An action thriller by Jock Miller


Fossil fuel has an ageless affinity with dinosaurs. To create oil, dinosaurs died.


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The perfect energy storm is sweeping over the United States: Japan’s Fukushima nuclear plant meltdown has paralyzed nuclear expansion globally, BP’s Gulf of Mexico oil spill has stalled deep water drilling, Arab oil countries are in turmoil causing doubt about access to future oil, the intensity of hurricanes hitting the Gulf’s oil rigs and refineries has intensified due to global warming, and the nation’s Strategic Oil Supply is riding on empty.

As the energy storm intensifies, the nation’s access to Arab oil, once supplying over sixty percent of our fossil fuel, is being threatened causing people to panic for lack of gas at the pumps, stranding cars across the country and inciting riots.

The U.S. Military is forced to cut back air, land, and sea operations sucking up 58% of every barrel of oil to protect the nation; U.S. commercial airlines are forced to limit flights for lack of jet fuel; and businesses are challenged to power up their factories, and offices as the U.S. Department of Energy desperately tries to provide a balance of electric power from the network of aged power plants and transmission lines that power up the nation.

The United States must find new sources of domestic fossil fuel urgently or face an energy crisis that will plunge the nation into a deep depression worse than 1929.

The energy storm is very real and happening this very moment. But, at the last moment of desperation, the United States discovers the world’s largest fossil fuel deposit found in a remote inaccessible mountain range within Alaska’s Noatak National Preserve surrounding six and a half million acres.

Preventing access to the oil is a colony of living fossil dinosaurs that will protect its territory to the death.

Nobody gets out alive; nobody can identify the predator--until Dr. Kimberly Fulton, Curator of Paleontology at New York’s Museum of Natural History, is flown into the inaccessible area by Scott Chandler, the Marine veteran helicopter pilot who’s the Park’s Manager of Wildlife. All hell breaks loose when Fulton’s teenage son and his girlfriend vanish into the Park.

Will the nation’s military be paralyzed for lack of mobility fuel, and will people across America run out of gas and be stranded, or will the U.S. Military succeed in penetrating this remote mountain range in northwestern Alaska to restore fossil fuel supplies in time to save the nation from the worst energy driven catastrophe in recorded history?

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Eleven Nations With Large Fossil-Fuel Subsidies

Iran: A Heavy Fiscal Burden

Photograph from AP
Fire spreads through a Tehran gasoline station in 2007, the kind of protest that has paralyzed governments around the world that are addicted to fossil-fuel subsidies.



Iran has long led the world in government support for oil consumption, spending $80 billion in 2010 to ensure that its citizens would have cheap gasoline. But the Islamic Republic, which has taken major steps since then to slough off this growing burden on its economy, is far from alone.

Global government spending on programs that directly lowered the cost of consuming or producing oil, natural gas, or coal totaled $409 billion in 2010, a number expected to swell to $630 billion this year, the International Energy Agency (IEA) says. Add to that figure $45 billion to $75 billion in tax breaks and other support for oil companies in the mostly developed nations, led by the United States, that are part of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, an OECD inventory shows.

Renewable energy gets government support, too—about $66 billion in 2010, says IEA; fossil fuel subsidies were at least six times larger.

Fossil-fuel subsidies have strained government finances. And because below-market fuel prices encourage wasteful consumption and undermine efforts to slow climate change, the issue is front and center this week at the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development in Rio de Janeiro. Nations have been slow to fulfill the climate-protection pledges first made 20 years ago in this Brazilian city at the historic Earth Summit. But many believe Rio+20 could bring consensus on fossil-fuel subsidy reform that would slash global carbon dioxide emissions significantly, even though concern for the planet is not the prime motivator for many countries.

Iran is a case in point. With its finances under pressure due to Western-led sanctions over its nuclear program, Iran became the first major oil-exporting country to enact large subsidy cuts in December 2010. Wary of the miles-long gas lines and civil unrest sparked by the 2007 gas rationing, its earlier effort to curb subsidy costs, the government set a different course. The legislature approved raising fuel prices while compensating citizens with monthly cash payments. A public relations campaign delivered the message that subsidies promoted waste and social injustice because the poorest citizens here, as in most high-subsidy countries, do not benefit as much as the wealthy.

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad announced sweeping economic "surgery," and on December 19, 2010, gasoline prices quadrupled to $1.44 per gallon (38 cents per liter). Riot police were deployed, but violence never materialized.

Mohammad Reza Farzin, Iran's deputy finance minister and head of the subsidy reform, co-authored an International Monetary Fund working paper that said the price increases removed $50 to $60 billion in fuel subsidies, distributed at least $30 billion in cash to citizens, and freed $10 to $15 billion for investment in energy efficiency.   Read More

  —Joe Eaton


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