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The United Nations' climate confab (COP 29) in Azerbaijan, of all places, will convene less than a week after America's presidential election. It will be pretty glum gathering if Donald Trump returns to the White House. The jet-setting climate bureaucrats may be putting on a brave face claiming that "global climate action" isn't dependent on who sits in the White House, but it's easy to believe that they are already having nightmares. What would Trump's election do to the global climate agenda? The Heartland Institute's H. Sterling Burnett, Anthony Watts, Linnea Lueken, James Taylor, and Jim Lakely discuss on Episode #127 of The Climate Realism Show. As usual, we also cover some of the Crazy Climate News of the Week.
Creators & Guests
Host
H. Sterling Burnett
H. Sterling Burnett, Ph.D., hosts The Heartland Institute’s Environment and Climate News podcast. Burnett also is the director of Heartland’s Arthur B. Robinson Center on Climate and Environmental Policy, is the editor of Heartland's Climate Change Weekly email, and oversees the production of the monthly newspaper Environment & Climate News. Prior to joining The Heartland Institute in 2014, Burnett worked at the National Center for Policy Analysis for 18 years, ending his tenure there as senior fellow in charge of environmental policy. He has held various positions in professional and public policy organizations within the field. Burnett is a member of the Environment and Natural Resources Task Force in the Texas Comptroller’s e-Texas commission, served as chairman of the board for the Dallas Woods and Water Conservation Club, is a senior fellow at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, works as an academic advisor for Collegians for a Constructive Tomorrow, is an advisory board member to the Cornwall Alliance, and is an advisor for the Energy, Natural Resources and Agricultural Task Force at the American Legislative Exchange Council.
What is Heartland Daily Podcast?
The “fire hose” of all podcasts produced by The Heartland Institute, a national free-market think tank.
And that's what climate change is about. It is literally not figuratively a clear and present danger.
Greta Thunberg:We are in the beginning of a mass extinction.
Jim Lakely:The ability of c 02 to do the heavy work of creating a climate catastrophe is almost nil at this point.
Sterling Burnett:The price of oil has been artificially elevated to the point of insanity.
Sterling Burnett:That's not how you power a modern industrial system.
Andy Singer:The ultimate goal of this renewable energy, you know, plan is to reach the exact same point that we're at now.
Sterling Burnett:You know who's trying that? Germany. 7 straight days of no wind for Germany. Their factories are shutting down.
Linnea Lueken:They really do act like weather didn't happen prior to, like, 1910. Today is Friday.
Jim Lakely:That's right, Greta. It is Friday. It's the most important day of the week, but it is it is the day that the Heartland Institute broadcasts this here Climate Realism Show. I'm Jim Lakeley, vice president of the Heartland Institute, and there is nothing else like the Climate Realism Show streaming anywhere. So I hope you will like, share, and subscribe, and leave your comments under this video.
Jim Lakely:Those simple actions, which are completely free, tell YouTube's algorithm to smile upon this humble program to get the show in front of more people. And a reminder, because Big Tech and the legacy media do not approve of the way that we cover climate and, energy policy on this program, Heartland's YouTube channel has been demonetized. So if you wanna support this program, please visit heartland.org/tcrs. That's heartland.org/tcrs, which stands for the Climate Realism Show, and that will help us keep making this show happen every single week. Any support you can give us is very warmly welcome and appreciated.
Jim Lakely:And we also wanna thank, today, our streaming partners that help us get this show in front of more eyes. That's junk science.com, CFACT, and what's up with that. Alright. Let's get the show rolling into with us today, we have our usual crew, plus 1. We have with us Anthony Watts, senior fellow at the Heartland Institute and the publisher of the most influential climate website in the world.
Jim Lakely:What's up with that? We have h Sterling Burnett. He is the director of the Arthur b Robinson Center on Environment and Climate Environment and Climate Policy at the Heartland Institute. We have Linnea Lukin, a research fellow for environment and energy policy at Heartland, and a wonderful special guest, the president of the Heartland Institute, James Taylor, who before taking over as president, at Heartland was our chief, energy and environment researcher and commentator and the former editor of Environment and Climate News, which is now in the hands of the great Sterling Burnett. Welcome, everybody.
Jim Lakely:This is gonna be a fantastic show.
James Taylor:Good to be here.
Jim Lakely:So so, James, last time we had you on the program, we had a theme of I believe it was when we had the theme of the good, the bad, and the ugly, and, you were kind enough, or fun enough to, put on an outfit and a and a hat and a, and a cigarillo or at least a very large cigarillo. No.
James Taylor:No. No. No. Not a cigarillo. That was a He
Sterling Burnett:had a chroot.
James Taylor:Baby baby.
Sterling Burnett:He had a chroot.
Jim Lakely:Yes. That's what I do.
Sterling Burnett:Just like Eastwood had in in his films.
James Taylor:And I always enjoy taking advantage of an opportunity to put on my Clint Eastwood garb, so that was quite enjoyable.
Jim Lakely:That was quite enjoyable. And, of course, we did not have a show last Friday when I actually, when I just said we have this show every week. The one week that we do skip, perhaps we'll probably even do it during Christmas week and New Year's week as well. But the one week we did skip was last week, and last week was, the Heartland Institute. We held our 40th anniversary benefit dinner at the Hilton Chicago in, the historic hotel in downtown Chicago with, featured speakers of Nigel Farage and Larry Arnn and doctor Jay Bhattacharya and Harold Valimski.
Jim Lakely:He's a he's a conservative member of the European Parliament. And, I I have to say, we were talking about this backstage right before we went live. It was great to see so many viewers and fans of this show at that event, last Friday night, and, some people came up to us came up to me, I know, and James was just saying it, right before we went live on air. People talk about how much they really love this show and appreciated it and especially the personalities we have on it. I didn't get special mention.
Jim Lakely:But, Linnea, you did, so congratulations.
Linnea Lueken:That's what I get. That's what I get for being the q and a master of the show.
Jim Lakely:It's true. And, Anthony, you were not able to join us, unfortunately, you, because of, illness, but you are, look you look fit as a fiddle today.
James Taylor:Yep. Yep. Well, I was on COVID round 3. You know, COVID is the gift that keeps on giving, and then, of course, I got another gift right before that. So I'm fine now.
Jim Lakely:That is good to know. That's good to know. Alright. Well, we are going to get started on our show as we always do with, Anthony Watts' favorite feature of the Climate Realism Show, and that is the crazy climate news of the week. Hit that drop, Andy.
Jim Lakely:It always sets the tone, doesn't it? Yeah. I have one of one of these days, we're gonna use the one I made for Greta, but, maybe if she hits the news again. Alright. So our first item here, most of these things are shared.
Jim Lakely:Just a little inside information. We have a Slack channel for the Heartland Institute. We have people working, all across the country, and, most of these items that we find are mostly found by Anthony. You really have a good eye for this stuff. But this is from a tweet.
James Taylor:People send me stuff. I get I get so much email on a daily basis. You wouldn't believe.
Jim Lakely:Yeah. No no kidding. No kidding. Alright. Now now this is this is just funny.
Jim Lakely:This is, Andy, if you could bring up the, the, the tweet that that I we have in the links there. And this is this is just kinda funny. So Wide Awake Media, which is a must follow for everybody on X, that's formerly Twitter, posted a video time lapse of satellite photos of the Maldives from 1984 to 2022. Now the Maldives, that's a vacation spot archipelago in the Indian Ocean, up the southwest, coast of India. It has an average ground elevation of just under 5 feet and a natural high point of just under 8 feet.
Jim Lakely:And so the Maldives have been ground 0 for climate alarmists. They've been telling us for years that if we didn't stop driving our SUVs and burning fossil fuels and engaging in modern farming and eating meat and all that good stuff, that global warming was going to raise the sea levels so much that these islands would disappear. Well, as you can see in this in this little time lapse video, that is not the case. And, in fact, even the New York Times, just a couple of, or back in June, had a feature story with the headline, the vanishing islands that failed to vanish. And it noted that many islands are stable, and in fact, some have even grown.
Jim Lakely:So, that is kind of, crazy climate news in the way back machine. I know that we've written about a lot of this, about the Maldives at our climate realism dot com website. So, Anthony, why don't you, take it first? Isn't this quite a remarkable little time lapse?
James Taylor:Yeah. Well, you know, the first, item that goes with this is the 1989 announcement by a UN official who said entire nations will be wiped off the earth by a sea level rise. That was published in the Associated Press in 1989, and it's a commonly distributed thing these days because it just shows how how wrong these predictions have been. You know, this was all, of course, based on computer models and sea level rise and all that stuff, and it hasn't happened. The other thing that happened was around 2,010, 2012, I discovered and published on what's up with that, that while they're talking to the UN and making, pressure leeches and pitches about, we need money to overcome sea level rise because, you know, we're gonna get wiped off the face of the planet, so help us.
James Taylor:Right? So in the meantime, they take that money that they're getting in and all this this, this anguish that's being directed to them monetarily and turn that into more airports and more hotels and more tourism with the thing with with the marketing. Visit the Maldives before they're gone. Oh, seriously. And then we had a publication by Willis Eichenbachs on what's up with that who pointed out that these coral atolls are actually floating islands, and they grow.
James Taylor:The coral grows as the sea level rise comes up. And so the islands are actually increasing. And there was a scientific study that showed that several of these islands has have actually grown, and they have not sunk at all. So the whole thing is to sum it up, it's bogus Maximus.
Sterling Burnett:It's not, yeah, it's not just we're we're focusing here on the Maldives because of the nice, time lapse, but it's not just the Maldives, and it's not just coral atolls. It's it's normal islands. It's Tuvalu. It's, islands in East India. It's islands in the Pacific.
Sterling Burnett:It's islands in the Atlantic. They're all, for the most part, stable or growing. They're actually adding, and it's not just that the corals are growing. It's sand is accreting on the islands. They're growing in height, despite sea level rise.
Sterling Burnett:And, of course, we've got probably a dozen or more articles on climate realism where we discuss that, they're not having a immigration problem, that people are not leaving the islands to escape the, you know, the impending seas that are washing over their feet, which aren't. You know, they're growing populations, they're growing their economies, and, at the same time, they're going to the UN with their hands out saying, save us because we're dying because of climate change, because our island homes are soon disappear. You know, the New York Times is so
Linnea Lueken:I don't
Sterling Burnett:wanna call it hypocritical, but the the 2 faced on it. 2 months before this article ran, the the vanishing islands that failed to vanish, they ran an article saying the islands were vanishing.
James Taylor:Right.
Sterling Burnett:And they cited the same study in both articles. It's it's crazy.
Jim Lakely:Yeah. Yeah. No matter what good news comes about, there's always that, that mandatory paragraph or or several paragraphs to talk about how this does this changes nothing, everyone, that the human activity is still causing, catastrophe that's just around the corner. Just that corner just never seems to appear. Well, James, I wanna read
Sterling Burnett:Every every scientific study, it it's really sad. Every scientific study, no matter what the result, how, much doubt it cast upon the narrative that humans are causing a climate crisis, they all have to have the, paragraph addendum that says, now we're not saying climate change isn't happening and it's not bad. We're just saying our data doesn't show that this particular thing is happening like the models say it should, but we still believe in climate change, blah blah blah. You shouldn't have to do that as a scientist.
Linnea Lueken:It's even worse than that. You know, even if the entire body of the research show, you know, that there is something less alarming or not alarming at all about any particular case that they're looking at, the abstract paragraph will explicitly state human caused global warming is causing these problems to get worse. And then for the rest of it, it proceeds to talk about how there's no evidence of this particular thing getting worse. And it's it's, Looney Tunes. And, looking at the, you know, it's almost like those abstracts are written specifically for journalists.
Linnea Lueken:And so they don't, you know, get in trouble, and that's so they can get, like, published and not Yeah. Glossed over. Right?
James Taylor:You say almost like.
Jim Lakely:Yeah. James, let me let me read something real quick from that New York Times story and and throw throw it to you since you do a lot of presentations on on these sorts of things. But from that Time story, it says, quote, the seas had risen an inch or so an inch or so each decade, yet the waves had kept piling sediment on the island's shores, enough to mean that most of them hadn't changed much in size. Their position on the reef may have shifted. Their shape might have been a little different.
Jim Lakely:Whatever was going on, it clearly wasn't as simple as oceans rise, islands wash away.
James Taylor:Yeah. And a couple points come to mind. First of all, the beauty of this story is that it illustrates, what we have as a resource for for people, and that is Climate at a Glance. On our Climate at a Glance website, climate at a glance.com. Also, go on to the Play Store or, you know, via Apple and get the Climate at a Glance app.
James Taylor:We have a summary specific to, these islands and sea level rise, how they're affecting them. And we show that for the Maldives and other islands that the impact of sea level rise is negligent. It's really actually as as Anthony pointed out, because of the building sediment and the story pointed out, the most of these islands are actually growing, not shrinking. So that is that that's a very important resource that we have available, that every day when you see these these stories, check out our Climate at a Glance website, and you'll have the answers yourself.
Jim Lakely:Yep. Very good advice. And that's what, I know a lot of the viewers and listeners of this, of this show do that. And it's, it's it's it's you'll you'll never run out of times to use it, literally. And you can also check out the Climate at a Glance video series that, stars our own Linnea Lukin, where she goes over each one of those chapters and explains in about 3 minutes or, fewer than that.
Jim Lakely:And I think they're really great videos. You can find them on this channel, and they're fantastic. Be sure to watch those and also share it with other people. Alright. Let's pop on to the second item on our crazy climate news of the week.
Jim Lakely:And, this is another tweet, or I should say post on x, by James Melville and how it it talks about how, x or I'm sorry, that Amazon is being is being destroyed because of windmills. So this is another thing that Anthony shared with us. This post notes that balsa wood is a key component in wind turbine blades. So, the lungs of the earth, the Amazon rainforest, is being plundered to supply balsa wood for wind turbines with a devastating impact on the indigenous peoples of Ecuadorian Amazon. And how is this saving the planet?
Jim Lakely:Now, you know, we, or maybe just me, learn something new all the time on the Climate Realism Show, and I had no idea that balsa wood was such a vital component of wind turbine blades. And now, I know, you know, more about those balsa wood planes. I used to fly as a kid. I feel a little guilty about them. Maybe I should.
Jim Lakely:I don't know.
James Taylor:Think about those poor children that are being denied balsa wood airplanes now because they're being used in wind turbines.
Jim Lakely:They're used in wind turbines. That's right. Right. So so let me, you know, this is not the first entirely predictable unintended consequences of the green energy push that is devastating our landscape. So, you know, why don't you take it from there?
Linnea Lueken:Sure. And and this isn't to say that, you know, like, harvesting timber is bad. Right? I mean, we're not we're not gonna say that we need to stop harvesting balsa wood and and that just because it's wind turbines that are using it now, it means that it's all bad and we shouldn't be doing that. But it's, it's just another one of the examples of how, you know, environmentalists will go after industry, you know, feverishly.
Linnea Lueken:I mean, they are they are extremely anti industry. They tend to be anti temper production. But when it comes to anything that forwards, specifically wind and solar, It's not like they're all enthusiastic about nuclear and they're all enthusiastic about hydro. They're shutting down dams all over the place. It's it's specifically for wind and solar.
Linnea Lueken:They will push aside and ignore all of their previous supposed, you know, environmental principles. You know, I would I would love to see. You know? Do you think that, you know, they're gonna make a a version of Fern Gully, anytime soon where they're complaining about the balsa wood harvesting to build wind turbines. I don't think so.
Linnea Lueken:I mean, who was it that made the documentary that pointed some of this out, that pointed out that a lot of what the wind and solar industries are doing is actually pretty well pillaging natural resources, as much as they have ever accused any other industry of doing so, maybe even more so in some cases, especially because so many of them rely so much on the, cobalt and lithium because, you know, everything now is computer components and all of that stuff relies very heavily on rare earth elements, that are spread very thin in whatever placement that they're in. And so it rely it relies on a lot of manpower and a lot of ground being moved in order for it to be liberated. Oh, yes. Michael Moore. Thank you, Don.
Linnea Lueken:Donnie. So that was planet of the humans. Yes. And, and he covered some of that saying like, look, this is I mean, this stuff is just as exploitative as anything else. And and to greenwash it and to pretend like this is, you know, fine in pursuit of climate policy, is pretty gross.
Sterling Burnett:Well, you know, it's it's way beyond balsa wood. You know, you can get a lot of little, balsa wood airplanes out of a a couple of balsa wood trees. We weren't deforesting Ecuador for balsa wood, airplanes. You need a lot of balsa wood for every wind turbine, not not for all wind turbine, for every each and every wind turbine. And when they're not cutting down balsa wood, they're cutting down natural forest to plant palm oil trees for, for, biofuels because they say that's better for the climate even though, you know, once again, they're taking down trees that absorb carbon, and, they're still having emissions from these, from the palm oil, or they're just clearing whole landscapes.
Sterling Burnett:I think, in Scotland, it turned out they cut down 500,000 trees for a wind farm. It's, it's it's not just hypocritical, it's it's anti the environment. They are literally imposing environmental harms, typically, by the way, not in their own backyard. Remember, the the palm oil is in some faraway Indonesia and Ecuador. Who who knows anything about Ecuador?
Sterling Burnett:Scotland was a surprise when I found out about about those trees. But, you know, they're not clear cutting here, to build these things, though they are sort of, in a sense, paving over the desert with, solar farms right now, to erect solar farms one after the other or destroying the desert environment. But and I've written about this extensively, multiple times at Climate Change Weekly. Every time I find a new one or 2, instances where the mining, the logging, the land conversion for wind and solar, you know, anecdotes, I certainly write about them.
James Taylor:Yeah. It it, calls to mind how environmentalism used to be primarily about preserving open spaces, preserving ecosystems, for those old enough to remember back in the nineties, I believe it was, where the the wars in the Pacific Northwest because some logging would be in spotted owl territory. I imagine that the Amazon rainforest is host to species at least as ecologically significant as a spotted owl, And yet the traditional environmental activist groups are silent because it's wind turbines and, you know, it would be the same for solar panels. It it it makes no sense to just completely ignore environmental issues across the board if it's wind and solar, and then accentuate them for everything else. And when I saw this story, I thought about just recently, I drove from Chicago to Denver.
James Taylor:And it's one of my favorite drives because driving through Western Nebraska, you get the you get the feeling of what it was like for the original settlers as they were heading west. I mean, you know, granted there are ranches, but you don't see many buildings. You don't see many fences. It's primarily open range land. Pretty close to what it would have been like 200 years ago, 300 years ago.
James Taylor:200 years ago when settlers first were were exploring out there. And one of my favorite moments is when in Northeastern Nebraska, after going across the great plains of Nebraska, Northeastern Colorado. So Northeastern Colorado, you go over a swell of land finally, and there you see in all their glory, the Rocky Mountains. After so long of just great plains, great plains, vast flat lands, and then there they are in all their beauty. But this time, it was really striking.
James Taylor:I hadn't made this drive in quite some time. Because driving throughout Northeast Nebraska, or excuse me, Northeast Colorado, there were turbines after wind turbines after wind turbines. It had to be I mean, it had to be close to a 100 miles, or that's what I'm seeing on the right and on the left. And it just destroyed the notion of what the great plains had been like. And then by the time I went over the the swell of land where I could see the rockies, first of all, the whole experience had been just diminished because I no longer had the great plains experience leading up to it.
James Taylor:But then going over the swell of land and and seeing the Rockies, there I see this this wind turbine, project between I think it was between Boulder and Denver that just destroyed any romantic view of the Rockies. And it's funny because 20 years ago, while I was, overseeing energy environment and climate policy here at the Heartland Institute, I made a trip out to Colorado because there was a great deal of pushback from environmental groups about oil derricks and how they were destroying it was it was site blight as they called it. And we couldn't allow the production of oil and natural gas because look, it's destroying these beautiful viewscapes. And I went out there and I and I went to find the most heavily populated oil derrick region, you know, with the most oil derricks per square mile. I found what I thought what I could find to be the most densely populated oil derricks, and I took photographs.
James Taylor:And you still could barely notice the oil derricks because they're only about 20 feet high, and they're painted to be the same color as the landscape. I mean, you have to really look for them. I I put together a slideshow where I asked people to find the oil derricks, where there's, like, 6 of them in view and you still can't find them. However, the wind turbines, you're talking they're 10 times as high. The the turbines are are so much larger, and they just destroy the viewscape of anything they touch.
James Taylor:And it's it's just incredibly hypocritical that the environmental activist groups for so long would fight against the destruction of open spaces, the destruction of forests, and now they're going to celebrate and promote the destruction of the Amazon rainforest so that they can have more turbines. I think that if the wind turbines and the solar panels are creating far more environmental and economic ecological damage than climate change ever could.
Sterling Burnett:When when I wrote my dissertation, I would have to, rewrite portions of the dissertation now because of the, renewables push. Because when I wrote it, it was about, wild lands and, endangered species wildlife that inhabited them. And there are so many, wild lands disrupted by government policy now, and so many endangered species put at risk. We don't allow whaling, and we fight every, offshore oil rig saying it will disrupt whale habitat and and fisheries, and then we put, huge disruptive noisy, wind turbines there. We protect the desert tortoise from, almost everything except for solar panels.
Sterling Burnett:Then we've got to move the desert tortoise and hope they make it in their new habitat where they didn't exist previously. Why? Because it really wasn't prime desert tortoise habitat. But we're gonna cross our fingers, folks, and hope for the best.
Jim Lakely:It's
Sterling Burnett:it's it's really discouraging for someone who cares about wildlife, who, who, you know, has has spent, you know, who who's put a good chunk of change into conservation.
James Taylor:Yeah. Yep. For sure.
Jim Lakely:Anthony, you wanna weigh in a little on this, or, we can move on to our next item?
James Taylor:Actually, I think it's been covered pretty well. So, I will just say no comment.
Jim Lakely:That's what you're instructed to say to the corrupt leftist media as well, so it's good to see that you have that on the tip of your tongue. Alright. Let's move on to the next item here. More electric vehicle blues. Again, Anthony, alerted, us to this item.
Jim Lakely:And, actually, this is a story that we covered a few weeks back. At least part of this story is something that we covered, a few weeks ago on this program. But the, the mini disasters with the Biden administration's foolish headlong rush to electrify everything and mandate only EVs in the pretty near future just keep cropping up. So a semi truck carrying EV batteries went up in flames a few weeks ago on Interstate 15, which is basically the the highway everybody drives if you're going if you live in Southern California and want to go to Las Vegas, and that closed that road for, I think at least a day.
Sterling Burnett:And I know 4 days.
Jim Lakely:4 days. Goodness gracious. Well, okay. Well, apparently, Nevada is a glutton for punishment for this kind of thing because 2 trucks crashed into each other this week on US 95 in Nye County, Nevada, which is just north of Las Vegas. One was hauling wood and the other was hauling £31,000 of lithium batteries.
Jim Lakely:Now, you know, I when I read that, it's like this is something, like, out of a Far Side cartoon, right, where, like, a truck full of cats and a truck full of mice crashing into each other, and the 2 truck drivers are looking at each other arguing while the the mice look panicked that the cats are very happy. So, anyway, according to Fox 5 Las Vegas, the fire, in this crash was pretty severe, and the road was closed, it turned out, for almost a a full day. Anthony, I'm gonna go to you since, you are a resident of the great state of Nevada, in an undisclosed, bunker somewhere, surely. But, this this, we we we have had to cover this a lot on this on this program, the idea that, you know, electrifying everything, which is gonna require lithium batteries, which is the best technology we have right now. The story angle from this Fox 5 in Las Vegas was that these things are very hazardous materials, and they're not being treated as such on our open highways, and it's putting people in danger.
James Taylor:Yeah. It's like basically, like transporting fireworks. You know? It's the same kind of explosive potential that these things have. And the the problem with the whole electrification movement, one of the problems is the fact that they jumped on lithium batteries as the solution because it it offered the best power to weight ratio, but they didn't think through all of the ramifications associated with safety.
James Taylor:And, you know, there should have been some there were lots of red flags. For example, some of the early laptops that went out on airplanes caught fire, in the air, you know, and then there was a call to make the the laptop lithium batteries safer. Well, we haven't gotten there yet with the EV batteries. They're still very, very dangerous, and, I mean, a single puncture can cause these things to go up in flames. All you have to do is get oxygen in from the atmosphere, and these things will take off.
James Taylor:They will spontaneously combust. And so any kind of an accident is gonna result in a fire. Sometimes they will spontaneously combust just from heat. You know, they're sitting out in a very hot situation, and, you know, maybe there's a flaw in one of the batteries or something, and it burst into flames. This happens regularly.
James Taylor:Seawater, the same thing. I mean, if you have, well, we've had stories about, EVs being inundated by storm surge associated with hurricanes. You know? And while the the vehicle survived the hurricane just fine, the saltwater incursion into the lithium battery through small holes or whatever created a situation where a chemical reaction started and the thing burned up. I mean, we've seen plenty of pictures of this.
Jim Lakely:So We've seen pictures of them burning underwater. Yes. Remember?
James Taylor:Exactly. A lithium fire is not something you can put out with water. The only thing you can do with a lithium fire is just let it burn itself out. There is no strategy for dealing with a lithium fire. And in the case of these 2 semi truck, accidents, that's all they could do.
James Taylor:Push it off the road and let the thing burn itself out. There's no way to solve the problem.
Sterling Burnett:Yeah. They don't have a lot of water in the desert to put out these fires. There's, you know, a a little problem with that. Foam foam isn't available. You know, and it's not just, of course, trucks hauling these batteries or the batteries in the cars and trucks themselves.
Sterling Burnett:Look, San Diego in September or early, they had a battery plant, a plant that's one of these bat backup battery. Oh, we've got we've got backup battery. It caught fire. It burned weeks. They couldn't put it out.
Sterling Burnett:They had to evacuate the the businesses around it and the homes around it and the apartments. The only one they didn't evacuate was the prison that was near it. I guess they didn't care too much about the prisoners breathing in toxics because that's why they said they evacuate them is the air pollution from the battery fire that they were gonna just have to allow to burn itself out. Yeah. You know, it this is crazy.
Sterling Burnett:You know, we had a gas fire here in in Texas this week. They they cut off the gas to it. They they fought it actively. But what they didn't do is throw up their hands and say, we're just gonna let it burn until it burns itself out.
Jim Lakely:Yeah. Yeah. It would I'll throw it here to James and and Linnea, but, you know, one thing that was not exactly on on the show notes, but I did come across a story in in a, publication called Torque News, and it talked about the headline was Tesla, quote, exploded like a bomb after fiery crash. Shrapnel takes down a passerby. It says here that in the latest of a long list of Tesla fires following crashes, 2 occupants of a Tesla vehicle are dead and others are injured.
Jim Lakely:Police report that the vehicle struck a curb and a tree before slamming into a multifamily residence. And, yeah. They they the the when the fire department got there, they had to pull the car as quickly as possible away from the house so that the whole thing didn't go up because they knew they weren't gonna be able to put that, that electric vehicle fire out anytime soon. You know, I I know that when gasoline powered cars, James, crash, especially in the movies, they just blow you know, they can blow up. Right?
Jim Lakely:But it seems that these that these electric vehicles specialize in exploding and and bursting into flames either through an accident or through no seemingly no action at all. They just go up.
James Taylor:You know, I think we need a bumper sticker for these that says my other vehicle is not an explosion risk.
James Taylor:It's it's predictable lethal buffoonery when you have government and political actors trying to direct the future of transportation. You may recall 10 years ago or so, it was the hydrogen highway. Remember, this is
James Taylor:Oh, yeah.
James Taylor:California especially, but throughout the country. Oh, this is this is the wave of the future, and and we need to get on board and support this rather than impede its progress. The market's going to take us there. That's why we need government to get involved. And this is what we're seeing here for electric vehicles.
James Taylor:It's going to suffer the same fate as the hydrogen highway, and the, you know, the the problem is in in the meantime, we're lowering our living standards. We're subjecting ourselves to quite lethal risk. Of course, I always love the the hydrogen highway, and I'd I would always think of the Hindenburg and how many little mini Hindenburgs we could potentially have there. But regardless, yeah, I mean, this this is what's going to happen. It's predictable.
James Taylor:It's predictable when we're trying to impose some government directed and, and I will say leftist inspired government directed imperative on people's lives.
Sterling Burnett:I will, you know, I'll point out. Someone said someone we've talked about this in the past, and someone wrote, oh, well, more gasoline powered cars catch fire every year than than, battery powered cars. And and that's true. That's true. They don't typically catch fire just sitting on the curb or parked in your garage for no reason, but they do.
Sterling Burnett:There's also a 100 times more gasoline powered cars. 100. Yeah. Yeah. Probably a 1,000.
Sterling Burnett:Right? There's there's 200 and something million, gasoline powered vehicles in the US. In the US alone, there's, about 3,000,000 electric vehicles. As a percentage of cars going up, EVs are much higher. Well, also numbers.
Sterling Burnett:You know?
James Taylor:Well, also, it's it's the impact. I I've had a car catch fire before. It wasn't fun, but it didn't imperil a whole city block. I mean
Sterling Burnett:Right. When my my first vehicle caught fire, driving across a bridge, and all they did was they blocked it off, got the got a got a, you know, not a hydrant, fire retardant, fire, thing out, sprayed it, it went out, they hauled the car off, they didn't close the highway or anything. No one was warned or evacuated.
Jim Lakely:Yep. Alright. Well, that's good. So we we will continue to keep an eye. We're not gonna obsess over EVs.
Jim Lakely:You know? Some people have said that we're maybe covering that angle a little bit too much, but, you know, one of the purposes of this show is to get the the audience and the public, up to speed on what's really going on out there when it comes to energy policy and the environment.
James Taylor:It needs to be defeated.
Jim Lakely:It does. It does. And that's what we're trying to do here. And with your help in the audience, that will happen. Alright.
Jim Lakely:So let's go to our, we have a meme for you. We try to find something funny out there. So this is a meme that we found, of Greta. She's holding a sign that says climate change, where the weather is always your fault, and the only solution is more communism. And, that's a fantastic segue.
Sterling Burnett:Wait. Did you get my meme?
Jim Lakely:The the meme I sent?
Sterling Burnett:Where it was you. Where they were looking out in this I forget what it was, but I sent you a meme earlier this week. You said, oh, yeah. We gotta use that.
Jim Lakely:Oh, alright. Well, maybe next week. If, if you can describe it funnier than that, then we'll we'll put
Sterling Burnett:you in the description. You liked it initially. I'll have to find it again.
Jim Lakely:Alright. Not perfect. I lost track of that one, but alright. So let's move on. We're gonna get we're gonna hit our main
Sterling Burnett:virtue signaling. It was them showing the, the bat signal, and it was
Jim Lakely:yes.
Sterling Burnett:Virtue signal has been turned on.
Jim Lakely:Alright. Well, now we don't have to say. You just described it perfectly, so we'll just find something new for next week. Alright. So speaking of, global more global communism, COP 29.
Jim Lakely:That is the, conference of the parties of the United Nations. It's the, you know, the annual climate confab where the jetset come in and, from all over the world instead of zooming in to save the planet and, and talk about how they're going to take over the world, with global communism in the guise of saving the planet. So, as you might imagine, the next one is going to be in is it, Baku, Azerbaijan?
James Taylor:Yes.
Jim Lakely:Yes. So I I wanna get the city right, but Azerbaijan of all places, that's that's that's fun.
James Taylor:Isn't that a big oil producing city?
Sterling Burnett:Yes.
Jim Lakely:And you know what? And this will be the 2nd COP in a row in, in an oil field because the last one was in the United Arab Emirates, and the the chairman of the entire COP was their the head of their national oil company, and that caused some controversy. And, I remember he got in some arguments with people saying that the, you know, the science, we can't go off of fossil fuels right away. This is crazy and all that stuff. So, maybe by accident and by being inclusive to the emerging world, some some common sense will come to come.
Jim Lakely:Anyway, the angle on this one here, and this is from the Japan Times, is the prospect of Donald Trump returning as president. They say that that prospect is hanging over the crucial UN climate UN sponsored climate negotiations with countries now holding back their positions until they know who's going to sit in the White House. Now the election is November 5th and the COP opens. It convenes into session on November 11th, less than a week after the election. And, well, gosh, if we can have the election results known by the 11th, that would actually be really great in this country.
Jim Lakely:We'll see. But anyway, so these countries are holding back their positions until they know who's going to be in the White House. Veteran observers of climate diplomacy say uncertainty over the election outcome is stalking this November's COP 29 summit. The election lands awkwardly as governments are trying to build global consensus consensus in coming months, not just around climate, but stronger protections for the environment and a treaty to address plastic pollution. As president, Trump withdrew the United States from the Paris Agreement on global warming, and, then heartland Institute president Joseph Bass was in was invited to the Rose Garden to be there when that happened.
Jim Lakely:Joe Biden, of course, put us back into Paris when he became president. And so now there are concerns about, you know, what this will mean for climate action if Trump is reelected. This apparent wait and see approach has frustrated those seeking a new long term commitment at COP 29 for rich nations who pay the 1,000,000,000,000 of dollars needed for clean energy and climate adaptation in developing countries. So so, Anthony, let me let me start with you here. So, you know, this would be the 2nd straight COP that ended up, being marked by a, quote, lack of unity, shall we say, and not a not even just a little bit of bickering and chaos, but a lot of it.
James Taylor:Well, you know, I've always looked at these cop conferences sort of like they start out like herding cats. You know? They're they've got all these different everybody's got their own agenda. Everybody wants this piece of the pie. You know?
James Taylor:And so there's all these competing interests that come in, and then the the whole process is predictable. You get the initial announcements of competing interest or battling at, you know, cop 20,760 or whatever the heck it is. So and they keep doing these things, and it's the same thing, same script. So they're the competing interest start out battling, and then there's glimmer of hope for some kind of an agreement. And then at the very last minute, oh, thank goodness.
James Taylor:We're saved. We've reached an agreement, and here it is. It's published, and it's completely toothless.
Jim Lakely:Except it's never
Sterling Burnett:in the last minute. Yeah. It's never in the last it's in overtime. It's always in overtime. They always extend the conference to get the language right.
James Taylor:Well, the point of these conferences isn't really to find an agreement. I'm I'm sure that the environmental left, the global establishment would like to be able to say that. The point of these conferences is to send UN bureaucrats and leftist NGOs to resorts around the world where they get to spend 2 weeks on taxpayers' dimes and to have a good time. So Baku, although I wouldn't say it is it is the the most, desirable of resort locations still. You're on you're right on the Caspian Sea.
James Taylor:They have their their beaches, and it's an exotic place that people have never been before. That's all this is about. Now Heartland goes, we we send a contingent to many of these, to these meetings, especially if there is something that is being pushed that might have importance. If there's some type of agreement that they say is going to be reached, and also to to educate people there and around the world what's really happening. This one, I don't think is worth our our time or effort.
James Taylor:Although if Trump is elected in November, it might be worth going there just to rattle some cages. And you notice the headline of that article that Jim, showed that Trump is stalking the cop meeting. I wonder what was this deliberately trying to invoke images of a mythical Donald Trump stalking Hillary Clinton as she described it. And apparently, the moderator were powerless to stop it, and there were no police or security during their debate as Trump is stalking her, and she's feeling physically threatened. I I mean, I couldn't help but think of of that mythical Donald Trump character when they used the word stalking, not just in the headline, but the body of the story.
Sterling Burnett:You know what I thought of is, and I wrote about this on Climate Change Weekly this week. I thought it was old World War 1 and World War 2 posters where in World War 1, it was, it was the Hun. He had his pointed helmet and, he was lurking over Europe. Well, that's that's, the Donald Trump image that I got was him lurking over, the world, standing at work the globe, preventing us from saving it. You know, this the conference is this time, as it has been in the past, who pays its rich nations, who gets paid developing countries, how much, on what timeline, and who and who shares.
Sterling Burnett:And that's what the debate is over here is they're they they always negotiate these things in advance. They always have language going in. They hold these multiple meetings, and and that's where the problem is. These meetings, these multiple meetings are being held up because no one's committing to anything in advance, that can be agreed to at a big press conference. The the the the the, the delegates might actually have to work this time rather than just, eat caviar and red meat and and sip champagne and then complain about the poor.
James Taylor:Yeah. I was just gonna say who pays new benefits? It's it's taxpayers and western democracies. And the beneficiaries, unfortunately, although technically, it goes to developing nations, it doesn't go to those countries. It goes to the dictators.
James Taylor:There's nothing that's been done to even if you believe in a climate crisis and the harms of carbon dioxide to mitigate that. They go to pad the pockets in the bank accounts of the dictators in these 3rd world nations. Show me how many 3rd world nations are western style democracies where any money that goes to these countries are going to go to the people. It doesn't happen at all.
Sterling Burnett:Oh, not just and not just the dictators, but, the elites that they'll work with. I mean, some of the funding from the last round of funding, some of it went to, an Italian gelato company that set up, gelato, stands and off office fronts in developing nations. Some of the money went to a filmmaker who did a romance in the, the rainforest amidst logging. It goes to to those aren't poor people. Those aren't the the average man.
Sterling Burnett:I don't know how many people in Nigeria can afford gelato.
James Taylor:But it
James Taylor:was most of you to donate via your, your paycheck there, Sterling. Very nice you can go.
Jim Lakely:Well, I mean, the the bureaucrats and the, you know, and the WEF crowd that that show up at these, climate, at these cops. And, James, you you know, obviously, you remember, you and I went together to Paris in, what was that, 2015? I guess that was I forgot that that
James Taylor:was tracked.
Jim Lakely:Yeah. And so, yeah. And there was even a wanted poster with your face on it, so that made it worth the trip for sure.
James Taylor:All up and down the Champs Elysees, there were posters wanted my picture. And the scary part was, it was just a week or so after they had the train bombing from Paris to Belgium. So they had French military personnel all over the place with their assault rifles. And and then there's these wanted posters with my picture on it. And I'm thinking, okay.
James Taylor:This is this is cute. I mean, I kinda like the attention. If someone's gonna get attention for being this climate denier, I'm glad that they that they say, hey. James Taylor is somebody that is really making a difference. I just didn't wanna be mistaken that that wanted poster was for someone blowing up the the train and getting shot in the back by some French army guy.
Sterling Burnett:Yeah. You know, if this cop fails, it won't just fail because of Trump, however. It'll fail because of all the changes that have taken place in Europe since the last cop. You've had, conservative members of parliament, new parties elected to the EU parliament that had blocked, after after James gave his talk, they voted to block, their net zero, plan that had been slated for approval. You've had new governments elected in EU countries, conservative governments, and the one thing they all have in common, well, a couple of things.
Sterling Burnett:They generally share a view on immigration, but they also share a view on climate realism. They're tired of the UN pushing things down their throats. They're tired of higher energy prices. They're tired of protests in their streets because of higher energy prices, and that's what they were a response to. So, that's holding it up.
Sterling Burnett:Even our neighbor to the north is having trouble because he's gone much farther than a lot of countries. You know, he's imposed a carbon tax, a rising carbon tax. He's imposed Trudeau's imposed various restrictions. They've lost 2 by elections in not just safe seats, safe seats that have been in his party for decades in urban areas, Toronto and Montreal, or or Ottawa and Montreal, I forget which, but, they were safe liberal seats and they lost them. He's down 20 points in polling, not not 2 percentage points, not 5 20 points in polling to the conservatives who were basically wiped out, just a few years ago, all because of his climate policies.
Jim Lakely:Yeah. Well, let let's let's see if we can get a little bit into the substance of of what it would mean. I mean, it is it is a little fun and funny, to see these people kind of in a panic about what if if Trump comes back. And they insist they insist, guys, that, no matter I know that this is something that John Kerry, I know, has stated either direct quote or very close to it, that the world is moving on, that it doesn't matter who's who's, what anybody says, it doesn't matter who the president of the United States is. This train ain't stopping.
Jim Lakely:The the, you know, the global climate agenda is moving forward, whether it doesn't matter who your president is, it doesn't matter any of that any of that other stuff. So, you know, I guess, I'll ask James, you probably have more experience going to COPS than anybody else on this panel. I mean, do you think what will happen if if if let's just say that on election night, Donald Trump's victory you know, his lead is so immense that, there's no chance that he would not be pronounced the victor by November 11th. What would that do to what happens to the negotiations, the things that happened at the COP?
James Taylor:I think it puts any hope of some type of advances, agreements to a halt. I mean, there's no there's no indications that anything significant is going to come out of this conference other than people getting a sunburn on the beach of this on the shore of the Caspian Sea. But, yeah, what we'd be looking at is for at least the next 4 years, I think we would see a just a burgeoning movement of climate realism, especially in Europe and also around the globe. Heartland has had meetings with leaders in Europe, the prime minister of Poland, members of the European Parliament, representing Austria, Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, you name it. And they're for the longest time, even conservatives and the vast majority of conservatives in Europe bought in to the climate alarmist media hype, but that's changing.
James Taylor:And there is a a grassroots populist conservative, populist free market, populist libertarian movement that is also beginning to see what is behind the so called climate crisis. If if Donald Trump wins in November, it just is a huge boost of wind in the sales for climate realism around the globe because it gives people the I'm not I'm not sure the word I'm looking for, but the cultural, not quite political, but just the just the justification for saying, hey. Look. You know, people are beginning to understand that this whole notion of a climate crisis is a sham. It it'll be huge.
James Taylor:Yeah. And I think what'll happen is we'll probably see a lot of the rhetoric rhetoric ramped up. You know? There will be, of course, the wailing and gnashing of teeth associated with, Donald Trump canceling getting being in the Paris agreement again. There will be the wailing and gnashing of teeth over all these different policy cancellations, opening up more drilling, more pipelines, whatever, and they will ramp up their rhetoric about Donald Trump is a danger to the planet.
James Taylor:You'll see more and more of that stuff being, published, and they will shift their focus from we're doomed because of climate changes to we're doomed because of Donald Trump.
Sterling Burnett:I think I think they'll have to go, I mean, he will be the spark, but they're they're gonna have to go broader because I think other countries are gonna follow his lead. They don't have to do that. As I wrote my article, look, if they wanna fund these client these these financial goals, if they wanna ship money to dictators and corrupt governments and to, crony companies in developing countries, they can do that. They don't have to have the America involved. They just will choose not to.
Sterling Burnett:And if so, that's their that's on them. He's not holding a gun to he won't be holding a gun to anyone's head. He's just gonna say, I'm not gonna play your game. Go ahead and play football with your own football. I'm not gonna give you my football.
Sterling Burnett:And, if they choose not to, it's because well, in in fact, they evidently don't think that the world's gonna come to an end. Because if they can end it without if they can save the planet without him, wouldn't they be heroes for doing so?
James Taylor:Oh, when John Kerry
Sterling Burnett:applauded for doing so?
James Taylor:Yeah. When John Kerry says the train's rolling regardless, the world's moving ahead. I say let them. First of all, try to get China on board seeing as they're the beneficiaries of all our largest being sent to 3rd world countries for which China qualifies apparently. But, fine.
James Taylor:If the rest of the world wants to torpedo their economy, if they want Germany's electricity prices that are 4 times ours, if they want Europe's gasoline prices that are triple r's, fine. I mean, that that's no harm to us. Although, I will say I I I have a love for people everywhere. I've developed a special affinity for people, in in European countries, and it's amazing the many different cultures. It's not one vast European culture, although the EU bureaucracy and the global left would like to turn it into that.
James Taylor:There's a specific Polish culture, a specific Czech culture, a specific German culture, a specific French culture. I love the people of Europe. For their sake, I'd love to see each of their nations, adopt policies of climate realism and energy sanity. But if they don't, if John Kerry wants to say, well, if you don't do that, they're going to do it anyway. I said, okay.
James Taylor:Fine. Go ahead.
Linnea Lueken:If I was a, you know, kind of a climate radical, I would despise John Kerry and everyone like him despite the fact that he runs around playing, you know, the the game and saying the right things at the right conferences, he also goes and speaks out the other side of his mouth. He was just at a gas conference in Houston for natural gas technologies. And although he was kind of threatening them while he was there, he was saying, you know, if you don't get carbon capture, utilization, and storage to work, then we're gonna you know, you're not gonna be part of the conversation going forward, that kind of thing. But at the same time, he's singing praises of natural gas industry. Kamala Harris is talking about how actually she doesn't support banning fracking, which I think she still does, but, she's just lying about that.
Linnea Lueken:But but I would be driven mad if I was a true believer in the climate cause.
Jim Lakely:Yep. Yep. For sure. Alright. Well, I was able while you guys were talking, I was able to to, have a little special treat for you, especially for James Taylor.
Jim Lakely:So, we'll add to the stage. There it is. There's the water poster from the Paris the COP 21 in Paris in 2015, December 2015. So there was, there all other friends of ours, and I'm sure a lot of people watch the show are familiar with it. Myron Ebel had his own poster.
Jim Lakely:Steve Malloy had his own poster. Mark Marrano had a poster from CFAK. Beyond Lomborg, who is a, you know, a a warmest in in pretty much every regard, he believes in the science. Right? He believes in all the alarmist stuff, but he just thinks it's a waste of money to try to stop it, and we should mitigate.
Jim Lakely:He got his own wanted poster. So, there it is. And if you go to the next slide, and this is, this is James proudly holding it up as we took it off one of the one of the places. So what an honor, James. You're wanted.
James Taylor:Wanted for crimes against the planet posted by an environmental activist organization near you.
Jim Lakely:That's right.
Sterling Burnett:I hope that was recycled paper and, and, plant ink.
Linnea Lueken:I hope you kept it and framed it. I would have kept it and framed it and put it in my office.
James Taylor:I I have one, but I I seem to have lost track of it. So I need to frame and, you know, hang these things, in real time before it's too late.
James Taylor:Yep. For sure. Alright.
Jim Lakely:Well, let's get to q and a. We've already gone a little long and, but we've had a good time and covered a lot of great topics. So, Linea, we hand the show to you. Alright.
Linnea Lueken:We didn't have a whole lot of questions today. People had a lot of comments to make, but we didn't have a lot of questions. Love our our commentary and our chat there. Okay. So here's the first one.
Linnea Lueken:This one's an easy one. I'm gonna pitch it to Anthony. Anthony from Kite Man Music. Has there not always been extreme weather?
James Taylor:Oh, no. Before 1910, there was no extreme weather whatsoever. Right, Linea?
Jim Lakely:Right.
James Taylor:Yeah. The idea that the the weather is getting worse has been debunked again and again and again by data. When you look at the data for hurricanes, tornadoes, thunderstorms, it's just not there. Even the IPCC does in their most recent AR 6 report, there's no increase in severe storms. It's just not there.
James Taylor:It's not emergent. But what is going on in the media and why people believe that it's getting worse is because the coverage has increased exponentially. When I first started doing television weather back in 1978, I had an old teletype machine, you know, the and print it out, you know, at about, 20 words a minute. It was crazy. It's crazy slow.
James Taylor:You know, on a fax machine that sent me weather maps. Right? Now we have all kinds of technology that has exploded all across the planet. Everybody, virtually, everybody's got a cell phone in their hand, and that cell phone can take a a picture or make a movie and send it to CNN on a moment's notice. And so you end up with so much more reporting of severe weather events, which gives the impression that severe weather is getting worse.
James Taylor:It's a reporting bias. It's not an actual reality in nature.
Linnea Lueken:Thank you very much. Okay. This is a question. It's a good question from, Luke, and he says, what are your thoughts about the future of hydrogen cars and trucks? And I'm gonna start answering this one.
Linnea Lueken:I'll get you guys in a second. I think it's very interesting. So far, the the technology has not been working out super great in terms of the transportation, especially of hydrogen. Right now in the United States, at least, you cannot move hydrogen in just like a pipeline like you can normal natural gas without mixing it with natural gas first because hydrogen and brittles, the, the metal in the pipeline. So they have to install, you know, hundreds of miles of plastic sleeves in order to boost the amount of hydrogen in the pipelines.
Linnea Lueken:And, of course, where does that plastic sleeve material come from? I don't know. Most of the time right now and I'm I'm not aware of a situation in which this is not the case, but it doesn't mean that it's not the case in some, facility. I'm sure labs are able to accomplish this. But, currently, the production process or cracking out the hydrogen, from whatever it is that they are getting it from, which is usually natural gas, is more energy intensive than the actual, like, energy output, which isn't always a problem.
Linnea Lueken:But, you know, like, if you were to I don't know. Well, I don't I don't know if I can if I can give good enough numbers to be really, solid about that. But there's also hydrogen is definitely more explodey than gasoline and diesel. Diesel being the least likely to ignite the 3 of those. And so
James Taylor:with the young people explodey. I like it.
Linnea Lueken:It's very technical terminology. We learned that at school. And so so far, the hydrogen hub stuff seems to be mostly just graphed, at least in the United States. It's not going very well. But that doesn't mean that the technology can never be made safe or won't ever, you know, be efficient or whatever.
Linnea Lueken:It's it doesn't mean that it's impossible. I'm I'm hesitant as an engineer, I'm hesitant to dismiss a technology out of hand, because a lot of technologies that we have today were dismissed out of hand initially. But there are some logistical problems that we just are not don't appear to be close to solving on those.
James Taylor:Yeah. But there's more than that, Lanae. Most people don't realize that to create hydrogen requires energy. You have to disassociate water into oxygen and hydrogen to produce hydrogen. Now hydrogen is not not something you can drill for generally.
James Taylor:Right? So it costs more energy to produce hydrogen than you get back from it. So it's a net loss in terms of energy production.
Sterling Burnett:In that And it's explodey. And it's explodey. In that instance, in the in the former instance, it's a lot like, ethanol a few years ago where it took more energy to produce a gallon of it took more fossil fuels to produce a gallon of energy ethanol than the energy the ethanol produced.
Linnea Lueken:Right. Yeah. It does seem to be in a little bit of a similar situation as the cellulosic biofuels at this point where, you know, there's a lot of money being poured into it, but the the amount that's being generated from what we're putting into it is not so good.
Sterling Burnett:Well, yeah, they've missed every they've missed they've missed every deadline under law. The EPA has had to waive the cellulosic requirement under law. It it it was set, you know, under under the second bush. He, he signed the bill that pushed cellulosic ethanol, and every time the deadline came up to produce x percentage of cellulosic ethanol into the, the fuel stream, it's been missed.
Linnea Lueken:Right. And and regarding, you know, kind of novel technologies like that, a lot of people get really excited when someone is able to make something in, you know, a test facility or in a lab or something, and they say, see proof of concept. It can be done. Well, that really doesn't mean that it can be done commercially for large numbers of, you know, just normal car buying consumers.
Sterling Burnett:Absolutely. How many
James Taylor:When I was living in Florida, I used to hear this quite a bit from people. Well, we're the sunshine state. We're in Florida. We should be getting solar energy. This should be our primary energy source.
James Taylor:We are the sunshine state. And I would tell them, I'd say, look. I've traveled all over this country, And I can tell you from personal experience in Manhattan is indeed the rat capital of the world. I mean, you see them everywhere. You see, you know, people are leaving their garbage bags out, their restaurants, all
Jim Lakely:that, and
Linnea Lueken:Scared of where this is going.
James Taylor:And, yeah, we have the technological ability to build little rat treadmills and put little, you know, electrodes on there, and then have the rats producing. We we can have Manhattan run by rat power. It it's something that technologically feasible, and Manhattan is the rat capital of the world, but there's a reason why Manhattan is not run by rat power. The same applies to Florida and solar power.
Sterling Burnett:I hear it every
Linnea Lueken:year. Will.
Sterling Burnett:I hear it almost every year, for decade for a couple of decades now with regard to to, fusion energy. Right? They they made a breakthrough just last year. Fusion energy. They've they they did a sustained fusion reaction for, like, what?
Sterling Burnett:2 microseconds or something last year is the longest they'd ever done? Well, that's that's gonna get us, it's just around the corner then. 2 nanoseconds.
Linnea Lueken:And then he just asked a follow-up question, which I am gonna show, and we're not gonna take the bait. Half of the question is bait, but I am gonna answer the first half of the question genuinely. He says, why pursue hydrogen when battery tech is so good?
Jim Lakely:I'm not
Linnea Lueken:gonna take the bait. Bait is the mind killer. But I I will say it's always worth it to pursue new technologies. It doesn't necessarily mean that they deserve 1,000,000,000 of dollars of taxpayer subsidy. Okay.
Linnea Lueken:Next. How about this? This is from engineer guy. He says, what of high speed electric trains? How's it going in California?
Linnea Lueken:Anyone care to comment
Jim Lakely:on this?
James Taylor:Being built.
Sterling Burnett:It's still being
James Taylor:built from dollars that overrun and and a decade late.
Sterling Burnett:From one location where nobody lives to another location in the country where nobody lives. But that that that has to stop, Texas from moving forward with its own, high speed rail plans, idiotic as they are.
James Taylor:As as silly as they are from a from an economic perspective, it's it it gets even worse when this becomes a government program and politics get involved. So in my home state of Florida, there was a push for high speed rail connecting Tampa, Orlando, Miami. And I remember the the segment from Tampa to Orlando, and they were touting this. Well, we could get there and I forget the time frame that they just did a straight direct, line. But then the problem is you had legislators from Lakeland that was along the route, legislators from Plant City that demanded their own stops.
James Taylor:It no longer is high speed when you're stopping all the time. Moreover, for the drive from Tampa to Orlando, which I would make frequently when my daughters were young, we had the Disney annual passes. We love going there. It'll take about an hour and a half to get from Tampa to Orlando. If I were to take the high speed rail, first of all, I'd have to drive to downtown Tampa, find parking, get from parking to the train, get there in sufficient time that I don't miss the train, wait on the station for the train, take the train.
James Taylor:The train, unless they're gonna have a stop at Disney and in downtown Orlando, it means I have to get from Orlando to Disney. If they're gonna have a stop in Disney and downtown Orlando, it defeats the purpose of high speed rail from Tampa to Downtown Orlando. You get the point. Not only is it prohibitively expensive, it it's it's just never going to make sense, for any reason other than politics. And hopefully, political snaps.
Sterling Burnett:Current non high speed rail doesn't pay for itself. They take gas taxes to subsidize it, and high speed rail would be even more exorbitant. We currently have daily flights, a lot of them, from Dallas to, Austin and from Dallas to San Antonio. That's the roots for the high proposed high speed rail is Dallas to Austin. It takes, about 40 minutes.
Sterling Burnett:You still got all the problems that that James, said. You gotta park, you gotta get there early, blah blah blah. All the same things that would be true for high speed rail and how fast are they gonna get us there? About the same time as the flight, except the flight's not being subsidized by 1,000,000,000,000 of dollars, and they're not having to steal anybody's land along the route, which is a big problem. The takings that are that are going on with ranchers who don't want, to lose their land to the high speed rail or the carbon capture pipelines for that matter, if you wanna go on a different topic.
Sterling Burnett:But the the point is, it's not needed in Texas. It won't be cheaper unless, general taxpayers are subsidizing the tickets.
James Taylor:And it's not needed in Florida or anywhere else. If it's a long enough route to somewhat justify in terms of the speed and, you know, getting on and off the train, all that, then a flight makes more sense. If it's not that long driving makes more sense. And one thing I forgot to mention is I was talking about the Florida experience. When they presented the numbers on cost projections, if we assume that they don't go if they don't have cost overruns, which we know in California, you know, factor of 5 or 10, the cost the true cost versus what they project, what we'd be looking at is a per passenger trip would have been something like a $100 from Tampa to Disney World.
James Taylor:Now granted in their projections, the taxpayers subsidize and pay for it. So they're only gonna charge people 20 or $40, but I mean, really, that's the true cost is a $100 or so per person. It does not cost me a $100 to drive from Tampa to Disney World. It cost me maybe 6, 7, $8 in gas. If Donald Trump was president, maybe 5 or 4.
James Taylor:And even expensive Disney parking, where where do you I don't know what it is today, but I'm guessing 20 or $30 even at the subsidized price. Why would I wanna do that? It's silly.
Linnea Lueken:Right. If you guys if if we have viewers who are interested in the trains in the United States part, because I, you know, I see I have a lot of friends who love Japan and who love Europe, and they have very successful train infrastructure, Well, when it's not under strike in France, but in Europe. But, it's, it's very interesting to read the track, like, the readership or the ridership numbers and stuff for Amtrak and for the train infrastructure that the United States does have. And a lot of that will show you why probably spending money on expanding train infrastructure is not such a good idea. It's called, ti.org/theantiplanner.
Linnea Lueken:And, that's a friend of Heartland's as well. If you like to read someone obsessively reporting on, inf like infrastructure projects and trains in particular, that's the website to watch. Okay. So we have time for probably 2 more questions. Maybe just one.
Linnea Lueken:Let's see how long it takes us to get. This is from energy colonizer who says, what is the hurricane activity level at this this year? And is it wait. Sorry. There's a little bit of some typo going on here.
Linnea Lueken:I have to is any lower activity this year chalked up to climate change by the usual suspects? Guys?
James Taylor:Well, the usual suspects is out there, particularly Michael Mann, predicted 33 named storms this year, higher than any, season in history. And, of course, so far, he's got egg on his face because it's come nowhere close to that, and it's you know, we're going to have to have super turbo hurricane season now in order to even catch up to that, and that's not gonna happen. The problem is is that, the Atlantic as one as one person put it, I think it was Klotzbach, said the Atlantic is broken, and they don't know why. You know? The these, super smart climate scientists cannot explain why the hurricane season is not materializing to be doom and destruction as they had predicted.
James Taylor:So are they attributing it to climate change? Oh, no. They just don't know. And they're not going to attribute a her slower hurricane season to climate change because that would be counter to their narrative.
Linnea Lueken:I did I did see one comment. I'm not sure if it was from, one of the scientists in Colorado, but I think they did acknowledge that the mild warming that's occurred over the last couple decades could be contributing to fewer hurricanes because of the lower energy difference between the Northern Atlantic and the tropics. Yeah. And which is something that, Anthony, I remember reading on your website. I don't remember who posted about that, like, in 2011 or something.
Linnea Lueken:I read an article, that that gave the same hypothesis, but it was brushed off back then.
James Taylor:So so the moment that there is a scientific consensus, which, of course, we know is always right whenever bureaucrats declare consensus, that global warming climate change is causing fewer hurricanes, we're going to be inundated about how a lack of hurricanes means the end of the world and about how all of the all of the destruction and mayhem because our ecosystems depend on hurricanes. What's really funny, I saw an article. I think it was New York Times yesterday or the day before talking about the slow hurricane season. And they were talking about some potential systems developing in the Gulf of Mexico, And they noted how that there is has been this year more upper level wind shear than is typical that is preventing the formation of these hurricanes. Wind shear basically tears apart the the cloud tops, the the tops of the storm systems before they can get too large.
James Taylor:And that's something that scientists have predicted for decades that with more warming in a warmer environment that we have more upper level wind shear. The media makes it seem like the only factor for hurricane formation and strengthening and frequency is ocean temperatures. No. It it it's one of many and wind shear is a very important one. And, in terms of the question, will the media report it?
James Taylor:Yes. I did note that although the New York Times, I think it was New York Times, mentioned more upper level wind shear. No. They did not mention the scientific studies and, reports that because of more warming, we're gonna have more upper level wind shear, which, of course, reduces hurricane activity.
James Taylor:Yeah. For sure.
Linnea Lueken:Well, I I think that's all we have time for.
Jim Lakely:It is. It is. I think it's time we have to wrap up. I'm sorry that, we probably went too long on some of the earlier segments to give you more q and a, but, we try to do our to balance that out. I wanna thank everyone who is a part of this show today, h Sterling Burnett, Linnea Lukin, Anthony Watts, and our special guest for, this week, and I hope he's not a stranger, Heartland Institute president James Taylor.
Jim Lakely:I wanna thank everybody in the audience, especially in the live chat. It is always a lot of fun to be watching that happening as we broadcast this show live every Friday at 1 PM EST. I want to ask you to please visit climate realism dot com, visit climate at a glance dot com, visit what's up with that dot com, and subscribe to the Climate Change Weekly, which is a fantastic newsletter that ant, that Sterling Burnett puts out every single week. You go to heartland.org/subscribe, and you can get yourself signed up for that. And, please, go to heartland.org/tcrs.
Jim Lakely:Please help us support this show. It's actually a good thing that our YouTube channel was demonetized because now they won't take their 30% cut, and you can support shows and programming like this directly, and that's even the best way to do it. Thank you again, everybody, for watching and being here on the show, and we will talk to you next week. Bye
Linnea Lueken:bye. We did it. We did it, Joe. You're gonna be the next president of the United States.