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- [00:00]
A
Foreign. Hello, you're listening to American Power. I'm your host, Nat Town, stand up comedian, speechwriter, many other kinds of writer and most likely to win me an award that no one's ever heard of, podcast host. I am joined as always by our panel of experts in a form, starting with our panelist expert on the military and foreign policy. Please welcome Chad Scott. Chad, how's it going?
- [00:39]
B
It's going great. I'm actually looking forward to this episode because I feel like I won't have to stand in Mr. Global Shadow today. He's so impressive, but I'm really excited for who's filling in for him today.
- [00:52]
A
Well, I can't wait for another shadow to be cast upon us because we have another giant joining the panel filling in for Mr. Global. We're very excited to have him here. He is a chemical engineer with nearly three decades of international experience across oil, gas refining, synthetic fuels and renewable energy. He's the author of Power Energy Options in the Age of Peak Oil and the brand new book American A History of Power, Progress and Change. He is also a longtime Forbes contributor and one of the most respected voices in the energy industry. His work has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, the Economist, and he's been featured on 60 Minutes, CNBC, PBS and the History Channel. Joining the panel as our energy expert, Robert Rapier. Welcome to American Power. Robert, thank you for joining us.
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C
Thanks guys for having me on.
- [01:38]
B
I retract my shadow statement. I now feel inadequate again after that.
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A
We are, we are on the shoulders of giants.
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B
I know.
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A
Robert, I really appreciate you joining us here for this episode and I was hoping for, you know, I gave a bit of an overview of your career, but I was hoping you could talk to our listeners and just explain a little bit about what it is that you do and how you came to this point in your career.
- [02:01]
C
Okay, sure. I graduated with a master's in chemical engineering from Texas A and M University. And then I went to work in the petrochemical industry. And I worked in the petrochemical industry for the last now it's over 30 years. Took me overseas three times. I worked in the Netherlands, I worked in Germany, I worked in Scotland, I was in Hawaii for five years. I've been a lot of different places and somewhere along the line I started to write about energy. Whenever I was working at a refinery in Billings, Montana, I started a blog about energy and it started getting picked up by the national media. Salon picked up one of my very early blog articles and it sort of took off from there. And I like to joke sometimes that I was on the COVID of Rolling Stone because there's a Rolling Stone that's got Guns N Roses on the COVID and there's a story about ethanol mentioned up on the top. And. And I'm in that story. I'm quoted in that story. So say I was on the COVID of Rolling Stone sort of with Guns and Roses.
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A
You're basically in Guns and Roses.
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B
Yeah, basically.
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C
But yeah, so that kind of took off. And yeah, I done a lot of media now at this point. Forbes tapped me to be a contributor and now I'm senior contributor. My Forbes articles have been read something like 12 million times. I usually write a new article for them once a week. I also write for Investing Daily. I crank out multiple articles for them every week. So I'm a chemical engineer, an investor, a writer, and yeah, that's kind of me in a nutshell. I've got a passion for energy. I like talking about it. People call me from Egypt and say, hey, would you come on my show? Absolutely. I love it. I talk about energy anytime, day or night.
- [03:50]
A
Well, you are in the right place, my friend. And thank you again for joining us. I want to take us right in from there to our first topic of the show, if you don't mind. It has been a minute since we had an update on the situation in Iran. Obviously an energy adjacent topic directly affecting our oil markets, but also something of a military topic. We last checked in on this situation a couple episodes ago and there have been some pretty major developments in the situation since then. Chad, do you want to give us a little bit of a recap of what's been going on in Iran?
- [04:21]
B
Yeah, for sure. So the war seems to be somewhat in a pause stage as each side is reconciling their munitions, their capabilities. Kind of feeling out where the future goes here. Obviously these, this munitions problem for both the United States and Iran is critical. And I'll talk about that in a bit about why that's driving some of Trump's decision making at the moment. But broadly, over the last three months, Iran has attacked roughly 30 commercial vessels and that continues. The Strait of Hormuz does continue to remain closed and traffic remains critically low. We saw like three vessels per day crossing over the last few days versus what used to be like 100 plus vessels per day. So those vessels that are crossing seem to be paying the tolls. All of that is still going on. More concerning is there's new satellite imagery suggesting that Iran may be rebuilding their damage or underground Nuclear facilities, specifically at Pickaxe Mountain. That's a facility that theoretically our bunker busters cannot strike. So that is a concern. We can close off access by hitting the entryways, but it's not necessarily something that is going to destroy the nuclear material. And there's potential intelligence that said that they had moved a lot of their capability to Pickaxe Mountain before even the midnight hammer strikes last year. Now, the thing about what is going on though, is Trump is probably going to pull out of this war and declare victory, no matter what the reality on ground is. He keeps tweeting that he's going to destroy power plants or bridges for every ship that Iran fires on those single one offs may continue, but the broader war is going to wind down from a munition standpoint because Trump is starting to realize that there is no deal left for the United States to make. If Trump walks away, he doesn't actually have to acknowledge the failures of this war, and at least he won't have his have to acknowledge it to his domestic audience. At least he won't have to say, hey, us, we failed. The world is going to realize, yeah, America failed here, but Americans largely just don't care about that. They care more about the personal financial aspect, in my belief. And if that, and I hope if I'm wrong, please correct me. But he doesn't have to formally recognize Iranian control over the Strait of Hormuz. If he just walks away. He doesn't have to accept Iranian demands on sanctions. He can simply just declare that the United States won. High five to George Washington in his AI posts that he does and simply just call it a day. And a lot of this is being driven by what I was talking about earlier is that a lot of the high value targets, the missile sites, the command posts, the air defenses, the naval facilities, weapon storage locations, they've already been struck. And so at some point, we're no longer using our exquisite, expensive munitions against meaningful targets. We're just burning through what is a scarce munition at this point for lower value targets. So he can keep talking about this bomb bombing campaign to project strength. And even his own advisors are saying, this is not going to work. We're exhausting critical munitions that could be potentially used in a conflict in Europe if Russia decides to pivot from Ukraine or in the Taiwan Strait. And therefore he finally has kind of gotten a wake up call. All of the realities of the world have come to bear on him and he's either deciding to withdraw or escalate. And there's Just no way. With the midterms as close, he's going to escalate. So I fully believe his best political option is for him to just basically surrender what is essentially a surrender and declare victory to his domestic audience and walk away. And, I mean, that kind of brings up a question for me, for Robert here, because from an energy standpoint, if he does walk away, which, again, I think that's probably his best route, how long would it take before the world actually feels the war is over and gas prices normalize at the pump for Americans or even Canadians, because we have a lot of them as well in our audience.
- [08:15]
C
Yeah, so. So let's go all the way back to the start. I mean, when, when we attacked Iran, I said this only ends one of two ways. They're going to close the Strait of Hormuz, which they did. That's. This is why we don't attack Iran. I mean, we, if, despite problems people have had with Iran, there's one reason we don't attack them. They can shut down the Strait of Hormuz. I'm sure it's been covered. They, you know, there's 20% of the world's oil flow goes through there, and even more than that of the world's LNG flow. So it is a major, it is the critical choke point in the world. And so once Iran closed that, there's only one of two options here. We walk away and we leave them in control of the Strait of Hormuz, which is what you're saying and which I think is the most likely option at this point. I think we just, I think Trump just walks away. And I've said that for a couple of months. The only other option is putting boots on the ground and trying to seize control. And that's really nasty. And I agree with you. I don't think going to the midterms that, that he has the appetite for that. So what's going to happen here? If you had told me that five months after shutting down the Strait of Hormuz and an almost continual shutdown that entire time that oil prices would still be below $100 a barrel, I wouldn't have believed it. You know, so, so how long before gas prices normalize? I would say they, I didn't think they would normalize again while Trump is president. As long as Iran controls the Strait of Hormuz, they're extracting tolls and less, there's going to be less traffic going through because they have to go through a very specific route. So that's going to cut down the traffic in and out so it will cut down the oil flow. I don't think we'll get back to the oil flows that were coming through there before. And there's going to be a surcharge now on the track, on the tanker traffic coming through. That's going to add to the price of oil. And so I don't, from a fundamental perspective, I don't think gasoline prices are going to get down, back down to a pre war basis. I don't see them doing that now. There are some other mitigating factors going on. So, you know, why aren't oil prices much higher than they are? Well, US Oil production continues to grow. I mean, we've been growing since 2009. We've added tremendous amount of oil. We're the largest oil producer in the world. There are other countries that are doing the same thing. I've written an article before. The next big shale boom is in Argentina and I just happened to see an article this morning that Argentina is now setting records down there in their shale formation. So you have a lot of countries that are coming on and putting oil on the market and that has helped. We went into this with China having a very full strategic reserve of their own and that has helped immensely. Otherwise I think we would have seen oil at $150. I'm surprised oil didn't go to $150. Honestly. I think global inventories have been pulled down pretty low. So we're in a very different situation than we were in February before, before hostilities. Europe has drawn down their strategic reserves, we've drawn down ours. China certainly drawn down theirs. And so even when things start flowing again, those strategic reserves will have to be replenished. And so that's going to keep pressure on prices. But I've learned the oil markets will surprise you. And I think many, many people, many very, you know, competent people predicted oil prices $150 a barrel. And you can see why, you know, that wasn't a crazy prediction. It was just looking at, you know, you can't take 20% of the world's oil flow out and not expect to see an immense reaction. But you know, it is what it is. We've got, you know, inventories are lower, that's for sure. So there's more risk now out there for a disruption. But you know, if this, if it continues to go on, I think there's some point that China's pulled down their reserves, we pull down ours, Europe's pull down theirs. And we say, hey, you know, there's, there's nothing, there's nothing else to, there's nothing else to put out on the market.
- [12:17]
A
And if you don't mind me asking, what do you think, do you see from the administration, like as you mentioned, like the, essentially the only choices were Iran has always controlled the strait, but we've effectively allowed them to prove their power through this entire action. Right. I think this has really shown that closing the strait will hold the US's feet to the fire, will hold our economy's feet to the fire in a way that was more theoretical beforehand. Do you think that that has eventually affected the administration's strategy here? Is it simply that Iran's war of attrition, of just letting us inflict, of inflicting the pain and letting us feel it, is that functioning? Is that getting through to Donald Trump or what, what's to Essentially we've known that this was the dichotomy like either either there's diplomacy and we somehow get the strait open or there's a full scale invasion, which I don't think we're going to do. I pray we're not going to do. That has been the situation for quite some time now. So are we really seeing the administration track differently as a result of the midterms or is the policy shifting at all?
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C
So let's think about why we did this in the first place. I think the reason this in the first place was Venezuela was too easy.
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A
Venezuela was what we say it was like claw game, like they thought they could pluck out another dictator.
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C
Yeah. So, so, and Trump, you know, we've
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A
seen world leader, I should say now
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C
we seize Venezuela's oil and that's another story. Where's that, where's all that oil revenue going? We've, we are taking their oil revenue and it's going to some dark hole somewhere. We don't, we don't know where it's going. And I think Trump decided, well, Venezuela was easy, let's go in there and let's topple Iran. And he said many, many times it's not speculation. He said we're going to take their oil. And I think he probably had the same intention, we're going to grab Iran's oil too. So now we've got our oil, Venezuela's oil, Iran's oil, we've got a lot of oil revenues and there's no telling where those oil revenues are going. So I think that was the strategy. And when the initial bombing didn't have, didn't result in regime change. Okay. Well, Iran now is going to hunker down, and they did. And so now we got in a situation where I think Trump's lost interest. You know, it wasn't a quick victory, and, you know, now it's really requiring strategy and thinking and, you know, public, the public's getting upset about it and gas prices are going up and, you know, he's dealing with a lot more criticism than, you know, Venezuela, which just happened, you know, so, so quickly. I think Venezuela put up more of a fight. I think we would have thought long and hard about going into Iran. So I think Trump is looking at a bunch of bad options right now, and I think the best option is to do what he does, just declare victory and, and move on. But then I don't see, in that case, gas prices getting back down to where they were. I mean, we've already paid a tremendous price for this, you know, not just in what we spent in the military, but, you know, it sucked a lot of money out of the economy here. The, you know, billions and billions of dollars now we've spent on, you know, higher gas prices and higher diesel prices. And I don't see us getting back to where we were. So, you know, we're all paying a tax now and we're going to pay a tax. The whole world is paying a tax for this.
- [15:29]
B
So do you see, like I, you said diesel. I feel like, again, I'm not an energy expert, but I feel like gasoline, what we, we feed, we feel at the pump. That's like the, the sexy headline that we always talk about. But I always kind of intrinsically believe that diesel and jet fuel actually have a greater impact on the economy because, I mean, diesel runs our transport, jet fuel runs our shipping industry, cargo, air cargo. Are those on different paths than gasoline? Are we looking at. Yeah, gas may drop and we may see a bounce in Trump's polls because gas prices drop and he'll get a tweet about it. But then again, in the background, with Russia continuing to, to hold its own gas or diesel exports, does that mean we're going to see a worse recovery or no recovery at all? Because diesel and jet fuel are on a different path than gasoline.
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C
Yeah. So the diesel markets are a lot tighter. And you can go back and you can see when Russia invaded Ukraine, the diesel markets went up a lot more than, than gasoline did. And that's. That happened again because diesel markets are just tighter than the gasoline markets around the world. And so you're likely to see gasoline come down for sure more than diesel. But you're right. Diesel runs the economy. I mean, diesel moves all the goods, you know, the grocery store. If we see inflation, you know, it's just not. It's not just commodity prices. It's because diesel is costing more to move absolutely everything around. And so there's inflationary pressure, then that ripples through the entire economy. So, yeah, we've got a. We got a problem with diesel, and it's not going to be resolved anytime soon. Russia, as you say, is making matters worse because Russia does export a lot of diesel to the world. And, you know, that's not happening right now. And there's no indication that that's going to return anytime soon. U.S. refiners are in sort of a difficult situation because they can shift some. And this actually, they actually did this when Russia invaded Ukraine.
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A
They.
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C
They shifted production toward diesel, but then that takes production away from gasoline. And so now you've got, you know, you got shortages of diesel, shortage in gasoline. And so you can shift your refinery back and forth a little bit. Not a whole lot, but about maybe 5% from, from gasoline to diesel. And, you know, that puts in pressure on gasoline. So you're just looking at, you know, from a refiner's perspective, they're looking at where our margins highest. You know, they're not looking at where's the shortage, the worst. They're looking at prices and saying, okay, we're making a lot more diesel. Let's try to shift as much as we can diesel.
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A
And I want to ask you one thing about something you said a little bit earlier, which was just that we don't know where Venezuela's oil is going. Obviously, not every oil sale is publicly entered into a tracker and record. But I do remember Bloomberg reporting earlier this year back in February that Venezuelan crude was going to Israel for the first time in 17 years and that most of Venezuela's oil had gone to China in the past, but they were starting to sell to Spain and other parts of Europe. So we know some of this. Or I'm asking you, I don't mean
- [18:35]
C
physically where it's going. I mean where the money's going.
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A
Oh, I'm sorry. I misunderstood. So we do know where the shipping routes of the sales are?
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C
Yes. We don't know where the money's going. I mean, the money initially said, okay, it's going to go to an offshore account and Trump is going to control that money. And. But there was a story, I mean, it was in the Economist or Financial Times, and it, it said, where's Venezuela's oil money. So, so there are a lot of people who are asking that question. There's no transparency here. We don't know where those revenues are. You know, Trump said in the beginning, you know, we're, we're going to take that money and you know, we're going to use it and hold it and help Venezuela rebuild. But there's been no transparency on that at all. So.
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A
Right.
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C
And I, for the record, I worked for ConocoPhillips back when Chavez expropriated us and he took, you know, billions of dollars worth of assets that we put in the ground down there and we took them to world court and won. And so Venezuela has been had, had huge arbitration ruled against them that they've never paid. And so when Trump starts seize this money, he said we're not paying those guys back. That's their fault. You know, they should have, they should have known better. So he blamed Exxon Mobil and ConocoPhillips for doing business in Venezuela and said we're not going to use. And they actually have judgments that they are supposed to be paid. And so now it makes it more difficult for them to get paid if we're essentially stealing their oil revenue.
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A
Interesting.
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B
Yeah, because I was, when I was reading through some of the, the southcom briefings on this, they brought up the, the funding sources for the recent earthquake that took place there and, and Trump went on TV and Marco Rubio went on TV and made a bunch of, of headline grabbing speeches about how we're going to help them out with their, with the post earthquake, the post destruction rebuild. And we're now seeing that that's not even happening. A lot of it has to do with the fact that our, our aid arm USAID has been defunded and dismantled. But it brings back where, I mean, what better place to use that oil money than put it back into the Venezuelan economy in a post earthquake situation to help them rebuild. And it just, it just reminds me once again that I feel like we're just dealing with an administration that loves the grift. They love to just make money disappear. It's the Board of Peace all over again. It's all of that. And I worry that we will continue to see this as he gets closer to countries like Saudi. We've seen the Saudi nuclear deal that he's trying to push through. And that, that kind of just brings up to me, do you see the Saudi oil situation? Now granted, I think the Saudi oil situation with the Houthis in Yemen is a bit different than what's going on with Iran. This is a, a longer conflict. I know the Houthis are somewhat of a proxy of Iran, but they're also an independent group, so they make their own decisions as well. They can be influenced by Iran and the Ayatollah and the, and the Islamic Republic. But we're seeing this blockade of Saudi oil through Baba Mandeb. They originally were blockading the Red Sea during the initial stages of strikes into Gaza by Israel. Do you see this blockade of only Saudi oil as of right now, which is the biggest driver of oil through there? I believe through the Boba Minute. Do you see that going to impact any of this at all or is this just a hormone?
- [22:01]
C
Yeah, if it went on. So, so that is the emergency outlet. You know, if Hormuz is the front door, that's the emergency exit. And if they are blocking that, then yeah, that's a problem. But you know, I checked traffic just for coming online. It looked like ships are going through there. So they don't have the capability to do what Iran has done. You know, Iran has functionally shut down the Strait of Hormuz, but it looks to me like traffic is still going through. The Houthis do not have the ability to do what Iran did. And yeah, if you look at traffic, you know, like Marinetraffic.com you can see there's, there's essentially no traffic going through Hormuz, but there was a line of ships going back and forth, you know, in and out of the Suez Canal.
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B
So, so I guess that brings up why is this even a problem for the US then? Are we not, we've talked about this with Mr.
- [22:48]
C
Global.
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B
Are we not the largest oil and natural gas producing on Earth? I mean, if that's the case, why, why can this war. And it's to be quite honest, in the grand scheme of wars, it's not even that big of a war for the United States to try to manage. Why is this war immediately raising the price of gas here in my hometown here in Idaho? Why is that still a problem for us if we're so star spangled awesome and such a large producer?
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C
So that question came up again and again when I first started writing about this after it happened. People say why would, why should this affect, you know, we don't import anything from Iran. Why should this aff us? And the reason it affects us is this a global market. And if somebody's producing oil in Utah and you know they're not going to sell it to, you know, their refiners there for $60. If they can get a hundred dollars out on the world market, they're going to get it by a pipeline down to the Gulf coast and get it out of there. So that affects prices. I mean, people are trying to, the oil producers are trying to sell oil at the highest prices. And we have a crude, we used to have a crude export ban in place to kind of insulate the US from that kind of thing. And that was repealed under President Obama in 2015. As shale production continued to grow, there started to be a glut of shale oil in the US and that was repealed as part of a package that also gave Obama some renewable energy things that he wanted. And so we now export a lot of oil. We export a lot of lng. I mean, we're the largest LNG exporter in the world now. And so when prices, when something happens in the rest of the world and it affects the, you know, it affects oil prices overseas, it affects oil prices here, too, just because oil is going to flow to wherever people are going to pay the most for it, minus cost of shipping and so forth. But, you know, nobody's going to sell oil in Utah for $40 less than they can get, you know, by selling it to Europe because it doesn't cost that much to get that oil from Utah over to Europe. So that, that's why it affects everybody. You know, if we had a complete export ban on LNG and oil, it wouldn't affect us as much, but, you know, that would cause a lot of, a lot of other problems, problems that were happening. You know, we wouldn't be producing nearly as much oil right now if we had that export ban in place. So, so that's why, that's why it affects us, because it's a global market.
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B
So just to clarify for everyone, lng, Liquefied natural gas. That's what that is. When he keeps. When he says lng, it's just the, the whenever.
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A
That's correct. Thank you.
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B
Oh, sorry.
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A
No, no, no, no. I was saying I should have caught that. My apologies.
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B
Yeah, no worries. I just, yeah, just for everyone's awareness, anyway.
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A
Liquefied natural gas. Yeah, there was a. Liquefied to ship it because it's deserved for our listeners. They cool it to a point of liquidity to make it easier to ship and contain.
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C
Yeah, it's a fraction of the volume when it's liquefied, but it has to be cooled down a lot. And 20 years ago, we were actually building import terminals because we thought there was going to be a serious Natural gas crisis. This is one of those things where the energy markets can humble you. Twenty years ago, people were predicting, we have a natural gas crisis on the horizon. And in fact, Matt Simmons, who wrote Twilight in the Desert, it's back there on my bookshelf, he predicted Saudi Arabia production is going to crash and the US natural gas production is going to crash. And he said the only solution is to pray. And here we are, 20 years later, we're the world's largest oil and natural gas producer because fracking came along and opened up all these shale reserves and suddenly the import terminals we were building got converted into export terminals. And if you had told people 20 years ago, if you'd made a prediction, the US in 20 years will be the world's largest LNG liquefied natural gas exporter, they would have thought you were mad. I mean, that would have been just a ridiculous prediction. Just like the US being the world's largest oil producer again, because we had declined for 40 years our oil production and there was no reason to believe it was going to turn around. And then the fracking came along and boom. We've been on a, on an upward climb ever since.
- [26:56]
A
Well, not to be too critical of that, but isn't fracking a more, a little bit more caustic to the environment than burning oil? Are like, are we increasing our domestic, our domestic carbon exports by relying more on fracking?
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C
Yeah, so, so that's a, that's a whole nother can of worms there.
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A
Oh, I know, I know fracking.
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C
Fracking can be a lot of things. And, and if you live in a community that is a rural community that suddenly, you know, there's oil discovery and you got all these, all this traffic coming in, all this fracking going on and you got, you know, you got more emissions, you've got more traffic, more dust, more people. People don't like that. I mean, I know people in rural Pennsylvania who, you know, if you live on a farm and you didn't, you weren't on top of a deposit, but your neighbor was, you know, there, there are cases where wells were contaminated and these people got absolutely nothing for it. So if there's a boom happening and people getting rich are not necessarily the people suffering the consequences, then you're going to have some pushback. And, you know, fracking has been associated, not the fracking itself, but the re. Injection of the water has been associated with earthquakes. You know, Oklahoma went from no earthquakes, hardly to number one earthquake state a few years ago. You know, they, and it was because of fracking. So. But that's a whole. And that's a whole nother show. I mean, there's, there's good and bad. You know, without fracking, we are heavily dependent on OPEC for oil. You know, we're, we're exporting massive dollars for petroleum without fracking. So, you know, I say again, again, there's no free lunch in the energy sector. There's always, it's always something. You know, if it wasn't for fracking, we would be supporting Saudi Arabia and we'd be supporting all these countries and sending them our dollars.
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A
Well, I think that's a good time to talk about America's ongoing renewable, renewable energy transition, or in some people's opinions, currently halted renewable energy transition, depending on how you look at the administration's attitude towards energy right now, although there is a lot of innovation happening at the state level and at other levels. You wrote an article recently stating that renewable energy is growing at an extraordinary rate, but our emissions are still breaking records. And I was wondering if you could talk about why this is happening globally, how it's, you know, how that renewable energy development is happening asymmetrically in different countries and sort of where that increase of emissions is coming from.
- [29:30]
C
Right. So you know about the energy transition. So I think a lot of people got really ahead of themselves with predictions. And I'll give you an example. In I think about 2015, Bloomberg wrote an article about the adoption of electric vehicles, and it predicted that by, I think, 2022, electric vehicles were going to displace 2 million barrels a day, and that was going to cause the price to crash and it would never recover. And I took them to task in Forbes and I said, you're overlooking a very important thing. Oil demand and energy demand is growing every year. So between now and 2022, demand is going to be 5 million barrels a day higher than it is now. And so you're saying their calculation.
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A
Sorry to interrupt. Their calculation was based on the current level of.
- [30:16]
C
Yeah, they're not factoring in that energy demand is growing year after year after year. And that ties right into the question you just asked. How can renewable energy be setting records and growing rapidly, but so are our emissions? Because overall energy demand is growing fat and our consumption is going faster than renewables are coming online. And so that means renewables are setting records, but so are. So is coal, so is natural gas, so is oil. Everything is setting records. Renewables are growing at a much faster rate from a much lower base. But you know the others, because there's not enough renewables to meet the total demand. Everything has to go up. And so that's why we were setting emissions records. Now you ask where it's coming from. So historically, the United States has put more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than any other country. For about 50 years, though, our emissions have been pretty flat. Where they've been growing dramatically are in the Asia Pacific region. And Asia Pacific now is emitting more than three times the US and the EU combined. And it's been, it's been dramatically growing, particularly China, not far behind India, Indonesia, but mainly China. And so I actually wrote an article recently because a guy said, you know, this isn't China's fault, this is our fault. Well, it's both our, it's our fault that the historical emissions are there, but we cannot stop it now because its growth is being driven somewhere else. So even if we got our emissions down to nothing, it emissions will still be growing because it's growing everywhere else. So that's why I say, you know, yes, we're responsible. But you cannot say that China's not responsible. They burn more than half the world's coal and their emissions have grown dramatically. And, you know, they will surpass us for overall emissions in the atmosphere at some point. So, you know, that's, that's a problem. It's, you know, we've got to acknowledge that, yes, historically we are the number one offender, but China is currently the number one offender and they are emitting far more per year than we ever emitted. And that's, you know, that's what's driving emissions right now.
- [32:28]
A
And I, this is not to, I'm not taking sides in any US China culture war that people are having in their minds right now. So I just want, I'm not, I want our listeners to know I'm speaking practically. But isn't China also outpacing us in building renewable energy sources?
- [32:47]
C
Oh, China's doing all of the above.
- [32:49]
A
430 gigawatts last year, that figure we
- [32:53]
C
were number one in a lot of these renewable categories. But it was clear from China's growth rate they were going to pass us. But what China's doing is they're lifting,
- [33:02]
A
you know, they're building hundreds of millions
- [33:05]
C
of people from poverty into the middle class and they need every sort of energy. So, you know, every kind of energy there in China is increasing. Now one thing they're doing, they're electrifying as fast as they can and they are, you know, building nuclear power plants as fast as they can. And that will help. But until their coal consumption starts to decline, they will continue to drive emissions. You know, the biggest, single most, the lowest hanging fruit in the world with carbon emissions is Chinese coal. And you know, if we could get that under control, that would really help with emissions. Now, having said that, U.S. coal, which has been on the decline for 15 years, resurged last year. So we saw U.S. emissions, U.S. emissions have been, you know, over the last 20 years, U.S. emissions have declined more than any other country in the world. But last year they went back up. And that was mainly because there was a resurgence in our coal consumption last year.
- [34:02]
B
It's interesting because we talk about, and I've seen this in kind of all of the studies of African nations, this notion of we for the last 50 years have kind of run roughshod across the earth, building our society. Europe, same way. They, I mean, to the point where they had acid rain and all kinds of problems. And, and now we, we sit here on our, from our ivory tower, looking down with our high tech industries and saying, hey China, you can't lift your people up with an industry now that because it's making our air dirty. I, I feel, I, I've always felt that was somewhat disingenuous of us, but I get that it's a global problem. We have to, now that we recognize that we have to and unfortunately it's something that is something we have to deal with. Did you have something to say?
- [34:48]
C
Yeah, that's the thing. I mean, we, from, from a per capita standpoint, we still use twice as much energy as China does.
- [34:55]
A
Yeah.
- [34:56]
C
So, you know, we don't have very much moral ground to stand on there. But, you know, the problem is they got 1.3 or 4 billion people over there and you know, the atmosphere doesn't care. The atmosphere doesn't care if it's a, you know, a billion people consuming half of what we consume or, you know, we've got, you know, what, 300 million consuming twice as much per person. We're still emitting a lot less overall. That's not to excuse us. We should be, you know, taking care of ourselves for sure. But we cannot fix the problem unless China figures out something about the coal, you know, that, that we are, we are powerless. You know, we, again, we should do all we can. Absolutely all we can, but we're powerless to solve this unilaterally just because of the volume of emissions coming out of China.
- [35:46]
B
So why did our coal surge, though?
- [35:49]
C
The Trump administration has promoted it. I mean, they've promoted coal and tried to get coal fired power plants running again. And, you know, they don't see any issue there at all. So it's been a priority. Money has.
- [36:01]
A
The thing we've talked about a lot in previous episodes is just that renewables, the build out of renewables is cheaper in most cases now. But the Trump administration has been effectively buoying fossil fuel, various parts of the fossil fuel industry, to, I mean, to give carve outs to his business buddies, essentially. But that's why we're seeing this. I mean, I was going to ask the same thing about coal, but I'm not shocked at the answer, which is that, you know, we're seeing sort of like a regressiveness on some of our progress when it comes towards renewables because he's trying to make fossil fuels competitive again.
- [36:32]
C
I want to loop back to a question that Scott, Chad and I talked about it on email, but it's related to the, it's related to the question of why, why fuel prices go up here if we're the largest producer. And the other half of that is aren't we energy independent? Why, why does this affect us? Because aren't we energy independent? That's the question I get a lot. So I want to talk about that a little bit because people get so confused about this because I know when, when Biden came in, people said, well, we were energy independent under Trump and now we've lost our energy independence. And the first thing I'll say is define energy independence. What do you mean by that? Because there's two ways to think about that. One way, energy independence means we don't depend on anybody else for energy. If that's the case, we have not been energy independent in the last hundred years because we have imported oil from other places. We did under Trump. We did under Biden. We have continuously, even though our oil production has grown dramatically, we still import oil because it's a better fit for our refineries. So under that definition, we have not been energy independent. We weren't under Trump. But I like a different definition, and that is we produce more energy than we use and we export some of the excess and we may import some that. So in that case, energy independence. Yes, we're energy independent on that definition. And we were energy independent. We were. We've been on a trajectory for that ever since oil production turned upward under Obama in 2009. You know, natural gas turned up a little bit earlier, but we've been on a trajectory for that. And so we actually hit net energy exports in 2019. Now Trump was in office then, but we've been on that trajectory for the last 15 years and it continued to grow and it grew under Biden. It was more under Biden than it was under Trump. And I've said that to people and they say you're a liar. I mean I actually had an article, Matt Randolph actually mentioned it in a TikTok. US energy independence climbs to the highest level in 70 years under Biden. And people said you're a liar. We've lost it under Biden. I said, look, it's an Energy Information administration has these statistics on our energy exports and our energy exports have grown every year and they grew. So our imports declined steadily under Obama until they finally hit an export number under Trump, but that export number continued to grow under Biden. And so, so are we energy independent? You know, from the perspective of we produce more than we use? Yes. And that grew under Biden and we did not lose energy independence under the definition. We don't use, we don't import energy. We haven't been energy independent in 80 years.
- [39:18]
B
So I guess I have a coming from. So I'm a, I'm a military expert. I look at energy independence from a different perspective. Let's say the worst case scenario happens and we have a coalition formed between Russia, China, North Korea, Iran and effectively it becomes a scenario where yes, NATO comes together to fight this, but the United States is going to be largely the energy provider, not only for itself and in Canada obviously plays a part there as well. And I don't mean to dismiss our Canadian. They produce a huge amount of energy for, for the globe. But could we, under my view of I need, we need to be energy independent to defend ourselves. Could we do that if we just had to rely on our own? It becomes an every country for itself. We need to try to, to win a war. Can we do that?
- [40:07]
C
You're thinking about the, my second definition where I said if we export energy, we got a net surplus of energy. We're energy independent because if we had to, we could supply all of our own needs. Yes, we could do that. Now it's not optimal because our refineries are not designed for the light sweet crude oil that's coming out of the Permian Basin right now. The economics are not as good. I've heard people say we can't use our oil. Yes, yes, we can use it. It's just not optimal. It's not, our refineries are not designed for that. You can still run it through. Your yields are going to suffer. A little bit. The costs are going to be higher, and so that's why we don't do it. But, yes, if you built a wall around the US and you said, you know, you can only use what you produce. Yes. We could produce enough to satisfy our needs. So by that definition, we're energy independent, even though we still do import oil and we export More. More. We export, you know, natural gas.
- [41:05]
B
Yeah. And I think Canada is kind of a helpful superpower there. And it's very frustrating that we've had our relationship so degraded by the Trump administration because, man, they, I think between, if the United States combined with Canada, from an energy perspective, I'm. Correct me if I'm wrong, it's like a superpower. We're basically almost like the entire Middle east able to handle without the volatility.
- [41:26]
C
So, yeah, you've got a reliable trading partner there. Right. You know, that historically very reliable trading partner that has a lot of oil. So U.S. canada, that's, that's an important relationship. That's, that's also why, you know, I was always in favor of the Keystone XL pipeline. You know, people say we don't need it. I said, well, if we don't need it, then Trans Canada at the time, so they just wasted their money. But if we do need it, that is there. You know, if we, if we find ourselves needing that oil, that pipeline is there. And if we find ourselves needing it and it's not there, then we're going to have to go get it from Saudi Arabia.
- [42:03]
A
Counterpoint I would pose to that is that a pipeline we're not using can still cause massive environmental issues. Right. Like you're still disrupting the coastline to build it. You're still, you're still disrupting a lot
- [42:12]
C
of nature to coastline. It's going to come right down the. Sorry, not country.
- [42:15]
A
Sorry. I think of the Williams pipeline.
- [42:17]
C
Yes.
- [42:17]
A
The Keystone pipeline. Yeah, effectively. I mean, I understand what you're saying, but I would, I'm just trying to steer us a little bit to the ecological side of this conversation, which is, you know, talking about like, who's responsible for emissions. And your point stands very strong, which is that, like, it doesn't ultimately matter. The environment doesn't care. The atmosphere doesn't care where the emissions come from or how many people they come from. Right. Like a billion people using half as much as half a billion people is the same amount of, you know, is the same amount of emissions. I would also add that, you know, like Chad said, you know, it doesn't matter if it's fair. But we did burn a bunch of, coil a bunch of coal in order to industrialize our country. Right. In order to lift a lot of our working class out of poverty. And so, you know, whatever, whatever moral standard is being leveraged against China in this argument. And you know, obviously our, our international relationships under this administration are not really, you know, it feels like a very grudge based international policy. So I find, I'm almost reticent to, to acknowledge that. But like, even if we are having a grudge match with China, essentially we are creating that grudge over a thing that we did ourselves as, as a country. But that doesn't also matter because there wasn't as severe greenhouse gas problem as there as there is now. Like ultimately we can't say it's fair for China to do this because we are dealing with an accelerating crisis. So as I loop us back to the renewable question of, you know, or the environmental question, you know, talking about building out pipelines, talking about how China is building nuclear, they're relying on every source, they're building everything out simultaneously as quickly as possible. We can't control that, we can't control their emissions, we can't control what they're doing. Obviously some kind of global cap standards, obviously there is room for diplomacy, but we can't pull a lever to have China, you know, change a law or something. We can't pull a lever to change China's oil industry. What can we do in terms of reducing emissions? You know, even if our, you know, we're, we're, even if our emissions are lower, what can the US do to reduce its massive emissions? But also, is there in our renewable energy transition, is there a military or otherwise global strategic opportunity there towards energy independence? Whatever you should mean by that, if we're looking, you know, is there in the move towards other energy production methods, are we leaving ourselves more vulnerable that way? Is there a way of creating less vulnerability, of creating more safety, more, you know, should, should we have to go into a crisis moment? Is there more energy independence afforded by a potential increase in our renewable energy transition?
- [45:05]
C
Yeah, so I mean the biggest problem is you've got an administration that absolutely does not care about emissions and. Oh yeah, and so, so right now, speaking in theory. Yeah, so I mean, but what we should be doing, I mean our low hanging fruit as well as coal, we, we need to be getting the coal out. We need to, that is the highest, highest polluting source of energy and we've got to get it out. And for the last 20 years, we've been getting it out. I mean, why did US Emissions fall more than any other countries? Two reasons. Fracking brought on natural gas and it got so cheap that it started pushing coal out of power plants. But then the second thing was renewables. So you had natural gas and renewables. That basically took a dramatic market share away from coal and power production. That's why our emissions failed so much. And so that should be exported everywhere that's burning coal. I mean we need to be getting them off of coal. You know, whatever, whatever it takes to get them off of coal. If they go from coal to nuclear power or coal to renewables, it's the best. But if they could go from coal to natural gas, they're still cutting their emissions in half.
- [46:16]
A
Certainly. But building new, new renewables is a lot faster than building new nuclear plants, right?
- [46:20]
C
Yeah, but you don't have, you can't, you don't have.
- [46:24]
A
I'm not talking about pre existing nuclear plant, that's different.
- [46:26]
C
You know, coal fired power plant. You can't produce a solar farm to replace a coal fired power plant as you could, you know, a nuclear plant
- [46:35]
A
in terms of just the pure volume.
- [46:36]
C
So yeah, it's, I mean you can have it distributed all over the place. So incrementally you can add, you know, the equivalent of a coal fired power plant, but it's going to be distributed and all over the place. But if you've got a central power plant and it's a coal plant, you know you're going to replace that with some firm power like a natural gas plant or nuclear plant. And again, you know, China's demand is growing so they are adding renewables but it's, it's not enough. So they're still needing that firm power to come in and displace the coal.
- [47:06]
B
So with regard to the nuclear discussion, you, you recently wrote in Forbes that like our, our trillion dollar companies, the big, the big heavy hitters like Microsoft and Amazon, they're pursuing their own like nuclear power. Can you explain that a bit? Is it driving? Is it being driven because of this AI movement? Is that why? I mean, it's almost like they are. I've seen, I have a, I have a, a data center that's about 15 minutes from my house and there's a solar farm right next to it. I felt like, hey, that's pretty adequate. Why would Amazon and Microsoft be pursuing nuclear power when the build out seems like it'd be longer and more expensive? Can you explain a bit of the nuclear stance where we'd have These nuclear companies suddenly.
- [47:49]
C
Yeah, I think they're looking down the road here. I, I would bet that that solar plant does not supply the, all the power for that data center. I mean I look into it. But those data centers are pretty massive power producers, power consumers, sorry. And so that's, that's the reason. And Amazon's not going to produce nuclear power, but they're, they're signing agreements with companies to provide them with nuclear power. I think they can look down the road and see their power demands are going to continue to grow. And if they're not going to be, you know, ostracized by communities for, for, you know, the data center needs, they've got to bring their own power and they've got to figure out, you know, deals like sign and sign a nuclear deal where they can produce power with no emissions or low emissions. I think that's the whole driver for the nuclear. They see that could be a, an economical low emissions, firm power option for them. Now alternatively, you know, batteries are coming on like crazy. And so, you know, batteries and wind and solar, you know, those are going to be more and more adequate as time goes by. But you know, as long as our energy demand keeps growing like it is, as fast as we're adding renewables, we're still falling behind.
- [49:05]
A
I just want to add to that also that processor density in terms of data centers is changing and theoretically we'll have a very different energy demand in about three or four years. So while it is these increasing in these data centers are sucking up a huge amount of energy. Theoretically as they expand, they should become more efficient, not the existing data centers, but it's not necessarily going to scale at the current rate that the data centers are burning up, which isn't going to like, it's not going to make us carbon neutral all of a sudden. But the rate at which the data centers are currently accelerating is probably where it's going to be for about two years and then we may actually have a retraction in that. I don't know how long it's going to take companies like Amazon and Microsoft or the government rather to respond to that kind of thing. But I think internally companies know, maybe they're creating their own energy needs, projecting that they'll be able to expand a lot more rapidly because currently the data centers are extremely energy intensive. Right. But we will hopefully have a point at some scene where the density makes it possible for them to be less of a, less of a massive consumption of energy for like every center.
- [50:27]
C
Presume we're Going to have a bubble that pops. And we may have a bubble that pops and we see, you know, things go sideways for, for a while.
- [50:34]
A
Yeah, I mean that's the other thing. When we say data centers, there's a big difference between, you know, things that are backing up Google searches, things that are OpenAI, ChatGPT, running LLMs. Like some of those are data centers for our just in general more digital, increasingly online world. And some of those are as you said, Robert, something that very well could be a bubble and then we'll be stuck with necessarily stuck, but we will be left with infrastructure for something that can no longer fund itself, which will be an interesting juncture.
- [51:04]
B
Yeah, yeah, it's interesting because you bring up the. As they get more efficient, we should be able to reduce energy. Unfortunately, I don't know if that translates to real because you talk about Moore's Law, we're using more energy now and our compute is incredibly more powerful than it was even five years ago. And I start to worry about things like quantum computing which is starting to become a viable entity. And quantum computing itself is not, it's actually quite power. It's not power hungry at all. It's really going to be a great technology. It's everything around it. Because managing the temperature, the quantum computers get extraordinarily hot, like unfathomably hot. And so it's a hundred times the requirements are we have to basically either build them in space to keep them cool or find ways to air condition them to such a level that it's going to require huge amounts of power. And that's where I get concerned about we, I love this idea of, yeah, we're just going to keep getting better. I'm looking at a computer right here that is my gaming computer. It consumes more power than the computer I had. That was my gaming computer 10 years ago because I just.
- [52:09]
C
Paradox. Have you heard of Javon's paradox?
- [52:12]
B
No, I've not.
- [52:13]
C
So Javon's Paradox. Javon Stan William Stanley Javon, 1865. He, he create, he, he formulated this, this paradox where he said as coal engines become more and more efficient, we're using more and more coal. And that has happened throughout history that as we become more efficient, we just use more and more energy. So it never works out like, you know, our energy efficiency is going up, therefore our energy consumption is going to go down. It's never worked out that way. And that's Javon's paradox that as our energy efficiency has increased over time, our energy usage has just continued to Go up. And it's what you see with your computer and it's what we saw with coal, what we saw with oil. You know, engines today are far more efficient than they were in the past and yet our consumption just went up and up and up.
- [53:04]
A
So you're saying conservation standards, for example, aren't necessarily preventative towards the increase in consumption. They're just, they reflect the efficiency of that consumption, but not overall numbers.
- [53:17]
C
Consumption would probably be higher otherwise, I mean, if we didn't have constitution measures. But it's never been enough to actually arrest or make our consumption decline.
- [53:29]
A
Which strikes me as a pretty strong argument for the, the least environmentally impactful forms of energy possible. If we're going to be inevitably scaling them forever. Maybe not forever, but I don't know if there's any projection towards our ceiling of energy use.
- [53:44]
C
Now the Dyson sphere that goes around the whole sun and captures all of our energy, that's, that's where we're headed.
- [53:52]
A
Eventually if we get there, then we will be fully energy independent. That's the, that's the maximum. I think that's a level three society. It's known as in, yeah, science fiction, something like that. We're showing our true colors here, Robert. But all we would need is a few Dyson panels orbiting the Earth first of all, that would be, we need a space elevator and a few panels we don't need to fully consume the star.
- [54:18]
C
There's more than a few sci fi books on the shelf behind me.
- [54:21]
A
I'm not shocked. For those listening who don't know what we're talking about, a Dyson sphere is a theoretical highly advanced form of energy consumption that involves harnessing the star at the center of your solar system. It is a theorized higher form of civilization than the one we're currently living in, which is a type 1 civilization.
- [54:41]
C
A massive sphere that captures 100% of the solar output and uses that for the civilization. It's a science fiction concept proposed years ago and actually sometimes a telescope will see a dimming star and they'll postulate, well, maybe that's the civilization building a Dyson sphere.
- [55:00]
A
Big part of how we, you know, the question of how, how do we not see other civilizations in space is perhaps they have blocked off their star. Now obviously we're getting very sci fi here, but a lot of these concepts from solar panels to hydro fracking were science fiction initially. And I think let's get the fusion first. Yeah, I mean I've been hearing Nuclear fusion is 10, it's been 10 years away for the past 40 years, but it's only 10 years. But that said, a lot of the ideas, as much as we joke around, I do encourage people to think as insanely out of the box as possible when it comes to forward thinking energy solutions. Because so much of what we have learned is that thinking innovatively is how we find solutions in terms of technologies that we wouldn't have otherwise expected.
- [55:53]
B
Yeah. So I want to pivot real quick because to respect Robert's time here, but there is something that is near and dear to both Robert and mine's heart. The because he's in Arizona, I believe, and I'm in Idaho. Now Idaho, people think of it as a mountainous state with potatoes, but I'm in southern Idaho, which is a high desert. And water is a problem for us. And water obviously is a problem for the American Southwest. It's a problem for California. It's a problem everywhere. And when I say it's a problem everywhere, I mean it's starting wars. India and Pakistan, they have water. They're starting to get concerned about water and it's starting wars. The Sahel region, a lot of the migration, the refugees that leads to terrorism and building of extremist organizations, these are just people that can't farm anymore and have nowhere else to turn because of water scarcity. And we talk constantly on this show about whether we have enough oil. The oil independence, we just talked about it. Gas, I mean, we've talked briefly about the uranium being stopped because of the Ukraine war and power generation. I really do think that one of the things that is going to be a problem in the future and is going to cause a lot of death instruction, because it's a, we need it for life, but also it's going to cause a lot of wars is water and water scarcity. Is that something you believe, Robert, that we're missing? It's a problem with our supplies or, or now we're trying to divert it to energy infrastructure to cool things off or computers and AI. What are your thoughts on that? Because I know you've written about it.
- [57:25]
C
Yeah. I think people tend to think about water in a different way that they. Than they think about oil because, you know, water is recyclable. It, you know, it comes down to us as rain and you know, you burn up a barrel of oil and it's not recyclable in our lifetimes, you know, but, but water is. And I think people don't worry about that as much. You know, if you're in Arizona like I am, you do worry about it. I mean, the first time I ever flew into Phoenix, I looked out the window and I was shocked at the number of golf courses. After flying across all this desert, suddenly there's all these green golf courses. And I thought that must be a tremendous water usage. You know, there's a lot of low hanging fruit there. But you know, people, people don't want to lose water to their golf courses. But we're using a lot of water in ways that, you know, don't impact on our survival. I worry about a place like Phoenix. I don't, I don't know how in the long term Phoenix is viable as a city because we're depleting our water resources. You know, Lake, Lake Mead is, you know, is being depleted. The Hoover Dam is, you know, I don't know how much longer that's viable because it's, you know, you don't have enough water coming there to replenish that. And we're seeing that in a lot of places. We're seeing and aquifers being drawn down. You know, the Ogallala I think is, I don't believe it's, I think it's continued to decline. Now you may have some massive rains that do refill some of these reservoirs, but you know, in places where aquifers just coming down and down and down and in places where, you know, you've got lakes that are just drying up, yes, that's going to be a big problem. You know, we're, we're bringing in water here in Phoenix from California. You know, we've got, you know, aqueducts bringing in water from far, far away here that, you know, those places are growing too. I mean, we've got, our water supplies are all coming from far away. So as those places grow and they need more water, I mean, there are options, but they're pretty expensive and they're pretty energy intensive. You know, desalination is very expensive. It's viable technically, but it's expensive and it's energy intensive. So yeah, I think we've got water, water issues, you know, a lot of issues, topsoil issues. We've got, we've got a lot of issues to face that I don't think we're taking seriously enough.
- [59:55]
B
What's, it's interesting that you brought up golf courses because in the Treasure Valley here, Boise and where I'm, where I live, we have like one of the highest concentrations of golf courses in the world. Like for, for a population of our size and like there's something like 32 golf courses within a two hour drive from where I live here in Boise. And we have only like 800,000 people, but they get used. And it's fascinating. We've been talking about data centers and because there's just more controversy, they're growing fast. A lot of it surrounds the uncertainty with AI, they use far less water than golf courses. Like a single golf course on a sit in a year uses like 20 million gallons of water and a single AI data center uses around 7 million gallons. So it's interesting, what we decide to
- [60:42]
C
focus on is recycling most of the water. I mean, they've got probably cooling towers. So they're coming through and they're cooling and they've got some blowdown in the cooling towers that they're losing. But most of the water gets recycled. So. So, you know, consumption there, yes, it's a concern, but the water is going back into the air and it's going to come back down as rain somewhere. It's not like, you know, some places that contaminate water, like fracking for instance, if you're using fresh water for fracking, that water is not usable, it's not drinkable. When it comes back up, I mean, you're going to have to use it for something else. So, so, you know, if they use brackish water or something for that instead of fresh water, the problem is contaminating fresh water supplies when you're contaminating freshwater supplies. And that's, that's a, that's no good.
- [61:31]
A
Yeah, and I would just add Chad to the, comparing those statistics. I know you're saying it's interesting what we choose to focus on, but there are more, there is more consumption per golf course, but we are not building thousands of golf.
- [61:47]
B
Yeah, those are declining.
- [61:48]
A
That's the thing. I would say there are 16,000 golf courses roughly in America and it's not going up. Especially anything adjacent to urban areas is getting developed for housing and everything. You know, New York lost a lot of. New York no longer has some of the golf courses it had because, you know, obviously our population exploded. But the rate of change when you look at data centers is, yeah. Is only increasing right now, actually. So the consumption is not only growing, it's accelerating. So I think that's the, I mean, aside from the fact that they're building these giant, you know, rectangles in people's backyards that feel imposing and people want to fight back against them. I think that's part of it. Aside from that, I think it's the rapid encroachment that's made it more of a hot button issue because they are really accelerating. And as we are approaching the end of our episode, it's time to move on to our final segment of the show in which we highlight a highlight of our week, if not the best part. It's time for the least worst part of my week. Up first, Chad, what was the least worst part of your week?
- [62:46]
B
So I, you know, you know, I'm always focused on the marginalized population, specifically women and children. Really, really genuinely good news came out, even though, and I don't want this the good news to override the broader situation. It does. It is a problem and we need to solve it. But the United nations latest food security report showed about 645 million people experience chronic hunger in 2025. That's not a good news. The good news is the population of those experiencing hunger dropped from a higher level. It was roughly 705 million. So 60 million people came out or came were elevated out of hunger. And this is interesting because what we're seeing is more of the population is being helped by countries that previously were not helping as much. That's a good thing. I will say the reason is bad because the United States has taken a massive step back. We're the most powerful, most wealthy country in the history of ever. And the Trump administration has dismantled usaid. And I've talked about this before, USAID was a dream job for me. I always wanted to work for them, to go and help people transition. My military service and all the logistics stuff I have to helping them. Unfortunately, that's not the case because they've been dissolved. Nonetheless, the world has responded. And even in the face of Trump eliminating aid around the world, we're seeing private entities, charities as well as other countries such as Japan I spoke about, or excuse me, South Korea I spoke about last week, really elevating food security around the globe. And as such, we are seeing again, we're returning back to levels that we saw pre Covid was pretty hard hitting. Most improvements are coming from Asia and Latin America as well as India made substantial progress. So food security is growing again. That's a good thing. After it dropped from COVID and then it dropped again in the initial stages in 2024 from Trump cutting off aid. Now the world has somewhat evolved and adapted and we are now seeing them a better world because of it. So that's my least worst. I'm always happy to report good news around the world when children are getting fed and whatnot.
- [65:09]
A
Thank you, Chad. I didn't Know that that is good. That is good news. Robert, you're joining us for the first time, but I'm curious if you have a least worst part of your week you'd like to share with us.
- [65:19]
C
I can't compete with feeding hungry children,
- [65:21]
A
but do you want me to do something selfish in between here? I'll do a really selfish one. Well, I'll go next then. Mine is considerably more selfish. But as a professional podcaster, it is incumbent on me to talk about podcasting and little else. I was lucky enough to be a guest on the excellent podcast Dr. Game show on our Not Rival network, the Maximum Fun Network. And I say not Rival because I think they are vehemently apolitical. But I had a great time on the show. It is a show in which listeners submit game shows and then have to compete in them. And I was a guest host, and they only got slightly annoyed with me for injecting my politics into every sentence. So I would say I was very well received. And it's always nice to be a guest on another show on another network and see how other people do it. So go take a listen to Doctor Game show featuring me. I believe the episode is called Nat the Eldritch God, which is a reference to a joke I make very late in the episode. So just. Just pretend it'll make sense. That's the least worst part of my week. Always a pleasure to be on another podcast and go check that out if you can. I had a great time. Robert, you might have some exciting news for us. What was the least worst part of your week?
- [66:32]
C
Well, so about a decade ago, a little over a decade ago, I published a book. And it was. A publisher came to me and he wanted me to write a book. He'd been reading my Forbes articles, and in between, since then, I've had publishers come to me several times, and I've always resisted. But a year ago, my son graduated with a degree in history. And one of the ideas I had was, you know, we should write a book together about the history of energy in America. And there's a graphic that the energy information has that shows the rise and fall of different energy sources in the country. And I said, let's tell that story. And so for the last nine months, we have worked on that together, you know, basically from. From pre colonial America to the wood, you know, to coal, and how that shaped the country, how, you know, it shaped our ability to, you know, to be a superpower, basically, if we didn't have the energy resources that we've had we, you know, arguably would not be a superpower. And, you know, it was fun working with my son on this. You know, he brought the historical perspective, I brought the energy perspective. I think we learned a little bit from each other, but it just hit the Kindle store hours before we broadcast here, before, before we recorded this. It's called American Energy, A History of Power, Progress and Change. It's written about a high school graduate level. You know, I'm just trying to tell the story about energy in America. And I will say, if you read it, you'll know more about energy than 99% of the people in the country. It's not political at all. It's just telling the story about how our energy sources, you know, how they developed into what they are today. And, you know, the last chapters kind of forecasting where we're going from here.
- [68:18]
A
Well, congratulations. Not super cool to do with your son, but congratulations on your second book. And at a high school reading level, upwards of 65% of Americans will be able to read that. And I think that's really important that they hear that story for the rest of them. I hope you enjoyed the audiobook.
- [68:33]
C
Some children will be able to read it and learn.
- [68:36]
A
That's true. This is true. There are.
- [68:38]
B
This is the Helping Children episode.
- [68:43]
A
Will there be an audiobook as well, Robert?
- [68:45]
C
I don't know. So I've got the. So the Kindle version is hit. The print version, I've got a copy coming to me so I can review it. There's color graphics in there, and color graphics, they start to get expensive to print. The Kindle version is only 9.99, but the print version costs more than that just to pr, just for cost. So it's probably going to be twice that. But, you know, some people like, you know, like to have a book in their hand. I've got mine.
- [69:14]
A
Yeah, go get yourself a nice hardback that can sit on the shelf.
- [69:16]
C
There's my. There's my first one. That was. That was the first one I did, you know, about. You know, I think it came out in 2012 or so. And, you know, I missed the whole fracking boom. You know, it was 2012. It wasn't that far into it. And I don't think I said shale one time in the book. And this one, I covered it heavily. And this is one of the things where my son got to learn something because he wrote the oil chapter. And when I read it, I said, you've missed the whole shale boom. And so I, I came back and I Edited that chapter. And I said, to tell the whole story of American oil. You know, he started in 1850s and went basically until 2000. I said, there's a whole nother chapter after that. I mean, there's a huge. If you're missing that piece, you're missing a huge piece of American energy that most people didn't see coming. And so, you know, we went back and forth like that. He came to me with some, you know, historical perspectives on some of the chapters and how, you know, how it affected our. Our ability to wage war and how it affected our. Our, you know, development. And, you know, it was a fun project to work on with it.
- [70:22]
A
Well, congratulations. Worst part of your week. What's your question, Chad?
- [70:27]
B
I have an unrelated question. It's related, but unrelated, so.
- [70:30]
A
Got it.
- [70:31]
B
And to be fair, I've asked Matt this not on the show, but separately. Is every Landman. Do they all have just the hottest wives? And is that really what it is, like the show? Are y' all Billy Bob Thornton's landman out there?
- [70:46]
C
Oh, here's a funny. Here's a funny story. I had a woman contact me and say, hey, I'd like to interview you about some. About some things. And she was a landman, and she was a very attractive woman. And I, you know, when we interviewed, I said, I just. I don't think you're. What pops into mind. When people think of Landman, I think they're thinking Billy Bob Thornton. She said, I get that all the time. She said, I. But she said, I'm a landman.
- [71:11]
A
The landman.
- [71:12]
C
Yeah.
- [71:12]
B
Oh, wow.
- [71:14]
C
So not all landmen look like Billy Bob Thornton.
- [71:16]
A
Not all cable guys look like Larry the Cable Guy, but some of them look like Jim Carrey nevertheless. Robert Rapier, thank you so much for joining us on American Power. Really appreciate you filling in on the panel. Not just filling in, sharing the show with us. Chad, any final thoughts? Robert, any final thoughts before we go?
- [71:38]
C
I'd just like to thank you guys for having me on. And, you know, if you. If you need me again, just. Just tap me and. And, you know, I'm there. Any time I get to talk about energy is a good day.
- [71:50]
A
Well, like I said, once again, you've been in the right place. It's been great having you here, and we'll definitely have you back if you're available. So thank you so much for taking the time for Chad Scott and our guest panelist, Robert Rapier. I'm Nat Townsend, and this has been American Power from Find out Media. And remember power corrupts, but American power corrupts Americanly.