5-8-25 - 8am - The Green New Deal Fading Away

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
You know, I'm really happy that Poulus is focusing on
the most important things facing us right now, forcing the
government state agencies to buy electric vehicles to save the world,
and then they get abandoned on the side of the highway,
just like I saw yesterday on my way to southeastern Colorado,

(00:22):
a Sea Dot electric vehicle Avalanche Silverado, abandoned under an overpass.
I'm sure it ran out of charge.

Speaker 2 (00:33):
We needed a picture of that, or a picture of
it being towed away. That would have been even better.
Which is kind of it, because I wanted to talk
a little bit about yesterday or during the course of
the week, I'm not sure which today it was. We
talked about the rising sea levels and how they're not rising.

(00:54):
We talked about how they are manipulating the data about
the temperatures. Remember, the number of ninety five degree or
above days has actually been declining, yet when they do
the projections, they project that the number of ninety five
plus degree days are going to increase. And I made

(01:19):
an offhanded comment in talking about those stories that I'm
beginning to detect this slight movement away from the Church
of the Climate activists. The congregation is maybe beginning to
either just quiet down, or they're beginning to recognize that

(01:41):
maybe they were part of a cult and they're getting
you know, deprogrammed, and they're getting out of the cult,
kind of like the Marxist dialectic or the prediction of
the Gospels. The green movement has long seen its triumph
as pre ordained. But sometimes that inevident inevitability turns out

(02:06):
early enough to be so so much so it's probably
not that inevitable you think about it. Over the past
few years. Now, Colorado does remain an exception, Colorado, California,
New York not quite so much. Illinois probably a lot
like Colorado and California, but most Red states are beginning

(02:34):
to to back away from their drive for net zero,
and in fact not just back away from it. The
drive and the policies that push net zero had been failing.
And I think it's not just the politicians that are

(02:56):
beginning to see this. I think the markets seen it.
What Joe Biden's Treasury secretary wants to call the greatest
business opportunity of the twenty first century has actually turned
out to be kind of a financial disaster. Now Trump's
probably going to be blamed for the implosion of the

(03:17):
green agenda, and I think he will embrace that and
be happy about it. He will gladly take on the
armor of having killed off the Green New Deal or
whatever you want to call the Inflation Reduction Act. But
I think actually the collapse predates Trump because well before November,

(03:40):
the opportunity of the century was going bust, not least
because and just one little anecdote will actually one anecdote,
but I'm going to give two disparate examples. One is,
how many times have we heard about the billions of

(04:00):
dollars that we were going to spend to, you know,
create this huge infrastructure of electric vehicle chargers all over
the country, and we got what one or two built.
That's kind of like saying we're going and that that's
the anecdote. And the other example I want to give
is the idea that we're going to fix the Airtrafic
Control System, which we talked about yesterday. So we've been

(04:22):
told for years after years after years that we're going
to fix the ATC, but yet we appropriate money, but
then nothing ever happens. Where did the money go and
where did the money go for the EV chargers? As
I recall it was literally billions of dollars to build
this you know, nationwide infrastructure of VV charges to help

(04:43):
push the Green New Deal and to help push people
that were being subsidized by you and me to go
buy evs.

Speaker 3 (04:49):
Oh come on, do we need to talk about the
internet stuff again? How?

Speaker 2 (04:53):
Oh, that's another great example.

Speaker 3 (04:54):
Yeah, that they spent billions for internet and zero.

Speaker 2 (04:58):
Zero hook cups. Right, it was zero hook cups. Meanwhile,
Elon Musk takes starlink and just throws them up in
the sky, just hooks up people instantaneously. Well before the
November elections, I think that all of those so called
financial opportunities, oh, a whole brand new economic opportunity I

(05:19):
think was going bust, not least because the policies were
having almost zero impact on the actual climate. But on
Wall Street, all of those ESG, environmental, social, and governmental
approved stocks have been tanking according to all the leading

(05:40):
studies anyway, shackling those firms that embraced it with massive losses.
So then you see Jamie Diamond and others like him
that run these big monolithic financial companies are starting to
back away from that and actually you know, abandoning things like,
you know, state capitalism, which is no different than that

(06:04):
zero or climate activism and climate capitalism. Now, the climate activists,
don't get me wrong, They still insist that Trump's departure
from the Green New Deal is all a bunch of
hubris that you know, and he's he's ticking his head
in the sand, and there will be an inevitable climate

(06:26):
apocalypse that will eventually occur. But I think voters in
Europe and voters in this country have had second thoughts
about spending upwards of globally six trillion dollars for the
next thirty years annually, six trillion dollars annually for the
next thirty years on the Green New Deal. And it

(06:49):
really doesn't help their agenda that those spending pledges are
so often advocated by the jet setting billionaires. You know,
Bernie Sanderston argue all he wants to about how he
has to fly a private jet in order to, you know,
get to the next rally, which if you were running
for president, I would agree. But a rally today in

(07:10):
Denver versus a rally tomorrow and Tulsa. You don't need
to fight, you don't. You don't need a private jet
for that there are even between Denver and Tulsa. There
are plenty of flights.

Speaker 3 (07:20):
And slightly related to the whole Green New Deal thing.
I think we all remember that beyond meet the fake burgers.
Oh yeah, there's another great exact that that company is
projected to go bankrupt next year.

Speaker 2 (07:33):
And how many of the solar companies went bankrupt from
Solendra on. So all the well funded campaigners, all the
well funded congregants in the church, they'll continue to try
to shield Europe's environmental policies from the Trump environmental policies.
But this is not a passion among the voters. I think,

(07:58):
either here or across the landing. Most people just don't
want to huddle in smaller dwelling units. And by smaller
I mean not downsizing like Tammer and I would like
to do. You know, we've got a three bedroom home,
three bass fully finished basement, although we don't need all
of that, you know. And even when our even when

(08:21):
our kids do show up, they don't stay that long.
I'm talking about, Oh you can't, you can't live. We
don't care whether you've got two kids, four kids, or
you know your mormoning and you got twelve kids. We
don't care how many kids you have, and we don't
care how many partners you have. You can have eight
hundred square feet, you can have five hundred square feet.

(08:43):
I don't think people want that. I don't think that
people and I don't think about this often, but I
think about it enough that it reminds me. I don't
think people want less mobility. I don't think people want
less as for mobility, you know one of the As

(09:04):
much as I as much as I am not a
car guy, I do talk about my two cars, maybe
more than I need to. But do you know what
I really like most about my vehicles? Assuming they're operating,
I can't and neither one of them require anything except

(09:27):
uh well, one requires just regular unloaded and the sports
car requires premium unloaded. As long as the batteries charged
and long as long as the engine's operating, as long
as there's fuel in the tank, I can get in
that one of those two cars, and on my schedule,

(09:49):
my timeline, I can go anywhere whenever I want to,
versus what the option is in coll it's the regional
transportation district of getting on a bus. But I first
got to get to the bus stop, which when I

(10:10):
think about my neighborhood, the closest bus stop is probably
half mile away, probably on Highlands Ranch Parkway somewhere, so
I'd have to I'd have to walk that half mile,
which is no big deal, but then I have to
make sure that, well, when do I start walking, what's
my pace of walking? Because I got to get there.

(10:32):
I don't want to stand at that bus stop for
you know, more than you know, five or ten minutes.
And then the course that assumes that RTDs on time,
which obvious is a question too. I don't think that
people want less mobility. I think when people want more mobility,
and I think that mobility represents in many ways individual

(10:54):
freedom and individual liberty. I don't think we want to
pay more to heat our homes, no matter how much
you tell me that it's good for the environment. I
don't want to spend more. I have other priorities to
spend my money. And we're coming up on summer season,
and of course I dread that because while I do
like to keep the house cool, Tam and I will

(11:15):
have the inevitable debate over the thermostent and its settings,
and of course I will inevitably throw out the cost
of electricity from Excel, and look, can we not just
turn it up maybe one or two degrees? So maybe
we could say, I don't know, instead of paying you know,
five hundred dollars a month or whatever we end up
paying the summer, we could maybe pay only four hundred
dollars a month. I'd rather spend that extra hundred dollars

(11:37):
because I don't any It's not even that I don't
give a rats. That's about the environment. I do care
about the environment. I love the outdoors, fishing, hiking, hunting,
whatever it might be, which is out walking the dogs.
I want clean air, I want clean water. I don't
want I don't want to live in Beijing. But there's
also a cost benefit ratio that you have to look

(11:59):
at about how much am I willing to spend? You know,
every time I get the stupid Excel bill about oh,
don't you want to go all solar? Don't you want
to go all win? No? Actually I don't, and are
actually telling me that, oh, I can feel good about
it by just paying more. Because electricity, like money, is fungible.

(12:20):
So whether Excel generates the electricity from a wind turbine
or a solar farm, it gets loaded onto the grid
with all of the other electricity, whether that's generated from
nuclear plants or from coal plants, or from natural gas plants,
or from hydro plants or whatever it is. It's all fungible.

(12:43):
It all gets set in saying, so, all you're asking
me to do is pay more so that I can
tell dragon, Well, you know all of my electricity comes
from solar or wind. No, I'm just paying. I'm just
paying for the consta solar or wind. But I can't.
It's not like, you know, the electricity that comes into

(13:03):
the house is marked green if it comes from wind,
and pink if it comes from solar, and it's marked
black if it comes from coal. So no, I don't
think most people are willing to pay more to heat
their homes or to cool their homes, or what about food.

(13:24):
I'm not willing to give up, you know, a really
nice bone in Rabbi, just to make you feel better
and to create fewer calfarts. I'm just not willing to
do that. There is already a growing economic dislocation. Look
at Germany, the energy driven decline, which is what it is.
It's an energy driven decline of the German industrial machine.

(13:49):
That alone is sparking opposition to green policies throughout Western civilization.
And in fact, I would say that one of the
silver life of the blackout in Spain and Portugal is
it caused people in Europe to go, huh, that's not good.

(14:10):
Maybe these policies aren't even what we should be pursuing.
And that started in France in twenty eighteen, the Jelais
Jeaniue movement, which is now spreading even further across Europe,
which is becoming even more distressed. And we're not immune
to that. We see it. I think even some of

(14:33):
the left are starting to reconsider their policy of gender
and ultra lefty with the Berlin they're now considering a
referendum on tightering mission targets, which failed to win over
enough voters to pass. Oh you don't want tightering mission targets.

(15:00):
So the decline of the Greens is obviously a clear
sign of change. Foreign Affairs once said that the Green
Agenda the Church of the climate activists. Foreign Affairs said
that that was going to reshape global politics. Well, I
think they were right, but not in the way they

(15:23):
think they were right, Because the Greens are suffering all
these defeats across Europe, and there are now moves to
boost fossil fuels in Eastern Europe and in Japan. Britain,
of all places, once probably the most reliable implementer of
extreme climate policies, is now considering new oil and gas projects.

(15:43):
The EU concerned about their lagging productivity and their declining
gd I shouldn't say declining GDP, but their GDP not
being as robust as it should be. They're about to
describe their climate requirements. So the support for green policies,
including the now abandoned mandates for evs, has traditionally been

(16:06):
weaker in the United States, obviously reinforced by really bad
sales lost profits by the carmakers. I told you about Ford.
But then there's a gallop. Pull shows that just three
percent of Americans consider climate change, only three percent. And
it's not just climate change they gallop through in the
word environment. Only three percent of Americans consider climate change

(16:31):
in the environment their main concern. Ninety seven percent of
people in this country have other greater concerns than climate
in the environment. And it's not just okay boomers, even
young people. The group that is supposedly most concerned about
climate change, rank green energy and environment below inflation, housing, gun, violence, jobs, corruption.

(17:00):
Maybe those generations behind us boomers aren't really as out
of it as we think they are. Opposition to Biden's
green climate policies, I think we're critical in Trump's election
Pennsylvania major freighting state, as well as manufacturing oriented Wisconsin

(17:22):
and Michigan. Now, just as a footnote, I would point
out Trump's now got to deliver on that, whether that's
the tariffs or other industrial policy, He's got to deliver
on it because huge parts of this economy, manufacturing, agricultural
logistics all depend on reliable, reliable and low cost electricity. Well,

(17:44):
we saw in we saw in Portugal and Spain. You
can't do reliable electricity with wind and solar, no offense.

Speaker 1 (17:57):
But the boomers need to fade away and hand the
reins over to somebody else.

Speaker 2 (18:01):
They got us into these positions, not all you see
I I uh, I mean because I is a boomer.
That bugs me because not all of us did that.
Some of us have been fighting to good fight our
entire lives. Some boomers, Yeah, you know the first one

(18:22):
that really kind of put us Well, if you wanted
to name one individual that really started to get us
getting us on this path, but be Bill Clinton, Bill
and Hillary. But back to this idea that it really
is beginning to fade, it really is waning. Now. Trump

(18:42):
was obviously backed by the fossil fuel industry and their
campaign contributions, which now there's nothing wrong with that because
the Greens back Kamala Harris. But Trump's plan to reindustrialize
the country, which is obviously the key MAGA go and
it's obviously critical for the Midwest, rely in large part

(19:05):
on keeping US energy energy supplies both affordable and reliable.
I just don't think that we understand. Yeah. Actually I'll
give you a personal example. So this morning I discovered,
to my chagrin as I'm getting ready for work, that

(19:29):
the electrical outlets in the bathroom. Now this has nothing
to do with obviously with supply. It has to do
with there's a there's a circuit breaker that's fried or
broken or something. But the outlets in the master bathroom
aren't working. And it's funny to watch the reaction of

(19:51):
both myself like wait a minute, because you do that
kind of like okay, like as Dragon says, hey did
you flip the GFI. Yeah, I punched the GFI a
couple of times, so there's you know. And then and
then I start plugging things in different places to see,
if you know, if I can isolate the outlets. But

(20:12):
it's funny how we are so dependent on reliable electricity
that when it's not there, Oh my gosh, I've had this.
In case she's listening, I'll have to describe it as
an intense text conversation with my lovely wife. Because when

(20:34):
I went to the breaker box to flip the breakers,
I discovered that, oh, the outlets in the bathroom and
the outlets in the garage are both not working. Because
I could see that the little monitor that I have
on the freezers that it was showing that there was
no power to it. So I flip a couple of
the breakers and I can't do it. I'm thinking, well,

(20:55):
everybody's you know, TAM's asleep, dogs are you know, laying
around nothing. So I'll just turn turn off the I'll
flip the whole house on and off. Oh I forgot
that that takes off the router to the internet, so
I had to go through this whole thing. We're all
panic because there's no internet at the house right now,
although it has been restored since. But you know what

(21:18):
it's like when there's a thunderstorm and the power goes out,
or Exfinity is doing something, you know, they somebody cut
a cable somewhere. It's like, or you leave your phone behind.
We'll drive miles to go pick up our phone because
we got to have it right now. We got to
have it right now. So we rely on rely We

(21:45):
depend on reliable energy, and we want those energy supplies
to be buoyant and affordable and reliable. And I think
most Americans, like a lot of Yourope maybe most of Europeans,
I think I think we support which is a little
argument I had when I was in Chicago a couple
of weeks ago. But I do believe the climate changes.

(22:07):
What we need to learn to do is to mitigate
climate change. So if let's just say, if I didn't
think you have to say, if there will always be tornadoes,
there will always be ice storms or blizzard, there will
always be hurricanes. So what we need to learn to
do is we need to learn to adapt to that.
It's always going to be there. Whether you want to

(22:28):
make the argument that storms are getting stronger or not,
and they're not getting stronger. Hurricanes are not getting stronger.
What we have to admit is we just have more people,
we have more infrastructure, and we don't do enough to
protect the infrastructure.

Speaker 3 (22:43):
Michael, you're wrong. The damage cost from those hurricanes have
just astronomically shot up.

Speaker 2 (22:50):
Hmm. I wonder if that could be because there's more infrastructure.
I wonder if that could be because the cost of
building that infrastructure has gone up. I wonder if that
could be because we demand fancy or infrastructure.

Speaker 3 (23:03):
These hurricanes everything except they're more destructive.

Speaker 2 (23:06):
We demand better infrastructure for everything except what air traffic control?
And I was talking about the floppy discs.

Speaker 3 (23:14):
Don't worry, let me get that floppies out.

Speaker 2 (23:16):
You know what I thought about dragon. Do you remember
how you know you probably don't remember this. Do you
know how excited I was when we went from the
how big what was the size of the big.

Speaker 3 (23:25):
Floppies having a quarter to three and three and.

Speaker 2 (23:27):
Then we went to three. Yeah, we went to three
three inches or three three point something.

Speaker 3 (23:31):
Whether the actual floppies were actually floppy.

Speaker 2 (23:34):
Yeah, the original floppies were actually floppy. And then we
went to the smaller floppiece and I thought, wow, that's amazing.

Speaker 3 (23:41):
Much more storage on this.

Speaker 2 (23:42):
Oh my gosh, yes, I got five megabit story this one.
This is amazing. CD ROM yeah, yes, oh yeah. Oh.
My good friend Andy the lawyer, My best friend Andy
the lawyer. Uh, he was the first one to have
a CD player.

Speaker 3 (23:59):
I don't even think you can buy a computer with
a CD ROM anymore.

Speaker 2 (24:02):
I know Apple doesn't sell them. In fact, I keep
but I think it's a us maybe a USBA connection.
So I need a USBA to USBC connection to even
use that CD ROM. But what would I use it for?
I didn't even know what I would use it for anyway.
So back to the reliable energy. We do support the

(24:25):
idea I think of climate mitigation. There will always be
these things the mother nature does, so we ought to
be smarter about how do we mitigate against the effect
of those things. But I don't think most Americans or
anybody anywhere in the world is willing to pay a
high price for it. You know, a large majority seems
I'm willing to pay even if you'll just give ten

(24:49):
dollars a month to save the planet. Maybe if they did,
like is it Sheryl Crow that does the stuff for
the for the for the animals, you know, and she
sings are song. They have all the pathetic puppies in
the cages or the starving dogs attached to a chain somewhere,
and so they sing a horrible song.

Speaker 3 (25:09):
You know.

Speaker 2 (25:09):
Well, people will give to that, but nobody's giving to
the climate. Nobody does that. There's a reason poll that
suggests that urban elites, high earners with graduate degrees, they
actually favor unpopular notions like rationing gas, rationing meat. Ideas
that if you ask anybody else outside an urban area

(25:32):
would think you're absolutely nut. But the hipsters, even hipsters,
to some degree, you're ditching the green agenda. Berkeley, Washington State,
voted overwhelmingly last fall against measures that would limit or
increase taxes on natural gas. Even in California, they seem
to be losing a passion for renewables throughout Red America.

(25:57):
As I said earlier, communities have been rejecting wind and
solar projects. Over seven hundred times since twenty fifteen. They've
voted down those projects. So the crux of the green
dilemma lies in part with the realities of physiques, as
well as geopolitics renewables. Think about it low power density, which,

(26:24):
as the CEO of Siemens, Christian Birch suggests, requires ten
times as much material to work effectively. Regardless of whether
the wind is blowing or the sun is shine shining.
You've got to have ten times as much material to
work effectively for wind or solar. As the OECD in

(26:47):
Europe noted back in way back in twenty fifteen, now
seven years ago, the full cost of energy, meaning the
cost of integrating renewables into a full nationalized grid, is
higher than natural gas, coal or news. So expect the
green lobby to start ramping up the propaganda. Because while

(27:09):
I sincerely believe that the church is losing its congregants,
just like in the real world church are losing congregants,
this church is losing them, but I think they're losing
them for practical reasons. Costs, lack of flexibility, lack of reliability,

(27:30):
and they see that the money they're spending they're not getting.
Even even liberals want some AROI show me some benefit,
and they're not seeing any benefit. But you won't get
a sober discussion about it. No, it's a complex topic.
So they'll continue to predict all these catastrophic results. They'll

(27:51):
be mass starvation, they'll be growth in weather related fatalities,
even though, as we pointed out yesterday, decades of addictions
of all these impending unalterable dooms have well mostly theatrics.
John Klauser, who won the Nobel Prize for Physics in

(28:12):
twenty twenty two, says climate science has metastasized into massive
shock journalistic pseudoscience. Now the outcries and the screams they'll
get attention, but the propaganda driven by the climate activists

(28:35):
they already enjoy. The cabal, the Associated Press or National
Public Radio or CNN or anybody else which actually takes
money from the climate advocates, So paid off or not,
the cabal remains largely the climate lobbyist, useful idiots, and
they'll continue to push it. Last year, the New York

(28:55):
Times mass climate migration away from places like Texas despite
continued migration flows toward it. Listen to that again. Suggest
they suggested mass climate migration away from Texas despite we
see continued migration flows toward Texas. Robert bryce An analysts

(29:18):
back in twenty twenty one demonstrated that green nonprofits, which
he scathingly called the anti industry industry, got well over
four times as much in donations as those that were
advocating for the use of nuclear or fossil fuels. So
follow the money, and when you follow the money, you

(29:39):
realize that all the climate doom has turned out to
be untrue. And now with Chris Wright at Energy, Doug
Bergham at Interior, and Trump talking about drill baby drill
into developing world, fossil fuels continues to grow places like Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Vietnam.

(30:01):
No country in the world, said former Nigerian Vice President
emails In Bajo. No country in the world has been
able to industrialize using renewable energy. So what's happening in China,
the big bad bear China? Michael my Apple two E

(30:26):
from nineteen eighty something.

Speaker 3 (30:27):
What if the green screen is good enough for me?

Speaker 2 (30:31):
Well, hail, it's good enough for air traffic control. And
by the way, uh Gooba number zero four to three three.
I mentioned two thoy eighteen, which was seven years ago,
because I'm looking at my notes and I have two
thousand that was from twenty eighteen. You heard twenty fifteen,

(30:51):
but I said twenty eighteen. Speaking of this is hilarious.
Speaking of the thermostat wars. It's safe dragon because it
comes from broadcast TV. The thermostat fight. Uh, I was

(31:13):
listening to it. You gotta pluck it back in. Okay,
baby doll pink, Let's see if you can cover up
the fact that I got my dad's teek. Two degrees
shows and.

Speaker 3 (31:23):
I just want to turn up a thermostat two degrees.

Speaker 2 (31:25):
Let me point out that two degrees could be the
difference between water and.

Speaker 3 (31:29):
Steam if we lived in our cheat kettle. If this
is the temperature you agreed to in the room made agreement, Oh,
screw the roommate agreement. No, you don't screw the roommate agreement.
The roommate agreement screws you. You want to go to
hell and bear thermostats. I don't have to go to hell.
It's seventy three degrees. I'm there already.

Speaker 2 (31:50):
That's it's seventy three degrees. I don't have to go
to Hell. I'm already there. Who is that? D hang on?
Can sleep on your couch tonight? Well you can try,

(32:12):
but the people across the hall are being very noisy.
Heard that.

Speaker 3 (32:16):
Huh, Apparently the one fella tried to adjust the thermostat.
Then the other fellow went backcrap crazy.

Speaker 1 (32:23):
You agree he's not well, not as nuts as the
guy who chooses.

Speaker 2 (32:27):
To live with him. Believe it or not, he was
worse when I met him.

Speaker 3 (32:31):
I do not believe that.

Speaker 2 (32:36):
The thermostat wars. That's exactly what's going on in our
home and will get and trust me, will get even
worse as time goes on. So who's benefited the most
from this mandated switch to renewables, Well, it's China. The
country's which are critical for providing the necessary resources are

(32:59):
often dominating by Beijing. The Chinese regime uses efficient, cheaper
fossil fuels so they can then dominate the stupid solar
panel industry that they then sell to us. They build,
they're building, it's better it's battery capacity to roughly four

(33:19):
times what ours is, while exercising effective control of all
the rare earth minerals and the technology for processing them.
So I would say to all of the greenies out
there that think that green, the green New Deal and
green energy is the way to go. So does so
the communists in China. Because every time you buy the
solar panels or the batteries or anything else. Oh, those

(33:43):
have been manufactured using reliable fossil fuels. Yeah, so you
can't escape it, just as we've often talked about how
everything around you somehow is a petroleum product. Everything around you. Well,
when you think that, oh, I'm saving the environment because
I put in a solar panel or I put in

(34:03):
a windmill somewhere, Yeah, the Communists made it, and they
made it with fossil fuels. How does that make you feel? No,
wonder the churches beginning to lose its congregants. In fact,
I hope the church dies off.