In the US, EV inventories are up three hundred percent from a year ago.
There's very poor demand for EV pickup trucks. The guys who have pickup
trucks don't seem to be too interested. Ford Motor has announced that they're losing
between forty and sixty thousand on each EV sold. They're projecting a four and
a half billion dollar loss this year from their EV business. Both Ford and
GM have moved out their new models and we sort of I think we have
an early adopter phase that is over. You're listening to Carrie Letz's Financial Survival
Network where you get valuable information you just can't find anywhere else to thrive in
today's trying times. You need the Financial Survival Network now more than ever.
Go to Financial Survivalnetwork dot com and get your free newsletter and gift. Financial
Survival Network now more than ever, and welcome. You are listening to and
watching the Financial Survival Network. Come your host. Carrie Let's say so.
The green economy, it's wonderful. Will just to all be living in this
pristine environment. The earth will be restored to its former grandeur and everyone will
be happy. Right, well, not so fast, Yes, Environment very
important. We're all we all believe in the same things clean water, clean
air, and the good environment to raise your children and your family. And
it's just a question of how bad are things what do you need to do
to get there? Steve Gorham, author of Green Breakdown The Coming Renewable Energy
Failure. You title might be a little bit late on the score at Steve,
We're thrilled to have you on the show. Hey, so how bad
are things? Are things really getting worse? Are they getting better? In
the environment ary great to join you. Yeah, they're actually getting better.
And my prediction of a green breakdown or first and net zero and actually jecting
out about a decade, but it appears that that is closer. We have
a lot of things going on around the world that show that people are stepping
back from that zero. But you're right, pollution is we've made great strides.
One of the great untold stories in the United States is how much better
the air is than it was thirty forty years ago. I remember in the
nineteen sixties driving near Chicago, south of Gary and having our windshield coated with
something coming from the steel mills. We had to pull over and wash the
windshield off. My grandfather had a coal for us in his basement in the
nineteen fifties, and after it snowed in Chicago for about four or five days,
there would be black dust on all of the snow you could see from
the coal. And young folks that listen don't know what spring cleaning was for.
Literally, in the nineteen fifties, people would every spring washed down all
the walls on the inside of their house to remove the coal dust that was
uncleaning. But we don't have to do that anymore. Our air is very,
very much clearer. Yeah, that is a fact. And I remember
driving into New York City from New Jersey where I grew up and seeing this
huge yellow cloud hovering over Manhattan and that was all the coal fired power plants.
But look like without the government pushing businesses industry, do you think things
would have improved anyway? I think as a commodation the government helped. And
we had many states. In nineteen fifty there there were no statewide laws for
pollution, but by nineteen sixty they just about all had them. And then
the clean erect came in I think sixty nine or so. But the problem
is the world has gotten off track. Where we used to reduce a real
pollution, and we've done a great job. APA numbers show our air pollutants,
the six major pollutants are down about eighty percent since nineteen eighty, probably
much much more since the fifties. What comes out of the tailpuppy or car.
The volatile organic compounds are down ninety eight percent since nineteen seventy. But
now we're chasing this idea that carbon dioxide is a pollutant. We've really gotten
off track. Carbon dioxide is an odorless, harmless, invisible gas. It
doesn't cause smoke or smog. We burn sugars in our body and every day
we exhale about two pounds of carbon dioxide each person, and it makes the
plants grow. It's you know, I like to ask when I'm speaking to
audiences, what do cannabis growers know that the EPA apparently doesn't know? And
the answer is that CO two is green. Every marijuana grower with his or
her salt is literally pumping carbon dioxide into the greenhouse to make the crops grow
bigger and fast. Oh, we've got to stop them. They got to
be stopped here. We've got a lot on track. We need to continue
to reduce real pollution. But this war on carbon dioxide and this plant for
zero by twenty fifty really is not the proper way to go, all right,
So what is happening in the marketplace? Besides Tesla? There is isn't
an auto company on the planet that can make money on evs. Maybe a
couple of Chinese ones, but they're using slave labor and fourth League all that
a byd Yeah, the electric vehicle market has hit a speed momp, if
you will. In the US, EV inventories are up three hundred percent from
a year ago. There's very poor demand for EV pickup trucks. The guys
who have pickup trucks don't seem to be too interested. Ford Motor has announced
that they're losing between forty and sixty thousand on each EV sold. They're projecting
a four and a half billion dollar loss this year from their EV business.
Both Ford and GM have moved out their new models, and we sort of
I think we have an early adopter phase that is over. Many of the
folks that wanted to cool Tesla's and wanted EV's for a second car have purchased
them. Now we have people that are driving long distances, or they're in
cold climates and the batteries don't charge well, or they're in apartments and there's
no way to charge r EV except across the public walkway. So you know,
it's slowing down a little bit. All right, I'm going to propose
a reason for this to you, okay, and you're free to agree or
disagree. In the case to the Tesla, all right, their demand really
isn't slowing down. They're going to sell one point eight million cars this year.
Yeah, o case, the driving experience and the product that they produce
is superior to all of the ice vehicles out there, with certain exceptions like
if you live in a condo or an apartment, charging can wind up costing
you more than gasoline. But if you live at a home and you can
charge it yourself, it's great. Yeah. And I would avert that GM
and Ford's products, and even Horsia and Audi their products are inferior to the
ice cars that are being produced by themselves, and that is why the market's
not catching on to their products. Yeah. I mean, I think what
you say is true to really is a great job. There's there's just kind
of a mounting series of things that make it difficult for some owners. Another
one is insurance. I think in the US the price of insurance for an
EV is about up seventy two percent versus a gasoline car. Yeah. In
Accent Island, in an accident in my Tesla, it was gone a month
and a half and a simple accident that really on a regular car would be
maybe six seven thousand dollars was twenty thousand. Oh my gosh, totally Yeah.
In England now there are a lot of it's hard to get insurance in
England for an EV. There's a lot of articles. People are calling around
all over and the price is about five thousand pounds for a year for an
EV insurance. So there are just noes. And again I'm not against evs.
I think, you know, we have people that have a choice.
But this idea that the federal government has going to force everybody to buy under
the state of California and we're going to stop the oceans from rising if we
do that, that's where we've really gotten off base. Hey, you know,
I've said this so many times. There's never been an energy transition that
was mandated and facilitated by the government. You know, the market always did
it before we had any vehicles. Some guy came along and invented the wheel
well, or he discovered that you could put a saddle on a horse.
You know, the government wasn't there saying, you know, you need to
get stop walking and start riding. And then you know, we had brown
energy from horses for a few hundred years, maybe a thousand years, and
then we had the internal combustion engine come about, and the government was not
there saying, hey, give us your horses and we'll give you a free
car. You know, the market figured this stuff out, and that's what
that's why this is such a fool's Errand Steve in my opinion is the market
wants a new power transition and the market will dictate it. The market will
mandate it, it'll demand it, and anyone who doesn't comply will go out
of business, right they will. And we have some serious issues coming about
if we could switch to a winds and wind in solar form. Most of
any states, not most of the Midwest or the South, but the east
and west coast are are trying to switch to wind in solar and use as
much wind and solar and get rid of coal, natural gas and even nuclear
and we have some serious problems developed. I listen to this quote from Mark
Christi. He's a federal Energy regulatory commissioner. He testified in June in front
something he might know something. He said, I think we're headed for very
dire consequences, potentially catastrophic consequences in the United States in terms of the reliability
of our grid. And he went on to say that we're closing the things
that are keeping the lights on too fast. And indeed, if you look
at if you look at data from the u US Energy Departments, they track
outages for electricity users, and back twenty thirteen twenty fourteen, the average outage
hours of outage was about three and a half per year. Now it's up
to about seven or eight per year in the United States, and it's going
to go much much higher. And we've had big problems in Texas and Oklahoma
and California. We had the blackout in February twenty twenty one. Power was
off for seventy two hours to four and a half million people, and we
had somewhere between two hundred and fifty and seven hundred people die. That's bigger
than a big hurricane and this. Texas is doing better. They didn't have
blackouts this summer, but they actually issued ten electricity shortage warnings Seth, don't
plug in your electric car, don't run your air conditioner, that was it,
don't put the coffee maker on. So we have some real problems coming
and I'm afraid people are going to have to learn the hard way on this.
And so we're going to have this as part of the coming break green
breakdown. We're going to have people going back to sensible, reliable, low
cost energy. Steve, this is an absolute unmitigated disaster that's coming down the
pike. Look, I do believe that microgrids really have an application because it
will stabilize grids and enable that the alternative energy to be stored and used when
needed. I mean, there's definitely a major, major advance. I think
a lot of it's being pushed now by tax credits, but there's no question
the microgrid stabilizes unstable grids when you have enough of them well, and might
even eliminate the need for peaker plants. You know, plants that come on
during peak period, peak periods of demand. But you can't, you absolutely
can't not based the future of your grid on this. Yeah, I think
we're talking about I think you're talking about grid scale batteries which are being put
in a number of places. Yeah, and those two back up wind and
solar. The problem, there's a couple of problems. One is it so
far is very very small. Again, I talked to audiences about this and
ask them a question, how much more electricity is stored by batteries in the
US. It's nothing, And the answer turns out it's it's two watt hours
in every million watt hours. I mean, it's it's basically insignificant at this
point, and even if you double, triple, quadruple it, it's going
to be almost almost not not useful. It would have to be a very
very big amount. The other things is batteries tend to be expensive. A
good rule of thumb is if you want to back up a wind system for
a day with batteries, you need to spend about five times as much on
batteries as the wind system itself. And then the batteries die in. They
have half the lifetime of the wind. They die in ten or twelve years.
So right now you're talking about ten times the cost of the wind system.
Itself to back up for a day. Now, batteries are going to
come down in price and they may get better, but we're still a long
long way away from that solution. That's a given, and there's enough incentives
in the market. The government doesn't need to be giving away truckloads of money
here. What about the way they're subsidizing the purchase seventy five hundred dollars towards
an EV And these are wealthier people, more well off people who could afward
the vehicle without the subsidy. It's just giving money away getting absolutely nothing in
return for it. It's a wealth transfer to the rich, really, and
the amount of money is huge. Back in the Biden administration about two I'm
sorry, in the Obama administration about twenty fifteen, we were subsidizing wind and
solar and other renewables about fifteen billion a year. That went down to about
eight billion a year on Trump. But now with the Inflation Reduction Act and
President Biden is going up to forty fifty billion dollars a year. It's just
huge. And we had crazy things going on. There's a war going on
in Iowa, South Dakota, and North Dakota right now. Over carbon dioxide
pipelines. They want to capture these from ethanol plants, put them through pipelines
to North Dakota, store the carbon dioxide underground, and so the farmers are
battling these pipeline companies. But nobody would be doing this without the subsidy.
If the subsidy wasn't there, it just nobody would do it. It doesn't
make any sense. We have plenty of carbon dioxide for soft drinks and beer.
We don't need to be capturing it. It's all based on the theorem
and the share of man made warming and these huge subsidies. Hey wait,
we have a I heard we have a shortage of carbon dioxide. Is that
true? Well, it depends on the way you look at it. Yeah.
Actually, we have about four hundred parts per billion in the atmosphere right
now, about four of every ten thousand molecules in the appmos here is pretty
small, but many scientists point out that it was much much higher in Earth's
distant pass the three thousand or four thousand parts per billion eight or ten times
as much. And by the way, those happened during ice ages, which
is evidence that having high levels of carbon dioxide doesn't cause a lot of warming,
so it is low compared to past situations, but it has risen about
thirty percent since the nineteen fifties. Right, Okay, So what's it going
to take for these policy makers to come to their senses or do we just
forget it? Well, we're going to have four things happen with a green
breakdown. First, we're going to higher energy prices, especially electricity. California
in the last three years has passed up all the New England states and is
now second highest in the nation behind Hawaii, yce, as high as any
of the Western state for electricity. We're going to have electricity blackouts, which
we've talked about. We're going to have less freedom because they're try kind to
ban gasoline vehicles and gas stoves. And we're going to have transnational energy shocks
like they've had in Europe over the last two years, where the price of
electricity more than triple than the price of natural gas was up two and a
half times. And they are really hurting over there in England. They don't
want to turn on their robbins and they don't want to turn on their furnaces.
The price are just way too high. So this is what is going
to come from green energy these four things, and people are going to push
back. It's going to break down, and we're going to demand a return
to low cost, reliable energy. Hey, you know they keep talking about
sustainability. To my way of thinking, Steve, the most sustainable form of
energy ever ever found was petroleum. Well it is. There is a real
pollution we still need to reduce, don't get me wrong. For example,
eighty percent of the world's wastewater is discharged in the rivers, lakes, and
streams untreated. Not in the US, not in Europe. But if you
remember about seven years ago, the swimmers in the Olympics down in Brazil didn't
want to swim the water. Another issue in Brazil is just building their first
water treatment plants. Another one is plastic in the oceans, which is an
overstated thing somewhat. We have about one hundred million tons of plastic in the
oceans. We're adding about ten million a year. We need biodegradable plastics.
So problems to solve, Well, it tends to be more expensive. They've
got some of it, but it's more expensive. By the way, banning
straws in Los Angeles isn't really going to do anything. So so there these
are real problems we need to say, we need to solve, but let's
quit this attack and carbon dioxide. By the way, another thing is there's
still seven hundred million people across the world that don't have electricity. There are
hundreds of hospitals that are trying to run without electricity, hookup two billion people.
An additional two billion get blackouts every day. So these people need low
cost electricity. Though. That's another big problem to solve. Let's quit trying
and give rid of CO two. Yeah, and you know, like I
like soa man, if we get rid of CO two, I'm gonna have
to drink a flat soda. That doesn't seem right to me. Yeah,
it's totally wrong. Steve, Hey, where do we find you? How
do we connect with you? How do we get your book? Yeah,
Green Breakdown. So it's available on Amazon. They're also ebooks on Apple and
Google and Bares and Noble, or they can go to my website Steve gorm
g O R E H A M dot com and I'll send them a signed
copy. Excellent, all right, appreciate that. If you've got a question
for us, Steve myself email address kl at Carrie LUTs dot com and the
link to steve site is in the show notes of this interview on Financial Survival
Network dot com. Click it take you right to it. You can get
his books all of that good stuff. While you're at the site, Please
sign up for your free newsletter, Steve, We'll talk to you again.
Thank you so much for stopping by. Thank you, Kerry, thanks for
listening to Carrie Letz's Financial Survival Network, your solution to today's trying times.
For the latest, go to Financial Survivalnetwork dot com. Financial Survival Network now
more than ever,