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joke.

First of all, a very brilliant scientist,

David Pimentel, took the concept of net energy,

how much energy do you invest,

versus how much do you get in return,

and he concluded about a decade ago,

I guess,

that it takes more energy to make ethanol,

than you get from burning it,

which is absolute stupidity.

Because you drive the oil powered machines, et cetera,

you irrigate, you produce the fertilizers,

you're burning all that oil and natural gas to grow it.

Then you make steam,

which is more hydrocarbon energy,

you add more chemicals,

and you come up with ethanol,

which you can put in a car.

Now the Bush administration had annouced

a goal of having 15%

of all fuel in the United States made from ethanol,

I think, by the year 2015.

They forgot to tell you that that would take

all the arable land used

to grow corn to do it.

Canadian tar sands is an oil.

It is a very, very thick,

sticky, obnoxious substance,

that's mixed in with sand,

at levels two, three, four, five hundred feet

in layers beneath the soil, this is in Alberta.

And they literally stripmine

thousands of tons a day.

They put them in these huge oil powered

dumptrucks and drive them to a place where

they then wash the sand.

They take billions of gallons of freshwater

at which we're running out of everywhere,

and boil it buy burning natural gas.

There is not a possibility anywhere,

that Canadian tar sands production

will exceed maybe

three and a half million barrels a day.

The first thing that the uneducated mind

that's in denial says,

well, what about hydrogen.

Can we make electric cars?

And I have to bring them back to the fact

that there's 7 gallons of oil in every tire,

there are thousands of gallons of oil in every car,

in the plastics, the paints, the resins.

Everything. All of that's made by oil.

The oil that's used to manufacture the car,

and ship it around to heat the metals, et cetera.

There will never be 800 million

electric powered vehicles,

and electricity is not an energy source.

electricity is generated

by burning or using

some other kind of energy.

It's clear that electricity

is the key to industrial civilisation,

in that it powers our refrigeration,

it runs the water pumps,

that pump water out of the New York

subway system every day.

It allows us to communte electronically,

charge our cellphone batteries,

preserve food, run operating rooms,

et cetera.

The subject of alternative energies...

There is no such thing

as clean coal.

And there never ever will be.

Why? Carbon sequestration

is enormously expensive.

What it says, is essentially you capture the CO2

and any other greenhouse gases emitted,

in the burning of the coal, you exert

enormous amounts of energy to compress it,

then you move it over

enormously long distances,

and you pump it into some airtight chamber

in the ground, where

somebody will figure out with technology what to do

with the greenhouse gas in 10 or 15 000 years.

Nuclear process requires something

like 10 to 30 years of incubation

to get the permitting done,

all the regulations satisfied,

and the construction of nuclear powerplants is

one of the most energy intensive processes.

in the world.

The steel, the lead containment, the enrichment

of uranium is a horribly intensive process.

You just don't throw a rock of uranium in

and start making nuclear energy.

Can't do that.

The first and obvious problem

with tidal energy is

is that it has to be generated

or collected near coastline.

Salt water is extremely corrosive.

There's an enormous energy cost

in manufacturing the machines.

There are only two alternative energies, which can

really have an immediate impact, an immediate benefit.

Now, the problem with plans like

enormous wind farms in Texas, Oklahoma,

Colorado, ...

The fundamental law with electricity is

that it's drawn off right where it's used, first.

Yes, you can transmit electricity

over long distances, but

people don't think about the energy

that goes into transformers,

and how much copper's in power lines,

and all the maintenance that has to go that grid.

So, when you see

really ridiculous commercials that say,

we could have a solar array

they don't even think about the fact that

that electricity is gonna get used

in California before it goes any place else.

Just, uhm you know, if you saw this movie

and you didn't know who you were,

and you wanted, you were just curious

what your credentials are in terms of

understanding this information?

I have a bachelor's degree

in political science,

with honors from UCLA,

uhm, in 1973.

Graduate of the Los Angeles police academy,

valedictorian,

class of 1173.

Uhm, was sent to do DEA,

Narcotics Enforcement School,

by LAPD.

I have 30 years of experience as an

investigative journalist.

I've broken major schandals,

that have had national impact.

Of course, I got to know

many members of congress.

I've been trying to testify for a long time,

and actually,

I have never testified in congress.

I did at the request of the senate

select committee on intelligence,

submit written testimony.

But after they read the written testimony that

I was going to submit, I never got called to testify.

I've written two books,

one of which is in the Harvard

business school library.

Uhm, I've lectured at universities

all over the country,

and in many countries.

Uhm, people wonder how this guy with a

bachelor's degree from UCLA, came to know all this sh*t,

Well, this comes from thirty years

of learning how to scan mainstream media,

and read it.

A way of finding stories

from around the world,

that tell you all the things

that are really going on,

that are not played on the headlines,

but they're the kind of stories that

people who really make decisions

know how to look for.

Uhm, and then how to connect them-, how to place

the dots close enough so that they can be connected.

The soil is the place from which all plant matter

gets its nutrients.

And if you keep sucking the nutrients out,

the soil is useless.

For all of history, the way that the soil was

replenished, the nutrients were

returned in some measure to the soil,

was that plant matter was allowed to decay,

to compost, to restock the soil.

That's why crop rotation is so important.

You may have one crop of

celery, which will suck

certain chemicals out of the soil.

Another crop, wheat or something else,

may return those same chemicals to the soil,

so the soil maintains a balance.

It's kind of sad, because we as a species

have become so disconnected from the earth.

We don't have any real contact with the earth.

We don't have any sense of its functions, its feel,

its nature, its seasons, its timing.

First of all, the top soil

on which food is grown now,

is nothing more than a sponge,

unto which we pour chemicals,

that we get from oil and natural gas.

And without those chemicals, the soil has

been turned into a junkie, the soil is worthless.

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