Glenn Glenbeck is back with a special guest, former US Ambassador to the United Nations, former South Carolina Governor, and founder of Stand4Americans, Nikki Haley, joins us to talk about the New York State Attorney General's office accidentally leaking documents to the press.
00:15:10.440You know, as a person with such immense self-control, I find it personally revolting to see people who are even the slightest bit overweight.
00:25:12.900And the genius of in a very sort of evil, maniacal way, the genius of the Great Reset, which is what you're describing, is that in America and in places where we have constitutional protections in place to prevent the government from doing these kinds of things to us, you now have government working hand in hand with private corporations and businesses who are not beholden to those same rules and constitutional guidelines, who are now doing the dirty work.
00:25:39.820On behalf of the government in order to limit people's rights.
00:25:43.980And this is stories are coming out about this literally every single day.
00:25:47.340In fact, just yesterday on the blaze dot com, I saw a story just browsing the Web site.
00:25:52.200I saw a story that was titled New York lawmakers ask MasterCard and American Express to flag gun store purchases.
00:26:02.460They want MasterCard and they want American Express and other credit card companies and other servicers to do the dirty work for the government because the government can't get these laws passed.
00:28:52.580Go through some of the benefits of fossil fuels, because everybody's like, oh, fossil fuels, okay, I get it, petroleum, so you got your cars.
00:29:03.440I mean, the real benefit of fossil fuels, as I talk about in Chapter 4, is a livable world.
00:29:08.940I mean, people talk about, oh, I'm worried that fossil fuels would make the world unlivable.
00:29:13.180But you have to recognize first that fossil fuels are the only reason why the world is livable as you know it.
00:29:19.780So the world naturally is a very deficient and dangerous place.
00:29:24.080It's very low on resources, and it's very high on threats.
00:29:28.140We, in what I call the empowered world, experience the world as an abundant and safe place, but that is a very unnatural phenomenon.
00:29:35.160Specifically, it's a phenomenon of being able to use machines to radically expand and amplify our productive abilities.
00:29:44.220So expand means we can produce things using machines powered by low-cost, reliable energy that we simply can't do with our physical bodies,
00:29:52.020like provide an incubator that can save a baby's life.
00:29:55.040And then we also amplify our abilities.
00:29:56.800We can do things like run a combine harvester that can reap and thresh a thousand times more wheat than a really good manual laborer can.
00:30:04.500So we only exist in this abundant and safe world by the grace of all of these machines doing work for us.
00:30:12.240And that only works to the extent energy is cost-effective, which means low-cost, reliable, versatile, meaning being able to power any type of machine, and scalable.
00:30:22.200So providing energy for billions of people in thousands of places.
00:30:25.160And what we're seeing with this energy crisis is when you make energy less cost-effective, everything becomes less cost-effective.
00:30:31.700And you see Europe afraid of winter, which is an embarrassment, and you see real threats of starvation around the world.
00:30:38.400Now, people here in America will say, well, it's not going to happen here.
00:30:41.760That's just because Europe screwed up somehow, and I don't want to think past that.
00:30:45.860They actually just didn't take the pause on the Paris Climate Accords, right?
00:30:52.500Yeah, well, nobody is following the Paris Climate Accords.
00:30:57.680In a certain sense, we are following it more than they are, but nobody is really following it in terms of rapidly eliminating CO2 emissions.
00:31:06.100But this is what's scary, is that the net zero agenda has maybe had 1% to 2% success in terms of slowing the growth of fossil fuels, because fossil fuels are still growing around the world, mostly in underdeveloped places that are less restrictive.
00:31:23.920But in general, fossil fuels are still growing, but they're shrinking in what I call the empowered world, the freer parts of the world.
00:31:30.280And even that is causing an energy crisis, because energy is so important, and it's so desperately needed.
00:31:37.920So people don't really understand what it means not to have energy.
00:31:42.740Over in, I think it was Scotland, Amazon and Microsoft shut down some server farms because they just couldn't get enough electricity.
00:31:53.420We are a country and a civilization that is reliant on our technology, not just our engines, but also our technology.
00:32:04.060And if you don't have the power, you can't keep it at today's standards.
00:32:09.440But I don't know if anybody's noticed this.
00:32:12.340What's happening in the technological world is only getting bigger and more invasive in our lives, not smaller.
00:32:21.940We need more electricity in the future, not less.
00:32:27.960So this is something I talk about in Chapter 5 of Fossil Future, which includes talking about, you know, it's an expanding pie in terms of the need for energy.
00:32:36.780The biggest reason is just most people are very energy poor in the world.
00:32:40.440We have 6 billion out of 8 billion people who use an amount of energy that you and I would consider unacceptable.
00:32:45.380We have 3 billion people using less electricity per person than a typical American refrigerator.
00:32:50.600We have a third of the world using wood and animal dung as their primary fuel for heating and cooking.
00:32:56.500But then as you're pointing out, the parts of the world even that are empowered, we're finding new ways to use energy.
00:33:03.120And particularly in the realm of information technology, we have rapid growth.
00:33:08.000And what you're finding with some of these tech companies, it's really tragic or in a certain sense shameful, is they are huge consumers of electricity who are rightly using more electricity.
00:33:18.960And yet they're huge boosters of the idea that we can get off fossil fuels rapidly.
00:33:24.920And one way they do this that's particularly insidious that I talk about in Chapter 6 on alternatives is they claim to be 100% renewable.
00:33:33.460And the literal way they do this is they pay grids to give them credit for everyone else's solar and wind and to give everyone else the blame for their coal, gas, and nuclear.
00:33:43.500So this is really shameful, and it's promoting all the wrong ideas, even though the world needs more energy, and they're exhibit A of why.
00:33:50.500Can you talk a little bit about, I mean, the problem with our information system that we have now where people believe global warming is a catastrophe, and yet we have more information now or access to more information than ever before?
00:34:06.040Yeah, I have a term I coined called knowledge system to really capture the set of institutions.
00:34:11.380We often call it the media, but that's too much of a simplification.
00:34:14.400The set of institutions that are designed to give us expert knowledge and guidance.
00:34:18.640And I think one key thing is that you have these different phases by which knowledge is acquired and transmitted, and so there's the research phase.
00:34:26.080But we don't just get things from the research.
00:34:28.020The research needs to be synthesized by institutions and then disseminated, and then ultimately we evaluate what do we do about it.
00:34:34.860Now, something like climate, what you see is the actual research has quite a few biases, but that research, even as it exists today, in no way justifies this idea of climate catastrophe, and certainly in no way justifies the idea of rapidly eliminating fossil fuels and replacing them specifically with unreliable solar and wind.
00:34:55.740And yet we get this narrative that, oh, the scientists say we need to get off fossil fuels and replace them with 100% renewable.
00:35:04.260And so what's happening is we are getting a distortion from what I call the knowledge system.
00:35:09.060The institutions we're trusting to get expert knowledge, they're distorting the actual state of the research to the point where we're being told that fossil fuels have no benefits, and yet reality is proving they have huge benefits, and losing those benefits is catastrophic.
00:35:22.880Alex, put this on – I mean, you've been warning about this for a long time.
00:35:33.420Put this on what's coming in some sort of scale that people can understand.
00:35:39.600What is life like in 2030 if we continue down this path?
00:35:44.240What's it like in 2024, 26, if we continue down this path?
00:35:48.660I think there are two versions of this that we need to contemplate.
00:35:55.100One is less realistic, and one is more realistic.
00:35:59.160So the less realistic one is the one where we all pursue anything resembling net zero, where we all seek to reduce our emissions without a viable replacement.
00:36:09.200And certainly there's nothing resembling a viable replacement by 2030, particularly because you're basically not allowed to build nuclear now.
00:36:15.140So if everyone did that, it would be like much, much, much more extreme than what Europe is experiencing right now because it's just – and you're just seeing it.
00:36:24.780Their power bills are going up by a factor of four.
00:36:54.740They'll be providing oil for any country that is not adopting this insanity.
00:36:58.660And so this is what I – one of the things I warn about in Chapter 11 of the book, which I call unilateral disempowerment, which Europe is exhibiting right now, which means the freer countries decide, hey, we're going to restrict our emissions.
00:37:12.280We're going to start – we're going to lower our fossil fuel use.
00:37:14.800But what happens then is you empower often the less free places like China and Russia, and China in particular loves using huge amounts of coal to produce huge amounts of unreliable solar and wind that then ruin our economy and our way of life.
00:37:30.360Like that's great for their ambition of becoming a global superpower by 2049.
00:37:34.720So that's what I think is the most realistic is that we kind of sacrifice unilaterally, and we make ourselves much less secure, much more dependent on powers that do not wish us well and that are not pro-freedom.
00:37:47.820Tell me what – tell me what we lose besides freedom.
00:37:51.580Tell me what the average person's life – how is this going to impact?
00:37:55.340How is this going to change their life?
00:37:58.920Well, I would just ask, have you ever been really poor?
00:38:08.140No, I'm just saying like most of us, even who have had success, have had periods where we didn't have much money.
00:38:14.980I certainly had that in my life, and like it will be much, much worse than that.
00:38:19.840I mean this is the thing because you have the element of just becoming much poorer, which people experience even with modest rises in gasoline prices.
00:39:24.000We can pursue what I call energy freedom.
00:39:26.780And that's a lot of my work right now besides making clear this idea of a fossil future is promoting energy freedom policies so that we can get there and also get to new alternatives.
00:39:36.140So I only have about a minute left, and I want to ask you about your energy freedom because you're saying let us build nuclear power.
00:39:44.780Let us – you know, real promising alternatives.
00:40:05.460So reality, you know, this crisis, they're helping us open people's minds.
00:40:10.540If people want to check this out, go to alexepstein.substack.com, and you'll see near the top the energy freedom platform.
00:40:16.640I should say, you know, I used to have no influence at all in D.C., and now I work with something like 300 staffers on policy in different ways.
00:40:23.760So I'm optimistic that there's a real appetite for a new energy policy that gives us all the energy we need in the present and promotes the positive evolution of energy going forward.