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- [00:01]
Alex Trembath
Lifelock. How can I help?
- [00:02]
Steve Hayes
The IRS said I filed my return, but I haven't.
- [00:05]
Narrator/Advertiser
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- [00:08]
Alex Trembath
What do I do?
- [00:09]
Steve Hayes
My refund though.
- [00:10]
Alex Trembath
I'm freaking out. Don't worry, I can fix this.
- [00:12]
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- [00:18]
Steve Hayes
I'm so relieved.
- [00:19]
Kevin Williamson
No problem.
- [00:19]
Steve Hayes
I'll be with you every step of the way.
- [00:21]
Narrator/Advertiser
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- [00:36]
Alex Trembath
Mom talk has just been blowing up.
- [00:37]
Steve Hayes
Whitney and Jen are on Dancing with the Stars.
- [00:39]
Alex Trembath
Taylor is a bachelorette.
- [00:41]
Kevin Williamson
Saying that out loud is crazy.
- [00:42]
Alex Trembath
Like that is huge. But all the cool opportunities could pull us apart.
- [00:46]
Steve Hayes
It's causing issues in everyone's marriage.
- [00:48]
Alex Trembath
My whole world is falling apart right now.
- [00:51]
Steve Hayes
It's chaos.
- [00:52]
Narrator/Advertiser
Watch the Hulu original series the Secret Lives of Mormon Wives now streaming on Hulu and Hulu on Disney for bundle subscribers. Terms apply.
- [01:01]
Steve Hayes
Welcome to the Dispatch Podcast. I'm Steve Hayes. Today we're going to be sharing with you a panel that we did at the Dispatch Energy Conference at Old Parkland in Dallas, Texas. Joining me for the conversation is Jonah Goldberg, Kevin Williamson, and Alex Trembath, who's the executive director of the Breakthrough Institute and an author who contributes to Dispatch Energy newsletter. We discuss the Iran war and its impact on energy. We talk about US Energy policy more broadly and then we look ahead to the midterms and beyond. What's going to happen in the midterms and is anything going to happen in energy policy in a divided Congress and a lame duck presidency? I thought it was a terrific conversation. The people in the crowd thought it was a terrific conversation. I hope you agree. Thank you all. We are going to move on to sort of a big picture panel. We're going to try to do a lot in a little time. My outline that I came up with that I shared with these gentlemen, we're going to start on the Iran war generally, and we're going to talk about Iran and energy. Then we're going to talk about energy policy more broadly and we're going to end looking at the midterms and in particular the midterms and sort of beyond and what it means for the US Energy industry and energy policymaking. Jonah, I'll start with you. Less than two weeks ago, the United States attacked Iran we have heard, to be charitable, a variety of explanations for why that happened and several different descriptions of the objectives. Just as a level setting exercise here, can you tell us what we're doing and why
- [03:18]
Jonah Goldberg
we're bombing? A bunch of stuff I think is an objectively true statement.
- [03:24]
Steve Hayes
Are you just showing off your military jobs there?
- [03:27]
Jonah Goldberg
I'm sorry, we're heavy Connecticut operations. No, look, you're right, people. There's been a lot of punditry saying he hasn't explained the war. What they mean by that is he didn't make a case before. He did have this opportunity during this institution that I despise, that I blame on Woodrow Wilson for us having called the State of the Union address, but we have it, and he basically spent 30 seconds or something on the war he was going to go into a few days later. That's a political problem for him. But they actually have, as Steve alluded to that they've made a lot. They've offered explanations. The problem is they've offered every conceivable explanation possible, including many that contradict each other. And in fact, if you follow it closely, Trump spent a couple days calling different media outlets, offering different explanations on the same day for why we're going to war.
- [04:25]
Kevin Williamson
AB testing.
- [04:26]
Jonah Goldberg
Yeah, yeah, AB testing. And the problem with that is, look, I am not a monocausal explanation guy. I think there are a lot of reasons to go to war with Iran. I'm for regime change in Iran. But if you haven't made the case in advance and then you throw up a thousand different reasons for why you're doing it, it just confuses a whole bunch of people about what the hell is going on. And that's a political problem for Trump. In terms of my own theory of the case, I think he thought it was really cool what we did in Venezuela, and let's be fair, it was really cool. And he said we can do that again. And the problem is, for a lot of different reasons, Iran is not Venezuela. And there's nothing like the Straits of Hormuz off the coast of Venezuela like you're screwing with some catamarans in the Caribbean, which is just a different thing. And the, the biggest problem, I think, really is not so much the multiple explanations, it's the multiple definitions of what the end goal is. Yes, right. I mean, in fairness to Trump, which is not a sentence I offer a lot, he said that thing about unconditional surrender, which I think was bat guano crazy, but then the next sentence was. And I get to define what Unconditional surrender means. So it's not unconditional surrender. Right. It's just the exact same thing that we had before. And, but look, the enemy gets a vote. And I don't think this. I think Trump will be out of this war by the end of the week, but Iran won't, which means we're going to go back into it by
- [06:13]
Steve Hayes
the end of the week.
- [06:15]
Jonah Goldberg
I think week to 10 days at most before Trump comes up with an exit strategy to say it's over. And then Iran takes its time, figures out something and responds, which it kind of has to.
- [06:26]
Steve Hayes
Well, I'm very eager to have you talk less, but I can't move on because.
- [06:31]
Jonah Goldberg
You can't. Sure you can.
- [06:33]
Steve Hayes
I can't move on without getting a further explanation of that. What is it that makes you think we'll be out in a week?
- [06:42]
Kevin Williamson
I think it's Wednesday, by the way.
- [06:44]
Jonah Goldberg
Yeah, okay, fair enough. Okay. By next Wednesday. I think that, look, the streets of Mrouz is not technically closed, but it's closed very close because you can't get insurance to go through it. And it's becoming very, very expensive to go through it. That is screwing with financial markets in ways people don't appreciate. The fact that as Jonathan was saying, they're closing down wells in part because there are no places to store the oil anymore and it's backing up and that's gonna have knock on effects. Trump is not gonna like it. Part of my whole point of him saying he wanted to me thinking he wanted to repeat Venezuela is the whole thing about Venezuela. It was a cool two part TV show. He goes in, I'm strong like bull, gets what he wants and gets out. That's what I think he wanted on Iran. And he's not getting it. And we've already seen that he's gotten spooked by the reaction from markets. So I think he finds a way to say this TV show's over and tries to get out of it. And the problem is I don't think that regime can just say, oh, thank you for destroying our Navy and Air Force and killing my dad. People make mistakes, screws fall. Right? You know, it's no big deal. They're gonna respond in some way. And I just don't know how our society right now, as polarized as it is, responds to a major terrorist attack, responds to some other provocation.
- [08:10]
Steve Hayes
Yeah, I mean, those of you who listen to the Dispatch podcast have probably heard me cite this before. My favorite example from the first Trump term was when the president had a victory celebration at the White House after repealing Obamacare. You think I'm kidding? After the House passed the Obamacare repeal, he literally had a celebration and had a raid next to him on stage. All of these Republicans, including a very uncomfortable Paul Ryan, to celebrate the fact that Obamacare was going away after only the House passed Obamacare. They had the Marine Corps banned. I mean, it was a full celebration outside at the White House, and they didn't repeal Obamacare is the kicker. No, I'm serious. I'm serious. Kevin, to you next. We've seen, I mean, we have had, as Jonathan pointed out in the first panel, tremendous military success. You know, part of the problem. We have Mike Nelson, who's a Dispatch contributor on national security issues on a Dispatch Live that we hosted the night of the bombing started. And his prediction was, in a week or two, we're gonna be talking about how there aren't any targets anymore. And we're getting awfully close to that point. So tremendous military success taken out. You know, remember, it took weeks in the Iraq war to take out the card deck, Saddam's card deck. And we were looking at the cards, and every day it was somebody new. We've taken out a card deck. Now, not everybody. Not everybody important, but we've taken out a card deck and had tremendous success that way. Does that matter? If Jonah's right, that Trump is going to declare victory, is that enough? And can the Venezuela model, if we're calling it a model, sort of be brought to the Gulf?
- [10:15]
Kevin Williamson
You know, the story of the American military acting abroad since about World War II has been that there's this vast chasm between policy and military capabilities. I remember Desert Storm and, like, the whole world watching the United States just roll through there going, oh, my. Like, they're playing a whole different game. And every couple of years, the United States does this. Somewhere in the world where we go, look, we can do anything we want in terms of getting stuff done with airplanes and rockets and soldiers and things like that. The question is, do we have the sort of policy that's going to enable us to get what we want out of that? And Donald Trump is in charge of things. So the answer is no. Jonah was saying he's coming up with an exit strategy, which I think is a really grandiose way of saying, what the hell am I going to tweet about this when I quit? A couple of things about that. One, the US Military often shows that it can do anything. And in the last couple years, we've really seen the whole world going, man, Israeli intelligence is really good. They are all in everyone's business everywhere. You can't turn on a pager. You can't have. Jonah was saying a whole lot of people's last thought the other day was, man, this meeting could have been an email. They're awfully good at this stuff. And yeah, we're going to get to the point where we're just looking for stuff to blow up and going to make the rubble bounce. And I like making the rubble bounce. Fine, do that. Let's get the guys some practice and let them do that. Otherwise they'll be practicing in Minneapolis and Philadelphia and places like that, and we don't want that so much. The Strait and the mining business is essentially an engineering problem, and we're pretty good at solving engineering problems. I'm not saying that sort of stuff is easy, but they'll figure out a way to get that done if it needs to get done. The question is, is the US Government going to have the intellectual staying power, which I almost laugh saying out loud, to figure out what it is we actually want to get out of this situation and whether this is actually in accord with our economic and national security needs? I've written many, many times that we have this problem with China, and our problem with China is that we don't know what we want from the Chinese relationship. We just know we don't like when tire factories close and people start making tires in China instead of making them in Michigan or wherever they used to make tires. And we don't know what we want out of Iran. We want them to sit down and shut up basically, and leave us alone. But you can't really get that from what we're doing here. Obviously, the Trump administration is not going to be very much inclined to do a post World War II, Japan style nation building, let's be there for the next 70 years program in Iran. I think Joni is right that they're going to want to think in terms of days rather than months or longer than that. But to actually get what we want, this sort of change in the Middle east would require just a much longer term commitment, a lot of political capital that they're not going to want to invest. Because what it would be doing is essentially taking up the end of the George W. Bush democracy project and saying we're going to rebuild states in the Middle east, if not in the American image as sort of Jeffersonian democracies, but maybe in the Turkish image, or at least in the image of countries that are less hostile to our ambitions and goals and needs from that part of the world. It's really very difficult to see Donald Trump doing that. And given that Marco Ruby has 18 other jobs, apparently, I don't see him doing that either. We already send JD Vance, who doesn't believe in this stuff. That gets us down to, I don't know, Lindsey Graham will do whatever he's told. I suppose maybe we send him over there to solve the problem. So, yeah, I don't have high hopes for us getting anything useful out of this. I'm great with killing ayatollahs and I think Ayatollah junior probably has a life expectancy that's going to be measured in days as well. You got to figure he's the first target and they're going to drop something big and heavy and explosive on him at some point. But yeah, we're going to run out of stuff to blow up.
- [14:22]
Steve Hayes
Yeah. Alex, if we take a step back and think about the geopolitical moment that we're in now and the sort of differences in resource security that the United States enjoys now versus 2003 in the Iraq war, should that give us more confidence? Given everything that Jonah said, everything that Kevin said, there doesn't seem to be an obvious objective. I mean, one of the objectives was to take out their nuclear program, to diminish their missile program. We've done that. We have met some objectives, some military objectives. But given the fact that there doesn't seem to be sort of a broader long term strategic objective and given the problems that both Jonah and Kevin detailed, are we okay because we're in a better position right now than we were.
- [15:20]
Alex Trembath
Do you feel okay?
- [15:22]
Steve Hayes
I mean, I feel okay. I feel okay. Okay is probably as far as I would go. I mean, I'm nervous about the.
- [15:29]
Jonah Goldberg
We're better positioned than Germany.
- [15:31]
Alex Trembath
I agree with that. And I would say that we should have some confidence with one or two caveats. So as Jonathan and I were getting at earlier, the United States is a global energy superpower in a way that it was not in 2003 and in 1973. Some of the big analogs for an extended quagmire in the Middle East. Oil production in the United States has more than doubled since 03. Natural gas production has more than doubled since 03. And there are sort of smaller but non trivial revolutions in renewables. Wind and solar or were less than 1% of electricity in O3. Now they're over 15%. Natural gas generates over 40% of our electricity and does so very affordably we might be on the cusp of revolutions in nuclear and geothermal. So all of the kind of revolution in domestic energy production should give us a kind of buffer against the supply shocks and in a way that we didn't enjoy in previous eras. The big kind of singular caveat that I would add to that is that energy demand is growing, which it hasn't in a while. We talked a lot about the growth in supply in energy in the United States over the last generation or so. A lot more oil and gas, a lot more wind and solar. But that was during a period when demand for energy, demand for oil was stagnant, demand for electricity was stagnant, demand for natural gas really went up, but it mostly displaced coal. So if you actually just look at the quadrillion BTUs that were consumed by the United States economy over the last 30 years, it was flat. And that's ending for a variety of reasons. We're electrifying heating and vehicles and industry, which means our electricity generation is going up, AI is driving demand up. And I am an optimist on that, at least in terms of the technological capabilities. And so what we have now is a situation. And Mark and Megan were talking about the supply and demand mismatch that leads to rising prices when you have, for the first time in a while, rising demand. And that's the context that this conflict in Iran arrives at, that we're in a better position than we were as a global energy hydrocarbon superpower. And it might cause some immediate and maybe even medium term pain, but we're much more able to respond. Our markets are much more able to respond. But it's one of many pressures on energy prices. And that is the kind of X factor that should, I think, rock our confidence at least a little bit.
- [18:20]
Steve Hayes
Let's talk about the straight of Horbooth specifically for a minute. I think Jonah mentioned it a little bit earlier for the lay audience. How important is it? Everybody's been talking about it for the last two weeks. There seems to have been some surprising surprise that it's been effectively shut down or severely throttled. How important is it and what are sort of the long term consequences if Jonah's wrong and this persists and the Iranians are able to deploy mines at a greater pace than we might imagine?
- [19:00]
Alex Trembath
I don't have a good numeric answer to that question, but the uncertainty that Jonathan and I were talking about I think is sort of centered on Hormuz, frankly. A huge amount of barrels transit through the strait like we were Talking about, I don't think all of the uncertainty is priced in. And I think that even if Trump chickens out and declares victory, or whatever you want to call it, as Kevin or Jonah was saying, that doesn't necessarily mean that Iran is going to chicken out and stop mining the strait, which could cause extended pain for American consumers of hydrocarbons, but also Asian and European consumers. And that's where things get scary. I think that's where you start thinking about months or longer of five, six dollar gallon gasoline, which feels to me like a possibility.
- [20:01]
Jonah Goldberg
Yeah. Just quickly, first of all, part of the problem is if oil supply, because it's a global commodity oil supply anywhere, gets constricted, if the price goes up halfway around the world, it goes up here too. Also, there is a, I mean, you know the stuff around you, but there's a real mismatch in terms of we haven't built a new refinery since the mid-1970s. And so the oil that we're getting from Venezuela, just because we have more supply here, does it mean we can convert it immediately into gas? And the other things, oil without refineries is just sludge. You gotta turn it into stuff. And one of the things I was reading about today or yesterday, people forget that there are an enormous number of other products that go, first of all come from oil, right? All plastics, your iPhones are made of oil.
- [21:01]
Kevin Williamson
So are your solar panels, and so
- [21:03]
Jonah Goldberg
are your solar panels. Right. And so in some ways it's like, think about it more like a tariff, right? If the price of plastics is going up because of all that, it's embedded in all sorts of things. But also no one's talking about the ships that need to go in to the Straits of Hormuz. Everyone's trying to the ships trying to come out. It's also a huge supply place for like food for the Middle East. And there are all sorts of other knock on effects that I think people are just downplaying. And the other last point I was gonna make is almost all the military planning about the Strait of Hormuz has been about mining.
- [21:40]
Kevin Williamson
Right.
- [21:40]
Jonah Goldberg
And the Iranian too. One other thing that has changed since 2003 is drones. And there's just a massive amount of cheap mobile launch drones.
- [21:53]
Steve Hayes
And you think about the logic both airborne and underwater.
- [21:56]
Jonah Goldberg
Yeah. And you think about the logic of how terrorism works. Right. The point of blowing up a plane isn't that one jumbo jet matters that much in the grand scheme of the economy or anything. It's psychologically, it gets millions of people to stop Flying.
- [22:09]
Kevin Williamson
Yeah.
- [22:10]
Jonah Goldberg
You send one drone a day to set a fire to a tanker in the streets of Hormuz, and it means hundreds, thousands of tankers aren't going to go in Iran or the Houthis. You know, there are proxies that can maintain that level of low ebb terrorism for a very long time. And Trump signaled they were making this point in the Financial Times. Trump signaled when he did his, like, the war is complete thing. That was in response to him freaking out about the market.
- [22:35]
Steve Hayes
Yeah.
- [22:36]
Jonah Goldberg
The Iranians heard that as, okay, we know if we can just keep screwing with the market. They've dropped six times more bombs and drones on Arab states than they dropped on Israel. For a reason, is to create this sense of panic and uncertainty. And I think it's gonna work.
- [22:54]
Kevin Williamson
Yeah.
- [22:55]
Steve Hayes
Kevin, help me understand something. This has been maybe the most predictable aspect of this conflict was that the Strait of Hormuz was gonna be choked, that the Iranians were gonna make trouble, that it was gonna cause problems, that there were gonna be potential economic panic.
- [23:12]
Kevin Williamson
That.
- [23:14]
Steve Hayes
And yet you read reports that the Trump administration was briefing allies beforehand, saying, in effect, we're not that worried about it. I listened to a podcast today, actually, the one that Jonah recommended, where they interviewed a woman who had written a chapter in a book for the Army War College in, like, when was it? 1990. Basically predicting all of this. None of this should have been a surprise. Why is it a surprise? Why are we unprepared?
- [23:49]
Kevin Williamson
Let me give you my favorite quote from the library of my favorite Donald Trump quotation. Nobody knew healthcare could be so complicated. Literally everybody but you, everyone knew. Right? And this stuff is complicated as well. To. What Jonah was saying about oil being used in other products, by the way, is just enormously consequential in all sorts of ways that maybe aren't always obvious. It's not just plastics and petrochemicals. It's pharmaceuticals and things like that. And the petrochemical industry is really what's driving the growth in oil production. Oil consumption in China, which is now a huge oil consumer, they've actually. They've electrified a lot of their. The cars in transit. They don't consume as much petroleum, automotive fuel as they used to, but the oil consumption continues to go up, and that's because of petrochemicals, which they now manufacture about 47% of the world's supply of that stuff. So it's going to be. It's going to be. It's going to be complicated again. I think it just goes back to using the Capabilities as a substitute for having the policy discussions of, you can do whatever you want to do. You know, Trump made these jokes about turning the Middle east, turning Gaza into, like, the French Riviera, which is awesome, and I would go vacation there. It sounds like it would be fun, but they don't know what they're really trying to get out of these capabilities. We could do that. You know, we could put an Air Force base on the top of Mount Everest if we wanted to. We're real good at doing that kind of thing, at solving these physical engineering, logistical kinds of problems. But that doesn't get you to the philosophical point you need to be at, which is the end state you're looking for in terms of dealing with drones and the Houthis and the proxies and things like that. The only way you really solve that problem is by getting rid of all the people giving those orders. You either change their minds and bring them on board with something new, or you just keep killing them at such a pace that they don't have time to recover. And I don't think we've really probably got the patience or the diplomatic expertise for either one of those. Either one of those outcomes. It is potentially useful for us in the long run that episodes like this highlight the risk of oil production in that part of the world and creates incentives for shifting more of it to North America, which I think is probably a good thing. Jonah mentioned the refinery issue. Iran used to import, until very recently, almost all of its gasoline because they had tremendous oil and gas production but no refineries. We should probably get on some of that stuff and start looking at making it easier for people to make some of those investments. I mean, the problem with that is a lot of people in the refinery business will tell you we don't need new refineries because they're happy with their little oligopoly. And so we'll see how that works.
- [26:38]
Steve Hayes
So back to you on this. One more question on this specific topic. The President's mused publicly about sending service courts through the strait. U.S. naval escorts.
- [26:51]
Kevin Williamson
I wish Trump knows what the word escort means.
- [26:56]
Jonah Goldberg
Let's send Brandy with three eyes to the Strait of Hormuz.
- [27:02]
Steve Hayes
We haven't even started drinking yet.
- [27:05]
Kevin Williamson
Jeez. Yeah, I know you meant three vowels, but briefly, I was thinking, like,
- [27:15]
Alex Trembath
Sometimes
- [27:15]
Steve Hayes
it's hard to know where to go after these things.
- [27:19]
Kevin Williamson
Sorry for that interruption.
- [27:20]
Steve Hayes
He's.
- [27:21]
Kevin Williamson
But he's like. He's talking about asylum, right?
- [27:24]
Steve Hayes
What's that?
- [27:24]
Kevin Williamson
It's like he misunderstands the word Asylum.
- [27:26]
Steve Hayes
I mean, that is true.
- [27:27]
Kevin Williamson
Yeah. He doesn't understand what the word means. He thinks he's just crazy people.
- [27:29]
Steve Hayes
So I think he actually understood what he was talking about this way because he went a little further as he explained the concept. And you had Energy Secretary Chris Wright send this tweet that turned out to be mistaken, that that had actually happened. I think most people probably, if you took a survey of Republicans in Washington about who was the most competent and effective Cabinet secretary, probably a lot of them would point to Marco Rubio, but a sizable minority at least, would point to Chris Wright. How does. How does that happen? Where he's saying that this has happened, it hasn't happened, and the President's talking aloud about sending escorts and that hasn't happened? Is it a resource question? The Navy doesn't have the resources at this point to do that job. Is it a risk tolerance question? Is it a matter of just the mines?
- [28:31]
Kevin Williamson
You know, first of all, I think the most competent member of the Trump administration is one of those tallest buildings in Wichita issues. I think it's risk aversion. I think that Trump is afraid to committing himself to a course of action that looks too, you know, Bushian and Wolfowitzian, and that looks too much like the things he was criticizing Republicans for as being, you know, stupid and out of touch and all that when it came to the Iraq war. So, yeah, I think that someone has probably, to the extent that it's possible to do this, explained to him what that would mean in terms of an actual commitment of resources and the risk you'd be putting American troops out and all the rest of it, because it's a relatively narrow place, it's easy to shoot at and all that, and he just doesn't want to do it. He thinks you can continue to do it by kind of remote control, video game style and get the outcomes you want.
- [29:24]
Jonah Goldberg
So it's funny, I haven't looked closely at that. I just assumed when that news came out about them deleting the tweet was that Chris Wright had told the truth and the administration just didn't want that fact released.
- [29:37]
Steve Hayes
Yet another possibility.
- [29:40]
Jonah Goldberg
I don't mean it as a criticism. I just.
- [29:42]
Steve Hayes
That's how I've seen other reporting suggesting that is not true. They seem to put it down pretty hard.
- [29:47]
Alex Trembath
But it's hard to know what happened there, especially because I agree with you, Steve, that Secretary Wright is one of the more kind of competent and respected, very widely respected figures in this administration. And there are a whole bunch of even Democrats, who at one point, maybe not so much these days, were excited when Trump named Chris Wright as Energy Secretary. Like we're all saying, a lot of uncertainty. It's hard to know what happened with that beyond think this administration and Trump likes a photo op and they had maybe the kind of storyboard of a photo op and released it too early.
- [30:26]
Steve Hayes
Yeah.
- [30:26]
Kevin Williamson
I mean, this is also an excellent illustration of the real practical costs that are imposed by certain kinds of ethical shortcomings. If you didn't have an administration full of people who lied to us all the time at every opportunity about everything, including what they had for breakfast, then we might be able to listen to their explanation and take it more seriously instead of, I forgot to mention that lying was a possibility because it's just so obvious. Yeah.
- [30:52]
Steve Hayes
Alex, you mentioned you took us back briefly, I think, to the 1970s. I want to talk about that for a minute. And that sort of oil crisis. I was reading Ronald Reagan's 1974 State of the State address.
- [31:10]
Alex Trembath
I think I read that one.
- [31:12]
Steve Hayes
Well, you weren't around. I was. I was only 4. Oil prices had quadrupled between October of 1973 and early 1974 when he delivered this speech. And one of the things he said was, the energy problem is a crisis now, but it can be an historic opportunity to free America forever of dependence on unstable foreign oil that can be turned on and off at will by those who would use world commerce for economic blackmail and coercion. So my question to you, Alex, is on a scale of early 70s style dependence on unstable foreign oil and the kind of freedom Ronald Reagan imagined, where are we today?
- [31:59]
Alex Trembath
Well, Reagan was right. He wasn't just. That wasn't just happy talk. He ended up being right.
- [32:03]
Steve Hayes
So the turns out he was right about a lot of things.
- [32:06]
Alex Trembath
He's right about a number of things. So in the 70s, oil crises prompted a radical restructuring of US energy policy. There was no Department of Energy before the oil crisis. The Department of Energy is actually created in 1977, which was after the Energy Research and Development administration created in 1974 as a response to the first OPEC oil embargo. You also have the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, all created as a response to the oil crisis and a new, sudden, shocking understanding in American society and culture that energy is a thing, not just a vulnerability or a problem, but that it is a facet of life that we need to have a sort of clear set of institutions, rules, investments. And it wasn't just coming up with New agencies and regulations. We poured lots of money into energy supply that didn't pay off immediately. But we were talking about the fracking revolution earlier. A bunch of the early investments in photovoltaics and lithium ion batteries start in the 1970s. A bunch of the oil sands and shale explorations start in the 1970s. So Reagan was right that there's opportunity in crisis. That is what our. That's the posture our policymakers should be taking today. But on this panel, we've been, I think, probably rightfully beating up on the Trump administration a lot. And I'd like to turn our attention to Congress because the difference between then and now is that we have a legislature that doesn't want to do anything. I think Mark made the observation on the other panel that this is the least productive legislature in terms of laws passed ever in the modern era, certainly, and the administration has some blame to share there. But this is between AI and between electrification and between the rising electricity costs. And now with the addition of this potentially very painful supply shock in hydrocarbons caused by geopolitical conflict, this should be an obvious area, area for legislating, for sort of doubling down on investments in existing natural resources and long term innovation in energy technologies and geothermal and nuclear and hydrogen.
- [34:29]
Jonah Goldberg
And,
- [34:32]
Alex Trembath
and it doesn't. I'm not, I work on this every day, so I have to be optimistic. Otherwise I wouldn't have anything to do at the office. But it's. We don't have one or two parties that want to work with each other to actually craft energy policy. Megan was talking about permitting reform. That is one of many things that this Congress keeps promising to get around to doing eventually. And at this point, I just can't help but be hopeful that some crisis gets so bad it forces a 1970s like reckoning with our energy policy and our energy politics. Because it wasn't just in the 70s. The parties came together regularly to craft bipartisan energy policy acts through the 2000 and tens. In fact, the last piece of legislation that Donald Trump signed in his first term was an omnibus piece of legislation that included a bill authored by Lisa Murkowski and Joe Manchin, a Republican and a Democrat, to put big investments in energy supply. And we just haven't had anything like that possible since the last five or six years.
- [35:52]
Steve Hayes
Well, if we're putting our hope in Congress doing its job, we should just open the bar right now.
- [35:59]
Alex Trembath
It's almost that time, I think.
- [36:01]
Steve Hayes
Let me. Actually, you're right. We've been critical of the Trump administration in a number of ways, but one way I think that the Trump administration looks pretty good on energy policy specifically is if you compare it to the Biden administration. Can you, Alex, walk us through the 2021 Infrastructure and Investment act, the 2022 Inflation Reduction act, and the one big beautiful bill as sort of reflective of the different approaches each administration has taken to energy policy specifically.
- [36:34]
Alex Trembath
It's an important illustration what I was just talking about in terms of politics, right? Because, you know, for years after the 1970s, the two parties would come together, not every five years like the farm bill, or with that kind of regularity, but fairly regularly to craft bipartisan policy for transmission and oil and gas and solar and wind and nuclear and these things. And you can criticize those policies, but they actually work together. More recently, the Biden administration comes in with the narrowest of majorities in Congress and passes $500 billion over 10 years in spending on climate. And the unfortunate political outcome of that bill, the Inflation Reduction act, was that really what the administration, the Democratic Congress did in 2022 is they took a bunch of pre existing bipartisan popular policies, tax credits, grants, sort of research investments, and just supercharged them in the midst of historic inflation and called it climate policy instead of clean energy policy. And that was just an unprecedented escalation in the sort of polarization of energy politics. And so the Trump administration, the second Trump administration responds in kind. They didn't repeal the Inflation Reduction act, but they went after the solar, wind and electric vehicle tax credits that had once been popular. And that I think the administration and the 119th Congress was correct to trim. Because I think my point of view, and we wrote about this as one big beautiful bill was being drafted. The Democrats had gotten a little spend, happy with their climate agenda. And the plan was just to sort of subsidize energy technologies permanently in order to reach the Biden administration's climate goals. And so we've had this now like multi administration ping ponging between Democrats want to spend to the moon on solar and wind and Republicans don't. The real bright side for this moment in energy and for the Trump administration is on issues like nuclear issues like nepa. I agree with Meg. We need a legislative solution to nepa. You can't just do it all through executive orders and through CEQ guidances in one administration. But this administration actually has been, for instance, again, credit to Secretary Wright and his team doing everything that you would do to create a nuclear renaissance. The Biden administration spent a lot of money or committed a lot of money to new Energy technologies and new energy programs. But then they kept all of the rules in place to make it difficult to commercialize a new technology to build a power line. And we'll sort of see how it nets out in terms of overall outcomes. But on geothermal, on nuclear, certainly on oil and gas, on NEPA and Clean Water act, this administration has done some good things, I'll say.
- [39:52]
Steve Hayes
Yeah. Kevin, Alex mentioned in his conversation with Jonathan that I think it was your first newsletter for us was called the End of the Climate Hawk Era. You have written about this. Is he right? Are we at the end of the climate Hawk Era?
- [40:12]
Kevin Williamson
Yeah, I think in terms of it being like a popular global mass movement, I think that's kind of over. So I didn't realize it at the time, but I went to the. I think it was COP26 in Glasgow a few years ago and I think that might have really been the high water mark of it. Pieces of COP.
- [40:30]
Steve Hayes
What's COP 26?
- [40:32]
Kevin Williamson
COP is the UN climate process.
- [40:34]
Alex Trembath
Conference of the Parties.
- [40:35]
Kevin Williamson
Yeah, conference of the Party. People get together and they make various promises no one has any intention of keeping. And then people burn incense, apparently, which is a terrible thing to do for the indoor air quality. You shouldn't really do that. So I wrote this thing about the climate movement is essentially a religious phenomenon, which I think it is. It's something that people get a sense of ethical anchoring out of. And I think between Covid and some other things that have happened this, the energy has been sort of tapped out of that. So major parties are not even pretending to take things like COP seriously anymore. Things like the Paris Accord are effectively dead. The European Union has essentially decided that it can do things within the eu, but probably not any new future multilateral stuff that they're going to get any real purchase from. That doesn't mean that the issue is going away as a regulatory concern. It means that the energy will be transferred to national agencies mainly, rather than international courts and things like that. And it is still fairly easy for a committed ideological group to capture an agency. So I don't think that the process of liberating ourselves from this stuff is going to be short or easy or obvious in a lot of ways. There are going to be a lot of people at agencies like the EPA who are just going to be very, very stuck in this mode. I wrote a piece earlier in the week for the Dispatch about this article I'd seen in the Times about electrification and why the main response to what we should see in Iran should be more subsidies for electric cars, which I get that. But that just sort of sticks in some people's mind. Like that's my thing and I'm going to stay with that. And it's going to be the thing forever. And that's going to be climate for a lot of people. It's going to take a long time to sort these people all out of the regulatory agencies and the academic positions and things like that.
- [42:21]
Alex Trembath
I think that's right. I think that their ERA is over, but they're still and I think depending on the circumstances and the economic and geopolitical context of a potential Democratic victory in 2028, a 2029 Democratic administration could easily just run that tape again at epa, at doe, could try, I would not assume successfully to restore the Inflation Reduction act and restore those subsidies to EVs and solar. But that's why I think we need new ideas, ideally bipartisan ones, that can end this again, this sort of partisan ping ponging on energy policy because it is very easy, even if climate change sort of recedes in the public attention. And by the way, it was never a big priority for voters, despite what Joe Biden and Greta Thunberg might have might have suggested. But you could still see kind of pernicious, quiet sort of behind the scenes action in the regulatory agencies.
- [43:35]
Kevin Williamson
Sort of last Japanese soldier on that Pacific island who hasn't heard that the war is over.
- [43:39]
Steve Hayes
Yeah.
- [43:40]
Kevin Williamson
Yeah.
- [43:43]
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- [44:10]
Steve Hayes
See homedepot.com licensenumbers well, Alex, it's like we're an old team because I feel
- [44:18]
Alex Trembath
like I'm with old buddies here.
- [44:20]
Steve Hayes
Yeah, well, you teed me up sort of intuitively on the way. I want to close our conversation tonight and that's to talk about politics. So we'll, we'll stay away from 2028 for a moment. But I want to talk about 2026. Jonah Donald Trump is historically unpopular. More than 2/3 of the country thinks it's going in the wrong direction. Midterm elections are always brutal on incumbents. Republicans seem to be in the process of overreaching in a number of different ways. Is There any reason to think that the 2026 midterm elections won't be disastrous for Republicans?
- [45:08]
Jonah Goldberg
So, first of all, I just want to respond to one thing that Alex said where he said, I work on this stuff every day, so I have to be optimistic. I work on politics every day and I cut myself all the time.
- [45:20]
Kevin Williamson
It's not in the contract.
- [45:22]
Jonah Goldberg
Yeah. So look, and I think, look, I actually think there's an argument that if you hear about the long term health of the Republican Party, a shellacking might be good for it. But that's not what you mean by the question. So one of the best things about being at cnn, I've said this a bunch of times, is that I get to interact with a higher quality of Democratic hack than I did at fox. You know, at Fox, they were kind of kept creatures, you know, the Washington
- [45:55]
Steve Hayes
generals to the Harlem Globetrotters.
- [45:57]
Jonah Goldberg
That's right. You know, it's like, you know, bring out the gimp and have them defend Biden. You know, it was just, it was kind of sad. And like at cnn, they're like real people with real contacts and they do real work in the Democratic Party and they're smart and they're interesting to talk to, and a lot of them think it's going to be a true blowout wave. I'm skeptical. There's just not that many competitive seats. And at the same time, it's worth keeping in mind, it doesn't matter in the sense that even if it's just a historic norm or half the historic norm, the Democrats take back the House. And the way the House works is a simple majority runs the place. They're in charge. And so I would be really, really stunned if Democrats didn't take back the House. The one caveat to that, which I don't think we have time to get into the catastrophizing, is Trump says a lot of things about nationalizing the election, about, you know, how at least in 15 states we should send in the feds to run the election. You know, I wonder which 15. I don't, I don't think it's Oklahoma. Yeah. Wow.
- [47:16]
Kevin Williamson
Oklahoma. We didn't practice that.
- [47:19]
Jonah Goldberg
If we both sang it, that would have been Oklahoma.
- [47:21]
Kevin Williamson
Sorry.
- [47:21]
Jonah Goldberg
Anyway. And so it's easy to get seduced into that sort of horror story. But I think, I don't think the reaction to that would be particularly good for him and for Republicans, you know,
- [47:40]
Steve Hayes
if you were to send in.
- [47:41]
Jonah Goldberg
Yeah, the gerrymander thing in Texas looks poised to have set off just a cascade of stupidity and self destructive stuff. I mean, it bothers me what they're doing in Virginia, but I'm not even sure they're gonna pick up anything close to the five seats they thought they were gonna pick up.
- [47:59]
Steve Hayes
Just so I'm sure I'm understanding you correctly, you think the fact that it set off a cascade of stupidity would be the thing that keeps Trump from doing it?
- [48:07]
Jonah Goldberg
I think that keeps more other Republicans from saying, yeah, we're all in on this bad idea. I think that there's a certain amount of pent up. Look, I've been saying for a very long time, you keep asking on the dispatch podcast, are we gonna see any more resistance from Republicans and all this kind of stuff. And I keep saying, check the filing deadline for primaries because Trump's superpower politically has always been that he can kill you in the Republican primaries. Once you know you're not going to be challenged by a Trump backed challenger, you now have free reign, you know, like open field to run for your own reelection in a general election. And so I think you're gonna get to a point where a lot of Republicans are gonna be like, I just don't think this is a good idea for me to get behind sending in the National Guard into Minneapolis to take over polling stations.
- [49:04]
Steve Hayes
Yeah, but they don't have to be for it. Right? They can just be silent. We've seen that before.
- [49:07]
Jonah Goldberg
We've seen that before. I agree. I'm just saying that, like, he needs a certain amount. Like one of the things Trump likes to do is say be shamed if something happened, that somebody should go do something. Right, right. The thing about sending troops to 15 states was Republicans should do this as if, like he's standing on the sidelines as an observer. He needs enablers. And, you know, and now Kristi Noem is busy doing her important work at the Shield of The Americas is down 1.
- [49:35]
Kevin Williamson
I loved that comic book.
- [49:37]
Steve Hayes
It was great, Kevin. So I'm worried about it. I'm worried about it. The FBI is seizing ballots from 2020 in Georgia. They're causing mischief in Arizona. If you rewind to the weeks before the 2020 election, you had people like Ross Douthat writing in the New York Times, the people who were worried that Trump would try to remain in office or cause a stink or try to keep the certification. Those people were hysterical. And then that's what we saw. Are you worried?
- [50:14]
Kevin Williamson
Yeah, I am. I don't worry so much about Trump successfully interfering with the midterms because that would take just more logistical effort than he's willing to make. I think. I think that without sounding like a crazy person, I think if he lives to the end of his term, which, I mean, he's just old, so there's a chance that he won't. And the outcome is not one that he wants, which God knows what he's thinking right now whether he's going to try to anoint his successor or try to seek a third term for himself. I think there's a 50, 50 chance we literally have to fight him, that there will be a mob surrounding the White House and he will be refusing to leave and there will be some element of law enforcement who rallies to his cause and that there will be literal fighting over this at some point.
- [51:08]
Steve Hayes
Okay, that's even darker than me.
- [51:11]
Jonah Goldberg
Optimism is actually a spectrum.
- [51:15]
Steve Hayes
I want to end by returning to our optimist, the guy who announced that he's an optimist for a living. I'm an optimist because I have to be.
- [51:24]
Alex Trembath
They pay me extra for that.
- [51:25]
Steve Hayes
Final, final question to you. I'm gonna assume that there's a divided Congress and a lame duck president after November. So heading into January, I think the Senate, I think it's possible the Senate could actually go to Democrats even though the map is not friendly for Democrats. But I do think it's going to be the kind of wave you can get when you have heavily gerrymandered House districts. So not 94, 2010, but pretty big. If we have that, if we have divided government, a lame Duck President, the 2028 campaign starting. Does anything happen on energy policy?
- [52:08]
Alex Trembath
I think in order for anything to happen in that scenario, Steve, we've got to pass permitting reform this year. Because if Democrats and Republicans can't get together in this administration to pass bipartisan permitting reform that gets 60 votes in the Senate, then Republicans and Democrats are not going to want to work together in the 120th Congress. I think they're going to want to fight each other. So there might be some smaller things that get passed in so called secret Congress. There's bills on geothermal and there's bills on critical minerals and there's bills on sort of wildfire management that I think could pass. But I think we're at a bit of a kind of hinge moment in terms of energy policy right now where we, we actually have a opportunity. We've been talk, there's been dozens of permitting reform bills over the last five years. The meaningful ones haven't actually gotten over the finish line. And I think that it is a civic imperative for our legislatures, the Democrats and the Republicans in Congress to actually work together. Because if they can't do it in these circumstances, I don't think they'll do it in the future. That's just my prediction right now. The last sort of X factor that I would add to the sort of political prognosticating just to bring it full circle is just energy prices. I think that the public demand for legislation changes with high and rising electricity and gasoline prices. And I think the context of President Trump's eventual exit from office is very different in a context of high energy prices compared to the last time around, when he lost narrowly in 2020 and unemployment was low and energy prices were low. I think that it's a very. I think it's very different sort of dynamic. If the public is really pissed off about energy prices, which I don't want to hope for and I'm not predicting, but is certainly a possibility.
- [54:11]
Steve Hayes
Certainly possible. Certainly possible. Well, I want to thank Kevin and Jonah and Alex. I want to thank our partners at Pacific Legal foundation for today and for their partnership, for helping us launch Dispatch Energy. I want to thank the team at Old Parkland for your hospitality, and especially Harlan and Kathy Crow for being such wonderful hosts. As always, I mentioned a few different times, the bar opening. The bar is now open. Thanks for coming,
- [54:48]
Kevin Williamson
Sam.