Speaker 1: Well whiskey, come and take my pay the moneys my ry.
Speaker 1: Oh why why think alone when you can drink it all?
Speaker 1: In with Ricochet's three Whiskey Happy Hour, join your bartenders,
Speaker 1: Steve Hayward, John You, and the international woman of Mystery, Lucretia.
Speaker 2: Where this lapstappen live? It ain't you easy on the
Speaker 2: should tap?
Speaker 3: Got agive me.
Speaker 2: And let that whiskey blow.
Speaker 1: Well, hi everybody, and welcome to the three Whiskey Happy
Speaker 1: Hour or one Whiskey Short This week, though John u
Speaker 1: is away traveling.
Speaker 2: So it's just me and Lucretia.
Speaker 1: Although we're gonna change things up a bit later in
Speaker 1: this episode. I'm gonna drop in an interview I did
Speaker 1: recently with Robert Brice, the Great Energy Guru. So today
Speaker 1: I am mostly just gonna ask what's on Lucretia's mind.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna take a chance and react to it. But
Speaker 1: first of all, how are you, dear? How has this
Speaker 1: week been for you?
Speaker 4: I've had better. I'll just leave it at that.
Speaker 2: Well, okay, that's it. Don't be so cheerful for everybody.
Speaker 3: Now.
Speaker 2: It's been another week where I can't keep up.
Speaker 1: I mean, I keep trying to chase, after this, that
Speaker 1: and the other thing, and things changed too fast, and
Speaker 1: I've been on the move too. It's the last week
Speaker 1: of classes, so at final exams essays to grade. Commencement
Speaker 1: was Friday morning, so I was in my robe and
Speaker 1: my gown and in my hat and all that. The regalia,
Speaker 1: that's what we're supposed to call it, right, I was
Speaker 1: in all that. So any case, I'm behind on things.
Speaker 1: What's on your mind this week?
Speaker 4: So, okay, you accuse me of being all grumpy, I'm
Speaker 4: going to start off with a happy story. What I
Speaker 4: think you ought to be a happy story. So while
Speaker 4: then Holland and the other scumbag Democrats are traveling down
Speaker 4: to El Salvador to worry about a wife beating sex
Speaker 4: trafficking gang banger. The Amish who are interesting because for
Speaker 4: the first time they really came out and forced to vote.
Speaker 4: Thanks to our friend Scott Pressler otherwise known as the Persistence,
Speaker 4: got them to vote to make them realize what it
Speaker 4: is they are missing out on in terms of, you know,
Speaker 4: protecting what they care about in the religious freedom. That
Speaker 4: he convinced them that Trump was actually in favor of
Speaker 4: their of religious freedom. Anyway, they've gone down in force. Thousand,
Speaker 4: at least a thousand of them have just moved to
Speaker 4: down to North Carolina to help try to rebuild small
Speaker 4: towns that are more or less being ignored by by
Speaker 4: the government, even by Trump and whatever it is that
Speaker 4: is left of FEMA after Doge. I'm not really quite
Speaker 4: sure even North Carolina Governor to some extent, they're just
Speaker 4: they're just not paying any attention to these small towns
Speaker 4: that are just hopelessly devastated from Hurricane Helen, and they're
Speaker 4: just volunteering their time to build the rebuild the town.
Speaker 1: Well, so that this now suddenly I understand a question
Speaker 1: I got this morning when I was doing a Ricochet podcast.
Speaker 1: It was came in from a listener and I didn't
Speaker 1: I mean, I thought I understood it, but I didn't,
Speaker 1: because it made reference to thousands of volunteers coming to
Speaker 1: rural North Carolina to help rebuilding towns, and then asked,
Speaker 1: is there anything like that going on in Los Angeles
Speaker 1: in the aftermath of the terrible fires there? And I'm thinking, oh, now,
Speaker 1: I'm thinking it must have been at least partially in
Speaker 1: reference to the story you're bringing up. By the way,
Speaker 1: what connects these two I think is this. There was
Speaker 1: a story in the news I did catch sometime this
Speaker 1: week that a saw mill at the communal saw mill
Speaker 1: at the Amish have in one of their communities in
Speaker 1: what Pennsylvania, Ohio wherever burned down.
Speaker 2: And they rebuilt the whole thing in four days.
Speaker 1: And by the way, I don't I you know, the
Speaker 1: almost don't use technology. I'm not sure if their sawmills
Speaker 1: are all hand tools or whether they might allow a power.
Speaker 2: So I don't know.
Speaker 1: But the point is is they do very sophisticated, would
Speaker 1: work have for centuries, right, But the fact that the
Speaker 1: damage can rebuild a large structure that is industrial and
Speaker 1: from their point of view, in four days, I should
Speaker 1: tell us something about what's wrong with the world. And
Speaker 1: so what I told the listener on Ricochet was well
Speaker 1: as far as I know, And last I checked ten
Speaker 1: days ago, the Greater Los Angeles area had issued all
Speaker 1: of four permits four to rebuild houses that have burned down.
Speaker 1: But meanwhile, I said, volunteers, forget it. They won't let
Speaker 1: any volunteers in to help with the demolition work. I
Speaker 1: was in a part of Pasadena up by the mountains,
Speaker 1: middle of the week, and I saw lots and lots
Speaker 1: of burned out houses where nothing's happened, nothing's been demolished.
Speaker 1: And here we are three months into all this. And
Speaker 1: I understand there are some legitimate health concerns and potentially
Speaker 1: toxic residue in some of these sites, but for goodness sake,
Speaker 1: we ought to have some common sense here and either
Speaker 1: allow volunteers, expedite the process, speed things up.
Speaker 2: I don't know what, but it is ridiculous. The Amish
Speaker 2: wouldn't what to do. They'd have la up and going again.
Speaker 1: We'd need probably all the Amish to do it such
Speaker 1: a big area. But right we can learn a few
Speaker 1: things because I don't think they go through a long
Speaker 1: permit review process.
Speaker 2: When the Amish rebuilds.
Speaker 4: They don't. And I suppose it's true that those small
Speaker 4: towns in North Carolina are being ignored to such an
Speaker 4: extent that they're actually not having to deal with those
Speaker 4: kinds of things. But I sort of want to go
Speaker 4: one step deeper than all of that to Steve. I mean,
Speaker 4: it's true enough that they're building those tiny houses, you know,
Speaker 4: to get people out of tents, the ones that they
Speaker 4: can put it very very quickly and get people with
Speaker 4: a roof over their heads. In the meantime, Democrats again
Speaker 4: are worrying about gang bangers, due process and all that
Speaker 4: other nonsense. But why these people doing it? And I'm
Speaker 4: going to quote one person, a volunteer said, our hearts
Speaker 4: just felt drawn to come and help people in this area.
Speaker 4: It fills my heart with joy watching people getting their
Speaker 4: lives back again. So they're doing it out of the
Speaker 4: you know, my fundamental belief the most important virtue is gratitude.
Speaker 4: They're actually doing it out of a sense of gratitude
Speaker 4: for what they have and helping their fellow not even
Speaker 4: you know, the Amish live quite a ways away from
Speaker 4: North Carolina, so they have to be experienced some experiencing,
Speaker 4: if not hardship, at least some inconveniences themselves. But it's
Speaker 4: just a wonderful story. I wish we saw more of
Speaker 4: those things. And you know, we could have a long discussion.
Speaker 4: We've had this discussion before about why it is that
Speaker 4: faith based organizations not being subsidized by the federal government
Speaker 4: are actually the best way to get charity work done,
Speaker 4: to get you know, to to fix the homeless problem.
Speaker 4: So because they can do so with a view to
Speaker 4: the virtues that are necessary to make it work. Well,
Speaker 4: they're not in it for the money, all of all
Speaker 4: of those other things. Anyway, does my feel good story
Speaker 4: of the week?
Speaker 2: Yeah, well I can add to that that.
Speaker 1: I think, you know, there are two or three sort
Speaker 1: of I think big topics just generally floating in the
Speaker 1: world that nobody, nobody in the media ever bought us
Speaker 1: to even inquire about. And I think there are several
Speaker 1: books can be written about faith based organizations, people like
Speaker 1: the AMIGE. I mean, I remember hearing some stories about
Speaker 1: faith based groups that went to New Orleans after Katrina,
Speaker 1: which is what twenty years ago now, and it was
Speaker 1: a mixed experience because they were trying to these are
Speaker 1: sort of more conventional, you know, not the amass are
Speaker 1: pretty unconventional. Let us just stipulate that, right, that's not
Speaker 1: a controversial statement. But they tried to do things within
Speaker 1: the system, you know, go through the permitent planning process,
Speaker 1: and it was very frustrating because you know, New Orleans
Speaker 1: is pretty corrupt as we know. But I do think
Speaker 1: that somebody could write some great books about that. We
Speaker 1: hear people talk talk about it a lot, but I
Speaker 1: think the stories it could be told and data to
Speaker 1: be gathered for the social scientists would be quite remarkable.
Speaker 1: And related to that, yeah, I might say the flip
Speaker 1: side of the story. As you know, I have heard
Speaker 1: just over the years, I've heard stories of people who
Speaker 1: got out of college. They're all idealistic liberals, they studied
Speaker 1: social work, they went to work for the social service bureaucracy.
Speaker 1: To make a long story short, they ended up raging
Speaker 1: conservatives from the experience because they saw how horrible their
Speaker 1: bureaucracy is. They saw how the welfare state actually degrades
Speaker 1: the very people that are trying to help. And I've
Speaker 1: thought there'd be a great book to be written about
Speaker 1: disaffected social workers because I think their stories would be
Speaker 1: extraordinary and added out all up, and the people who
Speaker 1: stay behind are just time servers. And you know, I
Speaker 1: don't need to say more about that. I think everyone
Speaker 1: understands the point of that. But like I say, I've
Speaker 1: heard enough of those stories to think that would make
Speaker 1: a great book. So pair those together, real social work
Speaker 1: by people who actually have their heads on straight, because
Speaker 1: the other heads looking above and the dysfunctional social work
Speaker 1: of our bureaucratic welfare state.
Speaker 4: Yes, okay, you can talk about that forever. Okay, my
Speaker 4: worst story of the week, and this one's tough, really tough.
Speaker 4: Probably hmm. I'm probably going to go with the Supreme
Speaker 4: Court oral arguments that happened this week out of a
Speaker 4: case out of Maryland where parents were having to go
Speaker 4: to the Supreme Court to have the right to pull
Speaker 4: their children out of school. And these were pre kindergarten
Speaker 4: through the fifth grade age school children in public schools
Speaker 4: to when the English classes were teaching puppy pride, and
Speaker 4: basically they had literature. And you can't see my scare
Speaker 4: scare quotes, but I definitely mean that in scare quotes,
Speaker 4: literature that promotes the idea of transsexuality, trans identity, whatever,
Speaker 4: mental illness, and it's grooming children to take a three
Speaker 4: year old and teach them about leather and domination. And
Speaker 4: everybody heard the story. But the thing that I told Steve,
Speaker 4: if I'd have had time this week, I would have
Speaker 4: written a through the looking glass story Nixie and I
Speaker 4: looking out the window at the snow, but I live
Speaker 4: in Arizona, so there's no snow. But my kitten becomes
Speaker 4: the Red Queen and I become the white Queen and
Speaker 4: lo and behold, we live in this world where instead
Speaker 4: of the Supreme Court saying what the hell is wrong
Speaker 4: with you, school board members thinking that you should somehow
Speaker 4: bring this filth, in this smut into the classroom. Why
Speaker 4: aren't you teaching English? Why? Real English? Why aren't you
Speaker 4: teaching reading, math? All the skills that students no longer
Speaker 4: have when they go to public schools. We're talking about
Speaker 4: whether or not parents have a right to pull their
Speaker 4: children out of school to be notified in for the
Speaker 4: first place, and then to pull their children out of
Speaker 4: school when they're going to be taught lessons about transsexual identity. Well,
Speaker 4: world do we live in, Steve Well, I mean through
Speaker 4: the looking glass?
Speaker 1: Yeah, well, now, I mean two or three observations. One is,
Speaker 1: this case came out of Montgomery County, Maryland. And for
Speaker 1: listeners who don't know Montgomery County is it's very left.
Speaker 1: It's very rich left, it's very elite left. It's it's
Speaker 1: Marin County, it's Cambridge, Massachusetts. It's places like that. And
Speaker 1: the fact that the case came out of there, and
Speaker 1: by the way, isn't one of the parties. It's a
Speaker 1: like mock mood versus school district or something like that.
Speaker 4: I think there's a population of Ethiopian, right, I hope
Speaker 4: I don't get it wrong. I think it's Ethiopian Christians,
Speaker 4: and then I forget about Muslims also exactly, not exclusively.
Speaker 4: They make the group of parents that right.
Speaker 1: And I actually remember talking to some Montgomery County parent
Speaker 1: and some Zoom meeting I was on too, three four
Speaker 1: years ago, and like you know, these things are crazy here.
Speaker 2: And remember point number two.
Speaker 1: Just a point of fact is there had been an
Speaker 1: opt out and the county had sought to end it.
Speaker 2: And that's what brought the case along.
Speaker 4: Right, So at the county, the school board, well the
Speaker 4: school board.
Speaker 2: But I think it might have been the county. I'm
Speaker 2: not sure it was the county school board or what.
Speaker 1: But anyway, well, so what happens is what became clear
Speaker 1: in the oral argument, which I only heard some snippets of,
Speaker 1: is that the justices, especially Justice Gorsicic, who you might
Speaker 1: thought would be the weakest on this since he did
Speaker 1: that crazy Bosstoc decision, he clearly had read these books
Speaker 1: and was asking the lawyers defending it about details from
Speaker 1: the books by the way. Did any news reporter ever
Speaker 1: read the books and report the content of the No,
Speaker 1: of course not. There were no news reports about that,
Speaker 1: and that was much more embarrassing for the people trying
Speaker 1: to defend it. It was pretty clear they had an
Speaker 1: awkward case to make, and Gorstich actually was Kavanaugh who said,
Speaker 1: you have a tough case to make, don't you write it?
Speaker 4: Well? They even got Alina Kagan, who's the only really
Speaker 4: truly intelligent person on the liberal side of the court,
Speaker 4: to come out in favor, saying essentially that you don't
Speaker 4: have to be apparent with religious convictions to find this offensive. Yeah,
Speaker 4: the right to opt your child child out of this shit.
Speaker 4: What I heard them say that she said seemed pretty strong.
Speaker 4: But the most amazing part of all of it was KITTENINGI.
Speaker 2: I knew you were going to go there next, said moron.
Speaker 4: And you know what. One of my more popular tweets
Speaker 4: on x was that, what is it you would expect
Speaker 4: from a person whose only qualifications for the court were
Speaker 4: the color of her skin and the number of chromosomes.
Speaker 4: I mean, we know that was why she was appointed.
Speaker 4: We have seen the effects of her idiocy because she
Speaker 4: was the court's affirmative action appointment with you know, but
Speaker 4: what she said is actually, in some ways even more
Speaker 4: appalling than the fact that she's even on the court.
Speaker 4: And that is that, well, if they don't like it,
Speaker 4: they can take their kids somewhere else. In other words,
Speaker 4: all of a sudden, Kteenji is in favor of school choice.
Speaker 1: Oh that's what I wanted to notice about it, because
Speaker 1: you know the Edgocrats, they hate school choice.
Speaker 2: They also hate homeschooling.
Speaker 1: And I think even more I think Jackson said your
Speaker 1: parents could homeschool their kids. Well, that's not going to
Speaker 1: go down well with Randy Winegarten. Would you say Randy
Speaker 1: Winegarten for us, because I'll bet you'll do it well.
Speaker 4: No, I don't call her Randy Winegarten. I call her
Speaker 4: the world's worst female impersonator.
Speaker 2: I should have guessed. I thought you were gonna get Randyer.
Speaker 1: So anyway, Yeah, No, I think that shows you how confused,
Speaker 1: to put it mildly, Justice Jackson.
Speaker 4: Is confused, is a nice way to put it. Steve,
Speaker 4: I know, well, I'm blazing more is more like it.
Speaker 1: I'm in a good mood, as I often am on
Speaker 1: a Friday evening, even though I haven't got my whiskey
Speaker 1: out yet because I'm running behind.
Speaker 4: Well, all right, because you're traveling, Steve, I do want
Speaker 4: to really quickly as our friend. I want to because
Speaker 4: I think it would hurt his feelings if we didn't
Speaker 4: at least bring it up. Our good friend, John, whom
Speaker 4: we missed terribly is was not able to join us
Speaker 4: today but because of scheduling conflicts. But he did have
Speaker 4: a piece in the New York Post. I posted it
Speaker 4: on x It's already gotten a lot of good feedback
Speaker 4: Steve about the Supreme Court agreeing to hear the birthright
Speaker 4: citizenship universal injunction appeal of the Supreme ecume of the
Speaker 4: Trump administration. The reason it's interesting he doesn't go into
Speaker 4: any of the facts of the case around birthright citizenship itself.
Speaker 4: John does not. What he does is explain in both constitutional, legal,
Speaker 4: and I would say even political terms to a great extent,
Speaker 4: why it is that judges should not federal district court
Speaker 4: judges should not be issuing these injunctions, these universal or
Speaker 4: national injunctions, that there's no basis for them in the Constitution.
Speaker 4: That and I will anticipate the end of it for everybody.
Speaker 4: But I do encourage maybe Steve can even link to
Speaker 4: it all notes. I encourage people to read it because
Speaker 4: it will explain things in it in a nice simple way.
Speaker 4: Because I get a lot of questions about this, Steve,
Speaker 4: why can they do this? How can they do this? Well,
Speaker 4: according to John, they can't. But it also explains what's
Speaker 4: going to be happening when the Court issues a decision
Speaker 4: about this in May, and how far it is the
Speaker 4: Court is likely to go. They're not likely necessarily to
Speaker 4: take on the birthright citizenship case on the merits of
Speaker 4: that particular question, but they are likely to take on
Speaker 4: the case of the universal injunction that stopped the Trumpet
Speaker 4: administration's enforcement of not recognizing birthright citizenship by not issuing passports,
Speaker 4: et cetera, across the whole the whole nation. And you know,
Speaker 4: if it's gotten out of hand, yes, absolutely gotten out
Speaker 4: of hand. We did have one more case. I should
Speaker 4: mention really quickly that you may or may not have
Speaker 4: the time to pay a lot of attention to Steve
Speaker 4: about the executive order mandating that that you have to
Speaker 4: in federal elections. You have to ascertain the whether or
Speaker 4: not a registrate registrant at a registrant is a citizen
Speaker 4: of the United States, and they actually got not only
Speaker 4: a lefty liberal federal court judge to issue an injunction,
Speaker 4: but also actually a Trumpet administration excuse me, a Trump
Speaker 4: appointee judge, and hers was entirely procedural. They want to
Speaker 4: mention that there's more than one person out there, arguing
Speaker 4: that this is a typical forty chess on Trump's part,
Speaker 4: because even though they expected this kind of thing. Of course,
Speaker 4: Democrats want illegals to vote, they want illegals to be
Speaker 4: counted in the census. We all understand that this puts
Speaker 4: the pressure back on Congress to do something. In Congress,
Speaker 4: this ability to do something about this is a little
Speaker 4: bit limited to by the fact that the Constitution still
Speaker 4: leaves voter requirements, voter all of the things that have
Speaker 4: to do with voting, even in federal elections up to
Speaker 4: the state legislatures to decide. But under the fifteenth Amendment,
Speaker 4: I think we've seen evidence that Congress can issue certain
Speaker 4: laws pursuant to the enforcement clause of the fifteenth Amendment,
Speaker 4: and maybe this is something that they can do there,
Speaker 4: certainly to keep citizens from non citizens from voting in
Speaker 4: elections seems to me to be within the purview of
Speaker 4: enforcing FIFE.
Speaker 1: But yeah, I mean it looks like I mean, even
Speaker 1: if the birth rights citizenship case and then the voting
Speaker 1: rights uh citizen case you mentioned, even if they're purely procedural,
Speaker 1: they then set up an enforcement action that will force
Speaker 1: the courts to have to take it up on the merits.
Speaker 2: And maybe that's next term.
Speaker 1: But you follow what I'm saying, right is, you know
Speaker 1: they have to say no, a judge couldn't issue an
Speaker 1: injunction against this, Uh, we can't, you know. And then
Speaker 1: the Trump administration actually refuses to issue citizenship to someone
Speaker 1: an illegal alien born here or born to illegal aliens here,
Speaker 1: and then that person sues and then they have to
Speaker 1: rule on the question.
Speaker 3: So you know, I don't know.
Speaker 2: That's unfortunately the way things go.
Speaker 4: Uh.
Speaker 2: I wish things.
Speaker 1: I wish things could go faster and let me do
Speaker 1: it this way. One thing that trump men is stration
Speaker 1: did late in the week was declare that they want
Speaker 1: to have a procedure in place to grant permits for
Speaker 1: the opening of new minds and mine processing and essentially
Speaker 1: refining industrial operations. Permits that would be granted within twenty.
Speaker 2: Eight days of initial application.
Speaker 4: Specifically for raw rare earth minerals.
Speaker 1: I'm not sure if it's rare. I think it's a
Speaker 1: lot of stuff rare earth minerals, oil and gas. I
Speaker 1: think it's that runs across the board. They're going to
Speaker 1: emphasize rare earth minerals. But the point is is that normally,
Speaker 1: you know, if you said twenty eight months, people would say, wow,
Speaker 1: that's optimistic. Twenty eight days is astounding, and I think
Speaker 1: I'm going to use that as our excuse to segue
Speaker 1: to my conversation. I did a few weeks back with
Speaker 1: my favorite energy guru, who is Robert Brice. And I'm
Speaker 1: sure many of our listeners may know of him or
Speaker 1: read his work or maybe even read his substack. But
Speaker 1: I always have fun talking with Robert, and he shovels
Speaker 1: out some good dirt on the left on our conversation.
Speaker 2: So let's break here.
Speaker 1: We'll talk to Robert for the little bit, and then
Speaker 1: we will come back at the end, you and I
Speaker 1: and do some of our usual ending for volities. Well, Robert,
Speaker 1: before we get onto the latest news and energy, I
Speaker 1: do want to do a bit of origin story because
Speaker 1: I'm not sure, just like it. And you have an
Speaker 1: interesting background sure, which I think is just fun. I
Speaker 1: mean I know bits and pieces of it. But born
Speaker 1: and raised in Oklahoma, that's right, But then college in Texas.
Speaker 3: But tell us a little bit about how you got
Speaker 3: into a journalism and then be energy. Sure.
Speaker 5: Well, Tulsa is my hometown, born and raised, long and
Speaker 5: deep roots in Oklahoma on my mother and my father's side.
Speaker 3: Proud to be from Oklahoma.
Speaker 5: You know, I thought about why I became a journalist,
Speaker 5: why I became a reporter, and a long time ago.
Speaker 5: I well, as a very brief bit of backstory, I
Speaker 5: always read the newspaper.
Speaker 3: When I was a kid. We took two in Tulsa.
Speaker 5: At that time when I was growing up, there were
Speaker 5: two newspapers. There was a morning paper in an afternoon paper.
Speaker 5: The tuls Tribune was the afternoon paper, and when the
Speaker 5: morning paper was the Tulsa World, And my folks took
Speaker 5: both of them. So I read the paper every day,
Speaker 5: and I always read Duonsbury every day, right, And I
Speaker 5: read the horoscope, and I always read the op eds,
Speaker 5: and just it's always interested in newspapers. I like the
Speaker 5: thingness of the paper right, the thingness of the thing,
Speaker 5: as I'd like to say. And then I edited my
Speaker 5: high school newspaper at Bishop Kelly High School in Tulsa,
Speaker 5: go commets. And then when I went to you know,
Speaker 5: finally settled at the University of Texas, where I eventually
Speaker 5: got my degree. I you know, I worked for the Day,
Speaker 5: wrote for the Daily Texan. But when I was in Austin,
Speaker 5: I'm still in Austin now forty years later, there was
Speaker 5: a woman there named Marian Winnick, and she had some
Speaker 5: sid something about writing, said, what you write about does it?
Speaker 3: You don't choose it, it chooses you.
Speaker 5: And there's I think that in thinking back on that,
Speaker 5: in some ways that's kind of true that I grew
Speaker 5: up around the energy business in Tulsa. My dad was
Speaker 5: in the insurance business, not the energy business, but he
Speaker 5: knew a lot of people who were in the energy business.
Speaker 5: And so and you know, I had a quail when
Speaker 5: I was a kid. I hunted in the oil fields.
Speaker 5: I knew what that was about, and so it was
Speaker 5: always from a young age I was always interested in
Speaker 5: it and interested in the scale of it and the
Speaker 5: size of it. And my dad's friends were working all
Speaker 5: over the world, and you know Iran and in Panama,
Speaker 5: and you know it was part of just being in that,
Speaker 5: just being around it, and so kind of had an
Speaker 5: intuitive feel for it, or just a proximity feel rather.
Speaker 5: And then once I started writing for the Chronicle, I
Speaker 5: was also freelancing and found that I could sell articles
Speaker 5: at that time. You could be a freelance writer at
Speaker 5: that time, and I could sell articles based on energy reporting.
Speaker 3: And so one thing led to another, and here I am.
Speaker 4: Right, so.
Speaker 1: Now let's see I want to get to your first book.
Speaker 3: But sure, well actually let's do that right now. So
Speaker 3: you're working for was it the Austin Chronicle? Was that it?
Speaker 3: Or well, yeah, somebody else? Right?
Speaker 5: So I wrote for the Austin after I finished writing
Speaker 5: at the Text and I graduated from UT Austin. And
Speaker 5: then I graduated and I got a job working for
Speaker 5: the Austin Chronicle. For get this, I would it was
Speaker 5: a bi weekly at tabloid, and you asked to get
Speaker 5: paid and they would measure your copy and we were
Speaker 5: paid a dollar a column inch.
Speaker 3: Wow.
Speaker 5: So the editor would get out the ruler, Lewis Black,
Speaker 5: I remember this clearly still to this day. He would
Speaker 5: get a metal ruler out and measure how many column
Speaker 5: inches you wrote, and he would write your check, and
Speaker 5: so I'd get a check for forty five dollars or
Speaker 5: sixty dollars or something like that.
Speaker 3: The columns were narrow well.
Speaker 5: And then later, you know, I got more formalized and
Speaker 5: got you know, a living wage there. And then I
Speaker 5: got hired by a technology magazine called Interactive Week in
Speaker 5: early two thousand and one at double the pay. I
Speaker 5: thought I was on easy Street. And that job lasted
Speaker 5: for about nine months. But while writing for them, I
Speaker 5: wrote about Enron and that led to writing pipe drains.
Speaker 3: Well, see, that's the thing is I think what you
Speaker 3: told me is the part of its fun is you.
Speaker 1: Got the con try to write the book before Rod imploded.
Speaker 3: That's right. So talk about great timing, right and yeah,
Speaker 3: and you were just be in the right place right time.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 5: I was in the Inron building in July of two
Speaker 5: thousand and one, and at that time, now we look
Speaker 5: back and we think about online business and the rest
Speaker 5: of it. Inron online was, for years, until the rise
Speaker 5: of Amazon, the biggest online medium or online marketplace ever created.
Speaker 5: They were transacting tens of billions of dollars online on
Speaker 5: Inron online.
Speaker 3: Now it was all you know, based on a very
Speaker 3: shaky foundation, as we learned later.
Speaker 5: But so I was in the Inron building talking to
Speaker 5: Ron people at Enron Broadband in the summer of two
Speaker 5: thousand and one and was told when I didn't told,
Speaker 5: I told them I was interviewing this guy. I vividly remembered.
Speaker 5: I said, you're selling broadband. I said, I don't understand
Speaker 5: what you're doing here. So he told me, and I said, okay,
Speaker 5: one more time.
Speaker 3: Just give me one way.
Speaker 5: I still did it, and the third time I said, look,
Speaker 5: you know, I'm an average or sub average intelligence. One
Speaker 5: more time here because I don't understand what you could.
Speaker 5: And the answer was, well, you're just too dumb. Yeah,
Speaker 5: he didn't say it exactly that way, but I'm too.
Speaker 3: Smart for you.
Speaker 5: You don't understand how complicated this is. You know, I've
Speaker 5: got other things to do. You can you can leave now.
Speaker 1: Well, I mean that's the way I feel about blockchain
Speaker 1: these days. I really don't understand how this works. People
Speaker 1: explain it, and I'd say, it's just like, could you
Speaker 1: explain that.
Speaker 5: Again, please, It's just it's just a ledger with yeah right, yeah, no,
Speaker 5: I'm I'm the bitcoined stuff.
Speaker 3: We're probably both too old for that world.
Speaker 1: But in any case, I mean so you by the way,
Speaker 1: I mean, I always heard later from some people who
Speaker 1: worked at Enron that some of that trading was, if
Speaker 1: not phony, it was trading with themselves to run the volume.
Speaker 1: So it was artificial and sure, and and then you know,
Speaker 1: some of the trading desks and floors were either empty
Speaker 1: or nobody was doing anything. It was all a Potempkin village.
Speaker 1: And I guess, to be slightly fair, they anticipated that
Speaker 1: this was going to boom and take off.
Speaker 3: Often. They were going to be you know, like what
Speaker 3: Nasdaq is for stock trading. Yeah, you know, that didn't happen.
Speaker 1: I mean, that's why they were from the Kyoto Protocol
Speaker 1: and all kinds of stupid things. They thought they were
Speaker 1: going to be the energy traders instead of energy producers.
Speaker 5: I guess, well, and they were fully in favor of
Speaker 5: carbon trading today, right, And that was of course. They
Speaker 5: wanted to trade everything, and that was what their expertise was.
Speaker 3: I think they were even going to trade weather futures.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, well they were, and you can do that today.
Speaker 5: I mean, there are derivatives on weather futures based on
Speaker 5: gas contracts, electricity contracts.
Speaker 3: So in Ron in many ways was ahead of its time.
Speaker 5: But I would also say that we're still living with
Speaker 5: many of the you know, the ghosts of Enron, and
Speaker 5: particularly in electricity markets, right because they were the ones
Speaker 5: who were the great advocates for this what Kenley called
Speaker 5: restructuring of the electricity markets. Well, it's interesting because now
Speaker 5: years later, when I was writing that book, I interviewed
Speaker 5: a guy named Jim wall Zel and he sent me
Speaker 5: an email just yesterday and I need to reply to it.
Speaker 5: But well, Zill worked at Houston Natural Gas and he
Speaker 5: was an older guy at that time. He's been its
Speaker 5: mid eighties now, I guess. But anyway, when we were talking,
Speaker 5: he had left Enron when ken Lay was hired, and
Speaker 5: he said, I've seen well.
Speaker 3: All I need to see. I'm out.
Speaker 5: But he told me at that time, he said, you know,
Speaker 5: and this was in the early two thousands, he said,
Speaker 5: I don't you know this.
Speaker 3: In fact, this was just after Ron failed.
Speaker 5: But Ron had been the leader in the promotion of
Speaker 5: the deregulation of electricity markets in Texas. And he said
Speaker 5: then he said, I don't think this is good for consumers.
Speaker 5: He said, you know, monopoly utilities, Yeah, they're not the
Speaker 5: perfect beast, but I don't see how the consumer is
Speaker 5: going to fare on this.
Speaker 3: This doesn't make any sense to me.
Speaker 5: And now here we are, twenty five years later, and
Speaker 5: we see all across the country these areas where you've
Speaker 5: had these deregulated markets. Consumers are getting screwed now again.
Speaker 5: Monopoly utilities are not necessarily the best way to make
Speaker 5: the world work, or the best way to make the
Speaker 5: grid work, but at least there's accountability. Yeah, and so
Speaker 5: now we're running I talked to my friend Jacob Williams
Speaker 5: at Florida Municipal Power Agency the other day and he
Speaker 5: said this. He said, look, this deregulated idea worked as
Speaker 5: long as there was excess capacity in the market, right,
Speaker 5: And now we're running out of excess capacity, and the
Speaker 5: ship's about to hit the fan and the consumer is
Speaker 5: going to get screwed again.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Well, were we here in California certainly know this?
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, well, are the early victims of it all
Speaker 3: started here?
Speaker 4: Right?
Speaker 5: And then they followed that same model in Britain, they
Speaker 5: followed the same model in Texas. And in Texas it's
Speaker 5: worked a little bit better because well, look it's a
Speaker 5: different state, right, we have our own grid, we have
Speaker 5: there's a lot of open space in West Texas where
Speaker 5: you can put solar and wind, and we have super
Speaker 5: cheap natural gas where you don't have any extra land
Speaker 5: here in California. It's beautiful here, obviously a lot of
Speaker 5: people here, but there's no extra land. And where there
Speaker 5: is some vacant land, people don't want wind turbines and
Speaker 5: solar panel right, and you're heavily you're completely dependent essentially
Speaker 5: on imported gas from other states.
Speaker 1: And yeah, in Texas was able to build transmission line
Speaker 1: that's right, just about any place else in the country
Speaker 1: for because it's Texas.
Speaker 3: Well.
Speaker 1: Now, I mean one last detail on that is I
Speaker 1: think you told me once is you know the news
Speaker 1: flashes Enron is collapsing, and what you got up when
Speaker 1: in the morning to drive down to headquarters to try
Speaker 1: and talk to people something?
Speaker 3: Oh? Sure, Well, so.
Speaker 5: By I was fired like in early October from my
Speaker 5: job an interactive week, and so I went fishing and
Speaker 5: with a friend of mine in South Texas and then
Speaker 5: we came back and I owe and still to this day.
Speaker 5: My friend Lou Debo's who was then the editor of
Speaker 5: The Text Observer, and he'd written several books.
Speaker 3: And I came back and listened to my phone machine.
Speaker 5: He'd left me a message and he said, Okay, you're
Speaker 5: the perfect guy to write the book on run. He said,
Speaker 5: I've connected you with my agent. The book title will
Speaker 5: be Pipe Dreams. My agent is expecting you. He'll connect
Speaker 5: you with public affairs. It'd be a great outlet for you.
Speaker 5: You need to get started on this. And that's exactly
Speaker 5: what happened, and that was the title we used. And
Speaker 5: my agent still to this day is Dan Green, who's
Speaker 5: been my agent the whole time. Not that I'm writing
Speaker 5: any more books, but I still call him my agent.
Speaker 5: But I was just incredibly lucky. You know, I'd been
Speaker 5: in the Enron building. I understood the kind of the mentality.
Speaker 5: I'd seen how these people think. And then I got
Speaker 5: the contract for the book before the bankruptcy. Effectively, I
Speaker 5: was a verbal contract. But on December third, two thousand
Speaker 5: and one, I left Austin at four in the morning,
Speaker 5: three in the morning and drove to Houston. And so
Speaker 5: that Monday morning I was standing outside the Enron building
Speaker 5: talking to Enron employees as they were leaving, because they
Speaker 5: were carrying their shit out in boxes, and I was saying.
Speaker 3: Would you talk to me? Would you talk to me?
Speaker 3: And so I met a few people that day.
Speaker 5: In fact, you know Rob Bradley, I think he was
Speaker 5: one of the people I met that day, right, And
Speaker 5: a few others. No, most of them told me to
Speaker 5: go fuck myself, you know, and understood why right, you know,
Speaker 5: and carrying my stuff out and you want me to
Speaker 5: talk to you and I'm.
Speaker 3: Not so, you know. Yeah, but there were a few.
Speaker 5: But it was also the experience of just being there,
Speaker 5: right and seeing how dejected these people were, and how
Speaker 5: this was the darling company, you know, the most admired
Speaker 5: company in America, right, and for seven years in a
Speaker 5: row something like that, and went from the you know,
Speaker 5: the top of the heap to the you know, bankruptcy.
Speaker 3: And right in a matter of months.
Speaker 1: Well, I'm sure you've seen all the quotes that Enron
Speaker 1: was the favorite energy company of the leading environmentalists back
Speaker 1: in the late night.
Speaker 5: Oh sure, Joe Ram Joe was like, oh, this is
Speaker 5: a different They're showing us how everything most energy company
Speaker 5: anywhere and ken Lay we love ken Lay, did we
Speaker 5: mentioned we love ken Lay? And Lay understood what the
Speaker 5: game was, right, that he saw the way to game
Speaker 5: the system and use government to his advantage.
Speaker 1: This political capitalist it was, Yeah, what is Rob Bradley
Speaker 1: called it the political capitalist?
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, political capitalism. No.
Speaker 1: I know, Rob was pretty high up in the Public
Speaker 1: Affairs office and he used to try to persuade him
Speaker 1: out of their madness on climate and other things and
Speaker 1: didn't get you know, didn't get anywhere with it.
Speaker 3: But he was a shocked as anybody.
Speaker 4: You know.
Speaker 1: He had his entire rowin kN Inn run Stock Yeah,
Speaker 1: and you know, anyway.
Speaker 5: Like a lot of them did, right, Yeah, and you know,
Speaker 5: and that was one of the tragedies of the whole thing,
Speaker 5: was that the people and one of my I actually
Speaker 5: opened my book Pipe Dreams. Now it's hard to believe
Speaker 5: it's twenty out, twenty three years ago a woman I
Speaker 5: wish I went now so many interviews in between, but
Speaker 5: I opened with a vignette of her walking around at
Speaker 5: the Inn ron Field what.
Speaker 3: Was then in run Field, when they had a job
Speaker 3: fair and.
Speaker 5: She had bought Azurix stock right, which was the water
Speaker 5: company that they'd spun off, and she had almost all
Speaker 5: of her savings in ron stock as well.
Speaker 3: So you know, the people in the building.
Speaker 5: Who didn't have big fat salaries, who were just getting by,
Speaker 5: you know, they bought the they bought the lie as well,
Speaker 5: and so they were the ones who really got hurt.
Speaker 3: But you know, it was for all of those things
Speaker 3: that are negative, and there are many, and I.
Speaker 5: Can you know, we can talk about all the marked
Speaker 5: and market accounting, which is still kind of polluting accounting statements.
Speaker 3: But they were very I mean, they were a lot
Speaker 3: of smart people there.
Speaker 5: And they were all super aggressive, and they all had
Speaker 5: but they were innovative and almost too innovative.
Speaker 3: Yeah, one last question about they weren't.
Speaker 5: Too innovative when it came to the financials, right, the
Speaker 5: off balance sheet vehicles and the rest of it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, well, let's uh one more question about sort of
Speaker 1: you in that era. I mean, I think I always
Speaker 1: had the impression of what little you mentioned about you know,
Speaker 1: when you were younger, that you were I'll put it
Speaker 1: this way, you were a Texas Democrat, which my joke
Speaker 1: now is a reactionary you know, that's the little joke.
Speaker 3: But now, I mean Texas Democrats were.
Speaker 1: Always sort of, you know, moderately liberal, what populist a
Speaker 1: little bit, yeah, in a good sense of that.
Speaker 3: And uh, I mean where did you sort of place
Speaker 3: yourself then?
Speaker 1: I mean I think you told me once you were
Speaker 1: never a fan of the Bush family, which these days
Speaker 1: that's me too.
Speaker 3: But yeah, well, you know, it was part of being
Speaker 3: in Austin at that time, right.
Speaker 5: Austin was that, you know, still is very democratic city, right,
Speaker 5: you know, heavily democratic, as Kirk Watson calls it, the
Speaker 5: blueberry and the tomato soup in.
Speaker 3: Texas, right in the middle of the bowl, right.
Speaker 5: But I wrote for an alternative weekly, and there were
Speaker 5: no Republicans with the writing for the Alternative Weekly.
Speaker 3: We were all you know, it was all liberals, right,
Speaker 3: and you know, oh, you.
Speaker 5: Know a Republican, Oh fuck off, you know, we had
Speaker 5: nothing to do, nothing to do with them, right, right.
Speaker 3: But it was also the beginning.
Speaker 5: I was fortunate in a lot of ways in that
Speaker 5: started writing about politics with the Chronicle in the late eighties.
Speaker 5: And so the nineteen ninety election, of course, was the
Speaker 5: watershed right where you had Carl Rove worked for Rick Perry,
Speaker 5: You had them, they you know, they threw out Jim
Speaker 5: high Tower, you know.
Speaker 3: And Richard's lost.
Speaker 5: I think that was it that before it was ninety four,
Speaker 5: it was later, right, but you started to see the
Speaker 5: turn in Texas politics.
Speaker 3: Now, of course it was led by Bill.
Speaker 5: Clements in what was at nineteen eighty four where he
Speaker 5: became the first Republican governor in Texas since reconstruction and
Speaker 5: or nineteen eighty six, and who was his campaign advisor, Row, Right,
Speaker 5: So I was able to have a very you know,
Speaker 5: interesting view on a lot of that, just being a
Speaker 5: frankly a young and dumb reporter at that time, but
Speaker 5: being able to see kind of the change in the
Speaker 5: state from what was solidly democratic for years to one
Speaker 5: that was, you know, overwhelmingly Republican. We haven't had a
Speaker 5: statewide Democrat elected in Texas since I don't know, Gary,
Speaker 5: Gary Morrow maybe, And that's yeah.
Speaker 3: I mean years ago. You know, the Democratic Party of
Speaker 3: those days was still the Democratic.
Speaker 1: Party of Robert Strauss, right, and now it's Beto o'rouric
Speaker 1: and yeah, you know, abortion Barbie whatever that woman's name was, right,
Speaker 1: this is just not going to work on.
Speaker 3: Yeah, what was her name? From Fort Worth? Yeah?
Speaker 5: Right, Yeah, and I interviewed Strauss about that, and Strauss
Speaker 5: and you know, I've been lucky too. I interviewed Bill Clements,
Speaker 5: you know, you know, for my books and different things.
Speaker 5: And so I've just been incredibly fortunate, you know, throughout
Speaker 5: my career to be kind of in that city, which
Speaker 5: is obviously a very dynamic city still. But then Bush
Speaker 5: ran for president, and of course you're not going to
Speaker 5: make money, you know, saying Bush is great, right, you know,
Speaker 5: so you know, Blue Debos wrote a book with Molly Ivans.
Speaker 5: You know, I didn't write a book about Bush, although
Speaker 5: I did write a book in two thousand and four
Speaker 5: called Crony's Texas America Superstate, right, and talking about how
Speaker 5: the rise of Texas, which is largely the rise of
Speaker 5: the oil and gas business, and the support that the
Speaker 5: oil and gas business had.
Speaker 3: For key politicians.
Speaker 5: So, you know, still to this day, Lyndon Johnson's one
Speaker 5: of my political heroes, I mean, you know, and he
Speaker 5: was a Democrat and was you know, I think about
Speaker 5: if he was in the Senate today, he put up
Speaker 5: with the you know, the president just running rough shot
Speaker 5: over the Congress. I don't think so, right, But that
Speaker 5: was a different era. But Johnson still is a hero
Speaker 5: to me because of his you know, he was a
Speaker 5: deeply flawed politician, right, and brutal and cruel in many ways,
Speaker 5: but you know, and Vietnam was his great sin, but
Speaker 5: the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Acts where it
Speaker 5: was his great redemption.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, I think about him a lot as
Speaker 1: the Senate leader. I think had volume of Caro's multi
Speaker 1: volume biography of Johnson the Senate is one of the
Speaker 1: great classics, not just a history but a political science,
Speaker 1: uh huh, because it showed you know, anyway, Master of
Speaker 1: the Senate, Master the Senate. That's a book I sometimes
Speaker 1: assigned the students depending on a class.
Speaker 5: But yeah, you know, it's one I've read most, most
Speaker 5: of the two first two books I've read.
Speaker 3: I've got it. I should read it, yes, But Caro
Speaker 3: is a master obviously.
Speaker 5: And also I'm fascinated by the relationship between Johnson and
Speaker 5: Rayburn because Rayburn was another hero of mine, because he
Speaker 5: was born on a cotton farm in Bottom, Texas and
Speaker 5: then rose to become Speaker of the House, the longest
Speaker 5: tenured speaker fifty years, fifty two years. Mister Sam, mister Sam. Right,
Speaker 5: but he was one of the great proponents of rural electrification. Right, so,
Speaker 5: the Rural Electrification Act of nineteen thirty five and then
Speaker 5: the or no, the Public Utility Holding Company Act of
Speaker 5: nineteen thirty five and the Rural Electrification Act of nineteen
Speaker 5: thirty six.
Speaker 3: It's either.
Speaker 5: Well, Rayburn's name on both of those, right, he was
Speaker 5: the co sponsor of both of those bills. So, and
Speaker 5: it was because he grew up in rural poverty and
Speaker 5: knew the importance of electricity to people that were in
Speaker 5: his district.
Speaker 3: Right. Well, now, all right, let's get onto energy.
Speaker 1: The path of least resistance for a journalist would have
Speaker 1: been to go along with all the trendy, fatty stuff
Speaker 1: that everybody wants, like your buddy Avery Loven Samory Love,
Speaker 1: We'll get them.
Speaker 3: That's the clothes.
Speaker 1: So the question that is, when did you first start
Speaker 1: perceiving or thinking or maybe you did all along that
Speaker 1: an awful lot of what we think we know about
Speaker 1: energy is just crap, and a lot of the conventional
Speaker 1: wisdom is wrong.
Speaker 3: When did you first start seeing that? What were some
Speaker 3: of your early stories or insights about that?
Speaker 5: Yeah, well, there was a key essay that Jesse Osabel
Speaker 5: wrote in two thousand and seven. I think it was
Speaker 5: called nuclear is Green and other heresies or something like
Speaker 5: that in that essay.
Speaker 3: And it was just an essay.
Speaker 5: He I say, just an essay, but it was an
Speaker 5: extended essay, and he really made me understand the concept
Speaker 5: of power density. And that really did change the trajectory
Speaker 5: of my career because once I understood that basic metric
Speaker 5: and physics, I understood, oh well, everything in the way
Speaker 5: we've built down to our energy and power systems is
Speaker 5: related to the power density issue.
Speaker 1: Right, And say what that is for listeners who don't,
Speaker 1: I mean, I know what you mean, I think, but sure,
Speaker 1: so energy and power are not the same things, right, Right.
Speaker 5: Energy is the ability to do work. Power is the
Speaker 5: rate at which work gets done. Say it often, we
Speaker 5: don't care. We don't give a damn about energy. What
Speaker 5: we want is power. Energy is worthless unless we could
Speaker 5: make it flow. So power is a measure of energy flow.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 5: So a gallon of gasoline is energy, but five gallons
Speaker 5: per minute or five gallons per second is power. Right,
Speaker 5: So watts are power, what hours are energy? Okay, So
Speaker 5: I don't want to dive too far into that, but nevertheless,
Speaker 5: they're not the same things. The key is to make
Speaker 5: systems that and the greenest systems are the ones that
Speaker 5: produce the most power with the smallest footprints.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 3: So that's one reason why I'm so pro nuclear.
Speaker 5: Right, the power density of nuclear is two thousand wats
Speaker 5: per square meter or more. Power density of wind energy
Speaker 5: is one wat per square meter. I don't care where
Speaker 5: you put it. Power density of solar is ten wats
Speaker 5: per square meter, I don't care where you put it.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 5: Power density of biofuels, ethanol, cellulosic, whatever, is measured in
Speaker 5: the fractions of a watt per square meter.
Speaker 3: So that means you need lots of land.
Speaker 5: If you need lots of land, you need lots of steel,
Speaker 5: let's copper, lots of concrete, lots of other things inputs
Speaker 5: to counteract the low power density. So Jesse made me
Speaker 5: understand that, and I've spent now years and nearly twenty
Speaker 5: years since I read that essay thinking about and trying
Speaker 5: to help the public understand it, because once you grasp that,
Speaker 5: it makes you understand why so much of this alt
Speaker 5: energy is just a fraud. You know that's only propped
Speaker 5: up by subsidies. And then so that's the intellectual part
Speaker 5: of it. But then so in two thousand and nine,
Speaker 5: I was contacted by a horse trainer in King City,
Speaker 5: Missouri named Charlie Porter, who had had wind turbines built
Speaker 5: near his home and his he you know, he and
Speaker 5: I looked at my up vice research into a fairly
Speaker 5: well and he was what he was telling me was
Speaker 5: right that once he'd had these turbines built near his home,
Speaker 5: his life was ruined, and that he had to move
Speaker 5: out of his house because of the noise.
Speaker 3: Wow.
Speaker 5: And so it made me an, oh, here's the human
Speaker 5: impact of so called green energy that everyone is saying, Oh,
Speaker 5: this is so great wind, we love wind, you know,
Speaker 5: blah blah blah, blah blah. And here was a guy
Speaker 5: who trained quarter horses. He was master at it, and
Speaker 5: he was suing amerin to you know, make them, make
Speaker 5: him whole. And he later got a settlement in that
Speaker 5: sense is not you know, won't talk about it. But
Speaker 5: that introduced me to these land use conflicts, which has
Speaker 5: been the other one of the other defining say defining
Speaker 5: bits of research in my career, the one that I'm
Speaker 5: very proud of, renewable rejection database.
Speaker 3: Now the Global Renewable Rejection.
Speaker 5: Database, you know, pointing out how many places around the
Speaker 5: world people are fighting back against these projects.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. The wind thing, it's a scandal.
Speaker 3: It's a scandal. A scandal.
Speaker 5: The first order, Steve, the way that this industry has
Speaker 5: lied repeatedly about their impacts on property values, on the
Speaker 5: noise impacts, and how many people they have hurt, how
Speaker 5: many people have moved out of their homes, how many
Speaker 5: lawsuits they've settled quietly next era among them to try
Speaker 5: and prevent people from talking about the damage that has
Speaker 5: been done to their homes. So it's you know, so
Speaker 5: much of this has been covered up, and you know,
Speaker 5: the big media outlets just won't cover it. They won't
Speaker 5: cover it fairly, and I find that just to be reprehensible.
Speaker 1: Well, the recent story that you brought to my attention
Speaker 1: was was the Oklahoma Indian tribe that won a lawsuit
Speaker 1: forcing a company to remove the windmills they've built. That's right,
Speaker 1: And you say you're looking around, and you say, I
Speaker 1: can't find anybody reporting us in the mainstream media.
Speaker 3: There still hasn't been any.
Speaker 5: So here's the or a Just briefly, so I mentioned
Speaker 5: I'm at deep roots in Oklahoma. My great uncle Ernie
Speaker 5: Rapp was a member of the Osage tribe. He was
Speaker 5: born in Fairfax, Oklahoma, in nineteen oh nine, so he
Speaker 5: had a front row seat on the reign of terror
Speaker 5: in the nineteen twenties. He saw it firsthand and didn't
Speaker 5: talk about it very much. My cousin Nora owns his
Speaker 5: inherited his Osage head right. So that period in American
Speaker 5: history is a stain on American history of the first order, right.
Speaker 5: And Martin Scorsese's film The Killers of the Flower Moon
Speaker 5: and David Grant's book, I mean truly remarkable. Grand's book
Speaker 5: is must read if you haven't done it, read Killers
Speaker 5: of the Flower Moon.
Speaker 2: Okay.
Speaker 5: So that was in the twenties where you had outsiders,
Speaker 5: whites coming into Osage County, Oklahoma and killing Osage tribal
Speaker 5: members to get their oil wealth, right, the subterranean value
Speaker 5: which was assured to the tribe by Chief James Bigheart
Speaker 5: and the Osage Allotment Act of nineteen oh six.
Speaker 3: But there was a replay of.
Speaker 5: That, or reprise of that when in now the Italian
Speaker 5: Company comes into Osage County in about twenty eleven and
Speaker 5: they they start planning a wind project. The Bureau of
Speaker 5: Indian Affairs tells them, you need to get a permit
Speaker 5: from the tribe. Because the tribe owns their sovereign tribe,
Speaker 5: they own all the subsurface. They don't just own the
Speaker 5: oil and gasoling on all the rocks, all the minerals
Speaker 5: that are six inches below the surface. And they'll ignored them.
Speaker 5: In twenty fourteen, and now starts to build the wind
Speaker 5: project called Osage Wind. In September of twenty fourteen, the
Speaker 5: Bureau of Indian Affairs sent them a letter saying cease
Speaker 5: and desists. You need to get a permit from the tribe.
Speaker 5: And they'll not only ignored the letter, they started working
Speaker 5: at night to speed up the work.
Speaker 3: Oh God.
Speaker 5: And they built eighty four wind turbine one hundred and
Speaker 5: fifty megawats of this wind project in Osage County, just
Speaker 5: north of north of Fairfax, in between Fairfax and Pahusca.
Speaker 5: And it's still operating today. But the tribe has been
Speaker 5: in litigation within l now in the longest running legal
Speaker 5: battle over wind energy in American history.
Speaker 3: There's no second place.
Speaker 5: And in December of twenty twenty three, they won in
Speaker 5: federal court in Tulsa, and the judge sided with the tribe.
Speaker 5: In last December, just now two months ago, the same
Speaker 5: judge ordered that n L take down all of the
Speaker 5: turbines by December first of this year. Wow, it's unprecedented,
Speaker 5: never happened before. And that NL has now appealed, of.
Speaker 3: Course, because it's gonna cost them three hundred million dollars
Speaker 3: and they lost.
Speaker 5: They lost the damage's judgment as well as several tens
Speaker 5: of millions of dollars. But it's a landmark case, a
Speaker 5: landmark case for sovereignty in American Indian history and not
Speaker 5: Native American sovereignty. A landmark case in terms of wind energy,
Speaker 5: a landmark case in terms of damages, a landmark case
Speaker 5: in terms of alternative energy, a huge black eye for
Speaker 5: the wind business, enormous black guy for NL, which if
Speaker 5: you read their documents, they're all about ESG and environmental
Speaker 5: partnering with the community and the rest of it. And
Speaker 5: they screwed the tribe every chance they got. And so
Speaker 5: it's personal to me being from Oklahoma. It's personal to
Speaker 5: me because it's my family, right, my great uncle who
Speaker 5: I love very much, my cousin, and I'm a member
Speaker 5: of the Cherokee tribe, and so to me it's something
Speaker 5: that when they start taking those turbes down, I'm gonna
Speaker 5: be there and my sibling, my sibling, they're going to
Speaker 5: be there, and my cousin Nora is going to be there,
Speaker 5: and my friends in Fairfax are going to be there,
Speaker 5: and we're going to be hooping and hollering because it's
Speaker 5: going to be a great, great.
Speaker 3: Day, wonderful. Yeah.
Speaker 5: So uh Now, rather than get off into a long
Speaker 5: story there, but it's but it's a remarkable one. And
Speaker 5: just to get to the other point, there not a
Speaker 5: single word in the New York Times, not a single
Speaker 5: article in the Washington Post, NPR, Bloomberg, Wall Street Journal.
Speaker 3: They won't cover it. Yeah, it doesn't fit the right
Speaker 3: it doesn't. It's not the right narrative. And these are
Speaker 3: the these are media. I'll say, oh, we need to
Speaker 3: cover the heart nine of America more.
Speaker 5: Yeah, well, yes, right, yeah, of course they'll send reporters
Speaker 5: all over the world to write about new coal mines
Speaker 5: or you know, rare elements. But here here's a case
Speaker 5: where very clear wrongdoing by a foreign corporation on Native
Speaker 5: Americans in Oklahoma, and they won't cover right.
Speaker 1: So rather than get off too much into the weeds
Speaker 1: and energy, which you know I could do for a
Speaker 1: long time, will tell listeners to get your books.
Speaker 3: The question of powers, the.
Speaker 1: Ask question of power a gusher of lies, an early
Speaker 1: one that still holds up really well.
Speaker 3: I think, I think so right? And power hungry, power hungry?
Speaker 1: Right, I've got that somewhere. I can't find it right
Speaker 1: now anyway. And then, of course you can find your
Speaker 1: documentaries on YouTube.
Speaker 3: That's right.
Speaker 5: Our twenty nineteen documentary Juice, How Electricity Explains the World,
Speaker 5: and then a year ago we released Juice Power Politics
Speaker 5: in the Grid, which is the first film is a
Speaker 5: feature link documentary. The second project is five parts, five
Speaker 5: part docuseriies, each about twenty minutes, and the third episode
Speaker 5: in that docuseries, which you can find at Juice series
Speaker 5: dot com, is on.
Speaker 3: The osh oh Okay, I think I saw that, don't okay?
Speaker 1: Last general questions may lead to some follow ups. There's
Speaker 1: stiff competition for this. But who's the greatest energy energy
Speaker 1: Charlottan of our time?
Speaker 3: And why is it? Amory Lovins? Mean you can name
Speaker 3: a rose gallery of these people, right, But it's remarkable.
Speaker 5: I'm just finishing a piece on Rocky Mountain Institute in
Speaker 5: their federal contracts, which is just amazing that this outfit
Speaker 5: would have any federal contracts.
Speaker 3: It's like, Oh, you're going to know what's next.
Speaker 5: Green Peace is going to get federal contracts, you know,
Speaker 5: or Sierra Club is going to get federal contracts.
Speaker 3: This is the equivalent of that. Levens I think deserves
Speaker 3: a special place.
Speaker 5: In the Wall of Shame in terms of energy policy
Speaker 5: in America because he has been wrong for fifty years,
Speaker 5: and yet he's been lionized by all these different outfits
Speaker 5: and given all these honorary doctorates and all these different prizes,
Speaker 5: and how smart and.
Speaker 3: Gred he has done.
Speaker 5: And all this time he's been promoting the two legged
Speaker 5: stool of efficiency and renewables. Well, a two legged stool
Speaker 5: doesn't work, right. But he's an anti anti nuclear, you know, insisting, Oh,
Speaker 5: electricity consumption is going to go down. Oh, we don't
Speaker 5: need hydrocarbons, we can run all the world on biofuels.
Speaker 5: I mean, I just looked up some testimony gave Senate
Speaker 5: in twenty six, two thousand and six, saying Oh, yeah,
Speaker 5: the cellulosic ethanol is going to be so great.
Speaker 3: There's no cellulosic ethnol. It was all bullshit.
Speaker 5: It was a bullshit from the beginning. But there's this
Speaker 5: romanticism around this vision that he's promoted. And give him credit,
Speaker 5: you know, despite being wrong all this time, he still
Speaker 5: has achieved all this fame. And now Rocky Mountain Institute,
Speaker 5: their latest budget is one hundred and thirty nine million
Speaker 5: dollars thirty one hundred and thirty nine million dollars a year.
Speaker 5: Their budget has gone up fourteen fold since twenty twelve. Wow,
Speaker 5: I know, I know of no other NGO like that,
Speaker 5: a climate INNGO. It's done the same thing. And what
Speaker 5: are they promoting this this claim, Oh, we're going to
Speaker 5: reach that zero, We're going to cut CO two emissions
Speaker 5: by half by twenty thirty.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean it's a radical agenda.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and he bent, I mean he's he's been a
Speaker 1: bipartisan bamboozler, you know.
Speaker 3: So George W.
Speaker 1: Bush went in baked for cellulosic ethanol and set up
Speaker 1: a big pilot project. And I remember Nuke Gingrich about
Speaker 1: twenty years ago, falling under his spell and coming in
Speaker 1: to see me.
Speaker 3: That's when I was next door to and bulls wove
Speaker 3: those guys s David Freeman, right, you know, and.
Speaker 1: He's coming in saying, I'm Amory loves has convinced me
Speaker 1: we can be all hydrogen in ten.
Speaker 3: Years, And I go, oh, where do I start now?
Speaker 1: Right?
Speaker 5: But you know, it's it's fun to make fun of
Speaker 5: Lovin's and you know, and he's I don't know how
Speaker 5: old he'd be now, but but I think that his
Speaker 5: success or traction in the marketplace is just yeah, we
Speaker 5: can blame it on him, and we could say, ah,
Speaker 5: he's a bamboozler and you know, run him down, and
Speaker 5: you know, I'm not opposed to that, but what is
Speaker 5: he Why has he been so successful? I think it's,
Speaker 5: you know, frankly, is that the public and policymakers are
Speaker 5: just scientifically illiterate and enumerate.
Speaker 3: And so if you start with somebody who.
Speaker 5: Doesn't know what they're talking about, doesn't have any basic
Speaker 5: physics and basic understanding of energy and the systems and
Speaker 5: the scale of the systems and how they work, then
Speaker 5: they'll believe anything. And so the fact that he or
Speaker 5: other people like him would gain traction in some ways
Speaker 5: isn't surprising, and because you know, and who are they
Speaker 5: talking to policymakers and policymakers, well, who are they? Overwhelmingly
Speaker 5: their lawyers, and why are they lawyers? Because they couldn't
Speaker 5: do the math to get an engineering school or med school. Right, Yeah,
Speaker 5: So you know, you get someone like him that tells
Speaker 5: a good story, and it's a story, and that's what
Speaker 5: drives a lot of you know, narrative is important, and so.
Speaker 3: What do you get? What do you expect? Yeah, to
Speaker 3: have happened.
Speaker 1: So I believe I have to check this out, but
Speaker 1: I think that famous article that made him a star
Speaker 1: in nineteen seventies, soft Paths of Energy whatever, it's nineteen
Speaker 1: seventy six.
Speaker 3: Seventy six, That's what I was going to say.
Speaker 1: It was nineteen seventy in Foreign Affairs, a prestigious journal
Speaker 1: at the time and maybe still, I don't know, And
Speaker 1: it caught the moment, right. It was one of those
Speaker 1: It was sort of like Fukuyama's end of history when
Speaker 1: the Cold War ends, right, and.
Speaker 5: Everybody the first oil shock in nineteen seventy three, right,
Speaker 5: and Carter is president and this is kind of this idea. Oh,
Speaker 5: we're running out of oil, right, and Carter said that
Speaker 5: very thing. Right, We're running out and we're running out
Speaker 5: of natural gas, right. And you know which thinking about that,
Speaker 5: now here we are, fifty years later, running out of
Speaker 5: gas and the US is a natural gas superpower.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you know, I've published on.
Speaker 5: This, but the US now produces more gas than Canada, Norway,
Speaker 5: Cutter and Iran combined. Yeah, we're producing We're now the
Speaker 5: biggest supplier of LNG into Europe. Without US L and G,
Speaker 5: Europe would be in a terrible spot, that's right, right.
Speaker 3: So this idea that.
Speaker 5: We're running out, I mean, we talked about it a
Speaker 5: little earlier today about this enthusianism and kind of the
Speaker 5: you know, Paulerlick and the rest of it, and this ingenuity.
Speaker 5: It's still flabbergasting if you think about it, the ingenuity
Speaker 5: of the oil and gas industry and how the US wants,
Speaker 5: partly because of private ownership of mental rights like the
Speaker 5: Osage tribe. Right, this ingenuity and that has driven this
Speaker 5: industry to be able to out produce every other country
Speaker 5: in the world, even though we don't have the best
Speaker 5: necessarily the best natural gas resource, right, but we have
Speaker 5: the best natural gas technology.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah, Oh that's all fun.
Speaker 1: So people can find you on Robert Bryce dot substack
Speaker 1: dot com dot com.
Speaker 3: Right, yeah, okay, well that's all I need to know.
Speaker 3: Yeah it is. Did you say Robert Bryce dot substack
Speaker 3: dot com. I hope you said right.
Speaker 1: I'll repeat the narrations on the show notes and all
Speaker 1: the rest of that, but this has been fun.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And I'll just say one quick. I know you're
Speaker 3: on substack as well.
Speaker 5: And you know, I've been a journalist for a long
Speaker 5: time now, you know, going on forty years, and I
Speaker 5: love substack. Yeah, and I love the freedom that it
Speaker 5: gives me. And you know, for the first time in
Speaker 5: my career, I can really write what I want, when
Speaker 5: I want, how I want, with the charts that I want,
Speaker 5: with the graphics that I want, at the length that
Speaker 5: I want.
Speaker 3: I just tell you, I just freaking love it.
Speaker 5: I mean, it's just and to have instant feedback and
Speaker 5: I don't have to go through an editor and I
Speaker 5: can in my only editors. I joke about it, but
Speaker 5: my wife Lauren, who's you know, really good and that
Speaker 5: she reads it with a with a.
Speaker 3: I would say a.
Speaker 5: Commoner's eye or a commoner's ear but she's you know,
Speaker 5: she's not married to it. I mean, like she tells me,
Speaker 5: I wrote a piece. She says, you got to calm
Speaker 5: this down, right, to tone it down, And I trust
Speaker 5: her right And Grammarly I use. I don't boost a lot.
Speaker 5: I don't get paid by them. I pay for Grammarly.
Speaker 5: It's an AI program. I use it religiously and because
Speaker 5: that makes sure I don't make stupid mistakes. And I've
Speaker 5: got you know, I don't have my participles dangling infinities,
Speaker 5: splitting my infinitives or whatever it is. But anyway, I
Speaker 5: just I've been so happy to be on substack, and
Speaker 5: I have not been tempted, as we talked about earlier,
Speaker 5: to write for any other platforms.
Speaker 3: And I've written for all of them, I mean all
Speaker 3: of them, and I don't, you know, good luck to them,
Speaker 3: but don't I don't desire to really be on any
Speaker 3: of them anymore.
Speaker 1: Well, thanks much, Robert, and we'll keep up with you
Speaker 1: on substack and elsewhere.
Speaker 3: Awesome, Thanks Steve.
Speaker 1: All right, So there is Robert Bryce, who sadly I
Speaker 1: had to say, is not a whiskey drinker.
Speaker 2: He's a beer drinker, but we will forgive him for that.
Speaker 4: And I'm a beer drinker too, Steve, Well.
Speaker 2: I'm not like I used to be.
Speaker 1: I'm really yeah, not as much as when it's really
Speaker 1: hot out, I will have a beer. But so what
Speaker 1: have you got from our friends at the Babylon b
Speaker 1: this week? Who must be working overtime these days. I
Speaker 1: don't know how they can keep up.
Speaker 4: So too that I didn't get to really quickly help
Speaker 4: the show that My favorite meme, uh meme trend of
Speaker 4: the week was the jd Vance Who's Who's jd Van's
Speaker 4: going to visit next? Who do you want jd Vance
Speaker 4: to visit next?
Speaker 3: You know?
Speaker 4: And all of the things that that came out of
Speaker 4: that that was absolutely wonderful. The other thing is that
Speaker 4: the today it was sort of trending across social media
Speaker 4: because Amy Kloviachar and Tina Smith, you know, two brain
Speaker 4: dead idiots on the left who came out and were
Speaker 4: screaming about the fact that because Trump and and Elon
Speaker 4: Musk didn't like or maybe it was Cash Battel, Trump
Speaker 4: and e and Cash Battel didn't like the rulings of
Speaker 4: certain federal judges. They had them arrested. Of course, the
Speaker 4: real point of the matter is, let's see, one of
Speaker 4: them was harboring a trendy Agua thirteen whatever it was
Speaker 4: in their home. Anyway, you know, they were breaking the law,
Speaker 4: they were arrested for.
Speaker 1: It, and the I think they were I think they
Speaker 1: were state court judges, not federal judges.
Speaker 4: I think, yeah, New Mexico. Yeah, the New Mexico judge. Yeah,
Speaker 4: I forget. We don't have time to discuss all the details,
Speaker 4: but it is rich to see people screaming about, you know,
Speaker 4: the rule of law and political persecutions and using the
Speaker 4: courts and law enforcement against your political enemies, and what
Speaker 4: kind of a country have we become? Shot up? But
Speaker 4: which brings me to my first one. While being questioned
Speaker 4: by authorities following her arrest, FBI agents discovered seventeen more
Speaker 4: illegal aliens hiding in the back of County Da Da
Speaker 4: Da Da with the one in Wisconsin that they arrested. Yeah,
Speaker 4: federal judge travels back in time to overturn Trump's birth
Speaker 4: A little fun for you, Steve. Money can't buy happiness,
Speaker 4: this guy who never bought a taco, Not really, but
Speaker 4: I still thought it was kind of funny. Yeah, uh,
Speaker 4: false alarm smoke coming from Vatican. Just Cardinal Steve accidentally
Speaker 4: burning toast again. Actually you should say Cardinal Steve accidentally
Speaker 4: burning popovers again. Oh well, yeah, I don't forget Steve.
Speaker 3: I know you don't.
Speaker 2: You're like an elephant that way.
Speaker 4: Okay, you know I don't. Coach is a couple more
Speaker 4: Catholic church to consider electing pope? Who's a Catholic this time?
Speaker 2: What's so true to that?
Speaker 4: Yes, Dali Lama quietly canceled scheduled meeting with JD. Vance
Speaker 4: And this was said to me by a listener, a
Speaker 4: good friend of ours. It's got a picture of Amy
Speaker 4: Coney Barrett, Alena Kagan, Son King g and the dread
Speaker 4: coward Roberts, and it says, for first time in history,
Speaker 4: Supreme Court has five female justices.
Speaker 1: By the way, on the JD Vance meme, I think
Speaker 1: my favorite was the one with Pope Francis leaning over
Speaker 1: and saying I have information that will lead to the
Speaker 1: arrest of Hillary Clinton.
Speaker 2: That one will never die. That's as good as the
Speaker 2: Epstein didn't kill himself stuff.
Speaker 4: And thank God for social media, right, that's right. Last
Speaker 4: one on that subject, Fauci suggests Democrats maintain six foot
Speaker 4: social distance from JD. Vance.
Speaker 2: Oh, I had not heard that one.
Speaker 1: That one is really good, and they're going to really
Speaker 1: If they didn't fear Vance already, they will now. Well,
Speaker 1: all right, So, as John would say, always drink your
Speaker 1: whiskey meat, and as a I would rhapsodize about our
Speaker 1: modest little podcast, the Three Whiskey Happy Hour, ticking backwards
Speaker 1: in the mind. Raise your glass to Reason's tower, where
Speaker 1: the fools and profits dine.
Speaker 2: I don't have to think about that one. But we'll
Speaker 2: be back next week with all three of us, we hope.
Speaker 3: And for now, oh cheers.
Speaker 2: Ricochet joined the conversation