About the author
Growing up in the '60s, John Rickey was influenced by Jacques Cousteau, Sea Hunt, Flipper, and any National Geographic special on television. Early on he called himself an environmentalist, concerned about environmental quality especially of the human environment with respect to the control of pollution.
Somehow, by the '70s, the definition of environmentalist had been highjacked by liberal activists and changed to become political in nature especially against the petroleum industry and the use of fossil fuels. Many of these environmentalists argued for a return to a preindustrial society.
Upon graduating from University of California-Santa Barbara with a degree in Environmental Biology, John moved to San Diego to attend Scripps Institute of Oceanography. Although he never attended, he was offered multiple jobs the first day in was there. He worked for years in the commercial diving industry with commercial divers, Navy divers and sport divers. He taught underwater photography and ran diving excursions off the Southern California coast as well as Baja, Mexico.
John became active in the San Diego Underwater Film Festival and was responsible for getting Jean-Michel Cousteau to host one year which allowed John to meet his father Jacques Cousteau and his brother Philippe.
During the '70s John worked on many exciting projects in San Diego, from generating energy from ocean tides and waves, investigating reverse osmosis of salt water to clean water, homesteading land offshore San Diego in the kelp beds and building a ferro-cement underwater geodesic dome habitat. John worked at establishing an underwater museum displaying the many contributions of San Diego to the marine history. He helped support a dive on the Andrea Doria, and got permission from the Navy to take a World War II submarine and sink it off La Jolla as a man-made reef.
By the late 70's John was working in the petroleum publishing industry and traveling North America. He pretty much has been to every major and independent production and exploration company, drilling contractor and pipeline contractor in North America.
We all want clean air & water, safe roads, good schools and safe food at the grocery stores. Most of us work hard for our money and are supportive of investing in the common good. But for some reason, whether it is greed, power or control, the government wants to spend our money anyway they choose. They want to spend more money, even money we dont have and will never have.
Today John calls himself a global warming heretic. He is fighting the dogma of today's church of environmentalism which is made up of hundreds of well-meaning organizations and millions of passionate people worldwide that care about our planet. Unfortunately, the politics is controlled by activist, scientists taking grant money to prove a wanted outcome, government scientist with a political agenda, the media and even the United Nations. Their goal is to gain power and control and redistribution of wealth.
John is a very positive person and believes in independent scientific research and American exceptionalism. He knows we can solve our problems and continue to make improvements that better our lives.