Great Scott, It's Garbage

In the 1985 film Back to the Future, Doc Brown pulls up in a DeLorean running on household trash - a banana peel, a half-empty soda can - tossed into a converter mounted where a gas tank should be. It's a punchline. A scientist so far ahead of his time that garbage becomes fuel, and the audience laughs because it's obviously make-believe.

Except it isn't, entirely. Long before "trash-to-energy" was a phrase anyone outside a lab used, a Christian prophet named Kim Clement was describing a coming energy shift in language that sounds almost lifted from that scene - and people are revisiting his words right now, wondering how close we've come.

The Big E

Clement spoke often in the early 2010s about what he called an acceleration - secrets God was preparing to release one at a time. One recurring phrase was simply "the Big E," a coming energy discovery he said would be uncovered after having been buried for decades. In a related 2013 word, he described a vision that opened with "two crowns, golden crowns, an investment," before shifting into watching the formation of something unusual - a strange new light and energy, prepared, he said, for the benefit of God's people.

He was honest that he didn't fully understand what he was seeing. That kind of admitted uncertainty runs through a lot of Clement's energy-related words, which is part of why his daughter, Donné Clement Petruska, and the House of Destiny ministry keep bringing them back up on their weekly broadcasts as current events unfold.

Tell OPEC To Shove It

The clearest of Clement's energy words came on February 28, 2012. He described a coming shift where America would stop relying on Middle Eastern oil altogether - where the nation's own soil would hold the resource everyone assumed only OPEC countries had. He framed decades of American oil dependence as the nation effectively feeding OPEC, and prophesied a moment when that dependence would end so completely that America would be able to tell OPEC to "shove it." It's a blunt, memorable line, and it's one reason this particular word keeps circulating. Energy independence and OPEC leverage are not new topics, but they're live ones again in 2026, and that's exactly the kind of overlap that makes a decade-old prophetic word worth a second look.

From the Garbage, From the Ground

This is the word that sounds the most like Doc Brown's converter. In it, Clement said plainly: "it shall come from the garbage. It'll come from the ground." He went on to describe it coming from paper, too, and then, more strikingly still, from small creatures - bugs - consuming the very waste material most people would consider worthless. He framed it as almost absurd on its face: the very things being thrown away would turn out to hold the fuel.

Set alongside where the country actually is right now, that's not as far-fetched as it once sounded. On January 14, 2026, President Trump signed an executive order addressing the national security risk of America's reliance on foreign-sourced rare earth and critical minerals - the materials used in everything from fighter jets to smartphone magnets. In the years since, a real and growing industry has emerged around extracting those same minerals from waste coal piles and gasifying landfill and municipal waste into usable fuel - genuinely converting what was thrown away into something that runs an engine.

None of that is a verdict on any particular company or investment - that's a decision for each person's own judgment and financial counsel, not something to lean on a prophetic word to justify. But as a matter of where the technology and the policy conversation both are right now, the shape of it - buried value, waste made useful, a nation no longer dependent on outsiders for fuel - lines up with what Clement described more than a decade earlier. Doc Brown's converter was played for laughs. This word wasn't.

Five Forms of Energy

In another word, Clement described being shown a vehicle where the driver could choose how to fuel it - implying not one replacement for gasoline, but several viable options running in parallel. Those who've studied his energy-related words count as many as five distinct forms described across different prophecies: multiple paths converging on the same result rather than a single silver-bullet discovery.

Whether that detail holds up as literal or simply reflects the range of energy alternatives already being pursued today - synthetic fuels, hydrogen, and others - is exactly the kind of specific, checkable claim that makes this word worth tracking rather than dismissing outright.

Testing the Word

Scripture doesn't ask believers to accept every prophetic claim uncritically, and it doesn't ask them to reject the category either. 1 Thessalonians 5:20-21 gives the balance in a single breath: do not despise prophecies, but test all things and hold fast to what is good. Dismissing a word out of hand is just as far from that instruction as swallowing it whole. Deuteronomy 18:21-22 sets the patient standard for the testing part: a word from the Lord comes to pass. Time and outcome are the test, not enthusiasm and not skepticism. That's worth considering. Clement's energy words are specific enough to actually fail or succeed - not vague enough to mean anything. That's rare, and it's part of why they're worth revisiting rather than filing away. Isaiah 43:19 has God declaring that He is doing a new thing, springing forth even now, making a road in the wilderness and rivers in the desert. A new energy source, hidden in plain sight in what looks like waste, fits that pattern of God working through the overlooked and the discarded.

Proverbs 25:2 puts it another way: it is the glory of God to conceal a matter, but the glory of kings is to search it out. Whether or not this particular word is fully fulfilled yet, that's the posture worth having - watching, testing, and refusing to either dismiss it outright or build a financial decision on it.

All Scripture quotations are taken from the New King James Version (NKJV).