Chapter 41
NEW ENERGY: TRUTH AND LIES OF OMISSION
The following essay is by Dr. Brian O’Leary, Ph.D. (April 26, 2007). www.brianoleary.com
George Orwell said that the biggest lies are lies of omission. The manifold manipulations of the Bush administration and its media mouthpieces bring this deception to a fine art. They skillfully manage our perceptions by selecting themselves as the sole “newsmakers” on important issues, while avoiding any deeper context or greater truth. Hidden from view are both drastic corruption and exciting possibilities that lie outside any serious consideration by the collective mainstream. But the consensus perception is only just now coming to grips with the problems, which will inevitably lead to an understanding of their deeper roots. This is a process of “truth and reconciliation,” one that is only beginning to reach the awareness of some people and a few select politicians.
We can begin to sense the principle that “if the people lead, the leaders will follow.” Sooner or later, the truth will come out. But the process of truth-telling appears to be much too slow for us to be able to plan our futures in a timely and rational way. For example, I’m struck by the collective’s lie-by-omission about radical innovation in clean energy and other sustainable solutions. Sadly, the lie is shared even by the most progressive scientists, politicians, journalists, and environmentalists. To them, there can be no clean-energy breakthroughs, period. Only when pressed do these mainstream scientists and pundits claim that advanced energy technologies are not even worth researching, because “we all know you can’t break the laws of thermodynamics.” They are wrong. This is a lie, because those laws are broken many, many times under non-equilibrium conditions — for example, by quantum experiments, and by research on various devices that show anomalous energy coming from electromagnetic, plasma, solid-state, and electrochemical systems.
These experiments are systematically debunked by some of the most vocal and powerful physicists, who really don’t know what they’re talking about. But these high priests of a decadent, materialistic physics provide a convenient and effective censorship on bold new breakthroughs, as the oil barons laugh all the way to the bank and the planet descends into ecological, political, and economic tyranny. The schools of Richard Heinberg (The Party’s Over), George Monbiot (Heat), Michael Ruppert (Crossing the Rubicon), James Lovelock (The Revenge of Gaia), Tim Flannery (The Weather Makers), Ross Gelbspan (The Boiling Point), Michael Klare (Blood and Oil), and countless academic scientists excel at stating the problems of global climate change and dwindling oil supplies. Their despondency about the lack of viable solutions — beyond sacrifice and imminent global collapse — shows on virtually every page of their writings. But many of these authors can only scoff at considering even the remotest chance that we could violate any of the sacrosanct “laws” of physics, or that we need not live forever with existing technologies to obtain our energy. Needless to say, their prognosis is truly grim — as it should be, under the limiting assumptions they themselves have placed on their analyses.
The sad result is an unwitting alliance between the powers-that-be and those partial truth-tellers who are articulate about the crisis itself but woefully ignorant about the full range of solutions. Layers of truth unfurl at a frustratingly slow pace. We all lose from this creep of perceived credibility. Greater truths seem to be embraced only in fleeting, bite-sized increments, and then drown in the cacophony of hubris and kitsch. We are led to believe that our awareness can only take on so much at a time, and that any true energy breakthrough could only occur in the distant future, at best. As we move through each unfurling layer of illusion-to-truth and its propagation out through the collective consciousness, the Earth clock ticks ever onward toward exhaustion. Our growing biocide and genocide move much faster than we can respond. This censorship of underlying truth — especially by those who should know — is but another deception, a lie of omission, which pre-empts rational discussion of the wide variety of choices we really do have.
What we see happening now is that the wave of consensus awareness sweeps through the culture first toward those “solutions” that are really non-solutions in the long run: clean coal, nuclear, natural gas, biofuels, hydrogen fuel cells, electric cars, solar, wind, waves, tides, ocean thermal gradients, and macro-engineering boondoggles such as carbon-dioxide sequestration caves, the injection of sun-screening toxic particles into the atmosphere, gigantic Tokamak nuclear reactors that don’t work, HAARP, and so on. Upon intelligent examination, none of these alternatives — by themselves, or even in combination — could adequately replace hydrocarbons to meet current demand without serious economic and ecological consequences. Yet they are the only ones allowed to be discussed in the public domain, because they represent only what we now know and have a vested interest in.
History teaches us the same dynamic of the denial of new possibilities, again and again. Many wise people — Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Mark Twain, Aldous Huxley, Martin Luther King, Albert Einstein, Franklin D. Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, Bertrand Russell, Albert Schweitzer, Buckminster Fuller, George Bernard Shaw, Arthur C. Clarke, Margaret Mead, and the whole genre of science fiction — point out, time after time, that new ideas are often not taken seriously until it’s too late to implement them wisely or peacefully. Out of fear and ignorance, we give our power away to those who are defending an old paradigm that could kill us all. We shut off our imaginations, our vision. We all collaborate in committing lies of omission. I know about the resistance to discussing real change only too well: even though my scientific credentials and long research career are impeccable, my presentations on new energy possibilities are most often ignored or debunked by my former academic colleagues, the media, and a bewildered general public.
For example, I was recently invited by a BBC producer to talk about new energy on a special about future energy alternatives, but then uninvited when an executive producer decreed that they would cover only nuclear “hot” fusion (Tokamak) reactors as the one “credible” new-energy option. This research, long supported by the scientific establishment, has so far turned up nothing, yet has cost governments tens of billions of dollars. Some of these same scientists have fraudulently debunked, defunded, and derailed early experiments by electrochemists suggesting that clean, cheap energy could come from low-temperature catalytic nuclear reactions in water and heavy-water solutions (“cold fusion”). The frauds, the lies, and the cover-ups can only get worse as the truth marches on, polarizing the culture ever more. We are on a collision course toward an unprecedented revolution, in which either the people awaken to deeper truths to be acted upon, or we all perish and bring down nature with us. My new-energy colleagues and I keep getting muzzled and debunked because the corporate cartel running the world wants more and more control over our energy policy. Meanwhile, I feel that the closer I get to the truth, the further I feel pushed away from the culture.
Once again, censorship has almost totally cut off my access to the media, which I used to enjoy as a mainstream scientist for decades. This is a grievous lie of omission. Hundreds of publishers have also turned me down, in spite of a productive and profitable background of authorship. They, too, lie by omission. So how is the collective mind to ever learn about these possibilities, with all these media blackouts? To the censors, I’ve become a heretic who has abandoned his comfortable positions at prestigious universities to tilt at windmills in exile, one who uses bad science to bolster some extraordinary claims. Worse, I am one of those “conspiracy theorists” not worth listening to — for surely the existing worldviews must prevail if we are to mold our future. It’s all a Catch-22: a mishmash of fuzzy thinking, obfuscation, denial, careerism, and self-protection. “Better the devil we know than the devil we don’t know, so leave me alone and let me do my work” is the usual refrain.
Progressives, mainstream scientists, environmentalists, and Al Gore alike have all stopped far too short of telling us how to meet the mandates of the climate crisis and the depletion of fossil fuels. My attempts to engage most of these spokespeople about new energy remain unanswered, in spite of my broaching the discussion only as a hypothetical possibility, a what-if. Admirable as their critiques of current energy policy might be, they speak to only part of the truth, and so cover up the real solutions. In the big picture, these people lie by omission almost as much as the oligarchs do — and, by default, so do the rest of us. New-energy truth will emerge in time, but we do not have the luxury of time to keep the charade of believing “new energy cannot exist” going indefinitely. Our leading scientists and communicators are going to have to stop riding the slow wave of unfolding partial truth in such politically correct ways — or step aside and let others take over. We need to make it safe to accelerate the process of unraveling the truth. We need to be willing to suspend disbelief.
If we want to uncover deeper truths, we must develop a new perspective; we must reframe the issues; we must be willing to be perceived as wrong — in short, as heretics. For years I had a bumper sticker that read, “The truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off.” That’s fine. But then we will need to muster the courage to face the truth with action. We can begin to do that by creating a greater context from which to ask our questions. The necessary reframing begins with leaving our prior beliefs at the door (even if only for a moment). We must be willing to have discussions we’ve never had before. It begins with a simple, neutral statement like: “Say we spend a small amount of our collective resources on exploring the possibility of having clean, cheap, decentralized energy for all humankind. Is this worth the effort? If so, how can we implement this research, development, and deployment?”
There are at least two important reasons why we need to have this discussion. First, we can begin to address the full range of possibilities for a clean-energy future and a sustainable Earth. How can we make informed decisions based on incomplete information? Is there no acknowledgment at all of energy innovation? Why is this topic so taboo, especially in the face of such a planetary crisis? The second reason is just as important: who will benefit by going to this or that energy choice? A new-energy future must be able to benefit all of humankind, all of nature. Therefore, we cannot — must not — give this one away to the oligarchy, who have benefited so much from controlling nonrenewable resources and destroying our environment.
Those who run the world know this best. They have structured things to suppress real solutions. They optimize fear while they optimize profits, wanting to squeeze out every last drop of oil, natural gas, uranium, water, wood, topsoil, crops, coal, or anything else we all need, until these resources are utterly exhausted. History tells us that if we wait too long, a time might come when they take their last profit and run for the hills, moments before being lynched by a just-awakened mob — or they’ll blow us all up in a World War III. And the rest of us, in our silence, are complicit with this madness. In such a case, we lose our freedoms, our environment, our health, our peace.
To summarize the problem of our unabated thirst for hydrocarbons under the ground: two communities are forming a consensus about two pressing issues that mandate a drastic reduction in our consumption of oil, gas, and coal. One community is made up of competent climate scientists, who warn us that we must drastically cut back carbon-dioxide emissions very soon if we are ever to reverse drastic climate change. The second, made up of oil geologists and economists, warns us that the decreasing supply of available oil and other resources, in the face of increasing demand (the “peak oil” movement), will create such international havoc that wars, poverty, and economic collapse are inevitable — unless we quickly switch to viable energy alternatives. The irony is that those same experts who justifiably warn us of the grim consequences of our actions also deny the full range of possible solutions, such as new energy. Meanwhile, some progressives working within the system are slow to respond to the problem and have not the foggiest idea how to really solve it; others surely do know, but lie by omission to stay in the good graces of their powerful corporate sponsors.
Politics is about the art of what’s possible, not the science of what’s real. In the U.S. and other Western capitalist “democracies,” we are sacrificing the truth on the altar of economic expediency. The accumulation of money and power for the privileged few is what runs the world. These oligarchs perceive authentic democracy in energy independence as a threat, because they would lose their power if new, clean, cheap energy were to become available. We are talking about supplanting a multi-trillion-dollar economy that underlies their immense power. That is why they are lying by omission; that is why so many inventors have been threatened and assassinated.
New energy can be introduced for the benefit of humankind by a common revolution of the people themselves. But only through a cultural-political process of truth and reconciliation can we reveal the answers with which we must develop a new consensus. We are entering an era of truth-telling coming from the people, not from any politician or mainstream-media “source”: 9/11 truth, constitutional truth, electoral-fraud truth, war-pretext truth, depleted-uranium truth, UFO truth, consciousness-science truth, and many others. If new-energy truth is to take its place among them, we are going to have to organize ourselves as activists to force the body politic to embrace truth, cutting across many issues and forming alliances. Otherwise, we will surely enter a Dark Age of enormous proportions, and most all species will die off from human folly. Just as important as truth-telling is the reconciliation of our past with our future. The ending of apartheid in South Africa and the fall of the Berlin Wall are modern examples of truth and reconciliation. We must not only serve justice upon those who have knowingly lied for their own benefit, to the detriment of humans and nature; we must reconcile ourselves with our past, with one another, and with all creation. New-energy truth and reconciliation are key elements in these times of great change.