TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - #335: The overlooked tradeoffs of "renewable" energy with Brian Gitt

Episode Date: May 23, 2022

Join Marty as he sits down with Brian Gitt to discuss the overlooked tradeoffs of "renewable" energy. Follow Brian on twitter. Read more from Brian. Shoutout to our sponsors: Unchained Capital Braiins HodlHodl CrowdHealth

What is up, freaks? It's your boy Marty Bent here to introduce this RIP of TFTC. What RIP number was this? RIP 335, I believe, with Brian Gitt. And it's a very interesting story. It comes from a renewable background, particularly solar, and we dive into the unspoken trade-offs that exist with wind and solar, particularly energy policy overall and the economics of what's going on and how we are probably making grave mistakes in terms of energy policy here in the United States and throughout the West. is brought to you by our good friends at Unchained Capital. Unchained Capital is here to help you eliminate single points of failure in your custody model. They have their vault, which is a two-in-three multi-sig quorum. You hold two keys,

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now uh they are the team behind brains os plus brains os plus firmware uh which allows you to stack more sats with uh your a6 is an auto tuning firmware that focuses on the higher frequency hashing chips over the lower frequency chips allows you to produce more hashes and therefore more sats on top of that it helps with fan management sound management noise management excuse me and all that good stuff if you have an asic that is compatible brains os plus firmware and you're not running it you're leaving sats on the table it's as simple as that go check out everything they have going on at brains.com that's b-r-a-i-i-n-s.com double i brains This report was also brought to you by good friends at HODL HODL.

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If you use the code TFTC during signup, the first 1000 members of this Bitcoin community using the TFTC code are going to receive a discounted membership of $99 a month for the first six months. Right now, for between the ages of 55 and 64, or the ages of six and 54. If you're between the ages of six and 54, it's 175 bucks a month as an individual. If you're older, it's $325 a month. If you've got a family, $695 a month. If you have families, $4 to $8. So that first six months of $99 a month is significant savings. Use the code TFTC during signup. Go to joincrowdhealth.com slash TFTC to check out our dedicated landing page where you can learn everything about what CrowdHealth is about and how they're implementing Bitcoin. and you should also check out RIP 327 where I sat down with Andy Skunover who is the CEO and founder of CrowdHealth

and we talk about the trade-offs of the traditional healthcare system and insurance scam and how CrowdHealth is entering the market to try to bring power and savings back to individuals. It's a great way to opt out, freaks. Join crowdhealth.com slash TFTC. Enjoy this RIP with Brian Gitt.

Okay. you've had a dynamic where money's become freer than free when you talk about a fed just gone nuts all 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. What is up, freaks? Welcome back to Tales from the Crypt. It's your boy, Marty Bent here on a lovely Monday morning in Austin, Texas. I'm sitting down with Brian Gitt,

who is in California. It's early for you. Thank you for joining us so early. Oh, thanks so much for having me on. I'm really excited to have this conversation with you. No, I am as well. Like I was saying right before we hit record, I think, obviously, If you've been listening to this podcast in recent months, there's been a lot of focus on energy policy and the state of the world as it relates to idiotic energy policy that has been thrust on many people throughout the world. And me personally, I think this conversation and this topic is extremely important because we're beginning to realize rather quickly that idiotic energy policy is having a material effect on the quality of life of humanity globally. And it is putting us in a very precarious situation. So that's why I'm very excited to be sitting down with Brian, who has been trying to help investors navigate the energy sector and highlight where the signal is in the sector and where sensical policy could go. And I think your experience, particularly in the solar industry and your beating of

the drum of, hey, we need to focus on nuclear is very important. Yeah, I don't want people to make the same mistake I made. I basically wasted 20 years of my life, which is a lot of time, a lot of years, working on the wrong problem. And I was doing it for all the right intentions, the right reasons. But that doesn't mean that you're going down the right path. And so anything I can do now to correct the mistakes of my past and to help educate people about a more effective way forward is what I'm trying to focus on right now. So why do you believe that you wasted 20 years of your life?

So it really started, the genesis of my whole journey on this really started because I love the outdoors. I love nature. I used to lead wilderness trips for teenagers in Alaska. We'd go 40 days into Alaska and do mountaineering and backpacking, ice climbing, whitewater rafting, all that kind of stuff. I just fell in love with nature and the outdoors, wilderness, the kind of raw energy of it. And I just wanted to do something to protect it. And so I got sucked into energy and buildings and efficiency and renewables because I thought, wow, this is very tangible. This is pragmatic.

You know, people talk about saving the rainforest or, you know, these kind of things that are very distant from most of our lives. But to me, we all live in a house, or most of us, we go to school or work in a building. We have this direct relationship with the built environment and with energy. And so I figured if I can help educate and change policy and just promote energy efficiency and renewable energy, I can make a really pragmatic, direct impact. And so everything about my journey was mission-driven. I wanted to make a difference. And I think my story is probably similar to a lot of people that are embracing renewables.

Like they're getting into it for the right reasons. They want to make the world better, right? I'm sure there's a few people on the fringes out there that maybe don't have the holiest of intentions. But I think the vast majority of people are really thinking correctly in terms of they want to make the world better. But the problem is I capture, I got this mind virus that it seems many other people have gotten recently, which has you view these issues through tunnel vision and really lacks critical thinking on how you understand the energy system. I actually remember the moment I was sitting in this little auditorium in Prescott, California, not California, Prescott, Arizona. I was sitting with Amory Lovins, who is well known in the energy efficiency space and promoting renewables. And he was giving a lecture and he just blew me away. He's a really great

communicator. For one, I was really young, really naive. I was at that time, I think I was maybe 21 years old, very impressionable. And I was already going down this path, taking all these classes and how do you install photovoltaic systems, really trying to understand how buildings worked, went together to make them more energy efficient. And here I was in this lecture, listening to Amory and Avery was telling me these amazing facts, like more sun hits the earth in one hour than we consume in a whole year. So of course, I mean, that sounds amazing, right? Why wouldn't we leverage that harness all that energy, especially when it, if we could do it without creating excess pollution. And so I got sucked in and went deep down that rabbit hole and just went

all in on that. And it's, it's a very romantic idea, right? It's, it's, it's almost has a religious tone to it. The way we, as humans, we worship the sun for, for thousands of years in our history in nature. We, you know, we created gods out of nature, right? And so I think there's something deep within us that resonates about being connected to the natural world and doing things in alignment with these natural cycles, the sun and weather and these various elements. And so it hit me on a very, very deep level. And I just went 100% into it. And I worked in the industry and had many different hats over those 20 years. I did everything from I was the executive director of a trade association for green building in California, where we brought together all of the stakeholders. So we worked with the investor-owned utilities like Pacific Gas and Electric and SoCal Edison. We worked with most of the local governments in the state, the state energy office, which is the California Energy Commission.

We had a lot of involvement working with Department of Energy. But we also had all the private sector folks. So we had all the production home builders like Pulte Homes and Centex. We had manufacturers like Johns Manville Insulation. We had large lenders like Wells Fargo Bank and other people that were trying to finance these projects. And what that experience really taught me is how to view these various problems through the lens of all these stakeholders. And so that was just an incredible experience. We were basically developing green building policy in the state of California as well as programs.

So we would train contractors on best practices on how do you make homes and buildings more energy efficient and how to employ renewable energy on those buildings. We developed new financing programs to basically cover the upfront capital investment in these projects and drive down the interest rate. We created a green home label for what it means to be a green home in California called Greenpoint Rated, which is like a lead for homes. kind of, if you're familiar with LEED, similar to that. So we worked on all aspects of this, from policy, to training, to educating the public, developing new financing programs, incentives, all of this. And so I did that for a number of years. I'll pause there. I don't want to just ramble on here. I mean, there's a lot of different directions we can go. No, I love, I wouldn't consider it a ramble at all. I think it's important to set the stage

the context from with your background specifically because like you said you went into this rabbit hole with the best of intent intentions you're emission driven and that's one thing i get uh i get scoffed at a lot because a lot of people think i'm just some greedy oil and gas guy who just wants to burn fossil fuels and pollute the environment when i i would consider myself an environmentalist as well and i i certainly had these types of feelings in my 20s as well i thought that we we needed to be cleaner we were we i mean it's inarguable there certainly is a lot of pollution in the world and it's something that we should definitely curb as much as possible but i think a lot of people conflate this idea of renewable energy with

reduction in pollution and that's they're not always mutually exclusive or they can be mutually exclusive excuse me um where you can reduce pollution and not um not embark on idiotic energy policy and that's i think the context of your background is very important because i again i i think you've seen uh up front up like up front like the the the unspoken trade-offs that that come with this quote-unquote renewable energy and uh its viability for humanity in the long run so i think setting the stage is is very important i guess we could go into like having set all this up these financial products these um these renewable standards and stuff like that what when did you begin to um have this feeling that that maybe what you were doing

wasn't having a an overall positive effect on the world well in that role with that organization i i still was delusional so i reality didn't hit me yet it took me a longer time so my my next role I was recruited to become the CEO of this consulting firm that was focused on clean technology, efficiency, commercializing new technologies. We did everything from fuel cell vehicles to carbon sequestration at power plants to we would run really large energy efficiency programs to make buildings more energy efficient. And I spent seven years leading that firm and growing it. And during that time is really when some of the cracks in the overarching narrative started to show, and my own belief system started to show. And it happened during the Obama administration in around 2008, which was obviously when the Recovery Act, due to the huge economic meltdown that was happening. And the federal government, specifically Department of Energy, wanted to infuse the economy with a bunch of money to put people back to work, to create jobs and stimulate that.

And so one of their strategies, obviously they had many strategies, but one was to pump a lot of money into the energy sector specifically. And so my firm, this was partially the benefit I had because I had all those relationships through my prior role within government and within utilities, etc. I was able to build this coalition of stakeholders really quickly because these were competitive solicitations from both Department of Energy, the California Energy Commission, and also local governments in California. And billions of dollars were flowing. And so you had to jump on it quick. And I brought some of these relationships to bear. We put proposals together and my company ended up winning some pretty substantial contracts. Just our firm alone won a 60 million dollar contract to be the prime contractor to help implement very large scale programs throughout California, which included working with all the investor owned utilities, local governments and private sector stakeholders. And I always thought the problem was, and this was one of my false beliefs, that if we just had enough money to implement these programs, we could scale it. We could make them really effective. But what this time period really taught me in working on this for several years is that money was not the problem.

The problem was the core design principles, and we were lacking critical thinking on how to really address the problem. And in that program, we pulled out all the stops. So we built huge loan loss reserve funds to drive down the cost of financing the upfront capital improvements to make these projects happen. We developed standards for the programs. We did quality assurance. We done all the training. We did massive amount of community outreach and engagement to the general public as well as to the building trades. And we ran this program for years and still around today. It's called Energy Upgrade California. And it's grown and changed over the years. And we had these big, bold, audacious goals for the program about how many homes were going to be upgraded, how many buildings were going to become more energy efficient. and the reality is the program just did not deliver at all on the anticipated goals that we had hoped and it was really uh telling because the government agencies that wouldn't it they they couldn't take that in really i mean they just kept spinning success stories like they said oh look at all the energy saving and look at what we've done and i was looking around go what are you talking about i mean this to me i i felt i felt partially responsible because i was you know

I was one of the main people that helped bring this whole strategy together and promoted these ideas. And when I was seeing it fail and fail and fail, it really rattled me, right? Because I had all these beliefs and ideas about what it would take to make the program successful. And what I was seeing in the real world, in the most progressive state in the United States of America, California, with almost unlimited resources, with all of the support of state, local government, utilities, private sector buy-in, these things did not scale. These things did not work. And so that was really eye-opening. So what were some of the specifics of the failure of these projects? What was preventing them from scaling and how were they not working?

The main issue is they didn't provide enough economic value to consumers, to homeowners, or to building owners to move forward on these projects without massive rebates, incentives, and low-cost financing. And even when they did, it was mostly free riders. And what I mean by that is let's just take a house, a typical home, a single family house, and we would be offering up to sometimes $5,000 worth of rebate money to make them more energy efficient. So to upgrade your heating and air conditioning system, to put a new insulation into the house, do all these various energy efficiency measures. And we would offer subsidized financing and up to like $5,000 worth in rebates, like direct rebates, which is pretty substantial. Now, these projects on average

can cost, depending on the size of the home and in some unique aspects to it, sometimes $15,000 to $20,000 to put these improvements in. Well, the energy savings that you're going to derive from implementing these projects, never pay that back. Or it takes so many years to pay that back. I mean, there's a lot of great reasons to do these projects. I mean, adding insulation in your home is excellent, not only because you increase the thermal comfort of your home, you have better acoustics, you don't hear all the noise pollution from the street, it's more comfortable. There's good reasons to do it, as well as upgrading your heating and air conditioning system. But economics generally is not the driving factor. So what we found was the people doing these projects

had really old furnaces or really old air conditioners. They needed to replace them anyway. So they're just taking advantage of the government subsidies saying, well, we got to replace this thing or we're thinking about replacing this thing. We might as well do it now and grab this five grand from the government and take it. And I don't blame them. I would do the same thing, right? I mean, I'm not pointing fingers at anyone like they're doing something wrong. So all the incentives were misaligned to develop a scalable program. If you want to scale something, the market has to pull it. You need to provide enough value to a customer that they want to buy it and they can internalize that value. And these programs did not do that. They were

propped up by subsidies and therefore only the people that were already likely going to do these projects or already had so much money they didn't really care about the financial incentive in terms of the savings would do the project. So it's mostly wealthy people. We are in essence subsidizing wealthy people to upgrade their homes, similar to how we're subsidizing wealthy people to buy Teslas or other electric vehicles and solar panels today. So it's kind of a regressive energy tax on poor people or lower income people that can't afford these $15,000 or $20,000 dollar improvements and they're they're getting subsidies from the government it's it's kind of uh really obnoxious when you zoom out and think about what's happening yeah i mean it's funny how

when the government steps in and offers all these quote-unquote incentives and subsidies uh people are going to figure out a way how to how to game the system and find the loopholes to to better take advantage of it for themselves and again it's a hasn't produced the the outcomes that the government would like and i think that is honing in on like the micro scale like a house by house basis but when it comes like overarching energy policy and these push for solar wind and evs specifically like yeah there there's a lot to be said about the the economics of these systems and whether or not they're driven purely by subsidies uh is is that the case on the macro scale too in terms of trying to transition grid baseload fuel sources from fossil fuels and

nuclear to wind and solar specifically. Yeah. I mean, when we look at this, we have to acknowledge all energy sources have trade-offs, every single one of them, whether it's fossil fuels, nuclear, solar, wind, geothermal, no matter what it is. They all have pros and cons and costs and benefits, and we need to weigh those. But I think what we're oftentimes missing is we've started to pick a winner just because of a certain narrative around because it sounds good or makes us feel good versus fully evaluating it based on really effective criteria. So I think the first thing is zooming out. And what is the goal? What are we actually trying to achieve? Why do we even care about renewable energy? What is the point of all this? It's a useful question to ask. I mean,

I think the goal is we want to protect and improve the quality of human lives, and we want to protect and improve the quality of our environment. Okay. I think most of us can agree that's the goal, right? So oftentimes I think we skip past that and lose total sight of that. So my question is, all right, well, what's the most effective way to reach that goal? And then what are the evaluation criteria that we should be using to assess any technology? I don't care what it is. I'm agnostic on technology. I really don't care. I just want whatever's going to be most effective. And I think there's really five criteria that we need to apply to use critical thinking and evaluation of any energy technology. The first is energy security. If we don't have energy security,

we don't have a country, we don't have a civilization. And if you don't believe me, just look around and read a history book because, man, Europe would all be speaking German if it wasn't for United States oil and gas. I'll tell you that because during World War II, the United States, there was about 7 million barrels of oil that were consumed in World War II to basically fight off the Germans. And 6 million of those, or basically almost 90% of them, came from the U.S. So if U.S. oil and gas hadn't supported the Allies, Europe would all be speaking German right now. And this goes to every war in human history. It's all about the ability to um, project and harness energy to harness and project the energy in the world is how you protect

your, yourself, your civilization versus being invaded and taking over and conquered. So that has to be the foundation because if we don't have that baseline of energy security, then we don't have anything, right? Everything else is noise. So to me, that's the most important criteria. You have to wait criteria too. They're not all created equal, obviously. So to me, that's number one. The second criteria is reliability, right? Because we, in modern world, we use energy 24-7, 365, and we're spoiled rotten here in the United States and in most of the Western world because we just take it for granted. You flip a switch, you turn your air conditioner on, you want to go in your car, whatever it is, the energy is there whenever you need it. That is not the case

in most of the world. I mean, most of the world lives in energy poverty. Over 3 billion people don't even have access to adequate energy. It's about the amount of American refrigerator and less than a billion of them don't have any power, no electricity, no gas, no anything to basically sustain themselves and their lives. And so if we don't, if we start eroding the reliability, we are going to have massive consequences. And you're seeing it in Germany and in Europe right now, factories are shutting down and halting. It's like fertilizer factories to create our food system, are not able to operate. Smelters are shutting down because they're not able to operate.

If you can't operate energy-intensive industries, you can't function. So you need to have reliable electricity and a reliable energy source for that. You can't just have it on, on and off. That's why countries are poor. That's why when you go to Africa and some of these other third-world developing areas, a huge part of why they're poor is because businesses can't effectively operate there because they don't have a reliable energy grid. So reliability is number two. Number three is affordability. If it's so expensive to make energy, then it really limits what you can do with it.

That's why they're shutting down these plants. You can't make fertilizer right now in Europe, in many parts of Europe, because it costs more to make the fertilizer than you can sell the fertilizer for. So if if it's that expensive, it just basically inhibits what you can do with energy. So affordability is key. And this is just crushing on lower and middle income folks as these utility bills go up. I was actually retweeting one of your tweets. I think it was over the weekend or maybe on Friday about Germany in Germany's energy costs have gone up 87 percent year over year, which imagine if you're on a budget just trying to feed your family and all of a sudden your energy bills in the winter are going through the roof and you can't even afford

to heat your home to protect your family. I mean, this is survival. This isn't just nice to have. This is, are people going to die? Are people just not going to be able to function well? So that's the third one, affordability. Fourth criteria is emissions. And this is important. no one wants to breathe dirty air. I mean, we all want clean air. I don't, I haven't met a single person that enjoys, you know, just breathing dirty air and, you know, but there are trade-offs, right? Coal creates pollution, air pollution. And the reality is, it's gotten cleaner and cleaner and cleaner. The more we had the money to put emission control technologies on these plants and scrubbers. And now the air quality in the United States is much better than it was 20 years

ago. So there's ways that you can still burn energy sources and be responsible and reduce pollution. And usually it goes through an evolution. And then the last criteria is land use, right? You don't want to cover all of your land, destroy all the habitat, basically killing all the animals that live on that land by taking up excessive amount of and using too much land. And especially in parts of Asia and Europe, they don't even have the land. We're blessed here in the US where we have the benefit of this just privileged geography and abundant land resource. Most of the world doesn't even have that. But we don't want to cover our prime agricultural land in Central Valley, California with solar panels. That's the biggest waste of resources on both sides. I mean,

so those are the kind of criteria when we zoom out, we think, okay, what's the goal? What are the criteria we're going to evaluate technologies and look at? Now, how do all of these technologies stack up across these, right? So I'll pause there, but that's kind of how I think about when you're looking at an energy system, how you would evaluate various approaches to solving this problem. Yeah, I mean, that's a very robust analysis and criteria to think about. I think that's a very good way to present this to the public, like, hey, we need energy. You like flipping a switch and having your lights turn on. This is obviously important. And that's what I think the biggest problem in the whole debate around energy today, particularly here

in the West, is it's very binary. It doesn't take that nuanced criteria that you just described into consideration. It's either green and renewable or it's dirty and unusable. It's going to kill us all and i think setting the landscape with those five criteria is very important to help frame the conversation and land use specifically is one that many people don't talk about and and that really what underlies that that land use when you compare like a natural gas power plant to a a solar farm like land use for solar there's a ton of land land that you need to use for wind same thing and when it comes to like a natural gas or nuclear power plant significantly less land that is necessary to to bring a considerable amount of energy to market

and that gets into the whole concept of energy density which is another area where people really don't you know consider the the impact of how dense a particular fuel source is and that's one of the weirdest things about this transition to wind and solar that i've been trying to beat the drum on the last few months more particularly is what we're doing is regressing to a less dense energy source or less dense energy sources and wind and solar, particularly away from nuclear and natural gas, which are significantly more dense. And when it comes to actually getting leverage on a, a, um, molecule, um, that, that leads to electricity, there's, there's no doubt that wind and solar are far behind other reliable sources that exist out there.

Yeah, a wind farm uses 360 times the amount of land as a nuclear power plant to generate the same amount of electricity. And a solar farm uses 75 times the amount of land as a nuclear plant for the same thing. A natural gas farm, let's just take a wind farm, a 200 megawatt wind farm takes up about 13 square miles. That's 13 square miles. I mean, imagine that versus a natural gas power plant of the same generating capacity could fit on a single city block, right? So when we start to think about resource impacts, not only in all the materials that it takes to actually build these machines and deploy them, but all the land that we're taking up is just an immense amount of land. And you're usually destroying either farmland, forest, or native habitat for

species. And this extends beyond just renewables. I'll give you an example. Two weeks ago, I was down in Kern County, California. I was visiting an oil lease down there. My friend Mike Umbro is running a new operation. Mike's been on the show. We had a great conversation with Mike on the show. I'm a big fan of Mike and what he's doing. Yeah. So I went and spent some time down there with Mike. I met him on Twitter as well. And he's like, yeah, you want to come down and see my operation, my oil lease? I was like, yes, I will be down there next week. So I went down and met up with him. We had a great time. And one of the things that struck me here in Kern County, where his oil lease is, when you go out there, the first thing you'll notice is there's not a

single tree or plant as far as your eye can see. It's the desert in California. It's like, maybe some people are familiar with Nevada desert. It's just barren. It doesn't look like there's anything there. Now, obviously, there's life that lives there. But the first thing I saw when I stepped foot on his oil lease was three people, three biologists doing a survey, basically a survey of endangered lizards on the property. Because what they were doing is they were trying to identify where the endangered lizard burrows were so they could mark off with flags and put fencing as they develop the site to avoid disturbing the lizard burrows right i mean think about this this is in this i'm this is a good thing i'm not saying this is bad this is good

this is being responsible uh company and how you operate a business but what is so hypocritical about this whole ridiculous policy energy policy in california is because of these strict requirements. They're pushing all oil and gas production out of the state pretty much. I mean, it's almost impossible. MICA spent years trying to get this thing permitted, even when they're bending over backwards to employ the best practices for the site. But California consumes more fossil fuels than just about any other state. They're the number one consumer of jet fuel, the number one consumer of gasoline, but they're sitting on 1.5 billion barrels of oil, mostly in Kern County, under the desert, right? It's crazy. So now we're importing it. So

California gets 50% of its oil. It comes on crude tankers from Ecuador, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia, 50% of it just from those three. Number one is Ecuador. So what we're doing, instead of drilling in the desert where there's no plants and trees in a very responsible way, we're carving out so we don't bother the lizards. We're slashing and burning the rainforest in Ecuador where they have no regulations or requirements. They're not containing the oil nearly as responsibly as they are here. They're flaring like crazy because they don't have the flaring. You're not allowed to flare in California, which is basically just burning off unwanted natural gas when you're drilling for oil. In Ecuador, they don't believe in that. They flare as much as they want, right?

So you have all the air emissions from the flaring. You have all the destruction of the Amazon rainforest that's happening unnecessarily just because California wants to feel virtuous and export or import their oil. Then you put it on a crude tanker, and you burn fuel oil to ship oil halfway across the ocean, whether it's coming from Iraq, Saudi Arabia, or Ecuador. That is the most polluting of the fuels, much more so than gasoline that we use in cars and trucks. Then those ships come into the Long Beach port in Southern California, and they're emitting all this air pollution around the disadvantaged communities, usually communities of color that are around the ports in Long Beach. that have some of the highest pollution levels in the state, right? It's actually a big problem, air pollution, because of all the ships coming in. So this is an example of a policy that is so counterproductive. And we could reduce CO2 emissions, reduce air pollution, reduce impact on the environment by just drilling in a responsible way in Kern County, California,

instead of doing all that crap. And that just drives me nuts. Why are we doing this? The people that say they're doing this to basically help reduce co2 emissions they're emitting more co2 emissions they're they're they're not saving anything so that that's just a really tangible example just from oil but this applies obviously across all of these types of energy sources yeah and and it can also probably lower costs like you're saying before we hit record there's parts of california that are seeing seven dollar and up gas some places it's more than the minimum wage a gallon of gas is more than the hour minimum wage here in the united states it's completely befuddling honestly like how in your mind like have we gotten to this is a pure virtue signaling

is like there's a lot of people saying controlled demolition i'm not gonna put words in in your mouth but like it just you look at the situation and everything unfolding that particular example um of california shipping in oil on tankers from ecuador saudi and iraq is it just seems so clear-cut to me at least maybe i'm seeing things more clearly than others but it like it seems like a very cut and dry like this is much better than what we're doing now like why what is what is it Is it pure virtue signaling, political unwillingness? Is there inability? I think there's a few things happening, and I don't want to just broad brush and stereotype everyone, obviously.

But I think the majority of people, this really aligns with my own personal story, my own experience, because I was one of those people. So I'm not really pointing fingers and saying these are horrible, evil people, because I was one of them. I believe these things. So not only did I believe him, I invested 20 years of my life professionally working to be a proponent and champion for those ideas. So I think at the core of the people that were like me, which I think is the majority out there, I think it comes from a deep desire to have a sense of meaning and purpose, honestly, to contribute to something bigger than yourself and to have a positive impact on the world. I think that's the underlying desired motivation. And I think that what is happening is it's easy just to kind of consume this narrative about solar, wind and electric vehicles. It feels good. You feel virtuous by supporting this and you don't actually have to do the work and think critically about, you know, invest the time to educate yourself about how the energy system works. What are all these trade-offs that we're talking about? And really do a full evaluation. Because let's say, I mean, most people, they're busy. They have kids. They have work. They're just

trying to keep their household up. They don't have a lot of extra bandwidth and time to invest in exploring in depth these topics. So I think people are outsourcing this function to some political elites, to some thought leaders in the space, to environmental organizations. And it's having really dire consequences because these ideas are not good ideas. These ideas can really threaten the very prosperity of our civilization. And these ideas kill people, right? And we're starting to see that around the world right now. And so that's one of the reasons I decided to really speak out so vocally about this is, one, because I contributed to the problem. I was part of the problem. But two, I understand the mindset. I understand how people that view the world think. And to be honest,

I was just deeply ignorant, is even working in the energy industry. I mean, I helped develop new technologies in cleantech and such, and I was deeply, deeply ignorant of how the energy system works because I had my blinders on. Because I was not allowing myself to think critically, really delve deep into some of these concerns because I just wrote them off. I just said, oh, these people, it's just the greedy fossil fuel companies that are just trying to rape and pillage the land and take advantage. I don't need to study what they're saying because they're just wrong.

I'm right. I'm the hero. They're the villain. So I think a lot of it is around that, is this sense, this deep sense to try and find meaning and purpose to contribute. But people are outsourcing this function. So they get all the dopamine hits of feeling virtuous

without doing any of the work, right? Actually investing the time. Yeah. And again, it's hard. i don't want to like have like a woe is me well like i've been again like talking about this stuff very aggressively for the last few years i started with like esg and then as i dove down like i was ignorant to how the energy industry worked and how electricity actually gets delivered until i fell down the bitcoin mining rabbit hole and was forced to learn more about it uh just because of

my job and uh it's been again i i've had a lot of people attack me i've had one star reviews on this show on on apple podcast because people hear me talking about this stuff and beating this drum and they're like you're you're just like an evil greedy like you're using natural gas to mine bitcoin so your your incentives are not aligned but again this take the bitcoin mining out of it like i've come to realize that this is a very big human issue that if not uh identified and we don't change the tides rather quickly like we're going to find ourselves in a situation in the next decade two decades where you have deep human suffering because of these idiotic policies and i agree like again like i'm an environmentalist i want to be as clean and

efficient as possible um but i've come to learn as you have as well that like what is being preached is not actually what's playing out in real life. The models and the narratives just do not compute with reality. And I think if we are going to succeed as a civilization moving forward, you have to come to grips and identify and recognize this and just accept what is the cold, hard truth of the world

and adapt to that. If not, again, the future is not as bright as it could be if we were focusing on the five criteria that you mentioned earlier in this conversation. And that's another thing that really has hardened my resolve in this whole conversation is nuclear, right? How has nuclear gotten to such a point where it's so villainized when, again, it's the densest form of energy that we have on this planet,

arguably the cleanest form in terms of CO2 emissions, And yet, everybody pushing wind and solar is not also pushing nuclear as well. Why has nuclear been demonized? Nuclear is the most powerful, reliable, low-emissions energy source we have. And it is inevitable, I believe, that we will power future civilization on nuclear power. I don't think there's any doubt in my mind about that. But the question is, how much suffering and how much hardship do we have to go through until enough people realize that and start to embrace it? And we've gone in fits and starts on it.

The genesis of the downfall of the nuclear movement really was in the 1960s and starting in the late 50s when people were conflating nuclear war with nuclear power, right? So the anti-war movement has invested so much time and energy into fighting against nuclear weapons, which understandable, right? No one wants the world destroyed by nuclear weapons and nuclear war. But they made a category error of assuming that nuclear power stations and power plants would lead and support nuclear weapons and nuclear war. And so I think the genesis of it and the association is like the spillover effect of that was really the beginning of it. Because even the environmental organizations originally, like the Sierra Club and folks, they were pro-nuclear way back in decades ago. So the reality is, is that nuclear by far is the safest way to make energy today. And this is just a statistical fact, right?

I mean, nuclear has been in commercial operation for 70 years. 20% of United States electricity comes from nuclear power. A lot of people don't know that. They think, oh, they don't really understand the magnitude, even today, of what we have almost basically 100 nuclear power plants generating 20% of our electricity today, which is showing that it's been operating safely and effective. Not one person in the United States of America has died due to nuclear radiation effect. Not one.

We had one nuclear accident in 70 years in the U.S. that was Three Mile Island, and no one died in it, right? It's horrible, a terrible incident. You never want to have accidents. But let's be real. I mean, we have industrial accidents all the time of large chemical plants, industrial facilities. I mean, it's an unfortunate reality when you build very complex machines that sometimes you have accidents.

But now the technology is so much more sophisticated than it was when these original plants were built and the safety mechanisms. I mean, we barely even had computers that worked well then. So, I mean, to compare plants that were built in the 1970s with a plant that we could build today is just insane. But even using the old technology, it's very safe. you know, in Fukushima, which is another horrible disaster, only one person died from radiation exposure. Yeah, people died in the evacuation due to the earthquake and tsunami and all that, but that wasn't due to nuclear radiation. And, you know, the biggest Chernobyl disaster, obviously, they did not have the containment systems that are used across the industry.

They were like, everything that you shouldn't do, they did, basically. And even in that horrendous disaster, only about 200 people have died due to radiation effects in the original accident. And the people that did get exposure and have some cancer risk, it's thyroid cancer, which is generally not fatal and it's very treatable. And it's a very small percentage of people that are actually having adverse life impacts in the scheme of things, right? So it's the same reason why some people are more scared to fly in an airplane than drive a car. It makes no sense statistically or just when you evaluate risk. But there are people that are scared to fly.

They think it's more dangerous, right? But it's not. I mean, we know that very few people die in plane crashes, but tons of people die, like, what, 30,000, 40,000 people die just in the U.S. in auto accidents every year. So it's the same thing applied to nuclear, where people are not applying statistical thinking and risk assessment to the level of potential risk involved in this.

So I don't see any reason why we shouldn't be building nuclear, especially in Western developed nations like the U.S., Europe, Australia, Canada. We should be going all in. And the reality is China is going all in. They're building 150 new nuclear power reactors right now. South Korea is going in. Other countries in the Middle East are building. We're the only ones that are stagnant. And not only stagnant, we're going in reverse.

You know, we've shut down Indian Point, New York, that supplied, I think it was about 25% of electricity of New York City. And what do we, they're just replacing that clean energy with fossil energy anyway, and their emissions are going to go up. They're not replacing that with solar and wind anyway. And now we're facing the potential shutdown of Diablo Canyon in California. It produces about close to 10% of the in-state electricity production in the state. And, you know, at a time where we're facing grid reliability issues and shortfalls, they're talking about the California Independent System Operators saying, telling us, warning us that we're going to likely have rolling blackouts due to not having enough electricity. They're even considering shutting down a safe operating nuclear plant that's supplying almost 10% is the height of insanity. Like, why are we doing this?

This is absolutely crazy to me. Yeah. I mean, you just mentioned Germany a bunch of times. You look at what they've done over the last two decades. They've decommissioned a number of nuclear power plants in favor of wind farms, and it's created disastrous consequences for them. They have the highest electricity cost per kilowatt hour in the developed world because of this transition. um it's i think germany is the best example because there's no country on earth that has invested more time more energy and more money they'll they'll have spent by 2025 the equivalent of 550 billion dollars to build a redundant grid of solar and wind power and when i say redundant i truly mean redundant because when you analyze the fossil fired power plants and kind of the infrastructure. They've had to keep 90% of all their fossil fired power plants, 90%. So they're going to spend $550 billion to build a redundant grid. Solar only works 12% of the time in Germany,

12%. That's crazy. They're over-investing in this unreliable low-grade power source that's working 12% of the time. Wind, they have massive wind droughts. In Europe in 2021, we had six months of wind droughts in Europe. In UK, the wind turbines in UK operated at 32% less power generation than they were expecting just in 2021 due to the six-month wind drought. And going back to Germany, you retweeted something I commented on one of your posts over the weekend. This, I think, is the best example because people have this fallacy thinking, well, we're going to develop battery technology and then batteries are going to kind of gloss you know help kind of make all this go away all this unreliability issues go away we'll be able to use batteries to store it

when the wind's not blowing the sun's not shining well that's absolutely craziness right germany they actually looked at 35 years of data i'm not talking about models of the future or estimating what could happen in the future there was this uh group that put together they went back 35 years in hour interval data. So you looked at every hour over 35 years. And what they found was within that period of time, there was a period of 61 days where you had scarce wind and sun, basically wind droughts and just cloudy days and just didn't have the resource there. So what that actually meant when they calculated, well, how many batteries would we need to cover that 61 days with just less sun and wind? What they came up with was 24 days of energy storage. That's 36

terawatt hours of energy. 36 terawatt hours of energy, 24 days, that's over three weeks of storage would be required for them to go to this 100% renewable energy fantasy goal that they have. So when you really think about that and you step down, they haven't in right now, guess how much battery storage is available in Europe, not just Germany, in the whole of Europe today. it's one minute and i think 22 seconds of battery storage uh of you know available basically in comparison to their their total grid uh needs so man i mean the entire continent of europe has one minute and 22 seconds of storage germany needs 24 days just that one country of energy storage to go to this ridiculous fantasy of 100 renewables so that gives that that gives you the orders of

magnitude and scale that we're talking about, and the cost of batteries, the amount of mining in chemicals and everything that's involved in making that, it's just astronomical. Why are we even doing this? This is the most backwards way to even think about designing an energy system that is so harmful to the environment, so resource unnecessarily extractive, and basically delivers an inferior low-grade product. It's inferior in almost every way. so why are we doing this that's that's a great question but that's maybe we can put this to rest

too but we just haven't hit the the we're still going down uh moore's law curve like we're going to hit uh efficiency gains uh in the future that that will make that that possible is this true is there a future to to steel man the argument in which the efficiency gains in terms of the amount of energy that solar panels and wind can harness and the amount of energy that this battery technology can store, is there gains that could be made over the next couple of decades that will make this a viable option? Solar, wind, and batteries are getting more expensive now, not less expensive. So this is an absolute category error of thinking there is no Moore's law that applies to these technologies. So commodity inflation, as we all know,

is happening around the world with the core ingredients that go into making these things. 50% to 70% of the cost to make a solar panel and wind turbine is just all of the raw materials, the minerals, the energy that goes into making it. And when the cost of those goes up, obviously, the cost of solar and wind has to go up. The largest wind turbine manufacturers in the world are losing money on every wind turbine they make right now. They're in negative profit margins. right? The entire industry is propped up by this whole network of production incentives and tax incentives, et cetera, and subsidies. And without it, it would just collapse overnight, right? And so it's not grounded in any solid economic viable foundation. And so these things are getting more

expensive overall as we go forward. They're not getting less expensive. And the reason why it's true that the cost of a solar panel or the cost of a wind turbine did drop like 80% or so over the last decade. So that's absolutely true. Now, why is that? Well, when you actually peel back the curtain and look for the overarching reasons why, the main reason why is because energy cost was low, right? We had really cheap energy over the last decade, which we obviously don't today globally. China was subsidizing cheap coal to make a lot of these various technologies. And not only were they subsidizing the energy side, they were subsidizing flooding those manufacturers with money in China because they wanted to undercut the competition in Europe

and the US. And they were successful. They basically bled Europe dry. There's very few, if any, I'm not aware of any solar manufacturers in Europe that are left. They've all left and gone to china wind turbine manufacturers there's a few big ones still left but those are now losing money hand over fist and those are are going to be gone soon the same thing in the u.s we have a little bit a little bit more capacity in the u.s for solar uh but that has dwindled to like a trickle um it's basically the whole supply chain is now in china right and there's this understanding that it's not complete where you know most people have heard the stat like 80 of the solar panels come from china right which sounds like a lot it is a lot but that's really not the whole story because

the components that make that the the polysilicon the solar grade polysilicon that goes into making that solar panel when you actually look at the wafer or the solar ingots etc that that get assembled into that now we're talking about near 99 are made in china in a lot of it is made in Xinjiang, where there's 45% of the polygrade solar polysilicon is made with slaves. So that's another reason your solar panels have gone down 80%. Not only is China overly subsidizing the energy and subsidizing the manufacturing, but now you have slave labor that is producing 45% of the solar grade polysilicon. And it's even worse than that. They don't even have real transparent tracking to know if your solar panel has slave labor components in it or not, because that

polysilicon gets blended with other polysilicon and there's no way to extract it or to to trace it so it's kind of ironic to me that a lot of the people that are talking about these esg virtue signaling um initiatives and they're worried about how many women are on a board um don't mind about slaves making their solar panels i mean that's kind of insane when you think about it because that's what we're talking about i'm not talking about like cheap labor and factories i'm talking about concentration camps, forced imprisonment, where you're forced to go work in a factory. That's what we're talking about here. So that's the social impact of making solar panels. And when we're talking about 95% of these core components are made there, now you layer in,

well, how does that work for energy security, right? Do we want our whole energy system to hold in on China, our biggest strategic adversary in the world today, the most powerful adversary? We're going to base that on when these systems only last like 20 years at the best, in the best case, and we need to replace these things. I mean, that makes no sense from not only a cost but energy security standpoint. So these are not getting cheaper anymore. They were for all the reasons I just described. And basically, a lot of cheap labor, a lot of cheap coal, a lot of subsidies from China that were helping to drive down the cost. And the last thing is low interest rates.

people forget. We were in a historic last decade state of low interest rates, cheap money, right? And that contributed to being able to produce these cheaper. Now we got higher interest rates, commodity inflation. All of these things are making the cost of making a wind turbine and a solar panel more expensive. And I'm kind of bought into Lynn Alden's view of this, of the 2020s being more like the 2040s and that we're likely to see this commodity inflation, energy inflation for the remainder of the decade. So if you believe that hypothesis is true, how in the world is the cost of a solar panel and work timber going to go down? It's only going to go up, right? And the higher the cost of energy for oil and gas, the more incentive there is to

drill for it. So that's another fallacy that people have about it, right? They think, well, if we just jack up the cost of fossil fuel energy, that'll make more people want to buy wind and solar. It's just the opposite. All that's going to do is increase the cost of the panels and the wind turbines and it's going to create greater incentives for the oil and gas industry to produce more oil and gas yeah critical thinking it's lacking these days yeah no but it's it's very in terms of energy security too that's the most frustrating part you mentioned the immense privilege we have here in the united states just purely on the landscape and the resources that we have below our feet here and there's this again this political unwillingness and this virtue

signaling that's not allowing us to tap into it. And like you mentioned with Mike Umbro in Kern County and the barrel of oil he produces is arguably the quote unquote cleanest barrel of oil that you can produce in the world. And there's other companies out there. I saw that you recently wrote a report on Liberty. We've had Chris Wright, the CEO of Liberty Oil on the podcast before and what they're doing in terms of being a very efficient and quote-unquote clean oil and gas producer is something that should be celebrated. But again, for some reason or another, there's this theme here in the United States where the oil and gas industry here on our land has been completely demonized when compared to the rest of the world, the way that we produce oil and gas is

arguably the cleanest way that can be produced. And so you would think that we would champion that and try to bring about more of that. And I really like that you highlighted what Chris and the team at Liberty are doing specifically. Yeah. And this is why shows like yours are so important and all the other folks that are trying to champion these ideas. Because I think the biggest problem we face today in this whole mess we're in is around storytelling, is around the narrative, right? Because we have a lot of people buying into a false narrative that is not grounded in physics and economics, and that is really threatens to destroy all the prosperity that we've built. We're basically like spoiled rich kids living off the past generation of wealth

and not contributing. And we're just eroding and eroding the quality and the reliability of our energy system every day. And it has dire consequences, especially for the poorest among us. So I think, you know, having people like yourself being very outspoken on this is incredibly important. And again, that's why I decided to speak up because these issues are just way too important. And so this narrative has put fossil fuels as the villains, as these greedy companies that are exploiting the land, exploiting our water and everything, doing whatever it takes to get them. And in reality, the opposite is true. The fossil fuel companies are the heroes in this story. Now, they're not perfect. I'm not trying to paint that the fossil

fuel industry has been perfect all along. They've made mistakes. They have work to do still to help capture more methane emissions, for example, from various drilling sites, et cetera. But the reality is they're the ones, they are kind of the backbone of human civilization right now. They're propping us up um and so instead of being grateful and just in giving them incentives to to um increase their efficiency and operate domestically we're doing exactly the opposite because of this narrative and so that's why i think storytelling is so important in this and and we know this i mean this is how hollywood works disney works every brand on the planet works people don't buy apple computers because of tech specs right that oh look how much this can process and how

how fast it is. You know, Nike doesn't sell clothes or rackets based upon how many athletes use their product. They sell Tiger Woods or Serena Williams going on this hero's journey and overcoming these amazing odds and being champions. And that's what we need to get back to. We need to tell the stories because the physics and economics are on our side, right? All the data, all the science, all of the foundational elements are there. What I think the energy industry is lacking is effective storytelling, right? They're incredibly talented scientists, technologists, engineers, and they're just bad at storytelling, to be blunt about it. And so we need more people telling this story. What do you like about Liberty's story specifically?

I think Liberty's story is one of the best to showcase because Chris Wright, in his background, He actually worked on solar and various renewable energy systems and nuclear early in his career. That's where the genesis of it. So he wasn't even coming into it, oh, I want to be an oil and gas executive. He was just inspired by kind of this bold vision of a clean energy future, really. And I think what he's done with Liberty is a great example. Well, first of all, Chris had a big role in helping to develop and kind of implement the original fracking revolution, right? But his company was doing a lot of the testing and diagnostics underground to kind of help facilitate fracking to happen.

So he played a pivotal role in that. And there's no doubt, I mean, we already know that the biggest emissions reductions in the United States over the last 20 years from a CO2 lens have come from switching from coal to natural gas. They've not come from solar and wind. So 61% of the emissions are from that switch to natural gas. And a lot of that is due to fracking. So Chris's role in kind of early in the fracking revolution, but then creating a company that is employing American jobs of American people here and producing kind of oil and domestic oil and gas for all the reasons I illustrated earlier about how that on all of these criteria, when we look at energy security, reliability, affordability, emissions, land use, all those things. You know, an oil and gas operation can operate like almost on a postage stamp, right, compared to a lot of these energy sources. They have limited disruption of the surrounding ecosystem. They're basically just drilling down deep into the earth.

And so I think their story is illustrative, and Chris does a fantastic job of talking about how energy is the basis of all human progress and human flourishing, right? He does a fantastic job of telling the story. A lot of energy executives, unfortunately, have put their head in the sand and just think no one's going to bother them if they just keep going along the same path. And clearly, that strategy is not working. I think we can all admit that we've kind of lost the narrative here right now. And we have some work to do to overcome a lot of this momentum that, unfortunately, is rolling down the path. yeah and another specific thing that i like about chris and what liberty is doing to educate the public is to highlight is how many end products that we use involve hydrocarbons right like his

campaign against north face when north face came out heavily against oil and gas uh he highlighted that it was extremely hypocritical hypocritical north face because a lot of the products that they sell to the consumer are made predominantly of hydrocarbons. Yeah, I think that's a great example, actually. And the genesis of that is there was a company called Inovex Downhole Solutions. The CEO is Adam Anderson. He's a great guy. I met him recently. And Adam just wanted to make a co-branded North Face jacket for his employees because he thought the quality of North Face jackets were great. He just wanted to put Inovex Downhole Solutions as a little logo on it for a Christmas present. That was what all he wanted to do. And North Face came back and said,

no, we're not going to co-brand. We don't want your logo on our jackets because you are a fossil fuel company and we think you are a villain and you are bad. And he was like, this is insane. So he wrote a letter to the CEO of North Face. The industry came together, created those billboards that basically said, you look great in that puffer jacket. Because the reality is all of North Face's products, to my knowledge, I can't think of a single North Face product where whether it's a tent, a sleeping bag, a backpack, down to a shirt or shorts, all of it is made from fossil fuels. So what the hell are they talking about? I mean, they wouldn't even exist as a company without companies like Inovex Downhole Solutions. And here, they won't even put their

brand on a jacket, right? And so, and then Chris was a part of that, obviously, that industry response and created that viral video. But that, I think, is a fantastic example of pointing out the hypocrisy. The story is obvious. Anyone that can't see that North Face products are all made using oil and gas is either just completely ignorant or willfully blind not to see that reality. And so we have to highlight that. We have to point this out to people that everything around me right now, everything I'm touching from this microphone to the clothes I'm wearing to the desk to my light, everything is made from oil and gas. There's very few things. You could even go an hour i don't think in your day without touching dozens of things made from oil and gas yeah unless

you're sleeping in the woods naked and then you wouldn't be very comfortable yeah uh no it's i'm hope i hope these i'm very happy that you came on that you're telling the story that you you are because i think considering your your background your experience and the hero's journey that you've gone through yourself is a very powerful story to get out there to people. I do completely 100% agree that the world that we live in today is very much narrative driven and the people on the side of reliable energy production and delivery have not been telling a good narrative for a couple decades at least. And it's time to begin counter punching on the narrative front because like we've been saying throughout this whole conversation, human lives depend on it. Yeah. And that's what

I'm trying to do with my Twitter is just put out a lot of content every day so people can see these stories or combat some of these false narratives that are out there. I'm trying to write long-form articles and publish in various trade media and other magazines. People can go to my website, too, briangit.com, if they want to see some of the long-form articles. My Twitter is at briangit. Those are ways that people can find me and see some of this content. But ultimately, I just want to spread this as far and wide as I can. And I really appreciate folks like yourself having me on. Alex Epstein has been a really great supporter, and he invited me down to Southern California

for an event down there to meet Peter Thiel and a bunch of energy executives. He's been very supportive. Michael Schellenberger and many others. And so I think we really need to amplify as many voices as possible and build this coalition. You know, we really need to build a movement around this. And this can't just be kind of a hodgepodge effort of a few voices here and there. I mean, we're in an ideological war, and whoever tells the best story wins, ultimately. I mean, that's what we're facing. And we need to build a movement that is coalescing around this and bringing in as many people that have different backgrounds and connections and resources as possible to combat these false narratives. Yes, I completely agree. And I guess this is a Bitcoin podcast and I've came to this discussion via Bitcoin mining specifically. I've seen you intermingling more with the Bitcoin sphere. What are your thoughts on Bitcoin? Do you see and do you agree with the ways in which the Bitcoin mining industry is highlighting that it can help out in terms of energy efficiency? I think the Bitcoin mining console is making the same mistake that I made. I would agree there.

Basically, I think that there, you know, I think many of them, I'm sure, are well-intentioned and kind of looking at this from a pragmatic standpoint, thinking that, well, we have to check this ESG box. But I think they're really seeding the playing field and making a strategic error. Because we've been talking for an hour about all of the deficiencies of this low-grade, inefficient, over-consuming, polluting power source that is solar and wind power. solar and wind are not going to be able to solve this problem. And I think it is just going to fuel this ESG effort in these false narratives by just kowtowing to them and saying, well, look how much Bitcoin mining is happening using solar and wind power, because that is not the solution to this. Again, zooming out, what is our goal? We're trying to protect and improve human lives, protect and improve the environment. We know that solar and wind are not the most effective tools to get us there. We know that nuclear and natural gas are the most effective

tools to get us there. That doesn't mean that we can stop burning coal everywhere. Obviously, in India and in China, they're going to be burning coal and they're going to burn coal for decades, actually. But certainly in more developed countries, we should be accelerating towards switching from coal to natural gas and then into nuclear as much as possible. And then I think Bitcoin miners holding up, basically propping up this false narrative around solar and wind is not helpful. It's counterproductive. And all it's going to do is just increase the service of the attack vector. Because you think they're going to wait. Let's just say you have 90% of all the Bitcoin mining is all renewables. You think they're

going to somehow just leave you alone i mean it's crazy they're not gonna leave you alone then it turns to oh the bitcoin miners using the renewables that could be used elsewhere i mean that's another that's another drum i've been beating uh in the industry specifically is stop doing this stop kowtowing right it's nothing's ever going to be good enough for for these people it won't because they don't think that bitcoin has value and if you don't think bitcoin has value then no energy investment in it makes any sense. So that's the core issue. And I think the more engagement on this is a really big strategic error going down that path. Do you think Bitcoin has value? Yeah. I've put a substantial part of my net worth in Bitcoin. About a year and a half ago,

when a lot of these ideas started to gel after many years of building up and taking shape, um i i took you know basically a quarter of my net worth um and invested it in specific traditional energy companies uh and a quarter of it into bitcoin and so i am huge bitcoin bull um you know big believer in it um you've been very helpful in helping educate me on my journey and in the bitcoin space as well as others and uh so yeah i'm all in on bitcoin oh yeah love to hear I'd love to hear that. You got some value from the show. No, it's...

That's like Bitcoin mining specifically. People focus on wind and solar. Like, oh, it's going to incentivize the build out of that. I'm like, no, we should be drilling more efficiently. We can bring more oil to market. Maybe we have a first buyer of nuclear energy while reactors are waiting for transmission lines to get built out.

That's where I like to focus the narrative is like the future of the cheap, abundant, secure energy system here in the United States. And Bitcoin mining can definitely play a part in that. But I completely agree. I think the Bitcoin Mining Council and those in the industry who are pointing like,

hey, look how many renewables we're using are making a, I don't think it's going to be a fatal mistake. Maybe it's a fatal mistake for them in the long run, but it is a big error in terms of narrative. And we need to begin pushing back. Energy is good. human flourishing is good like you can't push humanity forward without more energy and that's

something that people just need to come to grips with accept and with that acceptance go for saying all right how do we do this as efficiently and as clean as possible yeah one thing i wanted to ask you around this narrative of bitcoin acting as this kind of uh first rider refusal to go offline when there's a power emergency almost acting like this battery storage for the grid. To me, that makes no sense from a variety of standpoints. But just from a strict Bitcoin mining perspective, I'd be curious to hear your thoughts on this. Because the whole point of being a miner is to optimize use of the machines. You want to be running 24-7 as much as possible. So to consciously design a system to support, let's say, a solar farm out somewhere

where you know that you're only going to have sun 8 to 10 hours a day, and you know you're going to be offline or you're going to have to use grid resources the rest of the time or have more downtime. Why would any Bitcoin miner even contemplate that? That doesn't even make sense to me. It doesn't to me either. That's why

I focus, that's why I like off-grid natural gas because you can get a sustained stream of gas that doesn't have any competition in terms of buyers and the operations that I run have very high uptime because we're not competing with anybody else for that electricity source i mean there is

when it comes to like demand response like i think demand response makes sense uh on grid when you have a reliable baseload like if you have a nuclear power plant that you want to produce for peak demand i think it makes sense to have bitcoin miners eat up that excess capacity when peak demand isn't here and then when peak demand does arrive and you need to shut down it makes sense if you're engaged in a contract that allows you to sell that electricity to grid at the market price at that given point in time so that your lost bitcoin revenue is supplanted by electricity selling revenue that makes sense to me but again there's a lot of nuance yeah when it comes to operating a mining operation purely on solar or wind that the downtime alone like

would make it completely uneconomical in my mind um i with that being said i personally just have not um read any of those proposals or explored that just because i have that um that thought off the bat it's not reliable so i'm going to go focus on natural gas has been my mentality but yeah like just from a pure um analysis standpoint the unreliability and the downtime that comes wind and solar for me as somebody who's investing in mining computers and power generation like that's too much of a of a risk for me personally yeah it seems like it'll cannibalize the economics i mean i get it that it can be bitcoin miners can be a useful asset to the grid in an emergency like in a in a really critical time like in texas where the whole thing is going to shut down and

you can shut down bitcoin miners then great that's a fantastic service can provide the grid but It doesn't seem like that should be the overarching design principle where you're trying to optimize around that or that you want to design your Bitcoin mining operation to try to leverage those kinds of situations as much as that should be such an infrequent occasion to ever happen, right? I mean, I just don't understand this kind of whole mode of pitching Bitcoin mining is this great way to kind of moderate and kind of deal with this unreliability of renewables. yes yeah and again the nuance like i think it makes sense with something like nuclear and that gas power plants like turn off sell the electricity as long as you're supplanting that that mining revenue with us dollar revenue from the electricity cost that makes sense but yeah the that's why i worry about here in texas like again i have no skin in the mining game in texas in terms of operations all my operations are elsewhere throughout the country but i have skin in the

game as a texas resident and i see a lot of the bitcoin miners going throughout west texas and other parts of the state and saying yes well you can build that wind plant that wind farm that solar farm um we'll we'll come in and buy that electricity uh and as a texan uh that perturbs me a bit because it's like no we should be incentivizing the build out of more reliable baseload in nuclear natural gas maybe potentially clean coal if we can get it like i'm they're talking about rolling blackouts here this summer and i'm about to have a newborn baby i'm like i don't want to be in 110 degree heat and the air conditioning go off when i have a newborn we should not be pushing the expansion of these unreliable sources uh in favor of reliable sort

Again, there's a lot of category errors that many are falling down, particularly here in Texas. I mean, the Texas mining meme is a big one right now. And that's the other thing that I've been warning people in the industry and those at the Bitcoin Mining Council have been pushing this narrative. It's like you're setting yourself up for a big narrative fail in the future. Because imagine if all this unreliable capacity gets built out and miners were the ones championing it and you have grid instability in the future, like they're going to point and people are like, what the hell? Why did you incentivize this? Yeah, and that's happening. I mean, in Texas, $34 billion is going to subsidize renewables on the grid.

I mean, this is massive subsidies. And what that's doing, they're acting like parasites because all of the incentives are pushing people to invest in solar and wind in West Texas, which is great for those developers. But it's horrendous for the residents of Texas and the business of Texas because what that's doing is cannibalizing the other thermal power plants and making them more economically unviable because they're operating the way that the system is designed. The renewable resources get first preference onto the grid. They can actually sell their power into the grid at a loss because they make it up in all the subsidies they get. So that makes the other thermal power plants like a natural gas plant run less amount during the year, eroding the economics of keeping that plant maintained and operating, destroying any incentive to build a thermal power plant based on fossil energy in Texas because all of these preferences and subsidies to renewables. Right. And so what's happening is the grid is becoming more and more fragile, more and more unreliable. And just just by overbuilding renewables is not going to solve that reliability problem. It just makes it it's creating more chaos in the system. Right. I mean, electricity in the energy system is trying to bring bring order to the chaos of our world. Right. I mean, that's what energy does. But we're doing the exact opposite. By loading up on all of these unreliable distributed generation energy sources, we're introducing more complexity, more chaos that has to be managed in eroding the economics of our stable thermal baseload, right?

And this is a colossal failure of vision and strategy because people are going to die, number one. And number two, it's going to erode the economic kind of foundation of businesses being able to operate effectively. It's not just Texas. We're seeing this in California as well where I'm sitting. So this is a huge problem, and it's going to have massive consequences. I completely agree. will people please wake up to reality and and begin focusing on reliability over virtue saying so that's the other thing like subsidies like if i believe it was trump might have been biden but

somebody extended the renewable energy credits uh that that are a lot of which is subsidizing this build out like what happens when those subsidies dry up like do you like think about the the problem that like god god forbid the i mean well if we want efficient markets i don't think the subsidies should exist but like when the subsidies run out and it becomes glaringly obvious that these these operations are not profitable at all you're just going to have a bunch of solar panels and wind turbines sitting in the middle of of the country doing nothing right it's already happening um and this is happening in europe uh to some degree today what they've found, the Renewable Energy Foundation did some analysis on wind turbines in the UK and

other parts of Europe. And these are prime, I mean, there's more wind capacity and power there almost anywhere in the world in some of these locations. And what they found is even in these very desirable areas with lots of wind resource, that after about 16 years, a wind turbine degrades in its kind of generational capacity and efficiency for offshore wind it's 50 of the output of when it was built right so after 16 years it's just degrading slowly slowly and about 50 for onshore it's about 30 i think it's 37 percent um less output after 16 years and then once they so the the maintenance goes sky high right because it takes a lot more first of all it makes no sense in an offshore seawater environment of course you're going to have tons of corrosion all this

kind of impacts of the weather on this machine. So it takes a lot of money and time and effort to keep them running, especially as they get older and older and have less output. But then you take away that tax credit in that subsidy, then it just doesn't make any sense to keep them running. So a lot of the false assumptions around levelized cost of energy that we see all over the place, they assume these wind turbines are going to last for like 30 years When they're not, they're going to be taken off of out of operation to be generous after 20, but some of them are going to be well before that just because it's going to cost too much to operate them and they're not going to continue to get the subsidies after that. And once that stops, there's no reason to run them. So the whole industry will collapse if it doesn't have, it's not propped up by all these tax incentives and subsidies. Yeah, the LCOE is something that people really lean into. Like, look, look at the LCOE. It makes sense economically. That's game. Yeah, it's apples and oranges. It's just a totally disingenuous way to compare energy sources because solar and wind power act as expensive, wasteful add-ons to the grid for all the reasons we talked about. They don't provide storage or these reliability functions to the grid.

And so how are you going to, it's like if you had two cars, let's say you're going to buy two cars. In one car, you can drive for, let's say, eight hours a day during certain time periods. And that's it. So too bad if you need to go somewhere at night or you need to go for a longer distance or something. And the other car that you have the option to buy, you can run 24-7, 365, right? Is the value of those two cars the same? Of course not. No one's going to put the value of those two cars the same. But for some crazy reason, that's what we're doing when we are saying so-called levelized cost of energy. We're comparing a solar farm and a natural gas power plant as having the same value.

It's insane. It makes no sense. Yeah, like taking the cars out, like you have a propane tank and a solar panel and you want to fire up a grill at night or create energy to create electricity on a camping site. The solar panel is not going to work for you, obviously. And you know the sad thing about this intermittent reliability issue is there was a study that was looked into this case with Duke Energy in North Carolina. What they found is that because they were ramping up the power plant up and down, it

seemed like you drive a car, right? When you're on the highway, you get better gas mileage versus in the city, you're stop starting, stop starting. And every time you hit a stop sign or stoplight, you use more fuel, right? When you're stopping and starting. Same thing with the power plant. When you have to ramp up and down the natural gas power plant to accommodate for when the solar is on and off and clouds are moving over and or wind is intermittent, basically

you are using fuel, natural gas, inefficiently. And you're actually generating more emissions than if you were just running the natural gas plant, it even keel the whole way. So what they found was that air pollution went up with the amount of solar penetration in their service territory, which is crazy. Like the whole reason, supposedly, you're putting a solar farm in is to reduce air pollution and CO2. I don't really – can't think of any other reason why you would do it. And here, because it's forcing the power plant to operate in this very inefficient manner, you're actually increasing the air pollution than if you would have just run natural gas in the first place, right? So this just destroys the whole value proposition.

Yeah. And that story is mind-boggling. I got into a debate with a Bitcoiner. It's like, that's not true. I'm like, no, it is. Like, here's the Duke Energy. And then they go, well, they're just trying to besmirch solar so that oil and natural gas is favored over solar.

But it's like, no, just think about it. Like you just said, when you start and stop, you're going to create excess emissions. It's just the way these things work. It would make much more sense to just run the NatGas power plant 24-7, 365 and deliver that energy to people instead of virtue signaling about this. And then when it comes to EVs and charging stations, that's another thing. People just think, oh, I have this electric car. It is 100% renewable and using clean energy.

But those charging stations are powered by something at the end of the day. All you're doing, electric vehicles just shift the emissions from the tailpipe to the power plant. which can be more efficient. I'm not totally anti-electric vehicles in all cases, but you're not basically avoiding the emissions. They're getting burned somewhere. So if you're burning coal to create energy to charge your electric car,

don't pretend that somehow you're not having the emissions associated with the coal. The problem with electric vehicles is that the embodied energy to create them is so high. And you even look at Tesla's annual report or any of these car makers' reports, They all admit that there's a lot more embodied energy and CO2 out of the factory than a traditional internal combustion vehicle of a similar size, make, model, weight, et cetera, right? They all admit that.

And then the debate comes in, well, how long do you have to drive it before it makes up for that debt, right, that extra energy? Because of the weight of an electric vehicle battery, it's typically about 1,000 pounds. So you have all these minerals of cobalt and lithium, et cetera, that are going into the battery. Well, now you have 1,000 pounds in the vehicle. You have to increase the thickness of the structure of the steel, the aluminum of the frame of the car. And that takes a lot of embodied energy to make that, right? So it's all compounding to use more energy up front than a traditional vehicle. And then it depends on, again, where the energy is coming from to charge it, how often it's driven, et cetera, how long it's driven.

And a big problem, too, is a lot of the electric vehicle charging stations aren't even working. There was a recent report out in the Bay Area that someone did a survey of all the electric vehicle charging stations that 23 percent of them didn't work when they went to go charge the vehicle for a variety of reasons. Like the screen interface was down or the cord was too short to reach the car. They had a whole bunch of different connection issues, et cetera. So there's all these issues surrounding it. I'm not against inherently the idea of electric vehicles, but to pretend that they're a better technology today when they take, obviously, a long time to kind of recharge versus a traditional gasoline car. They're limited in range. They still have a lot of these emission issues that you have to figure out.

and they cost more. As gasoline prices go up, you see people saying, oh, this is why we should drive electric. Well, you're paying a lot more for the vehicle up front to begin with. So what are you talking about? You're basically just front-loading your cost

and you may or may not ever get that back depending on how long you have the car or how far you drive it. So it doesn't make sense from a lot of different perspectives. Yeah, talk about another regressive tax. It's like telling poor people, oh, just drive an electric vehicle.

yeah sorry especially these are subsidized there's it's our taxpayer money especially lower middle income people are paying into the tax base that is subsidizing wealthy people to drive these vehicles so that that just makes no sense yeah virtue signaling all around we need to get back to sanity and i think you're helping us do that um so brian it's been a fascinating conversation. Thank you so much. I really appreciate not only having me on, but all of your thought leadership in the space. I've learned a ton for you over the years on my Bitcoin journey. And it's just such a pleasure to chat with you and talk about this stuff. No, well, again, the feeling is mutual here. I mean, the amount of quality information that

you're putting out on the energy sector has helped me up my game as well. So this is a symbiotic relationship here and uh hopefully um we'll be able to do this again sometime maybe even in person that would be incredible i would love it yeah let's do it well i mean you so you have your you have your website brian grit that brian get.com correct uh-huh um find brian on twitter at brian get that's g-i-t-t two t's uh keep crushing it man i think we're gonna win i think we're gonna shift the narrative we just gotta get more of these conversations into more minds out there let's build this army let's go all right um well i hope you enjoy the rest of your day um that's all we got today freaks peace and love