Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country. Mister Gorbachev, tear down this wall.
It's the Ricochet Podcast with Stephen Yward and Charles C. W. Cook. I'm James Lylyax. Today we talked to Robert Bryce about energy, so let's ever seve a podcast moment.
For the moment.
Supply has already been restored in several territories in the north and south of the peninsula thanks to the interconnections with France and Morocco countries, to which I would also like to thank for their solidarity.
At this time.
Combined cycles and hydroelectric plants have also been reactivated throughout the country, something that should allow us to recover supply throughout Spain.
Welcome everybody. This is the Ricochet Pond Gust number seven hundred and thirty nine. I'm James Lilacs in Minneapolis, where it appears to be trending towards precipitation this afternoon in meteorological terms, or gosh, looks like rain. You bet, you're sure. See. I can code talk just like Tim won't say. I can switch with ease between the various ways of communicating with people that's why they chose me here for the podcast. And I'm joined by other great choices, those being Stephen
Hereward and Journals C. W. Cook. Gentlemen, Hello, Hello, Hi James. How are things where you are? Well?
Things are just fine out here on the left coast. It's foggy and cloudy, as it has been all week, but at least we're not facing rain. And I saw some weather map. There's some weird weather phenomenon that has you guys up, and I don't know, it just all looks very strange.
Well, earlier, earlier this week, there was some it was like a fist, like a boxing glove, that was heading straight toward us. We were warned that there would be hail. We were warned there was a twenty percent chance of tornadoes here in the city. We had missed, I believe, just gentle not even qualifying as drizzle. And Charles, of course, is in subtropical Florida, which I assume is starting to
get into its humid season. But politically speaking, we are, of course here to discuss a variety of other wonderful things. Where do we begin to tell the sweet love story? Well, let's say it's been a couple of weeks some immigration news, although that story seems to have been muted somewhat. There was the arrest of the Wisconsin judge for facilitating the escape of somebody out the back door, which really needed sort of a smoking in the bandit banjo, you know,
country western kind of caper music soundtrack. There was the gentleman who was ordered released from federal immigration custody on Wednesday. The Columbia activist Colleen No one seems to be talking much about Maryland Dad anymore. So is this just a function of the media pipelines in which I am being shot through? Or is the vibe shifted to elsewhere? And if so, what is the current terror? The current panic? You guys, tell me what you think.
Well, I mean, there's a third of judicial development this week, which was a federal judge in Texas, a Trump appointee, it should be noted, who barred further deportations under the Alien Enemies Act of what seventeen ninety seven or whatever it was, And so that's going to slow things up.
I'm a little puzzled by that, not because it's a Trump judge, but only on the broader constitutional grounds that I think determining what constitutes a threat to America and whether that satisfies the terms of the statute of invasion or I forget the actual terms in the law, but seems to me that's an executive determination entirely within the Commander in chief powers, and not a judicial one.
But I could be wrong. As they say, Charles, what do you believe is the basis for that?
Well, this is a difficult one because the practice, as Steve implies, of the judicial branch for a long time, has been not to make that sort of determination, that is, to leave the factual questions to the political branches and deem them non justiceiable. But it doesn't have to in the sense that there is enough elastic within our system that if a court is reviewing a statute, and the Alien Enemies Act is a statute, it is empowered under Marbury to say what that statute means, thereby to make
some factual determinations along the way. So I was also surprised by this, not because I necessarily disagreed with the conclusion, or because I'm necessarily against courts making some factual determinations, but just because.
They normally don't.
And it wasn't even the Supreme Court doing it, which would have been interesting. This was a judge at the beginning of the food chain, so not outraged by it, but that did surprise me too.
Explain to people if you can exactly how it happens that a Texas judge just pops up with something like this and it has an effect that just stops what the government is doing. Did the judge get up in the morning and say, you know, this is really nagging at me. I'm gonna call the press conference. I'm gonna
bang my gavel down. Or does somebody does somebody have to go around and say we need to we need to find a judge to do this, and you know, they start going through the rolodex and saying, well, here's one in Texas, you know, go and give her a call. I mean, how does that work?
Well, you have to follow the bouncing ball several weeks back to when I forget which level appeals court it might have been, it was a Supreme Court ultimately that said, no, you can't a person in Texas and Louisiana file with a district judge in Washington, d C. To get relief and do process. You have to file where you're being held,
which was Texas. So I think this case follows the process more correctly that it's brought in the venue where the people who are eligible or you know, on the docket for deep rotation actually are residing at the moment. I think it's just that simple. I think the your other question you raised, James, though, James, is uh, why
have we forgotten suddenly about Maryland Man? Well, more and more, more and more data is coming out, including some uh uh you police, uh video camera footage of a traffic stop, and and more documents about how this guy had been a.
Wife beater and so forth.
Uh, And all of a sudden, even Democrats are saying, you know, And in fact, the story reported this week is that Hakeem Jefferies, the Democratic House leader, told his caucus no more trips to l Salvador.
I think they realized that.
Trump is out smarter than once again by getting them to defend a person who's not very appealing, uh, and leave aside the you know, the the various legal issues which you're serious. But I think Trump and his people thought, you know what, if we're stubborn, uh, we're gonna win this.
And I think they probably are.
And then finally, uh, the guy Badawi who has released the Columbia graduate student. Well, it turns out there's some affidavits from ten years ago where he says directly, I want to kill Jews. That seems fairly cut and dry. You know, I gotta find it. There's writing, Charlie Love. You know there is a I looked this up once and I should find it again because it's it's gristed
for you, James. It's the visa application form to visit the United States, and it has these ludicrous questions in it that include things like, and this is pretty close for memory, do you seek to enter the United States for purposes of terrorism?
Have you ever used to say?
Have you ever been a member of the Nazi Party or any other group that advocates genocide? And of course you can see so yes, I'm for genocide. I'm here to do And but finally you get to the end of this. Charlie's laughing. You've probably seen these. You get to the end of this and it says a yes answer to any of the preceding question does not automatically disqualify you from receiving a visa. But if you've answered yes, you may want to schedule a visit to the local
consulate for an interview. So here's guy who, in an affidavit said I want to kill Jews, and we're still gee. I wonder if the Trump administration is, you know, persecuting some guy for free speech. I don't think let's.
Let's get this guy in here to tease out the nuances of what he does sitting down. Okay, So, so is this a statement that you want to kill Jews? Is a blanket way, a modus operende, a modus vivende. Shall we say, or are there specific Jews in certain situations that you're talking about? And of course the person would say, well, of course it's specific Jews in certain situations. It would be the Zionist element if they're a non Zionist.
To understand that. In the original Arabic kill is more akin to say, wrestle with right.
Exactly a ba right. It's a spiritual contest. So yeah, well, and of course what we're going to hear again and again and again is that the desire to deport this guy who wants to kill Jews is proof that we are living under a Nazi regime. I mean, there's absolutely the ability to switch between those two concepts is remarkable and almost unnotable at this point. So, yeah, he is not the best you know example, maybe perhaps for them
to show. But then again, you know, when they're talking about the guy Maryland Dad being accused of being a wife beater or human drafficking or the rest of it, people will say, and probably correctly, and Charles can expand on this, that it's not so much. I mean, the fact that he's a bad guy doesn't mean that he should be sent to El Salvador, or when specifically the arguments or the documents that he should not be sent to El Salvador.
But that seems to be.
One of those little legal technicalities that make people shrug and throw up their hands and say, you know what about that. I care not a whit what counts as getting the guy out because he's bad and he wasn't supposed to be here, and that's how you sort of lose the specific ad adherence to the rule of law.
They'll say, yes, that's true, and I have some time for that. The problem is that democrats can't help themselves but make the wrong arguments here. So I am a classical liberal, and I am, on some of these questions much more of a squish than many conservatives. But the argument that the classical liberal squish must make is as follows. There are lots of very bad people, but our law
requires us to treat them in a certain way. If, for example, you go back through all of the cases that we now know habitually as Americans, Miranda, for example, and you look at the people after whom they are named, they are invariably terrible, terrible sorts. They are rapists and pedophiles and serial killers, and are guilty of assault and bank robbery and so forth. And the argument ought to be okay, but they still get due process. Okay, but they still get a trial. Okay, But that doesn't mean
you could talk to them or what you are. That is the argument that I believe in, and I will make till I'm blue in the face. Most recently, in the case of Rahemi was assumed pre caught decision on the question of Second Amendment rights. Rahimi was a terrible, terrible man, But the question at stake was are you allowed to remove somebody's Second Amendment rights without a court decision? Not?
Do you like Rahimi.
The problem that Democrats have jensis that they can't help but lionize the people in the cases. And then they turn around and they say, well, it shouldn't matter. Agreed, it shouldn't matter. But you put these people on the Senate Democrats Twitter feed. You told us it was just a good old Maryland dad. And if you go back five years during the George Floyd hysteria, they did it
every single time there was a police shooting. The argument wasn't, well, this maybe did not necessitate lethal force, although in many cases it of course did. They said, this man, had he been left alive, would have gone on to cure cancer.
He was a wonderful human being.
He was a giant.
And you look at what they'd done, and they'd been caught, you know, shooting a pregnant woman and slapping her mum about, and they're like, okay, fine, we can argue whether or not they deserve to be shot in the altercation that ensued, but don't pretend that they were gandy. And I just I find this baffling that the Democrats keep doing this, because then it opens themselves up to other people saying, well, no, actually he was illegal immigrant gangbanger who was guilty of domestic violence.
Oh, it's built in nineteen sixty. It's built into the da DNA of nineteen sixties radicalism, where you've allorized the antisocial person because they are making a stand and a strike against an illegitimate order o chay wovarav being a perfect example. But I love the idea, as you noticed, that bad people may produce laws that are court decisions
that are necessary and safeguard the rights of all. For example, if the police were to barge into somebody's house without a warrant and find a whole bunch of quicklime in the basement under the stairs and bodies therein and took it to the Supreme Court and won, I would not want to be a lawyer who said, well, under John Wayne Gacy v. Chicago v. Cicero Police, my client not being convicted. I would be saying, could you find another
case that isn't gaycy maybe to back me up. Well, there's there's that, and there's also as long as we're in the history or on the topic of people who are just having a problem with Zionists, not Jews Zionists, mind you, Harvard has issued some statements about what's been going on at that August institution, and those of us who believe these to be final Glass's ivy colored palaces in which the Western values are transmitted to a hungry new generation, maybe a tad surprised, Steve, Have you taken
a look at the recent report on campus anti semitism at Harvard?
Oh?
Have i?
Ever?
I mean it's three hundred over three hundred pages long, and I didn't read every word of the whole thing. It's that's too infuriating to do because it's example after example of complete moral failure on the part of Harvard. The irony is, Oh, by the way, as we are sitting down to record here Friday morning, Trump has put out a social media post saying he is going to strip Harvard of its tax exempt staff and point does
that warm my cockles for this Friday? And I think they originally deserve it, and we'll leave aside the legalities and precedents for that, which I think are pretty strong. But the irony here is that the current leadership of Harvard, Alan Garber, the president, and especially the provost John Manning, they're as close as you're going to get to a sort of centered with some people with conservative sympathies as you're ever going to get at an Ivy League school.
I mean, John Manning was dean of Harvard Law for a while, he was a clerk for Scalia. He's known to be a Federal Society participant. Now he seemed kind of weak to me. But on the other hand, on the relative scale, he and Garber are. You know the fact that the Harvard Water Trustee said, you know what, we need to stop the identity politics and getting and get back to having some white guys in charge who know what they're doing, so they'd like to clean things up.
They've got all the usual constraints of a faculty that was able to show Larry Summers the door twenty years ago for making one comment about women that went against the orthodoxy.
So you know, they got a.
Lot on their hands, and it's too bad that they're taking the heat that the university deserves for decades of mouthfeasance. So yeah, I mean, among other things, some of the things they describe and report, and kudos for putting it out and not sugarcoating it, although they say in the opening statement, we worry that this essentially what they say is We're worried this report is going to give Trump ammunition against us, but we have to put it out anyway.
So good for them.
But they have a story after story testimony from students of the treatment of Jews on campus that if it was any other minority group would be front page news for weeks and weeks, and calls if it was a Democratic president calls for stripping that institution of tax exempt status for its blatant civil rights violation. So they richly deserve what is happening to them, and I want more.
I know your cagos are warmed, but I am still hung up on that whole legality thing, the whole means by which they could The president could do this with a stroke of the pen or call of the you know, or using the phone phone and dependent, as another man said, you can't just say yay, I like this, do it, but he can't. Oh, but do it. I mean, we'll we'll see. Well, hold on a second. I mean this is worth I don't know, So that's why I'm asking,
But I'm not going to say. It seems to me that the legalities are very very important.
Part of this.
Well, look, I think it's actually pretty strong. Just the twenty seconds on this, which is when the Bob Jones case came down in the eighties. And remember the Reagan administration said, we don't think the IRS has the authority to strip the tax exempt status. That's for the Justice Department Civil Rights Division to look at, not the IRS. The Supreme Court said, no, the IRS gets to and then the Rega administration said, fine, but just you know, limit their federal funding that was part of it, or
eligibility just to the programs that are discriminatory. And the Democrats said no, we want to be able to punish the entire universe for any lapse in any department of civil rights law, and they passed a statute over Reagan's veto to do that. That's why I say, I think the legal basis here is very strong, and you know, it's time to make the left live by their own rules and the brand.
Charlette, well, I agree with half of that in that I think we need to make the left live by their own rules. And this has been an annoying feature of civil rights enforcement in general now for years. The left has never explained why it took a different position in Bob Jones and it's now taking.
In relation to Harvard.
I would like to see a universal enforcement of the rules in the other direction. That is to say, I don't mind that Harvard has an exemption, but I don't want to live in a country in which Harvard gets its exemption, but people that the left dislikes don't. So I'm half or maybe more than half with Steve. I prefer that we have had a classically liberal order in which we could have tax exempt institutions that were all
treated the same. But until we get that, this is the sort of threat or possibly execution that we are going to need. And that really is one of the stories of the last four or five years. It's been a big story here in Florida with DeSantis approach, where he has shepherded through and signed a bunch of laws that, for example, say that you're not allowed to run workplace trainings that imply that white people are a problem. And when he's done that, people have said, oh, my goodness,
is this government overreach. I thought you wanted small government, or I thought you were against this. Well, yeah, but not against it if it only runs in one direction. If you are allowed, as some middle manager at Unilever to be forced to attend a session in which you were told that you are awful, then the government is allowed to step in and say, now, that's against the equal protection of the laws and existing civil rights statute.
So I have no issue with Trump doing this, but I would rather have a system in which no one did it.
Well, you know this is twice now. You refer to yourself as a classical liberal, and I too, and I too like to claim that mettal as well. But being a classical liberal these days it seems like somebody. It feels like somebody who is holding up a finger and saying point of order during a mixed martial arts fight. Right right, Perhaps if we are a little bit more robust, we would get our point across. Perhaps if we had more energy, perhaps if our metabolism was doing exactly what
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now we welcome to the podcast. Robert bryce So writer public speaker who's concentrated on energy Policy's the author of five books on the subject, including Pipe Dreams, Greed, Ego, and the Death of Enron, and most recently A Question of Power, Electricity and the Wealth of Nations. You can find his work at Robert Bryce dot substack dot com. I'll have that link at ricochet dot com. Robert welcome, hi all,
Thanks for having me. You know, Spain touted, and I'm sure of course you knew where we're going to go with this one hundred percent renewable energy. Look at us, Look at us. We're no longer burning those liquefied dinosaurs. We don't have those nasty, you know, smoke stacks belching out. We are clean and we are green, and days later
in the dark. Now, I've been reading an awful lot about what happened, and the minute that I started reading people who seem to know what they're talking about, it vaults into an area of expertise and technical details about grid and balance and deviations and the rest of It's very complex for people to figure out. What they do know is that Spain went dark. Portugal too, what happened, Well, it.
Was only fifty five million people who are so it's not that not that big of a deal. And yes, you're right. I mean the timing of this was pretty rich. I think it was eight days before the blackout or so. The Spanish government was bragging, Oh, for a few minutes, we were one hundred percent renewable. Well, what's that old mine about pride goeth before the fall. But this is just a simple result, a very obvious result, rather of
bad energy policy. And the socialist government under the Prime Minister of Pedro Sanchez, has made net zero their target. They have pushed hard for for wind and solar energy. I don't call them renewables, it's alt energy, alternative energy.
And the short answer is why did this happen? Well, you fragilize the grid by adding these what are called asynchronous forms of generation or wind and solar don't add the kind of oomph you call it grid inertia to the grid, and so the grid becomes less less stable.
And there was a small some it appears to be some kind of falter interruption or disturbance on the grid, and the wind and solar capacity couldn't respond and flatten out that that disturbance, and so the system tripped and grid went down.
First of all, fragilized is a word I don't think I've encountered before, and I now love it, and I'm going to have to incorporate that into a.
Merry body be my guest, my compliments.
Secondly, a lot of people in the green side were saying after this, well, what this proves is that we just need better battery technology that when you lose from this, where they can just power up the batteries and they sort of imagine that there's these large, ever ready copper tops sitting around somewhere that they can just plug right in. Before we go further into this, how I mean, I know Elon Musk and the rest of the guys are keen on battery technology, but how good are we getting.
Are we getting anything to the point where we can actually maintain the base currency that is needed to keep these systems online.
Well, I think it's important before we talk about batteries just to put this in context about what's happening in Spain. So just at the moment of the collapse, more than is about sixty percent of all the electricity on the
Spanish grid was coming from wind and solar. But remember this Spanish government is aiming to have eighty one percent renewables by twenty thirty and they're also aiming to shudder all of their nuclear plants by twenty thirty five, and those nuclear plants provide twenty percent of the power in Spain today. So I'm just finishing an article for Substack on this right now. But that you know, this is just a recipe for disaster. Whether they try and add
batteries and do so quickly, we'll have to see. But there are all these other costs that they're going to have to ladle on top of the existing costs on the grid in order to accommodate this, all this intermittent generation. So you know, this is just a glimpse of what could happen if Spain continues with this terrible energy policy.
Is the King behind this? Only because I want to say the pain in Spain falls mostly on his rain? Sorry, I'm done, I'm done.
I's done, really bad, really bad.
Ton I will say, I have no idea about the king and don't really care about kings.
Well, I don't know.
My variation of what James said a couple of minutes ago, with your use of fragilized is being out here in California, were at the cutting edge of a lot of this nonsense. With apologies to Mary Poppins, it seems to me you can say Spain and others are super cowy fragilizing. Okay, I know that's even worse, right, Charlie Cook, I hope you can.
I mean it's a low bar these guys, so please chime in.
I have an actual, actual question, not a Mary Poppins.
So this is of course me being a typical right wing mini.
But I really like nuclear power, and maybe you'll correct me, maybe I'm wrong, but I was given to understand that France, which is next to Spain, is really heavily invested in nuclear power, has been since the fifties, and in America, nuclear power has become more and more popular if you look at opinion polls. I'm sure people will bulk a little when they told the station will be built in their backyard, but as a general matter, it's increased in popularity.
But you just said Spain is getting rid of it's nuclear power. Can you talk me through that decision? Because Spain's next to France, surely they can see it works. So what is it that level of environmental isn't that they can't even stomach that?
You know, Charlie, I'd say I just correct you. It's not environmentalism, it's ideology. And I mean, there's just no cure for I mean, you're a brit Look at the Brits. They're following Germany's example of driving their economies straight into the ditch with this, I mean, frankly just idiotic energy policy, anti nuclear, anti hydrocarbon, claiming that they can run their systems on wind and solar and batteries and unicorn farts alone,
and it just doesn't work. And there was a great quote, in fact, it just came down in l pais today, the English version, and it was a quote and this, you know, it's interesting you point out there is the you know, Conservatives, Republicans tend to be more pro nuclear, and Democrats and particularly the US Democratic Party has been anti nuclear for fifty years. Now that's changing some a
little bit. But anyway, here's the key quote. It was from Alberto Nunez Feju, who's the leader of the People's Party and Conservative Party pro nuclear People's Party in Spain, said that he was talking about what happened and he said, our energy system is being managed with an enormous ideological bias. And I think that's exactly right. You know, you need engineers to run the grid, not ideologues, and that unfortunately, that's what we're seeing.
They really got.
Started with their nuclear building program in the late seventies after the first energy crisis, and I think I think three quarters of their fleet they have now was built in the eighties when we built none, or I think we finished maybe two long running projects were finished in the eighties, one of them Diablo Canyon that I live near. I did ask a Frenchman once, a libertarian guy who Max Falk was his name, and I said, how did you guys build all this nuclear power when we stopped?
And he said, oh, it's very simple.
You see, he says, in France, our communists supported nuclear power, whereas in your country, your communists opposed it. But yeah, that sounds about right, and you had more to that. But I want to do this, Robert, I want to go back to this grid question for a moment, because you know, most Americans, and I'm one of them to some extent, have a simple minded view that, well, electricity, it comes from you know, power plants and wind and solar,
and isn't it great? And we just throw it on wires and it comes into our house and we turn on our lights. And I try to explain the grid in simple terms as well. Think of it as something like your garden hose. It's got to be filled with water and has to have adequate pressure to keep the
water moving. But I think that's not quite adequate. Can you do you know a minute of grid one oh one so that you know, a five year old can understand it because we keep hearing these terms like you know it's got to be at fifty hurtz and you know this and that, and your eyes glaze over really fast. But it turns out to be the key part of the story more than generation.
I think, yeah, well, and that's the way even engineers, because electricity is it's complicated, I mean just everything about the grid and it's it's this massive machine with all these different parts and it's amazing it all works, I mean just incredible. And the electricity phenomenon itself is difficult to understand. But nevertheless, your idea about water is the right analogy, and engineers even do this to compare it
to water. The difference between your garden hose example, is that say you're you know, you're filling your swimming pool, and I've been to your house the Olympic sized swimming pool in your case, say you put your garden hose in there and the pressure in the hose drops a little bit, well, it just takes you a little longer to fill the hoe, fill the pool, or take a shower, wash the dishes or whatever, because that difference in water flow doesn't matter very much ultimately to you as a
cut consumer. The electric grid works differently in that that pressure and the water flow has to be constant and has to maintain in the US at sixty hertz, in the Europe fifty hertz. It has to be maintained around that frequency or and if that frequency varies too much, the system shuts down. And that's what we saw in Spain, this slight change in frequency, a sub frequency drop or a surge. And because of that lack of pressure. Think of the power generation systems in general. Have our water
pumps or electricity pumps, and they operate at very high pressure. Well, wind and solar don't provide that same pressure that you get from nuclear plants and gas fired power plants, hydro plants, et cetera, and so they don't provide that Inertia is the term of art that keeps that pressure and frequency at the same at the exact same level and it's clear. And the piece that I'm writing is saying, yes, we can blame solar for the blackouts.
Well, let's go back to batteries for a minute, as James brought that up. And so it's one thing to have, you know, the Tesla power wall in your house, which can I guess if you get a couple of them, and depending on your power needs, can run your house overnight if the power goes out. But these good storage batteries we're talking about, that would be you know the size of a small house and you need what thirty
of them or something for a small town. And I think I've seen some figures from you and others that they wouldn't last very long. Oh and that leave us and maybe you want to talk about this too, but
maybe it's asking too much. The supply chain requirements to build all those batteries are massive, and if we're doing it to save greenhouse gas emissions, it's not even clear it's net plus for that accounting game, right, So the battery fantasy is really I think my opinion and it'll stop, is it's a way to keep solar and wind power viable quote unquote for the greenies who are made religion out of pushing it so hard.
Sure. Well, a couple of quick thoughts.
One is I'm starting to come around to some of the battery storage, like here in Texas. You know, they can be valuable for peak peak shaving right when the demand is very high. So I'm coming around to some of their utility in terms of overall grid management. However, what we saw in Spain is that the power went out for twelve fifteen sixteen. I don't know how many hours it berries on the region. There are no batteries that are going to last all day. They're generally meant
for about four hours. To other quick points, one is that the battery supply chain is almost completely dependent on China, and you know China. China is not our friend. I think we can all agree on this, but I think I'd like to just steer the conversation just a little bit if I could. On the other issue in Spain, and you know, Charles, you know from the UK, it's all across Europe. Land use conflicts around renewable energy projects, whether it's a wind or solar or high voltage transmission.
I've documented them here in the US, and the renewable rejection database. It's on my website. I've also started the Global renewable rejection database now at one hundred and three and of those rejections in Ireland, Scotland, in the UK just this year, just since January first, there have been twenty three rejections. Well, look at what's happening in Spain. Just In and Bloomberg reported on this. I'm just finishing this piece was Reuter's reported on a storm of lawsuits
against wind energy projects in Galicia. In February, officials in Tora Vieja stopped the construction of the solar project for a desil plant in Galicia. They've implemented a new rule on wind projects in that area. So what you know, This idea that Spain is going to get to eighty percent renewals is just hogwashed. They're never going to be able to do it because they don't have enough land.
And that's the same the thing that is hindering a hamstring will always hamstring wind and solar projects is they're just the amount of land they require is just cartoonish.
On that, I have another nuclear power question. Sure again, correct me if I'm wrong, but I think I remember reading that with nuclear power. Once it's on, you know exactly how much power you're getting out of it per generator, right,
because there's no variability of the input. So given that we know that, how many nuclear stations, and accounting for geography, because I understand how much energy you lose over distance, how many would we need realistically to completely nuclearize the United States?
Huh? Okay, Well let me just do some back into them. Okay.
So Spain gets about twenty percent of its power from nuclear plants. It has five plants. In the US, we have ninety some odd nuclear plants. Some of them are twin reactors, some of them I think Palo Verde has four. In any case, we get about roughly twenty percent from let's call it one hundred, So we'd need four hundred more to meet be one hundred percent nuclear power in the US and something like that.
Right.
So I'm with you, Charles. I'm adamantly pro nuclear. Ive been saying the same thing for fifteen years. If we're serious about decarbonization, serious about reducing CO two emissions and sparing land, which is what I'm in favor of. I'm a point watcher, I'm a bad, bad enthusiast landscape enthusiast hiker natural. As for nuclear preserved, they have high power density, which is key. But let we have to be very
sober about where nuclear is in the United States. It's the rollout is going to be slow, and I wish if I had one wish for the Trump administration, get on it, man, get on it. We have to solve the capital, the fuel, the regulation, and the waste problem. We got to get on it right away.
Nixon wanted a thousand plants. That was one of the reaction. No, he did, he absolutely did, and it would have provided like something like two hundred percent of the projected power and it would have been great. Of course, the Left would have spent a great deal of time shutting them down because they made Bruce Springsteen unhappy.
But here's Jackson Brown.
Don't forget Jackson Brown and everybody else who required undependable energy sources to do their concerts.
But here's the thing.
I mean, yes, there is something I suppose that stirs the heart of the European breast when they see a windmill. I know that when I go to England and we're driving around Sussex and we come around it. We always come around a bend and there's It always startles me to see these dark satanic blades just slowly moving. And some people see these enormous structures as signs of hope, when I think, you know, you don't have to dodg your countryside with these things everywhere, You don't have to
have shiny walls of mirrors. You can build a nuke. But here's the thing you mentioned before, an ideological attachment to these things. And I don't think that anybody believes that, well, maybe I do. There's the notion of de growth, that if that there's something wrong about the fact that Western society continues to grow and invent and spread, and that this is some sort of cancerous fungus on the planet on Guia's face, and what we ought to do is
to be less and less and less. And there's something about the unstanding ability of nuclear power to provide this that they don't like because it suggests abundance. And I know that's sort of a complicated psychological take on it, but I think that's part of it. I think that if you say this grid is less dependable, what they will say is you're going to you will adapt, You'll be fine. If the power isn't on between one and two, will all be better for it? If the power goes
down to fifty percent? Ten? Am I wrong?
Well where to start? You've made a.
Lot of points there, I think in the seventy and you know, I'm going to be sixty five this year, so I'm not quite as old as Steve Hayward. No it is, but I'm you know, getting I'm getting older. But you know, in the sixties and seventies, the anti nuclear movement was really propelled by this kind of anti nuclear weapon view, right, that the conflation of nuclear energy
with nuclear weaponry was really the main thing. Right, So that's kind of changed over time, and now the ardent nuclear opponents are saying, oh, we can't deal with the waste, and you know it's too long lived. But but it's all this has just been the ideology of the left in America really since the sixties and particularly after the end of the Cold War. You know that nuclear energy is bad and that that alt energy renewables are good,
regardless of whether you know the intermittency or whatever. But I'll quote Jesse Osibel, a friend of mine who has influenced my thinking on this greatly. He said, you know, wind and solar may be renewable, but they are not green. And I think that's just such a great summation of that. And that's why one of the reasons why I'm so pro nuclear is a small footprint and power density. High
power density is key. It is green, and that is something where the I think this environmental betrayal by the left in favor of offshore wind, which I cannot stand, is just this incredible betrayal of the environment. But you know, I think it's all just motivated by money, and the NGOs are allied with big banks, big law firms and big business to promote this wind and solar. I think it's just that simple.
I was gonna say, Billy Bob Thornton has a speech and Landman that addressed the very greenish yeah, talking about it and as they love to debunk it, I love to listen to it. Steven.
Yeah, Actually, Robert, do your three keys to thinking about energy? Briefly? I use them for my students, and I got them from you.
You know, you know, the density, cost, and scale.
If you need to prompt.
Right, Yeah, Well, it's it's what I call the four imperatives. And I'm in my fourth book power Hungry, power density, energy density, cost and scale. So why are our energy systems why have they developed the way they have over the past, you know, two centuries really in the in the in the since in the beginning of the industrial age. Well, it's power density. And what is power density. It's a measure of energy flow that could be harnessed in a given area of volume or mass. That's not power and
energy are not the same thing. Power is the ability power. Energy is the ability to do work. Powers the rate at which work gets done. Okay, so power density is a measure of energy flow in a certain time. And so that's why again going back to nuclear and natural gas and and even coal mines underground coal mines are super high power density. Energy density is the amount of energy that's contained in a certain weight or mass or volume.
So this bottle here has water in it, but if it had you know, leaves or sawdust, and it would have lower energy density than if I fill it with gasoline or kerosene. And then costs and scale are obvious, right you know, And so uh these then the lower one other quick point is the lower the power density, the higher the resource intensity. And that's what we see with corn ethanol, with wind, with solar, they just require massive amounts of land because they produce very small energy
flows from the relative footprint. So it's a you know, basic physics, but unfortunately, very very few people understand it.
Yeah, I mean what I what I do Robert with students, is I show them I use music because I can understand this. I show them an old a track tape which they've never seen, and a cassette tape. By by the way, you have an old a tract tape of electric light orchestra to make it topical. And then I'll show them, you know, cassette tape, a record album, and then I'll show them an old iPod or you know, well you could you have ten.
Songs, right, or a little flash drive flash drive.
Right, and that that's an easy way to get the energy density question across. And then what do you want where do you want to get your music from? You know, a hardboard box full of eight tracks with fifty songs, or your little device that's not even a square ranch that has a thousand songs and they understand that.
So you can play that eight track in your vintage firebird their right right, that's the image that comes to people.
We let you go, Robert. Then one related question that brings us all together. What is the gauge on the top east ring on that stratocaster hanging on the wall.
Well, it's E, right, it's E.
But use a nine gauge, ten gauge eleven.
Oh gosh, I think those are ten gauge strings. I'm I'm a perennial beginner when it comes to the to the guitar, but I have a I think I worked too much to play all the time. But yes, but I love my guitar collection.
But nine is great for soloing because you can really bend that baby. I always found the elevens would just pop like crazy. They would, they would even and you Miami bar takes it out of tune, and then you've got to even bend it even more than it snaps, which is why I actually it's more of a Gibson man, even though I love my strat Well, next time, practice
a little bit more. You can play us out. But for the moment, we're going to tell everybody that a necessary, important, and incredibly relevant book to our times today is a question of power electricity and the wealth of nations. Robert Bryce, thanks for joining us today. Fascinating. Could have done another hour and someday soon I hope that we will. Robert, see you later.
Thanks y'all.
So Charles, I believe that you had something you didn't want to burden the fellow with an anecdte. No I us burden us if you will.
So fay globalist elite that I am. I just came back from France. I spent a lovely ten days and we drove across much of the country and my favorite wine regions were on our schedule. And one of the things that I saw that I just would not have seen on my many trips to Front's as a kid. Also driving trips with these wind farms that are everywhere. Now you see them in this beautiful countryside, but it's marred by all these horrible War of the World style machines.
But here's a funny little insight into what people really think. Spit of wine torn Burgundy, and between where we were staying and the vineyards, there are all.
These wind farms. And I said to the lady, I said, why, why why are they there? You have all this nuclear power.
This is just vanity, right, and she felt a bit defensive, you know, so I said, no, no, no, they are fine.
They do not look too bad. We have these these bring electricity to the villages. They are fine, you know. We drive on a little bit.
Eventually we end up near Bone in Burgundy, a middle all the vineyards, and I said to her, you know, I noticed.
There aren't any windmills here, and she said, have those things near the grapes.
That's exactly what I thought, that somehow the vibration caused by these things would somehow affect the tanning gas and somebody.
Now I get it, I get it.
People put these things in different places, but it's like when they're ruining a beautiful landscape. She was like, no, they're beautiful, while you said, you feel is dying. And then the minute I'm like, well there they aren't near the grape, She's like, those disgusting tall, mud and swingy things, we kind of put them near the wine.
I just I think that's what they actually think, right.
It's like, well, you can always tell what people want when you say let's put it in your backyard.
Uh yeah, well it requires a lot of substances, which is copper, and everybody is complaining here because Trump is threatening to open up areas near our beloved boundary waters to mining to get copper because there's a lot of copper up here. Because you can't use old copper, recycled copper. You need lots of virgin copper for these things. But somehow we'll have to get it from someplace else. We'll get it from China. Well maybe not the way things
are going. We have seen interesting stories this week about reshoring of several things, from electronics to I think Eli Lilly is committed like five billion dollars or something, don't quote me on building pharmacy complants here, which is great, which is really nice, because I'd like for us to not have to depend on China four that stuff. We had that spasm in twenty twenty when we're realizing, oh wait a minute, we all need masks, we didn't and China is the only guys who have them, and they
did to tie back to electricity, so ied. I saw an interview with the guy, and I can't vouch for any of this. I probably shouldn't say it, but he was talking about the fact that we get most of our transformers. It seems from China. And if you were the Chinese government and you were selling transformers to the grid of a nation for whom you have a certain amount of antagonism, wouldn't you just build a back door into every single one of them.
Yes, that's one reason why we don't want stuff from Wua Wai on a Internet precisely, person like the British who decided that that was all fine.
It's as if it's xenophobic to somehow say that China would be installing all sorts of spyware and back doors into their stuff. I mean, it's simple national self interest. Why wouldn't they, especially when they have a trading partner like us who's so credule has to believe that they're behaving completely above board. When I mean, I wish I could show you. I have two electric razors. One is by Phillips, the others by some Chinese fly by nine company,
and they are exactly the same. They are precisely the same in terms of their design, They have everything about them you can just tell China stole it.
Well.
We do expect this, though, James, because we don't allow China to sell us anything that is used in our military equipment, so we do know, yeah, likely to do this. I mean this is a very very small example. But I am, as you know, a big technod and I've installed all manner of smart devices in my house, most of which are either proprietorial or I built myself, or are not linked to the cloud or whatever. Well anyway, there's a lot of custom code that I have running them.
But I have these two devices in the house that were made in China because there's nowhere else that I can get them. Long story short, and those two devices constantly and of course I've stopped them. They're the only two devices in the whole lot that constantly try to ping China on the network.
They're phoning home all the time, phoning home.
All the time.
So I got rid of them because it's like, I can't have that in my house. I can't people say, oh, wow, you're so paranoid. Do you think they care how often you open your garage door? I don't know, but I don't want them knowing that.
Who are they pinging?
Okay, so I mean you can you can get did you use little snitch or did you just look at your logs?
Well, I have a whole server room full of equipment that runs my network. So I see all of the packets that go in and out, and I can say, so, who's it trying to I don't know, but it's the manufacturer, I guess. In Chinese IP addresses, you can't really tell where they're going inside China because China has this bpeak firewall around the country and it translates everything into subnets.
So I don't know. But it's also just even.
If they were pinging Tampa, it would still be different than everything else on the network. Now of the light switches in my house, I'm trying to ping Amazon websites. Right, It's just these two Chinese made devices. It's fascinating, right.
Pitch them out, pitch them out. Well. Also, we need rare earth, we need minerals, we need stuff like that, and as it turns out, Ukraine has got a lot of them, and including Neon, which I'm very happy about. The fact that we have struck a trade deal with Ukraine for Neon means that the American Renaissance can possibly bring back to the downtowns and the drive ins more. Neon a wonderful American art form. But for all those people who are saying that you know, Trump's is going
to abandon Ukraine. It seems as if struck a deal whereby we get access to the minerals in exchange for security, really and they trust us. What do you think of the deal? Well, wait a minute.
I mean, I've thought from the beginning that this was quite a significant idea on several grounds, But the main one is you just mentioned it if the United and I'm not sure if we're actually taking co ownership, which was one of the original ideas, or whether we're just going to get favorable terms and be first in line
to buy Ukrainian mineral exports. I prefer the former because then it gives the United States a direct national interest in the survival of Ukraine, and that tells Russia that right, you're right, Johns. Another guarantee on paper is not worked very much from us, since we didn't follow the previous one from thirty years ago that said give up your nukes and we'll guarantee your security.
Well, we didn't live up to that.
So the point is is that now you have a real tangible economic interest, it sends a signal to Russia hands off Ukraine. So I kind of like that people all like to say, well, this is Trump being an economic imperial I don't know what they're saying, but you know,
it's Trump's deal making. I kind of think it reminds me a little bit of the len Lease Act back and len Ley's actions of Roosevelt back on the eve of World War Two, where because we had constraints in the law, the Neutrality Act, we were lending destroyers to Britain which were maybe obsolete, but it was a political statement that was important. But in return, we got some British bases in the Caribbean that they weren't likely to be needing anytime.
Soon at the outset of that war.
And so I don't think this is entirely unprecedented or without any parallels in our past. And I'm rather encouraged by it as someone who wants to see Ukraine survive. And I'll just sort of stop there and see what Charlie thinks of any of that.
Well, do you know when the British finally paid off Lendleys.
Yeah, the nineteen nineties or something, or two thousand and six.
It, Yes, I knew it was recent.
Yeah, So it's certainly, as you say, not new a lot of the coverage of this is implied this is some monstrous innovation on the parts of the Trump administration, but it's not. I'm pleased about it for a couple of reasons. First because its signals that we're going to be siting with Ukraine rather than Russia, which we should be.
And second because I don't.
See a great problem in them helping us pay them to fight Russia. No, I think we should be helping them, but there's nothing written in the stars that says we can't ever get anything in return.
I don't I don't have an issue with it.
No, I agree completely. It was after the Iraq War and Sodomusine was toppled and they were selling the oil leases, the oil rights around. I don't believe that the United States companies came in the top two or three. I think it was total Fena and I think it was France. I think these guys bid us. So, I mean, we didn't get the oil out of that, and if we had, it would have been, well, it's blood for oil. No,
we're just ye. So I agree with Charlie. There's there's no reason that Ukraine can't slip a couple of bucks our way and we'll all be together. It just may seem, however, when you look back at all the shouting and the bluster and the Putin cozening and the rest of it, that we saw somebody staking out absurd, irrational position and getting people to the table and eventually moving more towards
the center. I keep being told that that's what's always going on, and sometimes I actually kind of sort of believe it, credulous soul that I am. Well, Stephen, before we go, I believe that you would like to let the world know of an absolutely brilliant, pithy Charles able to cook tweet. Yeah, that sums it all up.
Charles wins Twitter for this week. In my mind, at least my humble opinion, there was that if you missed this, Sir James, a what a squib in the New York Times or a quote in the mainstream media saying there's a clamoring among Democrats to have Kamala Harris re emerged. She's the only leader to speak up against Trump when there's clamoring going on. Charles, I had a great laugh out of your tweet, which I'll read to our listeners.
There is not there has in fact, never ever been less of a clamoring for anything that is on off for In the history of clamoring, no people has ever clamored less than the American people are clamoring for Kamala Harrison's voice. She is clamorless. She is a hollow clamorree and that's it. And I thought, you know what, were you subconsciously channeling John Clees and the Parent Shop about the I was wondering was the inspiration?
Right?
That was fabulous, Charles. I envy your your style with that one.
Wow, thank you. I stepped.
Back to my computer and found that that story and I a couldn't believe the claim that was being made, but even better, I couldn't believe that the claim had been made on background. So she had managed whoever said that had managed to get permission to say it anonymously, because why why do you need.
Anonymity to praise your former boss? It was osity bizarre whole thing.
Is right well? I saw a re emerging a clip that was going around where she was referencing some TikTok or YouTube video about what elephants at the zoo do when there's an earthquake. Apparently they form a circle with their butts all together and write it out. And she was saying that that's what the Democrats should do. And
I thought, here's a perfect example of Kamala Harris. She's cackling, she's loud, she's beaming, she's rambling on about a video, and she is using as a symbol of what the Democrats ought to do, the literal representation of the Republican icon, which is the elephant. And it was in Comarington Sparkley, and she didn't explain everything right, but she was just going right, you've seen it right, right, like we're all still back in Brat's summer, and God help me if
ever that comes back again. I have only to say, however, that if you, by any means, after your lunch, find yourself a little bit or breakfast or dinner or whatever. You're an evening ice cream aunt when you'll listen to this, if you find yourself a bit logi, you might want to check your metabolism and Lumen is the device for that. You might also want to go to iTunes. They still call with that Nah music podcast wherever you get your podcast, and they have the opportunity to rate us, Why don't
you rate us. Don't want to be like that guy who's I was sending you this stuff saying good Joe, please rate us. But I am that guy. I guess and five stars helps why services the podcast, More people listen to it, more people go to ricochet dot com to figure out what it is. And what it is is that same civil center, right place you've been looking for on the internet all your born days. Yeah, you can read the main page for free member pages, where
many friendships and interesting conversations form. Give it a look. Charles Cook, Stephen Hayward, It's been a pleasure. I'm James Lilacs and we'll see everybody in the comments at Ricochet four point oh bye bye