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July/August 2004 Living Now
New Energy Movement Inaugural Conference Scheduled for Portland, Oregon

by Jeane Manning

Do people want to change our sources of energy and therefore clean up rivers, nuclear waste and our air? It seems many do; much has changed in ten years.

One night a decade ago, I was in Calgary, Alberta. A conference room was packed with well-dressed men and women who each cheerfully paid $35 to hear an American space scientist talk about his latest book. The author, Brian O’Leary, had earned a Ph.D. in astronomy and now held their rapt attention with anecdotes of his odyssey. He’d journeyed from the excitement of the NASA astronaut program in the 1960s and teaching physics in Ivy League universities to Exploring Inner and Outer Space – the title of one of his books.

The audience’s mood shifted, however, when O’Leary said that independent inventors and theorists proved it’s possible to tap the underlying "zero-point energy" of the space that surrounds us, for generation of electricity. He asked rhetorically, "Wouldn’t it be great if we didn’t have to drill for oil anymore?"

Silence. Bewilderment.

"I know." he hastened to add, "Oil built Calgary. Don’t worry. There will be other opportunities…"

What was he talking about? they wondered. To many of those in Calgary, Alberta, drilling for oil is the opportunity.

"…And we could clean up the waterways. We have this abundant source of energy that can be tapped either by a magnetic motor or by a small solid-state device like a little black box that electronically pluck this energy out of the vacuum of space. Just a little bit is all you would need to power your home or – like here -- your public places. And your car."

The mellow-voiced scientist repeated that in the future we will not need oil for fuel. Nor will we need nuclear power, nor to dig for coal.

"It’s almost like we’ve been in a nightmare, creating these polluting dinosaurs in our industrial civilization over the last 100 years." He stopped pacing the platform. "I think we’re going to look back, say from the year 2020, with 20/20 hindsight – and look at the 1900s as that century when we abysmally polluted the earth…when we went down an incredibly crazy path. And then we backed off."

Why is this alleged new energy source not reported in mainstream publications? It isn’t the first time discoveries were ignored, O’Leary said. Think Galileo. The resistance to a new idea is in proportion to the idea’s importance; energy is a multi-trillion-dollar industry. Humankind has never dealt with a changeover of this magnitude, but we could take our time and do it wisely.

When he invited questions, the audience ignored "free energy". Instead they asked about spoon-bending, Sai Baba and crop circles.

Ten years later, O’Leary has a new book covering solutions to environmental problems – Reinheriting the Earth. And he and Alden Bryant, an originator of the United Nations Climate Change Treaty, have started a citizens’ federation called the New Energy Movement (NEM).

Its first public conference will be in Portland, Oregon. The venue is Reed College 9 a.m. – 8 p.m. on September 25th, and Portland State University auditorium from 1 p.m. on September 26th.

It looks like this time the audience will be focused on new energy possibilities and implications. Last year O’Leary and Bryant testified at California Energy Commission hearings, and O’Leary spoke to U.N. officials as well as doing mass-audience radio interviews and a public speaking blitz.

The single best chance for humankind to solve global problems, says the New Energy Movement manifesto, is a transformation in the way we generate and use energy.

The range of options – breakthroughs in how society powers its homes, workplaces and transportation – is broad. The NEM supports a spectrum of clean-energy alternative technologies, from innovatively enhanced solar and wind technologies and low-impact tidal power to water-as-fuel breakthroughs to inventions that seem to tap into the energy of the cosmos.

On that far end of the spectrum where new theories have not yet been developed to explain results of experiments, some experimenters claim to be finding a harmonious-with-life type of electricity that they call cold electricity, or Radiant Energy. In contrast with the well-known hazardous electricity, it is finer and doesn’t electrocute. On that end of the spectrum of discoveries, however, nothing is ready for the marketplace.

O’Leary says new energy science is not a magic potion, but could help create a better world if used wisely. As with alternative healthcare, a wholistic power-generation science which recognizes subtle energies -- life force – is scorned by defenders of the old materialistic, reductionist worldview.

The non-profit movement’s activists are quick to add that even the desired gradual changeover in energy technology won’t solve many problems, unless change comes hand-in-hand with a widespread increase in awareness. They have in mind awareness of our responsibility as caretakers of ecosystems – a transforming knowledge about the influence we have on the interconnected web of life.

"New energy science is in the research phase of a research-and-development cycle," O’Leary says, seeking help for inventors. While critics note that no revolutionary energy inventions are on the market yet, he requests that people be realistic. "Asking today’s under funded independent inventors to immediately deliver finished products is like asking the Wright brothers to deliver passengers and mail right after their maiden flight in 1903."

Meanwhile, despite the national-security risks of nuclear fission and oil dependence, and hazards from burning fossil fuels, it seems government planners are in no hurry to promote truly new small-scale clean energy technologies. Fuel cells are touted, but the public doesn’t seem to know that decision-makers plan on carbon fuels and nuclear fission to produce the hydrogen for powering fuel cells. And judging by statements from energy officials, the door to other future energy sources will be open in, say, 2050.

In contrast, the people display a sense of urgency. At the end of the year I attended a NEM board of directors meeting in the riverfront home of Dr. Brian O’Leary and Meredith Miller in northern California. Attendees were a microcosm of seekers-of-solutions – including environmental and social justice advocates as well as physicists, an accountant, a chemist, social worker and teachers.

"I have two young daughters, and I don’t want to wait for two generations," says NEM board member Joel Garbon, a scientist in the paper industry. "Why are the ‘zero-point-energy’ technologies popping up like daisies all over the planet if they’re meant to languish?"

None of these NEM organizers expect new energy to be a magic formula for Utopia. But if people realize that energy is potentially abundant, the group noted, justifications for oil wars fall flat. And if the emerging science of energy-from-surrounding-space is fully understood, more citizens of the world may perceive their interconnection with fellow humans who also arise out of a nonmaterial background sea of energy. That common source creates our every atom and sustains us in every moment.

At the NEM board meeting the word "consciousness" was heard more often than technology. It’s a chicken-and-egg situation, long-time researcher Wade Frazier said. Which comes first – a higher level of awareness out of which responsible use of powerful new technologies would flow, or the knowledge of new energy science catalzying human consciousness toward an abundance paradigm and awareness of our interconnection with all life?

Frazier concludes that New Energy, raising human consciousness and healing the planet are joined at the hip, and those who say we have to become fully conscious before we can pursue free energy may be in deep emotional denial. In the discussion he agreed with physicist Mark Comings that there is peril and even some seeming illogical quantum leaps in going straight to zero-point energy while bypassing highly-efficient solar.

"But the political-economic dynamics are so stacked against innovation in energy that I think there needs to be some critical-mass event/technology to overcome the truly awesome inertia." Inertia exists, Frazier added, not only in the establishment, but in opinion leaders who say they want solutions but stand in the way of powerful solutions and even devote a great deal of energy to ignoring them.

Despite its importance, revolutionary science that deals with how we electrically power everyday activities runs smack into a more rigid wall than does alternative health science. When a science is developed and applied, people use the new knowledge to make useful things. New-paradigm appliances for enhancing our health rile up vested interests in the healthcare field, but the opposition is nothing compared to the forces allied against new-paradigm appliances that would replace fossil fuels and nuclear fission power plants.

Electrical-power pioneer Nikola Tesla pioneered Radiant Energy. Tesla could have given us decentralized energy technology, but moguls had already bought copper mines for stringing wires across the country and didn’t want anything to disrupt profits. From then on, Tesla was subtly sidelined.

The emergence of a New Energy Movement to promote public education is timely. It may be urgently needed because the disconnect between the standard picture world of expectations, as created on TV newscasts and in print media, and the reality of new science grows wider daily. Hope also comes from the prodigious sharing of information on the internet among new energy researchers. Those who attend the Portland conference in September will be able to meet leading experts in the field of new energy and have a say in how this vital movement progresses.

Jeane Manning is a freelance journalist who since 1981 has traveled throughout North America and Europe to report on new-energy technologies. Her articles and essays have appeared in numerous energy journals and she is the author of The Coming Energy Revolution: The Search for Free Energy , and the co-author with Nick Begich of Angels Don't Play This haarp: Advances in Tesla Technology.

For conference details go to www.NewEnergyMovement.org. Two-day tickets - $75 US advance price – can be purchased by mailing a cheque to NEM, c/o Alden Bryant, 1442A Walnut Street # 57, Berkeley CA 04709. Phone 510-527-9716 or toll-free: 1-866-585-2344. Organizers urge advance registration.