Sentient Times Aug/Sept 2004

Our Clean-Energy Birthright

By Jeane Manning

An emerging grassroots effort intends to see oil, coal and nuclear power gradually yet seriously replaced by clean sources—even perhaps from energy found in the primordial sea of energy that supports every atom in the cosmos. Called “zero-point energy” by physicists because it causes atoms to jiggle even at frozen-solid zero degrees Kelvin, this invisible source is only one of many alternatives explored by the New Energy Movement (NEM). The NEM seeks to involve every woman, man or child who cares about clean air, jobs, sustainable communities and a more enlightened civilization.

Real-life stories of recent “new energy” efforts echo a certain classic novel set in our region. In the fictional story, a feisty, bright student from northern California invents a do-it-yourself solar cell so anyone can get electricity from sunlight. In Wash-ington DC to receive an award, she boldly tells the Department of Energy that her device could benefit everybody but was being “treated as a terrible threat by the utilities and the oil industry.” She then stomps back to the Pacific to help folks build free-energy solar devices.

If you read Ernest Callenbach’s 1981 novel Ecotopia Emerging, you remember the above heroine—Lou Swift, inventor of Swift Cells. Callenbach’s fictional world is outdated, but his depiction of the politics of energy, the subtle implacable opposition to revolutionary people-empowering inventions, stands true in the 21st century.

The human spirit won’t be quenched, however. The New Energy Movement is emerging from the same Pacific Northwest where Callenbach’s characters plotted energy independence. The first NEM gather-ing will be in Portland, Oregon, September 25-26 (NewEnergyMovement.org)...........

This non-profit organization was born in northern California last year when space scientist and author Brian O’Leary, PhD, met with mechanical engineer and longtime social activist Alden Bryant of Berkeley.

Bryant, who US Representative Ronald Dellums once introduced as the “number one ecologist in the US,” had played a role in starting the United Nations Climate Change Treaty process. He saw that O’Leary’s book, Reinheriting the Earth, resonated with his own Earth Regeneration Society in seeking to stabilize climate and provide jobs by mineralizing soils, planting trees, and switching to nonpolluting energy technologies.

Reinheriting the Earth calls for a new Apollo program—an all-out effort to reverse human-caused pollution. Brian O’Leary is a former Apollo scientist/astronaut whose passions now include consciousness research and new-paradigm science as well as down-to-earth hemp production.

O’Leary and Bryant both testified at California Energy Commission hearings, informing commissioners about the unsung range of revolutionary energy alternatives. Bryant opened doors at the UN and O’Leary spoke to officials there as well as to communities in Italy, South Africa and South America through radio interviews and a public speaking tour. Branches of the NEM are now growing on several continents, and it has a diverse board of directors.

The group’s manifesto says the single best way for humankind to solve some of our largest global problems is to transform the way we generate and use energy—creating and using power that is clean, quiet, decentralized and low-cost as well as reliable.

The NEM website points to various nonpolluting energy inventions in existence. Their revolutionary approaches tap into a source of energy in water, background heat and/or the background called zero-point energy. Other frontier scientists have other names for that energy ranging from “aether” to “orgone.” They say the so-called missing “dark matter” in the universe is not material at all, but is the ubiquitous power that mathematicians swept under the rug when they “renormalized” equations early in the 20th century.

I’ve seen working devices—in crude prototype form—that tap into that ever-present energy. The revolutionary inventions, and the non-mechanistic science beginning to explain them, are completely different from ancient attempts at mechanical perpetual-motion machines which are indeed impossible. However, most academics shun the new develop-ments, without even investigating them, for fear of being ostracized from funding or ridiculed by peers.

Some physicists whose employers get government grants for hot-fusion are particularly hostile to the new and non-conventional inventions. Hot nuclear fusion experiments, which release some radio-activity (though nothing in comparison to nuclear fission), have taken millions of dollars and some decades to prove very little.

The problem, according to engineers such as William Baumgartner, is that 20th-century technologies do things the wrong way. The fuel-burning electric power industry and the internal-combustion engine are based on actions that nature uses to destroy its wastes—fire and explosions. Centrifugal movements, pressure, friction, noise, heat and messes, are signatures of such machines.

The solution, Baumgartner says, is to work with nature’s cleansing creative movements—inward-spiraling, cooling, frictionless and quiet suction. An Austrian genius, the late Viktor Schauberger, built generators that moved air or water in inwardly-spiraling vortexes. Energy accumulated in the center of a vortex and pulled the water away from the sides of “twister pipes,” moving it along faster than pushing would do.

Schauberger’s generators revitalized the air or water while putting out enough electrical power to run appliances. Baumgartner, who will be one of the panelists at the NEM conference, is learning how to build such beneficial machines along with his European colleagues.
The most radically different energy inventions aren’t yet ready for the marketplace; they need teams of engineers and specialists to transform rudimentary devices into reliable products for mass manufacture. That step is beyond the budgets of independent scientists, but certainly much cheaper than building nuclear power plants, a new central power grid, or hydrogen tankers and pipelines. Some scientists say the small-is-beautiful electrical generators could be brought to hardware-store shelves for mere millions, compared to the billions of dollars proposed for hydrogen developments. The lower cost also compares to the billions of taxpayer dollars spent on oil wars, and their outrageous toll on humankind.

NEM directors suggest that while industry transitions to manufacturing truly new energy technologies, widespread use of energy-efficiency measures could give immediate relief from oil dependency. With solutions already invented for every energy need, there is no need for oil wars. All that is needed is the political will to develop those solutions into reliable energy-generating appliances.

However, NEM activists are quick to add that even the desired changeover to abundant environmentally-benign energy must be accompanied by a widespread increase in awareness. We must all realize our responsibility as caretakers of ecosystems. Transformative new science offers more than energy inventions; it illuminates the influence humans have on the interconnected web of life.

A scientist whose memory will be honored at the Portland conference, Eugene Mallove, PhD, defined New Energy as “… a class of clean and renewable sources of energy of practical use that has heretofore been unrecognized by mainstream science. By this definition, existing solar, wind, biofuels, tides, hot fusion, and most currently-envisioned hydrogen combustion/fuel cell infrastructures are not new energy. Innovative technologies that could significantly enhance the economics and environmental friendliness of a given source could be considered new energy (e.g. cheap, efficient solar collectors and advanced hydrogen technologies).”

The New Energy Movement opens its arms wider. Nearly anything that is proven to be able to replace dirty power with truly clean, quiet, low-cost, small-is-beautiful generators of energy is embraced by the NEM. Bring on the esoteric devices and bring on the revolutionary improvements to solar, wind, geothermal—whatever can compete with coal, oil and gas.

Is it time for a major paradigm shift? The late Dr. Mallove, educated in science at prestigious universities, appreciated the accomplishments of “modern official science,” but he also experienced many examples of paradigm-paralysis in the science establishment and “concluded that its organizations and journals are mired in obsolete science and technology paradigms that are holding back progress.” In Mallove’s magazine, Infinite Energy, he reported what he saw and experienced in independent laboratories such as the revolutionary pulsed-plasma energy generators of Dr. Paulo and Alexandra Correa in Canada which have more measurable output than input (www.aethero
metry.com). The Correas say that their devices tap into an invisible energy that is more like the “life force” recognized by healers than the “zero-point energy” model of other physicists.

Whatever the new science turns out to be, the realization that everything is formed out of and supported in every moment by a sea of invisible light is potentially transformative. The NEM discusses the spiritual, geopolitical, economic and everyday implications of new energy science. On an environmental and social level, new energy technology could indeed nourish an Ecotopia if used responsibly. Callenbach’s vision of a would-be utopia in the Pacific Northwest may be dated—with “free love” and 1970s issues—but his story about bioregional community-building speaks to today’s needs. Callenbach gave his heroine experiences that are similar to New Energy inventors’ human stories, he could have based Lou Swift’s drama on real present day events—laboratories trashed, people assaulted—that have traumatized inventors whom I’ve interviewed. Highly credible and well-educated people have been threatened and harassed after information leaked out about one or another revolutionary energy-generating device they invented.

The NEM doesn’t dwell on those suppressive antics of the opposition, but neither does it pretend that vested interests are never ruthless. The financial stakes are high for those in the trillion-dollar multinational energy sector. They have benefited from having geopolitical power by controlling scarce resources, but now energy apartheid could be swept away. Potential new power sources, such as water or the energy that physicists know as the zero-point quantum fluctuations of the vacuum of space, aren’t limited to Saudi Arabia or any one place on Earth.

Perhaps an ecotopia has a better chance of emerging now that a real-life citizens’ movement is supporting non-polluting decentralized low-cost energy break-throughs that empower people. The move-ment is in harmony with home-power traditions of the Pacific Northwest as well as the quest for enlightening knowledge by cultural creatives and the peace and justice aspirations of today’s global citizens.

The new-science part of the New Energy spectrum may be too far out for some who are thoroughly educated in the 20th-century paradigm, but the New Energy Movement organizers advocate not one, but a variety of approaches. The NEM organizers invite all who are interested to take part in the dialogue at the conference, where the focus will be on technology’s impact on climate, air and water quality, health, jobs, communities, peace, true national security, and individual empowerment.

Jeane Manning has a BA in Sociology from the University of Idaho and lives in British Columbia. A former newspaper editor, Jeane has researched the international new-energy scene for more than 20 years, and is a member of the board of the New Energy Movement. Jeane is author of The Coming Energy Revolution: The Search for Free Energy (Avery Publishing,1996), visit www.jeaneman
ning.com.Jeane will be speaking at the New Energy Movement’s public dialogue in Portland, Oregon, Sept. 25-26 (see sidebar).