TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - #264: Energy poverty, nonsensical energy policy, and the miracle of petroleum with Chris Wright

Episode Date: July 30, 2021

Join Marty as he sits down with Chris Wright, Founder and CEO of Liberty Oilfield Services, to discuss: - Energy poverty - Lack of education around energy extraction and delivery - Energy density - Does fracking pollute water? - Is Chris anti "renewables"? - much more Check out the Liberty 2020 ESG Report Shoutout to this week's sponsors. Cash App. Start #stackingsats today. Use the promo code: "stackingsats" to receive $10 and contribute $10 to OWLS Lacrosse when you download the app. Lend at Hodl Hodl is a new non-custodial bitcoin backed lending platform, that allows peer to peer lending and borrowing between users, globally, anonymously & on your own terms. Create you offers & set your own terms on lend.hodlhodl.com Compass Mining. Compass wants to democratize bitcoins hashrate and give everyone the ability to strengthen the network while mining bitcoin profitably. Thanks to Compass, it’s never been easier to mine bitcoin. Check them out at compassmining.io Braiins. Braiins are leaders in the mining industry; running Slush Pool, creating firmware to make miners more profitable (Braiins OS+), and building out Stratum V2 to help further decentralize mining and make Bitcoin more robust. Check out their mining profitability calculator.

What is up, freaks? It's your boy Marty Bent here. Got the cops coming after me in the background. Owning Bitcoin. They're gonna try to make it illegal. Wouldn't be surprised, apparently. Rumblings that this infrastructure bill is worse than many people thought even earlier this week. So, be prepared. They caught me.

They're waiting outside my father-in-law's house. Guns drawn. Asking me to come out, my hands over my head, my private keys in my back pocket, so they can snap it. They don't like Bitcoin. They're coming after it. Fight heats up, freaks. Are you willing to fight for Bitcoin? Are you willing to fight for freedom in the digital age? I hope so.

With all that being said, this episode of Tales from the Crypt has nothing to do with Bitcoin. This is a Bitcoin podcast, but we've been talking a lot about logical inconsistencies and people just not understanding things in the real world, particularly as it pertains to electricity generation, delivery, and the quote-unquote climate emergency. Is it really an emergency? I don't think so. I don't think so at all. I sat down with Chris Wright, the CEO and founder of Liberty Oil Field Services, to talk about energy production, delivery, why the oil and gas industry is a boon to humanity, how much hydrocarbons, how many hydrocarbons, how many products are based off of hydrocarbons, energy poverty, why it's important to have bountiful and cheap electricity and water to bring people out of poverty and why

it seems that the US government particularly the Biden administration is dead set on making electricity production and delivery much harder for people in this third world the developing countries and even here in the United States I hope you guys enjoy this episode it was brought to you by

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out excuse me before we get to last but not least at compass mining.io we have a special link in the show notes if you want to use that that helps out the show we love all the help we can get and all the freaks that have used compass uh because of this ad have given me glowing uh reviews they're all they're all loving it um so go check it out last but not least is brought to you by brains os plus as well brains is the team behind slush pool and they're the team behind the firmware that helps you stack more sats with your hash speaking of slush pool the update is live the newest update went live a few weeks ago it includes ultra flexible payouts that can be either time-based are threshold based it includes mining rewards splitting for automatically distributing rewards

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I know a lot of you freaks hate me for some of the views I have as it pertains to the energy sector. But I steadfastly believe that I'm in the right. It's because people like Chris give me confidence that I'm not crazy. Energy is important. Oil and gas is important. Those who say otherwise are either nefarious or ignorant. So enjoy.

Tiki! You've had a dynamic where money's become freer than free. If you talk about a Fed just gone nuts. All the central banks going nuts. So it's all acting like safe haven. I believe that in a world where central bankers are tripping over themselves to devalue their currency, Bitcoin wins. In the world of fiat currencies, Bitcoin is the victor. I mean, that's part of the bull case for Bitcoin.

If you're not paying attention, you probably should be. Welcome back to Gamcast. It's Marty Bent here. It's been a while since we've recorded an episode. Sorry for the delay between content, but we only want to bring you the best content. And I think today is going to be a very special treat for anybody listening to this episode because I'm sitting down with Chris Wright, the founder and CEO of Liberty Oil Field Services. Chris, how are you doing today? Glad to be here, Marty.

I'm glad to have you here. You hopped onto our radar when you made a video responding to a bit of virtue signaling from North Face, essentially describing how many products have hydrocarbons as part of an integral material in their final product, North Face being one of the companies that depends highly on hydrocarbons. um we reached out we wanted to record an episode you sent me your 2020 uh esg report uh bettering human lives what is it 84 uh pages of content about what you're doing at liberty to uh to basically make sure that you're being the best environmental stewards possible describing the benefits of oil and gas the industry uh many facets of it from reducing energy poverty to having high density energy sources to pulling people and communities out of poverty. So I guess to start, I think we probably start with the common misconceptions that people have about

the oil and gas industry. It's much maligned in the mainstream media and is villainized as something that is terrible for the earth and for the future of humanity but if you read your report which we'll link to in the show notes uh it seems to be the exact opposite yeah i look at i grew up you know i was in high school in the early 80s i mean there was it was less very then but there was almost a view then the oil and gas was dirty and it was the past and and new energy's got to replace it as soon as possible and so you know i heard that same stuff when i was young as well But what I've learned as you dive into it, and we try to cover a bit in that report, is just oil and gas enabled the modern world. Without oil and gas, there is no modern world. You know, there's no technology that's going to come around, and we're not going to have oil and gas tomorrow, and we're still going to have a modern world. Well, what if we can power our cars with batteries? Well, how do you make batteries? How do you charge batteries? A Tesla has a thousand pounds of oil and gas in the car. Plastics, petrochemicals, they're made of oil and gas.

So it's not just the energy source that comes from oil and gas, which is critically important and the most important and largest energy sources for the world, but it's also the materials that come from oil and gas. All plastics, all petrochemicals, over 90% of manufactured products have oil and gas in them, and probably 100% use oil and gas to make them. But in any case, I could go down that rabbit hole forever. But yeah, so the goal of the report was just to try to give an even hand. And today I'll be very opinionated. I'm an opinionated guy. But in the report, I tried not to be opinionated. I tried to just lay out the data. Where does the world get energy?

This huge issue of energy poverty, people that a third of humanity doesn't really have access to modern energy. I laid out the basics on climate change, the chemistry, the physics, the data, climate economics, the world, the work that's done by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. What do they say about climate change? And, of course, if people read that, which is very few ever read those reports, I'm hoping a little more will read Bettering Human Lives because it's shorter and it's got pretty pictures and it's trying to be efficient in the communication. but but almost everything you hear from politicians it's a crisis the world's getting worse and people are dying all these things you hear about climate change almost everything you hear is wrong yeah you just triggered a bunch of people there chris be be careful but that's

i guess we're we can really dive in headfirst into the report is something i feel very passionate about because i think the the powers that be the politicians the activists the corporations pushing this particular narrative they they usually try to play to people's emotions and and they'll say that the oil and gas industry um it affects poor people the most the climate change affects poor people the most and it makes their lives worse off and and it's really frustrating because they say all this they they pretend like they care about the the downtrodden and those in poverty um and they posture that way publicly but then you look at what they do i think most famously this year with the shutdown of the indian point nuclear facility um in in new york and they

basically shut that down did not replenish that power generation now electricity prices have increased for new york city residents a lot of which would fall under the poverty line so uh I want to jump in at the energy poverty section of this report and basically describe how important energy is to uplift people out of poverty. I mean, and maybe use the specific example that you have of the border of Haiti and the Dominican Republic and how energy actually allows economies to be more green than people would otherwise think. yes yeah most people have seen that great image of the korean peninsula at night and you can see that border between north and south korea you know south korea is bright and and north korea although it's got a relatively large population is dark there's a little tiny spot for pyongyang the capital city and the rest of the countryside and population is dark at night and i think most

people get that image hey i'd rather i'd rather live in the light than live in the dark you know that sort of communicates poverty and wealth um but what's neat about the island of hispanola as you as you just mentioned if you if you're looking at it to the east is the dominican republic and to the west is haiti it's you can actually see the border between haiti and the dominican republic during the day um and you can see it just from where does the forest end that's the end of the Dominican Republic, and then you move into Haiti. And the reason it is, is traditional societies, people that haven't been fully enabled by oil and gas yet, they get energy the same way all of our ancestors got energy throughout all of human history, which is

dominantly from burning trees, supplemented by burning dung or agricultural waste. But burning trees is the main source of energy throughout all of human history. And as population grows, or you have a larger population, eventually you run out of trees. So Haiti has been almost completely deforested, which means when it rains, there's more erosion, there's more mudslides, it's harder to grow food in it. Now, the energy source of Haiti, if you looked at total energy consumption, the dominant sources of energy in Haiti is still oil and gas. That's maybe for 70% of the people. But you've got a large percent of the people that just are so poor, they don't get to use oil and gas. So they burn trees. And that hurts the environment. That hurts the ability for

it to support a population where the Dominican Republic is just meaningfully wealthier than Haiti, a little secure property rights. And so therefore, the dominant source for almost everyone in Haiti, I mean, in Dominican Republic, is oil and gas. So they have these beautiful, lush rainforests. They've got a great tourist economy. They've got a beautiful, peaceful, pleasant place to live. I've traveled to over 50 countries in my life in sort of my quest to understand poverty and how do we get humans out of poverty. I was lucky. I was born middle class. I've had this dreamy life. So my sort of life passion is I want everyone to have the opportunity to pursue whatever their dream is. Everyone's dream is different, but you want to have the ability to do that, where if you're in grinding poverty, your focus is just getting to the next meal. it's just survival. You want to protect your family, but you don't get to dream as broadly.

And when I go to traditional societies in poor rural areas, the environment's not bucolic. It's actually much worse because they've got to burn everything around them to get fuel. Because even if you live in a tropical country, even if you live in Africa or Haiti, it's warm. People think you don't need energy. Well, most of the calories we get are from grains. We're eating wheat or rice or cassava or sorghum. We grow these, so grains or roots, but we grow these food sources. Humans can't break down complex carbohydrate chains in our stomachs and liberate all the energy out of them. Cattle can, deer can, elk can. They just eat the grass. They have much bigger digestive systems than us and they liberate the energy. Humans probably had an evolutionary

trade-off where our digestive system shrunk and our brains got bigger. But for us to liberate the calories from most of the food sources in the world, we need to cook that food because by cooking it, we break down those long complex carbohydrate chains into shorter carbohydrate chains that we can liberate energy from. So cooking food is essential to survival. And so about a third of humanity, and you see that environmental impact in Haiti, but about a third of the people in the world today, think two and a half billion people cook their daily meals burning wood dung or agricultural waste inside their home and huts people in the u.s have no idea that that many people two and a half billion people

that's how they prepare their daily meals yeah and it's it's crazy to think how and so i had um i had uh somebody on my other podcast tales from the crypt uh scott harrison who runs charity water um not exactly connected to the energy business but he describes how uh water is essential to these communities too and what they do is they show up and they create like a water well fresh water that allows uh the women particularly in these areas to to not have to walk hours and hours to get water and then bring it back and it's actually pretty dirty and you just have all this dysentery and stuff like that so like small base layer maslow hire needs things like water and energy are things that we take for granted in the West here. And it's very frustrating

seeing the posturing from a lot of privileged people in the West demonizing oil and gas specifically and energy consumption more broadly when they truly don't understand the nature and the first principles of why we use energy and how uh it is it is so important to to uh allowing what we we consider modern society in the west and it's uh especially like with oil and gas too what you highlight in your report like despite the fact that over the last two decades specifically um the north american oil and gas industry has done more uh gone above and beyond to reduce emissions in the field people and nothing ever satisfies these these zealots who don't i would say frankly don't understand how energy extraction delivery electrical grids work

yeah again that's the idea of the report is most people you know when when when i was in high school and even when i was in college you know politics was there but it wasn't that big of a deal you didn't talk to your friends about politics you know until you grew up and got older or maybe at election time, you chatted about the candidates, but everything is so hyper politicized today. It's really unfortunate. I feel for the younger generation that's growing up now. I go and speak in schools, elementary schools, high schools, colleges. And oh my gosh, my daughter graduated from college two years ago. Her biology class was hyper politicized. They took a week off from learning about biology to get preached sort of the Al Gore training on climate alarmism

from a college professor teaching biology. Like that stuff didn't happen when I was in school, but it's very common today. So it's very understandable to me that, you know, folks under 35 today, you know, they think that their greatest threats to their future is climate change, you know, a lot of people don't want to have kids, 20% of under 18 year old kids report nightmares about climate change. So we've got this huge campaign to scare the hell out of people. I mean, what else? How would they not fear that and believe in that, if that's what you've heard from school, even in primary and high school, but that the data tells just such a radically different story. But if schools are not about, let's get the facts, and then let's make our

own judgments about the facts, people will still draw different conclusions from the same set of facts. That's human nature. We're emotional. We have different values, different priorities. But so much of what's done today is not based on the facts or data. I've been a nerd. Of course, I can't resist to dive into a few more facts, which we cover in the Bettering Human Lives report, which is deaths from extreme weather um that's the biggest i read an article yesterday about you know there's fires in siberia there's floods here there's drought here we're in an obvious crisis and the administration's infrastructure bill is not doing enough to address climate change and we have to fix this crisis so the biggest meme now on climate change is extreme weather because

that's scary. That's scary to me. That's scary to kids, floods, droughts, hurricanes, tornadoes. All these are terrifying. But it's only a few clicks away on the internet to get the data on all of these phenomena. Very interesting to study. But I'll start with the punchline, which is deaths from extreme weather. That's why we care about extreme weather. It destroys our property. Worst of all, it kills us. So 100 years ago, about 500,000 people a year died from extreme weather. Half a million people. The population today is three or four times larger than it was 100 years ago. And about 20,000 people a year die from extreme weather. So an over 95% decline in the deaths from extreme weather in a population that's three or four times bigger.

So your chance of dying from extreme weather has dropped by over 98% in the last century. But that's not what kids believe or fear. I don't think kids 50 years ago, 20% of them had nightmares worried about this stuff. Today's kids are massively safer. That risk is massively reduced, but yet they're terrified of it. And of course, where are those 20,000 deaths? They're in poor countries that aren't energy enabled to build stronger houses, to move people when the floods or hurricanes are coming. So that number will continue to drop, deaths from extreme weather,

if we continue to energize societies in low-income countries, that last third of humanity changing so they can have electricity, clean cooking fuels, and things we take for granted. That'll save their lives as well as make them healthier, longer, more opportunity-rich lives.

But yet there's massive opposition against that. The World Bank, the U.S. AID, Agency for International Development under Biden, they're now wanting to stop any lending to poor countries for development of hydrocarbon assets. So that third of humanity that's cooking, burning wood, dung, and agricultural waste, 90% of the people that transition away from that. And one of the reasons to transition away from that is it kills 3 million people a year. That's how many people roughly that died of COVID in the last year. That amount of people die every year, simply because they don't have clean cooking fuels. The other reason you already hit on, which is that women in traditional society spend a little more than an hour a day collecting fuel wood to burn to cook meals, and about an hour a day searching for water sources. So two plus hours a day for these very basic necessities. So your previous guest that's out there drilling water wells, fantastic. That is game changing for people. And of course, to drill a water well and to run a pump from a water well takes an energy source. So if you've got propane or a simple energy source, you've got a clean cooking fuel, you can run a pump, you get over two hours a day in your life, you're not going to be breathing that dirty, smoky air, you've just changed your lives. But yet, our government is actively trying to reduce the funding, in fact, stop United States funding, helping people to make that step. Now, those people still want to make that step, and they are going to make that step.

I was in Tanzania a couple of years ago, 85% of Tanzanians cook their daily meals, burning wood, dung, and agriculture, 85%. But there's six businesses there selling liquid petroleum gas, think propane stoves, think what's a camp stove to us. That's what everyone dreams about in Tanzania. And they're getting them. If people can drive their incomes up, they're going to move to a cleaner energy source. Of course, if you have a cleaner energy source, that enables your incomes to go up because you get more than two hours back every day. Your kids can have a clean light inside house to learn to read, to grow their education, and to go forward.

So to me, the people like your previous guests that are working in these third world communities, incredibly honorable work. It is so necessary, and it's happening, but it's appalling to me that our own government and a good chunk of our population wants to stop that, wants to stand in the way and not aid and create barriers to people rising out of poverty. that that that to me is a problem of ignorance there's no 20 year old college kids i talked to that wants that to happen they just have no idea they're supporting activities and championing things that are preventing people to rise out of poverty they don't want to prevent people to rise out of poverty they just don't understand the issue no no they don't and again that's what's so disgusting about like the mainstream narrative in the political class specifically is the virtue signal we care about the poor we want to help the downtron we want to uplift and yet look what they do not what they say their policies do the exact opposite and but i i want to like touch on this

very shortly because it was poor like i have the deck up here and like you mentioned the the fall and global related climate that's too but another thing it's been a big meme the last two years with with the forest fires particularly in australia and in the northwest section of the us now this chart is is like it's astonishing considering the the uh the way uh the alarmist are are portraying the forest fires today uh like the amount yeah the millions of acres burned over the last hundred years uh in the u.s alone so this doesn't include australia but the u.s alone fell from like 50 million in 1930 around 1930 and now it's it's around 10 million so it's fallen 80 percent and yet the the climate hysterics are making it seem like this is the worst uh it's ever been in human

history exactly and that climate change is the driver yeah i i spoke with a reporter recently here in denver who you know i had no idea about the earthquakes i mean about uh hurricanes are not getting worse, and tornadoes aren't getting worse, and floods aren't getting worse. I mean, I think she was skeptical, but well, maybe that's what the data shows. And she said, but I know that forest fires are much worse, because I grew up, you know, she's about my age, you know, I grew up 30 or 40 years ago here in Denver, and I know the fires are worse. And in that, she's correct. Forest fires have risen over the last few decades, but it's all about forest management. As you just said, forest fires 100 years ago were five times greater than they are

today. And in California, it may have been 10 times as many acres on average were burned in the 1800s that are burned today. So forest fires, of course, are just a natural phenomenon. They're just part of nature. And particularly in a climate like California, that is an area that just burns and regrows and burns and regrows. That's just the natural cycle. And humans have interrupted that natural cycle. And for good reason. Hey, if we're going to live there, we don't want a raging fire to come down and wipe out our town or our village. So we started an aggressive campaign in the US, really in the 40s. And everyone knows it, but the Smokey the Bear campaign, only you can stop forest fires and incredibly effective, right? So just making sure, you know, people

didn't do stupid things, throw their cigarette in the woods and report fires as soon as you've seen them. And then the other big piece was just forest management. If you log the forest, clean out the undergrowth and sort of manage a forest so there's not too much live fuel, too much tinder, then you could reduce the ability for fires to run fast. And if as soon as they start and they're reported and you go put them out real quick, you know, we had this just plummeting 90% drop in the number of acres burned. And then priorities started to change. Very effective campaign. Then in the 80s, you know, we started this movement against logging and logging's bad. Well, everybody wants wood and wants to live in houses. So I guess they want just logging

somewhere else. But we had a very strong campaign against logging in this country. And the easiest place to stop logging is federal lands, because that's the government. You know, if it's private land, you can't really stop someone to manage their forests. And of course, for paper products, and if you want toilet paper and houses, well, you need wood. So logging moved dominantly to private land. And we really dramatically shrunk logging on national forests in this country. Well, how do you control forest fires? By managing the forest, which means logging, which means undercut, clear-cutting. But we got to a more, don't touch our national forests, let them be natural. And then a little bit of, well, if the fires are away from houses, let them burn. And so it's really forest management that caused this tremendous drop in forest fires for several decades, and that's leading to a rise in forest fires now. Very predictable. They will continue to rise for sure in the coming decades, drifting a little bit back towards what was normal before, unless there's intervention. And there's probably going to be intervention because there's so many society enabled by

oil and gas and free markets. You have so many people have vacation houses and mountain houses. People don't really want fires to go back to the way they were. So I suspect we'll slowly start to do forest management again for fire mitigation. But that takes time. It takes political will. I mean, it's probably decades before we stop or plateau the rise in annual acres burned again. That's going to head up for a while.

So disheartening. It was actually very, what opened my eyes was Australia specifically, because last year when you had like half of eastern Australia burning, and the mainstream media was like climate change, climate change, climate disaster, and the farmers were coming out. like no you you stopped allowing us to do control burns a decade ago and this is the product of that and you have the people who are closest to the source of information which would be how to manage the the forest uh coming out and like screaming no this is not like you you didn't let us do control burns for a decade and all the brush build up and now this is why we have this fast moving very hot forest fire uh but that never gets covered in the mainstream so it's like there's

almost this concerted effort to move people in the wrong direction it is it's just well again it's politics and and media and activist groups that are just so appeal to people's emotions they've got other agendas not really generally about greenhouse gases but they you know people have agendas and fears a powerful force but in our report that that you read we reference a great forest service study just a scientific study of what is driving the rise of forest acres burned And I already gave that summary. But the biggest factor, well more than half of it, is just more live fuel in the fires. But they attributed of order 10% of the increase to climate change. So if the world is a little bit warmer, and it is a little bit warmer, is that a slight nudge in favor of forest fires? Sure. But it's totally swamped by forest management. We could bring acres burned down, or we could let them go up, depending upon what we do with forest management. yes force management freaks it's something to to pay attention to um trying to think of where i want to go next with it i mean i think energy density too because that's like been a big topic

on this you have an incredible graphic uh in the report of the energy density of wind solar in oil like in how many houses um they they could power um just as a yeah what people think of environmental impacts. Look, I'm an outdoor mountain climber, mountain biker, hiker. I love the outdoors. I've been a board member of environmental group for a long time. So I'm a big believer as societies get wealthier. We do want to bring back nature. We want to have quiet, peaceful, undeveloped, open spaces. You know, I think that was sort of the main thrust of the environmental group 40 or 50 years ago before it became really a political movement and not as much about the environment now. It's mostly wrapped around climate change. But if you look at how do

we shrink our environmental footprint, the biggest mover there is do things more efficiently. If we can produce more energy on less land, and the even far bigger one is more food on less land, then we can shrink our footprint on the world. Another thing most people don't know is soon after World War II, the United States land that humans touched peaked. It peaked 70 years ago. And we had about 60 years of declining land used for residences, for food production, for energy production, grassland, forest land was just slowly growing in the United States. And again, the biggest driver is that was we could just produce more and more food using less land. Our population was growing. Our food consumption was growing.

Maybe some of that's not all positive. Our food exports were growing. But yet we were doing all this on less and less land. Tough for farmers, tough for farming business. But that shrunk. And then in 2006, the Bush administration decided to count ethanol as a renewable fuel to be good for the environment, kind of his first move on climate change. And that's led to a surge in the growth of corn in this country. We use more corn today to produce ethanol than we eat in the United States. So this meant in 2006, that was passed. All of a sudden, the acreage used by humans to grow food started to grow again. We planted more acres. But again, these are policy decisions, not necessity things.

In energy, it's even more dramatic. You know, as I said, England got almost completely deforested just from the start of the Industrial Revolution. It wouldn't have gone very far with just trees, but coal soon displaced wood, and it displaced wood in England because trees were hard to come by. I say coal arrived as an energy source in time to save most of the forests of Europe and the forests of North America, but not in time for England. And so what we put in the report is how much land, how much energy can be produced on an acre of land. And for oil and gas, that's more than 1,000 times more energy that can be produced from biofuels, from growing ethanol or growing trees you're going to burn. Just massively higher energy density. And for wind, it's many hundreds, like 500 times more energy from oil and gas than from wind. And from solar, it's about 100 times more energy from an acre if it's oil and gas versus solar or wind.

The other thing, and that number keeps getting better. One of the things I love about the shale revolution is oil and gas was already very energy dense, small amount of land to produce a lot of energy, but it's gotten even much more so recently. And what's neat about that is like, I use the example of Western North Dakota, where the Bakken oil field is. It's a rural farm and ranch community. The farm and ranch output of Western North Dakota has not changed at all in the last 15 years, but it went from producing almost no oil and gas to more oil than six OPEC nations. So this huge surge in oil production in Western rural North Dakota, but less than 1% of the land is used to do that. Because what's great about oil and gas production is most of the plumbing, like you see wind turbines, you see these giant steel and cement or solar panels, all those materials, they're right there on the surface where we live. With oil and gas, most of our plumbing is just cracks and rocks that we create by pumping water at high pressure underground. So it's easier to build our plumbing, and that plumbing is two miles underground. And at least today, no one lives two miles underground. so we have this small surface footprint and then these wells that expand outwards underground and through water we're engineering this plumb system to drain oil and gas but we're but again most of our work is two miles underground and no one's down there so with a smaller footprint we can provide more and more energy you brought up something i wanted to touch on later in the

conversation but since you brought it up i think we should touch on now which is water making water obviously another we talked about earlier very vital resource for humanity and the uh the growth of humanity and the success of humanity uh and it's something that triggers a lot of people too particularly with fracking they worry about the fracking operations contaminating water obviously um what's a gas land freak a lot of people out used to fear campaign and people run with what was the name evan fox or something like that and he put out there and they believe that to this day there's a couple things i want to touch on one i'm sure you can eloquently explain why that's not the case and when companies like liberty uh have a very high priority to make sure that

doesn't happen and there's some self-policing in the industry to call out bad actors and and fix that problem which was bigger decades ago and then two a very interesting part of your report that i was unaware of was yes it takes a lot of water to to frack um but You alluded to the fact that you could potentially produce more water from burning natural gas and the associated gases at the back end of the process after extraction, which is fascinating. Yeah, water obviously is a big deal, essential to life on Earth. I say three molecules are essential for life on Earth. um one of them's water h2o one of them's oxygen because that's that's the that's uh critical for obviously us um and the third molecule co2 you cannot have life on the planet without those

three molecules so and there's a lot of other essential elements and compounds for complex life but for basic life you have to have those three molecules so this is an aside calling carbon dioxide, CO2, one of the three essential molecules for life on Earth. To grow our bodies, carbon dioxide is pulled out of the atmosphere to build plant matter. We build ourselves from the basic building box from plant matter. So the carbon that's in our bodies, it comes from CO2 in the atmosphere. So without CO2 in the atmosphere, there is no life on Earth. We can discuss, and there is a real discussion by increasing CO2, which we are absolutely doing by burning fossil fuels. We are changing the amount of infrared radiation that's absorbed, that's

having an impact on temperatures, also makes plants grow faster. But that's a real discussion. But calling CO2 pollution or carbon pollution, the term we hear, is just totally disingenuous. I guess it's brilliant marketing, but it's just wrong. You know, mercury or soot or particulate matter or sulfur dioxide, there are pollutants that are harmful to humans that are rightfully called pollutants. Carbon dioxide is not a pollutant. It's an essential molecule for life on Earth, but we should talk about the amount of it. Lumping it into pollution, I think, has been effective in scaring a climate mania, but very disingenuous. Going back to water, one of the other three essential molecules for life on earth josh fox made these two movies gas land one and

gas land two and they were incredibly effective i was in the united kingdom or france talking about energy they all knew fracking was bad because they saw if you frack you can burn your groundwater and this is contaminant us is going down the hill and no way are we going to do that here So wow, master communication, fear cells, and Josh did a great job. He knew what he was making was wrong and deceptive, but he didn't care. He was out, he doesn't like hydrocarbons, and he was very effective in scaring people on them. So real quick on those things. One of those burning waters was in Colorado. One was in Pennsylvania. The Colorado one was from a water well. Colorado has very shallow coal seams in the Denver area. It was a coal mine just south of Boulder, the Superior Coal Mine. So those seams are only 20, 30, 40, 50, 100 feet underground. So if you drill a water well and you don't isolate the coal seams from the aquifer, you can produce methane in your gas and you can light your well. So the wells he was lighting were just from getting methane gas out of coal seams, just a poorly designed water well. He knew that. The ones in New York, the Indians could light the water on fire hundreds of years ago and did because there's shallow methane all sorts of places. Nothing to do with oil and gas. When biologic matter decomposes in a swamp, swamps just emit methane, because as things decompose, particularly sometimes when they're isolated from oxygen, they create methane gas. So methane is very natural. It's in the soils everywhere.

um and that's called biogenic from biological decay um our our our uh thermogenic is the methane we produce it's the same chemical but you can tell the difference because of different isotope ratios but we produce methane from very deep underground that took also biologic matter from 100 million years ago and through heat and pressure broke it down and turned it into oil and gas. But in any case, there's all sorts of monitoring networks in Colorado, for example, that monitor groundwater and groundwater quality around our wells and thermogenic versus biogenic methane in the groundwater. And the results of that have been outstanding in that 99% of all the methane in the groundwater in Colorado, in some places, it's all different amounts depending

upon the biologic matter around but does a little bit of thermogenic methane from oil and gas production you know through casing leaks or problems get into get into groundwater of course but it's less than one percent of the naturally occurring methane so you you would never notice it it doesn't make water that wouldn't burn burn um the obama administration epa did a multi-year study on fracking to see if it damages groundwater. And God bless them for doing that. And over 2 million wells drilled in the United States, they never found a single example of fracking communicating up to the surface and contaminating groundwater, not one in 60 plus years of fracking. There are surface accidents. People's drilling a well, they spill some chemicals, drains into

the ground, that happens. Oil and gas is very small contributors to that. Agriculture, construction, maintenance have much more impacts there. But from fracking itself, it does not contaminate groundwater. In fact, the track record there is outstanding, which is why the Obama administration decided not to have federal regulations on fracking, and they left it up to the states. So again, a deep dive into the data, got to the right conclusion. The other topic I mentioned in the report is, you know, we produce oil and gas in South Texas, very dry areas. So if you're looking for things to point at, hey, you guys are using fresh water and using

millions of gallons of water to produce oil and gas wells. And that's true. We do use a lot of water. Today, it is mostly fresh water. Turns out it doesn't need to be. We could quickly switch to using brine or brackish water, and we are in some places. But the data in Colorado, fuel and gas industries, somewhere between 5% and 10% of our total economy, and we're about 0.1% of the freshwater consumption. A little more than the freshwater that's used for snowmaking in Colorado, not nearly as much as water in golf courses.

So we use a small amount of water to produce a lot of economic activity. So we're, we're very water efficient compared to industry as a whole in Colorado. And the other point I made was that you could you could add up for a well, how many total gallons of water are used from drilling from production, fracking is the biggest use of water, and then compare it to when we produce methane gas, whether it goes to your cook to your burner in your house, or it goes to a power plant or a manufacturing plant. when you burn methane or oil or propane or any hydrocarbons, two dominant products come from that combustion. One is water vapor and one is carbon dioxide. So when you see those big white clouds that are all pointed to like pollution or global warming, that white cloud rising up, that's water vapor. CO2 is transparent and it's odorless. You can't see CO2. You can't sense CO2. I know Greta says she can, but I think that's not true. So when you combust methane, combining it with oxygen, that's what combustion is, rapid

oxygenation, you produce water vapor and carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide is the source of the dialogue. We have raised atmospheric carbon dioxide by about 50% through the combustion of hydrocarbons globally over the last 100 years. Those have lifted people out of poverty, but they've increased the carbon dioxide and the atmosphere by 50%. This has led to probably a little bit less than one degree of global average warming, but it is warming. We should expect some warming to continue. It's logarithmic effect. So if we put the same amount of CO2 again in the atmosphere, and we will in the next few decades,

the impact of that will be maybe half the impact of the first amount that went in. it's increasingly less impact. It's a logarithmic function, the amount of warming you get from more greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. But that 50% increase in plant food, CO2 in the atmosphere, has also led to a greening of the planet. When I was a kid, they were saying the Sahara Desert was growing. A lot of this, again, is just scaremongering. But the Sahara Desert is actually shrinking now because those marginal areas near the edge of the desert, it's easier for plants to go, whether they're grasses or trees or agricultural crops, they're easier for them to grow with a higher atmospheric CO2 concentration, and they also become more drought tolerant.

Crops don't need to open the stomata, the little pores in themselves as wide to bring in CO2 and a more CO2 rich atmosphere, and therefore their respiration of water is reduced. So plants have become a little more drought tolerant and a little bit greener. I think we've had about a 14% increase in the leaf area index, sort of a nerdy technical term for the greening of the planet. I think I put that figure also in the report. That's a great multi-author NASA study of that. You never hear about that as well, right? Because it isn't scary and it isn't bad. It's actually a few hundred billion dollars a year of economic benefit globally, because of the increased agricultural productivity from increased atmospheric CO2,

maybe no big deal in the rich USA, but in poor subsistence societies and increased agricultural yield that didn't come from extra effort or fertilizers, that's a benefit. I'm not saying we should burn hydrocarbons just for that reason. But if you look at climate change, you've got to look at the negatives. It's certainly contributing to sea level rise. It is certainly, you know, as we gradually raise the temperature, the ideal, you know, growing crop at that latitude is going to move a little bit. Those movements have been incredibly modest, but the slow warming does have some negative impacts. it does have some positive impacts. And the economists that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change takes the work of, all people do make different assumptions and get different answers. But their sort of consensus view is two degrees C of warming. We've had about one so far.

Sometime late this century, think a couple generations from now, we'll probably get to two degrees C warming. The warming could slow, could speed up. But if we get to two degrees C warming, they estimate the economic cost to the planet is somewhere between 0.2% and 2%. So take the geometric middle there, maybe a little less than 1%. That's like the economic growth from about three or four months right now. Global GDP growth growing 2.5%, 3%. So if you lose 1%, over the next 60 years, it means that, and of course, with economic growth, and in all the projections, we're massively richer 60 years from now. But if we don't do anything about climate change, to get how much richer we're going to be 60 years from now, we might have to wait 60 years

and three months. So their own estimate of this is incredibly slow moving and incredibly modest. That's the work of the group, the UN body set up to study climate change. That's just almost unrelated to the climate crisis, the catastrophe. Climate change is killing millions of people and creating refugees. There's so much nonsense said about climate change. And really, it's for political reasons. It's for environmental group reasons. it's a great way to raise money and to scare people. For a lot of young people, it gives them

meaning. It gives them fear. But like, I'm a climate warrior, the planet's going to die, if not for my efforts. And so it's a very seductive belief. But if you dig into the actual data, the actual science, the actual science, not the science, science is a process, not an authoritarian diktat of rules or answers. But if you dig into that stuff, climate change is very real. Our industry, the oil and gas industry, is the biggest factor in it. But what's actually happening is slow moving, not alarming at all, and relatively modest. Not that we should ignore it or do nothing about it. It's just like ranking it high as a crisis or a tragedy. And California should keep jacking up their energy prices. They've already

successfully created the highest adjusted poverty rate in the nation. So as an offset, even in rich countries, if you make energy more expensive and less reliable, you hurt everyone, but you disproportionately hurt lower income, blue collar, think immigrants, lower education residents, you disproportionately hurt them. And in a cause that the benefits of slightly reducing greenhouse gas emissions are just, they're just incredibly modest. We are constantly investing $10 for $1 of gain a generation or two from now. That's not bettering human lives policy. No, it is not. It is not. And speaking of like uplifting people out of poverty and access to energy, oil and gas particularly helps people do that. I mean, it does it directly too

of the jobs that are created in the industry which would you touch on uh in the report as well you have a case study uh comparing pennsylvania's new york state and then also with willston north dakota i mean you mentioned western north dakota earlier but you focus in willston and what the oil and gas industry has done for that community specifically we actually have some deployments of great american mining up in willston so we're contributing to that economy as well um but yeah it is funny the the biden administration too they're talking about all the green energy jobs they're going to come with their green new deal and they're going to have what was it called the climate corps whatever they're calling it now he announced that this yeah right civilian climate

corps or something yeah and they're saying don't worry we're going to decommission all these oil and gas jobs we're going to replace them with green energy jobs but they're not nearly as uh as there's not nearly as many jobs and they're not as good of jobs if you will so i i think that's well we have 10 minutes here i want to touch on just the quality of jobs that are created in the industry what it does for the individuals in the industry in these areas in north dakota western pa wherever it may be and just just how the oil and gas industry is creating a a respectable workforce that is able to provide for families and create good communities, which is another focus of Liberty is community as well. Yes. Yeah, very much. So yeah, the social

impact of our industry, it may be two stripes. One is oil and gas people. And a lot of us grew up in rural areas or they come from lower income communities. They tend to be much more community focused than someone who grew up in a city and got a science or engineering degree like I did. So the community give back to a community thing is just hardwired into the people. I've worked in a number of industries. I don't know any industry remotely as charitable or community engaged as the oil and gas industry. So we talk a little bit about that in the report and what Liberty does there. The other point that you mentioned there that I think is big, too, is that if you look at the economic trends of the last 50 years or 100 years, whether it's the U.S. or globally, more and more people are urbanization. People are leaving rural communities and moving to cities. Globally now, we just hit like 50% of the people live in urban areas. In the US, it's closer to 70%. So societies get richer, people go to cities, there's more jobs, higher paying jobs, more opportunities there. So what that means is rural communities have it tough. And the last 50 years have not been good for rural communities. Their population shrinks, the job opportunities go away. Think of crystal meth addiction, opioid addiction, you know, where it's the worst, actually, it's not an inner city thing. exists in their cities. It's a rural, dying rural community, you know, sort of drugs of despair.

And so oil and gas sort of turns that tide back a little bit, because most of the jobs that we create in Liberty, 90% of our jobs are out where the oil and gas wells are. They're not in cities or towns. So I'm proud we employ about 3000 people that work and work and most of them live in rural areas. They're generally blue-collar workers, $100,000 plus annual earnings with healthcare benefits. Over 95% are participating in our 401k. They're saving for their retirements, but it's basically revitalizing high-paid blue-collar jobs in rural communities. um and so to use the example of north dakota north dakota's population peaked in 1930 very start of the great depression right and then people started to leave the farms then it was

because it was it was it was tough to grow the people think it's you know it's it's hotter droughts now most all the temperature records the united states set in the 1930s in the dust of the 1930s, Washington, D.C. shut down for dust storms. Washington, D.C. was buried in clouds of dust. D.C., 2,000, 1,500 miles away from where the farms were. If something happened like that today, we would say it was a climate apocalypse, and it was all due to oil and gas. But weather changes, climate changes. The 1930s were tough, but that continued a long-term trend of people just leaving rural farm areas. Some of it was because the success of farming. We used to have 70% of Americans in the year 1900 worked in food production. Today, that's less than 2%.

So we've gotten really good at farming. Well, if you get really good at farming, you don't need as many farmers. I could say the same thing about oil and gas production. We produce more oil, gas, natural gas liquids than ever today in the United States. But our employment is probably a third of what it was 20 or 30 years ago. It's getting better at what we do. But what happened with the oil boom in Western North Dakota was not only did they go from 39th in per capita income to like fifth or sixth of all the states in the country per capita income, state got a lot wealthier. But what people in rural North Dakota celebrate even more was they reversed a 60, 75 year trend of declining population. And I think four or five years ago, they passed their peak

population from 1930. So if you live in a rural community, as is typical there, that median age becomes very old because the kids leave. They got to go get jobs somewhere else. And then they have their kids somewhere else. And so you got vacant houses. You got the community center that eventually shuts down because there are not enough people around. And life just is tougher in that. declining population societies are not great stories. But so yes, I'm very pleased that Liberty and our industry as a whole is revitalizing a lot of rural America, bringing high paying jobs and economic opportunities. It's not just the people working directly in our industry, but the people that run the local restaurants and the hotels, they got more

guests, they got more visitors. Now, the local tax revenue, Williston, North Dakota now has got a great rec center for all the people that are farmers and ranchers now. They've got these great rec centers to go to. The schools have all been upgraded, quality of teachers, the investment in these communities. So it's the follow-on effects I think are very significant. We do talk about that some in our country. Politically, I think we actually talk about too much the high-paying jobs. Oh, you're going to destroy high-paying jobs in the oil and gas industry. We're only a few percent of Americans work in oil and gas. I don't want to trivialize that, but way more important, and I know you know this as well as I do, way more important is low-cost, reliable energy

just makes people's lives better. The shale revolution booming US natural gas production meant that energy-intensive industries that left to where cheaper energy costs were decades ago are returning back to the US. Well over $100 billion has been invested in the last decade in new manufacturing facilities in the US, because now we have low cost energy. And United Kingdom, England, for example, has gone exactly the opposite direction. They're producing less and less energy domestically. So natural gas in the units, we sell it in 1,000 British thermal units, costs $3 in the United States. That costs $10 in United Kingdom. So you're not going to manufacture energy-intensive stuff there. So the United

Kingdom has lost its sort of blue-collar manufacturing energy-intensive jobs. They've gone to China or Asia or to the US. But having energy produced in your society benefits everyone in that society through lower cost energy and the jobs that follow on jobs that come from lower cost energy yeah i better end on that note yes we're gonna have two minutes left here in the hour that we have allotted could have gone much deeper but chris thank you for doing what you do and being so vocal about this uh i think some of the listeners who may be skeptical being like this is oil gas propaganda you have a background in in renewable energy correct and yeah i went to college. I have no family background in oil and gas at all. I went to college. I went to MIT

specifically to work on fusion energy, to displace oil and gas. Then it was because we thought we were running out of them. But I went to study plasma physics to work on fusion energy. I went to graduate school at UC Berkeley and worked on solar energy. After that, I went back to MIT in electrical engineering graduate school. Soon after that, I worked in geothermal energy in Japan, and sort of a next generation geothermal energy. I'm working on that again as well now. But yeah, I don't care where energy comes from. I don't care at all where energy comes from.

I just care that it's cheap, affordable, reliable, and enables better human lives. But it turns out, throughout all of my life, and likely for the next several decades to come, oil and gas just have compelling, compelling advantages over the alternatives. I'm all for fusion energy. I want to see it come. I think geothermal is going to have a little bit of a renaissance. There's certainly a meaningful role for solar to play in the world, and I cheer that on. We may have tide power, just normal fission nuclear power. Closing Indian Point is a tragedy. Nuclear power has the highest energy density, safest record of any energy source, period. So I am for all energy sources that can compete in a marketplace and bring cheap, affordable, reliable energy and make people's lives better. I just happen to work in oil and gas because right now we've got awesome advantages.

I'm cheering for the others to get better, too. And my hope is they win by being better, by lifting people up and making more things possible. Right now, A, they're not winning. Globally, wind and solar is only about 2% of global energy. So 20 years and a couple trillion dollars of subsidies haven't moved that needle very much. What we need is energy sources that are better, that are just going to compete and win. And part of that better is just better produced oil and gas, but there's going to be better nuclear and better geothermal and better solar and for all of the above. that's an incredible note to end it on again chris thank you um for what you do for coming on the show again i could have gone down a lot more paths with you uh i respect the business that you've built the care that you have for your employees it actually what you're building

at liberty reminds me of something that we talk a lot about at great america mining which is the story of jj hill and his railroad company i think a lot of the things that you do at liberty uh parallel with what J.J. Hill did, giving back to the communities, giving back to your workers, giving people equity in the company. It's an incredible thing. And you're making the world a better place and keep fighting the good fight with all this information that most people don't have access to outside of the fear that they're fed in the mainstream narrative. Marty, thanks for your time and for your kind words and your great podcast. I enjoy listening to it. I look forward to hearing the future episodes as well. Have a great day. Thank you.