Speaker 1: At six o six. I think about garre ceed talk station.
Speaker 1: I hope you're having a happy Tuesday. Coming up inside
Speaker 1: scoop with bright Bart News every Tuesday, nay o five.
Speaker 1: Today Kurtz and Dalka, the bright Bart London Debut editor.
Speaker 1: What in the hell is going on with the French
Speaker 1: election parallels to what happened with Trump? That the subject
Speaker 1: matter with Kurt followed by the Daniel Davis deep dive
Speaker 1: the latest on the Russia Ukraine. Trump apparently not real
Speaker 1: happy with Vladimir and Putin right now an Zelensky, I
Speaker 1: guess pulling out of that mineral deal that I thought
Speaker 1: was kind of negotiated, sort of kind of Plus, you
Speaker 1: see surgeons are using three D printed organs in the
Speaker 1: operating room. Just that brief statement about the subject matter, right,
Speaker 1: we're talking about you see researcher doctor Prasha Robbie, he'll
Speaker 1: be a guest on at eight forty five to explain
Speaker 1: that to us. And I've never done this before, but
Speaker 1: I got a great reaction to an op ed piece
Speaker 1: out of Reason the other day. Mark Osterich, who was
Speaker 1: described as a founding partner of a nonprofit firm Crane
Speaker 1: and Gray, and the editor of a daily energy newsletter
Speaker 1: called Gridbrief. But he did such a beautiful job explaining
Speaker 1: the bat crap insanity of United States energy policy that
Speaker 1: I just wanted to bring it back to everybody's attention
Speaker 1: because I didn't get to it till the very end
Speaker 1: of the program, and I only read a part of it,
Speaker 1: but I got so many requests for the link to
Speaker 1: the article. I've just asked Jostreker to put a link
Speaker 1: to it on my blog page or podcast blog page
Speaker 1: at fifty five caresee dot com. Because when you contemplate
Speaker 1: his words and they make perfect sense, you realize what
Speaker 1: a lie and a bill of goods we've been sold
Speaker 1: on this whole green crap. Anyway, bear with me and
Speaker 1: enjoy if you haven't heard it before. We're not short
Speaker 1: on power, we're just too sanctimonious to generate. At the
Speaker 1: caption of the article, I recall Ontario Premier Doug Ford
Speaker 1: he threatened at twenty five percent retally on American energy exports,
Speaker 1: and I know he pulled that off the table, but
Speaker 1: that's the predicate for this wonderfully written analysis. And he
Speaker 1: writes the headline framed as another Trump tariff story Ontario
Speaker 1: premiere Doug Ford threatening a twenty five percent retaliation in
Speaker 1: American energy exports. But the real story of the Northeastern
Speaker 1: energy crisis is more than a cross border drama and
Speaker 1: goes back well before the tariffs and trumpeting. Ford's threat
Speaker 1: is the latest lash and a decade's long ritual of
Speaker 1: energy self flagellation. US regulators and lawmakers have been kneecapping
Speaker 1: American energy electricity production with regulation after regulations, smothering new
Speaker 1: projects in the name of preservation wetlands of the Northeastern
Speaker 1: bullrush sedge, often before they even break ground. Instead of
Speaker 1: building up capacity, we import Canadian power to keep the
Speaker 1: missions off our ledgers like mafia countants, cleverly skirting the
Speaker 1: law while they convinced the world that they're making us cleaner, greener,
Speaker 1: and smarter. Even as the lights flicker and the bills climb.
Speaker 1: The people paying the price are not in press conferences
Speaker 1: or policy meetings. They're at home, choosing between groceries and
Speaker 1: the gas bill. I met them last winter in North Philly.
Speaker 1: I was there to run focus groups on the impact
Speaker 1: of rising energy costs. A father talked about replacing olive
Speaker 1: garden dinners with Spaghettio. It's a shame that little League
Speaker 1: wins no longer earned a night out. A grad student
Speaker 1: turned her one bedroom apartment into a boarding house, three
Speaker 1: people sharing the space just to keep the lights on.
Speaker 1: A restaurant owner described her kitchen working in winter coats
Speaker 1: because they couldn't afford to run the heat. These weren't
Speaker 1: sob stories, they were quiet portraits of sacrifice and grit.
Speaker 1: Since then, prices have jumped another seven percent percent despite
Speaker 1: our reliance on Canadian imports. In twenty twenty four, this
Speaker 1: is where we get to the meat of it, folks,
Speaker 1: the US imported twenty seven thousand, two hundred gigawatt hours
Speaker 1: of electricity from Canada. That is enough to cover twenty
Speaker 1: percent of New York supply and fifteen percent of New
Speaker 1: England's total winter load. Because we've made building new power
Speaker 1: here nearly impossible and incentivized imported power through regulatory loopholes
Speaker 1: that allow us to ignore any emissions that happen outside
Speaker 1: the United States. It's a simple formula, export emissions, import virtue. Meanwhile,
Speaker 1: domestic energy products in the Northeast stall, sputter or collapse.
Speaker 1: We're sitting on four hundred and sixty nine billion tons
Speaker 1: of coal, two point nine trillion cubic feet of gas,
Speaker 1: and centuries of nuclear fuel. But in the United States,
Speaker 1: building power plants now requires a legal team and decades
Speaker 1: of hearings. We've turned power generation into a theater of guilt.
Speaker 1: We're producing energy in the United States is too sinful
Speaker 1: to permit, but importing it from somewhere else lets us
Speaker 1: feel pure. It's not policy, it's penance. In twenty twenty one,
Speaker 1: New York shut down the Indian Point Nuclear Plant, one
Speaker 1: of its last sources of zero emissions based load power.
Speaker 1: That same year, New York began ramping up electricity imports
Speaker 1: from Canada to fill the gap, bringing in seven thousand,
Speaker 1: six hundred gigawatt hours. Hydro electric power alone couldn't handle
Speaker 1: the demand, so Ontario's gas plants fired up to meet
Speaker 1: the demand, releasing an estimated one million tons of carbon
Speaker 1: dioxide plant food. But because those emissions occurred north of
Speaker 1: the border, New York claimed to drop in its own
Speaker 1: energy sector emissions. And that's the game. When Canadian hydro falters,
Speaker 1: Canadian gas steps in, but the emissions vanish on US.
Speaker 1: Climate ledgers turned to Vermont, importing over eighty percent of
Speaker 1: its electricity. Massachusetts and much of the rest of New
Speaker 1: England operate from the same playbook. The grid operators they
Speaker 1: belong to import around fifteen percent of its winter peak
Speaker 1: from Canada. When hydro output dropped eighteen percent due to drought,
Speaker 1: gas peaker plants and fossil fuels save the day. In
Speaker 1: twenty twenty three alone, utilities in Quebec, Ontario, and New
Speaker 1: Brunswick generated an estimated thirteen point four million metric tons
Speaker 1: of carbon dioxide plant food, none of which appear on
Speaker 1: the emission ledgers of states like Massachusetts and Vermont, despite
Speaker 1: their heavily reliance unimported power from those provinces. Meanwhile, the
Speaker 1: twelve hundred megawat Commonwealth wind project was canceled outright after
Speaker 1: a developer paid fifty million dollars to walk away, citing
Speaker 1: financial infeasibility and permitting delays. This is not a glitch
Speaker 1: in the system. Is the system and I love this line.
Speaker 1: A nineteen to ninety nine rule by the Environmental Protection
Speaker 1: Agency allows states to treat imported electricity as emissions free,
Speaker 1: regardless of how it's generated. I don't make the rules, man,
Speaker 1: I just think them up and write them down. It's
Speaker 1: a convenient accounting trick that lets politicians hit climate targets
Speaker 1: without actually reducing actual emissions. At the same time, domestic
Speaker 1: energy projects face a labyrinth of legal, regulatory, and activist
Speaker 1: roadblocks thanks to laws like Title VIV of the Clean
Speaker 1: Air Act and a permitting system that treats any new
Speaker 1: infrastructure as a threat until proven otherwise. We've built the
Speaker 1: political culture that worships the optics of clean energy while
Speaker 1: punishing the act of actually producing it. Across the Northeast,
Speaker 1: domestic energy projects don't just struggle. They're buried. Offshore wind
Speaker 1: collapses under lawsuits over fishing rights in ocean views, small
Speaker 1: modular reactors gathered dust in regulatory limbo. Pipelines are killed
Speaker 1: over silt and wetlands. Nuclear plants drowned in litigation. In
Speaker 1: twenty sixteen, New York veto to the Constitution pipeline, leaving
Speaker 1: the Marcella Shale untapped. Two years later, during a brutal
Speaker 1: cults in a Massachusetts imported liquefied natural gas from Russia
Speaker 1: rather than lay pipe from Pennsylvania. A proposed forty two
Speaker 1: megawat biomass plant in Springfield, Massachusetts, was blocked on a
Speaker 1: technicality in twenty twenty one after years of permit delays
Speaker 1: and concerns over quote unquote environmental justice. Clean local energy
Speaker 1: was too controversial, imported emissions no comment. Altogether, the region
Speaker 1: has canceled enough projects to generate forty two thousand gigawatt
Speaker 1: hours annually, more than fifty percent above the power we
Speaker 1: imported from Canada in twenty twenty four. We're not out
Speaker 1: of energy, we just outlawed reality. We pretend its progress,
Speaker 1: We pretend the air is cleaner. We pretend that exporting
Speaker 1: emissions is environmentalism. It's not. It's theater for climate lobbies,
Speaker 1: campaign sound bites, and activists to measure success and press releases,
Speaker 1: not power output. The emissions remain, only the guilt is outsourced.
Speaker 1: So No Ford's tariff thread isn't the story. It's just
Speaker 1: the headline. The real story is what made that threat possible.
Speaker 1: Our addiction to imported virtue, our refusal to build in
Speaker 1: a regulatory culture that punishes the very act of producing energy.
Speaker 1: We're not short on power, we're just too sanctimonious to
Speaker 1: generate it. Thank you for indulging me on that I
Speaker 1: thought he made awesome points. And isn't it crazy the
Speaker 1: nineteen ninety nine rule imported electricity is emissions free. They
Speaker 1: could be using the dirtiest coal plants on the planet
Speaker 1: in Canada, but because that smoke isn't coming out of
Speaker 1: the state of New York or ver modern New Jersey,
Speaker 1: its counts as emissions free. You see the nonsense. And
Speaker 1: all this we import products from China, the component products
Speaker 1: for all these environmentally correct green electric vehicles, with the
Speaker 1: exception of teslas, which apparently you're not allowed to drive
Speaker 1: anymore because well, yeah, evil space man, they come from
Speaker 1: coal plants, energy generated by coal plants in China. Aren't
Speaker 1: we all breathing the same air on this globe of ours?
Speaker 1: Don't the winds flow? And it is an amazing reality
Speaker 1: that one volcanic eruption can negate all of the efforts
Speaker 1: to get rid of carbon from the atmosphere. And again,
Speaker 1: carbon dioxide's plant food. It's plant food. It's a lie, man,
Speaker 1: We are living a lie. This climate religion has got
Speaker 1: people so damned delusional that they just you buy into
Speaker 1: this six seventeen fifty five Kerosite talk station. I just
Speaker 1: I just woke up in some sort of parallel universe.
Speaker 1: I just don't know when it happened.