Latest / Financial Survival Network / Environmental Missteps: Carbon Policies, EV's, and Net Zero with Steve Goreham #5951

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Environmental Missteps: Carbon Policies, EV's, and Net Zero with Steve Goreham #5951 · Financial Survival Network

• 0:00
  In the US, EV inventories are up three hundred percent from a year ago.
• 0:04
  There's very poor demand for EV pickup trucks. The guys who have pickup
• 0:07
  trucks don't seem to be too interested. Ford Motor has announced that they're losing
• 0:11
  between forty and sixty thousand on each EV sold. They're projecting a four and
• 0:15
  a half billion dollar loss this year from their EV business. Both Ford and
• 0:19
  GM have moved out their new models and we sort of I think we have
• 0:24
  an early adopter phase that is over. You're listening to Carrie Letz's Financial Survival
• 0:30
  Network where you get valuable information you just can't find anywhere else to thrive in
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  today's trying times. You need the Financial Survival Network now more than ever.
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  Go to Financial Survivalnetwork dot com and get your free newsletter and gift. Financial
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  Survival Network now more than ever, and welcome. You are listening to and
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  watching the Financial Survival Network. Come your host. Carrie Let's say so.
• 1:00
  The green economy, it's wonderful. Will just to all be living in this
• 1:06
  pristine environment. The earth will be restored to its former grandeur and everyone will
• 1:12
  be happy. Right, well, not so fast, Yes, Environment very
• 1:18
  important. We're all we all believe in the same things clean water, clean
• 1:23
  air, and the good environment to raise your children and your family. And
• 1:27
  it's just a question of how bad are things what do you need to do
• 1:32
  to get there? Steve Gorham, author of Green Breakdown The Coming Renewable Energy
• 1:38
  Failure. You title might be a little bit late on the score at Steve,
• 1:44
  We're thrilled to have you on the show. Hey, so how bad
• 1:49
  are things? Are things really getting worse? Are they getting better? In
• 1:52
  the environment ary great to join you. Yeah, they're actually getting better.
• 1:55
  And my prediction of a green breakdown or first and net zero and actually jecting
• 2:00
  out about a decade, but it appears that that is closer. We have
• 2:02
  a lot of things going on around the world that show that people are stepping
• 2:06
  back from that zero. But you're right, pollution is we've made great strides.
• 2:12
  One of the great untold stories in the United States is how much better
• 2:15
  the air is than it was thirty forty years ago. I remember in the
• 2:19
  nineteen sixties driving near Chicago, south of Gary and having our windshield coated with
• 2:24
  something coming from the steel mills. We had to pull over and wash the
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  windshield off. My grandfather had a coal for us in his basement in the
• 2:31
  nineteen fifties, and after it snowed in Chicago for about four or five days,
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  there would be black dust on all of the snow you could see from
• 2:40
  the coal. And young folks that listen don't know what spring cleaning was for.
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  Literally, in the nineteen fifties, people would every spring washed down all
• 2:51
  the walls on the inside of their house to remove the coal dust that was
• 2:55
  uncleaning. But we don't have to do that anymore. Our air is very,
• 2:58
  very much clearer. Yeah, that is a fact. And I remember
• 3:01
  driving into New York City from New Jersey where I grew up and seeing this
• 3:07
  huge yellow cloud hovering over Manhattan and that was all the coal fired power plants.
• 3:14
  But look like without the government pushing businesses industry, do you think things
• 3:19
  would have improved anyway? I think as a commodation the government helped. And
• 3:24
  we had many states. In nineteen fifty there there were no statewide laws for
• 3:29
  pollution, but by nineteen sixty they just about all had them. And then
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  the clean erect came in I think sixty nine or so. But the problem
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  is the world has gotten off track. Where we used to reduce a real
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  pollution, and we've done a great job. APA numbers show our air pollutants,
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  the six major pollutants are down about eighty percent since nineteen eighty, probably
• 3:50
  much much more since the fifties. What comes out of the tailpuppy or car.
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  The volatile organic compounds are down ninety eight percent since nineteen seventy. But
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  now we're chasing this idea that carbon dioxide is a pollutant. We've really gotten
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  off track. Carbon dioxide is an odorless, harmless, invisible gas. It
• 4:09
  doesn't cause smoke or smog. We burn sugars in our body and every day
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  we exhale about two pounds of carbon dioxide each person, and it makes the
• 4:19
  plants grow. It's you know, I like to ask when I'm speaking to
• 4:24
  audiences, what do cannabis growers know that the EPA apparently doesn't know? And
• 4:30
  the answer is that CO two is green. Every marijuana grower with his or
• 4:33
  her salt is literally pumping carbon dioxide into the greenhouse to make the crops grow
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  bigger and fast. Oh, we've got to stop them. They got to
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  be stopped here. We've got a lot on track. We need to continue
• 4:46
  to reduce real pollution. But this war on carbon dioxide and this plant for
• 4:50
  zero by twenty fifty really is not the proper way to go, all right,
• 4:55
  So what is happening in the marketplace? Besides Tesla? There is isn't
• 5:00
  an auto company on the planet that can make money on evs. Maybe a
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  couple of Chinese ones, but they're using slave labor and fourth League all that
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  a byd Yeah, the electric vehicle market has hit a speed momp, if
• 5:15
  you will. In the US, EV inventories are up three hundred percent from
• 5:18
  a year ago. There's very poor demand for EV pickup trucks. The guys
• 5:23
  who have pickup trucks don't seem to be too interested. Ford Motor has announced
• 5:26
  that they're losing between forty and sixty thousand on each EV sold. They're projecting
• 5:30
  a four and a half billion dollar loss this year from their EV business.
• 5:34
  Both Ford and GM have moved out their new models, and we sort of
• 5:39
  I think we have an early adopter phase that is over. Many of the
• 5:43
  folks that wanted to cool Tesla's and wanted EV's for a second car have purchased
• 5:46
  them. Now we have people that are driving long distances, or they're in
• 5:49
  cold climates and the batteries don't charge well, or they're in apartments and there's
• 5:55
  no way to charge r EV except across the public walkway. So you know,
• 5:59
  it's slowing down a little bit. All right, I'm going to propose
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  a reason for this to you, okay, and you're free to agree or
• 6:05
  disagree. In the case to the Tesla, all right, their demand really
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  isn't slowing down. They're going to sell one point eight million cars this year.
• 6:15
  Yeah, o case, the driving experience and the product that they produce
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  is superior to all of the ice vehicles out there, with certain exceptions like
• 6:26
  if you live in a condo or an apartment, charging can wind up costing
• 6:31
  you more than gasoline. But if you live at a home and you can
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  charge it yourself, it's great. Yeah. And I would avert that GM
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  and Ford's products, and even Horsia and Audi their products are inferior to the
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  ice cars that are being produced by themselves, and that is why the market's
• 6:55
  not catching on to their products. Yeah. I mean, I think what
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  you say is true to really is a great job. There's there's just kind
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  of a mounting series of things that make it difficult for some owners. Another
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  one is insurance. I think in the US the price of insurance for an
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  EV is about up seventy two percent versus a gasoline car. Yeah. In
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  Accent Island, in an accident in my Tesla, it was gone a month
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  and a half and a simple accident that really on a regular car would be
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  maybe six seven thousand dollars was twenty thousand. Oh my gosh, totally Yeah.
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  In England now there are a lot of it's hard to get insurance in
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  England for an EV. There's a lot of articles. People are calling around
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  all over and the price is about five thousand pounds for a year for an
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  EV insurance. So there are just noes. And again I'm not against evs.
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  I think, you know, we have people that have a choice.
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  But this idea that the federal government has going to force everybody to buy under
• 7:55
  the state of California and we're going to stop the oceans from rising if we
• 7:59
  do that, that's where we've really gotten off base. Hey, you know,
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  I've said this so many times. There's never been an energy transition that
• 8:07
  was mandated and facilitated by the government. You know, the market always did
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  it before we had any vehicles. Some guy came along and invented the wheel
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  well, or he discovered that you could put a saddle on a horse.
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  You know, the government wasn't there saying, you know, you need to
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  get stop walking and start riding. And then you know, we had brown
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  energy from horses for a few hundred years, maybe a thousand years, and
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  then we had the internal combustion engine come about, and the government was not
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  there saying, hey, give us your horses and we'll give you a free
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  car. You know, the market figured this stuff out, and that's what
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  that's why this is such a fool's Errand Steve in my opinion is the market
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  wants a new power transition and the market will dictate it. The market will
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  mandate it, it'll demand it, and anyone who doesn't comply will go out
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  of business, right they will. And we have some serious issues coming about
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  if we could switch to a winds and wind in solar form. Most of
• 9:15
  any states, not most of the Midwest or the South, but the east
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  and west coast are are trying to switch to wind in solar and use as
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  much wind and solar and get rid of coal, natural gas and even nuclear
• 9:28
  and we have some serious problems developed. I listen to this quote from Mark
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  Christi. He's a federal Energy regulatory commissioner. He testified in June in front
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  something he might know something. He said, I think we're headed for very
• 9:43
  dire consequences, potentially catastrophic consequences in the United States in terms of the reliability
• 9:50
  of our grid. And he went on to say that we're closing the things
• 9:54
  that are keeping the lights on too fast. And indeed, if you look
• 9:58
  at if you look at data from the u US Energy Departments, they track
• 10:03
  outages for electricity users, and back twenty thirteen twenty fourteen, the average outage
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  hours of outage was about three and a half per year. Now it's up
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  to about seven or eight per year in the United States, and it's going
• 10:16
  to go much much higher. And we've had big problems in Texas and Oklahoma
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  and California. We had the blackout in February twenty twenty one. Power was
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  off for seventy two hours to four and a half million people, and we
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  had somewhere between two hundred and fifty and seven hundred people die. That's bigger
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  than a big hurricane and this. Texas is doing better. They didn't have
• 10:41
  blackouts this summer, but they actually issued ten electricity shortage warnings Seth, don't
• 10:48
  plug in your electric car, don't run your air conditioner, that was it,
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  don't put the coffee maker on. So we have some real problems coming
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  and I'm afraid people are going to have to learn the hard way on this.
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  And so we're going to have this as part of the coming break green
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  breakdown. We're going to have people going back to sensible, reliable, low
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  cost energy. Steve, this is an absolute unmitigated disaster that's coming down the
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  pike. Look, I do believe that microgrids really have an application because it
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  will stabilize grids and enable that the alternative energy to be stored and used when
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  needed. I mean, there's definitely a major, major advance. I think
• 11:35
  a lot of it's being pushed now by tax credits, but there's no question
• 11:39
  the microgrid stabilizes unstable grids when you have enough of them well, and might
• 11:46
  even eliminate the need for peaker plants. You know, plants that come on
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  during peak period, peak periods of demand. But you can't, you absolutely
• 11:58
  can't not based the future of your grid on this. Yeah, I think
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  we're talking about I think you're talking about grid scale batteries which are being put
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  in a number of places. Yeah, and those two back up wind and
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  solar. The problem, there's a couple of problems. One is it so
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  far is very very small. Again, I talked to audiences about this and
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  ask them a question, how much more electricity is stored by batteries in the
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  US. It's nothing, And the answer turns out it's it's two watt hours
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  in every million watt hours. I mean, it's it's basically insignificant at this
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  point, and even if you double, triple, quadruple it, it's going
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  to be almost almost not not useful. It would have to be a very
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  very big amount. The other things is batteries tend to be expensive. A
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  good rule of thumb is if you want to back up a wind system for
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  a day with batteries, you need to spend about five times as much on
• 12:54
  batteries as the wind system itself. And then the batteries die in. They
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  have half the lifetime of the wind. They die in ten or twelve years.
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  So right now you're talking about ten times the cost of the wind system.
• 13:07
  Itself to back up for a day. Now, batteries are going to
• 13:11
  come down in price and they may get better, but we're still a long
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  long way away from that solution. That's a given, and there's enough incentives
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  in the market. The government doesn't need to be giving away truckloads of money
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  here. What about the way they're subsidizing the purchase seventy five hundred dollars towards
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  an EV And these are wealthier people, more well off people who could afward
• 13:33
  the vehicle without the subsidy. It's just giving money away getting absolutely nothing in
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  return for it. It's a wealth transfer to the rich, really, and
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  the amount of money is huge. Back in the Biden administration about two I'm
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  sorry, in the Obama administration about twenty fifteen, we were subsidizing wind and
• 13:52
  solar and other renewables about fifteen billion a year. That went down to about
• 13:58
  eight billion a year on Trump. But now with the Inflation Reduction Act and
• 14:03
  President Biden is going up to forty fifty billion dollars a year. It's just
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  huge. And we had crazy things going on. There's a war going on
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  in Iowa, South Dakota, and North Dakota right now. Over carbon dioxide
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  pipelines. They want to capture these from ethanol plants, put them through pipelines
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  to North Dakota, store the carbon dioxide underground, and so the farmers are
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  battling these pipeline companies. But nobody would be doing this without the subsidy.
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  If the subsidy wasn't there, it just nobody would do it. It doesn't
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  make any sense. We have plenty of carbon dioxide for soft drinks and beer.
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  We don't need to be capturing it. It's all based on the theorem
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  and the share of man made warming and these huge subsidies. Hey wait,
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  we have a I heard we have a shortage of carbon dioxide. Is that
• 14:50
  true? Well, it depends on the way you look at it. Yeah.
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  Actually, we have about four hundred parts per billion in the atmosphere right
• 14:56
  now, about four of every ten thousand molecules in the appmos here is pretty
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  small, but many scientists point out that it was much much higher in Earth's
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  distant pass the three thousand or four thousand parts per billion eight or ten times
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  as much. And by the way, those happened during ice ages, which
• 15:16
  is evidence that having high levels of carbon dioxide doesn't cause a lot of warming,
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  so it is low compared to past situations, but it has risen about
• 15:28
  thirty percent since the nineteen fifties. Right, Okay, So what's it going
• 15:33
  to take for these policy makers to come to their senses or do we just
• 15:37
  forget it? Well, we're going to have four things happen with a green
• 15:39
  breakdown. First, we're going to higher energy prices, especially electricity. California
• 15:45
  in the last three years has passed up all the New England states and is
• 15:48
  now second highest in the nation behind Hawaii, yce, as high as any
• 15:52
  of the Western state for electricity. We're going to have electricity blackouts, which
• 15:56
  we've talked about. We're going to have less freedom because they're try kind to
• 16:00
  ban gasoline vehicles and gas stoves. And we're going to have transnational energy shocks
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  like they've had in Europe over the last two years, where the price of
• 16:07
  electricity more than triple than the price of natural gas was up two and a
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  half times. And they are really hurting over there in England. They don't
• 16:15
  want to turn on their robbins and they don't want to turn on their furnaces.
• 16:18
  The price are just way too high. So this is what is going
• 16:21
  to come from green energy these four things, and people are going to push
• 16:25
  back. It's going to break down, and we're going to demand a return
• 16:27
  to low cost, reliable energy. Hey, you know they keep talking about
• 16:33
  sustainability. To my way of thinking, Steve, the most sustainable form of
• 16:37
  energy ever ever found was petroleum. Well it is. There is a real
• 16:42
  pollution we still need to reduce, don't get me wrong. For example,
• 16:48
  eighty percent of the world's wastewater is discharged in the rivers, lakes, and
• 16:51
  streams untreated. Not in the US, not in Europe. But if you
• 16:53
  remember about seven years ago, the swimmers in the Olympics down in Brazil didn't
• 16:57
  want to swim the water. Another issue in Brazil is just building their first
• 17:02
  water treatment plants. Another one is plastic in the oceans, which is an
• 17:06
  overstated thing somewhat. We have about one hundred million tons of plastic in the
• 17:10
  oceans. We're adding about ten million a year. We need biodegradable plastics.
• 17:15
  So problems to solve, Well, it tends to be more expensive. They've
• 17:19
  got some of it, but it's more expensive. By the way, banning
• 17:22
  straws in Los Angeles isn't really going to do anything. So so there these
• 17:30
  are real problems we need to say, we need to solve, but let's
• 17:33
  quit this attack and carbon dioxide. By the way, another thing is there's
• 17:36
  still seven hundred million people across the world that don't have electricity. There are
• 17:41
  hundreds of hospitals that are trying to run without electricity, hookup two billion people.
• 17:45
  An additional two billion get blackouts every day. So these people need low
• 17:51
  cost electricity. Though. That's another big problem to solve. Let's quit trying
• 17:55
  and give rid of CO two. Yeah, and you know, like I
• 17:59
  like soa man, if we get rid of CO two, I'm gonna have
• 18:02
  to drink a flat soda. That doesn't seem right to me. Yeah,
• 18:04
  it's totally wrong. Steve, Hey, where do we find you? How
• 18:07
  do we connect with you? How do we get your book? Yeah,
• 18:11
  Green Breakdown. So it's available on Amazon. They're also ebooks on Apple and
• 18:15
  Google and Bares and Noble, or they can go to my website Steve gorm
• 18:18
  g O R E H A M dot com and I'll send them a signed
• 18:22
  copy. Excellent, all right, appreciate that. If you've got a question
• 18:26
  for us, Steve myself email address kl at Carrie LUTs dot com and the
• 18:30
  link to steve site is in the show notes of this interview on Financial Survival
• 18:34
  Network dot com. Click it take you right to it. You can get
• 18:37
  his books all of that good stuff. While you're at the site, Please
• 18:41
  sign up for your free newsletter, Steve, We'll talk to you again.
• 18:45
  Thank you so much for stopping by. Thank you, Kerry, thanks for
• 18:48
  listening to Carrie Letz's Financial Survival Network, your solution to today's trying times.
• 18:55
  For the latest, go to Financial Survivalnetwork dot com. Financial Survival Network now
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  more than ever,