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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Amazing Transportation Inventions

Harry Potter "Knight Bus"



Photograph by Astrid Stawiarz, Getty Images

A stranded young wizard in the world of Harry Potter need only jab a wand in the air to summon the Knight Bus, a triple-decker that offers a topsy-turvy brand of public transportation on demand. Forget taxis. This machine can shrink to squeeze through tight spots, and passengers can buy hot chocolate or a toothbrush on board.

"I love Harry Potter's Knight Bus," said Rachel MacCleery, vice president of infrastructure for the Urban Land Institute. "[It's] so great that it's a bus--the workhorse of any transit system-and not a train," she wrote in an email.

Wands sadly remain the stuff of fiction, but the Knight Bus illustrates concepts at work in real-world transportation systems. Telematics, for example, have helped advance "demand responsive" and community-based flexible transport services to help fill the gap between buses and taxis, especially in rural areas. Routes can be optimized based on real-time demand and passengers can be assigned dynamically based on the location and status of vehicles in the fleet.

In cities around the world, minibuses and share taxis facilitate this kind of trip aggregation in more informal networks. Residents of New York City and other metro areas, meanwhile, have a growing number of apps to use for finding fellow travelers who will share a cab ride--thereby saving on fare and potentially preventing emissions that would otherwise result from two cars carrying solo passengers.

"Even with diesel buses, we're taking cars off the road," Virginia Miller, a spokesperson for the American Public Transportation Association said in a phone interview. But many buses now run on natural gas or use gas-electric hybrid systems. Percentage-wise, she added, "If the auto fleet here had as many hybrids as the transit system does, we'd be in a much better place."


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