Podcast with Mike Umbro, and David Blackmon
This was a fun podcast featuring Mike Umbro of Californians for Energy and Science, along with David Blackmon of the Energy Impacts podcast.
We covered some critical points about the total failure of Gavin Newsom’s war on oil and gas, and you have to ask the real question. Did Gavin Newsom do such a great job on the war that he has driven the oil companies out to the point of a total market collapse?
We cover the new attempt by Governor Newsom to allow drilling in Kern County.
Full Video
Highlights of the Podcast
00:01 – Introduction
02:25 – California’s Policy Failures Under Newsom
03:41 – Drilling Permits and Production Challenges
05:16 – Regulatory Red Tape and Permitting Delays
07:10 – California’s Pipeline Crisis
09:28 – Oil Seeps and Environmental Misconceptions
11:37 – Refinery Closures and National Security Risks
15:38 – Import Dependence and Foreign Control
16:44 – The Best Rock, the Worst Policy
17:36 – Ignoring Science for Political Agendas
19:58 – Political Landscape
22:02 – Shutting Down Productive Oil Fields
24:58 – Hope for Change and Leadership
26:31 – Mike’s Encounter with Governor Doug Burgum
31:18 – The Root of California’s Crisis: Activist Control
33:44 – Reforming the System: IRS and Nonprofit Abuse
35:46 – The Need for Transparency and True Innovation
39:04 – America’s Energy Independence vs. China’s Influence
42:18 – California’s Solar Subsidy Myth
45:10 – Wind and Solar: Hidden Environmental Liabilities – No land reclamation is funded for the 79,000 wind turbines in the U.S.
45:59 – Lithium Battery Hazards and Waste Mismanagement
47:49 – Closing Thoughts and Call to Action
Again, thank you to David Blackmon and Mike Umbro for highlighting this huge energy crisis in California. We have a significant number of visitors to our sites from California, New York, New Jersey, and other states with high taxes and unfavorable energy policies.
If you have not calculated your tax burden yet, please get with your tax professional. Explore the potential savings using the Tax Burden calculator. Michael and I have a blast working on Oil and gas deals.
https://energynewsbeat.co/investinoil/
Full Transcript
California Energy Crisis Brought to you by Gavin Newsom
David Blackmon [00:00:08] Hello, everybody. This is David Blackmon with the Energy Impacts podcast. I’m here with my co-host Stuart Turley, a man about town in Abilene, Texas, I believe today.
Stuart Turley [00:00:20] You bet. How are you today?
David Blackmon [00:00:21] I’m great. Stu has energy news beat and his own sub stack as well. And with us today is Mike Umbro with Californians for Energy and Science. Are you the executive director of that? I forgot.
Mike Umbro [00:00:39] I am. Yeah, I founded it in 2022, so we’re going into our what, third year, fourth year, so yeah.
David Blackmon [00:00:48] Yeah, you’ve got a lot of success too, haven’t you?
Mike Umbro [00:00:52] Yeah, it’s it’s been the market and policy is is needing change screaming for change and people are really joining our group quickly and we’re trying to keep up with that demand to hold events and educate folks. So it’s exciting.
Stuart Turley [00:01:08] Hey, I want to give you a group.
David Blackmon [00:01:11] Uh, what Stu, sorry.
Stuart Turley [00:01:13] I want to give you, uh, your group a shout out by the way, uh George over there that you work with on that and got to interview, uh Steve Hilton and George, Steve Hilton running for governor out there has a plan that man is cool and George, uh your compatriot over there is absolutely phenomenal as well.
Mike Umbro [00:01:33] Yeah, they’re great people. George Harmer, George Harmar, H-A-R-M-E-R. He’s a great person, brother of mine, one of my best friends now. We didn’t know each other before we started Californians for Energy and Science. And then he came to our second meeting and joined the board and he’s with General Production Service, one the largest production service companies in the You know, staying in business, employing 600 plus people. Just a great group over there and he’s a great individual. Yeah.
David Blackmon [00:02:08] That’s fantastic.
Stuart Turley [00:02:09] And I’ll tell you, I love, uh, Steve Hilton, Steve Hilton is a class act and that man needs to be governor instead of the piece of, uh hair, hair gel that is now running California. I just made sure, sorry about that.
Mike Umbro [00:02:25] Yeah, yeah, Steve, he doesn’t hold back. And he has a vision. And he knows that California is the golden state for a reason. This was a land of tremendous opportunity, rich in natural resources. There’s no reason we should have the highest utility rates, the highest gasoline prices other than bad policy. And he’s very, very effective at presenting that case.
David Blackmon [00:02:47] Well, I guess the, the biggest blessing, uh, this year for the state of California is the fact that Gavin Newsom has turned out so he can’t run again, which thank God for that. Not just a blessing for the State, but for the whole country, really. Uh, although now he’s a good problem. I guess he’s going to run for president. So maybe
David Blackmon [00:03:09] But, so, but, but he said, you know, he’s done a couple of things here recently. You talk about the need for change in policy there in California, and it’s obvious a huge need. And wanted to get with you today, in part, to talk about that bill he signed recently that is going to open up drilling permits for a couple thousand wells, actually more than a thousand a year, right? In Kern County alone. But only for the Cali.
Mike Umbro [00:03:41] Only Kern County and up to 2,000 or enough to stabilize in-state production at 25% which We’re dipping below as it is and I think one of the there’s several misconceptions about this bill It’s a good thing. I don’t want to say it’s a bad thing. It’s good thing to unstick 2, 000 permits a year, but when you look back historically in 2013 and 2014 when we were actually starting to increased production for the first time in several years. We had well stimulation treatments, hydraulic fracturing, which Lawrence Berkeley National Lab issued a 2015 study saying this is a whole bunch of good for the state of California and not much negative with our, with our well stimulation treatment. So you had high oil prices. And then on top of that, we were drilling about 3,500 to 4,000 wells a year. So there’s an It’s important to stink. Distinction that people outside the industry or even inside the industry need to understand. Permits are one thing. Drilled wells, drilled and completed wells, are entirely different. And that’s really the metric that we focus on. We need to be drilling and completing 3,500 wells a year minimum to stabilize where we’re at with this production collapse. And so it’s, it’s really, it’ a good thing that, you know, developers like us, we will benefit from that. We are in Kern County. We are not in a health protection zone. We’re in the established oil field. And we’re bringing a new technology, geologic thermal energy.
Mike Umbro [00:05:16] Ability to permit the wells is one thing. The other thing that we need desperately, and I speak a lot to the folks in Washington DC about this, is we need aquifer exemptions and underground injection control applications to be processed. And that allows us to re-inject brackish water back into the reservoir we’ve produced from. Very simple. If we were in Texas, this would take days, maybe a week. In California, we’ve been working on our aquifer exemption in UIC for seven years almost. So just this permit, SB 237, is not enough. Just unlocking that is not enough.
Stuart Turley [00:05:57] Mike, let me throw this ugly baby on your doorstep. Not that you don’t need another ugly baby on your doors step, but the pipeline, the artery, we have two topics that I’m going to bring up the refineries, uh, including the Chevron fire and devastation that just happened. Plus the other refinerys that are closing, but let’s talk about the pipeline first. Okay. The, the pipeline. Uh, is that, uh, almost critical level, uh because the heavy California oil has to be heated and then transported. And if it goes below a certain point, you lose that pipeline and physics matter to a the grid and physics matter to oil transportation in that pipeline. You’re not going to get Kern County oil to the refineries. If that pipeline goes down and I went to Oklahoma state. And I’m having a hard time with my crayon. The math ain’t math and up, even if you got a thousand wells, the amount of oil does not add up to keeping that pipeline open. I’m, I’m a little negative on that number that it’s trying there. Can you give me some insight there?
Mike Umbro [00:07:10] Yeah, speaking of negative, Crimson, the operator, is losing $2 million a month on that pipeline. So they’re losing a massive amount of money every month because these volumes are so low. And this is where the math is not math-ing, where you have sable offshore that can literally unleash 40,000 to 50,000 barrels a day offshore in federal waters near Santa Barbara. And so on the one hand, Sacramento is saying, well, we need to stabilize… The refineries. We need to stabilize the pipeline. We need to give Kern County 2000 permits here, which isn’t enough. But you’ve got this amazing resource, world class resource sitting there and they’re fighting tooth and nail to get that pipeline online to get those three platforms online. And they can produce an increased production faster than any other operator in the state. There’s no other operator that can bring 40 to 50,000 barrels a day on within months and stabilize that because ultimately the pipelines are in Santa Barbara and then that feeds the main artery up and down the state of California. So we need all that production coming online, not to mention the jobs it creates, the economic impact it creates. And I believe we will get it online, but it’s just one of those. Goofy scenarios where you have eighty seven-year-old Jane Fonda running a three million dollar ad campaign to block all of this And and why are we listening to this? It’s it’s just absurd and You know, we need to be listening to the experts the industry experts if we really want to stabilize this situation
Stuart Turley [00:08:53] Before I, before I hog the podcast today, David, and I apologize when you, when you also, I believe I either heard you or some other great Californian mentioned that it is scientifically real science that the oozing of the oil offshore benefits from oil drilling and it has less methane going out. So it actually helps the economy of the ecological to drill it. Did I hear that correctly?
Mike Umbro [00:09:28] 100% correct. Yes, the Chumash were the first to discover oil thousands of years ago in this region by way of oil seeps. And these these oil seepes, according to NOAA, seep more than 5 million gallons a year into the water. And that’s Wow. Orders of magnitude more than what ruptured on that on that beach in in Refugio State Beach back in 2015 when the pipeline had a had a rupture. But Of course, you’re seeing increased seepage as you shut these wells in, the reservoir pressure increases. I think it’s a misnomer to also suggest that these oil reservoirs are depleted. They’re not. They’re recharging. As Sable turned on those first six wells, they got hit with flush production of 6,000 barrels a day on six or seven wells. I mean, just phenomenal. When they just put that one platform back online and that handful of wells back online. And so what would the environmental activists rather have? More tar balls and more seepage coming up on the beaches, as well as more tanker traffic, ruining the marine ecosystem, spewing unabated pollution into the air. Or would you rather have sable offshore producing these reservoirs, creating jobs, reducing the tar seeps? And this is coming out of UC Berkeley, Professor Jamie Rector, who really, you know, is a friend of Californians for Energy and Science. We had him on our California insider panel explaining, you know not only the oil seeps, but the methane emissions from seeps in the LA basin. There’s a tremendous amount of methane seeping into the air, the Brea tar pits, as well as old oil wells that were not abandoned properly. So, again! You want to be producing these with modern technology to reduce that seepage. San Diego, where I’m located, in 2015. I mean, there’s active oil and gas seeps up and down this state because there’s a lot of resource up and down this state.
Stuart Turley [00:11:37] They’ve got one up in D.C. And I believe his name is Znadler. It’s a big oil sleeper up there. We were talking about the, I didn’t pull his finger, I swear. But when we sit back and take a look at some of the things going on, the refinery capacity has the war on oil and gas in California gone so far that it’s a national security risk when we have chevrons. El Segundo and it goes out. It’s 40% of the jet fuel for Southern cow. It it’s all this other stuff When is it coming back online and if but has Gavin Newsom? Absolutely eviscerated other 20% that’s coming offline like Valero saying we’re done. Yeah, it’s gone too far
Mike Umbro [00:12:34] It’s about to get really bad. So El Segundo, what I understand… It’s going to get bad. Is that a technical term? Yeah, it is. We have to explain this to the layperson. So the crisis is here. So I understand what I’ve read. El Segundos Chevron, it was an explosion in the jet fuel portion of the And they’re still able, I think, to make gasoline and diesel. So it will cause an increase. But it goes to speak, the Monterey battery fire, the lithium battery fire that PG&E operates in Montere, that’s gonna be offline through June of 2026. So there’s trade-offs with any kind of energy as we all talk about, but the fact that there was nobody injured at this refinery explosion, and they’re still able to produce some of their product and they are getting it back online as quickly as possible. Speaks to the resiliency of what we’re talking about. You can actually put out a refinery fire. You can’t put out on lithium battery fire. You just let the whole place burn down and then you try to rebuild it. On Benicia and Valero leaving, they’re the sole provider of jet fuel to Travis Air Force Base in Northern California. So now we’re saying, okay, Benicia, you’re gonna go out and now we’ll be importing that jet fuel into Travis Air force base and Phillips 66 accepted their last crude tanker shipment in Torrance at their refinery on September 30th. So that’s the last we convert to an import terminal. So that foreign supply chain risk is real. These communities that are being told, oh, we’re gonna shut down the refineries. Well, what do you get instead? You get a massive tank farm. That ain’t the best thing either. So you just get more chips and unabated pollution because the refiners pay into cap and straight. They obviously feed rail to nowhere with that money. And so it’s a whole scheme that is collapsing.
David Blackmon [00:14:42] And the oil that’s coming in on those tankers is produced in places with much more lax emissions standards than other environmental protections that we have in the United States. And emissions, global emissions, is disastrous. And again, it’s Jane Fonda. We’ll never talk about that. She probably doesn’t know it.
Stuart Turley [00:15:06] And what people don’t understand is Iraq just shipped a tanker to California from their new pipeline and it is on the way. I mean that pipeline in Iraq had been shut down for years and then a Russian crude went to India, and then it went and got turned into gasoline news. Holy smoke.
Mike Umbro [00:15:38] Yeah, it’s this whole issue of not looking at sources and uses. Where does it come from? We’re not tracking emissions from these other places. The indigenous leaders of the Amazon came up to Sacramento pleading for California to stop buying their crude because we import about 50% of all of Ecuador’s oil production and that’s controlled by China.
Stuart Turley [00:15:59] Thing. I was going and where who’s doing the production? China.
Mike Umbro [00:16:05] And who’s heavily invested in Iraq is Russia, China, Iran, those three countries. So is Iraq gonna stop producing because we stopped buying 70 million barrels a year? No, but we should be making those 70 million barrels a years with Sable Offshore, Kern County, Ventura, Santa Maria, Los Angeles Basin. We can easily get those fields back online. We have per acre more more oil reservoir productivity than Saudi Arabia and Iraq. We have great rock here. Everybody talks about this in the industry. We have the best rock and the worst policy.
David Blackmon [00:16:44] Yeah, and the production in Kern County, of course, is coming from, well, I mean, most of it’s the heavy crew that has to be heated to get into the pipeline and, you know, from those kinds of recovery efforts. But there’s also, I think the formation is more of a conventional formation, right? It’s not the shale that’s the source rock for that formation. What is it? I’m sure that’s
Mike Umbro [00:17:09] Shale.
David Blackmon [00:17:12] Excuse me, that declines in taxes. And so, you know, I mean, the resource estimate on that scale are in the billions and billions of barrels, but of course, it’s never really been accessed because of the regulatory environment in California. So people have very little understanding of the magnitude of the resource that’s available.
Mike Umbro [00:17:36] And this is what gives me so much hope with the Energy Dominance Council, Secretary Burgum, Secretary Wright, Secretary Zeldin. Secretary Wright came out of California. He’s now overseeing all of our national laboratories. And I think once they get their arms around the entire national picture, they can zero in and say, hey, let’s highlight this science that came out Lawrence Berkeley National Lab in 2015, said our Well, stimulation treatments use less water than other areas of the country. They reduce the carbon intensity of our barrel of oil. They do not expand the physical footprint of the oil field. So you’re not going to see more expansion in the L.A. Basin and a whole host of other benefits, along with the fact that in 2020 to 2022, Governor Newsom commissioned Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory to then approve well stimulation permits. They approved nearly 100. And then he said, wait a minute. The scientists are not doing what I want them to do. So I’m going to sign an executive courage. They were talking about codifying that in SB 237, and it did not make that piece of legislation, thankfully. But I think Secretary Wright could absolutely do us a huge favor in just calling out the fact that we have two national labs that support well-stimulation in California. Yes, so policy makers need pay attention to the science, that they always seem to verbally, you know, speak to you that they support science. Well, back it up with your actions.
David Blackmon [00:19:13] Wow. … Is apparently a former member of Congress, apparently the favorite to win that election, at least the primary. Did you see…
David Blackmon [00:19:24] Katie Porter, who is, I believe, the female version of Governor Pritzker in Illinois, she’s been viral this morning for a segment she was recording with a CBS reporter yesterday who dared to ask her follow-up.
Mike Umbro [00:19:43] Right.
David Blackmon [00:19:46] It’s going pretty viral today. Is Katie Porter’s, with her energy policies, has she even talked about it first? And if so, would they be any different to the Governor’s?
Mike Umbro [00:19:58] I’m not sure what her energy policies are because I think she just blew herself right out of that race. I think, you know, not being able to have the temperature of all these candidates, good luck dealing with $10 gasoline and rolling blackouts in 2028, which we will have. We will have $10 gasolines and rolling backouts when we host the Olympics. I’m, I’m almost And so whoever’s leading the state of California, for her not to be able to conduct an interview, you know, think about, I think about myself just when I’m going and pitching investors on our project. I mean, you’re asked every question imaginable. You know, what’s the efficiency of your technology? You know? When are you breaking even? How does it work? All, you know? The list goes on and on and one. Imagine saying, well, we’re done here. But then expecting to have the positive result, expecting to get an investor from that kind of a meeting. It’s just, it’s not professional. And it’s typical of some of the Democrats in Sacramento and how they behave. Now, I will say there are Democrats in Sacramento, Henry Stern is one of these Democrats where he said, I’ve seen the light. I’ve see that we need to unleash Kern County and he’s an environmental lawyer. And so I think when, when you have with both sides, but both sides have to have that critical thought and the temperament to have these conversations.
David Blackmon [00:21:33] We’ve all seen old photographs of the Chevron, big Chevron operation in Los Angeles way back in the 40s and 50s, all the hundreds of people standing in that part of the world. There’s got to be other resources besides Kern County in California. I just wonder are those resources all depleted and no longer worth accessing or are they just off limits because of regulatory restrictions?
Mike Umbro [00:22:02] It’s really off limits because of regulatory restrictions. Inglewood oil field is a prime example of this. Prolific oil field, that is being shut down because if you don’t produce more than 15 barrels of oil a day per well, they’re calling that a well that needs to be shut down. It’s a danger to the community. But the amount of air monitoring that’s going on in that field is tremendous. And the public just doesn’t know about this. See you again! Jane Fonda and Governor Newsom together had a press conference in this oil field saying, we need to shut this oilfield down. And what they’ll do is they’ll plug the wells and then they’ll build houses on top of it. And I don’t know about you guys, but I wouldn’t wanna live on top of an oil field just by sheer virtue of the fact that there are natural seeps occurring in this whole area. This is a very active place, tectonically. You have a lot of earthquakes and faults, a massive fault that runs right through the middle of that field. Bye! Professor Rector at UC Berkeley, again, is studying this very topic. As we shut in these oil fields, one, there’s the increased seepage that we see, but two, are you gonna have increased seismic risk? Because as you pressure up those reservoirs, producing those reservoir on a fault block reduces the pressure. So when you don’t produce those, are you going to see more seismic activity? I think it’s a great scientific hypothesis to investigate.
Stuart Turley [00:23:30] Oh, absolutely. And Jed Clement was filmed in California shooting the ground and oil came up out of the ground. I mean, this is a scientific
David Blackmon [00:23:37] back in Tennessee where he shot.
Stuart Turley [00:23:40] But they filmed it in California, dude. Well, that’s true
Mike Umbro [00:23:44] Yeah. Well, Beverly Hills still has a tremendous amount of oil. And sadly, I don’t know that the LA basin ever has an opportunity to really drill and get after it again. But there are operators that are responsibly drilling from centralized pads, obviously we can drill directionally, we can hit a target two, three miles away through subsurface drilling. And hit that target safely, and then produce it back to a central facility that already has an existing footprint. And so those are the types of common sense approaches that I would take of just saying, hey, if the operator’s operating responsibly and supporting the community with tax revenue, why not produce it?
David Blackmon [00:24:31] Well, maybe in future generations, you might be able to get that done, right? Go ahead, Stu. I’m sorry.
Stuart Turley [00:24:36] Oh, no, as we sit here and we take a look at what’s going on, does Steve Hilton have an opportunity if the voting machines are thrown into the bay and, and we have, get rid of mail-in ballots before the election? Or does, does, Steve Hilton, is he out? And I mean, how does this look shaping up?
Mike Umbro [00:24:58] That’s funny, because my wife’s mail and ballot came in the mail yesterday for Prop 50, which is Sacramento’s gerrymandering bill in response to Texas gerrymander bill. So let’s gherymander so that we can save this country from gerry mandering. So I think that will be your indicator, Stu. If it passes. It’s probably not looking good for Steve Hilton. If everybody rejects this bill, I think then that’s your signal that the people of California are waking up. But again, you see a flood of ads and there’s so much, this is what we have to get away from as a country of saying, you know, getting on these two sides, these polar opposites and we do it with energy. And I think that’s what… Um what what secretary bergman wright and zelden are trying to advocate for uh all of the above you know opening up the mining road in alaska yesterday amazing um bringing bringing pipeline infrastructures the you know the ability to permit pipelines amazing so i think that i think the the answer is somewhere in the middle and and the jury’s out on you know can steve win But he posted on X today that he’s up in the polls. I mean, I don’t really follow the polls, but he posted something that showed he was up.
Stuart Turley [00:26:21] Isn’t that great? I sure hope he does. He is one cool cat. I saw a picture of you and Doug Burgum. Did you get the chance to have fun with him?
Mike Umbro [00:26:31] What an amazing man. I got the chance to speak to him. Of course, when you’re in a group setting, they have a lot of people they need to talk to. I had a chance to tell him about our project. I had the chance personally to thank him for canceling. The BLM, Bureau of Land Management, had a memorandum of understanding with CalGEM, our state agency, that gave CalGem primacy on permitting on federal lands. And under Secretary Burgum, that was revoked. So I was able to thank him personally for doing that. And I was able to tell him that, you know, we’re blessed to have him. And I was at an event that was a two-day event for the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library, a $450 million library they’re building in the Badlands, just in the town of Medora, North Dakota. Huge, huge, amazing project. Yeah. And he was there listening to him address. There was a small dinner we were at with maybe just 30 people, but… Listening to him speak about Theodore Roosevelt, and most people don’t know this, Theodore Rozevelt saved the NFL because they had 18 deaths in one year while he was president, and he really pushed for safety measures so that they didn’t shut down the NFL. And so he’s an amazing sportsman. I learned so much about President Roosevelt just listening to these stories about him daring greatly. His conservation. He’s the only president or the only individual with a national park named after him. He is a great conservationist. But not only that, he advocated for developing resources in these areas for the benefit of the people. So it wasn’t just shut it in the ground. It was a very balanced approach to resource development, to ranching, to conservation. The man lost his father, excuse me, he lost his Father at a young age, I believe when he was at Harvard. And then on the same day, his mom and his wife died. And so he went out from the East Coast and that’s how he landed in Medora. Just an amazing story. And then we all are familiar with his, man in the arena speech. And I think it’s just, that’s exactly what I see in Secretary Burgum, Zeldin Wright, President Trump. These men are in the arena trying to benefit all people, not just some people. They’re trying to bring affordable, reliable, abundant energy to all of us. And we all need to join them in that effort. And, and so I was just very blessed to have that experience. My brother Dan Wright, my fraternity brother from Pepperdine, is building an AI company called Armada AI. They’re doing containerized. Solutions on the edge, where you have stranded gas and really remote areas. Really awesome technology. People should check out Armada AI. But he invited me to this event. And I said, Oh, of course. Yeah, I’ll come. Why would I not want to meet Secretary Bergen? But, you know, he I’ve met a lot of politicians lately. And after one meeting with me, he remembered my name that night. I mean, the guy just that personality, just that personal touch. And maybe he looked at my place card on the dinner table. I don’t know. But the fact that he remembered, you know, he meets thousands of people a week. And just his level of care is. Uh, and his level of servant leadership. He doesn’t, he has money. He doesn’t need to be doing this. He said, yeah. And, and, and he obviously just cares. And it’s, it’s great to have that kind of leadership.
Stuart Turley [00:30:17] You know, leadership is incredibly important. I did just interview General Flynn and he is having a, he’s putting together an energy summit in DC. So I’m going to do an intro letter to you and his staff to help get you in there, cause you’re critical for this because the Californians for energy and science is critical from the standpoint that. California is the number one economy in the United States and it is being tubed and has become a national security risk because of hair gel. I mean, Gavin Newsom, I mean it is absolutely a mess. And here’s a comment from a CJA. If we start using Newsom’s hair gel as a fuel, Would that solve California’s fuel crisis? No. Because it would go up like a drone strike on a refinery and it would absolutely combust and be bad. So I don’t know that that would be a good solution. Pretty funny comment, but.
Mike Umbro [00:31:18] Yeah, I do think that President Trump is looking into what’s causing this with the energy emergency declaration and the executive order Signaling and calling out specifically the bad policies in the northeast and the west but the root of this is Newsom is obviously the man in charge, but the route of this Is the sierra club is jane fonda is these activists that control how? The whole apparatus in Sacramento votes. And when we implement a law, you’re seeing this roll into Colorado and New Mexico. So this whole idea that we do need to fix this in California, we can’t just all say, oh, crazy Californians, leave those people alone. They don’t know what they’re voting for. They’re mailing in ballots. Everybody and their brother from Ecuador gets to vote in our elections. Well, I don’t, but we need to clean it up and we need signal that we shouldn’t be giving money to these activist organizations that are largely funded by state actors like Russia, like China. They’re getting dark money from places that you cannot trace and they should not have their tax-exempt status. I’m sorry, but it needs to be revoked and the money spigot needs to turn off. We saw this with Greenpeace in North Dakota getting hit with that six hundred million dollar, you know, fine, settlement, whatever it was but There needs to be a total chilling of the activist community. We don’t have time for this. We need to build affordable, reliable energy while protecting the environment. And again, President Roosevelt taught us we can walk and chew gum at the same time. We can conserve the environment and develop our resources at the time. And that’s what the Energy Dominance Council is doing.
Stuart Turley [00:33:06] I think, um, I, I call the energy dominance council. I actually call Krister, uh, Chris, right. Uh, Lee Zeldin and Doug Burgum, the three horsemen of the energy dominance apocalypse is what I call them. And I truly believe that they are. And I want to give Christopher Messina who wrote the federal budget, uh, the Messina federal budget a shout out. I didn’t recognize his new picture on X when he was. Uh, making that comment, but, uh, we need to follow the Massey at Christopher Massey and his budget. If we did that, we would not have any problems, but.
David Blackmon [00:33:44] All the budget problems would be over if they did that, but you know, you can’t get Congress to agree to anything. I, you know one of the, I was having an email exchange with my editor at the Daily Caller this morning about the fact that, you now, all these executive orders and all these things that Trump administration is doing are great, they’re wonderful, but if the next election goes the wrong way, then it’s all going to get immediately reversed by the incoming Democratic president. So, Congress really needs to act. Not just to memorialize what’s going on in those executive orders into law, but also to address the 501 section of the IRS code, which is what enables all those nonprofits you were just talking about to exist. It needs to be repealed. Section 501 C of the irs code needs to be repeal and put all of those groups completely out of business immediately, because that’s what Doge showed us that that sector of our economy. Is just a big money laundering operation. And a lot of it’s been funded by the taxpayers. It needs to come to.
Stuart Turley [00:34:51] Let me ask this, if the IRS, if President Trump, we bought more gold, we bringing in more gold and then we end the Fed and end the IRS. Does that automatically go away? Because that could be one of the big wins.
David Blackmon [00:35:07] You’ve got to repeal the laws. I mean, you know, those laws would still exist on the books. And as long as these groups like the one Stacey Abrams was trying to get $2 billion out of the energy department for are able to just send in 100 bucks for a filing fee and become a tax-exempt organization that claims it’s going to cut emissions in certain underprivileged communities around the country. Literally, they were about to get two billion dollars of taxpayer money. For an organization that, that didn’t really even exist other than in a hundred dollar filing doc. Yeah. Go ahead. Go ahead
Mike Umbro [00:35:46] Oh, I was going to say, I think if you don’t fully repeal it, I think there also are ways to cap the cap the donations per.
David Blackmon [00:35:53] Yeah, whatever, but it’s not
Mike Umbro [00:35:56] It’s gotta be reform, cap what someone can do. Maybe all of the money they receive has to be from and traceable from the United States. So we don’t have these foreign countries funding the anti-fracking campaigns and all these other campaigns. Yeah, I think there needs to be a whole lot more transparency. And that’s what we do at Californians for Energy and Science. We don’t really, A, we’re mainly self-funded. B, we go on campus and we’re talking to students and see where. We’re not really raising money from big money at all. I think the largest check we’ve ever received is 25,000 bucks. I mean, that’s really not that much money. And so, but we’re fine. We’re gaining momentum through word of mouth, through the, through the teachings that we offer. And that’s the way it should be. It should be grassroots. These nonprofits should not be controlling everything. And thank thank god also that they they pause the inflation reduction act and and i was i was directly impacted by that we had we had a six million dollar award through president biden’s administration awarded under biden we according to the deal we were one of five five that were approved under president trump because there was so much grift in the on those IRA, this is what I am hypothesizing now. I don’t have, no one told me this, but we, I, I wrote our grant, I wrote our budget, I had zero DEI in our grant. I had 0 money allocated to anything other than our project and the labs were partnered with it. It was all for the betterment of the people of the United States. We are trying to bring a new technology, which is what a grant is for this first of a kind technology. And then we’re done. We don’t need money in perpetuity to make these technologies exist, like wind, solar, lithium batteries, and Secretary Wright is very vocal about talking about why our grid is so unstable, and it’s the result of these renewables. And then when you post on that on X, there’s so many pundits that even energy developers in Texas and folks that are now grifting, and they started to grift into that business model. And they’re pissed off because it got yanked out from under them and it rightfully so. I was actually glad when our grant got paused. I said, you know what? They’re going to look at what we did and how we applied and they are going to approve us because we’re making geothermal power and we’re make the lowest carbon oil in the world and it’s never been done before. That is the criteria of what a grant should be to get a technology proven for the first time. And then let it fly with free market economics. And that’s what we’re doing.
David Blackmon [00:38:46] Well, you’re also being transparent about what you do, right? You’re not some dark money group with a secret organization and secret sources of funds coming in. I mean, it’s a whole different kind of thing than what we saw out of the Doge revelations from the USAID budget, for example.
Mike Umbro [00:39:04] Yeah, it was basic. The IRA was set up to be a giveaway to China. Make all these wind turbines, make all these lithium packs, bring it here. And the administration, this is a great signal from Alaska’s big news yesterday. They want mining, they want they want, you know, renewable power, they just want it to be made with US product. They don’t want to make it with China product, which is exactly right. That’s exactly what should happen.
Stuart Turley [00:39:31] The grid problem that we also face is because of the China electronics that are made and I see some huge problems because there are 492 major grid interconnects that were made in China that have been put back into the grid. I cannot confirm that they’ve been pulled out. There, several of them got connected to and can be remotely shut down. So, um, and then we have all of the other technology that China has been putting in into solar farms and wind turbines that they can remotely control and remotely shut down. This is a technological problem. We need to be building our own things. And I love the, uh, the, the uh, ambler road up there that they just did yesterday. And you got that thing rolling. Cuz Alaskans need all the money they can get.
Mike Umbro [00:40:28] Absolutely. Then we need to manufacture those panels and those batteries here, not in China. Furthermore, the Chinese flooded the market with cheap photovoltaics, and I see this on X2. Well, California is deploying all this solar, but so is Nevada and Arizona, and their utility prices aren’t going up, so it can’t be the solar. Wrong. We have too much solar in California, so much so that Californians subsidize Nevada and Arizona because we shed our excess solar photovoltaic power to those states when we need to curtail because our grid is so fragile and unstable as a result of all of these renewables coming online. And this is, again, where energy professionals that are not grifting into this market need to be vocal and explain how this works because I’ve been on X with people about the ERCOT grid and they say, oh, well. We’re turning off our crypto mining when the demand increases, and so that stabilizes the grid. It’s like, well, yeah, but you’re not paying for any of the system upgrades, and who gets any benefit from the coins that you’re making for yourself? Why don’t you just pay peak rates and off-peak rates, and if you can survive that way, you can survived that way? What’s setting up in ERCOT is another Enron, in my opinion. It’s trading phantom megawatts. And in the name of grid stability, but what’s going to happen? It’s going to be those dark winter days where you don’t have a lot of sunlight, you don’t t have the amount of hours to charge the batteries. What’s saving ERCOT right now is the all-of-the-above energy strategy. You allow natural gas. Texas has a duck curve now, just like California, and so at a certain point, that reality will hit.
David Blackmon [00:42:18] But it’s, it’s no accident. People don’t understand that the California system and the Texas system are both Ken Lay, Enron systems. The basics of both of those systems were designed by Enron, lobby by Enrun, Ken Lay was one of George W. Bush’s best friend. George W Bush was the governor who signed the bills to remodel the Texas system on the Enron model. So these outcomes. We’re just five, 10 years behind California and all the stupidity, right? The only biggest difference is it’s all been done by Democrats in California. It’s all done by Republicans in Texas, but it’s the saints.
Mike Umbro [00:43:01] It is. It is, that’s well said, absolutely.
Stuart Turley [00:43:04] Yeah, that’s why he gets paid the medium bucks.
Mike Umbro [00:43:08] Well, I think it again kind of goes back to that conversation around we need to be talking about all of this and not just forget California or we’re Texas and we’re great. So we don’t need to worry everybody should just adopt our model. And I don’t think I think that’s where the Energy Dominance Council again is signaling. We need all sources, we need domestic sources. We we need to stabilize the grid, we need to build more generation, you need to more power generation. It’s not enough just to turn off computers. You have to turn on turbines to stabilize the grid.
Stuart Turley [00:43:43] May I make a comment to that? We do not need, I used to say we need all energy forms. Doing the math again, my OSU math and my fingers, I ran out of fingers. We cannot add any more wind turbines or solar farms because there is zero land reclamation for those things and they don’t last three years. They don’t eight years. Eight years is when they become fiscally totally irrelevant and a collapse three years they start doing the nameplate and then they use the inflation reduction act to say we’re doing an upgrade when that machine needs to be done in three years eight years they go to their rate payers and start going hey we got a rate it’s an eight year total collapse on a wind farm. Guess what? We have seventy nine thousand when. Turbines in the United States. I want to throw a question out. How many have land reclamation? Zero, $89 billion to barely scrape the surface on these things is a liability just on the wind farm, not including what we’re doing to the, the horrific problems of the solar panels that we ship to other countries and then they throw in the ocean, this is terrible.
Mike Umbro [00:45:10] You got to own it cradle to grave, just like oil and gas operators. You own that well, cradle to the grave until you abandon it. And you might have to go back and re abandon it, but there are also stories. You don’t see this talked about in the mainstream media, but landfills in California that are having fires because the lithium, even small lithium batteries get tossed in the landfill. You can’t put those out. And so these are major, these, these. Waste products need to go to special waste-handling facilities to be treated with. None of that makes it into the levelized cost of electricity that Lazard puts out. Again, Secretary Wright called that one out in an interview. He’s not beholden to the investment banks that are trying to these schemes. It’s amazing to see.
Stuart Turley [00:45:56] Well, Mike, how do people reach out to you?
Mike Umbro [00:45:59] We’re on LinkedIn. I got to get cranking more on other social medias for California’s for energy and science, but we’re picking up. We’re about to cross 3000 followers on LinkedIn, we’re getting yeah, a lot of followers in other states, New York, in other areas like Washington DC. And so the more that we publish content like this with you, hopefully you snip out some short ones for us to post and we’ll get those on there. That’ll help all of us. And then www.energyandscience.com I couldn’t believe the URL was available when I picked it up, but energyandscience.com is ours, and I’ll be in the coming months, weeks, I’ll at Geothermal Rising in a couple weeks, I’ll Be at Harvard in a few weeks, at Berkeley in a week, back in Washington DC in December, so we’re just one trip at a time, one conversation at a you know, follow us and… We don’t spam, you can sign up on our website. I send maybe like an email every other month. So you’re not gonna just get spammed with our content either.
David Blackmon [00:47:08] Um, David, how do people find you? Well, they don’t find me at Harvard and Berkeley. I can tell you. You can find me at Blackmon.substack.com. Everything I write or record like this ends up being reproduced there.
Stuart Turley [00:47:26] And, uh, for me, I I’m Stu Turley, president CEO of the sandstone group. You can find me on energy newsbeat.com and, or the energy news beat.substack.com. And, I’ll tell you what, this has been a lot of fun guys. And I do appreciate you guys. Um, if we can get that general Flynn, uh energy summit rolling and some other trips to DC, we’ll be having some serious fun.
Mike Umbro [00:47:49] Count me in, yeah, for sure. Thanks for continuing to shine a light on California. We really appreciate it. We need it. Well, thank you for doing it with us.
Stuart Turley [00:47:57] We appreciate you and I’ll tell you what Gavin Newsom is such a scoundrel, but he he is doing me a lot of favor favors My website I range between a hundred and two hundred thousand people a day on the site and most of them are in New York or California and they’re all sitting there going we live in a really bad place So taxes if you got taxes, that’s a problem
Mike Umbro [00:48:23] Yeah, and you’re good with very provocative headlines. So, but Doomberg said the same thing, that most of their subscribers are in California. People want answers to this. And same at these college campuses, Berkeley, Harvard, they want to know the truth. We’ve got to go to those places and re-educate these students.
Stuart Turley [00:48:44] It’s amazing. And again, thank you to everybody and appreciate it. And Christopher Messina, I want to give you a shout out and have a great day, guys. We’ll see you all soon.
Mike Umbro [00:48:54] Appreciate it.
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