Economic Sense of Wind and Solar
How in the world do you make “Economic Sense of Wind and Solar”? Is the question for the day? We have been told for years that wind and solar energy are cheaper and should replace all traditional power sources. Even Elon has been recently saying that all power comes from the Sun.
You won’t want to miss this podcast featuring Irina Slav, David Blackmon, Tammy Nemeth, and Stu Turley as we explore the global market for wind and solar.
There were some critical points that came out of today’s broadcast. One of those was the segment on President Trump discussing wind farms, which he claimed only last 8 years rather than the 25 to 30 years people advertise, and his views on wind farms in front of world leaders.
Highlights of the Podcast
00:01 – Opening Commentary and Global Conditions
02:00 – Trump’s Critique of Wind Power & European Response
07:00 – Subsidies: The Foundation of Wind and Solar
10:13 – The Problem with Repeating Truths About Energy
11:25 – Subsidy Withdrawal and Its Economic Impact
16:20 – Wind Farm Lifespan Myth
18:09 – China’s Strategic Energy Role & Kill Switch Fears
20:21 – European Policy Blindness & IMF Bailout Fears
24:26 – Trade Agreements, Emissions Barriers, and Sovereignty
29:15 – California as a Regulatory Backdoor
32:45 – Joint EU-China press statement on climate
34:42 – ICJ Advisory Opinion on Climate Change
37:53 – Zeldin, Trump, Prepare Assault on EPA Endangerment Finding
41:00 – Energy Absurdity: Buttigieg’s EV Charger Folly Collides With Reality
44:49 – End bets on energy transition profits to match oil and gas by 2035
47:47 – Qatar threatened to cut EU LNG supplies over sustainability law, letter shows
53:06 – US Green Project Cancelations Hit $22 billion in First Half
54:53 – As the EU and U.S. Reach Historic Agreement, Oil Prices Climb
58:28 – Wind Turbine Lifespan: A U.S.-Only Problem?
01:00:18 – Closing Remarks
Economic Sense of Wind and Solar
Video Transcription edited for grammar. We disavow any errors unless they make us look better or smarter.
David Blackmon [00:00:11] Good morning, everybody. Welcome to the Energy Realities Podcast. The gang of four is all here today and we’re ready to go talking about the economic sense of wind and solar. Boy, this is going to be a lot of fun, isn’t it? Tammy Nemeth is in Canada today?
Tammy Nemeth [00:00:30] U.K. Today.
David Blackmon [00:00:31] U.k. Today, back in the U. K. How are things in Keir Starmer’s domain?
Tammy Nemeth [00:00:38] Don’t ask me that question if I answer I might get flagged by the new social media police
Tammy Nemeth [00:00:47] I’ll just say, yeah, the weather’s… I’ll stick to weather, since it’s not climate. But it’s a nice day. It’s not too hot, not too cold. Just the way I like it.
David Blackmon [00:00:58] As it tends to be in the UK in the month of July, yeah. So it’s, it’s always, I mean, goodness gracious, compared to what Irina Slav is going through in Bulgaria right now, the deadly heat wave that has struck her country yet again in the heat of summer, how are you doing? Are you surviving?
Irina Slav [00:01:19] I am surviving, yeah. I’m holding on. The problem is that there are wildfires here and there, and there are not enough people and machinery to put them out. But you know what? Some of these fires are being set on purpose. Isn’t that shocking?
David Blackmon [00:01:39] No, I mean, sounds like you’re living in California.
Irina Slav [00:01:43] Yeah,.
Tammy Nemeth [00:01:44] Or Canada for that matter.
Irina Slav [00:01:48] We’ll survive. Amazingly, we will survive.
David Blackmon [00:01:52] Well, good. I’m glad to know it because we want you back next week. Okay. Uh, Stu Turley, our dear leader is in his bunker, his fabulous palatial bunker in Oklahoma today. How are you doing?
Stuart Turley [00:02:07] I’m doing fantastic. I am sore. My backhoe got a good workout and also got my cement mixer out there. So, uh, absolutely had a blast.
David Blackmon [00:02:18] Stu spent the weekend building the culvert that will flood his neighbor the next time it rains. So he’s a very vindictive guy in the neighborhood here. Just kidding, that was a joke. So here we are today talking about the economic sense of wind and solar. And we in the United States woke up to a diatribe from our president, Donald J. Trump. About- The huge scam that is the wind industry. And, uh, so, you know, it, it put a, put a big note of joy in my heart to hear all that, because it’s things I’ve been writing about for about 10 years now. Um, but it was, it was just really fun. What did you think Tammy about, um, the frozen face of Ursula von der Leyen while Trump was going through.
Tammy Nemeth [00:03:12] On one hand I felt kind of sorry for her because the previous bit there was this, you know, yay we signed this agreement finally the whole tariff uncertainty is done and then he just starts going and when it pans to her face afterwards she’s just got this like sick stony look and um but you know the the thing with with everything that he said he wasn’t wrong. And as you said, this is something we’ve been talking about for a long time, because he said, and he was so right, that wind doesn’t exist except for subsidies. If you didn’t have the subsidies, it wouldn’t be there. And then I loved how he mentioned Germany and Ursula von der Leyen was part of Angela Merkel’s government when they embarked upon the Energiewende. And so it’s the energy transition in Germany. So, you know, for her to have to sit there and take it, I mean, that must have been very difficult for her. And of course, the Europeans today are all angry about it and everything when you look at some of the European press. But, you, know, the thing is, now it’s in a situation. At another conference, he was talking about how China is doing everything, but they’re really doubling down on coal, they’re doubling down, on natural gas. There but his big focus was if we’re gonna do AI and everybody’s talking about how AI is going to fix all these things and do all this stuff it’s going to need like twice as much maybe three times as much energy as the current grid has and it’s like okay well how do you get that China’s already been planning ahead because they’ve got the coal they’ve the reliable power, they have the reliable grid. And I think this is, if you’re looking at it from a geopolitical perspective and great power competition, China is well ahead. And, you know, Trump has been talking about in other contexts, how they’re changing the regulations, how they are going to make it a little bit easier to get approvals that can’t be just litigated to death or whatever, in order to slow walk until investors just pull out. So there’s some potential there for America to catch up. I don’t know if Europe can catch up, maybe Germany’s kind of thinking about it now that they’re exploring natural gas exploration with Holland offshore, which is crazy, but they’ve been talking about a couple of years ago, even six months ago. What’s interesting is that when we talk about the economic sense of it Trump highlighted there is no economic sense It’s all you know, politically motivated or whatever But then you know if you look at some really great writers, I talked to david turber last week on my podcast Where he talked about the hidden costs of renewables and it’s insane. It’s absolutely he’s looking at it from the uk perspective And then if you Look at what the uk’s announcing and irena had a great piece on the bank of england today And they’re just like oblivious to this whole idea that they like, you know, fingers in the ears going la la la, because it’s like, no Trump, we’re not gonna listen to you. Wind is the best thing ever. Solar’s great. Batteries are gonna take it. We’re gonna have interconnectors. What the other countries are going to produce on those interconnections, who cares, you know, we’re just going to double down on all this kind of stuff. So I don’t know, I hope it was a bit of a wake up call. Unfortunately, I think a lot of European leaders, when whenever Trump talks, it’s kind of like in America, they just do the opposite. So it’ll be interesting to see what happens going forward.
David Blackmon [00:06:59] Irina, Warren Buffett, who’s worth about $200 billion at last count, famously once said that there’s absolutely no reason to build a wind farm unless it’s to take advantage of the subsidies. That’s the only reason why any of them ever get built. Was he wrong?
Irina Slav [00:07:19] Of course not, he’s a smart man and he’s an honest man. Nobody paid much attention when he said that but he was absolutely right and now we’re seeing this. But first I would like to ask Tami, please don’t waste your sympathy on Ursula von der Leyen, please. I had a little bit, I had little bit. No, the closest I’ve come is nearly feeling sorry for her but. I’m sorry, was she visiting the King of Europe? No, but she acted in exactly this way. She could have said something, but you didn’t. And then she goes and closes this deal that includes a commitment for buying, what, how many hundreds of billions of…
David Blackmon [00:08:06] $750 billion in total.
Irina Slav [00:08:07] Yeah, but $150 billion worth of oil gas coal from the United States from the United States, which is physically impossible. And she literally betrayed the whole European Union, which is not the first time it won’t be the last time. So they’re committing to buying all this hydrocarbon energy. While building more wind and solar which by the way they’re falling behind with you know their targets and Germany specifically and not just Germany I wonder why probably because it doesn’t make economic sense and David as you say you’ve been writing about this for a decade now but there was so much noise and so much propaganda that nobody listened but now we’re seeing the inevitable results of this push to build as much wind and solar as possible. And we’re saying that it does not make sense, and Trump has nothing to do with it yet. Trump stopped offshore wind in the US, but in Europe there has been no, you know, no government led attack on wind and solar. Governments still support wind and solar and yet they’re falling behind on their targets because it’s impossible to hit these targets and because the money for subsidies on which these two technologies rely and I’m sorry I’m saying this we’ve been saying this for thousands of on this podcast. Money is not infinite. And this is beginning to, you know, to become so obvious that they can’t hide it anymore. So I think we’ll be blaming climate change for all this.
Tammy Nemeth [00:10:13] But Irina, I’m so glad you pointed out the repetition, because unfortunately, that’s required these days. You have to keep repeating the point until maybe it sinks in. Even if it’s not the policymakers, it could be just the average person who’s like, hey, wait a second, this isn’t, my bill is going up. Don’t tell me it’s going down when it’s up, stop gaslighting me. And I’m grateful that we have this podcast where we can talk about these things and repeat. Because we you know I think a lot of people just throw an idea out there it’s really obvious okay I’ve done my thing here’s the point but unfortunately we do we do need to keep repeating and I’m so grateful for everybody’s voice on this um podcast for for articulating it so well
Irina Slav [00:11:03] It’s like saying that the sun rises from the East, it sets in the West, as if this could be debatable, but apparently facts are debatable now and people will ignore them, they purposely ignore them just to push their vision of reality which does not reflect actual reality.
David Blackmon [00:11:25] Yeah. And the big part of the reality is the national debt of all these countries that are running up their debt immensely with all these subsidies. And Stu, Tammy mentioned your favorite topic, the Bank of England. And when does this all come crashing down? I mean, when does reality come crashing down? It’s crashing down now in the Trump administration in the United States. But when does this reality come pricing. You know, in the UK and the EU.
Stuart Turley [00:11:56] I think sooner than you think, uh, let me go ahead and play that clip that you guys were laughing about. And I, I absolutely just thought this was the absolute ultimate trolling of president Trump. So here we go.
Video Speaker (President Trump) [00:12:14] But we will not allow a windmill to be built in the United States, they’re killing us. They’re killing the beauty of our scenery, our valleys, our beautiful plains. And I’m not talking about airplanes, I’m talking about beautiful plains, beautiful areas in the U.S. And you look up and you see windmills all over the place. It’s a horrible thing. It’s the most expensive form of energy. It’s no good. They’re made in China, almost all of them. When they start to rust and rot in eight years, you can’t really turn them off. You can’t bury them. They won’t let you bury the propellers, you know, the props, because there’s a certain type of fiber that doesn’t go well with the land. That’s what they say. The environmentalists say you can bury them because the fiber doesn’t do well with the land, in other words, if you bury it, it will harm our soil. The whole thing is a con job. It’s very expensive. And in all fairness, Germany tried it, and… Wind doesn’t work. You need subsidy for wind and energy should not need subsidy. With energy you make money. You don’t lose money. But more important than that is it ruins the landscape. It kills the birds. They’re noisy. You know you have a certain place in the Massachusetts area that over the last 20 years had one or two whales wash ashore and over the last short period of time they had 18. Okay, because it’s driving them loco. It’s driving him crazy. Now windmills will not come, it’s not gonna happen in the United States. And it’s very expensive, and I would love to see, I mean today I’m playing the best course I think in the world, Turnberry. Even though I own it, it’s probably the best of course in the word, right? And I look over the horizon and I see nine windmils, it’s like great. At the end of the 18, I said, isn’t that a shame? What a shame. You have the same thing all over, all over Europe in particular, you have windmills all over the place. Some of the countries prohibit it, but people ought to know that these windmils are very destructive. They’re environmentally unsound. Just the exact opposite. Because the environmentalists, they’re not really environmentalists. They’re political hacks. These are people that, they almost want to harm the country. But you look at these beautiful lands.
Stuart Turley [00:14:40] One thing I want to point out. I’ve been talking for a long time and this is very critical. President Trump is the first political leader to say eight years. When farms only last eight years, that number is critical because I’ve been saying it for almost three years. That all the numbers that I can get from the maintenance because they keep them close to their vest. I’ve had to have whistleblowers give me the reports. And it is three years that they start rolling nameplate upgrades on these things. So they get the subsidy money to get a nameplate upgrade. Oh, that gives them a little more time. And that now fudges the numbers in the wind farms. But I’ve been saying eight years is the magic number that it is. And all of a sudden, and when Tammy, you forwarded that note, I was like, Oh, he said eight years. It made my day. Somebody else has got the same number set that I have. I’m like, Holy smokes. That’s critical.
David Blackmon [00:15:51] Yeah, it really is critical, and it just busts the myth that these things have a 25-year life. That’s what the wind industry claims, that their turbines and their blades and their towers have a twenty-five-year-life. Well, that’s obviously false. And now that subsidies are going away, the economics of these projects, they’re gonna have to figure out, somehow devise a business plan that’s sustainable without them.
Stuart Turley [00:16:20] You just nailed it, David, and that is as these subsidies go away, every three years they put in a new nameplate or they consider it an upgrade in order to get those things fixed. Now that that money is going away, you’re going to see more wind farms just abandoned. And as those wind farms are abandoned, there are 79,000 windmills in the United States. Uh, there is zero land reclamation. It is about $89 billion liability for this in the United States alone. It is a horrible project, but let me, David, you bring me it back to the question, um, is Trump stalling on this? I want to give again, Felicity Broadstack, uh, from oil price.com. A great author is, I think she is a very good one, but she Has this point from a UK perspective, is Trump stalling? No, because Doug Burgum pointed out over the last week, a few critical points. And that is there are huge kill switches in the Chinese wind and solar equipment. And I noticed that somebody just put out, they could take out Europe with only controlling three gigawatts because of what we saw on the Iberia plane. So when you sit back and take a look at this, this is absolutely critical as we go through. I also wanna point out, let’s not forget the Chinese spy balloons that I wrote about almost a year, two years ago.
David Blackmon [00:18:09] And then-
Stuart Turley [00:18:11] three, when has China has a kill switch, but could China hack our electric grid and in four words, yes, how soon is my orcas in on it? That has been out there for a long time. This is absolutely nuts. How far all this is gone.
David Blackmon [00:18:33] So, and it’s not just wind. We’ve focused a lot on wind. It’s also solar has a big problem. I’ve got a report here from FDI Consulting, great consulting group that does economic reports like this. They’re talking about the implications of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act on wind and solar. And they find that we conservatively estimate that more than 320 proposed wind and solo projects with a total capacity of over a hundred gigawatts. Would no longer be economically viable under the language in the one big, beautiful bill act that is going to phase out those subsidies over the next five years. And, um, you know, this is, it’s, it, it you know what I mean? It’s just due to the subsidy going away. And I think that’s a serious understatement. And I talked to some folks at FTI the other day, and they I think agree that this is probably an understatements because There’s no way to really factor in. The magnitude of what is going to become a real epidemic of capital flight out of those industries by private equity institutional investors, as they see the economics of these projects begin to collapse due to the phasing out of the subsidies and the inability to access the investment tax credits, I just think it’s just going to be become this kind a Tsunamity. Tsunami that’s going to hit both of those industries in the United States. But there, of course, you know, US is one country. Yes, it’s a big economy and a big piece of the pie, but there’s nothing similar at play in the UK or the EU or Canada or anywhere else in the Western world, right?
Irina Slav [00:20:21] Well, I don’t know, I think… No, no, go ahead.
Tammy Nemeth [00:20:25] No, go Irina.
Irina Slav [00:20:27] I was going to say that these industries busted their own myth because they’ve been telling us that wind and solar and solar is economical and makes market sense even without the subsidies. So why did you start crying about losing the subsidies then? When the one big beautiful bill was passed. Why were you warning that this is going to break the grid? Because you wouldn’t be able to build more solar installations. Why wouldn’t you? You said they’re economical, even without subsidies. So why? Why are you worried about the loss of subsidies?
David Blackmon [00:21:10] Cause it’s going to lose the capital. They won’t have the capital to pay for everything.
Irina Slav [00:21:15] Because they don’t make sense.
David Blackmon [00:21:17] Yes, they don’t make sense. As Warren Buffett said, yes, Tammy, go ahead.
Tammy Nemeth [00:21:21] I would say that the companies that operate currently in the UK and the EU, the EU and the UK aren’t really changing anything, like the David Miliband or Ed Milibands sorry, had the new offers where they do this contracts for difference in the UK and what they’re going to pay as a sort of fixed price for wind, solar. And different kinds of wind. And the solar prices actually declined a little bit, but they’re still getting a fixed price, a subsidy. And then there’s a natural gas subsidy or tax that’s put on everybody’s bill that they have to pay. They call it a green gas levy that people have to play. So, you know, when we look at what’s the economics, what are the costs. Of wind and solar and we often put them together because it’s part of the overall grid and then there’s these different elements that combine in the pricing. For consumers because ultimately it’s the consumers who pay whether they’re the taxpayers where the governments are throwing around all this money like they can just print it off or pull it off a tree or whatever. Ultimately it’s taxpayers who pay and then they’re also paying when it comes to their bill and when you look at say the UK which has the highest industrial pricing in the world, which is crazy, and what is that going to do for de-industrialization? So I think that the EU and the UK are going to continue down the subsidy path as far as they can take it, because they lose face if they say, you know what, I think we’re wrong. I think we’ve been wrong. This whole Green Deal thing that we’ve been pushing for the past five years, maybe we got it wrong. They can’t do it. They cannot admit they’ve been wrong.
Tammy Nemeth [00:23:18] So Trump’s like, yeah, this is dumb and we’re not going to do it. This is expensive and everything. But the European leaders, they can’t do it, they can’t. And so what does that mean? It means that they’re going to continue down the subsidy path until everybody’s broke, until the IMF comes along and says, well, you got to make some choices. And this was an article actually last week in the UK where they’re like, oh, well they’re gonna have to start making. Significant choices now maybe they have to change how they do their national health service maybe they’re going to have to do this other stuff if they want to make sure they’ve got enough money in the bank because the IMF is probably going to to bail out the UK or whatever and the EU where are they going to get all this money from they say they’re gonna do all this defense spending which I thought was hilarious in this trade deal yesterday because Canada is like oh no we’re not going to deal with the America anymore we’re going buy our defense stuff from the EU, the EU yesterday says, we’re going to buy from America.
David Blackmon [00:24:16] Yeah, we’re going to buy it from the U.S.
Tammy Nemeth [00:24:19] So is Canada going to participate in an EU program to buy American stuff? I don’t know. It seems kind of stupid.
Stuart Turley [00:24:26] Wow, I did not have that on my bingo card.
Irina Slav [00:24:30] That is why the EU wants to go to war, because if they don’t distract people from the actual problems, people will see them for who they are, and they must not.
Tammy Nemeth [00:24:47] Great point.
Stuart Turley [00:24:50] Hey David, can I, if you don’t mind, I’d like to play this one video that I did say it’s about a 30 second video from Doug Burgum. Let me pull that up, give me a second. It is critical to realize that as the EU goes through this movement, that as net Zero Policies Equals Deindustrialization And there’s a alignment more with China and the EU and the UK. This is going to be a, a really big problem for them. And I think Doug Burgum really hit it right when he said this. So hang on, bear with me. I’m moving a little slow.
David Blackmon [00:25:43] Come on now, we can’t have dead air.
Tammy Nemeth [00:25:46] That’s okay. John Chavner had a really great comment there where he was talking about the full carbon footprint of
Video Speaker(Doug Burgum) [00:25:50] for intermittent, unreliable, and expensive sources, wind and solar. The other part about that, Maria, and you’ve been so good on this for so long, but most of those components, like for solar, all coming from China, I mean, information coming out a few weeks ago that some of these Chinese solar panels had kill switches inside of them. So this is just like the Huawei thing a few years ago. It’s like we have to have secure supply chains. But for right now, President Trump understands we need reliable, affordable American energy, baseload energy, you know, the
David Blackmon [00:26:23] yes, go ahead, Tammy. Oh
Tammy Nemeth [00:26:25] No, no, no. He’s, he’s absolutely right. We need that that baseload. I just wanted to do a shout out here to the comment from John Chavner where he talks about the full carbon footprint of the manufacturing and disposal of both solar and wind. And Trump said it there where you you know, now the environmentalists are saying don’t bury the turbine blades because of the carbon fibers and what’s that doing to groundwater, maybe or whatever. And so that’s a real issue, which is why in California, for example, the wind turbines just stay there. They don’t actually take them down because it’s like, what are you going to do with them? And, and the same thing with this disposal of solar and The amount of energy required if they actually decide to rip it apart and melt it down or whatever is insane. And where are you going to use solar power to rip apart the solar panels? Whatever. But but Doug Burgum’s comments there about the the kill switches. Well, there’s the the national security risk if you’re not using. Components and parts that you’re making yourself and you’re reliant upon a foreign power, especially when it comes to the technology sphere where you put chips in and stuff, who knows what is actually in there and that’s a legitimate concern and I don’t think the EU and UK are really going to do anything about it.
Stuart Turley [00:27:45] I see a closer relationship with the EU and China and the UK and China in the trading blocks that are forming around the world. One fear that I see out of the EU, and the President Trump’s agreement yesterday is that A, the oil prices are going up today because they think that there’s going to be a lot more traffic and stuff. But B, the net zero energy policies and the carbon taxes and all the fees that are facing the US oil and gas producers, I see as a real problem looming on the horizon for this administration. If they don’t get it fixed now, it’s gonna be a problem.
Tammy Nemeth [00:28:35] Yeah, I want to see the details of this trade agreement because, you know, Trump’s talking about companies are going to be able to export into the EU. There’s all of these emissions accounting rules and regulations in the EU, so, yeah, that’s great. You have these tariffs that whatever you have zero tariffs or whatever, but that’s a non tariff barrier when they’re saying that in order to. To sell your product, you have to comply with all this stuff. And then there’s the labeling regulations. If you’re selling anything that’s like food or whatever. So yeah, I don’t know how that’s going to work in practice. Yeh sounds good on maybe in his announcement, but the devil’s always in the details.
David Blackmon [00:29:15] There is language in the deal apparently that addresses the secondary trade barriers, but I haven’t seen what that language says. So until I see it, I’m concerned. I will say, I know that the administration has been extremely concerned about the whole carbon accounting crap at the EU and how the impact it would have on American companies, uh, selling into that market or doing business in the EU in any way. And and so I You know, I’ll be interested to see what the actual language says.
Stuart Turley [00:29:48] May I ask, Tammy, Tammy the the California debacle that we have going on with Governor Newsom is truly a energy, a human debacle, and it’s also a national security issue. And as it is appears to be the back door to the EU and Canada and the UK’s energy policies, this new methodology of Uh, governor Newsom trying to impose his will on the U S kind of seems like he’s aligning himself with the EU, the UK and Canada. Um, and I think that they’re going to try to squash that, but boy, that’s a real problem.
Tammy Nemeth [00:30:35] You’re right, and it’ll be interesting to see how that plays out, because when Trump was talking at the AI summit last week, he said that one of the biggest obstacles is when you have different states coming up with these rules that impact every other state. And he said it ends up being a race to the bottom of whichever state has put up most roadblocks. Ends up dictating what the rest of the nation has to do and he was talking in particular about the the automobile emission rules that are you know the California emission standard or whatever that ended up being what everybody had to use and I guess the EPA is now saying no we’re not going use that standard anymore. And I don’t really know how automobile manufacturers, you know, they would have to have two production lines. I don’t know how that works. So, yes, I think that it’ll be challenged in court, but what happens in the meantime? If they implement this thing and it goes to court, does that mean companies still have to comply until an outcome has been reached, which can take years, as we know, in the American system? Or are they allowed to just be nor operate normally without complying with all these emissions accounting rules and stuff? I don’t know, but California has been in alignment with the EU and the UK and what Canada is doing. They have an emission trading system with Quebec for a long time. So I don’t t know how that gets undone in six months or four years. It’s been building for some time now.
David Blackmon [00:32:17] Yeah, it’s hard to see.
Tammy Nemeth [00:32:19] That’s a good point.
David Blackmon [00:32:22] All right, I’m exhausted on this topic. I have no questions left. Maybe we should go to, does anyone have anything else to add before we move to articles? We’ve beaten that horse. All right, Stu. Okay. Tammy’s first.
Tammy Nemeth [00:32:39] Okay, so this is actually a great segue to what Stu was saying about China. This past week, the EU and China had a meeting about climate, and they issued a joint statement about how they’re going to cooperate on everything climate, how they are going to uphold the central role of the Paris Agreement and the IPCC, how are they all going to support Brazil, how they’re going to work towards. All economic sectors reducing their greenhouse gasses in alignment with the long-term temperature goal, the Paris Agreement and so on. And I think this was the biggest point and it was put at the bottom and I’m just gonna read it out here. The joint statement says, they’re going to be enhancing bilateral cooperation in such areas as energy transition, adaptation, methane emissions management and control. Carbon markets and green and low carbon technologies to drive their respective green and low carbon transition processes together. So I know that the big thing that they’re talking about coming up at COP 30 in Brazil is this whole carbon market thing and how they want to set up this voluntary carbon market where companies can trade their emissions numbers and what they’re saving and invest in these other different things in order to bring there. Their emissions score down and there was a whole bunch of banks and deals made this past week actually that are establishing these carbon markets and I’m not going to say which banks because I can’t remember precisely I don’t want to get it wrong but if you go to ESG today which is this aggregate news source for all these different sort of things they listed all the different deals that were made and then this links to the second article there. And this is a great substack, Jessica Weinkel, who her substack is called Conflicted. And she wrote this really great piece about the International Court of Justice and their advisory opinion on climate change. Now the environmentalists in Canada were celebrating, there I don’t know, there was like five articles last week about how amazing this is, ha ha Carney, you’re not going to be able to get any projects done because this proves, this sets the precedent that you can’t build any more fossil fuel infrastructure, no more fossil-fuel projects and other countries can sue you for the emissions that you’ve had in the past. So I… Highly recommend reading, taking a look at this substack just for an analysis about where the heck did they come up with this 1.5 degrees Celsius target when the Paris agreement supposedly was two degrees and then they decided well you know we’re going to be under two and then suddenly 1. 5 becomes the number so she yeah she goes into this great thing they talked about some opinions of different justices. There was of course a justice from China who said that, you know, you can’t stop developing countries from using fossil fuels because it would be inhumane. So other countries have to pay to help them reduce their emissions or something. Um, so yeah, really interesting development. Uh, it’s, I would love to hear Trump’s take on what this ruling is, but I know in the United States, um, they will just say, yeah, it doesn’t apply to us since I think they pulled out of, uh, of the ICJ, but Canada, unfortunately follows all this stuff and our justices are not national and they would rather absorb an international ruling than have a national policy in Canada.
David Blackmon [00:36:35] I guess my question about that whole deal is if the target temperature is so easily malleable, if you can just willy-nilly change it here and there depending on, you know, what’s convenient at the time, then do we really have a climate emergency we’re trying to cure? I mean, doesn’t that effectively negate any claim that there’s an emergency going on? Seems to me it does.
Tammy Nemeth [00:36:58] Well, the thing with the emergency declaration is that when is it ever over? So they make they make an emergency declaration. We’re in a climate emergency. OK, well, when’s it over? What what points do you have to reach in order to say it’s over? And they’re like, well you have to stop warming by one point five degrees. It’s like, OK, well, what would happen at the end of an ice age? And things are warming up. I don’t think that, you know, the ice age people were like, no, no. Stop burning. Stop having a fire because everything’s warming up
David Blackmon [00:37:29] You’re obligated to freeze the death in order to stop global warming.
Tammy Nemeth [00:37:35] Anyway, that’s my stuff. You can find me on Substack at TheNemethReport.substack.com. And…
Stuart Turley [00:37:45] Great information, Tammy.
David Blackmon [00:37:49] Oh, it’s me. Okay. Um, so the first one on the left there is Zeldin and Trump preparing assault on EPA’s endangerment finding. This is really the biggest policy initiative related to energy and climate that we’ll see in the Trump administration because the endangerment finding that has enabled EPA to regulate carbon dioxide, plant food, the fundamental building block for all life on planet Earth as a, quote, pollutant, unquote. Has been the foundation for every climate-related regulation, heavy regulation, in both the Obama and Biden administrations now for, what is it, 16 years since that endangerment finding was made by the EPA. And it was based on a 2007 court decision in the case called Massachusetts v. EPA, a decision, 5-4 decision reached by the Supreme Court. Um, in which it, it gave the EPA the right to study whether or not to regulate carbon dioxide and other quote, greenhouse gasses as pollutants. Those other greenhouse gasses include methane and wait for it, water vapor. So technically the EPA could be regulating water vapor as a pollutant if it had gotten that far yet. Here’s the thing about that court decision. When it was issued, the Chevron deference was in effect, which was the legal doctrine that required the courts to defer to the judgment of these self-inflating bureaucrats and all the bureaucracies of the federal government in their interpretation of laws like the Clean Air Act. And so that deference, was repealed last year in the Loper Brite. The Raimondo decision by the Supreme Court. It no longer exists. The courts are no longer required to defer to the judgment of these regulatory bureaucracies. And so that sets the stage for the rescission of this idiotic doctrine that will, after that’s done, result in the complete repeal of the entire Obama-Biden climate agenda. So this is the kicker right here. This is the key point, you know, they’re going to go after it and it will be litigated for several years in the courts, but ultimately you’re gonna get to a 6-3 Supreme Court with no Chevron deference and the Supreme Court’s gonna say, sorry, folks, this was never legitimate to begin with. And so this is a big deal. You know, the media is hysterically. Quoting the NRDC and the climate guardians and all these left-wingers who just really want communism. But the reality is this is most likely going to happen, and the left-wingers are going to have to figure out a different way to force the United States to adopt a communist government at the end of the day. The second one is Uh, just an update on just how awful a transportation secretary, Pete Buttigieg really was. We will all remember that he famously was given a $7.5 billion pot of money in the IRA, no, it was in the infrastructure bill of 2021, $7 point $5 billion for, uh, the transportation department to build, uh strategically located. Uh, thousands, supposedly 8,000 charging station across the United States by the end of the first Biden term that didn’t become a second term, blessedly, um, he got 400 built, most of them are not, not working and vast majority have been located in parts of cities where no one owns an EV to begin with under the whole DEI climate justice mindset that dominates the democratic party. So, I mean, he built 400 stations. You know, Tesla can roll that many out and install them at Bucky’s stations around the country in a week. It took him three and a half years to do 400. So that’s how bad Pete Buttigieg really was. And I guess that’ll be the end of that particular story because the current transportation secretary has clawed back whatever’s left of that $7.5 billion. So none of that crap is gonna continue now.
Tammy Nemeth [00:42:28] It’s insane how much money was spent on this.
David Blackmon [00:42:30] It’s just unbelievable.
Tammy Nemeth [00:42:32] And this is wasting a lot of money.
David Blackmon [00:42:34] Yeah. Yeah.
Tammy Nemeth [00:42:36] I’d like to know where that money went. You can’t tell me it cost that much to build them.
David Blackmon [00:42:41] No, it doesn’t. A lot of it went to, it was like the USAID budget. Okay, where we saw all these billions of dollars going to these NGOs that have just been created for the specific purpose of grifting off the government budget. And a lot of, it went there. And then, you know, a lot of it, went to the climate justice NGOs. And, you know, at the end of the day, what really needs to happen in the United States is to make NGOs illegal. We need to completely rescind or repeal section 501 of the IRS code, so that these NGOs simply cannot exist. Because all they are is left-wing grifting operations fed by the federal government. And it’s why we’re seeing, for example, media platforms, left-wings media platforms like BuzzFeed and Media Matters and these. Media operations that also were set up as 501 C3s and C4s now going out of business all of a sudden because the USA budget no longer exists. And so it’s just a really one of the most enormous griffs ever set up by anyone in our country. And, you know, this was all part of that general scheme. So anyway, it’s over. Pete Buttigieg is no longer. In office of any kind, although he’s probably going to seek the presidency in 2028 and we’ll see if the Democrats are willing to nominate. Yeah.
Tammy Nemeth [00:44:12] Yeah, good luck.
Stuart Turley [00:44:14] You can’t buy that kind of entertainment unless you go to the energy realities of davidblackmon.substack.com
David Blackmon [00:44:23] Yeah. Energy transition, absurdities, blackman.substack.com. Oh, DavidBlackmon dot substack.com and uh, you know, new content every day. Some of it’s great. Some of, it is not so good, but you know what can I say? We try to have a good time.
Irina Slav [00:44:45] Alright two really funny stories. First, Eni bets on energy transition profits to match oil and gas by 2035. Do you know how they’re going to do it? With two subsidiaries which they call satellite companies. You know what these companies do? One deals in biofuels but also it deals with fuel retail, fuel as in diesel and petrol. And the other one. Deals in wind and solar and you know electricity but it also deals in gas distribution and electricity distribution so what Eni did was because it’s business and by the way the F.T. Is spelling this out they’re being being truthful about it so when Eni started doing winds and solar, oh, and EV charging as well. It wasn’t doing very well this business, so they decided to combine it with some of their hydrocarbons business because it was making money. And now after they combined it, these two are making money and they even sold a couple of steaks in each of the two companies, one to KKR and the other, I forgot which private equity giant it was, for billions of dollars because they are now making money, Why are they making money? Because of the hydrocarbons business and they’re saying it Cloud you this county is saying with a straight face that they’re going to match profit from that oil and gas business. It is your oil and gas business! By 2035! It is still your oil and gas businesses but you combined it with wind and solar so you can you know you can make it easier to pull out of them. I see that it’s really really comical. It kind of felt like clapping at what Eni is doing. Well in the meantime Eni it just signed some. 30-Year deal for Algeria, I think. They’re doing deals in Egypt. They are pursuing oil and gas. I mean, the man, the skeleton, knows what he’s doing. He’s been in the oil and gas industry for many, many, many years. But apparently he also knows how to spin it.
David Blackmon [00:47:14] So have we had a true change in direction at the FT, telling the truth about these things all of a sudden? After all these years,
Tammy Nemeth [00:47:23] That’s why the headline says betting on the transition profit.
David Blackmon [00:47:27] Right.
Tammy Nemeth [00:47:28] You know.
Irina Slav [00:47:30] Just say the truth in the middle of the story, but you know, hoping that nobody will notice because it’s the wind, solar and EV charges that are driving the profits. Yeah. Yeah. And the other one is even more hilarious. I love this. Qatar threatened to cut EU energy supplies over sustainability law letter shows. Now, first of all, the energy minister of Qatar said it openly in December last year. Yeah, if you’re going to pursue this, you know, I call it the bra size directive because it’s called CDDD, the corporate due diligence directive. And basically, they want to make sure that all all foreign companies over certain size, doing business in the European Union should make sure that. Their supply chains do not involve slave labor, environmental damage, you know, human rights violation, and that all of these companies have a net zero planning place. Yeah. Obviously, Qatar Energy is not interested in net zero plans. So in December, the guy said, the gentleman, sorry, said if you’re going to do this we’re not going to tell you LNG because if you do not comply with this directive, they could fine you with some up to five percents of your global turnover. Apparently once was kind of enough but not entirely because, what do you know, this year the European Union rushed to amend this directive simplifying its requirements and making it easier to report and do all the compliance stuff but Qatar is still not happy so they had to write a letter to the Belgian government for some reason in May to spell it out. We are still not going to sell you LNG if you pursue this directive and the energy minister even included a sort of post script saying you have to remove the net zero plan requirement. Or you’re not getting any Qatar LNG.
Stuart Turley [00:49:54] Wow that’s huge that is absolutely huge because if they give up and give into guitar and i think that they should they’re going to have to give into the US.
Irina Slav [00:50:09] Exactly, which is going to wreak havoc on the argument for overall, for diversification. We do not want to be reliant on a single supply, really. You either get reliant on a single supplier, which is Trump’s America, or you’re spitting in your own face, as we say down here. And you remove a net zero plan requirement to keep getting Katari LNG. It’s really nice. It’s fun.
Tammy Nemeth [00:50:40] I love this statement they made, and this is really true because the whole point of the Paris Agreement, which is not enforceable supposedly by international law or whatever, it’s that every country has a right to set their own national contributions towards the Paris agreement goals. But by forcing companies and countries to have, especially when it’s a state energy company like in Qatar. It’s basically forcing another country to have the same nationally determined contribution as the country that they’re exporting to. And that’s really an infringement upon national sovereignty. So I think Qatar’s right to push this issue because the EU wants every country that trades with them to do this, to set this net zero transition plan, which is then because it’s in the financial statements. Is now available for litigation, so environmental groups could sue the company for not having met its transition plan targets and can create all kinds of issues in international trade. So I think they’re absolutely right to make that argument.
Irina Slav [00:51:59] And the EU is absolutely insane to try and enforce this, because they’re not in a position of power. They’re in the position of energy beggars.
David Blackmon [00:52:12] Wow. And they’ve imposed that position on themselves.
Tammy Nemeth [00:52:18] Exactly yeah yeah but now they’re trying to yeah and trying to make everybody else be like them too
Stuart Turley [00:52:25] Two fantastic stories, Irina. Great job.
Irina Slav [00:52:28] Really, really funny, yeah.
Stuart Turley [00:52:34] And your substack is phenomenal.
Irina Slav [00:52:36] I’m nice, it’s Irina Slav on Energy, and yeah, I try to post regularly, whether you like it or not, dear readers.
Stuart Turley [00:52:48] I get my Irina fix when I listen to your stories. So I actually like the way you do it. So it’s an outstanding, uh, sub stack. Um, this one we’ve already covered a little bit on, uh wind and solar projects are waking up to the fact, but I want to go ahead and cover this one. U S green projects cancelation hit $22 billion in the first half of this year. This is a very important point. David, you brought up some of this a little bit earlier in the fact that in Secretary Chris Wright’s great report that we had about two weeks ago, we have about, just ballpark, 200 gigawatts of planned projects in the United States. 22 gigawattes of those are nuclear and natural gas. That’s it. And we’re about to have 100 gigawatts retire of coal and or natural gas plants retire as well. So we’ve got a gigantic, the mathen ain’t mathen up as we say in Texas. It ain’t Mathen and we got a hundred fold blackouts coming out of this. But when you take a look at at this is very, very critical because as these projects, David, the folks that you just mentioned, you mentioned that there’s about 100 gigawatts of wind and solar that aren’t mathin’ up as we say, right? Is that what they said from FTI Consulting? Very conservative estimate, yes. Holy smokes, Batman. So you’re gonna see this number hit 100 billion canceling. Very quickly in this. So I think that that is a huge issue. And then we’ve covered a lot on the EU Reach Historic Agreement. That was some excellent trolling by President Trump. I find him very humorous, uh, and I felt almost sorry for, uh Vonderland. She almost, almost felt sorry for her, but.
David Blackmon [00:55:14] There was no reason to feel sorry for him.
Stuart Turley [00:55:16] That was a fleeting moment of like, Oh, Lee smokes. That was some brutal activity that he was doing there. And I didn’t play the part on the open border. He goes, everybody in the EU has got open borders. I don’t have an open border and I’m like, Holy smokes, dude. That was brutal. But anyway, you can find…
David Blackmon [00:55:40] Not everybody. Some countries have protected their borders. I think Bulgaria may be one of them.
David Blackmon [00:55:48] Oh, there it is.
Irina Slav [00:55:50] We’re just not very attractive, but they’re going to send their migrants to us now, Vickies.
David Blackmon [00:55:56] Oh, it’ll be your strength, believe me. Yeah. Yeah.
Stuart Turley [00:56:00] You can find me on energynewsbeat.co as well as theenergynewsbeat.substack.com
David Blackmon [00:56:09] Wonderful stuff, Stu.
Tammy Nemeth [00:56:11] Amazing stuff.
David Blackmon [00:56:13] Guy pounds out content like no one I’ve ever seen.
Tammy Nemeth [00:56:16] Yeah, it’s unreal. I don’t know how you do it.
Stuart Turley [00:56:18] I don’t sleep much and when I do, when I’m, when I’m relaxing, I’m actually, it’s kind of fun. Um, I did about a ton worth of cement work this weekend on this massive project I’ve got out here, but I think on the backhoe or I think when I’m riding a bike or I’m writing stories and I get back and it makes it a lot easier to write, it was kind of weird.
Tammy Nemeth [00:56:42] Yeah, it has, yeah.
Tammy Nemeth [00:56:46] It does help. Yeah, maybe that’s why, you know, when the founders wrote the Declaration of Independence and the American Constitution, so many of them actually worked on the land and they had time to think about these things. I like that. It helps you think.
David Blackmon [00:57:06] So what are we doing this week? What’s gonna be new this week, you know? We have all these slow news weeks, nothing ever happens and it’s hard to imagine what we’ll even be talking about next week.
Tammy Nemeth [00:57:18] I don’t know, I mean…
Irina Slav [00:57:20] I know, we try, Emil, we tried, but we don’t really have the manpower. I live actually along a route that is used by smugglers, refugee smuggler, I’m not sure if they’ve been refugees and police regularly makes, how do you call it? When they set up… Those along the road and stop cars that are suspicious. We do try, but…
David Blackmon [00:57:54] Well, that’s that’s more than the UK does. I mean, it’s like that.
Irina Slav [00:57:57] Oh yeah, we don’t want to open arms because they don’t want to stay here. You know, the only people who want to stay in Bulgaria are the actual refugees running away from war because they are running away from war and they don t care if they’re going to get massive help from the government. They just want to not be in a war zone. Right. Which I respect, obviously, and understand. Most of them go away.
Tammy Nemeth [00:58:28] Sadly, yeah, they all end up in the UK. And France helps them. Thank you. Thank you to France. And Germany. I want to just, before we wrap up, I wanted to say one thing about the wind turbines wearing out after eight years. I think that’s really an American phenomenon, and that’s related to the subsidies, because there’s various wind projects in Canada that have been around for some time where the wind turbines are still going and stuff like that, because the subsidy structure isn’t the same as it is. In the United States and it’s the same thing I think with the solar panels in America where because the subsidies apply to new installations than things that they had just recently installed we have these other ones that are better and then they would take them down and to get the subsidy so I think we have to be a little bit careful when talking about the wind turbines wearing out. I still think it’s probably mostly an American. Thing. I don’t think they do that in the UK.
Stuart Turley [00:59:30] Don’t do that. Excellent point, Tammy. I absolutely love your point. I had to pull teeth in order to get those numbers. And I find it odd that President Trump said that in that meeting. So either he’s reading my podcast or, you know, somebody on his team is reading my material. And I applaud your, your statement, Tammy, 100% that it may be an American phenomenon, But I’m guaranteeing you the numbers won’t be published globally. Yeah. They hide those numbers. So I’m going to put it as a 50% that it might be there. Well, I’ll do bad incentives in our subsidy structure. And the good news is that’s all going to be going away.
Tammy Nemeth [01:00:18] Yeah and I think it also depends on the manufacturer and stuff because Siemens-Gamza was running into trouble with some of their bigger turbines where they were wearing out much quicker which is why their profits had dropped substantially because they were stuck doing all these sort of maintenance things for the larger turbines. So again it depends on manufacturer, depends on subsidy structure, how are companies trying to game the system.
Irina Slav [01:00:43] But they are trying to game.
Stuart Turley [01:00:44] And I just want to say, I really appreciate all of you and all of our great listeners out there as well, too. But you three cats are some pretty cool cats, so.
Tammy Nemeth [01:00:55] Right back at you.
Irina Slav [01:00:56] Thank you for the comments, everyone.
Tammy Nemeth [01:00:59] Thank you, everybody.
David Blackmon [01:01:00] Thank you everyone. same time.
Tammy Nemeth [01:01:05] Bye.
Irina Slav [01:01:06] Bye
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