The Ricochet Podcast - Clamoring for Power

Episode Date: May 2, 2025

Within a week of Spain boasting its success at wiring up the grid with renewable energy sources, it was lights out for the whole Iberian Peninsula. Who could've predicted such an outcome? Today's guest is Robert Bryce, author of A Question of Power: Electricity and the Wealth of Nations and a Substack well worth a look. Robert provides a little refresher course on energy grids and explains how Green hubris threatens to overheat our whole system.Plus, James, Steve and Charlie delve into a few developments on the administration's run-ins with the judiciary; they welcome progress on America's mineral deal with Ukraine, take a few swipes at Harvard's report on campus anti-semitism, and declare this week's winner on Twitter.- Sound from this week's open: Spanish PM Pedro Sánchez addresses the blackout of the Iberian Peninsula.

Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. It's the Ricochet Podcast with Stephen Award and Charles CW Cook. I'm James Lilacs and today we talk to Robert Bryce about energy. So let's have ourselves a podcast. Energy. So let's have ourselves a podcast. For the moment, supply has already been restored in several territories in the north and south of the peninsula, thanks to the interconnections with France and Morocco, countries to which I would also like to thank for their solidarity. At this time, combined cycles and hydroelectric plants

have also been reactivated throughout the country, something that should allow us to recover supply throughout Spain. Welcome everybody, this is the Ricochet podcast number 739. I'm James Lylacs in Minneapolis where it appears to be trending towards precipitation this afternoon in meteorological terms or gosh, it looks like rain, you betcha, sure. See, I can code talk just like tim waltz there i can switch with ease between the various ways of communicating with people that's why they chose me here for the podcast and i'm joined by other great choices those being steven

hayward and charles cw cook gentlemen hello hello hi james how are things where you are oh things are just fine out here on the left coast it's uh foggy and cloudy as it has been all week, but at least we're not facing rain. And I saw some weather map. There's some weird weather phenomenon that has you guys up in a, I don't know, it just all looks very strange. Well, earlier this week there was some, it was like a fist, like a boxing glove that was heading straight toward us. We were warned that there would be hail. We were warned there was a 20% chance of tornadoes here in the city we had missed I believe just gentle general not even qualifying as drizzle and Charles of course is in subtropical Florida which I assume is starting to get into its humid season but

politically speaking we are of course here to discuss a variety of other wonderful things where do we begin to tell the sweet love story uh... well it's been a couple of weeks uh... some immigration news although that story seems to have been muted some watch there was the arrest of the washington judge for facilitating the escape of somebody out the back door which really needed sort of a smoking in the banded banjo country western kind of caper music soundtrack. There was the gentleman who was ordered release from Federal Immigration custody on Wednesday,

the Columbia activist, Khalid. No one seems to be talking much about Maryland dad anymore. So is this just a function of the media pipelines in which I am being shot through, or is the vibe shifted to elsewhere? And if so, what is the current terror, the current panic? You guys tell me what you think. Well, I mean, there's a third judicial development this week, which was a federal judge in Texas, a Trump appointee, it should be noted, who barred further deportations under the Alien Enemies Act of, what, 1797 or whatever it was.

And so that's going to slow things up. I'm a little puzzled by that, not because it's a Trump judge, but only on the broader constitutional grounds that I think determining what constitutes a threat to America and whether that satisfies the terms of the statute of invasion or I forget the actual terms in the law. But it seems to me that's an executive determination entirely within the commander in chief powers and not a judicial one. But I could be wrong as they say. Charles, what do you believe is the basis for that?

Well, this is a difficult one because the practice, as Steve implies, of the judicial branch for a long time has been not to make that sort of determination. That is to leave the factual questions to the political branches and deem them non-justiciable. But it doesn't have to, in the sense that there is enough elastic within our system that if a court is reviewing a statute, and the Alien Enemies Act is a statute, it is empowered under Marbury to say what that statute means, thereby to make some factual determinations along the way. So I was also surprised by this, not because I necessarily disagreed with the conclusion, or because I'm necessarily against courts making some factual determinations, but just because

they normally don't. And it wasn't even the Supreme Court doing it, which would have been interesting. This was a judge at the beginning of the food chain. So I'm not outraged by it, but that did surprise me to explain to people, if you can, exactly how it happens that a Texas judge just pops up with something like this and it has an effect that just stops what the government's doing.

Did the judge get up in the morning and say, you know, this is really nagging at me. I'm gonna call the press cops, I'm gonna bang my gavel down. Or does somebody have to go around and say, we need to find a judge to do this? And they start going through the Rolodex and say, well, here's one in Texas, go and give her a call. I mean, how does that work?

Well, you have to follow the bouncing ball several weeks back to when, I forget which level appeals court, it was the Supreme Court ultimately that said, no, you can't a person in Texas or Louisiana file with a district judge in Washington, D.C. to get relief and due process. You have to file where you're being held, which was Texas. So I think this case follows the process more correctly, that it's brought in the venue where the people who are eligible or on the docket for deportation

actually are residing at the moment. I think it's just that simple. I think the other question you raised, James, though, is why have we forgotten suddenly about Maryland, man? Well, more and more data's coming out, including some police video camera footage of a traffic stop and more documents about how this guy had been a wife-beater and so forth and all of a sudden even Democrats are saying you know and in fact the

story reported this week is that Hakeem Jeffries the Democratic House leader told his caucus no more trips to El Salvador. I think they realized that Trump has outsmarted them once again by getting them to defend a person who's not very appealing and leave aside the you know the the various issues which are serious, but I think Trump and his people thought, you know what, if we're stubborn, we're going to win this. And I think they probably are. And then finally, the guy Badawi who was released, the Columbia graduate student, well, it turns out there's some affidavits from 10 years ago where he says directly, I want to kill

Jews. That seems fairly cut and dry. says directly, I want to kill Jews. That seems fairly cut and dry. You know, I've got to find it. There's a writing to Charlie Lowe. You know, there is a – I looked this up once, and I should find it again, because it's grist for you, James. It's the visa application form to visit the United States. And it has these ludicrous questions in it that include things like, and this is pretty close for memory, do you seek to enter the United States for purposes of terrorism? Right.

Have you ever, it used to say, have you ever been a member of the Nazi party or any other group that advocates genocide? And of course you can see, yes, I'm for genocide, I'm here to do, but finally you get to the end of this, Charlie's laughing, he's probably seen these, you get to the end of this and it says, a yes answer to any of the preceding question does not

automatically disqualify you from receiving a visa. But if you've answered yes, you may want to schedule a visit to the local consulate for an interview. So here's a guy who in an affidavit said, I want to kill Jews, and we're still... gee, I wonder if the Trump administration is, you know, persecuting some guy for free speech. I don't think so. Let's get this guy in here to tease out the nuances of what he does. Sitting down, okay, so is this a statement that you want to kill Jews, you know, as a blanket way, a modus operandi, a modus vivendi, shall we say? or are there specific Jews in certain situations that you're talking about? And of course the person would say, well, of course it's specific Jews in certain situations. It would be the Zionist element. If they're non-Zionist Jews.

No, James, you've got to understand that in the original Arabic, kill is more akin to say, wrestle with or play pool against in a bar. Grapple with, right. It's a spiritual contest. So yeah, well, and of course, what we're going to hear again and again and again is that the desire to deport this guy who wants to kill Jews is proof that we are living under a Nazi regime. I mean, there's absolutely the ability to switch between those two concepts is remarkable and almost unnotable at this point. So yeah, he is not the best example, maybe perhaps, of them to show. But then again, you know, when they're talking about the guy, Marilyn Dad, being accused of being

a wife-beater or human trafficking, or the rest of it, people will say, and probably correctly, and Charles can expand on this, that it's not so much, I mean, the fact that he's a bad guy doesn't mean that he should be sent to El Salvador when specifically the arguments or the Documents that he should not be sent to El Salvador But that seems to be one of those little legal technicalities that make people shrug and throw up their hands and say you know what? About that I care not a wit What what counts is getting the guy out because he's bad and he wasn't supposed to be here and that's how you sort of lose the specific Adherence to the rule

of law, they'll say. Yes, that's true. And I have some time for that. The problem is the democrats can't help themselves but make the wrong arguments here. So I am a classical liberal, and I am on some of these questions much more of a squish than many conservatives. But the argument that the classical liberal squish must make is as follows. There are lots of very bad people, but our law requires us to treat them in a certain way. If, for example, you go back through all of the cases that we now know,

habitually as Americans, Miranda, for example, And you look at the people after whom they are named. They are invariably terrible, terrible sorts. They are rapists and pedophiles and serial killers and are guilty of assault and bank robbery and so forth. And the argument ought to be and bank robbery and so forth. And the argument ought to be, okay, but they still get due process. Okay, but they still get a trial. Okay, but that doesn't mean you can torture them or what you will. That is the argument that I believe in,

and I will make till I'm blue in the face. Most recently, in the case of Rahimi, it was a Supreme Court decision on the question of Second Amendment rights. Rahimi was a terrible, terrible man, but the question at stake was, are you allowed to the question of Second Amendment rights. Rahimi was a terrible, terrible man, but the question at stake was, are you allowed to remove somebody's Second Amendment rights without a court decision? Not, do you like Rahimi?

The problem that Democrats have, James, is that they can't help but lionize the people in the cases. I know, I know. And then they turn around and they say, well, it shouldn't matter. Agreed, it shouldn't matter. But you put these people on the Senate Democrats' Twitter feed. You told us it was just a good old Mary Lynn dad.

And if you go back five years, during the George Floyd hysteria, they did it every single time there was a police shooting. The argument wasn't, well, this maybe did not necessitate lethal force, although in many cases it of course did. They said, this man, had he been left alive, would have gone on to cure cancer. He was a wonderful human being. He was a gentle giant. And you look at what they've done and they've been caught, you know, shooting a pregnant woman and slapping her mom about and they're like, okay, fine, we can argue whether or not they deserve to be shot in the altercation that ensued, but don't pretend that they were

gandy. And I just, I find this baffling that the Democrats keep doing this because then it opens themselves up to other people saying, well no actually he was a illegal immigrant gangbanger who was guilty of domestic violence. Oh it's built into the DNA of 1960s radicalism where you valorize the anti-social person because they are making a stand and a strike

against an illegitimate order. Che Wovarov being a perfect example but I love the idea as you notice that the bad people may may produce laws that are court decisions that are necessary and safeguard the rights of all. For example if the police were to barge into somebody's house without a warrant and find a whole bunch of quick lime in the basement under the stairs and bodies therein and took it to the Supreme Court and one I would not want to be a lawyer who said well under under John Wayne Gacy v Chicago v Cicero police my client cannot be convicted I

would be saying could you find another case that isn't gasey to maybe to back me up? Well, there's that. There's that. And there's also, as long as we're on the history or on the topic of people who are just having a problem with Zionists, not Jews, Zionists, mind you, Harvard has issued some statements about what's been going on at that august institution. And those of us who believe these to be fine old places, ivy-colored palaces in which the Western values are transmitted to a hungry new generation,

may be a tad surprised. Steve, have you taken a look at the recent report on campus anti-Semitism at Harvard? Oh, have I ever. I mean, it's over 300 pages long, and I didn't read every word of the whole thing. That's too infuriating to do, because it's example after example of complete moral

failure on the part of Harvard. The irony is, oh, by the way, as we are sitting down to record here Friday morning, Trump has put out a social media post saying he is going to strip Harvard of its tax-exempt status. And boy does that warm my cockles for this Friday. And I think they richly deserve it. And we'll leave aside the legalities and precedents for that, which I think are pretty strong. But the irony here is that the current leadership of Harvard, Alan Garber, the president, and especially the provost, John Manning,

they're as close as you're going to get to a sort of centered, with some people with conservative sympathies, as you're ever going to get at an Ivy League school. I mean, John Manning was Dean of Harvard Law for a while. He was a clerk for Scalia. He's known to be a Federal Society participant. Now, he seemed kind of weak to me, but on the other hand, on the relative scale, he and Garber are, you know, the fact that the Harvard Board of Trustees said, you know what, we need to stop the identity politics and get back to having some white guys in charge, you know what they're doing. So they'd like to clean things up, they've got all the usual constraints of a faculty that was able to show Larry Summers the door 20 years ago for making one comment about women that went

against the orthodoxy. So they've got a lot on their hands and it's too bad that they're taking the heat that the university deserves for decades of malfeasance. So yeah, I mean, among other things, some of the things they describe in the report, and kudos for putting it out and not sugarcoating it, although they say in the opening statement, we worry that this, essentially what they say is, we're worried this report is going to give Trump ammunition against us, but we have to put it out anyway. So good for them. But they have story after story testimony from students of the treatment of Jews on

campus that if it was any other minority group, it would be front page news for weeks and weeks and calls, if it was a Democratic president, calls for stripping that institution of tax-exempt status for its blatant civil rights violations. So they richly deserve what is happening to them and I am wanting more. I know your cockles are warm but I am still hung up on that whole legality thing, the whole means by which they could, the president could do this with a stroke of the pen or a call of the you know or using the phone phone and a pen as another man said there's you can't just say yeah I like this do it but he can't

oh but do it I mean we'll we'll see well well hold on a second I mean this is worth nothing I don't know I don't know so that's why I'm asking but I'm not gonna it seems to me that the legality is a very important part of this. Well, look, I think it's actually pretty strong, just 20 seconds on this, which is when the Bob Jones case came down in the 80s. And remember, the Reagan administration said, we don't think the IRS has the authority to strip the tax-exempt status. That's for the Justice Department Civil Rights Division to look at, not the IRS.

The Supreme Court said, no, the IRS gets to. And then the Reagan administration said fine, but just limit their federal funding, that was part of it, or eligibility just to the programs that are discriminatory. And the Democrats said no, we want to be able to punish the entire university for any lapse in any department of civil rights law, and they passed a statute over Reagan's veto to do that. That's why I say I think the legal basis here is very strong and you know it's time to make the left live by their own rules. End of rant. Charlie?

Well I agree with half of that in that I think we need to make the left live by their own rules. And this has been an annoying feature of civil rights enforcement in general now for years. The left has never explained why it took a different position in Bob Jones and it's now taking in relation to Harvard. I would like to see a universal enforcement of the rules in the other direction. That is to say, I don't mind that Harvard has an exemption, but I don't want to live in a country in which Harvard gets his exemption, but people that the left dislikes don't. So I'm half or maybe more

than half with Steve. I prefer that we had a classically liberal order in which we could have tax exempt institutions that were all treated the same. But until we get that, this is the sort of threat, or possibly execution, that we are going to need. And that really is one of the stories of the last four or five years. It's been a big story here in Florida with DeSantis' approach, where he has shepherded through and signed a bunch of laws that, for example, say that you're not allowed to run workplace trainings that imply that white

people are a problem. And when he's done that, people have said, oh my goodness, this is government overreach. I thought you wanted small government, or I thought you were against this. Well, yeah, but not against it if it only runs in one direction. If you are allowed as some middle manager at Unilever to be forced to attend a session in which you were told that you are awful, then the government is allowed to step in and say, no, that's against the equal protection of the laws and existing civil rights statute so I have no issue with Trump doing this but I would rather have a system in which no one did it. Well you know this is twice now you refer to

yourself as a classical liberal and I too like to claim that mantle as well but being a classical liberal these days seems like somebody feels like somebody who's holding up a finger in saying point of order during a mixed martial arts fight and right perhaps if we're a little bit more robust we would get our point across perhaps if we had more energy perhaps if our metabolism was doing exactly what it needed to do mine is is yours that's the question do you know do you know that when your metabolism is working properly you will feel the benefits in literally every single aspect of your life, really.

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He's the author of five books on the subject, including Pipe Dreams, Greed, Ego, and the podcast robert bryce to writer public speaker who's concentrated on energy policy the author of five books on the subject including pipe dreams greed ego in the death of an ron and most recently a question of power electricity and the wealth of nations you can find his work at robert bryce dot substack dot com all of that link at ricochet dot com welcome i don't think for having me

you know spain uh... touted and sure of course you know we're gonna go with this Robert welcome. Hi y'all. Thanks for having me. You know Spain Touted and I'm sure of course, you knew where we're gonna go with this 100% renewable energy. Look at us. Look at us. We're no longer burning those liquefied dinosaurs. We don't have those nasty You know smokestacks belching out we are clean and we are green and days later in the dark. Now I've been reading an awful lot about what happened and the minute that I started reading people who seem to know what they're talking about it vaults into an area of expertise and technical details about grid and balance and deviations and the rest of it's very complex for people to figure out. What they do know

is that Spain went dark, Portugal too. What happened? Well, it was only 55 million people who were affected. So it's not that big of a deal. And yes, you're right. I mean, the timing of this was pretty rich. I think it was eight days before the blackout or so the Spanish government was bragging, oh, for a few minutes we were 100% renewable. Well, what's that old line about pride goeth before the fall?

But this is just a simple result, a very obvious result rather, of bad energy policy. And the socialist government under the prime minister Pedro Sanchez has made net zero their target. They have pushed hard for wind and solar energy. I don't call them renewables. It's alternative energy. And the short answer is, why did this happen?

Well, you've that you've fragilize the grid by adding these what are called asynchronous forms of generation, or wind and solar don't add the kind of oomph, you call it grid inertia, to the grid. And so the grid becomes less stable. And there was a small, it appears to be some kind of fault or interruption or disturbance on the grid.

And the wind and solar capacity couldn't respond and flatten out that disturbance. And so the system tripped and the grid went down. First of all, fragilized is a word I don't think I've encountered before and I now love it and I'm gonna have to incorporate that into a Mary Poppins. Be my guest, my compliments.

Secondly, a lot of people in the green side were saying after this, well what this proves is that we just need better battery technology. That when you lose from this, they can just power up the batteries and they sort of imagine that there's these large EverReady's, copper tops sitting around somewhere

that they can just plug right in. Before we go any further into this, how, I mean, I know that Elon Musk and the rest of the guys are keen on battery technology, but how good are we getting? Are we getting anything to the point where we can actually maintain the base currency that is needed to keep these systems online?

Well, I think it's important before we talk about batteries just to put this in context about what's happening in Spain. So just at the moment of the collapse, more than as about 60% of all the electricity on the Spanish grid was coming from wind and solar. But remember, the Spanish government is aiming to have 81% renewables by 2030. And they're also aiming to shutter all of their nuclear

plants by 2035. And those nuclear plants provide 20% of the power in Spain today. So I'm just finishing an article for Substack on this right now, but that you know this is just a recipe for disaster. Whether they try and add batteries and do so quickly, we'll have to see. But there are all these other costs that they're gonna have to ladle on top of the existing costs on the grid in order to accommodate this, all this intermittent generation. So you know, this is just a glimpse of what could happen if Spain continues with this terrible energy policy. Is the king behind this only because I want to say the pain in Spain falls mostly on his

reign. Sorry, I'm done. I'm done. I'm done. I'm done. I'm done. It's a royally bad pun, I will say. I have no idea about the king and don't really care about kings. Well, I don't know. My variation of what James said a couple minutes ago with your use of fragilized is being out here in California, we're at the cutting edge of a lot of this nonsense, with apologies to Mary Poppins, it seems to me you can say Spain and others are super cowly

Fragilizing Okay, I know that's even worse right Charlie cook. I hope you It's a low bar these guys Actual actual question not a Mary Poppins I have an actual, actual question, not a Mary Poppins joke. So this is of course me being a typical right wing Meany, but I really like nuclear power. And maybe you'll correct me. Maybe I'm wrong, but I was given to understand that France, which is next to Spain is really heavily invested in nuclear power and has been since the 50s. And in America, nuclear power has become more and more popular. If

you look at opinion polls, I'm sure people will balk a little when they're told the station will be built in their backyard. But as a general matter, it's increased in popularity. But you just said Spain is getting rid of its nuclear power. Can you talk me through that decision? Because Spain's next to France, surely they can see it works. So what is it? Is it that level of environmentalism that they can't even stomach that? You know, Charlie, I'd say, I just correct you. It's not environmentalism. It's ideology. And, and, and I mean, there's just no cure for, I mean,

you're a Brit, look at the Brits. They're following Germany's example of driving their economies straight into the ditch with this, I mean, frankly, just idiotic energy policy, anti-nuclear, anti-hydrocarbon, claiming that they can run their systems on wind and solar and batteries and unicorn farts alone, and it just doesn't work. And there was a great quote, in fact, it just came out in El País today, the English version, and it was a quote and this, you know, it's interesting you point out there is the, you know, conservatives, Republicans tend to be more pro-nuclear and Democrats and particularly the US Democratic Party has been anti-nuclear for 50 years. Now that's changing

some a little bit, but anyway, here's the key quote. It was from Alberto Núñez Feijú, who's the leader of the People's Party and Conservative Party, pro-nuclear People's Party in Spain, said that he was talking about what happened. And he said, our energy system is being managed with an enormous ideological bias. And I think that's exactly right. You know, you need engineers to run the grid, not ideologues. And then unfortunately, that's what we're seeing. They really got started with their nuclear building program in the late 70s after the first energy crisis. And I think three quarters of their fleet they have now

was built in the 80s. When we built none, or I think we finished maybe two long running projects were finished in the 80s. One of them Diablo Canyon that I live near. I did ask a Frenchman once, a libertarian guy, Max Falk was his name, and I said, how did you guys build all this nuclear power when we stopped? And he said, oh, it's very simple you see. He says, in France, our communists supported nuclear power, whereas in your country,

your communists opposed it. But yeah, that sounds about right. And he had more to that. But I want to do this, Robert, I want to go back to this grid question for a moment, because most Americans, and I'm one of them to some extent, have a simple-minded view that, well, electricity, it comes from power plants and wind and solar, and isn't it great, and we just throw it on wires, and it comes into our house, and we turn on our lights. And I try to explain the grid in simple terms

as well think of it as something like your garden hose. It's gotta be filled with water and it has to have adequate pressure to keep the water moving. But I think that's not quite adequate. Can you do a minute of grid 101 so that a five year old can understand it? Because we keep hearing these terms like,

yeah, it's gotta be at 50 Hertz and you know, this and that, and your eyes glaze over really fast. But it turns out to be the key part of the story, more than generation, I think. Yeah. Well, and that's the way even engineers, because electricity is, it's complicated.

I mean, just everything about the grid and it's this massive machine with all these different parts and it's amazing it all works. I mean just incredible and the electricity phenomenon itself is difficult to understand. But nevertheless your idea about water is the right analogy and engineers even do this to compare it to water. The difference between your garden hose example is that say you're you know, you're filling your swimming pool and I've been to your house the the Olympic-sized swimming pool in your case. Oh, no.

Say you put your garden hose in there and the pressure in the hose drops a little bit. Well, it just takes you a little longer to fill the hose or fill the pool, or take a shower, wash the dishes or whatever, because that difference in water flow doesn't matter very much ultimately to you as a consumer. The electric grid works differently

in that that pressure and the water flow has to be constant and has to maintain in the US at 60 hertz, in the Europe 50 hertz. It has to be maintained around that frequency, and if that frequency varies too much, the system shuts down. And that's what we saw in Spain. This slight change in frequency, a frequency drop or a surge. And because of that lack of pressure,

think of the power generation systems in general have our water pumps, our electricity pumps, and they operate at very high pressure. Well, wind and solar don't provide that same pressure that you get from nuclear plants and gas-fired power plants, hydro plants, et cetera. And so they don't provide that inertia, as the term of art, that keeps that pressure and frequency at the same,

at the exact same level. And it's clear in the piece that I'm writing is saying, yes, we can blame solar for the blackouts. Well, let's go back to batteries for a minute. As James brought that up. And so it's one thing to have the Tesla power wall in your house, which can, I guess if you get a couple of them and depending on your power needs,

can run your house overnight if the power goes out. But these grid storage batteries we're talking about that would be the size of a small house and you need what, 30 of them or something for a small town. And I think I've seen some figures from you and others that they wouldn't last very long. Oh, and that leaves, and maybe you wanna talk about this too but maybe it's asking too much. The supply

chain requirements to build all those batteries are massive and if we're doing it to save greenhouse gas emissions it's not even clear it's net plus for that accounting game right. So the battery fantasy is really I think my opinion I'll stop, is it's a way to keep solar and wind power viable, quote unquote, for the greenies who made religion out of pushing it so hard. Sure. Well, a couple of quick thoughts. One is I'm starting to come around to some of the battery storage like here in Texas. They can be valuable for peak shaving, right, when the demand is very high. So I'm coming around to some of their utility in terms of overall grid management.

However, what we saw in Spain is that the power went out for 12, 15, 16, I don't know how many hours it varies on the region. There are no batteries that are going to last all day. They're generally meant for about four hours. Two other quick points. One is that the battery supply chain is almost completely dependent on China.

And China is not our friend. I think we can all agree on this. But I think I'd like to just steer the conversation just a little bit, if I could, on the other issue in Spain. And Charles, you're from the UK. It's all across Europe, land use conflicts around renewable energy projects, whether it's wind or solar or high voltage transmission. I've documented them here in the US in the renewable rejection database. It's on my website. I've also started the global renewable rejection database now at 103. And of those rejections in Ireland, Scotland, and the UK just this year, just since January 1st, there have been 23 rejections. Well, look at what's happening in Spain. Just in, and Bloomberg reported on this, I'm just finishing this piece, it was Reuters reported on a storm of lawsuits against wind energy projects in Galicia.

In February, officials in Torrevieja stopped the construction of the solar project for a desal plant. In Galicia, they've implemented a new rule on wind projects in that area. So what, you know, this idea that Spain is going to get to 80% renewables is just hogwash. They're never going to be able to do it because they don't have enough land. And that's the same, the thing that is hindering and hamstring will always hamstring, uh, wind and solar projects is they're just the amount of land they require is just cartoonish. On that.

I have another nuclear power question again, correct me if I'm wrong. But I think I remember reading that with nuclear power, once it's on, you know exactly how much power you're getting out of it per generator, right? Because there's no variability of the input. So given that we know that, how many nuclear stations, and accounting for geography, because I understand how much energy you lose over distance How many would we need realistically to completely nuclear eyes the United States? Huh? Okay. Well, let me just do some back into them. Okay, so Spain gets about 20% of its power from nuclear plants. It has five plants here in the US We have 90 some odd nuclear plants.

Some of them are twin reactors. I think Palo Verde has four. In any case, we get about roughly 20% from, let's call it 100. So we'd need 400 more to be 100% nuclear power in the US. Something like that. So I'm with you, Charles. I'm adamantly pro-nuclear.

I've been saying the same thing for 15 years. If we're serious about decarbonization, serious about reducing CO2 emissions and sparing land, which is what I'm in favor of, I'm a pro-watcher. I'm a bad enthusiast, landscape enthusiast, hiker. Natural gas and nuclear preserve. They have high power density, which is key. But we have to be very sober about where nuclear is

in the United States. The rollout is gonna be slow. And I wish, if I had one wish for the Trump administration, get on it, man, get on it. We have to solve the capital, the fuel, the regulation, and the waste problem. We gotta get on it right away. Nixon wanted a thousand plants.

That was one of his reactions. No, he did. He absolutely did. And it would have provided like something like 200% of the projected power and it would have been great. Of course, the left would have spent a great deal of time shutting them down because they made Bruce Springsteen unhappy. But here's- And Jackson Brown. Don't forget Jackson Brown. Jackson Brown and everybody else who required undependable energy sources to do their concerts. But here's the thing. the thing i mean yes there is something i suppose that stirs the heart of the european breast when they see a windmill i know that when i go to england and i'm driving around sussex and ice

we come around it we always come around a bend and there's and it always startles me to see is dark satanic blades just slowly moving and some people see the enormous structures of signs of hope when i think you know you don't have to dot your countryside with these things everywhere you don't have to have shiny walls of mirrors you can build a nuke but here's the thing you mentioned before uh... ideological attachment to these things

and i don't think that anybody believes that well maybe i do there's the notion of degrowth that if you did there's something wrong about the fact that western society continues to grow and invent and spread in that this is some sort of cancerous fungus on the planet and guy is facing what we ought to do is to be less and less and less and there's something about the unstinting ability of nuclear power to

provide this that they don't like because it suggests abundance and I know that's sort of a complicated psychological take on it but I think that's part of it I think that if you say this grid is less dependable what they will say is you're going to you will adapt you'll be fine if the power isn't on between one and two will all be better for it if the power isn't on between one and two. We'll all be better for it if the power goes down to 50% at 10. Am I wrong? Well, where to start?

You've made a lot of points there. I think in the 70s, and I'm gonna be 65 this year, so I'm not quite as old as Steve Hayward, no one is, but I'm going to be 65 this year, so I'm not quite as old as Steve Hayward. No one is, but I'm getting older. But in the 60s and 70s, the anti-nuclear movement was really propelled by this kind of anti-nuclear weapon view, right? That the conflation of nuclear energy with nuclear weaponry was really the main thing, right? So that's kind of changed over time. And now our nuclear opponents are saying,

oh, we can't deal with the waste. And it's too long lived. But this has just been the ideology of the left in America really since the 60s and particularly after the end of the Cold War that nuclear energy is bad and that all energy renewables are good, regardless of whether the intermittency or whatever. But I'll quote Jesse Ossibel, a friend of mine who has influenced my thinking on this greatly.

He said, wind and solar may be renewable, but they are not green. And I think that's just such a great summation of that. And that's why one of the reasons why I'm so pro-nuclear is a small footprint. And power density, high power density is key. It is green. And that is something where I think

this environmental betrayal by the left in favor of offshore wind, which I cannot stand, is just this incredible betrayal of the environment. But I think it's all just motivated by money. And the NGOs are allied with big banks, big law firms, and big business to promote this wind and solar. I think it's just that simple. I was going to say, Billy Bob Thornton

has a speech in Landman that addresses the very green issues that you're talking about. And as they'd love to debunk it, I love to listen to it. Stephen? Yeah, actually, Robert, do your three keys to thinking about energy briefly. I used them for my students, and I got them from you. Yeah, you know, density, cost and scale

if you need a prompt, right? Yeah, well, it's what I call the four imperatives and I find them in my fourth book, Power Hungry. Power density, energy density, cost and scale. So why are our energy systems, why have they developed the way they have over the past two centuries, really, in the beginning of the industrial age.

Well, it's power density. And what is power density? It's a measure of energy flow that can be harnessed in a given area, volume, or mass. That's not power and energy are not the same thing. Energy is the ability to do work. Power is the rate at which work gets done. So power density is a measure of energy flow in a certain time.

And so that's why, again, going back to nuclear and natural gas and even coal mines, underground coal mines, a super high power density. Energy density is the amount of energy that's contained in a certain weight or mass or volume. So this bottle here has water in it. But if it had leaves or sawdust in it, it would have lower energy density

than if I fill it with gasoline or kerosene. And then cost and scale are obvious. And so one other quick point is the lower the power density, the higher the resource intensity. And that's what we see with corn ethanol, with wind, with solar. They just require massive amounts of land because they produce very small energy flows

from the relative footprint. So it's a basic physics, but unfortunately very, very few people understand it. Yeah. I mean, what I do, Robert, with students is I show them, I use music because I think I understand this. I show them an old eight track tape, which they've never seen, and a cassette tape. By the way, I have an old eight track tape of electric light orchestra to make a topical and then I'll show them You know cassette tape a record album and then I'll show them an old iPod or you know

And what you can be a ten songs, right? Or a little flash drive last drive it right and that that's an easy way to get the energy density question across and then what? Do you want to where do you want to get your music from? You know, a cardboard box full of eight tracks with 50 songs or your little device that's not even a square ranch that has a thousand songs and they understand that. So you can play that eight track in your vintage firebird. Right, right. That's the image that comes to mind.

Before we let you go, Robert, then one related question that brings us all together. What is the gauge on the top E string on that Stratocaster hanging on the wall? Well, it's E, right? It's E, but you use a nine gauge, 10 gauge, 11? Oh, gosh, I think those are 10 gauge strings. I'm a perennial beginner when it comes to the guitar a, I think I work too much to play all the time but yes, but I love my guitar collection. But nine is great for soloing because you can really bend that baby.

I always found the 11s would just pop like crazy. They would, they would even and your whammy bar takes it out of tune and then you got to even bend it even more and then it snaps. Which is why I actually was more of a Gibson man even though I love my strat. Well next time, practice a little little bit more you can play us out but uh... for the moment we're going to tell everybody that a necessary important and incredibly relevant book to our times today is a question of power electricity and the wealth of nations robert price thanks for joining us today

fascinating could have done another hour and some day at the soon i hope that we will robert they show Could have done another hour and someday soon. I hope that we will Robert. See you later. Thanks y'all So Charles, I believe that you you had something you you didn't want to burden the fellow with an act Burden us burden us if you will so Fade globalist elite that I am I just came back from France where I spent a lovely ten days and

we drove across much of the country and my favorite wine regions were on our schedule. And one of the things that I saw that I just would not have seen on my many trips to France as a kid, also driving trips, with these wind farms that are everywhere now. You see them in this beautiful countryside, but it's marred by all these horrible war of the world style machines. But here's a funny little insight into what people really think. So we did a wine tour in Burgundy, and between where we were staying and the vineyards, there are all these wind farms. And I said to the lady, I said, why, why, why are they there? You have all this nuclear power.

This is just vanity, right? And she felt a bit defensive, you know, so I said, no, no, no, they're fine. They do not look too bad. We have these, these bring electricity to the villages. They are fine. You know, we drive on a little bit, and eventually we end up near Bone in Burgundy amid all the vineyards.

And I said to her, you know, I noticed there aren't any windmills here. And she said, have those things near the grapes? Mm-hmm. Well. That's exactly what I thought. That somehow the vibration caused by these things would somehow affect the tannic acid.

No, I get it. I get it. People put these things in different places, but it's like when they're ruining a beautiful landscape, she was like, no, they are beautiful. Why? You said you feel a style. And then the minute I'm like, well, they aren't near the grapes. She's like, those disgusting, tall, modern, swingy things. We cannot put them near the wine. I think that's what they actually think, right? You can always tell what people want when you say, let's put it in your backyard. Well, it requires a lot of substances, one of which is copper. And everybody is complaining here because Trump is threatening to open up areas near our beloved boundary waters

to mining to get copper, because there's a lot of copper up here. You can't use old copper, recycled copper, you need lots of virgin copper for these things. But somehow we'll have to get it from someplace else. We'll get it from China. Well, maybe not the way things are going. We have seen interesting stories this week about reshoring of several things from electronics to, I think, Eli Lilly has committed like $5 billion or something, don't quote me, on building pharmaceutical plants here, which is great, which is really nice, because I'd like for us to not have to depend on China for that stuff. We had that spasm in 2020 when we were realizing, oh wait a minute, we all need masks, we didn't, and China is the only guys who have them, and they did, to tie back to electricity. So I took, I saw an interview with a guy, and I can't vouch for any of this, I probably shouldn't say it, but he was talking about the fact that we get most of our transformers, it seems, from China. And if you were the Chinese government and you were selling transformers to the grid of a nation for whom you have a certain amount of antagonism,

wouldn't you just build a back door into every single one of them? Yes, that's one reason why we don't want stuff from Huawei on our internet precisely precisely British who decided that that was all fine I think it's as if it's xenophobic to somehow say that China would be installing all sorts of spyware and backdoors into their stuff I mean it's simple national self-interest why wouldn't they especially when they have a trading partner like us who so credulous has to believe that they're behaving completely above board when I mean I wish I could show you I have two electric razors

One is by Phillips the others by some Chinese fly-by-night company and they are exactly the same They are precisely the same in terms of their design. They're half everything about them. You can just tell China stole it Well, we do expect this though James because we don't allow China to sell us anything that is used in our military equipment. So we do know that they're likely to do this. I mean, this is a very, very small example, but I am, as you know, a big tech nerd and I've installed all manner of smart devices in my house, most of which are either proprietary or I bought myself or are not linked to the cloud or what you will.

Anyway, there's a lot of custom code that I have running them, but I have these two devices in the house that were made in China because there's nowhere else that I can get them. Wrong story short. And those two devices constantly, and of course I've stopped them, they're the only two devices in the whole lot that constantly try to ping

China on the network. They're phoning home all the time. They're phoning home all the time. So I got rid of them because it's like I can't have that in my house. I can't. People say, Oh, why were you so paranoid? You think they care how often you open your garage door? I don't know. But I don't want them knowing that. Who are they? Who are they pinging? Okay, so I mean, you

can you can get... Did you use little snitch or did you just look at your logs? Well, I have a whole server room full of equipment that runs my network, so I see all of the packets that go in and out and I can see what they're doing. Okay, so who's it trying to... Well, I don't know, but it's the manufacturer, I guess, in Chinese IP addresses. You can't really tell where they're going inside China because China has this big firewall around the country and it translates everything into subnet. So I don't know, but, but it's also just,

even if they were pinging Tampa, it would still be different than everything else on the network. None of the light switches in my house are trying to ping Amazon web services, right? It's just these two Chinese made devices. It's fascinating. Right. Pitch them out. Pitch them out. Well, also we need rare earth. We need minerals. We need stuff like that. And as it turns out, Ukraine has got a lot of them and including neon, which I'm very happy about the fact that we have struck a trade deal with Ukraine for neon means that the American Renaissance can possibly bring back to the downtowns and the drive-ins more neon,

a wonderful American art form. But for all those people who are saying that, you know, Trump's gonna abandon Ukraine, it seems as if struck a deal whereby we get access to the minerals in exchange for security? Really? And they trust us?

What do you think of the deal? Well, wait a minute. I mean, I thought from the beginning that this was quite a significant idea on several grounds, but the main one is you just mentioned it. If the United, and I'm not sure if we're actually taking co-ownership, which was one of the original ideas,

or whether we're just going to get favorable terms and be first in line to buy Ukrainian mineral exports. I prefer the former, because then it gives the United States a direct national interest in the survival of Ukraine. And that tells Russia that... Right, you're right, James. Another guarantee on paper has not worked very much from us since we didn't follow the previous one 30 years ago that said, give up your nukes and we'll guarantee your security. Well, we didn't live up to that.

So the point is that now you have a real tangible economic interest, it sends a signal to Russia, hands off Ukraine. So I kind of like that. People all like to say, well, this is Trump being an economic imperial. I don't know what they're saying, but it's Trump's deal-making. I kind of think it reminds me a little bit of the Len Lease Act back, and, you know, Len Lease actions of Roosevelt back on the eve of World War II, where because we had constraints in the law, the Neutrality Act, we were lending destroyers

to Britain, which were maybe obsolete, but it was a political statement that was important. But in return, we got some British bases in the Caribbean that they weren't likely to be needing any time soon at the outset of that war. And so I don't think this is entirely unprecedented or without any parallels in our past, and I'm rather encouraged by it as someone who wants to see Ukraine survive. Uh, and I'll just sort of stop there and see what Charlie thinks of any of that. Well, do you know when the British finally paid off Lend-Lease? Yeah, the 1990s or something or 2006.

Is that it? Yes. I knew it was recent. Yeah. So it's certainly, as you say, not new. A lot of the coverage of this is implied. This is some monstrous innovation on the part of the Trump administration, but it's not.

I'm pleased about it for a couple of reasons. First, because it signals that we're going to be siding with Ukraine rather than Russia, which we should be. And second, because I don't see a great problem in them helping us pay them to fight Russia. No. I think we should be helping them, but there's nothing written in the stars that says we can't ever get anything in return. I don't have an issue with it. No, I agree completely. It was after the Iraq war and Saddam Hussein was toppled and they were selling the oil leases, the oil rights around.

I don't believe that the United States companies came in the top two or three. I think it was Total Fina. I think it was France. I think these guys bit us. So I mean, we didn't get the oil out of that. And if we had, it would have been, well, it's blood for oil.

No, we're just. So I agree with Charlie. There's no reason that Ukraine can't slip a couple of bucks our way and we'll all be together. It just may seem, however, when you look back at all the shouting and the bluster and the Putin cozening and the rest of it, that we saw somebody staking out an absurd, irrational position and getting people to the table and eventually moving more towards the center. I keep being told that that's what's always going on and sometimes I actually kind of sort of believe it. Credulous soul that I am. Well

Stephen before we go I believe that you would like to let the world know of an absolutely brilliant pithy Charles Ebel Charles Ebel, your cook tweet, that sums it all up. Charles wins Twitter for this week, in my mind at least, my humble opinion. There was, if you missed this James, a squib in the New York Times, or a quote in the mainstream media saying,

there's a clamoring among Democrats to have Kamala Harris re-emerge. She's the only leader to speak up against Trump when there's clamoring going on. Charles, I had a great laugh out of your tweet, which I'll read to our listeners. There is not. There has in fact never ever been less of a clamoring for anything that is on offer. In the history of clamoring, no people has ever clamored less than the American people are clamoring for Kamala Harris's voice. She is clamorless. She is a hollow clamoree. And that's it. I thought, you know, were you

subconsciously channeling John Cleese in the Parrot Shop about the next Parrot? Yeah. I was wondering if that was the inspiration. That was fabulous, Charles. I envy your style with that one. Wow, thank you. I stepped back to my computer and found that story and I, A, couldn't believe the claim that was being made, but even better, I couldn't believe that the claim had been made on background. So she had managed, whoever said that had managed to get permission to say it anonymously because why? Why do you need anonymity to praise your former boss?

It was utterly bizarre, the whole thing. Very strange. Well, I saw her reemerge in a clip that was going around where she was referencing some TikTok or YouTube video about what elephants at the zoo do when there's an earthquake. Apparently they form a circle with their butts all together and write it out. And she was saying that that's what the democrats should do and I thought here's a perfect example of Kamala Harris. She's cackling, she's loud, she's beaming, she's rambling on about a video. And she is using as a symbol of what the democrats ought to do, the literal representation of the

republican icon which is the the elephant it was in current and sparkly and she didn't explain everything right but she was right you've seen it right right like we're all still back in bratt summer and god help me if ever that comes back again i have only to say however that if you by any means uh... after your lunch find yourself a little bit or breakfast or dinner whatever your evening ice cream I don't know when you listen to this if you find yourself a bit logy you might want to check your metabolism and lumen is the device for that you might also want to go to iTunes

they still call it that yeah music podcast wherever you get your podcast and have the opportunity to rate us why don't you rate us don't want to be like that guy who's out sending you the stuff saying, good job, please rate us, but I am that guy, I guess, and five stars helps. Why? Services the podcast, more people listen to it, more people go to ricochet.com to figure out what it is and what it is is that same civil center right place

you've been looking for in the internet all your born days. Yep, you can read the main page for free, but the member page is where many friendships and interesting conversations form. Give it a look. Charles Asilio Cook, Stephen Hayward. It's been a pleasure. I'm James Lilakes and we'll see everybody in the comments at Ricochet 4.0. Bye-bye.