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 02 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 tried 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, Greta, you pint sized protagonist. It is Friday, and this is our own personal Friday protest. Climate realism show, the new name, episode 101, electric trains, planes, and automobiles going nowhere fast. I'm your host, Anthony Watts, senior fellow for environment and climate at the Heartland Institute. Joining us today are regular panelists, doctor h Sterling Burnett, director of the Arthur b Robinson Center, and Linnea Lukin, research fellow at the Robinson Center.

Welcome, guys, and happy Friday.

Happy Friday. And today is hat day.

Today is hat day, and I'm wearing my Texas Rangers official world championship,

the

the greatest team sports victory in the history of mankind, and, of course, everyone knows I don't exaggerate.

Well, you're certainly justified in wearing that. You know, they did a great job. It really was a great great thing. Anyway, we're gonna get to our regular topic, our main topic, planes, trains, and automobiles in just a little bit. But first, crazy climate news of the week, and, boy, have we got some for you this week.

Scientists wanna build a 62 mile long curtain around the doomsday glacier to basically contain all that meltwater. $50,000,000,000. A hail Mary. Yeah. Right.

That's gonna work. What do you think? Charlie?

I'm almost at a loss as to have anything to think. It's just so idiotic. You know? What, you know, what are they is the curtain gonna be black so it absorbs heat? Is it gonna be white so it reflects heat?

How did they tuck it under the glacier so it doesn't melt or move? If it's translucent, well, it might magnify the sun's rays, act as a, you know, like a a spy the the magnifying glass that you used to, you know, burn up insects with. It it's just it's idiotic, and this is look. Glacier's it has melted in the past. It has recovered, all without human intervention, either in the melting or the recovery.

And this is just one more stupid, stupid.

It's like really feel.

It's a kid's yeah. It's a kid's sign it's a kid's science fiction story is what it is.

Yep. Yeah. It's it's it's not even good science fiction.

Yeah.

It's science fantasy. That's really what it is. And and, you know, and the first time some sea mammal gets trapped inside the curtain Oh. Yeah. Then what are they gonna do?

Right?

Yeah. All your all your, your, your penguins migrate over there, and then they get trapped and can't feed, and all their young die. That'll be climate change's fault, by the way.

Yeah. Right. That's climate change's fault, not the idiocy of the so called scientists. Alright. Speaking of idiocy, historic dam removal in California.

Now there's been this issue with the Klamath River in Northeastern California, and the environmentalists have been wanting to take out the dams for years because, oh, no. The salmon can't make it upstream. So we're gonna get rid of all the dams. And in the process, getting rid of the dams, we're gonna put 100, if not thousands of people out of business, you know, that are farming in the area, livelihoods for families. But we're not gonna worry about that.

No. We're not gonna worry about that at all. It's the salmon that are important. River, and they all got squished in the new tube or whatever. Plus that, there's huge amounts of muck, sediment, mire that's now polluting the main river.

It's an environmental disaster caused by environmentalists.

And, of course, a disaster in another way. It's not just the Klamath. It's it's rivers all around the northwest. They're taking dams down. These dams weren't put there for no reason, by the way.

They provide they provide hydropower. Most of them have ladders for salmon to go around. But so they're taking out the only reliable, relatively reliable renewable source of power in the region, that keeps the lights on in California and elsewhere. They're taking those dams out. They're killing the salmon downstream, and they're doing nothing about the sea lions and seals that are, feasting at the mouths of the rivers at the salmon come back because they're no longer harassed or hunted by humans or protected instead.

So it's one government created problem after another with the solution never, well, let's fix the initial problem. They just make it worse.

Yeah. I know. The the environmentalist movement

Oops. He's been taken out.

Yeah. Yeah. And then they don't look around as to what the, you know, the repercussions might be. And it it's it's the we see the same thing again and again and again, like, with offshore wind power in Wales. You know?

Renee, do you have something to say about this?

Oh, me on the salmon? Well, I don't know. I my only commentary was going to be that it's not hard to build a fish ladder. Most dams, I think, do have them at this point. They do.

Apparently, the the fish were sucked through the tube and they were, killed by the increased water pressure, which is something that they had to have had engineers on this. And so the engineers must have told them that this was going to happen, and they just didn't listen, I guess. They're they're now putting the fish downstream manually from what I understood in the articles, to avoid this from happening again until they're able to fully remove the dam. But it's still it is kind of insane that, you know, hydropower is a very good renewable in the areas that it works. It works very well and consistently for the most part, far more consistently than wind or solar do.

And yet this is the one that they don't like. Starting to think that maybe inefficiency is the goal. You know?

Of course. And if they're putting them downstream, that's just well, they could have put them downstream with the dam still there.

Right.

There was already a stream, folks. Just put them there if that's where they're gonna go in the first if you're gonna put them in the first place. It's it's like

Yeah. It Yeah. Well, once again, there they go.

I think, Lynnea, may be too charitable. She thinks they hired engineers for this. My suspicion is they hired environmental engineers who who studied the new math where 1 and 1 doesn't necessarily equal 2. It's subjective. It depends on your feelings, and, this is the result.

Yeah. Once again, they put the mental in environmentalism. Alright. Let's go to the next one. We've got, this guy who's smuggling greenhouse gases.

This is hilarious. This is like something out of the Babylon Bee. This guy is smuggling refrigerant from Mexico into the United States. And instead of just simply saying there he's smuggling refrigerant to keep the old refrigerators working because there is a market for it even if it is a black market, they say, no. He's smuggling greenhouse gases.

Oh my goodness. It just it it's and, again, this is what happens. Environmentalism says, oh, the ozone hole. The ozone hole. We gotta save it.

We gotta save it. And so we go down this path of getting rid of these refrigerants, which some people suspect had absolutely nothing to do with the ozone hole, but had to do with the patent expiration that DuPont held for the refrigerants of the time. So then we gotta create new refrigerants to save the ozone hole, but we got a patent on those that last for another 17 years. So there you go. But, anyway, so now they're smuggling of greenhouse gases, and, I can't wait for someone to be arrested for driving a carbon dioxide tanker.

That's gonna be great.

Well, you know, the black market in, in CFCs and others have been around for a while. I hadn't heard about the smuggling from Mexico, but, you know, he was he was not very smart because if it's not easy, I I I've noticed on my border, it's not easy to get illegal things across the border of Texas. I mean, it's not hard. Things people come across daily. And if a cartel wanted to get into this, they could put a c a CFC tube in everyone's backpack as they come across.

And and DPS,

you know, they're Greenhouse gas mules.

Yeah. Greenhouse gas mules. And and the and the government's idea would be hands off. We gotta let's ship them to Chicago, via planes, because we certainly can't arrest them for breaking the law. You can rob people.

You can kill people. We don't arrest you for breaking the law. So are they really gonna be arrested if they're smuggling greenhouse gases? I suspect not.

Yeah. No. Naleya, you've been awfully quiet during this crazy part of the show.

I'm keeping up with our

for you to comment on?

I'll almost. I'm keeping up with our fantastic audience here. We, we have a lot of comments today. Everyone's having a good time. I don't know.

I guess he was just that guy was gonna was suspected of committing a, or planning to commit an ozone attack. So

An ozone attack. There you go.

Oh my goodness. Alright. Let's move on to cartoons. There've been a number of cartoons the last couple of weeks. Apparently, now, you know, there's a mandate for, eating lemons with the UAW.

And, more expensive, lots range, less gobs. That's all good for the planet, but not so good for the UAW. But, apparently, they're going along with it because must be some kickback in there somewhere. That's how those guys operate. Alright.

Next cartoon. We've got, one about the electric Daytona 500. Yes. Indeed. They wanna make the Daytona 500 electric.

Wow. The thrill, the speed, the noise, the recharging wait. It's all fun.

Yeah. The recharging wait and and then when they have a crash they

can't put the fire up.

Yeah. They have to cancel the race and and restart 2 days later. You know, but I wanna go I wanna go back just for a second to that guy getting arrested. We have worried for some time about, people being declared climate criminals and prosecutions. He may be the first example.

It it's not it's not paranoid. It's not paranoia if they really are out to get you.

Yep. Yep. Climate criminals. And finally, Greta, can Leonardo da Vinci use oil paint? This happens to be something I found on the Internet.

It's true. Alright. Let's go on to our main topic, planes, trains, and automobiles, electric version. Of course, we all know that hurricanes and electric vehicles don't mix, particularly when the saltwater gets involved. And, you know, it doesn't even take hurricane to cause electric cars to go k boom.

No. They'll just do it on their own. You know, they the movie, planes, trains, and automobiles, it's all about these different modes of transportation. You know? And they all fail badly in the movie, leaving Steve Martin stuck with John Candy in these hilarious situations.

And now with net zero being the latest nonsensical climate goal, we noticed that for quite a while, there is different modes of transportations now electrified are feeling just as badly as what went on during the movie. In fact, we regularly see electric cars standing by cold weather or out of charge or spontaneously catching fire just like what happened in the movie. Let's roll this clip. Yeah. What?

That that's basically the sum total of it. You know? That we see this with electric cars now on a regular basis. In fact, with the hurricane situation, hurricane Ian, one of the auto junkers that has you know, that hauled all these things away because they wouldn't run anymore decided he's going to put them in this parking lot all by themselves and give them 50 foot spacing so that when one spontaneously But

But what about the grass? That's what I thought. That grass looked a little parched to me.

I was gonna say, it looked like a pretty much a dirt lot, but but I'm not convinced that for a, auto junkyard, that is a very efficient use of space. But that's just me. I've been to

a few

of them. They they seem to stack these things up in most instances. You you you go and and pull out your own thing. I'm not going there for sure.

Well well, Sterling, I think it's probably a better use of space than having your entire junkyard burned down.

Yeah. Perhaps so. Well, you know, it is what it is. But, planes, trains, and automobiles, they're all being electrified now. You know?

And, I don't I haven't seen this video. What's this one? Oh, there we go. There's one up in flames. Yeah.

Just along the side of the road. Just normal weather, normal travel. That's incredible.

Saw that I saw that a couple years ago, on my way back from Austin through Denton. There was a an EV with no apparent accident damage. I think that it was just it overheated in in, rush hour traffic, and they had to clear the highway. Yep.

Keeps the street warm. You know, electric claims have yet to capture the public attention mainly because given what we've seen with electric cars and their track record, who wants to be on an electric airplane? I mean, seriously, do you wanna be on an electric airplane that might spontaneously combust?

Mhmm.

Yeah. And

I I'm I'm skeptical that that will ever, you know, in terms yeah. Will ever take off. Terrible. With, especially when you it comes to passenger plane like, large passenger planes and, cargo planes and stuff like that. I just don't see how that could be electrified with current technology, at least on battery because the battery itself would have to weigh.

I don't know. I it it the numbers aren't adding up in my head when I'm plugging them together pretty roughly, especially considering normal, road vehicles. The electric versions of them are far heavier than normal, and you have less range. So I can't imagine that an electric 747 would do very much good for anyone even if it didn't just spontaneously catch on fire mid flight.

You just you just put solar panels on the wings, and and I'm sure they won't blow off. You can strap them down. Of course, that adds extra weight. I'm just trying to figure out how they think this is gonna work. There may be a new battery that comes along.

I have no doubt they're improving battery technologies, but still not me. Thank you.

You might be able to come up with some kind of a hybrid electric situation. You know, Formula 1 cars are part electric, but still

train engines are are diesel electric. Right? They're they're they're hybrids. They have been for some time.

Yeah. Electric The diesel engine powers the electric generator. The electric generator powers the trucks.

Right. So I I there it's not the case that elect that electric, vehicles are always in all time, a not bad idea. You know, we talk the the first notion was trains. Right? Well, we got electric trains everywhere.

And, but but they're powered a different different way. They're not battery powered trains. Right. Hooked up to overhead lines. Right.

They they they run along specific routes and corridors, and they're taking a charge directly from, the power system. That's a very different thing than a battery powered, train.

I will say, though, a Boeing being at the forefront of this doesn't give me, at this point in time, very much comfort.

Don't don't say that, Linnea. I have Boeing stock. Don't don't don't trash Boeing.

I'm sorry, Sterling, but just today, another set of, landing gear fell off another Boeing next month.

You're killing me here. My portfolio is suffering every every word you speak.

So after, Boeing and NASA worked together to produce an electric plane, they decided, well, you know what? This ain't gonna work. So they killed the plan, citing safety concerns because the decision not to apply the, to fly it came about because the agency discovered that the propulsion system had the potential to fail and put people at risk. Gosh. Who would have thought

Imagine that. Yeah. Imagine that. Well, you know, I forget it. Just forget it.

You're just beside yourself too today, Sterling?

It's like, you know, the the the whole we've got these, electric buses. Right? They're catching fire left and right. Electric scooters burning down entire buildings, killing people in New York. Why anyone thinks that these are are a good idea?

Oh, yeah. The entire fleet gets taken out here.

Yeah. That old video. That's

I think it's not that I mean, it's it's it's only a couple years old. And remember, this video, I believe, is, is Connecticut is, is Bridgeport, Connecticut's proud electric bus fleet that the day, before this fire took hold, the the governor was proudly proclaiming that they were gonna go all electric in their fleet in the state of buses of public buses, and this happens the very next day, and they have to pull them all and say, no. No. Woah. Woah.

Woah. You know, they are constantly they are constantly saying, we need to get out of our cars. We need more public transportation. We need more. And then what they wanna do is put people in, in tender boxes.

Let's put them in in in ovens that could go off at any second. That's good for the public. I guess they just don't care about the poor and middle class who are the ones that typically take that. I don't see many millionaires and billionaires on electric buses, so maybe they just don't care. It's not their kids.

Their kids are going to private schools. Somebody don't care if school buses spontaneously erupt or strand you in the middle of a Maine winter on a back road.

Yeah. It just the whole idea of electric cars was killed over a 100 years ago. I mean, there were at the very beginning of the automobile revolution. We had a couple of of electric cars, one called the Detroit Electric. It looked like a, you know, an early version of the Model T, and it worked.

But it only had a range of, like, 25 miles or something, which was fine for the time because towns were smaller. There were no interstates or freeways or whatever. But the bottom line is even though that car worked for the environment that it was built for, it was surpassed by the internal combustion engine driven cars because they were so much better. And that's the whole thing. We keep getting pushed these, you know, these electric cars pushed on us, and they're not better.

They don't have better range. They don't have better safety records. They don't have anything going for them. And yet we're supposed to just, like, give up these habits of, you know, driving a gasoline engine vehicle and go for these electrics. And some people have done this, and what they found is, hey.

It doesn't live up to the hype. A lot of people who have owned electric vehicles, me included, have, you know, gone through the process and discovered they do not handle the long term or the distance.

Let's you you know, Anthony, you mentioned electric cars have been around for, over a 100 years now. The first electric vehicle, this technology, the government has says, we need to finance wind and solar. We need to finance EVs. Why? Because they're orphan technologies.

They're new technologies, and we gotta get them started. We've just gotta get some initial financing. No. The first electric vehicle was a train put on the tracks in 1837, nearly 200 years ago. It couldn't compete with steam, coal, and steam engines.

Right? They said, well, it's the battery is the problem. The first electric renewable rechargeable battery was 1857 or 9. I wrote about this today in Climate Change Weekly. People people think that these are rechargeable batteries, new things, never happened before.

No. 1857 still couldn't compete. Then you had electric cars. They had to compete with the internal combustion. They failed.

These aren't new technologies, and they don't support they don't merit government support, especially since they ain't cleaning up the environment. They're dirtier than internal combustion engine vehicles through their manufacturer, through their operation, it turns out, in a lot of ways. They're not saving the planet from climate change as if it needs saving, as if we have the power to do that. There is nothing to recommend these things other than, if you don't get me wrong, if someone wants to buy an electric vehicle, I'm very happy for them to do so, but I shouldn't have to subsidize them.

Yeah. Well so here's the fun part. Now they're talking about electric locomotives, some company called Wabtec. And last year, they revealed their 1st battery electric locomotive. And guess what?

It's pink. I mean, if you're if you're producing something for the very first time to show to the world, what better choice could you make for rejection than pink. Why in that?

Well, if they wanna get it accepted, they should make it a rainbow color. Right? That's the age we live

in. Oh.

Yeah. That's completely oh, man. I found something the other day online that I think I'll I'll read it off for you guys. I I forgot to send it in the chat, but it's it's a good little example of what we're talking about here. It says, imagine we lived in a world where all cars were already EVs, and then along comes this new invention, the internal combustion engine.

Yep. Think about how well it would sell. A vehicle that's half the weight, half the price, almost a quarter of the damage done to the road. It can be refueled in 1 tenth of the time and has a range of up to 4 times the distance in all weather conditions. It does not rely on environmentally damaging use of nonrenewable rare earths to power it and use far less steel and other materials.

Think about how excited people would be for such a technology. It would sell like hotcakes.

Of course, they were excited in 1903 when they did when they did compete directly. That's true. You you you need to send me that link. That's beautiful.

Okay. I will.

Yeah. I saw that too, Linnea. And you're right. It just people would be thrilled if all the vehicles were electric and all of a sudden this came along. It, but anyway so there's this.

We got this pink locomotive. Now the other company, EMD, is making one that isn't pink. Win for marketing. Right? Not pink.

I mean, who wants a Pepto Bismol locomotive? A little engine that couldn't. Excuse me. But it's like the electric locomotive is fine if you're running from Cantonery wires. You know, you're getting your power from a central or distributed generator network.

That's worked for decades, and it's worked great. It's been wonderful for passenger service. But for freight service where you gotta go through the mountains, you gotta go through, you know, huge grades up and down and curves and things like that, is an electric locomotive really gonna cut it? I mean, how do you put a charging station in the middle of the Colorado Rockies? Well, maybe they'll put a a a couple of tanker cars and a diesel generator there to recharge the electric engine once it gets up to that point.

I don't know.

You'll have to build you'll have to build a whole new sidings so that when one is charging, it's not blocking the tracks or all the other rail traffic going through. Right? Look. We already have diesel electric. It is actually among the most fuel efficient transportation modes in existence.

Why do they think they need to replace it with look, I've I'm not Superman. I've never tried to lift a diesel electric motive, locomotive. My suspicion is they're pretty dead gum heavy. But think how much heavier a battery powered, locomotive is. So how much of the the motive force, the power moving that has to go just to hauling the, locomotive itself, much less all the train cars that it's supposed to be hauling.

It's

Yep. Yep. And and it just I don't think it's gonna take off just like the electric plane. I mean, the first train crashed with an electric locomotive, well, that's gonna be, you know, a fiery disaster that they can't put out for days, you know, unless they're using lead acid, but that's not likely to be practical. And the first electric airplane crash is gonna basically kill that just like the Hindenburg killed hydrogen powered airships.

Right?

Well, you'd think happen that. You'd think, but if if that was gonna kill an industry, this industry would already be dead. How many people have died from fires in automobiles, electric files? How many houses have been destroyed? How many tenement buildings in New York?

From a scooter, from a dadgum scooter, not even a car, not even a big truck. The scooter caught fire. It was just sitting there. Burns the whole tournament down, kills the kids, and yet they're still on the roads, and the government's still pushing them. I'd like to think that the first time this happened x, it would be over.

But the evidence suggests the government doesn't care how many people these things kill.

Oh, you have a point there. They don't seem to care at all. We don't see these massive headlines that accompany these kinds of tragedies, like we would see, you know, from the Hindenburg, for example. Didn't see that kind of a revelation. So but, you know, that's what it it it the whole thing is is that it's about a narrative.

You know, we have to do this to save the planet. Yeah. And the narrative is not about facts. It's about repetition. Right?

Yep.

Right. I think there's another element to this that is usually not talked about by people in our area because we tend to focus more on scientific and economic arguments, but I think there's also a an aesthetic argument against these electric trains compared to, like, a steam engine. And that is that a steam engine is a beautiful piece of machinery. And I think our friends in Europe would agree with me on this. And that is that rail travel is is more beautiful and better when it's a steam engine.

And, it's nicer to look at from a distance compared to the sterile, you know, I don't know, kinda urbanite vibe of the of the electric cars. It's not a good argument. It's not an argument that I would present that I would present in a official capacity, but it's one that I think about all the time is that, you know, these are okay. I I don't like them though.

Lynette Lynette would have us all go steampunk in all our technology because it's Yes.

Yeah. Well, you know, there's an the worst electrics train out there is the one that hasn't been built yet. In California, they

have the

bullet train. Oh, good. Right? The elect and this thing has been going on for over a decade. They have originally put to the voters who funded the bond, and then now it's gone, like, 3 times the expense.

They still haven't got it built, and it isn't even practical, though, because the the line that they've set up for it basically goes, just up and down the San Joaquin Valley, just south of Sacramento down to Bakersfield. And then once you get to Bakersfield, you have to get on a bus to go to Los Angeles because they're not gonna build a rail line, you know, from Bakersfield to Los Angeles. So what good is it? I think

it was initially supposed to go from, what, San Francisco to, to to Los Angeles or San Diego even. You know? And and they've they've had to cut it back and cut it back. Now the route that they're actually they they promised they're gonna build. It doesn't matter the cost.

We just keep coming up with more money from taxpayers, if not from the state the federal government.

Right.

It's gonna be a route that that nobody transverses. Right? You know, it's gonna be from one small town to another small town relative to California small towns. It's not going from a major metropolitan area to another. It is not a it's true.

Not a single private company would ever built this boondoggle. Yep. If it weren't for government, this would not get built. And why government decided this is a good idea to go from Bakersfield to where'd you say? I got nothing against Bakersfield.

You know? I think Buck Owens came from Bakersfield and maybe, Merle Haggard. So nothing's wrong with Bakersfield, but it's not California's mecca.

Yeah. I'm

at your hip about that's where the oil field is.

It is. The oil field the oil field the oil field which will not be powering

this Right. This train.

Right. So here's the interesting thing about this whole concept of this, you know, bullet train that's supposed to speed up travel between San Francisco and Los Angeles. Yeah. I don't know if you guys have ever watched the Mythbusters program. But several years ago, the Mythbusters did a, a test to find out, is it faster to drive between San Francisco and Los Angeles versus flying.

And they ran this test. They ran a parallel test. One team went on, you know, planes, and the other one took the automobile. The automobile won. Why?

Because you have to get to the airport. You have to park your car. You have to go through security. You have to check your luggage. You have to go through all of this preparatory stuff to get on the plane.

And then, you know, the plane itself is actually faster for that short distance, but then it's the same reverse thing. You have to get out of the Los Angeles, airport, and that takes a long time. You gotta get your baggage and all this other stuff, rent a car, and then drive to the location you wanna go to. The car team beat the airplane by several minutes, and so it's gonna be the same thing with the bullet train. It's still gonna be faster to take a car and drive interstate 5 or even highway 101 going from San Francisco down to Los Angeles.

So what have we gained? Nothing.

We've gained our green virtue. Green green in this in this instance means dollars, right, because 1,000,000,000 of dollars have been wasted. And speaking of 1,000,000,000 of wasted dollars, let's get back to automobiles because Okay. You know, we talked about planes a little bit. There's not much to say.

We've talked about trains. We probably said more than than it merits. Automobiles is where the action is at. And, the one of the wealthiest companies in the history of mankind, Apple, this week canceled after spending 1,000,000,000 of dollars waste not spending, wasting. How do you know it's wasted?

They didn't create a single electric vehicle that worked, and now they're canceling the project. That tells you they took stockholders money. They took money from their profits, and put it into a project that failed. And so now they're pulling out. No no Apple Electric Vehicles.

Rivian gotten infusions from government. Its, its stock has tanked. They're firing, laying off workers. Fisker has already gone through bankruptcy once. It's now a penny stock.

2nd the second iteration is now a penny stock, and it's probably gonna go under. And Tesla, thanks to Joe Biden, is getting a lot of competition from China. So, yeah, environmentally, we can get into that later, but physically and economically, these don't make sense.

I agree.

Yeah. It's kinda too bad too with those Fiskars. I think it's a very pretty car.

I like the first iteration of Fiskars. You know, I looked into buying a used one. You know how long it was it the the the used Fiskars are not electric. They were electric hybrids. Do you know how do you know how far they could go on a charge without the gas?

28 miles.

Mhmm. Yeah. That's not ideal.

And then and then you gotta bother with the fact that, well, they had leaked. You know, it it would rain, and it would leak. They were like the DeLoreans of their day. Really good looking.

Yeah.

But but not very functional.

Yeah. So, you know, the thing is I was an early adopter of all electric vehicles way back around 2004, 2005, And I thought, this is great. I really did at that time. I've actually owned 3 electric vehicles. They were revolutionary for the time, and they were great for around town.

But they all faced one fatal flaw, and that is the batteries would die. And, I I admit, I carried a small generator with me. Right? Because I didn't wanna be stuck somewhere. There was no place to charge it, and it's still almost that way today.

I mean, yes, you've got them. You got chargers and so forth at, you know, places like, Target, or you've got chargers like, you know, along the highway and so forth. But, you know, they're still few and far between. And the problem is is that people just don't want to worry about that range anxiety. They don't wanna worry about, you know, losing a charge.

They don't worry they don't wanna worry about the cold trying to get over the Sierra Nevada affecting the battery performance and basically meaning they can't get from San Francisco up to the ski resort, which has happened. There's been lots of vehicles towed off of Interstate 80 in the Sierra Nevada because they couldn't make the trip in cold weather. So what have we really gained here other than virtue signaling? I mean, that's really all this seems to be. Right, Sterling?

Well, they built I'll say this. They built a lot of infrastructure. We have about a 160 1,000 gasoline stations, filling stations in this country. We already have a 180,000 chargers, and yet the government says we need to build 500,000 more government finance, but the estimates are we need 1,200,000 more. That's how effective, electric vehicles are.

We've got 200,000 more, and we can't keep them on the road still. The you talk about range anxiety. The problem with electric vehicles, there are multiple problems, but two main problems are range and costs. And you know what? That hasn't changed in nearly 200 years, because why did they first detect your locomotive not compete?

It didn't have range, and it was too expensive, you know, when compared to the steam engines. So that hasn't changed. All this investment, all these technological innovations, and the fundamental problem that's, that was around nearly 200 years ago is still around today, range and cost.

Yeah. It just like the MRI metal has taken out the dams, they're they're focused on this one tunnel vision aspect of it without looking at all the other things around it, the things that don't work, and they're not paying attention to that.

For Jim, I'll say dadgummit. Dadgummit? I only said dadgummit because I was about to say something that probably I shouldn't say on this show.

So Right. Well, that's where all the best southernisms come from too.

Exactly.

Yeah. So here's the only thing I can really see valuable about electric cars in the future. This is me in 2050. I I don't know if I've showed you a picture of my 19, 50 hot rod. It's not this one, but, you know, I've got a 1950 Chevy 31 100 hot rod, which I intend to keep until the day I die.

And this is gonna be me in 2050 outrunning the cop waiting for his electric battery to die. Just wait. I can't wait. It's gonna be fun.

I think, I think so my sister and I, we used to go visit my grandparents in California. I think California has the most car chases I've ever seen shown on the news, like, on television. If you're anywhere near Los Angeles, you're getting Los Angeles news. There's just a car chase, like, 3 times a day to watch. And so we used to watch these things, and they would be so anticlimactic most of the time.

They would be going on and on and on. They would be driving for, I don't know, maybe like an hour sometimes. You know, it's not like the cops are trying to ram him off the road or anything like that. It would just be they're following him at a reasonable distance until they stopped. And I imagine that in an electric car scenario, those those cops better hope that their car is, charged fully before they get on the road there, especially in Los Angeles.

You know, the OJ Simpson chase would have been a lot more anticlimactic if he if if he had been in an electric vehicle himself. Maybe what we should do is ban internal combustion engine for criminals. Only give them electric vehicles. Say, you know, are you a bank robber? Here's the car that will allow you to do your getaway in.

Yeah. Well, it'll be just like guns when the internal combustion engines are banned. Only, criminals will have internal combustion engines.

Yeah. But that's a lot harder to I I'll say this. That's a lot harder to hide or, you know, it's much more visible than, than a firearm.

That's true. That's true. Alright. Let's go on to our question and answer period to see what some of our viewers have come up with for questions or comments today. Linnea, take it away.

Alrighty. So first, right away, I want to say our audience is really funny. I'm bringing this up again. We could have the dukes of fire hazard. That's.

This is one of my favorites of today, but you guys are all very, very funny. Alright. So for questions today, we only have 3, but first, we're gonna go for Alan Griffiths who gave us a 10 pound super chat. He says Tony Heller has a 124,000 subscribers compared to yours, 57 1,000 conservative political commentators such as Liberal Hivemind have over 1,000,000. Why are climate skeptics getting such little traction?

Well, I can answer that. Face or pretty much everyone, Facebook, also Twitter still. If you search for the Heartland Institute's tweet, like Twitter account or x account, it does not come up. You have to find someone who has the Heartland Institute, linked page in their bio or something in order to find the Heartland Institute. YouTube hates us very, very much.

And so pretty much anything that is climate related that is not towing the official narrative is heavily suppressed. It's part of the reason why so many conservative commentator organizations that are bigger companies almost never talk about the climate issue. It's because it is poison for viewership, because the sensors come down so hard on you for it. So Yeah. We're we're shadow banned still pretty much everywhere.

That's part of it.

It's not just us, of course. LinkedIn is another one that shadow bans people. Look. If I'm on Facebook and I wanna share something on Facebook, I could I could go through my list and start click clicking. But, typically, when I wanna share something on climate, if it's not just vacation photos, I I'm limited to 5 shares.

Someone passes me along something. It's limited to 5 shares. Now that that affects, by the way, my vacation photos because when you get shadow banned for a while, even those gets limited to 5 shares for a while. But the point is, it's harder we have less access. We don't control the media source.

They're supposed to be, I'm told, that they are not publishers. They're just neutral outlets for people to exchange ideas and converse. I believe that's what Facebook and them are have sold themselves as to get their exemption from from, you know, being sued for what's posted on their site. They said, no. No.

We didn't post this. We we're not arbiters of content. We're just a neutral site where people post what they want. We know that's a lie.

Right.

There was a comment there about censoring something only validates it, and that's true. I mean, we've had a number of our articles with the Heartland Institute attacked by fact checkers and so forth, and they really don't deal with the facts. They they can't dispute the facts. They just get some people with opinions on and say, well, we don't think that this is valid, or we don't subscribe to that or whatever. They don't actually get and and knock down the facts we presented because we present factual information, and we make sure it's backed up.

I mean, I can't ever recall a time when we've gotten one of our facts that we've published wrong. But the the sensors and the fact checkers out there, they just throw opinion and mud at it in order to try to smack it down.

Yeah. We we we present data.

A good point from Jim as well that this show is also on Rumble. We're we and we are starting to get more viewership there, he says, but we need YouTube because it's by far the number one place that people watch shows like this. So we're going to be on here until they kick us off, which who knows, in the tank in the tank had to move to a different channel so that we didn't get, both of us knocked down if one of us did. So, it's a little bit yeah. We're we're playing we're threading the needle on it.

We don't self censor in terms of our content at all, so you don't have to worry about that. But, yeah, it is, it's always a struggle. Okay. Let's see. William says, I saw a post on social media.

So it must be true that atmospheric o two is falling. Do you agree? If so, why?

You know, if it is, and I've seen some hints of this. If if it is, it's very subtle. Some atmospheric oxygen escapes into space, just simply by the action of the sun knocking molecules off into space from cosmic rays and solar wind and so forth and so on. But I don't think we're actually in an oxygen depletion problem, particularly since carbon dioxide has increased over the past several decades. We've got a greening of the earth going on.

And so there's more photosynthesis going on. And that in fact, NASA satellites have measured an area the size of the United States increase in greening throughout the world since about 1990. So what does that mean? More oxygen.

And I've got no idea. I I haven't heard that. So

Yeah. It doesn't seem like it's an issue.

Right.

Go ahead.

Okay. So we also have this one from Energy Colonizer. Why were so many climate clockers dissatisfied with the Copenhagen Accords in the era when the UN and others actually tolerated debate. And my question to you, Anthony, would be, do you think that they really did tolerate debate or that they just hadn't figured out yet that they could clamp down, as severely as they do now?

That's that's that's what they were dissatisfied about. In that era, they still had debate, and they weren't happy about that. So that's why they were dissatisfied. Yeah. I I just

went out. When I first started doing blogging about climate change back in 2,006, 2007 era, there was actually a fair amount of debate, and my articles would get picked up, you know, where we I would point out something factual. But today, that doesn't happen because there's just this universal clampdown by the media and the media, platforms to basically say, oh, well, they're just deniers. Don't listen to them. It doesn't matter what the argument is or how factual it is.

They're more interested in just simply not allowing it.

Yep. And, it's it's the same it's the same thing with all the social media groups. And if you spend any time around conservative media in general, then you know that we've got something of a situation here where our, social media and the Internet's, kind of gatekeepers have really gone hard the last couple of years acting like a 4th branch of government, enforcing whatever the federal agencies want them to enforce, when it comes to the unnamable virus that we don't want that we don't wanna bring up on this particular show because it's, except in the, situation where we talk about how carbon dioxide levels dropped, but not as much as anyone was expecting during that time. And it's, anything you try to say about that obviously gets censored very abruptly, and very harshly too. And if you look on our video right now, I do not have the YouTube link pulled up like I normally do at the moment, but I'm sure that we already have a Wikipedia link underneath the description of this video, trying to fact check climate change on us.

So, you know, it's it's the way it is. And we, as people are talking about in the comments, people get unsubscribed even from our channels all the time. It's just it's an uphill battle, but I think that we're doing pretty well considering, all the challenges that we have. Oh, yeah. There it is.

Yeah. No. We don't have

uphill battle every day.

Wow. We're actually not getting fact checked yet. Well, we'll see when the video goes up what happens.

Alrighty. So it looks like that's all the questions we have today. And, we're gonna move on and, let everyone have a fantastic weekend. So, that guy on the left is really good looking. What's that?

That guy on the left is really good looking.

Yeah. As you're facing screen surprised.

Yeah. Except for the Google, you know, the AOC, what's his name? Matt Adam Schiff Eyes. He is It

is Adam Schiff eyes. Yeah. It is Adam Schiff

eyes. That's

a that's a song. You know, if we could just get that, what was the name of that song? Betty Davis eyes?

He she's got Betty Davis eyes. Yeah.

Oh my goodness. So I wanna remind everyone to visit our website, climate realism.com, where we daily scoot down the media. We impale them with facts, and we point out where they're wrong every day. Visit that. Climate ataglamps.com, where we have all the facts correlated in simple 1 or 2 page summaries about particular climate topics.

We do that on a regular basis. We have 1 or 2 new articles per month getting into the different climate topics, and we've already got dozens up there that you can use for reference to factually cheat down some of the arguments that you encounter on the Internet. We also have energy at a glance dot com, and energy at a glance.com is Linnea's big project that talked about all the different aspects of energy from fracking to electric generation, to natural gas, to everything else. And, of course, my own namesake, what's up with that dot com, the it is the leading climate website in the world, and we have survived and outlived all of the other naysayers out there and continue to flourish even despite the odds. So I want you to visit all those.

So Sterling and Linnea, thanks for joining us today. Thanks for your expert commentary. I'm Anthony Watts, senior fellow for environment and climate at the Heartland Institute, wishing you a great Friday and a fantastic weekend. Bye bye.

Who's your lying dog face point, Joshua?