The Highwire with Del Bigtree - NET ZERO A BIG ZERO?

Episode Date: April 22, 2023

Without a proper risk-benefit analysis, governments have embarked on deindustrializing their nations, seemingly in unison, to make way for the unscientific and unattainable net zero dream. But, are they succeeding, or is Net Zero a big Zero?Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-highwire-with-del-bigtree--3620606/support.

Let's talk about the transition the United States is currently in, transitioning from our current energy power sources to electric, wind, solar, and also the entire automobile fleet. This is the headline that just happened recently. Out of Reuters, Biden, U.S. proposes 56% vehicle emissions cut by 2032 requiring big EV jump. Biden saying 67% of vehicles sold by 2032 should be electric or they want to be electric. 37% of cars in America within the next 10 years will all be electric. I mean, what is that? What do we have something like 280 million cars out there on the road? 67%?

I'm going to just get with that. Roughly 190 million cars are going to be taken off the road that are burning gas right now. We'll call it Mountain Car Everest. You know, we're going to build this giant rusty heap of dead cars that weren't obsolete, but made obsolete by an authoritarian policy, it appears. Right, exactly. And so we can look over to the European Union, to the UK, who's already into this push a little further than we are. And we can see some of the headlines coming out of there. Let's look at how that's doing. The backlash has begun against net zero's relentless

war on driving. It says a fanatical obsession with congestion charges, low traffic zones and electric cars is ignoring the needs of the majority of ordinary people. Again, you're going to hear that. Ignoring the needs of ordinary people is a big part of this. And so charging stations, Let's talk about that because we have a lot of cars to transition here, 278 million in the United States. Let's look how that's going in the UK. Headline ban on petrol and diesel cars by 2030. Unrealistic electric charger network won't be ready. It says in the article, estimate suggests that around 280,000 to 480,000 chargers will need it across the country by 2030 to fulfill demand from drivers.

Currently, they're around 28,000. And if you look at this graph here, you can see this is basically the cars that have been ready. registered from 2016 to 2022. You can see almost about 800,000 cars and they have 28,000 charger stations. I don't know where the planning is going there, but the clock's ticking. You got about seven good years left to get that done. I don't know if that's going to happen. But some countries are actually looking at this and pushing back. So a European Union was going to vote on this car ban, banning petrol and diesel cars. And Germany and Italy blocked Brussels from banning this. That is the headline. Now, Germany has been in talks,

try to find some type of work around around this, but not all countries are hook line and sinker on this because they possibly are looking and seeing that this may not be able to be done. I mean, here's what I find so shocking. And by the way, I have to make this caveat because I want to be understood by my audience. I am, I have always been for a clean environment. I still am. I consider myself an environmentalist, though I'm looking for a new word. Maybe I'm a conservationist now. But here's the truth. I think we should be across party lines, Republican, Democrat, Libertarian, whatever it is. We should agree that our air can be cleaner, that there are cleaner ways to burn fuels. There are better technologies that are out there. And we should utilize those because our children have asthma and all sorts of health issues that cost hundreds of millions of dollars in medical problems every year in America that could be alleviated by cleaner air. I think we should all be able to agree that just like Huckleberry Finn, used to be able to go down and fish out of a river and eat it, that those of us that like to fish with our kids should be able to go to any river in America, pull a fish out, go home and grill it,

and not be told you just poison your children and your family. While that is the case, we have work that we can do together. I believe in the immediate that there's an issue that we can all start working together to say, how do we clean all this up? How do we use technology? How do we use the free market space to make things better and cleaner? Great. I'm for all that. What I'm not into is enslavement by some idea that the ocean is going to be a foot deeper or 100 years from now, like that somehow has an effect or that you have any proof that we're going to get there. The immediate is where this conversation needs to be. And also, we need to be reasonable.

This idea, I mean, when I think about this right now, that 67% of our cars are going to be electric within the next 10 years, I challenge anyone in my family and my friends that still, you know, that are part of that clean earth that we've all dreamed about our whole lives. How the hell is this going to happen without destroying countless lives? First of all, what you are going to do is you're going to take all of these needed resources like cobalt and lithium and, you know, all the others, you know, things that we're going to, I mean, it's amazing. Shut down coal mining, but it's okay to mine copper and lithium and, you know,

cobalt with child labor. Look at these fields, these lithium fields. How the heck is that considered environmental? This is what we want? Oh, this is okay. Toxic sludge spewed across large, vast, you know, spaces of the earth. I don't understand it. Solar panels covering our mountains.

This is the future. This is environmentally sound. Look, I'm open to conversations, but we're talking about child labor. You were about to, you want to talk about warlords in Africa. What infrastructure is going to be built for this demand? We are going to turn these rare minerals into blood diamonds. You don't think that's the case, then you clearly are just lined yourself. This is an interesting video that was just recently out where these people,

like, I don't know how regulated this is, are trying to save each other from collapsing minds while they're trying to get these earth-friendly cars built that Biden's got rushing onto the market. This is absolutely pure and total insanity right now. We should be reasonable. We should be moving forward. I'm going to say this too. I have solar panels on my house. I like them.

I bought the house that way and I put solar panels on other houses. It reduced my cost. The market made it interesting and affordable. And I would also say I've thought about if I have an electric car that I can charge during the days, sometimes off my own solar panels, maybe I am going to be able to reduce some of the pollution out there. But it's a personal choice. And the market is allowing me to make that choice. I don't need an authoritarian government coming in and destroying the economy around me.

And by the way, an administration that claims to care about those underserved or those, those that are, you know, living paycheck to paycheck like Ernest that we just talked about. What's he going to do? You can't tell me he's out going to buy a Tesla next year and the next 10 years? I mean, come on. This makes absolutely no sense at all. And one of the issues that I'm finding is scratching underneath the surface of this climate situation and the climate push, whether it's taking of the farms in the Netherlands, whether it's, you know, trying to throttle the American car fleet, is this obsession by government industry to control and restrict down to the very smallest aspects of our lives.

And it's beautifully encapsulated in this headline here. This is just a recent headline. One of many, sees property and build wind and solar farms, says J.P. Morgan Chief, that's Jamie Diamond. That sounds like, it's eminent domain. That sounds like a great idea to get this done. I guess they have to rush to do it. So they're going to take your property to do it.

Well, I guess if it's a good idea, we're supposed to do anything for the environment, as long as the science is there, right? Well, we have some science. A new white paper by Michael Kelly. He's a professor of engineering at the University of Cambridge. And he just wrote a new paper titled the feasibility of a net zero economy for the USA by 2050. Not agenda 2030, 2050. And this is what he says in there.

This is a pretty well-research document. He says the scale of this project suggests that a war footing and a command economy will be essential as major cuts to other favored forms of expenditure, such as health, education, and defense. will be needed. He said the fourth, a fourth project is to secure the buying of the public. Did you get asked for this? For what will be 30 years of social disruption, diminished living standards, and living under a command economy. Now, Del, let's get to your point about the batteries. He says, if the U.S. were to convert overnight to an electric fleet, that's of cars, the materials requirements for the batteries alone compared with annual production today are estimated by scaling

UK estimates by population ratio as this. One million tons of coal, almost 20 times the annual global production, 1.3 million tons of lithium carbide, over seven times the annual global production, at least 36,000 tons of neodymium and dysprosium, nearly five times the annual production of neodymium, 10 million tons of copper, nearly the global production in 2018.

But God forbid we mine for a call. I mean, I'm sorry. The amount of mining I'm looking at there, Please, all my friends, I'm ready for this debate. We will do it offline. Call me. We need to have this conversation. And so Michael here even gives a price tag, and you get ready for this one.

He says this, with extra costs comfortably in excess of $35 trillion with a T, a dedicated and skilled workforce comparable to that of the education sector and key strategic materials demanded at many times the supply rates that prevail today, and all for no measurable attributable change in the global climate. The mitigation of climate change via a net zero emissions U.S. economy by 2050 is an extremely difficult ask. Without a command economy, the target will certainly not be met. And then he speaks to those people, the climate change community, says, my analysis requires the climate change community to go back in all humility and ask themselves, really, how bad will, as opposed to might the world's climate become? The proposed solution seems far worse for society

than the problem. So really some hard words there, you know, stuff we haven't seen before by academic professors too much. And it's not stopping there. We have another professor, Wade Ellison, professor of physics from the University of Oxford. And he now takes a stab at the wind power, the wind generation through windmills in a paper titled the inadequacy of wind power. And he says in there, the generation of electricity by wind tells a disappointing story. The political enthusiasm and the investor hype are not supported by the evidence. Here we go again. Not supported by the evidence. He goes into some of the numbers. If the wind speed is 10 meters per second, about 20 miles an hour, the power is 600 watts per square meter at 100% efficiency. That means to deliver the same power

as Hinkley Point C, that's a nuclear power plant in England. 3,200 million watts by wind would require 5.5 million square meters of turbine swept area. That should be quite unacceptable to those who care about birds, he says, and to other environmentalists. But then he says this, if the wind drops to half speed, the power available drops by a factor of eight. Almost worse, if the wind speed doubles, the power delivered goes up eight times. And as a result, the turbine has to be turned off for its own production.

So he finally concludes by saying this, with general electricity shortages, the war in Europe, high prices and the likelihood of failures in electricity supply, many popular scientific presumptions underlying energy policy should be questioned, absolutely but he says this wind power fails on every count again del this is just like lockdowns no cost benefit analysis right should be rejected out of hand because there was no cost benefit analysis on these things the science where is the science on this i mean what's going on and in the same place i mean look i i look at this all the same i these are we are looking obviously i'm going to

assume that a lot of these these scientists are because i know how this works are probably getting funding from coal companies and oil companies, and we can look in the background. There's bias on all sides of this, but sciences should be demanding at this point before you're allowed to pass laws that are clearly going to rock our economy in ways we cannot even imagine are going to drive countless children to have their arms chopped off in Africa if they don't dig up enough coal ball. Before all of that happens, can we get an independent body of both sides, 10 from the pro-environmentalist side, if they think this is an environmental action, and 10 from the other side to really start putting this all on table. And by the way, let's broadcast it.

Let's have the whole world watch these conversations and weigh in on what's going on here. I'm really tired of these decisions being made for us and not by us as citizens. And moving back here to the United States, announcement just by President Biden. He says this. This is the headline after his announcement. Biden backs tearing down Columbia Snake River dams contrary to comprehensive scientific assessment. Now, these are four hydropower dams that provide clean, renewable energy to homes and businesses in Washington, in central Washington. So they want to breach these dams, which would obviously have a dramatic impact on that energy production. But also the scientific...

I mean, like, again, and maybe we're finding out it's not clean. I don't know. Water flowing through the turbine seems like the best. Now Biden, while, you know, screaming green energy is about to tear down one of the best forms of clean energy we have. And even if there's side of it. Look, again, the reason why you don't dive in, if you're starting to find scientifically there's a problem with this type of energy, this is why you don't pass laws to shift everybody over. But continue, continue on. Right. And so it was against a comprehensive scientific assessment as well. So that's what has a lot of people stretch in their head, because the cover story, if you will, I guess, is they're doing it to bring the salmon runs back to the central river system in that area.

But Army Corps of Engineers and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, they did a comprehensive of scientific assessment of this. And they said, they basically concluded the dam can stay and the salmon, the salmon runs can be built back up. But I can also say this from personal experience. When I got out of school, I went and worked in a fish hatchery in Alaska. It is very easy to put a man-made hatchery, the mouth of almost every river, and raise a hundred times the amount of fish that need to flow up. You know, there are modern things that we now have that we can do here. I've been a part of that process.

This is ridiculous. And so the headlines are showing that that type of frustration now. I mean, just full throttle here. This is before, you know, maybe 10 years ago, you'd never see a headline like this. Now we are. Net zero is a Trojan horse for the total destruction of Western society. Strong words there, backed by some pretty good points in that article.