Now here's a highlight from coast to coast AM on iHeartRadio, and.
Welcome back to George nor with you, Steve Gorham with us. We'll take calls with Steve next hour here, Steve, what is a green breakdown that you talk about in your work?
Yeah, green breakdown is the world is pushing for a thing called net zero energy right now, and that basically means and they want this to be done by twenty fifty by the way, I should say, the wealthy nations of the world, the United States, Europe, Canada, New Zealand, Australia and some others. They want to get rid of all coal, oil and natural gas, substitute wind, solar and
biofuels and whatever they can't change. They want to capture carbon dioxide emissions from the hydrocarbon fuels that we're using. But this is really beyond. This is beyond a reachout goal. This is an impossibility. It's not practical, It just isn't going to happen, and we're already starting to see it
break down. I do, George, I do want to go on and talk about the looming electric power shortage, though I think this might be the biggest topic this evening, we have electric power shortage coming in the United States.
Can we go into that, sure, So a little bit of background first is last year the US got about a fifty nine percent of our electricity from natural gas, that was a forty three percent, and then coal sixteen percent, so just about sixty percent of our power from natural gas and coal, which the green movement, of course wants to eliminate as part of net zero, they want to shut all those down. Now, for the last two decades, our electricity demand has been flat in the United States,
just about four point one million gigwat hours. And during that time we have shuttered about two hundred coal plants. We've replaced it mostly with natural gas and some wind and solar. But now all of a sudden, we have big new demand drivers for electrical power in the US, and we talked about one of those earlier. One is forced a switch to electric vehicles that's in process both
at states and from the EPA. The second is a push for use of electricians appliances in home in homes and efforts to get rid of natural gas and propane. Cities and counties in six or seven states now have banned the use of natural gas, and new construction. The biggest one is the state of New York, which has a statewide banned by twenty twenty six for new.
Construction, even for heating the house.
Yes, this is heating, this is water heaters, this is stoves. Now, this can be very big. In New England, for example, they're estimating that if everybody shifts to electric appliances from gas this election, it'd be a bigger amount of electricity needed than a shift from gasoline cars to electric vehicles.
The third big driver is something most people haven't heard about, but the federal government wants to create a green hydrogen fuel industry and they want to use that for chemicals and use green hydrogen to power chemicals and steel and other things. But the way you get green hydrogen is use wind and solar and you break apart use electricity to break apart water molecules, and you capture the hydrogen. This is very, very electricity intensive. So we got these
three big green drivers. But the biggest of all is a new demand for artificial intelligence. And this looks like it's going to be huge, and it just happened about a year and a half ago. We had Chad GPT come out with their AI program about eighteen months ago. The thing is and this would be used in data centers. So today in the United States and today we have these big data centers that are mostly in use by
people like Microsoft and Amazon and Meta. They use four percent of the US electricity today and that's used for cloud storage and for the Internet.
It doesn't sell a lot, but it.
Doesn't sell much. But all these folks now want to upgrade these data centers to run artificial intelligence, and to do that they're putting in high speed processing cards and they're running this generational AI to make them think like humans these machines and when they do it, they run these routines for weeks and weeks on end, twenty four
hours a day. Now when you upgrade a data center with these new cards, and by the way, these come from Nvidia mostly, and you know, in Vidia just became the biggest company in the world in terms of value selling these cards. When you upgrade a data center, u six to ten times more electricity than you did when it wasn't an AI data center. And so it's projected that the data center consumption is going to rise from four percent to twenty percent of power demand within ten years huge?
Can we service that?
Well?
It's just I don't think the Biden administration really knows about this. But you listen to these grid operators. Here's one. Jason Shaw, chairman of the Georgia Public Service Commission, stated, quote, when you look at the numbers, that is staggering. It makes you scratch your head and wonder how we ended up in this situation. How are the projections that far off? He means projections for electricity demand. This has created a challenge that we've never seen before. In Virginia. Virginia has
the most data centers in the country. They have let's see, what is the number, four hundred and sixty seven of them near Washington, DC. And these things are huge. They're five and six acres these data centers. And the big companies went to the utilities in Virginia said we need two gigawatts of additional power. That's like two nuclear plants in Texas. They were forecasting they would need eighty five
gigawatts by the year twenty thirty. They just update up up, They just doubled that to one hundred and fifty gigawatts. But they don't know where they're going to get the power. And so this is going to be this is this is impacting power all over the nation.
And then what happens when the solar flare takes out the grid, Well.
That's another thing too, if there's some sabotage. Another example is Amazon. Amazon just purchased a data center a next to on a nuclear plant in Pennsylvania so they could get enough power for artificial intelligence. So we have all these these big guys going out here and saying we need a lot more power. They can build these data centers about six months, but you can't build nuclear plants and gas plants and wind and all these things. You can't build them, and it takes it's a years and years.
And so this is going to have a tremendous impact on our electrical grid and all of our consumers. So let you get a question in here if you want that's story. I want to talk about the impacts.
That's scary stuff, Steve. We can't afford to do this.
Well, so here are the impacts. The first thing that's going to happen is that fifty nine percent of power, the coal and gas plants that the green movement wants to retire. That's not going to happen. And already they're extending the power plants. The Diablo Cannon nuclear plant in California is being extended to twenty thirty was going to shut down next year. They are restoring a nuclear plant in Virginia, I'm sorry, in Michigan called Palisades that went
off in twenty twenty two. They are putting that back on with a billion and a half dollars of federal money. Utah is extending coal plants to twenty forty they were going to shut down. So the first thing is that the green movement's going to be screaming because we're not
able to shut down these colon gas plants. And then the second thing is that everybody's electricity prices are going to go up if you're a consumer, because these big guys like Amazon and Microsoft, they're probably going to get those contracts, but everybody else, we're going to have a shortage. Rates are going to go up.
Now, this is going to.
Affect charging stations who are struggling to break even with evs. It's going to be very hard for heat pumps to be cost effective versus gas in a house just going to have a big, big impact. And this just clobbered me about a month or two ago. And most of the world doesn't really understand this. But if your listeners will look at at you'll see start seeing a lot of articles that say AI is going to interrupt the green revolution. And that's exactly what's going to happen.
And let me ask you this. The World Health Organization has proposed a global ban on eating meat and dairy products. Yeah, why and what is what is that going to do?
Well? They want to do this because of global warming. This isn't a health issue, you know they so they're getting into the global warming business. So I said, okay, So you might say, okay, Well they say, by twenty fifty this is a worldwide band on meat and dairy. No, not twenty fifty, how about twenty forty. No, they said, if you can believe it, next.
Year, not going to happen.
Twenty twenty five. They want a global ban on meat and dairy I'm not sure what planet these folks live on, but every nation in the world, the meat consumption has been rising for the last sixty years, except with the exception of India. Of Brazil, meat consumptions up by a factor of four, Japan by a factor of five, and the average person in China is eating sixteen times more meat meat they were in the nineteen sixties. You know, this just isn't going to happen.
What are they concerned about methane gas from the animals.
Yeah, that's another one. Methane is a is a greenhouse gas. And we have about a billion cattle on the planet, about a billion and a half. And when those cattle graze, then they emit methane from the nose end and the tail end. So that is a factor as well. And so we have all we have states in federal government passing methane laws to try and cut down from first the oil and gas industry, but eventually agriculture. But you know,
we could go into a bunch of science. But the short thing is that methane is a good absorber of infrared radiation the greenhouse effect in the lab, but not in the atmosphere because methane is already saturated in the atmosphere. I like to say it's like painting. Does anybody in the audience paint their house room in their house ten times? Nobody does, because after two coats of paint, you can't
see any difference. So the good news is we have methane already sat rate in the atmosphere, so if we had some more, it's really not going to have any any measurable effect.
Steve, Why is this issue overall so polarizing?
It really is astonishing, isn't it. The world is spending There was an estimate just came out sey Is that said in twenty twenty three, the world spent almost two trillion dollars to try and promote renewables. And we have all these other problems to solve. But the fear, the fear of man made global warming is powerful. And you know, people are talking about not having children, about not eating meat. There was even a recent article of study in Canada that said it was getting too hot in Canada for
kids to get exercise. You know what about Las Vegas or Atlanta or Miami. I mean it was a goofy study. But the fear man made warming is powerful, and it has the world doing all kinds of crazy things.
These electric vehicle pushes, the driverless cars, driverless trucks, are they going to happen?
Yeah, you mentioned trucks. Now, trucks is another big thing that is really crazy. California pass an Advanced Clean Fleets regulation as the first of this year that says, all new heavy trucks, these aren't little trucks. All new heavy trucks must be zero missions vehicles that are registered with the state. These are big fleets, These are government vehicles. These are drayage trucks that take freight from ports to railheads. But nobody can do this. I mean, we don't have
charging for these things. These trucks cost two to three times more. They get very poor range, about three hundred miles versus a diesel truck that gets fifteen hundred miles. One truck or one truck. Fleet guy said, we were going to need twice as many electric trucks on the road as diesel trucks if we shift to this. So how is that environmentally friendly? Double the number of heavy trucks.
I mean, this is another thing that isn't going to happen, and it's it's one of the first areas that's going to break down as part of the green breakdown.
Rail trains run on what kind of fuel?
In the US, it's mostly diesel for freight. In Europe they have a lot of electric trains, even for freight. We have some passenger trains that are electric in the US, but it's mostly diesel. But that's another area of push. California is doing the same thing. They want to convert all railroads to electric railroads. And they can be pretty good products electric railroads, but you know, you have to convert all the tracks, you have to have all the rails,
either overhead or in the rails. It's very expensive and we require billions and billions and billions of dollars to do that sort of conversion. It's no and it isn't Again, it isn't going to have any effect on global temperatures, which are dominated by nature, not man made emissions. Despite the push to do this.
We talked a little bit about the green breakdown. How realistic is that?
Yeah, well, it's already happening. In Europe, for example, we see some pushback. Netherlands, which had a push to eliminate all gas by twenty fifty in homes. That was the government directive. Amsterdam declared itself a gas free city. It was going to be a gas free city. Well they have they have just backed down on that. They said we're not going to do that. Anymore. Gas is used in over ninety percent of the homes in Netherlands and to make everybody switch would just cost a huge amount
of cost to everybody. There's also a push now to eliminate the mandate for one hundred percent electric vehicles by twenty thirty five, which has been a European community mandate. But the new elections with the new conservative folks that have been elected, are now pushing back to change and stop that. So that's part of the green breakdown we see.
But the people are not going to put up with higher energy prices, are not going to put up with electricity blackouts and the loss of freedom for choosing your car or your appliances. They're going to demand a return to low cost, reliable energy and I think we're seeing that breakdown coming to four already.
And convenience, Steve, Convenience is important.
And convenience right, I don't want to spend that much time with my car. Let me tell you. I want to be able to get gas in five minutes and not have to be searching for a charging station and all the rest.
Listen to more Coast to Coast AM every weeknight at one am Eastern and go to Coast to coastam dot com for more