The Poor or the Planet？ ｜ Robert Bryce ｜ EP 375 (m54Rzm4fPZk)

https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=m54Rzm4fPZk

So imagine this, 47% of the population on the planet today is living in electricity poverty. But this Biden administration is the most anti-hydrocarbon administration in American history. And it seems like this climate issue is the only thing they want to talk about. Why isn’t he pounding the damn podium saying, we have to do something about this? Instead, he’s standing up and bragging about some stupid $900millionloantotheAngolansotheycanbuildsolarpanels.Whereareyourpriorities?Whereisyourhumanism?Helloeveryonewatchingandlistening.Today{I}^{\prime }mspeakingwithauthor,podcasterandfilmproducerRobertBryce.Wediscusstopicsfromhislatestbook,AQuestionofPower,ElectricityandtheWealthofNations,thecurrentaudacityofthosepushingthezeroemissions,netzeroagenda.HowthosepoliciesreallyaffectthedevelopingworldandthepoorintheWest.Hint,i{t}^{\prime }snotgood.Thefeasibilityandnecessityofcoalandfossilfuelandnuclearpowernowandintofuture,thecatastrophicpracticalandenvironmentalproblemsrelatedtowindandsolarandapositivevisionforthefuturewecouldallsharevoluntarilyshouldourinstitutionsfinallydroptheirfear-mongeringtyrannyinducingdoomsdaynarrative.Le{t}^{\prime }sstart,wellwecanstartwhereveryouwant,butperhapsontherenewableenergyfrontmightbeagoodplacetodivein.Sure.Andso,well,gladtotalkaboutallthose.Imean,thoseareall,I^{\prime }mpassionateaboutthoseissues.Thosearemypurpose.Andsoalsojustpointoutonmylatestsubstack,Ido{n}^{\prime }tknowifyourteamsentittoyou,butthetitlewasLetThemEatSolarPanels.AndthegistofitisthattheUSExport-ImportBankjustfundeda$900 million loan for a solar project in Angola. Jordan, 60% of the people in Angola don’t even have electricity. Why? In the name of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, we’re funding a solar project. They hit a natural gas-powered plant and instead we’re funding solar. And the Ex-Im Bank’s press release said to help Angola meet its climate commitments. What are you talking about? Yeah, well you can be absolutely certain that the primary concern of the Angolans is to meet their bloody climate commitments. Right, exactly. You know, it’s so interesting watching the leftists in particular on the environmental front rampage down this pathway because they’re the same ideologues who constantly, what, conspire to accuse conservatives and classic liberals of being colonialists in their endeavors. And I’ve never seen a more colonialist endeavor in my entire life than the attempt to impose climate concerns on the developing world. It is something bloody miraculous to see. And to see the leftists sacrifice the poor to their idiot planetary concerns is an absolute bloody nightmare as far as I’m concerned. So in this situation, Angola sounds like it’s tailor-made for that kind of idiocy. So how is it the case that a solar power plant can become the number one concern on the international development front for Angola? How did we get there? Well, how long do we have to go? It’s a long history. But this has been something that’s been ongoing now for years, where the World Bank and the other multilateral bilateral lending institutions are refusing to fund any hydrocarbon projects in developing countries. And this latest example is the Angolan story where, and President Biden bragged about it during a high dollar fundraise, he spoke at a high dollar fundraiser for the League of Conservation Voters in early June. And he bragged about this, saying, we’re building a huge solar plant in Angola. The average 60 percent of the people in Angola don’t have electricity at all. And you’re bragging about the in the in the Export-Import Bank brags in their press release about we’re helping Angola meet its climate commitments. I mean, it’s crazy town. And this is a country that has enormous natural gas and oil wealth. They should be allowed to burn those hydrocarbons. This is it’s green colonialism, carbon imperialism, green colonialism. And numerous leaders, numerous analysts have pointed this out. But I just find it anathema. I mean, electricity is the key to better life for everyone everywhere on the planet. And this is effectively telling the developing countries and one of the most desperately poor countries in Africa, no, you can’t burn hydrocarbons. Yeah, yeah. 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 a proud father. I’m proudly married to Lauren, my wife. We’ve been married for 37 years. We have three great kids. We’re empty nesters, which is a beautiful thing. But we have three great kids, Mary, Michael and Jacob. And they’re all thriving. I’ve been a journalist my whole career. I’ve never had a real job. I’ve been a reporter my whole life. I wrote my first book on Enron, which came out in 2002. It’s now already 20 years ago. I started my career in newspapering in the Austin at the Austin Chronicle here in Austin in the late 80s. That one thing led to another led me into the book business. And my book on Enron was called Pipe Dreams, Greed Ego and the Death of Enron came out now 20 and a half years ago. And I’m still writing about Enron, in fact, these days. So now six books later, my latest is A Question of Power, Electricity and the Wealth of Nations. I’ve been very fortunate to have the same publisher, Public Affairs, the same editor, Lisa Kaufman, same agent, Dan Green. All have been incredibly supportive and helpful along the way. So I consider myself incredibly fortunate, Jordan, to be able to write about, think about, do a lot of public speaking on energy and power. These are the world’s biggest industries, biggest and most important businesses. And particularly now, where there are so many political issues around all of these things and so much focus on climate and renewables. And I think there are some positive trends. And I want to talk about those. But I see a lot of bad policy happening, and particularly in Europe and here in the US, where Europe has just driven itself into the ditch. But yeah, that’s my brief. 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. They shut down their nuclear plants. Their energy provision is now unreliable. They are dependent on Russia and other totalitarian states for their energy provision. Energy is so expensive that electric car manufacturers are moving from Germany to China. Germany is deindustrializing because the energy prices are too high. 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. Isn’t it insane? I mean, you couldn’t make it up. I’ll give you one. I’ll make you even one better. So you mentioned lignite, and the company that’s RWE of memory serves, right, is the big utility. 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. And to expand the lignite mine, Jordan, they took down a wind project. Oh, yeah, that’s just great. The irony is just remarkable. But to your point, yes, Germany has, more than any other country in Europe, has driven itself into the ditch. They did it to themselves, and they’re patting themselves on the back. I mean, none of it makes any sense. Yeah, well, the response seems to be, well, we didn’t do stupid things fast enough. I like that. So let’s hurry up. Let’s drive ourselves faster into the ditch. But yeah, I mean, the coup de grace was them shutting down their last nuclear plants 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. So what did they do? They went into the global LNG market and they snapped up as many LNG cargos and future contracts as they could. And in doing so, what did they do? Well, not only did they are they burning more lignite, more coal, to your point, but they also priced out a lot of developing a lot of developing countries from importing liquefied natural gas, principally among them, Pakistan, which is remarkable because Pakistan in February announced we’re done with the LNG business. We’re going to burn. We’re going to burn coal. And so the Pakistanis are now saying we’re going to expand our coal fired capacity. So it’s not just that this is affecting Germany. It’s having knock on effects in the developing world. Well, you know, and 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. 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. 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. 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. And so I really don’t understand how the hell this can be happening in Germany. I mean, I’m I’m not a cynic, although, you know, whatever naive optimism I had about the political process is certainly being disabused. 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. But if they could say that, well, that would be something. But for them to also have to say, oh, well, we’ve made electricity five times more expensive and unreliable, plus we pollute more. It’s like there’s zero victory. That’s F minus, man. You guys failed on every bloody front, including the ones you set up as your own principles. And yet nothing seems to happen. And as you said, you know, Biden can come out and and 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 neocolonial enterprise. Like, I can’t believe we can be this stupid. I can’t understand how this could happen. So obviously, Germany is this classic example of what not to do, which remarkable is what’s happening here in the United States, where California is following this example straight into the ditch. More than any other state in the U.S., California has emulated these policies of mandating renewables, shutting down baseload power plants. They shut down the San Onofre nuclear plant a few years ago. They almost succeeded in closing Diablo Canyon. That would news of maybe, you know, I think finally sobered up and said, no, we need this plant. Forget that it’s nuclear. It’s nine percent of our electric generation production in California. But look at what has happened. It’s a similar story, Jordan, 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 from their electric generation sector. Further, they have seen their electric prices rise faster than any other state in the United States since 2008. And I’ve written about this on my sub stack. Schwarzenegger signed a renewable energy mandate in 2008. Since then, California’s electric rates have gone up at a rate three times faster than that of the average in the United States. It’s unconscionable what they’re doing, Jordan. And this is in a state that is dominated by the Democratic Party, the liberals who say they care about the poor and the middle class. And yet this and this is what, as my late brother, John Bryce, just grills my cheese. I mean, it’s ruinously regressive. California has the highest poverty rate in America, Jordan. And yet they are sticking it to the poor and the middle class in a big way. And where the peak electric rates in California now, 40, 50 cents a kilowatt hour. 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. They can’t afford to live there. They live inland where they have to use air conditioning. 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, rooftops, it’s ruinously regressive. It screws the poor and the middle class. I’ve been absolutely stunned to watch the left in their rampage to sacrifice the poor, to fail to save the planet. 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 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 after the poor so assiduously. My understanding is this. You tell me what you think about this. It’s 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. And the reason for that is that there’s no difference between energy and work and there’s no difference between work and productivity. Now, you might say two things. You might respond, well, the planet has too many people on it. We can’t encourage that sort of thing. And if you make people rich, then the rich people destroy the environment faster. But both of those things are nonsense because we’ve seen a massive increase in population over the last 40 years. And all the bloody doomsayers like Paul Ehrlich, 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. 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. And as we’ve got more people, we’ve actually got richer. So that’s all bloody complete backwards nonsense. And then not only that, is that the data that I’ve looked at and I’ve looked at it with Bjorn Lombard or through his eyes is that if you can get people in the developing world up to about five thousand dollars a year in gross domestic product on average, they start taking a long term view of the future and start becoming concerned about local environmental issues and will take that burden onto themselves so that top down centralist, globalist, utopians don’t have to enforce all this idiocy on them. So like, am I missing something here? You know, have I gone down some bloody right wing rabbit hole or is this is this just the stark truth? So I think the key for me, Jordan, in all of this discussion is electricity availability. And this is, yes, energy in general matters, but more specifically, it’s electricity. 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. And when we’re going to be realistic about energy and we’re going to be energy humanist, we have to look at the lens of energy and energy availability in particular and how it affects women and girls. Electricity frees women and girls from the pump, the stove and the wash tub. You remember the the the New Dealers here in the US 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 their mothers wash clothes by hand. They wanted them to be liberated from from that from the wash tub. They’d seen this kind of backbreaking labor. And this is the key. There are something like who’s the Swedish demographer? He recently died. He estimated there were five billion people in the world today walking around in clothes that have been washed by hand. Well, that means that. Rosen? Yes. Oh, now see, what is his what’s his first name? Hans Rosling’s. Forgive me. Hans Rosling. Yes, Hans Rosling. Brilliant. He did that. Yes, a brilliant. Brilliant. He did that amazing video. I think he gave a TED Talk where he was talking about his grandmother and his grandmother. His folks had bought a washing machine as grandmother came over when they first time they use the washing machine and she wanted to start it right because it was a miracle to her. He said that, in fact, he said the washing machine to my grandmother was a miracle. So when we think about electricity and energy availability, this is the key for women and girls because if they don’t have it, they are effectively slaves to the household chores. And so Roslyn, Hans Rosling point five billion people in the world today are walking around in clothes that have been washed by hand. 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. They’re not in the library. They’re not in school. They’re not able to get a job outside the home. So there is. They’re also not contributing their brain power to the rest of us. You know, can you imagine can you imagine the economic value of two billion brains that are occupied in menial labor that could otherwise be freed up? I mean, there’s there’s two thousand women in that group that are one in a million, you know, and that’s genius level, man. We could use those people. And the fact that that we’re locking up that that degree of neural architecture in these menial tasks to not save the planet while we’re making electricity more unreliable and more expensive is just it’s it’s absolute it’s beyond incompetence into the realm of absolutely criminal. As far as I’m concerned, it’s it’s just it’s just it’s an it’s an it’s it’s an it’s an excessive focus, I think, on the look. Here’s my line. Climate change is a concern. It’s not our only concern. We have to balance our action on climate with our other other issues. 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. Well, if that’s the case, we’re going to need a lot more energy, not less. We’re going to need a lot more reliable energy, not less. And yet the trends are for this effort to rely more on weather dependent renewables. So for 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? It’s like on the face of it. It makes no sense. I mean, I don’t want to get too technical. It’s just crazy town. Using the Internet without ExpressVPN is like not paying attention to the safety demonstration on a flight. Most of the time, you’ll probably be fine. But what if one day that weird yellow mask drops down from overhead and you have no idea what to do? It’s better to be safe than sorry. Every time you connect to an unencrypted network, cafes, hotels, airports, any hacker on the same network can gain access to your personal data such as your passwords and financial details. It doesn’t take much technical knowledge to hack someone, just some cheap hardware. Hackers can make up to one thousand dollars per person, selling personal info on the dark web. ExpressVPN creates a secure encrypted tunnel between your device and the Internet. Hackers cannot steal your sensitive data. I love ExpressVPN for how easy it is to use. I just fire up the app and click one button to get protected. Secure your online data today by visiting ExpressVPN.com slash Jordan. That’s E-X-P-R-E-S-S-V-P-N dot com slash Jordan. And get three extra months free. ExpressVPN.com slash Jordan. Let’s walk through this again, too. And so I’d like you to push back on me as much as you could. So this is what I’ve watched in the course of my lifetime. So in the 1970s, we were going to run out of fossil fuels. And that was a big bloody catastrophe for everyone for about six years after 1972 and the energy crisis. And that turned out to be complete rubbish. We’re not running out of fossil fuels and we won’t. Partly, I mean, I think it was Exxon two weeks ago 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? And the 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. And that’s partly because as the price goes up, people’s incentives to 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. So we’re not going to run out of fossil fuel. That’s not going to happen. That was wrong. OK, next. The next thing that happened in the 1970s is global cooling. We’re the planet’s going to freeze. And that happened for about five years. And then that turned out to be nonsense. And then the next thing that happened was global warming. And then that turned out to be not true enough to be sustainable. And somehow the narrative switched to, oh, well, it’s climate change now. And that is one Weasley proposition, man. It’s like, oh, change. So now you have a get out of jail free car for all of your idiot policies because of the climate is changing. And that means increased variability. Now, I’ve looked at the data on hurricane frequency, for example. There’s no evidence whatsoever that hurricanes are increasing in frequency. 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. Then we also have Bjorn Lomborg’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, you know, some degree poorer than how much richer we would have been 100 years from now. Right. And so he thinks we can handle that. No problem with it with an iota of intelligence and some. But then I’m wondering, too, you tell me what you think about this. I’ve been watching the greening data. Now, the world has greened 15 percent since the year 2000, and that is a lot. It’s an area of leaf twice the size of the continental US. That’s a lot of extra leaves. And interestingly enough, it’s greened in exactly the areas that the climate catastrophes told us would be at most risk because they presume that the semi-arid areas, the arid areas would expand out into the semi-arid areas and the deserts would grow. Well, the desert isn’t growing. The Sahara is actually shrinking, especially on the south end. And the reason it’s shrinking is because more carbon dioxide has allowed plants to thrive. And when they thrive, they can close their breathing pores, which means they don’t need as much water. And now they’re growing in semi-arid areas all over the 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 know these arguments. And here’s how I keep my sanity, Jordan, is that I don’t I don’t get into the you know, what is how many parts per million is the right number? You know, we can argue about the climate science. My approach is very simple. Look, if we’re going to agree that we need to do something, what’s the best policy? Right. As I said, climate change is a concern. It’s not our only concern. So what is the way forward? What do we if we accept that we are facing some risk? How do we deal with this risk? What is the best no regrets policy? So I’ve been saying now for more than a dozen years, natural gas to nuclear. This is the way forward. And this is the part that just, you know, as I said, grills my cheese, chaps my hide on this Angola deal. And it’s on my sub stack, Robert Bryce, sub stack dot com. Let them eat solar panels, right? That the Export and Export 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. Instead, we’re funding a solar panel project. I mean, this makes no sense whatsoever. So if 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. How do we do that? Natural gas resources globally, Jordan, are just they’re not abundant. They’re super abundant. They’re geographically widespread. 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 and to Europe and advanced countries or developed countries. 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. I think it’s it’s anathema. 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. We should be helping them develop because that’s incumbent upon us. We’ve already done getting in their way or at least not getting in their way. So then natural gas to nuclear. I’ll just finish this other point. 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. They’re NGOs, they’re climate activist groups. And by the way, they’re spending four and a half billion dollars a year. I’ve documented this. That’s their budgets. They’re just enormous. But they’re almost a person. Almost all of them are anti nuclear. Well, if we’re serious about CO2, I mean, it makes no sense. It might my line is if you’re anti carbon dioxide and anti nuclear, you are pro blackout anti blackout. You’re also bloody well, pro starvation. Well, right. So we need to be helping develop this technology. And these are the things that I think are positive. Now, we can we can focus on a lot of things that are negative. And I will grant you, there are many negative things that are happening. 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. But what we’re seeing in the wake of the Russian Ukraine War that I think is really encouraging, Jordan, is a move toward nuclear. Romania, one of the countries of France, just Finland just opened up. We know just Sweden just said we’re going to we’re we’re bagging our renewable push. We’re going to build nuclear plants. Just yesterday was June 29th. A EDF group in France said we’re going to build two more nuclear reactors. The US tremendous amount of momentum and money behind new nuclear. Now, there are a lot of friction points, including fuel availability, because the Russians have are producing 46 percent. I think over 40 percent of the global uranium enrichment market is in Russia. Saskatchewan has the biggest uranium reserves in the world, and they’re bloody untouched. And in our idiot country, you know, we have all these fossil fuel reserves, but we have we have tremendous stores of of of nuclear fuel as well, of uranium. And Canada actually has good nuclear technology. The Cando reactor is a good reactor. And Canada is another good story. And I’m working on a new documentary. It’s going to be out this fall. It’s called Juice Power Politics in the Grid. And one of the the people we’re featuring is one of your Canadian colleagues, Chris Kiefer. He’s done a remarkable job in in this revitalization of the Canadian nuclear sector that you’re you’re going to rebuild some of your can do reactors. You’re building an SMR, I think, at Darlington with a BX BRX 300. So I won’t say it’s all due to Dr. Kiefer, and he’s a remarkable story by himself. He’s an emergency. You have him as a podcast guest. Oh, you should put us in touch. Would you put us in touch? Absolutely. Yeah. No, he’s he’s got he’s got a lot of Elvis. He’s six feet nine. He’s just this big presence. But he almost single handedly, Jordan, has he has ignited this new rebirth in Canadian nuclear. And it’s been a marvel. So that Canada is kind of Canada rather has kind of jumped into the lead. But it’s not so Canada, Romania, China’s building dozens of reactors. The Russians are still pushing out there. Their technology, Britain, France, Poland, I mentioned Romania. So there is amidst all the crazy town that’s happening. The one, I think, thing that is positive that’s occurred in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is a 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 turbines and solar panels, we’re going to embrace nuclear. So I think that’s a very positive thing that is happening and one that I’m watching closely. Well, and where do you see, where are you particularly optimistic on the nuclear technology front? Do you what do you think of small modular reactors and the molten salt technologies and so forth that people seem to be? My 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 brought down and so that the systems can be distributed without having to build an immense amount of high of transmission wires. So but I don’t like I’m trying to get up to speed on that, but I’m not precisely. So where are you particularly optimistic on the nuclear front? So like you, I see a lot of promise with nuclear in general. So what about SMRs, 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 GE Hitachi new scale here in the US, X, X, X Energy, Kairos, Oklo. It remains to be seen which one will will be the one that makes it to market. Among the most interesting ones to me, Jordan, is X Energy. That’s a high temperature gas reactor. And they just recently did a deal with Dow and Dow announced. In fact, Dow, I think, took an equity position in X Energy and they are planning to deploy four of their SMRs at one of their Dow’s chemical plant in Seadrift, Texas, which is fairly close to Corpus Christi if memory serves. Well, to me, what’s interesting about that one of those high temperature gas. Right. So that’s a safer design inherently than than than a water based reactor. Second, it’s that Dow is looking at this and Dow is an old line chemical company. We’re very conservative. They’re looking at this and saying, we think this is the right technology. 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, to make high temperature steam. Oh, so it has that additional advantage. Right. So walk through. Do you want to walk through that? Why that’s important for people? Well, sure. So industrial process heat is needed for a lot of different things. Right. Refining mining chemical production. So industrial consumers use a lot of electricity. They use a lot of energy in general. So if you have a source of high temperature heat, then you could produce high temperature steam and then use that for your processing of whatever it is that you’re doing. 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. And so that’s quite intriguing. I also think Rolls Royce might be an interesting play in, you know, Britain. Britain now, is their technology the right one? We don’t know yet. I think we’re kind of in the I’d compare it maybe to the early days of video. Is it going to be VHS or is it going to be Betamax? Right. Is it, you know, and which one will prevail? But I think your general idea that we should have one or two designs is the right one. Right. That is why France was so successful in deploying nuclear. 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. And 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 he had an accident here in the US. There were two reactors, but the two reactors had two different control rooms because they were built by two different companies. Well, that makes no sense at all. Right. So if we’re going to see a new a new renaissance of nuclear, there are a lot of friction points. I’ll talk about those in a minute. But we’re going to have to speed up the regulatory regime. And that means the Nuclear Regulatory Commission here in the US. We’ve had some US companies domicile in Canada because they think it’s what will be easier path to licensure if they start in Canada and then come back to the US. The Europeans are going to have a different type of of of licensing procedures than the US. But the NRC is a big roadblock. The other is the fuel part. So this is where I think the friction parts are. And I want to be very sober about this, Jordan, because I was in Japan earlier this year. I was very fortunate. I’m very lucky in my career to be able to travel and see things. And I went to Fukushima Daiichi 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. The Japanese are embracing energy realism. The home of the Kyoto Protocol. They’re not aiming at net zero. We met with top government officials. We met with top industry officials. I said, so what about your carbon emissions? They said, yeah, we’re not we’re not really going to pursue those. We’re pursuing energy security first. And I had one guy just say very clearly, look, we live in a bad neighborhood. We got the Russians over there, the Chinese over there, the North Koreans over there. We are going to take care of our energy security first. So I think Japan more than any other country in my recent experience is an indicator of how energy realism and energy security is trumping concerns about climate change. And I think rightly so. The Japanese are nothing if not practical. So they’re building 1.3 gigawatt coal fired power plant on Tokyo Bay. They’re also building another 500 megawatts ultra super critical coal fired power plant. Forgot where that one is. And another five gigawatts of gas fired capacity. So they’re slowly reopening their nuclear reactors. But they’re also being very diversifying. They’re also very clear eyed about where they are going in the world. And they are saying energy security is our first concern. And we’re going to take care of that because our industry demands it. And so I think so the Chinese are doing the same thing. 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. And that’s a critical point that I think that I’ve heard other people say this is not original to me. The emissions from the West in many ways don’t matter anymore. Because the story is in places like Vietnam, Bangladesh, Pakistan, India, China. These are the places where emissions are growing so rapidly. And in fact, I spend a lot of time I nerd out on spreadsheets. And the statistical review of world energy just came out. So I’ve been studying it very closely. The country that had the biggest and absolute terms, the biggest increase in CO2 emissions last year was Indonesia, followed closely by India. So these are countries that have enormous populations and are still desperately energy poor. But let me return back to- Yeah, we’ll wait till Nigeria kicks in. You know, Nigeria is going to have more people in it than China by the end of the century. So and your point there that we’re seeing the huge growth in energy consumption among the countries with the largest populations. It’s like, well, that’s pretty bloody self-evident, isn’t it? 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. And, you know, it certainly seems like- 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. So big companies, Nike, Adidas, Samsung, Apple, to name a few, locating in Vietnam. And suddenly Vietnam is power short. So what did Vietnam just announce? Their Vietcoman is their state-owned mining company, announced they’re going to expand their coal mining capacity by 15%. This is the iron law of electricity, what I call the iron law of electricity. A nod to my friend Roger Pilkey Jr., who coined the iron law of climate. He said when faced between- his focus was faced between climate policy and economic growth, economic growth will win every time. 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. Climate change is not their first concern. And this was evident in Japan. This was the part that really was a sobering experience in going to Japan. But I’ve seen it myself. I’ve seen people in India stealing electricity. In Beirut, where I talk about that, I write about it in my book, seeing the generator mafia, where pretty much everyone in Lebanon pays two electric bills, 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. The grid fails in Lebanon every day. So this iron law of electricity, I think, is another example, in my view, we have to be realists. Energy realism is energy humanism. People are going to do whatever they have to do because they are not going to sit in the dark. They’re not going to let the food in the fridge spoil. They’re going to find a small generator. They’re going to steal electricity. They’re also not going to let grandma freeze to death in the winter. I mean, I looked at Lombard’s data on the consequences of lowering thermostat temperatures just a few degrees. 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. That’s old people, you know, because old people can’t regulate their temperature very well. And so there’s two things we need to point out to everyone who’s watching and listening. And the first is, is that if you raise energy costs, you imagine that there’s a pyramid of it, of economic development. And there’s hundreds of millions or billions of people who are sitting right on the threshold of poverty. They’ve climbed out of absolute poverty. So now they have enough money so that they don’t have to worry about where lunch is coming from. But that’s just where they’re at. And they’re barely there. And if you increase their energy costs to any degree at all, all you do is whack them down, back down into absolute abject poverty. 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. High polluting fuels, yeah. Well, right. And they pollute the indoor atmosphere and that’s really, really hard on their kids and their elderly people as well. And so you cannot, we got to say this over and over, you cannot raise energy prices without devastating the poor. Period. The end. And the more poor people you make, as far as I can tell, the worse things are actually for the planet rather than the better. And this brings us to another conundrum. 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. 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. And those actually turn out to be the same thing. And you can tell in these when 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 bandwagon in a second saying, well, obviously we should transition to nuclear because it’s zero carbon dioxide output. And that’s not happening. So that means, as far as I’m concerned, that everything, that their fundamental narrative is a delusional lie. And it’s got a malevolent twist in it, too. 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. There’s a certain, well, you know this field better than I, but there’s a certain puritanical part of this, right? And a certain also, I think, a religious fundamentalism. And I’m sure other people have talked about this before, I know. But there are many overlaps between the Christian belief and these ideas around climate catastrophism, right? That we’ve sinned against the earth, right? We haven’t sinned against God, we’ve sinned against the earth. We need to repent. We need to use less, do less, and go back to the garden, right? And even Martin Luther, to keep going on this just a hair longer, he would recognize carbon credits, right? You get a carbon indulgence by buying some offset because you flew to Fiji. But let me just build on your point about the availability of hydrocarbons and how important it is. 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 among the first researchers to document the effects of indoor air pollution on women and girls. And I was interviewing a climate activist yesterday. And by the way, I don’t call it green energy. I don’t call them green. I call them climate activists. I don’t call it green energy. I don’t call it clean energy. I called it alt energy, right? Because I don’t think it’s green. I don’t think it’s clean. Covering the landscape with solar panels, destroying landscapes with wind turbines. I’m a longtime critic of the wind business, proudly so. They don’t like me. I don’t like them back, okay? Because I’ve documented now for more than 10 years, and on the Renewable Rejection Database, which is on my website, robertbrice.com, I’ve documented nearly 400 rejections of wind energy in the US from Maine to Hawaii. It’s happening in Canada, too, by the way. In Ontario, over 90 communities have declared themselves unwilling hosts to wind energy. Now, you don’t read about this in the New York Times because it doesn’t fit the narrative. But I digress. So back to the point about hydrocarbons and Kirk Smith. Indoor air pollution is one of the leading killers of women and girls in developing countries. Kirk Smith and the WHO, I think, the World Health Organization, documented something like three or four million women and girls a year dying premature deaths because of indoor air pollution, because they’re cooking with dung or wheat straw in their homes. And Kirk Smith made this point. They need LPG. They need butane. They need propane. They need clean. Forget electricity for just a minute. Let’s replace those low-density fuels, low-density, high-polluting fuels, with hydrocarbons. That’s a step change in their standards of living. And so, but I’m with you in terms of kind of your broader points here. We need more energy, not less. And I’ll stop here because I could go on and pound the table here. But expensive energy is the enemy of the poor. And I remember very vividly. I live in Austin, which is, of course, I used to have friends here. It’s a liberal hub, right? But a friend of mine, a former acquaintance of mine, he was pounding the table, oh, energy’s too cheap. And I thought, OK, here you are. You vacation and you fly around the world. You go summer here, there, and there everywhere. You’re rich. And you’re telling me energy is too cheap. I don’t see it that way. And I haven’t talked to him in a long time because of that. Because I just thought, you don’t understand what you’re talking about. Expensive energy is the enemy of the poor. And yet so many of these policies, both in the developed countries and the developing countries, are aimed at 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. And I just think that’s just fundamentally wrong. Energy means life. And the absence of energy is death, to quote my friend Doomburg. The Bible is the root of all wisdom, inspiration, and spiritual nourishment. The Hallow app empowers you to explore the Bible’s profound teachings and to effortlessly incorporate them into your daily life. A great place to start while you deepen your understanding of the Bible is to check out Father Mike Schmitz’s Bible in a Year, available on the Hallow app for brief daily readings and reflections. Here you can dive into an extensive library of Bible reading plans, accompanied by insightful reflections and audio-guided meditations. 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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 while virtue is 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. There’s no excuse for any of that. Now my understanding is this is that there’s a pretty clear developmental pathway to cleaner and more reliable energy in the long run. 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 scrap wood 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. You move from that to coal. 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 and almost no time flat and its disadvantage in particular is particulate pollution although it also produces a lot of carbon which I don’t really care about but the particulate pollution is a problem. You move from that to oil or natural gas and you move from that to nuclear. Do we know this or not? Is this just can we rest assured that this is a reasonable developmental pathway and one that we should be pursuing? Well this is the way it’s been happening for a long time now. I mean that is the way the world has decarbonized over time. My friend Jesse Ossobel at Rockefeller University has documented this and shown we are gradually decarbonizing but that decarbonizing is underway in developed countries and there are dozens of underdeveloped countries that are just getting started. They’re still at the biomass stage and there’s this claim, oh well we can leapfrog, they can. The alt energy crowd, the climate crowd says, oh well they don’t need hydrocarbons, they’ll jump right to renewables. No, wrong. 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. Here’s a quick comparison. So you’re a Canadian, in rough terms there are 35 million Canadians. They use compared to 1.4 billion Africans roughly the same amount of electricity. That’s the disparity that we’re talking about. Now there’s no numbers aren’t exact but in rough terms that’s a comparison. So the need for electricity is overwhelming globally Jordan. It’s just enormous. So how do we, this is the part where look we can talk climate change all day long. What’s the right number? What’s the wrong number? Who’s doing the right thing? Who’s the wrong thing? What’s the best no regrets strategy as we look to the future? And I think again end to end, natural gas to nuclear, these are the ways that we are that no regrets. Okay so maybe we find in a few years well we’re wrong about climate change. I’m not necessarily not making that argument but when it comes to why natural gas and nuclear both are lower no carbon, the technologies are very well developed, available in numerous countries and they can scale at relatively low cost. So all of those things together to me make this a no brainer and I’m going to pound the table continue pounding the table on that because this is the challenge of our time. I mean when we look around the world, this is 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 to develop? How do we help countries like Vietnam? They’re going to look out for Vietnam first. That is that every country is going to do what is the right pathway for them. So how could the US, how could Canada, how could the European countries help those countries? Well help them develop their natural gas and help them deploy nuclear energy at scale. New next generation passively safe modular reactors. These are the things that are going to help us decarbonize and electrify these countries that are so desperately poor right now. Okay so let’s turn to two things here. Sure. I would like first of all I’d like to pick your brain momentarily about coal. Yeah. There’s lots of coal 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. And so how are we doing on the clean coal front? Sure. How good are the modern coal fired plants in terms of for example getting rid of particulate pollution? Sure. Well I’ll make a joke first which I think clean coal is kind of oxymoronic like military intelligence or family vacation right or jumbo shrimp right. You can make cleaner coal and so I mentioned Japan earlier. They’re building new coal fired power plants. What are they doing? They’re using ultra supercritical technology which is the highest level of combustion. You get you ring more watt hours for every kilogram of coal that you burn. So that is the optimum. That’s if we’re going to burn coal let’s use ultra supercritical technology but that’s more expensive and not all countries are willing to do that. Instead they’re building subcritical plants which are the most common ones. Well you think that would be a place for potential subsidy then to help the countries that are building coal plants build better ones. Absolutely. If we cared which we don’t. But I think it’s important to put it in historical context. So I’ve written about the history. 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. He burned coal right. Well we’re still now 140 years 141 years later coal globally still has 35% of the global electric sector market. So and you mentioned China before. Global Energy Monitor which is clearly an anti-coal group in February put out a report. Last year China permitted two new coal plants a week. Right. So India is building new coal plants. Bangladesh, Vietnam, numerous other countries. Indonesia. Indonesia had as I mentioned before has the highest or biggest increase in CO2 emissions last year of any country in the world. Why? Because they rapidly expanded their coal fleet. So coal is here to stay for decades to come. That is a fact. These plants that are being built now are going to continue running. So you know America is you know cheering on the closure of our coal plants. Well I think that’s probably problematic in terms of reliability but that’s a different discussion. But so coal is geographically widespread. Widespread. It’s relatively cheap and it’s super abundant. So that is why so many countries are 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 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. So that seems like a stupid idea to me all things considered. 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. But I think the key here is just to think about you know it’s a global story right and if we’re going to it’s not Texas warming, it’s not Canada warming or America warming, it’s global warming, it’s global climate change. We’re going to deal with this we have to have some sensibility about the world as a collection of nations that want to try and address this. Well what is going to be the way to make cleaner electricity cheaper and I think that means natural natural natural gas and nuclear. Well we could run around panicking about the sky falling even though it isn’t and we could lie constantly about net zero and make everyone poor 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. You know these these net zero advocates first of all that entire that entire what terminology just grates on me it’s like there is like net zero is a cliche not a policy and zero anything is impossible because we’re not going to get to zero carbon output obviously ever and we shouldn’t even aim at that because it’s stupid you know even if we could reduce it 80 percent that would be fine. But I think that narrative is running out though I think I you know if you look at what’s happening in Europe I think the politicians particularly in Germany we talked about Germany earlier. UK too. UK as well they’re looking forward and saying you know we’re not going to make net zero right we’re this is we’re going to have to throttle this back the German Green Party has been has lost some remarkable recent elections got shellacked the German politicians the German voters are looking around at this and they’re saying wait a minute this is terrible for us so I I think some of this another positive sign in addition to the expansion of nuclear I think we’re seeing more energy realism and thank thank the Lord for that I mean it’s taking a while. Yeah all right so let’s talk about and let’s take another attack on the environmental front now you’ve written rather extensively about the dangers the environmental dangers of wind power and you’re also well you you made a crack earlier about let them eat solar panels and so you obviously have some misgivings on the solar front so let’s start with on the wind front so my understanding I’m going to lay out a few things and tell me if I’m right or wrong so first of all Siemens last week two weeks ago announced that they were having catastrophic and I think the CEO said something like I can’t believe how catastrophic our problems are with our wind turbines that’s not a good thing for a CEO to say the wind turbines they’re unreliable they obviously don’t work when the wind is 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 they’re they don’t have a proven track record they only seem to last about 17 years god nobody knows what to do with them when they’re decommissioned and they’re very expensive to decommission they’re killing whales like mad hypothetically they seem to be really hard on birds and so this just isn’t working out very well and so now am I missing something on the wind front and then we could turn to soon? No I think you hit pretty well all of the issues here let’s set whales aside let’s set the wildlife issues aside I’m an avid birdwatcher and this again is one area that just absolutely just it’s unbelievable to me you know that that the wind industry gets a pass when it comes to killing some of our most iconic wildlife including bald and golden eagles but set that aside for a minute let’s talk about just basic physics 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 so we want high power density that’s one reason why I’m so pro-nuclear super high power density we’re talking 2,000 watts per square meter roughly so energy is the ability to do work power is the rate at which work gets done or I’m sorry energy is the ability to work that’s right power is the rate at which work gets done we measure power in watts so we want high watts per square meter nuclear 2000 explain that a bit more explain walk everybody through what energy density means because it’s a sophisticated concept and yeah it is people need to understand it and and it’s and to be clear it’s power density so what is power it’s a measure of energy flow it’s measured in watts so you have different kinds of power density and power is a measure of energy flow okay so you can have it barrels of oil in the ground are energy barrels per day or power we energy is worthless unless we can make it flow and the more we can make it flow the better so we want more power flow which is watts so power density is a measure of energy flow from a given area volume or mass and you’re right it’s not well understood 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 okay so we want high power density sources ethanol is extraordinarily low because it relies on on on photosynthesis about one tenth of a watt per square meter wind energy i don’t care where you put it is one watt per square meter period end of story elvis has left the building one watt per square meter solar is better about 10 watts per square meter so if i’m going to pick my renewables i think solar has more attributes better attributes than wind okay so what do we see though because of this low power density with wind it requires enormous amounts of land so and and when it requires enormous amounts of land well you’re impacting more people and the more the only way to expand the output of wind is to capture more land it’s axiomatic so to give you an and an analysis vatslav smill is your fellow canadian has written about this he estimated back in 2010 to for the u.s to meet its electric demands with wind would require a land area twice the size of the state of california 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 okay that’s clear jesse jenkins from princeton recently wrote a piece in in mother jones again saying that the footprint of wind energy is massive well this is a problem jordan i spend a lot of time in rural america and i these people i was in i i travel i meet these people they some of them become my friends they’re rural landowners rural farmers rural ranchers think we don’t want 600 foot high wind turbines in our neighborhood we don’t want to look at red blinking lights all night every night for the rest of our lives they these wind projects despite all these claims from the wind business they hurt property values and they produce enormous amounts of noise pollution which are is bad for human health it disrupts sleep this has been proven again so these are polluting machines they’re visually polluting they’re blights on the landscape they hurt human health they hurt property values and none of this matters to the sierra clubbers or these alt energy crowd because climate change right they they’re like these totems these climate change scarecrows that’s what i call them right that they’re somehow going to solve climate change no they’re not they’re only being deployed because of the tax credits which are enormously lucrative for the companies that are doing this so just another quick point this tax credit pursuit of the tax credits what i call subsidy mining is what’s driving this deployment of solar and wind but particularly the wind business so look at what happened in madison county iowa i wrote about this was in forbes some time ago but um mid-american energy subsidiary of berkshire hathaway owned by or controlled by uh warren buffett who in 2014 said the only reason to build wind turbines is to get the tax credits okay back to madison county berkshire hathaway a mid-american wanted to build a wind project in madison county madison county passes an ordinance saying we don’t you know no more wind projects they effectively the ordinance said banned new wind projects they got sued by mid-american energy imagine if chevron or exxon did that it would be front page news in the new york times and instead crickets no reporting on this at all 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 rightman filed a slap suit against her in canadian court because she was opposing one of their wind projects and called next era next error on her website they sued her in federal court they they put a slap suit on her the slap seats were designed to stop people from being intimidated by large organizations that was the bloody plan there right so imagine if the oil the oil industry did that but here is an american company suing a canadian and canadian court i mean the way these companies have acted in terms of corporate responsibility it’s just crazy i mean it’s just this be 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 it would be they would be pilloried and yet because it’s alt energy they get a free pass in a world filled with uncertainties it’s crucial to be ready for whatever comes your way whether it’s a natural disaster a sudden emergency or unforeseen circumstances having a reliable food storage system can provide you with peace of mind and the assurance that you and your loved ones will be well taken care of right now my patriot supply is offering major savings on their four week emergency food kit to help you stay prepared for anything go to prepare with peterson.com and grab this special price before it ends your four week emergency food kit provides over 2000 calories each day for optimal strength and energy in stressful situations you can enjoy a wide 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through their own negligence was killing about 600 000 migratory birds migratory birds a year they the fish and wildlife service and the department of justice brought something like 200 cases against the oil and gas industry and the fish and wildlife service was the only one in the oil and gas industry prosecuted them rightly so and the oil and gas industry to their credit cleaned it up they they put nets over their pits they closed their pits today the wind industry is killing at least that many birds probably more we don’t know and there is no accountability because they’re not required to report these deaths they have been prosecuted in very rare occasions but it’s this oh and the justification is well oh well these these birds are going to get hurt by climate change sometime in the future oh yeah you’re you’re you’re killing them now because you think it might help in the future well that’s just crazy policy that it makes no sense whatsoever yeah and you don’t do that with people either you don’t get i mean this is and yet there’s a free this is a free pass i mean we haven’t talked about the whales we can talk about that as well but but this idea that oh we’re going to kill them because we might have some climate change in the future and i’ll return to i’ll return i’ll return to next era just one quick point last year thankfully they got prosecuted by the department of justice why 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 they did it anyway and so they were prosecuted and i was glad to see it under the migrant under the uh i think it was just under the migratory bird treaty act they should have been criminally prosecuted under the endangered species act bald and golden eagle protection act and the migratory bird treaty act 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 the wind farm in the first place so there are perverse incentives at hand here and um i i i i i words fail me because i i do i care about wildlife but i think this is the death of environmentalism climatism has replaced care for the environment and this idea oh we’ll just pave this rural countryside with wind turbines and solar panels in the name of climate change what are you out of your mind man we need to small we need small footprints it’s also the case too that this unit dimensional mania in relationship to carbon dioxide is stopping us from solving environmental problems that could at least in principle be addressed 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 and we do that like it’s to call it devastating is to barely even scratch the surface i think we’ve eradicated something like 95 percent 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 shelf so it’s a bloody catastrophe 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 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 so you get a 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 plus you’re sacrificing the poor not to help not to do anything but but make them poorer and more likely to pollute so this looks like a three-way catastrophe to me well and this is obvious in in in the development of offshore wind on the u.s east coast where these and these ngo’s these climate ngo’s that in the past autobahn society sierra club etc would have been jumping up and down to protect the north atlantic right whale from the encroachment of offshore wind develop offshore development i mean imagine if it was the offshore of the oil and gas industry 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 on the planet imagine if this was the oil and gas industry doing that they would these groups would be raising hell i mean i mean they would be laying down they would be blocking the trucks and instead because it’s the wind industry and largely being developed by foreign companies not even american companies it’s it’s what michael schellenberger calls the environmental betrayal and i think that’s the exact right word 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 you know this was kind of like this was the kind of almost a joke right but that environmental ism right and i call it i’m working on an essay on the death of environmental ism because i think that’s what we’re seeing that’s what we’re seeing this this idea of protecting landscapes or protecting wildlife has been has been forsaken for climatism what we’ve and and what i call climatism and renewable energy fetishism so instead instead of a focus on preserving landscapes preserving wildlife and and and and that 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 uh well not just in the onshore wind issue which i’ve documented and and the rejections of solar by the way on the the solar solar rejections on the renewable rejection database i think we’re at 130 or more rejections or restrictions but this climatism this new renewable fetishism i think is most obvious when it comes to the the north atlantic right whales and the development of offshore wind on the east coast of the united states it’s it’s it’s very sad sad to see so 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 and the higher you are in the hierarchy the more stable your nervous system is and the more positive emotion you you experience and so and plus all sorts of other benefits accrue to you because people if you have a good reputation people flock to you so reputation really matters so that means that there’s an avenue open constantly for false avenues to reputation enhancement and that’s what psychopaths and narcissists do but it’s also what ideologues offer because they tell people look um if you’re a good person you stand up against problems here’s the problem which in this case would be carbon dioxide 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 on your part whatsoever you just have to protest and complain you don’t actually have to solve problems and now you’re a good person 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 now your reputation is significantly enhanced and anyone who stands in your way is like a devil and and evil and so that’s the that’s the religious nexus that we’re dealing with here and the problem with that is as you’re pointing out is that well first of all it’s really hard on the poor and second it sacrifices all the real problems to the this pseudo problem solution or pseudo problems pseudo solutions and and so now and so now the destructive and so now the solution is to go throw some soup on some paintings in the museum yeah right and right which is like oh i’m going to protest by by being a vandal i mean and so yes right by destroying yeah exactly well that that that signals that opposition to the you know colonial industrial enterprise or whatever the hell it is but there’s a certain but there’s a certain pathetic aspect to that i mean it’s they’re these these kids i call them i’m going to be 63 here pretty soon and i look at them and i think what are you doing i mean what do you what is your hope for the future have you no idea how privileged you are living where you live have you no sense of yourself in the world relative to the rest of the planet because uh we mentioned i think before we started recording but i’m i’m happy i’m working on a piece for the alliance for responsible citizenship which you’re helping found and and i’ve written a long paper and and on on electricity availability in the developing world and i’ve documented i went through using data the latest data from our world in data 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 1200 kilowatt hours or less per capita per year that’s about the same 1200 per hour kilowatt hours about the same amount of electricity is consumed by a large kitchen refrigerator in the united states so imagine this 47 percent of the population on the planet today is living in electricity poverty and we’re and we’re complaining because our electricity isn’t you know from alt energy or something i mean there is there there there there’s a certain i think michael schellenberger calls it this kind of nihilistic narcissism or so i’m not sure exactly how he describes it but but there’s something about this only presentism right that we only have right now and none of it there’s no history there’s no future and but there’s no sense of how we in the west are i mean i sometimes pinch myself i mean just how lucky i am and not just in my career my family you know married to a 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 what is dominating this administration and i say this is not a partisan i’m not a democrat i’m not a republican i am disgusted but this biden administration is the most anti-hydrocarbon administration in american history and all and there it seems like this climate issue is the only thing they want to talk about when you know an existential threat and i’m thinking existential threat a hundred thousand americans died last year of opioid overdoses i my son jacob is 23 within the last two months two people that he knew two two kids two boys that he knows i say young men died of opioid overdoses here in austin that’s a that’s a public health crisis and yet where has the biden administration been on fentanyl where are they on opioids why isn’t he pounding the damn podium saying we have to do something about this instead he’s standing up and bragging about some stupid 900 million dollar loan to the angolan so they can build solar panels where are your priorities where is your humanism i mean i i get worked up about this is part of the reason 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 first of all we are working diligently with bjorn lombard who’s on board with the project because i think of all the people that i’ve met his ability to prioritize is unparalleled and he’s done very careful empirical work showing what our priorities should be 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 it’s a lot more complicated than that but we’re also concerned you know you said there’s something pathetic about watching these young people for example glue themselves to to paintings and i think that’s where pathetic degenerates into outright criminal by the way but i take your take your point with regards to pathetic i mean part of the problem with 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 and that’s what we’re trying to do with the arc is 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 and that would be something like well what would it look like well how about we get how about we take those 47 percent 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 how about we make that a bloody priority and while we’re doing that while we’re doing that we could we’d make some real advances on the environment front because as soon as they’re rich enough to care they’ll start caring and that i mean even china is greener than it was 20 years ago you know that and it’s partly because as china has gotten rich people have started to care a little bit about their local environment and we could really you know places like india are almost at that threshold now where they’re going to start to really care and so and the story could be instead of oh my god it’s an apocalyptic nightmare and everyone’s going to die and we should only have 500 million people on the planet 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 we could say no you know more people like musk has been saying more people the better because we can convert we can convert all that to brain power and if we were ethical and we had a clue we could have a future that everybody could be proud of 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 it’s not a good idea and and energy has to be one of those most fundamental building blocks and i am completely on board with that because as i say energy realism is energy humanism we have to be realistic about the limits of this the these renewables right and um my friend jesse ossoffel i mentioned before he said um just because he says wind and solar may be renewable they are not green and i think that’s a just a great a great way to think about them yes they’re renewable but just because they’re renewable doesn’t mean they’re green what an example i you know i could pound the table on this one jordan because it does just get me riled up but please do i was in wisconsin i had an event at the university of wisconsin oshkosh a few weeks ago and i flew into milwaukee and i’ve been contacted 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 well john uh john barnes is a resident of christiana wisconsin a little town of 1800 it’s about an hour west of milwaukee so i got in the rental car i drove straight there i met him i met the town uh town supervisor mark cook um and another one and a woman who was there his name escapes me at the moment they’re fighting a project that would cover get this seven square miles of their little farming community it’s a farming community of 1800 would cover some of the best farmland in all of wisconsin with solar panels it’s some of the best farmland in wisconsin some of the best farmland in the world and these local people are saying we don’t want this and yet it’s invenergy this privately owned renewable company out of chicago that is going to develop the project and then flip it to uh local or local utilities circumventing wisconsin state law but it screws that farming community i mean just screws them and it’s and who’s speaking up for them no one you know wind and solar may be renewable they are not green why in the world would we be covering prime farmland with solar panels the answer is very simple it’s the climatism and the investment tax credit you and you you put you put those you put those two together right this renewable energy fetishism which is i think the right word right description with these incredibly lucrative tax credits which for solar amount to like 30 percent of all the layout the initial cost capital cost of the project it’s incredibly profitable for these renewable energy developers to do these projects and so you know oh food you know fiber you know farmers we don’t care about that we’re here to make money and these are little you know not little farms but they’re growing corn and soybeans they’re you know they’re they’re rural farmers who are just getting by and yet they’re just going to get screwed by these kinds of projects where’s the new york times where’s the new york times why isn’t why is the washington post report hands why is it in in npr why aren’t they reporting on this because they don’t care so you said something interesting that solar and wind are renewable but you know i don’t think that’s true exactly let me say what i mean by that the sun and the wind are renewable but that doesn’t mean that solar and wind power are renewable those aren’t the same thing and the reason the reason i’m saying that is because the lifespan of solar panels isn’t very long and the lifespan of wind generators isn’t very long and so they’re not renewable at all because once they exhaust themselves they have to be scrapped and destroyed and then they they have to be rebuilt so i don’t understand what’s renewable about that at all like if if we were growing solar solar panels in a field that would be a different thing but we’re not wood is renewable because wood will grow but like and i don’t know exactly what happened to semen’s i haven’t been following that story close enough to know but the semen’s 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 what did they mean by that like what what exactly is the problem do you know the problem on that front what did they run run into right i i don’t know exactly i haven’t looked into that specifically but here’s my theory and let’s go back to physics and and fluid fluid mechanics the beth’s limit is what determines the amount of energy that you can harness from the diffused energy in the wind right it’s it’s like a water water and wind i think in many ways so i understand an amount of physicists but they function in many of the same ways right there’s a limited amount of power that you can harness from this diffused source of energy i think they just got to a point where they made the system the machines got so big that the the forces on them are effectively tearing the machines apart right 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 that they made them too big well you think about the variability too right i mean those bloody wind 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 gale level storms and that that’s a tremendous engineering challenge especially you’re also putting them in the bloody salt water out in the middle of the ocean right which is just madness by the way you know that you’re going to put them out there any put anything in salt water it’s going to cost you two or three times more than putting it on land so i think this is about basic physics and they’re getting to the limits of the bet’s limit right and you have these blades that are 80 meters long and you’ve got to manufacture those and that’s another thing and then when they’re done you you can’t you have to landfill them right there’s no way to recycle them 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 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 sub stack that these supply chains for alt energy are almost all dependent on china let’s look at electric vehicles why do you think alan musk is building his next gigafactory i’m in austin they just built one here it’s a massive factory i just flew in the other the other night from miami and we flew over it it’s a massive bet on a few very specific commodities cobalt lithium neodymium neodymium iron boron magnets dysprosium and terbium to name a few manganese a few others copper obviously so what’s the problem there well the chinese control the market for 90 percent of the global market for neodymium iron boron magnets which are the key element in the ev drive motors right nearly all the electric vehicles being produced today use this type of magnet so other countries can make those magnets but who controls the terbium and the dysprosium two other rare earths neodymium terbium and dysprosium are all rare earth elements china controls 100 percent of the terbium and dysprosium markets 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 so it’s not but okay so let’s go beyond the magnets which are needed as well 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 talking tons of magnets china controls the market completely what about the other things that we need graphite for batteries copper for the the material intensity of electric vehicles is far greater than that for internal combustion engines so who who where did all these supply chains lead to china i’m not a china basher china is going to take care of china but why in the name of peter paul and mary now would the united states be to be staking its future economy on the chinese supply chains it doesn’t make any sense whatsoever i mean and for the u.s to try and reshore all of those technologies including rare earth element refining and and and these 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 again who are you where is the strategic here where is the long-term thinking about our strategic vulnerabilities and i don’t see any of that and it’s very worrisome that’s the problem with doing things in an idiot fear-based panic is that these are very very complex problems right and the supply chain problem is an invisible part of that and if we did repatriate those industries that you described well that would mean a lot more mines and it isn’t obvious at all in today’s regulatory environment that that’s even vaguely possible plus it’s not like there’s not an environmental cost to let’s say copper mining so so the the notion that this is somehow green in some obvious way is not it’s not a tenable notion at all and then you add that supply chain vulnerability to that and that that could be well that’s obviously unwise to say the least well well and and and it applies to solar as well and this is something else that’s been largely ignored in many cases just flat swept under the rug is the supply of poly silicon for solar panels now let me be clear i have eight and a half kilowatts of solar panels on the roof of my house why did i put them on because i got three different subsidies hello i’m i’m opposed to energy subsidies unless i’m getting them jordan all right so let’s be clear but am i sure that those solar panels which are made in korea don’t have any content that was that came from china 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 weger slave labor in jinjang and the content in particular for poly silicon produced in jinjang with weger slave labor and and the u.s government called it genocide now are these credible are these exactly right i don’t know for sure but this is very problematic i mean imagine if the oil and gas industry were in any way connected to something involving slave labor i mean it would be front page news but because the solar industry again they get a free pass and i just think that we live in a world of networks 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 and we’ve forgotten that and particularly when it comes to the alt energy discussion we’ve neglected this to understand how how vulnerable we are how how reliant we are on foreign suppliers and that includes enriched uranium but in particular it includes rare earth elements neodymium iron boron magnets poly silicon nearly all of the alt energy stuff that is being pushed and being heavily subsidized now through the inflation reduction act to the tune of 400 billion dollars depends in either almost completely or in large part on chinese supply chains 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 there’s many people providing hydrocarbon based electricity 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 and those are relatively simple technologies in some ways as well 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 right and and further that i you know there’s this blind spot here let me focus in on the u.s electric grid and my friend emmett penny with grid brief has done a lot of good reporting on this and and across the u.s we’ve had grid operators warning of reliability problems the pjm new york iso uh california obviously has had huge problems with grid reliability um the the the myso the mid-continent independent system operator all have been warning and as well as the north american electric reliability corporation of reliability problems why because we’re shuttering our coal plants too fast and instead of having keeping those coal plants online we’re the the push is on for a lot of these utilities to install renewables because that’s where the money is 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 you mean those coal plants just very similar ones yes exactly so i i what but there’s again i think this is a lack of forward thinking and a lack of accountability and that way i saw it here in texas right with the urquhart blackouts in february of 2021 there was this idea oh well the market failed well who made the market well well the legislature well who’s in the legislature a bunch of lawyers well they don’t know what the they don’t know how the electric grid works they like the idea of the market and so they said well we’re going to make a market it’s going to be great well who who was responsible well no one was responsible and that’s what we’re seeing now when it comes to these bigger threats to the reliability of the u.s grid is everyone’s looking around well who’s responsible for reliability uh no one well isn’t that kind of a problem so i think it’s you know i think we’ve talked around a lot of big issues here but to me the more the more when it comes down to it the u.s in general and i think the west in general when it comes to uh the alt energy push with climatism renewable energy fetishism it’s this narrow focus on this idea of co2 is the only issue no it is a concern it is not our only concern we have to be concerned about reliability affordability resilience 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 it’s one thing to talk about a blackout it’s another thing to to be blacked out and it really once that happened i realized well wait a damn minute if this can happen in texas the energy capital of the world what is going on here and so that led us into this deep dive for this our new our new docu series when is that coming out it’ll be out this fall um we haven’t made the announcement yet but it’s uh uh juice power politics and the grid and when that comes out just before that comes out why don’t we do another uh podcast and you can provide us with some video footage as well that we can incorporate into the podcast to advertise it in some more in some if in a manner that is as effective as i can manage because well this is a crucial issue you know in this this arc enterprise we have six domains of of focus let’s say and what and one is energy and one is in one is environment there’s four others yeah but we 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 and we we want to take those words apart momentarily maybe we can do that close this program off affordability okay that means poor people don’t die right right that’s what affordability means it doesn’t mean that you know reasonably well off people can save a few dollars on their energy bill because the people who are most hit hardest by far by any increase in energy costs or the people who are barely clinging to the bottom of the economic hierarchy and there’s billions of people like that and they can easily be knocked back down into absolute privation and this idiot moralizing in the west is exactly doing that and it’s hurting poor people like mad in in the west as well so it’s not just in the developing world right and reliability it’s like well reliability means that your food doesn’t rot in your refrigerator how about that or in the supermarkets right and reliability means that your power is there when you’re on the bloody operating room table and you need everything to work 100 percent of the time which is what we’ve managed right we have this miraculous bloody industrial state where people are working flat out 100 percent of the time to make sure everything works 100 percent of the time and we’ve managed that and we’re doing everything we can now to compromise that in the name of a false and potentially genocidal moral virtue it’s absolutely appalling there’s a you said a lot there um i’ll reply this way which is if your energy isn’t reliable it’s not affordable and that is the key here right right yeah well you talked about those countries that are turning to the mafia so to speak to right to supply backup energy well obviously that’s going to happen everybody will have a bloody diesel generator in the backyard if we make the grid unreliable and i don’t think that’ll be that good for the planet well and so you know to build on that point if your electricity isn’t reliable it’s not affordable 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 the generator they have to pay two electric bills one to edl electricity do liban and one to the generator mafia and in some cases they’re the almost the same cost right or look at here 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 so people are acting in a rational way and they’re buying generacs well who can afford generacs it’s the same people who can afford electric vehicles the average household income for the average generac buyer is around 130 140 000 that’s twice the u.s average so here are people who are you know i’m do okay i’m not rich man but you know if i wanted a generac i could afford one i suppose but if your electricity isn’t reliable then it’s not affordable and if it’s not reliable you buy a generac because you know that it’s going to go off so i’ve seen it myself after hurricane in louisiana people like get a small generator and they’re putting gasoline in it because they can’t you know they’re we met one guy at the gas he’s going he’s buying gasoline so his mom can sleep at night with an air conditioner right in home of louisiana we talked to this guy so so if it’s not reliable you’re going to have to spend enormous amounts of money to make it reliable so these things go hand in hand but i’m so pleased that you know i was honored flattered to be asked to you know participate in the arc project because electricity is fundamental and it is a humanist it is at a humanist standpoint to say this is the critical this is the critical form of energy that we crave as humans and it’s critical because it makes us more human electricity is our bodies are electric where our entire systems are electric and the creation of the electric grid is one of the greatest engineering feats in human history and it has changed humanity like no other form of energy ever has and if we’re going to be humanists 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 that they’re half they’re they’re half of humanity and electricity that is an excellent place to end absolutely man absolutely there is no bloody way that you can be pro-poor and you know often the most vulnerable people on the poor front are obviously women and children there is no way you can be pro-poor and anti-energy those two things do not go together not in the least so yeah yeah it’s unconscionable 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 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 that are that are causing all sorts of counterproductive activity so anyways good talking to you amen to that one jordan all right all right so all right so good talking to you and to everyone watching and listening thank you for your time and attention these things especially for you young people who are listening you know you guys got to think this through because this is the world that’s being created now 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 or you could wander down this demented pseudo moral route and break everything while making the planet worse and those are basically the options that are open to you and so you know it was good to talk to robert today he’s got some intelligent things to say on the energy and environment front and as a man who’s also concerned with environmental considerations 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 least on the practical front so thank you very much for talking to me today sir let’s have another podcast when you get this documentary up and ready that would be a very good thing we’ll see you in london at the end of october obviously i’m looking forward to reading your report the one that’s been commissioned for the for the alliance for responsible citizenship and so until then we’ll turn now over to the daily wire side i’m going to talk to robert for another half an hour a little bit about so you know more personal issues i’m interested in how his his calling to the energy environment nexus came about and and to delve a little bit more into his motivations for devoting his life to that so join us on the daily wire plus front if you’re inclined 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 so thanks invisible youtube background sensors you bet robert thank you very thanks thanks thanks a lot jordan it was a privilege