#693: Joel Garbon and the New Energy Movement

Joel Garbon is president of the New Energy Movement (NEM), an organization devoted to promoting “the rapid widespread deployment of advanced, clean, and sustainable energy sources across our imperiled planet […] to educate the public, policymakers, and investors about the need to support research, development, and use of” – so far, so good – “zero-point energy, magnetic generators, advanced hydrogen processes, and other little-known powerful energy technologies now emerging from inventors and scientists all over the world.” Whoops. The reason this energy technologies are little known is of course because they, well, don’t show much promise of actually working and the claims made for them are based on pure and shining pseudoscience (or perhaps more accurately voodoo science).

Garbon and his gang (including HAARP crank Jeane Manning, whom we’ve encountered before) are primarily just another group of Tesla cranks. Indeed, one of the expressed goals of the group is to destroy the current harmful paradigms in science, in particular “the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics which, as currently applied, pre-supposes the Universe to suffer from a condition known as ‘entropy’. It surmises, despite much contradictory evidence, that energy can never appear at any one point in space without being drawn out of another.” Or in other words, the NEM-people asserts that the fact that their suggestions violate the basic laws of physics should not be used against them. “[T]he premise that the Universe, as a whole, is an ‘isolated system’ into which no (as yet unmanifest) energy can flow […] is indeed an assumption based upon purely metaphysical constructs,” says NEM. That, of course, is false, but if you have paid attention you should start to suspect where their “new energy” will come from. That’s right, it’s unadulterated quantum woo all over again. And of course their website contains all fallacies known to man, being particularly prone to lapse into “science was wrong before”, the Galileo gambit and special pleading. It really is a red flag when a website repeatedly mentions the purported existence of “much evidence” without providing, you know, any of it.

But couldn’t they be right, against all odds? Well, here’s a list of the top 100 free energy technologies. #1 is cold fusion. Which doesn't bode well for the other 99.

Their board of directors include Sterling Allan, a reporter at freeenergynews, Terry Sisson, and Thomas Valone, one of the “most respected names in the field of Free Energy research and advancement,” according to Sterling Allan, who may be biased.

Diagnosis: Their intentions are surely good, but without a complete overhaul of their approach they are doomed to spend their efforts in pursuit of nonsensical fantasies and black cats that aren’t there, and most likely nurturing the paranoid conspiracy theories that goes with those kinds of chases. It’s really a little bit sad.