The Highwire with Del Bigtree - THE THREAT OF ESG

Episode Date: December 17, 2023

Leave a ReplyLeave a Reply You must Register or Login to post a comment.Utah State Treasurer, Marlo Oaks, CFA, sounds the alarm on the threat of ESG; Environmental, Social, and Governance standards, which rates businesses on their impact on politically charged issues.Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-highwire-with-del-bigtree--3620606/support.

I'm really actually very excited. You know, Jeffrey's got me all pumped up over this whole environmental insanity and what's going on and the lies that are being told. And, you know, those are government agents talking about it. But now you have these giant corporate entities that, by the way, also seem to be controlling our government. So I don't know what's first the cart or the horse or however that goes. But this idea of ESG corporations that are being judged by how much they get involved in, the environmental, social, and governance systems, a business framework for considering environmental issues

and social issues in the context of corporate governance. I'll tell you, this is something that I'm very confused about, and I've got someone that is going to be very capable of answering some of my questions, I think is going to answer yours too. Take a look at this. It's good to have Marlowe Oaks with us, our state treasurer. The Utah State Treasurer, Marlowe Oaks. And joining me today is Marlowe Oaks,

who is the state treasurer for the state of Utah. I've never seen a state treasurer get a standing ovation before. Marlowe Oakes knows more about the subject than anybody in the country. He's now the treasurer of the state of Utah. He's a longtime investment manager. Thank you for inviting me to testify before you on the impact of ESG on retirement security. Masquerading as a sophisticated, holistic, and enlightened way of creating shareholder value, ESG is a dangerous investment scheme.

ESG has created an uncontrollable impulse to pressure corporations to solve complex, global, and societal issues. ESG sounds good, it sounds positive. You know, a lot of the language are things that all of us are concerned about, but it's the way we go about it. These are subjective factors that are chosen, and there is subjectivity related to what makes the right answer, what allows you to get a higher score. And in order to drive this particular outcome, there has to be some collusion in the marketplace. Otherwise, you have free market capitalism.

Of course. Right? ESG represents the greatest threat to our economic engine, which has produced more innovation, wealth, and opportunity than any other economic system in the history of the world. It's also undermining the constitutional form of this country. It's my honor and place. It's my honor and pleasure to be joined by the Utah State Treasurer Marlow Oaks Now.

Thank you for coming in. Thanks for inviting me. Absolutely. This is sort of like one of those things. Like I feel like I go around saying it, but I don't really know what I'm talking about. Like you say ESG, it seems like a bad thing. What is it? I mean...

Yeah, it's very confusing because on the surface it sounds great. It stands for environmental, social, and governance. And I really think of it as two different systems, or two different parts. There's the part that people see. It's sort of the ratings of companies, and then there's the part that people don't see. And that's the problem.

Okay. So the first part is sort of this rating system that takes subjective criteria and really tries to objectify it. So you're gonna see a score on a particular company. I think Bank of America, for example, is one that I look at, often and two different rating firms give it very different answers based on ESG criteria.

Okay. But that's an important market function. A market takes subjective criteria and because there's so many different actors in the marketplace, they all have different weights and different ideas about the importance of those subjective criteria, right? That's how markets function. You take subjective criteria and people have different ideas about the future importance of those, and that gets buying and selling of the same security in any given day. That's how markets work. If ESG just stopped there, that would be not nearly, you know, it wouldn't be nearly as big of a problem as it is, but it doesn't stop there. It goes

into engagement with companies. And what happens then is, is companies are then told how they have to operate and the kinds of policies that they have to have in place in order to get money. What is the they that's enforcing this? Is this just... So if you think about, really this is globalism being pushed. And really, I think of it as three legs of a stool. So the governments pushing globalism, that's really where the UN and Sustainable Development Goals come in. Those 17 sustainable development goals.

So all of our governments come together sit in this room and as a giant hole besides... Yeah, basically the UN is saying we have to address climate change. That is the number one issue that's really driving this whole engine, right? The E-part, the environment. If there were no climate crisis, ESG wouldn't exist. Okay. And so the climate crisis is really what drives the train. And so that's what animates the UN Sustainable Development Goals, and governments are pushed

to adopt those in their countries. On the corporate side, it's really World Economic Forum, the Davos crowd, right? And that's where ESG comes in. Okay. And then the third leg is individuals, getting individuals to buy in. And that's where religious organizations are being co-opted because people listen to their religious leaders. Right. And so that's sort of the three legs of the stool that I view as really driving globalism.

But at the heart of it is climate change. Right. And the climate crisis in that narrative. And boy, when I think to myself as the piece we just did, all the energy we're putting the climate change and to think, what if we were wrong when that became the number one focus of all humanity? Yeah. And we were actually, it's like ants with self-importance, you know, thinking somehow they're

making me move around on the planet or something. Well, and James Madison, I think, said it really well. Crisis is the rallying cry of the tyrant. When you hear a crisis narrative, I want you to think tyrant. Yeah. People should think tyranny. because that is ultimately what is being pushed. It really is an effort to take power and control and consolidate it.

And our country was founded on this idea of decentralization. We did not want power consolidating to any one particular area. And the markets are some of our most pluralistic institutions. If you think about plurality meaning many different actors. Right, right. All the different companies and all the different investors and you and I with our own investment dollars. I was using it terms of diversity, like having diversity.

Tremendous diversity in the capital market. So it's very difficult to drive an agenda through the capital markets. And yet we know ESG is driving an agenda. And this is really where the problem begins. Back in 2004, the UN said only if all actors come together to push. ESG, it was first time ESG is in writing. Can we make significant improvements in this field? And so that's when you know that there's an agenda beyond just investing money. The only reason that we invest money is to make money. That's why you invest. Now individuals may have reasons

to, you know, want to improve society and that's their choice. The problem is, is that now because there's an agenda here, you have to consolidate a lot of. lot of power and the way you do that is to target the financial sector in the economy because the financial sector is at the foundation of our free market system. Right. And they determine who gets capital and what that cost of capital is. Okay. Right?

Yeah. So the banks, the investment managers, the asset owners, so the asset owners are really sort of at the top of the food chain. That's the pension plans, the sovereign wealth funds around the world. 19 of the 20 largest institutional investors in the world are government-sponsored pension systems or sovereign wealth funds. And the majority of them have bought into ESG. Which means now they go into an investment manager like a BlackRock, a Vanguard, State Street, whomever. And say, we want you to manage these assets using ESG.

And we don't mean just our assets. We mean all of the assets that you have under management. And so it's not like you and I are deciding that the money that we have invested is going to not be an ESG. These investment managers are getting pressure from the asset owners telling them that if they want to do business with them, because that's how they make money, is to manage money, right? The largest asset owners are telling them they have to implement this in their business. So it's really corrupting the capital markets and to drive an agenda. I put it like a globalist force upon these businesses. Yes.

That have to play ball. And it seems to me, you know, I see everything in those lens because I'm really focused sort of in the medical space. And like, for instance, you know, Pfizer doesn't mind that they have to do double blind studies most of the time. It costs about $100 million. But it takes every competitor out of the way that could never afford to do that. No vitamin company can do a $100 million study. None of the things that would compete. So in a way, they want it there because it gives them the power over the market that they're in.

Is that similar? I would think Amazon has no problem moving into a green energy space. Number one, sort of like taxes, they can hire an army of people to make everything look like they don't need to pay taxes. We're making an army of people look like we're a green energy company. Whereas your mom and pop shop or the little book store, on the corner does not have the ability to play that game and just gets trouts because it just can't, where did those books come from, what were the shipping costs, how much fuel was used, and now they're buried and they're out of the market.

No, that's exactly right. And in fact, it plays out in the oil industry to a certain extent because the largest oil producers are able to sort of fend off the attacks on oil. It really harms, and I'm not saying they're not harmed and that they're not against it, But it really harms the smaller players because then they have all this regulation, all this demand for information, scope three emissions, scope one, scope two, scope three emissions, all this information that the government is trying to, and investors are trying to push on companies. It really harms those smaller players. It has exactly the same dynamic. How does it affect the average consumer?

I think that most of it just think, well, this is the big players, you know, fighting with each other. I don't really care as long as the products are still available to me, whether they made them green or not. Does it affect the consumer? Oh, it has a very serious effect on consumers. In California, there's a group called the 200. It's made up of former legislators and cabinet officials and civil rights activists. They're suing the California Air Resource Board because of the climate policies that have been implemented. that are resulting in higher energy costs,

it harms those who can least afford it the most. So those in the lowest socioeconomic stratosphere, they pay three times the amount of their income on energy as to the regular American. And so this really harms those who can least afford it. And it's just very sad. So it's really a misallocation of capital. And what we've seen is that, you know, because this,

Because this is a push with an agenda, the free markets are not easily going to correct this problem. So you might think, well, banks could, there could be banks that come in and provide loans and that sort of thing. From 1991 to 2008, there were over 2,000 bank charters that were approved in the United States. After Dodd-Frank went into effect, so over 12 years ago, 13 years ago, 65. That's it.

That's it. on the institutional investor side, where there's a lot of capital that has been raised for oil and gas funds. So these are raised among the largest institutional investors, those pension plans, the sovereign wealth funds, right? There was about $50 billion raised in 2015 among institutional investors for North American oil and gas funds. In 2021, that was $3 billion. It went from $50 billion to $3 billion. The only way you get that is if there's an agenda that's being driven. And right now, one of the New York pension plans is being sued because they did not invest,

they have not invested in oil and gas, which points to that statistic, that $3 billion. There have been pension plans that have actually bragged about not being invested in oil and gas. In fact, the UC Regent system is one of those. You know, they sent out a message to their participants last year saying, we no longer have oil and gas in our investment lineup, as if that was a good thing. Right. It's really amazing. And, you know, we're seeing some pushback in this. We're seeing the electric car industry is falling apart.

They're just not making the bottom line. It's hurting what you would think some of these larger corporations, right? The Fords, the GMs are struggling now saying we put, you know, we retooled, we built all. these cars and the cost to the because I mean I think part of it's consumer caught they just don't want to pay this for a car and people not quite psyched about this idea and it really is where I'm sort of seeing things differently like I said I want clean air I want all these things but when we force you know when the government forces and regulators force or in this case even the W.E.F I mean in a

way it's sort of like you know the the idea of democracy is mob rule Like you just we're all gonna turn you in so you're big brother. I always thought was like one individual watching you It's actually everybody watching yeah. Yeah, right and and so how do you move and we're making really catastrophic choices that are gonna hurt even these big business. I mean is there some of these large institutions that are sort of the banks saying we want out of this or are they all game? Well Jamie Diamond I think it was last year before Congress He said you know one of the the Congress persons was asking about shutting off lending to coal and, you know, oil and whatnot.

And he said that, essentially he said that is the road to hell if we go down that road, right? So I think there is some pushback. One of the things that I recognized early on when I started looking at ESG is that this was going to have to come from the states. The states had to push back because corporate America was under attack from these global forces and that if they stood up they could be harm their business because there was so much momentum right there was only one narrative that was acceptable you want to be the odd man now exactly yeah and and so it really had to come

from the states and so that was when I started pushing back on S&P global and their credit indicators ESG indicators on state states so Utah has the best credit in the world we are very responsible when it comes to borrowing money. And we are rated AAA, which is the highest rating of any credit rating agency. It's like having a perfect score, right, credit score. My staff has actually been told that if there was a quadruple-rated state, it would be Utah. We really are highly regarded as a borrowing entity.

But that may not matter if we have a separate ESG score because then investors can point to our ESG score and say, well yeah Utah has the best credit in the world but look at their policy on X Y or Z right and you can drive politics that way and so this is really that's where I talk about being in harming the constitutional form of government you're doing an end around our constitutional institutions and trying to push politics through the capital markets right and it destroys both of them you know it seems to me you know when and when you start seeing John Kerry talking about food contributing to global

warming right and cows are contributing to global warming I mean cars is one thing but you know now every animal on the planet and and it gets scary right why why should a food supplier be compared to a skateboard manufacturer or like as you're saying we're taking the diversity we are dealing with a we're totally different function in society our function is to feed people right and whatever I mean, are you doing the math that whatever contribution we have to CO2, if that even matters, that that cost per person is valuable because we feed them versus what some other company, or is it just sort of this blanket that's thrown over everybody, and they're competing in spaces that you can't compete in?

Are we going to stop making food? Yeah, I mean, and this is one of the more fascinating parts of this. If you think about the UN Sustainable Development Goals, Goal number two is to end world hunger. Goal number 13 is climate change. And what happens when they collide? Right. Yeah.

And we have a perfect example of Sri Lanka and the Netherlands, right? Right. The Netherlands is the second largest exporter of agricultural products in the world. This tiny little country, they're incredible farmers. Yeah. And that country is trying to shut down 3,000 farms. And what is that going to do to global hunger, right? Right.

This is the problem with centralized planning. Well, even if you think about that, if you're going to compare that country's ESG, you know, they're producing more food than this other country. Like, well, look, Spain is doing better than you. They're not making food for you. I'm feeding you. Doesn't that weigh into this equation at all? Well, and to your point, they're only looking at one side of the equation saying, you know, we're all going to die from climate change. Well, it looks like we're all going to die from starvation so that we don't die from climate change.

That's been my, you know, when I've, and I've said it, you've. heard me say on the show today, like I still care about the environment. And I've looked at my thoughts on coal. You know, I was one of those like, I don't like coal exhaust. I don't like what it does to rivers. Can we clean that up? But what bothers me is when I see us saying, well, look, we're going to go to West Virginia and shut down all these coal plants. And this all started changing as I was visiting, started going to state capes in West Virginia, meeting the people and realizing, oh, we actually took all your industry away. Like, you have no industry. It's one of the most beautiful capitals you've ever seen and they're starving in West Virginia because, you know,

they're not getting able to do the work that built that state. And then I watch us starting to buy products and energy systems and things from China. That is just, they're ramping up the coal, you know, plant that we just took away. So we're not actually doing anything for the environment. We're just destroying the lives of people in our own country. And then, you know, buying that energy or that form of those solar panels from China that are using that energy. And so to me, you're basically moving, you know, deck chairs around, but you're screwing our country. And you're, and for this concern, when I hear about, like, the ocean for a long time, is the ocean's going to be a foot deeper, which I just don't think is a very good sales opponent.

I think unless you have a Miami high rise on the beach, I'm not sure you care. But just this idea that in order to protect ourselves from the dangers ahead, we're literally going to kill you now. Yeah. Like, we're talking about, we're all going to do. with global warming, so we're just going to kill you now. We're going to take your jobs away, let you starve to death, have meth, you know, and all the issues that come into poverty and the issues like that, ruining your cities and states, all to preemptively deal with a theoretical problem.

That's exactly right. No, that's exactly right. And this is where when you hear climate, the climate crisis, that it doesn't make sense, you know, some of the things that they seem to be fighting, like nuclear power, right? And so you have to look a little bit deeper and say, what's the real agenda here? Yeah. What do you think that is? Well, and so...

Because I always asked my guests that's sitting in a seat, who is the they? Yeah, yeah, no, exactly. So back in 2019, AOC's chief of staff said the Green New Deal wasn't originally about climate. It was about how do you change the economic system. In 2015, Christiana Figueras, who was... responsible for the Paris Climate Accord. She was the head of the IPCC at the UN, which is, you know, kind of the climate change body. Earlier that year, she said this is the first time in the history of the world that we have tried to intentionally change the economic system

that's been in place for the last 150 years. In 2018, the UN commissioned a study, and the headline is we cannot address the climate crisis with capitalism or climate change. So it's like, okay, there it is, right? The focus is on economic freedom. And if we destroy our economic freedoms, we have no other freedoms. Right. And that's really the agenda that's going on here. I mean, it does seem, and I've said it, what's scary about being in America,

which is supposed to be this beacon of light and hope for freedom and liberty and invention and ingenuity. We're just watching most of that getting shipped, you know, overseas. Our children being raised to hate advancement, you know, or things that we can do or great ideas, the idea that someone that is too successful we should take from them, you know. And, you know, I like one of the images you had like the Coca-Cola company. I mean, that, you know, we really are struggling. It's like communism, you know. It's something we talk about on this show, which is sort of give up your individual needs for the greater good. And now as a nation, it feels, feels to me like these world forces, and this is I've struggled with, because it seems like

doesn't Bill Gates want to walk out into a world where everyone has got money and they're flush and they're buying cars, they're buying the products that you're selling, but it seems that your ideas are starving everybody out to where you're just going to have squalor, sort of like you do in Seattle, Washington now. At what point does one of these financial oligarchs walk out and say, I have to have to turn the world I have to walk through into a slum. Yeah. No, it is it is really it is really troubling. And you know, you think about just the food issue I think is such an interesting. You think food and power if you want to cripple a society or control a society, you go after food and

power. Right. Right. And that seems to be the that seems to be where this whole effort is pushing. One of the things that I'm very concerned about is these natural asset companies, and nobody really knows much about it. Yeah, what is they? Explain that. Yeah, because it's sort of in line with this push against agriculture, where we're trying to reduce emissions. Agriculture is responsible for about 25 to 35 percent of global emissions around the world. And the large chunk of that is land use change, so taking forest land. and converting it into a farm, for example.

Yeah. And then the agricultural component, you know, nitrous oxide emissions from fertilizer. Yeah. Rice and cattle methane emissions, right? So that sector has been targeted, and they're trying to reduce by 85% land-based emissions in agriculture. 85% by 2050, which means we've got to cut red meat consumption by 50%. We have to electrify all farm machinery. There is an attempt right now to push...

Which will bankrupt every farmer there is. Exactly. Giant monolithic companies. That's exactly right. You know, companies. And ESG is really the consolidation of power across lots of different sectors. Yeah. So, you know, just the investment business, a lot of money has consolidated into the passive managers. Why? Because it's cheap and better performance generally.

Right. And so a lot of retirement systems have put billions and billions of dollars in those kinds of strategies. Well, three managers really are sort of the kings of that space. It's Black Rock, Vanguard, and State Street, right? So they have tremendous power. What's interesting is they're passive investors, but active owners. So we have capital there that's consolidated. The banking industry is consolidated tremendously.

So the banks have signed on to net zero climate pledges, which basically says we are going to push the net zero agenda through our business. and stop lending to certain businesses that are cut down, you know, the lending that we do in certain business, agriculture is one of those. And so that's where this 85% reduction comes in. And the real results are really trying to push people from roast beef to roast crickets, right? I mean, that's where we're starting to see it

and the shutdown of farms. And so now the New York Stock Exchange went to the SEC at the end of September and said, we need you to approve a rule that will allow us to list companies whose purpose isn't to make money, it is to provide ecological services. And so what does that mean?

Well, essentially, this company that would be listed on the New York Stock Exchange would raise money from investors globally and would go out and buy interest in natural resources around this country. the state of Utah, 67% of our land is owned by the federal government, and the Bureau of Land Management manages that land. And so this really is a tremendous threat to our rural communities. Because I was going to ask about that.

Look, we all want open spaces in parks and things like that. Utah, which I've done tons of camping, grew up in Boulder, Colorado, probably spent more time over the summers in Utah, some of those beautiful natural parks there are in the world. Are we talking about moving out of letting the state of Utah, you know, control those parks and starting to allow private industry to come in and just buy up land spaces and lock them down? Yeah, and, you know, it still could be the federal government owning it, but what they would do is allow the management of those assets.

And so this is where this rule comes in, where these natural asset companies would be allowed to basically manage the resource. And they're looking at quantifying ecological services. So essentially, what is the value of clean air? What is the value of clean water? What is the value of taking carbon, like photosynthesis, but also the absorption of carbon into soil? Yeah.

And selling those things that can be sold, like carbon credits to companies. So if I'm a bank and I'm pushing for net zero, I may have an interest in buying interest in a natural asset company, particularly if it's a forest or something and it's taking carbon out of the atmosphere, creating oxygen, there's some dollar value associated with that.

So it basically allows me to have carbon indulgences, right? other parts of my business, right? Right. So again, where the giant corporations can afford to do this. Yeah. They live the life they want, but they just buy up territories and land or things that can show some sort of environmental benefit. It reminds me I was sitting with my wife in a hotel recently.

We were on a trip and we were in the spa. I had no windows or anything. And there was just video images of flowers and forests and things like that in an otherwise totally modern room. And I just thought with all this push, Bill Gates, buying up land, like you're saying. And I'm sure he's behind this trying to get some sort of credit from the government. Get me on the stock exchange so I can call it like a nonprofit experience while I continue to garner power and credits around the world. But what I was starting to

thinking about the future is I think we may live in a time as they try to move us into 15-minute cities. They clearly don't want us moving around. They want to take plane travel out of the equation all in this same space. I really see a future where those parks that I used to visit and that walk through the forest. Like we don't want human beings, can't have contact with that. It's messing up the, you know, the fauna or whatever it is, but we're going to teach you to watch on your beautiful LCD screen, the forest that you're going to visit them by curiosity, the virtual reality. Like it feels like that's like they're locking this stuff away from us. So where you think, oh, what's the wrong with, you know, having on the stock exchange like controlling large

territories, well, it's taking it out of your hands maybe permanently forever. That's right. And yes, so if you think about the Bureau of Land Management, the Federal Land Policy and Management Act in 1976 basically was Congress delegating the authority to manage these public lands for the benefit of society. And they operated under this mixed-use concept where you could have recreation, mineral extraction, you know, forest, harvesting, all these different activities that could happen

on the land simultaneously, and they were managing that for the benefit of society. Ammons really for society, right, yeah. Now they have a proposed rule that is trying to create conservation leases, which would essentially be elevated above mixed use used and replace mixed use and those conservation leases could then be owned by a natural asset company and that natural asset company then has the management rights to that land and if conservation leases are the primary driver of what happens on that land goodbye to all the mixed use and so you're talking about the destruction of agricultural production and they are talking about regenerative agriculture but that doesn't really happen because you can can't use traditional fertilizer on the land.

You can't use machinery on the land, right? And so we're talking about like 1820s farming here, right? And Sri Lanka went through that. When they outlawed traditional fertilizer, right? You had. What about like social justice? Like it's attached to it because the ESD is social part of this. Environmental justice.

Environmental justice. On natural asset companies. But the S part is really where we talk about social justice in ESG. How does that play in here? So what's interesting is this S part is really based on definitions. Definitions really matter when you're talking about diversity, equity, inclusion. If you think of classical social justice, diversity, we think about diversity of thought,

diversity of experience. Under critical social justice, we want just demographic diversity only. And in fact, we're looking for ideological purity. Inclusion, you know, we talk about an inclusive society. And really inclusion is the colorblind society, a meritocracy, right? And under critical social justice, you're looking at really that purity of, you want to have only a certain person or ideology involved. And so you end up harming those who are not identified, right?

Right. It's really looking through the lens of oppressors and oppressed and that critical social justice, equity, equal opportunity versus equal outcomes. And so people often don't understand how the terminology is being twisted to drive an agenda. The governance part,

of ESG was really brought in to lend credibility to ESG because governance, traditional governance in the shareholder capitalist framework added value to investors. You know, things like board independence and tying CEO pay to financial metrics. Under ESG governance, you're tying pay to ESG metrics and and, and, you're, you're tying pay to ESG metrics. looking for demographic quotas on boards. And so like California passed a law 2021 somewhere that said publicly traded companies in California have to include at least two women on the board. And the Los Angeles Court of Appeals struck that down as unconstitutional.

We're turning so many of our laws, these civil rights laws on their head and basically saying, no, we are going to discriminate and try to think favor certain groups at the expense of others. And it really marks us. So let me just play devil's advocate as we sort of, you know, close this up because it's super fascinating and you've looked at this for so long. But let's like look at things like that,

like the social side of this. One of the conversations is right now that the 1% I think own, you know, more than the other 60%, you know. And these ideas, this wage disparity, you know, and things like, that how do you fix these problems where you know the living wage you can't buy a house now if you work if you work if you work you can work a 40 hour week there's

people working two three jobs can't buy a house mechanic used to be able to buy a house used to be able to go on vacation had a pension had all these things and we keep being told that the corporations just need more tax breaks and they need to you know and what we see is CEOs paying themselves more more they're buying private jets flying all over laws for the rest of us, but the living wage is disappearing. And so doesn't it make sense? You know, either you're going to have a, you're either going to have the government do it,

or you're going to have to instill, how about if as a corporation, you know, lessen that gap and we give you some credit for it. I mean, I can see some sense in that. If we don't do that here, where do we have any effect on this? Yeah, and you know, we talked initially about regulation and how that drives costs up, and it makes it difficult for competitors come in. Dodd-Frank's perfect example in the banking industry. It really, a lot of this starts with regulation that prevents competition from coming in and correcting these market problems. Right.

And so this is one of the challenges that we have in any market is over-regulation that prevents a market from operating. It's actually interesting getting back to the natural asset companies. Really, one of the animating forces there is externalities. And they talk about how that is preventing the market from working because we're not properly valuing externalities. How much does dirty air costs? Conversely, how much is clean air worth? Right.

And so we're trying to now price externalities, things that you and I take for granted. that we're going to have, now, you know, there's a saying what gets measured, gets managed. If we are managing clean air, what is it worth you and I to have clean air? Are we suddenly going to have to pay for clean air? Are we going to have to start paying for some of these things that you and I take advantage? Yes, that's true. No, that's true. And I have a sister-in-law that actually died from bad air, from California wildfires that were coming over to Utah.

Wow. Yeah, I mean, so I get it. But the problem is, is that once we start valuing those kinds of things and put it in the hands of an elite group of the most wealthy investors, then they determine what you and I can use. You and I are net carbon emitters. Whenever we extract air, 4% of our breath is carbon, right? Right. And so now what are we going to do to offset our carbon footprint to be net zero? Right.

Right. I mean, it's very dangerous to take this land and put it into the hands of those who are managing it not for our benefit with multiple use, but for one use, and that's to drive ecological services to somehow value some of a lot of these ecological things that happen and then to drive outcomes based on that. What's your, you know, for our audience out there, what do you think is sort of the call to action, what do we do to rein back control of, you know, freedom and the ability to rise and to grow?

I think most of my problem, most of this, it's just going to kill a small business. It's going to make it impossible to ever bring a new thought or an idea to market because you're just going to have so many constraints. And I know that's why the big players aren't pushing back against us because they know they can afford it and we can't. Well, and I think really with the natural asset companies, it's going to kill. rural America. And rural America, we all depend on rural America for food and for energy and for so many different resources. This is a threat to America overall, all of our freedoms and things

that we enjoy. So I think one thing that people can do is to contact their legislators in state. The governor also, the attorney general, and contact their congressional delegation. We have a very short window here. January 2nd is when the SEC is deciding whether they're going to allow natural asset companies to be listed on the New York Stock Exchange. And so we have a very short window to act, and so we need to have people in Congress pushback. So they need to be aware.

States need to be aware. and then also the SEC. People can reach out to the SEC, the different commissioners, let their voices be heard and say, no, we don't want this. This is a terrible idea. It's really the people that are closest to the land

that are much better at managing the land than some bureaucrat or some global investor, right? Or some of these massive pools of capital. We don't want that. That will be the detriment of all of us. All right, well, we're going to try and help with that. One of the initiatives between ICANN and PERC, Amy Bonds perk. We're putting this together to make it easy for you. We've got two different ways to sign up and you can click on these by the way. If you're watching on your phone, obviously you can take a picture of the QR code that makes it easy, but if you know if you get a screen grab of that, then when it's in your photos, you tap on that QR code. I just learned this the other day and it'll take you here. But basically we have a contact SEC to oppose NYSE proposal to SEC regarding natural asset companies. You can fill out that information and then we have another one called.

contact the federal and state legislators to oppose NYSC proposed to SEC as ECC regarding natural asset companies. Again, these are things we've got to watch. They're wolves and sheep's clothing, I feel like. They sound like good idea for those of us that want a clean environment, but look who's buying it up, right? It's some of the biggest polluters, some of the biggest, you know, private jet flying, you know, oligarchs in the world.

It sort of reminds me with a friend of mine, I've had some very liberal. friends are like, communist just, communism just hasn't been given the right chance. I was like, oh no, Chuck Schumer is the right chance, like a government, totally corporate controlled government. Let's hand them the tool of communism because then it's really going to get the queen slate. It's always been looking for. Yeah, exactly. And we're looking at right now, we are looking at the merger of corporate and state power. That's it. Which we're like in 1930s Europe, right? I mean, Mussolini said the merger of state and corporate powers is fascism or corporatism. I agree.

And that's exactly what's going on. I am, it's really just great to meet you, know that you're out there, so informative, very important. These are really big issues and people just aren't paying enough attention to it, so I'm glad that you're out there spreading the word. Well, thank you for having me on. All right, keep up the good work. Pleasure meeting.

Thank you.