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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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From the high desert in 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.
Uh, the webcam photograph tonight is Aaron, 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 Reign 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 rule area, south of Baghdad, where they disappeared and their top commander expressed optimism, hoped 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 him, doesn't want to hear about it, is getting closer to his adult children.
Alright, 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.
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.
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 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.
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 US 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.
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.
Alright, more tonight.
I want to get to the lines.
West of the Rockies.
Welcome.
You're on the air.
Hello, Mr. Hill.
How are you doing, sir?
I'm just fine.
Alrighty, then.
Well, I'm not really west of the Rockies.
That's just the number that showed up on Excel here.
My name is Virgil, and I have a little, sort of like a funny, uh, uh, bigfoot story to tell you.
Um, alright.
Where are you actually, Virgil?
I'm in Austin, Texas.
Okay.
Anyhow, you remember when the legend of the Boggy Creek came out back in the early 70s?
The legend of what?
Boggy Creek.
Boggy Creek.
No, I don't offhand.
I'm sorry, but that's alright.
Go ahead.
That's one of the big foot movies.
Anyhow, the wife and I were working at dairy down in 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 an old cow that was called Sleepy.
That did not come up.
And Mr. Bell, it was so darn foggy, you couldn't see them.
Couldn't see your hand in front of your face.
I'm out there hunting those cows.
And old Sleepy come up behind me, nudged me in the back, and said, I beat the cows to the barn.
I guarantee it.
It scared me so bad.
I come in that bar and the wife looked at me and said, uh, what's wrong with you?
And I said, nothing.
And I just fell completely down.
Well, uh, there have been a few, there've 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'll 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.
Hey, Art.
Hey.
How's it going, man?
It's going real well.
Where are you?
I am calling from Denver, Colorado.
Okay.
Well, welcome.
Well, thank you.
I, uh, talk to you here real quick.
Uh, I keep having a deja vu and you had a subject on that.
You had somebody on there earlier or sometime a couple of months back and I never really get a chance to get in.
And what I keep occurring is, 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.
Maybe it's just work.
You know, in other words, when you get a new job, you say to yourself, oh my God, I'm working again.
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've 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 objects... Well, now wait a minute.
You said you pointed, uh, out in the sky.
Did they see it?
Yes, they did.
And they've seen two objects.
Well, then why would they call you whacked out if they could see them?
They turned around and they said, well, why are you saying this?
And I said, I'm going to get fired from my job.
You're not, you're not following me.
If they could see the said objects, why would they call you crazy?
Okay?
Because they said it was like a weather balloon or some kind of balloon in the sky.
Oh.
So I turned around and I said, every time that I see these, something happens to my job.
Something 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.
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.
Yes.
Hello.
From Clinton Township, Michigan.
Welcome.
About the war.
Yes.
You asked for comments.
Yes, I did.
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.
You know, there's power in numbers.
Either go over there with a bunch of guys and get it over with or pull out.
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?
Yes.
Yes, definitely.
That's what I say.
Either, you know, go full force or get out.
All right.
Well, I appreciate the 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.
Oh, Wildcard Line, you're on the air.
Good morning.
Hello, Art.
Hi.
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.
Is there somehow I can get this book to you, a general delivery or something?
Through the network.
Through the network.
Right.
I checked on the computer screen and I can't find an address.
Really?
Yeah.
Well, let's see.
There's got to be a way on the computer, that's for sure.
Look up Premier Radio Network.
Go to Google and put in Premier Radio Network, and I'm sure you will find an address there.
Okay, thank you very much.
You're very welcome, and good luck.
Google, boy, I depend overly Depends 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.
Hi Art, this is Gringo from New York City.
Hello Gringo.
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 Convention?
No, I did not.
You should check into it.
If you want to see what a police state run down on lefty groups, it's very interesting documents.
The federal court forced the NYPD after a long battle.
Alright, 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.
Well, Mr. the Rockies, you're on the air.
Hi, how are you?
I'm just fine.
Well, that's good.
You know what I wanted to talk to you about?
I heard, uh, I really enjoyed Evelyn Paklany on the show, uh, I guess that was last week or maybe a couple weeks ago, but I heard Red Elk on, uh, on another show earlier today, this morning, and he spoke, uh, he said that he spoke of riots just like he, uh, she did, uh, happening this summer.
And, uh, but he said that, If that bill passed, that, uh... What bill are you referring to?
The immigration bill?
Uh-huh.
Yes.
If that passed, that he believed that there would be riots.
And, uh, you know, I just wanted to run that by you, but, uh, and I thought about, uh, Evelyn Paklady on the show saying that, uh, there would be, uh, riots this summer.
She of course didn't specifically say 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, you know, doctors and lawyers and that sort of thing, and nurses, it's 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.
Yes, it is.
I mean, it's ridiculous.
I heard in that field that they had what they call a humanitarian clause, and if it passed that would mean that the illegals, which would be legal then, could bring their families, aunties, uncles, grandmothers, cousins, That would be so many people coming here before you know it.
I think that would really change our country overnight.
I kind of agree and I absolutely do not favor this 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 in 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 away and I'll see what I can do about answering it.
Wild Card Line, you're on the air.
Hi.
Howdy.
Howdy.
John in Houston, Texas.
Hi, John.
I had a couple of comments.
I believe it was either... I don't remember whether it was either you or Art that had... Well, I'm Art, first of all.
Oh, excuse me.
Either you or George.
Right.
I wasn't paying attention earlier.
Sorry.
Had a caller call up talking about liquid-filled cockpits.
That's funny.
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.
Uh, perfluorocarbon, and it's used in medicine.
Uh, 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.
Alright, and what's it called again, please?
What's that?
What's it called again?
Perfluorocarbon, uh, ventilation.
Uh, literally, liquid breathing.
Liquid breathing.
Would it, in your opinion, aid in the ability to withstand big G-forces?
What it was originally developed as is something to eliminate air-breathing, I believe it was developed by the U.S.
Navy.
That would make sense.
In other words, for deep divers, that sort of thing, right?
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 fluorocarbon ventilation works.
Alright, 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 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.
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.
A legal form?
It's called salvia and what you do is you smoke it.
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 in the... and they have various classifications of drugs.
Well, for the Rockies, you're on the air.
Hi.
Hello?
Hello.
Yes.
Turn your radio off, please.
Right away.
Got it.
Okay.
Hey.
Where are you calling from?
From Vancouver, B.C.
Welcome.
Yes.
Proceed.
How are you?
I'm fine.
Good.
Am I on the air right now?
That's what it means when I say you're on the air.
I didn't hear you say that.
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.
You know, I'm getting a lot of reports from Canadians, they are seeing quite a few bees.
Now, I had somebody send me an email a couple weeks ago and said maybe they've gone north because of something related to global warming.
Who knows?
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.
Bees usually aren't playful.
They are usually very busy.
And the other thing was, I just wanted to say I'm happy for you and your wife and your baby to be.
Cross fingers, knock on wood.
And I just wanted to tell you that I have a volunteer job, and that involves holding brand new babies.
Really?
Isn't that cool?
It is kind of cool.
Brand new babies are kind of scary to hold, but... Oh, no.
You think so?
A little bit.
Oh, they're adorable.
They're so soft.
And so delicate.
They're delicate to touch.
They're soft.
They're tough.
Enjoy your beautiful baby.
I know you will.
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 Lion, you're on the air.
Hello.
Turn your radio off and proceed.
I'm trying to call Art Bell.
You've got Art Bell.
Turn your radio off, please.
Okay, I shall.
I'm on the internet, so I'll turn right down.
Okay?
Okay.
Got it?
Yeah, we're down.
Okay, go ahead.
What I was going to say is I'm from Everett, Washington.
Yes, sir?
We're building a 787.
We put one together in five days.
We don't have the wings on it yet, but it's going to be perfect.
It's going to be splashed all over the news about on Monday the governor's coming, the senators are coming, and I think Dick Cheney's coming.
It's going to be 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 Art Bell a little bit about that.
Plus, I have a brand new wife from the Philippines.
Okay, I guess you didn't register the fact that I am Art.
You are talking to Art.
You are on the air.
I'm on the air?
Yes.
Oh, this is Art.
Okay, I'm hearing challenge.
Yes, we are building... You already told me, the Boeing 787.
Five days of 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.
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.
Hey Art, this is Chris in Tennessee.
Hey Chris.
Hey, I just wanted to respond to the caller who was asking about a salvia.
I believe that salvia divinorum is an actually naturally occurring plant that the most potent psychedelic, naturally occurring psychedelic on Earth.
And Mayans, I think in the Mexicans have used it, the shamans, For centuries, and I would relate it to like a DMT experience.
It's kind of short-lived, but very potent, you know, 10 or 15 minutes.
Is it, as he suggested, legal to sell over-the-counter now?
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 DMT, I mean the salvia.
Well, I would imagine if it gets much more publicity like this, it won't be very long.
Yeah, they're related to the suicides they've taken, but I think for the most part it is legal to sell.
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 Card Line, you're on the air.
Hi.
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.
That's all right.
Go ahead.
My dad had a brain tumor, and he was dying.
This was in 2003.
Sorry.
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 in to 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.
Really?
It does not look like I have showed it to so many people and nobody can believe it.
All right, listen to me.
You've got, obviously, a photograph of this.
So, if you would, can you get it scanned or... I have it on my computer.
I mean, I can... I'm sorry?
I have it on my computer.
I'd love to email it to you.
Wire it to me.
I'm artbell at mindspring.com or artbell at aol.com.
Okay.
All right, and if I consider it really interesting, I absolutely We'll put it up for all to see.
Now, I have considered, I don't know if butterflies, you know, 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.
Hi.
Hello.
Oh, I had a comment for Art.
I'm Art.
Oh, okay.
About the salvia diavianorum.
Yes.
You have to get the extract and put on the herb that they buy.
And you can buy it, like, in malls and shopping centers.
Well, this is sounding like some hot news street thing, and an awful lot of people seem to know about it.
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.
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.
Yeah, Rich from Arizona.
Yes.
Yeah, you know, I've seen that movie you're talking about, and I'm thinking the name of that movie was The Address.
No, wait, Sphere.
I think it was called Sphere.
Yeah, the sphere, yeah.
Yeah, I see now, and I remember all that breathing 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.
Vaporize them is what you said?
Yeah.
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 and consider, you would be vaporizing millions and millions of innocent people.
Wildcard Line, you're on the air!
Hello?
Yes, this is John.
Hello, John.
You're on Art Bell.
Yes.
I was wanting to ask him about, uh... This is Art Bell.
Oh, oh, oh.
Oh, good, good.
I was listening to you talking to somebody else on the radio.
Yes, we have a delay system, so you need to turn your radio down right away.
I was wanting to ask, did you ever interview Robert Heinlein?
Uh, no.
I never did.
Oh, that's too bad.
It is too bad, but I guess you just can't get around to everybody.
That's true.
That's true, and he was kind of hard to get to in his older age.
Okay, well, thank you much.
You're very welcome.
That was it, huh?
International Line, you're on the air.
Good morning.
Oh, hello.
Hello.
I'm really appreciative that you picked up my call.
Yes, sir.
Definitely patience pays off.
Where are you?
Yep, so I'd just like to say that I've been listening to you since 1997, today on my brand new wideband receiver.
Where are you located?
I am in Toronto, Canada.
My name is Jeff.
Alright, very good Jeff.
Just sort of adding a comment to that Salvia Denorum.
First of all, 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 Tao of Change.
Where did you hear about this drug?
I'm curious.
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 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.
Okay, well the first caller likened it to LSD.
You would say not?
I think the general consensus is that that's just not true.
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.
Hey, Eric.
How are you doing today?
Well, sir.
Well, listen, I've got this difficulty in trying to get through my concept of Virgin Earth Challenge as to how to suck as much CO2 out of the atmosphere as anybody would care to suck.
And how would you think it would be done best?
Well, simply build these gigantic crafts that are about 5 to 10 kilometers across, big, floating, fat, um, for lack of a better term, uh, uh, what do you call them?
Um, uh, you know, this, uh, the, the UFO type, what do you call those things?
Um, you know, the round flying saucers, flying saucers.
Yeah.
Alright, 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 desert, 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 B.S.
with majors in chemistry and applied mathematics and an M.S.
in physical biochemistry.
In 1979, he applied and was accepted to MIT as a Ph.D.
candidate studying material science and engineering.
At the same time that Mark was preparing for his move to Boston, the Iranian revolution was in full swing and gasoline here in the U.S., you'll 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 seeded an interest in energy science and policy that never faded.
Four years later, Mark received his PhD, and he was one of a handful of scientists attempting to understand fracture at the quantum mechanical level.
Wow!
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 materials 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 Eberhardt, welcome to Coast to Coast AM.
Well, thank you so much for having me.
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.
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.
I see.
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 shaped science and engineering.
Professor, a lot of us feel that things are designed to break.
And that if we design them so they didn't break, the economy would collapse eventually?
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 sit there and go, why?
Why should that?
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.
That's true.
But the cars are generally wrecked, but you're right.
I mean, they protect the people.
Yeah.
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.
Today I wish I had one of those.
Yeah, exactly, and I just finished replacing a computer where the motherboard went belly up.
No doubt some small, stinky little component, a capacitor or diode or something went belly up, and that's it.
Yeah.
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.
Yeah, that's absolutely true.
So, I don't know.
And you're wondering why?
Yeah, and you're obviously not going to have the answer.
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.
So, you know, it's playing the game.
I mean, how much do you want to pay for your computer?
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.
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.
And did it make it for you?
Oh, no.
Okay.
No.
No, but I guess four years in the computer world is not bad.
All right.
On defeating 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.
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's going on... Well, wait a minute.
Let me stop you.
Is it a good idea or a bad idea?
Well, biofuels, as it currently is, I think it's a bad idea.
I think the way we're getting biofuels from corn, it's not at all clear to many people whether there's a net energy savings or a net energy loss.
And you're driving this by basically, you're 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.
I heard a story earlier today, Professor, that said that the cost of bread Yeah, because of energy and because of the subsidy, and that's absolutely right.
What you've got to realize, if we were to be, if we were extracting more energy out of the corn plant, that's actually taking the stalk and the cob and all of that and converting that to alcohol as well, then we'd have something 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 Of grains up in general.
Right.
You make a link between energy and imagination, and I can't figure out how you make that link.
Tell me.
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.
What humankind did is they used energy to feed the fires of their imagination, and that's where the title for the book came from.
Everything that we use energy from, for, or almost everything, is essentially a product of our imaginations.
The automobiles are 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.
I suppose you're right.
Our imagination keeps coming up with these new high-tech devices of one sort or another, and they all require energy.
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.
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?
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, our energy use is increasing at an exponential rate.
I won't even hazard to guess at numbers, but it's just an astronomical increase over the last half century.
And how would you propose to change this, and what do you imagine will occur if we don't?
Well, you know, there are two things that are really important in this country, or to the world in general, but particularly 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 that is going to our enemies, those nations in the in the Mideast that we would, yeah, our enemies.
And, you know, if there is a tremendous act of terrorism someday, and we want to follow 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 is Doubled its energy usage, most of it in the form of coal.
I've had a couple of guests tell me recently that they expect China to pass our energy consumption within the year.
Yes, and in fact they are now the greatest producer of carbon in the world.
Already?
Already, yes.
And so, if you follow that train backwards, or forwards I should say, We're coming to the point where, you know, climate change is an issue and we should consider that.
How much of an issue in your opinion, Doctor?
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 contribute it.
You can attribute it to human activity.
Uh, 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, uh, it's going to become a, uh, if it's not already now, then it will be shortly.
Uh, humankind will be making a big change to the environment.
Well, many people, as you pointed out, already are saying that.
Yes.
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.
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.
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 I think it's past time now.
The evidence is superficial.
It's hard to give cause and effect in this area.
and yet i had about a sand and admit what's going on uh...
i think it's past time now uh...
there there you know it's a bit did the evidence is is is superficial
it's hard to it's hard to give cause and effect in this area
for instance it's hard to say that that katrina
was caused by global warming yet course it's not it's not impossible to draw the
link and say more of this kind of thing will happen uh... we've had very strange weather patterns uh... it's
hard to say of those are a result of global warming
but nonetheless uh...
you know the way i like to think about it is that if you if you told me i was
going to you're going to take the 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 you gave me a half an hour
to pack well i i'd i'd pack for the extreme
I pack for the desert, so I take sunscreen and I take a parka and gloves in case you drop me off somewhere at the pole.
So I 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.
What made you decide to write this book?
Pardon me?
What made you decide to write this book?
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 Change is 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.
Really?
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 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 where it's renewable.
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.
You'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.
Yeah, and that's the reason I wrote the book.
The idea here is people who are afraid, who are being told that... I'll tell you what, hold that thought.
We're at break point.
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.
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 fistfights.
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!
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.
Alright, 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?
You know, personally, I don't think so.
Really?
When they talk about peak oil, they're talking about What is called conventional oil.
And every year unconventional sources become more, more useful.
Right now we get, 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...
How expensive?
In other words, at what point will it be competitive?
Pick a price.
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 environmentally benign manner.
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 what extraordinary means we can use to get at oil and energy.
All right, well right now, premium here is around $3.30 or $3.40, somewhere in there.
Where's it going, in your opinion, and how soon?
You mean, where's the price going?
That's right.
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.
We 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's going up.
Will it go up?
All right.
No, let me try this.
What would happen if we were cut off from oil in the Mideast?
Oh, it'd be catastrophic.
Catastrophic.
If the same thing were to 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.
It would be that the whole world would go into a major collapse.
A major collapse?
That's my opinion and I'm not an economist, of course.
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?
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 assume 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.
Perhaps the Canadians, yes.
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.
If you were the President of the United States, what would your directives be?
What would you change right now?
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.
It's crazy that we have built no nuclear power plants since Since Chernobyl, since Three Mile Island, that technology is very important.
It's 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.
Yeah.
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.
Let's go back to France.
If France can do it, why can't we?
Part of it is, again, the issue of fear.
Three Mile Island, particularly, we had a number of people who We're 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, 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.
Well, I guess my question is, if France can handle the nuclear waste and recycle it, why in the world can we not?
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.
I've heard about that.
Yeah.
Is that what France is doing?
No, they're simply reprocessing.
So they take all of their reactor rods and send them to a central location where they reprocess the I think the biggest reason is, again, fear.
And so that takes care of their high-level waste.
Then why can't we do that?
We could.
And there's no reason we couldn't do that.
All right.
Why aren't we doing that?
Well, the, 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 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.
So bad decisions. Very, very bad decisions.
Not planned out. And in my mind part of what goes on there is that we think of
energy as a 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 if we think about energy as a One of the concerns with nuclear reactors, of course, is proliferation.
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. Okay, one of the concerns with nuclear reactors, of course,
is proliferation. Are you concerned about that? Yeah, and I've heard a number of
people talk about the possibility of proliferation and then you're leading to
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 possibility to 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.
Back to the atmosphere for a moment.
You did see the movie, Vice President Gore's movie, right?
Yes, I did.
And did you believe the science was accurate?
Now, there are two things going on.
Yes, the 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.
We are established.
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.
You mentioned solar dimming, and I really don't know what that is, and its effect on global warming.
What is solar dimming?
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 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.
What they discovered was that we're pumping a lot of particles into the air, particularly
sulfates from burning coal.
These reflect light and interact with the clouds in a different way.
They reflect light and so actually the light falling on the surface, the amount of light
that reaches the earth now has been reduced by about 5% over the last 50-60 years.
Okay, well then, in my average mind, that says that things should be cooler.
If you have 5% less light hitting Earth, then you have a cooler.
And that's what was going on in the 70s.
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 looks horrible.
It looks like the worst days in LA.
Well, it is.
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.
Yeah, 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. It causes acid
rain and it's a health hazard.
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 gonna
double the amount of global warming.
If I heard you correctly, did I?
Yeah, that's correct.
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. Eberhard, 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 what is it?
Well, it's interesting.
If you look at his proposal, he gave that in a 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 to generate the hydrogen?
And if you look at his proposal, well, that was going to come from burning fossil fuels.
So we're 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.
You would be going to nuclear energy?
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.
I don't think a lot of the audience understands sequestration.
I'm not sure I do.
So explain it to all of us.
What happens when you burn coal is you make carbon dioxide.
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 waterbeds 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 Putting 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.
Okay, that might be an option for the U.S., but what about the rest of the world?
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.
Sure.
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.
Okay.
What about solar and wind?
Wind, of course, is right now the fastest growing energy Alternative energy source.
It's viable now.
It can be produced at practically the same cost as burning fossil fuels.
So wind is the 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, windmills are a way to go.
Tremendous technology is going on there.
Solar energy.
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, Uh, geothermal.
Geothermal has some incredible possibilities in geothermal.
So there are so many wonderful possibilities out there of things we should be doing.
We should be looking at these possibilities with great optimism instead of... Well, I do.
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 hate us.
And there is going to come a time I absolutely agree.
I think the argument for becoming energy independent lies 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.
Yeah, it seems to me the same way.
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?
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 US 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.
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.
Right.
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.
Yeah, I know.
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.
Do you think that if we were cut off from the oil supplies in the Middle East, that we would go to war?
Oh, absolutely.
With this administration, there's no question in my mind about that.
Maybe I ought to say more war.
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.
Uh, 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.
Well, and to have bases in very strategic locations.
Pardon me?
To have bases in very strategic locations.
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 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?
The parallels are just, to me, a little scary.
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?
Yeah.
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.
Yeah, absolutely.
and the logic not to be doing something I do not understand.
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.
Right.
I don't get it.
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.
What is it you tell your students?
Oh, 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.
Right.
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 scientists and engineers 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.
People are looking for jobs.
The energy sector is going to be a place where Where there's just going to be a tremendous demand for knowledgeable people.
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 o'plenty, it will fill back up again and you can pump it out again.
Well, they're wrong.
They're wrong.
They're wrong.
Uh, 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.
So as far as conventional resources are concerned.
And so basically you're looking at to get at these increasingly harder and harder oils to get it.
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, uh, When sustaining the amount of oil we need to keep our society running and feeding our imaginations will be incredibly expensive.
Professor, is there any chance that there's another Saudi Arabia that we simply haven't found yet?
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.
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.
Not quite.
Dinosaurs don't 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 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, if 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 deep, 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 basically look 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.
Gee, that's discouraging.
It's also upsetting that it wasn't dinosaurs.
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?
Not true.
In fact, there was the very nice Sinclair commercial.
Well, they may have contributed in some manner.
in the 70s where they showed the dinosaur actually... I remember that. And they said
put a dino in your tank. Yeah. So they perpetrated that myth. So it's a gigantic myth. Yeah.
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... So there
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 That one mile deep region where it gets hot, 200-300 degrees Fahrenheit, and it needs to be cooked.
So we would need millions of years to generate new oil in the manner you just described?
Absolutely, yeah.
No dino in the tank, 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.
He 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 compaction 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?
Possibly, but you know the point of dinosaurs is actually in coal beds.
Your coal probably has a part of dinosaurs in it.
They do find fossils in coal beds.
Well, then the process that created oil, to some degree, is always underway.
Yes.
But not enough of it.
It takes a long, long time.
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.
Bob in Colorado Springs asks, why can't we make use of a similar process that the Earth itself uses to make oil?
No?
Ah, 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 put that energy in, often it comes out that you've used more energy to turn it into oil than you would get back.
Okay.
Nigel in Texas asks, how viable is using hemp as a fuel source?
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 To make alcohol, yeah.
Fusion.
Hot fusion and cold fusion.
I guess cold fusion is still... There are still people exploring cold fusion.
The last I saw, I do not know many people who still believe that they're seeing anything, but there's 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.
All right.
I want to take some questions from the audience.
Dustin in Oklahoma.
You're on the air with Dr. Everhart.
Hi.
Yes.
I live in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma.
And just east of here, there's a company called Centralium.
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.
Yeah, absolutely.
In fact, in fact, producing aviation fuel and just fuels in general from coal Is a process that the Nazis used during World and I believe Japan used also during World War Two 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.
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?
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 It would have been impossible to squelch it or to hide it.
I am not a conspiracy theorist as far as this kind of thing is concerned.
I'm not really either, Doctor, but I can imagine motive.
I mean, after all, 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.
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's 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.
It's just consistent with the laws of science.
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?
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.
Right.
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, Uh, this balance sheet keeping it all makes sense.
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 they can comment on on policy and say, that just doesn't seem right to me.
And these concepts aren't hard to understand.
Well, our president said it, so I would assume that he had some science behind what he said.
I'm curious, how much energy do you need to put in versus what you get out when you're talking about hydrogen?
Okay, 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.
Well, gee.
So, it's costing you energy to generate the hydrogen.
I've heard it suggested that you could use solar power and wind power to put together the hydrogen.
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.
All right.
Mike, in Ithaca, New York, you're on with Dr. Everhart.
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.
So in a sense, if we burn sugar and just use a renewable energy source like sugar or cellulose,
that's really no difference in splitting the water.
The only difference is you're leaving the carbon dioxide out of the picture and leaving it in the atmosphere.
But if you burn sugar the way a horse does, You just take the carbon dioxide in and you kick it out again later instead of just leaving it free in the air.
So is there 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 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 vat of algae, and as it grew, it would generate hydrogen, and then you could burn that hydrogen to make energy.
So very, 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, you generate carbon dioxide, it goes up in the air, and then the biomass takes it out again in the next growing season.
That leaves you carbon neutral also.
So both those are reasonable things to do.
How about the cost of it, and can you do enough of it?
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.
It's worth 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 of arable land to produce to produce 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.
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 cost of of grain and food and that kind of thing up.
So it's an enigma as to what we should do about biomass.
All right.
Steve in Houston, Texas.
You're on with Dr. Eberhard.
Yes.
Great show.
Appreciate your guest selection.
Excellent.
I graduated from Colorado School of Mines in 71 and 73 with Wolsey.
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?
Great question.
What conditions out there, and that's the critical resource for this whole process.
Yeah, it's going to take a huge amount of water.
What's happened is that Shell Oil has made some interesting That was in the report in 2006, I believe.
research which shows that they can basically process the oil shale in situ
and it will not require nearly as much nearly as much water so they're looking
at this as a potentially useful way to get the 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 yeah that was in the report in 2006 I believe pardon me there was a report
2006 about the in situ.
They've been talking about that forever.
And Shell seems to have found a way that they can make it economically viable.
I haven't heard a word about it, Doctor.
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.
And 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.
Okay, Mike in California, your turn with Dr. Eberhardt.
Hi, Art.
Hi, Doctor.
I'm kind of curious, something we could do in almost the immediate Let's 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, 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, 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 alcohol.
All right, hold tight, Dr. Mark Eberhardt 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 night.
I'm Mark Bell, and we'll be right back.
Here I am, Dr. Mark Eberhardt 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'll solve our, 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 the 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?
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.
Okay.
Bill, in Michigan, you're on the air with Professor Eberhardt.
Yes, Professor Eberhardt.
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 also I'm from Northern Michigan and as far as the biomass goes, we 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.
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 whipgrass 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 shale, then we would be replicating nature's technique for making ackley.
We would be using the energy from deep in the ground to cook the as yet uncooked organic matter.
Professor, what about tidal energies?
I recall seeing a lot of stories on people experimenting with tidal energy.
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.
Okay.
Jim, in Erie, Pennsylvania, east of the Rockies, you're on the air.
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 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.
Caller, do you know what kind of RF field was involved?
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.
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?
Yeah.
Do you want the web address for the... Not here on the air.
Look, I'm artbell at AOL.com or artbell at mindspring.com.
If you can get me the story, I'll take it from there.
All right.
All right?
Sounds good.
Thank you.
Have you ever heard of anything like that, Professor?
No, I haven't.
I would be baffled, too.
I will look around and see if they come up with an answer.
All right, Greg, in Phoenix, Arizona, your turn.
Hi.
There was a day when the diplomas were solid silver, signed with the Viper tool.
Took $200 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, 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?
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.
Okay.
Mark to Mark from Golden, Colorado.
You're on with Professor Eberhardt.
Hi, Art.
Hi, Arthur.
Hi, there.
I guess my question is about the long-term viability of carbon sequestration on a really large scale.
It 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, uh... you know we had the x prize for uh...
uh... space flight uh... and uh... it would seem like there'd be great if
there was an x prize for some of the uh... you know i guess you would call it maverick
approaches to uh... energy
uh...
and i think that would be you know pretty good thing if there was some such thing
is there something like that doctor
uh... i've 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 uh... i 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.
All right.
What about the potential problems that you might imagine could arise from mass sequestration?
Sure, and this is something that has to be considered.
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.
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 possible, what kind of things could go wrong.
Okay.
Dennis in Oregon, you're on with Dr. Everhart.
Art, how are you?
Just great.
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 Holley 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.
And how many miles per gallon was he getting?
He was getting around 74 to 78 miles to the gallon on his car.
And then Mr. Wagner, which was the developer, he was getting approximately 103 miles to the gallon on his small pickup truck.
It was like a Ford Something or another.
It doesn't matter, right?
We've heard a million of these stories, Dr. Everhart.
I told you we would hear them tonight, and there you have it.
Shell Oil bought it up, he says.
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 getting 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.
And you haven't seen a room at Shell Oil lined with carburetors.
No, I'm afraid I haven't.
All right, Bill in California, you're on with Dr. Everhart.
Yes, hi Art.
Hello.
Have you heard about the electrical vehicles that GM produced?
They called them the EV1.
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.
Right.
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.
Not necessarily.
It can also be charged using solar energy or wind energy.
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?
Sure, because one of the things you can do with electric cars, and the EV1 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...
It gets 250 mile range and 0-60 in 5 seconds, I believe.
Wow.
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 futures, and electric cars being a real way to go.
Okay.
Ernie in California.
You're on with Dr. Eberhard.
Good morning, gentlemen.
Good morning.
We don't have a lot of time to the break here, so go ahead.
Okay.
How about, do you fellas 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.
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.
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 Art 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
the problem that it is right now so quickly for us.
Is that fair?
Well, I think that's fair, yeah.
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.
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 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.
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.
We have to lead the way.
Absolutely.
Alright, Dick in Bailey, Colorado.
You're on with Dr. Everhart.
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 there We are 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.
Alright, that's a good question.
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, are 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 has been moved into a heat exchanger.
And this is very cost competitive right now as a way to make electricity.
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?
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 automobiles.
You're talking 30 years down the line, which is the number I picked in my book to say by By 2035, we could totally turn things around.
All right.
Bob in Northern California, your turn with Dr. Everhart.
Hi, Dr. Everhart.
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 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 alloy, 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.
They've licensed it to an Indiana startup company called Algalco 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 and when you need it.
Have you heard about that, Dr. Everhart, or is that something new to you?
No, I haven't heard about it, but you're saying it's an alloy of aluminum and gallium, and when you add water, it generates hydrogen?
He had a crucible of 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, it just, you know, like you said here, the quote is, there was a violent poof.
Yeah.
And what's left over is aluminum oxide and gallium.
Right.
You know, so no toxic fumes, etc., etc.
And the beauty of it, I think, is that it's produced on demand, you know, so they talk about the storage, etc., etc.
I can envision, you know, a whole new... We're still talking about an internal combustion engine, so we don't have to, you know, re-engineer that thing.
But this...
new fuel.
It just seems to me, I can envision a tank 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, as we've all said, it's just too cost.
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.
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.
Okay.
Lloyd in California, your turn with Dr. Eberhard.
Hi Art, pleasure to talk to you.
My name's Lloyd and good afternoon or evening, Dr.
I hope everyone in the country is studiously listening to everything you've just said.
It takes energy to make energy, and wow, are you impressive.
Well, thank you.
I mean it, man.
When I was 13 years old, I went to the Smithsonian Institution in 1972, prior to the energy crisis, and Chrysler had developed 12 turbine engine cars.
It took them 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, 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.
No, I know, I know about the turbine cars by Chrysler, absolutely.
Right, there you go, so there's a high mileage vehicle, but Ford and Chevrolet sued them because they said, listen, this would put us out of business.
Now right there is a high mileage vehicle.
If we could combine high mileage vehicles and drill our own oil, and it seems to me that in the interim, over the next two to three hundred 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?
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, that 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.
Okay.
Tom in Indiana, you're on the air with Professor Everhart.
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's 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 two of those 250 million cars in the form of water vapor, greenhouse gas CO2, some other polluting gases, and noise.
And so what would you replace these cars we're addicted to with?
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 interurbans.
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 & World Report 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 The WPA was remarkable.
It built most of the infrastructure in this country that's still being used.
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... It's 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.
Alright, 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?
I agree partly with what he says.
I agree with you also.
The idea of getting I just came 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 takeoff and the landing.
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 the rail system offers some real potential here, and that's one of the methods I suggested in my book.
Excellent.
All right, Josh in Alaska.
You're on with Dr. Everhart.
Hey, George.
I'm Art.
George is on during the week.
Sorry, Art.
That's quite all right.
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.
All right.
We already discussed the tidal energy to some degree, but he's certainly right about oil being much more than just gasoline.
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.
the oil, the rest of it, 97, 95 to 97 percent is burned.
Wow. Wow. Bob in Reno, You're on with the Professor.
Hi.
Good morning, Art.
Good morning, Professor.
Two things I wanted to talk about was what you just discussed, was the battery-powered cars and solar electricity.
In about 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 4 feet by 4 feet and about 6 inches thick.
And it focused a beam on that, and in about 15-20 minutes, it melted a hole through there 6 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.
Yeah, absolutely.
And as I mentioned, 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.
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?
Feeding the Fire.
Feeding the Fire.
And it's been available how long?
It came out May 8th.
May 8th.
Oh, it's new.
All right, so Amazon.com, that sort of place?
Amazon.com is great.
And if you like it, write a nice little review.
If you don't like it, don't say anything.
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.
Okay.
Sounds wonderful.
Thank you, Professor, and good night.
Thank you.
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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