WTH Is Going On With the War on Fossil Fuels? Dan Yergin on Restoring America's Energy Dominance
What the Hell Is Going On
AEI Podcasts
4.4 • 633 Ratings
🗓️ 6 July 2022
⏱️ 46 minutes
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Summary
Today’s episode with Dan Yergin explores America’s shift away from fossil fuels, looking at the very real domestic and geopolitical implications of shuttering coal plants and transitioning to green energy. Pivoting away from U.S. energy independence has not made the country energy progressive; rather, it has set Americans up for reliance on adversarial energy sources, encouraging strategic allies to import from Russia and China instead. Promoting wind and solar alternatives does not dramatically lower resource usage; it simply shifts from a world of big oil to a world of big shovels, as an enormous quantity of rare earths and minerals are required. Then there’s the fact that the technology to store wind and solar energy does not yet exist. So, how can we think about climate change, resources, geopolitical strategy, and security… practically?
Yergin is the vice-chairman of S&P Global, a director of the Council on Foreign Relations and a trustee of the Brookings Institution. He is a winner of the Pulitzer Prize, for his book The Prize. His newest book is The New Map.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This podcast is brought to you by the American Enterprise Institute. |
| 0:03.0 | If you like what you hear, please subscribe, rate, review, and share. Thanks for listening. Here's our show. What the hell's going on? What the hell is going on? What the hell is going on? I don't know what the hell he's talking about. You don't have to know what the hell is on it. What hell's the matter with these guys? We don't know what's going on. What hell's going on? |
| 0:01.1 | Who in God's name knows what |
| 0:22.4 | it's all about. I'm Daniel Pletka. I'm Artisan. Welcome to our podcast. What the hell is going on? Mark, what the hell is going on? Well, what the hell is going on is we're paying $5 a gallon at the pump. If we're lucky. If you don't live in California, my friends, you are paying $5 at the pump. If you live in California, you're paying closer to seven. Yes, exactly. |
| 0:54.6 | And of course, we all know that it's because of Vladimir Putin. Right, right, because he is the |
| 0:59.6 | source of all evil in the modern world. Except that we had a record high in gas prices in October |
| 1:04.8 | of last year, long before the invasion of Ukraine. So the largest year-over-year increase in gas prices in 30 years hit us in October. |
| 1:14.4 | And, yeah, and energy prices are through the roof. |
| 1:17.1 | We're now going to have blackouts. |
| 1:18.8 | The Washington Post reported that there are going to be blackouts this summer. |
| 1:21.6 | And the reason they say, of course, because of climate change, which we've had podcasts on that, which explain. |
| 1:26.2 | We had Steve Coonin, our fellow |
| 1:28.1 | AI scholar and Obama Science Advisor, who pointed out that there actually are not greater |
| 1:34.9 | heat waves now than there were 100 years ago. So that's not the reason. The reason is, |
| 1:39.6 | is because fossil fuel plants are shutting down early because they have been told by John Kerry at the COP 26 conference |
| 1:46.7 | that the Biden administration's policy is no coal plants working in America in the next eight years, |
| 1:53.4 | which is absolutely insane. And so what that means is if you have a coal plant, you're not going to invest in upgrades. |
| 1:59.2 | And you're not going to invest in upgrades and you're not going to invest in |
| 2:00.9 | that plant. You're going to shut it down early and move on to other things. And as a result, |
| 2:05.0 | we're shutting down coal plants, but we don't have the renewable energy capability to meet the |
| 2:10.5 | increased demand. And as a result, if you live in the Midwest, your air conditioning might not be |
| 2:14.9 | working this summer because of the war on fossil fuels. |
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