Latest / Cultural Wars | America Out Loud News / Heartland’s Linnea Lueken fights back against “climate hypochondria”

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Heartland’s Linnea Lueken fights back against “climate hypochondria” · Cultural Wars | America Out Loud News

• 0:07
  Mainstream media has betrayed our trust.
• 0:10
  Rather than tell us the whole story about the important issues of the day, they tell us only what they want us to hear.
• 0:16
  Your hosts, Tom Harris and Todd Royal will bring you the other side of the story.
• 0:27
  The failure of last month's United Nations Climate Conference in Brazil, COP 30, has sent climate alarmists into panic mode.
• 0:35
  Over the past couple of weeks, we've seen scientists, policy experts, and civil society groups stressing that the lack of decisive action to restrict fossil fuel usage increases the urgency of warnings about catastrophic impacts.
• 0:49
  The AI co-pilot, it says the following the scientific consensus remains clear.
• 0:54
  Emissions must peak and decline rapidly within this decade to avoid crossing dangerous thresholds.
• 1:00
  COP30's inability to deliver decisive commitments has therefore amplified warnings from the intergovernmental panel on climate change and other bodies, which emphasize that the window for action is closing.
• 1:12
  Civil society voices have echoed this urgency, describing the summit as deeply disappointing and warning that political gridlock is pushing humanity closer to climate catastrophe.
• 1:25
  All this is nonsense, of course.
• 1:27
  So to help our audience sleep at night, we've invited Linnea Lucan, research fellow with the Arthur B.
• 1:32
  Robinson Center on Climate and Environmental Policy at the Heartland Institute to be our guest today.
• 1:38
  Linnea, a native of Kildeer, Illinois, and now residing in South Carolina, graduated from the University of Wyoming in 2018 with a BS in petroleum engineering and a minor in geology.
• 1:51
  Before coming to Heartland, she worked in the Gulf of Mexico on deep water drill ships as a logging geologist.
• 1:57
  So welcome to the show, Linnea.
• 2:00
  Oh, thank you very much for having me, Tom.
• 2:02
  Great.
• 2:03
  Yeah, we've got to ask about this offshore drilling thing, Tom.
• 2:06
  We gotta we gotta figure out all about this.
• 2:09
  So how far offshore did you work?
• 2:11
  And I I don't know about you, but I think we both would say, come on, you got to talk to some about some of the storms at sea as well.
• 2:17
  So thanks for being here.
• 2:20
  You know, one little anecdote that I think you guys will get a kick out of is one of the very first uh hitches that I spent offshore, and this was a couple hundred miles into the Gulf of America.
• 2:30
  I almost say Gulf of Mexico again.
• 2:32
  Takes a minute to get you to that.
• 2:34
  Um I was sitting up on one of the higher decks of the ship because I worked on um drill ships, so it's less so those platforms that you usually see in the movies or in advertisements for offshore.
• 2:46
  Um it's more of you picture like almost an aircraft carrier size ship or like a big tanker ship or something, but with a derek in the middle of it.
• 2:55
  So I was up on one of the higher decks taking a break, just admiring the uh infinite blue scenery.
• 3:03
  And one of the company men for the drilling company came up to me and he said, Man, it sure is hot out.
• 3:10
  And I said, Yeah, it is.
• 3:11
  It's crazy how hot, you know, I never imagined it would be 90 degrees in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico.
• 3:16
  And he goes, Yeah, well, and you know, it gets every it gets hotter every year from global warming.
• 3:22
  And even at that time, I was extremely global warming skeptical at the time, at least with regards to uh it being an emergency.
• 3:31
  And so I kind of just shut my mouth and nodded and I was so uncomfortable instantly.
• 3:36
  I thought, man, I thought this would be the one place where I wouldn't have to deal with this, but I was wrong.
• 3:41
  Um, but yeah, no, we were you know a couple hundred miles out there, um, so very far away, a couple of an hour helicopter ride or you know, a 10 to 12 hour boat ride, uh, depending on you know, air conditions and stuff or sea condition.
• 3:55
  In in heavy weather, they wouldn't take the helicopter, they'd send you in a boat, and then you would get to watch everybody turn green while you're on these big swells and everything.
• 4:05
  Um, I was offshore for a couple of pretty good storms.
• 4:09
  Um, if a hurricane came through, we would just move, you know, because it was a boat, so you'd unlock from the well and drive the boat for like farther away from the storm um so that the wind speeds didn't get you, but the swells would still kind of get us.
• 4:23
  Um, and in those days, they would just lock everything down and you wouldn't work.
• 4:28
  You would kind of just stay inside where it's safe because you never know if something comes, you know, unlatched somehow from all that heavy equipment out there, you wouldn't want that sliding around the deck on you.
• 4:37
  So um, and you would just kind of sit there being rocked for a day or two.
• 4:43
  So, how how high were the waves in this big storm?
• 4:46
  Oh, I couldn't begin to estimate.
• 4:47
  I mean, they've been, you know, even 20-foot swell or something would probably be the high.
• 4:53
  I mean, it was there were some that we were out there where it was really pretty bad.
• 4:57
  Um, but they do try to escape as best as they can, but there's only so far that you can go in a reasonable amount of time.
• 5:04
  And they would trace it pretty close too.
• 5:07
  Um, you know, not dangerously, but they wanted to see until kind of the last minute, because if you abandoned your your spot in the ocean, and it turns out that the hurricane is going to turn away and not come in your direction, or you know, not pass close enough to be a problem, um, then you waste a lot of downtime, and downtime can be extremely expensive.
• 5:28
  So they do kind of play chicken with it a little bit, but I wouldn't say dangerously so.
• 5:34
  Yeah, what a great experience.
• 5:35
  Wow.
• 5:36
  Yeah, that was something else.
• 5:38
  I wanted to ask you, you know, Tom, he he introduced this, and we're talking about COP 30, and it's so funny, like co-pilot saying what it said.
• 5:46
  But do you consider it's just amazing that that quote unquote AI has a bias.
• 5:51
  Um, do you consider the failure of COP 30 actually a success?
• 5:56
  I mean, from my perspective for sure.
• 5:59
  For the perspective of energy realism, climate realism, and you know, energy affordability for people, not just in the Western world, which is where a lot of our energy is under attack, but also in the developing world, um, I think it's a huge benefit.
• 6:16
  Yeah.
• 6:17
  Now I have to ask you as a younger person, because you must be in your mid-20s.
• 6:21
  Do you find that most people today are worried about most young people are worried about climate change, or do they really take it that seriously anymore?
• 6:30
  Well, it's very flattering.
• 6:32
  I'm a bit older than my mid-20s, but I'm very flattered.
• 6:35
  Um, but I I yeah, no, my age, I mean, we were hammered with it every year in school in almost every class we took.
• 6:44
  When I was in sixth or seventh grade, no, I think it was seventh grade.
• 6:48
  I had two teachers who put all of us into a pilot program where they introduced climate into every single course we took.
• 6:56
  You know, whether it was our English class, we would read something about you know how people would survive in a you know climate catastrophe or whatever.
• 7:06
  Um, in our science class, of course, it was all climate focused.
• 7:09
  If we were talking about biology, it was about how the polar bears were all drowning or whatever.
• 7:13
  It was, I mean, it was every single class.
• 7:16
  In math, we calculated our um carbon footprint.
• 7:20
  It was I'm not sure if I would be here doing this if they hadn't hit us so hard with it so much when I was so young, to the point where I just disengaged entirely.
• 7:33
  I had a little bit of a you know, a protesting mindset, although I I wanted to believe my teachers and stuff, but when I knew that they were wrong about things, um it it just made me disconnect entirely and not trust them anymore.
• 7:48
  Um, and there was one instance where a teacher told me that polar bears were not good swimmers.
• 7:53
  You know, Ursus Maritimus is not a good swimmer.
• 7:57
  Um, and I knew that that wasn't true, and that was kind of one of my turning points when I was a kid that I said, wow, my teachers can just be totally wrong and not know what they're talking about.
• 8:08
  Yeah.
• 8:09
  So, yeah, all of us in my generation were were hammered with this stuff, probably to less than that uh of a degree, but I think most people just don't think about it enough to either be super worried about it or be skeptical of it.
• 8:26
  I think that's changing.
• 8:27
  I think more people of my generation and generation Z are starting to turn on it just because the rhetoric is overdone.
• 8:36
  You can only say that the world is about to end so many times where it doesn't, um, and and not have it pan out.
• 8:42
  And I think I've even seen it from some of the scientists and some of the more serious beliefs true believers who work um, you know, and and go to these conferences and stuff, were getting frustrated because they realize that the media hype on it is turning people against the whole program.
• 9:01
  And so they're getting frustrated that the media exaggerates everything so strongly.
• 9:06
  Um, they still believe it's a catastrophe or whatever, but they don't think that the media should be telling people that every single weather event is directly because of climate change or whatever.
• 9:17
  And so they're saying, you know, people are getting news fatigue, and so they're not worried about it anymore.
• 9:22
  And I think that's definitely true for people in my generation.
• 9:26
  Yeah, yeah, for sure.
• 9:28
  Do you think too, and in regards to kind of staying on this issue that obviously affordability has become a big deal?
• 9:34
  You know, you hear about the electricity prices have gone up, home prices, you know, it's harder for you know your generation to get homes to be married, have children, you know, to kind of move up in society because of because of cost and student loan debt.
• 9:49
  Do you think kind of blanket the whole affordability issue as well makes kind of younger people or you know, a younger generation go, we just have a lot bigger concern.
• 10:00
  Than something I love how you just said it.
• 10:02
  We hear every every weather events climate change and the world's ending every day when I just need to go pay off my student loan debt, or I'm trying to get a down payment for a house.
• 10:11
  Do you think that some of that works into it as well?
• 10:14
  Well, I'm not entirely sure because I think you know, as much as people are getting fatigued, I do think that there, you know, there are studies that show that there's a fairly high amount of anxiety in in people of my generation and younger generations, you know, kind of an uh using the climate alarmist favorite word, unprecedented amount of uh of anxiety about the future and stuff, and it and it's from climate claims and it's also from affordability.
• 10:43
  And I think that a lot of people, especially people that don't pay all that much attention to these issues, probably haven't made the connection between energy costs and the cost of everything else going up, or insurance and the fact that these insurance companies get to claim, you know, that something is climate change or whatever, and so they can charge you more.
• 11:05
  I don't I don't think people are quite making that connection yet, but it's it's coming, I think, if we keep hammering on it.
• 11:11
  Yeah, sure.
• 11:12
  Yeah, I'd like you to talk about the difference between climate and weather, because I know you did a nice video on that.
• 11:18
  And a lot of people, like Todd was saying, they're blaming every weather event on climate change.
• 11:23
  So what's the difference between the two?
• 11:25
  Sure.
• 11:26
  So a weather event is anything that can occur in a relatively short time span from you know minutes to hours to days, even um, you can even have weather that occurs for weeks.
• 11:37
  Uh, but climate is kind of a statistical construct of weather over a longer time period.
• 11:44
  So when you're talking about climate, you're talking about time in chunks of probably about 30 years, which I think is what the American Meteorological Association um measures it by.
• 11:56
  So it's just a matter of scale, really.
• 11:59
  Um climate is the the average of all sorts of weather conditions for a region.
• 12:05
  It's kind of crazy to talk about climate at a global scale, other than to say the climate of Earth is good for sustaining life, and that's pretty much all you can say about it.
• 12:16
  Um because we have so many diverse climate zones on this planet that it's I I've always found the idea of both average global temperature and uh average climate conditions to be kind of silly.
• 12:31
  Yeah, yeah.
• 12:32
  It's interesting because nobody and nothing lives in the globe, they all live in regions.
• 12:37
  Yeah, so you don't have like a super being straddling the planet saying, Oh, I'm hot today, you know.
• 12:42
  I mean, it's a silly concept, you're right.
• 12:44
  And yet this seems to dominate a lot of our media.
• 12:47
  You know, we had an environment minister here in Canada, and he was giving a presentation a few years ago, and he's he was talking about global warming.
• 12:54
  He says, And if you don't think that it's warming, just look outside.
• 12:58
  And I've I felt like you know, you weren't supposed to ask questions, but I felt like saying, yeah, it's summer you know, it's it's so silly.
• 13:06
  Yeah.
• 13:07
  Talking about climate change, uh, I noticed you've had some Midwest snowstorms.
• 13:11
  You dump a foot of snow.
• 13:13
  My goodness.
• 13:13
  Is that being caused by climate change?
• 13:16
  Well, I'm sure they're claiming that it is.
• 13:18
  It's kind of questionable.
• 13:20
  It depends, you know, on years that they have not very much snow at all, that there's a snow drought, they'll claim that that's because of climate change, because climate change is making it too hot for snow, and this is bad because there won't be enough snowpack to slowly melt in the spring and give us water for spring flowers or whatever, if the showers don't come, whatever it happens to be.
• 13:40
  If there's a lot of snow in any given region, they say that's also because of climate change.
• 13:45
  Because global warming, even if it doesn't warm above the point of snow formation, still makes it so that there's more moisture in the air, which causes more snowstorms.
• 13:55
  And and there have been claims some years that there are more blizzards because of climate change, that there's more of a dipping in the um the polar vortex because of climate change, that there's less dipping of the polar vortex because of climate change.
• 14:10
  It goes back and forth every time that the weather conditions uh for a season change in any given location in the world, it's always climate change.
• 14:18
  No, I would not be worried about that.
• 14:20
  There's one trend that's fairly clear with regards to northern hemisphere snow extent, and this is snow extent, not snow mass.
• 14:31
  But it seems that in the fall and winter, over the last 30 or so years, over the period of time that we've had satellite data, there has been an increase in snow extent in the northern hemisphere.
• 14:45
  Increase.
• 14:46
  And that's in the fall and winter.
• 14:48
  In the spring, there's a decrease in snow extent.
• 14:53
  So spring might be coming earlier, but it's on a course of like a couple days, and these are averages over time, right?
• 15:00
  So it's it's different from year to year.
• 15:03
  That's the only trend that you can fairly well point towards that the data doesn't flip-flop depending on who does the study.
• 15:11
  They have fairly good satellite record of that kind of thing.
• 15:14
  And I wouldn't be surprised if that was the case, and no one should be, because there is a gradual warming trend since we came out of the little ice age, and you should darn well hope that there is one, because you do not want glacial expansion.
• 15:30
  Um, glacial expansion would be a major problem for for everybody, especially you guys up in Canada.
• 15:37
  Yeah, that's a good point to emphasize it.
• 15:40
  Climate never stays the same.
• 15:41
  So if you got a choice between warming or cooling, yeah, let's have some warming.
• 15:46
  Definitely.
• 15:47
  So you're seeing um, I just want to make sure I heard you correctly and for the audience.
• 15:52
  You're seeing a little bit of warming and you're seeing spring come up a couple of days earlier, let's say, two or three days earlier on average.
• 16:02
  Tom and I, we like to do I'll be I'll be the other side then.
• 16:04
  Well, then doesn't that show Linnea that oh my goodness gracious, if we if we continue burning all these fossil fuels and releasing all that CO2 and you deniers, people like you, we're gonna we're gonna warm the earth or we're gonna do something like reverse the earth, because I've heard that one recently.
• 16:23
  That's been the latest word.
• 16:25
  We're gonna reverse the earth, Linea, and Canada is gonna be full of glaciers because people like you keep burning fossil fuels.
• 16:31
  What you know, you can hear the argument from coming from the other side.
• 16:36
  What would be your response to to me being the other side for you against you right now?
• 16:41
  Well, to me, I would just say, you know, is any change okay in any direction on any weather condition over time?
• 16:49
  You know, if there's fewer hurricanes over time, is that a catastrophe?
• 16:55
  Well, it might not be necessarily all good because hurricanes are a major thermal regulator for the oceans.
• 17:01
  So maybe it wouldn't be good.
• 17:02
  Maybe you'd get more ocean temperature rise in in tropical oceans that have hurricanes and and cyclones.
• 17:08
  Maybe that would be a bad thing, but it's good also because you're not smashing up people's homes and and having major storms and stuff.
• 17:16
  So there's every single change that happens on this planet comes with good and bad.
• 17:21
  Uh there's not been very much historical precedent for anything like a positive feedback loop, which is where something causes more of itself to occur in like an uncontrollable spiral.
• 17:32
  I don't think we'd be here if that was something that happens on planet Earth, right?
• 17:37
  So over very long periods of time, Earth has had extremely large changes in its you know, average temperatures and its makeup and everything.
• 17:48
  And I would just say what I what I've called this a lot of the time, especially the hyper focus on minutia, like is tornado alley shifting 50 miles east over the last hundred years, you know, stuff like that.
• 18:03
  Um, I would say to me, it reads more like like climate hypochondria.
• 18:10
  Oh, yeah.
• 18:11
  Than you know, thing anything that we should actually be worried about.
• 18:15
  Yeah.
• 18:16
  So what do you say when people call you a denier?
• 18:19
  Um you know, it's usually not to my face, and that's usually within a group.
• 18:24
  So luckily I haven't had to deal with that too much.
• 18:28
  Um, and people are starting to kind of slowly drop that label, I think.
• 18:32
  But in the cases where I have been, I I would just kind of shrug.
• 18:36
  That kind of thing doesn't really bother me at this point.
• 18:39
  There's there's nobody who's denying that the earth has a climate, so that's just silly from the bumper sticker perspective anyway.
• 18:46
  So saying like you're a climate denier, or but I know what they mean when they say climate denier is that uh depending on who's saying it, they either mean I'm denying that human emissions of carbon dioxide and methane or anthropogenic emissions of carbon dioxide and methane are contributing to a catastrophic unraveling of our our great you know systems on this planet.
• 19:14
  I would say I yeah, I guess I'm a climate denier if that's what you mean by it, because I don't believe that that's the case.
• 19:21
  Um if you're saying I'm denying that human emissions of carbon dioxide and methane contribute to any proportion of the average rise in global temperatures, I'd be a little bit shakier on whether or not I would agree with you that I'm climate denier, because I'm not I'm not a what they would call a lukewarmer, but I'm not sold on the idea that human emissions have no effect on average temperatures.
• 19:47
  Um, and I certainly am not in the camp that says that human activity in general has no effect on local temperatures because we know that urbanization has a strong impact on local temperature.
• 20:00
  Temperature and even local rainfall.
• 20:02
  So yeah, it's it's always more complicated than they want to make it, but climate denier worked for a while, but I'm not I'm not overly offended by it because depending on what they mean, I kind of agree.
• 20:13
  Like, fine, sure, call me a climate denier.
• 20:16
  I don't care.
• 20:17
  I want to I want to ask you let me ask you, I want to ask her real quick about the other kind of big tropism.
• 20:22
  You know, because we are told that 97% of scientists, I think even uh Barack Obama when he was president said this in the Oval Office one time, you know.
• 20:32
  We are told that 97% of scientists agree that humans are causing, you know, dangerous climate change.
• 20:39
  Is this true?
• 20:41
  No.
• 20:41
  Emphatically, no.
• 20:43
  I the study that they pulled that number from was a bad study to begin with.
• 20:48
  Um, I think you know, they didn't even survey all that many people, and of the people that they you know that gave no response or said like I'm not responding, they like categorized them from what I understand as you know being neutral on the question or something, so that it skewed it a little bit more towards the alarmist perspective.
• 21:06
  And I I really having talked to as many scientists from different um, you know, all sorts of different areas that I have, uh, I would I would be very surprised if that was the case because there certainly doesn't seem to be, especially not when you make it, you know, that they believe that there's dangerous warming.
• 21:24
  I think actually a lot of the survey data shows that most scientists think that humans have some effect on average temperatures, um, but they're not willing to say that it's you know a catastrophe.
• 21:37
  Yeah, for sure.
• 21:38
  Uh just tell you what I say when people call me a climate change denier.
• 21:42
  I say, I deny that I deny climate change.
• 21:44
  I'm a denial denier.
• 21:46
  So you sort of turn it into a joke.
• 21:48
  And I also say, well, thank God there's climate change.
• 21:51
  You're here in Canada, I'd be under two kilometers of ice.
• 21:54
  Yeah.
• 21:57
  Yours is a quicker answer than mine.
• 21:58
  But that's part of the reason why I think our kind of our side of the debate gets bogged down a little bit because you have people like me who want to be like, well, I mean, if you're talking about it with regards to this, then I agree.
• 22:10
  But if you're talking about it, you know, because they're because real science has nuance.
• 22:15
  And in the politics of climate change make no room for nuance.
• 22:19
  Well, that's right.
• 22:19
  And sometimes you can't sum it up in a 18-word tweet.
• 22:23
  Yeah.
• 22:23
  You know, and you know, it's funny.
• 22:25
  In 1950, Einstein died in 1955, but in 1950, he was on a radio show, and there was a minute left in the program, and the host said, uh, Dr.
• 22:34
  Einstein, we have about 60 seconds remaining in the show.
• 22:37
  In the time remaining, do you think you could tell us about how the theory of general relativity works?
• 22:43
  And there was a long pause, and he said, No.
• 22:49
  Because I mean, some things you can't sum up in a few seconds.
• 22:52
  It's a complicated field.
• 22:54
  Yeah.
• 22:55
  But that's why I give, you know, people like our president Donald Trump a lot of grace when he says things like climate change is a hoax.
• 23:02
  It can make some people on the climate skeptic side pretty annoyed because they're like, but climate, you know, you know, technically, climate isn't a hoax.
• 23:10
  The earth has a climate, blah, blah, blah.
• 23:12
  It's like, well, we know what he's saying when he says climate is a hoax, just like we know what they're saying when you they call you a climate denier.
• 23:18
  When he's saying climate is a hoax, he means that the like climate industrial complex is a scam.
• 23:24
  And it is so yeah, so it it totally is.
• 23:30
  The the other one we you know, we get told this as well.
• 23:33
  I love that you talked about the polar bears.
• 23:35
  Um, you know, we're we we get that you know, Antarctica is melting, and and the uh all the ice and the snow and everything that makes up Antarctica, it's melting due to human-cause climate change.
• 23:47
  Again, is this true?
• 23:49
  And does this match the data that you're seeing?
• 23:52
  Well, there's no bears in the Antarctica, so they're safe in that.
• 23:55
  Okay, good, good.
• 23:57
  There's all those polar bears that you gotta know there's polar bears everywhere.
• 24:00
  They're real cute.
• 24:01
  I like them.
• 24:02
  Um, there are penguins, though, and they're also real cute, and I like them too.
• 24:05
  But which can I say something that if you if you actually ever encountered a polar bear, um, I suggest that you try to run, get away, jump in the ocean, or have a bazooka next to you.
• 24:16
  Because they are a vicious, yeah.
• 24:19
  They are a vicious.
• 24:21
  They always get told, like, oh, this cute little polar bear.
• 24:25
  No, you know, whether a grizzly bear, polar bear, black bear, brown bear, go the other way.
• 24:31
  It's not some cute little cuddly animal.
• 24:33
  You're right.
• 24:34
  I just want to give that public service announcement to our totalist.
• 24:37
  You're absolutely right.
• 24:38
  And I read a fiction series a couple of years ago where some polar bears were devouring people in uh Scotia, I think.
• 24:46
  So that was fun.
• 24:47
  Um, oh, I like them in Coca-Cola ads, is what I mean.
• 24:50
  Yes, I like them at a distance.
• 24:52
  Absolutely.
• 24:53
  Yeah, me too.
• 24:53
  Me too.
• 24:54
  Um, so yeah, with regards to Antarctica, you know, every single year in the summer, in the summer, the southern hemisphere.
• 25:02
  So we're about due for one of these stories.
• 25:05
  Um, you know, they get a really cool dramatic video of what they call um glacial or ice sheet calving, which is when huge chunks of the ice sheet in Antarctica knock off and fall into the ocean um and cause huge waves, and it's very dramatic.
• 25:21
  And sometimes these um icebergs that come off can be just colossal.
• 25:26
  I mean, city blocks size ice chunks.
• 25:30
  Um, they're they're or multiple city block size ice chunks, just gigantic and very large amounts of ice.
• 25:36
  And they will point to these and they will say, This is proof that Antarctica is melting and climate change is destroying the the polar continent there.
• 25:46
  Um it's pretty much not total nonsense.
• 25:50
  Uh and one of the ways that you can show people that it's total nonsense is you can give them an idea of the total volume of ice in Antarctica, even sea ice in Antarctica.
• 26:01
  Um, that just absolutely dwarfs any ice loss that you get um, you know, from random glaciers calving off and or random icebergs calving off.
• 26:12
  Uh there was a study from a couple of years ago, I think maybe last year, 2024.
• 26:18
  Um pull it up real quick, probably.
• 26:20
  Oh, yes.
• 26:21
  Okay, so there was a study in 2024 that looked at 47 years of satellite data on Antarctica, and they saw that there was actually no trend at all in that calving in that Antarctica calving trend um between that time period.
• 26:38
  So there's no trend in, you know, these like big icebergs breaking off of Antarctica.
• 26:43
  So that's not actually a good thing to look at.
• 26:47
  But there is one part of Antarctica that has seen a decline in ice mass over the last couple of decades.
• 26:54
  Um, and that's the Antarctic peninsula.
• 26:57
  Right.
• 26:57
  So there has been an ice loss there.
• 26:59
  The problem with that is that's the part of Antarctica that has the highest amount of tectonic um and volcanic activity underwater.
• 27:09
  And so temperatures are warmer there, one, because it's part of the continent that sticks out closer to um, you know, the the southern tip of South America.
• 27:18
  So it's already a little bit warmer in that spot to begin with.
• 27:21
  And two, uh, it's got a lot of volcanic activity that contributes probably to a lot of the ice melt that you get there.
• 27:29
  However, the other side of the continent has seen ice mass gains over the same period.
• 27:36
  The inner part of the continent has seen snow mass, you know, land mass, land ice snow gain over the same period.
• 27:44
  So the net ice balance on our Antarctica has either barely changed or slightly increased, possibly over the same period.
• 27:54
  So it's all just it's again, it's this hypochondria.
• 27:58
  There's part of the continent is changing, but another part of the continent is changing in a different way.
• 28:03
  It's a huge land mass.
• 28:05
  Um, and people really just don't understand the scale of this thing.
• 28:09
  So, no, I would not be worried at all about Antarctica at this point.
• 28:12
  Oh, that's good.
• 28:13
  That's good.
• 28:14
  We're we're helping well her helping our audience get to sleep at night.
• 28:17
  Oh, yeah.
• 28:18
  Yeah, well, I want to use the phrase climate hypochondria, Tom.
• 28:22
  That's all for sure.
• 28:23
  That is our new phrase.
• 28:24
  I am taking that from Linnea.
• 28:27
  We're doing climate hypochondria.
• 28:29
  Yeah, we have to take a break now, but in the second half, I'm hoping we can talk about fracking because hydraulic fracturing is a wonderful technology, and it's getting a lot of bad rap.
• 28:39
  So in the second half, can we talk about that, Linnea?
• 28:42
  Absolutely.
• 28:43
  Yeah, sure.
• 28:44
  So stay tuned.
• 28:45
  Todd Royal and I, with our guest Linnea Lucan, we'll be right back after the break.
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• 32:54
  And we are back with our guests today.
• 32:57
  Uh excited to talk to her here about fracking.
• 33:00
  And also I have to defend my co-host because he had all sorts of nasty comments recently from people, Linnea, that were all for clipped about fracking and it's gonna kill the earth.
• 33:12
  And Tom is oh my god, Tom is a Tom's taking millions from fossil fuel companies.
• 33:18
  I mean, dear lord, he's gonna kill us all.
• 33:20
  But in all seriousness, you wrote a wonderful report a few years back called debunking for persistent myths about hydraulic fracturing, fracking.
• 33:29
  Let's just kind of go through them if you wouldn't mind.
• 33:32
  Can you first describe the technology to our to our audience and describe also why it's so important?
• 33:39
  Sure.
• 33:39
  Um, so boy, where do you start?
• 33:42
  Um it's well, one of the difficulties with describing how fracking works is you kind of have to know how drilling works too in order to explain it.
• 33:51
  But in a in really really simple terms or in really short form, once you drill a well and you and shale has this shale rock is what's mostly being fracked.
• 34:02
  So you can frack everything else too.
• 34:04
  But but shale is the thing that's really been unlocked by uh fracking.
• 34:08
  So shale has properties that are that make it so that even though it can contain a lot of oil and gas and water and all sorts of fluids like that, it can't move.
• 34:20
  So normally in something like sandstone, you drill into it, and and if you play your pressure conditions right downhole in the well, the fluids will automatically kind of flow into the hole that you created because you're up at a lower pressure than the rock.
• 34:35
  So it'll flow in.
• 34:36
  Well, that pressure isn't able to overcome the um the like rock properties of shale.
• 34:44
  So the fluid can't move, it's stuck there.
• 34:46
  So what you have to do is you have to artificially create um a property called permeability, which is the ability for fluids to move through the rocks.
• 34:56
  So um that's what fracking is doing.
• 34:58
  Fracking, they will put high pressure fluids.
• 35:02
  Sometimes they'll use a little like minor explosive type thing to get it started.
• 35:09
  But um, that's really I mean, it's it'sy bitsy little grains of something compared to what you probably are imagining like sticks of dynamite that they're chucking down the hole that's not at all hit.
• 35:18
  But um, um, so but mostly it's just using high pressure fluids, which will either be water in some cases, but usually not because shale will slow swell with water, but it might be some other manufactured material that they'll use.
• 35:33
  They will use that fluid to carry something called a propent, which is like grains of sand into the cracks that are created, and then when the fluid is withdrawn, the the little sand grains are left behind, and that basically creates artificial permeability in the shale.
• 35:50
  Then the fluid, you know, oil and gas and water are able to come out of the shale, and you can produce it.
• 35:58
  So that's the that's kind of the like fast and dirty explanation of what it is.
• 36:05
  I want to tell our I want to tell our audience you are a geologist.
• 36:08
  You have worked in this field.
• 36:10
  So this is not someone just giving uh an opinion right now.
• 36:14
  This is this is someone who's a geologist and who is who's worked in the field, and also what she just described, you'll find the topics uh you'll you'll be called frack fluid, and typically um it's about the same components.
• 36:28
  It's got about what you'll find in a bottle of 409 cleaner.
• 36:32
  Uh whole lot, a whole lot of water, yeah, water and frack sand.
• 36:36
  Okay, my like I said, my co-host Linnae, he was all sorts of attacked recently, and all sorts of people, and they said this is so dangerous, and Tom, you're so dangerous to promote this.
• 36:47
  But is fracking really as dangerous as anti-fracking activists would have us believe.
• 36:54
  No, well, and it would depend on where your standard of danger is, too.
• 36:59
  I would not put fracking anywhere near any kind of, you know.
• 37:02
  I mean, gosh, what dangerous like what?
• 37:05
  Dangerous like having a power plant in general, dangerous like driving a car.
• 37:10
  No, not as dangerous as driving a car.
• 37:13
  I I really um when it comes to those kind of generalizations, it's it's tough to combat it because it's such a wide breadth, right?
• 37:21
  Any industrial activity is going to carry risk.
• 37:24
  And that's the case for manufacturing electric cars, uh, you know, uh hand mining cobalt in the in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
• 37:35
  These people, you know, these folks they'll they'll say to like Tom will go, well, Tom, I mean, they're drilling right there, they're doing this stuff, and you're it's gonna pollute our drinking water, it's causing earthquakes.
• 37:45
  Yeah, you know, you hear that the drinking water thing, and oh, by the way, it's gonna kill all of our air in the process because it you have all this stuff going out.
• 37:53
  So I please talk about the water and all those other things.
• 37:57
  So the water thing is the number one issue because I think a lot of people kind of it doesn't help too that the industry by necessity when they when they put out you know graphics of what fracking looks like, or they give you know a diagram or whatever.
• 38:11
  It's basically impossible to draw one of those diagrams to scale and have it show on your screen.
• 38:16
  Um, because uh it's you know, your average water reservoir is gonna be at about, I think the deepest water wells in the US are usually drilled, something around 300 feet.
• 38:27
  Yeah, but usually it's much, much shallower than that.
• 38:30
  And our drinking water is usually not deeper than that.
• 38:33
  When you go deeper, the kind of water that they're producing with oil and gas at the you know, thousands of feet below the surface that they're doing fracking at, that water is nasty, terrible stuff.
• 38:45
  You do not want to drink that anyway.
• 38:48
  Um fracking itself bears you know, carries basically no risk whatsoever of getting anything into water.
• 38:58
  It's it's not gonna be fracking.
• 39:01
  Um there is a possibility that other operations could lead to problems with that regard.
• 39:10
  Drilling itself, like all industrial activity at all, carries risk.
• 39:15
  Um, if things like the cementing job aren't done properly, and I think that's the case for almost every single one of the cases where um they try to link fracking to uh water being contaminated with drilling fluid or very rarely with fracking fluid.
• 39:33
  I don't think I've ever actually heard of one of those.
• 39:35
  But um, or with methane or whatever, it's it's almost always because a casing job was done poorly.
• 39:43
  Okay.
• 39:43
  And that's you're sorry, sorry to interrupt, but you're talking about the casing around the drill bit, is that it?
• 39:49
  Yeah.
• 39:49
  Oh, yeah.
• 39:50
  This is why this is difficult to to um explain in an audio format.
• 39:54
  But if you if you picture drilling a well kind of like a telescoping process.
• 40:00
  So you drill one big hole to start, you know, a hundred or so feet, a couple hundred feet to do your first casing.
• 40:07
  They put um a casing into that hole to separate off the rock and the dirt and everything from the hole.
• 40:14
  They cement that casing in place, and then they go back in and they drill another section with a slightly smaller hole.
• 40:21
  They case that they cement that in, and then they drill again.
• 40:25
  It's not like you're just drilling straight through to the target formation.
• 40:28
  Um, it's done in stages, specifically for this reason, right?
• 40:32
  You don't one, you don't want the whole caving in on you.
• 40:35
  So you need to encase it so that you know the rock doesn't like crumble in or the dirt doesn't crumble in at the surface.
• 40:41
  But also you don't want your fluids escaping into anything else.
• 40:47
  Um and you don't want those fluids getting into your well either.
• 40:51
  So those you're go you're drilling through the water table, but when you're going through that chance of polluting the water table is pretty low.
• 41:00
  Yeah, well, I mean, I would say it's it's very low as long as the casing job is done done correctly, and and it's so vanishingly rare.
• 41:08
  There for perspective here, I'm not entirely sure how many wells they've actually found bad casing jobs on that had anything to do with any kind of pollution in aquifers, but there are millions and millions of fracked wells in the United States.
• 41:28
  Yeah, it's it's basically significantly, or it's basically insignificant from a statistical point of view.
• 41:36
  Um and again, the fracking process itself cannot drive fluids into aquifers.
• 41:44
  We're talking about thousands of feet of solid rock between the location that they're fracking and your aquifer zone.
• 41:52
  So the fact that they have to frack at all is evidence that the rock is impermeable.
• 41:59
  Right.
• 41:59
  And those frack and those that those fluid pressures that they're using to drive um your your fracking fluids and your propens and everything are not strong enough to make cracks all the way up thousands of feet up multiple layers of rock.
• 42:13
  It that's just absurd.
• 42:15
  That's not what's happening.
• 42:16
  Um so that's one of the major things that people complain about is the potential to um damage aquifers or pollute aquifers.
• 42:26
  Fracking is not going to do that, it's just not it it's and they even give more context, Tom.
• 42:32
  And thank you, Lynn.
• 42:33
  It's such an excellent way you put it.
• 42:35
  The average fracked well is 5,000 feet.
• 42:38
  Most of them now are because the technology is just unbelievable.
• 42:44
  They're going deeper than that.
• 42:45
  Uh that it literally, there's no statistical relevance from a water table being it most of them are the deepest are 300.
• 42:53
  Most of them are in the 50 to 200 range.
• 42:57
  You're going all the way down 5,000 feet.
• 42:59
  And when you look at um where things are being done, you actually look at the geology.
• 43:05
  I mean, it'll be solid rocks.
• 43:06
  It will be there's literally no way for it to get there.
• 43:12
  It it's it's a and and there's been a couple of famous ones with oh, look, we're lighting the water on fire in Pennsylvania.
• 43:18
  Those are very uh famous things.
• 43:21
  Um, those were those are literally two times to be uh they're lies.
• 43:25
  The person who did it, he lied about it.
• 43:28
  And um, I cannot think of it.
• 43:30
  I'll find the name of the the movie.
• 43:32
  Do you remember the name of the movie?
• 43:34
  Yeah, so this one we had to watch this movie twice in school.
• 43:37
  So it's the biggest frack nation.
• 43:41
  Oh, it's the biggest two gas land was.
• 43:43
  I'm gonna mute before I get upset right now.
• 43:45
  It's such garbage.
• 43:46
  I'm gonna please that one Josh Fox, I think, was the uh that's that lovely, yes, yes, yes, yeah.
• 43:53
  Yeah, that one was really bad.
• 43:55
  There was a case in Colorado that they were trying to say that fracking drove methane.
• 43:59
  So methane gas that would be, you know, with the oil and gas, you know, that methane makes up a large proportion of natural gas.
• 44:08
  Um they were trying to say that fracking somehow was driving methane from thousands and thousands of feet down into someone's water well at their house.
• 44:19
  So they were able to light their water on fire.
• 44:22
  Um, and it's not good that you can light your water on fire, but what these scam artists don't realize is that methane actually carries biological fingerprints, and you can tell based on its chemical breakdown where it came from.
• 44:39
  And the EPA did studies and they investigated this.
• 44:42
  They came in guns blazing already to be, you know, they're more than excited uh to take down some oil companies.
• 44:48
  And what they found was that all of the methane in their well was um biogenic.
• 44:52
  So it was methane just from like bacteria breaking down stuff in their water well, just having stinky water.
• 44:58
  It happens all over the all over the country.
• 45:01
  Um, and uh usually not to the extent that they had it, it was very bad, but they were totally lying because that the stuff was definitely already there before the fracking operation started in their area.
• 45:11
  They were just trying to make a quick buck off of the oil companies, you know, and take advantage of it.
• 45:16
  Um it's so so that kind of stuff abounds, and um the same goes for earthquakes.
• 45:23
  So there's yeah, does it cause does it cause earthquakes at all?
• 45:28
  Fracking, I don't want to say never, but almost never causes any detectable earthquakes that that so what is an earthquake?
• 45:36
  An earthquake is ground the ground moves, you know, the rocks shake to where it can be picked up on a seismograph, right?
• 45:45
  Yeah, yeah.
• 45:46
  Seismographs can pick up a lot of ground movement that we would not classify as an earthquake.
• 45:53
  When you think of an earthquake, you're thinking like the ground is cracking open and or like your house is shuttering.
• 45:58
  If you've ever lived in a zone that has earthquakes, I know I don't know what part of Canada you're in, but like Alaska has a lot of earthquakes, and uh Oklahoma and Texas have earthquakes as well.
• 46:08
  And there has been an increase in seismology, you know, in in the seismographs picking up earthquakes in Oklahoma, Texas, Kansas, those areas.
• 46:21
  Usually not because of fracking.
• 46:25
  It's actually, but they tie it to fracking because what's actually causing this are what's called a wastewater injection well.
• 46:33
  So remember, earlier I talked about the water that comes up with oil and gas when you are drilling or when you're producing the oil and gas.
• 46:40
  Um, there's a joke in the Permian that like for every one barrel of oil, you get 800 barrels of water.
• 46:47
  So there's a ton of water down there, it's nasty stuff.
• 46:50
  The EPA says you can't just dump that nasty stuff out.
• 46:53
  You can't just pour it on the ground or in a river or something.
• 46:57
  So what they're mandated to do by law is re-inject all of that water into the ground where they found it, uh, in these specific wells and other chemical processes do this too.
• 47:09
  Different chemical plants are required to reinject or to inject their waste materials into the ground.
• 47:15
  So these wells are usually shared.
• 47:18
  Um, you know, if you're way out in the middle of Permian, it's gonna be all oil field-related wastewater.
• 47:23
  But if you're somewhere else that has other chemical companies nearby, they're also doing it.
• 47:28
  So it's not just the oil and gas industry.
• 47:31
  But um the the wastewater injection works at way higher pressures than frack pressures are.
• 47:41
  And these are by and large what's being picked up on seismographs, and these can sometimes cause earthquakes that you can feel at the surface.
• 47:50
  How bad are they?
• 47:52
  Well, it's it's about what you would feel from like the garbage truck driving down your street or dropping a jug of milk in your kitchen.
• 48:02
  Um, they are not, you know, rattling people's houses apart and stuff.
• 48:05
  So again, this is something that's vastly exaggerated, though it's not you know a good thing, and a lot of oil companies would much prefer to not have to re-inject their wastewater.
• 48:17
  Um, they'd like to be able to use it for something, uh, or you know, get rid of it another way, but the the EPA says no, you have to put it back.
• 48:26
  So um, yeah, that's that's just one of those that's it's tangentially related, but it's not fracking doing it.
• 48:34
  Yeah.
• 48:34
  Yeah, I suppose when you're breaking the rocks like a mile down, you're not gonna feel it most of the time at the surface, right?
• 48:41
  Yeah, well, I mean, hypothetically, I guess you could catastrophize and come up with a situation where somebody did no geological surveys at all and didn't see a big fault or something and you know, fracked right on a fault and caused some slippage.
• 48:58
  That I mean, but I would be constantly scared.
• 49:02
  That would be very dumb.
• 49:03
  Yeah, lose all your oil also.
• 49:05
  So it would be very unfortunate.
• 49:07
  And and you the the and the funny thing is, Tom, when you look at that, what and that's so important.
• 49:11
  She brought Linnae just brought up is that then it doesn't make it profitable for the the person doing the exploration and in production.
• 49:18
  Why are they just gonna go drill somewhere?
• 49:20
  You don't just, hey, I'm just gonna put up a pad well and start drilling.
• 49:24
  That that's millions of dollars to do that.
• 49:27
  That's why they hire the Linnaeus of the world, you know, side evaluates geological foundations.
• 49:33
  They want to be as precise as possible.
• 49:35
  They do not, they don't just no one's ever just gonna walk out and go, I'm gonna because you'll hear this from activists.
• 49:41
  Y'all just drill wherever.
• 49:42
  Well, that doesn't even make sense.
• 49:44
  So that like, do you really think that they want to go out there, drill wherever, quote unquote, cause an earthquake or cause some extensive damage and be and have legal be litigiously taken out of business.
• 49:59
  Yeah.
• 49:59
  No.
• 50:00
  It doesn't even make sense.
• 50:01
  Well, and here's another thing about the the water in the wells thing that people don't consider either.
• 50:07
  You know, oil companies don't want water coming into their well when they're when they're drilling.
• 50:13
  If there's fluids that you didn't plan for coming into your well while you're drilling and mixing with your drilling fluids and stuff, that's that's gonna cause a blowout.
• 50:22
  That's called that's called uh, you know, an influx from the formation, and you are you are very potentially going to be having major problems.
• 50:31
  Um you don't want you know, things like that can cause temperature changes, pressure changes, all sorts of things that you do not want.
• 50:37
  They very specifically design their drilling fluids um so that they they are not in danger of you know over pressuring or under pressuring uh the well as they drill.
• 50:49
  And uh anything, any foreign fluid that suddenly comes into that system is gonna cause major problems for them.
• 50:56
  Oh that's a great that's a great so you wouldn't mind if it uh fracking well was put in a you know a mile or so from your house, you wouldn't care.
• 51:04
  It wouldn't bother you.
• 51:05
  No, and I've lived that close to fracking stuff before.
• 51:09
  I mean, I I've lived in South Louisiana where they have all sorts of gas plants and stuff and and and gas frill um drilling operations and everything.
• 51:18
  It's not something that I'm worried about.
• 51:21
  I mean, if you if you're you know, your position is you know just pure NIMBYism.
• 51:25
  I don't like the look of the horse head pumper.
• 51:27
  I don't like these guys driving past my house to go, you know, work on it.
• 51:32
  Uh that's a totally different situation there.
• 51:36
  Um, but I'm not concerned about it with regards to like damaging the foundation of my house or damaging my water well.
• 51:43
  Um, nothing like that.
• 51:44
  I wish they'd find some gas on my property in South Carolina here.
• 51:50
  Yeah, I was gonna say if if if they find any uh oil and gas near you, Tom, uh say yes, and you'll be an extremely wealthy individual.
• 51:58
  Um on top of it, they'll do everything and probably hand you a 30% royalty check in the process.
• 52:04
  Yeah.
• 52:05
  All you're doing is handing off to their expertise.
• 52:08
  Yeah, I love the term NIMBY, not in my backyard.
• 52:11
  But you know, there's another one, banana, banana.
• 52:14
  Build absolutely nothing anywhere near anyone.
• 52:19
  Yeah, there's a lot of those two.
• 52:21
  Yeah, that's right.
• 52:23
  So you're not concerned about fracking, that's good.
• 52:25
  No, and the other one I think you brought up was uh air quality.
• 52:29
  Yeah, the whole air you hear about the air issues, yeah, typically water, air, earthquakes, yeah, you get.
• 52:35
  So again, I would point to my to my point on like any industrial activity that especially industrial activity that involves a lot of trucks driving back and forth is gonna have some air pollution.
• 52:46
  It's not any different than the air pollution that you would have at a sawmill.
• 52:50
  Except you don't have sawdust in the air, you have dust from the ground from trucks driving back and forth.
• 52:56
  Yep.
• 52:56
  You have um, you know, people point out methane leaks.
• 53:01
  Um, you know, methane seeps naturally from the ground in places too.
• 53:05
  I've I wouldn't be worried about it.
• 53:07
  The the company doesn't want there to be any methane leaks because they're losing product if they're going for gas.
• 53:13
  And if they're going for oil and methane is a byproduct and they're not catching it, they're flaring it off.
• 53:18
  So if you burn wood in a fireplace in your house, you're causing more pollution inside of your house uh than you would be living in proximity to uh oil field operations.
• 53:30
  Yeah.
• 53:31
  Wow, that's a that's a great point.
• 53:32
  And Tom to add on to that too.
• 53:35
  I have a very dear friend who's in the uh the financing part of of fracking wells and uh exploration in the Ohio area, and he would tell you the last thing we ever want to do is flare anything.
• 53:47
  He said they he said they try to capture every piece of methane.
• 53:51
  He goes, You'd be really shocked what it can be used for.
• 53:54
  You'd be shocked all the industrial processes.
• 53:57
  And he said, he said, we never he go he even puts it a point.
• 54:00
  He goes, we even try to recycle all of our water.
• 54:03
  He goes, most people do not want to flare or get rid of anything.
• 54:07
  He goes, that is because that is money down the drain for us, is how he put it to me.
• 54:12
  Yeah, yeah.
• 54:13
  I just highlight the report you wrote, and we're gonna link to this.
• 54:16
  People have gotta have a look at it.
• 54:18
  That was only a couple couple of years ago at Linnae, is that right?
• 54:21
  Oh, yeah.
• 54:22
  Yeah.
• 54:23
  And things change, but not all that much.
• 54:25
  So I imagine it's probably still true now.
• 54:28
  Yeah, sure.
• 54:29
  Debunking for persistent myths about hydraulic fracturing.
• 54:33
  So what do you think of calling it fracking?
• 54:35
  Is that a derogatory term?
• 54:37
  I've heard that.
• 54:38
  There's a couple of industry people I know who get really mad about fracking because they think that it was a term coined in order to make it sound like the F-word, basically.
• 54:48
  You know, like to make it sound like a curse word.
• 54:51
  I don't I've never really saw it that way.
• 54:54
  It's just a short, I guess you could spell it just with a C instead of putting the K on it to make it less angry sounding, I guess.
• 55:02
  I don't really see it as derogatory, and I really prefer not to have to say hydraulic fracturing every single time myself.
• 55:09
  Yeah, I understand.
• 55:10
  Well, we have to wrap up now, unfortunately.
• 55:12
  I'm so glad that we spent the second half on fracking, hydraulic fracturing.
• 55:17
  Because of course you have a BS in petroleum engineering and a minor in geology.
• 55:22
  So yeah, it's a it's great to have you on.
• 55:24
  So our guest today has been Linnea Lucan, research fellow with the Arthur B.
• 55:28
  Robinson Center on Climate and Environmental Policy at the Heartland Institute.
• 55:33
  And you do weekly shows, don't you, that are kind of fun.
• 55:36
  Yeah, we do.
• 55:37
  Um, so on Thursdays, I host a show called In the Tank, which is a kind of uh, you know, policy politics grab bag um with a couple of my colleagues.
• 55:48
  And then but on Fridays, we host the climate realism show that's at noon central, and they're both at noon central on their respective days.
• 55:55
  But um the climate realism show, we are covering, you know, crazy climate stories of the week, you know, whatever nonsense they're claiming in the news for that week we'll cover.
• 56:04
  Um, and also, you know, broader scientific topics and everything.
• 56:08
  So we try to hit it all.
• 56:10
  And what was the Thursday show called again?
• 56:12
  In the tank.
• 56:14
  In the tank, okay.
• 56:15
  I'll link to both of these because people can see past shows, can't they?
• 56:19
  Oh, yeah.
• 56:20
  Yep, they're all up there on our YouTube channel, and we're also on Rumble, and we also live stream them to uh Twitter or X.
• 56:28
  Yeah.
• 56:29
  Excellent, excellent.
• 56:30
  So thanks so much for being our guest today.
• 56:32
  I think a lot of our listeners can sleep better now.
• 56:35
  I sure hope so.
• 56:37
  Well, thank you very much for having me on, Tom and Todd.
• 56:40
  Okay.
• 56:40
  Well, this is Tom Harrison, my co-host Todd Royal with our guest Linnea Lucan signing out from the other side of the story.