Heartland Daily Podcast

And that's what climate change is about. It is literally not figuratively a clear and present danger.

We are in the beginning of a mass extinction.

The ability of c o 2 to do the heavy work of creating a climate catastrophe is almost nil at this point.

The price of oil has been artificially elevated to the point of insanity.

That's not how you power a modern industrial system.

The ultimate goal of this renewable energy, you know, plan is to reach the exact same point that we're at now.

Yeah. You know who's trying that? Germany. 7 straight days of no wind for Germany. Their factories are shutting down.

They really do act like weather didn't happen prior to, like, 1910.

Today is Friday.

That's right, Freda. It is Friday. It is the most important and most fun day of the week. It is it is the day that the Heartland Institute broadcast the Climate Realism Show. I'm Jim Lakeley, vice president of the Heartland Institute.

There is no other show quite like the Climate Realism Show streaming anywhere, so I hope you will like, share, and subscribe this this, this podcast. And, also, leave your comments under the video. These all help to convince YouTube's algorithm to smile upon this program and to get its the show in front of more people. And a reminder, because Big Tech and the legacy media do not approve at all of the way that we cover climate and energy on this program, Heartland's YouTube channel has been demonetized. So if you wanna support this program, please visit heartland.org/tcrs.

That's heartland.org/tcrs, which stands for the Climate Realism Show. And then, that will help us keep this show happening every single week. Any support you can give is, warmly welcome and also greatly appreciated. And we also wanna thank our streaming partners. That would be junk science.com, CFACT, Climate Depot, and What's Up With That?

This program is being, livestreamed on their x accounts right now, and we welcome all of you watching on x. You can also leave comments for us during the show. And let's get rolling. Today, we have with us Anthony Watts. He is the senior fellow for, environment and climate policy at the Heartland Institute and the publisher of the most influential climate website in the world.

What's up with that? We also have h Sterling Burnett. He is the, director of the Arthur b Robinson Center on Climate and Environmental Policy at the Heartland Institute. And, also, Linnea Lukin, of course, she's research fellow for energy and environment policy at Heartland, and we are very happy to have as a special guest today Steve Gorham. He is the author of 4 books on climate and energy, including his latest, which is, green breakdown, the coming renewable energy failure.

Welcome, everybody, to the to the show today. I think we have a lot to cover. It should be a lot of fun.

Yep. Sure will.

Good to be back. Alright. So, we we, you can see from the rundown here that we do have a lot of topics, to cover, and I'm very glad for all the people that are here in the chat. Again, we'll be doing q and a at the end of the show. So if you have questions for either Steve or anybody on this on this program, we will get to that in the last segment of this here program.

So without further ado, we are going to start the show as we always do with the crazy climate news of the week. See, Anthony, I told you I was gonna get that Greta drop in there one day.

I

was I was look so looking forward to Bill Nye. I missed

I missed

Bill Nye.

Bill Nye.

Bill Nye. Alright. Alright. There we go.

I feel better now. Me too.

I you gotta be in

the right mindset, Anthony. If you're not in the right mindset, I don't know. The the segment just won't work right, But I also like to embrace the power of and, so we'll we'll drop both of those. Alright. Our, our first crazy climate news of the week, is an item from our friend Chris Martz Chris Martz on x.

He's been a guest on this program, and I'm sure we're gonna have him on, again very soon. And, it is a, a tweet that he had. I'm showing the video on there for our for our viewers here on Rumble and on on YouTube. But he has a, he has a tweet on x where this right here. This is a drone footage, from a few days ago.

This is dated October 15th. Drone footage shows Duke Energy's Lake Placid Solar Power Plant located in Highlands County, Florida. Looks like, hurricane Milton did a did a pretty good job on it. This was a $100,000,000 project destroyed by a tornado last week. And, Chris asked, does this sound like the definition of a sustainable electricity generation source to you?

I don't know. You guys are the energy experts. I'm not really.

I will I will point out point out it doesn't look optimal. Point out that in the past, we have had electrical infrastructure such as, you know, transformer stations, that sort of thing destroyed by tornadoes. So, you know, tornadoes do go out and destroy the electrical infrastructure, but this one's particularly tragic in the sense of it's you know, it is the source of the power. As far as I know, we've never had a tornado destroy a coal or nuclear power plant ever.

Never had a nuclear power plant. I don't know if they've done coal, but I'll say this as well. You know? Look. You can see a a wide swath of the panels were just they no longer exist or they're in shards.

But just because some other panels are, standing, doesn't mean that they're functioning. It's all interconnected, and a lot of those panels have holes in them now where the shards were tossed into them. So they may look like they're still there and and working, but not so. And this isn't the tornado is not unique in in a sense. No hailstorm has ever destroyed a a traditional power plant, but hailstorms have destroyed solar farms in Texas and in other places, just shattering, you know, and leaving waste.

Look. They've gotta clean this up. Farmers have come to fear what wind and solar is doing to their land when these things, shatter, break, or blown around. The little fiberglass or the silicone crystals, if, you know, it's the if it's fiber fiberglass or whatever from, composites from wind turbines that break or catch fire, the silicone and stuff, the chemicals in it from the the solar panels, they don't want that getting into the food supply. It's it's it's madness, and it puts lie as if you didn't already hadn't put lie to the fact that solar is not reliable.

Remember, half the day is dark, so there's no solar power being generated then. Other days is cloudy or rainy, minimal solar power being generated then. It puts light of the fact that this is reliable. This is energy an energy source that you can count on to provide 247 power.

Yep. Now now even without the

Sterling, you are, this is actually the 3rd big solar installation that's been destroyed in the last 18 months. Yeah. And the other 2 were by hail. There was one destroyed in Scottsbluff, Nebraska, June of last year, a 14,000 panel system that was decimated. And then there was one in Texas, I believe, in March.

Yep. Same sort of thing by another hailstorm. So, this getting be a more and more frequent occurrence, these, these solar installations, I don't like to call them farms, being destroyed by the wells.

They're industrial facilities, and they take up a lot of space, and they don't work that well. And you're I'll I'll I'll issue one correction, Steve. It's actually the 4th that I'm aware of because one of them not here was a a floating solar farm.

Oh, yeah.

Who who thought the world's largest floating solar farm who who who thought that was a good idea?

That was in India.

Yeah. In India. In in a country that has a monsoon season every year, every year, and it just wiped it out. The waves came in, crushed them all together. So they've got a lot of pollution in the water now.

That that's a lot harder to pick up than the stuff you see on land. Yep. Yeah.

You know, I wonder if, solar farms are gonna be the replacement tornado magnets for trailer parks. You know? It used to be you could figure a trailer park would go out and be the target for any tornado. Mhmm. I wonder if that's changing now.

Do the tornadoes know? Well, maybe we could just save time and put the the trailers in between the solar panels so

you you you get them all in one fell swoop.

Yeah. That reminds me of a joke. Do you know what the difference between a divorce in Arkansas and a tornado is or what their similarity is? Somebody's gonna lose a trailer. Somebody's gonna lose a trailer.

Alright. Well, we'll leave that there, and we could move on to our, to our No

offense to our friends in Arkansas.

Yeah. Alright.

It just it it was originally from someone else. It's not my joke, but I thought it was appropriate at the moment.

So Right.

My apologies to everyone in Arkansas.

Well, every every state has a has jokes about the other state that there's a rival. Don't get me started on Pennsylvania and West Virginia for crying out loud. Alright. We're gonna add here to the stage. Our second item for the week that there is, apparently been no detectable warming surge since 19 seventies.

This comes from our, our friends at Climate Depot, one of our streaming partners. They highlighted, this week a new paper in the journal Nature Communications Earth and Environment that, as I mentioned, shockingly says there's been no change in the warming rate, since the 19 seventies. Now, Anthony, I'm gonna read this abstract, for our for our listeners and those people who may not be able to read it on the screen, and maybe you can put this in perspective for our audience, and let us know how significant it is. It goes like this. The global mean surface temperature is widely studied to monitor climate change.

A current debate centers around whether there has been a recent post 1970s surge slash acceleration in the warming rate. Here, we investigate whether an acceleration in the warming rate is detectable from a statistical perspective. We use change point models, which are statistical techniques specifically designed for identifying structural changes in time series. 4 global mean surface temperature records over 18 50 to 2023 are scrutinized within. Our results show limited evidence for a warming surge.

In most surface temperature time series, no change in the warming rate beyond the 19 seventies is detected despite the breaking record temperatures observed in 2023. As such, we estimate the minimum changes in the warming trend required for a surge to be detectable across all datasets, an increase of at least 15th I'm sorry. An increase of at least 55% is needed for a warming surge to be detectable at the present time. Now, Anthony, one study does not scientific consensus, to quote a term, make. But what do you make of this of this paper that was published in a pretty prestigious peer reviewed journal?

Well, this is a response to all of the media hoopla that happened last year in July of 23 where, you know, it was the hottest day ever, the hottest year ever, the hottest whatever ever. You know, it was all about that. And, of course, the media extrapolating from that started saying things like, well, global warming is accelerating now. You know? And it's just like what they do with sea level rise.

They claim that sea level rise is accelerating. You go and you look at the data, and you don't find it. It's not there. And so 1 year and of of I have normally warm temperatures does not make for an acceleration. And I will point out another study came out this week showing conclusively that the warming spike in 2023 and lasting into 2024 is due to a large El Nino, and that has driven that.

So, it's just not, it's just not there. The acceleration is not there. And so what they've done here basically is put the brakes on some of the climate alarmism surrounding the supposed acceleration.

Yeah. I mean, interesting, but this is, you know, that that's one of the things we talk about on this program. We talk about at the Heartland Institute a lot internally. We talk about and, actually, we showcase at our international conferences on climate change on how there is still so much to learn about what is happening to the planet, and there's even a lot to learn about how data is collected, how accurate that data is, and how it is then compiled into studies. Right, Sterling?

Well, a 100%. You know, 100%. You do science by testing confirmation, disconfirmation, not by consensus, not by votes, not by taking a poll. That's that's politics. And will this will this study prove, correct?

Will it prove true? Well, time will tell, but it's one more data point. It's one more bit of evidence on top of the stuff that Anthony and others have done on the urban heat island effect, on top of the work that Roy Spencer and and others have done on, and John Christie on density. That that points to the fact that this it's not clear what's going on as far as temperature wise and whether you can detect a climate signal despite what the IPCC basis based on consensus, we all agree, says. You know, you gotta remember at one time, it was generally agreed the consensus was the earth was flat.

The consensus was wrong. It was generally agreed, that, the earth was the center of the universe. Everyone knew that. Ask anyone. It was wrong.

In medical science, people the the the the doctors, the the natural doctors, argued that humors an imbalance of humors in the body was what caused illness. Of course, that was wrong. Consensus means nothing. Discovery, testing, verified, you know, verification, that means everything. So will this study prove true?

I don't know. But it's one more thing that's worth investigating. And while you while there are open investigations, valid reasons for open investigations, you can't say case closed. The science is settled.

Right. Yeah. It looks like the journal Nature, was caught, you know, committing science here instead of propaganda perhaps, first time in a while. Alright. We'll move on to our next, to our next fun item here, and this is from pardon me.

This is from Politico. And, I gotta say, even I'm shocked by the tone, considering it's from political, to be honest with you. They seem skeptical that you can actually pass a law to control the prices at the pump. So here's the story. Governor Gavin Newsom signed a bill on Monday aimed at reining in soaring gas prices that have come to symbolize California's multifaceted struggle with affordability.

Newsom said ABX 21, which gives his administration new authority to regulate the dwindling number of oil refineries, will bring the oil majors to heel by requiring them to prevent spike price spikes caused by maintenance and low supplies. The oil industry has fought the bill in Sacramento, arguing that it could backfire and drive up costs.

Wow. A

head of the industry's main trade group, accused lawmakers of being more concerned with painting big oil as the villain than tamping down gas prices. And Newsom said at his press conference that the proposal was, quote, not about politics. At the same time, he posted an animated video on x showing, former president Donald Trump cutting down trees with a chainsaw to make way for oil derricks. If only he did that, that would be pretty awesome. Newsom accused the industry in the video of increasing gas prices during the election to scare voters into supporting Trump.

Now guess what happened next, guys? Yeah. 2 days after Newsom signed this bill. Go ahead. Guess.

Come on.

A refinery closed. A refinery closed. Bill of 66. One of its few one of its few refinery look.

This is You are correct.

This is tantamount to, to, California's California causes these high prices. They have high fuel taxes.

Morning. We are looking at the pullback after another rather high yesterday.

We've got an auto That's brilliant. Video in there.

Well, I've I've got the video going.

Oh, sorry. I'll remove that. We don't need that anymore.

43,000. You you got you've got high fuel taxes.

Look at these You 59

It's still plenty.

Restrictions on energy use

43,000.

Evidently, though, not on that news broadcast. You have climate restrictions. You have limits on where you can operate, oil and gas operations. They they they they the van offshore. So, basically, they've done everything they can to raise cost, and then they wanna blame the industry, And it's tantamount to what they did with, the restaurant workers.

Right? They pass a bill. We are gonna give restaurant workers a living wage. We're gonna make it, what, 20, $22 an hour, for, the guy at the, the fry chef and the and the, person answering the, drive through. Everyone's gonna get paid that.

You have to live with it. And what have they had? A raft of restaurant closures. You can you can mandate something. It doesn't mean you'll still have the product, and they're gonna have less well, you know, Phillips are closing.

They'll have less availability of refined fuel right there in California, which means they'll have to ship more in. That raises prices. So it's it's the very opposite. Good intentions don't matter if you really believe it's good intentions as opposed to political theater. Yeah.

What matters is whether policies enacted, increase supply, and this directly decreases supply.

Right. And and the the real kicker is what, Phillips 60 six's, spokesperson said regarding, you know, because they're losing 85,000 barrels of gasoline production, for California now. So they said that, and I'll quote from their statement. Once we cease operations, we will work with California to fuels, including gasoline imports and renewable fuels. So cool.

Great. Now you guys get

to transport all of these new pipelines.

So it's just a nightmare all around. Good job, guys.

Yeah. This is Newsome's let them eat lithium moment. It's a

good one.

It's

Go ahead, Steve.

I'm waiting for the California rate payer revolt. I've been involved with the groups in Los Angeles. Electricity prices are up 50% in 3 years. And if you're now air conditioned in July or August in medium sized home, it costs you $1,000 a month for electricity, and it's gonna go much, much higher in the next few years. So we'll just have to see, what form that rate payer revolt, takes.

We already see it. The ratepayer revolt is they're moving out of California. Yeah. It it and it's losing it's losing population faster, I believe, than any other state. So, we're already seeing it.

They're voting with their feet, or their U Haul trucks, and, it it will only get worse. Right?

Yeah. It's gonna get worse.

But it's not politics, Gavin News assures us.

Yeah. Well, you know, it reminds me of the I'm a I'm a kid of the cold war. You know? And it reminds me of, you know, all we have to do to stop nuclear war is to just sign a bill that says nuclear war is illegal, and then I guess it won't happen.

Yeah. You know where I used to live in Chico, California? The city council actually passed a resolution that said, nuclear weapons are illegal to own within the

city

limits. I'm serious. I'm serious. It's on the books. And you know what?

It's been totally effective so far.

Right.

Well, as far as you know. As far as you know. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, I it's hard to even give the benefit of the doubt that there are good hearted intentions here when you when you pass legislation like this. Like, if you really wanna reduce the price of gasoline and oil and energy to the people of California, you do the opposite of everything Gavin Newsom and frankly the Democrats that have been ruining that once golden state for the last 20 years. It used to be one of the oil capitals of the United States, and now it is, increasingly and, in fact, if you go to California, you can still see derricks operating, you know, on the hillsides as you drive up the Pacific Coast Highway and places like that. I mean, the oil is coming out of the ground.

It's gonna come out of the ground one way or another. We could get it ourselves, or it can naturally leach. And, apparently, they just wanna leave it in the ground and let it leak everywhere.

As, in our comment section, Michael Johansen pointed out, time to invest in companies making horse carriages. And this I wrote a op ed, like, 2 years ago, accusing California of being a, old west or a yeehaw conspiracy theory because all of their policies are increasingly driving people towards towards horse transportation and trains. And, they're they're aiming for the golden days of California's history.

I'm putting all my retirement funds in, buggy whips and pulling horses.

Draft horses. I'm I'm harvesting smoke detectors to get the radioactive material out of it so I can build my own home nuclear reactor.

Alright. Cut his mic. We gotta stop his now.

It's cut off the rails. Alright. Let's get to our 2 memes of the week here for a little bit more laughter. One of them here, this was, Anthony submitted this one, and and I think, Sterling, you said it might be a little bit too mean, but what the heck? This is the Climate Realism Show.

We'll put it on the air. So it's a it's it's a 2 panel meme of a, a a young girl standing there saying, you'll die of old age. I'll die of climate change. And then we have somebody who looks, a little a bit like Sterling and Anthony combined, who says my money's on stupidity taking you out long before the climate does. The Internet has some great memes.

And then second, this is a cartoon we didn't get to show last week, I don't believe. And I thought it was apropos since we had a a crazy climate news thing about tornadoes destroying tornadoes versus solar panels. Tornadoes win every time. This is a, panel. They achieved net 0, and you have Greta flying a broom, just for Halloween.

Wow. We've stumbled upon the remains of an ancient failed religion. And, yeah, I think I think it would be a mistake. Archaeologists, you know, 500, a 1000, 2000 years from now might be looking at digging this stuff up and wondering what the hell we were thinking.

What you're looking at there is the day after the day after tomorrow.

Yeah. By the way, this cartoon is from the Saltbush Club down in Australia. Our friend down there, Viv Forbes, runs that outfit, and he he's, one of the leading climate skeptics in Australia. So he does these cartoons every once in a while. I like the fact that Grado is flying around.

That's cool.

That is good. That is good. Alright. Right. We can get to now, I think, our, our main topic for today.

So, and that is, climate alarmism in schools. Steve Gorham, I know you you do a lot of, public speaking. I I had didn't ask you if you've spoken on college campuses or on, or in high schools or places like that. I've been invited to actually speak a couple times at high schools up here, in the Northern Illinois area. But, you know, it's it's not often that somebody with a heterodox view, heterodox meaning, you know, not the mainstream alarmist viewpoint, on the climate gets to speak to impressionable people or to perhaps an attempt to deprogram them.

And before I go to you about that, there's there's there's an excerpt here that I'm going to read from a story in The Guardian. The headline is that, UC San Diego, the University of California at San Diego, has added an innovative prerequisite to, quote, prepare students for their the future they will really encounter, and that and that requirement is to take a course in climate change. So it starts here saying that, Melanie Calicott, a human biology major at UC San Diego, thinks about the climate crisis all the time. She discusses it with family and friends because of the intensity of hurricanes like Milton and Helene. That's one reason why she is glad that UC San Diego has implemented an innovative graduation requirement for students starting this autumn, a course in climate change.

Courses must cover at least 30% climate related content and address 2 of 4 areas, including scientific foundations, human impacts, mitigation strategies, and project based learning. 30% of a course. Goodness. The, quote, the most important thing is that UC San Diego wants to make sure we're preparing students for the future and that that they will really encounter, says a woman who was part of the committee creating this new planet at, UC San Diego. The requirement is designed to be integrated into existing classwork.

Forty one quarter courses meet this goal, including, quote, the astronomy of climate change, gender and climate justice, Indigenous Approaches to Climate Change, and Environmentalism in the Arts and Media. Many of the classes that fall under the climate change requirement overlap with courses that focus on diversity, equity, and inclusion. What a surprise. And I'll finish up with this real quick, a quote from, that same same university staffer. We'll throw it to you, Steve.

We're acutely aware as a society of how the climate is changing and how scary that can be. And that probably means that we need to implement some changes in how we do things. If they're thinking about the future, they need to be prepared for what the future might bring. That could mean new opportunities in climate adjacent fields such as carbon accounting or civil engineering with a climate focus. Steve Steve Gorham, you know, I I don't think recent college graduates are getting nearly the education I did, in the in the early nineties, and it's only getting worse.

Yeah. The, students are getting a a very one-sided point of view, especially in the high schools and colleges. I have a little story. About, about 8 years ago, I I did an online, kind of a lecture and discussion with, I think it was a junior college in the Chicago area. And, I I basically presented a point of view that that climate is dominated by nature, not man made influences.

And then at the end, they had comments from the students, and there were all kinds of crazy comments. One student said, this is like finding out there's no Santa Claus. He said, in 12 years of school, I've never heard that climate, wasn't made by humans. So they're getting a very one-sided point of view on all this sort of stuff.

Well, it's it's honestly, you're already seeing stories almost daily about college graduates being unhirable or being fired shortly after being hired because they're not prepared to work. They they they they don't have ambition, and they don't have knowledge. Despite Kamala recently saying after saying they're stupid and they must be, that's why we put them in dormitories now, she says, oh, they're the leaders of tomorrow. It's great. Businesses have found out how stupid these people are.

Not all of them, but a lot of them. How unprepared they are. That's that's the school's fault. And I tell you, if if I'm looking at graduates from UT, UC San Diego, it's suddenly one more reason for me to say, well, maybe I'll look elsewhere because I can't have them coming in telling me all about climate stuff that, by the way, has nothing to do with our business. And b, you know, the idea that they can know what the climate effects will be sometime in the future that we'll have to live with.

You know, that's pure that's pure fantasy projection. I guess the administrators there have a a a really powerful crystal ball.

Well, students are being forced to tow the line. If you're if you're a a college student and one of the scientists, you have two choices. You can follow the theory man made warming, or you can become a, climate realist or a denier, as they'll call you. And if you if you choose that alternative path, very tough to get research contracts, very tough to get tenure, all those sorts of things. So there's tremendous pressure on college science students to get in line with the with the the ideology of climatism.

Well, maybe they'll only be hired in academia and, as artists. Right? Because, I can't imagine some other discipline wanting them. I'll I'll say this. You know, I I wish I wish it were just limited to UC San Diego.

But as as, you know, Linnea can tell you, it's it it it wasn't when I was in in school. But when I was in school, they were worried about the next, ice age coming. But it it's in all of our education. And, you know, perhaps most alarming to me, even medical schools are requiring climate orthodoxy. They're they're they're not requiring learning the anatomy and, how to fiddle around with people's insides with small razor like instruments and, diagnosing diseases.

They're taking time away from that to talk about climate change. And you must learn the orthodoxy and maybe question your patient's carbon footprints. It's it's crazy.

Yeah. There are a couple big, scientific standards that that, are pushing schools. One is called the Next Generation Science Standards, and that that is now being used in 26 of the 50 states. And it for example, it says here that in middle school, quote, you're you're to teach that, quote, human activities such as the release of greenhouse gases from burning fossil fuels are major factors in the current rise in Earth's mean surface temperature. And so we have 26 states that have accepted, this Next Generation Science Standards.

24 are opposing it primarily because of the issues with climate change. We also have another one called from the National Academies of Science called a Framework for K dash 12 Science Education. And, for example, it says here by the end of grade 5, that you're supposed to teach that if Earth's global mean temperature continues to rise, so humans and other organisms will be affected in many ways. By the end of, grade 8, they're teaching human activities such as the release of greenhouse gases from burning fossil fuels are major factors in the current rise in Earth's mean surface temperature, global warming. And by the end of, Grade 12 high schools whoop, I just lost that here.

But basically, that says that well, that, the magnitudes of human impacts are greater than they have ever been, so too are humans' abilities to model, predict, and manage current and future impacts. Basically, they think here that science and engineering can control Earth's climate. So, unfortunately, this is this comes from some pretty big, science organizations backed by the US government, of course.

Anthony, you wanted to jump in here?

Oh, I was just going to say, I just saw just the other day, I think it was Wednesday, that Zillow, the home listing service, they're they're getting infected by this now. They are, offering a climate risk assessment to go with every house they put up on Zillow now. And the realtors are like, are you kidding me? Because who wants to you know, let's say the the the climate risk, you know, on this house is is low or high or whatever. It doesn't help with the selling process whatsoever, and it confuses the buyers.

And so, it's nuts. It's totally nuts. And, Jerilyn, you were talking about the medical community, you know, a little while ago, about them, you know, requiring climate courses. Well, I mean, some of the crazy that's out there like this one where they're talking about climate causes more kidney stones. I mean, it's nuts.

It's absolutely nuts. And that people that don't have the ability to think critically swallow this stuff as if it's factual. And and so that's why we see, you know, climate stuff showing up in medical schools now. It's crazy. It it's dangerous.

If, you know, just for the sake of argument, if climate cause kidney stones, would the treatment for kidney stones be any different? My suspicion is not. Are we now are we now rather than, you know, whatever procedures you have for removing or minimizing kidney stones for so they pass through, we'll say, no. No. We're not gonna do that stuff anymore.

What we're really gonna, deal with is the underlying cause. We're gonna stop running our cars. Yeah. The the reduced c o two will reduce whatever climate change, and that'll eventually solve your kidney stone problem.

Right. Right. The cure for kidney stones is communism. Everybody knows that. Exactly.

Well, what it might do is the phrase convince.

And then This too shall pass, but it's gonna pass like a

kidney stone. Yeah. Oh, well, what it will do is

it will get hospitals to ration their anesthesia and stuff. We're we're already seeing that. There have been tons of articles that have come out in the last couple of years talking about how hospital systems are reevaluating how they use, you know, their various knockout gases, because those tend to be also greenhouse gases. So, it's, it's not a very nice future when you when you consider that we might do all the old saw bones.

So so when

the doctor's style.

When you're about to go under and the doctor says, there's going to be a little discomfort, he means a lot more than there used to be. Right?

Well, there wasn't there a story just this week about how, people have to use inhalers, you know, asthmatics and all that stuff that, that causes, greenhouse gases, and that's a dangerous enough. People who have breathing problems are just gonna have to suck it up or or not suck it in.

I know. Yeah.

They've heard that.

They just they started destroying those, more than a decade ago when they took the original, gas that, ejected the medicine out and replaced it with an alternative, which wasn't nearly as effective. I mean, you had with asthma. You had to suck harder. And as an asthmatic, I can tell you that ain't possible sometimes. You just

you just summarized all of climate policy. Suck harder. Suck harder.

Here's another one. Did you hear the, the, study that's coming from Canada's report card research committee? Yeah. And they concluded that the climate change is emerging as a new barrier for children and youth to get more active in Canada. And and one of the things they're talking about how is it was getting warmer in Canada.

And now the average temperature in Toronto is 8.7 degrees Celsius. So you gotta kinda wonder, what about Atlanta, 16 degrees Celsius or, you know, 25 degrees Celsius in Miami? Those kids just must be getting no exercise down there in the US.

Well, they You

know, everything everything's gotta be due to climate change.

I would think it would make the outdoors more amenable to use in Canada.

Yep.

You know, there are whole months of the year where they either aren't allowed outside because of subzero temperatures, or they go outside, but they look like, the puffy Coke kid on South Park because, they just look like this bundled up large, what was it? There was a a movie. Oh, the Christmas story where the the kid has to go outside wearing that big puffy coat. This just Anthony says it best. The stupidity, it burns.

For sure. Well, Steve Gorham, you're you're on our show. You've been you've been a friend of the Heartland Institute, for quite a long time. I have up here on the screen, 2 of your 2 of your books, The Mad, Mad World of Climatism. The Heartland Institute actually helped distribute that book and get into a lot of people's hands.

It was very popular. Good. And and, then and your new one is called green breakdown, the coming renewable energy failure. I think you need to I think you need to cross out the word coming in the title in the next edition. But, why don't you talk 1st, I I just wanna ask you, because you use use this term climatism.

What is climatism in your view?

Well, I I, used that in my first book, climatism, and it's basically the ideology that humans are causing dangerous global warming. And it's an ideology of fear across the world, and fear makes people do do crazy things. Last year, it was estimated the world spent $1,800,000,000,000 on renewables, on wind and solar and biofuels, trying to control the temperature of the planet. That that just is not something that's going to be happening. So, I would I would encourage everybody to use the the word climatism for that ideology.

We we actually had, mister Ramaswami and mister Trump that have used it at various times, during the recent campaign. But, you know, the, the the climate is are are so, so effective in all the, terminology they they use. So, it's a bit of a counter term that we could use. But the Man Man Man World with the 3 polar bears and the Mazda on the cover really is a good book for kids, in in, from about 8th grade and up. If you have grandkids or kids, they're getting a very one-sided story in schools, and this would help, give them a little more balance if they were to pick up a copy.

Yeah. Yeah. In fact, yeah, that that's one of the reasons why we had you on here. That book is very good, as a good primer for people that are not quite up on this, and, frankly, most people aren't. They've been indoctrinated their entire lives, whether they're, you know, a millennial, or they're Gen x or or even, you know, older than that.

I mean, there's been nothing but nonstop propaganda about how human activity is causing a climate crisis to the to the point that, Anthony brought up earlier. The fact that Zillow is, you know, factoring in climate climate changes to to assess risk of a home. It's not climate that is putting homes at risk. It's weather. It's always been weather, and there's a huge difference in that.

And it's always the same no matter where you are. If you if you live in Florida, as we know this year, there is a higher risk of a hurricane hitting your house than there is in my house here in Illinois. It's just as natural.

I see a, I see a class action lawsuit in Zillow's future where homeowners who have had their home devalued, you know, because of this climate rating, will band together and say, hey. You caused my house, marketability to go down by 20% or whatever, or you caused my insurance to go up by 20%. I I see this as being a disaster for Zillow, and I don't think it'll be there very long.

Yeah. That's a very good point. And another thing to help the the Harlow Institute actually has been doing a lot to try to help deprogram the young skulls full of mush, as rush Rush Limbaugh used to say, in our schools. And that's with our Climate at a Glance, both website at climate at a glance dot com, and, the books Climate at a Glance for teachers and students. We sent out tens of thousands of copies of those to, school districts across America, and we know that they're being used in some schools.

And so we're trying to do our part, but you can always go to Climate at a Glance. And that's a good place to deprogram, your kid when they come home from school. Or if you're homeschooling, it's actually a fantastic way to get into some of these topics to understand what's really going on. That's a, a project of love by Anthony Watts and Sterling Burnett and Linnea. They've been working very hard on that on on this series for a long time.

So definitely

say, you know, to to toot our horn a little bit more, We were ahead of the curve on this. We started this long before Climate at a Glance with, why scientists disagree that we sent out to, what, 200,000 science teachers across the nation?

Yep. Yep. We did. We're we're that's that's what we're in the business of doing. That's what this show is all about, and that's what, Steve Gorham is in, is in the business of as well.

I wanna remind our, our people in the chat and in the audience that this is a great time to get your questions in. If you have any questions about any climate topic that has been on your mind lately, our panel will do our best to address it. But before we get to that, I wanna ask, Steve Gorham. Again, I know that you've been on the Environment Climate News podcast with host Sterling Burnett in the past, talking about your your new book, Green Breakdown and the Coming Renewable Energy Failure. And I encourage everyone to go get that.

It's very easy to find on Amazon and wherever good books are sold. But, Steve, actually, I'd like your perspective on I was kinda joking, but now I'm serious about it. You call it the coming renewable energy failure. It seems that renewable energy is failing already. What is your assessment?

Or have you reassessed how fast you think that collapse is coming just based on current events?

Well, there's been a lot of signs. I was predicting a couple decades for this to happen. The world is on at least a wealthy part of the world, US, Europe, Canada, New Zealand, Australia is on a quest, to get to net zero, emissions by 2,050. They wanna get rid of coal oil and natural gas, replace them with wind, solar, and biofuels, but this is beyond a reach out goal. This is an impossibility.

It's not going to occur. So, green breakdown looks at all the aspects of the energy transition, power plants, home appliances, electric vehicles, heavy transportation, heavy industry, the recent energy crisis in Europe, and a number of other things. There's one chapter on climate. Of course, climate underlies all of these efforts and it points out, all the problems with these, all the costs, all the problems with people losing choice and what they purchase, the problems with blackouts and power supplies and a lot of other things. And just points out how this isn't going to occur.

But we're seeing many, many examples right now from failing offshore wind turbines in the US to the the e the EV pullback. Just the other day, State Farm said they're gonna remove all of their EV charging in their parking lots, in their multistory parking lots, State Farm Insurance and any other companies because they start fires. So there are just many, many issues with this effort to try and push for a net zero, and it is it is starting to crumble, and it's going to going to accelerate.

Excellent. I do, we will keep an eye on that, and we will you know, I'm sure we'll let you back on again maybe, maybe every 6 months just to get an assessment of how bad it's going and things are going going into the toilet on that. Yeah.

It'd be great to join you again.

Yes. Yes. Alright. So, it is that time. It's the favorite time of many people on this show that watch the show, and that's q and a time with Linnea Lukin.

So, oops. Wrong slide. Here we go. Linnea, go ahead. Take it away.

Hello. Thank you very much. So we've got a bunch of good questions here today. Glad we were able to get to them at a reasonable time. Sometimes we go a little long.

You guys are having mercy on me today. Alright. So first is regarding our, California high gas prices story, and that is from it is I 2 who asks, does California have an exit task tax?

No. But they discussed it, believe it or not.

Yeah. They're working on it. I think I heard that Wisconsin had one a couple decades ago.

They they have discussed it, and they're talking about taxing millionaires and corporations to leave. But I don't think that flies in the United States. You have freedom of movement in the United States. That's that's that's constantly guaranteed. And, well, I I cannot believe any court would uphold an exit tax.

No. But to keep We also we also

have no tariffs between states for trade of goods. So it's kinda tough if somebody leaves the state to say, well, now we're gonna tax you or charge you.

Yeah. Well, Sterling, I bet a lot of Texans would like an entry tax from people from California license plates. But,

you know, I used to think that, but my suspicion you know, look. If if the election goes very differently than I expected to go, then maybe I'll blame that. But in my experience, the Californias I'm aware of that have moved here are the ones that really California needed more than anything. They were smart enough to get out because they said, we know what the problems are. We know who causes it.

Let's go someplace where they embrace freedom. You know? Yeah. You you got corporations moving here. They're tired of regulations, and they're not going out there now stopping.

Oh, if only we had the same regulations, California, we fled from, you know, here in Texas. So Yeah. I'm sure there's a mix of both, but many of the ones that come from California are the ones that were wise enough to realize that government in California is the problem with California.

You know, I think if there were to be an entry tax for Texas, rather than a tax, maybe what they should do is require people to take a course on properly making barbecue, properly making Texas chili, and how to shoot a gun.

Well, no. What what you should have is a competency hearing to come to Texas, and, the competency would you'd have to under you'd have to know the constitution, understand the limits it places on government, and, you know, what what you are allowed or not allowed. The freedoms that you have that government may not take away. And if you check the wrong boxes or no. No.

No. This gun thing, we gotta get rid of that. Well, you don't get to come in.

Yep. Alright. Here's a question from Squidward, straight from Bikini Bottom. He says, question for Sterling and Anthony. Would another climate gate scandal end this madness?

I think not, and I'll tell you why. When Climategate happened and and it it broke on my website, what's up with that, I thought, sure, that was just gonna put an end to all this because the exposure was out there. But, you know, they talk about the deep state in Washington. Well, we've got the deep climate in science. And so what happened is the deep climate people banded together to figure out ways to mitigate this.

You know? And and the way they did it was basically to brush it off saying, oh, well, he didn't really mean that. You know? When when Michael Mann hide the decline thing came out. You know?

Oh, well, that really wasn't it. You know? They just do all of this, then they then they let the fact checkers loose. Right? You know?

The fake fact checkers. And so what they did was they basically took what had happened in reality, twisted it, and turned it into a, yeah, that never happened. It's not really an issue. We're we're we're all fine. We're golden.

They did fake investigations of the people involved, like Michael Mann at Penn State and also Phil Jones over at CRU, and these were whitewashes. They were absolute whitewashes. They did not ask the difficult questions. All the simple, easy questions were asked, not the hard ones. And so, basically, all these people got off scot free, particularly Michael Mann, who's now who just recently got a promotion this past week.

You know? He's like the climate czar of Pennsylvania University or something like that. I don't know. Provost.

I I agree with Anthony a 100%. Climategate was the Wizard of Oz moment where the wizard says, ignore the man behind the curtain. The curtains pull back. He says ignore the man behind the curtain. But in the Wizard of Oz, they didn't ignore him.

In climate gay, they ignore the wrongdoing. And, as you said, it's just embedded. Look, they are wedded to the research dollars. I have I have asked climate scientists before. I said, look, is the science settled?

Yes. I say, okay. Then you don't need funding for further research in climate change because it's settled. And he says, no. No.

No. No. Let's let's, you know, there are still things we need to know about the tinkering around the edges and stuff. Okay. So we don't need to study greenhouse gases anymore because that's settled.

Oh, no. No. No. No. Let's so it it it never goes away.

It it will only go away when people say no more. We're not funding this anymore. And they move their attention to some other crisis, which starts getting the funding, and suddenly the researchers will find, oh, no. This is the real crisis. Let's start researching here.

Yeah. It's just like the particle physics people. You know? They want the bigger and faster, you know, supercolliders. You know?

Because if we get this new supercollider, we will find the god particle, you know, and we'll get it figured out. You know? And they keep asking for these bigger and bigger things just like the climate people are asking for bigger and bigger computers to do more climate modeling. It never ends.

Yeah. Just just one more lane. Just one more lane, then we'll fix traffic. Just one more supercollider.

Oh, except

they don't you except

they don't do one more lane. What they do is just one more light rail and we'll fix traffic.

Yeah. Exactly. One more one more, high speed rail.

Yeah. One more one more bike lane, and we'll solve it all.

Okay. Here's a here's a, asker from x, and, I think this is the first time this individual has submitted a question. So thank you, Stargazer, who says, living in the UK, we now have Labour Party's mad Ed Miliband who is doing his best to destroy our stable national grid. How do we get through to politicians hell bent on the crazy net zero agenda?

Kidnap them, take them out into the country, make them live in a grass hut for a month.

Steve, you've just talked about net zero. This seems to be up your alley. How do you convince them?

Well, I think, net zero is gonna become a hated term in the United Kingdom. They're already stepping the the UK, Germany, and Netherlands are already stepping back from their mandates to force everybody to go to heat pumps because people just don't like them. And, what they're doing now is every 6 months, they raise electricity rates in the UK. The electricity, prices are controlled, but then they adjust them, and so they're getting about a 10% increase every 6 months, and it's really it's really bad for people. There's about 15 or 20% of the population that has to deal with whether they're gonna heat their homes, this, this year or not.

Just really a bad situation. It's going to get worse and worse as long as they can they keep pushing these, these climate policies and try and shut down, other things they've been doing. The latest thing, a bit of news that came out this week, they want to burn wood chips for everything, like the the DRAX power plant. They want to use more and more wood chips with a mistaken idea that that reduces carbon dioxide emissions. Very, very foolish.

So they're still off in the Netherland, but, off in the Netherworld, but, the economics are eventually gonna force them back to something that's sensible.

Wait. Wood chips are renewable. They're green. Right?

If you burn wood chips, you emit more carbon dioxide than coal for for the same amount of energy, so that they're not renewable. It's it's, it's another, kind of misguided, tenant of the of of climateism that you can burn wood and reduce CO2 emissions.

Well, it's even more absurd when you look at where they're coming from, which is the Southeast United States for the most part, when it comes to the stuff they're burning over in the UK.

Yeah. That Drax the Drax power plant over there has been getting wood chips from, you know, Georgia for years.

Yep. US and Canada. Yep.

Alright. So here's a, sticking to the, the European theme for a second here. Here's Albert who said, did you all that's a funny way to spell that, but I'm guessing that's what you mean. See the electric ferry in Denmark that didn't cut it, and the 40 year old ferry was brought back in from retirement. I did not.

Anyone else?

I did tell a story about it a couple weeks ago, and it, it they they made I don't know how much they spent on this new electric ferry. It was, like, 5,000,000, $7,000,000, something like that, and, you know, net zero and all that. And the thing just couldn't cut it. It couldn't it was the little boat that couldn't, basically.

Yeah. I I think I saw a story here in the United States that even test there are some police departments with Teslas, and that those are not being those are proven to be not practical for the job either.

Yeah. The best the best electric vehicle out there, the Tesla, is not suitable for the job. They you look, you can have these fairy stories. It's not just fairies, it's buses. Just this week Fairy tales.

Just this week, the Biden administration recalled all the school buses that they subsidized, that they encourage schools to adopt because of fire risk. Well, you're in the middle of school year here, folks. What what are you gonna gonna do? Oh, my suspicion is if they still have their diesel buses, they'll restart them, except that according to most of the federal policies, when you get your electric bus, you have to scrap the diesel bus. It can't be resold even.

You have to destroy it because we don't want that polluting on the road. So federal policy keeps putting people in binds, endangering their lives, making them unable to travel, and in the case of schools, unable to get an education.

Electric school buses are a disaster waiting to happen. We we just hope that doesn't happen. But

Well, like I said, they went through them. They they they have, recalled them, at least from one company. But but the the problem is you'd think they'd have vetted these things before they encourage school districts to adopt them. It's like telling school districts in the sixties what you should all their parents you should be driving the Corvair, before Nader's book comes out and says it's unsafe at any speed. Now, we know it was no more unsafe than other vehicles, but the point is, they're they're in such a, a mania, a furor to push climatism, as you say, Steve, that they will endanger people, and then it's it's it's well, okay.

Let's cause the damage first, and then we'll say, oh, yeah. That was a mistake. Let's pull that back, But leave you with no other option.

Yeah. You know, they have so many laws regulating school buses about, you know, safety and so

forth. Mhmm.

It's like they completely missed the fire problem. You know? Oh, well, that's just not on it just blew past it. Amazing.

You know the fire problem? The stranding problem? I don't want an electric school bus in Maine or Alaska or Minnesota or South Dakota or North Dakota when you're going out to rural areas, when it's not just a a 30 minute trip around, an urban area, but it's, an hour front to back, hauling kids from rural areas, and then all of a sudden they get stranded in a snowstorm because the battery goes off?

Yep. Thank you. Alright. I've got a bit of a one two punch here, a comment, and then a question that I think ties to it. Bigfoot says, when I was in high school, we had a lady present in Al Gore's, an inconvenient truth slideshow to the whole school.

My science teacher the next period spent the whole time debunking it. He'd get fired today. And the question that I'm tying to it is from energy colonizer who says, for any students forced to profess climatism just to pass a course, how many eventually discover the truth? And I'm gonna pitch that to Steve first.

Well, everybody is eventually going to discover the the truth. Come, 20 70, I think, the fear of man made global warming is gonna become, high on the list of modern of superstitions in history. So it's all gonna get there. Matter of fact, we may go into a cooling period for for a few decades here. Very tough to predict, global temperatures, and these periods come and go.

And so, we could be looking at, 20 or 30 or 40 years of of cooling, and then, where will the, the climate alarmist be?

Yeah. The problem is is that we've got a corrupted temperature measurement system all throughout the world, which is is, geared towards getting increasingly warmer because of the fact that it's biasing the low temperature upward.

That's true too.

I will I will say that, we will start seeing temperatures coming down once this El Nino and the water vapor in the atmosphere from the Hunga Tonga volcano start going down. And so average global temperature will start coming down. And then they will have a little bit of a problem, but the long term is probably gonna still continue to go up because urbanization is going to increase. It's it has been increasing, and and there's no sign of it stopping.

Right. And I'll add that even if, you know, you have nothing but teachers and, media, you know, enforcing the idea all the time that we're in a climate emergency or whatever, there's still some of us do escape from the propaganda mill. You know, the the thing that's sad about the California story is that they they're making the climate part to the like credit that you have to get. When I was in school, I took 3 courses to avoid having to take women's studies because they they combined a bunch of credits into women's studies so that more people would take it to try and encourage that. And it seems like they figured out that, that strategy and headed it off at the past when it comes to the climate issue.

Alright. I've got a question here from LT Oracle of Truth who is watching on Rumble. Thank you for watching us there as well. Question. Doesn't global warming occur before an ice age, not global cooling?

I'm not really sure how to take this question. Anthony?

Yes.

What?

No. It I can't quite get my mind around this question. But, you know, if you go back in history, you know, paleo history and just look at it, there's up and down cycles, and the earth has periodically warmed and cooled. We've had snowball earth. We've had hot house earth.

You know? And it's done all that without any influence from mankind whatsoever.

Thank you very much. Okay. Let's see. Oh, this is one that I think we should address because it's directed at the Heartland Institute. This says from, Bob, I once saw a talk by an educator who claimed the Heartland Institute got its start by defending the tobacco industry.

Is that true, Jim?

Oh, wow. Okay. Yeah. We get this a lot. And, there's a lot of lies about the Heartland Institute that are out there, on the Internet.

We did not get our start by defending, the tobacco industry. Our we did defend smokers. We did present scientific studies that were, that were done and showed that secondhand smoke and actually smoking are not the same thing. And they are it was sold as that, by people who are against smoking. And, okay, fine.

But, you know, if you're against smoking, then let's have real data here. And the idea that secondhand smoke and firsthand smoke are the same thing is not scientifically correct. And, so, yes, we push back on that. We push back on you know, smokers were the least, just be honest about it. Smokers are picked on.

They're overtaxed. The taxes on cigarettes go up all the time. I think a pack of cigarettes in New York City now costs something like $17, maybe even it's even more than $20. And so, yes, in the 19 eighties, especially, the Heartland Institute, defended smokers' rights. We had a part of our website called the Smoker's Lounge, as we kinda did a little tuck and tongue in cheek and embraced the whole idea.

But we did not, we have never pushed or said that smoking doesn't cause cancer. We said that secondhand smoke, does not, you know, there's no studies out there to show that secondhand smoke induces cancer at the same rate as actually smoking. And so it's in line with what the Heartland Institute has stood for for now 40 years, and it's scientific integrity, it's truth. Just because you may get your way faster by saying that secondhand smoke is the same as firsthand smoke, And then you get smoking banned in bars, you get smoking banned everywhere. And I think now in the in the United Kingdom, actually, I've read this story last week, they wanna ban smoking outside bars and stuff.

So, like, even the minute smokers go outside, they're not gonna be allowed to do that either. We think that's alarmist. We think it's not scientific, and we think it's frankly discriminatory against people who are adults and choose to smoke. And so, no, we did not get our start defending the tobacco industry. We did in in the early years, and I think in through the nineties and even into the early 2000, talk about we were the only think tank in the world that would dare to defend smokers.

Nobody else would do that. And so, that's not something we're ashamed of or, frankly, run away from. It's everywhere. But the idea that we were just, like, swimming in big tobacco money to do this is also incorrect. It was a it was a stance taken on principle, and I'm glad to have the chance to address it.

But it was a stance not just taken. Everyone thinks that we're always defending the science, and I and we are defending the science. But if if you read about us and our, mission, it's not to defend it's to defend freedom, and this was from the start defending people's freedom. Look, I don't smoke. I smoke a cigar occasionally, a pipe occasionally, but I've never smoked cigarettes.

I go to bars, where I used to go to bars, and cigarette smoke would just, you know, for me, it was awful. But, I would defend the right of people to smoke in bars. You know what? Someone owns that bar. They pay taxes on that bar.

They employ people in that bar. If the people that work in that bar don't wanna be around smoke, don't work in the bar. If the bar owner owns the bar and wants to allow smoking, that should be his business. It's a matter of freedom. Should you abandon on the airlines?

You know what? We had an airline in Dallas based in Dallas run flying out of Love Field, that used to ban smoking. It banned smoking when all the other airlines were allowing it and it was competing and it was buying it was basically through its smoking ban, getting business from other airlines. They said, oh, we don't like this competition. So they got together and they said, oh, we've got a, you should ban smoking that way.

And and, of course, Braniff went under, largely because they no longer had the advantage that they had, through their own voluntary choice, decided not to allow smoking and create a market for their airline. So, it's it's about freedom. It is about scientific integrity, but it's about people allowing people's choice. Even when it discomfort some of us.

Well done. A few more questions in here.

I kinda started something with that one, didn't I,

for any question? No. I think it's no. Don't worry. We don't take tough questions on here or questions that challenge us.

We do. We will. Alright.

Let's go to Chris Nisbett's question. He had this question early on. He says, didn't it cool from the fifties to the seventies? Doesn't that mean that there hasn't been any surge since at least the fifties?

Well,

yeah, it did we did see some very cold periods during that time. Starting around 1954, so forth, started going down. I remember some very cold years in the sixties and early seventies. That's when they started talking about the ice age. In fact, when I first got my start in television at WLFI TV in West Lafayette, Indiana Purdue University, I did a special on the coming ice age, in, I think it was the fall of 1978, half hour special on that.

And, you know, the the climate people over at Purdue were part of that. You know? And so they believed, yeah, global cooling's on the way. But as far as the surge goes, nah, it it doesn't really mean anything. The overall trend when you look at it through the whole temperature record all the way back to about 18/80 it's still upwards even though there's that dip there.

So it really didn't it doesn't affect the long term trend. But the biggest thing about that surge is is that people, the media were saying, oh, no. We got the hottest day ever, the hottest year ever, and there's a big spike in temperature in 2023, and global warming's accelerating. Well, that one data point didn't do anything statistically insignificant in the whole scheme of things.

But looking at the study in particular, they didn't go back to the forties fifties. So they couldn't comment on that. They went back, and what they looked at was the trend increasing since the seventies. And they found no increase in the trend despite the fact, by the way, c o two emissions keep going up. C o two concentrations in the atmosphere keep going up, but there's no increasing trend of warming.

So that's what that was about.

Alright. Thank you very much. I'm going to take, I think, 2 more questions. We've got a few more than that, but, we're already running a bit late here. Let's see.

Okay. This is, referring to Steve's book. This is from Doug Troyer who is a very frequent viewer of ours. So thank you very much, Doug. And he says, where do you see that the breakdown begins?

Steve?

Well, there are many, many aspects of this, and we're already seeing it in Europe. As I mentioned, we have, Germany, Netherlands, England have have stepped back from requiring heat pumps shift from gas stoves. We see the agriculture laws in Europe have also stepped back. They were saying basically, let's cull dairy herds, let's stop using a synthetic nitrogen fertilizer that was being pushed. And the, the farmers started driving tractors into Paris and Netherlands and Berlin and blocked all of that, and they've stepped back from that, in the US.

And and, by the way, in the US and Europe, we now see a big speed bump with electric vehicles. EVs are losing share, during the last year. The, Hertz rental is getting rid of all our electric vehicles because they're they're too hard to maintain, too expensive, and people even people with EVs, when they come to rent a car, in another location, they don't really wanna rent 1 because they they can't charge at home and it's expensive. So we're just seeing, by the way, if you look also at a green equipment company stocks, with exception of Tesla, they've all been doing terribly. The, the Renex index of the top 30 industrial companies in

the

world has been flat now for 25 years. It's gone up and down, but at the same time, the S and P, 500 has has quadrupled, and, we have very, very poor these charging companies aren't making money. The other EV companies outside of Tesla with with 2 exceptions in China, are all losing money. Their stock prices are way down. So, there's a lot of things going on to say that, the, net zero revolution is failing, and I think, we're gonna see more and more of this.

Thank you very much. Okay. Alright. So here's a question from Bigfoot is the last one that we'll take here. And he says, could small scale nuclear reactors solve growing energy demands for data centers?

If not, what could? I'm fearful of consumer energy prices being driven higher unless they have their own source. And that's something that we've talked about. That's the reason why a lot of these, big computer companies are starting to look into modular nuclear reactors, SMRs and stuff. But, you know, what we've pointed out here at the Heartland Institute is at the same time as they are talking about that, they're also still pushing for electrification for consumer products and also still pushing for coal and gas and stuff to be shut down on the grid at large.

So it's kind of a energy for me, but not for the idea coming from them. Guys?

Yeah. There's 2 big things with artificial intelligence. 2 big things that are gonna happen. 1 is they're gonna be extending, and they are extending, coal and nuclear plants. They won't be shutting down coal and natural gas because we aren't gonna have enough power.

The second thing is energy prices are going to go higher. There's no doubt about that because of all the demand. I'm a little skeptical on small scale scale nuclear reactors. So far, if you add up the price of a bunch of small scale ones, they're not cheaper than the big scale ones. So, we really need reactors to, get those costs down.

I I, I'm skeptical of small scale reactors, not for the reason Steve mentioned, but for this reason. What he was right about is the AI folks need to start lobbying actively to keep coal and natural gas fire plants open because they say the main constraint on AI is not it's energy now, not in 2030, not in 2035. The a what is AEP 1,000 reactor last approved design? It was approved a decade before one was ever built. It took a decade to build.

After they approved the design, it took a decade because of all the regulations. And these small scale reactors, even if one gets its design approved, it doesn't mean that any of them will be functioning before 2035. And my suspicion is it will be longer. That's true for even large scale reactors. And so if AI is dependent on this stuff and it's growing, we will not have AI in the United States unless we keep existing baseload power plants on.

What will happen is they'll see they're all pushing for it there. Microsoft can say, we'll buy all the power from a restarted 3 Mile Island that it will deliver. We'll pay for all of it to get it restarted. That doesn't mean it'll be restarted next week or next year or even in 5 years. And what are they gonna do in the meantime?

Well, what they're gonna do if they can't keep the power on is they'll have to move overseas. So we're offshoring another industry.

Yeah. I'm holding up for the Mr. Fusion Appliance.

I mean, look, I don't think small scale reactors are that much trouble in the sense of, we've had a nuclear navy since the 19 fifties, folks. We have aircraft carriers and submarines that operate small scale and aren't killing people and haven't killed people for 70 years now. Yep. If you wanted to build those, but that's not what they're trying to do. They've gotta have new whole new designs.

Well, we're not we're already seeing power plants extended. You mentioned the 3 Mile Island plant, which was closed 2019 being restarted. They're restarting the Palisades plant in Michigan that was closed 2 years ago. They've extended the Diablo Canyon nuclear plant in California. We have, 2 coal plants in Wyoming, and I believe 2 in Utah that are they're now being extended.

They're talking about extending plants in West Virginia and Tennessee, and they're going to have to do this to get enough power. The big guys are are coming with these big contracts, Microsoft and Google and others, and they're gonna be extending these plants. And the green movement is gonna be wailing and gnashing teeth. Why can't we shut down these these coal plants? Why can't we shut down natural gas plants?

It isn't gonna happen.

Now you're right. They extended one in Kansas as well for a a specific factory. But the Michigan and Three Mile Island aren't extended. Remember, they have closed. It's not a matter of extending something.

No. No. No. They're

talking about restarting it. They're talking about it. It has to go through the same process that it went before. And so I don't it's not gonna start next year. It's not a matter of just running the fuel into a plant that's already it's been closed, but it's still functional.

No.

They have to

do the regulatory process. I have no doubt that they will restart, but that's not extending the life of a plant that is currently open.

It's a mix.

Alright. Well, I think that'll do it. Oh, I forgot the, I forgot the exit music. Goodness. Anthony or, Andy, our producer usually here, is not here.

There it is. There's our exit music. And, yes, you're right, Mark. Modesto, I did not get mad today. I get mad on the In the Tank podcast, which is done at the same time, but on the Thursdays, 1 PM EST.

I think I had a pretty good rants, yesterday. So you can go to Heartland's YouTube page, which is, youtube.com/heartlandissitude, and you can see that. It said, yes. That's right. Anthony is the one who's, Sterling's the one who gets mad today.

Sometimes it's, sometimes it's sometimes it's Anthony, sometimes it's Sterling, and sometimes it's me. It's never the name of those people.

Don't get mad. Get mad.

That's right. So I'd like to thank our streaming partners, for this show and and a lot of the shows that we're doing on here, and that would be junk science.com. What's up with that? Cintiq and Climate Depot. I want to thank, our panel for being here today.

That would be Anthony Watts, Sterling Burnett, Linnea Lukin, and our very special guest today, Steve Gorham. And you'd wanna check out his book. He's got several books on climate and energy that you're gonna wanna find. So go to amazon dot com and find those for yourself. Always visit heartland.org for great information on the climate and also climate ataglance.com, climate realism.com, what's up with that dot com.

Oh, yeah. For almost forgot. Energy at a glance.com as well. Thank you all for, for being with us today, and we will talk to you next week. Bye bye.

How dare you?