American Thought Leaders - How the Green Tech Industry Is Empowering Communist China: Steve Milloy

Episode Date: May 2, 2024

“The greener we get, the more dependent we are on China, and they’re taking advantage of it. That is part, I think, of their 100-Year Plan. They don’t want to go to war with anyone, they’re just going to own our economy.”What has been the result of the West’s current energy and climate policies? Has our planet become cleaner? Or greener? Or have our economies weakened, and our products cheapened? “China is burning fossil fuels like there is no tomorrow. And the Biden administration is doing everything it can to reduce fossil fuel use in the United States,” says Steve Milloy, senior fellow at the Energy and Environmental Legal Institute. “You have this European climate movement, which has been funded by Putin to block Europe from producing its own energy. The other side knows what the West’s weaknesses are, and they fund them—and much to our detriment.”He argues that the Biden administration is putting independent oil companies out of business, and that contrary to reducing carbon emissions, the West has merely exported them to hostile actors.“Exxon Mobil and Chevron ... last year they announced $110-billion worth of purchases of smaller companies who have been weakened by Biden policies,” says Mr. Milloy.Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

The greener we get, the more dependent we are on China. And they're taking advantage of it. They don't want to go to war with anyone. They're just going to own our economy. What has been the result of the West's current energy and climate policies? Has our planet become cleaner or greener? Or have our economies weakened and our products cheapened?

China is burning fossil fuels like there is no tomorrow. And the Biden administration is doing everything it can to reduce fossil fuel use in the United States. In this episode, I sit down with Steve Molloy, senior fellow at the Energy and Environment Legal Institute. You have this European climate movement, which has been funded by Putin to block Europe from producing its own energy. The other side knows what the West's weaknesses are.

They fund them, and much to our detriment. This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Jan Jekielek. Steve Malloy, such a pleasure to have you back on American Thought Leaders. Jan, thanks for having me back. So we're seeing headlines in the news these days saying that the U.S. is producing record oil and gas right now, record energy production. What's your reaction to that? Well, on one hand, I think it's great. We should be producing all the oil and gas we can. these circumstances, it's a bit ominous because, you know, since Joe Biden became president,

he has done everything in his power to sabotage oil and gas development in the U.S. Can't do much about oil and gas production because, you know, the permits have already been given, the leases let. And so, you know, the companies have the ability to do that. But what is scary is that, you know, Joe Biden has already drained the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve of oil. Now he is forcing U.S. oil companies to drain their own domestic reserves, which they are willing to do because oil prices are very favorable right now. But he's not allowing them to develop new reserves in the United States. So after having developed public reserves, now he's forcing, allowing U.S. domestic oil companies to drain their domestic reserves. One day we will just run out and have no reserves left. And then we will be even more dependent on OPEC, for example, for oil.

See, it's fascinating what you're telling me here, because I guess the devil, so to speak, is in the details, right? And the definitions. Because you sort of imagine, someone that's not as in the know like myself is imagining, oh, wow, finally, we're going back to some kind of energy independence. That's kind of what you think when you see, look, record energy finally, you know, we're going back to some kind of energy independence. That's kind of what you think when you see, look, record energy production. This is what we want, right? This is a positive thing for America, stronger. But what you're actually telling me is that the opposite is actually happening.

Isn't that what you're saying? Yes. I mean, this is just a Joe Biden is letting U.S. oil companies exhaust themselves without allowing them to replenish their food. I mean, it's you know, it's like letting someone run a race, but not allowing him to nourish himself after or during or running a marathon. You're just expending energy. There's no replacement. Eventually the whole system is just going to collapse. So we have big oil companies which have reserves all over the world and they can weather this stuff very well. But the key to controlling oil prices, or at least having the United States control oil prices, has been the smaller independent oil companies. And of course they operate in the United States. They're the ones that brought down the price of oil. They're the ones that made the U.S. energy dominant under President Trump. They're the ones that crushed the ability of OPEC to control prices.

And they're also now the ones that are not allowed, that don't have the reserves of the big oil companies. And they're not allowed to develop new reserves. So these guys are going to go out of business or be purchased by big oil. Once you have a lease or something, there's an estimate of how much oil or gas there is in that reservoir or whatnot. And then you kind of add up the amount of estimated reserve there is in what you're allowed to pump, I guess, and then produce ultimately. That's how it works. Well, so the federal government by law is supposed to conduct regular auctions for leases for, you know, offshore, onshore, and for coal mining as well. And so companies have been doing that.

They were especially doing that during the Trump administration, purchasing leases, getting them approved, getting permits. And then they produce oil as the market, as they see fit in the market, depending on demand. And of course, the big companies have a lot more of this because they're bigger companies and they have a lot more money.

And so the smaller companies have a lot more of this because they're bigger companies and they have a lot more money. And so they the smaller companies are much more, you know, sort of hand to mouth, so to speak. You know, they don't have these huge amount of reserves. And so everybody is now producing oil to meet global demand, which has grown a lot since covid and is going to continue to grow. And everyone's making money sort of hand over fist because oil prices are pretty high and they're happy to produce. But they're just they're exhausting the amount of oil that they are physically, it's physically possible for them to produce and they're not being allowed to find new sources of oil, new reserves. What is the impact on Russia of the current policy? Well, the current policy is just going to help Russia

because Russia is going to produce all the oil it can. It's a poor country. Its main source of revenue is energy, coal, oil, gas. You know, the sanctions against Russia really haven't had much effect. I mean, Putin can't take advantage of market prices, but he can sell more oil to China at lower prices. You know, China's very hungry for oil. So he's not really being affected by that. But if the United States is crippling itself, we're just empowering nations like OPEC and Russia to set the price of oil. The Trump years were really incredible because we had seized this power back from OPEC and Russia, and to the point where at the beginning of COVID, there was actually a production war, Russia versus Saudi Arabia, and the price of oil actually went negative

for a bit. And this is because of U.S. producers, these small guys that Biden is now forcing out of business. So what policy do you recommend at this point? Well, we have essentially unlimited supply of oil and gas, as far as we know. We're only limited by politicians and just by company economics, what's possible to do. We should, as Sarah Palin famously said, drill, baby, drill. We should be producing all the coal, oil, and gas that we can. Countries like European countries, Japan, Korea, they love U.S. gas. We can make a lot of money selling LNG to those countries, and we should be able to do that.

Producing coal would help us sell more LNG, because we're dismantling our coal fleet, we're relying more on natural gas, and that natural gas should really be exported. So we can have a robust coal industry, we can have a robust oil and gas industry, and get us back in charge of the price of oil. And of course that has strategic benefits because it

weakens OPEC, it weakens Iran, it weakens Russia, it weakens China. It makes China pay more for oil possibly. There's no benefit from what Joe Biden is doing by crippling our own energy production. Just doesn't even make sense. I mean, even, you know, for people that think, oh, well, we're going to be reducing emissions. Well, not really. You know, the United States is only about 10 percent or so of global emissions. The United States could go dark tonight and forever and you're still going to have 90 percent and more of emissions. You know, emissions are just never going away. Oil and gas is never going away. We're never getting to net zero. None of that stuff is

happening. We need, so, you know, we need to accept reality. You know, if we have a change of administration in 2025, I think you'll see that. I think the, you know, the boot will come off the throat of the oil and gas industry and hopefully the coal industry, and they'll be able to produce and make money and make America strong again. And just very briefly, I think when you're talking about the big producers being able to weather it, so to speak, you're really talking about weathering the policy until a new policy comes in, right? If I understand you correctly. Yes, of course. And they're not even really unhappy about these policies necessarily because these policies are first weakening the small companies. Exxon, Mobil, and Chevron have been

able to, I think last year they announced $110 billion worth of purchases of smaller companies who have been weakened by Biden policies. So they don't really, you know, they're not sweating Biden's policy so much. You know, oil companies are tremendously profitable when OPEC controls the price of oil, right, because they make lots of money. You know, it's funny, Elon Musk has this new climate video out where he says, oh, this transition is inevitable, and we need new energy sources that will last us a billion years. I mean, it's truly nonsensical stuff. We need oil and gas for the foreseeable future. Maybe one day we won't use oil and gas, but I can't foresee what that is, and neither can anybody else.

And so big oil knows this. And so they just assume buy up all the production they can in the U.S. and then allow OPEC to squeeze the price of oil. They will make more money. Through COVID, we've experienced a massive centralization in all sorts of realms, right? And you're just describing that this kind of policy, in effect, is kind of the same thing. Because it's portrayed as this sort of fight, battle against oil and gas writ large. But really, you're saying this is a battle against the small producers.

Well, it's kind of a divide and conquer strategy. And so first you can get rid of these small pesky producers, which were incredibly valuable in breaking OPEC's stranglehold on the price of oil. I mean, it's really incredible that these small companies in Texas and the Dakotas, you know, startups, wildcats, could just produce so much, so much oil and gas. Who would ever have thought that we would hurt OPEC? But we did. And we were in charge. And we just threw that away with Joe Biden. You know, I want to talk a little bit about, you mentioned the U.S. has 10% emissions, 90% is elsewhere. You said something very profound once when we talked.

I can't remember if it was on or off camera right now, but it affected my thinking considerably. I said, well, the U.S. has done very well at dealing with its emissions. This is what I was thinking. You said something like, well, Jan, just think about it. That's not what happened. What happened is we outsourced our emissions. So it's true that, you know, we have reduced emissions a little bit by the fact that we have used natural gas to replace coal. Natural gas has half the emissions. And then we've had also some, you know, more reliance on wind and solar in parts of the country.

And that has reduced fossil fuel emissions a little bit. But generally speaking, since the 1970s and 80s, we have been exporting our heavy industry to Asia. And that is where the bulk of our, you know, so-called carbon footprint has gone. We've been able, we send our emissions, China does our emissions for us. And we benefit economically. So if China was not this evil geopolitical actor and our adversary, it's sort of a policy that kind of makes sense, right? Because if you want to reduce emissions, fine, and make money at the same time. But of course, all we're really doing is just exporting our emissions. This is supposed to be global

warming where global emissions matter. And all we've done is send them offshore. It allows us to performatively say, look, yeah, look how well we've done with our emissions. Well, yeah, so it lends itself to propaganda from green groups and people behind this climate agenda because they can say, look, we have reduced our emissions and we have raised our standard of living at the same time. Well, we've reduced our emissions because we sent them to China. We've reduced our standard of living because we get cheaper stuff from China. But, of course, this is supposed to be global warming.

We're supposed to be reducing emissions. People will know that emissions have actually been reduced when their standard of living collapses. Then you'll recognize it. Europe is very happy about, we cut our emissions. We've cut our emissions 30% since 1990. We're going to go 90% by 2040. Well, all they've been doing is just exporting their emissions to Asia, someplace in Asia, China, India, Vietnam, wherever. And their emissions are not really going down until their standard of living

does. Well, and it strikes me the other part to this, which is very interesting, is that, you know, China under the Chinese Communist Party has become the dominant producer of all this green technology. Right. Quite ironic. Yeah. So break that down for me. Well, yeah, so not all windmills come from China, but a lot do. Not all solar panels come from China, but most do. Not all EVs, EV batteries come from China, but most do. But all EV batteries and all this green tech all depend on minerals and metals from China. So China is very much a central player in all this. And once again, China is not this benevolent actor out there not doing it. We'll reduce your emissions for you. You can have all this technology

you want. No, what China is doing is actively sort of making us dependent on them for energy because every windmill we put up, every solar panel we put up, every EV that is purchased makes us that much more dependent on China because that's where all this stuff is made. Western Europe, all the green tech they buy comes from China or depends on China. And if China was to shut down, all of a sudden the entire green agenda would be impossible because not enough of the vast majority of materials are made outside of China. I mean, there's one particular component for every EV battery relies on processed graphite, every one, and every bit of processed graphite comes from communist China.

China could decide just to embargo all these materials. As a matter of fact, China is already starting to do this. There are some Korean companies and maybe even some Chinese companies that are working on EV battery manufacturing plants in the United States. And it has occurred to China that, well, this is not a good thing. You know, they all depend on us. So we're gonna put export controls on this processed graphite

that I mentioned just a minute ago, and we're gonna control things. They know that the greener we get, the more dependent we are on China, and they're taking advantage of it. They realize that. That is part, I think, of their 100-year plan. I mean, they don't want to go to war with anyone.

They're just going to own our economy. We won't be able to do anything without China. Well, and this is, of course, particularly troubling given the brittle nature of the Chinese economy in itself and the debt, which even by our standards is astronomical. And I could go into that, but it's a scary prospect, never mind the medical precursors, which are similarly largely produced there for a lot of our key medicines.

And here's the other piece. Take Huawei. I remember I was talking actually with a Polish diplomat at one point, and I was talking about Hawaii, saying, I see you guys are putting up Huawei cell towers. That seems odd to me, given what you know about how communist regimes work. The Central European countries are supposed to be more knowledgeable about how, for example, Huawei is not... Of course, Huawei is incredibly well-priced

because it's a strategic priority of the Chinese Communist Party. It's priced because it's a national security purpose. It's not business in the way that we think of it. And so it's kind of a similar model. All these things are very much, you know, strategic from the perspective of the Chinese regime, not just business, right? Right. Well, I think that that's how they think generally. I mean, everything they do is strategic. You know, they have this 100-year plan, right? I think they're very serious about it. They're not worried about emissions. They're not worried about emissions. They're not worried about the environment.

Go to China. Look at the air quality. Go to these places where they mine and produce these materials and do the manufacturing. If I can just jump in, I was just sort of recently looked into what it takes to make one of these large batteries for a car. And by the way, these amazing technologically incredible cars, which I rather like in many ways. But I don't know if you're familiar with the breakdown, but it's an astonishingly large amount of ore and environmental impact, let's say, right? The battery itself, an EV was a battery for an internal combustion car, weighs what, 10,

15, 20 pounds at most. The battery for an EV is 1,000 pounds, okay? And hard to come by materials, right? I just mentioned Elon Musk, and he just put out this video about climate, and he's talking about clean and energy transition. He makes Teslas in China, and all these Teslas are produced with coal power. And you have to drive these Teslas, you know, tens of thousands of miles before you sort of break even on the carbon footprint because of all the coal that China burns. They're set to burn even more coal.

They are building twice as many coal plants as the United States has right now. You don't even have to be skeptical like I am of this whole climate scam. Let's just say emissions are causing the harms that are claimed. It's all happening in China and Asia and India. And then you have Africa. Africa wants to develop. And Western governments are desperately trying to make sure Africa doesn't develop and remains poor. Trying to somehow bribe African governments not to develop oil and gas and, and, you know, trying to force wind and solar on them if they, you know, if they want to have, if they dare to want electricity, you have to have this wind and solar stuff. It's ridiculous. Okay. These poor people need electricity to develop and increase their standard of living.

You know, ever since the malaria wars and DDT and DDT, the Greens and leftists have been after, trying to deny Africa the right to develop. It's very sad. I want to jump back to something we talked about when we had you on some months ago. We were talking about this Sunnyvale agreement. You know, this is basically, you know, U.S.-China making some sort of, you know, promise about energy and emissions and so forth. So, like, how has that played out now for us? Well, nothing has changed.

I mean, China is burning fossil fuels like there is no tomorrow. And the Biden administration is trying to, is doing everything it can to reduce fossil fuel use in the United States. The agreement is just some rapprochement between John Kerry and China on climate, which I guess is now being turned over to John Podesta. I'll read you what was in here. I think there's triple renewable energy capacity globally by 2030, accelerated substitution for coal, oil and gas, absolute power sector emission reduction. You know that these are the kinds of things, non-binding, of course. And none of these things are happening.

Right. kinds of things, non-binding, of course. And none of these things are happening. It is possible to replace some fossil fuel use with wind and solar. Europe has done it to some extent, but it has made electricity tremendously more expensive. If the Chinese use their low wage labor to produce this stuff, you know, possibly some emissions can be reduced. But generally speaking, to do the sort of industrial output that China is, you know, doing for the world, they're going to need fossil fuels forever and burn more and more and more. And that's why, you know, China, you know, they used to, I guess, talk with John Kerry about, well, maybe we'll peak fossil fuel use in 2030. Maybe we'll, you know, try to be at net zero by 2060. I mean, you know, this is just talk from the Chinese.

They show no, they're not building coal plants now so that they can shut them down in 10, 20 or 30 years. Coal plants are assets that, you know, last a long time. China has plenty of coal. They have, you know, more serious things to worry about than emissions. I mean, emissions are very low on their list of priorities. So what do you make of this, you know, shift from from Kerry to Podesta? Well, I think it's really interesting because John Kerry was essentially, he was the climate envoy. His portfolio, I suppose, was climate, but he really had no authority to do anything. Now, John Podesta is a completely different creature.

John Podesta is a D.C. insider, used to be a lobbyist. Most importantly, Biden has assigned him responsibility for spending the $369 billion of climate money that were included in the Inflation Reduction Act. So when you think about it, it's really quite interesting. So John Podesta has all this money to spend on green tech. And where does all the green tech come from? It comes from China. And so now John Podesta, he's the climate envoy, essentially the climate ambassador to China. He has this huge budget. What could go wrong? I mean, we're talking about, you know, more than a third of a trillion dollars. How is that contributing to inflation reduction?

Well, it's not. It's just making energy more expensive. The reason we have the inflation we have is because of Joe Biden's fossil fuel policies. And it's not really just $369 billion. Goldman Sachs has said that these subsidies don't sunset. They just keep going. And Goldman Sachs has priced the climate spending in the Inflation Reduction Act as actually exceeding a trillion dollars. And a lot of that money is going to go to China. What portion of the Inflation Reduction Act is for these green initiatives. And how is it that this is in this bill in the first place? It was a Democrat bill. It's essentially the Green New Deal. It's a Democrat bill. They were able to pass it by the narrowest of margins with the help of Joe Manchin,

who was initially against it. And, you know, in Congress, if you can spend money, everybody likes it, right? People want, you know, EV battery facilities or EV facilities or wind or solar. You know, unfortunately, you know, we have empowered the green tech industry, the wind industry, solar industry, electric cars. We have subsidized them to the point where they're a real political force, even in red states. They build a lot of facilities in red states, so they get Republican support now. The entire Democrat Party has been purchased by or is for this green energy stuff, and a lot of the Republican Party as well, maybe half. I don't want to beat a dead horse here, but it strikes me that this doesn't have

anything to do with inflation reduction. It doesn't. Most of the Inflation Reduction Act money has not been spent yet. But, that said, ever since we have gone down this road of wind and solar and EV, the price of energy has just gone up. To accompany these mandates and subsidies for new technology, we have also made it more expensive to burn fossil fuels. Gas prices more than doubled under Biden in 2022, which sent inflation through the roof. It's a disastrous policy. The Inflation Reduction Act, that is a totally Orwellian name. It's the Inflation Accretion Act, Inflation Increase Act. We've documented over the years numerous ways in which the Chinese Communist Party is influencing the policies of the American government. And it strikes me around this green energy stuff,

there's some recent reports that we've seen where there's some kind of direct linkages. Sometimes those things are hard to find. Yeah. Most people may recall last, about this time last year, there was a report from a group called the Energy Foundation. And it was about gas stoves, how gas stoves cause asthma and health effects in people. And that started off the notion that, you know, Biden was coming after our gas stoves. And the Biden administration proposed new gas stove efficiency regulations requiring manufacturers to make cleaner gas stoves, more efficient gas stoves. And, of course, there's nothing to this. Gas stoves don't cause asthma. Gas stoves don't hurt.

Properly functioning gas stoves don't cause asthma, don't hurt anybody's health. They're perfectly safe. We've been using them for 100 years. They are fine. But this report came along and just scared a lot of people. And as it turns out, this was just reported recently, the group that produced this report has been funded by Communist China. And you know, this is par for the course for Communist China. I mean, they are, they are, they spend money with green groups in the United States aiming to, you know, advance the climate agenda or the green agenda, which subverts the American economy. I first noticed this probably about 10 years ago. Communist China, or a businessman from Hong Kong, so Communist China, basically purchased the Harvard University School of Public Health. And it used to be called the Harvard University School of Public Health.

They changed it to the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, completely rebranded it, for $350 million. And so there are all these Chinese researchers now at Harvard. They are constantly putting out studies that the U.S. EPA is using to ratchet down air quality regulations, for example. Just recently, the EPA announced it was tightening air quality regulations for particulate matter. This is gonna put a lot of US states and counties out of compliance with the EPA rules. This gives the EPA even more power over these states' economies.

And this is being funded by Communist China. And then so we, And before Democrats took Congress in 2019, Republicans were investigating Communist China funding of green groups. And as soon as Democrats took over, that investigation just went away, just stopped. But this is an ongoing problem. It's cheaper for China to subvert America than it is to fight America. If China can push, you know, have others push green policies, get us dependent on products that are made in China, well, China makes money, China makes us dependent. I look at Russia's invasion of Ukraine as funded by what I call climate idiocy. Ever since the Kyoto Protocol, Europe has been getting off fossil fuels. They've stopped mining for coal. They have

stopped producing their own natural gas. They exported their emissions to where? To Russia. Russia is more than happy to do that because Russia was enriched by Europeans buying coal, oil, and gas, and Russia was empowered because Europe made itself dependent on Russia. And so a lot of the energy inflation we've seen since the Russian invasion was because Europe was caught flat-footed. Now the United States has to come to Europe's rescue with LNG, liquid natural gas, which in probably the strangest twist of all, Joe Biden has now put a moratorium on new LNG export terminals. Well, how are we supposed to help Europe? And unfortunately, the Europeans have not yet figured out, or the Green parties have so much power, that Europeans have not figured out that, you know, they have plenty of natural gas on their own and coal and oil, you know, they could produce their own. But the Greens block all this.

In Britain, you know, Britain is trying to produce more gas from the North Sea, but the Green groups are blocking it. You have this, you know, in Europe, you have this European climate movement, which has been funded by Putin to block Europe from producing its own energy. The other side knows what the West's weaknesses are, and they fund them, and much to our detriment. So there's an effort in Congress as we speak to at least ostensibly deal with this kind of reality that we've been discussing in this interview, the carbon border tariff. So can you just briefly explain what that is and how it works?

Well, the idea behind a carbon border tariff, it's essentially a tax tariff. And the tax would be placed on goods coming from other countries where emission standards are not as strict as in the United States. This is an effort that's being done, being led by Republicans of all people. Kevin Cramer from North Carolina, North Dakota, and Bill Cassidy from Louisiana, for example, they have a bill. It's also being done in Europe. And, you know, the core problem they're trying to address is stem the flow of Chinese goods and bring manufacturing back to both Europe and the United States. Of course, I think that's a really good idea. We need to, especially, you know, these vital industries, we cannot have them outsourced to China. We need to have them in the United States.

But the way they're going about it is really kind of stupid, this whole idea that we're going to start taxing emissions, which is just taxing energy, which is regressive and just hurts everybody. You know, our policy should be, you know, we are going to bring back vital industries, all our vital materials, steel, energy, you know, telecommunications, all the stuff we're going to do in the United States because we need to have it. You know, if we have a problem with China or Russia or there's, you know, God knows what, we don't need to pretend that, oh, we produce steel cleaner in the United States

than the Chinese do or the Koreans do. If we bring industry back, the idea would be that we produce these things and we would grow our economy at the same time. So I take a dim view of carbon border tariffs. It's not going to work here. It's not going to work in Europe. In the end, it's just going to work here. It's not going to work in Europe. In the end,

it's just going to make things more expensive and not accomplish anything. I'm thinking about this, bringing manufacturing here in one key area for us, and especially given the increased risk around Taiwan. And of course, Taiwan produces all of the most important chips that we have. There's been, you know, I actually drove by it a few months ago. There's a few, at least one plant in Arizona that's being built from a Taiwanese manufacturer. It's going to take a long time, but that's happening. But as I understand it, there's regulatory restrictions here to that happening, even the chip manufacturing itself,

never mind bringing back steel or this other kind of manufacturing. Yeah. Well, I'm not an expert in chip manufacturing, but I can certainly believe that that is true. You know, these manufacturing anything is going to involve emissions, going to involve, you know, resource use, especially water. And it's very difficult to get those sorts of operations permitted in the United States. You know, there's been talk in the United States about mining for the rare earths that we need for all this green tech. But of course, that's only part of the battle. You can't just mine them, which of course the Greens will never

allow to start with because mining is dirty. But then you have to process them, which means you need to build processing facilities, you need water, you need energy. And right now we do all this stuff in China, and the Chinese do it in a very dirty way because they don't care, they don't have any environmental regulations. You know, as clean as we could do it in the United States, the environmentalists don't want to let it happen. So, everybody says they're interested in the environment. Nobody spends any time learning anything about it. There's a lot more to these issues than reading a newspaper or watching a TV show because there's a lot of lying that goes on with the environment. The environment can be quite complicated.

It's got science, politics, economics. There's air issues, water issues. You mentioned aesthetics, which is actually important. Aesthetics, yeah. It's a lot for anybody. And around 2000, dioxins were everyone thought is the most toxic substance known to man. Ben and Jerry's on the back of one of its ice cream cartons said there is no safe level of exposure to dioxin. Well, of course, I know there's dioxins everywhere.

They're naturally created, right, from forest fires, from any combustion process. So I found a lab, and I had Ben and Jerry's ice cream tested for dioxins. And I found that a single scoop of Ben and Jerry's vanilla contained 2,000 times the amount of dioxin that the EPA said was safe. And I went and testified to EPA's Science and Biology Board about this, and that was the end of this. Because it's obviously stupid. You know, no one thinks Ben and Jerry's ice cream is toxic. And, you know, you could do that. You could test that in basically any food. I just did it at Ben and Jerry's because they said there's no safe way. You did it as a stunt. Yeah.

I did it as a stunt. Well, not as a stunt. It was true. You know, I knew that I would find it there. But they didn't. But they're saying there's no safe level of, why would you do that? So their product is not safe. I mean, it just, it blew the whole thing up. You know, when we were chatting offline the other day, you know, we both realized we share a great interest in, I guess, the lesser known book, Orwell's lesser known book, Animal Farm. You were saying that you're sort of, you envision what's happening as being kind of along the lines of that model.

And I thought that was fascinating. Yeah. So everyone read Animal Farm in eighth grade. And I guess it was an easy book to read. And what people maybe remember of it was sort of an allegory about Stalinism. And I think it's more than that. So Orwell has two major works, Animal Farm and 1984. In Animal Farm, we had the pigs convincing the farm animals that, well, we need to have a revolution and we're going to make our lives better. And so the

farm animals join in. And, you know, it's ironic because there's actually a windmill in Animal Farm which falls down and they rebuild and the windmill keeps failing, basically. They keep rebuilding, but it never works. And so at the end of the story, you know, everything that pigs promised was false. Nothing worked. But, you know, did the same thing happen to the pigs as happened to, you know, the farmer? No, they kept their power. Okay. And so Animal Farm is the story of the process of how you get to a place like 1984. We put all our faith in central government that has all these grandiose ideas, of which we are seeing none of them really work. And in the end, they're still in charge. We have less power. We are subject to them. And then, you know, so we are headed straight for 1984.

What is the Steve Malloy prescription here? I hate to get political, but we have kind of we have an election coming up and everyone we have all these choices and we have seen what has been going on in this country since COVID. And none of it is really good. I mean, we have a overreaching government, which is reducing our standard of living, taking away our liberties, not really accomplishing any sort of commensurate benefits for us. And people are just sort of oblivious to all this.

They get caught up in these sort of mindless, you know, political debates and controversies, not recognizing that, you know, their standard of living is going down because government is becoming a bigger and bigger part of their lives. I mean, and so we have this inflection point coming up, this election. Are you happy with how the world has been going for the last three and a half years and the economy? It's sad to me that it's going to be a very close election. We're at a crossroads in America right now. It's pretty clear that we have a political party that will do anything to obtain and maintain their power. Climate is all about controlling everything we do.

They want to tell you where to live, what to drive, what kind of energy you can use, what you can invest in, what kind of food you can eat, what kind of toilets you can have, what kind of light bulbs, just every aspect of your life they want to control. And that is just going to get worse. I think maybe we talked about this before, fossil fuels have taken us from less than a billion people, pre-industrial, to now more than 8 billion people. Climate idiocy sort of began in the 1950s, 1960s. Paul Ehrlich was really the first person with his population bomb to come up with this notion that

the Earth's carrying capacity is 2 billion people. Well, you know, Paul Ehrlich has never been right. He's still alive. And so 50 years later, he is still at the, you know, we only we can only have two billion people. Well, that means that more than six billion people need to go away. And I look at what our government is doing, the Biden administration and the Western Europeans. They're attacking our energy supplies and they're attacking our food supplies. And those are the two things that have made these 8 billion people live longer, healthier, wealthier, freer lives than ever before. And that's exactly what's being attacked. Not really attacking emissions so much as they're attacking the energy production and food production we need to survive. And what conclusion can you draw from that? Not a good one.

Well, Steve Malloy, it's such a pleasure to have had you on. Jan, thanks for having me. Thank you all for joining Steve Malloy and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I'm your host, Jan Jekielek.