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The Heartland Institute’s Donald Kendal, Jim Lakely, Chris Talgo, and H. Sterling Burnett present episode 466 of the In The Tank Podcast. Surprising news dropped earlier this week when Microsoft announced a partnership that would see the reopening of the 3-Mile Island Nuclear Plant. Despite the history of the plant suffering a partial nuclear meltdown back in 1979, Microsoft is so desperate for a source of reliable energy they are moving forward with this plan. What does this reveal about the state of big tech companies and their energy needs? What does this story show in regards to America's future energy composition? The ITT crew talks about all this and more on this week's episode.
Microsoft To Reopen 3-Mile Island
Reuters - Microsoft may pay Constellation premium in Three Mile Island power agreement, Jefferies says (Sept 23)
https://www.reuters.com/markets/deals/microsoft-may-pay-constellation-premium-three-mile-island-power-agreement-2024-09-23/
https://www.reuters.com/markets/deals/microsoft-may-pay-constellation-premium-three-mile-island-power-agreement-2024-09-23/
Bloomberg - Microsoft's Three Mile Island Deal Is Great News
Big Tech and the Need for Reliable Energy
Tom's Hardware - AI GPU bottleneck has eased, but now power will constrain AI growth warns Zuckerberg
NYP - OpenAI pitches Biden admin on need for massive data centers — that use as much power as a major city
Zero Hedge - Blackrock's Larry Fink Jumps On "Next AI Trade", Warning World Will Be "Short Power"
America's Future Energy Composition
WIRED - The AI Boom Is Raising Hopes of a Nuclear Comeback
39 Days Until the Election
CNN - Young voter voices: This college student is skeptical of Harris being a change candidate on economy
Creators & Guests
Host
Donald Kendal
Donald Kendal hosts podcasts In The Tank and Stopping Socialism for The Heartland Institute.
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.
We are live, and we are full of energy, folks. Surprising news dropped earlier this week when, it was announced that Microsoft is gonna be entering into a partnership that would see the reopening of 3 Mile Island Nuclear Plant despite the history of the plant suffering a partial meltdown back in 1979. Microsoft is so desperate for a source of reliable energy that they are moving forward with this plan. What does this reveal about the state of big tech companies and their energy needs, and what does this story show in regards to America's energy future? We're gonna be talking about all this and more in episode 466 of the in the tank podcast.
Kamala Harris:I don't know what's wrong with you young people. You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?
Donald Kendal:Oh, it's gonna be a shame when the election's over and she's not gonna be in the public space anymore. But, welcome to the end of the tank podcast. As always, I'm your host Donald Kendall. I've got a full crew today. I am joined by Jim Lakeley, VP of the Heartland Institute.
Donald Kendal:How are you doing today, good sir?
Jim Lakely:I'm doing pretty good, I guess. So do you guys did any of you guys see the, Kamala Harris interview with the the Oprah special with all the celebrities and the 1,000 screens up there representing America and all that stuff?
Donald Kendal:I haven't seen catch the Oprah show, but I have not seen that.
Jim Lakely:No? You missed that? Well, good. You know, I I actually didn't watch the whole thing. I just watched a few clips on, on YouTube and x, and I I think I I have lost brain cells that I will never get back.
Jim Lakely:That it was the most difficult thing to get through, that I have seen in a long time. It was horrendous. I cannot believe that that that little gambit is going to work for Kamala, but this is America. Who knows?
Donald Kendal:That's crazier things have happened. Yep. Chris Talgo, editorial director of the Heartland Institute. How are you doing today, good sir?
Chris Talgo:I'm doing better than Jim even though I actually sat through all of Stephanie Ruehl's interview last night with Kamala. And, let's just say that, yeah, she did not give any substance. It was as shallow as the kiddie pool and, just, you know, more of the same.
Donald Kendal:And we're also joined by a special guest, h Sterling Burnett, director of the Arthur b Robinson Center on, for climate and energy research. He's also a regular on the climate realism show that airs on Fridays at noon CST right here on Heartland's YouTube channel, as well as Rumble and Facebook and x, etcetera, etcetera. Sterling, thank you for being on with us. How are you?
H. Sterling Burnett:Good to be on. I lost no brain cells watching Kamala in either. I refuse to watch her more than, you know, brief segments at a time just to see her word salads. That's fun sometimes. But unlike you, Donald, when she shuffles off the public sphere and I no longer have to hear her cackle, her word salads, or any of the lies that she tells, I'll be relieved.
H. Sterling Burnett:I won't be you know, it's not something I'll look back. Oh, gosh. I sure miss those days when Kamala was was on TV.
Donald Kendal:Oh, come on. I I I already miss Joe Biden, and he's still our president. Like, those weeks where we're covering just like the weekly gaffes and all of that. Uh-huh. That was some fun times there.
H. Sterling Burnett:You know what's scary? So they had him this week. First off, he he he he stuck a a friend of mine said he shaved Kamala this week because he said she's already in charge of foreign policy and the border and everything else because she's so confident. I told her she could handle this. So
Jim Lakely:Yeah. He said he handed everything, all of the duties of his office to her already. So
H. Sterling Burnett:Exactly. So, basically, she's to blame for everything.
Jim Lakely:She he he definitely does not want her to win. That was pretty cold blooded if you ask me.
H. Sterling Burnett:That was like I said, it's like a prison yard shiv in the back. But, he was on The View. And this was you you couldn't get a more sympathetic audience and, interviewers than you had on The View. I mean, even even more sympathetic than Oprah with Kamala. And, god, he just he couldn't answer he couldn't answer a single question.
H. Sterling Burnett:He couldn't finish a single complete sentence. And I just keep thinking every day he's still president, and other dictators and and world leaders have their fingers on the button. And he's not competent to respond. He should he should already be gone. The day he said the day he said, Kamala, I'm leaving to allow you to run, they should have immediately moved to replace him with Kamala.
H. Sterling Burnett:As as terrible as Kamala would be as president, he's simply not there.
Jim Lakely:She's never ever asked, you know, hey. Why did you lie to us about the mental condition of the president of the United States for 3 years?
Donald Kendal:Yeah.
Jim Lakely:You know? Why did you they she's never asked about that. So, you know, again, this is the media we have today.
Donald Kendal:Well, you know, after the election and she loses, she'll have all the time in the world to write about all these things in her book, her inevitable book.
Chris Talgo:Sterling. Sterling. You ain't a dream. Everyone tells me that I, you know, take one for the team when I watch CNN and MSNBC. You really take one for the team if you watch The View because even I won't stoop to that level.
Chris Talgo:I mean, dude, wow. We should give you some hazard pay for that, I think. And, also, so Joe had a really bad week. Joe, was hosting the prime minister of India and I think a few other people. Of course, he wasn't doing it in Washington DC at the White House because he's basically permanently on vacation.
Chris Talgo:So when when, they set up the little, you know, ceremony, I guess, in his backyard at his beach house, Joe was not having a good day. He was barking, who's next? Who's next? And it was pretty pretty cringey. And, also, he, thought he was in Washington DC when actually he was in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware.
Jim Lakely:So just There you go.
Chris Talgo:Good to know that he's really on top
Jim Lakely:of this right now.
Donald Kendal:Happens to the best. Sharp as a tack. Right?
H. Sterling Burnett:Rehoboth Beach. Rehoboth Beach, Washington DC, they're almost the same thing.
Donald Kendal:Yeah. Right. Right. Right. Alright.
Donald Kendal:Before we get going, because we got a lot to talk about, I always put that message out there to our audio only listeners specifically. First off, why don't you leave a review for us? That would be greatly appreciated. Also, you're probably catching the show on a Friday or later. Consider joining us a day earlier on Thursdays at noon CST, where we are live streaming on Facebook and YouTube and Rumble and x, and you can join the conversation, throw your comments and questions in the chat.
Donald Kendal:Maybe we'll show your comments on the screen. Maybe we'll address your questions on the fly. You can also help out the show monetarily, not by using super chats on YouTube because we have been demonetized, but you can go to heartland.org/inthetankanddonatedirectlytotheshow. That way YouTube doesn't take a 30% cut. Also, you could help out the show just by hitting the like button, sharing this content, subscribing if you haven't already, or just leaving a comment out of the video.
Donald Kendal:All those things help break through those big tech algorithms that prevent content like this from being shown to more people. But like I said, we have a a lot to get into. So, this is a story that I find very interesting. I'm very excited to talk about this story. In fact, this story is the main reason why I invited Sterling to come on to the show.
Donald Kendal:I wanted to get an energy expert's take on this story. So the story is that, tech giant Microsoft is reportedly entering contract with Constellation Energy to reopen 3 Mile Island Nuclear Power Plant in Pennsylvania. Under the, Constellation Microsoft deal, Microsoft will purchase energy from the restarted plant for a period of 20 years. The 3 Mile Island unit will provide 835 megawatts of electricity or enough to power about 700,000 homes. But guess what?
Donald Kendal:None of that energy is gonna be used to power any homes. Microsoft is having 3 Mile Island switch back on for 20 years solely for the purpose of meeting their own demand for electricity from data centers to power its AI ambitions. So on this podcast, we've, talked a few times about Big Tech's growing appetite for reliable energy, considering their growing needs for power to run, their growing server farms as well as recent explosion in AI, their large language models, these data centers, etcetera, etcetera. And we'll get into that more in a little bit. But I feel like this like, my biggest takeaway from this is just it reeks of desperation.
Donald Kendal:Like, that that's what it feels like. Like, Microsoft is craving energy so badly. They are entering into a contract to restart probably the 3rd most notorious nuclear power plant in the world. Number 1 being Chernobyl, number 2 being Fukushima, and 3 Mile Island, of course, number 3, being the worst nuclear incident or the home of the worst nuclear incident in the United States. So, Jim, I'm gonna go to you first, actually.
Donald Kendal:What what are your reactions, at first blush here?
Jim Lakely:My reactions to Microsoft buying the buying the plant? I know. Thank you, by the way, for, not reminding me that I was muted So that that little pause, you know
Donald Kendal:I saw in your eyes that you realized it right
Jim Lakely:away. Typical gym. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Jim Lakely:You know, actually, no. When when you told me this, it's not often, Donnie, that you suggest a topic for this podcast, and I didn't know about it. And I literally did not know that, Microsoft was going to, buy 3 Mile Island, and use it to power their data centers. But, you know, what I what I thought about, though, was kind of the misperceptions about Three Mile Island. The very I mean, if you want to call it that minor accident at Three Mile Island, it was it was really blown out of proportion.
Jim Lakely:I mean, if people don't know, I I lived in lived in Pennsylvania for most of my life, and I've driven the Pennsylvania Turnpike 100 of times. And I always when I'm going across on the Pennsylvania Turnpike going across the Susquehanna River, just before you get to Harrisburg, I always look to my right. And I wanna see the Three Mile Island, nuclear power plant down there because you can see it from the bridge as you as you cross and go along. And I always think that, you know, nobody died from that, from that accident, from the so called it wasn't really a meltdown, but it that happened at the same time a movie called The China Syndrome was released in Hollywood. It's almost exactly perfectly synced in that way.
Jim Lakely:And so I think maybe the accident I was just about to look it up, but you went to be first, so I'll look it up later. But I think it was really only a matter of months between that movie coming out and the and the accident happening. And so it was just it put the country into a panic, and that incident has basically stopped for the most part. I mean, again, we do have nuclear power plants now, but we should have the the nuclear power capability of this country should be exponentially more than it is today. And the reason it isn't is because of the movie the China Syndrome, which was about a actual nuclear meltdown and how, awful that would be, and then this, this incident, you should probably actually call it, on 3 mile 3 Mile Island, nuclear facility.
Jim Lakely:And what people don't actually know is that the other 2 reactors were fully operational for years years years years. I think, I think one of them either just recently shut down, maybe it was last year, or maybe it's still going. I don't know. But, but the point of this the point of this is something that, again, why Sterling is on here, is that the AI revolution, which is accelerating, it seems monthly, is an extremely energy hungry industry. And this is bringing up something that has concerned me, and we've talked about it on the Climate Realism Show.
Jim Lakely:We've talked about it on this show. We cannot, as a society and as a country, allow big tech to create specific energy just for them so it's nice and cheap and reliable, and then let the rest of us suffer under, so called green energy that is expensive, unreliable, and poverty making. So that's the thing to to keep an eye on, so we'll see.
Donald Kendal:Yeah. Sterling, if if Microsoft is so desperate for energy, why aren't they just building a whole bunch of wind turbines? You know, this just kinda seems odd, don't you think? Oh, you're pulling a gym. This is outrageous.
Donald Kendal:This is so outrageous. You need to unmute yourself, Sterling.
Jim Lakely:Sterling, you need to unmute yourself, man. He doesn't understand what pulling a gym means, Donnie. He's new to the show.
Donald Kendal:Alright. Alright. Sterling, go ahead.
H. Sterling Burnett:Unlike unlike, everyone else on this, podcast, I like to be fair. Look, Bill Gates has been for nuclear forever. This isn't new for him. Bill Gates has always been for nuclear. In fact, he is developing stand alone nuclear plants of of new varieties, experimenting, paying for it.
H. Sterling Burnett:This is just one more nuclear thing. You know, look, we've got a new experimental reactor being built at a at a college here in, in Texas. Everyone acknowledges a bill has had long acknowledged that nuclear is an issue, that we need to have it. Now, I don't agree with the reasons why he says that, and I want to confirm what Jim said. Three Mile Island continued operating, continued operating for years.
H. Sterling Burnett:It only recently shut down
Donald Kendal:Yeah. 28 which is
H. Sterling Burnett:why which which is why they can consider reopening it. I mean, if it had been shut down back in, the late seventies when the accident occurred or 80 when the accident occurred, they wouldn't be able to reopen. It would have been torn down by now. Though, I will say, Jim, I remember Saturday Night Live, showing me giant Jimmy Carter, played by Dan Orchard, mopping the floors. And so it did have at least one effect.
H. Sterling Burnett:It created giant Jimmy Carter, you know, one one terrible incident. He could have he could have fought Godzilla, I guess. In any case, look, I I I like the fact that Bill Gates is commissioning, Three Mile Island just for Bill Gates. You know why? Ratepayers aren't having to pay to reopen Three Mile Island.
H. Sterling Burnett:And because he's using that power, he's not drawing power from the rest of the grid. In fact, what Heartland is advocating across a number of forums is if AI is going to demand all this power, they should have to pay themselves for that power without draining the electric grid, and they should have to stop lobbying to put, only renewable on the electric grid. They shouldn't take coal power and natural gas power and nuclear from the grid or demand that the grid shut it down and build only wind and solar, they know they need dispatchable power. Rather, as we add dispatchable power to the extent that it goes just to them or largely to them, they should have to pay for it. That's our position, and he you know, in this one instance, he's putting his money where his mouth is, but he's not the only one that, is saying we need nuclear.
H. Sterling Burnett:He is just the one that's putting his you know, that's actually putting his money where his mouth is.
Donald Kendal:Mhmm. Yeah. You know, and to that point, there was and let me let me actually be clear. I was I was gonna clear this up a little bit later, but I'll I'll just be real upfront about it. Yeah.
Donald Kendal:I I acknowledge that the 3 Mile Island thing was just like a like a like a a thing to not really worry about. I actually have some stats somewhere in my note talking about how, like, anyone in the area, even though they did, like, this, like, these evacuations or whatever, like, there was no injuries or direct deaths. Yeah. I got it right here. As an effect of the incident, and those living closest to the sites were exposed to less radiation that would normally result from a single X-ray.
Donald Kendal:So it's like it's not you know, I I know that people have it in their mind that this was, like, some big Chernobyl event, but it really wasn't. And in general, I am very much in favor of this. I just think, like, the optics when it comes from, like, public perception, and another point that I was gonna bring up, and I'm gonna come to you, Chris, next, but, there was a story. This this is a different writer's article that I have in the show notes, but it references another deal that was being struck just a few months ago between Amazon and Talen Energy, and it says that a similar deal between Talen Energy and Amazon signed earlier this year has been challenged by a group of electric utilities alleging that it could spike the cost for consumers or hamper grid reliability. So that seems to be, like, the situation that these big tech companies find themselves in.
Donald Kendal:It's like we could buy a bunch of energy just on the market, but, you know, that could just raise the cost of just your average rate payers, or we could open up, you know, close down nuclear power plants. But, Chris, I'm gonna come to you because I couldn't help but think of you when I heard this story because I remember one of the first times that we talked about this idea of big tech and their exploding appetite for energy. I brought up the potential for, you know, maybe maybe we're getting to a point where, you know, nuclear is gonna be brought online to the grid, and your response was something along the lines of, like, oh, yeah. You know, that would be great, but what you foresee is, big tech onlining nuclear for their own use while average ratepayers are still saddled with unreliable energy like wind and solar. So when I saw this story, I immediately thought Chris was right.
Donald Kendal:So what are your thoughts on this?
Chris Talgo:So here are my thoughts. I have, inside info. The reason why Bill Gates has decided to do this is because since his divorce from Melinda and the death of Jeffrey Epstein, his porn consumption has risen so high that he actually needs an entire nuclear power plant to facilitate the amount that he is currently The views that is true. That is true. That is true.
H. Sterling Burnett:What? What?
Chris Talgo:Steven knows it. Steven knows it's true. Bill Gates and Jeffrey were were were
H. Sterling Burnett:were really tight. No. No. No. He was friends with Diddy, not Jeffrey.
Donald Kendal:I'm sure they all hung out. I'm sure they all
Chris Talgo:hung out. Something like literally. Go ahead, Chris. But yeah. No.
Chris Talgo:But so, really, Donnie, I mean, yeah, that's what the this is about. You know, these these giant tech companies, Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and and, you know, the others see, we have been, pedaling for, you know, these windmills and these, you know, solar panels for, you know, a couple decades now. Oops. We made a big mistake because this new technology coming down the pipe, whether it's quantum computing or, AI is gonna require, you know, enormous amounts of energy. So what are we gonna do?
Chris Talgo:We're gonna we're we're gonna protect our own, you know, interests, and we're going to make sure that, we, you know, get all the power we need. And the rest of you peons, yeah, just, just do whatever you gotta do. You know? It's just it's it's so frustrating.
Donald Kendal:Yeah. I think they're locked in. I'm not sure. I'm I don't know what kind of the the average rate of a megawatt of electricity goes for nowadays, but, they're locked in for 20 years at a fixed rate of, like, a100 between a $110115 or something like that according to this one report. So they're gonna be paying that for the next 20 years.
Donald Kendal:Whether or not that's a great deal or a terrible deal, I'm not entirely sure. It it it
Chris Talgo:that that's what it's not about. It's about the fact that they have, they they have gone out of their way to ensure that they are protected for the next 2 decades while the rest of us, we're just either gonna have to deal with brownouts and blackouts, or we're just gonna have to really, you know, reduce our our consumption and just live with it. And, you know, I I personally am not gonna abide by that, and I think most Americans are not gonna abide by that. And, you know, this is unsustainable. And, obviously, I think the the green transition has failed spectacularly, and the American people are onto it.
Chris Talgo:And, we shall see what happens.
Donald Kendal:Yeah. So let me take the opportunity to spike the football and, wind power just for a minute here. So size of, so nearly the same capacity, you know, if we're looking at this, like, what was it? What I say, like, they're they're, they're contracted to supply, like, 8 60 megawatts of energy or something like that. The, size equivalent of wind farm, of that same sort of capacity would be the Trenton Knowles offshore wind farm, which spans nearly 60 square miles off the coast of the UK.
Donald Kendal:But that's not all because the listed capacity, you know, around 900 megawatts or whatever, is not what a typical wind farm produces. Listed capacity is the theoretical maximum that a wind farm could produce if the conditions were perfect, perfect wind speeds, all the wind turbines are operating efficiently, etcetera, etcetera. And because that they never are, that's never the case over the the span of a year, the actual energy produced by a wind farm is less than the stated capacity. In fact, your typical wind farm on average produces somewhere between 30 40% of their listed capacity. So to produce well, one second.
Donald Kendal:I'll go right back to you, Sterling. To produce the same amount of energy being promised by the 3 Mile Island deal, you're going to need, 3 of these Trenton Knowles offshore wind farm. So you're looking at, I don't know, roughly a 180 square feet of wind turbines. Sterling, this is admittedly back of the math, you know, back of the envelope math. But am I being too harsh in my approximations or Well,
H. Sterling Burnett:too too harsh and not harsh enough. So, I think it's 550 something megawatts he's gonna get from this nuclear power plant, 500 and some odd enough to power 700,000 homes. I agree with Chris that we shouldn't put up with them trying to foist renewables on us while they use base load. But as long as they're paying for the base load and it's not taking other power off the grid, I'm in favor of that. I've already said it.
H. Sterling Burnett:Concerning wind power, look, offshore wind, operates, a, the turbines are bigger, and, the winds are relatively more constant, so they operate a little bit better than onshore wind. The the problem is it's not that it's not like you solve their inefficiency if you just expand the number of turbines. If the wind ain't blowing, it ain't blowing for all of them. It's not like it it says, oh, well, these first 60 turbines, we're gonna blow on, but the other first the other 60, they're not getting any wind. No.
H. Sterling Burnett:When the wind doesn't blow at sea, it's called becalmed, as the old sailors, It's not blowing, and so, no one's getting any power at all. It's not like you're only getting 30%. No. 0. And wind has this problem that just can't be overcome.
H. Sterling Burnett:It's not just that sometimes it doesn't blow at all. It's that even when it's operating, it's never fantasy land, perfect efficiency, everything's oh, it's the winds constantly go up and down, up and down variables, so the power generated is constantly fluctuating. And you know what? Power grids weren't made for fluctuating power. They're made for a fairly constant stream of power, so you're constantly having to ramp up and ramp down other power sources to regulate the power over the grid.
H. Sterling Burnett:There's a lot of problems with onshore wind. There are even worse problems with offshore wind. And but it's not just a simple let's just multiply the number of of turbines in in a single area. That that doesn't solve the problem. You know, if you wanna multiply the number of turbines across the entire United States, so because there's some locations they're getting wind when others aren't, you just switch to, turbine, you know, that might solve the problem, but then you're talking about shipping power thousands of miles, and every mile across the grid that the electricity is flowing.
Donald Kendal:Mhmm. Mhmm.
H. Sterling Burnett:The farther it has to flow, the less power actually gets delivered to the final destination.
Donald Kendal:Right.
H. Sterling Burnett:And one thing about Three Mile Island, if if his AI centers are set up anywhere near, Three Mile Island, the power that comes out of there will get to his powers, you know, will get to the AI source. If it's on offshore wind, it's gotta go miles to get to where it's gotta be. And, that means less power is being delivered even operating in fantasy landfill efficiency.
Donald Kendal:Right.
Chris Talgo:That also is gonna require millions of miles of new transmission lines, which is gonna completely destroy the sacred environment that these people worship. I saw on CNN last week, with their one of their climate change gurus was talking about how, they are now putting up wind farms and solar farms on decommissioned, coal plants. And he said, oh, this is such a great idea because you've already got the infrastructure right there for the transmission lines and everything. Why not just keep the coal plant open then, genius? I it's all you know, it's been it's just so simple.
Chris Talgo:It it it it it makes no sense. Let's close down the plant, and then let's put a bunch of solar panels and wind farms all around it, which is gonna destroy the earth, you know, even more than we want to. And then we're gonna use that, like Sterling said, which is not gonna provide the base load power even to, you know, a lot of people to charge their EVs and such. I mean, so this is just doomed from the beginning. This is completely irrational.
Donald Kendal:Sterling, I I, I I don't have an opinion on this. I'm not fishing for something here, but do you have a take on this this idea that that Chris was kinda talking about where it's like, you know, we've got, like, the the electricity grid and all of our rate payers, you know, take energy off of that and pay for that service, whatever. But then, like, these big tech companies are kinda setting up their own thing where they have their own electricity, you know, on the side that doesn't feed into the grid or whatever goes directly to them or however that it's structured. Is that is that fine? Is that fine by your perspective, or is that, like, setting a bad precedence?
Donald Kendal:What's what's your take on it?
H. Sterling Burnett:Let's be clear. Microsoft is not all big tech.
Donald Kendal:Of course. But I'm saying if any any No.
H. Sterling Burnett:No. Wait. Let me let me finish. Let me finish. If big tech were completely setting up, their own power grid and their own power sources, like, if if I wanted to put a Generac power source outside my house and I wouldn't provide all my own power in my business, and it benefits everybody else because I'm not taking power off the grid any longer.
H. Sterling Burnett:So it helps them, if that's what Big Tech were doing, I'd be all in favor of it. So long as they weren't also saying everyone else has to shut down their base low power. But not all big tech is doing this. Microsoft is paying its way, but, you know, other tech, like, you know, Zuckerberg, you know, Facebook Sky and and and and these other big tech guys, that's not what they're doing. What they're doing is saying, we need more base load power.
H. Sterling Burnett:We need more dispatchable power. And so you need to keep coal plants open for us, but the rest of you for the rest of you, you have to live with wind and solar, and battery backup because we've got to solve climate change. Mhmm. So they're not supplementing the most of them aren't supplementing the grid and using only power that they generate. They wanna take our dispatchable power currently on the grid and leave us with the remainders.
H. Sterling Burnett:And that's what I disagree with.
Donald Kendal:Well, yeah. Jim, jump in on this because, you know, I I I'm sympathetic to that idea, but I just, like, foresee that, you know, if if if that were to if that idea ran wild, we're over here, like, suffering with expensive, unreliable energy because the, you know, the left has gotten their way, and wind and solar panels, all of that sort of stuff. And all of these people are just, like, sitting pretty with their high-tech nuclear facilities and their small modular reactors and all of that. It just it just seems like, that that could be an issue. I don't know.
Donald Kendal:What are your thoughts?
Jim Lakely:Well, I mean, this is where I disagree with Sterling on this. I mean, I think we agree in on most things on this topic. But I want big tech to have to pull from the grid that everybody else uses and from the power sources that everybody else uses because that because the the demand is going to be so great and the influence of people like Bill Gates and Larry Fink and Mark Zuckerberg and all these people that are leading the AI revolution, their power, social and political power is immense. It's a lot bigger than you and me and the and ordinary American people. So if they start needing more power, they're not going to and they know the truth is that you cannot power the AI revolution with sunshine and zephyr's.
Jim Lakely:They know it's going to take either the in a a ramp up of fossil fuel based power, which is the cheapest, you know, that you can get, coal, natural gas, or, of course, what we're talking about here, nuclear. I don't want Bill Gates taking over a power plant basically for his own personal selfish business reasons. And don't even get me started. I mean, Bill Gates kinda triggers me. Okay?
Jim Lakely:So don't get me started on this patent stealing, vaccine pushing, Epstein Island visiting, philandering, farmland grabbing, c o two emission, China loving, bossy, globalist, elitist piece of shite. Okay? That's for our UK viewers right there.
H. Sterling Burnett:Our our APS are now in checking into food.
Jim Lakely:Because if if Bill Gates is is basically allowed to to create and build his own nuclear power plant for his own selfish business purposes and then leave the rest of us out there, he is actually I want his demand for power to affect the power, market for everybody. And as long as he's paying the going rate and when demand goes up, we're gonna need more nuclear power plants. And then everybody else's rates will come down. If he if if big tech if all these guys are allowed to just go off on their own and create their own power that nobody else can have but them, that is bad for us. That means we are stuck in the green in the in the green energy ghetto where we pay more and get less.
Jim Lakely:And I don't want that. I want these guy I want the pressures of AI and the energy it needs to work on in the marketplace for energy, not outside the marketplace for energy.
Donald Kendal:Yeah. You know? Can I can
H. Sterling Burnett:I respond briefly? Because I think I I share Jim's concern. But the response to that, if you believe in markets, is to get AI out of the fucking market. I'm sorry.
Donald Kendal:Woah.
H. Sterling Burnett:Woah. Wow. Apologies to everyone to get these guys out of the influence game. Right. Look, every state has a public utility commission, and they are charged with one thing, ensuring reliable power, at at a reasonable rate, and they are charged with protecting the rate payers, not big tech and not anyone else.
H. Sterling Burnett:Now if big tech stays in the grid, what will happen is this, Rates will go up. They can afford it. We can't. They will still have more influence politically than we have, and they'll slough off the extra costs. They'll keep I I disagree that we just need coal that we just need nuclear.
H. Sterling Burnett:We should be keeping coal plants open. We should be keeping natural gas plants open. Big tech's not pushing for that. So whether they stay on or off, they're still gonna have an outsized influence on politics. But if they stay on, we pay ever more and more and more because they're still gonna use the same demand, and they can afford to pay those rates.
H. Sterling Burnett:You can say, oh, well, we'll object. Well, I'm living in a world where for 20 years, rates have been going up and up and up because of, more and more wind and solar, and I don't see the political will to stop wind and solar.
Chris Talgo:For some
H. Sterling Burnett:reason, people are inordinately concerned about climate change.
Chris Talgo:Sterling, let me just let me just pose a question to you. So since we are still at the very, beginning of this, you know, AI quantum computing, revolution, are you saying that in 20 years, let's say, when these things really start to come online and they are just, you know, extracting vast amounts of energy from the grid, that the American people would just accept either humongous in just gigantic energy bills or told that you're just gonna have to ration energy. See, I don't think that they would play ball with that. I think there would be a, you know, a a groundswell of, you know, people across those countries saying, this is insane. Stop with the windmills.
Chris Talgo:Stop with the green transition. Stop with all that stuff. Let's just, you know, get back to common sense policy of let's use natural gas. Let's use nuclear, let's use coal. And if you want to supplement that with those other things, so be it.
Chris Talgo:But that cannot be the backbone of our electricity grid, especially while they're pushing EVs and all this other stuff. I mean, it's just come on. Like, just do them. I mean, the the numbers. You know?
H. Sterling Burnett:Yeah. You asked, so I'm gonna answer. 20 years ago 20 years ago, I would have agreed with you a 100%. The public would rise up. 20 years ago, I gave a talk saying, reality will slap legislators and regulators in the face, and they will not take baseload coal offline because it provides reliable power.
H. Sterling Burnett:I was wrong. I live in a state where we have coal reserves, and we have plants next to coal mines. Not far to ship the coal. We've taken coal offline. My rates, my personal rates, and I shop every couple of years because I lock in a a as lower rate as I can find.
H. Sterling Burnett:My personal rates have gone from 7 to 12¢ a kilowatt hour. We have had outages. This is Texas. Red Texas. We have had outages in the middle of winter.
H. Sterling Burnett:Oh, I
Chris Talgo:know that. I know that.
H. Sterling Burnett:Yeah. And so you can you can say, well, people will object. People will object. People objected. Nothing happened.
H. Sterling Burnett:You've got to believe that politicians actually respond to people objecting. I haven't seen that in my personal life. I haven't seen it across the nation as outages have gone out have gone up exponentially. I don't see it in California. People are moving out, but they're not changing their governors, and they have outages every year.
H. Sterling Burnett:So I'm unconvinced that there will be sudden suddenly some sea change that will get them to make sense. I'd like to think so, but I don't see it.
Donald Kendal:Before you respond, there is another section coming up where I think that this conversation will fit naturally in, so we can pick it up there. But I wanna talk about big tech, a little bit more generally in regards to their need for reliable energy. So we talked about this a couple of times on the show, but I don't think it can be overstated. We've already kinda talked about it a little bit throughout this, this episode so far, but the appetite for energy amongst big tech firms is is just skyrocketing. So back on episode 451 of this show, we broke down some of the numbers when it comes to big tech and energy use.
Donald Kendal:Microsoft in 2023 used 23.6 terawatt hours of electricity, tripling their amount from just 5 years prior in, 2018. That's more than the entire country of Iceland uses. Amazon in 2022 used nearly 57 terawatt hours of energy in just a year, and that's more than the entire country of Greece. And that's just 2 firms. That's not talking about Google or Facebook or OpenAI or a whole host of different tech businesses that are getting into the the AI game.
Donald Kendal:And one estimate that I reported on back in that episode suggested that the AI industry alone will consume somewhere between 85 and a 134 terawatt hours of energy annually by 2027, and I guess that that would end up being a conservative estimate. Also, back on episode 448 of the podcast, I reported that the energy needed to train just one large language model, chat GPT, that's the, the one from OpenAI, was roughly 1.3 gigawatt hours of power. And, that's outdated. As Jim said, these things change seemingly by the month, if not the week. So newer data suggests that the amount of power needed to train the chat GPT 4 large language model is over 50 gigawatt hours of, of energy, roughly 40 times more than its predecessor.
Donald Kendal:And that's just the upfront cost when it comes to energy use. The use using of these AI tools also uses a lot of energy. Simple text generation requires multiples of the amount of energy needed to do a Google search. Sterling, you mentioned that before we went live. Image and now video generation is far more taxing in terms of energy needed.
Donald Kendal:So this stuff just drinks energy. Right? And the reality has caused many notable figures in the space to acknowledge the fact that wind and solar simply won't cut it and that, more reliable energy sources will be needed in the future. So the 1st tech person that got on my radar in regards to this issue was, OpenAI's Sam Altman. He's the CEO of OpenAI.
Donald Kendal:He went to Davos in January of this year and talked about how AI required technological breakthroughs. Altman himself has invested in at least 2 nuclear power plays. Oklo for traditional nuclear fusion and Helion for potential nuclear few sorry, For nuclear fission was the. Nuclear fusion, the potential for that is Helion. And I think we have a clip of Mark Zuckerberg talking about the need for nuclear.
Donald Kendal:This was, just a few months ago. But if we have that clip on the ready, let's go ahead and play good old Mark z.
Mark Zuckerberg:Over the last few years, I think there's this issue of, GPU production. Yeah. Right? So even companies that had the money to pay for the GPUs, couldn't necessarily get as many as they wanted because there was there were all these supply constraints. Yeah.
Mark Zuckerberg:Now I think that's sort of getting less. So now I think you're seeing a bunch of companies think about, wow. We should just, like, really invest a lot of money in building out these things. And I think that that will go for for some period of time. There is a capital question of, like, okay.
Mark Zuckerberg:At what point does it stop being worth it to put the capital in? But I actually think before we hit that, you're gonna run into energy constraints. Right? Because I just I mean, I don't think anyone's built a gigawatt single training cluster yet. I mean, just to, I guess, put this in perspective, I think a gigawatt, it's like around the size of, like, a meaningful nuclear power plant only going towards training a model.
Mark Zuckerberg:And then you run into these things that just end up being slower in the world. Like, getting energy permitted is like a very heavily regulated government function. And if you're talking about building large new power plants or large build outs and then building transmission lines that cross other private or public land, that is just a heavily regulated thing. So you're talking about many years of lead time. So if we wanted to stand up just some, like, massive facility, to power that, I I think that that is that's that's a very long term project.
Donald Kendal:Yep. So we played that clip before, talking about the idea that eventually these these tech companies are going to run into power constraints. But to me, the most notable figure talking about the inadequacy of wind and solar comes from the ESG loving head of BlackRock himself, Larry Fink. And I know we've played this clip a number of times, but I don't think I can ever play this clip enough. This was mind blowing to me, but if we have the Larry Fink clip queued up, let's go ahead and play Larry Fink talking at a World Economic Forum, event not that long ago.
Donald Kendal:Let's go ahead and play that, please.
Larry Fink:And I do believe to properly, build out AI, we're talking about 1,000,000,000,000 of dollars of investing. So data centers today could be as much as 200 megawatts. They're now talking about data centers that are going to be 1 gigawatt. That's a that's powers a city. There there is one tech company that I spoke to the CEO last week who said, right now, all their data centers is about 5 gigawatts.
Larry Fink:By 2030, they need 30 gigawatts. 30. The amount of power that's needed to do use AI is has huge impact on society.
Chris Talgo:Yeah.
Larry Fink:Where is that power going to come from? Are we going to take it off the grid? What does it mean for elevated energy prices for everybody else if it's that? I think it's going to represent some huge societal questions that we have not addressed the negative side. Forget about the use of it, but just the generation of it.
Larry Fink:It's massive power. Okay. But that that is a huge investment opportunity so that we we, you know, the world is gonna be short power. Short power. And to power these these data companies, you cannot have just this intermittent power like wind and solar.
Larry Fink:You need dispatchable power because you can't turn off and on these data centers.
Donald Kendal:Yeah. Exactly. So head of BlackRock himself talking about wind and solar, not adequate. We're gonna need massive amounts. So in the clip, he talks about some of these data centers needing 200.
Donald Kendal:I think he said megahertz. I think he means megawatts of energy. Yep. And he says, I spoke to a, CEO last week who said right now, all with all their data centers, they need 5 gigawatts, you know, by by, you know, 2030 or whatever. So he wasn't lying.
Donald Kendal:So get this. This comes from a new article. Andy, I don't think I put this in the show notes. Sorry. But, published by the New York Post talking about Sam Altman and others briefing the Biden administration, quote, on the need to build massive data centers that consume as much power as a major city to handle more advanced artificial intelligence models as global competition rises according to the report.
Donald Kendal:A slew of tech leaders, including OpenAI's CEO Sam Altman, and executives from Anthropic, Nvidia, Microsoft, and Google met with White House officials last week to discuss the future of AI infrastructure throughout the country. Soon after the meeting, OpenAI shared a document with the White House detailing the benefits of building 5 gigawatt data centers, facilities consuming the equivalent output of 5 nuclear reactors and enough to power 3,000,000 homes according to Bloomberg news. So, Sterling, how many, solar panels and wind turbines is it gonna take to quench that energy thirst? Like, that's just like we're talking about absurd amounts of energy.
H. Sterling Burnett:Yeah.
Donald Kendal:I I don't think, like, like, an average person can wrap their heads around it.
H. Sterling Burnett:More more than currently exist or are in manufacture, I suspect. You know, here in Texas, we have taken, I think 6 or 8 gigawatts of coal offline. There's there's the power for your data centers. Quit pushing climate alarm and keep existing well functioning plants online, and you get your power, we get our power. Everybody's happy.
H. Sterling Burnett:But that's not what's happening, you know? And I just like I said, I said earlier, I'd love to think that we'd really revolt. But we are in a time where we elected a president. Well, maybe we elected a president, but the president now in office became president despite not leaving his bunker the entire campaign. And there's a real possibility, as much as I dread it, that we will elect a president who may be more competent than the current president, but is policy wise even to the left of Bernie Sanders.
H. Sterling Burnett:So that's scary. If that can really happen in United States, I'm not sanguine about the possibility that we're just gonna say, oh, well, we won't put up with it.
Chris Talgo:No. I I gotta I gotta chime in, Danny. Okay. So, in his, speech at the WEF, Larry Fink said that we are short power. That is not true.
Chris Talgo:It's an artificially created shortage, and that is a very important point that needs to be hammered home. Nuclear power, we potentially have endless amounts of power. Coal, we've got endless amounts of power. Natural gas, we've got nearly limitless. In this 19 seventies, they told us, hey.
Chris Talgo:We're running short of oil. Hey. We're running short of all this stuff. That's not true. New technologies have allowed us to find it and to extract it in much more, you know, efficient manners, and we can actually now, use it and produce it for energy consumption in much cleaner ways.
Chris Talgo:So really what this is about is that those are older technologies that there's not this huge, cottage industry to be made 1,000,000,000 of dollars off of. The green energy transition, that's what that's about. That's about democrat donors and, you know, these these people who want to, make oodles of money by getting government contracts and doing all this unnecessary stuff. Because guess what? They're getting super rich off of it.
Chris Talgo:Mhmm. They they they they tell us it's all about climate change. This is all about saving the planet and all this BS. And then we know at this point in time that it's not about that. Because if they were about that, then they would stop in their tracks and not put up one more solar panel or one more windmill because that is having a humongous negative impact on the earth.
Donald Kendal:These people
Chris Talgo:are all about making money. It's about money money money, and I guess to some degree, it's about control and power. So they wanna tell you, you don't need to have all the, you know, all all the power you need. What why do you have to have that kind of a stove? Why do you have a gas car?
Chris Talgo:Who why do you have to go travel? You know? That's what this is about. It's about 2 the the 2 things that it's almost always about, power and money.
Donald Kendal:Sure.
Chris Talgo:I just wonder Chris is right.
H. Sterling Burnett:Chris is
Chris Talgo:the only dad I'm going home.
Donald Kendal:Jim. Chris I mean, you know you know as well as I do that, you know, these emerging technologies coming down the down the pipe, They're not stopping anytime soon. Like, we're gonna see vast increases in the the, the amounts of energy needed, the demand from all of these different companies, even newcomers to the field of AI. Surely, they're gonna need tons of energy. So, I mean, is the illusion that we can meet this demand with wind and solar, is that, like, over?
Donald Kendal:Like, for anyone that actually, like, has any real influence, that's gotta be coming to an end. What do you think?
Jim Lakely:Well, I mean, that's what we have to hope. Right? I mean, that's why I was encouraged. I mean, I'm I when we found that, Larry Fink, statement at AWEF Forum, for crying out loud Mhmm. And I I I think I remember right when I grabbed that clip, the questioner was, like, nodding her head and was basically, but but but but but what about wind and solar?
Jim Lakely:What about saving the environment? And he pretty much just blew that off. And so, you know, there's a competing interest here. Is the United States going to be the leader in, artificial intelligence development, or are they going to let China do that? I think, obviously, guys like Larry Fink and, and Mark Zuckerberg and the other titans of big tech here in the United States, are like like you said, Chris, they're greedy.
Jim Lakely:They want money. They want to get filthy rich. When they say 1,000,000,000,000 of investment when Larry Fink says there's gonna be 1,000,000,000,000 of dollars invested in this, they want to be part of that. Mhmm. Somebody who is right now in the early stages of developing, artificial intelligence could be the world's first personal trillionaire.
Jim Lakely:It's probably if it's gonna happen, it's gonna happen out of that industry. And so, you know, there was a time in this country where it wouldn't be we wouldn't be having this discussion, 50 years ago or, like, you know, the United States cranked up our industrial might to save the western world from Nazi from the Nazis in World War 2. Right? We didn't give one second thought to how that, energy was produced. We just knew we could produce it and would produce it and and cranked it up and got going.
Jim Lakely:In the seventies, in the eighties, it was kind of the same way. And now here we have Larry Fink staying at a WEF Forum of all places that, we are short power and emphasizing the fact that we cannot get the energy we need from these intermittent sources. And so I'm glad they're speaking out like this. I have some faith. I'm usually the the, the house cynic on this podcast.
Jim Lakely:But I have some faith that as the American people start paying more attention to this, they'll start wondering, hey. Hey. How come if if if you can't do AI with intermittent power, I can't live my life with intermittent power either. We can't live our lives with brownouts and rolling blackouts and all this other nonsense and having the energy cost 10 times as what it should. So we're all gonna get that good that good cheap energy now.
Jim Lakely:So that's and so, you know, it may not be a
Chris Talgo:I'm afraid. Are right.
Jim Lakely:Moment, but it should be a wake up call.
H. Sterling Burnett:Jim and Chris are right. It should it should be a wake up call. And it is about money. And more importantly, I think about power, them living their lives and telling us how to live ours because they know best. But remember, you're talking about these trillions of dollars.
H. Sterling Burnett:You think that money is gonna come from him and his people? No. No. No. No.
H. Sterling Burnett:No. Wind and solar exist solely because of government support.
Chris Talgo:Sure.
H. Sterling Burnett:Government subsidies, government mandates. And if that goes away, mister BlackRock and all the others will move to other things, investments because that money dries up in the private sector as soon as the government support goes away. Right. That's why they have been so all in on wind and solar is because environmentalists, democrats are almost a wholly owned subsidiary of the radical environmental movement, and they have changed policy to push radical wind and solar mandates and subsidies. You you talk about the the the trillion the the, you know, the multibillion, $1,000,000,000,000,000 dollar inflation reduction act, you know, laughingly called even Biden admits it wasn't about inflation.
H. Sterling Burnett:They're spending right now. They're spending $32,000,000 per charger that I can put in my home for $600. Mhmm.
Chris Talgo:But still in this,
H. Sterling Burnett:you know, who's cashing on that? People like BlackRock and the others. That's government money. And they're following that, and they're pushing it because they don't have to put their money into it. Exactly.
H. Sterling Burnett:Putting their money into.
Chris Talgo:This goes back to the Obama administration and his so called, you know, stimulus infrastructure act where, you know, he was subsidizing, subsidizing, you know, battery 123 and Solyndra. And what happened to those companies? They went bankrupt because because here's why, though. It's so simple. Because they are they are just getting, federal contracts and just getting, you know, just showered with money.
Chris Talgo:There's no free market. There's no incentive for them to actually take this technology and make it applicable.
H. Sterling Burnett:Sadly, Chris I'm sorry.
Chris Talgo:No. No. I was just gonna say that, you know, like, it we when you think back to it, like, in the early 1900, the government didn't say, Henry Ford, here's, you know, $500,000,000. Go build us a car. They just they just let all these entrepreneurs do their thing.
Chris Talgo:And then whoever had the best idea, they were like, alright. I guess your your idea is the one we're gonna go with. We should have that exact same strategy applied to your energy.
H. Sterling Burnett:You're right. But let me say this. Let me say this. I don't wanna just blame Obama. It goes back farther than Obama.
Chris Talgo:I know that.
H. Sterling Burnett:It goes back to Bush, the second Bush.
Chris Talgo:Yeah. I mean, we
H. Sterling Burnett:You know, his energy act, it started giving the subsidies and giving the kilowatt hour subsidies. That happened under him, and that happened under Republicans. They're equal opportunity offenders on this energy stuff. If you look at these Republicans, you look at these Republicans, not a single one of them, not a single one voted for the inflation reduction act. Now there's a push to roll back the green subsidies and the inflation and reduction act.
H. Sterling Burnett:About 30 of them are saying, no. No. No. Not the green subsidies that that our state is getting. Let those are good green
Donald Kendal:subsidies. Of course.
Chris Talgo:Why is the federal government involved in in in the in the energy industry at all? I mean, I Or
Donald Kendal:or any industry for that matter. But so let's let's, let let's let's look at the future here. So like I mentioned before, AI and all these emerging technology is not going anywhere. If anything, we as a society are gonna be growing in our in our appetite for energy intensive innovation. So the demand for power is going to increase.
Donald Kendal:So the question for some is whether or not wind and solar would be able to replace that power needed for modern society as well as keep up with the rising demand. That's not my question. Personally, I think that's laughable. To me, the question is whether or not we're gonna embrace nuclear power in an effort to keep up with the demand for energy. I've lost hope in, nuclear fusion playing any role in this conversation for the next 15 years.
Donald Kendal:Maybe it'll be a thing in 20 years, but even then, the time to scale that up would probably take another decade or 2, before that starts playing any sort of role and kind of enter, America's energy composition. So, I'm gonna ask Sterling to put on your kind of prediction hat here and tell me what you think the energy composition of America is gonna look like, you know, maybe 10, 15 years from now.
H. Sterling Burnett:Well, I'm just gonna go with the IEA's, the International Energy Agency's numbers. Currently, power, not just electricity, but power, is about 80% fossil fuels. And what do they predict it will be in 2050? 80% fossil fuels.
Donald Kendal:Okay.
H. Sterling Burnett:Regardless of what the stupid United States may do, the rest of the world's not following our lead. China's building coal plants every week. India is adding coal and expanding coal mines. The developing world is gonna demand more power. And the majority of that power, will come from fossil fuels.
H. Sterling Burnett:Now in the United States, the question is, do we have leadership that will finally say they're gonna put America first? There's a possibility in this next election. Now we we had those for 4 years. Our power output, our domestic energy production became energy independent in the sense of, we did import energy, but we exported, actually, more than we imported. Will we go back to that?
H. Sterling Burnett:It's possible. Will it be sustained? Well, you know, if Chris is right, and I hope he is, that the people just say no more. We're not gonna watch China prosper. We're not gonna watch India prosper.
H. Sterling Burnett:We're not gonna let Brazil prosper and the United States going to decline. We want people who do put America's energy future first. You know, we haven't mentioned this. Everyone oh, McCall is out there saying more oil was produced under us than at any time in history. That's true.
H. Sterling Burnett:On private and state lands, because energy prices are so high, private producers are out there producing. But you know what? This year is the 1st year that we have not issued a federal lease sale since 1958. That's on Kamala and Biden. Now will we continue that or will we go a different direction?
H. Sterling Burnett:I'd like to say we go a different direction, but it would require keeping currently planned, shuttered coal plants online. I think it would require going back to those that have recently shuttered and are still available for restarting, bringing them back online. But that means convincing to to me, that means Heartland's gotta win the war for hearts and minds on the climate science. We're fighting it. We're fighting it every day.
H. Sterling Burnett:But it because it it means convincing people that the world doesn't come to an end if the temperature rises by a degree. The data shows it doesn't.
Chris Talgo:I think we're winning that battle because when you look at coals, what are the top concerns? What is the number one concern for people? Economy, the cost of living, the cost of, you know, gasoline. So I think that we are at a tipping point. I think I think we are at that, like, pain pleasure threshold where the pain caused by these environmental regulations and this whole climate change, you know, industrial complex, the the the virtue signaling is is is not doing enough for them.
Chris Talgo:They're saying, wait a second. Who cares about, you know, getting a thumbs up from my neighbor about, you know, being a good greenie when I can't literally afford to feed my kids or whatever the the case is. So I I I think that we are at that point, and I I I think that in the, you know, decades to come, the American people are gonna demand, wait a second. Stop with this stupid energy transition. Put us back on, you know, on on base load power.
Chris Talgo:Let us live our lives. Let us be prosperous. And I think that even in Europe, I think they're starting to kinda get that that message, especially in places like Germany who were the, you know, the the front runners in all of this stuff.
Donald Kendal:Yeah. The one one I I've talked to a a a couple of energy experts about nuclear, and, you know, they they tell me that, like, oh, yeah. Nuclear would make a great source for baseload energy, but because nuclear is kind of difficult to ramp up and down, based on, like, the kind of the customer fluctuations throughout the day, that it needs to be supplemented by, like, another energy source. Most, like, the best supplement to it would be, like, natural gas. And to me, that sounds like a great combination to usher in, like, a new technological age.
Donald Kendal:And, of course, I'm not for, like, shutting down existing fossil fuels or prohibiting more fossil fuels for being developed in the future. I really think the market should kind of dictate all of that. But, yeah, I mean, a nuclear powered world supplemented by natural gas, I mean, that that sounds that sounds pretty good. And I just wonder and maybe this I'll just leave this question kinda hanging out there. We don't necessarily have to answer it.
Donald Kendal:But I just wonder, like, how this would look politically moving forward if society wanted to kinda lurch in the direction of nuclear power. Like, do you think the left kind of, like, gets on board, or are they gonna change their tune? Or because they have a long history of undermining nuclear power. My my favorite quote when it comes to this issue is the Sierra Club. They had this on their website for decades, or at least, like, 15 years that, the Sierra Club opposes the licensing, construction, and operation of new nuclear reactors utilizing the fission process, pending development of adequate national and global policies to curb energy overuse and unnecessary economic growth.
Donald Kendal:And I point that out because it just shows that they're against it, not because of any dangers or anything like that, just like purely from an anti humanist perspective.
Chris Talgo:What is unnecessary economic growth? I would love
Donald Kendal:for them to answer that question about what that is.
H. Sterling Burnett:Because they put look. They push they push right now, they're all pushing negative growth. They're they're pushing they're saying we can't live the consumers' lifestyles. And remember, Greenpeace was founded. Greenpeace was founded and formed specifically to fight nuclear power.
Donald Kendal:Yeah. Chris, I know I know what that is. Unnecessary economic growth is what stores in my area experience when my wife go shopping. Boom. Yeah.
Donald Kendal:Alright. Let's, let's move on to the last topic here. We only have a few minutes.
Chris Talgo:That's funny.
Donald Kendal:We're only 39 days away from the election. I'm hearing conflicting things when it comes to the race. There's all these rumors all over the place that the Harris campaign is scrambling. There are suggestions that public polls are supposed supposedly way overstating her support, whereas internal polls are suggesting a far more bleak, outlook for the Kamala Harris campaign. But if you go to sites like Drudge Report, it makes it seem like Trump is floundering.
Donald Kendal:I'm not really sure what's going on with Drudge Report. I don't know if he's got some bad blood with Trump or something like that.
Chris Talgo:Big time.
Donald Kendal:It's like every day. It's
Jim Lakely:Yeah.
Donald Kendal:Some anti Trump thing. But, Chris, I'm gonna go to you. What is the truth as far as you can tell when it comes to the stay in the race with just 39 days left?
Chris Talgo:So I'm gonna base this on where the campaigns are going and the nuclear policy average and, Nate Silver's, 538. So if you look at the real clear policy average in terms of the key swing states Trump is leading, that is a very good sign. He is, it seems like he is thinking about expanding the map because he is still going to the key swing states, but he's also branching out in some other places that were not necessarily on the electoral map a month or so ago. And Kamala actually has not, made a public appearance since, what was it, last Friday? So she's gonna be at the border tomorrow, but there's been a lot of chatter on MSNBC and CNN and then these other stations saying, where is she?
Chris Talgo:Why is she not having public events? What is going on here? And there's speculation that the reason why she's not is because the polling, the internal polling is really bad, and they are, they they are struggling to to come up with a plan to, have an electoral victory. So I think that that is pretty telling. You know, I I still think, like I said, you know, last week, and I'd like I've been saying for a very long time, I think it's gonna come down to the big three, economy, immigration, and crime.
Chris Talgo:And on all three of those measures, when you just ask the voters, especially in the key swing states, who do you, like you know, who do you trust more on those three issues? Trump wins on all three of those on, you know, in on, double digit, you know, margins. So I still think that there's this this notion that when people, asked are asked bipolar, hey. You're gonna vote for Trump or, Harris? There still is that, you know, 5% of people who are just not gonna say that they're gonna vote for Trump.
Chris Talgo:So when you look at the polls from 2016 and from 2020, keep in mind that at this point in time, here we are now about a month out from election, 5 weeks or so. Hillary Clinton had a double digit national lead. Joe Biden had a double digit national lead. Kamala Harris does not have a double digit national lead. Based on the polls, you know, she might be up a point or 2 or Trump might be up a point or 2.
Chris Talgo:In the key swing states, both in 2016 and 2020, at this point in time, Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton had near double digit leads in all of those swing states. That is not happening right now. So I think at this point in time and, yes, we still have 39 days, so a lot could happen. I think at this point in time, it's looking very good for Trump, and the betting markets are still putting, their money on Trump, and Nate Silver's, model is still favoring Trump more than 60%.
Donald Kendal:Jim, I'm gonna save you for last. I wanna go to Sterling and your thoughts, from your perspective with 39 days left remaining before the election.
H. Sterling Burnett:I think the election is Trump's to lose. He he has the better message if he'll stick to it. Chris is right. The 3 main topics should be the economy, which he wins on. You know, his constant refrain should be the same one that Reagan said during his second elections.
H. Sterling Burnett:Are you better off now than you were 4 years ago? Look, Trump, I think, would be present today, had not some nefarious stuff possibly happened, but also, more importantly, had COVID not happened. We don't have COVID. I don't think we're gonna have a COVID thing in the last 39 days. So it's his to lose if but he he will win or he should win if he sticks to the economy, immigration, and crime, all of which are winning issues for him.
H. Sterling Burnett:If he can quit being distracted by the minutiae and the backbiting and quit acting like a 12 year olds on social media, responding to every insult, He should win this race handily because she is possibly the worst, most dangerous candidate in my lifetime.
Jim Lakely:And
H. Sterling Burnett:Right. Believe me, I got into politics longer ago than anyone, but maybe Jim Lakeley was born when McGovern, ran, and he thought it would be a good idea to go 6 days a week school. I said, this man must be defeated no matter what. Yeah. Being in, you know, being in school at the time, I didn't wanna go to school on Saturdays.
H. Sterling Burnett:So he he can win, he should win. I don't care what polls show you. Because as Chris rightly pointed out, polls showed, Hillary was way up. Polls showed, you know, polls have repeatedly been wrong. And pollers are constantly surprised on election day when they come out wrong, and then they try and explain it away.
H. Sterling Burnett:So polls don't don't affect me. I I I think it he can win and he should win, but he can lose. Look. It it depends on the tack he takes in
Donald Kendal:the last 39 days. Jim, take us home. What are your thoughts on this?
Jim Lakely:Well, you know, to talk about all these polls, I mean, I was I was thinking about this the other day. And if you remember the 2020 election, who could forget it? But I I remember seeing some data where it showed that no president no one running for president has ever won this state or this county or these places. These were all bellwether areas in the country and that in in anybody's lifetime, anybody who won all of those things was elected president every single time going back a 100 years, except for 2020. Somehow, despite doing all of that, checking off all of those boxes that that say this person will be the next president, it didn't work out that way.
Jim Lakely:As, as k one in our chat, put in there, it's like it's not, it's not who votes, it's who it's who counts the votes. That's what Joe Stalin said, and it, it applies all the time. But having all that said, I'm back to my, my resident cynic, hat again here. Gallup poll. Gallup is not exactly a, a republican friendly polling outfit.
Jim Lakely:Right? Mhmm. And so they did a poll that just released it, I think, earlier this week. And one of the things they measured, all these what they call proxies for that you know, proxies for voter intention that tend to predict who is going to do the next president of the United States. One of the things that they poll for is party affiliation or leaning.
Jim Lakely:Right? And so, Democrats for 20 years, 30 years, maybe 40 years, more people are registered as Democrats than are registered as Republicans nationwide. Well, Gallup did a poll and they just released it last week. And at the current moment, more people are identifying as Republicans or Republican leaning than Democrat or Democrat leaning. Now, when the Democrats have had, you know, had that on their side, they won the presidential elections in 92, 96, 2008, 2012, and again in 2020.
Jim Lakely:The two times that they that, you know, that where they still had an advantage, but that advantage was narrower than normal was 2004 and 2016, 2 elections that Republicans had won. And so now so if if Gallup is showing that more people are affiliating as republicans or republican leaning than democrat leaning, that means it should be an enormous advantage for Donald Trump, that this country is actually going to elect him in a landslide if though if that kind of a harbinger or that kind of a, you know, of a tell by Gallup is, is correct. And then they run down the whole thing. You know? In, who who is better able to handle the most important problem?
Jim Lakely:Gallup asked. Republicans. 46% to 41%. Are you satisfied with the direction of the country? 22% say no and blame Democrats.
Jim Lakely:And all these things. And so every single one lined up that the voters of, of America prefer Republicans on that. That should and and I'm sure the Democrats and Kamala's, campaign has seen this, and I'm sure that they are concerned. I will not rest easy until, I guess, 4 days after the election when they finally tell us who win, who who won. I guess we'll discover then.
Jim Lakely:But, but, yeah, I think overall, it's, you know, I I don't like to get in the prediction game too much, but I think it probably looks better for Trump now than it did in 2016 and 2020. That is for sure. So we'll we'll just have to see how it turns out.
Donald Kendal:Yep. But, that is gonna do it. We are, nearing 12 minutes long on this episode. Not too bad by our standards, but, I do wanna thank everyone for joining us for this episode of the in the tank podcast. Join us every week for a new episode.
Donald Kendal:Those audio only listeners out there, leave a review for us on iTunes. That'd be greatly appreciated. And because you're probably catching the show on a Friday or later, join us a day earlier, Thursdays at noon CST, where we are live streaming this on Facebook and YouTube and Rumble and Axie. You can join the conversation through your comments and questions in the chat. We will show your comments on the screen.
Donald Kendal:We will address your questions on the fly. You can also support the show by not using the super chat functionality. We have been demonetized on YouTube. So you can, you can help out the show by going to heartland.org/inthetank, and donate directly to the show. That way, YouTube doesn't take a 30 cut.
Donald Kendal:You could also help the show by not spending a dollar, by spending a couple of seconds hitting that like button, sharing this content, subscribing if you haven't already, or just leaving a comment under the video. All those things help break through those big tech algorithms and print content like this from being shown to more people. Jim Lakely, where can the fine people find you?
Jim Lakely:You can find me at jlakely on Twitter, at heartlandinst on Twitter, and always visit heartland.org.
Donald Kendal:Fantastic. Chris Talgo, what do you have to pitch today?
Chris Talgo:Heartland.org. Lot of good stuff up there. Please go check it out.
Donald Kendal:Fantastic. And h sterling Burnett, I already know that we can find you tomorrow, Fridays, noon CST right here on the same channels and all of that. But
H. Sterling Burnett:Yep. You've got
Jim Lakely:a whole bunch
Donald Kendal:of other work that, that you're always working on. Where can people go to find what you are currently got going?
H. Sterling Burnett:Sign up for climate change weekly. Go to Climate Realism every day. You want the facts on climate change? Go to Climate at a Glance, and, just follow our op eds and things like that and support us. And if you want to, you can search me out on Facebook, Sterling and Maria.
H. Sterling Burnett:That's that's me.
Donald Kendal:Oh, fantastic. And I also wanna thank Andy, producer in the background, playing Johnny on the spot in today's episode. Thank you very much, Andy. Nice webcam utility screen popping up there. But thank you all for tuning in to this week, and we'll talk to you next time.
Jim Lakely:Turn that off.