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Farrell: “They seem to come out with these hot fusion announcements every time the market is in trouble.”
Fitts: “Right. Every time the dollar is falling, they need to prove that they can increase productivity, and it’s going to come through breakthrough energy.”
~ Dr. Joseph P. Farrell and Catherine Austin Fitts, 2nd Quarter 2023 Wrap Up, News Trends & Stories, Part I

By Catherine Austin Fitts

With the help of allies like Patrick Wood, the Solari Report has sounded the alarm about technocracy for many years, explaining that one of technocracy’s core features is central management of all resources, including energy. As the centralization push accelerates, the importance of understanding energy reality (as opposed to “official reality”) has become increasingly evident.

For that reason, I invited independent energy consultant and systems engineer Charlie Stephens to give Solari subscribers an overview of energy in the 21st century. In Part I, we consider various energy sources and the important concept of “energy return on investment” as well as unanswered questions about breakthrough energy.

In Part II, we dive further into the weaponization of environmental and climate concerns—and the monetary and fiscal policies that make that weaponization go. We also talk about the enormous energy costs of the control grid. Finally, we emphasize that our ability to shift from unproductive and destructive energy policies to something more positive and intelligent depends on a shift to lawful and transparent governance and regenerative agriculture.

Energy is a critical variable that shapes our day-to-day experience in a myriad of ways. Listening to these two interviews will help you navigate the flood of confusing debate and propaganda on this topic.

Money & Markets:

This is the last week of the month, so there is no Money & Markets. The next Money & Markets will publish on September 7. Post questions at the Money & Markets commentary here.


88 Comments

  1. Hi, some more thoughts on the 21st Century Energy. ….
    Before I get into the detail, I need some definitions :
    Anthropogenic Global Warming : Caused by humans, temperature changes.
    Climate change : AGW plus changes caused by Nations, including weather wars.
    Complexity : Systemic change from one stable state to another stable state.
    Complication : Systemic change at or beyond the limits of human comprehension

    I’m not convinced by Charlie Stephens argument extending by implication recent temperature and/or weather changes to cover the last 800,000 years. Maybe I missed something. I’d prefer written evidence, but I suggest the following two videos explain things a little better (apologies for linking to theirtube) :

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LmmmgiPha_Y

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0Cp7DrvNLQ

    There is other stuff, more complicated, and there’s still no certainty as to causes. It’s complicated.

  2. I was (once again) reflecting on Hope today. Hopelessness is indeed a great way for the rackets to neutralize resistance. But so is False Hope. Too many people in my opinion state lightly that this will e over in a few years. And that knowledge keeps them going. The problem is: What if it takes longer? Where will you be in that case?
    I believe (although not every day with the same strength) that we will eventually create that Simple, Harmonious, Productive Life here on Earth, but it might not happen in our lifetime. So in my opinion we need to lead a purposeful life in the spirit of Victor Frankl: Develop our talents and use them for the right things, Be kind to the people, animals and nature around us and, finally, carry our lives in good and bad times with dignity. Then, no matter what happens, we will have done the right thing.
    (source: Victor Frankl, Man’s search for meaning)

    1. Gerdt:
      Can I quote you? Let me know if yes, if I should attribute to you or to a Solari Report subscriber

    2. I very much agree with you, Gerdt. False hope isn’t helpful, but real hope might be not much more than believing that each of us has agency – that how we conduct ourselves can change how things happen in the world. Imagine what might happen if the primary goal of society was the thriving of all life. I suspect many people would sign up for that, but they aren’t the people who have been determining the outcomes of our societal systems. We’ve allowed the worst of humanity to run things. I do have some hope that we can change that situation. And like you, I suspect it will take a while to get it done. The biggest challenge is in getting started. Charlie

      1. YUP. Good time for everyone to GET UP OFF THE COUCH! If we all do what we can and have the heart to do, remarkable what can happen.

    3. Could not agree more. Very well said, Gerdt. Changing a 500 year old model can take more than a century, not to mention what happens if it goes upside down. That was the mystery of the cathedrals. The initial designers and builders would never live to see their work finished. Will be the same for me and Solari. Or what flows from your students and their families and students. Same for you. “What we do echos in eternity” That is what makes for a good life.

  3. From a Subscriber:

    How is the Economic Return on Energy metric calculated and when Charlie was speaking about the low return for nuclear, how does he account for Gen IV technology?

    For what we have spent in Ukraine we could have developed a viable Gen IV tech. To your point, new energy tech is being suppressed. Climate change being used to force in the control grid.

    SPAC deals in emerging nuclear tech are continuing. NewScale is a Gen III small modular reactor company – first deal to close. X-Energy and Oklo deals announced but have not closed. There is no other in pre-announce stage. Hopefully you can have Charlie comment on the various Gen IV tech, much of which was tested and proven out in the 1960s at Oak Ridge National Lab (TN) but was not pursued b/c the conventional pressurized water reactors helped with the weapons program. As example. Molten Salt Reactor Project at ORNL used Thorium as a fuel source and worked like a fast reactor on the thermal spectrum which allowed fuel to by burned up producing high heat 700 degrees Celsius with minimal waste.

    1. Well first let me say that you no doubt know more than I do about what you call Gen III and Gen IV nuclear technology. I see these generational technologies as part of a larger system, part of which you allude to when you mention the connection between pressurized water reactors’ ties to the nuclear weapons industry. I can offer some of my own observations and you can enlighten me about the Gen III and Gen IV technologies, if you like, in the same contexts.
      First, you ask about how the “Economic Return on Energy” is calculated. Here I need to ask if you’re raising a new metric to discuss – ROI – or if you misinterpreted the term “EROEI” as having to do with financial return. It stands for Energy Return on Energy Invested. At an EROEI of 1:1, a society is expending 100 percent of the energy it uses on getting more energy to use – there’s none left over to do anything else. Nothing.
      A huge fraction of the energy invested in nuclear generating capacity is spent on acquiring, transporting, processing (huge), and manufacturing the fuel for the reactors. The exotic materials and anti-radiation measures inherent in the system are very energy intensive as well. Relative to its output a nuclear plant tends to use a lot of its own generation to run itself, too. When you add it all up, a plant, at any scale, doesn’t produce much more than 5 times the energy it takes to fire up the system and run it.
      You suggest here, probably with good reason, that the newer generation technologies – the ones that may be suppressed – have the advantage of “using up” the fuel and producing “minimal waste.” That’s admirable, but none of the energy or financial costs of dealing with the spent fuel predicament of the current older generation technology are accounted for in the first place, so we can’t really quantify the advantage, in either energy or financial terms. By the way, 700 C (about 1,300 F) is not a particularly “high heat,” which is actually a good thing, if it’s high enough.
      I should add, though, that while EROEI is an important metric to consider (and one that most people just aren’t aware of), there are several other issues that are important to consider as well.
      First, the fuel. Radioactive fuel has to be acquired, in whatever form, and if it’s radioactive in its found state, it has to be handled differently, and more expensively, than non-radioactive fuels. As an example, the Black Hills of South Dakota are more or less a radioactive national sacrifice area. A Fukushima’s worth of radiation is spread into the environment there every year. (see http://truth-out.org/news/item/16752-americas-secret-fukushima-poisoning-the-bread-basket-of-the-world) . In an honest assessment, all of the energy and financial liabilities of the whole nuclear generation system, over the whole life cycle of the longest-lived adverse impact of the system, need to be accounted for. They’re not. Far from it. I advocate the same treatment for all of the other generation technologies, too.
      I say that because there are massive public subsidies in every part of the energy and all of the other predatory industry rackets. In fact, the nuclear business model looks a lot like the pharmaceutical business model. The public purse massively funds all of the basic research and development, and at the last minute, the private sector patents the particulars, and makes all the money. That’s how pharmaceuticals work. And the criminals who have been running our country for many generations are the chief beneficiaries.
      And then there’s the treatment of adverse impacts. Both the nuclear industry and the pharmaceutical industry have near-zero liability for the adverse impacts of their products. Big Pharma’s vaccines are liability-free, thanks to the Childhood Vaccine Injury Act (1986) and the PREP Act (2005, et seq). In the case of the nuclear industry, the public has blindly agreed, without thinking or knowing about it, to assume all of the liability for any adverse effects of nuclear power generation. If the nuclear industry had to pay for its own insurance against occurrences like 3 Mile Island or Fukushima, they would go out of business tomorrow. If they stayed in business by some miracle, the cost of their power would be completely uncompetitive. So the two rackets operate similarly and probably shouldn’t be allowed to operate at all.
      And then there’s your very valid assertion that “new energy tech is being suppressed.” Very true, and has been for quite a long time. One has to be careful, though, to distinguish between suppression and simply failing to invest. “The market,” fully rigged by the rackets as it is, can simply cause a failure to invest and the technology will die on the vine. I know of several of those.
      Then there are end-use technologies suppressed (like certain carburetor technologies for internal combustion engines, or engine technologies themselves – just look up GM’s rotary radial engine technology from the 70s). There has even been suppression of an asphalt pavement design with a 50-year+ structural life (I was personally involved in uncovering that back in the late 1990s). This latter technology had two major flaws – it lasts more than 50 years with no maintenance, and its cost – about 30 percent less than for conventional designs. This was clearly going to go nowhere, and it didn’t. I can explain how and why for anyone interested.
      There are generation technologies suppressed as well, of course. Some of Boeing’s best solar PV technology, with efficiencies in excess of 40 percent and using very little material, has been suppressed. But in the generation category, the most important of those suppressed is what Max Planck called Zero Point energy – the energy that can be easily tapped from the quantum vacuum, if you will. Without knowing exactly what it was, but certain of its existence,Tesla did this over 100 years ago. A team of physicists recently proved that it’s real and that it can be tapped. And if you want to know how much there is to be tapped, just consider the energy contained in a lightning bolt.
      The problem here is that the rackets who are profiting so handsomely from today’s several energy subsectors are the ones suppressing the alternatives, for the last 3 generations. This is in part because it would wipe out trillions in revenue from the current energy system, which they own and control, and partly because they’ve decided to use the better stuff themselves, and keep it to themselves, given its extraordinary advantages (aside from being free). If there were large sums of money to be made in something like this Gen III or Gen IV technology, they would already own it and control it, taking advantage of all the subsidies they could cause to happen in the process. I suspect they’re thinking something like, “Let the chumps invest in that inferior stuff; we already control the most important technologies.”
      In the end, the analogy I come back to for nuclear generation is that generating electricity with radioactive fuels is akin to killing flies with a howitzer. It may seem an attractive strategy when others are paying for the howitzer, its operation, and the clean-up of the collateral damage from its use. But in the end, there are smarter, much less complex ways to generate electricity, and do away with the need for batteries, for that matter. As far as I’m concerned, the era of nuclear power generation arrived with the atomic bomb and was gone not long after. Because of massive public subsidies and hidden budgets, it’s just taking an unfortunately long time to die. Charlie

  4. The fact that the racketeers are using climate to forward their agenda caused me to initially discount the validity man having an effect on climate. Also, because climate change has been with us since the world began, I discounted any talk that man contributes to it.

    Now, after hearing Charlie describe how carbon dioxide affects climate, how the energy industry contributes to it, and that CO2 levels are higher than the period covered by ice core readings, I recognize that as man is destroying the environment in every area, why not climate as well? 

    1. Hi Richard. I think you’ve touched on an important point – that the system is very complex, and there are number of factors that cause any system to produce the outcomes it does. Obviously, humans, given our current numbers, consumption habits, and predilection for violence on the part of those in control, will obviously have an impact. And if we feel that those impacts are highly negative, it’s reasonable to attempt to reduce or eliminate them, especially if they are a threat to the thriving of life.
      But these impacts, along with a lot of other negative impacts, are the product of the system designed by the criminal rackets who are running it. That’s what we need to change. If we were to succeed in that, I believe most of our most serious problems would solve themselves, including our contribution to adverse climate change. Charlie

      1. If the rackets were phased out over a reasonable period, with a move to regenerative agriculture, would be quite interesting to see what all indicators would then feedback.

    2. But it is not man that is doing this. We have many ways of changing this. The rackets are stopping that change and prefer total control and depopulation. Utah Phillips once said, “The Earth is not dying. It is being killed. And the people killing it have names and addresses.”

      1. Good clarification: It’s not mankind doing the destruction but a subset: the self-appointed, self-exalted, and self-defied.

  5. In the book “Unsettled” author Steven Koonin presents a spectral analysis of what frequencies of radiation atmospheric CO2 blocks. The reason why twice as much CO2 does not equal twice as much warming is because the CO2 was already “opaque” for the forms of radiation it could block. Making it “more opaque” beyond a certain threshold doesn’t have much additional effect. See photo. I’m curious if Charlie Stephens was accounting for this when he commented on the potentially dire consequences of continuing to increase CO2.

    I realize also that Koonin was comparing 400 and 800 ppm, whereas I think Stephens in your interview was comparing 200 and 400 ppm, which is probably a larger contrast.

  6. The information about the distant past atmospheric CO2 levels compared with current day presented here differ with the presentations of Canadian scientist Dr Patrick Moore which are quite interesting. What is the reconciliation or decisive factor in Mr Stephens’ conclusion on the matter as compared with Dr Moore’s?

    1. I’m afraid I’m not familiar with Dr. Moore’s work. I do know that the Earth is a participant in many sorts of cycles. The CO2 data I’ve relied on comes from the analysis 800,000 years or so of air bubbles formed in the Greenland ice mantle. Analyzing the contents of actual air from that stretch of history is one of the few direct measurements we have of the composition of the atmosphere in those times. Obviously no one was measuring actual temperatures over that same period, so temperature “data” is inferred and not measured, which means the connection between CO2 concentrations and temperatures have to be inferred, or the analysis period has to be confined to the period when both measurements were being taken – not more than a century.
      As I’ll say often here, I long ago came to understand that the impacts of how we conduct ourselves in the energy sector of human civilization have far more immediate and horrible effects than whatever we imagine about climate change. If I agreed that the notion of climate change isn’t a large enough concern for us to worry about, I would still advocate for the same changes when it comes to how we acquire and use energy. Charlie

      1. Thank you for the reply. I have no doubt that the vast opportunities to improve energy efficiency in so many ways are a feature not a bug. And that needs to change quickly and conclusively.

      2. Although tempereature data is inferred it is corroborated by archeological findings; the medieval warming period is corroborated by findings showing the viking were growing corn in Greenland and the brits were growing of wine in England all the way back to the roman times.

  7. Thank you very much for discussing nitrogen and carbon dioxide. The rackets have lied to us and brought death in many ways to support their profits. I am a student of the Buteyko Method. The Buteyko Method teaches that 6.5%- 7 % CO2 in the lungs is a physiological marker for homeostasis in humans. Since the air we breathe is less than 1% CO2, we don’t get the necessary CO2 for our lungs from the air. If we breathe the optimal 3-4 liters per minute (another physiological marker for homeostasis) our body converts/processes the necessary CO2 to be converted into carbonic acid and other things. Suffice to say, most of us “over breathe”. Dr. Buteyko called most illnesses “ diseases of civilization”. I’m interested in how to reconcile Charlie Stephens’ information with Dr.Buteyko’s method. For example, one student asked a senior practitioner about the effects of nuclear poisoning for students of Buteyko, and there were students living near Chernobyl when that incident happened. They did not suffer great effects. The method helps the body eliminate poison. Sadly, students who took the jab can not detox and some “died suddenly”.

    1. I’m afraid I’m not familiar with the Buteyko Method. And I’m not sure how that might relate to the 0.04% of CO2 that’s in the air we breath, on average. The troposphere is mostly made up of nitrogen (78%) and oxygen (21%), the latter being what we need to fuel our cellular ATP production – the source of our energy. The CO2 in our lungs is mostly a product of what hemoglobin carries away from our cells after it brings oxygen. Chlorophyll does this in reverse for plants and trees. In fact, the only difference between the 136 atoms of a hemoglobin molecule and the 136 atoms of a chlorophyll molecule is the one atom in the center – iron for hemoglobin and magnesium for chlorophyll. Do we think we might be related in some fashion to plants? Charlie

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