Monday 6/16/25 | Montalbano Monday | HuDost in Homer | Headlines

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The Michael Dukes Show, streaming live across the world. Live around the world on the internet at michaeldukeshow.com and across the state of Alaska on fish your favorite radio station and or FM translator. Hello, my friends. Are you ready? I mean, it's Monday. It was an unbelievably gorgeous weekend. Lots of great stuff happening around the state of Alaska. And I hope that you guys had a wonderful day. I hope you had a wonderful Father's Day for all you fathers out there.

You fathers. I hope you had a great day. I know I did. It was splendid. It was a splendid time was had by all.

And we are ready to go for this Monday. Full show today. We're going to start off here in just a hot second with Sarah Montalbano for Montalbano Mondays. That's right. We're going to dive into that and have a great time with one of our favorite guests. We're going to go hog wild on energy and discussions.

here in the state. Then in hour two, we're going to be joined by Moksha Summer, who is with the group Hudost, and they're going to come on and talk about their live show in Homer here for just a bit. before we dive back down into some of the other headlines from around the state and just kind of do a roundup of all the stuff that took place over the weekend.

So it's going to be fun. Why? Because I want to. That's what I say. Because it's my show. It says right there. It's my show. That's why. That's what's going to, because I'm a dictator. All right. Let's get to it. Let's. Let's get things rocking and rolling. I don't want to waste too much time here since we've got our lovely guest, Sarah Montalbano, who's waiting in the green room, although she's muted herself.

She needs to unmute herself. There she goes. We're all good. And she joins us this morning to talk about energy and so much more. Good morning, sunshine. How are you? Good morning. I'm doing well. Good, good. Hope you had a great weekend. Hope you had a great relaxing time. You ready to dive into this? Yeah, that was great. Good Father's Day. Yeah, everything's going well on my end, personally. All right. Well, geez, man, she's just so easy. All right. Well, let's get started.

Um, one of the reasons why, and for those of you who don't know and don't subscribe, Sarah is, uh, she's writing, uh, on her own, uh, sub stack, which she called Montalbano Mondays. She owes me a quarter. Uh, and, uh,

And she's talking about California throwing away solar power that it can't use, that things have been pushed so hard. in california and we've been talking with her a lot lately about the cost of winded solar and how uh while i mean it could be useful as an ancillary um power source, the fact that it's not dispatchable, meaning it can't be dependent on at any given time.

makes it very difficult. She's also writing a new report for the American experiment on this as well that she's said she's going to give us a little bit of a tease on. And so let's get started with this. First and foremost, Sarah, we'll touch on this piece you talked about for Cal. California it's kind of crazy I mean they are throwing away a significant amount of power

And they're not really throwing it away. Obviously, they're trying to find a way to spread it to other grids and do some other things. But they've got this excess of power in the middle of the day. that they don't know what to do with. And then, of course, at night, they're struggling when everybody comes home, gets off of work, turns on the air conditioning, their computers, their TVs, their stoves, whatever. All of a sudden, it creates a real problem.

that they don't have anything to do with. And their answer is, well, we'll just put some batteries in and we'll just, I mean, there's some real issues here. Give me the rundown here. Yeah, it's pretty interesting to watch because I try to kind of think of California as the ghost of Christmas future or ghost of Christmas yet to come, at least for states that are kind of rushing headlong into this.

renewables project. And California has reached the penetration on the grid right now that is really posing some problems for them because they're generating far too much.

uh in the middle of the day and my sub stack i believe i yeah um i i plotted from the energy information administration i just put their graph on there and it is an enormous up and down and up and they are curtailing an amazing amount of power and what curtail curtailment just means uh from a grid perspective is that the grid is so finely tuned um you can only

generate as much well you can only use as much uh as people want it's not able to be stored anywhere unless you have a massive amount of batteries um and That means that if you have too much unwanted solar power on the grid, you will fry your grid. And so grid monitors have to watch very carefully for this and discharge that power.

huge flaw of the solar project because you still need to have a certain amount of natural gas on the grid because, predictably, solar power doesn't generate anything at night. Can you believe that? Surprise, surprise, surprise. The sun does not shine at night. I mean, you know. Exactly. So there needs to be some natural gas able to ramp up at that time. And that just means.

You are just curtailing a bunch of this in the middle of the day when demand's not as high. Like you said, everyone comes home at the end of the day and they start doing all of their electricity things. And, you know, there's just not enough. uh, demand and no way to store the solar. So, uh, I thought this was a pretty, pretty interesting case, uh, in, in California at least. Yeah, no. And what's interesting about it is in their, in their, their, um,

Their drive to get all of these things up to these, you know, renewable, quote unquote, green powers. They've driven up not just the. excess of power that can't be used in the middle of the day and that are still struggling at night. But they're also, of course, spiking the cost to the average resident in the state of California. They have got, I mean, we complain about our electricity rates here, but in California right now, the average residency electricity rate is almost.

32 and a half cents per kilowatt hour, which was like, oh, oh, you know, I mean, it's it's pretty big for especially you would think for. you know, a state the size of California and, you know, the quantity, uh, you would think that they would be able to put some, no, it's huge. It's a huge amount. And there.

They're doubling down. They're not trying to fix it. They're just going to try and continue on. And now, again, moving to batteries, which, as you mentioned in your article, and I'd like you to go into a little bit deeper.

You know, the idea that somehow they can store the energy from the sun in the midday to use them in the evening is great on paper. But trying to exercise that and put together, you know, battery banks that. Well, tell me about the challenges. Yeah. So California is planning to deal with this in much the way that it tends to deal with everything is to try and export this problem beyond their borders. So in the immediate term, they're looking to build more.

transmission lines to send things over the border into Arizona, Nevada, all of these places. The other thing they're looking to do is to do more battery storage in. You know, their energy and capacity markets, which batteries have enormous challenges. They really do. And I kind of just glance over that in the article. But one of the reasons that batteries aren't.

you know a very good choice for this is that they are largely um not designed at least at the moment utility scale batteries aren't designed to be continuously charging and discharging um their lifespans are based on a number of um you know charge and discharge cycles much like your you know cellular telephone it's largely the same technology um and so what they're typically used for now is just to smooth out for a couple minutes of energy they'll discharge to

smooth over the ramp up from natural gas um that's largely what they're used for um the other problem with batteries is probably a fairly obvious one but um they also once they're discharged that's it they will need to be recharged again by solar power. Or if you're feeling particularly difficult about it, you can recharge a battery with a generator. That's natural gas or something. And that means you really only get about four hours.

hours, maybe six, depending on the size of the battery until you have to recharge it again with more solar. And so that means it's not really enough to be. reasonable base load through the evening and nighttime hours either um so you know i think there's some promise at least in getting finding ways to store this electricity, but I think this is entirely a problem that wouldn't have been necessary to solve if the market had just followed.

uh what actually needed to be built which is not nearly this much solar power right if they haven't if they hadn't overbuilt their solar grid they wouldn't have this challenge now And one of the things you didn't mention on the batteries, of course, is the life cycle and the cost. I mean, we're talking about enormous battery banks. um you know with tractor trailer size you know kind of batteries um where they only have a limited life cycle

And the the resources it takes to develop each one of these is this is significant. This is not a eco friendly solution as much as they'd like to say it is. And then, of course, you have problems with disposal. everything else. I mean, it's not like you can recycle a lot of this stuff. This is a huge, huge problem.

Yeah, and this is getting into some of the things I've been researching and that we're almost prepared to release in a big comprehensive report. But mining the batteries, materials are... typically in foreign countries because we don't allow ourselves to mine here. We have strict environmental standards that would make this a lot safer and better for the environment. But no, we're outsourcing this overseas.

problem with batteries is you're absolutely right that the recycling challenge is still there um you know we are obviously accustomed to recycling are small electronics batteries, but there are challenges with recycling utility scale batteries that we'll just start seeing once these things are decommissioned. Same thing with EV batteries.

There's also some safety risks. And, you know, this is not typical of every battery storage plant by any means. But earlier this year, Moss Landing as one of the. biggest battery storage and they had a catastrophic thermal runaway event that caused a fire Because these fires are chemical in nature, they burn incredibly hot and firefighters can mostly just stand by and wait for it to burn itself out. And residents in the area are saying now that they've...

They're feeling sick in the days after. You know, there's a lot of concerns about this. And, you know, the experts here are saying, you know, oh, this was a unique situation for... many reasons, but it's still something worth considering is do you want more of these things in your backyards? Because they had to evacuate the residents and it's, you know, 1200 people had to be evacuated.

Yeah. No, I mean, there's definitely some interesting things here. We're going to get into this and we're going to talk about. her new report, which is going to be coming out any day now, called Shattered Green Dreams, the Environmental Cost of Wind and Solar. And we're going to talk about it. We're going to wrap this back around to Alaska as well, because we all...

all know of course one of the biggest challenges in alaska right now is uh cheap affordable energy um and this continued push for uh you know more green initiatives wind and solar while at the same time poo-pooing some of the things things that are long-term and renewable, like. you know, hydro and geothermal and potentially tidal and some of these other things is still being fought here in the state of Alaska. We're going to continue with Sarah Montalbano here in just a moment.

Don't Go Anywhere, The Michael Duke Show, Common Sense, Liberty-based, Free Thinking Radio. We'll continue here in just a moment. Don't Go Anywhere, back with more right after this. If you missed the show, you can listen to it on your time with Duke's On Demand. Oh, and it's free. Like America used to be. Streaming live every weekday morning on Facebook Live and MichaelDukesShow.com.

Okay, we're in the break right now. Sarah Montalbano is our guest, and we are talking about energy, of course, across the nation, and specifically here.

in the state of Alaska is what we'll get around to here. You also said you would have given your right arm to be at the Sustainable Development Conference, the Energy Conference in Anchorage last week. Give me your... me your thoughts here on what you wanted to see what you would like to have uh you know what you'd like to have said to some of the folks that were attending there

Yeah, I mean, my right arm's the one I write with, so I hope it's clear how exciting I found this. I really think it was exciting to have three energy. cabinet level, you know, secretaries and the EPA administrator there in Anchorage to talk for a keynote lunch session. They also announced some pretty significant progress on NPRA. restrictions. Now those are becoming looser so that there is the possibility of exploration in a lot of NPRA. I think it was an incredibly...

cool time. And looking at the agenda, there's a lot of interesting proposals on nuclear and geothermal and all of these other panel discussions that, of course, weren't the big news, but were incredibly exciting. disease so i i want to read more about what happened at that conference so yeah i'm watching coverage are you uh are you bullish on alaskan energy right now i i think so

Yeah, I'm excited to see what's happening. Cautiously optimistic is more of what I'd say. Yeah, you know, I mean, I think that we have some good opportunities here to. Set some stuff in motion. Of course, it was just announced that they might have found another 700 million barrel field. There are Armstrong's out there. He's been out there exploring, and that came out yesterday.

They may have found another field west of Pika, I guess, that is is is another big field. I mean, we've still got a lot of stuff going for us here. A plus in the Alaska economy energy sector. We just got to get it. to where it's developable.

And, you know, relevant to the citizens of the state. I mean, that's a that's our big challenge right now. And I'm not sure. I mean, maybe we should be revisiting some of these things that we've talked about in the past. I mean, at one point they talked about.

You know, plonking down a generation plant right there on the North Slope and then slinging it via DC long wire from the... from the north slope down right putting dc because there's no loss there's very little loss in the dc versus ac and the distribution of it I mean, there's just there's so many different things we could do. But what we really need here is we're so energy rich and yet we still have this cost of.

so much cost in this kind of stuff to bring it to Alaskans. That's what we need to really focus on, I think. Oh, yeah. And, you know, I'm pulling up these kilowatt hour for residential prices. Alaska is very shortly behind Hawaii and California. And that is not because we don't have. friendly policies to these things, but it is because none of this is necessarily getting to the rate payer.

in alaska um and you know there's obviously our own challenges with that but i think solving this natural gas problem that we're about to have uh is should be first and foremost, I think. And that's why, you know, the utilities, the RealBalt utilities, we're talking about a hydropower project, which I think is an interesting solution as well. So, you know, make the economics shake out.

figure out what can we do and let's work on it because I think we are in an unprecedentedly friendly administration for building these kind of infrastructure things. Well, for the short term, anyway. I mean, we don't know what the next administration... That's one of the problems with the challenges with one of these energy problems is they're cyclical, and yet the build-out cost and times on these things is so huge comparatively.

It definitely makes it challenging to try and figure out what you're going to do next. All right, Sarah Montalbano is our guest. We're going to dive into this report. And yes, I know, I've actually reached out to the company with a thorium salt reactor to see if they would come on the program to discuss it. They're putting in a test model at Oak Ridge right now. We'll see what happens. Here we go.

Let's do it. The Michael Duke Show. Not your daddy. Wait, sorry. Not your daddy? Ooh, not your daddy's talk radio. Whew, I was scared for a second. Thought we were going down. Here's Michael Dukes and the show. Okay, welcome back to the program. Sarah Montalbano is our guest. You can find her at Substack at sarahmontobano.substack.com where you can just Google Montalbano Mondays and you'll find her over there.

She works and writes for the American Experiment, and she has got her latest report is going to be coming out, and she's offered to give us a bit of a sneak peek on it.

The new report, which is titled Shattered Green Dreams, the Environmental Costs of Wind and Solar. And I, you know, first and foremost, I want to point out that, you know, we're not saying that wind and solar, I'm not saying, and I'm not going to speak for Sarah, I guess, but I'm not saying that there's not a place for wind and solar. in ancillary power and some of these things. But the question is, can it drive an entire...

Grid, can it drive an entire sector? And is it the answer? As many people have said, you know, oh, it's the answer to everything. It's this it's the solution. Um, but again, if we weren't propping up a lot of these green and I don't know how many of you on YouTube or whatever, you just been inundated with these ads about, you know, American and how we should, I got a phone call the other day of all things, a recorded robocall about.

Oh, we need to keep these subsidies going for the green energy. And I'm just like, if we weren't doing that, it wouldn't make any sense. But let's talk a little bit about this. about this report, Sarah. Give me the rundown. Let's start off with some of the problems in the environmental costs of wind and solar. And you start off, and I mentioned it earlier, these things...

are expensive to build and by expensive, not just talking about dollars, although without the subsidies, they would be uneconomical. I'm talking about in the costs of materials and everything else.

Yeah, absolutely. And first and foremost, I would note as well that I agree with you. I think, you know, wind and solar can make sense in certain situations for certain people. I tend to think of that as more microgrid situations or, you know. situations where it doesn't really matter if you have power 24-7. But first, the impetus for this paper came about a couple of years ago. And, you know, I think it is...

We've seen a huge shift in the dialogue already, but I think it's also really important to have all these facts in the same place. The material demands are enormous, and I truly think that... You know, every set of generation technologies has its set of challenges and trade-offs and benefits as well. And we've covered a lot of the disadvantages of wind and solar, but material.

Intensity is a huge one. And even sources such as a green energy think tank called the Energy Transitions Commission, you know, they even. have concerns about this because they expect steel demand for global net zero by 2050 to increase by five times. 2022 levels um you know aluminum would uh grow to three 30 million metric tons annually which would you know make

make it so that we're hosed if aluminum wasn't highly recyclable and being recycled a lot already. The chief concern is copper, copper being the electrification metal. Annual demands would be about 20 million metric tons per year in their scenarios. But the world total only produced 23 million.

metric tons in 2024. So that's not tenable at all because we use copper for a lot of other things. And so at least some materials will see some huge supply crunches. And you know, the International Energy Agency estimates that we would need about 50 new lithium mines, 60. nickel mines and 17 cobalt mines to be constructed around the world by 2030 which simply isn't going to happen with permitting demands and such and i'm

I'm glad you bring up the Inflation Reduction Act because that is incredibly misnamed. And, you know, obviously these projects aren't sustainable without that kind of subsidy and the material demands. have been juiced by this. One estimate suggests that lithium demand is up 15%.

for where it would have otherwise been before the IRA. And we're seeing a raft of solar power bankruptcies right now. We're seeing just all of this uncertainty around the credits means that these... business models are suddenly no longer viable and that's in large part because they can't get their materials except from overseas um and you know it's it's just a huge mess

there but i thought that was an interesting component well yeah exactly i mean and we've talked about it on the program here i think with you and others before that you know the cost of um you know, producing a single solar panel or a single windmill, wind generator is, I mean, when you get down into the actual cost of manufacturing and everything else, there's very little.

There's very little green savings in the long run because of the material costs and the expenditure of energy to create these energy-saving devices, which is ironic, right? It's ironic at this point that you've got a solar panel that only has a 15-year lifespan, and by the time you've manufactured it, it has to run. all 15 or maybe even 20 of those years to recoup the cost and a little more, that's a problem.

Oh, yeah. And that gets to the kind of section in my paper where I kind of address head on the decommissioning and the repowering concerns and the waste disposal concerns. You know, wind turbines and solar panels, even in their... best case scenarios are only lasting between 20 and 25 years, their efficiency declines over that time. So they're generating slightly less every year.

Again, it's interesting how finances get into this, but they are often repowered well before their expected end of life. to the fact that they need to requalify for the production tax credit, which is a federal government tax credit that pays them for the electricity that they're producing. So the median age of partial repowering for windmills is actually only about 11 years.

And that, again, becomes a problem because the bulk of wind turbines are concrete and steel, but the blades are made of really not recyclable materials, at least right now, like fiberglass and carbon fiber.

those blades are now starting to be decommissioned from the earliest wind turbines, and those are going into landfills. So I had some interesting statistics on this that I didn't get around to writing down, but I think that... a huge concern too is how are we going to deal with that they just go sit in landfills and of course you know things like solar panels those are mostly glass why aren't we recycling those more often and that's because all of these little tiny metal

parts and components are difficult to recycle and it's simply not economical right now um yeah so so you could recycle it but the cost of recycling it costs more than the manufacturer of a new. And so, again, you just you just pitch it. I know that there's a whole sub industry now that's been going on trying to make it make the recycling of these panels.

you know, more economical and things like that. And maybe they will come about and be able to do it. But again, the problem with this all comes back to how much are we... How much are we really saving, right? I mean, how much are we really saving or are we expending? I mean, again, in the case of California, how much waste has gone on to create this huge solar grid that now has more power than it can handle during the day?

but it's still struggling at night. There's got to be an equity. There's got to be a balance here, and we're not seeing it. And as the market is distorted by more and more of these... tax credits and subsidies and all these other things, it really doesn't do, it does us a disservice because we can't really see what the true, what the true fallout of where the, where the equity point is, where the balance point is between these things.

Absolutely. I mean, we've put the overall overarching vision ahead of what is actually reasonable to do, because I think you could make the argument that 10 or 20 years ago, we were... you know starting to get the right amount of wind and solar power but i think we are well past that point now because it is imposing grid-wide, system-wide costs, especially in things like transmission lines, which need to be built to bring power from these windy areas, these sunny areas, into population centers.

cost you can't discount as far as copper goes um you know there's a lot of of concerns um with with recycling and repowering and i think for the most part recycling is treated as kind of the hand wavy uh option that says you know we'll we'll figure this out we've we once we get them built we will we'll have all of this material able to be recycled and we'll keep recycling ad infinitum um and that isn't realistic in in any sense of thing

especially now um and a lot of proponents will say well now we need to mandate recycling which isn't a reasonable option either

Sarah Montalbano is our guest. You can find her on Substack, and I recommend you subscribe to her Substack at Montalbano Mondays. You continue on with the report talking about... You know, again, the raw materials and where we mine and why where we mine matters. As you mentioned earlier, a lot of times we're going overseas because our own regulations don't allow us to.

mine the way that these other countries have made it economical to mine some of these heavy materials and other things that we just don't have access to. And so, again, it hides. The environmental cost, not just the cost in dollars, but the environmental cost, right? Absolutely. China is leading, dominating, I think is actually the appropriate word, in foreign-owned mines. And they're doing it around the world. And they are responsible for the mining and processing of about...

90% of the rare earths available around the world. And they're also dominating, you know, copper, nickel, cobalt, and lithium. And part of it too is the processing.

uh issue um not all of it is about mining but we've we've had a few high profile examples that i detail uh in my report from Just the last two years, one Indonesian tailing facility for a copper mine, no, nickel, actually flooded the whole... scenario and and flooded the village um and you know it killed one worker and has you know two were missing at the time that i came across these reports

You know, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, that is a huge cobalt hub. And, you know, a Department of Labor report from last year says, you know, 52% of these miners reported seeing children mining. at their mindsets. And that's the kind of stuff we're complicit in. And I don't need to put too fine of a moral point on it, but I am appalled by the fact that the U.S. isn't willing to do

any mining for the most part on its own domestic soil under its high labor standards and its high environmental standards. That's scary to me.

Well, again, because if we had to comply with our own regulations and everything else, the production cost of a lot of these materials would be astronomical right i mean it would be it would be much higher and again show it yet again how it was unsustainable and that just doesn't play into the narrative so there's a key of politics that is obviously uh plugged into this whole thing oh oh yes and and i think a lot of people will

claim that the kind of mines that we have in Alaska and Minnesota and all of these domestic places, oh, that's the same kind of thing. But no, we have incredibly modern mining standards. We have incredibly high safety regulations. they are able to undercut us because they don't follow those values they don't care about these things um and the other thing i would note too is if you have um if you particularly care about carbon dioxide emissions um

That is also worse when we're doing mining and processing overseas because their electric grids are fueled primarily on coal. China's electric grid is a primarily 60% coal. And that has twice the emissions of natural gas. So if you want to have these electric vehicles and wind turbines and solar panels, you need to decide where you want these materials to be mined.

Sarah Montalbano is our guest. We're going to continue with her here in just a second. We're up against the break already, so we're going to come back to this. It always goes fast. We'll continue with Sarah here in just a moment. We'll track it back. We'll finish her report. And then come back to Alaska. We'll be here in just a moment. Don't go anywhere. The Michael Duke Show. Common Sense. Liberty-based. Freethinking Radio. What is that? Regularly heard on American radio. All right.

All right. Sarah Montalbano is our guest here on the Michael Duke show. We're continuing on with her. Tracer asks, and a question from Rumble, she says. Federal Office Energy Management Alaska Division still wanted offshore wind turbines forced on us here too, last I heard. Any updates, sir? Are you familiar with what they've been pushing for offshore wind here? I haven't heard about that. I would be a little surprised if it's still under question in this administration. Yeah.

Yeah, I'll have to look into that. Yeah, I would think that any since most of those mandates have changed. And of course, that's part of the problem that we talked about here just a little bit ago is that. You know, with this administration, sure. But what about the next administration or the administration after that? We know these things are cyclical and the pendulum swings one way or the other.

And that's part of the problem is we're creating an energy policy that's supposed to be 10, 20, 30 years out. And yet we're at the mercy of, you know, every four, eight. maybe 12 years of political swings, that's a big part of this problem, right? I agree entirely. And it's one of the reasons that I think there needs to be. some relatively stricter decisions made on permitting, because I think it's... hugely damaging to energy projects and infrastructure in general when you know a litigious

nonprofit can decide, okay, we're going to sue about this energy project and you can do it up to seven years after this project has gotten all of its environmental impact statements. I think there needs to be tighter timelines on that stuff because

You know, they could be breaking ground by the time that you decide you want to sue. And that delays things enormously. Well, and a lot of these environmental concerns have developed that to a fine art. Will they wait until just after these companies have gotten started?

in breaking ground or constructing or something like and then they throw the play on the field right then they throw the flag and they and they go to they go to court and that's how i mean they've bankrupted many companies have been ruined because they've gotten everything they've dotted all the t's they've crossed all the i's they've done everything that they were supposed

to do and they get started and all of a sudden now they're stopped and of course they're on the hook for everything that they've done so far and they've got to wait it out and this could be the this could be the work of a couple of years of trying to work this stuff through the courts. And even if they win, they've lost at that point. And one of the interesting things about litigation on this front is that the Equal Access to Justice Act, I believe.

is allowing for successful litigation, they have all their lawyer fees recouped. And in some cases, it's more than they actually spend. because it's based on some interesting formulas that I don't recall right now. So they have incentives from the federal government to litigate whenever they can, see what sticks, and get paid for the time. Well, yeah, because...

That's their whole purpose, right? Their whole purpose and all their money that they've raised and everything else, that is their job. And if they have to pay out, so be it. If they don't, then so be it. It's a win-win in either situation like that, for sure.

which is highly, highly frustrating. Rick says, it is for sure scary, Sarah, that communist countries dominate several markets. It's not a good thing. I mean, that's... part of the problem, right? I mean, we're dealing with probably our biggest competitor in the world in China, and yet we've allowed them and encouraged them to become the dominant force in many of these things. That's a real...

That's a real problem. Exactly. And I find it alarming. I think there's a growing sense that this is alarming. And I think for the most part, China has decided that they'd like to at least. use the rhetoric of the wind and solar and green everything in order to handicap us on this stage. Because if our electric grid is entirely wind and solar,

What's going to happen in 20 years when all of these technologies start to wear out and need to be replaced if they're still dominating these supply chains? And one of the other things that I think is interesting and I follow kind of recreational.

is the cybersecurity aspect of things. I was just going to bring that up. Yeah, I mean, if they're completely in control and in the catbird seat on this, and yet they're the ones that are... creating a lot of this material or these pieces i mean they just they got a big transformer down there that had i essentially it wasn't malware but it was essentially you know bad stuff built into it where they could take control of the grid or shut it down or...

do nefarious things. And that is when we become dependent on a foreign source for that kind of stuff, when it's so critical to our infrastructure, that's a real problem. Yes, and all of these inverters on many solar systems, there were just some... US officials that kind of informally said we're looking into this because they found rogue communication devices on these Chinese manufactured parts. Yeah, a backdoor into our own electrical grid. That's a...

Well, it's kind of terrifying, quite honestly. It's kind of scary when you look at it that way. All right. Sarah Montalbano is our guest. We're going to continue to discuss her new report, which is going to be coming out shortly from the American. experiment called Shattered Green Dreams, the Environmental Cost of Wind and Solar. Please like and share, like and follow, ring the bell, do all the YouTube-y stuff. Here we go.

Public enema number one. Oh, wait, sorry. Enemy. Public enemy number one, which makes more sense. On the other hand, he's a little bit of a pain in the Michael Duke show. Yes, yes, yes, that's me. All right, let's continue on. Sarah Montalbano is our guest. We're continuing to discuss her upcoming report from the American Experiment entitled Shattered Green Dreams.

We were talking about, you know, where we mine matters and again, giving more and more power to communist China and other entities that don't comply with our own rules and regulations. It kind of seems very hypocritical that we. hold ourselves to a higher standard, and yet we pour billions of dollars overseas into these other things. And of course, that has to do with that. You talk about the ecology and the wildlife and the cost of that as well.

Um, that's a, that's a, that's a pretty tough, uh, it's a pretty tough deal. I care a lot about animals. Um, I, I find it really concerning that, uh, wind turbines and solar panels. lead to a lot of direct collisions with birds and bats. I would first say there's a lot of anthropogenic causes. Birds are flying into skyscrapers all the time. But one of the... concerning problems with wind turbines is the kind of birds that they tend to strike tend to be slower reproducing species like

eagles and hawks and other organisms that are using the updraft on these sites to make this happen. There's also concerns about offshore wind and disrupting whale habitats. The North Atlantic right whale only has about 360 individuals left in the world. And there have been several that have washed up along the Atlantic coast in tandem with

construction beginning on the Vineyard Wind Project. Of course, I would definitely note here that NOAA determined the cause of death to be chronic entanglement. They don't think it's related. But, you know, I think there is evidence that even if these aren't lethal effects, there are definitely sublethal stressors on these populations. And we need to be doing everything we can to.

to protect these species. If that is the kind of environmental things you care about, if you care about endangered species and threatened species, I think there's a strong case to be made that wind and solar aren't actually protecting them in the ways that you want. Go ahead. Well, no, and I think that that plays into one of your other points on this, which, of course, is...

You know, the land use on these types of facilities, whether it's wind or solar, the footprints on these things is enormous. I mean, maybe here in Alaska, we've got enough. free space that we can use, you know, without. But I mean, they are huge. I mean, the amount of square acreage that it requires for a wind or a solar farm compared to. you know, compared to, you know, traditional generation techniques of, you know, coal or gas or even nuclear is, I mean, it's exponentially larger.

Oh, I agree entirely. And that was one of the things that I wanted to look at the literature here and figure out exactly what these. facilities would take to do global or US net zero. And, you know, that is because they're low energy density. They only produce electricity 20, 25% of the time.

And that means you need a lot more area. And the estimate that you may have heard before is that wind and solar will need at least 10 times the land area to generate the same amount of electricity as a... a natural gas plant, an equivalent. a natural gas plant. That's concerning. The numbers are even worse for nuclear because nuclear is extremely energy dense and it really only needs about 1.3 square miles for the reactor itself.

So, you know, it's 72 times that to do the same amount of electricity generation for, I think that's wind. And, you know, if the US tried to power itself entirely on wind turbines. One estimate from 2010 suggests that would be twice the size of California. You would need to dedicate that to wind turbines only. And then the only other thing I would say on this, this one kind of floored me.

There was a study done of about 10 net zero scenarios, global net zero scenarios from various authorities on the subject. And they modeled the land use area. And one of them that is going to be very heavy. portfolio on wind and solar and vehicle electrification actually estimates between 500 and 900 million hectares would be needed. And just for context. 900 million hectares is about the size of the united states so that i think

truly isn't tenable, especially because we have other things that we need to use land for, like agriculture. Right, growing food. Yeah, growing food. Is that important? Yeah, living, living space, you know, growing food. uh and everything else i mean that's the thing we We've gotten into this so far to buy into this that this is the only solution, and yet we're ignoring a lot of the downsides. Again, not saying that there's not a place for wind and solar.

But to say that it can replace the rest of the grid is a pipe dream. Oh, absolutely. I mean, it is... you know, the kind of thing that you might find use cases for, but it is not the kind of technology that's appropriate for utility scale grids. And this net zero dream is simply not going to be feasible.

Yeah, no, that's a huge problem. I want to get back to the, we kind of skipped around here, but again. the decommissioning, the repowering, and the waste disposal. It's one of the things that we're discovering now on EVs. Now, here we are.

10 years into this experiment, essentially, on electric vehicles. And they were going to be the solution. That's what we heard. They're going to be the solution. They're going to be the answer. And yet now we're seeing whole... lots that are filled with depleted evs where the car itself is still great but the battery

is no bueno, right? And they don't know what to do with it. They can't, you know, how do they recycle it? How do they do that? I mean, this is, again, and the resale value on EVs has been taking a dramatic hit for the same reason, because it's only got a limited... lifespan on these big batteries that make up the whole lower part of the car. And what do we do now with them?

Yeah, this is a huge challenge that was coming up in the literature review. Utility scale batteries are bigger, but EV batteries are still difficult to recycle. And there's not a ton of recyclers that... uh have actually gone for uh doing this um so you know it's it's difficult to do it's expensive to do uh for the most part we are seeing again Like in a lot of scenarios, electronics go to land fills and EV batteries will do the same.

You know, on other notes, decommissioning of other technologies, there was a comment in the chat that I thought was interesting. But these wind turbines have enormous concrete pads that go. deep into the earth and on my research on this i found out look even when these are decommissioned They're not going back in and tearing up and getting all this concrete out. That stays in the earth, even when the turbines are long gone.

I can imagine that Alaska would have serious challenges with this, especially given permafrost and things like that. So that's an engineering challenge in itself, but I really, yeah. It's like three quarters of an acre of. concrete for every tower for every for every wind wind turbine it's like three quarters of an acre of concrete i mean forget about the cost of making that and mixing that and the energy cost of going but again like you said if you decommission it

they're not pulling up three quarters of an acre of concrete out of the ground. They're just leaving it. And that again, causes even more problems. Yeah, that has serious consequences for topsoil and such. I think there's a lot of hope and excitement around the fact that maybe we can do agriculture between wind turbines because they're spaced so far apart.

um i'm skeptical that that will work for most circumstances uh but that is mostly because all of this construction grading removes you know fertile topsoil um the other concern with this and hopefully i get the statistic right because it's not in my prep notes but You know, 80 something percent of these projects are being located on agricultural lands. And I can't blame farmers a bit because they're getting paid a lot of money to be able to do this. And that's a lot more.

guaranteed than going through a crop cycle and seeing how much it's going to pay at the end and risking failures there. But that is a little concerning to me, too, because we have prime agricultural land being used for these other purposes.

Right. Well, and I think that this, again, this more is become more political than it has. It's not really about environmental issues. It's more about political issues at this point. Would you agree? I would say so. I think, you know, the chat has been popping off today and I love that because I think people are coming to a really.

good understanding of these environmental costs now. I think there's a growing recognition of this, and I don't think I will convince any person who doesn't already believe this I think there will always be this kind of halo around these technologies is the only way that we can beat climate change and you know that's that is what makes it political um i truly think there's an openness to question problem here um but

this paper is extensively sourced um you know i have want to say almost 170 citations in my citation list um the knowledge is out there it is just a question of getting it all together and seeing the big picture for what it is well and seeing if people actually want

to look at the facts again because this is it seems to have become more about feeling than it has been about facts um and uh you can cite all you want you can have footnotes out the wazoo the question is will people actually go out there and

follow it and read it and that's the bigger question here less than 60 seconds sarah montalbano your final thoughts here for today Thank you all for listening and being engaged on these issues. One of my hopes with this paper is that local communities will take this when they need to and decide for themselves what energy generation makes the most sense for them.

Thank you for that. I hope you will look. Tune in this week to americanexperiment.org slash reports. I'm very much hoping it will be published this week, and I appreciate the chance to preview it for y'all. Yeah, no, I look forward to seeing more about it. Sarah Montalbano, you can find her at Substack Montalbano Mondays. Sarah, thank you so much for coming on board and joining us today. We appreciate it. We will see you.

again soon. The Michael Duke Show, Common Sense, Liberty-based, Freethinking Radio. Okay, Sarah Montalbano, our guest. Any final thoughts? I know you've got to go to a meeting here pretty quick, Sarah, but, you know, we didn't get to end really to, you know, the Alaska component of it. But, I mean, what can Alaska learn from all these things?

I think Alaska needs to realize that... I think nuclear is going to be really exciting. One of the things I didn't mention, but I think is cool, is the Eilson pilot demonstration of a microreactor got a contract signed. So I'm hopeful that Alaska will be... heading towards at least the nuclear future. And I think it's the perfect use case for us. Yeah, no. And I think that eventually, I think we're starting to trip in that direction, but I think eventually we're going to discover that.

Nuclear is going to be the answer for what we need, especially for the, you know, as you talked about before, the footprint and the amount per. acre of power you can generate. And the fact that they're coming out with these new technologies like the thorium salt batteries and some of the other things that they're putting in, they're really tuning this technology up to where it could be... a lot better for us in the long run.

I agree. And used fuel has a lot of recycling possibilities that haven't been explored. And if we're going to be mining, I think a lot of that should be spent on uranium and other elements that. that can be used in this way. So I find it very exciting and I'm excited to have this paper out there.

Really? Yeah, we're excited to read it. We're excited to see it and read it. And of course, I look forward to seeing your drop into my mailbox every week. So Sarah, thank you so much for coming on board. As always, it's great. And we appreciate you being part of it today. Thank you so much. I appreciate it. All right. Thank you. Appreciate you coming on board and being part of it today. Sarah Montalbano, our guest Montalbano Mondays here on the Michael Duke show.

I want to say thank you for her for coming on board and sharing with us some good stuff here this morning. All right. Let's see. What else did I miss here while we were talking with Sarah? Oh, Barbara wanted to make this comment. She said, for what it's worth, the Fairbanks North Star Borough Finance Committee of the whole will meet tomorrow.

Tuesday rather than Thursday, big topics is the new flood plan and the wildfire plan. So I don't know exactly what's going on there, but, uh, and why they wanted to do it on a tuesday rather than a thursday but we'll see you know you know we'll see we'll see what's going on um Anthony just said, I will literally have a Super Bowl style. My team won the big game barbecue when we slap some reactors up here. Yeah. I mean, I think that's.

That's going to be where things are going here in the not too near future. That's exactly what we're going to be looking at here. I'm just going back. Her voice is heavenly. She's a gentle lady and a scholar. Sarah is pretty amazing to have on the program. I love her. Brian said he is demolished. A series of concrete foundations that supported antennas, which are very similar, although not nearly as... There's a lot more concrete in a base for a...

uh, for a wind turbine than there is for a tower because of the stressors that are on it. But he said, yeah, he said it was hell beating them up and getting them out of the ground. Yeah. I can imagine that would have been a, uh, that would have been a hot, hot mess for sure.

All right. Let me see here. What else do I got? I got to. OK, I'm just getting I'm just getting stuff squared away here. Ready for our next guest. We're going to talk to Moksha Summer here in just a second about their big thing at the Porcupine this weekend. I want to make sure I got it all up here. All right. Okay. We will get things ready to rock and roll here.

uh with her let me call her and get her on she's going to do it by a phone today so let's uh let's see if we can get this um okay let's try this again try this again here Oh my lord. Let me try. Everything was working fine earlier. Fine, fine, just fine. And now... It's not. Let me see if I can get this connected. The challenge that is audio here. in the uh in the last frontier okay let's see here if we can get it again uh mulks are you there with me

Yeah, I was trying to get you connected to my system here. Let me call you right back. Okay, thank you. All right, so I'm going to see if I can fix this and get this going on here. Okay. All right. So we're going to take a quick break. And when we come back, we'll have Moksha here on the program. Don't go anywhere. Be right back.

folk world rock ensemble is what we call it. My husband is my main partner. I joke that I'm the benevolent dictator behind everything in this. We do have a lot of shows that we do with a full band at times. This tour, we are coming as a duo, which is still an incredibly full sound. And this is kind of a special year for us too, because it's actually our 20th anniversary.

um doing music full-time together and as who dosed and so uh it's it's pretty lovely touring behind all this stuff we have a new album out as well and um

It's kind of cool doing it as a team like this. Yeah, I want to talk a little bit because you've got quite a story. You really came from, you know, kind of a roundabout world, you know, kind of world sound, you know, coming out and coming around. You face some real challenges. I know that you.

You underwent brain surgery at one point in 2008, and now you're back again. Tell me a little bit about the genesis of you and your sound and your husband and everything that you guys have put together here. Yeah, we've been through a lot of different phases of who we are. And I mean, I think it's pretty amazing. Anytime you commit to a journey with someone else and where something so vital like music is part of what is happening.

the music itself goes through the changes that you go through in your life too. In my 20s, I had a brain tumor and went through a whole process around it. i'm lucky to be here i it impacted i had to relearn a lot of speech because of where it was in the brain and I learned so much in that process too and you know music was my number one tool in terms of being able to speak again as well because it's such

such an amazing thing in terms of how it can be used in that way. And in terms of, you know, we have come a long way.

in the midst of it having kids too which we our kids will be with us on this tour this is our very first time coming to alaska which we are so delighted about we tour we do a lot of festivals um and you know art centers all over the place and alaska's been on our bucket list for a for way too long and we're really thrilled to finally be coming so yeah no i mean alaska is the bucket list for a lot of people and and i gotta be honest when i

that you know you had gone through all this and i'm just thinking you know as a guy who uses his voice to you know make a living in a lot of ways um you know that is I mean, that's terrifying, you know, to think that I have to relearn to do all those things. I mean, that must have been a tremendous hurdle. But again, also what an accomplishment in the long run.

Yes. And I mean, just to give a little bit more info about how music was helpful, like I lost the ability to retrieve all nouns. They were just gone. But what was amazing is. no lyrics were gone for me and being able to sing things was available to me so I started to actually be able to sing what I needed to say because it just uses the brain differently and I think

You know, there's been so much development in terms of neurology and what's known, and it's absolutely not my area of expertise. I just have my firsthand experience, but the brain is so malleable. My real reclaiming also was. going back after going through that whole thing and after healing for a while and regaining my language skills and i went back and did my master's degree that was my like okay i can do this you know like um so

Anyway, that was a good way to do it. That's a good test of your new super abilities, right? I mean, now we're going to go back and get a master's degree and make it out.

Talk to me a little bit, talk to me a little bit about the sound, uh, that you guys, uh, you know, that, you know, your band sound, because, you know, it's on, you, you're on the, the rock charts, the, the folk charts. Um, and, uh. you know, independent music awards. You guys have won all kinds of different things. So tell me a little bit about the sound of who knows and what, you know, what, what is it to, you know, what would people liken it to if people haven't heard you before?

What they would liken to is a great question. And I don't know if I have the answer to that. My husband and I come from totally different music backgrounds. I studied classical piano and voice for many years and also did a lot of Eastern European music as well as some sort of like edge of Eastern Europe.

edge of the middle east you know what i mean so that area in terms of um where the music is that i studied most um my husband comes from like he was totally a punk rocker you know and and then went and studied um like various polyrhythm different types of training etc and so we come totally from completely different completely different places and yet somehow it makes sense together and so

The world element of what we do is absolutely an influence in what we do. It is sort of like electric folk driven in that folk in the sense of we often address certain social issues as well as just sort of being, you know. human and you know what songwriting can be about songwriting can address everything right and um but there can be a little bit of a like just a little bit of an undercurrent with it as well um so we're not afraid to get pretty we're not afraid to get gritty

essentially. And we also just love collaborating with different people too. So we have collaborated with different musicians from all over the world. Our last three records, if you know Jars of Clay, all the guys from Jars of Clay clay are on those and sort of helped co-produce and stuff they're based in nashville which we're we're just outside of nashville just across the kentucky line is where we're based right um and so that's had just a really great

effect on us in terms of as songwriters too um so yeah jars of clay have got some really i mean they've got a really great sound as well if you work with them then um and i'm sure they brought something completely different to what you were uh you know to what your your sound sounds like uh at the same time yeah they're really sweet guys too and

One of the things that's so wonderful about collaboration with other musicians is that you teach each other in the process, right? You get to learn just completely different ways of working. And so it's been lovely doing these last three records.

them. Something I always like to ask whenever I don't often get a chance to talk to musicians or singers or bands, but I always want to know about the origin story of their, of the name. What is who dosed? What is it? What does it mean? Is it an acronym? Does it stand for something? Is it a foreign word? What is it?

Hu dost is actually an informal Turkish greeting between people who love each other. So you would go up to a friend or a family member and go, hu dost. And what it means is, hu is... it's kind of like if you do if you know what all means right it's kind of like the Turkish version of that who it's

Sort of from a theological standpoint, it's kind of interesting. It's in all the Abrahamic faiths, right? And it's the sound, the breath, the shared sound and breath, right? And then dost is true friend. So it's like the true friend of that source. That source sound is what it breaks down to in terms of translation. That's super cool. All right. Well, that's some amazing stuff. And you've got this new album that just came out.

a couple days ago right is it just just now come out of this brand it's just come out yes yeah and we're excited about it and um It's already been up there in the folk charts, folk radio charts, which is great. And of course, we're going to be touring behind it these months as well. So putting it out there even more. What was the theme for this album or the inspiration for this album?

well i mean we wrote it and recorded it in the midst of having our second child who is sweet and wild of course um so i can't i can't deny that that's influenced it um he's like a totally rambunctious two-year-old who you know if you're if you catch us on this tour route you will catch him too Actually, you won't catch him is more like it. But we kind of went all over. I feel like I can share this just as a mom and I'm sure.

i'm sure not just moms can relate to this but you go through such a journey of both discovering your strength in that and also just seeing the areas of vulnerability of like not knowing how is this going to be what is this going to be and of course bringing kids into the world of what it is right now what our country is right now etc we do on a side note we do non-profit work working to end extreme

poverty. And we do a lot of it at a government level right here in Kentucky and on a national level too. It's complicated these days, right? I won't go into specifics, but it's complicated. And bringing kids into this world, there's a lot of questions of like, how do you rise up and how do you create? a place where they can rise up and the whole concept of the monkey and the crown is the idea of that it's sort of like a two-sided thing right where the monkey in the crown could be

a fool in royal clothing, right? And having that, right? Of being someone who puts on an illusion of who you actually are when you're truly a fool. Or it could be the other way around where it's having humility. and grace and be a surprising person of nobility. Nice. And that's what we hope to put forward is teaching. humility that is surprisingly noble.

We're talking with Moksha Summer, who is the part of the duo Who Dosed, and they're going to be performing live at the Porcupine Theater here in Homer on Wednesday night at 7 p.m. And you can go out there. and you can listen to it live at 7 p.m. It'll be a good show. You can find out more about their duo at whodost.com, where they've got everything there, including the new album.

all their details and everything else. Moksha Summer, appreciate you coming out and being part of it today and giving us a little bit of background. And, you know, I'm glad you're out there making music. We'd love to hear all different kinds of music, and I appreciate you. being part of the show this morning. Thank you. I'm really grateful to be on the show and anybody who comes out, we will take you on a...

journey. Trust me. It'll be, you'll enjoy yourself. A whirlwind. And if you're not nice, they'll hand their two-year-old to you so you can deal with that. It'll be, it'll be fun stuff. All right, Mokja, Mokja, thank you so much for coming on board. being part of it today. We appreciate that. Thank you. Have a great time. All right. Thank you. All right, folks, that brings us up to the break and we got more coming up. We will continue here.

In just a moment, we've got some headlines from around the state and everything else that's coming on. The Michael Duke Show. Common Sense, Liberty Base, Free Thinking Radio. Back with more after this. Running on 100% pure beard power. Oh, also some coffee. We dip our beard in coffee. Ha, nice beard. The Michael Duke Show. Okay, we are back after that audio break. Sorry about that. We had a, I don't know, I had to restart the whole sound system because something was busted. Busted.

All right. Yeah. Jars of clay are awesome. I do like them. I'm interested to see what kind of sound these folks have. So it should be. It should be fun. All right, you guys can all hear me now, right? I'm assuming I got all the audio back and everything's all good. Oh, man, what a hot, hot, hot, hot, hot mess. All right. we're ready to go um um what

Where could farm boys and a couple of farm boys would take a trip and never leave the farm? Yes, we hear you. Okay. Thank you. Barbara can follow instructions. She can tell me that we're all here and good to go. All right. Well, let me close down some windows here that I don't need. And we'll move back over to all the stories that are fit to print here around the state of Alaska. And what.

Some of the things that are going to be coming up here on the story for today. All right. I got it. I got it. I got it. Okay. So, you guys ready? You guys ready for a big day here? Let's see, what else we got? I'm just looking to see if there's anything else that I missed. We are good to go. All right. Coming up tomorrow on the program, Brad Keithley and Chris Story. Chris Story will be back with us tomorrow.

After taking a quick vacay down to the lower 48, he's going to come back on board and share with us his thoughts and ideals. It'll be fun. We'll enjoy that. We'll be... Uh, we'll be coming back to that. Um, I was just looking to see if, Oh, um, that's what one of the, one of the store, where's my story. I'm looking here. Um, okay.

this is what i wanted right here i wanted to talk a little bit about the governor's vetoes because the governor um here it is that's the story i found it all right we will uh We'll talk a little bit about the governor's vetoes and what came out late last week. And we'll see. We'll see what we can. We'll see what we can come up with on that here as we go through.

And, of course, Ranked Choice Voting, that's now coming to Anchorage. Did you see that? They're going to try and put Ranked Choice Voting into the Anchorage elections. And, oh, man. And we're also going to talk a little bit about the elections report, which we talked with Ben Carpenter about last week. But one of the big things that came out of that that he and I really didn't get into was the combination of the PFD voter registration.

And it was mentioned in the report, but as you get down deeper into it, it creates some real problems. And that's the automatic voter registration with a PFD application. We're going to talk about that as well this morning. And we'll talk about Tom Bodette. You know, he's Alaskan, right? He's Alaskan. This story came out last week and I was like, what? I mean, I just, I got to read the story just because it just, uh, it's, it strikes me. Um, heat advisory in Fairbanks today, man.

Yeah, I guess it was smoking hot in Fairbanks all weekend. What did it get up to there, guys? 85, 86, 89? Apparently this new heat index, this new heat warning is a new thing. It used to be weather advisories. Now they're calling them heat advisories. How hot did it get over the weekend? You guys will have to tell me that as well. All right. We're going to continue here. The Michael Duke show, common sense, Liberty based 89, 90. You guys can keep that.

You guys can keep that. I'll be happy with my 65. I'm just, I'm just happy with that. All right, here we go. Jumping back into it. The Michael Duke show common sense radio. The Michael Duke Show. Seriously humorous with a pinch of intellect. Pinch of intellect. Sorry. That is humorous. Here's Michael Dukes. Okay, welcome back.

It is the Monday edition of The Michael Duke Show. Oh, man, we got some headlines from around the state to cover from over the weekend or right there on Friday. Happened after we went off the air. Lots of interesting things going on. I did want to start with this, though, just on a little bit of a lighter note. Tom Beaudet, who always said, we'll leave the light on for you.

and has been doing so since 1986, right? This is Homer Wright, Tom Bodette, who I don't think he's here anymore, but, you know, he is, they're not going to leave the light on for you anymore. Because now he's suing Motel 6 for using his name and his voice in their advertising without permission. Motel 6, the chain, got bought up earlier.

uh earlier i guess earlier this year or late last year it got bought up by a new corporation and um the new corporation missed an annual payment that was due to him of over a million dollars And he said since he had cut ties with him, they continued to use his name and voice on their national reservation phone line and everything else. And it violates the contract. He said he tried to negotiate a settlement with him that would recognize his role in building up Motel 6.

And not to hurt their image or their franchises or anything else, but he said that they delayed, delayed, delayed. And so finally, he filed this lawsuit. We'll see. We'll see what it comes down to. Um, but yeah, I would be a little miffed if I didn't get my million dollar payment that I was supposed to get. Um, I'd probably, I'd probably take him to court too.

Uh, at that point, anyway, I just thought I'd throw that out there. Cause I saw that story come across my desk and I was like, wow, that's, I want to be the voice of a national hotel motel chain. A million, $1.2 million payment. That is some big stuff there, big stuff. All right. All right. Let's let's talk a little bit about the governor's vetoes. He signed it into law late Thursday.

But before he signed the new budget bills and everything into law, he vetoed about $122 million. Now, part of that was to cut. $200 from the $700 increase to the BSA. So he cut it down to where it's a $500 increase to the BSA. Moving forward in perpetuity. So they're always going to get it from now on. And this immediately threw the education lobby into a full blown panic.

Jarrett Bryant, who's the superintendent of the Anchorage School District, said during a special school board meeting on Thursday, statewide districts will instantly need to find the equivalent of $200 per student to cut from their budgets. It remains to be seen. What will happen as a result of this action from the governor, but certainly emergency school closures are on the table for districts. Which, I mean, I guess. That should have been just based on the enrollment figures.

Probably should have been part of the discussion. I know Fairbanks has been fighting this and they've been actually closing schools as part of the discussion. And now I know the KPB, they've closed at least. uh, Nikolaevsk, I don't know where else they, I don't know where else they, um, uh, are closing, but you know, it's on the table. Um, the governor has, uh,

I love how the Alaska Beacon quotes as James Brooks. They said, it's the first time in state history that a governor has failed to fully fund the education formula. Okay. But they did then go on to say it was akin to former Governor Walker vetoing part of the permanent fund, which had previously also been a sacrosanct formula. So I guess if it's good for the goose, it's good for the gander, right?

The that part of the reason the governor also he released a prerecorded video saying that his vetoes were the result of depressed oil prices, basically saying. We just didn't have the money. We don't have the money to pay for the obligations. And we'll see what that means. That was a huge, huge thing. He said, we have to balance the budget. Now, Senator Stevens said, well, we had a balanced budget. I think they only had a, was it a $57 million surplus?

I think by the time it was all said and done, if I recall correctly, somebody can correct me if I'm wrong, but I think it was $57 million was the balance that they had. on the budget that was the surplus when it was all said and done which 57 million dollars kind of a rounding error when you're talking about a five billion dollar budget you know but we'll say

Senator Stevens said we had a balanced budget and we knew how how low oil could be. It's not necessary. I don't believe. Well, we'll we'll see. We'll see. We'll see what happens, of course, with the. With the fight going on right now between Israel and Iran, that has sent oil prices back upward. So maybe we're saved again like we were by the Ukrainian Russian thing. I don't I mean.

God, I'd hate to think that we're building our whole state future based on the wars that are prosecuted overseas. I just, oh man, I hope so. So you can already see it. The reactions from the school people, the normal suspects in the school industry, is that this will be devastating. Devastating, I tell you. But they're not going to come back into session to override the governor's veto. Now, no word on SB 113, which is the unicorn tax that they talked about on the Internet.

No word on whether or not that are they going to hold that until right before the session? I don't know. I don't know. Technically, I don't know how long they can hold it. Maybe they can all the way up until. till the end of the i mean maybe i don't know we'll see if they try and use it as a political tool going into the new session there were other vetoes that were part of that as well

In a maneuver intended to reduce demand for the general purpose tax revenue, lawmakers had used $100 million from the state's higher education fund and $100 million from ADEA. The governor vetoed. the million draw, the hundred million dollar draw from Adia. And so now all 200 million of it is coming from the higher education endowment fund. So.

But don't worry, says Gary Stevens. Don't worry. People shouldn't be upset about that, he says, because the plan is to replace that money when we come back in January to put that money back into the higher ed fund. I mean. Where you're going to get an extra $200 million to pay back that fund or put back into that fund when you're projected to have a $1.5 billion deficit, I don't know.

But don't worry, it'll be fine. Under his vision, Gary Stevens' vision, lawmakers could take the money from the CBR.

I mean, we still owe the CBR $10 billion. Well, it's whatever it is now, $8 billion, $7.5 billion. It's supposed to be at $10 billion. It's barely under $3 billion right now. So, I mean, we're... but we'll take money out of that to put it in this other fund that's not constitutionally mandated there were other vetoes again five million dollars that was appropriated for the alaska seafood marketing institute

He alluded he he eliminated seventy five thousand dollars for a safe gun storage campaign. Why was the state even involved in something like that? $1.9 million in grants for child care centers and $37 million intended to fill the state's disaster relief and wildfire fighting funds, which...

I mean, you can cut it now, governor, but it's always going to come back in the supplemental because that's you got to spend it when it's there. I mean, you know, I don't know. He also cut the state's mental health budget by. $2.7 million that was intended to support infant learning programs. I have questions. I have questions about that. Why do we need $2.7 million to teach? I mean, where are the parents for teaching the infants? I don't know why we needed $2.7 million. That's a lot of money.

And then $100,000 for dementia education and prevention, as well as $3 million in programs that supported disabled Alaskans, which, I mean, I don't know the details of, but... I don't know if I'm a fan or not because I don't know the details of it, but it just, that on the outside doesn't look great. No veto again expected until January.

The leaders of the House and the Senate say that they believe that lawmakers may override some or all of the governor's budget decisions, but they won't do it until January. We'll see. We'll see what happens here. But again, overall, cutting one hundred and twenty two million dollars from the state's annual budget plan before signing it into law last late last Thursday.

And everybody's already, like I said, they're all ready, uh, up in arms about it. And, uh, now there is the cause, there is a question about whether the veto. violates the Alaska's constitutional guarantee of an adequately funded public school system, which, wow, that's going to be interesting. There is potential now for a lawsuit. Of course, all the education people have gotten together to try and pull this all together. They want to file a lawsuit to try and say that this was basically...

you know, basically unconstitutional, that we're not funding up to what we guaranteed. To which I then asked the question, well, what about the capital budget? What about, you know, what about the CBR? What about all these other constitutional mandates? I mean, if it's I don't believe that that's the in the reading of the law. I don't believe that that's true.

That's still within the governor's power and purview. They're still getting a huge bump on everything else. But on top of that, what about the constitutionality of all these other things that they just seem to be ignoring?

So, we're going to see. We're going to see where it goes from here, but there's already discussions on whether or not they're going to... see a lawsuit out of this uh the coalition for education equity which has been watching the governor and the legislature closely for years has had success in the past in suing the state to increase school funding Um, but we'll see, um, you know, we'll see what happens now. This is a double-edged sword. If they decide to try and take this all the way to court.

There is a possibility that they could lose. And what does that mean if that happens? Is that does that open up the door for something else? Or if they win, what does it mean that everything? that then we have to do even more. Now this is slippery slope here. It's a slippery slope, but we'll see what, uh, we'll see what happens. The bottom line is, um, that $200 per pupil is going to be, uh,

This is going to be a problem. Now, this whole thing could have been stopped if the legislature had just worked with the governor. and put his policy things in place. I'm pretty sure that if he had gotten 90% of his policy stuff in there that he wanted instead of the lip service that they gave to them, then... This probably wouldn't be an issue. But instead, they decided that they couldn't let the governor or I guess the minority have any wins in any of this.

And they were going to do it their way. So I don't know if they've boxed him into a round corner here or not, or I don't know who's, I don't know who's got the cat by the tail, but I do know that it's going to be, uh, I do know it's going to be a very, very interesting session this coming year. 100% on that right now. 100% a wild session in the coming year.

All right, we got more coming up. Don't go anywhere. The Michael Duke Show, Common Sense, Liberty-based, Free Thinking Radio. We'll be back with more in just a moment. Don't go anywhere. will return. Running on 100% pure beard power. Oh, also some coffee. We dip our beard in coffee. Ha, nice beard. The Michael Duke Show. Okay, let's get back over here to see what you guys have been talking about. Okay.

well you now you don't hear the bumper music okay great well you know i'll reset everything when we're all done you guys don't need to hear the bumper music the radio hears the bumper music i guess that's all that matters right now um

Melissa sounded off. Melissa said, Fairbanks is not doomed, but it's detrimental. I worked hard on this board to not have to be in the spot where we now are. 2.5 million more to cut. Where does that come from? I don't have it in admin. That increases class sizes and other possible school activities gone. which we only have $1 million in that bucket. It's pretty bad. Yeah. Well, I mean, I, it's tough, but again, this is not all on you, Melissa. This is past.

school boards who have done, uh, you know, uh, mismanagement of what they've had going on for the last few years. You guys are just dealing with it now. It definitely difficult. Um, Miguel said our school board president for Fairbanks, Melissa, tried telling them in the legislature in Juneau that this would happen when not wanting to work with the governor on policy. Yeah. Again, all they had to do was...

Help it out. Melissa said, yes. Past school boards left me with a mess. Past school boards pissed me off. They left me with a mess. Yeah. David Boyle says, monopolies fight like hell to keep their system. Look at AT&T in the 80s. That case lasted about three years and AT&T lost a Carter phone.

After that decision, the AT&T monopoly was told it had to divest itself into several regional independent companies and AT&T could keep its long lines. I mean, yeah, I mean, we should start talking about monopolies and doing the same thing over and over. and expecting different results for sure. ASD, says David, could cut five principles and save more than $800,000. It could cut the extra...

planning period in middle schools and save another $3 million. Really? $3 million for an extra planning period? That's what it costs? I mean, should we not be... Yeah. We'll see. Willie says from his viewpoint, the school, the BSA didn't take a cut. Schools didn't lose a penny. They're claiming forward spending is a constitutional right. No, the bill isn't law. It's not signed.

But it is true. I mean, it was a cut to the increase. So it's still a net increase. You know, it's still a net increase. For sure. Fo sho. Um, all right. I think I'm all caught up on all the comments here in the chat room. Yeah. I just, I don't know what they expected. Um, You keep pushing the governor back into a corner, back into a corner. You don't listen. You don't hear his bill that he wanted to have some of those things on.

You know, it's a big problem. Cindy says that the KPB school board also needs a huge overhaul. Well, I mean, I would agree. And again, as much as we all like to get... down into the national politics and everything else. This is what happens when we stop paying attention to what's going on in our own communities. You know, when people aren't.

When people aren't running for school boards or for the utility boards or whatever else, we always think that that's somebody else's problem while we focus on what's going on in the, you know, what's going on in the, in the, uh, uh, you know, in the national scene, which we have no, which we have no control over, you know? Um, it's crazy. Let's see. Good morning, good morning, good morning.

Hmm. In ASD, the middle school teachers have two planning periods out of a total of seven periods each day. With the extra planning period, ASD has to hire more teachers. Oh, I see. Because they're basically out of the rotation while they're in the planning period. Well, I mean, yeah, if you could take one extra class a day.

That could make a difference. Um, I don't know. Is it $3 million? Is that the actual, have you done the math on that? I'm interested to, interested to hear more about that. All right. It's not a blame on the teachers, Harold. Quit blathering. We're not blaming the teachers. I'm blaming the school boards and the administrators in the districts. That's where I'm blaming it. It's not the teachers' fault.

It's their fault. It's their fault. Here we go. The Michael Duke show proudly splitting the left versus right dichotomy. Yeah, I had to look that word up, too. I don't think it means what he thinks it means. There he is, though. That guy. Michael Dukes. The one with the show. Okay, welcome back to the program. We're continuing on The Michael Duke Show, Common Sense, Liberty Base, Free Thicken Radio. Some stories this morning out of Anchorage.

Oh, man, why do we have to talk about Anchorage? Why? Well, because as goes Anchorage, so goes the rest of the state. We've seen that happen, right? So it's monkey see, monkey do.

Um, and, uh, this is the, this is the story of what's going on in Anchorage. Well, first and foremost, I thought this was interesting. Um, there's an article in must read where, um, they talk about, uh, Suzanne Downing writes about it from last week where the Anchorage assembly was a little tense this last week because a, um, uh, an assembly member asked for legal clarification on an enforceability of a city permit for a homeless shelter.

The city permit for the homeless shelter, it was a rule that was originally advanced by assembly members. when they wanted to shut down the face-bathed Downtown Hope Center, which refused to house biological males in its women-only facility, which seemed to be probably a good, cautious thing.

So Assemblymember Daniel Voland requested legal clarification on the ordinance enforceability, basically saying, do we, can we even do any, can we, do we have the legal authority to do this? And that apparently. stirred up chris constant who said he said i've never been as filled with as much rage as i am now on this body he was raging But he did give the city attorneys time to review the matter because they were kind of caught flat footed on this.

Assemblyman Keith McCormick said he would vote against issuing the permits, arguing that shelters like the Anchorage Rescue Mission, Brother Francia Shelters, and Clare House have been operating safely for decades without city meddling. Like, why do we need a permit if it's, you know, any echoed concerns raised during back during the Bronson administration? Remember the heydays of the Bronson administration?

when the city's health department warned that requiring sheltering licenses could push more people into homelessness. This whole thing is... is is just crazy the assembly passed the ordinance requiring homeless shelters to be licensed in june of 2021 but now i mean now they're asking the question do they do they even have the ability

Chris Constant is so mad about this. He's so mad. He's I've never been filled. And he's kind of an angry guy anyway. Right. Never been as filled with as much rage as I am right now. Why? Because you won't. I mean, don't we want to protect the women in the homeless shelter if it's a women's only facility? Shouldn't we not have? I mean, and again, yes. Good question. Why is it the city's business?

to be involved in permitting this when they're not, you know, they, all these other ones have operated just fine for years without the city meddling it. But again, This is part and parcel of that same problem we talked about last week when we were talking about the alcohol ID thing. They believe that they need to have their hand in everything to orchestrate it just the way. They themselves, you know, licenses for homeless shelters. It makes perfect sense to them. Perfect sense.

But again, this is part and parcel of, again, the whole problem with the Anchorage Assembly. Oh, by the way, that same Chris Constant? Oh, yeah. Now he's decided that... They need to bring the whole ranked choice voting thing to Anchorage. I mean, heretofore, ranked choice voting has just been for the state, for the state elections, right?

So he's got a whole new plan, and on September 9th, the Assembly is going to hold a public hearing on an ordinance that considers... that considers an amendment that the voters will have to vote on to whether or not they are going to, they should implement ranked choice voting for municipal offices. So, gosh, I almost wish I was in Anchorage right now because I guarantee you there'll be a ton of money pouring into this to advertise to get ranked choice voting for Anchorage.

If it was passed, it will be submitted to the voters and they will have to vote on it in April of 2026. Juno is doing the same thing. They're advancing a plan to to adopt ranked choice voting for their local elections as well. The one of the proponents of that down in Juneau says that the. Ranked choice voting system fosters consensus and allows for more nuanced voter expression. Although there's no evidence for, I mean, nuanced, wouldn't it make sense?

So here's the thing for me that always kind of flies in the face of the whole rank choice voting thing, right? They say, well, it's like an immediate runoff. It's like, you know, you don't have to go, but you don't have to do it. It's easy. It's like the lazy man's, you know, voting system. Because I'll be honest, if, you know, let's just say we held an election and, you know, nobody...

got elected or, you know, the, the plurality thing where they have a runoff because in Anchorage, it's a plurality. If five people run and nobody gets a 50% vote, then they have a runoff, um, with, uh, with, I think the top two vote getters. I would much rather have a second bite at that apple than trying to predict who's going to win or who's going to lose on my rank choice voting thing. I would rather be able to come back and say, you know what?

I liked this guy, but maybe I changed my mind between now and the time that the, you know, the six weeks later or whatever, when the runoff comes up, maybe I changed, maybe something new came out. Or maybe the guy that I wanted didn't win and now I've got to choose between these other two yahoos and something. You know, that's the thing. This is like the lazy, they're trying to make it a one-stop shop, pull the trigger and, you know, make predictions and do it on that. I don't.

I don't know. I don't like it. I don't like it. But if Anchorage is going to do it, I definitely don't like it. So we'll... We'll see where it's going. Anchorage, again, Anchorage is already done vote by mail. Right. Juno now has adopted since then vote by mail. They did that in 2018. And now Juno since then has adopted vote by mail. And so you can just watch these two mirror each other as they go through two of the bluest cities in the state.

And, you know, I again, I just I would like to be able to vote on every election. I don't want to have to guess on who might win or who might lose. to be, you know, to make my decisions on the other two battles. I just, it's not something I'm interested in. We'll see what the city says. We'll see what the citizens of the city say. If this does go forward and passes out of the assembly, I mean, they may kill it in the assembly. It may not make it to the ballot, but if it does.

I guess we'll see what the citizens have to say, but I guarantee you, if it goes out on the ballot, oh man. There's going to be a huge push in Anchorage. They spent whatever they spent, $15 million in the state, they'll probably spend $5 million in Anchorage just trying to convince the people that ranked choice voting is what they need. This is what they need. So Jesse's asking about my, my wife got me a new t-shirt for, for, for, for Father's Day.

It's a firearms Friday t-shirt. It says, I'm guessing you're not here about the alcohol or tobacco. Anyway. Um, yeah. It's kind of frustrating to watch. And Harold, I have been pushing for higher taxation on oil. But again, unless we get the spending in line, it doesn't matter how much money you give them. If you gave them another $2 billion, they'd spend it all. This is the deeper problem that's going on in the state. You know? It's, uh...

It's going to be interesting to see. And nobody knows where oil is going right now with the advent of the Israeli-Iranian thing. So the state of Alaska is going to be kind of in limbo. But, you know, if you plan for the worst. and hope for the best, all your surprises will be happy ones. So if you plan for oil being in the fifties and build a budget based on that, then Hey, maybe you'll be pleasantly surprised when it turns out.

that we have a little more money than we expected i mean then maybe we could pay back the cbr or do some other things or put it away a little bit yeah i mean

I don't know. All right. Tomorrow is Brad Keithley. He comes in for the weekly top three. And Chris Story is with us next week or tomorrow, which I'm glad because, I mean, I did such a horrible job. uh trying to fill in for him last week it was pathetic it's pitiful All right, we got to go. We will see you guys tomorrow. Be kind, love one another, live well. The Michael Duke Show. Common Sense, Liberty-based, free thinking radio. We will see you then. Have a good day.

Okay. Yeah. Josh was asking about my shirt. It's a... It's a Coleon Noir shirt. My wife bought me a Coleon Noir shirt, which I thought was pretty damn cool. She loves me. She really loves me. All right. Is there any of the comments here that I missed? Let's see. David, what was it? Miguel says, this is a novel here. I can't even see my face.

Quite funny. Somebody asked me, why is this governor punishing our students with our final budget? And he also mentioned our local assembly here in Fairbanks. And then I asked him if government is punishing kids. Then what was your opinion when Assemblymember Rotterman found $29.5 million in the budget by not hurting taxpayers anymore and asking taxpayers for more deferred maintenance of our schools a few months ago, and the majority of the Assembly voted no on it, and I received no answer.

Of course you didn't receive an answer because that flies, you know, you know, that flies in the face of that whole thing. Flies in the face of what their belief system is. You know. Um, anyway, Willie, Willie went, he just never has anything nice to say. Tom Bodette was a failed carpenter. I mean, He did well for himself, Willie. Don't be so mean. Don't be so, you know, I only wish I could. I could write myself a million dollar contract to voice something for.

for a national hotel chain. That would be fantastic. That would be great. Let me see. Anything else? Tracer said, what? Don't want to have to have license for their homeless shelters. Human traffickers don't want to have to get a license for their homeless shelter. Are you asserting that the Hope Center there is a human trafficking organization? Is that what you're saying, Tracer?

Should we have to get licenses from the government for everything? It wasn't Josh. It was Jesse Walton. Sorry, not Josh Walton. Sorry, Jesse. I miss miss misspoke your name there. All right. I guess we're all caught up. I don't, I guess, I guess we're all caught up. Um, Don't spill your Folgers while you blabber around. I will never have that happen because I don't drink Folgers, but that's okay. You do you, boo. You do you.

All right, my friends. Well, love having you here. We hope you have a great day. Enjoy yourself. I'm drinking some North Pole coffee. I got some. saint nicker doodle out in the kitchen i got some bones coffee and i got some beard curler i gotta go decide which one i'm gonna have this morning all right guys we'll see you later be kind love one another live well The Michael Duke Show, Common Sense, Liberty-based, free-thinking radio. See you tomorrow. Have a good one.

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