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March 11, 2022 - Doug Collins Podcast
47:46
Competitive Enterprise Institute's Myron Ebell
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You wanna listen to a podcast?
By who?
Georgia GOP Congressman Doug Collins.
How is it?
The greatest thing I have ever heard in my whole life.
I could not believe my ears.
In this house, wherever the rules are disregarded, chaos and mob rule.
It has been said today, where is bravery?
I'll tell you where bravery is found and courage is found.
It's found in this minority who has lived through the last year of nothing but rules being broken, people being put down, questions not being answered, and this majority say, be damned with anything else.
We're going to impeach and do whatever we want to do.
Why?
Because we won an election.
I guarantee you, one day you'll be back in the minority and it ain't gonna be that fun.
Folks, you're listening today, and we're getting into a topic that I want to really dive into.
We did the podcast today, I told you it was a part one, talking about, frankly, the lies and the political deception coming out of the Biden administration on the rise of gas prices and the issue of energy in general.
And for the president the other day to simply say, it's out of my hands, can't do anything.
I showed you what was happening.
They're trying to blame everything on Putin.
The realization though is this Russian oil ban has a lot more to it.
And frankly, it goes into the very argument that Biden and his party are talking about when it comes to green energy, climate change and other things.
Today, I brought in, we've got somebody here on the podcast that is going to answer some of those questions.
Maribel is here.
To talk about not only the Russian oil ban and really the fragments of it.
And like I told you yesterday, it's not just saying we're not going to take oil.
It's like, what are you going to do to replace it?
And the Biden administration would rather go to dictators and countries who hate us instead of investing here.
But it's a bigger picture and we're going to have a great conversation today.
Myron, thanks for being a part of the show today.
Thanks for having me, Doug.
Well, let's start off here.
The hot topic right now is the leadership from behind of the Biden administration has finally made it to the fact that they say, we're not going to take Russian oil.
We're not going to buy Russian oil right now.
We'd already seen that happening from Shell, BP, Exxon, and others.
Tell our listeners what that really means, and then we'll expand from there, because I want them to understand really the effects of this right now and how the Biden administration is using that.
I think there are pluses and minuses.
The fact is that Russia is the world's largest exporter of oil and gas and it produces about seven, seven and a half million barrels a day.
Some of that goes by pipeline to China, but 2.5 million barrels has been out on the market and shipped by tankers.
So removing those 2.5 million barrels from the market, is that what's happening?
Or is the U.S. just saying it's not going to buy oil from a tanker that has Russian oil in it, but we're going to buy oil That would otherwise be going someplace else but is now being replaced by Russian oil.
So there's questions about this ban.
If everybody bans Russian oil then that will remove a lot of oil from the world market and it will have to be replaced or we're going to see even higher oil prices.
There are a lot of things to try to game out here about how this is going to work because there is some spare capacity in the world oil production system.
Some of it's in the United States, some of it's in Saudi Arabia, some of it's in the United Arab Emirates.
So President Biden, instead of talking to the You know, the American oil industry is saying, hey guys, I made some mistakes.
Let's sit down and see what you can do to increase production.
Instead, he called Saudi Arabia, who wouldn't take his call because they're angry about the sell-out in the Iran deal.
And other things.
So, you know, we'll have to figure out which angle you want to pursue here at first.
You know, I think, and I appreciate that because there's several angles.
And that's what I said, you know, sort of laid this out there.
We tackle hard issues here on the podcast because I want people to understand.
I don't want them to simply go out and hear, you know, the first bumper sticker answer they hear and say, oh, that's what I believe.
And that's why I have you on.
So let's take this in bit pieces here for a second.
You made an interesting point about Russian oil exports.
The one thing we do know is that Russia is an energy-based economy.
That's where they get most of their money.
That's where Putin's war machine, everything else.
That's how he does it.
Us pulling out of this affects him some, more symbolic than probably most, but isn't the real issue now coming into Germany, UK, others in Europe, if they join this, would that not be a bigger impact on his finances, even though he has seemingly an out with China right now?
Yes, it would, and I think Britain has already joined.
Yes.
I think the problem is Germany gets most of its natural gas from Russia, and Russia could cut that off.
And if they do that before the end of the winter, there could be some very cold people in Germany.
So I don't think the European Union has said that they've banned...
They certainly haven't banned Russian gas, but Russia gets more revenue from oil than it does from gas.
The other thing is, you said that Russia is an oil-based economy.
It's not only oil and gas, it's also mining.
They're one of the major world suppliers for a number of metals.
Yeah, and I may be wrong on this, but I'm learning as well.
Nickel and some other things is a very Russian issue as well from that mineral perspective, correct?
That's right, and the use of nickel is going up because it's essential for fabricating electric batteries for EVs for electric vehicles.
The London Metals Exchange had to stop trading in nickel because the price went up to $100,000 a ton.
That was because some people had invested short on nickel and they had to cover their Well, in a sense you should bring that up because,
and we brought up Nickel and everybody on these minerals, and I'm glad you did, because really one of the things that As we get into our discussion on this climate policy, climate change, the move toward incentivizing electric vehicles and everything else, is this really, I think, an interesting misunderstanding of how these vehicles come to play.
If you listen to some in Congress, especially from the left, it's just they're the answer to everything from basically whooping cough to the common cold is the electric vehicle.
But there's a lot of interesting issues that China, Russia, others play in that, that you move too quickly, you're going to cause an even bigger shortage on top of the problem that you're having with oil and gas.
Yes.
The claim of the electric vehicle promoters and many people in the Biden administration is, well, this oil crisis means that we just need to move more quickly to electric vehicles.
Well, you know, we became energy independent under President Trump.
The United States, because of the shale revolution, And the deregulatory actions of the Trump administration became the world's largest producer of oil and gas.
We became energy independent for the first time since the late 1950s.
And the sky was the limit.
I mean, production could have kept going up for a long time, but the actions of the Biden administration Put a screeching halt to that.
We were energy independent and what the promoters of electric vehicles are saying, we need to get off oil and become dependent upon China primarily for the critical minerals used in producing electric batteries.
China not only controls production, Of several of these, but they control the processing of most of them.
For example, most of the cobalt comes from the Congo in Africa, but China does all the processing.
So they really control the whole future of electric vehicles in China, and we have little to say about it.
Isn't that interesting, Myron?
I mean, we talk about this and we're talking about dependence on our oil and dependence on our gas and the places we're going in this first part of this equation of this Russian oil ban.
And then you have the left who is pushing a radical, in many ways, agenda of immediate change in our society, not always backed up by science and not always backed up by the facts.
The fact that now you're pushing us from...
And maybe you would agree with this analogy.
We're sort of pushing ourselves away from the OPEX of the world into the arms of China again.
This is a problem that we keep running back into a little bit.
Yes, I think it's extremely foolish.
Now, of course, you know, and a lot of people know, that we have a lot of these minerals in the United States.
The United States and Alaska, especially Alaska and the West, are heavily mineralized.
But it's become almost impossible to open a big new mining project in the United States And in fact, The Biden administration is opposing the permitting of several current projects.
So when people say, well, we can just mine it ourselves, well, we're going to have to change our rules of permitting and we're going to have to wait because even a...
Even if things work out well, it takes five to seven years to get a major mining project in production.
In the United States, it takes 15 to 30, which is why very few people attempt it.
Well, and I think you brought up another point.
I brought this up before.
And before we get to the bad choices, I think that the Biden administration is looking...
You know, look, and that is this simple fact that there are things, it's one thing to say you're not going to take the Russian oil.
I get it.
You know, we're in that position.
There could be a way that we reshuffle the geopolitical deck here and maybe push Russia to the side if you had enough buy-in from the rest of the world.
The problem was, and this is two-fold, and I want to hit on both of this.
The Biden administration, instead of looking to what you said, talking with our energy sectors, talking and saying, what can we do?
If I can go to the American people and say, hey, for a short term here, it's going to hurt your pocketbook.
But I guarantee you, I'm investing in American companies, American jobs, to make sure that we live through this and come out stronger on the other end.
Is it just become such a doctrine among liberal, especially the Democratic Party right now, that this climate change doctrine is so dominant that they have trouble even fathoming the realities of where we are in energy consumption?
Yes, I think that's true.
And of course, if the Biden administration wanted to change course, they would...
They would have to eat a lot of crow because from day one, the day President Biden was inaugurated, January 20th, 2021, every single thing he's done on energy has been designed to constrict and limit American oil and gas and coal production.
So what's the first thing he did on day one?
He got back from the inauguration parade and he signed an order getting us back into the Paris Climate Treaty.
He then suspended all leasing on federal lands and offshore.
And, you know, most of the West is federally owned, and then most of the offshore areas are federal.
So that took a huge amount of new production offline.
And we could go down the line here.
Even today, for last week, a judge threw out the Trump Gulf of Mexico oil and gas leases, a very large tract in the Gulf of Mexico that they leased near the end of the Trump administration through an auction.
The oil companies pay.
They don't get this free.
And a judge threw it out because he said the Trump Department of the Interior didn't go through all of the hoops.
The Biden administration announced last week that they will not challenge that in court.
So those leases are dead.
And, you know, every single thing that they've done, I mean, there's a very long list, and I'm sure you're familiar with most of it.
Well, let me jump into that, because right now there is offshore leases that were supposed to be, many of them from a bigger perspective, supposed to be renewed, I think it's this June, that five-year lease plan.
That looks like the Biden administration is going to let that lapse as well.
Would that be true?
Yeah, well, I think they're required to do a five-year plan, but the plan doesn't have to have very much in it.
So they can say, well, we're going to end this, you know.
In 2017, Congress enacted a law that said the executive branch of the Department of the Interior must open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge To oil leasing.
And they did that.
The Trump administration had the lease auction in December of 2020. And the Biden administration is trying to slow walk those.
They're trying to get them suspended.
And there's supposed to be a second auction.
And they're saying, well, we're going to delay that.
So the biggest possible chunk of oil deposits in Alaska is not being developed.
And, you know, here's the point about that is the Trans-Alaska Pipeline has a capacity of about 2 million barrels a day, and right now it's under, I think, 500,000 barrels a day.
So any new production that you can bring online from the North Slope Will be a huge benefit, and it will keep that pipeline running.
On the other side of Prudhoe Bay, to the west, the northwest corner of Alaska, you've got the National Petroleum Reserve.
Now, I don't know why there should be a debate about producing oil in the National Petroleum Reserve, but the environmental and preservationist groups have for decades blocked every attempt.
Well, Conoco's got one that's very close to completion that would supply 160,000 barrels a day.
The Biden administration should be helping them get that going.
No, they're trying to stop it.
They're still trying to stop it.
So, everything they do is designed to lower American oil and gas production.
But Doug, having said that, American oil and gas production is going to come up.
There's no doubt about that.
The price is so big that anybody who's got any ability to bring more oil online is going to be doing that.
Exactly.
Wow, back to the fundamentals of market economy.
I mean, you know, it's just like, wow, shocking, and it worked, you know?
As we look at...
Well, let's bring this up.
I remember when the Trans-Alaska Pipeline first came out, I was younger, and I remember the big deal that was back in the 70s and all when that really actually started.
But it is interesting, and I was part of Congress who actually passed that law.
So that was one of the big factors that we did in the Tax Cut and Job Act that actually came through.
I was very proud of that because, again, But let's also, I'm going to give us a second here because I may have listeners out there saying, you're just denying, you know, that we climate or you're saying, you keep saying exploration, but you're really destroying.
Explain to the listener how small of an area, number one, this area that we're talking about, I've actually compared to this entire Arctic wildlife area and really what happens there so that this is not this just, as I've heard environmentalists say, the raping of virgin land.
Yes, these claims.
The environmental pressure groups try to pick issues that are as far away as possible because you can tell the most lies about them because very few people ever make it up to the north slope of Alaska.
I think the number of visitors in ANWR, the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, is something like under 2,000 a year.
There are Eskimo native corporations there.
They have villages in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
It's 19 million acres or so.
That's not as big as Georgia but it's about the size of South Carolina.
The Arctic Plain where the oil production would be is about one and a half million acres.
It isn't where the All the wildlife is.
It isn't where the beautiful Brooks Range of Mountains is.
It's on the coast.
In the summer, it's a mosquito-infested swamp, and in the winter, it's a tundra-frozen, very cold, very dark place.
The amount of drilling would take up...
You know, there are different estimates, but it would take up a few hundred acres out of 1.5 million And then you would have, because now with modern oil drilling, you drill down and then you drill horizontally.
So you don't need many oil pads.
There would be some roads, but there are already roads in the Arctic Plain.
Where the Eskimos live.
So, you know, the people who live there are, of course, totally in favor of it.
I mean, they own part of the resource, so they would benefit from it, so naturally they support it.
But, you know, we've seen oil production at Prudhoe Bay since the 70s.
All the predicted environmental disasters have failed to come true.
And the technology used now is a lot better than the technology that they started out with in the 1970s and 80s.
So the whole thing is just one lie after another about ANWR. Well, and that's what we're continuing on this, because I started this series yesterday and my first podcast was the political spin.
You know, the famous Democratic line of Rahm Emanuel was, never let a crisis go to waste.
And I think this is where they're building on that right now.
And you see it with Jen Psaki saying, you know, attacking the oil companies.
The first thing out of their mouth is, well, they're making so much money, why don't they just lower the gas prices?
Then you had the 9,000 leases.
If you're comfortable there, because I've talked to several, and we mentioned this yesterday, just because there are 9,000 leases, which is amazing that some of these energy companies still have, it doesn't mean, number one, that there's something to be found there, and number two, it doesn't mean that if they even found it, they could get it to market based on the red tape that's out there.
Isn't that right?
Yes, well, the leasing issue is very easy to confuse, and I'm not sure I'm going to bring too much clarity to it.
But the fact is that the federal government owns subsurface rights, and those rights are for hard rock minerals and for oil and gas.
And they own it not only under federal land, but they own it under a lot of private land as well.
So, and it's a long story how that happened, but it did happen.
So, the oil and gas industry has developed through the Leasing Act, they have developed over the years a system whereby they will bid at an auction for leases, they will then drill an exploration well, and they then may find out that, oh, well, we need more leases.
We can't proceed with this unless the government agrees to expand the area because we want to drill.
We've discovered that we want to drill down and then we want to drill two miles this way instead of a mile that way.
So the economics of drilling when you can't get new leases and there's a moratorium on it A whole lot of exploration and production is not being developed because of this moratorium on leasing.
And then secondly, once you've paid your money and you've gotten the lease, you've won the lease through an auction, You then can drill an exploration well or wells, but you have to get permits to do that.
Well, they're slow walking the permitting process.
In Texas, it takes two days to get a permit on private land.
In New Mexico, it can take 100 or 200 days to get a permit on federal land.
The whole thing is a mess.
Well, and I use liberal in a very open term, but as far as some Democrats, they seem to understand very well that government is beyond Congress and it's founded a lot in the executive right now.
Congress, and I was part of that, abdicated our responsibility.
So you have these bureaucratic agencies who may or may not like something.
Many of them have been there for a lifetime.
And if they don't like something, they just slow walk it.
We see it at ATF, we see it at Energy, we see it at Interior, and we've got to get a better handle.
I'm looking for the first...
I think President Trump started that process really well.
I'm looking to see that come back in, that we examine these agencies for what they're stopping from happening.
I don't think most people understand that it's unelected, quote, bureaucrats who are withholding a lot of this.
Yeah, and as you correctly took credit, it's you and other members of Congress that are responsible for that over a very long period of time.
I mean, I'm just teasing you, but you're part of the problem here, right?
And every member of Congress is.
No, Congress is very sloppy about delegating authority.
Instead of trying to solve a problem, they'll say, oh, let's give this agency the authority to figure it out.
And then the authority does what Congress doesn't want and does something that the American people don't want.
And then the member of Congress or the senator says, oh, that's not my fault.
That's the agency's fault.
We told them to fix it.
And this game is played over and over.
And the left uses it.
They always try to make legislation as broad as possible and the delegation of authority to the agency as broad as possible.
I don't know how to solve this.
You didn't solve it when you were in Congress.
It's a huge problem.
It means you actually have to work.
I've got a lot of friends up there.
We're pulled.
The whole process has become out of whack.
For those of us who dug into a lot of issues, it takes a lot of time and work.
I don't necessarily complain that people don't understand it, but they've got to realize that it's Congress that's enlightening and causing this problem coming forward.
I think the big problem we have from this perspective is, and I make this analogy all the time, everybody made fun of Nancy Pelosi when she said we have to pass this bill to see what's in it.
And I've told you the reality is she was right.
I mean, because the bill had so much open-ended to be determined, to be determined, that she couldn't have said what it was about.
Let's move this conversation a little bit because we took the fact that this Russian oil ban At this point, not overly affecting Putin in a way that's going to cause immediate, you know, cessation of the war crimes in Ukraine.
For us, though, with a president and an administration who's in denial about the reason oil and gas prices are going up, especially from the American energy consumption, What bothered me, Myron, and I want your take on this, it bothered me, you mentioned it earlier, that they call Saudi Arabia, Saudi Arabia won't return their calls.
Finally, they're not returning their calls, but they did say they would up production this morning.
But look at who we went to.
Iran and Venezuela.
I mean, the mainstream media is not reporting this.
That's why we have podcasts.
That's why we have this thing.
Would you have ever imagined an American presidency...
Basically go on a hat-in-hand tour to Iran and to Venezuela to buff up their bad energy policy.
Doug, I think it's disgraceful.
The president has put himself and his administration into a box.
And it shows how desperate they are that they would actually ask Maduro in Venezuela or the imams and mullahs in Iran to give us some oil.
I mean, it's disgraceful.
And I don't think Venezuela can.
I think they've destroyed the infrastructure to such an extent that we would have to go in and make huge investments to get the oil going again.
And they have the world's largest reserves of very heavy crude.
So, you know, look, if you go back to what he's done to the American industry, what would it take to climb down and say, okay, we're in a new situation and the policies that I started out with are going to have to be modified.
And I think, you know, I think what you should go do, what the administration should do is to go to the oil and gas industry and say, look, okay, we know high prices are going to increase production.
You guys are trying to find every barrel you can and get it to market.
That's great.
But what else can we do to remove some of the obstacles that we've created?
We all have lists and there are letters floating around and op-eds and experts talking on TV. Everybody thinks they know what needs to be done, but it's obviously the oil and gas industry and the pipeline industry and the refinery industry.
They know what needs to be done, and they should be consulted and say, here, what are the five things that we could do right now that would get some more oil and gas into the system?
And this is a much bigger problem than high gas prices.
We've got massive inflation.
Part of that is directly caused by gas prices, but a lot of it is indirect, isn't it?
If you get anything that's transported It's going to be more expensive now because the cost of transport for any company like FedEx or Amazon is going up.
So we're building a lot of inflation into the system.
And the other thing, and I think you know a lot about this, is agriculture is very energy intensive.
It is.
And, you know, all those tractors run on diesel, or some of them run on, the smaller ones still run on gasoline.
The price of that has gone through the roof, but the other thing is that fertilizer, the main fertilizers are made from natural gas, particularly ammonia.
Ammonia is one of the top two or three fertilizers, and You know, Russia is a major supplier of the gas that's used to create that ammonia.
So the price of fertilizer is going to go through the roof.
So right now, I think we're looking at food shortages in the coming growing season.
And I think potentially we're looking at some areas of the world that are going to be starving because of the increase in the cost of energy for energy intensive agriculture and for fertilizer.
And this is something that they ought to be thinking about right now because it's going to hit later in the year and there's going to be some very angry and in places some very hungry people.
Yeah, and you know, that actually applies planning and it's a great point that you brought up here.
I don't think it's being talked about enough is that energy is not just about driving around or flying a plane.
It affects everything we have.
Look, I have a diesel truck and it was $5 a gallon yesterday.
I mean, it forces me to say, okay, you know, I've got other vehicles to travel.
Will I travel in them or will I go on that trip?
And then if I was still back at our farm, I mean, you know, we have those issues that are brought up.
You brought up something, though, that I want to dive into just a little bit, and that is going to the oil and gas industry, going into and talking to them.
But also, I think there needs to be an all-in energy approach.
I think President Trump talked about this.
He was not a fan of wind turbines, but for the most part, the solar, the wind, the water, The hydroelectric, the nuclear, are all from a perspective of mine is use them.
They're part of the system.
Bring those online along with our oil and gas and they have that place in the marketplace.
But there are two items in that that basically the federal government and these environmental groups have basically shut down.
That is the building of a new refinery and the building of a new nuclear facility.
Help me understand here.
A lot of liberals, especially the Paris Climate Accords and everything else, Paris itself is a nuclear-driven country.
I mean, I don't understand the just outright animosity toward nuclear in this country and the fact that when we get into Gulf Coast hurricane season, the reason gas prices go up is you've only got a set number of refineries and we're not building new refineries.
How do we overcome that?
Yes, I'd add to that.
You can't build a new coal-fired plant in this country.
And the United States has the world's largest coal reserves.
So we are basically shutting down one of our major resources and saying it has no value, which is just stupid.
Nuclear reactors, you know, this is so complicated and I follow this, but I'm not an expert and I'll just make some tentative remarks.
One is that Americans and people around the world are still concerned about the safety issue.
We had Chernobyl in 1986, and then we had Fukushima more recently because of the tsunami in Japan.
The other problem is that the costs have gotten completely out of control.
There's this plant, the Vodal plant in Georgia, Which they keep delaying the startup.
It was supposed to start last year, then it was this year, now it's next year.
I've gotten completely out of touch with how far the costs have gone beyond what the estimates were.
But it's three or four times as much as they thought it would cost.
Yeah, and let me jump in right there because I know that facility very well.
I was part of it when it first started and the cost estimates we got.
I was in the Georgia legislature at the time.
And the problem that is developed is almost the vast majority of those extra costs have either come through delays due to federal government, red tape, or other issues that have delayed this from a compliance standpoint.
I mean, it's no wonder that the costs are going up.
Yeah, and the regulators are ultra-cautious because of the safety concern, I think.
I just throw this out, and I think people in the nuclear industry have said this.
We need to develop smaller reactors, these so-called modular reactors, Instead of building one big reactor, you could build four right next to each other.
And we need to have a cookie cutter design.
We can't keep designing a new...
It would be like designing a new car every time somebody wanted a car.
Let's design one type, perfect it, and then just build them over and over again and get the costs down.
But that's a long-term...
You know, Bill Gates has this plan to build a modular reactor at the Kemmerer site in Wyoming.
And, you know, it's going to take until the end of the decade.
And that's just kind of a test one.
So this is a very long-term solution to our energy problems.
Well, and it's been something we've known about, though, for years.
And after, you know, Three Mile Island and others, we just sort of, you know, went away from it.
But again, it is always just ironic to me that how many times liberal members that I had and friends that I had, they're talking about, oh, Europe's this and Europe's that, the green.
But yet they're dependent on something that you won't even consider.
So it makes it tough.
Let's switch gears here for a sec, because I know you've done a lot of work on climate and basically some of the...
You know, missteps and theories that have been propagated among Americans in the sense that, you know, it's not all about man.
It's not all about what we've done.
There's things that we can do.
But at the end of the day, it does seem to me That the story perpetrated upon Americans is a misleading one in the sense that if you listen to the environmental groups and others, you would think that America was the absolutely worst environmental polluter, the dirtiest country in the world, the worst water, and the truth is it's just not there.
The Paris Climate Accords.
Explain to our listener, you know, because it's been back and forth.
President Trump got us out of it.
Obama put us in it.
Trump got us out of it.
Now Biden's trying to get us back in it.
Explain why that is a problem for the everyday person and also, I believe, doesn't do what they claim it to do.
Well, it's an international treaty.
It's not an agreement.
It's a treaty.
It's the Paris Climate Treaty.
Everywhere else in the world ratified it.
Every government in the world ratified it according to their procedures for treaties.
But the United States has this little extra hump that you have to get over, which is That the Senate has to ratify it by, what is it, 67 votes.
Two-thirds of the Senate has to vote to ratify a treaty.
So there was never going to be two-thirds of the Senate that would ratify the Kyoto Protocol in 1997 or the Paris Climate Treaty.
So Clinton never submitted Kyoto.
And Bush then said he wasn't going to submit Kyoto.
And with Paris, what Obama did in 2009, it was Copenhagen.
And Copenhagen was such a disaster that Obama said, well, we won't have, look, let's not have a treaty.
Let's just call it something else and we will get around the Senate.
So that's the first problem.
And I think that's a huge problem because it means that the country is not committed to it.
The Congress has not said, let's do the Paris Climate Treaty.
It's just, it's a personal promise of the president.
So I don't think, you know, it has much effect.
And I don't think...
You know, President Biden says, we're going to do this, but what's his authority?
Congress hasn't given him any authority to do this.
So, I think, I spent some time on this, but I think it's an important point to understand that what's at stake here is really the ability of the Senate and the Congress to make the laws and not the President.
Exactly.
So, what's at stake in the climate battle?
Well, the claim is that climate change, it constitutes An existential threat or an existential crisis.
That is a crisis, a threat to our very existence or the Earth's very existence.
Well, of course, this is ridiculous.
Climate change causes some problems.
It causes some benefits.
The climate is changing.
Human beings have something to do with that.
Mostly it's from burning coal, oil and natural gas.
The world gets 80% of its energy from coal, oil and natural gas.
The United States gets almost 80% from coal, oil and natural gas after 30 years of climate policies and subsidies for windmills and solar panels.
We still get 80%.
So, what is climate change?
What is the extent of it?
Well, you know, it's a long-term something that we ought to pay attention to.
I don't even want to say it's a long-term problem.
It might pose challenges.
So far, though, all the claims of more this and more that and less this and less that have not been substantiated.
You go back to the 1980s and 90s and you had claims about how much sea level rise there was going to be, and we've had just a tiny fraction of what was predicted.
You go back and hear about the world food system will be under stress.
World food production goes up every year.
We could go down the list.
Storms, hurricanes, tornadoes, droughts, floods.
There is no trend.
Roger Pilkey Jr. noted that last year around 6,200 people died from weather disasters globally, which is the lowest number in recorded history.
So, you know, all the claims of the climate doomsters and the climate industrial complex have proven not to be true.
We need to get off this crisis.
We need to say it's one problem among many others.
I think when you look at the invasion of Ukraine, you see for the Ukrainian people what a real existential threat is.
Right.
Have you ever noticed, and one of the things I hadn't thought about bringing this up until just now, it is amazing to me, has somebody told John Kerry that there's actually a war in Ukraine?
I mean, because every time you talk about it, he says, oh, this is, you know, this is putting our climate change agenda behind.
This is, that's like...
Mr. K, get off your cell board here and actually understand that there are people being killed in the Ukraine, and you're worried about it putting a delay on your climate change agenda?
I mean, that's a problem.
But going back, I can remember, you know, being a little bit older, I remember in the 70s, it was the hole in the ozone, so to speak, and it was going to be global cooling.
And it's just so many of these things.
It's almost like, and I hate to use the focus here, but it is sort of an issue.
It's like determining the weather.
If you get it right one day, you're great.
If you don't get it right, nobody cares.
And this just seems like what's happening with climate change.
Nobody is fact-checking where Miami is supposed to be starting to be submerged by now if you listen to them in the 80s.
It's not.
Yeah.
Well, I think for you in the southeast, you have a problem which is called subsidence.
And Florida, in I don't know how many hundreds of years or thousands of years, but a lot more of Florida is going to be underwater.
It's not because of sea level rise, it's because the ground is sinking.
And why is the ground sinking?
It's because of isostatic rebound from the last ice age.
Canada and the northern part of the United States had several miles of ice on top of them, and that, you know, Canada went down.
Canada sank, got lower, and the southeast and the Gulf got higher.
Well, Canada is still rebounding from the last ice age, and that is pushing Florida and the Gulf Coast and the southeast Atlantic coast down.
So, yeah, that's inevitable.
There's not much we can do about that.
It's called tectonic plates.
Our continent is a tectonic plate that's floating on essentially a liquid.
You said earlier that the United States is not really the big bad guy in this.
If you have a minute...
The United States was by far the world's largest emitter of carbon dioxide from burning coal, oil and natural gas in 1990 and in 2000. In 2005. But now China has quickly overtaken the United States.
China emits more CO2 than the United States and the European Union combined.
And on current trends, they will soon emit more CO2 than the US, the EU, Japan, Russia, and Canada combined.
So that's because they're producing all the heavy industrial goods now.
We don't do that anymore.
And that's also a reminder for our audience that China is not a signatory to the Paris Climate Accords or anything else, and leaving them off leaves it at a very unlevel...
Doug, you're factually incorrect and factually correct.
China is a signatory.
They just haven't undertaken to do anything.
They have signed the treaty.
They have ratified it according to whatever the Communist Party does.
But they have said, our missions are going to keep going up because we're a developing country.
Yeah, we'll sign it, but we don't care.
Well, that was about like when President Obama touted the fact that they had signed this big climate agreement with China that would last until 2030. When the reality was, is in the agreement, China would agree to start doing things in 2030 because that was the end of their next cycle of coal-fired facilities.
It's like, okay, that really wasn't our thing.
So as we look at this, sort of wrapping this up, I think one of the things for people to understand is just banning Russian oil is not going to bring back $2.50 gas or a dollar gas.
In fact, it's actually going to exasperate the problem.
And if the Biden administration doesn't, they're going to bad act.
It's like they're trying all the wrong answers before they hopefully come back to the right one, which is investing and encouraging our oil industry and gas industry here.
That's the better long-term solution, correct?
Yeah.
Yeah, they just need to let it loose.
They need to get rid of the financial regulations that they're trying to put on banks and investors not to invest in oil and gas.
They need to get rid of some of these regs and suspensions.
They just need to say, you guys, take it from here.
We're going to get off your backs.
Yep.
Well, that's the way to look at it.
Folks, the disinformation continues.
That's why we have this podcast.
I talked about the political spin of it yesterday and how they're doing it.
Now we got into some more facts and then just this political spin that is just not reality.
When you look at it, it's, you know, building straw men.
To try and tear it down and to get a willing mainstream media who won't dig into this even further.
And Myron, thanks for being on the show today.
We may come back at another time and talk more about the implications globally of the climate change agenda and how it's affecting other things.
But I think getting it dug in right now on the events, I'm glad that you were able to help clarify that.
Thanks for being on the show today.
Thanks for having me, Doug.
You do a great job.
Appreciate it.
Thanks, Myron.
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