Bill Meyer Show Podcast - Sponsored by Clouser Drilling www.ClouserDrilling.com - 02-18-25_TUESDAY_6AM

Episode Date: February 18, 2025

Talk of the morning news, Prov and the ONA to start negotiating again, Steve Milloy, founder of Junk Science Dot com talks with me about the change to relax EPA standards on appliances and other regulatory standards.

The Bill Myers Show podcast is sponsored by Clouser Drilling. They've been leading the way in Southern Oregon well drilling for over 50 years. Find out more about them at clouserdrilling.com. Here's Bill Myers. And good morning. Happy Pebble in Your Shoe Tuesday. Join the conversation. Like the band said, 770-5633-770-KMED.

The email bill at billmyershow.com. Hope you're doing well today. Had a great couple of days off. Ended up having a Valentine's day. Took my lovely, lively, sweetie Linda day before her birthday. Saturday was her birthday and ended up going to a nice meal.

And then we ended up heading over to the Alexander Tutanov program along with Dr. Hall dueling pianos and it was a just a wonderful wonderful performance and just uh really enjoyed it that was a great start to my long four-day weekend and then uh yesterday was just kind of reading news drinking coffee playing yahtzee things like that doing nothing particularly important but uh certainly uh some strange news around here like uh well we had this situation in which uh some people abandoned well allegedly we have to say allegedly right that sort of thing but there was a crash yesterday on the railroad here in southern oregon central oregon and pacific

train hits an abandoned truck in rural gold hill is where this ended up happening. And the 911 folks here in Jackson County, I got a report about 930 yesterday morning. Train crashes into a truck parked onto the tracks. And it got into the tracks apparently from a dirt road. And this was near the Gold Ray Road area, okay? Nobody heard on this one. And I guess there are some people in trouble, though. They have identified 45 year old kenneth lutke 78 year old caroline allen both of white city as suspects and they're charged with

trespass criminal mischief reckless endangering and allen also got an additional charge of driving well suspended so i i guess they decided to just take the car and take the truck rather and go uh out there on the uh you know, out there in the back roads until they got to the train track. And then you just parked it by the train track, I guess. Well, the trespassing aspect, people would say, why, why would it be trespassing? Well, it's because the railroad tracks are private property. And a lot of people don't seem to realize that it's actually private property and i know i've walked the tracks i've done things like that forever and ever and ever and usually nobody hassles you but

technically if they really want to get in your face they could you know about it so that is what happened that was our big one here a mishap in toronto yesterday though this was uh this made the national news you saw the picture of the Delta plane upside down? Yeah, after it crashed and flipped in Toronto. It was actually flying. Let's see. It was actually coming from Minneapolis. Yeah.

And one person listed critical with non-life-threatening injuries, though. It was going to be okay. Seven other people suffering moderate to mild injuries. And they're calling it a miracle. And it is fascinating, though, how NBC News ended up responding to this. I wanted to play this for you. It's one of their senior correspondents, Tom Costello. Now, remember, took off from Minneapolis, landing in Toronto under Toronto control. And this is how NBC News ended up reporting the plane crash.

I did want to underscore, to pick up on the conversation you were just having, though, in terms of the recent string of aviation incidents, Tom. This is going to, yet again, raise the concern about FAA staffing, air traffic control staffing. Now, this is a Canadian air traffic control tower, and this is under Canadian authority once it crosses the border. And yet, as you know, there has been this talk about maybe staff cuts at the FAA as a part of President Trump's effort to trim down the federal workforce. And yet, as you also know, the FAA has been complaining for years that they are understaffed in critical job positions, especially air traffic control. I was having a conversation

with somebody today about whether air traffic control in America is being affected by the staff cuts. So far, not to their knowledge. And yet other positions related to maintaining critical equipment appear to have been cut. So this is going to feed into all of these recent incidents, and the safety of the total air traffic system is going to be very much a part of the conversation as we go forward, at least on this side of the country, of the border, I should say. So NBC News' take was that, well, we can't prove that it's Trump's fault, but it's Trump's fault because of FAA cuts. What do you think about that, huh?

What do you think about that? Well, yeah, we know it was an American plane, but it was in Canadian airspace. But obviously, you know, it's going to feed into this. No, NBC News is feeding into this as part of it the uh preliminary figuring what they what they think happened with the plane is that by the way there had been some really bad weather in toronto and lots of snow over the uh the weekend and they had had some runways closed and they were trying to make up flights and trying to get a lot of people in and out of there. And the weather was really bad when the Delta plane was landing. And the theory at this point is that severe gusts ended up taking the plane

and twisting it to the point where, I guess, you know, not having seen video of the actual crash itself, but, you know, flipping, you know, the wingtip ends up grabbing you know because of the severe wind it grabs and then you can flip the plane i do that sort of thing but fortunately everybody's okay and um the one person that was more seriously engineered injured rather it seems to be okay too but that's all president trump president President Trump now controls the weather at Toronto's airport and also the response of the pilot to the weather at Toronto's airport. But just absolutely fascinating how NBC News,

and I'm sure ABC News and CBS probably had similar things. Well, this is feeding into the problem, okay? A little bit closer to home, Providence agreeing to come back to bargaining with nearly 5,000 striking nurses. This in a release from the Oregon Nurses Association. This has been dragging on for a while. And mediation is going to take place today and tomorrow.

This according to the Oregon Nurses Association. And they're saying more than a week after nearly 5,000 frontline nurses from eight prov hospitals resoundingly voted no on a tentative contract, Providence agreed to come back to negotiations. So they've been on strike for 39 days, by the way. I had a person, I don't know if they work at Providence or whatever it is, they left a note on my, or a message on my phone, and they were claiming that I told a falsehood or that I told an untruth about the Providence Oregon Nurses Association deal.

And I might get more into this at some point. They were claiming, because I was saying that Providence has been losing money, that they've lost money 10 out of the last 12 quarters providing medical care and they say that's not true uh providence has uh i'm just paraphrasing what this person said providence has uh eight billion ten billion dollars or eight billion dollars in in the savings account and that's true there is like eight billion in their investment account roughly speaking give or take a billion you know when you're talking a lot and that sounds like a lot of money but one of the only things that saved providence in losing 10 to 12 10 losing money on medical

care over the last 10 out of 12 quarters is because of money that was produced by the investment fund. So the way I, and I downloaded their financial reports, and maybe I can get somebody who understands those reports better than I do. I don't claim to be a green, you know, a green eye shade kind of accountant type. But the way that I read the providence financial reports is that the money from the investment fund generated enough money to be able to make up for the fact that providence loses money on providing medical care that's the way it looks like and see the way the oregon nurses association is looking at this is that there's $8 billion in the investment account.

So that should be going to the nurses and doctors. Now, it's a foundation. It's like the investment fund. This is something which is there to provide for Providence long term. It's kind of like the Providence 401K, if you want to look at it that way, another way. And I would imagine that capital expenditures like new buildings or new equipment that needs to be replaced, things like that may get paid out of that. The fact of the matter is, though, is that Providence, and I don't know about Asante's situation, who knows what it's going to be like over at Asante given the nurses, you know, the fentanyl

nurse trial and all of the lawsuits about that and whether they have enough insurance to really be able to cover that as a going concern. I can't speak to that right now. But when you actually look at the books, when it comes to Providence actually providing medical care, it tends to lose money on it. And there's a lot of reasons for it frankly you also have a lot of bum and illegal alien indigent care that that comes into the providence system and there's very little if any money that comes attached with those individuals well that money has to come for some from somewhere and some of it got patted i would imagine from the investment fund the way it looks like from my. And some of it got patted, I would imagine, from the investment fund,

the way it looks like from my reading of the books. But the investment fund is like the seed corn of Providence. And to take money out of the investment fund, the seed corn, and pay it to nurses or give it to suppliers or anything like that, is kind of defeating the purpose of having a savings account the idea is that you can't overpay your help now i know that you have to pay your help fairly in order to get them in there but i don't think that i was telling it on truth when i said that that providence just like providence has said has lost money 10 out of 12

times of the last uh 10 12 out of the last quarters, they've lost money 10 times out of it. And a lot of it is indigent care, providing care for the community like that, which is what they do. And you also have the situation in which, let's say you have someone coming in from Oregon Health Plan. Oregon Health Plan pays, if I recall correctly, about 55 percent of what the medical procedures are actually being charged for for other people. Now, I may be stating this inelegantly, but the state of Oregon doesn't pay what it actually costs to treat someone at Providence, or probably Asante for that matter, and various other doctors.

They pay less. I don't know of any other business that allows you to do this, in which the hospital says, or the doctor says, this is how much I charge, and then the state of Oregon says, well, this is how much you'll get. You know, that kind of thing. But that does seem to be the way it is. I mean, wouldn't you love to be able to go into the grocery store and just say, hey, you know, I know that ribeye is $17.99 a pound, but I'd like to pay $11.99 a pound.

Or maybe $10 a pound, and that's all you're going to get. Boy, wouldn't that be great. So to the person who, by the way, did not leave his phone number, but he was saying that I was lying about it. No, I don't think. I don't believe I am because Providence, technically looking at their books, loses money on providing a lot of medical care. And they backfill it with investment income earned from that big savings account. So the fact that they have a big savings account doesn't mean that big savings account means we automatically give the nurses everything that they want and everything's all

fine. You have to look out for the longer term. And I think that's what those investment funds are all about. Although it sounds like a lot of money, but Providence is a big system too. And if you've looked at the price of a CT machine or something, there are big expenses involved in all this too. All right. So there we go that's it nurses and providence back at the table today and tomorrow hopefully they can hammer out something that both sides are are happy with but uh yeah just saying that they have a big savings account hence we give it to the nurses no that's not the way the system works not if you're running your company responsibly you have to keep reserves and you have to keep – well, it's just kind of like – well, you can even look at Jackson County, for instance.

I don't know what their reserves are right now, but they have pretty good reserves in Jackson County. We've talked about that in the past. I haven't checked the budgeting on that recently but they'll say well why do we need to go to the taxpayers to get a new jail because we have enough money in there to probably build a jail or at least you know improve the jail do something like that it's like yes that's absolutely true there may be enough money to technically build a jail or get pretty close to it but of course you have a reserve in there in order to well if you have emergencies and you have something that has to be done, you get the big earthquake and you got to have some money from it. OK, there.

I mean, just as an example, there has to be some certain reserves in there. But just because Jackson County may technically have enough reserves to build a new jail or at least a pretty good addition to a jail or whatever, however you want to call it, doesn't mean that there's money to run the jail because then you have to hire a lot of people. Those are continuing expenses. Building the jail will be like a one-time expense. And that's kind of what, when I look at Providence's savings account. And by the way, I'm not saying that I'm a homer for Providence. I'm just talking about I see both sides of this issue. The nurses want the absolute most amount of money and the most amount of help is possible

with the minimum amount of work like any other unionized workforce or any other workforce for that matter nobody wants to do more than they can and they'll couch it in safety and all the rest of it and i get it and the company will play will cry poor i'm not saying that the company is poor, but when you're losing money on your core mission, 10 out of 12 quarters paying for the medical care, and a lot of this is due to the reimbursement rates along with the rest of it, and a lot of bums show up in the emergency room for free, along with the illegal aliens and all the rest of it. You can see how we have irresistible forces meeting up with immovable objects over at Providence and the Oregon Nurses Association. Just saying, all right?

Balance, balance, balance. Hope they get that figured out. 626 at KMED, 99.3 KBXG. Making America's appliances great again. Energy, too, for that matter. Steve Malloy will be talking about that. Dr. Robert Malone will also join me after 7 o'clock. Of course, he was a big guy within the COVID world. He was one of those truth-tellers during COVID.

And we're going to talk about RFK Juniors being confirmed late last week over at HHS and what that portends. Former Josephine County Commissioner Herman Beretshiger, of course, former state senator. We're going to talk with him about Doge and various other things. A lot of Doge news this morning, including, boy, a lot of people on Social Security that should be dead. There's nothing hinky about that, is there? Nah, couldn't be. This is the Bill Meyer Show. Hi, this is Bill Meyer, and I'm with Charisse from Patriot Electric, and I'm on KMED.

629, KMED, and 99.3 KBXG. Governor Kotek yesterday ended up putting a pause, a pause on the wildfire hazard map. So the wildfire hazard map and actually any further agency action is how it's being reported on the state's new wildfire hazard map until the legislature decides what to do with it in other words keep the heat on them folks and if you have not filed your wildfire agency map appeal or whatever it is get that in continue to keep flooding them and that is the main thing it would appear that the wildfire map may be circling the drain now i know that uh the republicans in the state legislature are trying to kill that right now they had a press conference yesterday statesman's journal reporting this laying out plans to repeal the risk map released earlier this year and the stricter building codes and the requirements that

places on about a hundred thousand properties in the name of wildfire prevention. And they were touting Senate Bill 678 that would eliminate the map. That is Noel Robinson's bill, from what I understand. Now, the issue, though, is that do they have the votes? I don't know. But the one thing about the wildfire map irritation is that this could be more of a bipartisan hating on issue than we may think we can't say for sure but uh you know not everybody that's having their property uh ripped up and down one side of the other in a wildfire risk hazard map of high is a republican not all of them and there's some Democrats probably upset about this too.

I would imagine that State Senator Golden has been getting a pretty strong behind-the-scenes talking to. And I think that's what's going on here. So the state of Oregon may blink once again on the wildfire hazard map, but that does not mean that you go to sleep and think that everything

will be taken care of. In other words, we'll take care of this after the legislative session is over. So you make sure and get your stuff in there if you are a rural property owner, okay? Don't go to sleep on us, okay? Don't go to sleep on yourself. I mean, I don't have a dog in this fight. My property is not that way, but maybe yours is. Good morning, KMED. This is Bill. Who's this? This is Margaret from Central Point. Hey, Margaret. How are you doing this morning? What's up? I'm doing very well. Thank you. Thankfully, you're back. Oh, it's great. It's good to be back. How are you? I'm great. I was wondering if we could get Robert Malone's opinion on the H5N1 avian flu

debacle because they're thinking now they want to try, the FDA wants to try to vaccinate chickens and they are going to make their own natural herd immunity if they just leave them alone and stop killing off all the chickens.

Okay, well I'll ask him about that, okay? We'll do that. Yeah. All right. Thank you very much. And like I said, he's a virologist of great renown, so he's certainly someone I can ask. I think I can probably trust his opinion, I hope, right? I think so.

Thank you very much, Bill. All right. Thanks, Margaret. 632 at KMED, 993 KBXG. Yeah, we'll talk with Dr. Malone here a little bit more than a half hour from now there's some other things we have going on here um ralph galley times reporting this morning more than 150 protesters holding signs chanted together made their presence known in downtown medford yesterday on president's day they were protesting President Donald Trump, his administration's policies and staff.

Similar rallies held around the entire country. They had signs like, send Elon Musk to Mars. And this is what democracy looks like. Protesting Doge. And cutting funding for federal grants and multiple federal agencies targeting the LGBTQ plus community. Yeah. With a Trump executive order banning transgender citizens from serving in the military. Yeah.

I would just raise the issue here gently with the 150 protesters. I'll paraphrase Barack Obama's administration. We won. You lost. Deal with it. This is the Bill Myers show at at 6 33 the best of southern oregon magazine the bill myers show on 1063 kmed steve malloy joins me he's with the energy environment and public health expert over at uh gosh what is the official there are a number of

things there's steve malloy.com, there's JunkScience.com. You're everywhere, you're everywhere right now, Steve. But tell me about energy and legal. Look, people can just follow me on X at JunkScience. I'm with the Energy and Environment Legal Institute, but people know me from X. Yeah, well, by the way, I just wanted to say that I think that you have a portrait of yourself in the attic there someplace. I mean, you're very youthful. Very youthful photo you got there.

Good stuff, you know? The portrait is. Yeah, good-looking guy. Good-looking guy. Hey, Steve, I wanted to dig into this. Like I said, you were talking about all these energies and the junk science things back before it got cool. Now it has become really cool.

But I wanted to find out, what are we looking at with making appliances actually work again, I think is what I was hoping that we could get out of this current administration. I was wondering if you could tell us what the EPA is up to and more. Yeah, so this is really interesting. Since the 1970s and the energy crisis, the government has been trying to force appliance makers to make more efficient appliances. And all it's really done has been to make appliances more expensive and work less well. Everybody knows this, from your dishwasher, your washing machine, toilets, water fixtures, just everything. It's just been a disaster because the sufficiency thing has just been ridiculous. And so the standards, you know, gradually built up, built up, built up until

things don't work until Trump, Trump won. And during Trump 1.0, he rolled back a lot of these standards, including light bulbs. And then when Biden replaced Trump in 2021, you know, Biden reinstated the standards before it actually made them worse. So President Trump announced last week that he was going to roll back all the Biden standards, which is great news. It means that manufacturers can once again make appliances that work, including incandescent light bulbs and dishwashers and washing machines, et cetera. But the problem is that we're going to have to find manufacturers that actually want to do that. You know, the reason that manufacturers have let the government get away with these efficiency standards is because they like them. And the reason they like them is because it makes

appliances more expensive and they can charge more. And they make these appliances in Asia where labor costs are very low. So these people are making a lot more money now because the cost of manufacturing has gone down, the cost of product has gone up, and they love it, but we hate it. So bottom line is, you know, great that the standards have been rolled back. We just need to find manufacturers that want to make appliances that work again. I'm just wondering if maybe part of President Trump's efforts to reshore or to onshore manufacturing, if some of that may happen. And I know that there are certain classes of uh of appliances and and one that i wanted to take a look at here i don't know how deeply you've

looked into this is refrigeration and also heating ventilation and air conditioning and one of the biggest challenges that when i talk to people in the industry, is that they keep changing the refrigerant. And, you know, first it was R12, then it was R22, then it was R440 or something like that. And it's like every few years they change the refrigerant all about either energy efficiency and or it's going to do less damage to the ozone field. And it's like planned obsolescence of some of the most expensive

appliances that we have certainly heating and air conditioning systems and refrigerators and refrigerators do not last nearly as long as some of the older ones using the older refrigerants yeah so you know the ozone depletion the ozone hole hoax was the first atmospheric hoax and uh has never really panned out the ozone is today the same as it was in the 90s when they started banning refrigerants like Freon. So we've gone from CFCs to HCFCs. Let me make sure I get my letters right, to HFCs. Okay. Recently, HFCs have been banned.

And although there's no replacement chemical. Okay, so we have nothing to replace it with, but we're going to just ban it. Okay. All right. So, yeah, and you're right. I mean, and these new refrigerants are a lot more expensive than Freon was. Freon was pretty cheap. You know, you could recharge your car pretty cheaply, your refrigerator's inexpensive, worked. And this is what I'm saying. All these federal programs to do whatever energy efficiency, save the planet, they all just produce disaster because they're all junk science based. So is there any talk about taking the knee off of the heating and air conditioning world? Do you know?

I haven't seen anything yet. You know, one problem is, you know, this is really a deeply embedded problem in our society, in our political class, because, you know, getting rid of the HFCs, that was part of a law signed by President Trump at the end of his first term and supported by, you know, red state senators like John Kennedy and Bill Cassidy from Louisiana. and Kennedy helped sign the Kigali Treaty, which is an international treaty to phase out HFCs. So this is really a problem. I think President Trump, he would get rid of this if he thought about it. But he's got so much on his plate right now. And it sounds to me like there would be political resistance to doing something like this.

Well, the industry guys, yeah, the industry guys are going to be in there lobbying hard, and they own these red state politicians, just like a lot of the – with the Inflation Reduction Act, the Green New Scam, as President Trump calls it. The Biden administration spent a lot of that money in red states, and so they've purchased all these red state politicians. So it takes a lot of political will. Now, on junk science dot com, you had mentioned that you called it the ozone hole hoax. And yet, wasn't there a big treaty a number of years ago about getting rid of Freon and the chlorofluorohydrocarbons back then?

And that supposedly it appeared that it actually worked. Am I wrong about that that yeah i am okay tell me how i see because you know normally we think hey they had a treaty and they got rid of all this stuff and you know they uh they arrest people trying to bring freon in from mexico you remember you remember that story a few months ago yeah so so the treaty you're talking about is called the Montreal Protocol. It was signed by the U.S., I believe, during the Bush administration, George Bush, George H.W. Bush, 1989. The treaty came out in 1987. And the guy that did the science for it actually won a Nobel Prize for his science. But the problem is that, you know, so he determined in a laboratory and on the blackboard that chlorofluorocarbons in the atmosphere destroy ozone, right? But in reality, in the real atmosphere, the ozone quickly reforms. So does it really?

So this is another one of those issues in which I think the term that I would use almost as a pejorative is the best available science, which usually means politicized science that helps support a predetermined outcome, that kind of thing. The best available science at that time, which was modeling in essence, wasn't it? Because, you know, we... Yeah, modeling and half-baked modeling. And if you go to Junk Science or go on my X-Feed and search for ozone hole hoax or ozone depletion hoax, I've got the most recent graph from NASA, and you can see that although we have eliminated CFCs and HFCs, HCFC, whatever, the whole alphabet. Yeah, they keep changing the letters on them.

I know. Yeah, the ozone hole over the Antarctic has stayed the same. And, of course, you know, why is the hole only over the Antarctic? It just makes no sense. The whole thing was just crazy. So the ozone hole over the Antarctic is still there, even though I was told that... Well, it's the same. It's not really a hole. We don't really understand it. It changes every year, but there's no trend in the change.

It's just, we don't understand it. Oh, okay. That's why I have you here, because here it is. I'm making the assumption that if they did the treaty, and they did everything that the treaty said, that obviously the ozone hole was not a problem anymore, and you're telling me, no, that's not true. Okay, thank you. Well, it never was a problem. Uh-huh.

This is the thing. It never was a problem. You know, people were scared into thinking that, well, you know, the ozone protects us from ultraviolet rays. Right. People thought that there would be, like, people getting skin cancer, and, you know, plants would die. Yeah, we would all mutate into uh into you know zombies you know that kind

of thing and none of that ever happened all right we don't really understand it what about the energy world though because like i said you study this uh very deeply here and are we finally at the death knell of uh of wind of wind energy i would, as maybe especially offshore wind? Or are we having – I know there was a plan here in southern Oregon, in northern Oregon, rather, that got canceled for offshore wind, and it doesn't appear that it's penciling at this point. And what are you hearing out there? What are you seeing because of the changes?

I think it's quite possible that we'll never see another offshore wind turbine, at least during the Trump administration, as long as Republicans are in charge. President Trump hates all wind, especially offshore wind, because it's the most expensive form of electricity you can get. It's not environmental at all. It kills whales and eagles and birds, all kinds of things. So is onshore – onshore is not as damaging as the offshore? Is that what I'm to understand here? No. No, the onshore kills birds.

Okay. It permanently destroys land. Offshore kills whales, permanently destroys the ocean. You know, the area where the wind farms are produces very, very expensive electricity intermittently. It's, you know, it's just a disaster. It's not necessary. It has no purpose. And so, you know, there's a trillion dollars worth of spending in the Inflation Reduction Act

for wind, solar, EVs, charging stations, all that kind of stuff, batteries. And, you know, President Trump can't, you know, end that. Well, maybe he can. He could just, I guess, treat it as fraud and not spend the money. Another way to do it is just to, you know, slow down, delay these permits for like offshore wind farms so that it becomes unattractive for investors. That would be interesting.

I received a pitch from an author who wanted to come on the show next week, and I wonder if I should talk to him and if you think that this is a reasonable thesis. He says, though, that the electric automobile is an unavoidable. You cannot resist it, and it is going to continue to move forward. Do you think this young man is making a case in his book? What do you think? Well, I don't know. You know, Ford last year lost $17,000 per EV sold. They expect the same results for this year, you know, how much longer can that go on? Now, you know, China has figured out, you know, with its essentially low-wage slave labor, it makes cheap automobiles, cheap EVs.

They're trying to flood Europe with them. I'm sure they'd like to flood the U.S. with them. I just don't see that, especially, you know, in the form of a mandate. I mean, you know, I don't predict the future for most things. It's quite possible that one day electric cars will become, will make sense, but right now they really don't. And, you know, to force them on people is wrong, and the government has no track record of selecting technologies, you know, picking winners and losers. Yeah, my concern has been, though, is that in spite of all this talk that, yep, you can't

resist the electric car, this is the future, this is where we're going, the grid, even as we're talking about, I mean, not to even mention all the talk about we're going to need lots of power to power AI, you know, AI server farms and this and that and the other. They're not able to keep reliable power on all the time, even, you know, in our West Coast areas right now because of the, well, we've closed coal fire plants. And the challenge that we still make with wind and solar is that it only provides it when Mother Nature wishes to. And I don't know how they get past that serious flaw in the energy-providing grid. What do you think? So over the last 20 years, we've basically been dismantling our power grid, loading it up with unreliable, expensive wind and solar. And at the same time, we're burdening it with

electrification of everything from heat pumps to EVs, especially EVs. And in crazy places like California, they want to electrify their ports. Electrify? What could go wrong? What could go wrong on something like that? They want to electrify trucks and cars, and the grid just can't support that. As it is right now, our grid operates on the edge. Anytime there's peak demand someplace, you know, the grid becomes unstable. And, of course, President Trump, and we need to reindustrialize. We're going to need a lot more power.

Well, that also means we need power that's actually on all the time, that is base, you know, that is baseload and stable. Yeah, and that power has got to go for, you know, the data centers and for reindustrializing America and for, you know, keeping us warm and cool and just, you know, electricity for everything. And we don't need to be burdening the grid unnecessarily right now. It just doesn't make any sense. Steve, what do you think about the future of nuclear? I hear some people talking about it. The West Coast states have tended to look really askance at this. And do you think that, you know, maybe the real energy needs will break

through the political resistance over time? Yeah, well, I mean, you guys have too many crazy leftists out there. You know, nuclear power is fine. It's great. It can be done safely. France is 75% nuclear. You know, the first nuclear plant in the United States took three years from plans to producing electricity. Three years. You know, and that plant operated for like almost 40 years. No accidents or anything like that. And today, I mean, you couldn't plan a plant in three years or get it approved in 10 years.

Or much less get the investment capital for that reason, I guess. Yeah, it's crazy. And these plants cost way more and they're way overbuilt because of, you know, junk science EPA standards and politically determined safety standards going back from 70 years. I mean, it's a long story. It's the top story on junkscience.com right now. I've got some great emails where EPA, people showing how politicized everything is when it comes to radiation and why we can't build nuclear power plants. The top story.

Yeah. It's got a pin there. It's so important. Okay, we'll put it up there. I wanted to ask you then, going back to the changing appliance standards or, you know, taking the regulatory boot off of the neck of manufacturers, is there any push that you're aware of to make these changes permanent? Because the challenge with using executive orders to do a lot of those things, yeah, your pen and your phone like obama used to say and you get some things done

but then the next administration can can flip it back and same with president trump too and one of the challenges when you're talking about car manufacturers and appliance manufacturers they're looking for steadiness regulatory certainty and they don't want to build for something just to have the next group come in and say, nope, you can't sell those anymore. See what I'm getting at? Yeah. Yeah. Well, you know, recently, of course, car manufacturers have been looking for steady subsidies, not

regulatory. Oh, that's the regulatory certainty they want, steady subsidies. Okay, yeah. Bail out. Okay. Yeah, I get that. Sure. So, yeah, I mean, some things can be done through Congress and should be done through Congress.

For example, the Inflation Reduction Act, that trillion-dollar beast that funds climate stuff, you know, that was passed during the Biden administration through the budget reconciliation process. Republicans could do the same thing. They could unpass it. Okay. And not subject to filibuster. Will they do that? Well, I don't know. Lots of Republicans have been purchased by money from the Green News scam. So we'll see. Yeah, Congress could do a lot, especially through budget reconciliation. Will they? Well, Democrats are not stupid. I mean, they spent a lot of money investing in Republican

politicians. And so it's always hard to roll back the spending. And you even see how the Doge cuts that have been proposed, and they tend to be equal opportunity. It doesn't just cut blue states, it cuts red states too, so everybody's going to have to pay, so to speak. Well, yeah, Bill, I mean, this is crazy. I mean, we are $36 trillion in debt. Government spending is 23%, almost one quarter of our GDP. Man. I mean, my God, everybody is on the federal teep. We have, you know, this must be cut. We need to, we need a much smaller federal government. I mean, it's nuts. And thank God for Doge. All right. Well, I agree, too. I'm just hoping they're able to make it stick. That's all. Steve, I appreciate the take on it. Follow him on

X. I'll put all of your other information up there, too. I always appreciate the take on it. So guardedly optimistic, but for long term, though, it's going to take Congress. And that is a big question, right? The other side's not going away. We've got to fight. Okay. All right. Thank you, Steve. Good talk, as always. Appreciate that. 656 at KMED 99.3 KBXG. You're waking up with the Bill Myers Show. Living and loving the outdoors. Finding cures. Saving children.

Welcome to the Bill Myers Show on 1063 KMED. Give Bill a call at 541-770-5633. That's 770-KMED. Pebble in your shoe Tuesday. Join in at 770-5633, 770-KMED.

And let me give just a quick email of the day. Email of the day sponsored by Dr. Steve Nelson, Central Point Family Dentistry, centralpointfamilydentistry.com. And by the way, they have an in-house lab now, which I think you'll really enjoy. It's on Freeman Way, right next to the Mazatlan Mexican Restaurant. And with their in-house lab, a lot of times you can get your tooth prepped and have, you know, you just sit around for maybe about 20, 30 minutes while the machine in the lab starts getting things done, and you'll get a brand new crown that quickly, no longer having to wait to

have it go out of town, okay? And to an out-of-town lab which is the way that all the people used to have to work with but at central point family dentistry they'll get you in right away and patrick writes me this morning because i was talking about the uh the situation with providence and i had a listener who uh called in didn't leave his phone number so i can get back to him but saying that i had lied about Providence having been losing money hand over fist. And when I look at their financial statements here, at 10 out of 12 quarters, they had lost money providing medical care. And a lot of this due to low reimbursement rates,

which a lot of doctors and hospitals are all having to deal with. Everyone's having to deal with the same sort of situation. They say something costs $100 and the state gives you 55 dollars for something that they would say cost a hundred dollars that's about the reimbursement rate right now on oregon health plan and medicare not a lot better you know in some cases and you know you have these uh these big government insurers that are just right well that's okay it doesn't matter if you think it costs this much. We're saying we're going to pay you this much. And so this is where we, you know, find ourselves right now.

And so Providence, like many hospitals, not really making money on their core mission, which is providing medical care, and they have to take it out of reserves. And investment income, investment income seems to be the one thing that saved them from their big savings account, so to speak. And then people were saying, well, because of that savings account, you just give it to the nurses. That's not the way it works. And Patrick says, Bill, like any other business, the wages have to be paid from income, not

assets. That's a very good point. And that's kind of what I was getting at. I think you put it more succinctly. not assets that's a very good point and that that's kind of what i was getting at i think you put it more succinctly you pay it out of the income and the income for get providing medical care has not been all that steady and is not really covering everything and providence is having to subsidize that now that doesn't mean that the nurses aren't going to get a raise they're definitely going to get a raise heck they're definitely going to get a raise. Heck, they were offered a $20,000, $30,000 raise earlier this year.

But what they're really hoping to do is to have more hired so that it spreads the load. And I understand the nurses' point of view on this. But once again, there has to be money within. There has to be income coming in to be able to flush those expenses out, other than Providence digging itself into a deeper hole for the next quarter now it has been improving a bit for them the last few quarters but still they overall lose money on providing medical care so there we go this is kmed kmed hd1 eagle point metford kbxg grants pass town hall news now dr robert malone md joins me in just a few