Jenny Beth sits down with Competitive Enterprise Institute's Myron Ebell. The far-left Sierra Club once called him, “One of the single greatest threats our planet has ever faced.” Myron exposes the left's war on energy and tells what needs to be done to ensure we have affordable energy that doesn't disrupt our daily lives.
Jenny Beth sits down with Competitive Enterprise Institute's Myron Ebell. The far-left Sierra Club once called him, “One of the single greatest threats our planet has ever faced.” Myron exposes the left's war on energy and tells what needs to be done to ensure we have affordable energy that doesn't disrupt our daily lives.
Twitter: @ceidotorg | @jennybethm
Myron Ebell (00:00):
The United States has spent trillions of dollars on subsidies for renewable energy, and it's had a very small impact in terms of the percentage of energy provided from those renewable technologies.
Narrator (00:14):
Keeping our Republic is on the line, and it requires Patriots with great passion, dedication, and eternal vigilance to preserve our freedoms. Jenny Beth Martin is the co-founder of Tea Party Patriots. She's an author, a filmmaker, and one of time magazine's most influential people in the world. But the title she's most proud of is Mom To Her Boy, girl Twins. She has been at the forefront fighting to protect America's core principles for more than a decade. Welcome to the Jenny Beth Show,
Jenny Beth Martin (00:46):
The far Left Sierra Club once called My Next guest, one of the greatest single threats our planet has ever faced. He's an expert on climate, energy and the environment. Myron Ebell is a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute. He was perhaps the most influential individual who helped pull America out of the Paris Climate Accords, and he's leading the fight against climate change hysteria. Myron Ebell, thank you so much for joining me today. You do so much amazing work fighting back against President Biden's War on Energy. Talk to us a bit about what is going on and what is he doing and how do you think he's declared War on energy?
Myron Ebell (01:27):
Thanks, Channy. Beth, president Biden, and basically all of the Democratic Party has declared war on affordable and reliable energy, and not only just electricity, but also the kind of cars we drive, the production of energy as well as the use of energy. So it's a very broad scale effort and it involves both subsidies passed in the Inflation Reduction Act last year, without you'll recall it, not a single Republican voted for the Inflation Reduction Act, and that bill provides massive subsidies for the renewable energy and electric vehicles and so on. And then second, are the regulations, the rules to try to limit the production and use of conventional fuels, coal, oil, and natural gas.
Jenny Beth Martin (02:22):
Why are the subsidies such a problem?
Myron Ebell (02:25):
Well, the subsidies essentially have been around for a long time for wind, solar, some other unconventional types of energy, and also for people who buy an electric vehicle. But what the Inflation Reduction Act did was it made them essentially permanent. Instead of renewing them or extending them for a couple of years, the so-called Inflation Reduction Act said these are going to go on forever until our economy reaches net zero. And so this fully the climate industrial complex, the people who are making money off of types of energy that can't make it in the marketplace, that aren't commercially viable, but get subsidies, they now have can see as far as they can see into the horizon, this is going to be a moneymaker. There's no way you can lose money on building a wind plantation or a solar plantation because of the federal subsidy,
Jenny Beth Martin (03:28):
Not because it is competitive, but simply because the government will pay for it no matter what.
Myron Ebell (03:35):
Yes. And the consequence of that is that our electric grid is becoming increasingly unreliable and electric rates are going up. So California's electric rates are far above the national average. They've been pursuing these policies for many years, and so we can see what's happening. They have high electric rates in Texas, which governor George W. Bush in 1999 at the urging of Ken Lay of Enron, you remember that name? Yeah. Ken Light convinced Governor Bush that a lot of money could be made from the federal wind subsidy because North Texas and West Texas are very windy places. And so Texas now has a huge overinvestment over several decades now in wind and underinvestment in conventional power plants. They've closed most of their coal fired power plants. They haven't built enough gas plants, and they've got all this wind. And the problem that they face is not high rates. Their rates have not gone up that much. The problem that they face is that it gets hot in Texas in the summer. Demand goes way up when people turn their air conditioning on, and the wind doesn't blow very much in the summer. So Texas now faces a terrible future unless the elected officials in the legislature to actually take the issue seriously. So far they're more or less controlled by big wind. Now
Jenny Beth Martin (05:14):
You would think it's big oil, but it's big
Myron Ebell (05:16):
Wind. No, it's big wind. Yeah. Wow. And the oil industry, because they're not involved in the electric grid, they're not running the grid. They haven't asserted themselves into the debate and said, Hey, wait a minute. You can't run a modern economy on expensive electricity. That's only on part of the time.
Jenny Beth Martin (05:39):
Okay. So that's what's happening in Texas. I've driven, I've been all over this country, flown all over the country. I have hundreds of thousands of sky miles each year. So it's crazy. But my point is I wind up seeing a lot of these solar farms and the wind farms, but if I just lived in, say, metro Atlanta, Atlanta, the metro area of Atlanta, you wouldn't even see them. And if you just go visit New York or LA or whatever, you're not going to see it necessarily unless you're out removed from a city. But they're all over driving through Iowa, driving through Nebraska, there are all these windmills, and oftentimes I have driven past and they really aren't moving or they're moving so slowly. I wonder how any energy is created from it. I suppose some is, but they really are quite prevalent around the country, even if most people don't see them in their metro or suburban areas.
Myron Ebell (06:46):
Well, that's right. And of course, in many areas now they're putting solar plantations into Virginia and they're cutting down thousands of acres of forests to do it. Timberland. And the funny thing is, if you look at a map of the United States, there are really good maps for wind potential. The windiest places and also the sunniest places. Virginia ranks towards the bottom. It's not a sunny place, and yet they're putting up all kinds of solar plantations across the state because of the federal subsidy and because people have told the utilities and the utilities have bought this, that there's an energy transition going on. Well, in fact, if you look at energy production, the sources of energy, the United States has spent trillions of dollars on subsidies for renewable energy, and it's had a very small impact in terms of the percentage of energy provided from those renewable technologies. So it used to be there was slightly more than 80% of all energy came from conventional sources. Now it's slightly less than 80%. So the idea that we're going to get to, so-called net zero that we're going to get rid of all of coal, oil and natural gas, except unless it has what's called carbon capture and storage, where they take the carbon dioxide out of the smokestack and pipe it somewhere and put it in a cave or something.
(08:20):
We don't have, if we've already spent trillions of dollars, then we've only reduced the amount of energy that comes from conventional sources. A tiny little bit you can see is every percentage point gets more expensive because they take the cheapest things first and the more expensive things later. So we're going to see this whole energy transition is going to come to a grinding halt because it's far too expensive, it won't work, and nobody will sort of say that. The utilities won't say it. President Biden says the energy transition is here. The International Energy Agency said in a report just this week, the energy transition is unstoppable. Well, it actually isn't even happening. We're just wasting a huge amount of money and we're creating an electric grid that isn't going to work. We're going to have, instead of a few minutes a year average without power, we're going to have hours and hours and hours. The average customer at home is going to have hours and hours and hours without power. A modern economy can't run on intermittent electricity. No,
Jenny Beth Martin (09:34):
Not at all. Okay. I want to ask a few questions about what you just said, and I want to preface something by saying, you said that the people who run the energy companies won't speak up and say what they know is true, that this is going to drive the cost up in the supply down of energy, essentially, that's what you're saying. I worked at a paper company, a factory paper mill, that was my first career job out of college. I programmed computers, and so I was inside that factory. A lot of people don't know that about me, but I had to wear earplugs and safety goggles and occasionally steel toed shoes and a hard hat. So I'm familiar with what a factory is like. When I was working at this paper mill, they decided to build a second machine so that they were producing two machines, were producing paper at a time instead of one.
(10:27):
And the factory that I worked at produces squiggly paper inside of a cardboard box. I spoke to somebody higher up in my division who worked in finance and said, so the reason that this is actually happening, and he drew it on my whiteboard and it just stands out, it's something I've always remembered, is that we have to get the emissions from our factory down. So if we build a second paper machine, the new paper machine has lower emissions and the average across the two is lower. So we're releasing more emissions into the atmosphere, but we've on average reduced it and that's acceptable to the government. And I just was like, wait a minute, what you're telling me that it's going to increase the emissions? But it's okay because he's like, makes no sense, but this is what we're doing, and that's what they wound up doing. And so when I hear you saying they won't speak up, it reminds me of that they're playing these games with the government because the government puts insane regulations on that don't work and don't actually even achieve the goal they're trying to achieve.
Myron Ebell (11:41):
I think that's right. Of course, there are different industries here. The oil and gas industry has these big oil companies, the majors, ExxonMobil, Chevron, shell, BP, and so on. These companies are very susceptible to being pushed around. And so their CEOs have shareholders and board members that don't want them to get out and say, Hey, I'm really proud of what we do. So instead, what they do is they apologize and say, we'll do better in the future. We're planning to reduce our emissions, and we're part of the energy transition. We're on board. The smaller guys are not like that. They're proud to be producing the energy that Americans use and depend upon. But of course, they're just small. They don't have big public relations departments. They don't have CEOs that have big public platforms. They're not on TV all the time. So the oil industry is kind of, it's solid, but the majors are too shy or they're cowed by political forces.
(12:48):
The utilities are very different, the electric utilities, because they don't really care where they get their electricity from, they just want to make sure that they're guaranteed a rate of return. And so in most states, a utility, if they build a new expensive plant and close an old plant that still has a lot of life in it, that increases their capital spending and therefore they can increase their rates. And so they're not so concerned about the reliability mix that really the grid depends on, you need different sources of electricity, you shouldn't get it all from the same kind of fuel. So what we've seen is that when the Obama administration declared war on coal, at that time, coal produced over 50% of the electricity in this country, but because of the rules, which were later overturned by the Supreme Court, but the utilities went ahead and said, well, we've got these rules coming, so we're going to start closing coal fired power plants. So now coal is down to 20 or 22% of our electricity. And that was all due to rules which were found to be illegal. So that's the kind of world we live in with the utilities.
Jenny Beth Martin (14:09):
Well, and the administration, whichever administration it is certainly on the left, doesn't seem to care whether what they're doing is right or not legal or not constitutional or not. They're like, well, we'll do it, and then if we have to stop, we'll stop. And even then, they don't always stop, right?
Myron Ebell (14:27):
That's
Jenny Beth Martin (14:27):
Right. So they achieve their goal, whether it was legal or not, they don't care because the end justified the means.
Myron Ebell (14:35):
Yes. And I'll tell you a somewhat amusing or a sad story about that. The rule that really killed coal-fired power plants was called the mercury and air toxin standards or MATS rule. And that rule was found in a very strong Supreme Court decision to be illegal. It didn't follow what the Clean Air Act said you had to do. Gina McCarthy, who at that point was the administrator of the EPA said publicly, she laughed. She said, ha, ha, ha. It doesn't matter that the rule is illegal and we have to give up on it because the utilities have already complied because of course, the court moves slowly the first test to go to the DC Circuit Court, then it goes to the Supreme Court. So it took several years, and by the time the court ruled, the issue was essentially dead because the utilities had given up on coal. I don't really care where we get our electricity from or what makes our cars go, but what I want is something that's reliable and affordable, and that's the whole war is on affordable, reliable energy at every, not just electricity, but also motor vehicles as well.
Jenny Beth Martin (15:56):
Okay. Let me go back to one more thing and then we'll keep going through some of what you've talked about, but I want to go back for just a minute. When they talk about net zero and carbon neutral, don't trees and plants get rid of carbon dioxide and turn it into oxygen?
Myron Ebell (16:13):
Yes. The carbon dioxide is essential for life on earth because plants take in carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and they use it to oxidize, to take solar energy and turn it into calories that they can use in growing. So CO2 is essential for the greening of the greenness of the earth, and without it, we wouldn't be around. So higher CO2 levels, which carbon dioxide levels are, it's a trace gas in the atmosphere, the atmosphere is mostly nitrogen. Then oxygen, CO2 is just a tiny trace gas. So it's thought that before the industrial revolution, when they started burning coal in England, that the level of CO2 in the atmosphere was 270 parts per million. That's about, well, I'll go forward. It's now over 400 parts per million. So after a couple of hundred years of burning coal, oil and natural gas, it's gone up from two 70 to about 4 10, 4 15, and that's essentially one part out of every 2,500 in the atmosphere.
(17:31):
So it's a very tiny amount. And it's thought that CO2 is a greenhouse gas. It does cause warming, but the rate of warming has been much lower than what the computer models predict. The data shows mild warming, the computer models show rapid warming. And what at the same time, because plants use CO2 for photosynthesis, the world has been greening. And you can go to the NASA website if you know where to look, and you can find the satellite photography that shows over time how much greener the earth is now than it was in 79 when the satellites went up. And so one of the reasons that food production, they keep saying global warming is going to cause food production problems, but food production keeps going up. Part of it is agricultural engineering of better crops. Some of it's better fertilizers, more fertilizer, but some of it is the greening of the earth from higher CO2 levels. And so we can thank CO2 for the fact that food production, global food production has been able to keep up with global population increase. And that's very important. And we should be grateful that all that coal, oil and gas is being burned and more of it is being burned around the world every year.
Jenny Beth Martin (19:06):
So if the trees are necessary, then isn't it a problem that Virginia is cutting down trees to put in solar planes?
Myron Ebell (19:14):
Well, yeah, I mean, I think there are lots of problems. As a rural agro American, you mentioned that people in cities and suburbs don't even notice that there are wind turbines and solar panels popping up all over the place. But as a rural American, I go home to Eastern Oregon and I see these wind turbines and they're not, they spoil the landscape. I mean, I could see, yeah, they really do. I could see at some places they might be okay, but they really do spoil the landscape, and I think being close to them is very unhealthy. But that's another issue. I'm not an expert on that, but I just suspect from what I've heard, that it's not healthy to be close to these things.
Jenny Beth Martin (20:01):
So oil and gas, the war on energy, we've got oil and gas, and then we unpack that one. There are several more areas where they're attacking energy. Right.
Myron Ebell (20:12):
Well, I think the war on what we call at CEI Auto mobility is really the one that should concern people. I'd say first, the reliability of electricity and how much it costs. The second is the attempt to force people out of automobiles or to force them into automobiles that don't serve their purposes, that don't really suit the needs. I've rented electric vehicles. I think they're fine. They have a lot of advantages. They have a lot of good things about them, and I think they're really perfect if you own two other automobiles. Now, my family, we raised four children and only ever had one car. An electric would not have done it. It wouldn't owned two if we'd owned a big SUV in some other internal combustion engine, and then the third vehicle to commute to work in as an electric vehicle, that would make sense.
(21:12):
So what the Biden administration has done, and Congress has done is they've extended the subsidies for electric vehicles. So anybody who buys one essentially can get $7,500 off the price. And now they're passing rules both at the Environmental Protection Agency, the EPA and the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration. That's a lot of words, but nitsa, these are the people that do the cafe standards, the corporate average fuel economy standards. So we now have CAFE standards for mileage, for automobile efficiency, for how many miles per gallon a car gets. And then we have EPA rules for the greenhouse gas emissions for the car. And you combine those two. And what it means is that the automakers have decided, and they haven't fought it, but they've decided that they will not be able to comply with these rules and keep producing internal combustion engines or diesel engines.
(22:14):
And that's why the big automakers, not Toyota, but for gm, several of the others have announced that by 2035, they will stop producing internal combustion engines and only produce electric vehicles. Well, as I said, they're good as a third vehicle in a family, but they're not so good if you just have one and you need it for everything. And particularly for rural people who need big rigs, who have to haul stuff, who have to drive long distances, who have to work in cold weather and in hot weather, I think if people are just commuting back and forth, a set number of miles a day and electric vehicle might be okay. But for people in, and the kinds of people who actually work, we found out during the shutdown who was important. It's the people who drive the trucks that bring the food. It's the people. I mean, those people can't, they're not going to get along with electric vehicles. So this is very serious because the automakers have bought into it and they're already changing their employment, the kinds of engineers that they employ, the kinds of development programs that they have. And so we're going to be, I think, left with an auto industry that's a complete car wreck, and consumers are going to say, Hey, where's the car that I want?
Jenny Beth Martin (23:40):
And they're doing that right now. I've seen videos online. I haven't gone and looked at the car dealerships myself, but I've seen several videos online where there'll be a Ford dealer, for instance, and there are all the electric cars are on the lot, but you can't get a gas powered car and nobody wants the electric cars. And I don't understand, just as a consumer, both of my cars are paid off. I have twins. They share a car. I have a car, and my car is a 2012, so it's an older car. I travel a lot, so there's not a lot of mileage on it as much as there could be. But I don't want to buy a car that I, after five years or three to five years have to replace the battery and the cost of the battery is more than the cost of a car right now. I don't want to be, I do not want to have perpetual car payments.
Myron Ebell (24:40):
Yes. And I think one of the thing I would add to that is that everybody knows that EVs are more expensive than conventional
Jenny Beth Martin (24:53):
Cars. Even with the subsidy, there's two more. They're
Myron Ebell (24:55):
More expensive. And the subsidy, of course, the automakers capture that they raise the price to take account of the consumer's going to get $7,500 back. But what the automakers are doing is they are raising the prices of internal combustion engine cars in order to pay for the losses on EVs. So I forget which quarter it was, but Ford announced that it had lost something like $32,000 per vehicle, electric vehicle that they sold. Well, they have to make that up by raising the prices of conventional cars. And I don't know if you've noticed, but the prices of conventional cars are just through the roof. I mean, you go and sticker shock is putting it mildly. And of course, if you need a big rig, if you need a pickup truck for example, you're talking $60,000 for a new pickup truck. I mean, rural people working Americans can't afford that. And so that's caused the price of used vehicles to go up. And so people are even being priced out of used vehicles. So there's an effort to really get people out of automobiles and say, well, everybody can take public transport.
Jenny Beth Martin (26:10):
And it's just not realistic. It
Myron Ebell (26:11):
Isn't. A few places it is in San Francisco, downtown,
Jenny Beth Martin (26:15):
Downtown dc the people who live in ivory towers, absolutely. But most people don't live in I ivory
Myron Ebell (26:20):
Towers. That's right. That's right. But the people running the agenda, they don't know that because they live in ivory towers. And so we have a bunch of people who think that they can plan a new organization for society that doesn't involve automobiles for most people, only wealthy people will have automobiles and everybody else can take the bus.
Jenny Beth Martin (26:48):
It's just absolutely maddening. And one thing that I've noticed, I've spoken to a few Uber drivers in my travels in the last few months and two different Uber drivers, and I have many a week. So two isn't a huge number. So these stand out to me told me that they had been driving 18 wheelers and that they own their own rig. So they had that, and then they had problems. And the supply chain is messed up due to covid, and they've gone to try to buy a new one, and it's just too expensive. And so their old one just basically is retired and they can't get it repaired and they can't use it, and they can't buy a new one. So now they're driving Uber with their car that they had at home. And that concerns me because if there are other people like that who are independent owner operators, that means our products aren't moving around our country, which exacerbates the supply chain problems.
Myron Ebell (27:46):
Absolutely. And I think the place to look for where we're going is California, because California has put a lot of new standards on freight trucks. And what the freight truck industry has done is they have wherever possible, they have moved to Nevada or Arizona across the border or southern Oregon, and their drivers drive every day into California to do their freight trucking. And so they've vastly increased the cost because of the hundreds of miles that they have to drive from, say, Western Nevada, say Reno, into the Bay Area. So this is where we're going. But of course, once it becomes national, you won't be able to escape California everywhere will be like California,
Jenny Beth Martin (28:43):
Which is why we have to fight this. And we talked about power plants, right? Yes. And then appliances.
Myron Ebell (28:51):
Yes.
Jenny Beth Martin (28:52):
That is the one that I think really just people feel the most because no matter whether you're in the rural or the metropolitan areas,
Myron Ebell (29:00):
You're not going to ban my gas stove,
Jenny Beth Martin (29:02):
Right? That's right. That's
Myron Ebell (29:03):
Right.
Jenny Beth Martin (29:04):
And they're after gas stoves, they're after. What else? The list goes on light bulbs, the list goes on and on.
Myron Ebell (29:11):
Well, this has been going on for a long time. The Energy Policy and Conservation Act of 1975, set cafe standards for automobiles, mileage standards for automobiles, and then efficiency standards for any appliance that the Department of Energy wants to set a standard for. So there's hundreds of standards and every five years they're supposed to review them. And what they've been doing, both the Obama and now the Biden administration, is they just ignore the law, which is the law says that you can require that an appliance be more efficient if it doesn't seriously impact the cost to the appliance and the reliability of the appliance. So what we have are standards for dishwashers, washing machines, refrigerators, furnaces, gas stoves, microwave ovens. So we could go down the list, but what's happened is, and I'm sure you are as aware this is I am dishwashers aren't as good as they used to be. Washing machines don't,
Jenny Beth Martin (30:22):
Washing machines are awful.
Myron Ebell (30:24):
Now they're trying to ban gas stoves. Some communities, some like Berkeley, California and New York City are just banning gas stoves. And so we are now living with less good appliances than we had 20 years ago. They don't last as long. They cost more and they don't perform as well. And this is all due to the Department of Energy, and it's all due to the aggressive nature of the Obama and the Biden administration. Now, during the Trump administration, the Department of Energy did something that we at CEI had actually proposed. Our general counsel, Sam Kasman, found that you could petition the department to create a new class of appliances and that could then be regulated. He proposed, and the department under Trump agreed to create a new class of fast dishwashers that would get the job done in an hour or less, and that these would have different efficiency ratings than the dishwashers we have now, which typically take well over two hours and don't get your dishes that clean. So the Trump administration actually promulgated regulations to create a new class of fast dishwashers. And of course, Biden canceled it immediately. So that was clever. It a nice, it's the kind of thing that might have some, we might make progress in the future with that.
Jenny Beth Martin (31:59):
Yes. And what we've really made progress with is if we had a Republican house and a Republican Senate and they passed a law that actually ended all of this and attached it to a spending bill and made it permanent and a president who would sign it into law so we could get rid of some of these regulations, they're onerous. And the swing from one administration to another creates instability in the entire market and chaos everywhere. And we need laws to just get rid of
Myron Ebell (32:28):
It. Yeah, absolutely.
Jenny Beth Martin (32:29):
And then we need people who will stick to the law and punishments to administrative people who won't stick to the law, to the bureaucrats. I was speaking to a man who does heating and air in the area where I live last, well in about 10 months or so ago. So in the wintertime, and we were talking about the ban on gas stoves. He doesn't know what I do. I'll have to send him a copy of this podcast, but he was telling me they are going to get rid of gas stoves and then they're going to come after your refrigerator and then mark my words. They're coming after your water heaters and ultimately your air conditioners. And let me tell you, Freon is through the roof, used to be able to buy canisters of coolant, I suppose it's free on, but used to be able to buy it for less than $10, and now it's over 80 or $90.
(33:22):
And he said they're coming for all of it. The refrigerators that they're making now are more explosive and will catch on fire. And he sent me all these links about it. I listened very attentively. So he came back and was sending me all this information. And so each time a new iteration has happened, I've just sent him a link and he's like, told you, told you. And he's right. If we don't get a handle on this, they're going to come after all of it, and our lives are going to be so much worse. It's not like we can't live without all of those appliances, but they make our lives more efficient. They make our lives less painful, and they make our lives more enjoyable, and the government shouldn't be just pounding us down and preventing us from having things that make our life better.
Myron Ebell (34:07):
Well, you live in the south where it gets kind of hot in the summer in many places. And so what's made life possible in the south and why so many people have moved there is air conditioning. That's right. And air conditioning became available. I think the first place that was air conditioned was in the 1920s. It was the US Capitol building.
Jenny Beth Martin (34:27):
Of course it was the Capitol. Well, it That's fine.
Myron Ebell (34:30):
Well, a guy named Carrier invented this new technology to cool a room, and they got it because obviously Washington DC in the summer is one of the more miserable places you can be. And then it got to movie theaters, and then after World War ii, it started to be found in people's homes, businesses, banks got air conditioning, office buildings, got air conditioning. And so it's been a remarkable transformation of our society. I mean, life is so much more comfortable. So the war on air conditioning, I'm glad you brought it up because it's very important, and CEO has been very involved in fighting it. There's this treaty called the Montreal Protocol, and the Montreal Protocol has an amendment called the Kigali Amendment, and the Montreal Protocol took a kind of refrigerant called CFCs and banned those because of their claim that they were causing the ozone hull.
(35:30):
So CFCs were replaced by HFCs, and the Kigali Amendment bans HFCs and requires some other kind of refrigerant. The most common are called HFOs. So why has this happened? Well, the companies that produce CFCs, the patents had run out on CFCs, but companies like DuPont and Honeywell, there were different names, but they've acquired them, so we'll just call them Honeywell and DuPont or Honeywell and Chemours, maybe we should say those two companies had the patents on HFCs, but those patents ran out, and they have patents on these two things called HFOs, so they make a lot more, but the problem CFCs to HFCs is more expensive, but they're about as efficient in terms of their refrigeration capacity. HFOs are not as efficient, therefore it requires more electricity to actually run and get the room cool, or the refrigerator cool. They have other problems that some of them are flammable, it'll catch on fire.
(36:45):
And so we're now faced with a crisis in air conditioning because conventional air conditioners that run on Freon are things related to Freon. Those chemicals are now going way up in price because they've been banned and the production has to go down every year. So people who have air conditioning units are going to face much higher repair bills, and that's already happening. My colleague Ben Lieberman has talked to people in the industry and repairmen and they say, yeah, it's going to cost an extra several hundred dollars every time you need to get your AC repaired. And then if you have a new unit, you're looking at much higher costs for the new unit and less reliable won't last as long. And so the government is destroying the air conditioning industry, and this is all due to the ratification by the Senate on a bipartisan basis, although it was overwhelmingly Democrats, but one of the leaders was Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, because they have big Honeywell plants in his state, and so the Senate ratified the Kigali amendment, even though it's going to do all of this damage to our air conditioning, which we all take for granted.
(38:09):
And it is cars too. I'm sure you've noticed that new cars have these huge intakes in front, right? Yeah, these gigantic intakes. That's because the refrigerant is not as efficient as the older refrigerant.
Jenny Beth Martin (38:22):
I've also noticed that a lot of the new cars that I'm renting, they aren't as cool or they turn off when you stop, and I'm sure there's a way to fix it. But on the rental car, they have it locked in. And if you're Phoenix, Arizona and it's 112 and the car air conditioning quits working, it's not pleasant at all, but, and Cassidy is from Louisiana, it gets really hot in Louisiana. It's just they are so shortsighted sometimes they blow my mind. Congress is just drives me insane. We're recording this in the middle of the speaker fight, so I'm really just on edge about 'em anyway. Okay, one comment and then two more questions for you. The comment is the same repair man told me that when it comes to the gas stoves, getting rid of the gas stoves, that in newer neighborhoods it's not as much of a problem, but in older neighborhoods, the house is connected to the grid, whatever the electricity is that's taking it to the grid inside your house. Most, a lot of older houses do not have the electricity and maybe even some of the newer ones don't have the electricity to be able to support an electric stove and an electric water heater and maybe an electric air conditioner. I don't even know what they're going to do with that. I guess it is electric somehow
Myron Ebell (39:47):
Replace your gas furnace with a heat pump.
Jenny Beth Martin (39:49):
So if you start replacing all of that, then you're going to wind up having to rewire inside of your house and you're going to have to change what is going from the road to your house. So replacing a gas stove, it may look like on the surface when you go to buy it a thousand, a couple thousand dollars at the store, but by the time you actually can get it installed, you might be looking at 10 grand and it isn't even an upgrade for your house. It's just an appliance that you need. And homes that have gas stoves are going to wind up being more valuable anyway.
Myron Ebell (40:20):
Yes, you're absolutely right.
Jenny Beth Martin (40:23):
Okay. The two question or Go ahead. Do you have some
Myron Ebell (40:26):
No, no. You put it very, I mean, you explained it Well, I mean, the problem is that the grid is designed for a certain type of housing with gas stoves, gas water heaters, gas furnaces. And if we move to electric vehicles and you need an electric charger that needs, you're going to need an upgrade to have a two 40 instead of one 20 outlet for that charger. Then if you get rid of the gas stove, the gas furnace and the gas water heater, you're going to have to have another more upgrade. So yes, it's going to cost a lot of money.
Jenny Beth Martin (41:06):
It's shortsighted for the politicians, especially Republicans who are allowing this to happen. They're harming their own constituency and the liberals and the leftists who want to get rid of the energy that works efficiently and affordably, it's their goal anyway, so they don't care one way or the other. China, what is China doing? I'm sure they're very clean and following all the same standards as the rest of the world, right?
Myron Ebell (41:37):
Well, China talks a good game. They belong like the United States and every other country in the world to the Paris Climate Treaty, and they talk at every meeting. We've got the annual conference of the parties COP 28 coming up in the United Arab Emirates in December, late November and early December. They go and they say that, yes, we're planning to cut our greenhouse gas emissions from carbon dioxide, from burning coal oil and natural gas. And then they go back and they build a lot more coal plants and natural gas plants. So China now consumes 50% of the world's coal production. And coal production is now at a global all-time high, primarily because of increases in Chinese consumption. So their emissions, their CO2 emissions from burning coal have gone up and up and up and they go to the UN meetings and talk a good game. So that's what China's about.
(42:42):
Now. People say that China is, it's dirty there and they have dirty energy. I don't really buy that. Yes, they have very serious pollution problems because they've got a highly concentrated population that is moving up. Their standard of living is moving up, so they're using a lot more energy, but they're building very modern coal plants. They're not building. We have old coal plants because we've stopped building them a long time ago. We have ancient ones. China has, I think we have what's called ultra super critical. That's where they grind the coal up. So it's just like dust. So it burns very efficiently. I think we have one of those plants, the most advanced kind of coal plant, China has about over a hundred. So they're modernizing, whereas we're letting our equipment become antiquated. Now, of course, we're moving to natural gas, which does burn cleaner, and we have modern natural gas plants.
(43:43):
But one of the odd things about the rules being pushed by the Biden EPA for power plants is it would make what are the most modern plants, which are called combined cycle. It would make them very hard to comply with the new standards, but instead backup gas plants, which are single cycle which they turn on whenever the wind isn't blowing or the sun isn't shining, they'll have a backup gas plant. Those would still be okay, but they're not nearly as efficient or clean as the modern combined cycle. So it is kind of ironic what's going
Jenny Beth Martin (44:23):
On. It's like building to a second paper machine. Yes, that's right. To reduce emissions, yet you're increasing emissions. That's right. The thing that is frustrating to me about what's happening in China versus what is happening here is that we are creating such a regulated and onerous regulatory environment, and it prevents manufacturing here, and it takes away jobs here because in order to manufacture here, you have to comply with the EPA and OSHA and
Myron Ebell (44:53):
All of the alphabet agencies.
Jenny Beth Martin (44:55):
And by the time that you've done all of that, the cost is so much higher. And then China just sidesteps all those regulations and has slave labor and everything else, and it makes it impossible for us to compete with them. And then they're producing using the kind of energy that people here are saying we have to get rid of. Yet they're using that energy to produce the cars that people are driving that
Myron Ebell (45:20):
They think are clean. And the solar panels and the wind turbines. Yeah,
Jenny Beth Martin (45:24):
There's an irony in that.
Myron Ebell (45:26):
Yeah, the solar panels are produced. It's claimed using a lot of forced labor and the critical minerals involved, you've heard of critical mineral. The critical minerals are the ones that are needed to create this new energy economy. So solar panels, wind turbines, electric vehicle batteries. And so cobalt comes from Congo and it's produced using 10 year olds going down into the mines. So it's child forced child labor. That cobalt is then processed in China. So China doesn't dominate the production of all of these metals, but they do dominate the processing. So for example, there was a big mine proposed a copper and gold and rare earth's mine up in Alaska called the Pebble Project, which in fact, the Trump administration stopped right at the end of Trump's term. It was outrageous that they did it, but that all of the metal, all of the mining, all of the ore would not be processed in the United States. It would be shipped to Asia because our environmental rules mean that you can't build a new smelter in this country.
Jenny Beth Martin (46:56):
We we're shooting ourselves in the foot sometimes, often, yes,
Myron Ebell (47:01):
Yes.
Jenny Beth Martin (47:02):
Not just, and
Myron Ebell (47:02):
We're becoming a second class economic power.
Jenny Beth Martin (47:07):
We have to fix that.
Myron Ebell (47:08):
Yes.
Jenny Beth Martin (47:09):
Now the last question is what can the average person do?
Myron Ebell (47:14):
Well, that's always the best question, but of course some of the answers aren't particularly convincing or powerful. I would say this. There isn't much that people can do on the production of coal, oil and gas. I mean, that's an industry versus government thing on the vehicle front, trying to force people into smaller electric cars instead of cars that meet their needs. I think people need to get really angry about that. And they need to talk to their elected officials, not just in Congress, but state officials, county commissioners, city councilmen and say, this isn't going to work. This does not meet. I need choice. I need to be able to choose the kind of vehicle that suits me and my family. And then they should talk to their auto dealers. Because if you've had a long relationship with a particular dealer who sells a particular kind of car, you ought to go and say, Hey, look, I can't afford this car, and moreover, it doesn't meet my needs.
(48:22):
So what is your industry going to do about it? And I think, so the dealers need to be put on the spot. And then in terms of electric reliability and electric rates going up at the same time that reliability's going down, this is something that the utilities for a long time have dominated state legislatures in many states. And I think people have to start complaining to their state legislators that, look, this racket that's been created is not it. It's okay so far because rates haven't gone up that much yet, and reliability hasn't gone down that much yet. But I can see that what's happening, we're all going to be like California and Texas. We're going to have days and days without electricity and we can't live that way. We can't have a modern economy. We can't run our lives without electricity. And so I think that the state legislatures in some states have, there's some ability to push back.
(49:31):
And then the other thing is we have to work on Congress to repeal the So-called Inflation Reduction Act. Every Republican voted against it. And last spring, the limit save grow act, pushed by the House Freedom Caucus, every Republican voted for that bill limits, save, grow repeal. This subsidies the energy subsidies in the inflation reduction Act. So there is support. And the leader on this is Chip Roy from Texas, and of course he's one of the great leaders in Congress. But Chip Roy gets it, and I don't know if you've heard him speak about this, but he gets what's going to happen if we go down this road of subsidizing, unreliable and expensive energy at the expense of conventional energy, which is where we get all our energy from. And so we need get rid of the Inflation Reduction Act and people should talk to their members of Congress. If it's a Republican, you should say, I really in the house say it's great that you voted to get rid of those subsidies. Keep at it. Don't forget about you voted once, but you need to keep
Jenny Beth Martin (50:44):
Going.
Myron Ebell (50:44):
Keep going.
Jenny Beth Martin (50:45):
Even if it takes a couple of years till it happens.
Myron Ebell (50:47):
Yeah. Perseverance is what makes political change happen. It's not giving up. We can't give up on this. We have to say these subsidies have to go. And with the kind of leadership that we have on this, and the fact that the whole Republican conference has gone along with it in the house and quite a few in the Senate, I think we have a good chance of changing the direction of the country.
Jenny Beth Martin (51:11):
Well, that should give people hope. And it is tough because we just have to keep going and going and going, and we just want to win and be done with it and be able to go live our lives. That's right. But we can't, the way to be able to live our lives is to stay on the activism and never give up.
Myron Ebell (51:28):
You're right. Jenny Beth, and you're one of the great leaders.
Jenny Beth Martin (51:31):
Well, thank you so much. And Myron, thank you so much for being with us today.
Myron Ebell (51:35):
Thanks for having me.
Jenny Beth Martin (51:36):
That was Myron Ebell and he's a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute. I'm Jenny Beth Martin, and this is the Jenny Beth Show.
Narrator (51:44):
The Jenny Beth Show is hosted by Jenny Beth Martin, produced by Kevin Mohan and directed by Luke Livingston. The Jenny Beth Show is a production of Tea Party Patriots action. For more information, visit tea party patriots.org.
Jenny Beth Martin (52:04):
If you like this episode, let me know by hitting the light button or leaving a comment or a five star review. And if you want to be the first to know, every time we drop a new episode, be sure to subscribe and turn on notifications for whichever platform you're listening on. If you do these simple things, it will help the podcast grow, and I'd really appreciate it. Thank you so much.