Fifty five KRC DE Talk Station eight thirty on this Tuesday morning, Tax Day twenty twenty five, Dan Carroll hanging out for Brian Thomas and get to welcome in another great guest. Steve Gorm is the executive director of the Climate Science Coalition of America. He is the author of four books on energy, climate change, and sustainable development. He's
got over one hundred thousand copies in print. His latest book is The Green Breakdown Becoming Renewable Energy Failure and Steve Gorm, it is great once again to welcome you to the radio and fifty five KRC. How are you today, sir?
Hey, Dan, I'm doing great. Great to join you on this text day.
Yeah, tax Day. I hope you've got all your I'm sure. I'm sure you've got everything squared away and you're ready to Absolutely absolutely.
I did way too much. But while we have huge, huge changes going on in climate policy and energy right now, just big, big things, absolutely.
I mean, before we get to that, let me ask you a question. You know, we live in historic time, sure, and of course we had the spectacle yesterday of the Blue Origin rocketing into space and the six women up there doing God knows what they were, and we've got
the audio of what they were doing up there. But uh, before the before the rocket took off, CBS was doing an interview with former astronaut doctor May Jamison, and one of the comments she made talking about the importance of this historic space flight was that that she claimed, and I don't know how the spaceflight figures into this, but she claimed that the Earth already no longer has an
atmosphere that supports our life form. And I'm looking at that and I'm thinking about that, Well, if the Earth is not supporting our life form, how is it that you and I are here in order to have this this discussion today, and that that she's out there still drawing bread.
Yeah, I'm not sure what she meant what she meant about that, that's uh, I mean, did she mention climate at all? Is that what she was alluding to?
Because but again, while she was talking about how, you know, we're all humans and we're all connected to the Earth, and you know, when you go up and view the Earth from you know, wherever they were re viewing it from, you know, makes it makes you realize how fragile the Earth is and that the you know, that somehow we you know, we just don't aren't able to support life here on Earth anymore.
Humans certainly have had a big, a big impact on the surface of the Earth. Of course, we've we have farmed it, and we have cut down forest. We've done a lot of things to transform the surface of the Earth. I don't know if the atmosphere has changed that much. So, you know, even the amounts that that humans emit in terms of carbon dioxide is only about one or two percent of well it's it's less than five percent of the CO two that nature puts into the atmosphere by itself.
So we're pretty small in terms of what's going on with the atmosphere. So I don't really understand her comments there.
Yeah, yeah, as CBS was also making the point that scientific experiments were being conducted on this flight. You know, the whole thing lasted eleven minutes. I don't know how to are you aware of any scientific experiments that can be conducted in that spent a time?
That's a short one. Well, they probably had some electronic sensors that were sensing something. But you know, one of the things mister Trump has said is that in his administration is that NASA now and this wasn't a NASA thing. I think it was a private thing. But NASA must stick to space and flights into space, and they're no longer able to do climate anymore. Really a tremendous change. And they're cutting about two thirds of the budget that's
associated anyway with climate change at NASA. So there's just some huge, huge policy changes in process.
Yeah, And speaking of Trump, Trump put out a and executive order that deals with American energy and it talks about overreach and things like that. How does that play into the whole scope of climate policy in the United States.
Yeah, this just happened last week, and this is a big deal.
The President.
Issued an executive order called Protecting American Energy from State Overreach, and he said that state laws were seeking to regulate energy beyond their constitutional statutory authorities, and he actually called them extortion laws. And he mentioned New York, in Vermont, and California, and he directed the US Attorney General of Pam Bondi to identify these laws that were burdening domestic energy resources or may or may not be unconstitutional, preempted
by federal law, or otherwise unenforceable. Within sixty days and to recommend actions to change this. So we're actually going to we have the federal government that are suing the states for their climate laws. This has not happened to my knowledge, to any extent over the last years. Really a huge change, and we haven't heard much about it in the press.
Yeah. Well, if the press has their way, anything that doesn't fit their particular climate narrative, we won't hear much about it at all. I want to ask you about solar panels and windmills, but we got to get to a quick break here, So Steve Gorham, if you would just hang on and we'll get right back to you as we roll on on fifty five KRC, the Talk Station.
This is fifty five KRC and iHeartRadio Station.
The Talk station, continuing our conversation with Steve Gorham, executive director of the Climate Science Coalition of America. And Steve Gorham. One of the things that Donald Trump has done is imposed tariffs on China, and this is going to have a pretty major effect on China because they send us so many solar panels and so many elements that are involved in the construction of an operating of the windmills and the turbines and all that kind of stuff.
Yeah, this is going to be the biggest impact. He has kept ten percent tariffs on every nation. He also has twenty five percent on steel, aluminum, and automobiles. He's pretty much backed off on everything else. I think he's negotiating. They're negotiating with more than one hundred countries now over the next ninety days. But China has not said they want to negotiate. They've just retaliated with terraffs, and so now China and the US both have terrors over one
hundred percent on imports and exports, I think. And this is really, as you say, this is going to hammer a renewable energy equipment. Eighty percent of the world's solar cells and panels are made by China or they are using components from China. Also, these big grid scale batteries that California and New York and some other states want to put in place to back up wind and solar, most of those batteries, or at least the metals for the batteries come from China. And so these prices are
going to skyrocket. It's going to have a huge impact and just another another problem with green equipment, green Energy, it's just going to stop stop by green Energy and its tracks.
Yeah, and with and with all the subsidies that are being cut off as well. We are seeing and the reports still come in almost daily of this wind farm that is shutting down, this solar panel project that is
that has run out of money. And I don't know if I've had a chance to ask you about this, but I know I read an article not that long ago talking about once these solar panels come to the end of their life, that we really don't have a good way to dispose of these solar panels because I guess they're necessarily going to have to go into a landfill.
But there's so many toxic chemicals that are involved in producing these solar panels that eventually these things leach out into the ground and calls all sorts of other problems as well.
Well. I think I think most of our landfills now have canvas and other things to prevent stuff from leaching. But the amount of waste really is huge. You know. It's when you're using hydrocarbons, you're basically burning up the fuel and there's nothing left except the water, vapor and the carbon acid that goes in the atmosphere. And you don't replace power plants, you know, maybe once every fifty sixty years, but if you're replacing the solar panels every
twenty years. Now in California, for example, our federal agencies have said it costs about twenty to twenty five dollars to try and recycle materials from a solar panel, but you only get about four dollars worth of useful metals out of it. And if you were to send it to the landfill and only costs one or two dollars. So nobody's going to recycle these things unless there's huge state or federal subsidies to do so, they're going to
send them to landfills. And so as we put more and more of these in, we send them to landfills. And you know, I sent you a little image of this picture in New York, which is also in my last book, Green Breakdown. There's a congressman standing next to this huge pile of wind turbine blades, which which is thirty forty feet high in New York. And when the wind turbines blades we're out, they have to they have to chop them up or burn them, they're too big
for landfills. It's it's really a significant problem that is getting bigger and bigger as we put more of these things in.
Yeah, I'm looking I'm looking at it right now. It is it is an astonishing photograph, and I think, really it gets to the point of just the absolute mountain of waste that these things create. All right, have you been surprised at all by the amount of waste frawden abuse that Lee Zelden has uncovered at the EPA.
Well, I you know, it really is amazing. And you know, mister Musk and his Doage group has gone through a lot of those and I just I just wrote an article about the Department of Defense. Pete Haigseth has said, we do not do climate change crap, and he's cutting out all the climate programs. But listen to some of these programs. They published a paper in twenty twenty two lauding the things they did in they did in climate.
This was the US Navy lauding the different different things they did for the climates, and one of them was studying climate change in the Mekong Delta of Vietnam with the government of Vietnam. This is a Navy project. Another one was a California organic recycling and composting Another one was a partnership with the Armed Forces of Ghana to combat vector born diseases. This is the United States Navy putting money out for these things. None of these things
improved Navy military readiness in any way. And this is just and you know, I just found this look at online. It's off that the Navy was publishing. There's this, there's this analyst amounts of this government money that's going into stuff that doesn't do anything really useful as far as military purposes.
Oh you know, it wasn't that long ago. We had a commander in chief and a chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff tell our graduating cadets at the Army and our midshipman at the Navy that the number one threat to America was climate change. You know that, Never mind Russia, never mind North Korea, never mind China, it's climate change. And I love this chart you put out of US military emissions by service and equipment type. And you know, you've got the Air Force has got fifty
six percent of emissions. And then you know, different aircraft than the Navy and then you got a little small sliver down there with the Marine Corps only puts out five percent of our emissions. That would figure that. You know, they're probably the most efficient out of all the military services. And they've got, you know, the I guess, the smallest carbon footprint you can possibly have.
That came from the Department of Defense, and President Biden hit them all marching down this, we're going to do climate stuff. I mean, the Army even was going to take all of its field technical vehicles, including the heavy ones, including tanks, and run them on electric engines. And they also they were developing battlefield chargers. If you can imagine, they're going to drive chargers out, sit them somewhere and have these tanks sitting next to them for an hour
or two at a time. I mean, this stuff is fantasy. It does nothing for our military capability. It's just there for climates. And Pete higgsuff is cutting all this stuff out.
Yeah, well, thank god. I don't know how anyone in their right mind could look at that and in a
practical sense think that that is a good idea. And you know, Steve Gorham, I mean that's the thing to me, was so much of this stuff that in a practical sense and when you you know, when you talk about the economics of it, and you know, and everything else that goes into all the you know, the different wind turbines and the solar panels and green energy this and the biofuels and everything else that and on economic sense, you know, none of this stuff exists but for government subsidies.
And once you wipe those out, well, these are these things they fold like a chief suit.
Yeah, we're gonna have a lot of bankruptcies too with all this stuff. As you say, cutting funding across all these different industries, we're also they're also laying off a lot of headcount. I mentioned NASA and Noah, but they're they're cutting headcount. The Environmental Protection Agency, they just shut down a museum at the Environmental Protection Agency. They had their own museum, but it costs per visitor. It was costing them over three hundred dollars because they didn't have
any visitors. The museum was expensive. Well, anyway, lies all them to shuttle it down. The Federal Energy Management Agency is shutting down their climate programs as well. And if you have anything any research project that says climate on it, that is going away in the federal government. Mister Trump is completely transforming it top to bottom.
So with your book, is green breakdown the coming renewable energy failure? Are we already here? Have we reached that stage already with the renewable energy failure? Is that upon us right now?
Now? This is quicker than I expected. I thought this would take several decades, and it probably will around the world. But mister Trump is accelerating this green breakdown. It's a very readable book. It has the science economics, and it also got one hundred and fifty color side bars. One of those is this headline Britain's advice to stop showering to conserve energy, And there was also a minister in Switzerland who said that people should shower with a friend
to conserve energy. But you know, these are the crazy things that are going on. But the book captures all this funny stuff and gives people the real background they need to see the crazy state the world is in and how it's going to change.
Yeah, you know, you and I always talk when these world climate gatherings take place, you know, under the auspices of the United Nations or whatever organization it is. If the United States no longer is going to participate in these sort of events. Do they have any impact, any meaning at all if the United States isn't there.
Well, right off the bat, there's about eight billion dollars a year that comes out of it. Mister Trump has shut that off. As part of the USA they were giving money, and then the US federal government was giving money. That's been shut off. And it is a big thing. And I do think that this is different than his first term. I think the world is ready. By the way, a friend of mine, doctor Benny Piyser in Europe, says
that people are just jaded with his climate stuff. He thinks more than half the population over there doesn't believe what leaders is telling him anymore. So I think we're about to see a big revolution. People are going to get out of the climate business. We're going to get back to sensible energy policy. But it is going to take quite a bit more for this to occur.
Well, you know, and I don't know if you want to answer this question or not, but with all this money that was changing hands, what percentage of that was finding its way into the pockets of a lot of these people who promote this sort of thing.
Well, there is a bunch of that, I think Leezeldon and the EPA has pointed out that there was something like twenty billion dollars that the EPA granted in the last couple months of the Trump administration to a number of non governmental organizations to do climate stuff. It went to I think the City Bank or somebody. There really wasn't a lot of audit on it or tracking, just a big shoveling of money. So you know, I've always said the biggest the bigger government gets, the more waste
you have. And we really need the lean government. We need to get back to the markets and let companies do their sorts of thing, and these programs that forced everybody to do certain things to try and save the climate are really very foolish.
All right, Well, Steve Gorham, with that, we will let you go. If people want to find out more about you and the Climate Science Coalition of America, how do they do that?
Go to my website Steve Goorham dot com. G O R E H A M. I'll send them a sign copy of any of my four books they can order. They can also get them on Amazon and there are e books available as well.
Steve Gorham always appreciate the time, Thank you, sir, and we'll do it again before too long.
Thank you Dan.
All Right, there you go, Steve Gorham of the client, the Climate Science Coalition of America. A little late for a break here on fifty five KRC DE talk Station fifty five KRC