C (12:37)

He is not meeting with a friend. He is meeting with an adversary. And an adversary who wants to see the destruction of the United States and the Western alliance. But if he could bring about the end to this terrible war where Putin is the aggressor invading a neighbor country, trying to change the borders, if he could end it without putting Ukraine in a position where it had to concede its territory to the aggressor, had to, in a way validate Putin's vision of Greater Russia, but instead could really stand up to Putin to make it clear there must be a ceasefire. There will be no exchange of territory. If President Trump were the architect of that, I'd nominate him for a Nobel Peace Prize.

A (13:28)

Okay. There's a lot there, a lot of ifs. We recklessly stoked a war that never had to happen. We stoked a conflict by expanding NATO without purpose and refusing to negotiate anything related to it. We acted arrogantly and Ukraine paid the price. Is this an opportunity for a Russian reset? Do I Think we're going to get the Anchorage Accords? No. Do I think that it's a really positive sign that Putin is flying all across his continent to go to a state, by the way, that used to be his talking about land swaps. Alaska used to be Russia's. We bought it in the mid-1800s for $7.4 million. I believe that was the number. Pretty good deal, right? Move. Remember, Trump said this is a setup for a second meeting. And if I were to conjecture a little bit, I think President Trump is like, ugh, I could totally get a deal with Putin. If it wasn't for Brussels, if it wasn't for the European ruling class, I think this deal could easily be cut. Yeah, $7.2 million in 1867, equivalent to $129 million. So we bought Alaska for 129 million bucks. It's amazing. Before, they really understood petroleum. Now, does Zelensky want peace? Do the intel agencies want peace? What President Trump is doing is he is short circuiting conventional norms of protocol. Oh, you can't do that. You can't meet with them. A lot of people are going to be critical of this whole thing. But it's Putin coming to us. It's Putin coming to America. That's a power move. I think we hold a lot more cards here than sometimes we realize. The military industrial complex does not want peace. And I think Putin, by flying all the way to Alaska, is signaling ever so carefully, hey, man, we're better together than we are apart. Yeah, there's a lot of problems. You're not gonna be best friends. This is not gonna be like an American UK relationship. But we are better than the ccp. And make no mistake, the Russian, China thing, they're not as natural allies as you think. They've had a lot of problems throughout the years. That is a forced marriage. That is an arranged marriage. The Russia, Chinese thing is an arranged marriage by the intel operations, as President Trump would famously said, we'll say, we'll see what happens. We're honored to be partnering with the Alan Jackson Ministries. And today I want to point you to their podcast. It's called Culture and Christianity. The Alan Jackson Podcast. What makes it unique is Pastor Allen's biblical perspective. He takes the truth from the Bible and applies it to issues that we're facing today. Gender confusion, abortion, immigration, Doge Trump and the White House issues in the church. He doesn't just discuss the problems in every episode. He gives practical things we can do to make a difference. His guests have incredible expertise and powerful testimonies. Each episode will make you recognize the power of your faith and how God can use your life to impact our world. Today. The Culture and Christianity Podcast is informative and encouraging. You can find it on YouTube, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Be sure to subscribe so you don't miss any episodes. Alan Jackson Ministries is working hard to get biblical truth back into our culture. You can find out more about Pastor Alan and the ministry@AlanJackson.com that is AlanJackson.com again. That is AlanJackson.com joining us now. Super excited for this conversation. Edward Kovalik, who is the chairman and CEO of the Prayer Operating Group and we've been talking about his stuff for a while. It's oilfacts.com Edward, great to see you. So much to discuss. Thank you for joining the program. You are an energy truth teller. First, let's just talk geopolitical and then we'll go a little bit more specific. What are the stakes of America and Russia meeting today? Russia being one of the biggest producers of petroleum on the planet? Please. Edward, welcome to the program and walk us through the geopolitical stakes of what's happening today.

B (17:30)

First of all, Charlie, it's great to be with you. I'm a huge fan and what you do is just so, so important. If anyone is not aware of this, oil, fossil fuels basically drive the entire global economy and as a result drive geopolitics. Russia is really a petro state and extractive state whose primary line of business is producing oil and minerals and essentially an influential member of opec. So to President Trump's credit, he's been really eagle eyed on keeping oil prices low to manage real costs for everyday Americans. And that's why I think you've seen the White House be a little bit light footed, light handed on really exerting maximum pressure on Russia. So it'll be interesting to see what happens with respect to these negotiations and if President Trump really uses that final trump card, so to speak, against Russia geopolitically with respect to Ukraine, because President Trump has really hesitated up until now to do that.

A (18:47)

Has global demand for fossil fuels or petroleum gone up or down in the last five years?

B (18:54)

So just to set the record straight, demand for energy and specifically fossil fuels has gone up every year since the beginning of the implementation of fossil fuels. If you go back to the early 20th century and look at the world pre fossil fuels up till today, you'll see pretty much a straight line up into the right linearly with demand growth every year, the only stutters in that growth have been the 0708 credit crisis. And then we saw demand bounce right back thereafter. And then we saw another pause in demand growth during COVID when we were all forced to stay in our homes for over a year. And then you saw demand growth come right back. And so that's really no mystery since even with all the talk about renewable energy, as it's called, replacing fossil fuels, fossil fuels still account for 60% of electricity generation in this country, a greater share in most other countries, and really are part of everything that we use in our daily lives. Everything that surrounds us in our daily lives is made from fossil fuels.

A (20:06)

Yeah. And so I asked for a reason, because we were told 10 years ago that there's gonna be a green energy push and that we're gonna divest ourselves from fossil fuels. How's that working? We were told that we had peak oil, that we're gonna have solar panels and windmills, and it was this very utopian vision. What's the truth?

B (20:26)

Well, the truth is that there is no energy transition. There's only energy addition. Nearly half the world is still energy poor and consume about the amount of energy that your refrigerator does on a per capita basis for an entire family. Most of the world is trying to pull themselves out of energy starvation in that same period of time. As we've seen demand for growth for oil rather grow linearly since the early 1900s, we've also seen people live a lot longer as a result of all the things that fossil fuels have enabled. We've also seen tremendous prosperity and record numbers of people coming out of poverty. I think global poverty is now down from about 42% in 1980 to less than 10% today. This whole idea that we can transition from fossil fuels to solar and wind for our primary source of energy is really just foolish and a lie because solar and wind are extremely inefficient, extremely low energy dense, and completely uneconomic. And were it not for extreme government subsidies up to date, we probably see much less solar and wind actually developed around the world.

A (21:51)

And you can learn more about this@oilfacts.com I'm actually on the website right now.

B (21:55)

You can.

A (21:55)

It's oilfacts.com and you have this amazing thing, 10 Energy Truths in the Age of AI. So there have been several predictions made by the kind of climate core. Would you say this is a decivilizational movement, the environmentalist? Is that the undercurrent. Is that the reason they have such gusto?

B (22:18)

Absolutely. If you just go through a logical progression of facts here. Cutting off energy supply to create energy scarcity is a path towards starvation, not towards promoting human flourishing. That's really the only logical outcome, particularly in a time where we're seeing real stress in the west on electrical grids as a result of AI driven data center growth that's projected to double between now and 2030. Really, on a grid in this country that dates back on average to the 1970s. It's really arcane and needs a tremendous amount of investment. With this aging grid, limited distribution capability, AI data centers are going to hog all incremental power supplied to the grid, which is really going to leave Americans left out in the cold and could lead to a scenario where we see energy rationing in this country, which again leads to poverty. Because we know for a fact that energy, well, access to abundant and affordable energy is the number one variable correlated to both human longevity and prosperity.

A (23:39)

Yeah. And so the decivilization component is incredibly important. Everyone could check it out@oilfacts.com but. So we are all marveling at artificial intelligence. We're marveling at what it can do. I mean, some of us are a little terrified, to be honest. But connect the dots. Why does energy and fossil fuels, why is that a key ingredient with the AI revolution? You can't have one without the other.

B (24:05)

Well, for one, it's as simple as AI data centers use a tremendous amount of power. Training one single AI model uses as much energy as electricity. We need to supply 100 homes in a year. It's just a staggering amount of electrical demand. This whole lie, which is simply what it is, that climate change is induced by the use of fossil fuels. And as a result, we need to curb fossil fuel use and thereby create scarcity. And energy in general goes against the whole narrative of empowering our society with AI, because AI is going to require every ounce of electrons we could possibly spare to power these data centers. So the sad irony is that people have been led to believe this lie, because I think people genuinely want to be virtuous. They want to do right, they want to do good by the environment. They want to do good, good to each other. I believe in the human spirit. And that human spirit has been turned against itself, ironically, by buying into this lie, because buying into it will lead to, you know, human poverty and really worse outcomes.

A (25:30)

Yeah. And so let's talk about some of those lies, and in particular one of them, they will say that the constant production of fossil fuels is bad for the environment. You touched on that what is the truth here? There was that ridiculous movie, Frack Nation, I think that's what it was called. And it was like, oh, my drinking water now has petroleum in it. What is the truth here?

B (25:57)

So as you recall, they started by calling it global warming. They rebranded it to be climate change. But ironically, far more people have died in history because of extreme cold, an extreme heat. Now that we have a scientifically honest administration in the White House and Chris Wright is really doing yeoman's job as Energy Secretary to expose real science behind climate. There is no proven correlation between fossil fuel use and climate change. There's actually no correlation between global CO2 and climate change when looking back at climate for 200 million years. So I think that historically you've had groups that have used bad science, very small data sets, really bad sampling to make a political point because it sure as heck is not a scientific point.

A (27:06)

Yeah. So can you just build that out really quick, tell us more about the evidence we have for the last 200 million years. How do we know that what you just said? Because that's a contention that's thrown at me all the time on college campuses.

B (27:18)

Well, we have great geological data that is exemplifying the nature of the atmosphere for that period of time. And you know, in times of high CO2 concentration in the atmosphere, the planet's gone through sort of a tropicalization period and we're kind of seeing that now, which leads to more abundant food supply, actually a greening of the planet. And so all of this is evidenced in the geologic history. It's really pretty indisputable.

A (27:50)

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B (29:09)

Well, you know, going back to when we started the company, everybody told us that we were crazy because we weren't going to need any more fossil fuels by 2030. So I was an absolute idiot for starting the company in Biden's America. Fast forward to today and I think we've got a much more sober, true attitude coming out of the White House. We'd like to see some real policy changes as an industry to promote American energy over OPEC oil because we are the largest manufacturing industry in the United States in terms of value. We employ over 10 million Americans. A lot of blue collar workers, mostly blue collar workers earning 84% above private sector wages. So you know, we're, we're big fans of this administration telling the truth about oil. But we need some help as an industry to really promote production in this country.

A (30:09)

Yeah. So what does that look like? What would the ideal portfolio or sequencing of decisions look like?

B (30:16)

Good question. You know, I think that there's a lot that the administration can do with respect to federal lands and federal leasing. Where we are in Colorado, for instance, there's significant amount of federal land. Yeah. And offshore and in Alaska. So that together with EPA policy on ozone and emissions, that could really use a lot of work. And I think they're, you know, working on it. But we are an impatient bunch and we'd love to see it all happen a little faster.

A (30:49)

Yeah. So this pro energy agenda is incredibly important. How much does this differentiate state by state? Colorado's a nightmare for a lot of different ways. The environmentalists have tried to get rid of exploration on the western slope. I don't know if they were successful, but they've tried for a long time. And what can the federal government do in addition? Not just executive orders but, but to increase production. But, but do you guys in your business, do you want more production? Because wouldn't that also drive down the price? So how do you reconcile that? More exploration, more Production with the price of oil, because if it goes down too low, then there's no incentive for you guys to keep exploring.

B (31:27)

Well, it's a really interesting topic because, you know, as much as President Trump would like lower oil prices, the reality is, is that oil prices are really at a historic low when really adjusted for inflation. So if you factor in the shale boom, that's allowed us to become producers of 13 million barrels a day or so of energy that was driven at really higher prices to today, there's been about $20 of inflation built into oil prices. So oil near 60 bucks is really oil near 40 bucks going back 20 years. So that's a really important thing to understand. The other really important thing to understand is that most of the oil produced in this country is now shale. And shale is not what you imagine on television where we drill a well and you see a gusher of oil and you walk away for 30 years and you keep producing that oil at the same rate. Shale is really a resource of very high decline. So. So we produce about 60% of the reserves from a shale well in the first three years of production with a hyperbolic decline. So just the effort to maintain production flat is a real huge challenge in the United States. And, you know, we're quickly running out of economic drilling locations to do that at these types of prices. So the idea that we can really create a lasting tenable American energy independence for the next 50 years at $60 or less, oil is really not correct. So we're really in a battle with opec. And OPEC still holds a lot of cards around total global production. But, you know, I and everyone in this industry have been trying to predict oil prices for as long as I can remember. And the one thing I know for a fact is we're always wrong. We've always been wrong in predicting. But economics, as you point out, have a way to right production. Low oil prices create high oil prices because people, you know, stop producing as much oil.

A (33:46)

Edward Kovalik, thank you so much. Oilfacts.com we need to dominate the world with energy. We should be drilling more, we should be exporting more, and we should be exploring more. If we want to dominate the AI space and we have to refute all these lies, that's why I want people to check out oilfacts.com the global warming, environmental, you know, pollutes or drinking water. It's all a bunch of BS. Oilfacts.com Edward, thank you so much.

B (34:08)

Thanks for having me on, Charlie.

A (34:09)

Thanks so much for listening, everybody. Email us as always. Freedomarliekirk.com thanks so much for listening and God bless us.

B (34:18)

For more on many of these stories and news you can trust, go to charliekirk. Com.