Heartland Daily Podcast

This is the Heartland Daily Podcast.

The other day, the Heartland Institute's h Sterling Burnett, director of the Arthur b Robinson Center on Climate Environmental Policy, was a guest on WLW Radio in Cincinnati, The Bill Cunningham Show. Sterling was invited on to talk about Donald Trump withdrawing The United States from the Paris Climate Agreement and also a flurry of executive orders on climate and energy policy. Have a listen.

I'm Bill Cunningham, the great American. One of the great reasons that so many of the American people put Donald Trump in office is to stop the madness when it comes to all these, windmills and solar panels from communist red China, etcetera, and to lower the price of energy, we need to have an energy demand, which is unbelievable. In fact, when you talk to the so called experts because of AI, every year, we're gonna have a 5 to 7% increase in the need for electricity. And every year, because of cutbacks and brownouts and blackouts, we have a 5 to 7% decrease of energy production, which is a major problem. We hope the problem has been solved, but, Sterling Burnett, PhD, is the director of the Robinson Center on Climate and Environmental Policy at the Heartland Institute.

And Sterling Burnett, welcome to the Bill Cunningham Show. And first of all, let let's talk about the road that was taken before we get to what's gonna happen in the future. Tell me the Biden energy policy and how that increased cost for all the American people gave us less electricity, fewer jobs, and emboldened China. Let's assume that Kamala Harris had won the road, thank god, not taken. What were what was the Biden policy on energy and things of that character?

Well, the Biden policy was for Americans to live less, to live less well, to pay more for goods and services that depend on energy. Energy is the lifeblood of the economy. Everyone thinks about energy when they turn on their lights or they drive their car, but energy goes into everything. If you get food, it was grown using a lot of energy, and it was transported using a lot of energy. If you wear clothes, it, they were if they're poly you know, any kind of, unnatural fiber, non natural fiber, they were they were they were produced using oil and gas and, of course, shipped, manufactured.

Everything uses energy as a component. Plastics. 6000 plastics produced by oil. And Biden and Harris did everything they could to raise the price of that in their so called, you know, in their idiotic fight against climate change.

And So And climate change America. You know, every you know, every now and then, it's so cold where I live in the Midwest. I could use some global warming right now. It'd be a good thing. I can't imagine how cold it would be without global warming.

But the the plan was to say, I can't imagine having a policy. Get in get in the heads of a leftist if you can, doctor Burnett. You're in the head of a leftist. Right now, you're Kamala Harris' energy provider, and you're sitting in the White House now for about a week, and you're in charge. Are you thinking, you know what?

We need to live less well. We need to pay more for gasoline oil, natural gas. We need to cut off LNG exports. We need to put out a work of those on the Keystone pipeline. Is that what a leftist actually thinks?

Yeah. No. It is what what they actually think. They think they think no. It's not that we need to.

It's that the other people need to sacrifice for the causes we think are important. Remember, Kamala Harris isn't suffering. Biden isn't suffering. No. Obama don't they don't suffer.

The the they pay the higher cost, but they can absorb the higher cost. They think other people must sacrifice. The poor in America must sacrifice to pay off corrupt politicians in developing countries, to satisfy their elite friends. They take their private jets, and they don't want us to travel at all. That's what they truly believe.

They they many of them are, what you call they're misanthropic, but they think there are too many people on Earth. They think the problem is too many people and too much consumption. So people suffering, that's no problem with them. They they they talk a good game. Oh, we're for the poor.

We're for the workers. And then they do everything they can to make it worse for the poor and the workers. So you have to look at their actions, not their words, to figure out what's really going on in their head.

As far as the climate risks, there's a it's almost a biblical belief they have that the climate is affected by human activity causing man made global warming resulting in climate change. And, if 1 would take the last hundred and fifty years of the industrial age, I'm told that the average temperature on Earth's gone up is maybe as much as 2 degrees Fahrenheit, and and that is the judgment of those doing the measurement who wanna define result, if you know what I mean. How much of a risk to to me, Tony Bender, and others is man made, global warming that is causing all these climate risks? How much of a risk is it?

So ask yourself this. If you step outside today and the temperature goes up 2 degree, do you die?

No. I'm it's it's a good thing.

Most people most people, in fact, when they retire, where they don't retire as much as beautiful places it may be is Minnesota or, North Dakota. They typically retire down south where it's warmer. Warmer is better for human life. Warmer is better for biological diversity. In the end, a warmer world is a better world, and we're not warming that much.

C o 2 is plant food, so we're feeding more people than ever before in history. We have fewer deaths tied to temperatures than ever before in history. We have fewer people dying as a result of natural disasters than ever before in history. So you have to show me where climate change is making anything worse. And does the the the data, not not the headlines, not what people the the so called experts say, the data does not back up the claim that we face a climate crisis.

And that's what Trump recognized. That's the hoax Trump calls out when he calls climate change a hoax.

You know, doctor Sterling Burnett, when I watched Jim Acosta on CNN who kinda lost his gig, but nonetheless, it just seems like there's more hurricanes. It just seems like there's more tornadoes. It just seems like there's more wildfires. It seems everything's getting worse going to hell in a handbasket. Is it?

Mhmm. Is it worse?

It's we we're able to track them better. We're there's a lot more reporting, you know, twenty four hours seven reporting. Used to if a if a tornado happened in the middle of Kansas or, the Panhandle Of Texas and it didn't strike a town or a house, no one knew about it. Now you have radar that sees every little hurricane tornado that forms regardless of whether it ever impacts any place. You get tornado warnings.

I get tornado I live in I live in Dallas. I lived here most of my life. When I didn't live here, I lived in Ohio, which was also part of Tornado Alley. I know I know tornadoes. Very familiar with tornadoes.

I get tornado warnings all the time. I probably have 10 of them a year. I haven't my town, the day after Christmas about eight years ago, had tornadoes struck about half a mile from me. That's the only 1 that came anywhere close to my house. I wouldn't even have known about them except for the 1 that was nearest me years ago because they wouldn't have been reporting on it because they didn't know it.

They didn't know the radar didn't track the little funnel coming down Right. Until it until it did some damage, until it hurt somebody. And even then, if it was just 1 small farm that got rocked out, you may never have known it. CNN didn't exist. 24 a day cable news, weather channels are relatively recent invention.

So, it's not that any of this stuff is getting worse because the data once again, I would always go back to this because that's what science is built on. The data don't show that these things are happening more frequently, or when they do occur, that they're more powerful than they've ever been before.

Oh, you you know, 1 of the things I saw on Fox News

the alarmist.

Yeah. The alarmist. Be because aren't people paid to hold these opinions? In other words, much like DEI, which is DIE, there's an $8,000,000,000 industry built around DEI. And the colleges, universities, many major businesses, Costco, for example, a lot of people are getting paid.

And so when lots of people are paid lots of money, guess what? There's gonna be man made climate change causing global warming. Correct?

Well, if it wasn't climate if it wasn't global warming, it was global cooling. Look. The environmentalists have had scare stories going back since the turn of the twentieth century, and the story is always the same. Humans it's it's it's the Bible story. Human sin.

In this case, they developed energy. And the the you have to repent your sin. You need to get rid of the energy. No matter what the crisis is, whether it was global cooling in the and the next ice age, whether it was endocrine disruptors in the that were gonna make it impossible for humans to have children.

Right. Right.

It was clean it was air and water in the This the the problem is always the same. Humans consume too much, and their answer is always the same. Bigger and bigger government to control your lives to dictate to you. Those things are common whatever the environmental problem is. And the the other thing that's always the same is academics and the media raking in a lot of money on it.

Right. If the environmental scares go away, funding to these academics goes away as well. Their whole careers are built on on, disaster.

Big business.

And and for the media look. It's not new. If it bleeds, it leads. If they had a report, nothing bad happened today.

Many times, I talk to those in news that's saying, well, we have to report something at 06:00. They gotta find something that's going on. One One of the best things I saw in a congressional hearing about three months ago was my favorite senator, senator John Kennedy of Louisiana. And he he has, a panel of experts. What percent of the atmosphere is c o 2?

And these were experts supposedly from academia, and they were giving numbers like 1%, five %, seventeen %. What percent of the actual atmosphere of mother earth is c o 2?

Well, a small fraction. C o 2 is is probably less than 1%. If you talk about the percentage of c o 2 as the greenhouse get remember, greenhouse gases are only a small part of the atmosphere. Right. And the dominant greenhouse gas, 96 to 97% of the greenhouse gas in the atmosphere is water vapor.

Right. Correct.

So so c o 2 and methane and all those of the greenhouse gases you hear about, are are 2 to 3% of the are 2 to 3% of the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, which is a small fraction of all the gases in the atmosphere.

Well, senator Kennedy had a a government expert that admitted that the percentage of c o 2 in the atmosphere is somewhere between point zero three and point zero four. For those who may not have a math background, that is well less than one tenth of 1%. So if you take an inch divided by 10, then go down to point o 3 of that. That's the percentage of c o 2 in the atmosphere, which is part of methane, which is a good thing, and it is not a significant part. In fact, mother Earth itself will regulate by itself methane and c o 2 in the atmosphere by what it does.

And 1 might add, doctor Sterling Burnett, I read in a scientific journal that the wildfires in California have now put, more c o 2 and particulate matter in the atmosphere than it's been so called saved by California in the past twenty eight years. So you have 1 wildfire and all of a sudden, all the Priuses that are driven don't matter anymore anyway because mother earth regulates. You know what I'm saying?

Yeah. No. The you know? And and these, as bad as as terrible as they are because of where they're located, you know, right in right in the populated Los Angeles area, these are small wildfires compared to some of the wildfires that have happened in California in recent years. You know, these are twenty, forty seven thousand acres, but they've had, you know, millions of acres burned in the last few years.

A lot wildfires have put out more all all the sacrifices. All the sacrifices. The lack of energy. The the jobs lost. The people moving out of the state because it's losing population largely due to high energy cost, high housing cost, all the regulations.

None of that has done anything to prevent any climate change at all. And, and it won't. No. We America America could tomorrow. The president Trump's good marks.

And if there were a light switch, turn off all the energy in The US, and emissions would continue to climb, and it's not a bad thing. You know what? During the last ice age, we dipped down to a 80 parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Plants stop, photosynthesis. They die at a 50 parts of the atmosphere.

So we were in danger of all life on Earth, and it wasn't due to global warming. It was due to global cooling and too little c o 2. Had c o 2 not come back after the ice age to 280 parts per million, we'd be in bad shape.

Right.

And most of the plants on lot most of life on Earth, most of the plants on Earth evolved at a time when CO 2 was much higher in the atmosphere than it is now. 420 parts per million is not a danger to anyone.

All of us, you know, all of us are against pollutants. I'm against pollution, but I'm in favor of economic development. Lastly, the left's going crazy because of the pie Paris Climate Accords, which is ending Chinese controlled renewable energy. Explain how the Chinese are making money out of this deal.

Well, the Chinese weren't bound by anything. They didn't have to cut their emissions under the Paris Climate Accord. They said that at some point in the future, they expect they will peak emissions. But if they take it double where they are now and they're already more than double what The US puts out Right. More than what the entire developed world puts out, then it wouldn't matter.

Even if you believe c o 2 was causing climate change because they would swamp anything, any sacrifices we make. Right. So they were glad going on their merry way, putting out c o 2, and then they were selling us green techno so called so called green technologies, and our energy system were becoming dependent upon Chinese technology, Chinese critical minerals. And, you know, to the extent that those are built into to chips, let's say the Chinese didn't like us all of a sudden and war broke out. They might be able to turn off our technologies and minerals.

It's it it was crazy. It is crazy to make your electrical grid and your transportation system dependent on minerals, technologies that come from a country that is not your ally, but is your enemy.

No. In fact, getting out of the Paris Climate that's a group.

Paris did?

That that's what they did. And thank God Trump did that because without that, we'd have more of these battery plants built by the communist red Chinese in Mexico to sell us cheap EVs that were mandated. I can only imagine if we'd gone through four years of Joe Biden, then eight years of Kamala Harris, then four years of governor Tim Walsh as the vice president to be reelected, we're done. It's over. We're gonna turn over our economy to the red Chinese.

It was a great thing. Once again, doctor Sterling Burnett, you're the climate environmental policy at the Heartland Institute. And how many times has CBS, NBC, ABC, or PBS, or the New York Times put your thoughts or the Heartland Institute's thoughts in their stories? Does that ever happen?

Very, very rarely because they decided about a decade ago that that there was no debate, and they were gonna they were no longer gonna cover dissenting voices on climate matters. So I won't say it never happened. But when it does, it's never complimentary.

Yes. Something's wrong with you. You're not thinking right. We we want the Chinese controls.

What they do what they do is they try and compare us to holocaust deniers. They call us climate deniers. Mhmm. They say we're holding up progress on climate change. No.

We're, defending American prosperity and Americans' freedom to choose.

Well, until Starship Enterprise shows up with dilithium crystals, we're gonna have to rely upon, a coal and natural gas and oil for for a long time, hundreds of years, and we have the supply. And don't believe what the mainstream media tells you because a lot of it is a bunch of lies, and you just laid it out. And once again, doctor Sterling Burnett, PhD, the Heartland Institute, thank you for coming on the Bill Cunningham Show. And doctor Burnett, you're a great American. Thank you very much.