Chuck Yates Needs A Job

0:00 Hey digital wildcatters, welcome to our webinar. And this is a treat. I'm going to try not to fanboy on you all the Scott, but this is, this is really cool. I think when I sent you the email,

0:12 what did I say? Long time listener. First time caller. Yes, I'm like that. Yeah. Will you do this for us real quick? Will you tell mom? I think my mom's watching. Will you tell mom who you

0:24 are real quick? And then kind of just briefly level set us on the radical middle. Cause you do such a great job of laying out what we need to be thinking about. What's your mom's name? Sally Sally.

0:38 Yeah, I'm Scott. It's nice to meet you and your son too. So yeah, I'm a geologist by training and trade and and love So I've been all over the world looking at rocks, but evolve that chuck into

0:56 energy through time

0:58 when I went to. From the industry to the University of Texas 25 years ago now, I couldn't do too much fieldwork or original research. I was running a big research unit. So I kind of evolved into

1:11 the energy scene where I could access online data and began speaking and meta filmmaker along the way. And one thing led to another. And I said yes to a lot of stuff. And pretty soon I was in a

1:21 coal mine in Vietnam. So that's how it rolls. But say yes, and you end up doing a lot of interesting things and learn a lot about yourself. So I'm kind of a global explorer. And always have been.

1:36 Went to Russia in 1982 when it was the Soviet Union after college and have continued debt exploring ever since then. That's really cool. We always had the joke at Kenan or someone when we were

1:50 looking at a prospect of some sort. If the geologist is not wearing a tie, It's probably a good prospect. Yeah, you don't have your - Or even a dress shirt.

2:03 Yeah, exactly. You better be wearing something pretty casual. Somebody shows up in an ACDC shirt. Go ahead and unstroll the well. Yeah, we'll drill the well with that. But layout. What I think

2:15 you call the radical middle, 'cause I think of all the folks out there that advocate for energy, that talk about energy. I think you do the best job of saying, hey guys, it's a water balloon.

2:29 You know, you push this side, this side pops out, and we gotta be cognizant about it. And I think you're, and again, I'll stop the fanboying, but I think you're actually the fairest person. So

2:41 if you could just kind of lay out what you mean by the radical middle, we'll start there. Yeah, it's a lonely space. But it's, if you think about energy, I said this, I think you're not first

2:56 in a TEDx talk. and how to explain to 1, 100 students what energy is and does for us, other than gasoline and electricity, which is what we know. So I have my little doctor's suicide, our pets

3:09 and our jets, our homes and our phones, our heaters and our beaters, whatever I kept going, everything. Everything on the planet is underpinned by energy. So if we don't have energy, we're

3:22 hungry and naked in the dirt, and there are people in the world today that are hungry and naked in the dirt So this isn't hypothetical, this is real. And in modern societies, let's call them the

3:34 rich world or developed nations have remarkable access to affordable and reliable energy. It underpins everything. So when you start to look at that and you think about, well,

3:46 I have energy and then it allows for economies to grow and flourish. And economies are what healthy economies are need to do invest in the environment. to protect the environment. Not just the

3:60 atmosphere for climate, for sure that, but the land the air and the water as well, the big pillars of the environment. So, and it flows that way. Energy underpins healthy economies, economies

4:10 invest the environment. And that overlap space in there between those three E's is what I call a radical middle. And it, you can think of it differently. You can kind of think of it as, you know,

4:21 where does

4:24 industry sit? Kind of on the economic side where, you know, where the environmental groups sit up there in the environment, the NGOs and all that kind of thing. And in policy. And so you can

4:38 start to play a lot of real things around in there, but it's really that overlap space. And it's difficult. You know, it's not simple stuff. That's the point, I think, is the world isn't binary

4:51 when it comes to energy, there's not clean and dirty, Good and bad, believer, denier, you know,

4:57 evil. and virtuous. It doesn't exist. And unfortunately, we're being told that there's this clean energy world and there's this dirty energy world. And if you don't believe in the clean stuff,

5:09 you're a denier of some kind, you know, religious terms come in wonderful, which are not what's needed. You start looking at that overlap space and you realize there's trade-offs in there.

5:19 There's a bunch of trade-offs in that very real world. You can't have it all If you want 100 no emissions, you're going to give up reliability, affordability, economic components of that, and

5:34 vice versa. So it's that overlap space, that radical middle, where you've got to look at the data, you're not always going to be right. You have to compromise, but that's where things get solved.

5:44 All the big problems in the world chucks it in that overlap space of these big spheres, if you will. Now, am I putting too many words in your mouth if I say, The only way we're going to solve the

5:59 world's problems is if we have energy for economic development, and we get the whole world rich. Am I taking you too far if I say that? I don't think you're going too far there. Because I believe

6:14 that. Yes. I started showing that

6:19 maybe a decade ago that when you think about this, and the demographics are very interesting. When you think about the so-called rich world, it's not that many people. Let's say about a billion.

6:33 It's a lot of people, but not out of 84 billion on earth today. You have another billion on the other end that are completely impoverished. Nothing. And then in between, you have this transition

6:49 from emerging to developing to developed And you can plot. got a plot of every country on Earth with its gross national income across the x-axis or the bottom and its per capita energy consumption up

7:05 the y-axis. And you make a plot of where those countries fit. And it's this beautiful correlation, kind of a curving correlation between impoverished with no energy and rich with energy. It's not

7:17 causative, but there's this really nice correlation in that So when you start thinking about this in order to become,

7:29 let's call it wealthy or at least developed, you need energy to do that. You simply need more than most people have. About a third of the world use less energy today on average in each country than

7:44 my refrigerator. The human being for a year less than my refrigerator uses in a year A third of the world.

7:56 And so, and I have more than one fridge, right? I put the beer fridge in the garage in Houston 'cause that's efficient. You know, I know that's brilliant. And, you know, and so you start

8:08 coming up there, I wanna get that set in people's minds. It's not just a little bit less. It's thousands of times less energy and economic wealth in many ways as well. So the challenge is to

8:21 accelerate. And this is where it's counterintuitive We have to accelerate people from being pinned down here in

8:30 economic and energy poverty through developing to develop. The faster we do that, the more wealth in the world to protect the environment. And this is the great

8:44 dilemma, if you will, and counterintuitive almost, oh, we gotta protect the environment. We can't do all these things with energy. We have to do those things with energy accelerate through

8:53 growth and development. afford to protect the environment.

8:59 And that's where I've evolved in my career and I think all the data support that. And I don't want to go too much into hyperbole. So I'll try to say this softly, but I actually believe this too.

9:13 There are going to be a billion extra people on the planet in the next, what, 50 years or whatever the stats say. And if our answer to those folks are in effect, let them eat cake. You can't have

9:27 energy. War skits started over things like this. They're going now. And I think that is as morally repugnant as it is to potentially have deaths 150 years from now because the temperature rose

9:43 another degree. To your point, it's a trade-off. It is, and not neither wore trade-off luckily. It isn't either one or the other Right. We can do a component of both of those. and we do have

9:55 time to do that. But yes, wars get started. I mean, look what happened when with Russia, when gas was no longer available to Germany a few years ago, that's weaponizing energy. Look what

10:09 happened when Russia went into Ukraine and attacked the nuclear power plant. Look what Israel's thinking about doing in Iran, nuclear power plant. Energy is the lifeblood of all societies And if

10:22 you wanna cut off the lifeblood, you attack the access points. And there are some pretty fundamental access points the energy, major pipeline hubs, major coastal receiving terminals,

10:36 trucking centers, trains and rails. It's hard to move energy. Okay, we move it on wires as electrons, not easy. We could talk all about the grid. We move it in pipelines, not easy In this

10:51 country, pretty hard to build a new pipeline. concept that it's somehow safer on trucks and trains, which it's not if I have humans involved, pipelines, we can monitor, you know, when there's a

11:05 leak and you go fix it. And then you move it as those are liquids and gases and move it as products. Essentially, the energy is wrapped up in a product and then delivered to us. So when you're

11:18 buying something on Amazon, look at where it's made. I give every listener right now 5050, it's somewhere in Asia and you're buying energy from Asia. That's what you're buying. That product that

11:33 was made there with components that come from around the world, truck to a port, put on a container ship running on diesel more than likely back here, offloaded maybe onto a train and then a

11:46 trucking network and then the Amazon truck to your front door and hey look you know I got a new flashlight. one item at a time, insane, okay, in many ways. And so you're buying energy from Asia

12:00 wrapped up in this product. And we can talk about this more, if you'd like to, but that energy, the energy that Asia is using to make our stuff is mostly coal, and we can go down the list from

12:14 there. And what we're essentially saying is, hey, Asia, make our stuff, and put out the CO2 emissions, 'cause we want it affordable and reliable. Amazon, I ordered, I want it next day,

12:30 somehow, magically, that happens. And just put out our CO2 along the way for us, this great shell game of, you make it, will be green. Right. And it's happening with companies, it's happening.

12:44 Countries happening with states, you make our stuff, will be green. Yeah, we've reduced our emissions Yeah, yeah, and that doesn't count somehow. Well, and I

12:57 hate to be somewhat 13-year-old boyish in my sense of humor, but my line on the podcast is always, there's not a peeing and a non-pying section of the pool. I mean, right?

13:09 One atmosphere. It's one atmosphere. Yeah, so if they're putting

13:13 in the air in India and China. Yeah, I mean, you're old enough, probably, I don't know, to remember when we smoked on airplanes. Yeah. And there's a non-smoking section in the airplane Oh,

13:22 great, you know, I just, I just like. I mean, you had trouble finding an ashtray.

13:30 No, that's exactly right.

13:34 And in fairness to environmentalists, they always say, well, you can't use China and India as an excuse for bad behavior here. So fair enough, you know, I'm - It's fair, and I am, I am an

13:47 environmentalist. It's fair, unless you consider that we have tighter environmental regulations here.

13:57 of all kinds, land, air, water, and atmosphere. So on a per unit product basis, we make things in a cleaner way than Asia. Not just CO2 and methane, all of it, water, dumping things in soils,

14:11 into oceans, okay? So if you're truly an environmentalist, you'd want it made where it's well regulated. Yeah, no, that's it didn't And it was interesting 'cause I don't wanna bring politics

14:25 into it, but Vance actually pivoted to that in the vice presidential debate when, and that's

14:38 the first time I've heard that be made in the political sphere of, hey, if you truly believe this in terms of the environment, et cetera, make it here. Yeah, because we didn't listen to our

14:46 stuff. Yeah, exactly, or one of his advice people Exactly, it's not a made up thing.

14:55 go look at a map of the clean air in the world, particulate matter, 25, or whatever you wanna. The cleanest air in the world, the stuff we breathe, not atmosphere, I'm talking local air, is

15:07 where it's rich.

15:09 The cleanest countries, the US, Europe, where it's rich. The dirtiest air are where it's poor. Sub-equatorial world, mostly everywhere and parts of in Latin America and other places Terrible

15:24 local air pollution. They can't afford to clean it up. They have other priorities. They're spending their limited wealth on shelter, maybe a little healthcare, education, food, trying to clean

15:41 up some water. They don't have the wealth we have to do those things. This relationship is very strong.

15:49 No, really? And you bring up a good point you've been out there advocating, you've been making content, you've been fighting the good fight, I will say, in terms of educational energy or

16:04 literacy.

16:07 When I look at it, when you go from burning dung and wood in your house to burning hydrocarbons, you basically double your life expectancy, right? I mean, you can twist that stat a few different

16:21 ways, but that's basically what happens. Why does an energy get credit for that in the world? What's your stats? We still have about 27 billion people in the world cooking indoors with some form

16:38 of biomass. Hey, wood, dung. My girlfriend's British, and whenever we go to Heathrow, Heathrow actually uses wood blocks to power. Thanks, I don't know, I'm going. Great guys, and those

16:52 gone backwards. Cut down trees, glue them into pellets or blocks, ship them on diesel ships. Probably from Canada, yeah, it's the end of this. The supply chain, but coming back, 27 billion

17:03 people, let's say, a third of the world. Okay, all of the Western Hemisphere, all of North American, South America combined is maybe 12 billion people. The whole Western Hemisphere, population

17:19 So double that are still cooking indoors with biomass. 3 million people a year are still dying, Chuck, from breathing into our smoke. 3 million people. What's that? Half the population of

17:32 Houston, maybe more. Every year, dying from, you know, that's more than AIDS and malaria kill every year. Just from breathing into our smoke, it's more than COVID killed in 2021, globally,

17:45 and we shut down the bloody economy for that.

17:50 it's so simple to solve this. And people are starting to talk about it now and do good things and all across the political spectrum, LPG, cook indoors with gas, electric varieties of things,

18:04 induction cooktops, et cetera. If you can clean up that local air, you address a huge human health as to your point globally, a huge component of human health. And so when I hear, yeah, but LPG,

18:21 basically propane, what you put in your cook, when your barbecue is a fossil fuel, they can't burn that. And stop, stop, stop, stop, three million a year.

18:34 The deaths from other things, climate and other things are way below that unless you start trying to falsely attribute everything in the world to this single thing. But if you look at the in the

18:49 rich world at least, we are so much safer from climate than we've ever been. Graphs I've seen, data interesting, 90 to 99 fewer deaths from climate change, impacts of climate, climate change

19:04 doesn't kill anybody, it's the impacts of that, droughts, storms, fires, et cetera. 99 lower than they have been. Why? Because we protect ourselves.

19:17 We're in an air conditioned room right now in Houston, Texas.

19:21 Minnesota has heat. We drive around in climate pods. We call them cars. You know, we have the energy and the wealth to manage the climate. A lot of the world doesn't still.

19:38 And the world, this is another benefit, is the world, every human in the world, it's time to power the people of the world. energy access, affordable libel energy access for everyone. That's

19:52 what our second film was about, switch on. Yeah. Energy poverty. And again, it's not just listeners to hear, it's not just people in the dirt, in mud huts and that's roofs, and I've been to

20:05 plenty of those places. There's this whole thing of five billion people in between them and rich that don't have reliable energy, affordable, accessible, the electricity comes and goes, the fuels

20:16 are expensive, they're not available, et cetera. They don't, they're living in some level of energy poverty today. This is two thirds of the world or more. Yeah, no, it really, and so we. I

20:31 don't understand why we don't get credit for making the world a better place. We being the energy business. I mean, and

20:41 maybe it's just being in the energy business I'm very sensitive and shallow and needy and all that. And so I'm quite good at getting some credit. Yeah, I'm quite good at

20:57 taking criticism and all. But I don't see us. And my theory on that is, is one, generally speaking, we're a bunch of scientists. We're a bunch of engineers in the energy business. Geologists

21:12 not was standing. Finance guy not was standing And so we have no ability to tell a story, right? I mean, we like to throw facts and figures and reasons. Like I just did at folks. And what's so

21:26 funny is when you look at the psychological studies, that's the literally the worst way to change someone's mind is earth effects or figures. It's, it's emotional laugh. It's ask a question or

21:39 it's scare them, you know? Which I kind of boil down to some sort emotional connection right. tell a story. So one, I think we're engineers, so we don't do that very well. And then two, I

21:52 don't think we've ever, because when you produce a barrel oil, you just sell it in the market. There's no Nike versus Adidas, right? You're not having to market your product in any way, for the

22:03 most part. There's no culture in the business, a story telling and marketing. So we're just not very good at it. Yeah. What else have you seen out there on why we're not getting any credit for

22:14 this? Yeah. We take it for granted.

22:19 Oh, that's a good point. We just know that when I turn on that switch, almost always the lights are gonna come on and they're gonna stay on. And my electric bill is gonna be eh, I can, you know,

22:32 we can pay it. We know when we go to the gas station, gasoline station, there's mostly gonna be gasoline there and it's gonna vary in price from a couple bucks to four or five bucks unless you're

22:42 in Europe your pan more California. So we take it for granted. And anything that you take for granted, you don't necessarily give credit to. It's just a, it's a right. Sorry, mom, exactly.

22:57 It's part of my life. Right. And if the gasoline's expensive, it must be the oil company gouging me, right? That's what the politicians tell us, which is as far from reality of what happens in

23:08 markets, you are an energy trader, you know what happened, you're an investor fine, right? You know, who sets the price of oil It isn't Exxon and Shell and BP and Chevron, it's not. It's a

23:19 huge complicated market. So there's the credit issue. Anytime you account for something in your life, if you think about it,

23:27 you don't just look at the cons of something, you look at the pros. Whenever you're thinking about what college to go to, well, what are the pros and the cons? We write down, you know, we've

23:36 tried to do these things. Do I wanna play soccer or tennis in school?

23:42 You know, well, what are the pros and cons?

23:44 What's happened is we've allowed a certain few

23:49 fear voices and boy are they good at it. We can name them, the people who are pushing climate fear. You and I grew up being taught to be scared of nuclear. We got under our little desks in

24:02 kindergarten 'cause we just, we did drills 'cause we just knew that if there was, it was the Cold War, a nuclear attack, that desk would save me No, that's right, okay. I actually asked that

24:16 one time when I was a little kid, is this really gonna help and I got told to shut up? Yeah, of course you did, yeah. But there's been a different fear taught to young people these days and

24:26 that's the fear of climate. And it's been extremely well taught. I've literally had classes in universities where I lecture where half the class raised their hand and said human beings won't be here

24:38 in 15 years human beings like the race of humans, that's how fear indoctrinated, young people have become, and very effective messaging fear, as you said. But

24:55 to get rid of fear is the beginning of knowledge. We have to do a better job of discussing the real fears around climate, and there are some, not fears, but issues, what the term looks like, etc,

25:09 and try to help mitigate that. But we don't account, you flip it, so there's this solar and wind, and the check boxes over there are all pros. In fact, on an AP, we have a curriculum in AP

25:24 environmental sciences around the nation, which does. Apes is what the class is called. Almost everybody takes it. High school kids. It's the most popular class. 200, 000 kids a year taking it

25:34 On the

25:37 AP testing to test out of that in college, here's an example of two questions. What are the pros of offshore wind? And so the student writes down on the brush. And then the next question, what

25:49 are the downsides to tar sands?

25:53 And they write down all the bad things. And there are plenty of goods for wind and bads for tar sands. But they're not asked, what are the pros and cons of offshore wind? Oh, the blades could

26:04 fall and spruce fiberglass in the ocean for a couple months like happened off Nantucket. They can burn up the North Atlantic right whale You can say what you want has been dying tremendously and

26:18 people will call, oh, that's misinformation. Well, help me explain then what else has changed to cause that to happen, which I'm not hearing too much of, getting the electricity in when there's

26:30 calm times. What do giant concrete anchors on the ocean floor do through time? How do you replace all that stuff? I can tell you all the pros of offshore wind too And there are some pros of. quote,

26:45 tar sands, oil sands in Western Canada. Pretty tough environmentally, but SAGD, steam assisted gravity drainage mechanism is producing it very different from mining it. Okay, the oil gets used

26:57 to do a remarkable number of positive things in the world. We are safer, living longer, healthier, better fed, more free time lives. Because of access to affordable oil energy, there's a huge

27:10 list of pros in the oil and gas and even the coal side, the ledger. But it doesn't get accounted for. And so when it's just basic thinking, is what are the pros and cons? What are the trade-offs

27:24 of these things as I think about my energy mix? And we are not being taught that. We are woefully under-educated with respect to energy. And that's why I do what I do and form the Switch Energy

27:37 Alliance. I mean, I could go to a kid

27:41 in school right now and say, Hey, for the next month, your diet's going to be, you know. soda pop, not diet, soda pop, and candy bars, you know, that's it for a month. And they'd probably

27:53 go, are you kidding me? Because they know about food. We've been taught about that. But if I said for the next month, your only energy is going to come from solar panels and batteries or pick

28:04 another one nuclear or coal, you know, they might know a little bit about coal But they wouldn't really have a skill set, even a frame to evaluate that. You could tell them solar and wind are

28:17 clean and electric vehicles are clean and everything else is dirty and they believe that. They just believe it because they don't have any basis for challenging it. They don't understand whether the

28:28 panels and turbines come from mining of metals around the world and China controls the processing of 80. That's a security issue. They don't understand that they get manufactured somewhere else and

28:39 there's a bunch of supply chain things that are environmentally impactful. And then when it wears out, we dump it all into landfills or the oceans and they do wear out in 20 years and we do it over

28:50 and over again. And so it's not renewable energy. They don't have a clue that solar and wind are not renewable energy. They just think the sun and the wind are always there. It's just this is

28:59 woeful level of under education. And that's why there's no credit because there's no basis for even thinking about the pros and cons And our politicians propagate these myths. So how do we do a

29:16 better job of educating on the pros? I think the one thing I've seen in my career that actually did a nice job of connecting at an emotional level as opposed to reciting facts and figures is, and I

29:37 think the API did it back in the '70s, energy transfers picked it up, things start disappearing that are made of oil and oil-based products. Have you seen our film in the Houston Museum of Natural

29:50 Science? I haven't seen it yet. We put it, it's called The Energy Makes Our World. It's five minutes and highly produced Hollywood. I spent a lot of money on that. It plays between the IMAX runs

30:02 and it's in the Weiss Energy Hall. You turn left and you panel there. There's one of the universe doing its thing for five minutes and then ours. And it starts with a school bus arriving with two

30:12 kids on it getting off and I have a cameo on the school bus driver. And I say, hey kids, have a good afternoon, stay sharp. And off they go, middle schoolers. And the same thing, everything

30:24 disappears. Into the house, the sandwich, the electronics, the house itself, their clothes. And they're in skivvies in a field. And then this all is in five minutes. We bring it back through

30:36 tiled supply chains. What's it take to make a house lumbering the wood

30:42 And no dialogue except for subtitles in all languages. And it says energy makes our homes. And then we do energy makes our electronics. Energy makes our water. Energy makes our food. Energy makes

30:56 our world. And it loops. They're getting off the bus again. And it's very impactful. People go, oh, I really didn't think and know that energy is in all these things. It's very impactful But

31:11 it's tough. It's very tough, Chuck, to overcome the deep fear of climate existential threat.

31:22 Very hard. The three Yates children have lived the greatest life of any three people on the planet. And it's all been funded by hydrocarbon money. And yet if you ask them, would you get rid of

31:34 hydrocarbon smart? They would unanimously say yes. My point back to them is, Well, that sounds like a parenting problem. Yeah, you brought it up. Fair enough, fair enough, fair enough. I

31:45 always say back to them, you know, you can put all the oil and gas companies out of business tomorrow, just stop using their product and they'll all go bankrupt. Yeah, and oil and gas wouldn't go

31:57 away. All of the national oil companies in China and South America and the Middle East would continue producing oil and gas from all the places that the so-called big oil companies do. It would not

32:10 go away because it can't go away. We are fully dependent on it in a good way. It does so many good things, but we gotta clean it up. Right. We gotta, and it's happening, but we have to continue

32:25 to make the exploration for the transportation of the downstream changing of refining of, if you will, etc, and then the use of

32:37 it. cleaner. Lower emissions, lower footprints, water impacts. At scale, the oil and gas industry has a big environmental impact. It does because it powers 83 of all the energy in the world.

32:52 It provides 83. Wait

32:57 till other forms of energy start to get to that scale. And it's already happening. People are saying,

33:03 I don't want that wind farm near me. This is happening over and over again. And people are counting for this. Robert Bryce keeps a list of these things. I don't want that nuclear reactor. I don't

33:16 want that giant backup battery plant in Katie. In Katie, the backup are ever less stable grid.

33:28 And I want to say that clearly. Solar and wind, low emissions, that's a pro.

33:34 use a lot of land to gather to the sun and the wind, 'cause they're not very dense. That means it takes a lot of area to get enough energy.

33:45 The sun doesn't always shine. That's just a fact. It's not judgment, night happens and clouds. And the wind doesn't always blow. So when those two things are happening, I have to have something

33:58 else there. 'Cause we want electricity 247, 365 It's either gonna be a giant Walmart-sized battery, a bunch and a bunch and a bunch of those, or a natural gas plant to turn on when the electricity

34:13 isn't there. That partnership has to happen with intermittent sources of energy. That partnership is expensive.

34:23 So we'll learn wind have gotten very cheap, giant batteries and gas plants that aren't always on are not cheap. So when you put them together to make my energy reliable, It makes it more expensive.

34:37 And I think that's the big, again, one of the big things we need to communicate better is the grid is less stable than it was because of the inputs. They're not always there. You have to have

34:53 something else redundant there. Now,

34:57 I like optionality. I like more options coming into the grid. I like solar coming in. I like wind coming in I like nuclear, natural gas, even some coal, depending on where you live. More

35:09 options make for a more reliable portfolio. You know that from your investing days. You don't invest in one thing only and hope it's the winner. I don't bet once on red. You don't do that with

35:20 energy either. But if you go too far with that and make it only solar and wind and batteries, then I've reduced the options and the sources are intermittent. And this is what's happening in our

35:34 grid today is we're introducing a lot of intermittency and lack of reliability. And that's why the battery farms size of Walmart are starting to show up to try to make that more reliable again. I

35:47 think that's one of the most effective things the environmentalist movement did is they convinced the world, not only, you know, is the world ending like you. So eloquently laid out, but they

36:00 also said if it weren't for oil and gas companies, we'd have solar wind and they could power everything and totally reliability as a concept was just tossed out the window, right? It's just not

36:13 true. You can't do it. Yeah, yeah. There are days when the sun doesn't shine and there are days when the wind doesn't blow. And so you hear a lot of hypothetical kind of academic studies showing

36:31 And they come out of the East Coast and West Coast universities, mostly, if you build wind in a big enough area, well, then when it's blowing somewhere, well, but the whole area still needs

36:42 electricity. And there are times when the doldrums come and it's not blowing anywhere for a long time. Right now, batteries have increased tremendously. There's about a four hour battery backup on

36:55 some grids When I say that you think, well, four hours, what does that mean, it doesn't matter how much is pulling on it, of course, if I have my 2D batteries and run a flashlight and get

37:09 certain number of hours, if I try to run my house on 2D batteries, it's gone instantly. So it does matter, but they describe it as a four hour, which is some capacity of batteries and some load

37:19 on the grid Four hours is great and it's increased to that, maybe we'll get to 8 or 12 or even a

37:29 But this is a remarkable amount of mining in order to get the metals, the lithium and other metals to build those batteries, manufacture them in chemical manufacturing plants to deploy them, to

37:43 keep them safe. Because we know you can't put your electronics under an airplane for a reason, they get hot. To keep them safe from fires, you've seen the cars, everybody's seen the cars now.

37:55 It's a real risk, it's just a risk, it'd be managed, but it's a risk, and then to dispose them. Those batteries wear out, they don't last forever. And so now you gotta build them again, or try

38:08 to recycle them, which is very expensive. So this whole concept of clean, if you think mining's clean, make the world batteries. If you think mining's clean,

38:21 build a bunch of solar panels. If you think mining's clean, build wind turbines But the amount of metals that go into all of those things and rare earth elements and metals is just phenomenal. So

38:33 some as needed, don't get mad at me haters. I like solar and wind and batteries for some things. I say it again, it's introduced optionality into our energy system. But you can't make it

38:46 exclusively those things because they're not designed for that. Well, and this is what I call three glass of wine math. You know, you're on the third glass of wine and you start thinking about

38:58 things. And generally speaking, my three glass of wine math is pretty decent. I'm not sure. I'm not sure you lower the amount of hydrocarbons used on the planet because when you mine and you're in

39:12 the middle of the Congo, you can't just plug in and use electricity. It all runs off diesel. Now, I know they're trying to electrify the mining world, but it runs off diesel and it takes a a lot

39:24 of diesel to mine and move those precious metals. so that we can use batteries here. It does. And I don't think we've truly quantified that yet. In the current term, it certainly does, and

39:37 moving them on diesel ships, which is most ships run on diesel now, thank goodness, not coal. But we are evolving. You're seeing, again, the rich world moving from diesel, call them engines,

39:49 to electric motors in large-scale industrial processes. Motors are really efficient The electric motor is a remarkably efficient invention. Okay. My Tesla was great. Yeah. I drove for six years.

40:02 Yeah. It was a more awesome car. Yeah, torque is incredible, et cetera. Whether it's, and those big electric motors don't have to run on batteries, they can be on a grid. Now, the electron

40:14 gets fed into the grid from somewhere. Right. Gotta make the electricity, it doesn't grow on trees, we don't mind electricity, we make it. So, coal-fired plants, natural gas plants, nuclear

40:25 power plants, solar and wind, hydro. Those are the big ones, geothermal and others add supplement. But those are the big ones in the electricity mix. So I feed in and run those motors, they're

40:37 very efficient. Terrific, I think I've added some things, there are no missions from that motor, no emissions from the motor. The challenge becomes scaling that. So I don't have a grid in Africa

40:49 today. There's a tremendous amount of the metals that we use that come from Africa China, again, brilliantly through Belt and Roads Initiative and others, has bought the rights, have bought the

41:02 rights to those, the processing rights to those metals. China processes 80 of the world's key metals for all solar wind and batteries. 80, that's essentially, they own the market. Okay, that's

41:17 a security issue, global security issue. You don't like OPEC being in charge of your oil and gasoline How about China and charge your batteries for your cars? which one feels more secure? They're

41:29 trade-offs to both. Personally, I'd like a little of both and some of our own, all right. Okay, so as you start to think through those supply chains, those very real supply chains, it's

41:40 important to understand the scale, the scale of the challenge. And you mentioned it, we might be gonna add another billion people, probably another billion and a half, where at 84 it might go to

41:52 10. On our PBS show, Energy Switch, where I have two guests on every episode, just this season six, we did population. It's gonna be incredible. It wasn't, we're post producing it now. We'll

42:04 just share this demographic, which is it'll blow people away, okay? The population has been rising steadily with wealth. That happened with coal, 1805, things started to go up. And we've gone

42:18 from a billion people in 1805 to 85 billion today. That's not very long. For a while, we were adding a billion people about every 13 to 15 years. starting to plateau, we're seeing most of the big

42:32 nations in the world have gone below the replacement fertility rate of 21 kids, including India. India went below it last year. Did they arrive? Below your way. China's been below it for a while.

42:45 Right. What's gonna happen is as we go below that, at least in history, we've never turned that back around. No country has ever turned that around. So you know it's not. I didn't know it's not

42:56 Okay. So you see a plateau of population and it doesn't flatten for a while, it plummets.

43:04 Population goes from 10 to 2 billion people in about 100 to 150 years, less than it took to build it. 10 billion to two. Demographers, economists are going, oh boy. How do the fewer and fewer

43:21 people pay for all the old people need? Right. China's struggling with that. The US. would be already rolled over if we weren't, if we didn't have immigration. But most countries don't have that.

43:33 So they're rolling Japan, South Korea, way below 21, plummets. So what do you do when growth isn't a measure of quality or success or goodness? This is a fascinating dialogue. But in that

43:50 dialogue, you can start to think about some positive things, pros and cons again Well, less resource stress.

43:59 2 billion people pull a lot less on resources, particularly as we get more and more automated than 10 billion do. So maybe we start to see, we save ourselves from ourselves. And it's not that far

44:09 away. And I wanna emphasize that because climate isn't gonna kill people in 15 years. 50 to 100 years, you mentioned it, another degree, degree and a half C. Well, we've adapted to that for the

44:23 last 150 we're gonna have to adapt to that. It's coming. And most people are not gonna be six or seven degrees. No climate scientist said that anymore. But one to two, realistic, after adapt to

44:35 that. But that's over 50 to 100 years. And this population thing starts to change as soon as 40 years from now. The peak population of the world as soon as 40 years from now. I probably won't be

44:50 here, my kids will. Roll over in population of the world 'Cause that's a one must, big deal. I mean, he's, that's why he's running around and pregnanting everyone. But, but no, I mean, he

45:05 actually thinks that's the existential threat to humanity is the reduction of the population. It could be, if we treat it the way we've thought about growth in the past.

45:17 How do you pay for that inverted pyramid to used It? be we had

45:25 a bunch of young people going up. to a few old people in most countries. And that pyramid is inverted now to flat. And then a lot of countries with old people at the top and that many young people

45:35 to pay for them through work. So you work longer, how do you address this

45:43 great challenge and it's coming, it's here. So China literally is going into homes now, pressuring people to have children. They've literally flipped their one child policy in less than 15 years,

45:56 but now please have kids. It's incredible.

46:00 While we're here on the world ending, 'cause I want to. I don't think it will. I think we're smart enough humans to figure this out and figure out what measures of quality we use and how to pay for

46:14 that transition, which will be different times and different ways around the world. I think we're going to figure it out. Love to live long enough to see it happen You know what, I've always kind

46:23 of said about that similar. thing is the United States, we're pretty crappy on a day to day basis. I don't think we operate day to day very well, but you throw a crisis at us. We're really good

46:37 at that. You know, give us the Nazis. We'll take care of them. You know, grand challenge. Yeah, we do that stuff pretty well. So I actually sleep pretty well at night, you know, thinking we

46:48 will solve this. There's a technology out there that will, but while we're, while we're kind of educating the, so we talked about the good things we don't get credit for. And this is one of the

47:00 questions kind of popping up that I'm, I'm going to change Lewis's question just a little as your walk us through climate change and, and what's kind of your view, what is the science telling us of

47:14 what actually is going to happen. And you can go high case low case. Yeah, but how bad does this really get? Yeah, I'll try to do it in a sort of a tight nut shell, first geologically because

47:25 I'm a geologist. It's a true statement. The world has been much warmer in the past for almost all of Earth's history, okay? I come into what I call the recent past, the last 500 million years out

47:37 of 46 billion. When life started to sort of get going, 560 million years, whatever. It was hot. Seven, eight, nine degrees C warmer than today. And through the mesozoic, when the dinosaurs

47:51 were doing their thing for acid, you're acid-cretaceous, much warmer, CO2 in the atmosphere, 567, 000 ppm. We're at 430 ppm today,

48:05 567, 000. Now, all those things had time to adapt to that. And then through time, kind of after the end of the mesozoic last 65 million years, it started cooling. And as you come into a moment

48:16 more recent times, as a geologist, let's say the last, I'm gonna go to the last million years We've had 10 glacial interglacial cycles chucked in the last million years. What does that mean? That

48:29 means ice on Michigan and New York City, 1, 000 to 2, 000 feet thick. Ice sheets, glacial, they last 70 to 80, 000 years. Interglacial, they melt back 15 to 20, 000 years. Canada's exposed,

48:47 Greenland's exposed. Every 100, 000 years this happens, and we can explain, I won't bore you with why, we understand why, every scientist knows this 10 times, ice, no ice, ice, no ice.

49:01 Human-like things have come through all those, et cetera, okay? Cold is hard on life, much harder than warm. When you've got ice on Michigan, there's a lot less land to work with, and it's

49:16 colder. We have to stay warm, cold, hard on life. Warmer's hard too, but we can manage through warm, better, more land, more agriculture, more farming,

49:28 I don't wear as many clothes. Okay, come into this current one. We're about 18, 000 years into our current interglacial. The ice has retreated. Sea levels started rising fast 20, 000 years ago,

49:42 which it did. The Gulf of Mexico used to be 300 feet lower 20, 000 years ago. I mean, we find fish fossils in the Rocky Mountains. Well, that was a big different scale. Right. That's a whole

49:52 different kind of talking about things. The landforms would look exactly like they are now You just have 300 feet lower sea oceans in the Gulf. It rises up and here we sit. And this was the Stone

50:07 Age, the Bronze Age, the Industrial Revolution. That's what's happened in these last 15, 000 years. Humans, modern humans have come about. Okay, so that's the geologic history.

50:22 It's one of the coolest times on Earth today

50:26 And that's the geology. Atmospheric CO2 is at one of its lowest points. It was down to 280 parts per million. Life needs CO2. So it was getting to the stress point. Now, unintentionally, we

50:41 have crammed a much more CO2 in the atmosphere. We're up about 430 to 480 to 430 from burning fossil fuels, coal, oil, natural gas, and wood. CO2 in the atmosphere. CO2 is greenhouse gas. It

50:54 does It's a heat-trapping gas. It was methane. So it's made it warmer. We've added a degree C in the last hundred years. Some of that, human-forced. And quite a bit of the future's degree or two

51:09 that we've talked about will be human-forced. So these are, yes, humans are warming the planet, and yes, it's one of the coldest times on Earth. Yes, it's 420 parts per million. Yes, it used

51:21 to be 6, 000 parts per million. These are all true statements, okay? So you gotta put them into a context.

51:30 Warm is very documentable. It's the impacts from that warm that we worry about, the droughts, the severe droughts, the storms, both the frequency and intensity of the storms. The rate of the

51:46 rise of sea level, forest fires, acidity of the oceans, these are big impact things. The

51:54 IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, is the leading voice authority. In its report number six, 2021,

52:06 working group one, which really looks at all these things, chapter 12, figure 1212, I think, has a table. It's a really important table. It shows all of the impacts of climate change

52:25 It shows the ones that have, they feel the science shows have. increased because of what we've done. There's a few things there. It shows a long list of things that human induce climate change

52:41 hasn't caused to come out of its normal window yet. Let's say that again. We know what's happened with all these things through the last few thousand years and hundred years. Most of them haven't

52:55 come out of their normal window yet This is the IPCC report. I'm not making this up some denier report, the leading body. And then they forecast the things that could come out of their, their

53:06 normal window in the next 50 and a hundred years. And there's a few things there. The models are forecasting those. This is so important and it's never talked about.

53:18 To date, whenever you hear, this is the biggest storm on record. It's the hottest year ever

53:27 It hasn't come out of its normal window yet. The heat has, but the droughts,

53:35 the storm counts. The forest fires, we did another episode on fires. They haven't left their normal window yet, they could.

53:46 This is the best, most educated group of scientists in the world showing this. So go look up those who are concerned, go look it up. The positive part of that, we have some time We have some time

54:01 to continue to work on reducing our emissions

54:05 and providing affordable reliable energy to the world. We've got to do both, Chuck. We have to do both, affordable reliable energy to everyone on the planet and lower the emissions. We can do

54:19 both. So the one pushback I hear, I have a dear Frank Kelly Mitchell who I met on Twitter who used to be at Green Police and would. would handcuff herself to her fineries. And anyway, she came on

54:31 the

54:34 podcast and we figured out we didn't agree on a single thing, but we adore each other. She's awesome. She would push back until you, okay, Scott, I agree with you on all that. The issue we have

54:49 is the rate of change. This is happening faster than it ever has. And that's why we should be so scared about it Yeah, we don't know that it's faster than it ever has 'cause the fossil record is an

55:03 interesting one and it's very punctuated, okay, so we don't know. We don't have hundred year fossil records of most things. This hundred year, yes, we are warming quickly, a degree, two

55:18 degrees. If you go back and look at the last four interglacial periods, So 500, 000 years. 100, 000-year cycles are called Malenkovich band cyclicity. Some Russian physicists figured out in

55:31 house arrest for 20 years by band, how this all worked. The shape of the year's orbit, the tilt and wobble of our axis drives us closer and farther from the sun. That's what drives these cycles,

55:43 okay? It's fascinating, 20, 000, 40, 000, 100, 000-year cycles. So, if you go back and look at the last four, they let the warm times, the good times, if you will, lasted for shorter

55:56 periods than the one we're in today. They've got cold again sooner than it right now. Some would say we're due for a cold spell. And we are at some point. There is also the high point of the

56:10 temperature in all four of those is right where it will be if we go up another two degrees C or three. So, in the past, naturally, humans weren't forcing those. God is hot as it is now. And it

56:21 looks like a spike on the proxies. We didn't have thermometers back then We have proxies for that.

56:27 It looks like kind of a spike near the end, so it's possible that the sun and our system could be doing some natural things. The rate of change, let's not kid ourselves, humans adding another

56:40 degree or two is not natural in that sense, so that is increasing a rate of change

56:49 After that and say, All right, can we mitigate that? in other words, stop it.

56:57 Pretty unlikely we're asking China to build all our stuff with coal.

57:03 Pretty unlikely. All the CO2 emissions in the world now, if you take them all, Asia is producing more CO2 than the rest of the world can buy today So we are guilty of doing it in the past, less

57:20 knowledge. Can you stop that? We don't even want to stop it We want our Amazon truck.

57:26 friend who might have flown here. Probably wanted to come on play, rate of change though. What do you do to adapt to a rate of change challenge? And I use the word adapt. We have to get adaptive

57:41 strategies in the hands of everyone. We have to be able to have some air conditioning, some heating,

57:49 modern facilities, education, insulation, better windows, the things that we have in the rich world for everyone adapting to that another degree or two, which by the way, it won't kill us. That

58:05 heat won't kill us. Now, if truly the storms continue to get bigger and bigger into these super, super storms, yes, that will have a large impact on life. Will it kill 3 million people? Milton

58:19 is pounding down on Florida today Is it going to kill 3 million people in Florida like breathing into or smoked us? every year?

58:28 No, it's not. And so again, it's this, I hate to be so accounting about it. But

58:39 the thing that improves human lives longer, healthier, better lives in many ways. And so when I go around the world and I've been in 60 countries and visited a lot of people,

58:56 in most of that world, climate change isn't in their top five things. It's using not their top 10. They know about it. They're not ignorant. They just say, no, no, in priorities, these things

59:07 matter more to us. It's not front of mind. And I think we are bringing a very wealthy world perspective to the whole world And this is the great radical middle. This is the great trade-off world.

59:20 Yes, rate of change. Got to adapt to that rate. We are accelerating some of these things. The impacts haven't changed. They're not what people are being told. On the news, it's not necessarily

59:30 the biggest fire, the biggest drought, the biggest storm. It hasn't left the window yet. In the aggregate, they could become that.

59:42 Lowering emissions.

59:46 Let's say you're a runner. You run marathons. I wanna run a, I'm 65 in a month. I wanna run a four hour marathon

59:56 I run a five hour marathon, but I finished the bloody thing. I ran the marathon. I wanna lower emissions from where they are today to hypothetically net zero, meaning we capture as many as we put

1:00:11 out. Brutal challenge will probably never happen. Let's say I lower it to net 40. Not net zero, but net 40 from 100.

1:00:21 That's, that's getting there That's taking a lot of them. would have been emissions out of our atmosphere from being released andor capturing them and helping. But it's not going necessarily zero

1:00:35 which might have a whole lot of other unintended consequences about all the things we've already been talking about. And this is the radical middle. So at what point does the world get better at

1:00:46 what we're doing but not impact everything else to go to some binary driver? If CO2 is your only problem, you're gonna have impacts on the land, the air, the water, human health, human

1:00:60 flourishing. You just will. Yeah. And I hate to break it down into money but I'm a finance guy and that's what we do. We're literally talking about how do we allocate dollars the best to deal with

1:01:12 that radical middle. And to the extent, to the extent we decide to get rid of all hydrocarbons tomorrow, we're gonna be spending a lot more money on healthcare dealing with people. burning soot

1:01:27 inside their house, et cetera. You're gonna, I mean, if you were to eliminate the hydrocarbons and I'm gonna include coal, oil and gas from the world tomorrow.

1:01:40 We can't even describe the challenges. And it would be global catastrophe. Yeah other 50s to Should we go shale producing from was one from Colorado, was book, there that oil guy in the,

1:01:45 ironically Chuck, know. And you metal don't want our you, All right, saying strike and just on industrialists going great of all the underpinning philosophical storytelling her. And that was

1:01:45 Shrugged to Atlas it and then changed Forever The Strike was working title The called The Strike. originally. It was Shrugged the book Atlas wrote and ran I this. That's what about be adults to

1:01:46 happen We have would bad things But day, you know? one do that just us to for while, I'd love a once in? every I get snarky when, and

1:02:27 Really? Incredible. I don't know that I ever put that together. I mean, it's been years since I read that. Me too is John Gall, you know? Yeah, yeah. I can't remember the heat she had

1:02:36 characters for each industrialist, but no, that was the premise is, all right, just go hide in a valley in Colorado and

1:02:45 let the world implode. It's a bad idea. Yeah. So we'll, John left

1:02:53 a question. Henry Ford didn't go around shooting horses to get people to adopt his transportation solution. His car had value at a price point that met the market. Why are so many blind to the

1:03:05 forced fit of the anti-hydric carbon crowd? Well, there's a lot of reason it's political. You know, if you look at who votes for what, that's part of the forcing through mandates and or

1:03:18 incentives that are just way up there. Electric, let me say it this way. Look, I like electric vehicles for something.

1:03:57 I do. I do. I do. I do. I do. I do. I do. I do. I do. I do. I do. I do. I do. I do. I do. I do. I do. I do. I do. I do. I do. I do. I do. I do. I do. I do. I do. I do. I do.

1:03:57 I do. I do. I do. I do. I do. I do. I do. I do. I do. I do. I do. I do. I do. I do. I do. I do. I do. I do. I do. I do. I do. I do. I do. I do. I do. I do. I do. I do. I do.

1:03:57 I do. I do. I do. I do. I do. I do. I do. I do. I do. I do. I do. I do. I do. I do. I do as the vehicle gets bigger, you're hauling more weight in that battery, because again,

1:04:01 remember batteries are very low density per unit weight. You have to have a lot to get the same bang for your buck out of the fuel source as gasoline. A barrel of oil weighs 300 pounds, the same

1:04:15 amount of associated energy and lithium, I believe weighs 200, 20, 000 pounds. It's a big number. I think it's 42 gallons of oil is, yeah, that's not right. The battery in a decent sedan is

1:04:28 about 700

1:04:32 to 1, 000 pounds. And yeah, people go, yeah, but the gasoline, you have to keep refilling it. And the battery's always there. Well, you have to keep recharging it. And when it wears out,

1:04:40 which it will, you have to replace the whole battery. And so there's a cost and a environmental mining. The physics works. This isn't judgment As the vehicle gets bigger, more weight in the

1:04:55 battery, compressed natural gas, hybrids,

1:05:03 hydrogen, fuel cells, or hydrogen directly. Some of the other fuels are great options for these. And then when I get bigger and bigger, the density of liquids, I will not be flying on an

1:05:13 airplane on batteries for a very long time, if ever, because most of the way would be in the battery. You wouldn't have people I don't even think. This stat was true two or three years ago. I

1:05:26 don't know if it still is, but Boeing and Airbus don't even have patents for electric plane jet. I mean, you know, it's not. It's a physics problem. Yeah. And you can't, batteries have been

1:05:38 around a very long time, hundreds years. Let us ask another kinds of batteries. We've been trying to improve that technology a long time. So to John's question, I mean, let me use a phone

1:05:49 analogy, which I hear often, well, we cell phones, we can skip the landline technology in countries that don't have them. Right, why? Because there are satellites. They weren't around when I

1:06:04 was in high school on one phone in the house talking to my girlfriend, who's now my wife, on a curly Q line hiding in the closet. It wasn't there. This thing in my pocket came along and it's just

1:06:15 better technology across the board. So we switched to it The electric car. isn't better or worse technology than a gasoline car. A gasoline car has a more complicated and less efficient engine,

1:06:32 but it has a lot higher density fuel. And everything else about it is kind of the same. There are just differences in trade-offs. It doesn't, one isn't better than the other one. So forcing

1:06:44 people and industries and companies to buy EVs through various schemes, which is happening now They say it's not a mandate, it's a mandate. California, you can't be buying. You have to, every

1:06:56 time you sell a mandated electric vehicle. Well, close, California, in order to sell a diesel truck, you got to sell a electric truck. So they are piling up right now in stockyards because

1:07:10 they're just so expensive. And there are dangers. There are dangers to diesel. There are a lot of dangers to electric vehicles too, the fires we've already talked about So it's a different

1:07:21 technology. It has it,

1:07:27 I like it. Optionality, more transportation optionality, great. Don't force these other things away 'cause now there are fewer options and it's not necessarily better. When something better comes

1:07:35 along, like John says. The market will go, whoa, that's awesome. Like it did with phones, okay. So I got a question for you that's not energy. We were all better off as a society when you

1:07:50 wanted to court a young lady You had to call and talk to her father on the phone before you got to talk to her, right? I don't think kids today with cell phones will have to relive the horrors that

1:08:03 we had. Yeah, I could have three sons grown and then our fourth as a daughter. And she relive some horrors. She describes, I shouldn't even tell this, but when she was dating in high school, I

1:08:17 would come up into the TV room. Hey, how's it going? She said one time I even started stretching. in front of her would be Sutter. And she's like, Oh my God, Dad, are you kidding me? So the

1:08:28 parents can still, we have ways if you're clever. That's funny. Well, my wife's father was a lieutenant currently Air Force.

1:08:39 And he just passed in 2020. I got to know him very well, a pilot through our long marriage. And we did ask about dating and things And I remember calling after a dinner out to say, can we go to a

1:08:53 movie? Right. Yeah. What movie? Yeah. I think it was called Black Sunday. I even remember the movie. Oh, that sounds like a real winner, he says, you know. What are you going to have her

1:09:04 back? Yeah. All those like, yeah, let's do this. You've been so kind with your time. We're running way over, but there were a couple more questions. I'll try to do a lightning round We'll

1:09:16 lightning round

1:09:18 on the sentences instead of paragraphs.

1:09:22 Okay, so Mark would like to know what your take on India's political balancing act with respect to its invitation to join the IEA. The government is clearly on a path to significantly increase coal

1:09:35 production and coal-fired generation. How does Mottie thread that needle politically? It's tough. And the IEA has gotten very political. Fati Biroh all runs the IEA. He works for European

1:09:47 governments and ours And it's gotten very political back in the summer of '21 with the net zero missions report. A lot of us energy people are going, What is that? So Mottie, Narendra Mottie has a

1:09:58 balancing act, not just in that, but in many ways. He is looking east and he's looking west and trying to juggle that. I think if you think about Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin and others in the

1:10:10 east, they have a lot to offer, markets, manufacturing, et cetera, and India needs products So I worry about the billion 11. 4 billion souls in India, and which direction they're going to go,

1:10:26 what block are they going to join, if you will. Right now, straddle on a fine line, I would delay it as long as I could if I was him as well. There's benefits on

1:10:37 both sides of that look, but I think the West, if you, I hate using that term, Western Europe, Eastern Europe, the US, needs to get to wake up to the reality that at some point in the not too

1:10:50 distant future, China doesn't have to have Europe as a market. It can sell to India, in Africa, plenty of products. Interesting, interesting. Caleb wants to know in reference to the

1:11:04 oil and gas industry heading into 2025, does the election matter?

1:11:11 It's funny. The oil and gas industry in the US actually does better economically under democratic presidents, ironically, because they tend to have more restrictions. And the price goes up. So

1:11:26 you're producing your barrels and getting a better spread. I think the election matters. Well, I'm giving a lecture talk called The Politics of Energy at the Petroleum Club in Houston in a couple

1:11:40 of weeks. So for those interested, sign up. I can't believe I put that title in. I'm regretting it today. But I'm gonna look at those things. And it does matter If you start looking individually

1:11:51 at the politics of each source of energy about building infrastructure, about dealing LNG the, neighbors our with pause, these are all political things. And so it does matter to the world and it

1:12:04 does matter to the US. There are pros and cons to both parties when it comes to the energy. The IRA, the so-called Inflation Reduction Act, which increased inflation.

1:12:19 If you look at where it's being spent the most, Chuck, it's in the red states. And industry itself has now called for Mr. Trump. Well, don't kill all the IRA. There's some of that we're using

1:12:33 and of that trillion something dollars. So money is a remarkable tool. And that money is being deployed in a lot of different ways that everybody is using. I personally have met Jack Kemp way back

1:12:55 in the '70s, kind of a supply cider. I worry about debt. I worry about debt servicing. Next year, for the first time since 1940, our debt will be higher than our annual GDP.

1:13:12 So a hundred and the debt servicing is now more what we spend in the military. paying the debt service every year is more than we spend in the military. I worry about another trillion dollars,

1:13:25 that's just me. And so it does matter, Trump's economic plan costs as much or more than Harris's at the current point, at least according to reasonable analyses, and they're both more than we're

1:13:37 heading today. So I think the bigger issue to me is just how do you tell the American people, we're not gonna get as much out of the federal government in the future We've got to start realizing we

1:13:50 can't just keep printing money. And so to me, the election is about that, is how do we really get our heads around our economy? Yeah, because when you go back and you study any of the fiat

1:14:05 currencies that are imploded, and guess what, they all have, it happens

1:14:10 really quick, and it's not a gradual lag into it, The dollars lost 97 of it. value since the creation of the bed, which may feel like we're lagging into it. But I mean, I just have fears as

1:14:26 someone living on a limited portfolio as an unemployed dude, I have fears of the Weimer Republic and wheelbarrows of money. And you would know that better than most. You've been in that world.

1:14:38 Yeah. And there was times when you looked at the yen or the yuan and other things, but they're not doing very well either. China's economy isn't doing very well So the dollar's still out there

1:14:49 maybe because it's the best of the worst. Healthiest member of the leper colony

1:14:56 is what we talk about. Yeah. And so on energy terms,

1:15:01 there's a lag.

1:15:04 I think both parties are recognizing the strength of nuclear now, which is good. It's more recent than the Democrats, but they're there. Nuclear has to be part of this solution when you think

1:15:13 about climate has to be.

1:15:17 It's a remarkable high density, no emissions, now

1:15:22 deployable. So you don't have to build the gigawatt reactors today. You can look at those 50, 100, 150 megawatt small mods or reactors and put them where you need them. When you see Microsoft

1:15:34 partnering with Three Mile Island to fire that up again, or heat it up again, it's a nuclear reaction, so by making the heat to boil the water, make steam, turn the turbine, run a generator,

1:15:49 make electricity for who, for Microsoft. It's a partnership, it's not going on to the grid, they need that. And this is why Gates has invested so heavily in TerraPower, an SMR company, new

1:15:60 scales, another big one, know the folks who run those, and you're really starting to see the world, China and Russia build 70 of the nuclear reactors in the world today, China and Russia alone.

1:16:12 We're getting behind, but I think it's time, Finally, the Renaissance has come too. reinvest in that and young people aren't scared of it. So they aren't scared of it. So

1:16:24 Trinity gas storage is open in the natural gas storage facility. The East Texas had me come out and keynote their operators meeting launch. And as I have a tendency to do, I just v8 about things.

1:16:38 I try to say controversial stuff, you know, just I'm entertainment first, energy second And I gave the speech and it was anecdotal in nature. It's certainly not a well researched thesis and all.

1:16:56 I came out and said natural gas is out of business in 10 years because no one in this room has gone and talked to Google, Microsoft or anybody else. Big tech is going to choose how to power their AI

1:17:09 demand and I did a funny routine on why we're all going to use AI in the future. And it's going to take so much power. And they're going to choose how they power it. They're probably going to do it

1:17:21 off grid. And they're going to choose nukes. And so anyway, I said that about a year ago. And all the pressure releases coming out, the guy keeps the emailing. How did you know? And I get,

1:17:33 well, I kind of made it up. But

1:17:36 I do think when you look at nuclear and you look at it in the hands of big tech and we as energy folks go, well, they're permitting problems. Big tech doesn't have problems with the government.

1:17:48 They tell the government what to do. They're right next to big pharma in terms of being able to do that. And that interesting. You know? And when you start looking at it through that one's plus,

1:17:56 they have tons of money to throw at it. They have really smart people. And so I kind of think that unless the natural gas folks get off their rear end, go to Silicon Valley, sit down and start

1:18:10 thinking, I entitled the speech, you don't sell natural gas, you sell electrons. Go figure that out. Yeah, they do and they sell molecules to for various things fertilizers and other kinds of

1:18:21 things you burn The gap that you're right. I think you're exactly right what because of the affordable reliable piece for nuclear the reliable piece They need 24 7 365 electricity for most things now.

1:18:36 They can run some things Intermittently right but a lot of it. You got to run the servers You got to be able to always have your electricity. You got to run the air conditioning. It always has to

1:18:46 be kept cool, etc, etc Nuclear very reliable for long periods of time That said Chuck the gap in the growth of demand So from our base today, which has been flat for a while that growth is AI data

1:19:03 center is a lot of tech But the base itself still has to be there Yeah, and that's where gases roll because gas has been replacing coal

1:19:14 You notice tech didn't go to wind and solar.

1:19:18 They're not going to coal. So

1:19:22 you see that mix that their important role that gas plays in the electricity side, both as a base load or dispatchable, but also as the load following or the peakers, as they call them, to back up

1:19:36 solar and wind. When I need something quick and my, I don't cook with charcoal in my kitchen

1:19:43 I cook with gas or electricity, and that doesn't even heat up as quickly as gas is on. And then it's off. And so this is a remarkable fuel for balancing solar and wind. And that partnership is

1:19:60 tremendous. In fact, there are a lot of Democrats, Mary Landrieu has become a friend that Senator out of Louisiana, former Senator 18 years, something called natural allies, putting solar and

1:20:09 wind and gas together. Because they complement each other.

1:20:14 I'm gonna say this clearly. Enough of the false fighting. Enough of competing solar wind against gas or gas against nuclear. We need these things. It's not an either or they do different things.

1:20:28 We've got to

1:20:32 stop this false warfare, which becomes law fair. Right. Enough. We need these things. And the industry needs to rise up together, wrap our arms around one another. And that's when we'll start

1:20:46 to see politicians able to actually do the things that make sense. When young people and others understand these things, and then they go say, Stop, I don't believe you. You know, this isn't

1:20:56 clean and dirty, good and bad. We need these things. That's when we have succeeded. Yeah. Scott, this has been great. I can't thank you enough for doing this. Standing invite to come back

1:21:08 anytime you want. Sounds great you're inviting me and I think it's fun to. Be here and I love the online questions, so. Yeah, that was fun. I don't think I embarrassed you. Nah, I tried not to

1:21:19 embarrass you. I tried to be on my best behavior. I will tell you one last quick story though, 'cause you'll get a kick out of this. So my dad is the guy that adopts new technology the first

1:21:31 moment it comes out and then never upgrades. We probably have the first VCR ever built in America, still at the Yates house. Still works. Yeah, probably still works So dad goes out and he buys

1:21:45 solar panels and Tesla batteries for the house. And I go, Hey, dad, that's great. How much does that cost? And he goes, Well, it costs125, 000,

1:21:55 but I never have to pay for electricity again. And I go, Well, you do any math? And dad goes, Yeah, it's a 124 year payback. And I go, You're 80. And I go, I hope you're here for payback.

1:22:09 But, you know. So fast forward to winter storm, Yuri. My house is in between the police department, fire department and the hospital. So I don't think my grid's ever going down. Of course it

1:22:20 goes down. So I show up over to my parents' house. I've got my cat in a carrier under one arm and bag under the other. I sit down, my dad's reading the paper. He didn't even move the paper, but

1:22:31 I hear the 124 year payback doesn't sound so bad. Right about it now does it. Good for him Scott, this was fun. Thanks for doing it. Enjoy the show.