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GUESr EDlrORIAl By RANDY HOLDEN State of Fear and the Energy Crunch centl y I was almost ready to collapse in a dead faint upon receiving several newspaper clippings from one of our opar Collector's Guide readers, David Macy in Toledo, Ohio. David had run across a couple of articles in the local paper that had caught his attention, so he forwarded them on to us. Generally speaking, Hollywood types, movie stars, rock stars and big-time authors tend to come down on the extreme leftwing side of the aisle as far as just about everything is concerned. Of course, there are exceptions (thank God for Bruce Willis, Ted Nugent, Mel Gibson and Tom Selleck). Who ever would have dreamed, though, that well-known author and novelist Michael Crichton would come down on the side of those who see through the scam environmentalists are trying to lay out. Thanks to a book review by syndicated columnist Jack Kelly, we were given some advance information about Crichton's upcoming book, State of Fear, which is described as a techno-thriller that debunks most of the lies that the mainstream media and environmentalist groups have been scaring people to death with for 20 years. In case you're not overly familiar with Michael Crichton, this guy's a way heavier hitter than Michael Moore or any of those type pinheads. Crichton started writing back in college to put himself through Harvard Medical School. Before he finished his medical training, his writing career had already made him worldrenowned, largely for his first major success, The Andromeda Strain. That book led to a seriously great movie and a career in writing books and working in the entertainment industry. Since then, he has done 13 best-sellers and a few little flicks you might have seen, mainly Jurassic Park and Rising Sun, just to name a couple. He also created the television series "ER." Crichton has a seriously good track record in coming up with influential books that can get a lot of mainstream attention. I can only pray that State af Fear does as well. One thing that many people may not know about Michael Crichton is that he is not just making things up as he goes along while writing his books. If you think for a moment about the subjects he addresses - cloning dinosaurs, killer viruses, scientific mishaps, things like that - you'll easily see a pattern here. Crichton enjoys writing about very complicated scientific mat, tt!f5 and putting them into terms that are Rj --- easy enough for the average guy to understand. Remember, Crichton was just about done at his Harvard with his medical training when he decided to become a full-time writer instead. Since then, he has continued his scientific studies in a number of fields that interest him. Years ago, Crichton became interested in claims being made by environmentalists, so he dove into the scientific study of our environment and began studying the condition of our planet alongside some of the world's leading scientists. Yes, State af Fear is a technothriller in the sense that it's characters are fictional and are facing some wicked conspiracy stuff we're not going to divulge (read the book), but more than that, the book explains the overall effect man is having on our planet in brilliantly simpleton terms. After the success of the ridiculously stupid The Day After Tamorrow environmental disaster movie, we hope that somebody produces a movie about Crichton's new book. Why? Because this book has information in it that the general public needs to know so it can stop panicking every time somebody burns a pile of trash. Quoting some of Mr. Kelly's review, "In [Crichton's) earlier novels, the science was subordinate to telling a crackerjack story. But in State of Fear, the purpose of the story is to present the science. Mr. Crichton explains it in terms laymen can easily comprehend. The planet will warm - probably by less than a degree Centigrade - by 2100. This will have little effect on humans or most other forms of plant and animal life, and such effects as it will have are likely, on balance, to be beneficial. This warming almost entirely will be result of natural processes. The Earth is always getting either warmer or cooler. It has been very much warmer (there were once jungles covering most of North America) than it is today. All this happened before Henry Ford built the first Model T Most of this happened before man first walked upright." Mr. Kelly then goes on to praise how wonderfully clear Crichton makes his points about how insignificant man is on the overall state of the planet. Addressing the subject of carbon dioxide, which is the biggest evil known to man right now according to environmentalist, Crichton does a remarkable job of illustrating what mankind has done to the Earth in this regard. Using actual scientific data, one of his characters, an environmental scientist named Jennifer Haynes, explains it clearly in State of Fear. In the best terminology I've thus far heard, here's how Crichton explains what effect mankind has had on the earth's atmosphere. From the book: "Imagine the composition of the Earth's atmosphere as a football field. Mist of the atmosphere is nitrogen. So, starting at the goal line, nitrogen takes you all the way to the 7Byard line. And most of what's left is oxygen. Oxygen takes you to the 99-yard line. Most of what remains is the inert gas argon. Argon brings you within 3 1/2 inches of the goal line. That's pretty much the thickness of the chalk stripe. And how much of the remaining 3 inches is carbon dioxide? One inch. You are told that carbon dioxide has increased in the last 50 years. Do you know how much it has increased on our football field? Three-eighths of an inch - less than the thickness of a pencil. Yet you are asked to believe that this tiny change has driven the global climate to change." That's an incredible illustration! Imagine that if you will. Globally, this giant "greenhouse gas" problem we're constantly hearing about, percentagewise, laid out on a football field, would be less than the width of a pencil! Think "60 Minutes" is going to do a report explaining that to you anytime soon? This is just one example in a book that tears the modern environmental movement to shreds, but it is just as surprising that the book would receive a positive review by Mr. Kelly in the Pittsburgh PostGazette. Pittsburgh isn't known for being an overly conservative town. It is refreshing to see its paper being the first to praise this important work by Crichton. I would strongly encourage everyone out there with an interest in the environmental scams surrounding us to pick up a copy of State of Fear. Speaking of fear, in a related article in the same Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, its science editor, Michael Woods, penned an article regarding the world's oil reserves based on a recently published report in the journal Science. Leonardo Magugeri, a senior vice president at Eni, an Italian Energy Company in Rome, prepared the report for Science in order to address the concern that our world is running out of crude oil. The article is entitled "Never Cry Wolf: Why the Petroleum Age is Far From Over," and it is filled with yet more news that CBS isn't telling you. From the article, ':All major estimates put oil reserves above the one trillion barrel mark. 'Proven reserves' means oil known to exist that can be pumped eco- nomically with today's technology and prices. At the current consumption rate of 28 billion barrels a year, the reserves would last beyond 2030." But Mr. Magugeri points out that in hundreds of instances, estimates of the amount of oil in major fields has dramatically increased as knowledge about the fields grew. "Estimates in 1944, for instance, suggest that the Kern River oil fields in California had only 54 million barrels of remaining," his report says. "By 1986 it had actually produced an additional 736 million barrels of oil. And 1986 estimates put the amount of oil still remaining in that field at 970 million barrels." That's one heck of a difference. This isn't the exception, either. This has been the rule worldwide. The Association for the Study of Peak Oil & Gas, a network of scientists in 24 countries which monitors world petroleum resources, stated, "Proven reserves have been very conservative numbers indeed. They do not reflect the total oil that has been discovered, but only that small portion of for which definite plans are in place for current access." And what's more interesting still is how little oil we can actually pull from known oil fields. "Barely 22 percent of oil in a typical field could be recovered in 1980, compared to 35 percent in 2003," Magugeri's report states. That estimate that we currently have a 30-year oil reserve is based on the admission that we can only harvest 35 percent of the oil in those known fields. As technology progresses, we can count on being able to access more of the oil in those known fields. If we can just double our current ability to drill, you can figure on enough oil until 2060, and if we can get all the oil we currently "estimate" exists, we have enough by today's admittedly conservative standards to last until 2090. And that is based on not finding any more oil than we already know of. Still think there's an energy crisis? Maybe, but it sure as hell ain't because we're running out of oil. Randy Holden is the feature editor of Mopar Collector's Guide, a monthly automotive enthusiast publication. Holden authars a controversial column entitled Enviro-Masochism in that magazine. Although his work has a decidedly automotive perspective, it is thought-provoking in nature. For more information on Mopar Collector's Guide, check out its website at www.moparcollectorsguide.com... Editor CN CYCLE NEWS • MAY 4,2005 99