The Highwire with Del Bigtree - ENERGY CRISIS’ HITS HOME

Episode Date: September 12, 2022

The energy crisis is escalating. Europe is reeling after Russia cut off its gasoline supply. California struggles with energy, while another state took control of residents’ home thermostats. Is the US headed for disaster under the ‘NetZero’ push?#XcelEnergy #AnnalenaBaerbock #Nordstream1 #Russia #NetZeroBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-highwire-with-del-bigtree--3620606/support.

Let's go over to the UK ITVs show Good Morning. It's a very popular morning show there. They recently went from kind of lighthearted messaging to kind of a tone-deaf dystopia. Take a look at this. Okay. Here we go. So we've got we'll pay your energy bills. We've got a thousand pounds as well.

So this is energy bills, I think, for four months if it stops on that. Nice. So how are your energy bills? Are you a bit worried about it all? Oh, I'm major. Yeah. I've got one of these prepayment meters, and it's absolutely murder. Oh, God.

Right, well, let's hope it lands on one of those then. Whatever you're going to win some money, so don't worry. Here we go. One way or another. Here we go. Round and round it goes, where it stops, nobody knows. Dada, thousand pounds or energy bill. Thousand pounds or energy bill. It is going to be. It's your energy bill. Oh, my God, thank you.

We are paying your energy bill for four months. Oh, fantastic. No worries. Oh, what a relief. Thank you very much. Listen, well done you. That's brilliant. Boy, are we slipping closer and closer to the hunger games here.

It's like entertainment. Will he feed his family or get to heat his house? Let's spin for the rest of his life. Does he survive or not? I mean, it's so crazy. And it's so bad there, right? I mean, these energy bills literally, we talked about this. We talked about the last several weeks, you know, up to four or five times the amount it was last year and continuing.

So it was amazing. You didn't see him going, oh, I really want to win the thousand pounds. A thousand pounds was nothing compared to his home energy bill. Really amazing. I mean, what's going on here? Where are we at? So one of the big headlines recently I just came out, and this is the ripple effect here. and this is really where it's going to have the showdown. So the European Union, most of Europe,

gets its gas from gas prom, this pipeline. And European energy prices start after Russia cuts off a natural gas pipeline to Germany. This is a Nord Stream 1 pipeline. It's a Russian state-owned company, Gas Prom owns it. And they're basically saying, you know, it's kind of a fog of war right now. This is like an energy war that we're in. And Russia is saying, look, because of the sanctions, we have a turbine that's broken, one of our major turbines at one of the engine pumping stations, we can't restart this thing. It needs to be fixed. The paperwork can't go through because the sanctions. So lift the sanctions, we'll restart it. And Germany is saying, because Germany is the biggest importer of Russian oil over 50% before the Russian-Ukraine conflict. They've been trying to cut that back, obviously.

We've been reporting on that in ways they've been doing it. But they're saying, look, it's not the sanctions. You're using this as war. So, you know, they're one side saying one thing, one side's saying the other, but the population is caught in the middle of this. And let's listen to, so are these sanctions coming off? What is Germany going to do? Let's listen to their foreign minister. Her name is Annalina Berbach, and she recently was in public and had this to say about the sanctions. Take a listen. If I give the promise to people in Ukraine, we stand with you as long as you need us. Then I want to deliver, no matter what my German voter think, but I want to do it.

deliver to the people of Ukraine. And this is why for me it's important to be always very frank and clear. And this means every measure I'm taking, I have to be clear that this holds on as long as Ukraine needs me. We are facing now wintertime where we will be challenged as democratic politicians. People will go on the street and say, we cannot pay our energy prices. And I will say, yes, I know, so we help you with social measures. But I don't want to say, okay, then we stop the sanctions against Russia.

We will stand with Ukraine and this means the sanction will stay also in wintertime, even if it gets really tough for politicians. These are really, I mean, it's amazing. These are those moments when I look at and think I would never really want to be president in the United States or something like that. But a shocking statement that we essentially were more committed to the war in Ukraine than we are to our own people. At least you could take it like that.

And I think the same thing is we start seeing, you know, issues here, financial issues, the billions of dollars being poured into some other country. And then you just think, where would that investment be if it was invested into our own country? And I'm sure in Germany, as we've talked about, they're planning on what heating museums and libraries for the elderly, people are going to die over there that this doesn't get worked out. And it just seems more important that they sort of stay in this war. I don't know, just really odd decision making at the moment as we look around the world. Yeah, and, you know, Annalina there said that even if there's tests in the winter,

we don't have to wait until the winter to see the protests. We're seeing these protests happening in Prague right now. Here's the headline of American newspapers. 70,000 protests in Prague against Czech government, EU, and NATO. And they're basically calling for neutrality in the Russian-Ukrainian war, and they're protesting all their energy prices. everything like that. So this is this is where we're going there. People are taking to the streets already and they're identifying NATO. It's interesting as the North American Treaty Organization.

It's an intergovernmental military alliance that has been over decades slowly surrounding Russia. So it's interesting that they're saying, stop with this military, this military interventionism and pushing Russia to this possible invasion. A lot of a lot of historians have said that's, that's really one of the reasons this happened here. So you have a populace. is very educated now with their protesting and their demands, their specific demands. And in that article here, this is what one of the organizers said. He said, quote, the aim of our demonstration is a demand change, mainly in solving the issue of energy prices, especially electricity and gas, which will destroy our economy this autumn,

event co-organizer, Yari Havall told IDNES.c.Z News. And so a couple weeks ago, we reported on these PPM meters, these prepaid meters. And that's what the gentleman said in the wheel of, wheel of energy there. These things are going across the UK and Europe especially. And this is the headline here. They're now being, they're now forcing them on customers. So smart meter fury, homeowners left in tears after men broke into house to install meter. Now, a couple weeks ago we reported they were automatically going to be switching people over these prepaid meters.

It's a form of smart meter where you have to like the name says, you have to prepay before you get your energy. And there's obviously issues if you can't do that. And this is off-gen. It's the government regulator for the electricity. They're the people that are doing this in Scotland, in this case, but in the UK as well. And so that's the, you know, so to speak, that's the temperature in Europe, which is a pretty dire one going into the winter here. How is it happening in the United States? What's going on here?

Well, let me be honest. Like, I mean, you know, I know we get, you know, we talk about like paying off college here and things like that, which really only affects some, you know, group of people that went to college. How about all those that already paid there? We have those discussions, right? But when you look at a situation like this, really honestly, this seems to me where the government, if they want to be in some war and be involved in this thing, why aren't there subsidies happening there? Why are the people being forced to sort of take the brunt of these what are really geopolitical

situations? And they're just choices made by the politicians. So we can, again, send billions of dollars over to other nations to just blow buildings apart and what have you. but where is it, you know, I think about this in the housing crisis we had. You know, where we had been, have we just taken care of the people that own the homes instead of bailing out the banks? This is the type of thing that just really starts to, you know, upset me. I'm sure there's libertarians out there screaming, Del, no, you don't get it.

I don't fully get this. This is where I get really confused on if there's money going out, where should it go? You know, shouldn't it take care of the people in a country that are paying taxes in that country? Right. And you know, today's day and age, people don't really have the appetite for war that they used to saying World War II or even the Iraq War where there, you know, World War II, there's a populace that was behind them. The sanctions were worth it. But now this directly affecting people's food and energy bills and their ability to live and heat and feed their families with a war that's really not that popular. I mean, outside of like the Hollywood elites or the mainstream media. So it's interesting how this thing is going to play out in on the population. I mean, Prague may just be. an example of what is to come. In the United States, this is what we're looking at here in Colorado. It's a state you're familiar with. This is the headline coming out of there. Thousands of Excel customers locked out of thermostats during energy emergency. 22,000 people lost controller temperatures in their homes. And we have a little screenshot here of what that look like.

These are the thermostats, the smart thermostats that they have. And you can get the little things on the phones, like the alerts on the phones. And it says here, temperature locked temporarily due to energy emergency. They're calling a rare energy emergency. Now, this is a shocking headline, of course, but it's important to understand that the people that had this happen to them, the XL customers, and a lot of states have this with XL,

it's called an XL AC rewards program. So you actually opt into this. So when times where the energy is surging in those areas, you agree to let them change your thermostat. Now, the contention here was, that they were locked out. So a lot of the customers said, look, I went into this thinking,

well, I can help the grid. You guys can just play around with my thermostat as you need to in the hot days, but they didn't know that they couldn't change it. They couldn't opt out and say, look, I turn this off. I want my air conditioning back on, so I'm really having a hard time here. So that was one of the big things in the article.

And let us be clear. I mean, this is just a trial on a small group of people. This is clearly where all of these things want to go. So as you're installing these smart meetings, all of your home and your nest machines and all that. Did you read all the fine print? I don't even buy those things because I'm not going to sit down to it. But I'll bet you somewhere in that fine print says that if this, you know, we decide to

make a deal with your energy company, they may actually be able to jump in here and circumvent you, your cell phone and your own energy. But what I think is critical right now is to show that these types of measures, we keep looking. I know we're an international show, but we're here in America. We just keep looking at these stories in other countries like, oh, that'll never happen. Here I can, you know, just continue to waddle on through my life not worrying about these things. But clearly that's not the case. They are working on measures so that they can control us here too on these exact situations.

So it's really, it's very disturbing. And the fact that it's all happening at the same time around the world, just like COVID. I just don't remember when we lived in the world where every single nation was like moving in the same. same exact direction at the same exact time. It's almost like there's a smaller group in charge of the entire world and not necessarily our own political leaders, but that would be a conspiracy theory and I'm not going to go there. Yeah, it's important to understand that the technology, obviously this framework exists. These aren't beta tests. These are operational technologies that are being used on tens of thousands of people, if not more. I mean, that's one headline. But a couple of

weeks ago, we covered this from California as well. A lot happening in that state again. And this was California to ban the sale of new gasoline cars. And that was a shock headline for a lot of people. But now the California is experiencing an energy crisis of its own because of the heat wave and the air conditioning units being used there. So this is the headline coming out of California just after the one we just showed. California won't let you charge the electric car who wants to force you to buy. Kind of cheeky.

I was saying. I was saying that just like a week or two ago, right? I mean, when they said this, we're going to move to fully electric cars, but we're going to have rolling blackouts. So then if you're not ready for the amount of electric cars on the road right now, can you imagine when that's all you can buy in California? It just shows how stupid this whole thing really is. And when they say rolling blackout, that's the next headline here.

California's potential rolling blackouts, what are they who are affected? And this was the headline. But they called a level three energy emergency. And these were color-coded emergencies, you know, just the to use to you know like like red lights green lights just yeah to scare people kind of like the war on terror or covid we've talked about that before the the social programming on that but these it was a level three emergency apparently it has it has reversed to the point where they're not going to do these rolling blackouts so the potential was hanging for a couple days there but you know

until until this temperature breaks as we're told it's it's going to be back and forth hopefully they won't have to go to rolling blackouts but understand that if you're sitting on the side of the road charging your Tesla, rolling blackout means it's done. The energy is gone. So you're going to sitting there for another couple hours. Hopefully it's not nighttime. Right.