Shaun Newman Podcast - #315 - Brian Gitt

Episode Date: September 14, 2022

Energy entrepreneur, investor & writer he's spent 25+ years working in the energy industry. We discuss Brian's switch from solar & wind to now believing Nuclear is the clear option into the future.  November 5th SNP Presents: QDM & 2's.   Get your tickets here: https://snp.ticketleap.com/snp-presents-qdm--222-minutes Let me know what you think   Text me 587-217-8500

What's up, guys, it's Kid Carson. This is Alexandra Kitty. This is Danielle Smith. Hey, everybody. This is Paul Brandt. Jeremy McKenzie, Ragingdissident.com. Welcome to the Sean Newman podcast. Welcome to the podcast, folks.

Happy Wednesday. The week is cruising along. I'm going to remind you if you're interested in getting QDM and two stand-up tickets at the Gold Horse Casino on November 5th. The link is in the show notes. If you want to yell at me, if you want to applaud me, if you want to start a conversation, Show notes also has the phone number. Shoot me a text. I'm always interested in what you find folks have to think.

Obviously, Thursday night was the, this past Thursday night was the first roundtable with the Western Standard. What did you think? Did you enjoy it? Not enjoy it. It was kind of, as some, a few people pointed out, a little bit niche because obviously talking about Alberta politics, some of you don't give a rat's ass about Alberta politics, but maybe you should. Obviously out here in the West, it's going to dictate a lot, I think. on who comes out of that and there's a lot of moving parts obviously

tomorrow night on Thursday the 15th will be episode number two of the roundtables and you'll just have to wait and see what I cook up for that one and I'm curious you know the one lovely thing about this round table every week no different than the Tuesday mashup is it's gonna be very current there's gonna be changing topics each week so if you want to have something on there well you got my phone number, fire me a message. I'm open to just about any idea and we'll see if we can't keep it a little spicy and bring on some intelligent people and see if we can't figure some things out for you. Either way, and for me, for that matter. Who am I kidding? It's probably this dummy sitting

sitting there listening to some experts and I'm kind of nodded my head. I understand. Anyways, you get the point. Coming up September 24th, I'm in Calgary. I'm there for a few days, Here's a little bit of a bombshell sitting down with Paul Brandt again. I'm going to be heading to his farm. I'm looking forward to that. Whoop, Ball Brand. Yep. Anyways, exciting times here on the podcast.

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Give them a call 780808-5025. Now let's get on in that tail of tape brought to you by Hancock Petroleum for the past 80 years. They've been an industry leader in bulk fuels, lubricants, methanol, and chemicals delivering to your farm, commercial or oil fuel location. For more information, visit them at Hancock, Petroleum.comptrollium.com. He's an energy entrepreneur, an investor, a writer, and he spent over, 25 years in the energy sector. I'm talking about Brian Gitt. So buckle up. Here we go. This is Brian Gitt, and you're listening to the Sean Newman podcast. Welcome to the Sean Newman podcast today. I'm joined by Brian Gitt. So first off, sir, thanks for hopping on. Thanks, Sean. I'm really looking

forward to this conversation and happy to be here. Well, like I told you before we started, I got some family that first directed me towards you off of Michael Campbell's show that they listened to weekly. and so then I, of course, I had to go take a listen and, you know, and it just leads in down a rabbit hole I go. And now to have you on, they're excited. I'm excited. And so appreciate you giving me some of your time. Now, to the person who doesn't know who Brian Gitt is, I think we best start for the listener. Who is Brian Gitt? And I'll let you run with it from there. Sure. Well, I'm a, at the core, I'm an energy entrepreneur, investor, and writer. That's kind of the three areas that I focus on within the energy space.

I've worked in the energy sector for over 25 years on a lot of different types of projects and technologies. But this really all started for me. I love the wilderness. I love spending time outdoors. I used to lead these outdoor adventure trips for teenagers, taking them out in Alaska and in the southwestern U.S. where we'd go sometimes for 40 days away from civilization.

And I just wanted to do something to protect those beautiful areas that I fell in love with. And that led me down this path of energy and buildings because it was such a tangible thing. We, you know, we all live in houses. Our kids go to school. We all interface with energy and buildings. And so I'm a practical person. I'm not really the activist type that wanted to go protest cutting down the rainforest or anything like that. I was like, well, what are the solutions?

What can we do in a very practical way? And that led me to energy and specifically thinking about how we interface with building. in transportation and all of these critical systems that we rely on in modern civilization. So if you go back 25 years in the energy sector, right? If you go back to day one, what did you think the answer was? I thought the answer was solar, winds, electric vehicles. You know, I was sold this vision and I embraced it. I took a hook, line, and sinker. Actually, I can remember the moment I was sitting in this lecture hall in a little college in northern Arizona. I was listening to Amory Lovenspeak, who in the energy efficiency world, he's somewhat well known.

And he was talking about ideas like more sun hits the earth's surface in an hour than we consume in a year. These are really romantic ideas in a way, especially when you're an impressionable early 20s, late teens, person that's really wanting to make an impact on the world. I was taken by this vision and it sucked me in. I just loved it. I was like, wow, that's just amazing. I need to learn about this stuff. And I just went 100% down that rabbit hole to try to learn as much as I could, as fast as I could.

And I went to work in the construction industry because I really wanted to understand how buildings went together and how heating, air conditioning systems worked and solar panels would be best leveraged within the built environment. I worked for a nonprofit organization that promoted green building policies and programs throughout the state of California. And we worked with all of the key stakeholders. So everyone from the state energy office, the California Energy Commission, the utilities like Pacific Gas and Electric in California to the building trades, to production home builders, to lenders. And trying to understand how do we transform the market. How do we scale up these green technologies so that they're mainstream? And I spent many years doing that.

I also worked in energy consulting trying to commercialize technologies and lighting and various energy efficiency technologies. We worked on fuel cell vehicles. We worked on carbon sequestration at power plants, all kinds of projects. And over all of these years, I believed it. I was 100% convinced this was the way to go that we needed to power civilization by the sun and the wind and electrify everything as much as possible. And that's what I believe for many years. And the cracks in my belief system started to show as I realized that these programs weren't working. I thought the issue was we just needed more money, that money was the barrier.

But here I was on the front lines during in 2009 when the Obama administration had earmarked billions of dollars to get people back to work because the economy was obviously suffering. And a lot of that money went into the energy sector. My firm was successful in getting a large contract. We had a $60 million contract to help implement a program that became called Energy Upgrade California. And the vision of it was to upgrade as many commercial buildings and homes as possible to begin. become more energy efficient. So here we had all this money. We had the utilities on board.

We had the local governments on board. We had the contractors on board. We had all of the folks I thought were essential to be able to scale these programs. And yet the programs didn't work. They didn't scale. What we ended up doing is mostly incentivizing wealthier homeowners who already wanted to do these kinds of upgrades anyway.

Let's say you had an old water heater, an old air conditioner, old heating system. And oh my gosh, the government's going to give me a $5,000 rebate and this really low cost financing. And, oh, they're even going to help qualify a contractor for me. I'll take advantage of that. Who wouldn't? And so what I saw, though, is that the programs weren't really having any kind of widespread impact. They were more limited to these wealthier homeowners that were taking advantage of these government subsidies and utility subsidies. But it wasn't transforming the market like we had intended. And once I started to see this firsthand right in front of me, you know, given all of the money and all the momentum we had with these stakeholders, I had to

start questioning my beliefs. I mean, it's kind of the definition of insanity. If you're trying things over and over again and they're not working, they're not scaling to not reflect and consider that maybe, maybe we're not approaching it in the correct manner. When you say cracks, you know, cracks in your belief system, what were some of the, you know, when you, you kind of reflect, what were some of the cracks that started to show, you know, in the 25 years? Or it's probably less than that, but you kind of get the idea. Yeah, I mean, some of it's kind of embarrassing, to be honest with you, because, you know, some of these things, the problem is when you hold these beliefs and they become part of your identity, they become part of how you see yourself in the world, and it makes, it insulates you, at least it did for me, and I see this happening with other people too, to feedback and criticism and to think critically and to really investigate these topics. I'll give you an example. So we talk about wind and solar power. Well, it's obvious that these sources of energy are intermittent, meaning obviously the sun's not shining at night and the wind's not blowing all the time, right? This is a basic physics problem of the technologies, not that they don't have utility in some applications, but this is a huge limitation.

Well, when you hold these beliefs that these are the future, these are the technologies that are going to power the world, you don't think as critically, about, well, what does that really mean? And when someone say, oh, we'll just use batteries as a way to store that energy when the sun's not shining or the wind's not blowing, then you don't go and look at the second order effects and really drill down into, well, okay, how much battery storage would we need? And do we actually have the battery technology today that can perform this function beyond, let's say, four hours? Do we have long-term battery storage?

Do we have enough storage to address seasonal differences? you know, when we have months during the winter where it's dark and there's sometimes no wind. So these are the kinds of thoughts that I didn't really question. Because I was so indoctrinated by these views, I just kind of took the main talking points and just went full steam ahead that this is what we need to do and, you know, just focused on trying to scale these programs and technologies versus reflecting and really using critical thinking to evaluate them. I'm curious, you know, as you talk this way now, how has the, I don't know, how has your

circle of friends or colleagues, are they okay with this brand? Are they not happy with you? Let's say it's mixed, obviously. I mean, I'm sure a lot of the colleagues I used to work with aren't overly enthused about some of my evolution of thinking. You know, I, because I work for so many years in California, especially, and I live in San Francisco, which is kind of the epicenter of a lot of this green ideology. You know, obviously close friends that I've known for years, like me for me, and it's not about what I did for work or necessarily a certain viewpoint. But certainly in different social circles and in older, you know, past work colleagues, I'm sure don't agree with a lot of my evolved views.

Do you ever think you could get you go back to what your professor had said, and you can say it again better, but basically in a day the sun hits the earth as much power as we need in a year. I'm romanticizing it just as much as he is, but the general idea, would there ever be a way in the future, we could harness that where we actually could do that or we'll never get there? solar and wind ultimately have a physics problem right i mean we're those particular technologies lack the energy density for example that because they require so much surface area to be able to harness these natural forces right so you're going to the wind is really strong in certain regions and in parts of the country and it's not in others and you can't control the wind it's not like you have a knob to turn the wind on and off same thing with the sun so there's some fundamental physics limitations on the technologies, not to say that there aren't applications and places for it. You know, even though I don't think that solar power is a scalable technology to power

industrialized civilization, it does have certain utility in different applications. So, for example, if you're in a rural area where you don't have power or you're in an African village where that can be a complete game changer to have electricity for a school or to keep at a local health clinic to basically keep vaccinations cold or to allow someone to study at night and have a light. I mean, it's not that I'm anti the technology itself. It has its applications and use cases. What I'm anti is misusing that technology to say that it is appropriate to scale that to power

industrialized society, which clearly it's not up for the task. And we're seeing the ramifications of that happen right now in Europe, where they bought the same vision that I bought. You know, in the year 2000, Germany created an energy transition plan and started dedicating huge amount of money towards this so-called transition from fossil fuels, namely coal and also nuclear power, which they had invested heavily in, to transition to a future reality powered by, mostly by wind and solar.

And what we've seen over the class, over the last 20 years in Germany, they've invested nearly 500 billion euros. That's a lot of money. It's almost a half a trillion. Basically, it is a half a trillion, right? We're not talking about an insignificant amount of effort and resource and funding in this thing. And not, I'm not talking about a few years. We're talking about two decades, right? And over the course of this two decades, what we've seen, the whole goal was to reduce emissions, right, and to transition to these so-called renewable energy technologies.

But we're seeing a complete deindustrialization potentially in Germany right now because of the energy crisis. And this has, of course, been exacerbated by the Russian-Ukraine war. I'm not to in any way make the case that this is just 100.000. percent due to this overinvestment renewables. Obviously the Russian war is a catalyst, but the underlying root cause of the energy shortages and challenges in Germany and in wider Europe is due to an overinvestment in solar and wind power, in underinvestment in fossil fuels, namely natural gas production, in building out the associated infrastructure of natural gas, for example, liquefied natural gas terminals so you could import that resource when needed.

Shutting down nuclear power plants. So I don't understand this at all. The most powerful, safest, most reliable way to generate low emission energy, they're consciously shutting down in the name of lowering emissions, right? This makes no sense. And it's under the guise of safety because obviously there has been a few, horrendous accidents, Chernobyl, Fukushima, through my island. But the people that are scared of nuclear are the same people that are scared to fly in an airplane versus to drive in a car.

Because statistically, it doesn't make any sense. They're making that decision based on a motion and not data. Because when you look at the data, when you look at the stats, nuclear power is the safest energy technology that has ever existed. There's only been 200 people over 70 years of commercial operation that have actually died due to nuclear, and all of them were basically at Chernobyl. And that includes the cancer-related deaths that they're projected to happen as a part of that disaster. Now, I'm not trying to minimize any kind of accident because any kind of industrial accident or an accident with a power plant should be taken deadly seriously.

But we have to look at the data and we have to look at compared to what. I mean, millions of people die every year due to pollution from coal fire plants. And now we're talking about 200, over almost 70 years of commercial operation. Not a single person has died due to radiation exposure in North America. And one person at this point is credited of dying due to Fukushima due to radiation exposure. And that's even contested because the person that died had lung cancer and he was a smoker. So when we look at the real impacts of these technologies, we have to weigh tradeoffs. All energy sources have tradeoffs.

And you have to learn to balance those. But we have gone, we've pumped people full of so much fear of nuclear in a completely irrational way that we're making these horrendous decisions that are basically threatened to unravel all of the progress that we built. We're seeing it in real time right now in Europe. And it's quite frankly, it's really scary because how many people this winter are going to freeze in their homes? How many businesses, how much industry is basically being forced to either ration or shut down operations?

How many jobs will be lost due to this? I mean, these are decisions that have far-reaching consequences. and it's it's really scary. Yeah, really scary is a good way to put it. When I stare at this, I go, how did we get here? You know, like, how did we get here? You know, you bring up nuclear being safe, and over the course of 70 years, only 200 people.

And I go, huh, so then why are we also terrified of nuclear? because as I told you before we started, once upon a time they talked about having a nuclear power plant not that far from the family farm. And I remember everybody not wanting anything to do with it. So what is that? Why are we all terrified of it? I think there's a few reasons why.

One is just ignorance. And I would put myself in that category in the past. These systems are complicated to understand nuclear fission and the implications of how it works and all the various complex systems that are needed to cool a reactor and to shield from radiation. I mean, these are not things that most people understand. So there's just a degree of ignorance that's involved. I think that there's also an agenda.

There's several different competing forces for people's attention. One is environmental organizations, and I don't really call them environmental. They're really just activist organizations or anti-nuclear. organizations really have preyed upon people's fear of death and dying, understandably, and weaponize this. And it is to drive a certain agenda, a certain political agenda. So there's certainly been environmental activists organizations that are, and it didn't always used to be like this. For example, some of the quintessential environmental organizations, like the Sierra Club, the Resources Defense Council, these various well-established, well-funded organizations used to support

nuclear back in the day. In the 60s, early 70s timeframe, were supportive of nuclear because it was a way to protect the natural world. But over the decades, nuclear has been, nuclear has been added to the evil column. And it is really. what happened was people conflated nuclear war with nuclear power. And when a lot of the activists that came out of the 1960s that were protesting, various nuclear weapons and nuclear war kind of initiatives, when those kind of died down, they turn their attention to nuclear power and then has been on a crusade for the last several decades to basically shut down nuclear. Now, you also have other forces. Like, this is not as much today, but certainly the fossil fuel industry wasn't very keen on nuclear power as a competitor and who can blame them. I mean, all industry is competitive, right? And they should be competitive. So certainly the fossil industry had an incentive to kind of push, keep nuclear down as well. I don't actually think today that is the main factor

that's limiting nuclear. I think it's much more on the environmental activist side, but at a certain point in history, that was certainly true. And at this point, we've just pumped people full of so much fear that they're not making rational decisions. So it's a complicated blend of things. Today, I think a lot of it is ideology driven. It is people that have embraced the same beliefs that I kind of absorbed

and are kind of not thinking critically on these issues. Well, here, let's, I guess, you know, you're well versed in nuclear. I'm curious. You know, I can just hear some of my family in the background going, but Brian, what about all that nuclear waste? And I'm sure there's like 15 questions when it comes to nuclear that get pumped out there that by the looks and sounds of you, you've done, a tremendous amount of research into.

What is the sales pitch for nuclear? One of the things that I followed on Twitter when I started following it, was how much safer it is than pretty much every power source that we have on the planet. But maybe we could dig into that a little bit to debunk or to just, you know, kind of take away some of that fear when you say the word nuclear so that listeners are like, oh, yeah, that kind of makes sense. Oh, I didn't know that. what are some of the things about nuclear that make it so attractive?

Well, let's start with the nuclear waste question since you brought that up. People have this fear of nuclear waste, although nuclear waste has not impacted a single living human being on the face of the planet from an adverse health effect standpoint, and it certainly never killed a single person ever globally anywhere in the world. So when people talk about this being a problem, I would say it's actually a problem. mostly solved problem because no one's gotten hurt from it, no one's died from it. Basically, all the nuclear waste is an example in the United States, which is not an insignificant amount.

So the United States, about 20%, 19% of all of the electricity in the U.S. is generated by large centralized nuclear power plants. And that's been the case for many decades. We started our programs in really in the 1960s, starting to commercialize and scale up these power, these large centralized nuclear power plants. So we're talking about many decades of waste that's been generated. 100% of that waste is safely contained. And by the way, this is the only energy source that actually takes full responsibility for

its waste. There isn't any other energy source that does this, whether it's coal, gas, solar, wind, everything else. Basically, there's an external impact. of that waste product. Yeah, go ahead. What does wind and solar have for waste? Oh, they, well, first of all, most of those technologies, so solar waste, for example,

has 300 times more waste than nuclear for the same amount of electricity generated, because the panels only last about 20, 25 years tops, right? So they're warrantied for about 25 years. but oftentimes they start degrading and depending on the condition they're need to be replaced or retired. So every 20, 25 years, you're having to replace them. So what do you do with that? So people say, well, we're recycling. But most of the solar panels aren't recycled today in a few places they are, but that's not the common practice.

They generally end up in a landfill. And solar panels are built with lots of toxic chemicals that go. into making these panels. And so ultimately, this is a groundwater contamination liability. And we're having millions and millions and millions of solar panels that are in the process of getting retired and reaching their end of life. So what are we doing with all these panels? There's going to be about 78 million metric tons projected by 2050 of solar panels.

It's just an enormous amount because the inherent, physics of solar requires a lot of surface area, right? It's not very energy dense. Like, nuclear is highly concentrated. It's a little bit of material creates a lot of energy. Solar is the exact opposite and wind's the exact opposite. You need a lot of materials to create a little energy. So is an example of comparing those two, solar requires, solar and wind and renewables in general require about 18 times more materials than nuclear. Now, these are the things. like concrete and glass or steel and all of the various core components that go into making these technologies.

Well, you got to throw them out somehow. Wind turbine blades are made from various plastic resins and polymers. They're not recyclable. They get dumped in landfills. And these are huge. These things are like as big as a 747 wing on an airplane. This isn't like your little, you know, a little plastic bottle or something. I think everybody can attest to see one of those suckers go down the road on a giant flatbed extended truck.

I don't even know what to call it. And I got a family that's in trucking. And I like when they come barreling down the road, you're like, holy man, look at the size of that thing. Yeah. And those things for the most part are all landfill today because there's no, they don't know how to recycle it. And there's nothing. What do you do with it? And the reality is that wind turbines is a great example, are very high.

maintenance and after about 16 years the economics the efficiency and production of energy starts to degrade to a point where between 16 and 20 years they're done right depending on obviously there's variables that go into how you know how that production is degraded but you're talking about a significant percent of the the productive output and it depends if it's offshore you mean in the ocean versus onshore but it can be as much as lose 50% of its capacity as it reaches towards its end of life between that 16 and 20 year time frame. So in this, in how much energy and materials it takes to create that wind turbine, let's say be generous and let's say 20 years that you're given life to that thing.

Well, then you got to throw it away. You got to mine all the materials. You got to expend all the energy to build a new one. well, a nuclear plant, they're generally lasting 60 to 8 years. And if they're well maintained, they can last 100 years. There's no reason they can't. Now, they do require some maintenance, obviously. But they can run almost a century.

So in the time that you would have to basically take your wind farm, build it, throw it away, build it, throw it away, build it, throw it away, you know, what, four times, but in the same, to get the same equivalent of energy of a nuclear plant. So think about that. I mean, think about all the materials, all the energy, all the resources. Why is this lost on the leaders? Why is that part of the conversation? Do they hear it and don't care?

Are people silenced? Why is that lost on everybody? Because that seems, I mean, we come from an area of the oil field, and we certainly know that wind farm isn't totally renewable because how on earth do you get the blades and everything else? Oh, it comes from a lot of products that are made from. Right, fossil fuels. Anyways, that's my little dig. Where along the lines is it lost?

Because this isn't just in the United States. This isn't just in Canada. This is like, you know, we come back to Europe. Look what's about to happen in Europe. And we're all staring at this like car crash about to happen. And you go, so how? How is it that this part of the conversation isn't getting brought up? Is it just we need to go through this to see that, holy crap, that won't work because

everybody believes the dream or is there something else I'm missing? Charlie Munger, who is Warren Buffett's investment partner, has this quote, show me the incentives and I'll show you the outcome. And I think that quote applies here, at least with respect to politicians. So politicians are incentivized to make short-term decision, short-term mindset, short-term decision-making, right? They're not going to be around in 10 years, 15 years, 20 years down the road to be burdened with the accountability for their decisions necessarily. They'll have moved on to other things or won't be in even then that office anymore.

And generally, politicians are go with the wins of public sentiment and where they think they can get the most votes and where they can raise the. the most money around. And at least over the last, I would say, five to ten years, we've seen a huge shift in public sentiment in terms of this narrative around the future of green energy, that by 2050, we are going to have an energy system that's powered by the wind, sun, and electric vehicles. And this has become a very mainstream view. And as more people have bought into this narrative and a lot of money from big wind, big solar, electric vehicle manufacturers are also influencing these elected officials. You see all of these new policies being enacted,

setting these big, bold goals for CO2 reduction, emissions reduction, et cetera. It's hard to go against that. If you're a congressperson or if you're a local elected official or someone, a governor, These aren't popular ideas to go against the grain. And if your fundraising is going to be impacted, if your voting constituents might not buy into your alternative view, it's hard. Right. So I think you have to look at the incentives for politicians today. And there's no accountability long term for these decisions because they're long gone.

So when you look at the future then, right, you help people with their, their perspective in the energy industry as they look into the future, correct? When you look into whether it's 2030 all the way to 2050, do you see that at some point we have to move towards nuclear? Or what do you see coming in the years to come? Nuclear power is inevitable. I think we don't really even have another option long, long term. I'm also very bullish on fossil fuels.

Fossil fuels are essential to our energy system. I mean, 97% of all the transportation in the world is run on fossil fuels. How do you think we, every time someone clicks that little Amazon button to get that delivered to your house, I mean, you're triggering basically ships, trains, planes, trucks, all this stuff. What's power and all that? Well, it's fossil fuels. It's power and all of that. And so fossil fuels isn't going anywhere. You know, I think over the long term, we will continuing to climb the ladder of energy density

to higher concentrated forms of energy, which ultimately emit less emissions, which is a good thing. No one wants to breathe dirty air. No one wants to drink dirty water. I haven't met a single person that wants that, right? And so we all really want the same thing. When we zoom out and we really think, what's the goal? What are we trying to achieve? I think there's two parts to the goal. First is to protect and improve the quality of human life, right? That's first and foremost. We want human flourishing. We want people to continue to get wealthier and be healthier. Second is we want to protect and improve the quality of our environment. So what are the most effective energy sources to reach those goals? I think most of us, you get a group of reasonable people around the table, we could agree on those goals. And instead of trying to pick

winners and distort market prices by trying to subsidize certain technologies, if we just stayed focused on those goals and let the market and other drivers determine what are the best ways to meet those goals, we would be in a much better position. Because right now, we're going backwards. We're not evolving. We're actually devolving and we're basically creating more emissions, whether it's air pollution and CO2 and otherwise. And so when we really think holistically about this, we really need to break down the problem. And once those goals are established,

we need to create evaluation criteria. Like how are we going to evaluate these different opportunities, whether it's natural gas, nuclear, coal, solar, or wind? We need kind of a set of evaluation metrics, so to speak, to weigh the cost and benefits because all of these energy sources have costs and benefits. So we need things to apply things like security, energy security. If you don't have energy security, you don't have a country. And just look at Germany and Europe right now under the thumb of Putin in Russia.

And they made a catastrophic bad decision to become overly reliant on Russian natural gas, right? Instead of producing natural gas themselves, which many countries in Europe, like in Germany and the UK, they have natural gas reserves, certainly in the North Sea and Norwegian countries do. Many of them banned fracking. So they would rather ban fracking and then import the natural gas from an adversarial country. And now they're suffering those consequences. So the combination of banning fracking, overinvestment, renewables, shutting down nuclear power, all of these things led to this catastrophic situation that we're looking at today.

But energy security is number one, to me. That's the most important. That comes before anything. Every single war that has ever been fought in the history of the planet is all about energy. It basically, if you, nations rise and fall by their ability to project energy in the world in how they project it in military force, having food, being able to power their civilization, it's interesting in World War II, the Allies relied upon North American and specifically American oil to basically want to allow them to win that war. 90% of the energy that was enabled the Allies to win World War II was produced in America, right?

Imagine the situation. Europe would all be speaking German right now if it wasn't for oil and gas coming out of the U.S. U.S. Right. I mean, so we really got to think critically. Every war in history is decided by energy supply and security of that supply. So that to me is number one. The second is affordability. If something's so expensive, no one, the businesses and homes can't afford it, then it isn't going to foster a lot of economic development and not a lot of people are going to be able to access it. So that's critical. We need reliability. We need it 24-7, 365. Unlike, you know, wind and solar, which are intermittent, that's not the way society works. Factories need to run 24-7, especially right now the reason a lot of these factories have to halt operations, and they're not designed for it.

If you run an aluminum or steel smelter or you're a glass factory, you run 24-7 for years. Some of the equipment hasn't even designed to turn off. So you physically will irreparably harm the equipment by turning off the factory. So you can't run these things on intermittent power. So all of these things, I can go on, but these are the kinds of evaluation metrics we need to apply to decisions about what kind of energy sources that we invest in. Do you not to make you speculate on things, but oh, well, whatever. do you see you mentioned war right war is fought over essentially energy then do you almost see it as an inevitable at this point with you know the reliance on other countries um energy essentially that's where uh we're getting to is where other countries have become extremely reliant on the ability of different countries to produce and if they don't you mention Putin yeah you know if he just decides oh it's down for maintenance uh do you see where this just leads into pulling other countries in because, I mean, if people are freezing in their

houses and things like that, an angry population, what are you going to do? That's why this is the most important criteria. And that's why it would be catastrophic for North America to embrace solar and wind power is our primary source of energy. Let's take an example of solar panels. So almost the entire supply chain of solar panels is monopolized by China. Our chief adversarial country, you know, Russia is obviously a threat and is of concern and is creating a lot of problems in the world right now. But Russia is not the most important strategic threat to North America and certainly not Canada and the United States.

You know, China is the number one competitive threat and the country we need to be most concerned about. China controls 97% of the solar waifers. They make 97% of the solar waifers, which are the core components that go into solar panels. When you look at every single element of a component of a solar panel, whether you're talking about the solar wafer's, the actual assembly, the other components, polysilicon. So 45% of all the polysilicon,

solar-grade polysilicon that goes to make the actual solar cell that collects the sunlight and converts it to electricity, that is all made in one province in China, in what's called Jingzang, and which, by the way, is notoriously known for using slave labor from, they basically have interned Uyghur Muslims in this region in Jingzang and have forced modern-day slavery in factories in various industry to produce products, and polygrade silicon is one of those. And so 45% of all of the global polysilicon created in the world today comes from factories using slave labor in China.

Let's wrap our heads around that. How is that green? How is that socially responsible? And I'm not talking about just factories that don't pay people well or, you know, a developing country that's kind of trying to level up. I'm talking about actual slavery where you do not have a choice whether you work or not. you are interned by military force and you are forced to work. That's what I'm talking about. I'm not talking about just bad factory conditions.

So this to me is an incredible embarrassment for the West. We even have the Biden administration put forth legislation. And we have actual mandates around this that we can't import products from. This isn't even a Republican or Democrat thing. This is an accepted view. that this is happening in the world. But somehow we're just kind of overlooking this, and we're allowing this to circumvent the various restrictions on this.

And basically what China does is they export these key components to other countries, especially in Southeast Asia, Malaysia, Vietnam, Thailand. They'll assemble panels there on there, ship it around to get around some of the restrictions and tariffs and things of that nature. So when we talk about security, We're talking about products that are being made in a country that is certainly not our ally and is our biggest strategic threat. And so I'm actually speaking at the National War College coming up in a month or so to a

class about this that studies the South Pacific. And they're looking at what is the impact of climate change? What is the impact of energy on our national defense? Because this is such a critical issue. And if we allow ourselves to build an energy system, our most important network that we own, there's no network that is more important than the energy grid in our energy system. You know, how well would things work without internet, without food distribution, without all these things are relying upon energy, right?

It all goes away. So we have to protect that. It's not just the solar panels either. Wind turbines, for the most part, are also the largest. seven to the ten largest wind turbine manufacturers in the world are in China. Rare earth mineral processing, which are a key component to make the magnets that go into the wind turbines, most of it is in China. So this would be a catastrophic error in judgment to basically turn over the keys to our

energy security to an adversarial country. I'm curious. is, you know, you dig in all these different issues, whether we're talking energy, food, you know, come from agricultural background, et cetera. Everything just seems like it's under attack, right? And very, very important things to life is under attack. Like, is media just blind to this? Or are they actively suppressing what you're talking about? because like I hear this and I feel like I'm relatively reasonable. Who knows?

Other people may not say that, Brian, but I listen to you and I go, okay. So once again, I hear a lack of education on the public side. It's like you're playing a soccer game and I'm, you know, Brian Get is on the one team, but he's been sitting on the bench and we've just been letting the other team score 16 goals and we didn't even realize the game started. Now we're down 16 nothing. It's like, holy crap, we better start playing. I know we're good, but we better get going.

And I sit and listen to everything you just said, and I go, okay, a lot of that makes sense. That seems reasonable. Why are we at where we're at, where we're, you know, 97% is coming from China? Part of that is infrastructure, supply chains, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I get that. But why is the average American, North American, Canadian tied in there, just so oblivious to what is going on? because you know you started the conversation that you like being outdoors you like clean air you want to drink clean water i think that's you know a lot of us probably all of us want that it's not like we i want to be floating around and filth but when you get

talking it's like i also live in a very unhabitable place where for eight months of the year it's dark it gets cold and some of the months it is really cold and if you don't have the ability to well to have to have continuous power to heat your homes. This looks pretty bleak. So how? I don't know. I come back to how, but maybe is it just the education portion of it?

Is that where we're falling short? It's all about the narrative and incentives. Going back with them, thinking about the media, the media is incentivized to get clicks, to say, to have outrageous headlines, to basically get people to,

engage and to drive outrage as well. Like we know this with social media. We know this with media in general. That that's how they make their money in essence. And it is hard for them, I think, to go counter what this mainstream story has been kind of as it's been adopted, right? You just don't see many people standing up wanting to go against the grain on it. So I think it's a combination of incentives.

as well as the narrative that kind of is stuck in the culture right now. It's interesting to say that. But here in Canada, and I'll speak to Canada specifically, there was a media bailout, right? So you look at the CBC, you look at global, you look at there's a whole bunch, list of them, got money from the government because, well, I mean, among other things, nobody's tuning in anymore. Nobody cares what they have to say because I don't know if they truly believe what they're saying anymore. So there is a movement to listen to things like this and other shows where people just are trying to, you know, like do we want, I mean, I come from Canadians oil and gas sector. I've worked in a long time. We got some stiff regulations. Are we perfect? Nobody's perfect. But at the same time, we do a pretty good job of a lot of things and are constantly improving. Instead of that being highlighted, It's, you know, Jane Fonda coming up and blasting one part of Alberta.

It's, you know, Leonardo DiCaprio. It's people like this. And that's what grabs attention. But as for the media here in Canada, I don't think anybody's listening to anymore. But the government's actively supporting it. So that narrative gets to continue. I would argue that if they had to privatize, go back to like, well, we got to figure out what people want to hear about. I think a lot of people are ready to hear this conversation and hear what we can actually do to, you know, have energy security, food security, all these different things moving forward so they don't have to be pumped full of so much fear because the fear amount of fear is just, it is wild at this point.

Whoever tells the best story wins, right? I mean, we know this from marketing and advertising. When you think of a brand like Apple or Nike, how do they sell their product? They tell stories. Nike does not tell you how many athletes wear their shoes or their apparel and kind of break down the data and the metrics for it. They don't say X number of athletes or ex tennis players or ex hockey players, whatever, you know, use this product. They tell you a story. They say Serena Williams or Tiger Woods overcame this hero's journey of insurmountable odds and achieved excellence, right?

storytelling wins. And the reality is that environmental groups and activists are good at telling stories. They know how to tap in to emotion because emotion is what drives a lot of this narrative. And the oil and gas industry is an example, although they provide this essential critical service that all of us rely upon for every aspect of our lives are not very good at storytelling. Let's be frank. I mean, they, you know, what I've observed is that, you know, the fossil fuel industry has some of the most competent, incredibly intelligent group of people that have come up with amazing innovations that basically allow all of us to live this great prosperous life. And yet they've been having their head down, just focus on producing, building, innovating, but they haven't really stepped up their storytelling game.

And an example of this is North America, I think is a great example of this. I mean, specifically in the U.S. with the Shale Revolution, this is an amazing story. I think this is one of the most innovative breakthroughs of the century so far that has transformed the global energy system that in a little over a decade, we went from looking to, we were building LNG import facilities because we thought we were running out of natural gas to now being the world's long. largest exporter of natural gas in little over a decade. That is incredible. And that was through technological breakthroughs that took many years to happen, but horizontal drilling and various production techniques that completely changed the global energy system and the whole balance of energy in the world. And that happened through innovation here. And the result of that is that we reduced emissions in the U.S. More CO2 was saved just in that transition from coal to natural gas

in the United States, about a billion metric tons. It's more than all of Europe put together. And most of that, 61% of all of that emissions reductions was related to switching to natural gas from coal versus it was double the amount of wind. Wind was about 30% or so. And solar is about 8% of that total emissions profile. So when you're talking about storytelling, you're talking about, you know, right now climate risk is this trending top-of-mind issue. Well, why isn't the natural gas industry all over that? They have the best story to tell.

They're basically beating out solar and wind many times over in terms of emissions reductions. It's one of the cleanest ways that we not only produce electricity but also heat and is this essential ingredient in fertilizer and our food system and all of these industrial materials. I mean, without natural gas, about 40% of the world would starve to death because natural gas is the core ingredient in fertilizer. And, you know, 40% plus to the world relies upon modern day fertilizer to eat. So, and it's not just food. It's most of our industrial products, think plastics.

I mean, look around you. almost everything I'm looking at my room here, from this computer to the microphone, to the light, to everything comes from oil and gas and petroleum chemicals. So the oil and gas industry has probably the best story ever imagined that all of us on the planet rely upon it for all the essential elements of our lives that give us everything that we care about. And yet it's vilified. It's viewed is almost like, the anti-Christ or something. And this

is a catastrophic failure of storytelling. And in really just putting their head down, doing this incredible work that they do in not paying enough attention to the narrative and seeding the ground, seeding the playing field to the environmental activists that are very

good at weaving emotional, compelling stories. And right now, they're winning. And if we don't do something, if we don't counteract this narrative. If more people don't start standing up against this, we're going to see the exact situation that's happening in Europe right now, where people are going to be forced to live in energy poverty. They're already rationing energy in multifamily buildings. They're turning off

lighting at night. They're universities and colleges, they're not heating the swimming pools. I mean, this is already happening today. And we haven't even hit the winter yet. So this is, the canary in the coal mine right now what's happening and we better wake up or we're going to be in for a rude a rude wake up call because we become complacent all of us i'm myself included we we all take so much for granted we just expect every time we flip a switch and our phone works and and everything in our life is just so seamless so comfortable so convenient everything i mean you don't think about having food insecurity or they we go to the grocery store and the food's going to be there or that, you know, your cell phone is going to be

able to download an email. You just, we don't even think about these things. But this is all due to basically the energy industry and specifically oil and gas enabling this. And if we vilify this industry, we are really threatening our own survival. It's a, it's a unnecessary self-inflicted wound that we have to course correct. So if you were the oil and gas industry, and I, maybe the the tough thing about it. And maybe you know the answer of this question. Or nuclear because you've talked very highly about nuclear as being inevitable.

As an industry, is there a way they could hire a storyteller to weave it together so the common person understands you mentioned Nike and these different brands, right? They hire stories, they get LeBron James, they get

Serena Williams, they get all these stars. They get Wayne Grecksky, you know, a famous well, probably the famous hockey player from Canada. Anyways, and what they, you know, emotions, everything else. The difference in my mind is, is like, well, if I don't buy a pair of sneakers, I don't starve or freeze to death. You follow this storyline too long and we end up where, you know, you go to heat your house

in the winter and it doesn't flick on. Or you get your energy bill, you know, what's the next thing that happens? You're seeing in the UK and other places is the energy bill is like, you know, it was affordable, and you talked about affordability and now it's like up and up and up and up and up and up and you're seeing demands for firewood and people waiting up front of coal plants and all these crazy things happening

in different parts of Europe. So to follow this storyline, too long, leads to not a great place. So if I come back, is there a way, and maybe they've already started this, or maybe they can't do this?

I don't know, Brian. Is there a way to hire the storyteller to tell a story to start doing exactly exactly what you're talking about. Like, hire the storyteller, get that message out, or is this a longer process that's got a, I don't know. What's your thoughts? I think the first step goes to the law of holes. If you're in a hole, stop digging, right?

I mean, that's the first thing to do. And the industry currently is still digging because they're embracing this ESG, which stands for environmental social and governance narrative. They're embracing the very evaluation rubrics and frameworks to evaluate their businesses. They're not pushing back. They're, you know, look at even all the big super major oil companies. They're all spot. You listen to them talk.

You might as well be listening to an environmental organization talk oftentimes. They talk about their transitioning to renewable energy. Oil companies are transitioning to renewable energy. First of all, they don't know much. about running a power company, which is a completely different business. You know, energy is not all fungible, obviously. It's a completely different industry, really. You know, if you sell oil and gas and to go to power is completely different,

much less technology that you have no background or experience in. So why are they embracing this? Why? Instead of telling their story and showcasing all the benefits that we just were talking about earlier, they're coutowing, not pushing back and say, oh, we're going to transition. We're going to be better. We will start embracing renewables. We're going to do this and that.

They're just digging that hole deeper. They're not there. So you can't bring in a storyteller if you're not even willing to acknowledge the root cause of the problem yourself, which is you can't let the opposition define the rules of the game. Everyone knows that in any competition. If you're going to compete against someone, you're letting your opponent define all the rules and the parameters, then what chance have you have to win? I mean, they're seeding the entire ground to the opposition.

And they've got to stop it. I mean, seriously, this is insane. Like, why are they going along with this narrative? Right. I know there's a lot of political pressure. The investment community is basically de facto threatening them by either increasing the cost of capital or. a lot of asset managers or shifting funds away from the fossil fuel industry. But that's all, it's this flywheel effect, right?

It's like one thing, triggers the next thing, triggers the next thing, and it builds momentum as we go. Sometimes you've got to stop the momentum and they have to stand up for themselves. It's like almost like a battered person. Like if someone's not even willing to stand up for themselves, it's hard to know how to help them. Like I feel the industry needs to stand up first. And there are people obviously doing this.

A good example of this is Toby Rice with EQT, which is the largest natural gas company in the U.S. We also have Chris Wright of Liberty Energy. So there are leaders that are stepping up and that are communicating these ideas, but there's not enough of them. We need a lot more of it. And until the industry is really going to go on the offensive

and stop playing defense, I don't think hiring some storytellers is going to really shift the narrative. You see Liz Truss in the UK, new prime minister of the UK, lifting the ban on fracking. Do you see things of that as like, oh, that's a positive sign? Or are you like, it's, I don't know, what's your thoughts on some of the things like that starting to play out? I think we're starting to see a shift. you know, we're starting to see a bunch of countries that were anti-nuclear and divesting from nuclear, starting to build out a plan and put forward motion. We're seeing it all across the world, whether even Japan, who had obviously taken almost all their nuclear plants offline, is now saying that they're bringing a bunch of those reactors online, Korea, UK, a bunch of countries are shifting their position on nuclear.

And it's great news that the UK is now lifting the fracking ban. these are all positive signals that the pendulum may be starting to shift back a bit, that maybe we've kind of gone as far as we can go in one direction and we're starting, hopefully the momentum shifts back. But the reality is it's going to take a long time. Like a fracking ban is one thing, but you need all of the infrastructure to actually get that industry kickstarting gear. You need all the rigs.

we have supply chain constraints. You need the technical skills in the labor pool, which doesn't exist right now there. You have so many constraints on being able to deploy these drilling rigs and get everything up and running. I mean, it's a great signal. It's a great step. And I applaud it. I think we need more of it. You got to start somewhere.

And so that's a great place to start. But I think it would be delusional to think, oh, we just lift the fracking band. And all of a sudden, we're going to pull a lot. lot of gas out of the UK. No, we're not. We got, I mean, we have huge supply chain problems even here in North America with even when we have the talent and we have the tools and they don't have the talent or the tools. So we got a, we got a lot of barriers here to, to overcome to really stand that up and get some serious production out of the UK and some of these other places. When you say it's going to take time, what is time, what's a timeframe?

that you think is, I don't know, reasonable or you expect? Like, what does time mean to you? You know, I agree with you. Coming from a background in the patch and everything else. I know what you mean by, well, you can't just flick a switch and all of a sudden you're pumping oil because, I mean, there's a lot of things that got to happen in front of that to get to that point. But what do you see as a reasonable timeframe of where this is probably reasonable?

I think we have to break down each technology individually because they're really apples and oranges. So let's say if you need to build liquefied natural gas import facilities like Germany is now doing and because they're back against the wall and they need to import this fuel to exist and so people don't freeze in their homes, well, that's going to take two to three years minimum, right? So it's not like even a year you can you can bring on a new LNG terminal. So you're talking about things like that are in the order of, let's say, three, four, maybe even five years, depending on the extensive build of that kind of infrastructure. If you're talking about something like nuclear power, well, it depends on the size of the facility because these very large centralized facilities, which I'm a big fan of and we need them. There's this false competition narrative out there between small advanced reactors and large.

centralized facilities. That's like saying we either do airplanes or cars, one of the two. I mean, we need both, obviously. They serve completely different functions in the market. We need airplanes when we want to go far distances and move a lot of people at once. And we also need cars to get the work and drive around locally. And the same thing with nuclear reactors. We need large centralized plants and those things are going to take a long time to build. And unfortunately, in many parts of the world, we've lost the knowledge in the technical ability to build because we haven't built them in so long. In Canada and the U.S., almost all of our reactors were built in the 60, 70s, 80s, right?

Ontario has, you know, some of the largest nuclear reactors in the world have 60% of electricity in Ontario is from nuclear. It's a great story, right? It's a huge success story. However, those were built a long time ago, and they're aging, and they're refurbishing some of it. But you can't just build, and today it's so hard to build any kind of large infrastructure project. I don't care if it's a power plant or bridge or any kind of large public works project just takes forever. And so these large centralized plants, you know, internationally, they're saying it's seven to eight years on average.

it takes to build a large centralized nuclear power plant. That's, I would say, ambitious for highly regulated Western countries like in North America. It's because we've seen right now, Vogel is huge cost overruns, huge delays in the plant in the U.S. that's being built now. So, you know, I'm not optimistic that those can be stood up quickly. Certainly not in the next five years, for sure not. the fastest nuclear. So, sorry.

So as you're saying 5, like 7, 8 years is kind of like the time frame. My brain goes whole. So like as you have rolling blackouts in different parts, you know, you have stories of people's thermostats now being locked at, you know, during peak times at a certain degree in their house and different stories like that. That's only going to get worse is what you're saying, unless things change. Well, we're going back to coal in the near term, and that's already happening. That's for sure. You know, just in the last 12 months or so, the increase in amount of coal that we're burning, I think it's somewhere around 500 million metric tons, just in this additional coal,

basically wipes out 100% of all the renewable projects in the U.S. over the last 15 years in terms of the emission benefits. So that's just the increase. That's the delta, right? So now we're going to be burning more. We're already seeing it throughout the world. When it comes down to it, people are going to get their energy. They're going to burn whatever they can to get it.

There's no politician that will be able to stay in office allowing people to freeze in their homes or not being able to get to work or not having food to eat. And so people are going to do whatever by any means necessary to get this energy. And what that means today is we're going to go back to more polluting energy sources like coal or wood. We're seeing people in Germany. There was this crazy chart that one of the highest search terms in Germany was for firewood, right? Because people are going back to wood. So which is one of the most polluting energy sources.

and obviously cutting down in our forest at the same time is not a good idea. We already did that once. So let's not repeat it. So what in the short term, the world doesn't have a choice. We're going to get our energy. We're going to cut down and burn more trees and burn more coal. That's what we're going to do. And we'll burn anything we can get our hands on.

In the medium term, we're going to use a lot more natural gas, specifically LNG, that can be shipped across the ocean to anywhere that they can import it. And I think longer term, nuclear, you're going to see a renaissance in the nuclear industry. And it's not going to happen overnight. I explained earlier that these larger centralized plants are going to take a long time to build, especially in Western countries. However, advanced small modular reactors are showing great promise. And one of the benefits, and again, those are the cars versus airplanes analogy.

They're not competing. You know, I actually work. I'm head of business development at a company called Oaklo, which we make small modular reactors. And we make these specifically for data centers, military bases, industrial sites, remote communities, let's say, in the northern provinces, you know, places that need a lot of energy. But maybe the scale of it is obviously a lot smaller than a large centralized reactor. So this technology, I think, and that's the reason I joined the company and I'm betting big on it with my own time. I think it has huge promise to, now it's not going to also happen in the next few years. We're going to start seeing a huge uptick in the next few years of systems deployed, but I think the 2030s are we're going to see a huge ramp.

We're going to go from, you know, single digits to dozens to then hundreds and thousands of these new small, modular nuclear reactors, especially ramping up in the 2030s, because it provides 24-7, 365 power. Like one of our oklo reactors has fuel for up to 20 years. You don't have to replace that fuel. So if you're in a remote location or if you're, let's say, at a data center, you don't want to have the extra liability of interruption or distribution of the power lines going down. You can put that thing right on the site. you have 10 to 20 years of fuel already there.

You're not having to rely on bringing it in from anywhere. And it's just going to run 24-7 with incredibly little maintenance. So that kind of technology, and it's not just Oakland, there's other companies that are doing this. There's dozens of companies now that are tackling this problem. I think we're going to see a nuclear renaissance both on the large centralized plants and the small modular reactor front. You're going to see a huge shift globally on this.

What's the time frame on a small reactor? Well, right now the biggest gating factor is regulatory. So, you know, once the regulatory piece is solved, so you can build these things in less than a year. There's no problem easily. So a giant centralized reactor, seven to eight years, five if we're really hopes and dreams and wishes. But a small one, we're talking a year and you could pop one up. Oh, absolutely. Once we're past the regulatory hurdles and we're actually standing up the supply chain on this by getting some volume going,

we're looking at deploying our reactors in under a year to get those going. And obviously you can do this concurrently with many different sites. And the more you order, the better the pricing because you're getting the economy of the scale and dropping it down. So we're not looking at because these smaller modular reactors are using off-the-shelf components. and stainless steel and various components that are not specialized to even the nuclear industry. And they have inherent safety characteristics, whereas the physics of it make it impossible to have an accident that we saw with the large reactors in the way they're designed.

So they're inherently safe. They use no water, right? They sit on a really small footprint. Like, let's say a 15 megawatt reactor could sit on an acre of less of land. so you could cite that right at the data center or the military base or wherever it is, you don't have the risk of all the distribution, transmission, interruption, and you don't need water to run it. So to cool it.

And it's impossible for it to have an overheating event because of the natural physics of how the natural convection work as heat. And how much power can it generate? You say 24-7 for 20 years. How many people is this sustaining? Well, it's all scalable, right? So we make reactors as small as 1.5 megawatts all the way up to 100 megawatts. So it's not, now I would say once you get over the common kind of breakpoint is around 300 megawatts where you're starting to get into the larger reactors.

But I would say anywhere from 1 to 100 megawatts is kind of the range of systems for a lot of these small reactors. So you're talking about, you know, for, let's say these smaller systems, you're talking about a community of 15,000 homes or something like that, you know, equivalent for a small, one of these small systems could power. Just a single unit that sitting on less than an acre could power 15,000 homes. You know, it's something in that order of magnitude. Do you ever see, you know, we've kind of the full gamut here. We went from, you know, you starting out as a guy in wind and solar,

and now, you know, talking very openly about fossil fuels, the importance of it, the importance of nuclear or the inevitability of nuclear at some point here in the future. Do you see a place for solar and wind in the future, like where they will be beneficial? I think there's certain places and applications where they make sense. I mean, if you live in the southwestern U.S. and Arizona, where they get tons of sunlight, then yeah, a climate like that could make sense for solar. I don't think these isolated locations, though, should be the basis for our overarching energy policy.

Just because there's places in segments of the market that makes sense, I mentioned earlier that solar makes a ton of sense in rural applications where you don't have existing power lines. That's a great application of solar. I'm agnostic on technology. I really don't care. All I want is the least cost, most affordable. least environmentally impacting energy source. And if that's solar, because you live in a rural area and you don't need, you don't have

power lines out there, then great, go solar. I am all for it. I still think there's supply chain issues currently that we should be aware of, as we alluded to earlier with slave labor and reliance on China, et cetera. But that, you know, again, we shouldn't be basing our national in North America, our energy strategy or energy policy on the. these applications that are what I would call edge cases. You know, in certain places where there's tons of wind like in Ireland, great, have a part of that. I still think it still doesn't solve

the continuous reliable energy. So you still have to have, you always have to have some type of reliable backup. That's why if you have one megawatt of intermittent wind or solar, you're going to basically need one megawatt of some kind of backup, whether it be natural gas or nuclear. So as you start scaling that, it just doesn't make sense economically. Why do you want to build a redundant grid? That's what Germany did. They spent this nearly 500 billion euros building a redundant grid. They still had to keep 90% of all of their coal plants and baseload power because for the obvious reasons that this other sources are intermittent.

Germany is a great example of this also with energy storage because that's what people say, well, we'll just batteries, we'll save us. We're just going to ramp up these huge grid sale batteries. They did this analysis in Germany. They went back for 35 years and looked at hourly interval data. I'm not talking about models of the future and projections. I'm talking about real life data based on actual weather over 35 years. And what they found in Germany was that there was a period of time that there was 64 days of scarce wind and solar resource. 64 days. And when they calculated, well, how much given,

there's a lot of cloudy out and there just wasn't a lot of wind, there's wind droughts, whatever, how meant how much battery storage would we need to build? And it was the equivalent of 21 days of battery storage. So you'd have to build enough batteries to accommodate 21 days of 24-hour periods of energy would have to be stored to make sure that you can. can provide 100% reliable energy to power all the companies, factories, houses, et cetera. Well, that is a non-starter. That makes no sense economically.

No one could ever afford that. It doesn't even make sense, especially in a climate like Germany when solar is only generating maximum power 12% of the time. Like, it's a northern latitude region. Like, you're in Canada's similar. I mean, maybe wind makes sense in certain climates up in the northern latitudes, but solar certainly doesn't. I mean, come on. I mean, when half the year, eight, nine months of the year is overcast and gets dark early,

why would you invest all this money in a technology that is going to yield energy 12% of the time? Yeah. For up here, I just hear the battery thing and I go, A, for up here, you're absolutely right. When it comes to the sun, it makes zero sense. Like, zero cents. Sure, we have long days in the summer, but we have some of the darkest days for over half the year, right? I mean, it's just like, we're on the trend now, you know? June 21st hits and the days just get shorter and shorter and shorter.

You know, you said something funny there, and I keep laughing every time I hear this. Did you ever think you would be talking about wind droughts? Like, I don't know about you. but I like a day where there's zero wind and we live in a windy place. But now we're going to look at the days and go wind droughts. That's an actual thing now. Wind droughts. It's a real thing.

In the UK and parts of Europe last year in 2021, there was six months of wind droughts and it decreased the output of wind farms in the UK by 30% of what they expected. And so how are you going to base your energy system on this power source that might just go on vacation for six months? and not be available. So it's a real thing. And here in Texas, in the U.S., we just had these big emergency events where we thought we weren't going to have enough energy to power the grid this summer when everyone's cranking their air conditioner up.

And the reality is on the day where we needed it the most, where it was the hottest day of the year and everyone's cranking on as much energy as possible, the total wind in Texas was less, it was only generating 3% of its total capacity, meaning all. All that money that was invested in all of these wind turbines, only 3% was available when we needed it the most. So in danger of the grid basically going into blockout, rolling blackouts. So this shows that it's not a reliable source of energy that we can run modern society on. And you can't count on it. If you're sitting there and you're listening, you're listening to this and you're like, well, I care about the environment.

a ton, right? I want to make it. I'm not afraid of a rolling blackout. I don't know. You know, you get the point. Um, by switching to natural gas and let's say nuclear in the future, how much does that take away from pollutants that are already there with coal, um, uh, wood, uh, I don't know, I'm just going to, you know, the big pollutants. How does that improve the quality of life across the world. Natural gas uses, basically generates 50% of the CO2 emissions of coal and 10% of the air pollutants. So it's incredibly clean source of energy and makes an immediate positive impact by transitioning from coal to gas. Nuclear doesn't generate any zero of air emissions, whether CO2 or air pollutants.

So if you care about the environment, if it, you know, we need, this is a a big tent. We need people of all different perspectives, all different backgrounds, all different worldviews. But if you care about climate change, if you care about air pollution, if you care about deforestation, if you're a hunter and you want to protect the natural habitat of game, all of these things, it doesn't matter what your particular issue is that you care about. There's no doubt that nuclear natural gas are the cleanest and most powerful and reliable ways to generate energy that have the least amount of environmental impact. So those should be the absolute go-to if environmental concerns are your number one top of

your list, right? Solar and wind make things worse. They use a lot more materials, so they require a lot more land. You know, a solar plant requires 75 times more land area than a nuclear plant, and a one farm requires 360 times more land than a nuclear plant. So when you start talking about environment, it's not just about CO2, it's about air pollution. It's about land use. It's about wildlife habitat.

It's about mining and mineral extraction. We have to consider all of the aspects of the environment, not just CO2 and even CO2. nuclear has 4x less CO2 emissions than solar panels. Overall, when you look at the life cycle of it, because solar panels are mostly made in China using coal, using a lot of toxic chemicals to make those things. These things don't just drop out of the sky and start generating energy, right? So it takes a lot of fossil fuels to make a solar panel.

It takes a lot of fossil fuels to create a wind turbine. And I assume, and I assume, I can assume this, it takes a lot of fossil fuels to create batteries. Correct. Because you mentioned that once upon a time that you can't just, you know,

they got to store it somewhere. Well, batteries aren't exactly environmentally friendly either. There's no free lunch in anything. All these energy sources have tradeoffs. And if we don't weigh them appropriately, we're going to create catastrophic environmental errors unnecessarily.

It's like an unforced error. Why do that? I mean, if environment is your number one concern, these low energy density technologies are an environmental disaster. I mean, you just go down the list and apply and actually use the evaluation criteria we talked about earlier. Stack these things up, weigh the cost and benefits. And it's very obvious that these are not pro-environmental technologies. And this labeling of green or renewable is just a fault. It's a marketing word.

It is not based in reality whatsoever. There's nothing renewable about solar panels or wind turbines. They're made from fossil fuels, toxic chemicals, and all types of other materials. So in minerals, right, you've got to mine the stuff to get out of the ground. And the interesting thing about the necessary scale, when they talk about these clean energy goals by 2050 or 2035, depending on the government agency, they're assuming this. massive ramp of mining, right? But no one wants to build the mines in North America. We, we, no one wants that in their backyard. So they have all of these regulations, all of these people that come out in local opposition to building these, this critical infrastructure.

So what happens? We end up relying on adversarial countries or poor nations. I would say it out of mind. Yeah. Yep. And then ultimately it all gets shipped to China to be processed at the end of the day. So this, you know, we have to really think about the full life cycle impact of these decisions from both economic and environmental lens. Well, I appreciate you hopping on and give me some of your time. One final question for you. It's always the final question here brought to you by crewmaster.

Shout out to Heath and Tracy McDonald for being supporters of the podcast in this very beginning. And in its he's words, he says, if you're going to stand behind something, then stand behind it. what's one thing Brian stands behind? I stand behind affordable, reliable, low emission energy. That's, I think, the most important thing we can do in the world to make everyone's life better, make the environment better. And I want to do everything I can to change this narrative because if we don't solve this problem, we're going to be backtracking significantly.

And, you know, if people are interested in this topic, if anything they've heard today, sparks their interest, they want to learn more. I try to share as much information as I can on my Twitter profile, which is at Brian Gitt, just my first and last name, or my website, bryngot.com. I try to write long form articles. I've been filming some videos recently. They haven't been launched yet, but those are coming out. I'm trying to just equip people with the knowledge and the data and the stories to start changing

the narrative. And so we need a lot more people standing up and talking about this. sharing the information and talking to their families and friends about it. And that's what I hope we can start to shift. And if people are searching you out, Git is with two T's, G-I-T-T-T. I know that I'm sure it will probably show up anyways, but just in case anyone, I'm sure there will be people who search you out because as soon as you hear some of this, you're like, oh, yeah, okay, that makes sense.

Or I hadn't heard it that way before. and you have a very, you're very articulate in your descriptions of things. It's easy to listen to and fall along with. So I appreciate you giving me some of your, your time today, Brian. And I look forward to enticing you to come back on the podcast in the future. I'm sure I'm going to hear all about you when the episode finally drops from all my listeners. Thanks again for having me on. It was a great conversation.