Wade Frazier

Hi: Historians are concerned about what happened, and scientists not only are concerned with that, but also why. As the tools, techniques, and hypothesis become more sophisticated, new questions are being asked and pursued. It is an amazing process. Dennis’s recent question on water can open up big areas of inquiry. The connection of oxygenic photosynthesis and the atmosphere’s oxygenation has been a very controversial area, and Ward and Kirschvink’s latest book spends some ink on it, and their conclusion is that oxygenic photosynthesis evolved a little less than 2.5 billion years ago. Life had not yet adopted aerobic respiration (why would it, if there was not any oxygen to consume?), and for hundreds of millions of years, oxygenic photosynthesis filled the atmosphere and then some. One speculation is that the atmospheric oxygen level might have reached multiples of today’s level. That high oxygen level would have also caused low carbon dioxide levels, as oxygenic photosynthesis takes carbon from the atmosphere, and that led to the first “Snowball Earth” episode, as Earth became one big ball of ice. Following the controversy really is fascinating, as various deposits of manganese, uranium, iron, and other minerals provide evidence of high or low oxygen conditions. Again, I am going to get into those issues a bit more in my upcoming essay update, and visit molecular biology a bit more, as the engines of life were built. The energy generation machine of mitochondria is nothing short of incredible, and I am going to devote significant effort to sketching its basics and how complex life is dependent on mitochondrial function. Bird mitochondria operate at peak efficiency in order to fly, which is the greatest energetic feat in the animal kingdom, and that aerobic capacity and related efficiency is closely related to why birds live ten times as long as similarly sized mammals. When the human line learned to walk upright and run, its aerobic capacity skyrocketed, and it is today thought that that is why humans live twice as long as their gorilla and chimp cousins. These are not areas of idle philosophical speculation, but have great import to the human journey, and gaining some understanding of life at the molecular level has been one of the great advances in my lifetime. Some scientific literacy is essential for understanding those vital issues. Best, Wade

Hi: A relatively recent development is the idea of a “Breakaway Civilization,” and I am getting bombarded with it. I received something just last night on it. Is the idea of a Breakaway Civilization valid? It is helpful? Right now, it is a New Age/conspiracist flavor of the day, and I am not sure that that is a good thing, as that awareness is usually at the childish/gossip/titillation level of the game. I’ll say this: the so-called Breakaway Civilization is another name for Godzilla and pals. They definitely have plenty of exotic technology, including FE and antigravity, which means that they are spacefaring. They approached a member of my circle on helping them terraform Mars, in case their antics make Earth uninhabitable. So, the group and its technologies are real. But calling them “breakaway” fosters seeing them as an outgroup, which is not healthy, IMO. They are simply humans who have taken power and control games to extreme levels. But the galactic neighborhood is not going to let them sail around the stars, not those spiritual degenerates. For all of their technological superiority, dishonestly acquired, they are spiritual children, with their ranks full of power-hungry dark pathers. Theirs is not any kind of “civilization” that a normal person would want to be part of. They can “breakaway,” for all that I care. We don’t need their technology. We can roll our own, if we can muster the integrity and sentience, which is the key, not the toys. I saw the Breakaway Civilization presentation some years ago, and it was a rather naïve, academic approach, of some “new” hypothesis, and I am not sure how beneficial it is. The “Breakaway Civilization” idea is a marketing gimmick, IMO. I doubt that it will play among the pipe-smoking, sherry-drinking Ivy League crowd, so it seems to be giving a veneer of academic respectability to the New Age/conspiracists, but they never get anything done. So, the Breakaway Civilization idea is taking its place among the New Age/conspiracist crowd, becoming some watered-down and titillating flavor of the day. Will it help mount an effort that can make a dent? I don’t see how. Will it help raise the general awareness? Maybe, but the downsides may outweigh the upsides. Best, Wade

Hi: I get asked about Bill Gates regularly, as he sings an “alternative” energy tune. Here is today’s tune: fission! Gates is not any kind of visionary, and it is getting frustrating to keep hearing about him and his “solutions.” Gates lives relatively humbly for the world’s richest man, at least officially, but to hear him dominating “alternative” energy talk these days is a sad state of affairs. I get asked about Elon Musk, too, as if he would be ripe to hear about FE. Damn, he runs a company named after Tesla! I never heard any FE talk coming from him. I don’t follow those talking heads much, but it is hard to avoid it today. Godzilla is chuckling all the way, as a “Tesla” company’s big energy play is a battery factory, or the world’s richest man promotes fission. To those FE newbies who think that Gates and Musk are just waiting to hear from somebody like me, I have news for them: they aren’t. Brian O banged his head on those doors for many years, and Dennis would get swarmed with billionaires when he was riding high, and none of them were worth a damn. These newbie predilections are all variations of trying to get The Muppet Movie ending after a few days of work, some easy way to the new Epoch, just by calling on the right potentate. It has never worked and never will. Both men have undoubtedly been approached on the FE issue many times. I don’t know and don’t care what their reactions have been, but they were likely some variation of reactions in Levels 1, 2, 3, and 5, and if they are the least bit worldly, and I think they would be, then they should know about stuff like this. It is very possible that they are playing a role, knowingly, feigning being true visionaries. But really, I try to not pay attention to them. It can be a seductive thought that they would wake up and throw their weight behind FE, but it is a waste of time and would actually be dangerous to them if they did. Then Godzilla would finally roll out of bed and deal with the threat. I would not talk to Gates about FE if he wanted to. Best, Wade

Hi: At Avalon, I have a poet who periodically posts, as she did today, and my reply is below, with some more on scientific literacy and technology… I have informed Melinda that I only “need” her to do that once a year, and anything more is gravy. On this thread, I have related the story of talking to a man, just before the boom was lowered onto us in Ventura, who had reason to call Princeton’s physics department when he was a young man, and Einstein picked up the phone with, “This is Albert.” The conversation quickly led to Einstein’s speculations on how the cosmos worked, and the man told me that it was like Einstein was wandering the stars as they spoke. That conversation happened not long before Einstein died. Einstein was well aware of the similarity of religious “rapture” and what he experienced when he pondered how the universe worked. I have known scientific minds that were similar to Einstein’s, and they definitely had a mystical bent. Einstein was a pure theorist who never performed any experiments related to his theories. He never learned to drive, got lost while walking home one day at Princeton, and about the only technology that he handled (other than picking up the phone ), was his pencil for writing down his thought experiments, his violin, and the tiller of his small sailboat. I am in the autism spectrum, as Einstein was, as were the greatest scientific and inventive minds that I knew. Not many of them are gregarious, man-of-the-people types, like a Brian O and Dennis. I think that that “autistic” orientation is what allowed them to “wander the stars” that way and perceive the universe’s “secrets,” just waiting to be understood. In very real ways, our technology made us, as without advanced tools and the control of fire, we would have never left the forest and might still get around on all fours. And our technologies have always primarily been about getting more energy or manipulating it for our benefit. There are few exceptions. As I sat down, before reading Melinda’s little gem, I was going to write a little more on scientific literacy and how science and technology can go awry, and it is all about scarcity and fear, and energy scarcity above all. So far, the greatest engine of technological innovation in the human journey has been warfare. The first practical application of Einstein’s theories was making history’s most evil weapons and gratuitously dropping them on a defeated people. Einstein himself owned part of that, and said that it was his life’s greatest mistake. The Space Race was a partial exception to that warfare model, but ironically, Jack Kennedy tried to end the Cold War, instructed NASA to develop a joint mission to the moon with the Soviet Union, not have a Space Race, and he was murdered soon thereafter, most likely by interests that did not want to see the Cold War end, as warfare presents wondrous profit opportunities, as some soldiers eventually realized. In a world of scarcity and fear, rapacious systems such as capitalism thrive, and technology can go down a dark path when greed and fear guide its development. If we choose love and sentience (they mutually reinforce each other), then a different path awaits. Not only do technologies developed and sequestered today turn the physics texts into doorstops (which were likely at least partly developed by reverse-engineering captured ET craft), but basic science has been greatly corrupted by vested interests. Corporate and military fluoride polluters turned a brain-damaging, tooth-crumbling toxic waste into “medicine” that is compulsorily jammed down the American public’s throat, literally. Western medical “science” is almost entirely bogus, with at least half of all medical research corrupted by vested interests (and I have even seen a study that estimated that 90% was bogus). If an effort like mine can ever build up enough steam to help make FE happen, capitalism and all other scarcity-based ideologies and institutions will go the way of the dinosaur, as the Fifth Epoch dawns. Technology will not be developed under the rubric of greed and fear, and the science that emerges will bear little resemblance to today’s. Today’s animal experiments will be unthinkable, and many other evil practices will fade away into the oblivion of a past Epoch. Who wants any of that? With FE, it all becomes feasible, and without FE, almost none of it does. Best, Wade

Hi: Here is another scientific literacy post. On the TV show Lost, one of the protagonists was called a man of faith (John Locke) and the other a man of science (Jack Shephard), but it was probably more accurate to call Shephard a man of doubt. Organized religion is based on faith, and mainstream science is based on doubt. But faith and doubt are poor substitutes for knowledge, which is only attainable through experience. The scientific ideal is a quest for knowledge via reproducible experiments that can verify or falsify hypotheses, which anybody with the proper technology and techniques can reproduce. The religious ideal is to attain direct personal experience of the nature of reality, usually by attaining mystical states of awareness. Both approaches require self-discipline and integrity, and some people are more talented than others. The most talented scientists generally had what we would call high IQs, while the most talented mystics had a flexibility of consciousness that can be hard to define, but the so-called miracles of the Bible, especially the feats of Jesus, is what most would agree is pronounced mystical ability, and Jesus attained it through love, which is something that scientists really can’t define. Performing “mystical” feats is really not all that hard to do. After 40 hours of meditation training, performing what is called a remote viewing was a typical feat. That is how Brian O’Leary and I had our mystical awakenings. Everybody that I most respected in the FE field had a mystical awakening, and most of us were scientists or scientists-in-training. I performed many “feats” in those early days of exploring my mystical abilities, and I had many preposterous events orchestrated by my “friends,” which guided me to the biggest events of my unbelievable journey. The “skeptics” will tell you otherwise, but thousands of experiments since the 1800s have proven beyond any reasonable doubt that human consciousness has abilities that the current scientific models are at a loss to explain. While such experiments are nice confirmation of those innate human abilities, there is no substitute for doing it yourself, which removes all doubt or faith and replaces it with knowledge. It turns out that the greatest physicists, who worked in that hardest of hard sciences, all had worldviews that verged on the mystical, which is one of the many skeletons in the closets of materialists, who engage in numerous logical summersaults to ignore or explain those uncomfortable facts away. Those with mystical experiences know better. The greatest breakthroughs in science and technology generally came from flashes of insight, which has been called the creative moment and other terms, but it was a close cousin to, if not identical to, mystical insight. I have had both, and they are arguably one and the same. In the Fifth Epoch, scientific literacy will be like reading, writing, and arithmetic are in the Fourth Epoch: something that all children learn. But the key to the Fifth Epoch is technologies that exist on the planet today that turn the physics textbooks into doorstops. Also, anybody who plays in the FE field for long enough, at a high enough level, knows that those technologies exist, if they can survive the process of discovering it. So, the process is reproducible, but just like with attaining the highest mystical insights, almost nobody really has the right stuff today to go find out for themselves, so they fall back on faith and doubt. In the Fifth Epoch, the religion of the Fourth Epoch, materialism, will also go into the dustbin of history, as the agrarian religions of the Third Epoch steadily lose their influence, and all Fifth Epoch children will explore their mystical abilities, and in ways that reject all of the hocus-pocus of organized religion or today’s New Age trappings. This entire line of inquiry is rich with paradoxes and conundrums, which Niels Bohr said was where the gold was. Wrestling with paradoxes is where the greatest scientific progress was made, and there is a paradox at the bedrock of physics that shows how far our current theories are from figuring it out. The greatest science of all is likely the science of consciousness, which mainstream science has barely begun to explore, and its often-materialistic stance usually defeats it before it begins. Materialism is a faith, or a philosophical stance based on unprovable assumptions, if you want to call it that, not a scientific finding, but most mainstream scientists don’t like to be reminded of it. If the limits of today’s scientific inquiry are understood, then it can be an immensely useful process, and the greatest scientists were keenly aware of those limitations, but the hack class of scientists has turned mainstream science into a religion, just like the professional priesthoods turned the enlightened teachings of the mystical masters into another form of social control. They did it from the beginning. So it is, in a world of scarcity and fear. Best, Wade

Hi: I received a response to my reply, and had more to write, below… Great question. Bucky Fuller developed a curriculum for training comprehensive thinkers. Bucky would say that all aspects of developing a comprehensive perspective are important. If I had to put a label on my work, I would call it neo-Fullerian. The best curriculum that I know of is my big essay. I purposely designed it so that if a person understood the rudiments of what I presented, it would be enough to achieve that level of scientific (and scholarly) literacy and BS-detector that I think is needed for those in the choir to keep their eyes on the ball. The essay’s more than 900 references essentially list the works that I used. It is the most scholarly and scientific essay on my site, and was the only big one that I wrote after encountering Bucky’s work back in 2003. I also spent the summer of 2014 aligning my older essays with the big one, as I readied the big one for publishing. The way that I navigated to my current perspective was reading such works, raiding their references, and daisy-chaining along. Among the scholarly and scientific volumes in my library, many of them I discovered by daisy-chaining from references in other works. Most of the scientific references in my big essay are to popularized science works, which were designed so that laypeople could read them. On this thread, you can see me refer to Scientific American, especially its special issues. They are written by specialists who are aiming at the general readership. Those are written at the level of scientific literacy that I am aiming for. When Einstein was young, he avidly read such popularized science works. And when reading those popular science works, I was happy to see popularizers referring to other popularized works. So, those popularized works are not only for the lay audience, but for scientists in other specializations, so that they could communicate with each other. Interdisciplinary efforts are where the recent breakthroughs are happening, and most of what I refer to are interdisciplinary works (and there is also a place for historians and social scientists in that milieu – they are also important disciplines). If Einstein read popularized science as a boy, then you can be sure that popularized science has been around for a long time, but in my lifetime, science began recovering from the over-specialization that plagued it, which Fuller thought was a ruling class tactic to keep scientists enslaved in their over-specialized tunnel-vision. We live in a kind of golden age of popularized science, and in that way, it is a good time to be alive. Today, scientists are the biggest fans of my big essay, but it was designed with the lay audience in mind. If scientists are going to be my only audience, then I will have failed in what I attempted. The lay audience often has a strange view of science, probably because they don’t understand it. Also, mainstream science is plagued with materialism, which is a religion, not a scientific finding. The so-called “skeptics” are Grand Inquisitors for the scientific establishment, and the scientists that I really respect have little respect for the “skeptics,” and see them as just another kind of religious zealot. I consider organized skepticism to be a criminal enterprise. So, that can be quite a minefield for laypeople to navigate, to understand the process of science without getting trapped in the fanatical aspects of that hack fringe that tries to turn science into a religion. I think that many people get turned off by the often-dishonest “skepticism” that hails from that politically active fringe and throw science away, and probably partly because they don’t have the mental horsepower to assess any of it in the first place. You need some mental horsepower to navigate those shoals. Also, and Brian and I discussed this before he died, the road to FE passes through the fringes of today’s science, so that scientists often deny FE’s possibility and reality by referring to the “laws of physics,” when there really aren’t any. Scientists only have hypotheses and theories, and to call their theories “laws” invests them with a quasi-religious certitude that is unwarranted and has served to blind them to a bigger picture. After banging on all of the biggest doors of the scientific establishment, the “progressive” organizations, and so on, Brian began openly wondering if humanity is a sentient species. It is a fair question. I have found that laypeople, especially in these Internet days, as you note, on one hand are kind of afraid of science and glom onto anything that calls science into question, especially the kind of doubt that lets them go on with business as usual, such as the Global Warming dissent, which was almost entirely funded by the oil companies and friends, and they have a willing audience to dupe, who want an excuse to go about business as usual, untroubled by what their activities may be inflicting on Earth. Hell, my great nation has slaughtered millions of people in the past generation, and I can hardly find an American who knows or cares, so ignoring the environmental calamities that we are inflicting is a vastly easier state of denial to achieve. Brian and Rupert Sheldrake were/are scientific heretics, but their heresies are the same kind that the great religious heretics were guilty of. They saw how their disciplines got corrupted and were trying to bring them back to their original humble roots. But they still believed in the process of science. The scientific ideal is a worthy one, just like the ideal of a free press, an objective history, democracy, and free markets. The problem is that there has never been a free press, an objective history, a true democracy, or a free market. They are all ideals that have never been seen in the real world, and when scientists think that science is somehow above the fray, and that vested interests don’t corrupt it, they are as deluded as people who think that they get the truth from the newspaper. Fuller remarked on that naïveté among scientists. This is not something that can be digested overnight, which is why I say that my best pupils go deep and come up for air months or years later. And I am here when they pop up. I’ll grant you that physics is not easy. It is the hardest of the hard sciences, and other branches of science have often had “physics envy,” which could set back their science. The experiments of physicists are often not amenable to the other sciences, and today you see professions that could be sciences, but they’re not, and they ape the trappings of science while being faithless to its process, such as mainstream economics. Very ironically, the greatest physicists all had worldviews that verged on the mystical, and there is a great unresolved paradox at the heart of physics that laypeople can readily understand, which makes it clear that our current theories are a long way from figuring it all out. I consider it very possible that the theories that would arise in light of the extant FE, antigravity and related technologies might resolve that paradox. In that light, it is not only a shame that it has been kept under wraps like that, but those technologies can usher in the Fifth Epoch of the human journey, which will dwarf all that came before it. No more poverty, no more environmental destruction, no more war. Who wants some of that? Well, we don’t get any while we sleep away in our egocentric pursuits of survival in a world of scarcity and fear. Love and sentience are the only way out that I know of, and attaining scientific literacy is part of achieving the requisite sentience, so that we are not easily led astray by the latest bright shiny object that comes our way. There are a million distractions that beckon, and all sorts of ways to fail on the FE path. On FE failure, I will give an example that I saw just yesterday. While performing my studies, I ordered some material from a fringe scientist, and now I am on his list for begging for money for antigravity (AKA electrogravity and other terms) experiments, and I received his latest entreaty just yesterday. He and his colleagues are begging for money to complete one of their experiments. While part of me lauds their initiative, another part is appalled by their naiveté. If they ever achieve some success, they are going to move up Godzilla’s radar. A handful of scientists in their labs, begging for money for FE and antigravity research, don’t stand a prayer in today’s environment. This is not the time for tinkering inventors and scientists to lead the way. The only scientist/inventor approach with a prayer is for the scientist/inventor with the goods to give it a worthy group, who will take it the rest of the way, and give it to the world. No other approach along those lines has a prayer, IMO. Been there, done that. My attempts to build that choir can be seen as an attempt to form that worthy group. Best, Wade

Hi: Here is a little more on scientific literacy. When you become scientifically literate, you can develop your own tools of discernment and awareness. This is highly important, and that critical faculty also extends to scholarship. In a world of scarcity and fear, many scientists and scholars have sold their souls to the prevailing winds of wealth and power. I chronicle many of them in my work, from the “skeptics” to historians that turn genocidists into national heroes (1, 2) and saints, literally, to “good news” advocates who never met a corporate chemical that they didn’t like, to Global Warming deniers, to journalists who are nothing more than mouthpieces for wealth and power, and so on. Not only are there innumerable sycophants to wealth and power, muddying the waters to keep the herd bewildered, the masses often exercise no discernment at all, with their awareness of such issues being little more than daily gossip and reading the tabloids. There is a mountain of chaff for every kernel of wheat on the fringes, and I am besieged by people shoveling the chaff at me, unable to tell that it is chaff, or they want me to sort it out for them. I have more important things to do. I’ll provide a few examples. I spent a lot of effort looking at the Apollo Moon missions, and I never saw any of “the moon landings were faked” evidence that withstood scrutiny, and most was laughable, but to this day, I am approached by people who argue for faked moon landings, but they have almost no familiarity with the evidence and all that they can provide as “proof” is recycled disinformation and other garbage. You will find all manner of “scholar” and “archeologist” that provide “evidence” for technologically advanced ancient civilizations, but none of what I ever saw withstood the slightest scrutiny. Virtually all that they point to are stone artifacts. Stone! Stone is not an advanced material. The necropolis at Giza, for instance, was the greatest early instance of elite-aggrandizing monumental architecture, during their Bronze Age, when times were good in the Old Kingdom, and the Egyptians never bettered it – they did not have the resources or social impetus for it. Pyramid-building reached its peak in Egypt 4,500 years ago. All over the world, all early civilizations built elite-aggrandizing stone architecture as a form of “display,” and since no civilization has ever been energetically sustainable, they all collapsed, and the most visible remnants of those vanished civilizations were elite stonework, including the Mayans, those who built Teotihuacan, and South American civilizations. In early civilizations where stone was not as available, they made earthen mounds, as they did in Sumer and in the Mississippian culture. But there is a veritable cottage industry of “scholars” and amateur archeologists in their pith helmets who provide “evidence” of technologically advanced ancient civilizations, with plenty of “mystical” overtones. Maybe there were such civilizations, but I never saw any such “evidence” provided by those people that withstood any scrutiny, and their claims are laughable, especially when compared to what professionals have done. For another example, there is a small group of “scholars” who argue that Antarctica was ice-free in historical times, and their evidence amounts to little more than novel interpretations of ancient maps. The scientific evidence is overwhelming that Antarctica’s ice sheet began developing about 35 million years ago, as Earth entered another Icehouse phase after 200 million years of a Greenhouse Earth. There is an awesome amount of scientific evidence to support that view, but some “scholars” examine a few old maps and tell their scientifically illiterate readership that Antarctica was ice free a few centuries ago. That is one example of many that I could provide, and if a person becomes scientifically literate and does the work, they are not led astray by that stuff, which amounts to little more than gossip, but there is a huge readership, whose awareness rarely extends past tabloid headlines, that eats it up. The scientifically literate can, for example, easily understand why my former partner’s heat pump was the best heating system ever put on the world market, or why my first professional mentor’s engine was the world’s best for powering an automobile. There is really not even anything scientifically unorthodox about them, although the idea that they could be married and produce FE is unorthodox. But unorthodox does necessarily not mean wrong, and many of the greatest breakthroughs in science and technology hailed from the unorthodox fringes, such as the ridiculed and ignored Wright brothers. But it takes scientific literacy and hard work to winnow the wheat from the chaff. Best, Wade

Hi: I was recently asked about what I mean when I write about scientific literacy, and it inspired a series of posts that are getting their own thread, so here goes. Scientific literacy means being familiar with the processes and findings of today’s science. Scientific literacy is needed to gain a comprehensive perspective, but a person does not need to be a professional scientist to attain it. I’m not. I purposely designed my big essay so that people do not need to be professional scientists to understand it. If they aren’t scientists, it may be a heavy lift for them, but not really all that hard, if they take the time to do the work. I am going to guess and say that an IQ of 110 is likely plenty to understand the gist of that essay, in something resembling a comprehensive way, if a person does the work, and I am here to help. We live in a kind of golden age of popularized science right now. I don’t mean the materialistic chicanery of Carl Sagan and the “skeptics,” but that recent book by Ward and Kirschvink is what I am referring to, as polymath scientists write to the lay public (and other scientists) about their cutting-edge work. This has partly come about by the welcome trend of scientists crossing disciplinary lines and escaping from the overspecialization that plagued establishment science. My references for my big essay abound with those works that laypeople can read and understand. One of humanity’s greatest scientific popularizers went out of his way, unasked, and specifically lauded my effort after spending all day reading it (and he is not the only one like that), so I think that I achieved my goal of making something both informative and relatively easy to understand. I also cite a hundred scientific papers or so in that essay, and my readers need to become at least familiar with scientific papers and how to read them. When I was still a science student in college, one of the first things that we did was read papers in Science and Nature, and both publications are designed to be read by a general science readership. They really aren’t that difficult to digest. I write plenty on the virtues, limitations, and failings of today’s mainstream science. If you read much of my writings at Avalon, for instance, I regularly make the distinction between math and science. I crunch numbers for a living, and there is nothing like that to make you appreciate their limitations. Einstein was particularly wary of math and tried to work without it whenever he could. Math has its uses, let there be no doubt about it, but in the early days of science, it got distorted into over-relying on math. Scientific literacy is like literacy. Being literate means that you can read and understand. Being scientifically literate means being able to read and understand scientific literature, but it also means reading it. Being able to and doing it are two different things, as one is capability and the other is achievement. I don’t expect anybody to have a two thousand book library in their homes like I do, or to stay up on all the subjects that my essay covers, but people need to get familiar with them in order to help my little project along. That takes work. Maybe I have been too close to it and have been doing it too long, but people have called my work an “avalanche” of information. I don’t quite see it that way, but if people eat one bite at a time, they can digest it, and when they do, a big picture can begin to emerge. Deciding that those in my effort need some scientific literacy was not something that I just decided one day, out of the blue. It was because the scientifically illiterate really could not understand the rudiments of ideas that are vital for understanding how the world works. I don’t take it easy on economists in my work, for good reason. They are responsible for the nonsensical information that parades as economic theory today, and I can’t tell you how many times I have heard stuff like, “Energy, so what?” Money is not even real, but people think in terms of money and not energy when they think of economics. How ignorant and backward, but the profession abets that delusional state, and it could well be intentional. I wrote this chapter of my essay as a response to a scientist pal who wanted me to make the relationship between energy and economic activity clearer, as people close to him had no idea how they were connected. It is pretty strange when I get people (not even scientists) who can’t believe that people can’t see the connection, and then I hear from others who can’t see the connection at all. Like the Fed today, just print enough money, and all is well. When I began studying Peak Oil theory back in 2003, I noticed the disdain that scientists had for economists, soon came to understand why, and what nagged me about economic theory since my college days became clear. Scientific literacy means understanding the rudiments of how our world works. If we don’t understand how it works, there is no way that we can intelligently change how it works, and make no mistake: that is what my work is really all about. We are about ready to crash Spaceship Earth, and I am doing what I can so that does not happen, but far more than that, humanity can achieve an Epoch that seems like a fairy tale today, and it all rests on the energy issue, as it always has. I recently wrote a series of posts on Peak Oil and Global Warming, and scientific literacy in that area means just understanding the basics of those ideas. And those are two areas where the propaganda has snowed the masses. If most people were scientifically literate, the Global Warming “skeptics” would have been laughed off the stage long ago, instead of being Fox News and Heritage Foundation fixtures. Best, Wade

Hi: A little more on scientific literacy, before I get back to the Seattle posts. When you become scientifically literate, you can develop your own tools of discernment and awareness. This is highly important, and that critical faculty also extends to scholarship. In a world of scarcity and fear, many scientists and scholars have sold their souls to the prevailing winds of wealth and power. I chronicle many of them in my work, from the “skeptics” to historians that turn genocidists into national heroes (1, 2) and saints, literally, to “good news” advocates who never met a corporate chemical that they didn’t like, to Global Warming deniers, to journalists who are nothing more than mouthpieces for wealth and power, and so on. Not only are there innumerable sycophants to wealth and power, muddying the waters to keep the herd bewildered, the masses often exercise no discernment at all, with their awareness of such issues being little more than daily gossip and reading the tabloids. There is a mountain of chaff for every kernel of wheat on the fringes, and I am besieged by people shoveling the chaff at me, unable to tell that it is chaff, or they want me to sort it out for them. I have more important things to do. I’ll provide a few examples. I spent a lot of effort looking at the Apollo Moon missions, and I never saw any of “the moon landings were faked” evidence that withstood scrutiny, and most was laughable, but to this day, I am approached by people who argue for faked moon landings, but they have almost no familiarity with the evidence and all that they can provide as “proof” is recycled disinformation and other garbage. You will find all manner of “scholar” and “archeologist” that provide “evidence” for technologically advanced ancient civilizations, but none of what I ever saw withstood the slightest scrutiny. Virtually all that they point to are stone artifacts. Stone! Stone is not an advanced material. The necropolis at Giza, for instance, was the greatest early instance of elite-aggrandizing monumental architecture, during their Bronze Age, when times were good in the Old Kingdom, and the Egyptians never bettered it – they did not have the resources or social impetus for it. Pyramid-building reached its peak in Egypt 4,500 years ago. All over the world, all early civilizations built elite-aggrandizing stone architecture as a form of “display,” and since no civilization has ever been energetically sustainable, they all collapsed, and the most visible remnants of those vanished civilizations were elite stonework, including the Mayans, those who built Teotihuacan, and South American civilizations. In early civilizations where stone was not as available, they made earthen mounds, as they did in Sumer and the Mississippian culture. But there is a veritable cottage industry of “scholars” and amateur archeologists in their pith helmets who provide “evidence” of technologically advanced ancient civilizations, with plenty of “mystical” overtones. Maybe there were such civilizations, but I never saw any such “evidence” provided by those people that withstood any scrutiny, and their claims are laughable, especially when compared to what professionals have done. For another example, there is a small group of “scholars” who argue that Antarctica was ice-free in historical times, and their evidence amounts to little more than novel interpretations of ancient maps. The scientific evidence is overwhelming that Antarctica’s ice sheet began developing about 35 million years ago, as Earth entered another Icehouse phase after 200 million years of a Greenhouse Earth. There is an awesome amount of scientific evidence to support that view, but some “scholars” examine a few old maps and tell their scientifically illiterate readership that Antarctica was ice free a few centuries ago. That is one example of many that I could provide, and if a person becomes scientifically literate and does the work, they are not led astray by that stuff, which amounts to little more than gossip, but there is a huge readership, whose awareness rarely extends past tabloid headlines, that eats it up. The scientifically literate can, for example, easily understand why my former partner’s heat pump was the best heating system ever put on the world market, or why my first professional mentor’s engine was the world’s best for powering an automobile. There is really not even anything scientifically unorthodox about them, although the idea that they could be married and produce FE is unorthodox. But unorthodox does not mean wrong, and many of the greatest breakthroughs in science and technology hailed from the unorthodox fringes, such as the ridiculed and ignored Wright brothers. But it takes scientific literacy and hard work to winnow the wheat from the chaff. Best, Wade

Hi: I have some time this evening. I would like to address a subject that continually rears its head. The bulls-eye of what I am doing is understanding abundance and realizing that nobody is going make FE happen for us. More than 99% of humanity reacts to the idea of FE with denial and fear. For the relative few that get beyond that, it is virtually a constant that beginners think of all the easy ways to FE that nobody ever thought of before! That is their egos talking, and I have yet to see one of those “bright ideas” that wasn’t a variation of all the failed approaches. It is this movement or that movement, that is ready-made to go after FE, some New Age guru with his flock/harem that he can direct at the issue, some billionaire who is going to cut the big check and we all get The Muppet Movie ending, the “progressives,” the conspiracists (actually they never get anything done), the clever infomercial that will wake everybody up, the Hollywood movie, the presidential candidate that just needs to be informed, the high-tech mogul/philanthropist, the FE inventor who really is the Messiah, and so on, ad naseum. I truly am bombarded with that stuff, and I get to work on my patience issues each time. Those are all variations of seeking the easy way out. We don’t have to do the hard work of waking up and achieving true sentience, somebody is going to do it for us. They are just waiting to! I offer a way that will work. I know it will, if enough people with the right stuff do the work. But those people are very few and far between. We will see what kind of dent that I can make in the rest of my life’s “spare” time. I am only asking for people to let go of their in-group conceits, become scientifically literate, if they aren’t already, and develop the comprehensive perspective that will be needed for the effort to keep its eye on the ball. If we make it to the Fifth Epoch and become a Type 1 civilization, people may marvel at how little was really required of humanity to make it happen. During the Third Epoch, although writing was invented during it, most people were illiterate peasants. Two centuries before the Industrial Revolution began in England, only 10% of the men and 1% of the women were literate. When I was growing up in Ventura, our next-door neighbors’ mother grew up in the agrarian South in the early 20th century, and she was illiterate. It was an embarrassing affliction that nobody talked about, and it was like the woman was mentally disabled. In the Fourth Epoch, reading and writing is something that nearly 100% of children learn, but about 95% of the population is scientifically illiterate, which is a similar proportion of illiteracy in the Third Epoch. In the Fifth, scientific literacy is something that all children will learn, just like Fourth Epoch children learn reading, writing, and arithmetic today. If I could time-travel to the Fifth Epoch to recruit choristers, I could easily fill up the slots with children. But on Earth today, it is not so easy. Best, Wade

Hi: My time is limited this morning, and I have wanted to write for some time on the hazards of reading reviews. A year ago, I read the reviews on Peter Ward and Joe Kirschvink’s latest book, and hesitated to buy it. What a fool. It is a goldmine for somebody like me, and when I update my big essay this year, that book will be well represented. It is cutting-edge stuff. Ward and Kirschvink are towering figures in their own right, and some of the reviews I read were from specialists who did not seem to see the bigger picture, or bewailed that Kirschvink seemed too interested in the Snowball Earth episode, when Kirschvink actually coined the term. Ward and Kirschvink are polymaths, and are going to come up with polymath kinds of views, which specialists ignore at their peril. For books like that one, I read with notepaper in hand, making notes where important ideas are for my work. But in the end, when I wrote my big essay, I generally ended up rereading entire books in which I made those copious notes, and it was time well spent, as the information “seated” better. Nick Lane’s latest and the Ward/Kirschvink book are going to be the core of that essay update, and I keep studying Lane’s book, putting it down, and coming back to it, trying to wrap my head around it. I have been recently rereading the Ward/Kirschvink book, to have it sink in more, and while reading it, I realized that it is going to be easy to find the parts that I want to put in, and where I want to put them in, because that book is organized like mine is, on a timeline. That sure makes it easier! Best, Wade

Hi: In addition to setting out that beacon, I have taken a number of precautions that will greatly reduce the risk to the choir. Those precautions also mean that what develops will start small and grow slowly, but what forms might have a chance at making a dent, and any dent at all will be an important contribution. For instance, I worked ten years of my life largely for free, surviving my adventures and performing the study, writing, and editing that resulted in my site. I also have this new tool called the Internet, and because of all that, I do not need any money to build the choir. When money changes hands, especially related to FE, the game changes entirely. You think that you know people, even close family members, but you can watch them turn into Orcs lusting after The One Ring when FE comes into the picture. It is something to behold, in a horrifying way. And even when money and personal gain is not involved, there is still plenty of peril. Brian got booted out of the non-profit organizations that he founded, more than once. When Brian was Mo Udall’s campaign advisor, their idealistic crusade wrecked Brian’s marriage, and Udall’s “other top advisors were Dexedrine-popping, power-hungry insomniacs…” Brian’s lesson from that stint in Washington was that, “even if you were on the ethical side of the issue, power still corrupts and those who were more ambitious and ruthless were the ones that rose to the top.” Those quotes are from Brian’s The Energy Solution Revolution, pp. 179-180. Not long before he died, Brian informed me that electoral politics is a dead-end. He would have known. When Dennis flew high, agents provocateurs were infiltrated into his organizations and participated in what I call the “inside-outside job,” in which they help take the organization down from the inside while the attacks come from the outside. The first one that Dennis encountered (at least, who was not a mobster) was responsible for the death of one of Dennis’s employees, and today he is a hit man for the medical racket. The one that was infiltrated into our Ventura effort looked and acted for all the world like Mr. Rogers, and even as he took out his knife and began stabbing people, I had people close to me making excuses for him, at least until he slit their throats, while using dupes in the organization. It was all very educational, and I realized that if people earned their livelihoods in the FE effort, they were easily taken out, either by each other, as greed and the like reared its head, or by the agents of organized suppression, who almost effortlessly manipulated them. I regularly encounter people who think that they can spot such people by just looking at them, and I have news for them: they can’t. Those psychopaths who were sicced on us were very good at what they did, and perfectly mimicked the Boy Scout demeanor. When Mr. Deputy finally dropped his mask for me, as I sat on the witness stand, it was the turning point of my life. I had to watch big names in the FE field make excuses for Mr. Skeptic’s pathological lying while they turned around and attacked Brian, as he duped them with his affable skeptic charade. What is wrong with that picture? It is OK to begin one’s journey naively. Everybody that I respected the most began that way, including me. But we eventually woke up. When you wake up, you begin to become worldly. You develop discrimination, can winnow the wheat from the chaff, and the like, and those that I invite into the choir I plan to be worldly and discriminating enough to spot the Mr. Texases, the Mr. Deputies, the hit men, if they somehow infiltrate themselves into my effort (if I garner any success, they will certainly try, and free-lance psychopaths will also come running) and begin trying to incite a mutiny (of course, so that they can selflessly lead the noble effort ). But since no money will change hands for a very long time, if ever, and whatever technology might come out of my effort is going to be given away, that will present a very hard nut to crack for Godzilla and friends. Of course, without the bait of self-interest, not many are going to be attracted to my efforts, and that is my intention. I seek needles in haystacks and know it. This task is not suited for those who want to rush out and do something. That is suicidal in this milieu, and such half-cocked newbies can also ruin the lives of those around them. As I learned from my days with Dennis and Brian, you can put on shows, mount technical efforts as a business, mount conferences and the like, but that does not attract the people who are needed. It instead attracts opportunists, gawkers, those trying to fill their social needs, etc., and maybe one or two in the crowd will have the right stuff. Talk is cheap. I worked for free for months before Dennis began to take me seriously. The agents of suppression are also sure to attend such gatherings, and murder is among their specialties, but they are best suited for playing silver-tongued Pied Pipers, to lead the herd astray. Herds are easily led astray by playing to their sociality, and those Pied Pipers stampede them right over the cliff. Sentient beings are needed, not herd members. As Seth once said, nothing is more powerful than truly sentient beings combining their efforts from a unity of purpose. When those in the choir don’t need my help anymore, to keep their eyes on the ball and hit the notes, then my work will be finished. Best, Wade

Hi: I got a new poster at Avalon, his first post was great, and my reply is appropriate for here, and is reproduced below. Best, Wade That is a great first post. I’ll say this: in a world of scarcity and fear, it is extremely difficult to shed one’s in-group conditioning. Yes, some of my closest pals had extremely brutal moments of awakening (1, 2), and mine was pretty “life-changing,” too. Even relatively gentle and gradual ones, such as Brian’s, led to a pretty rough ride that shortened his life. I don’t recommend waking up like we did. It is not easy to survive those ways, but to your question, it does seem to be the case that the “trauma” of the awakening was directly proportional to how “radicalized” that we became. But in our world of scarcity and fear, it seems that those Boy and Girl Scouts are the ones that best wake up to the lies of their in-group conditioning, and this is actually very close to what Michael Roads’s mystical mentor said, that if you choose love, you wake up, and if don’t, you remain asleep in your herd. The New Testament’s Jesus, who epitomized love in our culture, said that there is no out-group, which is the most enlightened message that can be delivered to humanity, IMO, which is what the Godhead states, according to sources that I respect. In our world of scarcity and fear, how many people actually achieve that lofty understanding? Vanishingly few. That is partly because of the carrots and sticks of our in-group conditioning. And it is partly due to the “age” of the souls that are here, IMO. But souls of any age can understand love. As I have written plenty, with the increasing energy surplus of each Epoch, human societies became increasingly humane. A quarter of hunter-gatherer peoples died violently (at least, after the easy meat was gone). The Industrial Revolution liberated women and slaves. There is every reason to believe that an end of poverty, environmental destruction, and warfare will come with the advent of the Fifth Epoch. If that day comes, all scarcity-based ideologies will crumble, as will the in-groups built around them. With economic abundance, there will really not be any reason to form in-groups, as they are based on survival. I’ll grant that forming in-groups is deeply baked into the human animal, but we are supposedly a sentient species, and that means, to me, that we do not have to be automatons of our evolutionary heritage. And we have rich and relevant examples that show how human societies can transform. When the food supply doubled of isolated chimps, females and non-dominant males ended the practice of violent male rule, and bonobo societies are more peaceful than any human society has ever been. When women began bringing in more calories than men in the early days of the Domestication Revolution, they also broke up the male gangs, and their societies were humanity’s most peaceful pre-industrial cultures. So, those who will help manifest the biggest event in the human journey are going to be doing the heavy lifting, sentience-wise, and I know the qualities that I need for my approach to have a chance at succeeding. Other ways may work, but I am doing something very specific that I never saw tried before, which could be called the love and enlightenment path to FE and a healed planet and humanity. As I have stated, those I seek will have already awoken to the lies of their in-group conditioning. Work like mine cannot awaken the sleeping. That does not mean that they have to shed all of their in-group conceits, as they are very insidious, as you note, but they at least recognize them for what they are. For those people, my work can be very helpful, and I show how I took on all of my in-group conceits, including my family, profession, gender, nation, race, and species. Each person has to work on his/her own, and it takes a brutal honesty that almost nobody on Earth can muster today, but those are the only people who are going to be able to help with my approach. I know that I seek needles in haystacks. But once FE is delivered to humanity and the super-Epoch of abundance begins, then it is going to be far easier for the masses to begin relinquishing their in-group conditioning. There are not going to be any out-groups to be afraid of. Will they achieve the exalted state that those who led the way did? Probably not immediately, as we get out of life what we put in. But the super-Epoch of abundance will likely see a flowering of the human potential that is quite frankly unimaginable to 99.9% of humanity today. That is what I am attempting to help manifest, and I may have another 30 good years ahead of me, to see what kind of dent that my approach can make. Thanks for writing. Best, Wade

Hi: I have a busy day and month ahead of me, but briefly, I have recently written of projection and Boy and Girl Scouts, and I have been in many discussions with very bright people over many years on this issue. Almost without exception, people fail to understand the Epochal significance of the FE issue, and that is a big reason why I wrote my big essay. People have to develop a Fullerian, comprehensive perspective before they can even begin to comprehend the issues. Otherwise, they glimpse facets of the situation, usually the facets that they somewhat understand, because they are familiar with them, but they miss the big picture because they can’t see beyond those facets. Generally, their egos trap them. Almost invariably, FE newcomers think that they have the magic answer that nobody ever thought of before, and they can crack the FE nut in a few days or weeks of effort (maybe even months, if it proves more difficult than expected ). If people get past denial or fear of FE, they almost invariably drag their scarcity-based baggage to the issue and don’t even realize that it is baggage. That is because that baggage is part of how they maintained their in-group status, and if they can’t see past their in-group, they are not going to see the bigger picture. In-groups are pre-sentient sociological organizational constructs whereby the in-group prospers at the expense of the out-group. That so-called “thinking” falls far short of what is needed for an approach like mine to work. The FE issue is not the New Age or conspiracist flavor of the day, a “progressive” or “conservative” cause that retail politics is going to assist, or any of those mundane ideas. The FE inventor of the hour does not stand a prayer, and FE aspirants who announce that they are the Second Coming or Messiah, as they gather their flock to them, are just part of that tawdry circus. Dennis’s religion-on-his-sleeve approach was another counterproductive aspect of the milieu, and is one reason why I am no longer with him, but far from the most important reason, which is that the hero’s journey to FE will not work. Nobody was better qualified than Dennis to play that game. Neither will the “Patriot,” business opportunity, religious, “progressive,” “radical,” Free Software Movement, etc., etc., approaches. All fall far short of the Epochal approach that will be needed. It is rare that FE talk ever gets past gossip on the inventor of the hour, the fringe scientist with his theories, the hero trying to scale the ramparts, etc. The level of conversation has to get way above those arrested development levels of discussion if an effort like mine will have a chance. Almost nobody on Earth is able or willing to understand what I am doing, but I seek the few who can, and I know what they will have in common. Right now, I am just building and maintaining the beacon that will attract them. When more can join the discussion and hit the notes, it will better attract those whom I seek. Impatience is my Achilles heel, and my journey has been teaching me patience every day. Best, Wade

Hi: Part of a series of interactions over here is appropriate for here. I am hunting for Boy and Girl Scouts, and my public writings are designed to bring the Boy and Girl Scouts to me. That is really the point of my work. When I write about my idealism that had me ask Easter Bunny questions after graduation, during my brutal years in LA, or my vignettes during my years with Dennis, or how Dennis and Ralph nearly did not survive their moments of awakening, or the awakenings of the others that I encountered like us, I am setting out a beacon to attract those who recognize their journeys in ours. They are the only people who can really help me with my quest, because they have that most important initial quality. When I joined all-comers forums, the trolls swarmed me, as I fished for Boy and Girl Scouts. I eventually decided that building the beacon was the most important use of my time. I will do some more “visibility” activities in the future, but dialogues with those Boy and Girls Scouts is what is going to attract more of them. Best, Wade

Hi: One little addendum to the Global Warming and Peak Oil posts… Before the asteroid hypothesis was posited for the dinosaurs’ demise, studying mass extinctions was taboo, due to Darwin’s uniformitarian dogma. But that was the spectacular extinction, with such monstrously large animals vanished, and for a century, explaining the dinosaur extinction became something of a scientific parlor game, with a hundred hypotheses proposed. But they were not being proposed by specialists, but by scientists operating far out of their field, as they all lined up to cast their harpoon at Moby-Dick. It was not a very credible way to go about the business. Specialists and generalists each have their virtues. But generalists who do not understand the findings of specialists can concoct ridiculous hypotheses, while specialists can get lost in the trees and fail to see the forest. Today, interdisciplinary works are dominant, as science tries to get beyond the overspecialized tunnel-vision of its past, which Fuller thought was a deliberate ruling class tactic. But the open-mindedness of scientists, embracing hypotheses outside of their fields of expertise, has also led to “interesting” situations. Einstein endorsed Hapgood’s Pole Shift hypothesis just before the rise of plate tectonics sent it to the dustbin of history. Einstein gave Velikovsky his ear, but never endorsed his work, nor would he take it seriously today. But Velikovsky did get credit for challenging the uniformitarian dogma of the day. Einstein also gave Reich his ear, and Reich was onto something, in several ways. Also, in every scientific field are contrarians, who challenge the orthodox position, proposing counter-hypotheses, as many seem to be trying to keep the profession honest and always questioning what it thinks it knows. Being a contrarian can be a noble calling. But they can also be wearying in their dogged commitment to hypothesis that are usually invalid. But contrarians with conflicts of interest are something different, and the Global Warming contrarians have been led from the beginning by scientists who sold their souls to the hydrocarbon interests. The Heritage Foundation and Heartland Institute are both bankrolled by the Koch brothers and other rich “philanthropists,” and they round up scientific rabble who make statements against the idea of Global Warming and other environmental issues, but there is not a credible climate scientist among them. If they weren’t being funded by such interests, they would seem like quaint dinosaur extinction enthusiasts of a bygone era, but that they are being bankrolled by billionaire “philanthropists” makes the entire enterprise obscene, similar to the “Astroturf” organizations that I encountered. If you study some of those Global Warming contrarian works, and I have, the authors either work directly for the oil companies, play contrarians in ridiculous ways, making outrageous statements to gain notoriety, and the like. I have yet to encounter one of them who was very credible. And when they seem reasonable, their tactic is to call for more research before anything is done, as curbing carbon emissions would be so “expensive” (the oil companies could not say it any better), as if we can’t see the glaciers melting globally, which the Global Warming models perfectly predict. The only credible explanation is that Earth is warming from humanity’s industrial emissions, especially carbon dioxide. All that noisy and well-funded “dissent” needs to be given the proper amount of attention, which is almost none at all, other than to see how vested interests can cloud these issues. As with all professions in a world of scarcity, too many are willing to sell their souls, as historians, journalists, and others have. I saw it in spades in law enforcement and medicine. My journey’s primary lesson was that personal integrity is the world’s scarcest commodity, and it is highly evident in the Global Warming “debate” that we see today. Best, Wade

Hi: I will wrap up these Global Warming and Peak Oil posts for now. As I often write, becoming scientifically literate on these topics is to not uncritically drink the Kool-Aid of dogma, but to become familiar with the hypotheses, the data, read the scientific papers and books, and develop the ability to assess the state of the issue. On Global Warming, I won’t belabor it much, as I have already covered it, but there is no debate amongst credible scientists on these issues: Carbon dioxide traps radiation coming from Earth and warms it; Carbon dioxide levels have been the primary variable in the Greenhouse and Icehouse phases of Earth’s history, and declining carbon dioxide levels are primarily responsible for the Icehouse Earth conditions of the past 35 million years; Humanity’s burning of Earth’s hydrocarbon deposits is increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide, which could reach 600 PPM in this century, which has not been seen on Earth since the last Greenhouse Earth phase; The last time that Earth went from Icehouse to Greenhouse conditions, Earth had its greatest mass extinction event, at least in the eon of complex life. There is no controversy of any significance on those issues, and if you follow the so-called “debate” on Global Warming, it was begun by a bunch of scientists who sold their souls to the hydrocarbon lobby, and the corporate-owned media has obliged the hydrocarbon lobby by giving those whores a platform to air their “views,” to create the appearance of a debate where one does not really exist. If you read the work of the Global Warming “skeptics,” they almost solely focus on short-term oscillations and regional variation, which is irrelevant to the issue. There is far more bluster than substance to their contrary views, and a great deal of dishonesty. Some are just being contrarians, which you can find in all areas of science, but spinning hypotheses is not evidence, much less proof. I find it bizarre that the conspiracist crowd gives the hydrocarbon lobby a free pass on this issue, when their efforts have been very well documented, as their minions parrot the obvious lie that Global Warming is some kind of hoax. All humans prefer business-as-usual, in their egocentric pursuits, so I guess that it is no surprise that the scientifically illiterate have been so easily seduced by obvious shills for the hydrocarbon lobby. And then they seize on nothing at all, such as with so-called “Climategate,” to further fuel their “skepticism.” I am happy to engage in scientific discussions on these issues, but I rarely find any takers. On the Peak Oil issue, there is also a series of key issues that credible scientists have no significant disagreement regarding: Coal was formed by the first rainforests, before anything on Earth learned how to digest lignin; The world’s oil deposits were formed by the remains of marine organisms that were “protected” by anoxic events and “distilled” into oil by geological processes; What is called “conventional oil” is that which has been extracted for the past 150 years via drilling oil wells, and in 1859, there was a little more than two trillion barrels of it in the ground that was recoverable, and humanity has already mined about half of it; There are trillions more barrels of other hydrocarbons on Earth, but they are all energetically inferior to conventional oil, as they are harder to extract and refine (which gives them a lower EROI, and humanity is already approaching an EROI that may not be able to sustain industrial civilization); Oilfield production peaks when about half of the oil has been extracted, global oil discoveries peaked in the 1960s, and peak production of conventional oil was reached in 2006; Since conventional oil is quickly becoming depleted – it will for all practical purposes be completely mined long before this century is finished – the lower-quality hydrocarbons are being mined, and the USA’s recent fracking boom and mining the Canadian Tar Sands are two examples of this dregs-sucking activity. Again, on those above issues, there is no significant debate in scientific circles. You will find interest-conflicted contrarians on the fringes once again, but even the mainstream media does not give them much coverage, partly because they were almost all Soviet scientists, and even in Russia today, you will be hard-pressed to find any scientists advocating the abiogenic oil hypothesis. Again, the scientifically illiterate, looking for an excuse for business-as-usual, seize on fracking or abiogenic petroleum theory (without understanding its rudiments, but they read a clever article once), in order to blithely go about their day. I am not making up some kind of straw man argument, but a close friend, college educated and smart, but who can’t get enough of Fox News, has parroted to me the Fox News line, that there is no such thing as Global Warming, and that there are plenty of hydrocarbons so that we will never run out. It is hard to have one’s head buried in the sand any deeper than that. When I hear pundits declare that the USA is self-sufficient in energy production (or that Peak Oil is now a discredited theory because of the fracking boom), I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. We are burning up the hydrocarbons a million times as fast as they were made, there is not any more being made on Earth (wait 20 million years or so, and another small batch might be coming), and because we are in a blip of mining the dregs so that we are not importing as much of it as usual (and a temporary dregs-mining glut has depressed prices), that is somehow “self-sufficient,” as if it was sustainable and all is well. Putting aside the interest-conflicted and often insane denial that comes from certain corners on the above topics, humanity is at quite the crossroads. Global Warming threatens to raise Earth’s sea level by several feet in this century, which will displace several hundred million people, and that is just for starters. Anybody who is not comatose with an IQ over 50 knows that all of the mayhem in the Middle East, which the West has been inflicting for a century, is all about the oil. No other rational withstands the slightest scrutiny, so, of course, the West’s leaders can be counted on to constantly lie about their true motivation. That is what politicians do. The West is currently toying with beginning World War III, if it has not already, by fighting over Middle East hydrocarbons. But maybe we will somehow dodge that bullet and keep it relatively peaceful as we pull the last hydrocarbons from Earth, and somehow Earth stays cool enough (with chemtrails ) so that the sea-level rise is only a foot or so, and we get the PPM up to 800 or so in the next century, and somehow, all is well. If you believe that, then there is a bridge that I would like to sell you. Humanity has its toes over the edge of the abyss, and almost nobody knows or cares, as it is business-as-usual, with everybody battling for survival and temporarily sating their addictions. Of course, it does not have to be this way, but only if a tiny fraction of humanity can muster the integrity and sentience. Then, it can be a brand new ballgame, and humanity can become a Type 1 civilization. What will we choose? Again, scientific literacy does not mean “believing” any of the above, but doing the work to sharpen one’s own tools of discernment, becoming familiar with the data and hypotheses, and being able to discuss these issues in an honest, informed, and intelligent manner. Not many are able or willing to do it, but I seek the few who can. Best, Wade

Hi: A key point in my big essay is that people in one Epoch never understood the next one until it arrived. It is that way with the coming Epoch. For those who glimpse what I am writing about, when I sketch the Fifth Epoch’s likely contours, they immediately rush out to tell their social circles the “good news,” and are invariably dismayed when they are attacked or ostracized. The masses have never been fit to help a new Epoch manifest. It is just what it is, and it does no good to judge the situation. But virtually all FE newbies think that they can crack the mass movement nut for making FE happen. They have to relinquish their social consciousness before they will understand. Sociality is pre-sentient behavior. A social movement won’t make FE happen, and I am doing something very different. An integrity-and-sentience movement may be able to. I have written plenty about the limitations of scientific illiteracy and the materialistic religion of our Epoch. Scientific illiteracy is a Third Epoch phenomenon (and only a few percent of the members of my great nation are scientifically literate), and materialism is a Fourth Epoch phenomenon. In the Fifth Epoch, scientific literacy will be like learning to read, write, and do arithmetic: something that all children learn (like they do here). But in the Fifth Epoch, materialism will no longer be in vogue, just like we no longer have racist ideology that justifies slavery. Children will have their mystical awareness developed from a young age, and that has nothing whatsoever to do with organized religion, which is a form of brainwashing that creates a false in-group consciousness and is diametrically opposed to the primary message of all spiritual masters. Today, many have been seduced by science, in what is called scientism, which is the worship of science’s methods, believing them to be the only true path to knowledge, instead of a handy tool with its own inherent limitations. That is as delusionary as thinking that writing is the only true form of communication (or speaking, or sign language, or non-verbal body language). But materialism is the Fourth Epoch’s religion. The greatest scientists were all keenly aware of the limits of science and how little we know, and had an awareness that verged on the mystical. I was a scientist-in-training from the cradle and had my mystical awakening when I was 16, with dramatic experiences that undeniably showed how false a religion materialism was. All of my fellow travelers with my greatest respect had similar experiences. Dennis, for as indisputably great a man as he is, never quite shook the peasant religion that he was raised with, which is a Third Epoch phenomenon. The reason why you see people such as Dennis believing that the Bible is the one and only word of God is that the Fourth Epoch is young and has been unevenly spread. The West received its primary benefits, but my grandfather lived in a sod hut as a child. Dennis grew up as a migrant farmworker and my father grew up on a farm, too, as did Mr. Professor. I am really the first member of my paternal line who grew up in the Fourth Epoch, and even I had to play farmhand in our backyard, as my father could not quite shake his agrarian roots. The Third Epoch lasted for ten thousand years before the Fourth Epoch began, and the Fourth Epoch is only a few centuries old. There are no purely Second or Third Epoch societies left on Earth, as they have all been influenced by subsequent Epochs, and the Fourth Epoch’s Demographic Transition has been trickling into peasant societies. Given a few more centuries and a global spread, organized religion as we know it would fade to oblivion, as slavery has. But materialism is just another religion, and it has its own popes, Inquisitions, and the like. But humanity cannot survive much longer using the Fourth Epoch’s energy sources. We are either going to have World War III over the dwindling energy sources of the Fourth Epoch, or environmental calamities greater than those already inflicted by humanity will take down global civilization, or some grim combination of them, as the few survivors, if any, live in some kind of Mad Max world. I have good news for the few willing and able to understand: the Fifth Epoch is already here, in many ways. The technologies for it are likely older than I am. Most of what my friend was shown was likely produced by reverse-engineering captured ET craft, and my understanding on the subject is close to Ed Mitchell’s. Understanding that materialism is only another religion, that technologies exist on the planet that make the Fifth Epoch feasible, and that we are far from alone in the universe blows the Fourth Epoch’s dominant ideologies out of the water, and that is why there has been such concerted organized suppression of all of it. And that is all a far cry from conspiracism, which I regard as a Third Epoch political philosophy (as structuralism is a Fourth Epoch philosophy), but it is convenient for those in the Fourth Epoch’s thrall to label and dismiss. There are also hints in relatively mainstream dynamics of the coming Epoch. Channeling is one of them. The so-called New Age has taken baby steps toward the Fifth Epoch, but it drags along its scarcity-based baggage, often to the extent that it has become a grotesque parody. Just as societies became more humane with each Epoch, in history’s richest and most powerful nation, on the so-called leading edge of technology - high tech and artificial intelligence (a pal sent me this article this weekend) - a movement emerged called the Free Software Movement, which makes and gives away software, using communal principles. It is another baby step toward the Fifth Epoch, although its founder is firmly stuck in the Fourth, dismissing FE as contrary to the “laws of physics” and calling tales of organized suppression a “conspiracy theory.” He is in good company (most of the “smart” people in the Fourth Epoch are mired in the twin religions of materialism and structuralism), but it is just another example of how people in one Epoch, even those who do things that point at the next, really cannot imagine it. Maybe a few from the Free Software Movement or New Age (or political “progressives”) will comprehend my message, but it will only be a few. I seek the vanishingly few people who will be able to imagine the next Epoch before it arrives, and I have developed my list for what they will have in common, which came from decades of experience and thousands of encounters. Time to begin my busy week. Best, Wade

Hi: This post will be on Peak Oil. Energy-resource-depletion dynamics are nothing new. Humanity had experienced Peak Megafauna, Peak Wood, and Peak Soils before a desperate England turned to coal. Heck, the Spaniards had Peak People as they raped and plundered the Western Hemisphere, having it nearly alone to themselves for a century. Oil formation theory is well established and has been used to find the oil deposits that humanity mines and burns with such abandon. The shores of the Tethys Ocean are where the majority of Earth’s oil deposits were created. The vast majority of oil seeps back out, and only fortuitous geological situations make oil then trap it, so that oil companies can later come along and drill it. When the USA’s first commercial oil well was drilled in 1859, the oil industry was off and running. It was soon taken over by an ingeniously ruthless John D. Rockefeller, who became Earth’s richest human in the process. The Rockefellers’ influence has usually been malign. We ran into them a number of times and they helped wipe us out. But Rockefeller built his empire by controlling refining, not exploration and drilling. When people began drilling East Texas oil a century ago, it was the peak of easy oil. The coveted oil is light and “sweet” which means that sulfur content is low and the oil is easily refined into gasoline (and does not need expensive and energy-intensive coker units, for instance). Also, East Texas oil was relatively close to the surface, and hence, easier to drill and extract. The concept of Energy Return on Energy Invested applies, and is called EROI. That East Texas oil of nearly a century ago had an EROI of more than 100-to-1, meaning that for every unit of energy invested, more than 100 units were extracted for use. Only about a third of all oil (called conventional oil) is extractable from an oil field. The reason is that the oil just does not sit in a pool, but is impregnated into the rock. Only the first third is easily extractable, and the rest is the field’s dregs. The oil well’s EROI falls to one for that remainder, and there is no longer any point in mining that oil. All of Earth’s easy oil is gone, and the last relatively easy oil of note sits in today’s Middle East, which is the only reason why the USA has had a military presence there ever since the Soviet Union collapsed. No other proffered reason survives the barest scrutiny. Middle East oil is history’s greatest material prize. Oil provides 90% of humanity’s fuel used in transportation. Liquid fuels are highly superior to gaseous (natural gas) or solid (coal) fuels, with its energy density and ease of handling. When the British Navy converted from coal to oil in 1911, the Middle East’s fate was sealed. The West has yet to stop meddling in and invading the region, lying all the way (although even prominent right wingers admit why the USA invaded), and has no plans to leave anytime soon, although the Empire is in steep decline today, as all empires eventually collapse, being as fundamentally evil and unsustainable as they all are/were. The Peak Oil idea was first proposed by M. King Hubbert, a petroleum geologist who worked for Shell Oil in Texas. Peak Oil refers to the phenomenon in which oilfield production peaks when about half of its recoverable oil is extracted. There is often a brief plateau of production when the peak is reached, and then comes a steady slide to the end, as the oil well’s EROI declines toward one and production ceases. Of course, there is a fledgling industry to suck the dregs out of those abandoned oil fields with new technological tricks, which may increase their ultimate recovery by a little. There is virtually no debate in scientific circles on these issues: Oil was formed by specific geological processes acting on the remains of marine organisms that were accumulated during anoxic events; The high-quality oil sits in well-known deposits (there have been no significant discoveries since the 1970s), and when about a third of the oil is mined, it is no longer energetically worth it to mine the rest; All of Earth’s easy oil has been discovered and mined, and what remains are the dregs of Earth’s hydrocarbon deposits. What made Hubbert famous was that in the 1950s he assessed the state of oilfield discovery and production and predicted that the USA would reach Peak Oil in 1970, which it did. The USA has been mining the dregs of its hydrocarbon deposits ever since. In 1974, during the USA’s first oil crisis, Hubbert also predicted that global oil production would peak in 1995. It was reached in 2006, so he was a little off in his timing, but the idea is unassailable. You can find reporting that world oil production keeps increasing, but that is misleading, as it includes non-conventional oil (AKA “the dregs”), which has a far lower EROI than conventional oil. In 1990, the global EROI for oil and gas was 30, it fell to less than 20 in 2014, and will fall below 10 in the 2020s, which is about the lowest EROI that can run a civilization. Take the now-ended fracking boom in the USA. Fracking for oil is an environmentally catastrophic dregs-sucking operation with an EROI of about five. The Canadian Tar Sands that fueled another boom that has ended for now has an EROI of about three for producing “oil.” It is an even greater environmentally catastrophic method, which turns the lands into something resembling Mordor. When you see graphs that the USA’s production increased by five million barrels per day from its nadir in 2008, as it has doubled, those are highly misleading statistics for dismissing the Peak Oil argument, for a few reasons. One reason is the production increase is not an increase in conventional oil, which is what Hubbert was referring to. It is the dregs, called tight oil, which is responsible for that increase, which is why North Dakota became a short-lived boom state in recent years, which has already turned into a bust. Another reason is that at an EROI of five or less, that five million barrel-per-day increase is misleading. A million barrels should be deducted from that gross production, to come up with net production, as it was burned to extract those five million barrels. As EROI keeps declining as the dregs are increasingly sucked, the net barrels will decline as a proportion, and Peak Oil for conventional oil has already been reached globally. To be fair to Hubbert, he did not project the doom that today’s Peak Oilers, led by Richard Heinberg, predict. Hubbert thought that once Peak Oil was reached, nuclear energy would supplant oil as civilization’s primary energy source. That has not worked out so well, and is partly responsible for the drums of austerity and doom that Heinberg and friends beat endlessly. Deepwater drilling in the oceans is another high-risk, low-EROI operation, going after those dregs. We are nearing Peak Gas (and may have already reached it), Peak Coal, and even Peak Uranium. After this century, if we do not go to FE or something similar, the only energy resources left of note (wind and solar are way overblown as solutions, which Brian O eventually realized), will be coal, that low-EROI conventional “oil,” and stuff like the tar sands, as we will have a global EROI of four or so, if civilization can even function at those levels. Of course, if we go that route, there will be 600 PPM carbon dioxide in the atmosphere or so, which will rapidly melt the ice sheets in Antarctica and Greenland, displacing hundreds of millions of people. You don’t want to live long enough to see that show, much less star in it. All that the fracking and tar sands booms did was put off the grim day of reckoning by a few years. Conventional oil will be completely depleted in this century at current rates of extraction. What Heinberg and friends got right, however, was that the energy crisis begins when Peak Oil is reached and supply and demand curves intersect and prices spike, not when the last barrel of oil is mined. Back in 2003, when I first encountered Heinberg and the Peak Oilers, he called the West’s strategy “Plan War,” in that industrial nations would simply invade and steal the oil from the world’s poor nations that sit on that oil, and today’s genocidal mayhem in the Middle East, led by the USA, is Plan War playing out. We are toying with having World War III over the world’s dwindling oil deposits before environmental calamities such as Global Warming clear Earth of billions of “excess eaters,” in the parlance of those in the milieu. Choose your poison. Of course, the Fox News School of Oil Exploration and Global Warming denies that any of the above will impact humanity at all, or at least white humanity, with their “school” taught by blowhards such as Rush Limbaugh. They parade well-funded Global Warming deniers on their shows, who sold their souls to the hydrocarbon lobby, and declining EROI is not even a concept to them. I’ll wrap up these Global Warming and Peak Oil posts soon, and discuss their relevance to scientific literacy and my work. Best, Wade

Hi: This will be a post on oil formation. First, a warning: I am not a petroleum geologist. But I began studying Peak Oil and oil formation theory back in 2003, and while studying for my big essay, many other pieces fell into place as I studied the history of life on Earth. People have argued that petroleum geologists are either dupes or part of a conspiracy, but I don’t see it. With the rise of other sciences, the story of oil formation only gets more robust. Those same anoxic events that often signaled mass extinctions formed the oil deposits. Paleologists generally do not work for oil companies. While petroleum geology is a prominent subspecialty of geology, it is not the only one, and other developing sciences and tools have independently validated oil formation hypotheses. I’ll cover some of them. Plate tectonic theory began development in the 1960s, and Wegener’s hypothesis of moving continents was vindicated, although he did not understand the mechanism. At the beginning of my history of life on Earth chapters, I present world maps, such as here or here. The rise of paleomagnetism studies has provided a great deal of the evidence of continental movements in the eon of complex life, but far from the only evidence. The evidence on the seafloor is easily seen, and plate movements can be measured today, as they happen. Fossil studies have also contributed, as scientists can reconstruct biomes from the fossil and paleomagnetic evidence, combined with radioactive dating techniques and other evidence. The rise in mass spectrometers and their increasing sophistication has allowed scientists to make many inquiries which were not feasible or possible in earlier times. That data has been used in many ways over recent generations, and not just for radioactive dating, but examining isotope ratios to tell when whales began moving into marine environments, for instance. Mass spectrometers have determined that hydrocarbon deposits are all enriched in carbon-12, which is a signature of life. Not only is carbon-12 enrichment a signature of life, with the rise of molecular biology, scientists have been able to determine, step-by-step, how the remains of marine organisms were transformed into oil. If you review the world maps in my big essay, you can see the births and deaths of the oceans that produced most of Earth’s oil deposits, especially the Tethys. The squeezing of those oceans subducted those ancient anoxic shores and formed the deep oil deposits in today’s Middle East. Before the rise of plate tectonics, molecular biology, ubiquitous mass spectrometers, and the like, some Stalinist scientists revived the idea that oil was not formed via geological processes working on marine sediments, but was due to some primordial processes in Earth’s mantle. In the West, respected scientist Thomas Gold championed the hypothesis, but with the rise of those sciences and techniques, the abiogenic hypothesis (meaning that life was not involved in oil formation) has fallen by the wayside, and for good reason. Einstein wrote the forward to Hapgood’s pole-shift book, too, before the rise of plate tectonics, and Einstein would be the first today to disavow Hapgood’s pole-shift hypothesis. With a process called thermal depolymerization, the multi-million-year processes that geologists think made the oil deposits has been shortened to mere hours. For those who refute the idea that geological processes can turn marine sediments into oil (Stalinist scientists, for instance), thermal depolymerization supports a powerful counterargument. Hypotheses come and go. That is the process of science. Most new hypotheses receive harsh receptions from orthodoxy, which is just partly how science works, and it is often unfair. I know of entire bodies of theory, developed from amazing and “impossible” tools that orthodoxy has ignored for nearly a century, and I know that technologies exist on Earth today that turn the physics textbooks into doorstops. I am intimately familiar with the failings of orthodox science, and when powerful vested interests get involved, mainstream science can be misdirected or come to a screeching halt. I make no bones about that. But those dynamics and techniques work in specific ways on specific targets. With the national security state, it is easy to put the kibosh on UFO information and fools applying for patents for free energy devices, cover-up the murder of the head of state, and the like, but private interests run the show, not the world’s governments. Their “private” methods are more effective than the governmental ones, and making a free energy inventor an offer that he can’t refuse is one of their specialties. But those strategies only work when the phenomena are at the margins of perception, when the targets for neutralization are relatively few, and when the issue is important enough to warrant a huge effort. The UFO/ET and exotic technology cover-ups are conjoined, and Ed Mitchell’s view of the UFO/ET cover-up is very close to mine. Brian’s life was shortened due to his snooping into the UFO issue, and Brian’s life was probably the epitome of the intersection of the UFO/ET and FE issues. If you try to peddle high-MPG carburetors, the oil interests will get involved, up to and including the Rockefellers, and even they treat the sitting American president as stooge. We encountered them more than once on our journey, or more accurately, they encountered us. But they are not at the top. Arab sheiks also have an interest in foiling FE attempts, but they are not at the top, either, or anywhere near it. The ploys by those at the top are highly sophisticated and subtle and rarely need to get overtly violent. But none of that seems to have much relationship with oil formation or Peak Oil hypotheses. There are thousands of scientists traipsing across the globe, in various disciplines, gathering data, studying it, and forming their hypotheses. I have yet to hear of a fossil bed being classified, mass spectrometers being outlawed, or scientific papers on those issues being put under the national security kibosh. Of course, armchair conspiracists (or “whistleblowers” with little credibility – Ralph is an example of a credible one) spin wild yarns with almost no evidence, and as Ed Mitchell said about UFOs, a lot of that conspiratorial hyperventilating and the attendant circus is often part of a disinformation effort, to muddy the waters and portray all alternatives to the orthodox view as tin-foil-hat stuff. And the masses oblige them, in their paranoid, tabloid-reading, scientifically illiterate fervor. To be scientifically literate on oil formation hypotheses does not mean uncritically accepting any of them, but means that the observer is familiar with the evidence, the hypotheses, the state of debate (or lack thereof), and so on. Only when you have some familiarity with the orthodox hypotheses and evidence can you credibly digest the alternative hypotheses, but I have found that almost none of the prominent challengers have any, but they regurgitate lists of talking points provided by dubious sources. Has anybody noticed that for every mass killing in the USA (which happens with numbing regularity as the American middle class crumbles), that the Internet is filled with “false flag” “analyses” within hours of the events? There is an entire conspiracist cottage industry that floats “false flag” “evidence” for any and all mass killings, often before there are even any suspects. That is not how credible investigations are performed, and I am very familiar with non-credible ones. To this day, I am contacted regarding the so-called faked Moon Landings, as scientifically illiterate people with minimal familiarity with the evidence regurgitate “evidence” that does not add up to anything. Amongst the scientifically illiterate, those “hypotheses” will never die, just as there is still a Flat Earth Society, and it is not a parody. The so-called “Climategate” was a great deal of ado about nothing, in which conspiracists and their enablers tried to make a mountain out of a molehill. Anything of real importance on keeping the lid on anything that could be disruptive to the world’s power structure is going to be highly secure, not something that university professors are in on. Trying to portray the “Climategate” emails as some sort of scientific conspiracy only demonstrates the scientific illiteracy and political-economic naïveté of the accusers. You can still find interested-conflicted academics and scientists who advocate the abiogenic oil hypothesis, as they try to raise money for drilling deeply into Earth’s crust. The only abiogenic hypothesis “success” that I ever heard of was a hole drilled miles deep that yielded 80 barrels or so of oil, which was likely the drilling mud. The EROI of such oil is going to be abysmal, and EROI is coming in future posts. The thought that drilling into Earth’s mantle for oil is going to solve humanity’s energy problems is ridiculous, for a number of reasons. Best, Wade

Hi: The start of my busy day got delayed, so here comes a little post. Of all the unproductive paths to FE, the one that I see advocated constantly is enlisting the masses to help manifest FE, which I call Level 10. Been there, done that, several times. One of the most important lessons of my journey is that masses have never helped any Epochal Event happen. They were always initiated by a relative or literal handful of people, and it will be no different this time. The masses see no further than the limits of their immediate self-interest, as they live in scarcity and fear. It has ever been this way. When the masses have been engaged in the FE pursuit, they all turned into Orcs lusting after the One Ring, as their egos were overcome by the immensity of the issue, FE aspirants announce that they are the Messiah, and the rest of that tawdry circus. The masses have never even imagined the next Epoch until it happened, and the fear and denial that are constantly aimed at the idea of FE are normal. Liberating women and slaves, or the Demographic Transition, were effects of industrialization, not causes, but “progressives” get all wrapped up in social causes that really are meaningless in the big picture, as all they did was try to more equitably divvy up humanity’s scarce economic pie, not make it bigger. If you had talked about liberating women and slaves in 1720 in England, the heart of the Industrial Revolution, you would have been looked at as if you were insane. Only when machines began replacing people did the “liberation” mentality begin to rise, and in Europe, the first glimmers of it really began with the spread of the watermill during the Medieval Warm Period and the reintroduction of the Classic Greek teachings. People who try to enlist the masses for Epochal change are deluded and hacking at branches at best, and usually are trying to fill their social needs. Acknowledging the situation is very different from judging it, and the sooner that would-be FE activists can relinquish their social consciousness, the better. Sociality is pre-sentient, and will be no help at all for manifesting the biggest event in the human journey, as it is all about in-groups and out-groups. Truly sentient beings coming together in a unity of purpose, seeing all of humanity as its in-group, however, is a horse of a different color, which is what my effort is attempting to initiate, not a social movement. I only need 5,000 of those needles in haystacks for my plan to work, which is less than one-in-a-million on Earth. I am not really asking for much, to manifest the biggest event in the human journey, when humanity becomes a Type 1 civilization. Best, Wade

Hi: Before I begin my busy day, I want to make a post on what I touched on yesterday, with the Western Antarctica ice sheet, before I get back to Peak Oil. Scientific literacy does not mean blindly accepting the pronouncements of any scientific authority, but means understanding the evidence, the hypotheses, the theories, how the evidence was amassed, and one of the most important aspects of scientific literacy is understanding when the scientific process has been corrupted by vested interests and why. As Bucky Fuller noted, scientists can be rather naïve about that part. It is kind of like believing that the American plutocracy is some kind of democracy (or that we have a free press), and that America’s politicians are anything more than disposable puppets, which Fuller also noted. It is kind of bizarre that conspiracists call Global Warming a hoax and conspiracy, when its effects are easily noticeable. Not only are they easily noticeable, but the prevailing hypotheses predict them, and the hypotheses are partly formed from studying the hot and cold periods in Earth’s past, when forests or ice were at the poles. It really is not all that hard to understand the basics of climate change, and the recent model that recreated the prior relatively ice-free period on Earth is important to understand. Take away the “girdle” of floating ice, and the ice sheets become much more vulnerable to disintegration. This latest model doubles the maximum sea level rise formerly predicted by the IPCC, which Global Warming “skeptics” decry as an alarmist organization, and conspiracist “skeptics” call the IPCC part of some global conspiracy. Conspiracies don’t work like that, in my experience, and I have some. The leading Republican candidates for the American presidency dismiss global warming as a “hoax,” etc., as they echo Professor Limbaugh at the Fox News School of Climate Science. Ted Cruz literally made his Global Warming denial statements at a Koch brothers’ event, who are infamous for funding right-wing think tanks such as The Heritage Foundation and The Heartland Institute, the kind that Brian O’Leary’s former colleague sold his soul to work for. Somehow, the conspiracists give the very obvious manipulations of the Koch brothers and friends a free pass. Those benevolent billionaires. It can be very educational to read Global Warming denier works. The scientifically illiterate try to dismiss carbon dioxide’s role in warming Earth’s atmosphere, which has zero credibility with anybody who is scientifically literate. I have seen so-called scientists dismiss both the temperature and carbon dioxide data, as they state that it was collected near cities and other “heat islands” or sources of carbon dioxide, such as the Mauna Loa Observatory readings. I have, of course, never seen one of those naysayers ever do any of the work to demonstrate that the Mauna Loa data is faulty, or is not reproduced by other gathering sites around Earth. In fact, when there has been some contamination of the data from the active volcano on Hawaii’s Big Island, the Mauna Loa scientists then adjust out the contamination. The more scientifically literate deniers seize on regional and oscillating data, as they try to muddy the waters, but local variation is largely meaningless (glaciers are retreating worldwide, not just the glacier that I witnessed receding), and oscillating data is normal. A great deal of effort by climate scientists has been devoted to teasing the signal from the noise. You won’t find Global Warming deniers dealing with that evidence at all, as they launch their empty theories. If you follow their work much, they nearly invariably conclude their efforts by stating the immense economic cost of reducing carbon emissions, and state that with the immense cost of reducing carbon emissions, the climate change data is not robust enough to warrant doing anything, so they finish by stating that business as usual is the best answer for now, and that more study is needed. Exxon could not have said it any better. This kind of “do nothing” response to human-induced environmental change has rich precedence, going back millennia, as ancient civilizations wiped themselves out. The “business as usual” voices could be heard even back then. As George Carlin said, inertia is the most powerful force in the universe. Those Global Warming deniers encourage people to bury their heads in the sand, create a seeming debate where one really does not exist, and do their best, helped out by Fox News and friends (the most vociferous of whom are directly on the payroll of the hydrocarbon lobby), to lull the masses back to sleep. And I am not making up some kind of straw man argument. One of my closest friends from college, who can’t get enough of Fox News and lionized the Bush regime, like many business school graduates, just this past month informed me that there is no evidence of manmade climate change. He has also parroted another Fox News talking point, which is that there is so much oil in the ground that we can never run out of it. So, epic increases in carbon dioxide levels will have no impact on global climate, and there is so much in the ground that we can burn it with abandon, and taking the carbon dioxide PPM to 1,000 is just fine. In fact, there are “scientists” in the pay of the hydrocarbon lobby who don’t deny that our hydrocarbon age is pumping unprecedented amounts carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, but they then perform experiments to show how great that is for growing plants faster (a “scientist” in Arizona has done just that), while ignoring the calamitous effects, such as acidifying the oceans, which is already happening. I was even horrified to find a free energy magazine doing that, of all publications, as it went off the deep end after its founder was murdered. 100 million people live within three feet of sea level today, and a six-foot sea level rise will displace 13 million Americans, and that level is about what the latest study states is quite possible in this century. The USA is history’s richest nation, and those 13 million may be able to move without too much travail, but I would not want to live to see it. Poor nations such as Bangladesh will be affected far worse, and as one of Earth’s poorest nations, they won’t really have anywhere to go. More than a billion people live within 80 feet of sea level, but a mere six-foot rise will mean hundreds of millions of refugees. Again, these projections are not being made by wild-eyed conspiracists, but come from the state-of-the-art models, buttressed by data that gets more alarming each year. A ten-foot rise in this century is by no means an outrageous prediction, especially when the recent model doubled the previous one. With epic rises in carbon dioxide, we are in uncharted territory, as far as how quickly the changes could come. That is just the sea level change. Vast changes to Earth’s arable land will also happen, accompanied by epic droughts and floods, which will precipitate immense crop failures. But the smart money thinks that humanity will have World War III over the world’s dwindling oil supplies, centered on the Middle East, obviously, before an environmental calamity does us in. Choose your poison. Of course, the answer to all of those scenarios has been on Earth longer than I have been alive, and has been studiously ignored by all factions, surreally. Best, Wade

Hi: I was just talking with a pal yesterday about some of this, and I was recently asked about “suicidal” behavior in the free energy pursuit. If a person has woken up, and by that, I mean awoken from their in-group conceits, they have already done the hardest work. Waking up is the hard part. Everything after that is relatively easy. But people don’t really awaken if their hearts are not in the right place, and there aren’t many of those to start with. Waking up like that is the greatest step on the path to true sentience, getting beyond our herd conditioning. For instance, seeing Godzilla as some kind of “bad guy” is just another in-group delusion, making him into an out-group. The GCs are just the masters of a game that nearly all humans play. You can get into trouble with Godzilla if you are not careful, and I have long written on the unproductive paths in the free energy quest, and don’t need to belabor them. Some are “merely” life-wasting, some are life-risking, and some are suicidal. If you want to try to get killed, go demo an FE machine in a public venue, with nothing protecting you but your merry little band of supporters. Almost nobody ever gets to that stage, for various reasons, so that risk is rather remote for FE aspirants. But the greatest threats that all FE aspirant face are their own foibles and those of their social circles and associates, not the agents of organized suppression. Dennis finally admitted it to me that last time that I saw him, and I learned that lesson the hard way in the 1980s. Best, Wade

Hi: Now for a series of posts on Peak Oil. The first fossil fuel of note is coal, not oil, not only in being used, but most of the world’s coal deposits were formed before most of the world’s oil deposits were, and the reasons and consequences are fascinating. The world’s oil deposits began forming with the rise of complex life, so deposits were formed going back to the Ediacaran Period, but most was formed during the reign of dinosaurs. Coal’s horizon of formation was far earlier, beginning when the world’s first forests formed. The Devonian Period was the Cambrian Explosion for plants. Just as the Cambrian Period is when all animal body plans were set, the basics of plants and trees were set in the Devonian, with roots, leaves, bark, seeds, and wood. The only significant change since the Devonian was hundreds of millions of years later when some plants decided to use animals rather than protect against them, and flowering plants were born. Lignin was the secret for making vascular plants, which first appeared about 410 million years ago, and eventually wood. Lignin is a polymer, which gives it strength far beyond cellulose, which forms the cell walls of plants. Without lignin, plants would have never evolved beyond mosses. Lignin was the critical ingredient in forming land-based ecosystems, which includes the rise of that seemingly intelligent ape. However, nothing on Earth learned how to digest lignin until a fungus did about 290 million years ago, and the basics of lignin digestion have not changed since. So, trees did not rot for nearly 100 million years, until that lignin-digesting fungus came along. That 100-million-year period is when most of the world’s coal deposits formed, and especially in the aptly named Carboniferous Period, when rainforests abounded and trees died and fell in swamps, never decayed, and piled up and were subducted by the formation of a supercontinent called Pangaea today. In my recent post on the carbon cycle and how carbon dioxide levels have seesawed over the eons, I mentioned carbon production and carbon burial as the ends of the seesaw, and carbon never got buried as quickly as those non-rotting trees did. The effect of those trees getting buried like that (and forming most of Earth’s coal deposits) was the highest oxygen levels in the eon of complex life, and maybe the highest in Earth’s history. Although there is plenty of debate today on the issue, few scientists dispute the idea that those skyrocketing oxygen levels led to gigantic animals, and not only those gigantic dragonflies, but the largest freshwater fish ever, and gigantic millipedes and other arthropods. High oxygen and gigantism has been demonstrated in sea animals today. But for us humans, the biggest impact of those high oxygen times was all of those buried trees that formed most of Earth’s coal deposits, which humanity is burning with such abandon today. My Peak Oil posts are coming soon, but Peak Coal is not far behind Peak Oil, and might be reached in my lifetime. Best, Wade

Hi: As a brief addendum to the Global Warming debate, a pal in another forum wrote that mentioning Cato Institute’s name was all that I needed to do, and I replied with: To your Cato Institute, “nuff said,” they are just one of an army like them: the Heritage Foundation, the Heartland Institute, ad infinitum, and Professors Limbaugh and Coulter at the Fox News School of Climate Science cannot get enough of it. I encountered my first “AstroTurf” organization when I became Dennis’s partner, as they shamelessly promoted nuclear energy. The nuclear establishment literally used a death camp Nazi to promote nuclear energy in the 1950s, to write a children’s book on the wonders of nuclear energy, which also became a Disney show. You can’t make this stuff up. Unfortunately, the so-called “environmental” organizations can be as deceptive. I studied Elizabeth Whelan’s work, and her chutzpa was astounding, as she was openly on the agribusiness and chemical polluter payroll, attacking anybody who disputed the “all chemicals are great” philosophy that she spouted, while calling their motivation into question, even Ralph Nader’s. But those people excel at chutzpa. When she became bedfellows with Steve Milloy it was surreal, as Whelan’s only “legitimate” claim to fame was taking on smoking, while Milloy was on the tobacco company payroll to discredit the second-hand smoke evidence, even coining the term “Junk Science” to attack it. They are all heading to a very fitting place when their days on Earth are done. Best, Wade