In this episode, I speak with author, podcaster, and film producer Robert Bryce about his new book, A Question of Power, Electricity, and the Wealth of Nations: How the current audacity of those pushing the zero-emissions, net zero agenda negatively impacts the developing world and the poor in the West. We discuss topics from Bryce s latest book, including: the role of the World Bank and other multilateral lending institutions in providing funding for renewable energy projects in developing countries like Angola, and why this is such a bad idea. Plus, we discuss why the Angolan government should be allowed to develop their own solar power plants, and how they can use their natural resources to meet their climate commitments. Betonline is betting on the outcome of the upcoming election, and you can bet on real-world events outside of the realm of sports, like sports betting. BetOnline has one of the largest offerings and betting odds in the world, making sports betting more accessible and convenient than ever before. Use promo code DAILYWIRE to get a 50% sign-up bonus of up to $250. That s betting on your favorite sports team or event! BetOnline Use Promo Code DAILYWEEKS to get up to 50% off your first month's best bets. The options are endless. You can t get more than $25,000 by betting on sports betting at BetOnline. If you're watching your favorite team or the news surrounding the upcoming midterm election, you can increase your wager on the NFL playoffs, or you can get a FREE bet on NFL tickets, NBA tickets, NHL tickets, MLB tickets, and more! - go to betonline.ag and you'll get a discount on MLB playoff tickets, too! Go to BetOnline: to place your bets on MLB and NHL tickets! and the NFL is giving you the best chance to win $50,000 in the MLB playoffs, and get a chance to become a FREE MLB playoff offer! on MLB FREEPRIZE! Subscribe to MLB FREEBIE, NBA FREEPROGRAM, NHL FREEPRIZES, NHL LEAGUE, NHL CHECK OUT AND MORE! FREE FUTURE PODCAST, NBA LEAGUES, NBA CHECKOUT AND MORE. FREE PREDICTION, FREE TALKING WITH MEET MEETING AND GAMES TO WIN A VOTING PRODCAST AND MORE?
00:18:27.400So I think the key for me, Jordan, in all of this discussion is electricity availability.
00:18:36.720And this is, yes, energy in general matters.
00:18:39.560But more specifically, it's electricity.
00:18:41.680And let me get on one point that I think is critical.
00:18:44.300When we talk about compassion, we talk about humanism.
00:18:46.880Because my favorite line these days is, energy realism is energy humanism.
00:18:51.280And if we're going to be realistic about energy and we're going to be energy humanists, we have to look at the lens of energy and energy availability, in particular, and how it affects women and girls.
00:19:03.180Electricity frees women and girls from the pump, the stove, and the washtub.
00:19:07.100You remember the new dealers here in the U.S., when they wanted to bring electricity to rural areas, many of these politicians, George Norris, Sam Rayburn, George Norris from Nebraska, Sam Rayburn from Texas, Lyndon Johnson from Texas, they had seen their mothers wash clothes by hand.
00:19:26.620They wanted them to be liberated from the washtub.
00:19:31.340They'd seen this kind of back-breaking labor.
00:21:10.560And the fact that we're locking up that degree of neural architecture in these menial tasks to not save the planet while we're making electricity more unreliable and more expensive.
00:21:22.020It's just, it's absolute, it's beyond incompetence into the realm of absolutely criminal as far as I'm concerned.
00:21:40.760We have to balance our action on climate with our other issues.
00:21:45.020But the overall point, I think, that is absolutely essential is that regardless of what we think, what you and I think about CO2 emissions and how many parts per million is the perfect number, if we're facing more extreme weather, hotter, colder, more extreme, longer, I mean, it's been crazy hot here in Texas.
00:22:01.620Well, if that's the case, we're going to need a lot more energy, not less.
00:22:05.960We're going to need a lot more reliable energy, not less.
00:22:09.380And yet the trends are for this effort to rely more on weather-dependent renewables.
00:22:15.720So if we're facing, that's the other part, Jordan, if we're facing more extreme weather, why in the world would we make our most important energy network dependent on the weather?
00:22:25.380I mean, it's like on the face of it, it makes no sense.
00:22:28.020I mean, I don't want to get too technical.
00:22:33.160And so I'd like you to push back on me as much as you could.
00:22:35.920So this is what I've watched in the course of my lifetime.
00:22:39.760So in the 1970s, we were going to run out of fossil fuels.
00:22:44.980And that was a big, bloody catastrophe for everyone for about six years after 1972 and the energy crisis.
00:22:50.840And that turned out to be complete rubbish.
00:22:53.080We're not running out of fossil fuels, and we won't.
00:22:55.320Partly, I mean, I think it was Exxon two weeks ago announced that they had a new fracturing technology that could double the known store of fossil fuels in the U.S., which is like should have been front page headline news everywhere.
00:23:07.820Because, oh my God, we have twice as many fossil fuels as we thought.
00:23:13.100And you Americans have become absolute bloody magicians at extracting out fossil fuel from these huge reserves that you have, like the shale beds.
00:23:24.260And that's partly because as the price goes up, people's incentives to extract out even more of the fossil fuel reserves we know are there increases.
00:23:35.980And the technology geniuses just get better and better at doing it.
00:23:40.180So we're not going to run out of fossil fuel.
00:24:21.100Now, I've looked at the data on hurricane frequency, for example.
00:24:24.460There's no evidence whatsoever that hurricanes are increasing in frequency.
00:24:27.800And to the degree that they're more expensive, it's only because people are building more and more expensive properties in hurricane-prone zones.
00:24:34.400Then we also have Bjorn Lomberg's data showing that even if we accept the IPCC's climate predictions, and I don't necessarily think we should, that we will be, you know, some degree poorer than how much richer we would have been 100 years from now.
00:25:17.200And interestingly enough, it's greened in exactly the areas that the climate catastrophists told us would be at most risk because they presumed that the semi-arid areas, the arid areas would expand out into the semi-arid areas and the deserts would grow.
00:26:51.480That the Export-Import Bank of the United States is not funding a natural gas-fired power plant in Angola, even though Angola has trillions of cubic feet of available natural gas.
00:27:01.940Instead, we're funding a solar panel project.
00:27:05.260I mean, this makes no sense whatsoever.
00:27:07.240So if we're serious about reducing emissions and bringing more people out of the dark and into the light, which I think is incumbent on the wealthy countries to help developing countries do that.
00:38:45.700Obviously, the Chinese are doing the same thing.
00:38:47.860I mean, the Chinese are planning, I think, 100 nuclear plants, something like that, over the upcoming decades.
00:38:54.060But they're also expanding their coal-fired plants like mad, which also makes an absolute bloody mockery of anything we're doing in the West on the so-called climate front.
00:39:02.900Because especially in a country like Canada, where our emissions are so trivial on the world stage that they're not even within the error margin of estimate for carbon dioxide effects.
00:39:14.460And that's a critical point that I think that, you know, I've heard other people say this.
00:39:20.840But the emissions from the West, in many ways, don't matter anymore because the story is in places like Vietnam, Bangladesh, Pakistan, India, China.
00:39:29.580These are the places where emissions are growing so rapidly.
00:39:32.560And, in fact, I spend a lot of time, I nerd out on spreadsheets.
00:39:35.420And the statistical review of world energy just came out.
00:39:38.760So I've been studying it very closely.
00:39:40.520The country that had the biggest, in absolute terms, the biggest increase in CO2 emissions last year was Indonesia, followed closely by India.
00:39:47.840So these are countries that have enormous populations and are still desperately energy poor.
00:40:12.580Once those countries start to pass a certain threshold of industrial development, that is where all the action is going to be on the climate and energy front.
00:40:20.280And so we should be planning for that.
00:40:21.920And, you know, it certainly seems like—
00:40:24.720And Vietnam is a good example of this.
00:40:26.640And I've written about Vietnam as well recently on my Substack, that here's a country that is rapidly industrializing.
00:40:34.340Major industrial companies are moving to Vietnam to hedge their bets about being in China.
00:40:39.860So big companies—Nike, Adidas, Samsung, Apple, to name a few—locating in Vietnam.
00:40:48.880Viet Coman, as their state-owned mining company, announced they're going to expand their coal mining capacity by 15 percent.
00:40:55.100This is the iron law of electricity, what I call the iron law of electricity, a nod to my friend Roger Pilkey Jr., who coined the iron law of climate.
00:41:03.720He said when faced between—his focus was, face between climate policy and economic growth, economic growth will win every time.
00:41:11.660So I borrowed Roger's idea and coined the iron law of electricity, which is people, countries, and businesses will do whatever they have to do to get the electricity they need.
00:41:20.820Climate change is not their first concern.
00:41:29.020I've seen people in India stealing electricity.
00:41:31.600In Beirut, where I talk about that, I write about it in my book, seeing the generator mafia, where pretty much everyone in Lebanon pays two electric bills.
00:41:40.200One to EDL, the grid operator, and the other to the generator mafia, who are the local entrepreneurs.
00:41:46.200They call them the mob, they call them the mafia, but they're providing power when the grid fails in Lebanon.
00:42:13.760Yeah, they're also not going to let grandma freeze to death in the winter.
00:42:16.920I mean, I looked at Domburg's data on the consequences of lowering thermostat temperatures just a few degrees.
00:42:23.840And he estimated, for example, that a three, if I remember correctly, and this is about right, that a three degree decrease in thermostat temperature in the winter kills 110,000 people in Europe.
00:42:34.020That's old people, you know, because old people can't regulate their temperature very well.
00:42:38.600And so there's two things we need to point out to everyone who's watching and listening.
00:42:43.340And the first is, is that if you raise energy costs, you imagine that there's a pyramid of economic development.
00:42:49.440And there's hundreds of millions or billions of people who are sitting right on the threshold of poverty.
00:42:55.840They've climbed out of absolute poverty.
00:42:57.640So now they have enough money so that they don't have to worry about where lunch is coming from.
00:43:01.980But that's just where they're at, and they're barely there.
00:43:05.240And if you increase their energy costs to any degree at all, all you do is whack them down, back down into absolute abject poverty.
00:43:13.320And then they do things like slash and burn agriculture, and they burn dung and other, you know, very low energy dense products in their house.
00:43:41.640And the more poor people you make, as far as I can tell, the worse things are actually for the planet rather than the better.
00:43:48.040And this brings us to another conundrum.
00:43:50.960You know, you pointed out that the green types tend not only to be anti-natural gas, which is, of course, completely insane, but also anti-nuclear.
00:44:02.180And this points to the fundamental underlying motivation, as far as I'm concerned, is that this green movement isn't so much green, certainly not as a consequence of the fruits that it is born, as it is both anti-industrial and anti-human.
00:44:18.620And those actually turn out to be the same thing.
00:44:20.660And you can tell in these when push comes to shove cases, because the bloody greens, if they were actually concerned about carbon dioxide output, which is what they say we should only be concerned about, would be jumping on board the nuclear bandwagon in a second, saying, well, obviously, we should transition to nuclear because it's zero carbon dioxide output.
00:44:41.960So that means, as far as I'm concerned, that everything, that their fundamental narrative is a delusional lie.
00:44:48.440And it's got a malevolent twist in it, too.
00:44:51.040And you can see that manifesting itself in the refusal of these Western NGOs and the World Bank and so forth to lend money to developing countries to try to raise them out of poverty, which is inexcusable.
00:45:03.600There's a certain, well, you know this field better than I, but there's a certain puritanical part of this, right?
00:45:09.740And a certain also, I think, a religious fundamentalism.
00:45:13.380And I'm sure other people have talked about this before, I know.
00:45:16.200But there are many overlaps between the Christian belief and these ideas around climate catastrophism, right?
00:45:25.160That we've sinned against the earth, right?
00:46:35.180Because I have, you know, I've documented now for more than 10 years, and on the Renewable Rejection Database, which is on my website, robertbrice.com,
00:46:44.160I've documented nearly 400 rejections of wind energy in the U.S. from Maine to Hawaii.
00:46:48.820It's happening in Canada, too, by the way.
00:46:50.600In Ontario, over 90 communities have declared themselves unwilling hosts to wind energy.
00:46:55.800Now, you don't read about this in the New York Times because it doesn't fit the narrative.
00:47:00.140So back to the point about hydrocarbons and Kirk Smith, indoor air pollution is one of the leading killers of women and girls in developing countries.
00:47:07.860Kirk Smith and the WHO, I think, the World Health Organization, documented something like three or four million women and girls a year are dying premature deaths because of indoor air pollution,
00:47:17.040because they're cooking with dung or wheat straw in their homes.
00:48:24.860And I haven't talked to him in a long time because of that, because I just thought, you don't understand what you're talking about.
00:48:30.300Expensive energy is the enemy of the poor.
00:48:32.440And yet so many of these policies, both in the developed countries and the developing countries, are aimed by these bilateral, multilateral lenders, by policymakers at the state level and federal level, are creating policies that make energy more expensive.
00:48:46.980And I just think that's just fundamentally wrong.
00:48:49.940Energy means life, and the absence of energy is death, to quote my friend Doonberg.
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00:49:48.860I started to take this whole domain of trouble particularly seriously when watching what was happening in Europe and starting to understand that the West, in its delusions of repentance, would sacrifice hundreds of millions of people and literally sacrifice them on the altar of Gaia.
00:50:10.900To not save the planet while virtue is signaling about how the industrial enterprise was unethical despite benefiting from every single one of the gains that the industrial revolution has produced and being 100% absolutely unwilling to give up any of it at all whatsoever under any circumstances for ourselves.
00:50:32.720Like, there's no excuse for any of that.
00:50:35.280Now, my understanding is this, is that there's a pretty clear developmental pathway to cleaner and more reliable energy in the long run.
00:50:44.880It's something like, well, you start at the very lowest rung with dung and with wheat straw and with those things and with wood, scrap wood, so forth, that can be burned that's there in the local environment.
00:50:55.460And it's low energy dense, it's expensive, it runs out easily, it's unreliable, it's polluting.
00:51:03.460Now, you move to coal because coal is unbelievably plentiful and it's dirt cheap and you can get a coal-fired plant up and running with relatively rudimentary technology in almost no time flat.
00:51:13.860And its disadvantage in particular is particulate pollution, although it also produces a lot of carbon, which I don't really care about.
00:51:20.900But the particulate pollution is a problem.
00:51:22.860You move from that to oil or natural gas and you move from that to nuclear.
00:51:29.560Is this just like, can we rest assured that this is a reasonable developmental pathway and one that we should be pursuing?
00:51:35.800Well, this is the way it's been happening for a long time now.
00:51:38.920I mean, that is the way the world has decarbonized over time.
00:51:42.280My friend Jesse Ausubel at Rockefeller University has documented this and shown we are gradually decarbonizing.
00:51:51.820But that decarbonizing is happening, is underway in developed countries and there are dozens of underdeveloped countries that are just getting started, right?
00:52:02.580They're still at the biomass stage and there's this claim, oh, well, we can leapfrog, they can.
00:52:08.260And the alt-energy crowd, the climate crowd says, oh, well, they don't need hydrocarbons, they'll jump right to renewables.
00:52:16.260I mean, while that's true in some cases in rural areas where solar and batteries are going to be the solution, Africa is rapidly urbanizing.
01:26:10.160Wood is renewable because wood will grow.
01:26:13.000But like, I don't know exactly what happened to Siemens.
01:26:17.240I haven't been following that story close enough to know.
01:26:19.700But the Siemens Manufacturing Company, and they've taken a huge stock hit because they said that their solar or their windmill generating systems are much more problematic than they had originally thought.
01:27:00.680But they function in many of the same ways, right?
01:27:02.440There's a limited amount of power that you can harness from this diffused source of energy.
01:27:07.340I think they just got to a point where they made the system, the machines got so big that the forces on them are effectively tearing the machines apart, right?
01:27:16.740That they couldn't, the forces, the torque, the forces that they're trying to deal with in these gearboxes, which are incredibly complex machines, that the stresses were just too great, right?
01:27:28.000Well, you think about the variability too, right?
01:27:30.300I mean, those bloody wind mills, they have to operate from conditions of like zero wind whatsoever, which isn't a problem, to like gale-level storms.
01:27:42.820And that's a tremendous engineering challenge, especially when you're also putting them in the bloody salt water out in the middle of the ocean.
01:27:50.020Right, which is just madness, by the way, you know, that you're going to put them out there, put anything in salt water, it's going to cost you two or three times more than putting it on land.
01:27:58.420So I think this is about basic physics, and they're getting to the limits of the Betts limit, right?
01:28:03.300And you have these blades that are 80 meters long, and you've got to manufacture those, and that's another thing.
01:28:07.540And then when they're done, you can't, you have to landfill them, right?
01:28:12.520But I want to take it in a little bit different direction, Jordan, because it's not just about the machines and how they're built, it's the supply chains.
01:28:20.240And this is the other part that is not getting the kind of attention that it deserves, and I've written about this on my substack, that these supply chains for alt energy are almost all dependent on China.
01:28:37.780I just flew in the other night from Miami, and we flew over it.
01:28:41.340It's a massive bet on a few very specific commodities, cobalt, lithium, neodymium, neodymium iron boron magnets, dysprosium, and terbium, to name a few, a few others, copper, obviously.
01:29:00.420Well, the Chinese control the market for 90% of the global market for neodymium iron boron magnets, which are the key element in the EV drive motors, right?
01:29:13.940Nearly all the electric vehicles being produced today use this type of magnet.
01:29:18.740So other countries can make those magnets, but who controls the terbium and the dysprosium?
01:29:24.360Two other rare earths, neodymium, terbium, and dysprosium are all rare earth elements.
01:29:27.680China controls 100% of the terbium and dysprosium markets.
01:29:31.660Those are the critical things that are used to dope the magnets that are put into those EVs so they can function at high temperature.
01:29:39.080So it's not—but, okay, so let's go beyond the magnets, which are needed as well in wind turbines, in offshore wind turbines in particular.
01:29:47.500But the new generation of wind turbines need these same magnets, and not just a few ounces or a few kilograms.
01:30:30.260I mean, and for the U.S. to try and reshore all of those technologies, including rare earth element refining and processing, copper mining and processing,
01:30:40.480and we could talk about uranium as well, there are all these supply chains that figure into the big picture here that are just like there's a lot of hand-waving.
01:30:49.360Oh, well, we'll just keep importing it.
01:30:51.460Again, who are you—where is the strategery here?
01:30:55.420Where is the long-term thinking about our strategic vulnerabilities?
01:31:12.420And the supply chain problem is an invisible part of that.
01:31:15.380And if we did repatriate those industries that you described, well, that would mean a lot more mines.
01:31:21.380And it isn't obvious at all in today's regulatory environment that that's even vaguely possible.
01:31:25.860Plus, it's not like there's not an environmental cost to, let's say, copper mining.
01:31:30.940So the notion that this is somehow green in some obvious way is not—it's not a tenable notion at all.
01:31:38.540And then you add that supply chain vulnerability to that, and that could be—well, that's obviously unwise to say the least.
01:31:46.600Well, and it applies to solar as well.
01:31:49.740And this is something else that's been largely ignored, in many cases just flat swept under the rug, is the supply of polysilicon for solar panels.
01:32:18.880And when you look at the solar market, in fact, the U.S. government just two years ago issued an advisory saying that—about Uyghur slave labor in Xinjiang,
01:32:29.160and the content in particular for polysilicon produced in Xinjiang with Uyghur slave labor.
01:32:38.080And the U.S. government called it genocide.
01:33:16.900And particularly when it comes to the alt-energy discussion, we've neglected to understand how vulnerable we are, how reliant we are on foreign suppliers.
01:33:31.540But in particular, it includes rare earth elements, neodymium iron boron magnets, polysilicon.
01:33:37.740Nearly all of the alt-energy stuff that is being pushed and being heavily subsidized now through the Inflation Reduction Act to the tune of $400 billion depends in either almost completely or in large part on Chinese supply chains.
01:33:53.520Yeah, well, the thing is, is when an energy ecosystem evolves of its own accord, it's full of a multitude of checks and balances, right?
01:34:03.680There's many people providing hydrocarbon-based electricity.
01:34:07.980And there's all sorts of supply chain problems that have been ironed out and nailed down and had a certain degree of resilience built into them over the course of decades.
01:34:17.100And those are relatively simple technologies in some ways as well.
01:34:22.120And now what we're trying to do is run in a mad rush because the sky is falling to replace all that, even though we don't know how and it's absolutely impossible, failing to understand at all the invisible supply chain complexities because the people who are putting forward the policies have never had to grapple with anything like that.
01:34:39.800And they just assume that if you plug an electric outlet, plug into the wall, that the electricity comes out of the wall.
01:34:45.960Right. And further, there's this blind spot here.
01:34:50.480Let me focus in on the U.S. electric grid.
01:34:52.940And my friend Emmett Penny with Grid Brief has done a lot of good reporting on this.
01:34:58.520And across the U.S., we've had grid operators warning of reliability problems.
01:35:04.900PJM, New York ISO, California obviously has had huge problems with grid reliability.
01:35:12.120The MISO, the Mid-Continent Independent System Operator.
01:35:15.960All have been warning, as well as the North American Electric Reliability Corporation, of reliability problems.
01:35:23.020Why? Because we're shuttering our coal plants too fast.
01:35:26.040And instead of keeping those coal plants online, the push is on for a lot of these utilities to install renewables because that's where the money is.
01:35:36.060You mean the coal plants, for example, that the British government had to reactivate like three weeks ago because it got so hot the solar panels wouldn't work?
01:36:32.420So I think it's, you know, I think we've talked around a lot of big issues here, but to me, when it comes down to it, the U.S. in general, and I think the West in general, when it comes to the alt-energy push with climatism, renewable energy fetishism, it's this narrow focus on this idea of CO2 is the only issue.
01:36:58.460We have to be concerned about reliability, affordability, resilience.
01:37:03.480These are the key things, because one of the key things that really brought this home to me and really motivated the work that I'm doing on this documentary that I'm working on with my colleague Tyson Culver, it's one thing to talk about a blackout.
01:37:39.880Well, when that comes out, just before that comes out, why don't we do another podcast?
01:37:44.080And you can provide us with some video footage as well that we can incorporate into the podcast to advertise it in a manner that is as effective as I can manage.
01:38:06.500But we understand, I think, as much as we possibly can, that the issue here, as you pointed out, is affordability, let's say, and reliability.
01:38:16.880And we want to take those words apart momentarily.
01:38:19.700Maybe we can do that, close this program off.
01:38:29.520It doesn't mean that, you know, reasonably well-off people can save a few dollars on their energy bill.
01:38:35.220Because the people who are most hit hardest, by far, by any increase in energy costs, are the people who are barely clinging to the bottom of the economic hierarchy.
01:38:44.800And there's billions of people like that.
01:38:47.020And they can easily be knocked back down into absolute privation.
01:38:50.540And this idiot moralizing in the West is exactly doing that.
01:38:53.660And it's hurting poor people like Matt in the West as well.
01:38:57.020So it's not just in the developing world.
01:39:10.200And reliability means that your power's there when you're on the bloody operating room table and you need everything to work 100% of the time, which is what we've managed, right?
01:39:20.420We have this miraculous bloody industrial state where people are working flat out 100% of the time to make sure everything works 100% of the time.
01:39:55.240Yeah, well, you talked about those countries that are turning to the mafia, so to speak, to supply backup energy.
01:40:02.700Well, obviously, that's going to happen.
01:40:04.280Everybody will have a bloody diesel generator in their backyard if we make the grid unreliable.
01:40:08.480And I don't think that'll be that good for the planet.
01:40:10.640Well, and so, you know, to build on that point, if your electricity isn't reliable, it's not affordable.
01:40:16.020So that's what I saw in Lebanon with the generator mafia, where the grid fails every day.
01:40:21.880And so people, they have the generator, they have to pay two electric bills, one to EDL, Electricité du Liban, and one to the generator mafia.
01:40:31.240And in some cases, they're almost at the same cost, right?
01:40:34.240Or look at here in the U.S., what's been one of the best stocks in the United States over the last few years?
01:40:38.880It's Generac, the company that builds standby generators, right?