My Energy Journey – Part 3

Bucky Fuller, Peak Oil, and collapsed civilizations

A key line of demarcation in my work was between the summer of 2002 and the spring of 2003. After several years of study and writing, interspersed with stints of working, my wife gave me a deadline of September, 2002, to finish my site. I raced to the finish line in the summer of 2002. The meat of my site is still those essays that I wrote by then. In those innocent days of the Internet, I had my email address on my site, until the attacks and threats become too much for me, in the wake of the 9/11 terror attacks, as my nation lost its sanity, and I stopped interacting directly with the public in early 2002. Mr. Professor died in May, 2002, which sent me into the darkest phase of my midlife crisis, which began when I worked on my war essay in the summer of 1999.

But to the positive, pals that I am still in touch with today came to me through that email address on my site. One man who contacted me had been Bucky Fuller’s pupil (his father was a friend of Fuller’s), and after I finished my site, during a phone call, he called me a comprehensivist, and I asked him what that meant. Then he had me read two of Fuller’s books: Utopia or Oblivion and Grunch of Giants. The lightbulb finally went on for me, when I read Utopia. Fuller was the professional grandfather that I never knew I had. I had been a seat-of-the-britches comprehensivist, and didn’t really understand that I took a polymath’s approach to my work. It was a revelation to see that what I had done on my own was largely Fuller’s curriculum on how to think comprehensively. There were some differences in our approaches, but the general thrust was the same.

Grunch was written near his life’s end, and it was the first and last time that Fuller really called out American imperialism. Until then, he was careful to not rile up the Empire, but near his life’s end, he did not care any longer and let it rip.

But it was Utopia that really opened my eyes, and my work has been consciously comprehensive ever since. Fuller said that energy is wealth, and that if we priced oil at the benefit that humanity derived from it, oil would cost $1 million a barrel. It took me another decade before I really understood that. In short, a barrel of oil contains the energy needed to run an adult human body for a year, but fed into machines instead, it gets ten times the work that that energy would produce if it instead fed a human. Humans “waste” energy sleeping, eating, talking, etc. Also, machines could perform feats far beyond human capability, such as sending men to the Moon and creating the technological infrastructure that allows me to write this and publish it globally on the same day, within seconds. Energy-fed machines were what the Industrial Revolution was all about.

Soon before he died, Fuller witnessed a free-energy prototype that was built by his student, Adam Trombly, and Fuller remarked that he was happy to live to see it, but he predicted that Adam would have hell to pay, and Adam did. Adam’s story is the only one that I know of that rivals Dennis Lee’s on the crazily spectacular scale. I have heard plenty of inside information on Adam, which I don’t know if he will ever make public. Like Dennis, Adam should be dead many times over.

I need to give Velikovsky some credit here. I had been following his work and the catastrophic milieu for several years by 2002, and I had been in contact with quite a few scientists who told me that Velikovsky’s work, while multidisciplinary, was not really valid. But Velikovsky’s work covered so much scientific and scholarly territory that I could not really assess it, and I knew that I would have to resume my scientific studies in earnest to do so. I discovered Fuller’s work a few months later. When I resumed my studies, I largely did it with popularized science, the kind that Einstein read avidly while growing up. Good popularized science is plenty for doing what I do, and I have read hundreds of books of popularized science since 2002, as well as a fair bit of specialist works. I soon saw the untenable nature of Velikovsky’s work. No astronomer on Earth takes Velikovsky’s ideas seriously, such as that Venus erupted from Jupiter several thousand years ago and that near-misses with Venus and Mars were responsible for Bible stories such as parting the Red Sea and manna from heaven. Using literalist interpretations of ancient texts as the basis for scientific theories is a very shaky way to go about the scientific process. Literalist interpretation of Sumerian cuneiform by Sitchin is similarly misguided, in my opinion. It is like making Grimm’s Fairy Tales into the history of Europe.

I did a deep dive on the megafauna extinctions, which Velikovsky argued came from those planetary near-misses. Nope. I regard the climate-change explanation as a red herring, to absolve humanity of responsibility (a common failing among scientists and scholars, as they defend their species), and the celestial-catastrophe hypothesis is even more way out there, but some scientists advocate it to this day.

I finished Fuller’s books in January, 2003, just as the drumbeat for the invasion of Iraq reached a deafening crescendo. Anybody who thinks that the invasion of Iraq had nothing to do with oil is likely unreachable by rational means. It was all about the oil, as usual. Middle East oil is history’s greatest material prize, and all meddling, government overthrows, invasions, and the like in that region have been all about the oil for more than a century, arguably ever since Winston Churchill converted the British Navy from coal to oil in 1911. Oil politics has dominated that region ever since, and the region’s map was drawn by the British and French after World War I, as they tore apart the Ottoman Empire.

Since the first oil crisis in 1973-1974, I had a vague understanding that the world’s oil would not last forever, but it was not until I read an essay by Richard Heinberg, mere weeks before the American invasion, that I first heard of Peak Oil theory. Heinberg soon followed it with his first Peak Oil book, which was published coincident with the invasion of Iraq.

For one of the many weird confluences in my life, Heinberg had been Velikovsky’s personal assistant while young, and to his credit, he left behind Velikovsky’s theorizing. Heinberg’s book was revelatory in several ways, which I will get to, but what also struck me was that he actually discussed free energy, but in a semi-ridiculing way, before dismissing it. He even described Sparky Sweet without naming him. I was very familiar with the free-energy situations that he wrote about, and knew information that the public did not. At that time, a leftist activist was promoting my work and knew Heinberg. I contacted him through that activist, and I made a very friendly overture to Heinberg, to help educate him on the very situations that he wrote about. He semi-ridiculed free energy in his book, but I gave him the benefit of the doubt. Was I ever wrong. Heinberg instantly declined my invitation, and ever since 2003, Heinberg has been beating the drums of doom, with book after book hammering home the looming catastrophe (or very unappetizing “solutions” based on austerity).

It could be tempting to call Heinberg dishonest, or working as some sort of catspaw for the global elite, but I think that I was seeing what I call a classic Level 3 in action. Level 3s deny and dismiss free energy, with seemingly sophisticated objections, and Heinberg also expressed his fear of free energy to me. So his seeming interest in free energy was less than genuine. I have found that nearly all Level 3s are also Level 5s, who not only declare free energy “contrary to the laws of physics,” but dismiss organized suppression as an unfounded “conspiracy theory,” and when it comes down to it, they are openly fearful of free energy, as all that they can see is the weaponization of free energy and using it to strip-mine Earth. Those are not very realistic fears, in my opinion, but those so-called intellectuals see free energy as the enemy, which I also found that environmentalists did. What made Heinberg’s denial and dismissal of free energy doubly bizarre was that Heinberg was onboard with the “inside-job” hypothesis of the 9/11 terror attacks, but he could not seem to fathom the idea of organized suppression of free energy and other exotic technologies.

It was after those surprising interactions with Heinberg that I came up with my “addicted to scarcity” ideas. A few years later, I wasted a month interacting with Richard Stallman, who is a classic Level 3. Two years later, I wrote the essay that brought Brian O’Leary back into my life, after the disaster of our New Energy Movement (“NEM”) days.

Only a few weeks after my interactions with Heinberg, Brian invited me to help him found NEM. While Dennis Lee tried to enlist the help of the right, Brian went after the left. By that time, I was in regular contact with Ed Herman, and I even introduced him to the activist who introduced me to Heinberg (and she got the hots for Ed!). I tried several times to introduce Ed to Brian, and Ed was never interested.

I tried to get Brian more publicity, help get him on radio shows and the like, as NEM’s spokesman. If there was ever a spokesman for the free energy field, it was Brian. Brian particularly tried to go after leftist organizations, with his background, but they all paid rapt attention to Heinberg’s message of doom. Brian said that Heinberg was everywhere in “progressive” circles. I walked into my grocery store in late 2003, and staring at me as I walked in the door was a magazine (Earth Island Journal) that had Heinberg as its cover story (1). Around the same time Heinberg was interviewed in Z Magazine. Doom played on the left, not solutions. It was like the left wore a hair shirt and lapped up Heinberg’s every austere word, while Brian was completely shut out. Near his life’s end, Brian expressed his dismay that he was completely banished from all “progressive” and “environmentalist” venues, while people such as Heinberg were feted.

Those were the days when the schism between right and left became very clear to me. The right was generally scientifically illiterate, and thought that conspiracies explained everything. The left was full of intellectuals, and they were kind of scientifically literate in ways, but they were also brainwashed into scientism, rationalism, and materialism, which I have called philosophies of the Enlightenment. They often had university positions, as they sipped their sherry in their soft berths. Fuller said that scientists were naïve and belonged to a slave profession. It took many more years before I really appreciated what Fuller said. Scientists are professional beggars, constantly seeking patrons, as they don’t engage in commercial activity. When they do engage in commercial activity, such as in biomedicine, that commercial aspect completely corrupts the field. Noam Chomsky said that Ed Herman’s Propaganda Model is only a special case of the constraints that all intellectuals in capitalist societies face. I was seeing this with scientists and academics, as they rarely thought beyond regurgitating their textbooks on these issues.

The reality of exotic technology suppression is 1% conspiracy and 99% complicity, which I learned during my first stint with Dennis. Both right and left have lopsided, victim-oriented views of this situation. The right thinks that conspiracies explain everything, (and their “evidence” is often at the tabloid/gossip level) and the left thinks that it explains nothing, although for Heinberg to embrace the inside-job angle of 9/11, and then deny that organized suppression of free energy technology exists (which is much easier to understand, and has clear motives), is very strange, and I have seen that kind of incongruity many times.

I read Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel when it was published in 1997, and it influenced my work somewhat. Diamond definitely used an interdisciplinary approach to understand the human journey. Diamond later wrote Collapse, but it was in Heinberg’s book that I first read of theories of civilizational collapse, as he referred to Joseph Tainter’s book on it. Ever since reading Tainter’s book, I have been a student of the collapse of civilizations. It has been an area of fierce academic controversy that became kind of nasty at times, and I have read most of the major works on the collapse of civilizations. While Diamond wrote that the environmental degradation that attended civilizations was why they failed, Tainter disagreed. But what they both really said was that civilizations collapsed when they ran out of energy.

Whether the civilization contributed to its own collapse or not was kind of hair-splitting to me. Agrarian civilizations always had thin energy surpluses that could only support a small elite and professional class. That thin surplus was always vulnerable to bad weather and crop failures, and in the Fertile Crescent, the forest-to-farm-to-desert dynamic has been very clear. I go more for catabolic collapse theory. Some scholars have argued that there were no collapses at all, in the sense of a population collapse accompanying a civilization’s collapse, but they often have an agenda and their arguments can be shoddy and spectacularly wrong. For instance, when the Spanish arrived, the Mayan population was a small fraction of what it had been several centuries earlier (perhaps more than 10 million people). The Mayan collapse was a spectacular population collapse, likely caused by epic droughts, and surely exacerbated by widespread deforestation.

Between 2003 and 2006, those were key areas of my studies, and Heinberg’s work gets some credit for it. It became very clear to me how all societies have always ridden on their energy practices, and my Epochal framework was well on its way to forming. Bucky Fuller would have instantly known what I was writing about.