5-14-25 - 9am - Energy Subsidies

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Michael, I don't know.

Speaker 2 (00:02):
I'm a Colorado Native, and we've always called them things gilapanos,
and we put.

Speaker 1 (00:09):
Them in our burritas, our tacos, and our into lay days.
They have a good day, fellas, do do do do
do do? Excuse me? Gouble number seventy five ninety two

(00:30):
writes Michael, Americans have elevated the obsession of insignificant things
to a national pastime. God like this entire program. They
just stupid.

Speaker 3 (00:48):
And you know why, Well, we specialize in.

Speaker 1 (00:51):
We specialize in insignificant things because I I don't I
don't know how you guys do it, but I'll tell
you how I do it. When you I know, there
are people, and I hope you're in this audience. I

(01:13):
really hope you're in this audience. That you're on Fox
News or what you know, O A N or Newsmax
or whatever you're on talk radio, and hopefully it better
be the situation with Michael Brown during the weekday and
then the weekend with Michael Brown on Saturday. Maybe you
do take the Sabbath off. I hope you do. But

(01:36):
it is all politics all the time. Now, what you
think about just sitting here where I'm sitting and six
days a week. I'm expected the audience's expectation is now,

(01:57):
some of you get, some of you get the joke,
some of you do not get the joke. But when
I leave here now today, I've got I've got a
medical appointment to follow up on something I had done
earlier on bellam Monday. So that's that's I'm gonna leave
here and go see the doctor and hav him check

(02:17):
this thing out and make sure everything's going the way
it's supposed to be going. And and then I'll probably
go home, grab the dogs, go for a walk, uh,
and then come back to the house and this whole
process starts all over again. And once again, I'll be
sitting in my home studio, home office, and I'll have

(02:38):
a couple of TV monitors on and I'll i and
I work like I do here. I have two monitors
connected to a to a Mac and then I have
my MacBook Pro and I've got the iPad over here
and everything will be on. And then and because the
the mac book, we'll have a word document up on

(03:01):
it and I will be making my notes, putting in
my U r L links, writing paragraphs about certain things
I want to say a particular way, and I'll do
that until usually about four or five o'clock, and then
I'll go upstairs. Tim and I will have dinner. Uh

(03:24):
usually you know, during the week, she usually cooks, or
we might go out to eat. Then we come back. Now,
even when she turns on whatever movie we're going to watch,
I'm still sitting with the iPad and the lap stop
in front of me because the show prep show prep
never stops. So when we when you when you hear

(03:46):
Dragon and I or me, Dragon doesn't always participate because
sometimes he's asleep pretending to be doing other things. I
don't mind jumping off in some tangent like to cut
are cut r job, and I don't mind doing that

(04:07):
because you know what for me to mental break And
may I just lecture you for a moment. You need
it too, We all need it. I think politics is
so infused our society, and part of the reason for

(04:30):
that is too I think it's twofold. There may be
other reasons, but I think the two major reasons are
twenty four hours seven news coverage. You you can you
can literally I'm using the word literally literally here. You
can turn on a cable channel Fox, MSNBC, CNN, Newsmaccinia

(04:53):
and you can't. You can for twenty four hours just
do nothing but consume news and most of that percent
of that is going to be political. Now why is that?
Because when you think about all of the government entities
that influence and or control our lives, politics infuses everything.

(05:19):
That's why I really taking the Lienburger's on walks. I
don't put airbut my AirPods in. I've got my iPhone
with me and my watch will notify me, if you know,
if Dragon or Tamer or somebody sends me a text message,

(05:39):
and I will stop and respond to the text message
most of the time, depending on what it is. I'm
also one of those guys that if you send me
a text message just to tell me something and all
you're doing is just in informing me of something, I
may or may not respond to it. And it's fascinating

(05:59):
to me the number of times that somebody will, you know,
text me and say like, I can't think of an example,
I don't think I don't I usually respond to your
text messages.

Speaker 3 (06:16):
Hey, you'll do at least an acknowledgment onto that text
bubble with the thumbs up or yeah.

Speaker 1 (06:21):
Thumbs up or something like that. But there are some
that are just purely factual. And if you put me
in a group text all almost immediately, even family, I'll
remove myself from the group text. I despise group texts,
but I get in trouble sometimes because from friends and
co workers because I don't respond to text messages. Well,

(06:45):
why you didn't ask me to do anything. You didn't
ask me to acknowledge it. You just said, hey, sky's
blue today. I looked up, Yeah, you're right, sky's blue today.
So I just I go on. I'm more interested in
watching the dogs. I'm more interesting in listening to the
sounds around me. I'm more interesting in smelling the smells

(07:07):
of the of the creek, or of the lake, or
of the listening to the wind rustle through the aspen trees.
I'm more interested in that because that's my refreshed time,
and all of us need that in one form or another,
whatever it might be. Some people might actually be gaming,

(07:29):
although I consider that just to be more screen time.
So I joked one time somebody sent me a text
message about grounding, about how they literally go out in
their backyard barefoot and there's a spot and they stand
there and they say they're scientific evidence for it. I've
never dug into it to see that it helps ground you.

(07:51):
That it has a physical impact on you. Well, I
believe that's just being outside has a physical impact on
one thing. You get natural vitamin DED. We have a
horrible lack of vitamin D in this country. People are
vitamin D deficient. Might account for some of the COVID problems.
But I say all of that to point out that,

(08:15):
you know, when you do catch on to some of
the stupid stuff we do, and then you mock us
or you actually engage in it. Either way, we don't
care because we think that helps balance out the program
so that the program is not just. And I you know,
you think about, you know a good example of this,
how many of you would get pissed off when Rush

(08:42):
was on air, and Rush, I'm just thinking, I'm not
I can't prove this, but I would say usually it
was a Monday, and he had had a great weekend golfing,
and he had talked about golfing, and he would sometimes

(09:03):
relay messages or emails that he had gotten about people
bitching about you're talking about golfing, and I don't care
about golfing, but you still listened. You still listened. So Michael,
you said dragon before your wife and the list of
people who might text you. That's adorable. The other day,

(09:31):
not last night, before last, because I go to bed
so early, Tammer sent me a text message while I
was upstairs in bed, and rather than get up, I
just laid in bed and texted her back. Is that?
Isn't it? Pathetic? Dragon? Now?

Speaker 3 (09:47):
That sounds about right.

Speaker 1 (09:48):
Have you guys ever done that? Oh? Yeah, I just
found it, Like, that's so stupid.

Speaker 3 (09:54):
I ain't getting up and going to the balcony and
yelling back at you.

Speaker 1 (09:57):
And that's what I would have had to have gotten up, right,
I had to take my seapap off, gotten up, walked
over to the stairway to the balcony and yelled, and
she would have had the TV on, So I had
had yelled even louder because Tamera, because she wouldn't be
able to hear me, and she'd be like, didn't she
be mad because I was yelling?

Speaker 3 (10:14):
And since the mother in laws there, I'd have to
put on some boxers while I went to the balcony.

Speaker 4 (10:17):
And that ain't happening, so anyway, that's that's all I
got to say about that.

Speaker 1 (10:29):
And I don't know why I wanted to do that.
I just felt like I just felt like I wanted
to do it. Let's talk for a minute about now
where did it go on that? Dirade, I've lost my
spot here. I think we're in a real pivotal moment

(10:51):
with our energy and the economic future of the country.
And the Inflation Reduction Act that Biden in the Democrats
shoved down our throat had all these energy subsidies, but
it wasn't just about the dollars and cents. It wasn't
just about the money of the Inflation Reduction Act was spending.

(11:13):
It was also about the kind of energy system that
we want. It's about the reliability. I'm not saying that
that's what the Inflation Reduction Act was about. I'm saying
that this is the inflection point that we're at that
it is about the kind of energy system that we want.
It's about the reliability of the grid. It's about the
cost of living for every single one of us. But

(11:36):
it's also about the integrity of the process by which
that Act was passed and what we are led to
believe that Republicans are doing about it, So what's really
happening This, again, is one of those things that I
go down the rabbit hole about when I'm sitting down

(11:57):
there at that desk thinking about the next day's program.
About okay, because I casually mentioned yesterday about how they
were unwinding some of this stuff, and I made a
note when I said that because I thought, I really
want to see the details of what they're doing. Well,
the current proposal is to phase out some of these subsidies.

(12:22):
It's not determinate them immediately. And I think that what
they're doing, what Republicans are doing, is dangerous because knowing
how DC works, unless you just cut off that limb,
it's turning, you got gangreen. You need to amputate it.

(12:43):
And the Inflation Reduction Act in those subsidies are a
gang green on the economy and they need to be excised.
They need to be sought off and thrown in the
medical wastebind somewhere. But that's not what Republicans are doing.
It turns out they're actually creating an illusion. So the

(13:03):
the IRA passed into this stupid idea that they were
going to fight inflation and promote green energy at the
same time. In the course of doing that, they created
all these subsidies solar, wind, evse, biofuels, anything you can
possibly manage imagine other than oil and natural gas or
for that matter, nuclear And they promised, they told us

(13:27):
that those subsidies would deliver cheap, clean energy and would
help us, you know, be the world's leader in climate action.
What about your bull crap. First, let's understand what the
subsidies really were. They were not tax credits in the
traditional sense. They were not rewarding you for being profitable

(13:49):
or engaging any sort of product product productive activity. You know,
a tax credit means that you have done work, you've
manufactured something, you've provided a service of some sort which
has resulted in a profit to you that's going to
be tax and the tax credit is against those taxes
that you're going to owe. Well wait a minute, if

(14:13):
solar wind or evs are not producing profits, then the
tax credit isn't going to do you any good. So
they're not rewards for productive activity. What were they? They
were actual cash handouts to businesses that otherwise in a

(14:35):
free market, would never survive. Their products were more expensive,
they were less reliable, they were less efficient than the alternatives,
and those so called subsidies they called tax credits in
the bill distort the energy market. It drives up costs,

(14:55):
it makes the grid less reliable, and the cost was
trillion dollars estimated to be a trillion dollars over the
next decade. So the Republicans run in twenty four, including Trump,
they're going to terminate those subsidies. We were promised decisive action.

(15:21):
We were going to eliminate all the market distorting handouts.
So that leads me to dig into what the House
Ways and Means Committee is doing. And it is not
a true repeal. It's not an immediate end to the subsidies.
It's their phase outs. And the phase outs don't even

(15:43):
begin for four years, so they could easily be reversed
by future congresses. Now, why do you think Republicans might
want to do that? Now, I'm not going to sit
here and tell you that they all have evil intentions,
But it seems to me that if you're going to
start a phase out and it doesn't start for another

(16:04):
four years, you are betting or assuming or hoping whatever
verb you want to use, that in four years, the
Democrats will control the Congress and they'll undo what you did,
trying to pacify you and me. That's how cynical I've
gotten about how this Congress is operating. They're not doing

(16:29):
what they said they would do. I know, shocking news, right,
But the problem is the process of the phase out approach.
That means you're never really going to have savings because
lobbyists will get involved and they'll phase out the phase out.

(16:51):
They'll start, you know, trying to carve out exceptions to
the phase outs. They'll try to eliminate the phase outs.
And by eliminating the phase out, I don't mean that
they're going to eliminate the so called subsidy. They're just like, hey,
don't do the phase out, just trying to get rid
of it, just you know, just kind of let it
either get rid of it or let it expire, do something.

(17:14):
So the bottom line is these phases out don't even
start until after the next presidential term, which means Duck
spell this out the next four years, next three half
plus years will continue to give out that money, which
is why Congress needs to enact the recision and actually

(17:35):
pull that money back.

Speaker 2 (17:37):
Yeah, bro, I mean, if you go to Kansas. It's
Elderada are Kansas River and the car River. I guess
it all depends on your perspective.

Speaker 1 (17:51):
No, it all depends on your dialect and your you know,
the region you come from. Beauty This to brain a Vista.
Don't you dare say a brain of Thista around Buna Vista.
The locals will rip you a new one. So I

(18:11):
find it funny, Uh funny, I find it interesting. I
find it fascinating that one. You know, soda, pop or coke?
You know what do you like? You know you always
use the term soda.

Speaker 3 (18:27):
Yeah, so what's it to you?

Speaker 1 (18:29):
A coke? An coke? Yeah, I'm gonna get a coke.
And always I always have a hard time. Like some
people will say, ask me, hey, do you have time
to have lunch? And I'll say not, I don't have
time for lunch this week. But I've got time. If
you want to go get a drink, well, I really
don't mean I want to go at two or three

(18:51):
in the afternoon and go have you know a Martinzeah,
I'll meet you somewhere and I don't care where it is.
It's Starbucks. I can get some iced tea at Starbucks,
or I'll go to the met you to McDonald's.

Speaker 3 (19:04):
I don't care, So it would be more of a
want to go for coffee?

Speaker 1 (19:06):
Yeah, but I don't drink coffee.

Speaker 3 (19:08):
Right, But see that's the same thing, right, don't drink?

Speaker 1 (19:11):
Right? So what do I What do I say to them?

Speaker 3 (19:15):
If the depending on what the intention is, Yeah, for sure.
If the intention is to actually slam a few back,
then no.

Speaker 1 (19:23):
Do you want to go drink? See?

Speaker 3 (19:24):
Is what I go for a drink? For a drink
is a social let's go hang out? Where go drink is?

Speaker 1 (19:32):
Well, that's social, but with a specific purpose of drinking, gotcha.
Whereas this is the social purpose of oh, we're going
to have something in our hands that we can sip
on while you tell me whatever woe you want to
tell me about, which, by the way, I charge one
thousand dollars an hour for that in case any of
you want to do that, and it's cash up front,

(19:54):
it's going to be in my Venmo account. Before I
show up at the McDonald's. I can't decide what I
want to go on with. There's not much else to
tell you about the rewriting of this bill. The while

(20:15):
they while they while they claim that they want to
get rid of the special interest, they call them special
interest giveaways. That's what they keep telling, you know, conservative media.
Two of the largest ones stay completely intact. They don't
even try to phase those out, the subsidies or the giveaways,
whatever you want to call them. For clean fuels that

(20:37):
includes biofuels, those are actually extended. And then for carbon capture,
and the one for carbon capture really fascinates me because
carbon capture is the idea that CO two in the
atmosphere is somehow cause of climate change and it's going

(20:57):
to destroy the planet. There was some thing on television
last night where they actually used the phrase that if
we don't do if we don't change our ways, were
maybe it's Bernie talking about something that I think it
was Bernie that we are really but that we are
truly going to destroy the planet. And I thought to myself,
how can you possibly think that. I mean, even if
we had nuclear annihilation of humankind, the planet would still survive.

Speaker 3 (21:23):
I think I had given you a story last week
that you completely ignored about the allergy season is so
much longer now because of oh oh. He holds up
his finger like he actually kept the story. Now he's
looking through his little filing cabinet to see if he's
even got it. I don't have that, but nothing because
you didn't keep that story. But yes, the allergy season

(21:46):
is longer now because of global warming, and because of
global warming, plants are blooming sooner and lasting longer.

Speaker 1 (21:57):
And that's bad because it causes allergy.

Speaker 3 (22:00):
Our allergies are going to be affected longer in the season.

Speaker 1 (22:03):
Okay, So which is more important to have more plant
growth and productivity from plants, which, by the way, you
know put more oxygen in the air, by the way,
but which caused some people to have allergies. So we
should just what we should do is just eliminate plants.

Speaker 3 (22:21):
I just find it fascinating. The way the story was
presented is that allergy is bad, you know, and you
know we're suffering more because global warming because the plant
are growing more, because the plants are growing more.

Speaker 1 (22:34):
Yeah. Oh well, the same with carbon capture. So the
whole presumption on carbon capture is that if we don't
eliminate whatever the process is, that you know, whatever your
manufacturing are doing is putting CO two in the air.
And so we have to figure out a way to
capture that carbon and then do something with it. I
don't know, but do something with it. So that's a

(22:56):
really dumb idea. Yeah, I told we did the story
a few weeks ago about or I did a Michael
Brown minute about it, about a company up in Boulder
that did a funding round raise some one hundred and
eighty some million dollars because they have a prototype that
does carbon capture that lowers the amount of heat needed

(23:16):
to forge iron or steel, and so by lowering the heat,
you lower the carbon output or something. And I thought,
what captured my eye about that story was they raised
one hundred and eighty some million dollars. You had to
stay that. Colorado gave them an eight million dollar subsidy
or tax credit or whatever it was. But taxpayers gave

(23:36):
them eight million dollars. And I'm thinking, wait a minute,
you raised one hundred and eighty six You couldn't raise
one hundred and ninety four million. And we're pushing that
because oh Pols was out there. Oh look, we we're
so happy about this because we're going to reduce the
you know the amount of carbon. We're going to meet
our you know, carbon zero by twenty thirty, twenty fifty
or whatever it is. I don't care. I want carbon

(24:00):
in the atmosphere. So here we are Republicans telling us
that they're going to get rid of the Inflation Reduction Act,
and they actually keep the subsidies for bio fuels and
carbon capture expensive unproven technologies. And when I say unproven technologies,
I mean that because a place in Boulder is a prototype. Now,

(24:24):
there must have been enough either institutional investors or angel
investors or I don't know. I never saw. I never
saw once their prospectives, So I don't know how likely
it is that they'll succeed or not. I you know,

(24:44):
if that's what they want to do, investors want to
put the money in that, and they can succeed at it, well,
then hallelujah. But the next question is can you commercialize it?
You might be able to create the apparatus for the
carbon capture, is it scalable and can it be commercialized?
Any savvy investor would ask that question that that so

(25:07):
let's say they do, Okay, Well, now you've got to
go sell it. You've got to commercialize it and sell it,
and it will it be sellable at a certain price? Point,
I don't know because how much is it going to
cost to do it? And what's what's the cost benefit ratio?
There is nothing in the story about what they're trying
to accomplish even has a cost benefit ratio. So these

(25:30):
giveaways that we're doing, nobody can point to me that
it's going to benefit us in any way except it is.
By the very nature of just calling a carbon capture.
People then assume that it must be good, that oh,

(25:50):
it's it is what it is, and because it is
what it is, it's therefore good. No, not really. So
if we can tinue down the path of them lying
to us, which I know is a shocker to you,
and not really doing what they tell us that they're doing,
when do you think Trump will realize this? Because you

(26:13):
know how many times does Trump talk about the you know,
the pseudonym Inflation Reduction Act and how stupid that was
and it didn't really actually cause the inflation. I think
in Trump's mind, some staffer needs to pull them aside
and say, you know what, the big beautiful bill that
you're talking about doesn't really do I mean it right

(26:34):
now has I haven't studied this yet, but I'm going
on the assumption that the stories I've read so far
really do the House ways and means Committee really is
enacting the tax proposals, but that's only part of the
big beautiful bill. The Big Beautiful Bills are supposed to
also include the recision of all these subsidies, and so

(26:57):
far apparently it does not, which means that even though
inflation ticked downward, it met the expectations at two point
three or two point four percent, whatever it was yesterday,
which is a good sign, doesn't mean it won't tick
back up when we realized that, oh, we're still spending

(27:18):
all that money, So that means higher costs for taxpayers,
and that will eventually result in rising energy prices. The
grid won't get any more stable, and as far as
getting closer and closer to energy independence, that's going to
be distorted. And speaking of distortion, that will result in
more market distortions. So there's no real client, there's no

(27:42):
real climate benefit, even if I thought that we somehow
needed to benefit the climate. So it's it's just another
example of everything that you read or hear from the
cabal you need to take with a grain of salt.

(28:04):
Because while yesterday I casually mentioned that, yeah, we were
going to do these get rid of these subsidies. In
further digging, turns out, well, there are a few things
here and there, because this is the really the evil
brilliance of the politicians. Eliminate a subsidy, so you can

(28:24):
claim that you're eliminating subsidies at the same time that
you're not really eliminating any of them. You're phasing them out.
And the phase out doesn't start for four years because
in four years you might have a Democrat controlled Congress
and they can just reverse everything that you've done. Wow,
can we survive as a republic? I would contend that

(28:48):
people evolve us the earth evolves.

Speaker 2 (28:51):
So if allergies season is longer and people might not
have allergies anymore, or we're all gonna die.

Speaker 1 (28:57):
One of the two. I think we're all going to die.
We're all just coming to an end. Remember back in April,
I forget exactly when it was, but that Milwaukee County
Circuit Judge Hannah Dugan was accused of helping an illegal
alien escape detention by ice while the alien was in

(29:18):
her court room, put him in the jury box with
her with his lawyer. I think he was there for
domestic abuse charges or something, and then she helped him
escape back out through the back the jury box door
and out through the back door, and then she got arrested.
She had arrested for obstructing and impeding and proceeding before

(29:38):
a US agency, which is a felony, and concealing an
individual to prevent their discovery and arrest, which is a misdemeanor. Well,
she appeared in court and she's been suspended from her
duties by the Wisconsin Supreme Court. And then she was
indicted yesterday on the same two charges, obstruction of a

(29:59):
u US agency and conceding a person from arrest. The
indictment based on witness testimonies, including her own court clerk
and another judge and the defendant's lawyer. Yeah, I just

(30:20):
want to say that if I would expect them to
tell the truth, don't get me wrong, but when your
own court clerk and one of your co workers, and
then when the defense lawyer, of course, I understand again,
I understand why they would because they're not going to lie,
and they're not going to lie for someone who's accused

(30:41):
of committing a crime. I just find a deliciously ironic
that her own clerk, another judge sitting in that same circuit,
and the defense lawyer that was involved in the case
all testified before the grand jury, and of course they
returned an indictment. The char just carry a maximum penalty

(31:02):
of six years in prison and a three hundred and
fifty thousand dollars fine. Now, obviously it's a non violent offense.
I'm assuming that it's her first defense, so she's not
likely to get six years in prison. She may g
it define because this goes against the very legitimacy of

(31:24):
our judicial system. Now she's expected to enter a plea
at a hearing scheduled four tomorrow. Of course, her lawyers
claim that she was that she's innocent, that she didn't
do anything wrong. And of course Democrats, just like they
run to these detention centers, all in support of drug dealers,

(31:47):
child rapists, human traffickers. The mayor of Milwaukee, and of
course Bernie Sanders all call it authoritarian by the Trump administration,
that what they did by arresting her is authoritarian. So
if we now crossed that rubicon where enforcing the law

(32:11):
is authoritarian, I I, in a really perverted way, love
this case because whenever Democrats scream about no one is
above the law. Hello, Hello, anybody out there,