to get, we're not, as I say, oil addicted.
		We're car addicted.
		We have to get people out of the cars.
		Now, the question is the cost.
		How do you construct?
		We've dismantled the passenger rail system and the trolley car system and the inter-urban system in this country.
		We've dismantled it.
		We're a third world status in terms of rail.
		How do we build it?
		That's the question.
		And where's the money coming from?
		We're the world's largest debtor nation.
		The only answer is social thermodynamics, to take a cue from the professor.
		We have massive human energy in this country in the form of our youth.
		I say, create a 1930s WPA program.
		The WPA was remarkable.
		It built most of the infrastructure in this country that's still being used from unemployed people, built it.
		And their future was improved.
		The youth have tremendous energy.
		It's not being tapped.
		It's going into all kinds of sort of degenerating and not being used properly.
		It's not helping them at all.
		The kind of activities, the kind of energy that they expand doesn't really help them, and it doesn't help America either.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right, well, listen, I think we get the idea.
		I don't think you're going to get Americans out of their cars.
		I could be wrong about that.
		I think that a switch to electric cars is more likely to occur than rebuilding an entire rail system.
		Professor?
mark eberhart ▲ ● ▼		Oh, I agree partly with what he says.
		I agree with you also.
		The idea of getting back from Europe, and boy, getting around Europe is wonderful.
		I would make short hops.
		I would prefer to get on a train that goes 300 miles an hour and takes me 800 miles than getting on an airplane anymore, going through security and the takeoffs and the landings who wants it.
		So I can see a huge advantage here with improving our rail system.
		Also, we could take a lead here and say, yeah, why don't we go to a personal electric car that literally hooks up to a third rail?
		And that would have a huge number of advantages.
		It would reduce the weight of the car.
		You would be getting your electric from somebody else.
		You'd only need a very small battery.
		You could also then put sensors in that, which would have advantages as far as crash protection and that kind of thing.
		So I think some sort of a hybrid where we're going to electric cars that somehow interface smoothly with a rail system offers some real potential here.
		And that's one of the methods I suggested in my book.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Excellent.
		All right, Josh in Alaska.
		You're on with Dr. Everhart.
		Hey, George.
		I'm Art.
		George is on during the week.
unidentified		Sorry, Art.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That's quite all right.
unidentified		Anyway, I read an article in popular science about a year and a half ago that said that if everybody on the planet lived in the manner we did in the United States, it would take four planet Earths to sustain us.
		Okay.
		Number two, what about tidal power?
		And number three, there's a lot more that comes from oil than just gas.
		We're talking about plastics, asphalt, lubricants for farm equipment and everything else that we use.
		And I'll hang up and get your answer on the air.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		We already discussed the tidal energy to some degree.
		But he's certainly right about oil being much more than just gasoline.
mark eberhart ▲ ● ▼		And that's what's one of the things that's of concern.
		But of those things we use, and let's include the whole list in there, pharmaceuticals, chemicals, almost everything that you see came from oil.
		Everything that's man-made came from oil, our carpets, everything.
		However, that only accounts for about 3% of the oil, the rest of it, 95 to 97% is burned.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Wow.
		Wow.
		Bob in Reno, Nevada.
		You're on with the professor.
		Hi.
unidentified		Good morning, Art, and good morning, professor.
		Two things I wanted to talk about was what you just discussed, was the battery-powered cars and solar electricity.
		In 1979, in Popular Science magazine, there was an article about a solar tower they made in France, and it was built on two mountains.
		There was a ravine separating them.
		The towers were approximately six stories high.
		The parabolic mirror was focused on a window across the ravine into the other tower onto a steel square, a blank.
		It was about four feet by four feet and about six inches thick.
		And it focused the beam on that, and in about 15, 20 minutes, it melted a hole through there six inches in diameter.
		So I'm saying, why can't we harness that power somehow, the technical part of it, it's no big deal, and just generate tons of steam and spin a lot of turbines.
mark eberhart ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, absolutely.
		As I mentioned, that's what we call that is solar thermal.
		And people, there are plants now producing megawatts of solar thermal power, and it's cost comparable to burning fossil fuels.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Boy, a lot of good ideas have been run by us tonight, and I guess if you combine them, you actually get somewhere.
		Professor, it has been a pleasure having you on the program.
		Your book, your most recent book, is what?
mark eberhart ▲ ● ▼		Feeding the Fire.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Feeding the Fire.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And it's been available how long?
mark eberhart ▲ ● ▼		It came out May 8th.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		May 8th.
		Oh, it's new.
		All right.
		So Amazon.com, that sort of place?
mark eberhart ▲ ● ▼		Amazon.com is great.
		And if you like it, write a nice little review.
		If you don't like it, don't say anything.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		It's been a pleasure having you on the program.
		And with the way the world's going, you can be sure you'll be on again.
mark eberhart ▲ ● ▼		Okay, sounds wonderful.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Thank you, Professor, and good night.
mark eberhart ▲ ● ▼		Thank you.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And for everybody else, that's only the first half of the weekend.
		We're going to be talking tomorrow night about something very, very interesting.
		I know a lot of you have been fascinated by the possibility of Stargates.
		That'll be tomorrow.

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