All Episodes
Previous Next
Jan. 9, 2025 - The David Knight Show
28:41
INTERVIEW How Do "Green" Regulations INCREASE Energy Use (and Costs)
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Welcome back.
Joining us now is Todd Myers.
We've talked to Todd before.
He's with a think tank, a policy institute in Washington State.
He's vice president for research at the Washington Policy Center, and this is in Washington State.
Thank you for joining us, sir.
Yeah, it's always nice to chat with you.
Great to have you on.
I saw your press release about what is happening in Washington State.
With CO2 emissions, tell us a little bit about what is happening there in terms of their emissions actually going up, and I don't think that everything is melting there in Washington yet, is it?
It's actually snowing outside my window right now, so...
Even though the CO2 emissions went up.
So tell us what's happening in Washington, Washington State, with their measuring of emissions.
Ten-year period, I guess, a nine-year period, 2012 to 2021. So, for those not in Washington State are probably wondering, why do I care about Washington State's CO2 emissions?
And the answer is, is that Washington and the West Coast has seen itself as a leader on climate change.
You know, say, oh, here are the policies that we need to implement to reduce the risk from CO2 emissions in climate change.
Our governor, Governor Inslee, actually ran for president, albeit briefly, in 2019 on the platform of addressing climate change.
And his whole argument was that he was going to bring the policies that we've had in Washington State to the federal level to fight climate change.
And we constantly call ourselves a leader.
So across the country, these are the kinds of policies that are in Washington State that, you know, many, particularly on the left, want to implement.
And what is notable is that they simply have failed to achieve their goal.
A lot of focus is on the cost of the CO2 policies and climate change and things like that.
But the simple fact is they don't work.
And so Washington state this week released CO2 data through 2021.
And so when you look at 2012, which was just before Governor Inslee took office through 2021, the ninth year of his administration, CO2 emissions actually increased 5% over that period of time.
And that's after COVID.
So, you know, considering that even COVID couldn't cause the emissions to go down, it's pretty remarkable.
Wow.
There at the same time, the United States CO2 emissions went down.
And so the message for people who aren't in Washington state is these policies simply don't work.
And if you care about CO2 emissions, if you care about the risk from climate change.
Don't do what Washington State has done.
Look for more innovative ways that put people, not politicians, in charge.
Yeah, and when we look at all this stuff in terms of CO2, we've got the Paris Climate Accord, which is hanging over everybody's head.
China is putting in two coal power plants a week.
And supposedly, it's not a problem if this stuff comes from China, but the same CO2, if it's emitted in the United States or in Europe or other places like that, oh, it's going to kill us all.
To me, that is the key thing about this, and it's kind of interesting that even in some of the places where they have scrupulously tried to reduce CO2, it's actually gone up, and it hasn't been a catastrophe either, has it?
Yeah, and I think that the challenge is that the exaggeration and sort of dishonesty has made it so that people simply write off climate change as an issue.
There have been so much exaggeration about the impact, about the harm and that sort of thing that people get very tired of it.
Yeah, we do know that CO2 does trap heat to some extent and there is some risk, but the problem is the exaggeration makes people sort of roll their eyes.
And then when you see the policies...
That cost a lot, raise energy prices, make things more expensive, and then don't work.
The natural reaction of people is to say, this whole thing is a farce, this whole thing is about ideology.
And, you know, it's hard to disagree in a lot of cases because, you know, even Al Gore, when he won the Nobel Prize for his work on climate change, said that climate change is an excuse to do things we should be doing anyway, right?
To implement our ideology.
And that's what you see in Washington State.
But I think that for those on the center right, like myself, we do need to recognize that there are things that we're doing to impact ecosystems, to wildlife and things like that.
And if you look, and what I always point out to people is, look at a map.
Look at where nature is and look at where conservative voters are.
They are overlapped.
Conservatives live surrounded by the environment because they love it and they want to be good stewards.
But what the failure of Washington State shows is that top-down political policies fail and bottom-up efforts to save energy, to save money, too, are a much better way to be good stewards of the planet.
Oh, yeah, absolutely.
I talked this week about the classic case at the turn of the century.
We're in big cities like New York or Seattle or London.
They had so much horse manure and horse urine that were accumulating in the streets.
And what saved that?
Was it a government-designed program that dictated solutions to people?
Or was it a free market where people got to try things?
And, of course, you're talking about this from the standpoint of Washington State.
And you said, how does this affect everybody else?
It's the federalism that we have, the fact that different states can try different things.
And the beauty of that is that we can see what works.
But the beauty of it is we can also see what does not work.
And I guess Washington State falls into the latter category.
Tell us a little bit about some of these regulations.
What have they done in Washington State in terms of forcing people to do this or that that hasn't really even accomplished their metric by their own paradigm?
What kind of regulations have you been seeing there in Washington State over this 10-year period?
Well, there's a few things, and I'll give you two examples.
One, we have lots of building regulations that force buildings to be what are called green buildings.
And in fact, years ago, we implemented a law that required all school buildings to meet what are called green building standards.
And so I started looking at these green buildings and these green schools to see if they were in fact saving money.
And what I found was that green schools that meet these standards Actually used more energy per square foot than the non-green schools in those same school districts for a variety of reasons.
And you see this with buildings.
There has been research that in Seattle, green buildings actually do worse than almost anywhere else.
So one of the things was that these very restrictive building standards about what you had to build.
Seattle and King County, where Seattle is, is one of the most expensive places to live in the United States.
We have a housing shortage.
We have very high prices.
And it's because we've added a lot of these regulations, so-called green regulations, that have ended up failing.
Let me give you one more example.
The number one source of CO2 emissions in Washington state is transportation.
So the governor and others have said, oh, well, what we need to do is to build a lot of electric vehicle charging stations.
But many of those charging stations sit unused because where people tend to charge up is at home.
And if they are out and they see a charging station, they will plug in.
But they're not very useful in terms of actually keeping your vehicle charged.
And, you know, if you're in the store, you don't get much of a charge while you're there.
So it doesn't help, it doesn't do much to actually help reduce CO2 emissions or help people who have electric vehicles.
And the result is we spend millions, tens of millions of dollars on electric vehicle charging stations that sit there and do nothing.
That's just a waste of money.
And so people focus on that as a waste of taxpayer dollars, which it certainly is.
But it's also a waste of opportunity to do good things for the planet.
There are lots of projects that we actually could do to, you know, make it energy more efficient.
We're fighting, you know, I used to work with Salmon Recovery.
We have very low populations of salmon.
There's things we could do there.
So if you waste money on useless EV charging stations, rather than doing projects that help salmon, you are harming the environment by misallocating resources in addition to wasting taxpayer dollars.
And, of course, what we're seeing with all this stuff is that they will come up with one solution, like an electric battery car, right?
And they will subsidize that heavily.
They will shut down any other competition.
And even if it is something like another form of an electric car, let's say a fuel cell car or a hydrogen car, even if it's something that could also be zero emission, no, no, no.
We've got this one solution, and you're going to do that.
That's something that we see from the government.
All the time.
But I want to step back, and when you talk about the schools and how the ones that were green schools, and they gave them regulations about how they wanted to build them and that type of thing, what was it that caused, what types of things were they having these schools do that caused them to use more energy than other schools that didn't follow this green building regulation scheme?
Yeah, people are always, when I mention that, they're always flabbergasted that you can make a green building and make it actually worse than the existing buildings.
There are several things that they did.
One is, I never understood this, but they repeated it again and again, which is, they said, well, we're going to have big windows, because big windows allow in more light, and therefore you need fewer lighting fixtures, and that will save electricity.
Well, LED light bulbs are extremely efficient, very low energy, put out a lot of light, and so there's just not very much energy to be saved by reducing that amount of light.
However...
Windows are not very efficient, right?
They let a lot of heat in.
They let a lot of, you know, cold in as well, right?
During the summer, it's hot.
During the winter, it's cold.
And so you have to constantly run the HVAC to keep that room a normal temperature.
The other thing, and that more than offsets any, you know, energy savings you get from wind.
The other thing that they do is they say, well, we want clean air.
We want fresh air.
So what they do is they have requirements to have to recirculate the air, to pull the old air out, put new air in.
And what do you got to do?
You've got to heat that.
You've got to cool that, whatever.
And so they're constantly running the HVACs.
And so I talked with several facilities directors, not just in Washington State, but across the country where these were.
And they just said...
In order to build a green school, we would actually have to increase the size of the HVAC system to meet these new requirements.
But I want to address your point about the one-size-fits-all.
That's the fundamental problem with government programs, or I shouldn't say the fundamental, a fundamental problem.
Which is that there is one size, and if it doesn't work, then you've lost time.
We need a diversity of efforts.
So, you know, I would be a horrible book author if I didn't mention my book, Time to Think Small, which focuses on exactly this issue, which is lots of small efforts and a diversity of efforts are better ways to find not only solutions that work, but solutions that fit people's lives.
Rather than have government impose restrictions on people that make their lives more difficult, The diversity of solutions, especially with technology, allows them to find ways to save energy, save money, do things that fit their lifestyle, make their life better, while also making the planet better.
And so I think that's the real key, is that we need a diversity of things.
What I'm hoping is, is that, you know, during the upcoming Trump administration, rather than just simply saying all of these environmental, you know, this focus is ridiculous, to say we need a new approach.
We need a diversified approach, federalism, local power, rather than top-down government power, to show that this way works better than the one-size-fits-all government approach.
Oh, yeah, absolutely.
When we're talking about federalism and the fact that we can see what works and what doesn't work based on different states and everything, and unfortunately, there's this idea that has taken hold in America across a political spectrum.
It doesn't seem to me to matter whether people on the left or the right, Republican, Democrat, everybody thinks that a solution needs to come from Washington.
And one of the results of that is that we get this one-size-fits-all organization, We're going to have a dictated solution, and that's the way this is going to work.
And we need to be able to experiment to find out what works and what doesn't work.
That's a key thing.
You know, it's kind of interesting, and you address this in your press release, the fact that the most recent data that they just released is...
2021. Why is that?
If this is something that's such a high priority for them, why aren't they, maybe it's because it's not working.
They don't want people to, why are they three years behind in all this stuff?
So another problem with, I mean, more evidence, this is, I think, more evidence that simply bureaucracy is not up to the task.
Certainly of addressing environmental issues as well as other issues.
And the fact that here we are in 2025, and the most recent data we have for Washington State's CO2 emissions is 2021. Interestingly, that is actually in violation of state law.
State law says that by the end of even-numbered years, like 2024, they are to release emissions data for the preceding two years, which would have been 2022 and 2023. So I pointed this out and said that the state is actually in violation of its own law and being two years behind.
And the problem with that is that 2021 data is useless if you are a policymaker trying to figure out what works and what doesn't.
Because you can say, oh, and what they do say is, oh, yes, we didn't meet those targets, but the policies we adopted after that are working.
Well, it's like, well, how do you know?
You don't have any data.
You're just making it up.
And so when I pointed this out, that they were in violation of their law, that the governor's press secretary sent out a snarky email saying, you know, what Todd doesn't understand is how difficult it is to gather this information.
Well, exactly.
Government doesn't have the capacity.
To get the information and to do the job in a way that will work.
That's what they are admitting.
It's like, look, we can't do this.
The other irony is that we actually have very onerous restrictions in Washington State about electric vehicles.
You can't basically sell a recreational vehicle or a semi in Washington State.
Because there aren't enough electric vehicles to sell because you have to sell a certain percentage of that.
So we stopped.
So the argument has been to the same agency who put these numbers out, look, we would like to comply.
We can't.
It's physically not possible to comply.
And the response of the agency is, sorry, that's the law.
So when it's other people, it's the law that you have to follow.
When it's them, they whine about the fact that it's not possible for them to actually comply with the law.
And I think that just shows you how incapable bureaucracy is of addressing these serious challenges, but also how...
That image, their own image, is more important than actually reducing CO2 emissions.
As much as they talk about it's an existential crisis, when the choice is between admitting failure and saying, yes, we need to do better, or making excuses, they make excuses to say their own image.
And that's something that we see all the time.
I talk about the fact that when you look at, let's say, a command-control economy's socialism, look at East Germany versus West Germany, or North Korea versus South Korea, why is it that they don't have any goods in the stores?
Well, because they don't have a market system.
Even if you had the smartest people in control, and we know that's not what happens, even if you had the smartest people in control, they don't have sufficient information to be able to make decisions about what is going to work the best.
That's what a marketplace does.
And so, as you point out, they're making this confession that, yeah, it's not possible for us to get all this information together.
It's not possible for them to get enough information together to make an intelligent decision.
That's what the whole free market is about, everybody.
And that's what your book is about as well.
You know, thinking getting small and pulling back instead of having central planning and dictates and mandates and bans that are being put on all kinds of things.
And I imagine you probably have that as well.
I mean, we're looking at Biden going out the door, banning hot water heaters and other things like that.
I'm sure you guys were way ahead of that, right?
At the state level.
Yes.
In fact, we just in Washington state, the state tried to ban natural gas hookups, not just the heaters, not just the stoves or anything like that, but actually running natural gas They tried to ban it.
The voters overturned that in this last election because they recognized that it was so Excuse me, extreme.
Yeah, and we've seen that in the U.K. as well.
You know, they've done the same thing there.
They want to ban natural gas and stuff.
And, you know, heat pump in a really cold climate, like you've got in Washington State or like they've got in the U.K., heat pumps just don't make it, handle it very well during the winter.
And so, but they don't care.
And they want to, in the U.K., they even want to remove the existing infrastructure.
I mean, they want to rewild, is one of the terms that they've used.
They want to rewild.
The infrastructure that's been built.
In other words, you know, just take everything back down to nothing.
That's what you're seeing everywhere.
Well, in fact, you mentioned heat pumps.
So I live in the mountains and we have a heat pump.
Well, last January, it was negative 10 where I was.
Fortunately, I have a propane backup.
And so I have a propane tank that when it gets that low, that we can heat our house because the heat pump, when it gets, you know, in the teens and certainly negative temperatures.
It doesn't work.
I also have a smart thermostat and my smart thermostat would come up and say, we think that your heat pump is broken because it's just turning and not generating heat.
And I was like, yes, because it's negative 10. And so that I think is the challenge of these one size fits all approaches.
But you made a really good point about local control.
And I think there's two things.
One is that you need to have the information.
Distant bureaucrats simply don't have the information necessary to make those good decisions because it's not in front of them.
And everybody's circumstances are a little bit different.
The second thing is that you need accountability so that when something goes wrong or when it goes right, you get that feedback.
When you fail, you say, okay, we've got to change.
Bureaucrats don't have that feedback.
They don't have that accountability.
And there's a fantastic example here in Washington State.
So the Quinault tribe, which is out on the coast, The Bureau of Indian Affairs had been doing all of the timber harvesting on the land on behalf of the tribe.
And what did they do?
They clear-cut massive areas and then left slash on the ground.
They said, don't worry, it will decompose and trees will regrow between them.
But what they didn't realize was that cedar has a chemical in it that slows decomposition.
So what was left was these massive areas where there was just all of this timber slash and no regrowth at all for decades, literally for decades.
So the tribe said, look, why don't we take over the forestry on our own land?
Because they were the ones who were paying the price.
They lived there.
Not the BIA, right?
The BIA was making decisions from Washington, D.C. So they took it over, and what was the first thing they did?
They forested, they removed this lash, and they started harvest rotations that were sustainable that would bring back those forests.
Now, critically, they harvested for revenue.
They want that money because they recognize that it's a valuable resource, and they use it to fund part of the tribe's budget.
So they didn't just, you know, leave the trees, but they were better stewards because they had the information about how cedar worked as opposed to other trees, and then they also had the accountability.
And my favorite part of the story was, is that when the tribe took over forestry in the early 2000s, completely from the BIA, the BIA said, the BIA had been harvesting without any environmental assessments at all.
They said, well, we have a general plan, go harvest.
When the tribe took over, the BIA said, You have to do environmental assessments.
You can imagine the tribe's reaction when they said, you haven't been doing it, but we have to, and the BIA said yes.
I think that's the arrogance sometimes of government overseeing, and in this case, I mean, really treating the tribe badly, who had been doing a better job than the BIA. Accountability is just so much better for the environment.
Oh, yeah.
I guess my question is, do they have some special status that we don't have that they could take back control from this bureaucracy?
Because that's the biggest problem.
We can't get control back from these bureaucracies that are doing a bad job.
How did they get it back?
Was it because of their status as Indian?
Yeah, it was, because they have sovereignty.
Now, what sovereignty means on tribal lands is sort of interesting, because the BIA is supposed to hold the land in trust and manage it for the benefit of the tribes.
It's an incredibly paternalistic system, I think.
But the point that you make is that in the tribes, they have the opportunity to do that.
They can at least make an argument that they are sovereign and can do that.
You and I, we can't say, hey, we would rather have control.
Let us figure a way to be better stewards.
You know, the federal and state agencies don't do that for us.
So I think it's funny because I've started studying tribal stewardship of natural resources for this very reason, which is that they have more control.
And I think that in many ways they provide a really good model for how we should care for natural resources because they have that local control, local knowledge, and the accountability.
And when it comes from forests, fisheries...
Wildlife habitat, wildlife management, they do a better job.
I'll give you one more fun example, which is that in Washington State, the wolf is considered a threatened species, but on the Colville Reservation, which is right in the area where the wolves are, They consider the wolf recovered because the populations are very high, and they actually hand out hunting permits.
That's the tribe.
So when they have authority and when it affects them, they can say, look, we're using the information we have.
We have the accountability.
We have the control to do a better job than the sort of bureaucratic systems from the government.
Well, that's interesting.
But part of it is, and again, it is the status of the Indians, but regular Americans have sovereignty that they're not using as well.
I think that they need to start using the Tenth Amendment and some of these other things, because federal policy, especially when you talk about forests, and we were talking about that earlier in the program with the fires that are happening in L.A., I've seen it over and over again.
Poor forestry management, because they're not doing stewardship anymore, they're doing environmentalism, and it's kind of just, you know, don't touch anything type of thing, rather than actually doing stewardship.
And it has been disastrous for the last 50 years, and it's getting worse all the time.
Everybody needs to start getting together and seeing how we're going to increase our sovereignty so that we can start addressing some of these problems ourselves.
And, of course, that's what your book is focused on, not the political aspect of it, but the beauty of having smaller local decisions.
Tell us a little bit about your book again.
I know we talked about it last time you were on, and the title of it is...
Time to think small, how nimble environmental technology can solve the planet's biggest problems.
And there are a lot of folks on the center-right who care about the environment but are very skeptical about environmental issues because they feel that it's a Trojan horse for policies that they don't like.
And in many cases, as we discussed, it is.
But they want to find an alternative that they can support to protect the natural resources.
Like I said, conservatives live around that.
The other source that I've had a lot of people say is, my college-age son or daughter comes back and lectures me about the environment and why don't we care about the environment.
And so I said, well, give them my book.
It'll explain a better way to help the environment.
But what it shows is that in the 1970s, when we created the EPA, you didn't have the technology, you didn't have the control for individuals to make a big difference in environmental stewardship.
That's just simply not true anymore.
We now have the technology.
We now have the ability to do really remarkable things to be good stewards of the environment in ways that bureaucracies fail.
And so what we recognize, what we need to recognize is that we need to change the way that we do environmental stewardship, put the power in the hands of individuals, peoples, innovative companies.
And less in the hands of politicians and bureaucrats who tend to focus on their own interests rather than the interests of the planet.
And Washington State's failure on reducing CO2 emissions that we saw this week is really just the perfect example of where an issue that the politicians say is critical, an existential crisis, and yet Even they fail and then make excuses for that fail rather than saying we need to find a better way.
For them, it's about political image.
It should be about for the planet, for conservatives and those on the center-right who live near nature every day.
That's what thinking small, that's what these new technologies, that's what my book is about.
It's about ways to do that, that actually live, that help us live the lives the way we want.
That's really well said.
And again, the book is Time to Think Small by Todd Myers.
And I guess I can find that on Amazon, anywhere books are sold, right?
Yep, absolutely.
That's great.
Yeah, I've seen that same type of thing.
As a matter of fact, I worked with a guy at a think tank who had been with the EPA. At the time, he had just retired.
He was with them for about 30 years right after their creation.
And to see that it had kind of changed its whole mission statement, you know.
And the EPA has not really been about pollution anymore.
It's all about the environmentalism.
And so that's what we see with the bureaucracies.
And it's really by design because it allows these people who have to stand for election.
To not have any accountability either, because they can always push it onto the bureaucracy.
Thank you so much for joining us, Todd Myers.
And again, the book is Time to Think Small by Todd Myers, and he works there at the Washington Policy Center.
Thank you all of you, and thank you Sandy Hayes.
I appreciate that.
Thank you for the tip.
Have a good day.
The Common Man. .
They created common core to dumb down our children.
They created common past to track and control us.
Their commons project to make sure the commoners own nothing.
And the communist future.
They see the common man as simple, unsophisticated, ordinary.
But each of us has worth and dignity created in the image of God.
That is what we have in common.
That is what they want to take away.
Their most powerful weapons are isolation, deception, intimidation.
They desire to know everything about us while they hide everything from us.
It's time to turn that around and expose what they want to hide.
Please share the information and links you'll find at TheDavidKnightShow.com.
Thank you for listening.
Thank you for sharing.
▲
Export Selection