Dennis Lee’s Unbelievable Journey – Part 4: The Greatest Attempt Ever Made to Bring Alternative Energy to the Marketplace

Dennis began to understand how the world really worked.

Dennis came close to dying in that final theft of his company on the East Coast, and he also came close to killing some people before he finally renounced violence as a solution. That regional dealer got into bed with mobsters. After Dennis’s company was stolen, the mobsters pulled off a scam of selling dealerships and took in more than $1 million before they folded the operation and disappeared. That dealer likely got cement shoes from his new gangster buddies. They blew apart a billion-dollar deal and the greatest opportunity to reduce American energy consumption that there ever was, to steal less than $2 million. That kind of situation spurred Brian O’Leary to observe that the enemy was us. Conspiracists get all in a lather about the global elite, but they are not the root of our problems: we are, but almost nobody wants to admit it. Psychopaths thrive in an environment like this. It is convenient to blame elites for our problems, and it deflects responsibility from our own contribution to the state of affairs. It has the virtue of allowing us to avoid the introspection required to improve our behavior.

With his company stolen once again, Dennis took his family home to Yakima for Christmas, 1983. His son soon died of crib death. There was really nothing to go back to on the East Coast, and Dennis began seeing full-page ads by the electric companies that encouraged conservation. It was because of the disaster known as “Whoops,” which was the biggest municipal bond default in American history to that time. Now is when I begin to come into the picture. I heard about Whoops every night in early 1982 when I lived with my grandparents in Seattle after college graduation. It was the leading story on the local TV news every night. It was a boondoggle over an ill-advised plan to build five nuclear power plants, and only one was completed.

Until Whoops, Washington State had the lowest electric bills on Earth, at one penny per kilowatt-hour, because of all of the hydroelectric projects. But in the wake of Whoops, electricity had already tripled in price and was projected to go much higher. Dennis’s heat pump saved about 70% over fossil fuel heating, and in an all-electric state, it would save over 80%. As I have written, air-to-air heat pumps are basically a scam, getting COPs of two, when Dennis’s heat pump regularly got COPs of six and also delivered twice as much energy. But Dennis did not really understand that when he read those full-page ads. The electric companies were promoting air-to-air heat pumps that would save 50% in electric consumption over electric heaters, which much of the state’s homes heated with. Dennis thought that if they encouraged 50% savings, they would be ecstatic with 85% savings. He reckoned incorrectly. All that the electric companies could see was the loss of billions of dollars in revenue if Dennis’s heat pump carpeted Washington State.

Carter’s tax credit was set to expire at the end of 1985, and Dennis had just spent several years having his companies stolen and surviving murder attempts. That tax credit is what made his marketing program so unstoppable. After his son died, he only had two more years of the tax credit to make it happen. Dennis wasted nearly a year of that by getting involved with the local oligarchy in Yakima. He finally had enough and moved to Seattle in the autumn of 1984, for his last run at it. The most complete rendition is in Dennis’s first book, written from his jail cell. I have written about the Seattle ordeal at length (1, 2, 3), and will only hit a few highlights in this post.

It took Dennis several months to realize that the electric companies were not going to welcome him. He did everything that he could think of to work with them. But instead, they called in all of their favors to wipe his company out. They blew deals apart, and Dennis did not initially know who was doing it. Dennis had to look beyond the Seattle area to find a bank willing to work with him, and he found one in Spokane. The owner of the finance company was like the chairman of American Express: he saw that what Dennis was doing was like a gold mine. Just as Dennis sold a thousand of the systems, the electric companies unmasked themselves, publicly calling Dennis’s company a scam and they sicced the attorney general on Dennis’s company. By “coincidence” the Rockefellers’ bank wiped out Dennis’s manufacturer at the same time, so Dennis had to build his own factory. Then the federal agency that was the ringleader of the effort infiltrated a corporate hit man into Dennis’s company, who was responsible for the death of one of Dennis’s employees, which radicalized Dennis in his energy pursuits. It was an onslaught from all sides, and it was incredible that Dennis was able to get 400 of those systems installed by the end of 1985.

The ugly underbelly of our society was on full display for anybody with eyes to see. Gangsters essentially run the world economy. Dennis had plenty of experience with mobsters, but they actually had more integrity than corporate executives, corrupt officials, the media, etc. Dennis was beginning to see how the world really worked. What happened in Seattle was the greatest attempt ever made to bring alternative energy to the marketplace.