Western Standard - July 20, 2022


CORY'S RANT： The roots of the EU energy crisis.

Topics
energy crisis in Europe green dreams failed
Mentioned
Justin Trudeau Der Spiegel Joe Biden Putin
Triggered： When will there be a forensic investigation into alleged residential school grave sites？ Two Calgary residents facing bylaw charges in dog mauling death

Episode Stats


Length

4 minutes

Words per minute

190.71

Word count

951

Sentence count

71

Harmful content

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode of Energy Reality Check, I discuss the energy crisis facing Europe, and why we need to do something about it. Energy reality is slapping Europe hard in the face, and while the common citizens are taking the brunt of this energy reality check, decision makers still seem to be blinded by ideology and living in an alternative universe where fossil fuels aren t needed.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.080 Energy reality, one of my favorite subjects, and this is not nearly enough people understand energy reality.
00:00:06.160 But right now, energy reality is slapping Europe hard in the face.
00:00:10.180 So, I mean, while the common citizens are taking the brunt of this energy reality check,
00:00:14.280 the decision makers still seem to be blinded by ideology and living in an alternative universe where fossil fuels aren't needed.
00:00:22.140 The excuses are coming in fast and furious.
00:00:24.800 Green energy apologists are blaming the pandemic, supply issues,
00:00:27.980 and, of course, the war in Ukraine for their energy crisis.
00:00:30.840 The problem is the crisis was pending well before any of these events ever happened.
00:00:36.000 So I'm going to pick on Germany as they've been the national poster child for green energy. 1.00
00:00:40.760 Germany committed an insane amount of money and set impossible emission reduction targets
00:00:45.260 and then started legislating their existing energy generation systems out of existence,
00:00:49.840 including coal and inexplicably nuclear.
00:00:53.360 They've called this initiative, and I might be mispronouncing it.
00:00:55.860 I'm sure Derek will correct me later.
00:00:57.240 It's a bigger energy wind, and it was the biggest political project since the reunification of the country.
00:01:02.680 It's huge.
00:01:03.540 And the initiative has been a catastrophe.
00:01:06.240 The energy wind is costing Germany right now about $36 billion a year,
00:01:10.860 and they've been at it for decades as money's poured into renewables like biomass, wind, and solar.
00:01:16.300 They slowed their growth in emissions a bit, but it hasn't even dropped.
00:01:19.700 There's no way Germany is going to come even close to their targets.
00:01:22.400 And Der Spiegel cited a recent estimate it's going to cost $3.8 trillion for Germany to meet their energy goals.
00:01:30.560 $3.8 trillion.
00:01:32.080 Think about that.
00:01:32.980 That's $3,800 billion.
00:01:38.240 It's not going to happen.
00:01:39.380 They're not going to come up with that money, and they're not going to reach those goals.
00:01:41.720 Now, while they're shutting down their own energy sources, Germany, of course, was filling their void with the increasing dependence on Russian natural gas imports.
00:01:50.520 That way they could claim fantastic numbers on their domestic energy sources while forgetting to mention the impact on their imported sources.
00:01:57.020 It was a shell game.
00:01:58.520 Germany, now, they're desperate.
00:01:59.780 They're firing up their coal generation plants and reopening coal mines as they're facing a winter supply crunch, and they're going to be in a lot of trouble.
00:02:08.800 They still won't consider, though, keeping their remaining three nuclear plants operating for fear of angering their Green Party.
00:02:14.540 Ideology is putting citizens at risk for the winter.
00:02:18.160 Germany's not alone.
00:02:19.160 They're just the worst example of the bunch.
00:02:21.140 Pretty much all of Europe is facing an energy crisis, and much of it's due to their focus on unrealistic green dreams while shunning efficient conventional sources of energy.
00:02:29.000 The EU is now proposing to somehow force their 27 member states to reduce natural gas consumption by 15% starting on August 1st.
00:02:38.320 They're going to enforce it.
00:02:39.440 How? I don't know.
00:02:40.840 It's doubtful that many nations can or will meet those reductions as winter looms.
00:02:44.980 Natural gas in much of Europe is in need, not a luxury.
00:02:48.200 If the EU starts penalizing nations for noncompliance, this could actually lead to a shattering of the EU itself.
00:02:54.780 A 15% reduction in natural gas use.
00:02:57.400 It will economically castrate the EU.
00:03:00.660 Energy-intensive industries are going to be forced to cut production, leading to layoffs and inflation as supply chains for consumer goods are screwed with even more than they've already been.
00:03:09.020 Meanwhile, the citizens, well, they're going to be shivering and rather upset.
00:03:13.120 The crisis looming for Europe this winter is unavoidable.
00:03:15.780 There's little that can be done in the short term, and people are going to suffer dearly.
00:03:19.680 There's no getting around that.
00:03:20.540 In the long term, though, we can fix this issue.
00:03:22.600 The world needs to rein in their ideologically insane leaders.
00:03:26.880 Justin Trudeau, speaking of which, is government still obsessed with shutting down conventional energy development.
00:03:31.840 He's attacking Canada's oil.
00:03:33.880 New emission caps are being proposed that will harm and chill investment into Canada's already battered and beaten energy sector.
00:03:39.560 Canada should be ramping up production and fast-tracking pipelines along with LNG terminals in order to feed the world because they're desperate for our energy.
00:03:48.140 Instead, we're shutting in some of the most abundant energy reserves on Earth.
00:03:52.680 Meanwhile, we've got Joe Biden groveling and begging for more oil from Saudi Arabia while he refuses to entertain new pipelines from Canada or expanding exploration in Alaska.
00:04:01.160 You know who's smiling?
00:04:03.140 Putin.
00:04:03.740 He's smiling as Europe keeps paying a premium for Russian gas.
00:04:06.880 He holds them by the balls, and he increases exports to China and India.
00:04:11.340 The day may come when renewables become a viable alternative to hydrocarbon-based energy, but it's clear that that day is still far away.
00:04:17.800 The mad rush to shut down oil and gas is causing world suffering.
00:04:22.100 Of course, the elites in power don't understand, or they don't care.
00:04:25.220 In Trudeau's case, it's both.
00:04:26.500 He's never had to struggle to pay a utility bill, nor have most of the people in the halls of power around the world.
00:04:32.060 So strap in, kids.
00:04:33.160 The world's in for a rough energy ride as energy reality slams nations, especially winter ones, this year.
00:04:39.880 The protests seen around the world in the last year are going to be nothing compared to those that come.
00:04:43.560 Because when people can't heat their homes or feed their families, nothing else matters.
00:04:48.120 Being chided for their energy use by vacuous leaders such as Justin Trudeau is only going to inflame them.
00:04:53.940 Desperate times are going to lead to desperate measures.
00:04:55.720 We can't pretend we didn't see it coming, guys.
00:04:57.900 The green dreams failed.