Russ:  Hi I’m Russ Capper and this is The EnergyMakers Show.  My guest today is B.B. Denson, formerly known as Barbara Denson but now that she’s become a big time author we go by B.B. Denson, but Barbara welcome back to The EnergyMakers Show.

BB:  Thank you.  I figure if it’s good enough for J.K it’s good enough for me.

Russ:  There you go.  I’m sure you’re catching up to her pretty fast too.  Well I love what you do, you’ve always been an incredible advocate for oil and gas looking for ways that you could make a difference and impact the world and you found writing these children’s books is something that you love to do and seems to work.  But go back, tell me the story about what motivated it – a friend of your was getting ready to travel and get on an airplane with kids and so let’s get some books for the kids and he was an oil and gas friend right?

BB:  Yes it was.  It was David Holt, the Consumer Energy Alliance, and he was telling me that he was on a flight, forgot to get books for his kids – they always like to read on the plane.  He just grabbed a bunch of books in the airport kiosk there without really looking at them. Got on the plane and sat down to read them and he said you wouldn’t believe it, they’re saying bad things about oil and gas in kids’ books these days.  And I had been trying to think of something we could do and it just occurred to me after he said that well that’s something I could do.  I mean there is self publishing out there now and what would it hurt.  The biggest deal was finding an illustrator, and as you know I found a fabulous illustrator, so I guess I’m now an author.

Russ:  Yes you are because this is book number two.

BB:  Yes it is.

Russ:  Gary the Go-kart Carbon Comes Out of the Closet, and your first book the title was?

BB:  Gary the Go-kart Wind Blows

Russ:  And which we had Barbara on the show when that one first came out about what, 6 months ago?

BB:  Yeah, it was last summer.  And so this one, the reason I called it Carbon Comes Out of the Closet is because as I was thinking about this I thought they vilify so much those of us that don’t believe in catastrophic, manmade climate change that I am going to come out of the closet and go ahead and admit it and then I had the idea okay, Gary’s going to – so it’s my double entendre – Gary’s also going to store his carbon in his closet.

Russ:  So he’s going to bring it out of the closet for what purpose?

BB:  Well we are a carbon-based life form, we need carbon to live; why not start saying let’s get rid of water too?  As a matter of fact I was thinking about this, water vapor is actually the biggest greenhouse gas, are they going to start taxing us on water now too and saying we’re going to have to sequester our water vapor too because that’s causing – that’s the major greenhouse gas?

Russ:  Totally.  Back to this one though, this one’s cool, I read it.  It’s almost written in Iambic Pentameter, it’s poetry the whole way isn’t it?

BB:  Thank you.

Russ:  It’s really cool.  So what age group are you targeting?

BB:  Preschool, Kindergarten; I’d say kids up to maybe 3^rd grade it might be their reading level depending on their level.  But the truth is I have a lot of guys that I know that are now keeping this sitting on their desk and they make people read it when they come to their office.  Somebody told me today that’s the only colorful thing he has in his office is my book sitting there on his desk for people to read.  So the truth is it’s there to educate adults as much as it is to educate children and you know my reason for doing that is I think that our side of this argument has got all of the facts and all of the data but we make it so complicated and so hard for the average person who’s not used to reading charts and graphs and things.

I mean it could be a really smart person in lots of ways, but they’re not used to looking at things; if they’re not a scientist or engineer they just don’t understand this data.  And so I thought we need to take it and just simplify it so that other people, they hear climate change they get scared but they don’t know – we’re just not good with the words on our side.  They come up with great words like clean power plan and alternative and renewable and we come up with words like fracking; what are we thinking?  So that’s what I was trying to combat with this.

Russ:  The other side has the whole PR momentum going, all of the media, probably about 70% – 80% of the politicians on their side and they think that everybody on the other side – our side – doesn’t give a damn about the environment, which is not true is it?

BB:  The truth is if you really care about the environment and you’re interested in energy I can’t imagine anything better than natural gas.  How is anybody going to come up with anything better than that?  It reminds me of that quote of Ronald Reagan’s that so much of what they know just isn’t true.

Russ:  It’s so interesting too at the end of the day.  So anyway where can we buy these books?

BB:  These books are available online at any place you can think of.  I would suggest actually Barnes & Noble at this point because Amazon kind of plays some funny game with it every now and then.  They pulled off my reviews and I had to put them back on and they made my other book not available by them, but Barnes & Noble is actually a tiny bit cheaper too;  I don’t know what’s going on with Amazon, they are there, you can try it and it’s also anywhere else online and you can even go to your local bookstore and you can order it there but it’s print on demand so then you have to come back later to pick it up.

Russ:  Okay, but I do know and I should point out too having flipped through it and stuff, you get into the positive aspects of CO2 in the environment too, right?  About plant growth and everything?

BB:  I do.  So I have in this book in the back, just like I had in the Wind Bows book, I have a section called for the adults in the room and I have some quotes there.  One of them is about how they actually use carbon dioxide to help tulips grow in the Netherlands.

Russ:  Sure they do.

BB:  So when you start seeing somebody doing something for commercial purposes that’s kind of a clue that it’s really, really good and really helpful with that.  I have another quote in here from one of our favorites Dr. Patrick Moore who wrote this brilliant paper about carbon, and as a matter of fact it was his paper that really got me thinking that I should make this second book be about carbon.  So if you recall what he talked about in his paper, to put it in basic easy-to-understand form, is that carbon levels – when people typically look at carbon levels they look at the last hundred years and temperature in the last hundred years, and he went back millions of years and he looked at it and he showed carbon levels going like this and he postulates that within 2 million years if we continued on that downward trajectory we would run out of carbon.

Russ:  And be in trouble.

BB:  And we are a carbon-based life form.

Russ:  That’s right.

BB:  The other thing that he had in his paper was that they like to say now that rising carbon levels are going to cause the temperature to rise and he showed the exact reverse, that actually a rising…

Russ:  Temperature causes CO2 to rise.

BB:  Causes CO2 to rise and postulates again that’s because the carbon is coming out of the oceans probably.

Russ:  Which I have often said wouldn’t it be a shame if we took all the action the other side said and yet the temperature still rose, which it probably will.  All right, Barbara I thank you so much, keep writing for sure, talking about B.B. Denson here, Gary the Go-kart: Carbon Comes Out of the Closet.

BB:  Thank you Russ.

Russ:  You bet.  And this is The EnergyMakers Show.