Well whiskey, come and take my pay the moneys my ry. Oh why why think alone when you can drink it all? In with Ricochet's three Whiskey Happy Hour, join your bartenders, Steve Hayward, John You, and the international woman of Mystery, Lucretia.
Where this lapstappen live? It ain't you easy on the should tap?
Got agive me.
And let that whiskey blow.
Well, hi everybody, and welcome to the three Whiskey Happy Hour or one Whiskey Short This week, though John u is away traveling.
So it's just me and Lucretia.
Although we're gonna change things up a bit later in this episode. I'm gonna drop in an interview I did recently with Robert Brice, the Great Energy Guru. So today I am mostly just gonna ask what's on Lucretia's mind. I'm gonna take a chance and react to it. But first of all, how are you, dear? How has this week been for you?
I've had better. I'll just leave it at that.
Well, okay, that's it. Don't be so cheerful for everybody.
Now.
It's been another week where I can't keep up.
I mean, I keep trying to chase, after this, that and the other thing, and things changed too fast, and I've been on the move too. It's the last week of classes, so at final exams essays to grade. Commencement was Friday morning, so I was in my robe and my gown and in my hat and all that. The regalia, that's what we're supposed to call it, right, I was in all that. So any case, I'm behind on things. What's on your mind this week?
So, okay, you accuse me of being all grumpy, I'm going to start off with a happy story. What I think you ought to be a happy story. So while then Holland and the other scumbag Democrats are traveling down to El Salvador to worry about a wife beating sex trafficking gang banger. The Amish who are interesting because for the first time they really came out and forced to vote.
Thanks to our friend Scott Pressler otherwise known as the Persistence, got them to vote to make them realize what it is they are missing out on in terms of, you know, protecting what they care about in the religious freedom. That he convinced them that Trump was actually in favor of
their of religious freedom. Anyway, they've gone down in force. Thousand, at least a thousand of them have just moved to down to North Carolina to help try to rebuild small towns that are more or less being ignored by by the government, even by Trump and whatever it is that
is left of FEMA after Doge. I'm not really quite sure even North Carolina Governor to some extent, they're just they're just not paying any attention to these small towns that are just hopelessly devastated from Hurricane Helen, and they're just volunteering their time to build the rebuild the town.
Well, so that this now suddenly I understand a question I got this morning when I was doing a Ricochet podcast. It was came in from a listener and I didn't I mean, I thought I understood it, but I didn't, because it made reference to thousands of volunteers coming to rural North Carolina to help rebuilding towns, and then asked, is there anything like that going on in Los Angeles
in the aftermath of the terrible fires there? And I'm thinking, oh, now, I'm thinking it must have been at least partially in reference to the story you're bringing up. By the way, what connects these two I think is this. There was a story in the news I did catch sometime this week that a saw mill at the communal saw mill at the Amish have in one of their communities in what Pennsylvania, Ohio wherever burned down.
And they rebuilt the whole thing in four days.
And by the way, I don't I you know, the almost don't use technology. I'm not sure if their sawmills are all hand tools or whether they might allow a power.
So I don't know.
But the point is is they do very sophisticated, would work have for centuries, right, But the fact that the damage can rebuild a large structure that is industrial and from their point of view, in four days, I should tell us something about what's wrong with the world. And so what I told the listener on Ricochet was well as far as I know, And last I checked ten days ago, the Greater Los Angeles area had issued all of four permits four to rebuild houses that have burned down.
But meanwhile, I said, volunteers, forget it. They won't let any volunteers in to help with the demolition work. I was in a part of Pasadena up by the mountains, middle of the week, and I saw lots and lots of burned out houses where nothing's happened, nothing's been demolished.
And here we are three months into all this. And I understand there are some legitimate health concerns and potentially toxic residue in some of these sites, but for goodness sake, we ought to have some common sense here and either allow volunteers, expedite the process, speed things up.
I don't know what, but it is ridiculous. The Amish wouldn't what to do. They'd have la up and going again.
We'd need probably all the Amish to do it such a big area. But right we can learn a few things because I don't think they go through a long permit review process.
When the Amish rebuilds.
They don't. And I suppose it's true that those small towns in North Carolina are being ignored to such an extent that they're actually not having to deal with those kinds of things. But I sort of want to go one step deeper than all of that to Steve. I mean, it's true enough that they're building those tiny houses, you know, to get people out of tents, the ones that they can put it very very quickly and get people with
a roof over their heads. In the meantime, Democrats again are worrying about gang bangers, due process and all that other nonsense. But why these people doing it? And I'm going to quote one person, a volunteer said, our hearts just felt drawn to come and help people in this area. It fills my heart with joy watching people getting their lives back again. So they're doing it out of the you know, my fundamental belief the most important virtue is gratitude.
They're actually doing it out of a sense of gratitude for what they have and helping their fellow not even you know, the Amish live quite a ways away from North Carolina, so they have to be experienced some experiencing, if not hardship, at least some inconveniences themselves. But it's just a wonderful story. I wish we saw more of those things. And you know, we could have a long discussion.
We've had this discussion before about why it is that faith based organizations not being subsidized by the federal government are actually the best way to get charity work done, to get you know, to to fix the homeless problem. So because they can do so with a view to the virtues that are necessary to make it work. Well, they're not in it for the money, all of all of those other things. Anyway, does my feel good story of the week?
Yeah, well I can add to that that.
I think, you know, there are two or three sort of I think big topics just generally floating in the world that nobody, nobody in the media ever bought us to even inquire about. And I think there are several books can be written about faith based organizations, people like
the AMIGE. I mean, I remember hearing some stories about faith based groups that went to New Orleans after Katrina, which is what twenty years ago now, and it was a mixed experience because they were trying to these are sort of more conventional, you know, not the amass are pretty unconventional. Let us just stipulate that, right, that's not
a controversial statement. But they tried to do things within the system, you know, go through the permitent planning process, and it was very frustrating because you know, New Orleans is pretty corrupt as we know. But I do think that somebody could write some great books about that. We hear people talk talk about it a lot, but I think the stories it could be told and data to be gathered for the social scientists would be quite remarkable. And related to that, yeah, I might say the flip
side of the story. As you know, I have heard just over the years, I've heard stories of people who got out of college. They're all idealistic liberals, they studied social work, they went to work for the social service bureaucracy. To make a long story short, they ended up raging conservatives from the experience because they saw how horrible their bureaucracy is. They saw how the welfare state actually degrades
the very people that are trying to help. And I've thought there'd be a great book to be written about disaffected social workers because I think their stories would be extraordinary and added out all up, and the people who stay behind are just time servers. And you know, I don't need to say more about that. I think everyone understands the point of that. But like I say, I've heard enough of those stories to think that would make
a great book. So pair those together, real social work by people who actually have their heads on straight, because the other heads looking above and the dysfunctional social work of our bureaucratic welfare state.
Yes, okay, you can talk about that forever. Okay, my worst story of the week, and this one's tough, really tough. Probably hmm. I'm probably going to go with the Supreme Court oral arguments that happened this week out of a case out of Maryland where parents were having to go to the Supreme Court to have the right to pull
their children out of school. And these were pre kindergarten through the fifth grade age school children in public schools to when the English classes were teaching puppy pride, and basically they had literature. And you can't see my scare scare quotes, but I definitely mean that in scare quotes, literature that promotes the idea of transsexuality, trans identity, whatever, mental illness, and it's grooming children to take a three year old and teach them about leather and domination. And
everybody heard the story. But the thing that I told Steve, if I'd have had time this week, I would have written a through the looking glass story Nixie and I looking out the window at the snow, but I live in Arizona, so there's no snow. But my kitten becomes the Red Queen and I become the white Queen and lo and behold, we live in this world where instead of the Supreme Court saying what the hell is wrong with you, school board members thinking that you should somehow
bring this filth, in this smut into the classroom. Why aren't you teaching English? Why? Real English? Why aren't you teaching reading, math? All the skills that students no longer have when they go to public schools. We're talking about whether or not parents have a right to pull their children out of school to be notified in for the first place, and then to pull their children out of
school when they're going to be taught lessons about transsexual identity. Well, world do we live in, Steve Well, I mean through the looking glass?
Yeah, well, now, I mean two or three observations. One is, this case came out of Montgomery County, Maryland. And for listeners who don't know Montgomery County is it's very left. It's very rich left, it's very elite left. It's it's Marin County, it's Cambridge, Massachusetts. It's places like that. And the fact that the case came out of there, and by the way, isn't one of the parties. It's a like mock mood versus school district or something like that.
I think there's a population of Ethiopian, right, I hope I don't get it wrong. I think it's Ethiopian Christians, and then I forget about Muslims also exactly, not exclusively. They make the group of parents that right.
And I actually remember talking to some Montgomery County parent and some Zoom meeting I was on too, three four years ago, and like you know, these things are crazy here.
And remember point number two.
Just a point of fact is there had been an opt out and the county had sought to end it.
And that's what brought the case along.
Right, So at the county, the school board, well the school board.
But I think it might have been the county. I'm not sure it was the county school board or what.
But anyway, well, so what happens is what became clear in the oral argument, which I only heard some snippets of, is that the justices, especially Justice Gorsicic, who you might thought would be the weakest on this since he did that crazy Bosstoc decision, he clearly had read these books and was asking the lawyers defending it about details from the books by the way. Did any news reporter ever read the books and report the content of the No,
of course not. There were no news reports about that, and that was much more embarrassing for the people trying to defend it. It was pretty clear they had an awkward case to make, and Gorstich actually was Kavanaugh who said, you have a tough case to make, don't you write it?
Well? They even got Alina Kagan, who's the only really truly intelligent person on the liberal side of the court, to come out in favor, saying essentially that you don't have to be apparent with religious convictions to find this offensive. Yeah, the right to opt your child child out of this shit. What I heard them say that she said seemed pretty strong. But the most amazing part of all of it was KITTENINGI.
I knew you were going to go there next, said moron.
And you know what. One of my more popular tweets on x was that, what is it you would expect from a person whose only qualifications for the court were the color of her skin and the number of chromosomes. I mean, we know that was why she was appointed. We have seen the effects of her idiocy because she was the court's affirmative action appointment with you know, but what she said is actually, in some ways even more appalling than the fact that she's even on the court.
And that is that, well, if they don't like it, they can take their kids somewhere else. In other words, all of a sudden, Kteenji is in favor of school choice.
Oh that's what I wanted to notice about it, because you know the Edgocrats, they hate school choice.
They also hate homeschooling.
And I think even more I think Jackson said your parents could homeschool their kids. Well, that's not going to go down well with Randy Winegarten. Would you say Randy Winegarten for us, because I'll bet you'll do it well.
No, I don't call her Randy Winegarten. I call her the world's worst female impersonator.
I should have guessed. I thought you were gonna get Randyer.
So anyway, Yeah, No, I think that shows you how confused, to put it mildly, Justice Jackson.
Is confused, is a nice way to put it. Steve, I know, well, I'm blazing more is more like it.
I'm in a good mood, as I often am on a Friday evening, even though I haven't got my whiskey out yet because I'm running behind.
Well, all right, because you're traveling, Steve, I do want to really quickly as our friend. I want to because I think it would hurt his feelings if we didn't at least bring it up. Our good friend, John, whom we missed terribly is was not able to join us today but because of scheduling conflicts. But he did have
a piece in the New York Post. I posted it on x It's already gotten a lot of good feedback Steve about the Supreme Court agreeing to hear the birthright citizenship universal injunction appeal of the Supreme ecume of the Trump administration. The reason it's interesting he doesn't go into any of the facts of the case around birthright citizenship itself.
John does not. What he does is explain in both constitutional, legal, and I would say even political terms to a great extent, why it is that judges should not federal district court judges should not be issuing these injunctions, these universal or national injunctions, that there's no basis for them in the Constitution. That and I will anticipate the end of it for everybody. But I do encourage maybe Steve can even link to
it all notes. I encourage people to read it because it will explain things in it in a nice simple way. Because I get a lot of questions about this, Steve, why can they do this? How can they do this? Well, according to John, they can't. But it also explains what's going to be happening when the Court issues a decision about this in May, and how far it is the
Court is likely to go. They're not likely necessarily to take on the birthright citizenship case on the merits of that particular question, but they are likely to take on the case of the universal injunction that stopped the Trumpet administration's enforcement of not recognizing birthright citizenship by not issuing passports, et cetera, across the whole the whole nation. And you know, if it's gotten out of hand, yes, absolutely gotten out
of hand. We did have one more case. I should mention really quickly that you may or may not have the time to pay a lot of attention to Steve about the executive order mandating that that you have to in federal elections. You have to ascertain the whether or not a registrate registrant at a registrant is a citizen of the United States, and they actually got not only a lefty liberal federal court judge to issue an injunction, but also actually a Trumpet administration excuse me, a Trump
appointee judge, and hers was entirely procedural. They want to mention that there's more than one person out there, arguing that this is a typical forty chess on Trump's part, because even though they expected this kind of thing. Of course, Democrats want illegals to vote, they want illegals to be counted in the census. We all understand that this puts
the pressure back on Congress to do something. In Congress, this ability to do something about this is a little bit limited to by the fact that the Constitution still leaves voter requirements, voter all of the things that have to do with voting, even in federal elections up to
the state legislatures to decide. But under the fifteenth Amendment, I think we've seen evidence that Congress can issue certain laws pursuant to the enforcement clause of the fifteenth Amendment, and maybe this is something that they can do there, certainly to keep citizens from non citizens from voting in elections seems to me to be within the purview of enforcing FIFE.
But yeah, I mean it looks like I mean, even if the birth rights citizenship case and then the voting rights uh citizen case you mentioned, even if they're purely procedural, they then set up an enforcement action that will force the courts to have to take it up on the merits.
And maybe that's next term.
But you follow what I'm saying, right is, you know they have to say no, a judge couldn't issue an injunction against this, Uh, we can't, you know. And then the Trump administration actually refuses to issue citizenship to someone an illegal alien born here or born to illegal aliens here, and then that person sues and then they have to rule on the question.
So you know, I don't know.
That's unfortunately the way things go.
Uh.
I wish things.
I wish things could go faster and let me do it this way. One thing that trump men is stration did late in the week was declare that they want to have a procedure in place to grant permits for the opening of new minds and mine processing and essentially refining industrial operations. Permits that would be granted within twenty.
Eight days of initial application.
Specifically for raw rare earth minerals.
I'm not sure if it's rare. I think it's a lot of stuff rare earth minerals, oil and gas. I think it's that runs across the board. They're going to emphasize rare earth minerals. But the point is is that normally, you know, if you said twenty eight months, people would say, wow, that's optimistic. Twenty eight days is astounding, and I think I'm going to use that as our excuse to segue to my conversation. I did a few weeks back with
my favorite energy guru, who is Robert Brice. And I'm sure many of our listeners may know of him or read his work or maybe even read his substack. But I always have fun talking with Robert, and he shovels out some good dirt on the left on our conversation.
So let's break here.
We'll talk to Robert for the little bit, and then we will come back at the end, you and I and do some of our usual ending for volities. Well, Robert, before we get onto the latest news and energy, I do want to do a bit of origin story because I'm not sure, just like it. And you have an interesting background sure, which I think is just fun. I mean I know bits and pieces of it. But born and raised in Oklahoma, that's right, But then college in Texas.
But tell us a little bit about how you got into a journalism and then be energy. Sure.
Well, Tulsa is my hometown, born and raised, long and deep roots in Oklahoma on my mother and my father's side.
Proud to be from Oklahoma.
You know, I thought about why I became a journalist, why I became a reporter, and a long time ago. I well, as a very brief bit of backstory, I always read the newspaper.
When I was a kid. We took two in Tulsa.
At that time when I was growing up, there were two newspapers. There was a morning paper in an afternoon paper. The tuls Tribune was the afternoon paper, and when the morning paper was the Tulsa World, And my folks took both of them. So I read the paper every day, and I always read Duonsbury every day, right, And I read the horoscope, and I always read the op eds, and just it's always interested in newspapers. I like the thingness of the paper right, the thingness of the thing,
as I'd like to say. And then I edited my high school newspaper at Bishop Kelly High School in Tulsa, go commets. And then when I went to you know, finally settled at the University of Texas, where I eventually got my degree. I you know, I worked for the Day, wrote for the Daily Texan. But when I was in Austin, I'm still in Austin now forty years later, there was a woman there named Marian Winnick, and she had some sid something about writing, said, what you write about does it?
You don't choose it, it chooses you.
And there's I think that in thinking back on that, in some ways that's kind of true that I grew up around the energy business in Tulsa. My dad was in the insurance business, not the energy business, but he knew a lot of people who were in the energy business. And so and you know, I had a quail when I was a kid. I hunted in the oil fields. I knew what that was about, and so it was always from a young age I was always interested in it and interested in the scale of it and the
size of it. And my dad's friends were working all over the world, and you know Iran and in Panama, and you know it was part of just being in that, just being around it, and so kind of had an intuitive feel for it, or just a proximity feel rather. And then once I started writing for the Chronicle, I was also freelancing and found that I could sell articles at that time. You could be a freelance writer at that time, and I could sell articles based on energy reporting.
And so one thing led to another, and here I am.
Right, so.
Now let's see I want to get to your first book.
But sure, well actually let's do that right now. So you're working for was it the Austin Chronicle? Was that it? Or well, yeah, somebody else? Right?
So I wrote for the Austin after I finished writing at the Text and I graduated from UT Austin. And then I graduated and I got a job working for the Austin Chronicle. For get this, I would it was a bi weekly at tabloid, and you asked to get paid and they would measure your copy and we were paid a dollar a column inch.
Wow.
So the editor would get out the ruler, Lewis Black, I remember this clearly still to this day. He would get a metal ruler out and measure how many column inches you wrote, and he would write your check, and so I'd get a check for forty five dollars or sixty dollars or something like that.
The columns were narrow well.
And then later, you know, I got more formalized and got you know, a living wage there. And then I got hired by a technology magazine called Interactive Week in early two thousand and one at double the pay. I thought I was on easy Street. And that job lasted for about nine months. But while writing for them, I wrote about Enron and that led to writing pipe drains.
Well, see, that's the thing is I think what you told me is the part of its fun is you.
Got the con try to write the book before Rod imploded.
That's right. So talk about great timing, right and yeah, and you were just be in the right place right time.
You know.
I was in the Inron building in July of two thousand and one, and at that time, now we look back and we think about online business and the rest of it. Inron online was, for years, until the rise of Amazon, the biggest online medium or online marketplace ever created. They were transacting tens of billions of dollars online on Inron online.
Now it was all you know, based on a very shaky foundation, as we learned later.
But so I was in the Inron building talking to Ron people at Enron Broadband in the summer of two thousand and one and was told when I didn't told, I told them I was interviewing this guy. I vividly remembered. I said, you're selling broadband. I said, I don't understand what you're doing here. So he told me, and I said, okay, one more time.
Just give me one way.
I still did it, and the third time I said, look, you know, I'm an average or sub average intelligence. One more time here because I don't understand what you could. And the answer was, well, you're just too dumb. Yeah, he didn't say it exactly that way, but I'm too.
Smart for you.
You don't understand how complicated this is. You know, I've got other things to do. You can you can leave now.
Well, I mean that's the way I feel about blockchain these days. I really don't understand how this works. People explain it, and I'd say, it's just like, could you explain that.
Again, please, It's just it's just a ledger with yeah right, yeah, no, I'm I'm the bitcoined stuff.
We're probably both too old for that world.
But in any case, I mean so you by the way, I mean, I always heard later from some people who worked at Enron that some of that trading was, if not phony, it was trading with themselves to run the volume. So it was artificial and sure, and and then you know, some of the trading desks and floors were either empty or nobody was doing anything. It was all a Potempkin village. And I guess, to be slightly fair, they anticipated that this was going to boom and take off.
Often. They were going to be you know, like what Nasdaq is for stock trading. Yeah, you know, that didn't happen.
I mean, that's why they were from the Kyoto Protocol and all kinds of stupid things. They thought they were going to be the energy traders instead of energy producers.
I guess, well, and they were fully in favor of carbon trading today, right, And that was of course. They wanted to trade everything, and that was what their expertise was.
I think they were even going to trade weather futures. Oh yeah, well they were, and you can do that today.
I mean, there are derivatives on weather futures based on gas contracts, electricity contracts.
So in Ron in many ways was ahead of its time.
But I would also say that we're still living with many of the you know, the ghosts of Enron, and particularly in electricity markets, right because they were the ones who were the great advocates for this what Kenley called restructuring of the electricity markets. Well, it's interesting because now years later, when I was writing that book, I interviewed a guy named Jim wall Zel and he sent me an email just yesterday and I need to reply to it. But well, Zill worked at Houston Natural Gas and he
was an older guy at that time. He's been its mid eighties now, I guess. But anyway, when we were talking, he had left Enron when ken Lay was hired, and he said, I've seen well.
All I need to see. I'm out.
But he told me at that time, he said, you know, and this was in the early two thousands, he said, I don't you know this.
In fact, this was just after Ron failed.
But Ron had been the leader in the promotion of the deregulation of electricity markets in Texas. And he said then he said, I don't think this is good for consumers. He said, you know, monopoly utilities, Yeah, they're not the perfect beast, but I don't see how the consumer is going to fare on this.
This doesn't make any sense to me.
And now here we are, twenty five years later, and we see all across the country these areas where you've had these deregulated markets. Consumers are getting screwed now again. Monopoly utilities are not necessarily the best way to make the world work, or the best way to make the grid work, but at least there's accountability. Yeah, and so now we're running I talked to my friend Jacob Williams at Florida Municipal Power Agency the other day and he
said this. He said, look, this deregulated idea worked as long as there was excess capacity in the market, right, And now we're running out of excess capacity, and the ship's about to hit the fan and the consumer is going to get screwed again.
Yeah. Well, were we here in California certainly know this? Oh yeah, well, are the early victims of it all started here?
Right?
And then they followed that same model in Britain, they followed the same model in Texas. And in Texas it's worked a little bit better because well, look it's a different state, right, we have our own grid, we have there's a lot of open space in West Texas where you can put solar and wind, and we have super cheap natural gas where you don't have any extra land here in California. It's beautiful here, obviously a lot of
people here, but there's no extra land. And where there is some vacant land, people don't want wind turbines and solar panel right, and you're heavily you're completely dependent essentially on imported gas from other states.
And yeah, in Texas was able to build transmission line that's right, just about any place else in the country for because it's Texas.
Well.
Now, I mean one last detail on that is I think you told me once is you know the news flashes Enron is collapsing, and what you got up when in the morning to drive down to headquarters to try and talk to people something?
Oh? Sure, Well, so.
By I was fired like in early October from my job an interactive week, and so I went fishing and with a friend of mine in South Texas and then we came back and I owe and still to this day. My friend Lou Debo's who was then the editor of The Text Observer, and he'd written several books.
And I came back and listened to my phone machine.
He'd left me a message and he said, Okay, you're the perfect guy to write the book on run. He said, I've connected you with my agent. The book title will be Pipe Dreams. My agent is expecting you. He'll connect you with public affairs. It'd be a great outlet for you. You need to get started on this. And that's exactly what happened, and that was the title we used. And my agent still to this day is Dan Green, who's
been my agent the whole time. Not that I'm writing any more books, but I still call him my agent. But I was just incredibly lucky. You know, I'd been in the Enron building. I understood the kind of the mentality. I'd seen how these people think. And then I got the contract for the book before the bankruptcy. Effectively, I was a verbal contract. But on December third, two thousand and one, I left Austin at four in the morning,
three in the morning and drove to Houston. And so that Monday morning I was standing outside the Enron building talking to Enron employees as they were leaving, because they were carrying their shit out in boxes, and I was saying.
Would you talk to me? Would you talk to me? And so I met a few people that day.
In fact, you know Rob Bradley, I think he was one of the people I met that day, right, And a few others. No, most of them told me to go fuck myself, you know, and understood why right, you know, and carrying my stuff out and you want me to talk to you and I'm.
Not so, you know. Yeah, but there were a few.
But it was also the experience of just being there, right and seeing how dejected these people were, and how this was the darling company, you know, the most admired company in America, right, and for seven years in a row something like that, and went from the you know, the top of the heap to the you know, bankruptcy.
And right in a matter of months.
Well, I'm sure you've seen all the quotes that Enron was the favorite energy company of the leading environmentalists back in the late night.
Oh sure, Joe Ram Joe was like, oh, this is a different They're showing us how everything most energy company anywhere and ken Lay we love ken Lay, did we mentioned we love ken Lay? And Lay understood what the game was, right, that he saw the way to game the system and use government to his advantage.
This political capitalist it was, Yeah, what is Rob Bradley called it the political capitalist?
Yeah, yeah, political capitalism. No.
I know, Rob was pretty high up in the Public Affairs office and he used to try to persuade him out of their madness on climate and other things and didn't get you know, didn't get anywhere with it.
But he was a shocked as anybody.
You know.
He had his entire rowin kN Inn run Stock Yeah, and you know, anyway.
Like a lot of them did, right, Yeah, and you know, and that was one of the tragedies of the whole thing, was that the people and one of my I actually opened my book Pipe Dreams. Now it's hard to believe it's twenty out, twenty three years ago a woman I wish I went now so many interviews in between, but I opened with a vignette of her walking around at the Inn ron Field what.
Was then in run Field, when they had a job fair and.
She had bought Azurix stock right, which was the water company that they'd spun off, and she had almost all of her savings in ron stock as well.
So you know, the people in the building.
Who didn't have big fat salaries, who were just getting by, you know, they bought the they bought the lie as well, and so they were the ones who really got hurt.
But you know, it was for all of those things that are negative, and there are many, and I.
Can you know, we can talk about all the marked and market accounting, which is still kind of polluting accounting statements.
But they were very I mean, they were a lot of smart people there.
And they were all super aggressive, and they all had but they were innovative and almost too innovative.
Yeah, one last question about they weren't.
Too innovative when it came to the financials, right, the off balance sheet vehicles and the rest of it.
Yeah, well, let's uh one more question about sort of you in that era. I mean, I think I always had the impression of what little you mentioned about you know, when you were younger, that you were I'll put it this way, you were a Texas Democrat, which my joke now is a reactionary you know, that's the little joke.
But now, I mean Texas Democrats were.
Always sort of, you know, moderately liberal, what populist a little bit, yeah, in a good sense of that.
And uh, I mean where did you sort of place yourself then?
I mean I think you told me once you were never a fan of the Bush family, which these days that's me too.
But yeah, well, you know, it was part of being in Austin at that time, right.
Austin was that, you know, still is very democratic city, right, you know, heavily democratic, as Kirk Watson calls it, the blueberry and the tomato soup in.
Texas, right in the middle of the bowl, right.
But I wrote for an alternative weekly, and there were no Republicans with the writing for the Alternative Weekly.
We were all you know, it was all liberals, right, and you know, oh, you.
Know a Republican, Oh fuck off, you know, we had nothing to do, nothing to do with them, right, right.
But it was also the beginning.
I was fortunate in a lot of ways in that started writing about politics with the Chronicle in the late eighties. And so the nineteen ninety election, of course, was the watershed right where you had Carl Rove worked for Rick Perry, You had them, they you know, they threw out Jim high Tower, you know.
And Richard's lost.
I think that was it that before it was ninety four, it was later, right, but you started to see the turn in Texas politics.
Now, of course it was led by Bill.
Clements in what was at nineteen eighty four where he became the first Republican governor in Texas since reconstruction and or nineteen eighty six, and who was his campaign advisor, Row, Right, So I was able to have a very you know, interesting view on a lot of that, just being a frankly a young and dumb reporter at that time, but being able to see kind of the change in the state from what was solidly democratic for years to one
that was, you know, overwhelmingly Republican. We haven't had a statewide Democrat elected in Texas since I don't know, Gary, Gary Morrow maybe, And that's yeah.
I mean years ago. You know, the Democratic Party of those days was still the Democratic.
Party of Robert Strauss, right, and now it's Beto o'rouric and yeah, you know, abortion Barbie whatever that woman's name was, right, this is just not going to work on.
Yeah, what was her name? From Fort Worth? Yeah?
Right, Yeah, and I interviewed Strauss about that, and Strauss and you know, I've been lucky too. I interviewed Bill Clements, you know, you know, for my books and different things. And so I've just been incredibly fortunate, you know, throughout my career to be kind of in that city, which
is obviously a very dynamic city still. But then Bush ran for president, and of course you're not going to make money, you know, saying Bush is great, right, you know, so you know, Blue Debos wrote a book with Molly Ivans.
You know, I didn't write a book about Bush, although I did write a book in two thousand and four called Crony's Texas America Superstate, right, and talking about how the rise of Texas, which is largely the rise of the oil and gas business, and the support that the oil and gas business had.
For key politicians.
So, you know, still to this day, Lyndon Johnson's one of my political heroes, I mean, you know, and he was a Democrat and was you know, I think about if he was in the Senate today, he put up with the you know, the president just running rough shot over the Congress. I don't think so, right, But that
was a different era. But Johnson still is a hero to me because of his you know, he was a deeply flawed politician, right, and brutal and cruel in many ways, but you know, and Vietnam was his great sin, but the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Acts where it was his great redemption.
Yeah, I mean, I think about him a lot as the Senate leader. I think had volume of Caro's multi volume biography of Johnson the Senate is one of the great classics, not just a history but a political science, uh huh, because it showed you know, anyway, Master of the Senate, Master the Senate. That's a book I sometimes assigned the students depending on a class.
But yeah, you know, it's one I've read most, most of the two first two books I've read.
I've got it. I should read it, yes, But Caro is a master obviously.
And also I'm fascinated by the relationship between Johnson and Rayburn because Rayburn was another hero of mine, because he was born on a cotton farm in Bottom, Texas and then rose to become Speaker of the House, the longest tenured speaker fifty years, fifty two years. Mister Sam, mister Sam. Right,
but he was one of the great proponents of rural electrification. Right, so, the Rural Electrification Act of nineteen thirty five and then the or no, the Public Utility Holding Company Act of nineteen thirty five and the Rural Electrification Act of nineteen thirty six.
It's either.
Well, Rayburn's name on both of those, right, he was the co sponsor of both of those bills. So, and it was because he grew up in rural poverty and knew the importance of electricity to people that were in his district.
Right. Well, now, all right, let's get onto energy.
The path of least resistance for a journalist would have been to go along with all the trendy, fatty stuff that everybody wants, like your buddy Avery Loven Samory Love, We'll get them.
That's the clothes.
So the question that is, when did you first start perceiving or thinking or maybe you did all along that an awful lot of what we think we know about energy is just crap, and a lot of the conventional wisdom is wrong.
When did you first start seeing that? What were some of your early stories or insights about that?
Yeah, well, there was a key essay that Jesse Osabel wrote in two thousand and seven. I think it was called nuclear is Green and other heresies or something like that in that essay.
And it was just an essay.
He I say, just an essay, but it was an extended essay, and he really made me understand the concept of power density. And that really did change the trajectory of my career because once I understood that basic metric and physics, I understood, oh well, everything in the way we've built down to our energy and power systems is related to the power density issue.
Right, And say what that is for listeners who don't, I mean, I know what you mean, I think, but sure, so energy and power are not the same things, right, Right.
Energy is the ability to do work. Power is the rate at which work gets done. Say it often, we don't care. We don't give a damn about energy. What we want is power. Energy is worthless unless we could make it flow. So power is a measure of energy flow.
Right.
So a gallon of gasoline is energy, but five gallons per minute or five gallons per second is power. Right, So watts are power, what hours are energy? Okay, So I don't want to dive too far into that, but nevertheless, they're not the same things. The key is to make systems that and the greenest systems are the ones that produce the most power with the smallest footprints.
Right.
So that's one reason why I'm so pro nuclear.
Right, the power density of nuclear is two thousand wats per square meter or more. Power density of wind energy is one wat per square meter. I don't care where you put it. Power density of solar is ten wats per square meter, I don't care where you put it.
Right.
Power density of biofuels, ethanol, cellulosic, whatever, is measured in the fractions of a watt per square meter.
So that means you need lots of land.
If you need lots of land, you need lots of steel, let's copper, lots of concrete, lots of other things inputs to counteract the low power density. So Jesse made me understand that, and I've spent now years and nearly twenty years since I read that essay thinking about and trying to help the public understand it, because once you grasp that, it makes you understand why so much of this alt energy is just a fraud. You know that's only propped
up by subsidies. And then so that's the intellectual part of it. But then so in two thousand and nine, I was contacted by a horse trainer in King City, Missouri named Charlie Porter, who had had wind turbines built near his home and his he you know, he and I looked at my up vice research into a fairly well and he was what he was telling me was right that once he'd had these turbines built near his home, his life was ruined, and that he had to move out of his house because of the noise.
Wow.
And so it made me an, oh, here's the human impact of so called green energy that everyone is saying, Oh, this is so great wind, we love wind, you know, blah blah blah, blah blah. And here was a guy who trained quarter horses. He was master at it, and he was suing amerin to you know, make them, make him whole. And he later got a settlement in that
sense is not you know, won't talk about it. But that introduced me to these land use conflicts, which has been the other one of the other defining say defining bits of research in my career, the one that I'm very proud of, renewable rejection database.
Now the Global Renewable Rejection.
Database, you know, pointing out how many places around the world people are fighting back against these projects.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. The wind thing, it's a scandal. It's a scandal. A scandal.
The first order, Steve, the way that this industry has lied repeatedly about their impacts on property values, on the noise impacts, and how many people they have hurt, how many people have moved out of their homes, how many lawsuits they've settled quietly next era among them to try and prevent people from talking about the damage that has been done to their homes. So it's you know, so much of this has been covered up, and you know,
the big media outlets just won't cover it. They won't cover it fairly, and I find that just to be reprehensible.
Well, the recent story that you brought to my attention was was the Oklahoma Indian tribe that won a lawsuit forcing a company to remove the windmills they've built. That's right, And you say you're looking around, and you say, I can't find anybody reporting us in the mainstream media.
There still hasn't been any.
So here's the or a Just briefly, so I mentioned I'm at deep roots in Oklahoma. My great uncle Ernie Rapp was a member of the Osage tribe. He was born in Fairfax, Oklahoma, in nineteen oh nine, so he had a front row seat on the reign of terror in the nineteen twenties. He saw it firsthand and didn't talk about it very much. My cousin Nora owns his inherited his Osage head right. So that period in American history is a stain on American history of the first order, right.
And Martin Scorsese's film The Killers of the Flower Moon and David Grant's book, I mean truly remarkable. Grand's book is must read if you haven't done it, read Killers of the Flower Moon.
Okay.
So that was in the twenties where you had outsiders, whites coming into Osage County, Oklahoma and killing Osage tribal members to get their oil wealth, right, the subterranean value which was assured to the tribe by Chief James Bigheart and the Osage Allotment Act of nineteen oh six.
But there was a replay of.
That, or reprise of that when in now the Italian Company comes into Osage County in about twenty eleven and they they start planning a wind project. The Bureau of Indian Affairs tells them, you need to get a permit from the tribe. Because the tribe owns their sovereign tribe, they own all the subsurface. They don't just own the oil and gasoling on all the rocks, all the minerals that are six inches below the surface. And they'll ignored them. In twenty fourteen, and now starts to build the wind
project called Osage Wind. In September of twenty fourteen, the Bureau of Indian Affairs sent them a letter saying cease and desists. You need to get a permit from the tribe. And they'll not only ignored the letter, they started working at night to speed up the work.
Oh God.
And they built eighty four wind turbine one hundred and fifty megawats of this wind project in Osage County, just north of north of Fairfax, in between Fairfax and Pahusca. And it's still operating today. But the tribe has been in litigation within l now in the longest running legal battle over wind energy in American history.
There's no second place.
And in December of twenty twenty three, they won in federal court in Tulsa, and the judge sided with the tribe. In last December, just now two months ago, the same judge ordered that n L take down all of the turbines by December first of this year. Wow, it's unprecedented, never happened before. And that NL has now appealed, of.
Course, because it's gonna cost them three hundred million dollars and they lost.
They lost the damage's judgment as well as several tens of millions of dollars. But it's a landmark case, a landmark case for sovereignty in American Indian history and not Native American sovereignty. A landmark case in terms of wind energy, a landmark case in terms of damages, a landmark case in terms of alternative energy, a huge black eye for the wind business, enormous black guy for NL, which if you read their documents, they're all about ESG and environmental
partnering with the community and the rest of it. And they screwed the tribe every chance they got. And so
it's personal to me being from Oklahoma. It's personal to me because it's my family, right, my great uncle who I love very much, my cousin, and I'm a member of the Cherokee tribe, and so to me it's something that when they start taking those turbes down, I'm gonna be there and my sibling, my sibling, they're going to be there, and my cousin Nora is going to be there, and my friends in Fairfax are going to be there, and we're going to be hooping and hollering because it's
going to be a great, great.
Day, wonderful. Yeah.
So uh Now, rather than get off into a long story there, but it's but it's a remarkable one. And just to get to the other point, there not a single word in the New York Times, not a single article in the Washington Post, NPR, Bloomberg, Wall Street Journal.
They won't cover it. Yeah, it doesn't fit the right it doesn't. It's not the right narrative. And these are the these are media. I'll say, oh, we need to cover the heart nine of America more.
Yeah, well, yes, right, yeah, of course they'll send reporters all over the world to write about new coal mines or you know, rare elements. But here here's a case where very clear wrongdoing by a foreign corporation on Native Americans in Oklahoma, and they won't cover right.
So rather than get off too much into the weeds and energy, which you know I could do for a long time, will tell listeners to get your books.
The question of powers, the.
Ask question of power a gusher of lies, an early one that still holds up really well.
I think, I think so right? And power hungry, power hungry?
Right, I've got that somewhere. I can't find it right now anyway. And then, of course you can find your documentaries on YouTube.
That's right.
Our twenty nineteen documentary Juice, How Electricity Explains the World, and then a year ago we released Juice Power Politics in the Grid, which is the first film is a feature link documentary. The second project is five parts, five part docuseriies, each about twenty minutes, and the third episode in that docuseries, which you can find at Juice series dot com, is on.
The osh oh Okay, I think I saw that, don't okay?
Last general questions may lead to some follow ups. There's stiff competition for this. But who's the greatest energy energy Charlottan of our time?
And why is it? Amory Lovins? Mean you can name a rose gallery of these people, right, But it's remarkable.
I'm just finishing a piece on Rocky Mountain Institute in their federal contracts, which is just amazing that this outfit would have any federal contracts.
It's like, Oh, you're going to know what's next.
Green Peace is going to get federal contracts, you know, or Sierra Club is going to get federal contracts.
This is the equivalent of that. Levens I think deserves a special place.
In the Wall of Shame in terms of energy policy in America because he has been wrong for fifty years, and yet he's been lionized by all these different outfits and given all these honorary doctorates and all these different prizes, and how smart and.
Gred he has done.
And all this time he's been promoting the two legged stool of efficiency and renewables. Well, a two legged stool doesn't work, right. But he's an anti anti nuclear, you know, insisting, Oh, electricity consumption is going to go down. Oh, we don't need hydrocarbons, we can run all the world on biofuels. I mean, I just looked up some testimony gave Senate in twenty six, two thousand and six, saying Oh, yeah, the cellulosic ethanol is going to be so great.
There's no cellulosic ethnol. It was all bullshit.
It was a bullshit from the beginning. But there's this romanticism around this vision that he's promoted. And give him credit, you know, despite being wrong all this time, he still has achieved all this fame. And now Rocky Mountain Institute, their latest budget is one hundred and thirty nine million dollars thirty one hundred and thirty nine million dollars a year. Their budget has gone up fourteen fold since twenty twelve. Wow, I know, I know of no other NGO like that,
a climate INNGO. It's done the same thing. And what are they promoting this this claim, Oh, we're going to reach that zero, We're going to cut CO two emissions by half by twenty thirty.
Yeah, I mean it's a radical agenda.
Yeah, and he bent, I mean he's he's been a bipartisan bamboozler, you know.
So George W.
Bush went in baked for cellulosic ethanol and set up a big pilot project. And I remember Nuke Gingrich about twenty years ago, falling under his spell and coming in to see me.
That's when I was next door to and bulls wove those guys s David Freeman, right, you know, and.
He's coming in saying, I'm Amory loves has convinced me we can be all hydrogen in ten.
Years, And I go, oh, where do I start now?
Right?
But you know, it's it's fun to make fun of Lovin's and you know, and he's I don't know how old he'd be now, but but I think that his success or traction in the marketplace is just yeah, we can blame it on him, and we could say, ah, he's a bamboozler and you know, run him down, and you know, I'm not opposed to that, but what is he Why has he been so successful? I think it's, you know, frankly, is that the public and policymakers are just scientifically illiterate and enumerate.
And so if you start with somebody who.
Doesn't know what they're talking about, doesn't have any basic physics and basic understanding of energy and the systems and the scale of the systems and how they work, then they'll believe anything. And so the fact that he or other people like him would gain traction in some ways isn't surprising, and because you know, and who are they talking to policymakers and policymakers, well, who are they? Overwhelmingly their lawyers, and why are they lawyers? Because they couldn't
do the math to get an engineering school or med school. Right, Yeah, So you know, you get someone like him that tells a good story, and it's a story, and that's what drives a lot of you know, narrative is important, and so.
What do you get? What do you expect? Yeah, to have happened.
So I believe I have to check this out, but I think that famous article that made him a star in nineteen seventies, soft Paths of Energy whatever, it's nineteen seventy six.
Seventy six, That's what I was going to say.
It was nineteen seventy in Foreign Affairs, a prestigious journal at the time and maybe still, I don't know, And it caught the moment, right. It was one of those It was sort of like Fukuyama's end of history when the Cold War ends, right, and.
Everybody the first oil shock in nineteen seventy three, right, and Carter is president and this is kind of this idea. Oh, we're running out of oil, right, and Carter said that very thing. Right, We're running out and we're running out of natural gas, right. And you know which thinking about that, now here we are, fifty years later, running out of gas and the US is a natural gas superpower.
Yeah, you know, I've published on.
This, but the US now produces more gas than Canada, Norway, Cutter and Iran combined. Yeah, we're producing We're now the biggest supplier of LNG into Europe. Without US L and G, Europe would be in a terrible spot, that's right, right.
So this idea that.
We're running out, I mean, we talked about it a little earlier today about this enthusianism and kind of the you know, Paulerlick and the rest of it, and this ingenuity. It's still flabbergasting if you think about it, the ingenuity of the oil and gas industry and how the US wants, partly because of private ownership of mental rights like the
Osage tribe. Right, this ingenuity and that has driven this industry to be able to out produce every other country in the world, even though we don't have the best necessarily the best natural gas resource, right, but we have the best natural gas technology.
Yeah. Yeah, Oh that's all fun.
So people can find you on Robert Bryce dot substack dot com dot com.
Right, yeah, okay, well that's all I need to know. Yeah it is. Did you say Robert Bryce dot substack dot com. I hope you said right.
I'll repeat the narrations on the show notes and all the rest of that, but this has been fun.
Yeah, And I'll just say one quick. I know you're on substack as well.
And you know, I've been a journalist for a long time now, you know, going on forty years, and I love substack. Yeah, and I love the freedom that it gives me. And you know, for the first time in my career, I can really write what I want, when I want, how I want, with the charts that I want, with the graphics that I want, at the length that I want.
I just tell you, I just freaking love it.
I mean, it's just and to have instant feedback and I don't have to go through an editor and I can in my only editors. I joke about it, but my wife Lauren, who's you know, really good and that she reads it with a with a.
I would say a.
Commoner's eye or a commoner's ear but she's you know, she's not married to it. I mean, like she tells me, I wrote a piece. She says, you got to calm this down, right, to tone it down, And I trust her right And Grammarly I use. I don't boost a lot. I don't get paid by them. I pay for Grammarly. It's an AI program. I use it religiously and because that makes sure I don't make stupid mistakes. And I've got you know, I don't have my participles dangling infinities,
splitting my infinitives or whatever it is. But anyway, I just I've been so happy to be on substack, and I have not been tempted, as we talked about earlier, to write for any other platforms.
And I've written for all of them, I mean all of them, and I don't, you know, good luck to them, but don't I don't desire to really be on any of them anymore.
Well, thanks much, Robert, and we'll keep up with you on substack and elsewhere.
Awesome, Thanks Steve.
All right, So there is Robert Bryce, who sadly I had to say, is not a whiskey drinker.
He's a beer drinker, but we will forgive him for that.
And I'm a beer drinker too, Steve, Well.
I'm not like I used to be.
I'm really yeah, not as much as when it's really hot out, I will have a beer. But so what have you got from our friends at the Babylon b this week? Who must be working overtime these days. I don't know how they can keep up.
So too that I didn't get to really quickly help the show that My favorite meme, uh meme trend of the week was the jd Vance Who's Who's jd Van's going to visit next? Who do you want jd Vance to visit next?
You know?
And all of the things that that came out of that that was absolutely wonderful. The other thing is that the today it was sort of trending across social media because Amy Kloviachar and Tina Smith, you know, two brain dead idiots on the left who came out and were screaming about the fact that because Trump and and Elon Musk didn't like or maybe it was Cash Battel, Trump and e and Cash Battel didn't like the rulings of
certain federal judges. They had them arrested. Of course, the real point of the matter is, let's see, one of them was harboring a trendy Agua thirteen whatever it was in their home. Anyway, you know, they were breaking the law, they were arrested for.
It, and the I think they were I think they were state court judges, not federal judges.
I think, yeah, New Mexico. Yeah, the New Mexico judge. Yeah, I forget. We don't have time to discuss all the details, but it is rich to see people screaming about, you know, the rule of law and political persecutions and using the courts and law enforcement against your political enemies, and what kind of a country have we become? Shot up? But
which brings me to my first one. While being questioned by authorities following her arrest, FBI agents discovered seventeen more illegal aliens hiding in the back of County Da Da Da Da with the one in Wisconsin that they arrested. Yeah, federal judge travels back in time to overturn Trump's birth A little fun for you, Steve. Money can't buy happiness, this guy who never bought a taco, Not really, but I still thought it was kind of funny. Yeah, uh,
false alarm smoke coming from Vatican. Just Cardinal Steve accidentally burning toast again. Actually you should say Cardinal Steve accidentally burning popovers again. Oh well, yeah, I don't forget Steve.
I know you don't.
You're like an elephant that way.
Okay, you know I don't. Coach is a couple more Catholic church to consider electing pope? Who's a Catholic this time?
What's so true to that?
Yes, Dali Lama quietly canceled scheduled meeting with JD. Vance And this was said to me by a listener, a good friend of ours. It's got a picture of Amy Coney Barrett, Alena Kagan, Son King g and the dread coward Roberts, and it says, for first time in history, Supreme Court has five female justices.
By the way, on the JD Vance meme, I think my favorite was the one with Pope Francis leaning over and saying I have information that will lead to the arrest of Hillary Clinton.
That one will never die. That's as good as the Epstein didn't kill himself stuff.
And thank God for social media, right, that's right. Last one on that subject, Fauci suggests Democrats maintain six foot social distance from JD. Vance.
Oh, I had not heard that one.
That one is really good, and they're going to really If they didn't fear Vance already, they will now. Well, all right, So, as John would say, always drink your whiskey meat, and as a I would rhapsodize about our modest little podcast, the Three Whiskey Happy Hour, ticking backwards in the mind. Raise your glass to Reason's tower, where the fools and profits dine.
I don't have to think about that one. But we'll be back next week with all three of us, we hope.
And for now, oh cheers.
Ricochet joined the conversation