English transcript

Well, you mentioned in one of your last talks that petroleum wasn't what we thought it was,

that it wasn't a fossil fuel, that it didn't come from fossil animals.

Yeah.

Is it just a mineral?

Is it a mineral like any other mineral?

Is that how it, what would you say?

What's the origin of petroleum?

You see, when they first found petroleum, because they were beginning to make motors

and needed it on axles of wheels, on railroad trains and all that sort of thing.

And remember, trains started in the beginning of the 19th century.

Then oil went from just a lubricant to a fuel, and it made it valuable.

And Rockefeller happened to be the smartest man in the business at the time,

but he made a lot of, most of his money, or much of it, off the transport of the petroleum as well as selling it.

But one thing they realized was, if you, because oil is, putting a price on oil is like putting a price on a pail of water.

You know, no initial cost is in the ground.

And in those days they were, some of it, almost what you'd call surface mining the oil.

It didn't go down deep.

So in order to get the price up, they hit on the idea that they would have to make it appear to be scarce.

That boy, after we take the next few barrels out, we're probably going to have to close as well.

You know, that kind of thing.

But a very fortuitous event.

In 1892, there was a convention in Geneva of scientists to determine what organic substances are.

Well, the definition of organic is a substance with hydrogen, oxygen and carbon.

And so it's usually a living substance, a tree.

You analyze a dead tree, hydrogen, carbon and oxygen.

And grass and so on, living things, animals.

We are hydrogen, oxygen and carbon.

So at this Geneva convention, Rockefeller took advantage of sending some scientists over,

who said, oil, petroleum is hydrogen, oxygen and carbon.

Therefore, it must be derived from the spoiling, the rotting of formerly living matter.

And playing the game properly, when this scientific convention was over,

they defined oil as the residue from formerly living matter.

Well, that makes it a fossil fuel.

I don't know why they decided to use the word fossil, but it says formerly living matter is fossil.

Well, of course, today, and another thing we should know is that there has never been a fossil,

a real fossil found below 16,000 feet.

And you can't argue with 16,000 as a level line, because some place the ground sinks and so on.

But 16 is what the scientists say, 16,000.

We mine oil or we drill for oil at 30,000, 33,000, 28,000 every day of the week.

So right there, we rule it out that it isn't fossil fuel.

It's called fossil fuel for the minds of the public to feel that it is an asset that is running out, being depleted.

We talk about depletion allowance, which is a lot of, you know.

And actually, if you know the world's oil supply, you know that it is not going to run out for an awfully long time.

It is the second most prevalent liquid on Earth.

And we haven't begun to dig.

Well, with all that background, you see, the people in charge of the petroleum business,

for perfectly reasonable business things, like any other man in the business,

wants to keep his price as high as he can get away with.

And the way to do it is to say, well, there's no more.

The last barrel is going to cost $1,000, and then it's all done.

And they preach that stuff.

What bothers me is that in geology books, it's in there.

The geologists say it's a fossil fuel.

Somehow they've been bought.

I went to a four-year federal staff energy seminar run by the government of the United States

during the so-called energy crisis.

I was the participant that represented the railroad industry.

The airline industry was there.

Every AA, administrative assistant of senators and congressmen, was there.

The CIA was there.

The Defense Department was there.

The State Department was there.

Sometimes sitting right in front of me in the row would be Henry Kissinger with his friend,

the head of the Department of Defense.

That's too bad.

I can't put the names with him.

But anyway, people like that, top men in the government,

sitting there listening to the federal staff energy seminar.

Well, what this was doing is for four years,

they were teaching a propaganda line to the leading people in this country,

and therefore to the leading people in the world, when you include Kissinger and Schlesinger, among others.

And the object of it was, as Kissinger used in his own terms when it was time for him to speak,

to create a world price for oil.

In other words, not 30 cents a gallon here and 90 cents a gallon there,

but let's get a world price.

That's their goal.

And they're trying to do that for wheat and everything else.

We don't realize what the controls are, whether it's oil or some of these other things.

Almost everything today is being categorized at the highest price they can possibly make it go.

And so calling petroleum a fossil fuel is the basis for this system with respect to petroleum.

I don't know if the name Arthur Kantrowitz rings any bell.

Arthur Kantrowitz is the head of the Kantrowitz Labs set up by the Avco company near Boston, scientific laboratories,

and a great man in the scientific world.

And Kantrowitz and I were sitting at a table at this seminar once,

and the table happened to be all young college grad PhD geologists.

And so just to get a conversation started, I turned to Kantrowitz and I said,

Arthur, what do you think about this foolishness of these speakers talking about fossil fuel?

And it was kind of put up.

He started laughing.

He said, you know, that gets me.

He said, I don't have a geology degree, but you have a thousand other degrees.

And he said, I don't understand.

He said, you'd think of these heads, these other fellows at the table.

We did it on purpose.

Start listening, you know.

And he asked, he said, are you gentlemen?

He says, you're here at the meeting.

Are you a gentleman by any chance a geologist?

And one fellow, yes, I am.

And the other, yeah.

He said, well, why don't you tell me?

He said, why is, you know, he went on like that.

We brought the house down, because nobody could argue with Kantrowitz.

He's like Einstein.

People aren't going to.

And he told them right there, he said, just drop it.

But it's in all the books and in all the papers.

But it started from that strange meeting in 1892, a scientific convention.

I have a big, thick, scientific encyclopedia put out by the Dievan-Ostrand Company.

It's about 15 years old now.

But it has the whole story of the conference.

It doesn't have the Rockefeller part, but it has the whole story of how they straightened out organic chemicals

and how it was all figured.

And they've got petroleum right in there.

Amazing. Amazing.

These aren't accidental things, you see.

There's a dollar sign behind almost everything.