375. Sacrificing the Poor to NOT Save the Planet | Robert Bryce

[0] Hello everyone watching and listening.

[1] Today I'm speaking with author, podcaster and film producer Robert Bryce.

[2] We discussed topics from his latest book, A Question of Power, electricity and the wealth of nations, the current audacity of those pushing the zero emissions, net zero agenda.

[3] how those policies really affect the developing world and the poor in the West, hint it's not good.

[4] The feasibility and necessity of coal and fossil fuel and nuclear power now and into the foreseeable future, the catastrophic practical and environmental problems related to wind and solar, and a positive vision for the future, we could all share voluntarily should our institutions finally drop their fear -mongering, tyranny -inducing, doomsday narrative.

[5] Let's start, well, we can start wherever you want, but perhaps on the renewable energy front might be a good place to dive in.

[6] Sure.

[7] And so, well, I'm glad to talk about all of those.

[8] I mean, those are all I'm passionate about those issues.

[9] Those are my purpose.

[10] And so I'll also just point out on my latest substack, I don't know if your team sent it to you, but the title was Let Them Eat Solar Panels.

[11] And the gist of it is that the U .S. Export -Import Bank just funded a $900 million loan for a solar project in Angola.

[12] Jordan, 60 % of the people in Angola don't even have electricity.

[13] Why, in the name of Jesus Mary and Joseph, we're funding a solar project?

[14] They hit a natural gas -powered plant, and instead we're funding solar.

[15] And the XM banks press release said to help Angola meet its climate commitments.

[16] I'm like, what are you talking about?

[17] Yeah, well, you can be absolutely certain that the primary concern.

[18] of the Angolan's is to meet their bloody climate commitments.

[19] Right.

[20] Exactly.

[21] It's so interesting watching the leftists in particular on the environmental front rampaged down this pathway because they're the same ideologues who constantly what conspire to accuse conservatives and classic liberals of being colonialist in their endeavors.

[22] And I've never seen a more colonialist endeavor in my entire life than the attempt to impose climate concerns on the developing world.

[23] It is something bloody miraculous to see.

[24] And to see the leftists sacrifice the poor to their idiot planetary concerns is an absolutely, it's an absolute bloody nightmare as far as I'm concerned.

[25] So in this situation, Angola, sounds like it's tailor -made for that kind of idiocy.

[26] So how is it the case that a solar power plant can be?

[27] become the number one concern on the international development front for Angola?

[28] Like, how did we get there?

[29] Well, how long do we have to go to Jordan?

[30] It's a long history.

[31] But this has been something that's been ongoing now for years, where the World Bank and multilateral bilateral lending institutions are refusing to fund any hydrocarbon projects in developing countries.

[32] And this latest example is the Angolan story, where, and President Biden bragged about it during a high dollar fundraise.

[33] He spoke at a high dollar fundraiser for the League of Conservation Voters in early June.

[34] And he bragged about this, saying, we're building a huge solar plant in Angola.

[35] The average, 60 % of the people in Angola don't have electricity at all.

[36] And you're bragging about the, in the Export Import Bank brags in their press release, about we're helping Angola meet its climate commitments.

[37] I mean, it's crazy town.

[38] And this is a country that has an enormous natural gas and oil, wealth, they should be allowed to burn those hydrocarbons.

[39] This is, it's green colonialism, carbon imperialism, green colonialism.

[40] And numerous leaders, numerous analysts have pointed this out.

[41] But I just find it anathema.

[42] I mean, electricity is the key to better life for everyone everywhere on the planet.

[43] And this is effectively telling the developing countries and one of the most desperately poor countries in Africa, no, you can't burn hydrocarbons.

[44] yeah yeah it's i i think it's i actually think it's criminal it's criminal levels of stupidity to do this to the developing world and so so tell me tell let's let's go into your background a bit so that everybody who's watching and listening knows a little bit about you so why don't you run through your biography and tell us all about how long you've been writing and how you've done your investigations sure well first things first i'm proud father um i'm proudly married to Lauren, my wife, we've been married for 37 years.

[45] We have three great kids.

[46] We're empty nesters, which is a beautiful thing.

[47] But we have three great kids married Michael and Jacob, and they're all thriving.

[48] I've been a journalist my whole career.

[49] I've never had a real job.

[50] I've been a reporter my whole life.

[51] I wrote my first book on Enron, which came out in 2002.

[52] It's now already 20 years ago.

[53] I started my career in newspapering at the Austin Chronicle here in Austin, in the late 80s.

[54] That one thing led to another, led me into the book business.

[55] My book on Enron was called Pipe Dreams, Greed Ego, and the Death of Enron.

[56] It came out now 20 and a half years ago, and I'm still writing about Enron, in fact, these days.

[57] So now six books later, my latest is The Question of Power, Electricity, and the Wealth of Nations.

[58] I've been very fortunate to have the same publisher, public affairs, the same editor, Lisa Kaufman, same agent, Dan Green.

[59] All have been incredibly supportive and helpful along the way.

[60] So I consider myself an incredibly fortunate, Jordan, to be able to write about, think about, do a lot of public speaking on energy and power.

[61] These are the world's biggest industries, biggest, and most important businesses.

[62] And particularly now where there are so many political issues around all of these things and so much focus on climate and renewables.

[63] And I think there are some positive trends.

[64] And I want to talk about those.

[65] But I see a lot of bad policy happening.

[66] and particularly in Europe and here in the U .S., where Europe has just driven itself into the ditch.

[67] But, yeah, that's my brief.

[68] Well, yeah, and I mean the rest of the world seems hell -bent on copying, let's say, Germany, which has had the most catastrophic energy and environment policies that you could possibly produce, short of shutting down the entire grid, not least because, what, their energy prices are now five times what they should be.

[69] They shut down their nuclear plants.

[70] Their energy provision is now unreliable.

[71] They are dependent on Russia and other totalitarian states for their energy provision.

[72] Energy is so expensive that electric car manufacturers are moving from Germany to China.

[73] Germany is deindustrializing because the energy prices are too high.

[74] Plus, and this is the kicker, they're actually polluting more per kilowatt than they were 15 years ago because since they've shut down their reasonable sources of electricity, including nuclear, which they import anyways from France, they're now turning to burning lignite, for God's sake, which is the dirtiest form of coal.

[75] Isn't it insane?

[76] I mean, you couldn't make it up.

[77] I'll make even one better.

[78] So you mentioned lignite, and the company, it's RWE of Memory Serves, right, is the big utility.

[79] So they're expanding a lignite mine so they can provide more lignite, which is a low -rank coal, emits more CO2 per kilowatt hour than any other form of power generation.

[80] And to expand the lignite mine, Jordan, they took down a wind project.

[81] Oh, yeah, that's just great.

[82] So, the irony is just remarkable.

[83] But to your point, yes, Germany has, more than any other country in Europe, has driven itself into the ditch.

[84] They did it to themselves.

[85] And they're patting themselves on the back.

[86] I mean, none of it makes any sense.

[87] Yeah, well, it's, the response seems to be, well, we didn't do stupid things fast enough.

[88] I like that.

[89] So let's hurry up.

[90] Let's drive ourselves faster into the ditch.

[91] But, yeah, I mean, the coup de grace was them shutting down their last nuclear plants.

[92] When they knew they were short natural gas, they knew they were no longer going to be able to import as much gas from Russia.

[93] So what did they do?

[94] They went into the global LNG market, and they snapped up as many LNG cargoes and future contracts as they could.

[95] And in doing so, what did they do?

[96] Well, not only did they, are they burning more lignite, more coal, to your point.

[97] But they also priced out a lot of developing countries from importing liquefied natural gas.

[98] Principally, among them, Pakistan, which is remarkable because Pakistan in February announced we're done with the LNG business, we're going to burn coal.

[99] And so the Pakistanis are now saying we're going to expand our coal -fired capacity.

[100] So it's not just that this is affecting Germany.

[101] It's having knock -on effects in the developing world.

[102] Well, you know, when the German chancellor came over to visit our idiot country, and he asked Trudeau if there was any possibility of increasing liquid natural gas imports from Canada.

[103] And of course, Trudeau has done everything he can for the last 10 years to absolutely devastate the Canadian oil and gas industry and to make the export of liquid natural gas impossible.

[104] And so Trudeau said, well, we can't make a business case for that, which is exactly the same bloody thing that he said when the Japanese leader came and asked for the same thing.

[105] and the reason that he can't make a business case for it is because his government has produced policies that have made the export of Canadian fossil fuel resources which are among the cleanest in the world impossible.

[106] And so I really don't understand how the hell this can be happening in Germany.

[107] I mean, I'm not a cynic, although whatever naive optimism I had about the political process is certainly being disabused.

[108] But everything that is happening in Germany is so stupid on the energy front, that it's a kind of miracle, especially because, you know, you could give the damn devils their due if they were able to say, well, we made electricity five times as expensive, but we've cut emissions by a certain proportion, and here's the net environmental benefit, which all of which I think is complete BS, by the way.

[109] But if they could say that, well, that would be something.

[110] But for them to also have to say, oh, well, we've made electricity five times more expensive and unreliable, plus we pollute more.

[111] It's like there's zero.

[112] Zero victory.

[113] That's F -minus, man. You guys failed on every bloody front, including the ones you set up as your own principles.

[114] And yet, nothing seems to happen.

[115] And as you said, you know, Biden can come out and flourish his agreement with Angola to produce a kind of electricity they don't need at a tremendously elevated price while engaging in this neo -colonial enterprise.

[116] Like, I can't believe we can be this stupid.

[117] I can't understand how this could happen.

[118] So obviously, Germany is this classic example of what not to do, which is remarkable is what's happening here in the United States, where California is following this example straight into the ditch.

[119] More than any other state in the U .S., California has emulated these policies of mandating renewables, of shutting down baseload power plants.

[120] They shut down the San Anofi nuclear plant a few years ago.

[121] They almost succeeded in closing Diablo Canyon.

[122] That Newsom made, I think, finally sobered up and said, no, we need this plant.

[123] forget that it's nuclear.

[124] It's 9 % of our electric generation production in California.

[125] But look at what has happened.

[126] It's a similar story, Jordan.

[127] For all of the effort and all the money that the California has spent, they've seen no reduction in their overall emissions from their electric generation sector.

[128] Further, they have seen their electric prices rise faster than any other state in the United States.

[129] Since 2008, and I've written about this on my substack, Schwarzenegger signed a renewable energy mandate in 2008.

[130] Since then, California's electric rates had gone up at a rate three times faster than that of the average in the United States.

[131] It's unconscionable what they're doing, Jordan.

[132] And this is in a state that is dominated by the Democratic Party, the liberals who say they care about the poor in the middle class.

[133] And yet this is what, as my late brother, John Bryce said, just grills my cheese.

[134] I mean, it's ruinously regressive.

[135] California has the highest poverty rate in America.

[136] Jordan.

[137] And yet they are sticking it to the poor in the middle class in a big way.

[138] And where the peak electric rates in California now, 40, 50 cents a kilowatt hour.

[139] I mean, this is fine if you live in a nice house that's on San Francisco Bay, but the low -income people don't live there.

[140] They can't afford to live there.

[141] They live inland where they have to use air conditioning.

[142] So all of this climate, I have to say it very clearly, nearly all of this climate policy, whether it's mandates for electric cars or the renewable mandates, rooftop solar, it's ruinously regressive.

[143] It screws the poor in the middle class.

[144] I've been absolutely stunned to watch the left in their rampage to sacrifice the poor, to fail to save the planet.

[145] You know, it's almost as unconscionable to me as the fact that the left, again, climbed in bed with the pharmaceutical companies so radically on the on the on the on the pandemic front you know I mean there's lots of things to be said in relationship to the so -called pandemic which I also don't believe in by the way because I think it was a pandemic of totalitarian overreaction and not a pandemic of illness but the fact that the left itself was so supportive of the pharmaceutical companies was something just absolutely staggering to see and to see the left go out after the poor so assiduously, my understanding is this, you tell me what you think about this, is like if you really cared for poor people and you wanted their lives to improve, the best thing you could possibly do, as far as I can tell, is to lower, is to drive energy costs down to the lowest possible level and to make energy provision your number one priority everywhere, especially in the developing world, but also for the poor in the West.

[146] And the reason for that is that there's no difference between energy and work.

[147] And there's no difference between work and productivity.

[148] Now, you might say two things.

[149] You might respond, well, the planet has too many people on it.

[150] We can't encourage that sort of thing.

[151] And if you make people rich, then the rich people destroy the environment faster.

[152] But both of those things are nonsense, because we've seen a massive increase in population over the last 40 years.

[153] And all the bloody doomsayers like Paul Erlich, who has more sins on his conscience than anyone else I can possibly think of, has said that by the year 2000, we were going to be out of commodities and everybody was going to be starving to death.

[154] And we're not out of commodities, and they're a lot cheaper, and we have more food, and people only starve to death for political reasons.

[155] And as we've got more people, we've actually got richer.

[156] So that's all bloody, complete, backwards nonsense.

[157] And then not only that is that the data that I've looked at, and I've looked at it with Bjorn Lomberg or through his eyes, is that if you can get people in the developing world up to about $5 ,000 a year in gross domestic product, on average, they start taking a long -term view of the future.

[158] start becoming concerned about local environmental issues and we'll take that burden on to themselves so that top -down centralist globalist utopians don't have to enforce all this idiocy on them.

[159] So like, am I missing something here?

[160] You know, have I gone down some bloody right -wing rabbit hole?

[161] Or is this just the stark truth?

[162] So I think the key for me, Jordan, in all of this discussion, is electricity availability.

[163] And this is, yes, energy in general matters.

[164] But more specifically, it's electricity.

[165] And let me get on one point that I think is critical when we talk about compassion, we talk about humanism, because my favorite line these days is energy realism is energy humanism.

[166] And when we're going to be realistic about energy and we're going to be energy humanists, we have to look at the lens of energy and energy availability in particular in how it affects women and girls.

[167] Electricity frees women and girls from the pump, the stove, and the wash tub.

[168] You remember the new dealers here in the U .S. when they wanted to bring electricity to rural areas, many of these politicians, George Norris, Sam Rayburn, George Norris from Nebraska, Sam Rayburn from Texas, Lyndon Johnson from Texas, they had seen their mothers wash clothes by hand.

[169] They wanted them to be liberated from the wash tub.

[170] They'd seen this kind of back -breaking labor.

[171] And this is the key.

[172] There are something like, who's the Swedish demographer who recently died?

[173] He estimated there were five billion people in the world today walking around in clothes that have been washed by hand.

[174] Well, that means there's, yes.

[175] Oh, now, see, what is his last, what's his first name?

[176] Hans Rosslings, forgive me. Hans Rossling.

[177] Yes, Hans Rossling.

[178] Brilliant.

[179] He did that amazing video.

[180] I think he gave a TED talk.

[181] where he was talking about his grandmother.

[182] And his grandmother, his folks had bought a washing machine.

[183] His grandmother came over when they, first time they used the washing machine and she wanted to start it, right?

[184] Because it was a miracle to her.

[185] He said that, in fact.

[186] He said, the washing machine to my grandmother was a miracle.

[187] So when we think about electricity and energy availability, this is the key for women and girls.

[188] Because if they don't have it, they are effectively slaves to the household chores.

[189] And so, how is Rosling's point?

[190] Five billion people in the world today.

[191] are walking around in clothes that have been washed by hand.

[192] That means there are two and a half billion women and girls who are washing those clothes by hand at every minute, every hour, every day that they're not washing clothes by hand.

[193] They're not in the library.

[194] They're not in school.

[195] They're not able to get a job outside the home.

[196] So there is this meat.

[197] They're also not contributing their brain power to the rest of us.

[198] Exactly.

[199] Can you imagine the economic value of two billion brains that are occupied in menial labor that could otherwise be freed up.

[200] I mean, there's 2 ,000 women in that group that are one in a million.

[201] You know, and that's genius level, man. We could use those people.

[202] And the fact that we're locking up that degree of neural architecture in these menial tasks to not save the planet while we're making electricity more unreliable and more expensive.

[203] It's just, it's absolute, it's beyond incompetence into the realm of absolutely criminal, as far as I'm concerned.

[204] It's, it's just It's just, it's an excessive focus, I think, on the, look, here's my line.

[205] Climate change is a concern.

[206] It's not our only concern.

[207] We have to balance our action on climate with our other issues.

[208] But the overall point, I think that it's absolutely essential is that regardless of what we think, what you and I think about CO2 emissions and how many parts per million is the perfect number, if we're facing more extreme weather, hotter, colder, more extreme, longer, I mean, it's been crazy hot here in Texas.

[209] Well, if that's the case, we're going to need a lot more energy, not less.

[210] We're going to need a lot more reliable energy, not less.

[211] And yet the trends are for this effort to rely more on weather -dependent renewables.

[212] So if we're facing, that's the other part, Jordan, if we're facing more extreme weather, why in the world would we make our most important energy network dependent on the weather?

[213] I mean, it's like on the face of it, it makes no sense.

[214] I mean, I don't want to get too technical, but it's just crazy town.

[215] Let's walk through this again, too.

[216] And so I'd like you to push back on me as much as you could.

[217] So this is what I've watched in the course of my lifetime.

[218] So in the 1970s, we were going to run out of fossil fuels.

[219] And that was a big bloody catastrophe for everyone for about six years after 1972 in the energy crisis.

[220] And that turned out to be complete rubbish.

[221] We're not running out of fossil fuels.

[222] And we won't.

[223] Partly, I mean, I think it was Exxon two weeks ago.

[224] announced that they had a new fracturing technology that could double the known store of fossil fuels in the U .S., which is like should have been front -page headline news everywhere because, oh my God, we have twice as many fossil fuels as we thought, and so isn't that really something?

[225] And you Americans have become absolute bloody magicians at extracting out fossil fuel from these huge reserves that you have, like the shale beds, and it's not going to run out.

[226] And that's partly because as the price goes up, people's incentives to extract out even more of the fossil fuel reserves we know are there increases, and the technology geniuses just get better and better at doing it.

[227] So we're not going to run out of fossil fuel.

[228] That's not going to happen, that was wrong.

[229] Okay, next.

[230] The next thing that happened in the 1970s is global cooling.

[231] The planet's going to freeze, and that happened for about five years, and then that turned out to be nonsense.

[232] And then the next thing that happened was global warming.

[233] And then that turned out to be not true enough to be sustainable.

[234] And somehow, the narrative switched to, oh, well, it's climate change.

[235] Now, and that is one weasley proposition, man. It's like, oh, change.

[236] So now you have a get -out -of -jail -free car for all of your idiot policies because of the climate is changing.

[237] And that means increased variability.

[238] Now, I've looked at the data on hurricane frequency, for example.

[239] There's no evidence whatsoever that hurricanes are increasing in frequency.

[240] And to the degree that they're more expensive, it's only because people are building more and more expensive properties in hurricane -prone zones.

[241] Then we also have Bjorn Lomberg's data showing that even if we accept the IPCC's climate predictions, and I don't necessarily think we should, that we will be some degree poorer than how much richer we would have been 100 years from now.

[242] Right.

[243] And so he thinks we can handle that, no problem, with an iota of intelligence and some.

[244] But then I'm wondering, too, tell me what you think about this.

[245] I've been watching the greening data.

[246] Now, the world has greened 15 % since the year 2000.

[247] And that is a lot.

[248] It's an area of leaf, twice the size of the continental U .F. That's a lot of extra leaves.

[249] And, interestingly enough, it's greened in exactly the area.

[250] that the climate catastrophes told us would be at most risk, because they presumed that the semi -arid areas, the arid areas would expand out into the semi -arid areas and the deserts would grow.

[251] Well, the desert isn't growing.

[252] The Sahara is actually shrinking, especially on the south end.

[253] And the reason it's shrinking is because more carbon dioxide has allowed plants to thrive.

[254] And when they thrive, they can close their breathing pores, which means they don't need as much water.

[255] And now they're growing in semi -arid areas all over the world.

[256] world plus crop yields have gone up so like well let me let me let me interrupt because i think i'm not familiar with all the data you're you're you're throwing out there and i i know these arguments and here's how i keep my sanity jordan is that i i don't i don't get into the you know what is how many parts per million is the right number i you know we can argue about the climate science my approach is very simple look if we're going to agree that we're going to agree that we need to do something.

[257] What's the best policy, right?

[258] As I said, climate change is a concern.

[259] It's not our only concern.

[260] So what is the way forward?

[261] What do we, if we accept that we are facing some risk, how do we deal with this risk?

[262] What is the best, no regrets policy?

[263] So I've been saying now for more than a dozen years, natural gas to nuclear, this is the way forward.

[264] And this is the part that just, you know, as I said, grills my cheese, chaps my hide on this Angola deal.

[265] And it's on my substack, Robertbrice .substack .com.

[266] Let them eat solar panels.

[267] right, that the Export Import Bank of the United States is not funding a natural gas -fired power plant in Angola, even though Angola has trillions of cubic feet of available natural gas.

[268] Instead, we're funding a solar panel project.

[269] I mean, this makes no sense whatsoever.

[270] So we're serious about reducing emissions and bringing more people out of the dark and into the light, which I think is incumbent on the wealthy countries to help developing countries do that.

[271] How do we do that?

[272] natural gas resources globally Jordan are just they're not abundant they're super abundant they're geographically widespread and and there is an enormous amount of stranded gas look at the huge offshore fields that have been discovered off of Africa Tanzania other countries including Angola enormous natural gas resources that have barely been tapped well some of that gas is going to be exported into the global market into Europe and advanced countries that are developed countries.

[273] But Africa should be using those resources and to prevent them from doing so, I think is just, as you say, I think it's morally wrong.

[274] I think it's, it's anathema.

[275] I mean, it should be, people should be shouting from the rooftop saying, no, we should be helping these countries come out of the dark.

[276] We should be helping them develop because that's incumbent upon us.

[277] Or at least not getting in their way.

[278] Or at least not getting in their way.

[279] So then natural gas to nuclear, I'll just finish this other point.

[280] This is one of the things that, again, to me, when I look at these big climate NGOs, I don't call them environmental groups, I don't call them green groups, because I don't think they are either.

[281] They're NGOs, their climate activist groups, and by the way, they're spending $4 .5 billion a year.

[282] I've documented this.

[283] That's their budgets.

[284] They're just enormous.

[285] Almost a person, almost all of them are anti -nuclear.

[286] Well, if we're serious about CO2, I mean, it makes no sense.

[287] My line is, if you're anti -carbon dioxide and anti -nuclear, you are pro -blackout.

[288] Well, I'm anti -blackout.

[289] You're also bloody well pro -starvation.

[290] Well, right.

[291] So we need to be helping develop this technology.

[292] And these are the things that I think are positive.

[293] Now, we can focus on a lot of things that are negative.

[294] And I will grant you, there are many negative things that are happening.

[295] And we can throw rocks at the NGOs and all the climate idiocy that's happening in terms of this, or the policy idiocy, rather, around this.

[296] But what we're seeing in the wake of the Russia, Ukraine War that I think is really encouraging, Jordan, is a move toward nuclear.

[297] Romania, one of the countries, France, just, Finland just opened Akaludo.

[298] Sweden just said, we're going to, we're bagging our renewable push, we're going to build nuclear plants.

[299] Just yesterday was June 29th, an EDF group in France said we're going to build two more nuclear reactors.

[300] The U .S., tremendous amount of momentum and money behind new nuclear.

[301] Now, there are a lot of friction points, including fuel availability, because the Russians are producing 46%, I think, over 40 % of the global uranium enrichment market is in Russia.

[302] Well, Saskatchewan has the biggest uranium reserves in the world, and they're bloody untouched.

[303] And in our idiot country, you know, we have all these fossil fuel reserves, but we have tremendous stores of nuclear fuel as well, of uranium.

[304] And Canada actually has good nuclear technology.

[305] The Can Do reactor is a good reactor.

[306] And Canada is another good story.

[307] And I'm working on a new documentary.

[308] It's going to be out this fall.

[309] It's called Juice Power Politics in the Grid.

[310] And one of the people we're featuring is one of your Canadian colleagues, Chris Kiefer.

[311] He's done a remarkable job in this revitalization of the Canadian nuclear sector, that you're going to rebuild some of your Kandu reactors.

[312] You're building an SMR, I think, at Darlington with a BX, BRX 300.

[313] So I won't say it's all due to Dr. Kiefer.

[314] He's a remarkable story by himself.

[315] He's an emergency room.

[316] I should have him as a podcast guest, eh?

[317] Oh, you should.

[318] Put us in touch.

[319] Would you put us in touch?

[320] Absolutely.

[321] No, he's got a lot of Elvis.

[322] He's six feet nine.

[323] He's just this big presence.

[324] But he almost single -handedly, Jordan, he has ignited this new rebirth in Canadian nuclear.

[325] And it's been a marvel.

[326] So that Canada has kind of, Canada, rather, has kind of jumped into the lead.

[327] But it's not, so Canada, Romania, China's building dozens of reactors.

[328] The Russians are still pushing out their technology.

[329] Britain, France, Poland, I mentioned Romania.

[330] So there is, amidst all the crazy town that's happening.

[331] The one, I think, thing that is positive that's occurred in the wake of Russia's invasion of Ukraine is a recognition that if we're serious about reducing emissions or just more serious about not covering the landscape, littering the landscape with stupid wind terms.

[332] turbines and solar panels, we're going to embrace nuclear.

[333] So I think that's a very positive thing that is happening, and one that I'm watching very closely.

[334] Well, and where do you see, where are you particularly optimistic on the nuclear technology front?

[335] What do you think of small modular reactors and the molten salt technologies and so forth that people seem to be?

[336] My sense is that the way forward is something like standardized production of small modular nuclear reactors so that the cost per unit can be.

[337] brought down and so that the systems can be distributed without having to build an immense amount of high of like transmission wires so but i don't like i'm i'm trying to get up to speed on that but but i'm not precisely so where are you particularly optimistic on the nuclear front so well like you i see a lot of promise with nuclear in general so what about smr's which is small modular reactors there are a lot of technologies that are being developed now and a bunch of different companies that are pushing them out so the ghe hit jih it's new scale here in the U .S. X Energy, Kairos, Oklo.

[338] It remains to be seen which one will be the one that makes it to market.

[339] Among the most interesting ones to me, Jordan, is X Energy.

[340] It's a high -temperature gas reactor.

[341] And they just recently did a deal with Dow, and Dow announced, in fact, Dow, I think, took an equity position in X Energy.

[342] And they are planning to deploy four of their SMRs at one of their, at Dow's chemical plant in Cedrift, Texas, which is fairly close to Corpus Christi if memory serves.

[343] Well, to me, what's interesting about that, one of those high temperature gas, right?

[344] So that's a safer design inherently than a water -based reactor.

[345] Second, it's that Dow is looking at this, and Dow is an old -line chemical company.

[346] We're very conservative.

[347] They're looking at this and saying, we think this is the right technology.

[348] And further, that they're saying, we're going to use the high -temperature process heat so we can make chemicals instead of burning gas to produce high temperature, right?

[349] To make high temperature steam.

[350] Oh, so it has that additional advantage.

[351] Do you want to walk through?

[352] Do you want to walk through that why that's important for people?

[353] Well, sure.

[354] So industrial process heat is needed for a lot of different things, right?

[355] Refining, mining, chemical production.

[356] So industrial consumers use a lot of electricity.

[357] They use a lot of energy in general.

[358] So if you have a source of high temperature heat, then you could produce high temperature steam.

[359] And then you can produce high temperature steam.

[360] use that for your processing of whatever it is that you're doing.

[361] So for Dow to make this deal with X energy, I think, is indicative of where the market, the industrial consumers are seeing things, how they see the market moving, right?

[362] And so that's quite intriguing.

[363] I also think Rolls -Royce might be an interesting play.

[364] And, you know, Britain now, is there technology the right one?

[365] We don't know yet.

[366] I think we're kind of in the, I'd compare it maybe to the early days of video.

[367] Is it going to be VHS or is it going to be Betamax, right?

[368] Is it, you know, and which one will prevail.

[369] But I think your general idea that we should have one or two designs is the right one, right?

[370] That is why France was so successful in deploying nuclear.

[371] They picked one nuclear reactor design, and then they just stamped them out, so that any engineer from any nuclear plant in France can go work at another plant because all the instrumentation, all every, all this equipment is the same.

[372] I didn't know this until I went to Paris a few years ago, and I was talking to a nuclear engineer in France, And he said at Three Mile Island, which, of course, is a nuclear plant where we had an accident here in the U .S., there were two reactors, but the two reactors had two different control rooms because they were built by two different companies.

[373] Well, that makes no sense at all, right?

[374] So if we're going to see a new renaissance of nuclear, there are a lot of friction points.

[375] And I'll talk about those in a minute.

[376] But we're going to have to speed up the regulatory regime.

[377] And that means the nuclear regulatory commission here in the U .S. We've had some U .S. companies domicile in Canada because they think it will be ewe, easier path to licensure if they start in Canada and then come back to the U .S. The Europeans are going to have a different type of licensing procedures than the U .S. But the NRC is a big roadblock.

[378] The other is the fuel part.

[379] So this is where I think the friction parts are.

[380] And I want to be very sober about this, Jordan, because I was in Japan earlier this year.

[381] It was very fortunate.

[382] I'm very lucky in my career to be able to travel and see things.

[383] And I went to Fukushima Daiichi.

[384] and it was an indelible experience for me. I've been pro -nuclear for more than a decade, but seeing the ruined reactors at Fukushima Daiichi and hearing the people from Tokyo Electric Power Company talk about how they're taking the reactors apart slowly and the processes they're going through and what they're doing and then seeing what is actually happening in Japan as well, TEPCO is building a coal -fired power plant on Tokyo Bay, right?

[385] The Japanese are embracing energy realism.

[386] The home of the Kyoto Protocol, they're not aiming at net zero.

[387] We met with top government officials.

[388] We met with top industry officials.

[389] I said, so what about your carbon emissions?

[390] They said, yeah, we're not really going to pursue those.

[391] We're pursuing energy security first.

[392] And I had one guy just say very clearly, look, we live in a bad neighborhood.

[393] We got the Russians over there, the Chinese over there, the North Koreans over there.

[394] We are going to take care of our energy security first.

[395] So I think Japan, more than any other country, and my recent experience is an indicator of how energy realism and energy security is trumping concerns about climate change.

[396] And I think rightly so.

[397] The Japanese are nothing, if not practical.

[398] So they're building 1 .3 gigawatt coal -fired power plant on Tokyo Bay.

[399] They're also building another 500 megawatts ultra -super -critical coal -fired power plant.

[400] I forgot where that one is.

[401] And another 5 gigawatts of gas -fired capacity.

[402] So they're slowly reopening their nuclear reactors, but they're also being very clear -eyed.

[403] They're also very clear -eyed about where they are going in the world.

[404] and they're saying energy security is our first concern, and we're going to take care of that because our industry demands it.

[405] And so the Chinese are doing the same thing.

[406] I mean, the Chinese are planning, I think, 100 nuclear plants, something like that over the upcoming decades, but they're also expanding their coal -fired plants like Mad, which also makes an absolute bloody mockery of anything we're doing in the West on the so -called climate front, because especially in a country like Canada, where our emissions are so trivial on the world stage that they're not even within the error margin of estimate for carbon dioxide effects.

[407] And that's a critical point that I think that, you know, I've heard other people say this.

[408] It's not original to me, but the emissions from the West in many ways don't matter anymore because the story is in places like Vietnam, Bangladesh, Pakistan, India, China.

[409] These are the places where emissions are growing so rapidly.

[410] And in fact, I spend a lot of time I nerd out spreadsheets.

[411] And the statistical review of world energy just came out.

[412] So I've been studying it very closely.

[413] The country that had the biggest, in absolute terms, the biggest increase in CO2 emissions last year was Indonesia, followed closely by India.

[414] So these are countries that have enormous populations and are still desperately energy poor.

[415] But let me return back just...

[416] Yeah, well, wait until Nigeria kicks in.

[417] You know, Nigeria is going to have more people in it than China by the end of the century.

[418] So, and your point there that we're we're seeing the huge growth in energy consumption among the countries with the largest populations.

[419] It's like, well, that's pretty bloody self -evident, isn't it?

[420] Once those countries start to pass a certain threshold of industrial development, that is where all the action is going to be on the climate and energy front, and so we should be planning for that.

[421] And, you know, it certainly seems like...

[422] And Vietnam is a good example of this, and I've written about Vietnam as well recently on my substack, that here's a country that is rapidly industrializing, major industrial companies are moving to Vietnam to hedge their bets about being in China.

[423] So big companies, Nike, Adidas, Samsung, Apple, to name a few, locating in Vietnam, and suddenly Vietnam is power short.

[424] So what did Vietnam just announced, their Vietnam is their state -owned mining company, announced they're going to expand their coal mining capacity by 15%.

[425] This is the iron, this is the iron law of electricity, what I call the iron law of electricity, a nod to my friend Roger Pilke Jr., who coined the Iron Law of Climate.

[426] He said, when his focus was face between climate policy and economic growth, economic growth will win every time.

[427] So I borrowed Roger's idea and coined the Iron Law of Electricity, which is people, countries, and businesses will do whatever they have to do to get the electricity they need.

[428] Climate change is not their first concern.

[429] And this was evident in Japan.

[430] This was the part that really was a sobering experience in going to Japan.

[431] But I've seen it myself.

[432] I've seen people in India stealing electricity.

[433] In Beirut, where I talk about that.

[434] I write about it in my book.

[435] seeing the generator mafia where pretty much everyone in Lebanon pays two electric bills.

[436] One to EDL, the grid operator, and the other to the generator mafia, who are the local entrepreneurs, they call them the mob, they call them the mafia, but they're providing power when the grid fails in Lebanon.

[437] The grid fails in Lebanon every day.

[438] So this iron law of electricity, I think, is another example in my view.

[439] We have to be realists.

[440] Energy realism is energy humanism.

[441] People are going to do whatever they have to do because they are not going to be.

[442] to sit in the dark.

[443] They're not going to let their, you know, the food in the fridge spoil.

[444] They're going to find a small generator.

[445] They're going to steal electricity.

[446] They're also not going to let grandma freeze to death in the winter.

[447] I mean, I looked at Lomberg's data on the consequences of lowering thermostat temperatures just a few degrees.

[448] And he estimated, for example, that a three, if I remember correctly, and this is about right, that a three degree decrease in thermostat temperature in the winter kills 110 ,000 people in Europe.

[449] That's old people, you know, because old people can't regulate their temperature very well.

[450] And so there's two things we need to point out to everyone who's watching and listening.

[451] And the first is that if you raise energy costs, you imagine that there's a pyramid of economic development.

[452] And there's hundreds of millions or billions of people who are sitting right on the threshold of poverty.

[453] They've climbed out of absolute poverty.

[454] So now they have enough money so that they don't have to worry about where lunch is coming from.

[455] But that's just where they're at.

[456] and they're barely there.

[457] And if you increase their energy cost to any degree at all, all you do is whack them back down into absolute abject poverty.

[458] And then they do things like slash and burn agriculture, and they burn dung and other, you know, very low energy dense products in their house.

[459] High polluting fuels, yeah.

[460] Well, right.

[461] And they pollute the indoor atmosphere, and that's really, really hard on their kids and their elderly people as well.

[462] And so you cannot, we've got to say this over and over, you cannot raise energy prices without devastating the poor, period, the end.

[463] And the more poor people you make, as far as I can tell, the worst things are actually for the planet rather than the better.

[464] And this brings us to another conundrum.

[465] You know, you pointed out that the green types tend not only to be anti -natural gas, which is, of course, completely insane, but also anti -nuclear.

[466] And this points to the fundamental underlying motivation, as far as I'm concerned, is that this green movement isn't so much green, certainly not as a consequence of the fruits that is born, as it is both anti -industrial and anti -human.

[467] And those actually turn out to be the same thing.

[468] And you can tell in these wind push comes to shove cases, because the bloody greens, if they were actually concerned about carbon dioxide output, which is what they say we should only be concerned about, would be jumping on board the nuclear wagon bandwagon in a second, saying, well, obviously, we should transition to nuclear because it's zero carbon dioxide output.

[469] And that's not happening.

[470] So that means, as far as I'm concerned, that everything, that their fundamental narrative is a delusional lie.

[471] And it's got a malevolent twist in it, too.

[472] And you can see that manifesting itself in the refusal of these Western NGOs and the World Bank and so forth to lend money to developing countries to try to raise them out of poverty, which is inexcusable.

[473] There's a certain, well, you know this field better than I, but there's a certain puritanical part of this, right?

[474] And a certain also, I think, a religious fundamentalism.

[475] And I'm sure other people have talked about this before.

[476] I know.

[477] But there are many overlaps between the Christian belief and these ideas around climate catastrophism, right?

[478] That we've sinned against the earth, right?

[479] We haven't sinned against God.

[480] We've sinned against the earth.

[481] We need to repent.

[482] we need to use less, do less, and go back to the garden, right?

[483] And even Martin Luther to, you know, keep going on this just a hair longer, he would recognize carbon credits, right?

[484] You know, like, you get a carbon indulgence by buying some offset because you flew to Fiji.

[485] But let me just build on your point about the availability of hydrocarbons and how important it is.

[486] And Kirk Smith was a professor at Cal Berkeley who died recently, and I cited him, I think in my latest book or in my fourth book, Power Hungry, but he documented and was one among the first researchers to document the effects of indoor air pollution on women and girls.

[487] And, you know, I was interviewing a climate activist yesterday.

[488] And by the way, I don't call it green energy.

[489] I don't call them green.

[490] I call them climate activists.

[491] I don't call it green energy.

[492] I don't call it clean energy.

[493] I called it alt energy, right?

[494] Because I don't think it's green.

[495] I don't think it's clean.

[496] Covering the landscape with solar panels, destroying landscapes with wind turbines.

[497] I'm a long -time critic of the wind business, proudly so.

[498] They don't like me. I don't like them back.

[499] Okay, because I have, you know, I've documented now for more than 10 years and on the renewable rejection database, which is on my website, Robert Bryce .com.

[500] I've documented nearly 400 rejections of wind energy in the U .S. from Maine to Hawaii.

[501] It's happening in Canada, too, by the way.

[502] In Ontario, over 90 communities have declared themselves unwilling hosts to wind energy.

[503] Now, you don't read about this in the New York Times because it doesn't fit the narrative.

[504] but I digress.

[505] So back to the point about hydrocarbons in Kirk Smith, indoor air pollution is one of the leading killers of women and girls in developing countries.

[506] Kirk Smith and the WHO, I think the World Health Organization documented something like three or four million women, women and girls a year are dying premature deaths because of indoor air pollution because they're cooking with dung or wheat straw in their homes.

[507] And Kirk Smith made this point.

[508] They need LPG.

[509] They need butane.

[510] They need propane.

[511] They need clean, forget electricity for just a minute.

[512] Let's replace those low, those low density fuels and low, low density, high polluting fuels with hydrocarbons.

[513] That's a step change in their standards of living.

[514] And so, you know, but I'm with you in terms of kind of your broader points here, we need more energy, not less.

[515] We, and choke, and I'll stop here because I could go on and just pound the table here.

[516] But expensive energy is the enemy of the poor.

[517] And I remember very vividly, I live in Austin, which is, of course, you know, I used to have friends here.

[518] It's a liberal hub, right?

[519] But a friend of mine, a former acquaintance of mine, he was pounding the table, oh, energy's too cheap.

[520] And I thought, okay, here you are.

[521] You vacation and you fly around the world.

[522] You go summer here, there, and they're everywhere.

[523] You're rich, and you're telling me energy is too cheap.

[524] I don't see it that way.

[525] And I haven't talked to him in a long time because of that.

[526] Because I just thought, you don't understand what you're talking about.

[527] Expensive energy is the enemy of the poor.

[528] And yet so many of these policies, both in the developed countries and the developing countries, are aimed by these bilateral, multilateral lenders, by policymakers at the state level and federal level, are aiming that are creating policies that make energy more expensive.

[529] And I just think that's just fundamentally wrong.

[530] Energy means life and the absence of energy is death, to quote, my friend Doombard.

[531] I started to take this whole domain of trouble particularly seriously when watching what was happening in Europe and starting to understand that the West in its delusions of repentance would sacrifice hundreds of millions of people and literally sacrifice them on the altar of Gaia to not save the planet.

[532] well -virtuous signaling about how the industrial enterprise was unethical, despite benefiting from every single one of the gains that the Industrial Revolution has produced and being 100 % absolutely unwilling to give up any of it at all whatsoever, under any circumstances for ourselves.

[533] Like, there's no excuse for any of that.

[534] Now, my understanding is this, is that there's a pretty clear developmental pathway to cleaner and more reliable energy in the long run.

[535] It's something like, well, you start at the very lowest rung with dung and with wheat straw and with those things and with wood, scrapwood, so forth, that can be burned that's there in the local environment, and it's low energy dense, it's expensive, it runs out easily, it's unreliable, it's polluting.

[536] You move from that to coal.

[537] Now, you move to coal because coal is unbelievably plentiful and it's dirt cheap, and you can get a coal -fired plant up and running with relatively rudimentary technology in almost no time flat.

[538] And its disadvantage in particular is particulate pollution, although it also produces a lot of carbon, which I don't really care about.

[539] But the particulate pollution is a problem.

[540] You move from that to oil or natural gas, and you move from that to nuclear.

[541] Like, do we know this or not?

[542] Is this just like, can we rest assured that this is a reasonable developmental pathway and one that we should be pursuing?

[543] Well, this is the way it's been happening for a long time now.

[544] I mean, that is the way the world has decarbonized over time.

[545] My friend Jesse Ossibill at Rockefeller University has documented this and shown we are gradually decarbonizing.

[546] But that decarbonizing is happening is underway in developed countries, and there are dozens of underdeveloped countries that are just getting started, right?

[547] They're still at the biomass stage and there's this claim, oh, well, we can leapfrog, they can.

[548] Alt -energy crowd, the climate crowd says, oh, well, they don't need hydrocarbons.

[549] They'll jump right to renewables.

[550] No, wrong.

[551] I mean, while that's true in some cases in rural areas where solar and batteries are going to be the solution, Africa is rapidly urbanizing.

[552] Here's a quick, quick comparison.

[553] So you're a Canadian, is in rough terms.

[554] There are 35 million Canadians.

[555] They use, compared to 1 .4 billion Africans, roughly the same amount of electricity.

[556] That's the disparity that we're talking about.

[557] Now, there's no numbers aren't exact.

[558] But in rough terms, that's a comparison.

[559] So the need for electricity is overwhelming globally, Jordan.

[560] It's just enormous.

[561] So how do we, you know, this is the part where, look, we can talk climate change all day long, what's the right number, what's the wrong number, what they're, you know, who's doing the right thing, who's the wrong thing?

[562] What's the best no regret strategy as we look to the future?

[563] And I think, again, end to end, natural gas to nuclear.

[564] These are the ways that we are that no regrets.

[565] Okay, so maybe we find in a few years, well, we were wrong about climate change.

[566] I don't necessarily not making that argument.

[567] But if it comes, why natural gas and nuclear, both are lower no carbon.

[568] The technologies are very well developed.

[569] They're available in numerous countries, and they can scale at relatively low cost.

[570] So all of those things together, to me, and make this a no -brainer.

[571] And I'm going to pound the table, continue pounding the table on that, because this is the challenge of our time.

[572] I mean, when we look around the world, when we look around the world and we think as humanists, right, if we're going to be humanists, what do we do to help developing countries come out of the dark?

[573] To develop, how do we help countries like Vietnam?

[574] They're going to look out for Vietnam first.

[575] That is that, you know, every country is going to do what is the right pathway for them.

[576] So how does, how could the U .S., how could Canada, how could the European countries help those countries?

[577] well, help them develop their natural gas and help them deploy nuclear energy at scale.

[578] New next generation, passively safe, modular reactors.

[579] These are the things that are going to help us decarbonize and electrify these countries that are so desperately poor right now.

[580] Okay, so let's turn to two things here.

[581] Sure.

[582] I would like, first of all, I'd like to pick your brain momentarily about coal.

[583] Yeah.

[584] There's lots of coal.

[585] And so if we could figure out how to use that coal, that would be real good because there's lots of it and it's everywhere.

[586] And so how are we doing on the clean coal front?

[587] How good are the modern coal -fired plants in terms of, for example, getting rid of particulate pollution?

[588] Sure.

[589] Well, I'll make a joke first, which I think clean coal is kind of oxymoronic, like military intelligence or family vacation, right?

[590] Or jembo shrimp, right?

[591] You can make cleaner coal.

[592] And so I mentioned Japan earlier.

[593] They're building new coal -fired power plants.

[594] What are they doing?

[595] They're using ultra -super -critical technology, which is the highest level of combustion.

[596] You ring more watt hours for every kilogram of coal that you burn.

[597] So that is the optimum.

[598] If we're going to burn coal, let's use ultra -super -critical technology.

[599] But that's more expensive.

[600] And not all countries are willing to do that.

[601] Instead, they're building sub -critical plants, which are the most common ones.

[602] Well, you think that would be a place for potential subsidy then to help the countries that are building coal plants build better ones.

[603] Absolutely.

[604] If we cared, which we don't.

[605] But I think it's important to put it in historical context.

[606] So I've written about the history.

[607] This is one of the points I make in a question of power is, when you look at Edison in 1882, well, he used coal on the Pearl Street station in Lower Manhattan.

[608] He burned coal, right?

[609] Well, we're still now 140 years, 140, years later, coal globally still has 35 % of the global electric sector market, right?

[610] So, and you mentioned China before, a global energy monitor, which is clearly an anti -cold group in February, I put out a report.

[611] Last year, China permitted two new coal plants a week.

[612] Right, right.

[613] So India is building new coal plants, Bangladesh, Vietnam, numerous other countries, Indonesia.

[614] Indonesia had, as I mentioned before, has the highest or biggest increase in CO2 emissions last year of any country in the world.

[615] Why?

[616] Because they rapidly expanded their coal fleet.

[617] So coal is here to stay for decades to come.

[618] That is a fact.

[619] These plants that are being built now are going to continue running.

[620] So, you know, America is, you know, cheering on the closure of our coal plants.

[621] Well, I think that's probably problematic in terms of reliability, but that's a different discussion.

[622] But so coal is geographically widespread.

[623] It's relatively widespread.

[624] It's relative.

[625] cheap, and it's super abundant.

[626] So that is why so many countries are...

[627] If we close all the bloody coal plants in the West, it also means that we won't be able to put our technological prowess to work to make the coal plants cleaner.

[628] And it also means it'll knock us out of the international market for the development of coal -fired plants, which, as you pointed out, is going to be a growth industry for, you know, into the foreseeable future.

[629] So that seems like a stupid idea to me, all things considered.

[630] Yeah, I don't know necessarily about that because there are a lot of companies that have that kind of technology that can deploy the Japanese, the Malaysians, the Chinese.

[631] But I think the key here is just to think about, you know, it's a global story, right?

[632] And if we're going to, it's not, it's not Texas warming.

[633] It's not Canada warming or America warming.

[634] It's global warming.

[635] It's global climate change.

[636] We're going to deal with this.

[637] We have to have some sensibility about the world as a collection of nations that want to try and address this.

[638] Well, what is going to be the way to, what is the way forward?

[639] And it's going to be to make cleaner electricity cheaper.

[640] And I think that means natural gas and nuclear.

[641] Well, we could run around panicking about the sky falling, even though it isn't.

[642] And we could lie constantly about net zero and make everyone poor.

[643] And we could hurt the hell out of the third world while not doing anything on the climate front instead, which seems to be what we're doing.

[644] You know, these net zero advocates, first of all, that entire terminology just grates on me. It's like there is, like, net zero is a cliche, not a policy.

[645] And zero anything is impossible, because we're not going to get to zero carbon output, obviously, ever.

[646] And we shouldn't even aim at that because it's stupid, you know, even if we could reduce an 80 percent, that would be fine.

[647] But I think that narrative is running out, though.

[648] I think, you know, if you look at what's happening in Europe, I think the politicians, particularly in Germany.

[649] We talked about Germany earlier.

[650] The UK, too.

[651] The UK as well, they're looking forward and saying, you know, we're not going to make it.

[652] net zero, right?

[653] We're going to have to throttle this back.

[654] The German Green Party has been, has lost some remarkable recent elections, got shellacked.

[655] The German voters are looking around at this and they're saying, wait a minute, this is terrible for us.

[656] So I think some of this, another positive sign, in addition to the expansion of nuclear, I think we're seeing more energy realism.

[657] And thank the Lord for that.

[658] I mean, it's taken a while.

[659] Yeah.

[660] All right.

[661] So let's talk about, let's take another.

[662] attack on the environmental front.

[663] Now, you've written rather extensively about the dangers, the environmental dangers of wind power.

[664] And you're also, well, you made a crack earlier about let them eat solar panels.

[665] And so you obviously have some misgivings on the solar front.

[666] So let's start with on the wind front.

[667] So my understanding, I'm going to lay out a few things and tell me if I'm right or wrong.

[668] So first of all, Siemens last week, two weeks ago, announced that they were having catastrophic.

[669] I think the CEO said something like, I can't believe how catastrophic our problems are with our wind turbines.

[670] That's not a good thing for a CEO to say.

[671] The wind turbines, they're unreliable.

[672] They obviously don't work when the wind isn't blowing, which is quite a lot of the time, and that's really a problem at night when the solar panels also don't work.

[673] They don't have a proven track record.

[674] They only seem to last about 17 years.

[675] God, nobody knows what to do with them when they're decommissioned and they're very expensive to decommission.

[676] They're killing whales like mad, hypothetically.

[677] They seem to be really hard on birds.

[678] And so this just isn't working out very well.

[679] And so now am I missing something on the wind front and then we could turn this soon?

[680] No, I think you hit pretty well all of the issues here.

[681] Let's set whales aside.

[682] Let's set the wildlife issues aside.

[683] I'm an avid birdwatcher.

[684] And this, again, is one area that just absolutely just, it's unbelievable to me, you know, that the wind industry gets a pass when it comes to killing some of our most iconic wildlife, including bald and golden eagles.

[685] But set that aside for a minute.

[686] Let's talk about just basic physics.

[687] So one of the key ways or the essential keys to understanding our energy and power systems is to look at the physics metric of power density.

[688] So we want high power density.

[689] That's one reason why I'm so pro -nuclear.

[690] It's super high power density.

[691] We're talking 2 ,000 watts per square meter, roughly.

[692] So energy is the ability to do work.

[693] Power is the rate at which work gets done.

[694] I'm sorry.

[695] Energy is the ability to work, that's right.

[696] Power is the rate at which work gets done.

[697] We measure power in watts.

[698] So we want high watts per square meter.

[699] Nuclear...

[700] Okay, can you explain that a bit more?

[701] Walk everybody through what energy density means because it's a sophisticated concept.

[702] Yeah, it is.

[703] People need to understand it.

[704] And to be clear, it's power density.

[705] So what is power?

[706] It's a measure of energy flow.

[707] it's measured in watts.

[708] So you have different kinds of power density.

[709] And power is a measure of energy flow.

[710] So you can have barrels of oil in the ground are energy.

[711] Barrels per day are power.

[712] Energy is worthless unless we can make it flow.

[713] And the more we can make it flow, the better.

[714] So we want more power flow, which is watts.

[715] So power density is a measure of energy flow from a given area, volume, or mass. And you're right.

[716] It's not well understood.

[717] Fairly simple in physics terms, but it's essential to understand it because power density determines the shape of our energy and power systems everywhere, always, all the time, period.

[718] Okay, so we want high power density sources.

[719] Ethanol is extraordinarily low because it relies on photosynthesis, about one -tenth of a watt per square meter.

[720] Wind energy, I don't care.

[721] Where you put it is one watt per square meter, period.

[722] End of story, Elvis has left the building.

[723] One watt per square meter.

[724] Solar is better, about 10 watts per square meter.

[725] So if I'm going to pick my renewables, I think solar has more attributes, better attributes than wind.

[726] Okay, so what do we see, though, because of this low power density with wind, it requires enormous amounts of land.

[727] And when it requires enormous amounts of land, well, you're impacting more people.

[728] And the only way to expand the output of wind is to capture more land.

[729] It's axiomatic.

[730] So to give you an analysis, Watslav Smil, your fellow Canadian, has written about this.

[731] He estimated back in 2010 for the U .S. to meet its electric demands with wind would require a land area twice the size of the state of California.

[732] About eight years ago, I'm sorry, eight years later, David Keith and Lee Miller at Harvard did a similar analysis, came up with the same number if you were going to generate all the electricity in the U .S. with wind energy, you need a land area of 900 ,000 square kilometers, twice the size of the state of California.

[733] Okay, that's clear.

[734] Jesse Jenkins from Princeton recently wrote a piece in Mother Jones, again saying that the footprint of wind energy is massive.

[735] Well, this is a problem, Jordan.

[736] I spend a lot of time in rural America, and I was in, I travel, I meet these people.

[737] Some of them become my friends.

[738] They're rural landowners, rural farmers, rural ranchers.

[739] We don't want 600 -foot -high wind turbines in our neighborhood.

[740] We don't want to look at red blinking lights all night every night for the rest of our lives.

[741] These wind projects, despite all these claims from the wind business, they hurt property values, and they produce enormous amounts of noise pollution, which is bad for human health.

[742] It disrupts sleep.

[743] This has been proven again.

[744] So these are polluting machines.

[745] They're visually polluting.

[746] They're blights on the landscape.

[747] They hurt human health.

[748] They hurt property values.

[749] and none of this matters to the Sierra Clubbers or these Alt Energy crowd because climate change, right?

[750] They're like these totems, these climate change scarecrows, that's what I call them, right?

[751] That they're somehow going to solve climate change.

[752] No, they're not.

[753] They're only being deployed because of the tax credits, which are enormously lucrative for the companies that are doing this.

[754] So just another quick point.

[755] This tax credit pursuit of the tax credits, what I call subsidy mining, is what's driving this deployment of solar and wind.

[756] but particularly the wind business.

[757] So look at what happened in Madison County, Iowa.

[758] I wrote about this.

[759] It was in Forbes some time ago, but Mid -American Energy's subsidiary of Berkshire Hathaway, owned by or controlled by Warren Buffett, who in 2014 said the only reason to build wind turbines is to get the tax credits.

[760] Okay, back to Madison County.

[761] Berkshire Hathaway, a mid -American, wanted to build a wind project in Madison County.

[762] Madison County passes an ordinance saying, we don't, you know, no more wind projects.

[763] they effectively, the ordinance said, banned new wind projects.

[764] They got sued by mid -American energy.

[765] Imagine if Chevron or Exxon did that.

[766] It would be front -page news in the New York Times and instead, crickets.

[767] No reporting on this at all.

[768] If the oil and gas industry was acting as aggressively as the wind industry has against rural Americans, and in fact, in Next Era Energy, sued one of your fellow Canadians, Esther Reitman filed a slap suit against her in Canadian court because she was a opposing one of their wind projects and called Next Era Next Error on her website.

[769] They sued her in federal court.

[770] They put a slap suit on her.

[771] The slapsuit were designed to stop people from being intimidated by large organizations.

[772] That was the bloody plan there.

[773] Right.

[774] So imagine if the, if the oil industry did that.

[775] But here is an American company suing a Canadian and Canadian court.

[776] I mean, the way these companies have acted in terms of corporate responsibility, it's just crazy.

[777] I mean, it's just, this, being.

[778] in this pursuit of subsidies, what they've done, from a corporate responsibility standpoint, it's just like, if the oil and gas industry acted this way, they would be pilloried.

[779] And yet because it's alt -energy, they get a free pass.

[780] And so what's happening on the bird front as far as you're concerned with regards to windmills?

[781] You know, I'm an avid birdwatcher and have been for more than 30 years.

[782] In 1990, I can pull the story up.

[783] In fact, I wrote a piece for the Christian Science Monitor back then about bird kills in open oil pits in West Texas and New Mexico for violations of the Migratory Bird Treaty Act.

[784] And at that time, the Fish and Wildlife Service estimated that the oil and gas industry, through their own negligence, was killing about 600 ,000 migratory birds a year.

[785] The Fish and Wildlife Service and the Department of Justice brought something like 200 cases against the oil and gas industry, prosecuted them, rightly so.

[786] And the oil and gas industry, to their credit, cleaned it up.

[787] They put nets over their pits.

[788] They closed their Pits.

[789] Today, the wind industry is killing at least that many birds.

[790] Probably more.

[791] We don't know.

[792] And there is no accountability because they're not required to report these deaths.

[793] They have been prosecuted in very rare occasions.

[794] But it's this, oh, and the justification is well, oh, well, these birds are going to get hurt by climate change sometime in the future.

[795] Oh, yeah.

[796] You're killing them now because you think, it might help in the future, well, that's just crazy policy.

[797] That makes no sense whatsoever.

[798] Yeah, and you don't get to do that with people either.

[799] You don't get, I mean, this is, and yet there's a free, this is a free pass.

[800] I mean, we haven't talked about the whales.

[801] We can talk about that, but, but this idea that, oh, we're going to kill them because we might have some climate change in the future.

[802] And I'll return to, I'll return to next era.

[803] Just one quick point.

[804] Last year, thankfully, they got prosecuted by the Department of Justice.

[805] Why?

[806] because in Wyoming, Next Era, had been warned by the Fish and Wildlife Service three times not to build a wind project in known Golden Eagle habitat.

[807] They did it anyway.

[808] And so they were prosecuted, and I was glad to see it under the, I think it was just under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act.

[809] They should have been criminally prosecuted under the Endangered Species Act, bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act, and the Migratory Bird Treaty Act.

[810] Instead, they paid a fine, but the fine they paid was less than the amount that they're going to earn from the tax credits for building.

[811] the wind farm in the first place.

[812] So there are perverse incentives at hand here.

[813] And words fail me because I do, I care about wildlife.

[814] But I think this is the death of environmentalism.

[815] Climateism has replaced care for the environment.

[816] And this idea, oh, we'll just pave this rural countryside with wind turbines and solar panels in the name of climate change.

[817] What are you out of your mind, man?

[818] We need to, we need small footprints.

[819] It's also the case, too, that this unit.

[820] dimensional mania in relationship to carbon dioxide is stopping us from solving environmental problems that could, at least in principle, be addressed.

[821] Like, I looked into the environmental literature in detail about 15 years ago, and my conclusion, for better or worse, was that one of the stupidest things we were doing was continually overfishing the coastal shelves in the ocean.

[822] And we do that, like, to call it devastating is to barely even scratch the surface.

[823] I think we've eradicated something like 95 % of the ocean life on the coastal shelves, and that's about where the life is, because you need sunlight for life and you need the shelves.

[824] So it's a bloody catastrophe.

[825] And it's impossible even to get people's attention focused on that, because everybody who hypothetically has an environmental concern is leaping up and down about carbon dioxide.

[826] And that means that every other problem, and there are plenty of them, and they are serious problems, and some of them are remediable, they're just ignored completely.

[827] So you get a get out of jail pass for any form of industrial development that claims carbon dioxide remediation as its goal, and you get a moral pass if you jump up and down about carbon dioxide hard enough because you're saving the planet, even if you're not doing any of the difficult work that would be necessary to actually do something useful on the environmental front.

[828] Plus you're sacrificing the poor not to help, not to do anything but make them poorer and more likely to pollute.

[829] So this looks like a three -way catastrophe to me. Well, and this is obvious in the development of offshore wind on the U .S. East Coast, where these NGOs, these climate NGOs that in the past, Audubon Society, Sierra Club, et cetera, would have been jumping up and down to protect the North Atlantic right whale from the encroachment of offshore wind development.

[830] I mean, imagine if it was the offshore, of the oil and gas industry who was trying to develop and put hundreds, because that's the goal, hundreds of offshore platforms in the middle of known North Atlantic right whale habitat, a critically endangered species, less than 350 or so specimens left on the planet.

[831] Imagine if this was the oil and gas industry doing that.

[832] They would, these groups would be raising hell.

[833] I mean, they would be laying down, they would be blocking the trucks.

[834] And instead, because it's the wind industry, and largely being developed by foreign companies, companies, not even American companies.

[835] It's what Michael Schellenberger calls the environmental betrayal.

[836] And I think that's the exact right word.

[837] I'm old enough to remember, you know, save the whales and that, you know, it was kind of parodied like, you know, save the gay baby whales for Jesus, right?

[838] You know, this was kind of like, this was kind of almost a joke, right?

[839] But that environmentalism, right, and I call it, I'm working on an essay on the death of environmentalism, because I think that's what we're seeing.

[840] It's what we're seeing.

[841] This idea of protecting landscapes or protecting wildlife has been forsaken for climatism and what I call climatism and renewable energy fetishism.

[842] So instead of a focus on preserving landscapes, preserving wildlife, and that real deep green ethic has been replaced by this idea that any wind turbine is a good wind turbine, any solar panel is a good solar panel, and it is most obvious, I think, in this, well, not just in the onshore wind issue, which I've documented.

[843] And the rejections of solar, by the way, the solar rejections on the renewable rejection database, I think we're at 130 or more rejections or restrictions.

[844] But this climatism, this renewable fetishism, I think is most obvious when it comes to the North Atlantic right whales and the development of offshore wind on the east coast of the United States.

[845] It's very sad.

[846] Sad to see.

[847] So the way it looks to me like this is that people, people's reputations are extremely important to them because they signal their position in the hierarchy.

[848] And the higher you are in the hierarchy, the more stable your nervous system is and the more positive emotion you experience.

[849] And so plus all sorts of other benefits accrue to you because people, if you have a good reputation, people flock to you.

[850] So reputation really matters.

[851] So that means that there's an avenue open constantly for false avenues to reputation enhancement.

[852] And that's what psychopaths and narcissists do.

[853] But it's also what ideologues offer because they tell people, look, if you're a good person, you stand up against problems, here's the problem, which in this case would be carbon dioxide.

[854] Thus, you could be a good person, all things considered and have your reputation enhanced, merely by standing up against carbon dioxide, takes absolutely no work.

[855] on your part whatsoever.

[856] You just have to protest and complain.

[857] You don't actually have to solve problems.

[858] And now you're a good person.

[859] And now that's a pre -packaged solution, especially for young people who are looking for moral virtue, say, well, all you have to do is be anti -industrial and anti -carbon dioxide, and now your reputation is significantly enhanced, and anyone who stands in your way is like a devil and evil.

[860] And so that's the religious nexus that we're dealing with here.

[861] And the problem with that is, as you're pointing out, is that, well, first of all, it's really hard on the poor.

[862] And second, it sacrifices all the real problems to this pseudo -problem solution or pseudo -problem -solution.

[863] And it's absolutely destructive.

[864] And so now the solution is to go throw some soup on some paintings in the museum.

[865] Yeah, right.

[866] Which is like, oh, I'm going to protest by being a vandal.

[867] I mean, and so...

[868] Yes, right.

[869] By destroy...

[870] Exactly.

[871] Well, that signals that opposition to the, you know, colonial industrial enterprise or whatever the hell it is.

[872] But there's a certain pathetic aspect to that.

[873] I mean, there's these kids, I call them a guy, I'm going to be 63 here pretty soon.

[874] And I look at them and I think, what are you doing?

[875] I mean, what is your hope for the future?

[876] Have you no idea how privileged you are living where you live?

[877] Have you no sense of yourself in the world relative to the rest of the plan?

[878] because we mentioned, I think, before we started recording, but I'm happy.

[879] I'm working on a piece for the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship, which you're helping found, and I've written a long paper on electricity availability in the developing world.

[880] And I've documented.

[881] I went through using data, the latest data from our world in data.

[882] There are 3 .7 billion people in the world today, almost half of the world population right now, that live in places where electricity consumption is 12 ,000.

[883] 1200 kilowatt hours or less per capita per year.

[884] That's about the same, 1200 kilowatt hours, about the same amount of electricity as consumed by a large kitchen refrigerator in the United States.

[885] So imagine this.

[886] Forty -seven percent of the population on the planet today is living in electricity poverty.

[887] And we're complaining because our electricity isn't, you know, from alt energy or something.

[888] I mean, there is, there, there, there's a certain, I think Michael Schellenberger calls it this kind of nihilistic narcissism or so.

[889] I'm not sure exactly how he describes it, but there's something about this only presentism, right, that we only have right now.

[890] And none of him, there's no history, there's no future.

[891] And, but there's no sense of how we in the West are, I mean, I sometimes pinch myself.

[892] I mean, just how lucky I am.

[893] And not just in my career and my family, you know, married to a woman.

[894] wonderful woman, got great kids, but in terms of energy and energy availability, and then yet all we, you know, what we're hearing and is what is dominating this administration, and I say this is not a partisan.

[895] I'm not a Democrat.

[896] I'm not a Republican.

[897] I am disgusted.

[898] But this Biden administration is the most anti -hydrocarbon administration in American history.

[899] And all, and it seems like this climate issue is the only thing they want to talk about when, you know, an existential threat.

[900] And I'm thinking, existential threat?

[901] A hundred thousand Americans died last year of opioid overdoses.

[902] My son, Jacob, is 23.

[903] Within the last two months, two people that he knew, two kids, two boys that he knows.

[904] I say young men died of opioid overdoses here in Austin.

[905] That's a public health crisis.

[906] And yet, where has the Biden administration been on fentanyl?

[907] Where have they on opioids?

[908] Why isn't he pounding the damn podium saying, we have to do something about this.

[909] Instead, he's standing up and bragging about some stupid $900 million loan to the Angolan so they can build solar panels.

[910] Where are your priorities?

[911] Where is your humanism?

[912] I mean, I get worked up about this.

[913] This is part of the reason.

[914] Well, this is part, okay, so on the arc front, the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship, I mean, we're trying to do a couple of things.

[915] First of all, we are working diligently with Bjorn Lomberg, who's on board with the project.

[916] Because I think of all the people that I've met, his ability to prioritize.

[917] is unparalleled, and he's done very careful, empirical work showing what our priorities should be.

[918] Now, it turns out to be complicated, and it's not you get to be a good person if you shake your protest sign up and down.

[919] It's a lot more complicated than that.

[920] But we're also concerned, you know, you said there's something pathetic about watching these young people, for example, glue themselves to paintings.

[921] And I think that's where pathetic degenerates into outright criminal, by the way.

[922] But I take your point with regards to pathetic.

[923] I mean, part of the problem with the classic liberals and the conservative types is that we, we, they haven't been able to put to get forward a narrative that's compelling on the genuine moral advanced front, right?

[924] And that's what we're trying to do with the arc, as we'd like to say, well, you know, why don't we envision a future that we could all get on board with voluntarily without fear and compulsion and tyranny?

[925] And that would be something like, well, what would it look like?

[926] Well, how about we get, How about we take those 47 % of people that you just described who are barely bloody well scraping by and get energy to them so that they can stop scrabbling around in the dirt and can start contributing their brain power to the collective human enterprise?

[927] How about we make that a bloody priority?

[928] And while we're doing that, we could make some real advances on the environment front because as soon as they're rich enough to care, they'll start caring.

[929] I mean, even China is greener than it was 20 years ago.

[930] You know that?

[931] And it's partly because as China has gotten rich, people have started to care a little bit about their local environment.

[932] And we could really, you know, places like India are almost at that threshold now where they're going to start to really care.

[933] And so, and the story could be instead of, oh my God, it's an apocalyptic nightmare and everyone's going to die.

[934] And we should only have 500 million people on the planet.

[935] And I don't know how the hell we're going to get rid of the other 7 .5 billion, but we'll figure out some way.

[936] we could say, no, you know, more people, like Musk has been saying, more people, the better, because we can convert all that to brain power.

[937] And if we were ethical and we had a clue, we could have a future that everybody could be proud of.

[938] Where no one is starving, where there's a world of abundance, where everybody has opportunity, and that would be a lot better than this bloody apocalyptic nightmare that justifies increasing top -down tyrannical pressure.

[939] It's not a good idea.

[940] And energy has to be one of those most fundamental building blocks.

[941] And I'm completely on board with that because, as I say, energy realism is energy humanism.

[942] We have to be realistic about the limits of these renewables, right?

[943] And my friend Jesse Oswald, I mentioned before, he said, just because, he says, wind and solar may be renewable.

[944] They are not green.

[945] And I think that's just a great, a great way to think about them.

[946] Yes, they're renewable, but just because they're renewable doesn't mean they're green.

[947] What example, you know, I could pound the table on this one, Jordan, because it does just get me riled up.

[948] Please do.

[949] Please do.

[950] I was in Wisconsin.

[951] I had an event at the University of Wisconsin -Oshkosh a few weeks ago, and I flew into Milwaukee, and I'd been contacted.

[952] People from rural America contact me all the time and asking me to, you know, help them find a lawyer, help them, you know, publicize their, you know, their fight against a renewable project.

[953] Well, John Barnes is a resident of Christiana, Wisconsin.

[954] A little town of 1800, it's about an hour west of Milwaukee.

[955] So I got in the rental car.

[956] I drove straight there.

[957] I met him.

[958] I met the town supervisor, Mark Cook, and a woman who was there whose name escapes me at the moment.

[959] They're fighting a project that would cover, get this, seven square miles of their little farming community.

[960] It's a farming community of 1800 would cover some of the best farmland in all of Wisconsin with solar panels.

[961] It's some of the best farmland in Wisconsin, some of the best farmland in the world.

[962] And these local people are saying, we don't want this.

[963] And yet it's in Venergy, this privately owned renewable company out of Chicago, that is going to develop the project and then flip it to local, or local utilities, circumventing Wisconsin state law.

[964] But it screws that farming community.

[965] I mean, just screws them.

[966] And it's, and who's speaking up for them?

[967] No one.

[968] You know, when in solar may be renewable, they are not green.

[969] Why in the world would we be covering prime farmland with solar panels?

[970] The answer is very simple.

[971] It's the climatism and the investment tax credit.

[972] You put those two together, right?

[973] This renewable energy fetishism, which is, I think, the right word, right description, with these incredibly lucrative tax credits, which for solar amounted to like 30 % of all the layout, the initial capital cost of the project, It's incredibly profitable for these renewable energy developers to do these projects.

[974] And so, you know, oh, food, you know, fiber, you know, farmers, we don't care about that.

[975] We're here to make money.

[976] And these are little, you know, not little farms, but they're growing corn and soybeans.

[977] You know, they're rural farmers who are just getting by.

[978] And yet they're just going to get screwed by these kinds of projects.

[979] Where's the New York Times?

[980] Where's the New York Times?

[981] Why is it?

[982] Why is the Washington Post reporting on this?

[983] Why is it in PR?

[984] Why aren't they reporting on this?

[985] Because they don't care.

[986] So you said something interesting that solar and wind are renewable.

[987] But, you know, I don't think that's true exactly.

[988] Let me say what I mean by that.

[989] The sun and the wind are renewable.

[990] But that doesn't mean that solar and wind power are renewable.

[991] Those aren't the same thing.

[992] And the reason I'm saying that is because the lifespan of solar panels isn't very long.

[993] and the lifespan of wind generators isn't very long.

[994] And so they're not renewable at all because once they exhaust themselves, they have to be scrapped and destroyed.

[995] And then they have to be rebuilt.

[996] So I don't understand what's renewable about that at all.

[997] Like if we were growing solar panels in a field, that would be a different thing, but we're not.

[998] Wood is renewable because wood will grow.

[999] But like, and I don't know exactly what happened to Siemens.

[1000] I haven't been following that story close enough to know, but the Siemens Manufacturing Company, and they've taken a huge stock hit because of this, said that their solar or their windmill generating systems are much more problematic than they had originally thought.

[1001] What did they mean by that?

[1002] Like, what exactly is the problem?

[1003] Do you know the problem on that front?

[1004] What did they run into?

[1005] Right.

[1006] I don't know exactly.

[1007] I haven't looked into that specifically, but here's my theory.

[1008] And let's go back to physics and, and fluid mechanics.

[1009] The Betts limit is what determines the amount of energy that you can harness from the diffused energy in the wind, right?

[1010] It's like water and wind, I think in many ways.

[1011] So I understand an amount of physicist, but they function in many of the same ways, right?

[1012] There's a limited amount of power that you can harness from this diffused source of energy.

[1013] I think they just got to a point where they made the system, the machines got so big that the forces on them are effectively tearing the machines apart, right?

[1014] that they couldn't, the forces, the torque, the forces that they're trying to deal with in these gearboxes, which are incredibly complex machines, that they, you know, the stresses were just too great, right?

[1015] That they made them too big.

[1016] Well, you think about the variability, too, right?

[1017] I mean, those bloody wind mills, they have to, they have to operate from conditions of, like, zero wind whatsoever, which isn't a problem, to, like, to, like, gale -level storms.

[1018] And that's a tremendous engineering challenge, especially when you're also putting them in the bloody salt water out in the middle of the ocean.

[1019] Right, which is just madness, by the way, you know, that you're going to put them out there, put anything in salt water.

[1020] It's going to cost you two or three times more than putting it on land.

[1021] So I think this is about basic physics and they're getting to the limits of the bets limit, right?

[1022] And you have these blades that are 80 meters long and you've got to manufacture those and that's another thing.

[1023] And then when they're done, you can't, you have to landfill them, right?

[1024] There's no way to recycle them.

[1025] But I want to take it a little bit different direction, Jordan, because it's not, just about the machines and how they're built, it's the supply chains.

[1026] And this is the other part that is not getting the kind of attention that it deserves, and I've written about this on my substack, that these supply chains for Alt Energy are almost all dependent on China.

[1027] Let's look at electric vehicles.

[1028] Why do you think Alon Musk is building his next gigafactory?

[1029] I'm in Austin.

[1030] They just built one here.

[1031] It's a massive factory.

[1032] I just flew in the other night from Miami, and we flew over it.

[1033] It's a massive bet on a few very specific commodities.

[1034] Cobalt, lithium, neodymium, neodymium iron boron magnets, dysprosium and terbium, to name a few.

[1035] Mangon, a few others, copper, obviously.

[1036] So what's the problem there?

[1037] Well, the Chinese control the market for 90 % of the global market for neodymium iron boron magnets, which are the key element in the EV drive motors, right?

[1038] nearly all the electric vehicles being produced today use this type of magnet.

[1039] So other countries can make those magnets, but who controls the terbium and the dysprosium?

[1040] Two other rare earths, neodymium, turbium, and dysprosium are all rare earth elements.

[1041] China controls 100 % of the terbium and dysprosium markets.

[1042] Those are the critical things that are used to dope the magnets that are put into those EVs so they can function at high temperature.

[1043] So it's not, but okay, so let's go beyond the magnets, which are needed as well.

[1044] in wind turbines, in offshore wind turbines in particular, but the new generation of wind turbines need these same magnets and not just a few ounces or a few kilograms.

[1045] We're talking tons of magnets.

[1046] China controls the market completely.

[1047] What about the other things that we need?

[1048] Graphite for batteries, copper, for the material intensity of electric vehicles is far greater than that for internal combustion engines.

[1049] So where do all these supply chains lead to China?

[1050] I'm not a China basher.

[1051] China's going to take care of China.

[1052] But why, in the name of Peter, Paul, and Mary, now would the United States be staking its future economy on the Chinese supply chains?

[1053] It doesn't make any sense whatsoever.

[1054] I mean, and for the U .S. to try and re -shore all of those technologies, including rare earth element refining and processing, copper mining and processing, we can talk about uranium as well, there are all these supply chains that figure into the big picture here that are just like there's a lot of hand -waving, oh, we'll just keep importing it.

[1055] Again, who are you, where is the strategy here?

[1056] Where is the long -term thinking about our strategic vulnerabilities?

[1057] And I don't see any of that.

[1058] It's very worrisome.

[1059] That's the problem with doing things in a. idiot fear -based panic, is that these are very, very complex problems.

[1060] And the supply chain problem is an invisible part of that.

[1061] And if we did repatriate those industries that you described, well, that would mean a lot more mines.

[1062] And it isn't obvious at all in today's regulatory environment that that's even vaguely possible.

[1063] Plus, it's not like there's not an environmental cost to, let's say, copper mining.

[1064] So the notion that this is somehow green and some obvious.

[1065] way is not, it's not a tenable notion at all.

[1066] And then you add that supply chain vulnerability to that that could be, well, that's obviously unwise to say the least.

[1067] Well, and it applies to solar as well.

[1068] And this is something else that's been largely ignored, in many cases just flat swept under the rug, is the supply of polysilicon for solar panels.

[1069] Now, let me be clear, I have eight and a half kilowatts of solar panels on the roof of my house.

[1070] Why did I put them on?

[1071] Because I got three different subsidies.

[1072] Hello.

[1073] I'm opposed to energy subsidies unless I'm getting them, Jordan, all right?

[1074] So let's be clear.

[1075] But am I sure that those solar panels, which are made in Korea, don't have any content that came from China?

[1076] No. And when you look at the solar market, in fact, the U .S. government just two years ago issued an advisory saying that about U .S. slave labor in Xinjiang and the content in particular for polysilicon, producing, in Xinjiang with Uighur slave labor.

[1077] And the U .S. government called it genocide.

[1078] Now, are these credible?

[1079] Are these exactly right?

[1080] I don't know, for sure.

[1081] But this is very problematic.

[1082] I mean, imagine if the oil and gas industry we're in any way connected to something involving slave labor.

[1083] I mean, it would be front page news, but because the solar industry, again, they get a free pass.

[1084] And I just think that we live in a world of networks.

[1085] And that's the part that I think if I was going to think about how your point about these simplistic notions, it ignores the fact that all of these systems, all of the networks that we rely on are all interrelated.

[1086] And we've forgotten that.

[1087] And particularly when it comes to the alt energy discussion, we've neglected this to understand how vulnerable we are, how reliant we are on foreign suppliers.

[1088] and that includes enriched uranium, but in particular, it includes rare earth elements, neodymium iron boron magnets, polysilicate, nearly all of the alt -energy stuff that is being pushed and being heavily subsidized now through the Inflation Reduction Act in the tune of $400 billion depends in either almost completely or in large part on Chinese supply chains.

[1089] Yeah, well, the thing is, is when an energy ecosystem evolves of its, own accord, it's full of a multitude of checks and balances, right?

[1090] There's many people providing hydrocarbon -based electricity.

[1091] And there's all sorts of supply chain problems that have been ironed out and nailed down and had a certain degree of resilience built into them over the course of decades.

[1092] And those are relatively simple technologies in some ways as well.

[1093] And now what we're trying to do is run in a mad rush because the sky is falling to replace all that, even though we don't know how, and it's absolutely impossible, failing to understand at all the invisible supply chain complexities because the people who are putting forward the policies have never had to grapple with anything like that, and they just assume that if you plug an electric outlet, plug into the wall, that the electricity comes out of the wall.

[1094] Right.

[1095] And further, there's this blind spot here.

[1096] Let me focus in on the U .S. electric grid.

[1097] And my friend Emmett Penny with Grid Brief has done a lot of good reporting on this.

[1098] And across the U .S., we've had grid operators' warning of reliability problems.

[1099] The PJM, New York ISO, California, obviously, has had huge problems with grid reliability.

[1100] The MISO, the Mid -Continent Independent System Operator, all have been warning, as well as the North American Electric Reliability Corporation, of reliability problems.

[1101] Why?

[1102] Why?

[1103] Because we're shuttering our coal plants too fast.

[1104] and instead of keeping those coal plants online where the push is on for a lot of these utilities to install renewables because that's where the money is.

[1105] You mean the coal plants, for example, that the British government had to reactivate like three weeks ago because it got so hot the solar panels wouldn't work?

[1106] You mean those coal plants?

[1107] It's just very similar ones.

[1108] Yes, exactly.

[1109] So, but there's, again, I think this is a lack of forward thinking and a lack of accountability.

[1110] And I saw it here in Texas, right, with the Urquot blackouts in February of 2021.

[1111] There was this idea, oh, well, the market failed.

[1112] Well, who made the market?

[1113] Well, well, the legislature.

[1114] Well, who's in the legislature?

[1115] A bunch of lawyers?

[1116] Well, they don't know how the electric grid works.

[1117] They like the idea of the market.

[1118] And so they said, well, we're going to make a market.

[1119] It's going to be great.

[1120] Well, who was responsible?

[1121] Well, no one was responsible.

[1122] And that's what we're seeing now when it comes to these bigger things.

[1123] threats to the reliability of the U .S. grid is everyone's looking around, well, who's responsible for reliability?

[1124] No one?

[1125] Well, that kind of a problem?

[1126] So I think it's, you know, I think we've talked around a lot of big issues here, but to me, the more, when it comes down to it, the U .S. in general, and I think the West in general, when it comes to the alt energy push with climatism, renewable energy fetishism, it's this narrow focus on this idea of C .O. to is the only issue.

[1127] No, it is a concern.

[1128] It is not our only concern.

[1129] We have to be concerned about reliability, affordability, resilience.

[1130] These are the key things because one of the key things that really brought this home to me and really motivated the work that I'm doing on this documentary that I'm working on with my colleague Tyson Culver.

[1131] It's one thing to talk about a blackout.

[1132] It's another thing to be blacked out.

[1133] And it really, once for that happened, I realized, well, wait a damn minute.

[1134] If this can happen in Texas, the energy capital of the world, what is going on here?

[1135] And so that led us into this deep dive for our new, our new docu -series.

[1136] When is that coming out?

[1137] It'll be out this fall.

[1138] We haven't made the announcement yet, but it's juice, power, politics, and the grid.

[1139] And I'm very proud of it.

[1140] When that comes out, just before that comes out, why don't we do another podcast?

[1141] And you can provide us with some video footage as well that we can incorporate into the podcast to advertise it in a manner that is as effective as I can manage because this is a crucial issue.

[1142] You know, in this ARC enterprise, we have six domains of focus, let's say, and one is energy and one is environment.

[1143] There's four others.

[1144] But we understand, I think, as much as we possibly can, that the issue here, as you pointed out, is affordability, let's say, and reliability.

[1145] And we want to take those words apart momentarily.

[1146] Maybe we can do that, close this program off.

[1147] Affordability, okay?

[1148] That means poor people don't die.

[1149] Right.

[1150] Right.

[1151] That's what affordability means.

[1152] It doesn't mean that, you know, reasonably well -off people can save a few dollars on their energy bill.

[1153] Because the people who are most hit hardest by far by any increase in energy costs are the people who are barely clinging to the bottom of the economic hierarchy.

[1154] And there's billions of people like that.

[1155] And they can easily be knocked back down into absolute privation.

[1156] And this idiot moralizing in the West is exactly.

[1157] doing that.

[1158] And it's hurting poor people like Mad in the West as well.

[1159] So it's not just in the developing world.

[1160] Right.

[1161] And reliability.

[1162] It's like, well, reliability means that your food doesn't rot in your refrigerator.

[1163] How about that?

[1164] Or in the supermarkets, right?

[1165] And reliability means that your power's there when you're on the bloody operating room table and you need everything to work 100 % of the time, which is what we've managed, right?

[1166] We have this miraculous bloody industrial state, where people are working flat out 100 % of the time to make sure everything works 100 % of the time.

[1167] And we've managed that.

[1168] And we're doing everything we can now to compromise that in the name of a false and potentially genocidal moral virtue.

[1169] It's absolutely appalling.

[1170] You said a lot there.

[1171] I'll reply this way, which is if your energy isn't reliable, it's not affordable.

[1172] And that is the key here.

[1173] Right, right.

[1174] Yeah, well, you talked about those countries that are turning to the mafia, so to speak, to supply backup energy.

[1175] Well, obviously, that's going to happen.

[1176] Everybody will have a bloody diesel generator in the backyard if we make the grid unreliable.

[1177] And I don't think that'll be that good for the planet.

[1178] Well, and so, you know, to build on that point, if your electricity isn't reliable, it's not affordable.

[1179] So that's what I saw in Lebanon with the generator mafia where the grid the grid fails every day and so people they they have the generator they have to pay two electric bills one to edel electricity do libon and one to the generator mafia and in some cases they're the almost the same cost right or look at here in the u .s what's been one of the best stocks in the united states over the last few years generac the company that builds standby generators right well why is their stock booming because everyone looks at the grid and that we're seeing increasing numbers of blackouts across the country.

[1180] So people are acting in a rational way, and they're buying generics.

[1181] Well, who can afford generics?

[1182] It's the same people who can afford electric vehicles.

[1183] The average household income for the average generac buyer is around $130 ,000, $140 ,000.

[1184] That's twice the U .S. average.

[1185] So here are people who, you know, I'm do okay.

[1186] I'm not rich men, but, you know, if I wanted a generac, I could afford one, I suppose.

[1187] But if your electricity isn't reliable, then it's not affordable.

[1188] And if it's not reliable, you buy a generac because you know that it's going to go off.

[1189] So I've seen it myself after a hurricane in Louisiana.

[1190] People get a small generator and they're putting gasoline in it because they can't, you know, we met one guy at the gasoline.

[1191] He's buying gasoline so his mom can sleep at night with an air conditioner, right?

[1192] In Homa, Louisiana, we talk to this guy.

[1193] So if it's not reliable, you're going to have to spend enormous amounts of money to make it reliable.

[1194] So these things go hand at hand.

[1195] But I'm so pleased that, you know, I was honored.

[1196] flattered to be asked to participate in the ARC project because electricity is fundamental.

[1197] And it is a humanist, it is at a humanist standpoint to say, this is the critical form of energy that we crave as humans.

[1198] And it's critical because it makes us more human.

[1199] Electricity is, our bodies are electric, where our entire systems are electric.

[1200] And the creation of the electric grid is one of the greatest engineering feats in human history.

[1201] And it has changed humanity like no other form of energy ever has.

[1202] And if we're going to be humanist, and I will stand on that pulpit all day long, if we're going to be humanists, we need to bring more electricity to more people, and in particular to women and girls, because they're half of humanity and electricity.

[1203] That is an excellent place to end.

[1204] Absolutely, man. Absolutely.

[1205] There is no bloody way that you can be pro -poor, and often the most vulnerable people on the poor front are obviously women and children.

[1206] There no way you can be pro -poor and anti -energy.

[1207] Those two things do not go together, not in the least.

[1208] So yeah, yeah, it's unconscionable.

[1209] And one of the things we really do want to do with the arc, and we're very happy to have you on board and to have your help in this regard is to push constantly to drive energy prices down and to climb up that hierarchy we talked about, right, from biodegradable fuels, fuel sources to coal, to hydrocarbons, past hydrocarbons, hopefully up into nuclear with renewables in there, wherever they can actually be, wherever they can pull their own goddamn economic weight without a variety of market distorting idiot subsidies that are causing all sorts of counterproductive activity.

[1210] So anyways, good talking to you.

[1211] Amen to that one, Jordan.

[1212] All right.

[1213] All right.

[1214] So good talking to you.

[1215] And to everyone watching and listening.

[1216] Thank you for your time and attention.

[1217] These things, especially for you, young people who are listening, you know, you guys got to think this through.

[1218] because this is the world that's being created now.

[1219] And you could have a world of, you know, continual abundance and reliability, which is kind of what we've had for the last 50 years, miraculously enough.

[1220] Or you could wander down this demented pseudo -moral route and break everything well -making the planet worse.

[1221] And those are basically the options that are open to you.

[1222] And so, you know, it was good to talk to Robert today.

[1223] He's got some intelligent things to say on the energy and environment front.

[1224] And as a man who's also concerned with environmental considerations.

[1225] And so, you know, it's good to think, this through and to eschew the cheap moralizing and to work forward into a future where we are doing what we can to supply energy to poor people because that's the best possible thing we could manage, at least on the practical front.

[1226] So thank you very much for talking to me today, sir.

[1227] Let's have another podcast when you get this documentary up and ready.

[1228] That would be a very good thing.

[1229] We'll see you in London at the end of October.

[1230] Obviously, I'm looking forward to reading your report, the one that's been commissioned for the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship.

[1231] And so Until then, we'll turn now over to the Daily Wire side.

[1232] I'm going to talk to Robert for another half an hour, a little bit about, you know, a little more personal issues.

[1233] I'm interested in how his calling to the energy environment nexus came about and to delve a little bit more into his motivations for voting his life to that.

[1234] So join us on the Daily Wire Plus front if you're inclined.

[1235] The folks there could use the support anyways at the moment, especially because we're under, you know, pretty heavy assault by the YouTube types at the moment.

[1236] So, the invisible YouTube background censors.

[1237] You bet, Robert.

[1238] Thank you very much.

[1239] Thanks, thanks a lot, Jordan.

[1240] It was a privilege.