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Lawfare In Energy – Energy Realities Podcast w/ Special Guest David Zaruk
How much do you think the Climate Activists cost you personally? Is it just when they block a road, or is it when they raise oil, gas, and electricity prices? We have the international team from Bulgaria, Texas, the UK, and Canada ready to discuss this expensive topic with David Zaruk. We have Tammy Nemeth, Irina Slav, David Blackmon, and Stu Turley prepared for a great start to your week.
Highlights of the Podcast
00:01 – Introductions
02:15 – Climate Lawfare Strategy
06:00 – La Jolla Playbook and Tobacconization of Oil
10:58 – Activist Science and Ethical Concerns
14:33 – Ideological Capture in Academia
16:22 – Legal Battles: Oil Companies Fight Back
20:05 – Foundation Money Behind Activism
24:17 – Lack of Transparency in NGO Funding
27:54 – Why Billionaires Fund Climate Activism
31:37 – Carbon Attribution Studies and Lawfare Tactics
36:31 – Grid Instability and Poor Risk Management
45:02 – Alberta suffers collateral damage from tariff ‘blast radius,’ with delay of Dow’s $9B megaproject
46:14 – The Conservative Leader said Canada must make a change if it wants to avoid a dark future of a hellscape where people will have nothing
47:59 – Trump, Burgum Move to Cut Energy Project Permitting Time to 28 days
48:55 – EPA head demands answers from company putting sulfur dioxide into the air to address global warming
51:08 – World Bank eyes energy financing options, holds fast on equality issues
52:09 – Vestas warns wind industry is falling behind global climate goals
53:35 – Study: California Gas Prices Driven by Policy Not Profiteering
54:44 – WSJ writes, Germany spends hundreds of billions on green energy, but the share of wind and solar falls
55:53 – RWE stops all US offshore wind activities due to political climate
58:02 – Closing Thoughts
Lawfare In Energy – Energy Realities Podcast w/ Special Guest David Zaruk
Tammy Nemeth [00:00:12] Hello everyone, welcome to the Energy Realities Podcast with your favorite gang. We’ve got David Blackmon who’s sitting there in his little conclave in Texas.
David Blackmon [00:00:27] Texas, yes, rainy North Texas. I’m doing great.
Tammy Nemeth [00:00:31] It’s raining, oh my gosh. Well, I guess it’s springtime, should be raining. Irina, we’ve got you, Irina Slav in Bulgaria. How are you doing today?
Irina Slav [00:00:42] I’m great, thank you, Tammy. It’s sunny and springy.
Tammy Nemeth [00:00:46] Sunny and spring, yay. Stu, we got Stu Turley. And are you in Oklahoma today or in Texas?
Stuart Turley [00:00:55] This week I’m in Oklahoma, but I’ll be in Texas next week, so.
Tammy Nemeth [00:01:01] And what’s the weather like there?
Stuart Turley [00:01:03] It’s actually wonderful. All 10 of my trees that I transplanted this year are doing fantastic and we’ve had a lot of rain. So thank goodness for a backhoe to divert all my water onto my neighbor’s yard.
Tammy Nemeth [00:01:18] You’re not trying to preserve the water in like a dugout or something?
Stuart Turley [00:01:23] No, I’m trying to ruin his land, so we’re going to have a great day though.
Tammy Nemeth [00:01:29] And I’m Tammy Nemeth, I’m in the UK today. It’s actually spring here, which is amazing. We’ve had so much gray over the past six months. We’re just happy to have a few days of sunshine. So yeah, I am from the UK and today we have a super special guest because we’re going to be talking on the energy realities today about climate lawfare and litigation. And we’ve got an amazing expert researcher, David Zaruk, who’s from the firebreak Substack. Hi David, how are you today?
David Zaruk [00:02:01] I’m pretty good. It’s also sunny here and you’ll see within the next hour the sun come around my window and I’ll be glaring in sunglasses at that point.
Tammy Nemeth [00:02:13] And you’re in Brussels, is that right?
David Zaruk [00:02:15] Yes, I am.
Tammy Nemeth [00:02:17] So we have quite the international crew today with lots of different viewpoints on lawfare and climate litigation. And just to give a little bit of background about David, he’s a retired professor. He was an environmental health risk analyst. He’s got this great website called The Risk Monger because he’s very much about how you do risk analysis, risk assessments. And I think he’s a brilliant science communicator. He’s got a substack at the firebreak, thefirebreak.org, and you can follow all of his research and writing there. So David, we’re going to throw you into the lion’s den here. I know this morning you put forward a new report or article about some attribution studies or some studies that have been. Put out by the World Health Organization in order to facilitate climate litigation against gasoline.
David Zaruk [00:03:18] Yeah, this is this unfortunately is a game that gets played quite regularly now that they a group of lawyers that employ a group of scientists go to IARC the International Agency for Research on Cancer where they produce a monograph has a hazard based approach and determine something as a and then they spend the next decade. Generating lawsuits. I don’t know if you want me to go into the background of all of this. It’s a strategy and a playbook that’s been written down quite articulately. And yeah, it works. You know, you can… You can sue companies out of business or get them to change tactics. If you have a hundred thousand plaintiffs filing that their cancer is caused by some product that was used.
Tammy Nemeth [00:04:18] Yeah, if you could talk a little bit more, because I know you’ve written quite extensively about some of the climate tort law firms that have really been pursuing a lot of these class action lawsuits, but can you just explain a little what this playbook is?
David Zaruk [00:04:35] Well, it’s if you look back at the tobacco master’s settlement agreement in 1998, the tobacco industry didn’t come to Congress and submit to do what they were demanding because they their science was wrong or because they’re because they had discovered religion. They submitted because they were under a large amount of lawsuits that would quite simply bankrupt their industry. And so a group of activists, scientists, NGOs and lawyers met in a town called La Jolla just outside of San Diego in 2012. For a meeting that was chaired by the Union of Concerned Scientists and the Climate Accountability Institute, a group recently formed then in Naomi Oreskes. And their view is that we should tobacconize other industries in the same way that the master settlement worked against the tobacco industry, therefore for the fossil fuels and particularly the oil industry, we could. Do exactly the same strategy, sue them out of existence until they relent and change their ways or go bankrupt. And so the idea is to work with NGOs to create a very negative public perception, at the same time working with scientists to provide enough evidence so that when the go to court, they would be able to win and profit nicely. So they implemented this strategy in the following years. If you remember the New York Attorney General’s subpoena on Exxon, and then finding these documents, they had an activist campaign called Exxon New, which was led by Oreskes again. But there wasn’t a strong, multi-district litigation approach afterwards to put the oil companies up against the wall. We can talk about why the tort industry didn’t go forward, but essentially that was the first attempt that failed. So the second attempt was to get foundations to pay large amounts of money to create a tort law firm, this one known as Share Edling, which also just curiosity has Naomi Oreskes on retainer. And they’ve given them 14 million. To fund essentially climate nuisance cases against the oil industry saying that they’re responsible for the damages and consequences of climate change. Now these aren’t individual cases or multi-district litigations, these are sharedly convincing governments who don’t really have anything to lose and many cases you know can get the good PR from this. And, you know, as long as the foundations, the big climate change foundations, continue to bankroll this amount, they’ll continue to file cases, but they don’t have very much likelihood of winning. So they took a third approach now to try to, essentially, tobacconize the oil industry. And that is to use part of the, tobacconization playbook that works so well against a company known before as Monsanto, now owned by Bayer, which is that you could send one of your scientists that the law firms are paying to IARC to produce a monograph that would show that the substance is carcinogenic. And so when glyphosate was found to be carcinogenic, it wasn’t that there was actually enough evidence to win on that, but. Same time, you get the NGOs doing the march against Monsanto and this idea that Monsento knew that their substance was carcinogenic and tried to hide it. And you create an outrage element, what I called a righteous risk, which worked against them. So that’s where we’re at today. Last month, IARC released Monograph 138 that shows that gasoline, not this. Additives that go into gasoline, but gasoline itself is carcinogenic. I used a line from an economist, which I liked very much, which is that if you torture the data long enough, it’ll confess to anything. And so they took a hazard-based approach. They’re not looking at what level you will be exposed to gasoline at risk. But rather simply put, it’s a carcinogen. And that’s enough for the law firms to go after the oil industry. Will this attempt work? It’s curious. I. That the oil industry will balk at the extortionary practices of the tort law firms, and it costs a lot to assemble more than 100,000 plaintiffs in a long-term litigation. And I think the oil will actually be more aggressive than the chemical pharmaceutical industries who will panic when their shareholders are. Revolting on them because of their lawsuits. And I would be curious to see if the tort law firms will go after big oil, according to the arrest case, the Hoya playbook, because I think they kind of know themselves that this is another type of boost that they’ll be fighting against.
Irina Slav [00:10:58] I have some comments and a question, the picture you describe is one of on demand science, science for sale. We know this has been going on for years and years, possibly decades, I mean you order a study and the study returns the results that you want. This is clearly unethical, it’s not just going on in so-called climate science and everything. But, uh… Do you have the sense, because I have the sense that they’re being extra arrogant and extra blunt about it and deliberately omitting all the benefits that the hydrocarbon age has brought to humankind? I mean they’re they’re very busy everyone, all these NGOs and activist science. I love this term by the way, activist science, it should be an oxymoron but it’s not. They’re trying to paint the oil and gas industry and coal industries entirely evil with no benefits for anyone, even as they too, each and every one of them to the last one continue to use oil and, gas and coal energy. To power their electronics, if nothing else, or to have their solar panels and wind turbines built. Why isn’t anybody, you know, opposing this? Why aren’t we hearing more about the benefits except, you now, from separate voices?
David Zaruk [00:12:41] Yeah, about 10 years ago, I coined the term activist scientist. A regular scientist will gather evidence and draw a conclusion. An activist scientist starts with the conclusion and looks for the evidence. And we see that a lot with very politicized debates that we’re in. And unfortunately, when you have an activist campaign, when you have zealots, they will quite gladly throw everything out to win an argument even if it creates suffering. A lot of the groups now are actually viewing this as a war against capitalism, so the fact that they’ll think about gains of industry due to having access to energy or access to food, which is another debate which, you know, we have to throw it all. Industrial agriculture because, you know, it’s causing CO2 emissions. Well, what about the hunger? That doesn’t matter. And so it’s about winning an argument, and it’s fighting for a post-capitalist world. And you can actually campaign quite well when you have enough levers to pull. And the media, unfortunately, is not standing up. People aren’t going to defend glyphosate and sustainable agriculture, which is far more environmentally friendly than what Organic is doing, because you’d then be accused of being a Monsanto shill. So they stand back. How many people in media want to have the big oil stamp on their forehead? They’re afraid of the attacks that these groups, and these groups will be brutal in their attacks, and a lot of firms will to them too.
Tammy Nemeth [00:14:33] I would add that in the academic community, for a long time, in all different departments, not just science ones, there’s been activist researchers. And as you say, they would go in with a research question already knowing what answer they want. And I’ve seen this in the historical profession, in political science and whatnot. It’s just sad that it’s transitioned into. The sciences as well because you know there’s a lot of money to be made. You can’t get a grant unless you subscribe to a lot this somewhat I would call ideology in pursuing the transition or trying to get off of all kinds of fossil fuels regardless of the benefits and I think you made a really good point about not being able to determine. Just what is the level of toxicity? And we see that in the determination that CO2 is somehow now toxic and pollution without ever saying exactly how much is bad. What is bad for earth? What, where does life start shutting down if you have too much? And, you know, they always say that 400 is too much, we have to stop, we have stop. But they never say precisely what is that toxic amount. And it leaves that room for just making claims and And I don’t think this is something that ought to be left up to judges to be determining. So you take it to court and now a court is gonna determine what is and isn’t toxic and so on, which is why I think we have that issue with glyphosate that happened and what’s happening now with gasoline potentially. So I think those are really good points that you brought up. David, do you have any questions for David?
David Blackmon [00:16:22] Well, I think everything you said is absolutely right. I mean, I’ve been writing about a lot of this stuff for a while, particularly the share edling, you know, lawfare campaign that, that they’re making millions of dollars for doing, even though they, they take these cases on a spec basis, so there’s no risk to the city, like Honolulu city and county of Honolalu is, is one of the prominent lawsuits there. They’ve done others with Baltimore and some other cities in the Northeast, in Colorado, California. They’re all failing because the law is pretty much settled that these cities and counties cannot sue based on emissions claims, okay? They can’t claim, make claims related to global climate change happening because of emissions. Because that’s already been ruled by the Supreme Court that it’s a federal province and only the federal government can regulate air quality under the Clean Air Act. So they have to choose these novel arguments like the city and county of Honolulu did and they sued the oil and gas companies under consumer protection laws, state consumer protection law. And so they have a very hard time making these cases. And the other thing they don’t seem to understand is that the oil companies hire better lawyers than they have to defend them. And that goes back a long time. They never seem to anticipate the quality of the legal counsel who represent the oil and gas companies who are a lot smarter than they are. And are able to beat these things back. But I mean, I had my first interaction with the justice department at a company in 1996 and met with a deputy US attorney named Lee Pico, I’ll never forget the guy’s name, who bluntly told us that he was taking our, they was trying to prosecute our company for royalty payments in front of a federal grand jury that he had convened. And his whole goal was to do this to every big company in the oil and gas industry, but he started with the independent producer I worked for because he frankly said he didn’t believe we could hire, we had the resources to withstand a prosecution by the federal government. Well, we brought in some of the best lawyers in the country, spent 22 million dollars defending ourselves, and the U.S. Attorney four years later dropped the case. This has been happening repeatedly in campaign, after campaign, after campaign against the oil and gas industry. And I suspect it will continue forever more, really, in the United States. I’m not familiar with the system in Europe and other countries, how it all works over there. But in the US, this is just a part of doing business for a big oil and guess company here. you know, they factored it, factor it into their business planning. They know they’re going to be having to deal with these lawfare campaigns. And it’s, it’s really sad aspect of our modern society. But I, I’m grateful to David for doing what he’s doing in terms of getting real information about all this stuff out to the public because, you know the major media outlets aren’t going to do it. So it’s left folks like us.
David Zaruk [00:20:05] Well, I think one of the things, thank you, David, for that. One of the thing that’s important as well is to follow the money. The article that was on my Firebreak page, the last one about Greta, has to do with the discovery that back in 2019, just before we fell into our COVID malaise, that was the height of the climate hysteria. If you recall, groups like Extinction Rebellion were saying we’re all going to go extinct within 10 years, 12 years. We were fawning over a 15-year-old Swedish teenager who somehow just managed to show up at the World Economic Forum and be given a microphone. And we believed everything. We believe what the media were reporting was legitimate news. And it’s only now that we’re beginning to peel back the curtain and see how much money was coming in to these organizations. And I took, for example, how Greta was actually managed, her PR manager was the European Climate Foundation, which in 2023 received $274 million, or sorry, euros, even more, so about $300 million. To essentially run lobbying campaigns, and this was all coming from the large climate foundations. Tammy, you did an expose which I found very interesting on how a group of foundations were funding small Canadian non-profits to try to essentially blockade Alberta from exporting oil. And so when you begin to realize that it’s the foundations who are pouring, not a couple hundred thousand, we’re talking a couple of hundred million into a lot of these campaigns, into the media, which now take foundation funding as a normal process, and they’re setting up their own news organizations. So when you realize how much the media is being paid, bought and paid for essentially by these foundations, and I know I must sound like a conspiracy theorist, but nobody wants to look because, you know, who’s going to stop and say the chemical industry is good? Who’s going stop and saying that the oil industry is good? No one will. And that’s what you call industries that are stuck in what that call a righteous risk. At the same time will never consider the environmental consequences of renewables or EVs, because that’s considered a social good, something that is morally cleansed and purified. That’s where religion comes in and distorts any scientific evidence.
Tammy Nemeth [00:22:57] Stu, do you have any questions, comments?
Stuart Turley [00:22:59] You bet. Hey, taking a look at some of the growth in litigation, the number of climate lawsuits against fossil fuel companies has nearly tripled since the 2015 Paris Agreement rising in five cases in 2015 to 14 in 2023. There’s a lot of information out there and I’m really wanting to know how much the United States USAID Climate Foundation funded all this crap going on around the world and if we’re gonna see this crap being stopped funded by the United States Democrats rhinos and Crooks in our own political party should be run out of town and primaried and never allowed near a grocery store again This is absolutely pathetic when you think about you’ve got freeloaders like John Kerry causing this much pain with money tax dollars. This is the sad part, how stupid are we as Americans to fund the rest of the world’s Lawfare.
David Zaruk [00:24:17] One of the things that I find, I don’t want to say the double standards are unusual. We’ve always had them, but now they’re amplified. But these foundations are considered as non-profits. So a billionaire can create his own or her own foundation and start to give to political interests. And as a non-profit, as an NGO technically, they are trusted. And what happens is you get different rules and codes of conduct imposed on them. So they don’t have to be transparent. We do not know how much of the 274 million euros that the European Climate Foundation has distributed to different groups. We know it’s a lot, but they have a two page balance sheet. That’s all they have to submit for their books. They don’t have to show where they’re giving the money or who’s giving them the money. And all we know is whichever organizations downstream wish to declare it. And every now and then I find a little mention in something like The Times that noted that this foundation, sounds good, it’s a foundation, has been taking over the PR of some of these groups that are quite active. So we don’t know, and there’s no transparency. Industry has to have transparency.
Stuart Turley [00:25:44] This double standard of hypocrisy is bullcrap and I had to cut myself out just to keep us from being swearing on this so we wouldn’t get wiped out here. But this bull crap is absolutely disgusting when we have the EU coming out with new climate regulatory issues from Ursula and her buddies over there that are going to go after United States companies if we do want to do business with the EU. They’re going to try to close down our United States companies. This is absolutely a double standard hypocrisy funded by a bunch of crap.
David Zaruk [00:26:22] Well, I’m sorry to say this is not actually coming from Brussels, it’s coming from California. It’s coming the tech billionaires who are funding these organizations. And they’re funding Europeans because I’ve actually called them carpet baggers. They’ll come to wear softer regulatory environment to impose the conditions they couldn’t possibly achieve. So, you get a… You get these groups coming in and spending very large amounts of money to get behind not just groups in Brussels, but also on the trans or transnational level, like the different groups that are involved with the UN, particularly the climate disclosure project and that all foundation funded as well, to push the agenda, which gets onto the world stage. And it’s it’s. Because there’s no transparency, we don’t see it until we start to really have to examine and find detail. So my conclusion, quite simply, is we have to stop calling these groups NGOs. They’re not NGOs like homeless shelters or, you know, groups that go out to provide medical services to the poor. These are lobbying institutions. And so rather than calling them NGOs, I’ve proposed to call them… The type of alternative policy enterprises, or APES for short.
Stuart Turley [00:27:54] I like that.
Irina Slav [00:27:55] I like that.
David Blackmon [00:27:57] In the United States.
Irina Slav [00:28:00] Thank you. I have this very simple fundamental question. Why are these foundations giving so much money for something that will make life harder for so many people? I suspect what the answer is, but I would like to hear it from you.
David Zaruk [00:28:19] I mean, the first thing we have to consider is that through the last, let’s say, 150 years since the Industrial Revolution, like it or not, capitalism has brought a lot of good things, but it’s also generated wealth. But there have been really three great wealth-generating eras. You’ve had the first one in the 1870s where you had an enormous development of infrastructure. 1920S with the new technologies. And so from the 1920s, we started to see the great foundation set up from Ford, Carnegie, Rockefellers, all the billionaires of the day in this massive wealth creation created these foundations, which for many years did a lot of good things around. Norman Borlaug was funded by the Rockefeller Foundation to go to Mexico to determine seed technologies, which were not being done by anyone. You haven’t had, in the history of the last 150 years, a wealth creation like we’ve had in the last 25, with four waves of massive wealth creation. You had the internet, first of all, and so you have Gates Foundation, but there are many other billionaires. And then the second, the social media wealth creation, so the Zuckerbergs of the world. And then we have also AI and now crypto billionaires coming in. So we haven’t seen between the 20s and the last 25 years wealth creation like that. So now we have billionaires like every 15 minutes is a new billionaire in the world. And they’re, of course, taking the giving pledge that they have to give money away. These people don’t want to give. They’re busy trying to solve a problem. They’re not they’re not interested in running foundations. So you have these new class of consultants who are coming in saying we’ll manage your, we’ll manage your money, we will do all these wonderful things so you’ll be able to feel good about yourself. So climate change. And so, and they’re not actively involved in this. So they’re leaving their billions to others. And this, these groups are quite interestingly connected into what are called fiscal sponsors. And the fiscal sponsor, yeah, They’re like unions of activists who now imagine billions from foundations to give away. I mean, the best example was the agroecology fund, which used to give around a million a year to different small groups to fund agro-ecology projects. But then somebody decided to go to Californians, to the tech billionaires, that this is a good way to fight climate change. You know, you build up resilience in agriculture by supporting peasant farmers. Sounds good. The next year, they went from one million a year a hundred million. And that’s from people like Steve Ballmer or Steve Jobs’ wife’s foundation. And it’s for lobbying. It’s not for actually helping peasant farmers in Africa. It’s to go to the FAO or to Washington to run campaigns against agricultural technologies, seed technologies, fertilizers, pesticides. It’s been. Apparently, it’s bad for climate change to produce more food on less land.
Stuart Turley [00:31:37] I want to give a couple of our comments out here, you know, AI have to be right once in a while. Thank you, Julianna. I do appreciate that. David Allen is absolutely a wonderful guest that I had on my podcast, and he actually turned coined Turley’s law. Turley law is the more money we have spent on renewable energy over the past uh decades the more money we spend in wind solar and hydrogen the more fossil fuels will be used that rule and that law is in effect so i gotta give david allen a shout out since he’s the one that really said that sounds like turdley’s law so anyway sorry
David Zaruk [00:32:24] Well, I actually wrote a piece confessing that I put solar panels on my roof. And I was ashamed of it, because I knew that I was convicting an environmental crime. But the point was the price of energy was going up. And they were giving me money. And the whole point was I could afford it. My neighbors across the street couldn’t. Their energy prices have gone up since. And I don’t pay an energy bill now. Uh, and so it’s, it’s disgraceful to think that I’ve increased the amount I live in Belgium. It’s sunny right now. So I’m, my, my meter’s actually going backwards, but this, you know, we get 10 hours of sun in December, you know, and it’s so it it’s ridiculous. And I, I have to apologize to people that I’m an environmental hypocrite because I know how much energy it takes. To build these panels and I know that we have no idea how to recycle them afterwards.
Irina Slav [00:33:26] Yeah, but you have two panels, you don’t have one megawatt solar installation in a field that could be used as a crop.
Tammy Nemeth [00:33:40] Yeah, putting it on a roof is one thing, but taking up, you know, arable land, taking food out of production is another thing.
David Zaruk [00:33:49] And subsidizing it. We have to understand as well that there are two things that we can look at. We can look taxpayer money and subsidies. We also look at taxpayer money that’s lost in tax deductions to a lot of these organizations that should in no way be given any tax deductible status. That’s also lost taxpayer money.
Tammy Nemeth [00:34:11] David, I wanted to just talk just one moment about a study that Irena had drawn our attention to, which is why we decided to have this segment on climate lawfare. Irena, did you want to talk a little bit about it? Because you wrote a great piece on Substack about that
Irina Slav [00:34:30] Oh, no, I was just going to mention the name. It’s called carbon majors and the scientific case for climate liability paper. I’m sure you’ve seen it, David, about those two guys who said they can quantify the damage caused by extreme heat caused by the oil and gas industry, including all scopes of emissions by 111 oil companies, no less.
Tammy Nemeth [00:34:59] These attribution studies.
David Zaruk [00:35:00] There was actually at the beginning of the carbon disclosure project there was a meeting I think in the sidelines of, it wasn’t Copenhagen, it was the top after Copenhagen I believe, I think it was in Peru. And they were talking about that and they talked about the top 50 climate emitters. So this goes back I think a dozen years that they, and this was part of the Climate Accountability Institute, I think, as well. Which the CDP picked up and supported. So the idea of carbon emissions that you can calculate and put a price on it is been a rather interesting political approach. I mean, today we can just get AI to do it. I mean Trump even got the trade deficits in each country calculated with AI. So I, but the whole point is what does this mean? What’s the point of it? The point is a political pressure. The point, it’s the same with share edling. Share edling is suing the oil companies not to win just to continue to keep the bad PR in the media.
Tammy Nemeth [00:36:12] And death by a thousand cuts, death by thousand cuts.
David Zaruk [00:36:15] Yeah, so we will get some number that will come out of some formula. You can add an extra couple of zeros to that number and I think most people wouldn’t blink an eye. But then what?
Irina Slav [00:36:31] Exactly. The Washington Post, I think, reported on this paper because its authors are claiming, essentially they’re claiming that now it will be easier to sue big oil mages because we have the numbers. And the Washington Post article noted that it could devolve into a battle of the experts because the authors of this paper used models and simulations. They didn’t use just hard data although they did use some hard data about oil and gas production, and if you can, as the Washington Post said, if you hire experts who will develop different models with different assumptions leading to conflicting conclusions, what are you doing and how reliable are the original Models to begin with.
David Zaruk [00:37:26] I think the Washington Post article covered, if I recall, that Saadi Aramco was the largest omit, so they would have to pay.
Irina Slav [00:37:37] Trillion.
Stuart Turley [00:37:39] I wonder if those those calculations, if you would imagine are like two things, either a reliant car that runs on three wheels in the UK, unbelievable machinery. I think that’s wonderful. Or is it a cat sitting there trying to think and calculate? Let’s go ahead and take a look at this one. Here’s a cat. And I know that this has got to be either an attorney calculating his commissions that he’s going to be making. Or is this a person trying to calculate how much savings that they can actually do? So let’s take a look and listen to the sound at the end of this calculation.
David Zaruk [00:38:30] We should add that no cats were harmed in the creation of this game.
David Blackmon [00:38:36] Always letting on their feet,.
Stuart Turley [00:38:37] But Timmy came up with a perfect set of videos on this and is this
Tammy Nemeth [00:38:43] Irina, Irina sent this one.
Stuart Turley [00:38:44] All right, Irina, I love this video and this is absolutely wonderful. Is this the best definition of climate inaction, climate activists, or is it renewable energy? I’m not sure, let’s start with the first one.
Stuart Turley [00:39:22] And if you take a look, if you think about that as 20 feet, it’s really bad, but then here’s another one.
David Blackmon [00:39:30] Wait wait don’t go yet. Don’t go. Yet. What that actually was was the power grid in Spain and Portugal today.
Tammy Nemeth [00:39:39] What the heck?
Irina Slav [00:39:40] It’s not fun, it’s a disaster. What happened?
Stuart Turley [00:39:43] It’s in France as well, too, as it is in the Netherlands.
Irina Slav [00:39:50] Uh oh, did an interconnect go down?
David Blackmon [00:39:52] I don’t know they don’t
Irina Slav [00:39:53] Or is that cascading effect they were warning about a few years ago?
Stuart Turley [00:39:58] Yeah, the grid physics and logic are not applied to fiscal responsibility of the grid. Here’s the second one that that we came at.
David Blackmon [00:40:26] There we go, that was the backup generator kicking in.
Stuart Turley [00:40:32] That was, David, to answer your point, that is an additional feature of international grid interconnections. A grid instability is an added feature for lack of energy security. Did I say that right?
David Zaruk [00:40:50] Think sounds good. The climate campaigners will say that Clarkson’s too fat and he needs to lose weight. And I think that’s one of the rather interesting points of the type of political preconceived ideas. It’s not about finding solutions or managing risks. It’s about getting rid of things that we can’t trust or we’re uncertain about. This is the precautionary approach of what’s not risk management, but uncertainty management. When something, if we’re not sure about something, shut it down. Or if it shuts down on its own, find a problem. I mean, if a grid shuts down, it’s not that we didn’t manage the risk. There is no risk management today. I discovered that when we could not manage a virus and the only thing we could do was take precaution and lock everyone in their homes until it went away. And where is our risk management strategies today? We use climate change as a wonderful excuse when Valencia had their floods. The last year, everybody was saying it’s climate change. Well, no, it’s called poor water management when you take a river basin and it’s a canal right down the middle. And if you don’t do risk management properly, you get consequences. Regulators should be risk managers. They shouldn’t be excuse makers and taking precaution and pointing at climate change whenever they screw up.
Stuart Turley [00:42:27] You know, climate change happens, and it’s been happening for millions of years, but on energynewsbeat.co, EPA warned demands answers from company putting sulfur dioxide in the air to address global warming. It’s now kind of like if climate change, if these people would quit paying for chemtrails and then putting in there like Bill Gates is trying to spray all this crap into the air. Well, that would be a really good way to stop a lot of this crap.
David Zaruk [00:43:02] I mean, we have to adjust to whatever happens. I mean weather changes and it will continue to change. And what we need are people who can manage risks. And we have, I mean when you look over the last 100 years, the amount of people who died from catastrophic climate issues. Is far lower. I think it’s only around, if I remember Lundberg’s calculations, two percent of what it was
Tammy Nemeth [00:43:35] Yeah, it’s phenomenal.
David Blackmon [00:43:37] Yes, and mitigation is what the human race has always been good at.
David Zaruk [00:43:42] Until now,
David Zaruk [00:43:45] And until now, it’s worked because we’ve become so comfortable. We’ve just assumed that this is the norm and we have to do something. And it’s become a very politicized issue, whereas quite simply managing forests and managing river basins should be basically this management.
Tammy Nemeth [00:44:07] It’s like when you talk about risk management and when there’s all the catastrophic forest fires, which is directly attributable to poor management of the forests and then of course climate change is put out there as the end all be all cause of everything. So we’re coming up to the last 15 minutes and we have some news stories to go over. David, would you like to stick around for that.
David Zaruk [00:44:35] Sure, but I’m curious on what news stories you’re covering. There’s a Canadian election, oh dear. I know, I know. As an original Canadian, this is close to my heart and close to my ears, but I’ll try to keep quiet.
Tammy Nemeth [00:44:52] Okay, so I tried not to do too much election-y stuff today, even because the election is today. So my two stories are the first headline, Alberta suffers collateral damage from tariff blast radius with delay of Dow’s 9 billion mega project. So, Dow was had committed to building this state-of-the-art net zero chemical project in by Fort Saskatchewan in Alberta. Nine billion and they had gotten all these assurances from the province and the federal government that they would they would assist with these different things and they were going to do carbon capture and all this different kinds of stuff and now with tariffs and various other things they’re now putting the brakes on it they’re slowing down they’re saying well we’re still going to build some stuff but we need to wait and see what what’s going to be with the new government in Canada, what’s going on with the tariffs, what the EU is doing. With their carbon border adjustment mechanism, how this would all play in and then they throw in there that there’s a slow in demand for their chemical products, which, okay, I don’t know about that. So that was a really interesting story that kind of flew under the radar because of all the different election stuff going on. And then my second story is on Energy Now and the title is, Poliev Addresses Dystopia predicted for Canada in government report. So what happened was back in January, the former head of the World Economic Forum’s foresight department, who now works for Canada, wrote a report explaining what Canada is going to be like in 2040. And the reason I bring it up is because if you follow through on the net zero trajectory, this is what the future is for Canadians, and it is dystopic. And this This is a Government of Canada report. And where they’re talking about people are going to have to be foraging for food on federal lands like Robin Hood. I mean it’s it’s crazy and this short little report is well worth a read just to understand this is what government officials believe is the course that Canada’s on, where people won’t own houses, they’ll be living in co-ops, they’ll live in tiny homes, they will be renting, there won’t be any jobs, they have to go on federal land to hunt food, I mean, it’s extraordinary.
Stuart Turley [00:47:24] They won’t have any guns.
Tammy Nemeth [00:47:26] Yeah, they want, I don’t know, a bow and arrow? They commission native people to hunt for them? I don’t know.
Stuart Turley [00:47:32] Just thought I’d point that out, Tammy, sorry. Slingshot.
Tammy Nemeth [00:47:35] Yeah, slingshots, bow and arrow, yeah. And you can find me at TheNemethReport.substack.com and yeah, that’s it for me. Thank you.
David Blackmon [00:47:50] Very concise. Oh, here we go. Um, well, let’s start with, uh, Trump and Burgum moved to cut energy project permitting time to 28 days. It’ll be interesting to see if they can remotely approach that timeline for permitting processes, permitting approvals under NEPA, the endangered species act and the, uh archeological survey requirements. I doubt they’ll be able to do that, but that’s what their goal is at the Interior Department. We’ll see if they can do it. There will be lawsuits galore out of this, speaking of lawsuits, you know, because any effort to speed up permitting on federal lands by necessity has to impact regulations related to environmental protection, well, environmental protections. Because those are the major laws that create all the delays. So this is the kickoff of that campaign and we wish them luck. EPA head demands, boy, that’s small. Anyway, that’s Lee Zeldin wanting, whoops, what am I doing? I’m really messing up here. Anyway, Lee Zelden wanted information, holy crap, okay, from company, oh, this is the one Stu mentioned. This is the company that is putting big weather balloons filled with sulfur dioxide up into the upper atmosphere and exploding them so that the sulfur dioxide can reflect sunlight back into outer space. To address global warming. For those who don’t know, environmentalists, real environmentalists in the United States of America have spent half a century trying to shut down coal-fired power plants because they emit what into the atmosphere? Sulfur-freaking dioxide. It’s the same pollutant coal plants put into the atmosphere and we’re actually doing this intentionally now as part of geo-engineering efforts, okay? That’s what they wanna put up into the upper atmosphere to reflect sunlight. It’s insane. But people are actually financing these weather balloons to go up and do this so they can get carbon credits in exchange. Okay, so this is billionaire funded stuff. They wanna get carbon credit to offset the carbon emissions of their private jets and their 400 foot long yachts. Okay, that’s who’s doing this to us, folks. And it’s just absolute insanity. And thank God, Lee Zeldin is at least going to investigate it and see if there’s anything he can do to shut the insanity.
Tammy Nemeth [00:50:44] Different state like the UK the UK is gonna prove that and everyone’s like, are you kidding me? The UK is gray enough already and now you want to create more cloud cover and you’re paying for solar panels everywhere
David Blackmon [00:50:58] Absolute lunacy. I’m at energy transition absurdities on substack. Come see me
Irina Slav [00:51:07] Okay, these are my World Bank Eyes Energy Financing options hold fast on equality issues. I really didn’t understand this story, because the World Bank apparently wants to finance access to energy for African countries, for example, and other poorer states where people need access to electricity, any electricity, but it is steadfast in it. Gender equality, like funding women-owned businesses, stuff like that. This is not cognitive dissonance. I’m not sure what this is. It’s some form of dissociation, I think. They’re talking about energy, but then they’re talking about gender and equality issues, and I think the World Bank has become extremely irrelevant. Like so many other international and not so international organizations and the second story is actually a joke but it’s it’s a factual joke. We had Ulster asking for more money now we have Vestas asking for money. It’s warned that the wind industry is falling behind global climate goals. To fix this, they need more money.
Tammy Nemeth [00:52:28] They need more money.
Irina Slav [00:52:29] I’m sure you’re all shocked. I was wondering how long it will take for Vestas to follow in OSSET’s footsteps. Yeah, there it is. There it is, but it’s going for the targets. It’s not talking about the downward spiral for the industry, it’s talking about targets. It’s trying to be more clever about it. We won’t hit those targets unless you give us more money. And these targets are obviously immutable and inarguable, and you can’t tweak them.
David Blackmon [00:53:03] Well, they’re based on models, and so models are always right.
Irina Slav [00:53:06] Oh, yes, absolutely.
David Blackmon [00:53:08] Models.
Irina Slav [00:53:09] You’re right, yeah, I’m done. That’s all I had. I’m at Irina Slav on energy. And I try to cover the energy transition as best I can.
Stuart Turley [00:53:25] With a straight face. I might I did. I today it was kind of fun when you sit back and take a look at the hypocrisy that we’re talking about today. California Gas prices driven by policy not profiteering. Unbelievable. This was a study of California Gas Prices by Professor Michael Mish at the Marshall School of Business. This is a quote, has not received any special compensation or promise of anticipation in any future conversation. Wow. Somebody that actually figured it out and did not take any compensation. So it is actually Governor Newsom and I firmly believe that he is now and in last week’s story David was when they are trying to shut down the refineries in California for so many years. Now, Governor Newsom has called for them to remain open or possibly even be mandated or controlled by the state.
David Blackmon [00:54:32] Yes, they don’t take more, that’ll work well. What could possibly go wrong with that?
Tammy Nemeth [00:54:35] What could go wrong?
Stuart Turley [00:54:37] Oh, absolutely nothing. And so you can’t buy that kind of entertainment. Speaking of entertainment, I love this one. It looks like he needs actually Chancellor Shulph needs this on his beanie so he could you know really have a propeller on his Beanie. I apologize. What a nice man.
Tammy Nemeth [00:54:55] He’s not Chancellor anymore!
David Blackmon [00:54:59] Was right, he’s not.
Tammy Nemeth [00:55:01] It’s the new guy, Mertz.
Stuart Turley [00:55:02] You still call somebody when you call him President Obama, even though he’s no president. He was still running the country for three terms. So you still call him president. You might as well call him chancellor, because he was chancellor. Fair enough. The Welfare Journal writes, Renewable sources make up some 47% of electric consumption in Europe’s largest economy in Q1. How much money has Germany spent on renewable energy and yet they have the highest energy costs? Anybody spending all this money on renewable energies shutting down your nuclear plants is not exactly, they’re almost like a cat trying to calculate a jump and failing. The other one is RWE, a Germany company, stops all offshore wind activities due to political climate. And it’s not because of cloud seeding, but it’s because of no more subsidies. And we have to remember that it was Warren Buffett in 2014 when he said, there’s absolutely no reason to put in a wind farm unless you have tax subsidies. Uh, and we’re always banned for reminding people that we’ve known about this since 2014.
David Blackmon [00:56:30] You can’t put them in unless the subsidies exist, and you can’t keep them going unless the subsides continue to increase, okay? That’s the second part of that.
Stuart Turley [00:56:41] And the other correlation that we have right now is Turley’s law. The more money that is spent in wind, solar, and hydrogen, the more fossil fuels will be used. And we are seeing that play out in real life. My two is theenergynewsbeat.substack.com. Got some great interviews coming up in energynewsebeat.co. This one is kind of fun. I am now averaging about 100,000 people a day on the site. And about 10,000 denial of service attacks a day on the site as well. I people do not like what we are saying here and it’s about the truth. So it’s kind of fun. Goodness gracious, my server staff absolutely hates telling.
Tammy Nemeth [00:57:35] Okay, Christopher, I will, I didn’t write a Substack article on it, but I did link to a different article on it.
Irina Slav [00:57:48] Maybe you should do a sub stack about it.
Tammy Nemeth [00:57:51] I think I need to. The trajectory of net zero to be foraging on.
Stuart Turley [00:57:59] show, Timmy, it’s called Naked and Afraid.
Tammy Nemeth [00:58:02] I know. You should have Bear Grylls doing it, right?
Stuart Turley [00:58:08] I love, Bear Girl, is an absolute hoot.
Tammy Nemeth [00:58:11] For sure.
David Blackmon [00:58:14] Well, thank you to David for joining us today. It’s a very interesting discussion. Really, really appreciate it and grateful to you again for the work you’re doing.
David Zaruk [00:58:24] Thank you, I enjoyed and I learned a lot about what happened this week in the news.
Stuart Turley [00:58:30] You’re just being nice.
David Blackmon [00:58:33] And we’re purely unbiased about all of it.
Tammy Nemeth [00:58:36] Oh, for sure. For sure. We’re just trying to be energy realists. We are just trying to be realists so people can flourish, you know.
Stuart Turley [00:58:45] Tammy, I just felt like I got into a time capsule going back to California. For sure!
Tammy Nemeth [00:58:53] Oh, Stu, I put in the private chat a link to a story that has a link to that report because I don’t have time to get the link for the report. If you could send that, put that up for Christopher. Do you see it in the Private there?
Stuart Turley [00:59:07] Yep, let me see if I can share the screen.
David Zaruk [00:59:12] Did the Canadian government offer any strategies to not have us all, you know, basically, you know, going searching for food in the government lands? This is the only point I’ll mention that the only way people can own property in the future is through inheritance, which gets me nervous because at 2040, my kids are probably going to be sniffing around like both of us.
Tammy Nemeth [00:59:38] Yeah, so, I mean, it’s their foresight department in the Privy Council Office, so all they do is say, look, based on the policies that are in existence right now, this is the trajectory we’re on, and we’re going to hypothesize what it might be like Point do they ever mention this is because of the net zero policies or any of the other different policy frameworks that have put us on this trajectory. They just say this is what it could be like in 2040.
David Zaruk [01:00:09] Scenario building 101 you create these scenarios and that’s probably the most extreme of the five scenarios but then the second part is that you then put policy strategies in to try to avoid worst-case scenarios.
Tammy Nemeth [01:00:23] Right, which could be what will be coming along after the election, maybe, if this department still exists. Who knows, but thank you. Thank you so much, David, for joining us. It was a great conversation. Thanks everybody.
Stuart Turley [01:00:40] We hope to have you back if you’ll put up with us again.
Tammy Nemeth [01:00:44] You and Stu, you should go on Stu’s podcast, y’all, I think would have a great time.
David Zaruk [01:00:49] I’ll take them down a rabbit hole for sure.
Tammy Nemeth [01:00:54] Bye everybody.
Irina Slav [01:00:55] Bye, have a great week everyone.
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