Speaker 1: What's going on. Thank you so much for listening to
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your support. All Right, our number two, I'm running at like,
I don't know, seventy percent, I feel it, maybe even
sixty it's uh may all right, sixty two percent stayed
up too late watching this show Special Forces have didn't
even get through the first season. Then I'm just talking
with Bernie and Nick during the break there. And that's
not the only show that we watched because we were
so my sister and her family were coming into town,
so we were prepped for them to come into town.
But then my nephew got sick and so they didn't come.
So we ended up with a free Friday night and Saturday,
and so it was like, oh, what do you, Let's
watch a bunch of like junk food TV because you know,
we don't watch enough of that, but we started by
watching this. Have you seen this show extracted? Oh my gosh,
it's such a train wreck. It is a psychological and
emotional train wreck. So they took a model. You've seen
these shows like Alone where they drop you into the
wilderness with nothing and you're alone, or Outlast where they
drop you out in the middle of the wilderness with
nothing and you have to outlast some competitors, right, and
it's a survivalist kind of thing. And we've seen we
like watching those shows, not all of them, but some
of them get kind of repetitive. But these people are
out there for like three months, like eating sticks. It's ridiculous. Anyway,
they took this concept and they're like, hey, I know,
let's throw like a completely emotionally and psychologically broken element
into this. So when you go, so you go out
into the woods, okay, or I'll use me. I go
out into the woods, so I'm the survivor or survivalist.
I go out yeah, because you can't call them survivor
because that's a whole different show. So you go out
into the wilderness and they got cameras set up everywhere
around your little camps and everything, and you can get
supply drops. How do you get the supply drops? Two
members of my family are back in a climate controlled
headquarters and they have access to all the feeds, and
they're in one big room with all the family members
of your other competitors. You're all in this room together,
and you're sleeping in these little I don't know, I
converted shipping container little pods. You got a two beds,
so you're all. Everybody's like there, and so now you're
you're trying to pick out supplies to send to your
loved one. But then they always throw these sick and
warped challenges and stuff and oh, you can take an
item from this other person's supply drop. And so then
they make the survivalist hike like two miles. They find
the crate and there's nothing in it that's super demoralizing.
And then you get the dynamics going on back in
HQ between the family members. You know, one of them,
I don't want to say, all right, spoiler alert, one
of them, the daughter. So the mom is out in
the woods and the daughter and the husband are back
at HQ, and she's like, I don't want mom to
be there anymore. She wouldn't want me to suffer like this,
so like that's you, that's not her, and that she's
using that as leverage against Dad and saying all of
the woke words. Oh my gosh, it's such a train wreck. Yes,
so we watched that. That was Friday and Saturday night.
I have no regrets it was. And yeah, so the
it's still going on the season is still going on
in that one. I think it's tonight. I think that
it may be this season finale tonight. Yeah, it's that is.
It is a it is an interesting dynamic and that
people are starting to get all cutthroaty back at HQ.
Oh brutal anyway, Speaking of surviving, North Carolina lawmakers want
to loosen certain building rules to make it easier for
people to reconstruct buildings that were damaged by Hurricane Helene.
A piece at w R A L by Paul spect
reports on State st Senator Tim Moffatt's Senate Bill two
sixty six. Tim MOFFITTT is a Republican Senator from Henderson County.
He used to be a state representative in the House
representing parts of bunkhom County Ashville area, but then he
moved to Henderson County. Now he's a state senator, and
his bill would allow victims of a historic flood to
rebuild their buildings to their original specifications, exempting the property
owners from construction regulations that were enacted into law after
the structure was first built. Which sounds like a pretty
good idea, except this seems kind of like an administrative nightmare.
How you're going to have to then know every single
building code when it was adopted, right, and then say, okay,
well you your house was built in you know, nineteen
ninety four, and so what's the building code for nineteen
ninety four? Pull that manual, Pull that code, and that's
what you can build to instead of the new standards,
which are very expensive and in some cases don't even
allow you to build the structure again. Critics of the
proposal worry that the bill, if immediately enacted into law,
could also make it more difficult for some North Carolinians
to receive federal disaster relief funding. Tim Moffatt told the
Senate Regulatory Reform Committee that he will not seek votes
on his bill until he receives assurances from federal officials
that his proposals are not going to jeopardize that funding.
Moffatt said he has been communicating with the federal government
and officials about loosening regulations that are imposed by FEMA
and the National Flood Insurance Program. His bill would allow
victims of once in a lifetime floods to rebuild in
a floodplaine, because that's also been part of the problem
up there is you had a house that was built
maybe one hundred years ago, and then somewhere in that
last hundred years they adjusted the flood maps and now
you're in the floodplain, and now you're not allowed to rebuild.
Stuff like that regulatory obstacles. He also said, quote elevating structures.
So you want to put a house, you know, higher up,
and that's one of the things we need to build
the houses, you know, like down at the beach, all
of the first floor is concrete, you know, and the
garages or car ports will be underneath. You park underneath,
and then the living space is you know, twenty feet
up or fifteen feet up from there. But it's not
as easy to do in the mountains because they're mountains.
I don't know if you're aware of this. It's pretty
difficult to like drill down into mountain. It's pretty tough.
It's hard. And so he said, we don't have a
lot of buildable land in the mountains that's available like
you see in the rolling plains of our state or
the coastal plains of our state. And he's exactly right
about that. You know, there's just not as much land
to build on. One of the things that was very
eye opening for Christy. I mean when we were driving
around looking to buy or build a house up in
the mountains, we were trying to find lots for sale,
and you would you would go, you know, pull up
your realtor dot Com or whatever, and you would go
find some lots and you'd go take a look, and
you pull up on the side of the road and
it's just like this sheer drop off the side of
the road, and like, yeah, that's the lot. Like how
are you going to build on that really tall stilts
that go down forty to fifty sixty feet down the ravine,
Like I'm not Yeah, I'm not doing that. Where do
you put a driveway? It's nuts? So, yeah, you got
limited land. So that's one way there. They're looking to
help rebuild and then there's Senate Bill six oh two,
which exempts businesses affected by Helene from having to reinstall
windows under current regulations. State Senator Ralph Hyes. He said
he filed the bill after he heard about a coffee
shop in Spruce Pine and the owners were told that
they would have to install windows that cost about four
hundred thousand dollars in order to comply with current regulations.
Spruce Pine has like two thousand people in it, Like,
even if they're doing brisk business at the coffee shop,
a four hundred thousand dollars bill for some windows that
might be a bit out of reach. Here's a great idea.
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and make memories that'll last a lifetime. Already, so I
guess I have to talk about the historical history here,
John says Pete. I realize you have only started the
show and maybe you're going to talk about it. However,
I feel now to be fair, John wrote this at
the beginning of the show last hour. I'm just now
reading it, but yes, there was historical history that was made.
He says, I feel this should really have been your
top story because there is a historic history being made
that just happened. It's historic, like it's never happened in
history before. It's so important, and all women crew has
flown into space. I know, who would have thought we
would have ever lived to see such historic history being made.
You know how many years of training it took for
them to become astronauts. They should be role models for
young girls all around the world, showing that if you
study hard enough, you could become a rocket scientist. Except
they didn't actually fly the rocket. Yeah, they I gotta
tell you, I object to them being called astronauts. I've
heard the term. They're using it to describe these famous
women that were taking up well in Jeff bezos fiance.
Like they they're okay, you could call them astro knots
like that's fine, astronot I'm okay saying that, but it
sounds too close to astronauts. So let's just call them
what they are. They're space tourists, that's what they are.
They are tourists. They took a ride, right, they got
in a pod and you know, we burned up a
bunch of fossil fuel to launch them up into the atmosphere,
and then they came back down and Jeff Bezos apparently
face planted in the Texas desert. He did, like, he
literally fell down on his face while he was walking
around the module, and it was it was landed in
the desert. He was just sitting there and he walked
up to it and as he was walking around it,
he tripped and fell and face planted. I don't know
what that means. I'm just saying. Also, it appears that
the the module returned with a scrape on the passenger
side rear quarter panel for some reason. That and all
of the participants were asked how would they rate their
their delivery? They were they did, yes, they did provide
the driver feedback. You should always do that with your
Amazon deliveries. This was the Blue Origin launch. My Gail
King was on it, Jeff Bezos's fiance was on it,
Katie Perry was on it, and like this. Matt Vespa,
who's a senior editor at town Hall Media, he says,
why is everybody acting like women have never been in
space before? I mean, Biden just left one trapped up
in the Space station, right, like they've been there. Guys like, oh,
but it's all female, that's the it's an all female crew. Yeah,
but they're not the crew. They weren't flying it. They
just rode up in it. Somebody else was driving, right,
probably a dude. But no, I'm kidding. I don't know.
I mean, good for them, I guess, But like, I'm
not calling William Shatner an astronaut because he rode up
in the Blue Origin thing before, right, I call him
an astronaut from his time on the Enterprise, but this didn't.
That doesn't make him an astronaut. The Origin, his Star
Trek days make him in the astronaut. How Come they're
not called astronauts, right? They're never called Are they called astrois?
Don't I'm not a tricky so I don't know. But
nobody ever calls the Star Trek crew astronauts. But they
would be astronauts, right, I think? I don't know. I
got a lot of questions about the nomenclature here. Also,
this is quite the story. CBS News reporting that they
have found an ancient altar in Guatemala in the jungle,
and apparently it was used for human sacrifices, especially of children,
say the archaeologists. So child sacrifice in the Guatemalan jungle,
in this very large pyramid looking like temple. And they
have a quote in this CBS article from Maria Berlen Mendez,
an archaeologist who was not involved with the project, but
she said the discovery confirms quote that there has been
an interconnection between multiple cultures and what their relationship with
their gods and celestial bodies was. Like, Okay, so they're
sacrificing all of the children, murdering the children all willy
nilly for their gods, for their sky gods or or
ground gods, I guess, or water gods, whatever, tree gods.
I mean, you could have a lot of gods really,
so okay, I guess. And so this children murdering thing
occurs across multiple cultures in these ancient times. That's the
interconnected relationship between the cultures she's talking about. And then
she says, we see how the issue of sacrificing exists
in both cultures. It was a practice. It's not that
they were violent, it was their way of connecting with
the celestial bodies. See a this is a non violent
murder people. This is not violent murdering, obviously, Matt Watsh
points out, you've heard of the mostly peaceful riots. Well,
now we hear of nonviolent human sacrifice. We truly do
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have received some clarification. Apparently James Kirk was an explorer,
not an astronaut. It's an explorer. That's good to know.
Thank you, Melissa, and Cheerio says on Twitter. It's a
peat tweet that these the all female spaceflight. They were passengers,
they were not a crew. Well, by the way, how
do we know there it's an all female Why is
this historical? Yeah? No, I'm just kind of thinking this through.
Is it because they identified as female before they got
on board? What if they had to change of mind
while they were Oh man, that would have been that
would have been a story. You get into space, or
like right before you enter space, and you're like, guys,
I just want to say, I identify as a man,
and now your historical history is for naught, like an astronaut.
Maybe that's what we should call them astronauts. Yeah, it's
too close to astronaut. I don't even want to give
them that. And then I mentioned the story about the
Guatemalan ancient civilization that committed the non violent child sacrifice,
and that was just discovered by some archaeologists. But it
was not violent because it wasn't about violence. This is
about worship. See, it's about getting into a commune kind
of relationship with the celestial body by murdering your children.
More than sixty research scientists signed in openly so speaking
of sacrificing your children. More than sixty research scientists signed
an open letter urging North Carolina Governor Josh Stein to
halt Duke Energy's fossil fuel expansion and what they call
the suppression of renewable energy solutions. They want him to
exercise his executive authoritie four public health and climate scientists
along with the Center for Biological Diversity and a solar
nonprofit advocacy group called nc WARN. That's within an n WARN.
They organize the letter these four public health and climate
scientists along with the two organizations. It's signed by a
total of sixty one scientists from universities and agencies across
the country who say it has all of the whole
of a Russian disinformation Oh wait, sorry, wrong letter, my bit. No, sorry,
this is they want Josh Stein to get all executive
authority E and the letter asks Stein to prevent Duke
Energy from delaying the transitions from fossil fuels to renewable energy.
This is a story by Christine ju Over at NC
news Line, which is one of the member outlets of
an organization called State's Newsroom. They are based in North
Carolina and Washington, d C. And it's a progressive front group. Basically,
it's funded by left wing nonprofits. It was founded by
Chris Fitzsimmons from North Carolina, who's big lefty guy, And
they put out these stories under the color of a
legitimate and objective news organization, when in fact it's just
a comms arm of the progressive nonprofit organizations. So the
story goes on to say that the company possesses one
of the biggest planned gas buildouts of any utility for
the decade. Duke Energy recently announced its intent to consider
delaying the retirement of its coal fleet as a result
of the Trump administration's climate protection rollbacks. Then they quote
Gabby sorry Tobar, a senior energy justice campaigner. I don't
know which part of that title to start attacking first.
Does that mean she's old? I don't know, senior energy
Justice campaigner at the Center for Biological Diversity, and she
says Duke Energy's reckless expansion of fossil gas is costing
lives and saddling North Carolinians with skyrocketing utility bills and
deadly or extreme weather. I mean just everything. It's like
every problem is to blame on the expansion of fossil gas,
which hasn't actually happened yet. It's to see the emissions
go way up when you just simply consider doing it.
Little known fact about the gas industry, it's already skyrocketing
utility bills, right, I mean, it's not the decommissioning of
all of the cheap energy producing facilities. That's not why. No,
it's talking about expansion of the gas facility. In the
entire article. You know what is not mentioned. If you
said nuclear, you are correct. Nuclear not mentioned anywhere in
the climate change energy production article, which is weird because
if you are actually interested in not impoverishing future generations,
because energy is the lifeblood of the civilization, if you
want to end up, you know, sacrificing your children like
the ancient Guatemalan culture that they just identified, well this
would be the way to do it. Make energy production
so costly that nobody can enjoy like air conditioning, you know.
And here's the thing. The wind and solar power myth
is just that it can't scale, at least not yet.
They can't figure they haven't figured this out. It can't
scale to the size necessary to fund or to power
all of the all of the demand. But nuclear can.
Many governments in the Western world have committed to net
zero emissions of carbon in the near future. The US
and UK both say they will deliver by twenty fifty,
and it's widely believed that wind and solar can achieve this.
Brian Lalan, writing at The Telegraph, says this belief has
led the US and British governments, among others, to promote
and heavily subsidize wind and solar. These plans have a
single fatal flaw. They are reliant on the pipe dream
that there is some affordable way to store surplus electricity
at scale. That's the core problem, all right. If you're
listening to this show, you know I try to keep
up with all sorts of current events, and I know
you do too, And you've probably heard me say get
your news from multiple sources. Why, Well, because It's how
you detect media bias, which is why I've been so
impressed with ground News. It's an app and it's a website,
and it combines news from around the world in one
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can check it out at check dot ground, dot news
slash pete. I put the link in the podcast description too.
I started using ground News a few months ago and
more recently chose to work with them as an affiliate
because it lets me see clearly how stories get covered
and by whom. The blind spot feature shows you which
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every feature. Your subscription then not only helps my podcast,
but it also supports ground News as they make the
media landscape more transparent. All right, So, Brian Leyland or Leland.
He is a power systems engineer with more than sixty
years experience on projects around the world. He says the
conventional power station or something very like it, will still
be needed frequently once the wind and solar come online.
Because it's intermittent, governments, many of them have kept the
lights on only by using existing fossil fired stations as
backup for periods of low wind and sun. This brings
with it a new operating regime where stations that were
designed to operate continuously now have to follow unpredictable fluctuations
in wind and solar. As a result, operating and maintenance
costs have increased, and many stations have had to be
shut down. He talks about open cycle, which can be
throttled up and down easily, but open cycle gas turbines
burn about twice as much gas as a combined cycle
gas turbine, so you're actually creating more emissions. Power prices
will soar, making more or less everything more expensive, and
there will be frequent blackouts. Only one thing can save
the day for the renewables plan, reasonable cost, large scale
energy storage sufficient to keep the lights on for several
days at a minimum, That would solve the problem. Right,
You got to be able to store the power for
you know, three, four, five days where it just rains.
What are the options? Battery storage? Okay takes a look
at that breaks it down by the numbers. Wind farms
cost about one point five million per megawatt, so the
cost of battery storage would be astronomical eighty times greater
than the cost of the wind farm itself. A major
additional constraint would be that such quantities of batteries are
simply not available. There's not enough lithium and cobalt and
other rare minerals that are being mined at the moment,
so that's off the table. He breaks down hydro pumped storage.
That's one of the options, but like that's not going
to be a feasible option. It cannot solve the problem
on a national scale. Hydrogen is another technology that's often
suggested for the storage, but it's got a ton of
problems as well, and he says the conclusion to all
of this analysis is that barring some sort of a miracle,
there's no possibility that a suitable storage technology is going
to be developed in the needed time frame. Right if
you're looking to be you know, net zero by twenty fifty.
The present policies of just forcing wind and solar into
the market and hoping for a miracle have been memorably
and correctly likened to jumping out of an airplane without
a parachute, and hoping that the parachute will be invented,
delivered and strapped on in mid air in time to
save you before you hit the ground. He says, wind
and solar need to be backed up close to to
one hundred percent by some other means of power generation.
If that backup is provided by open cycle gas or worse, coal,
then net zero will never be achieved, nor anything very
close to it, because the open cycle, as I said,
burns more gas because you're having to turn on and
off the power plants in order to adjust to the
ebb and flow of the wind and the solar generation.
There is one technology that can provide a cheap and
reliable supply of low emissions electricity, and that would be nuclear.
I'm kidding it's nuclear. Interest in nuclear power is increasing
as more and more people realize that it is safe
and reliable. If regulators in the public could be persuaded
that modern stations are inherently safe and that low levels
of nuclear radiation are not actually dangerous, nuclear power could
provide all of the low cost, low emissions electricity the
world needs for hundreds of thousands of years. But if
we had one hundred percent nuclear backup for solar and wind,
we wouldn't need the wind and solar plants at all.
And that, my friends, is why it's supposed they are pointless.
If you have nuclear, then wind and sow, wind and
solar are irrelevant because you're creating way more electricity for cheaper,
way more reliable. And that's why they won't. They won't
talk about it, they won't use it as part of
their strategy. They don't want nuclear at all. It's a
left it's a remnant of the sixties era like that
that the left wing sixties movement. There's a study that
was put out by the Radiant Energy Group public attitudes
towards clean energy. Support for nuclear energy outweighs opposition by
one and a half times. Across twenty three surveyed states,
forty percent support nuclear energy, twenty seven percent oppose it.
Nuclear may act as a safeguard for climate action, providing
insurance against potential backlash to the net zero goals. Among
climate action skeptics, nuclear energy has the highest level of
net support at plus thirty two percent of any clean
energy tech. Also, preference for nuclear energy is larger than
for onshore wind biomass from trees or gas with carbon
capture and storage. It's the preferred technology, and regarding government policy,
the public wants to keep using nuclear energy and wants
to build new plants. Support for nuclear is less politically
divided than or on shore wind farms or large scale
solar farms. Again, nuclear has more support and it takes
up less space. By the way, Republican and Democrat voters
share similar views on key energy attributes and environmental issues,
but concerns for climate change remain the most significant dividing
factor between them. Like this is the win, guys, take
the win, all right. That'll do it for this episode.
Thank you so much for listening. I could not do
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