EPISODE 291: The Ministry of Green Truth: Mark Mills Exposes America’s $6 Trillion Energy Fantasy

Bill Walton (00:02):

Welcome to the Bill Walton Show. I’m Bill Walton. Well, I’m back today with the man to go to in all things energy and climate. Mark Mills, who is executive director of the National Center for Energy Analytics and author of the Cloud Revolution, and I want to talk to him about the article he wrote recently on the inflation adjusted, what do we call it? Inflation Reduction Act. It’s really the green New Deal, but they had to come up with something and it’s not only will not reduce inflation, it’s the most profoundly inflationary bill of Congress has ever passed. And also all roads lead to a lot of corruption as to where that money’s going. So Mark, great to have you back on and let’s dive into the Inflation Reduction Act and all that portends,

Mark Mills (00:57):

And it’s great to be on the great Bill Walton Show. Thank you. Great. I appreciate coming back. I must not have offended your listeners enough to

Bill Walton (01:06):

No, you’ve always performed way outside our norms way.

Mark Mills (01:13):

I offended more people than your previous guests. That’s good. That’s a high bar. Alright, so the Orwellian Inflation Creation Act, I mean, you got to give Congress credit for Orwellian titles for legislation. Let’s stipulate you said it’s a censor to the Green New Deal. We’re not saying that as an invective, as you know, as soon as it was passed the Democrats and for the people who forgotten this was a bill passed on a reconciliation, which means it could circumvent filibuster and was passed on a total partisan basis, not a single Republican broke ranks broke for not a single Democrat broke ranks and voted against it. So passed by one vote. It was the most expensive piece of legislation in history and I’m looking for someone to tell me that I’m wrong. This is an exception when it was costed out, not by the CBO, but after it was passed, the Nancy Pelosi, you could read it after we passed it.

(02:11):

So analysts read it after it was passed and priced it out and depending on timelines and assumptions, it will cost between 1 trillion and $4 trillion. So World War ii, go ahead. World War II in inflation adjusted terms, and I looked this up as they say was about $4 trillion to prosecute. So we pass a single piece of legislation that will induce spending that’s bigger than any in history. When I say induce spending, it’s direct spending in subsidies, grants mandates all these one to 4 trillion and it will induce utilities, electric utilities in particular to build infrastructure that they will have to build to the mandates, but it’s not funded in the act. It’ll be paid for by rate payers. That additional spending will cost somewhere around two to 3 trillion more dollars in higher electric bills because that’s where the money will come from. They’ll raise electric bills over coming decade.

(03:17):

So all told, we’re talking a bucket of somewhere between three and $6 trillion of prospective spending. How can that not be that money has to print it? They’re not doing anything to fight a war except the war on climate. Right? They’re replacing affordable energy systems. That’s the other point. The Inflation Reduction Act. When you look at its actual components of what it deploys money on, it’s 90% energy. It’s not about climate, it’s not about science, it’s not about climate science. It’s not about funding climate science. It’s about funding people and projects to talk about literally funding people to talk about energy and climate funding groups through the rubric of social justice and equity. Billions of dollars, not millions, not hundreds of thousands, and funding subsidies and grants and mandates for windmills of batteries and EVs per car Subsidy built in the Inflation reduction Act is over $30,000 per car and the automakers are losing something like 30 to a hundred thousand dollars per car making EVs and we’re going

Bill Walton (04:27):

To give even with that subsidy.

Mark Mills (04:29):

Yeah, that’s crazy. The whole thing is it’s the most ill-conceived piece of legislation perhaps in American history. It makes Obamacare look like a sensible piece of legislation.

Bill Walton (04:42):

Well, a couple thoughts. One of the things I had no idea, the unfunded mandate on taxpayers rate payers, electrical users, $3 trillion. They didn’t talk about that. So that’s something else ugly that’s coming down the path. But to me as a investor private equity guide, this seems to me to be like the most massive misallocation of capital. We’re taking trillions of dollars in funding energy sources, which we know are infinitely less good than what we already have with fossil fuels and potentially nuclear. So we’re doing something which stepping back from it is going to be looked at 25, 50 years from now as insane.

Mark Mills (05:28):

Well, you don’t have to wait 25 to 50 years. Okay, well how about two to five years?

Bill Walton (05:33):

All right, good.

Mark Mills (05:34):

I’ve already, the experiment’s been performed in Europe, especially in Germany and the United Kingdom for those who follow European news. I know you do. You look at the massive layoffs and closures of car factories, auto factories in Europe though they’ve subsidized the Green New Deal. They started 10 years before the inflation reduction Act. They started early. They have far more windmills and solar panels and measured in absolute in per capita terms, especially per capita. And what’s happening is they’re de industrializing their electric bills and energy costs have soared not because of Ukraine. They’ve soared because of bad policies and factories are closing, they’re de industrializing. Foreign direct investment is leaving Germany, it’s down 70%. Energy costs are up 300% not spiked because of brief shortages, but absolute levels of electric grid costs have doubled and tripled. They’re creating energy poverty in de industrializing because of this mania to build windmills and solar

Bill Walton (06:37):

Panels. And these were all political choices and LED initially, I guess by Angela Merkel who shut down nuclear. And Germany’s not only not growing, the German economy is

Mark Mills (06:48):

Shrinking. Yes, it’s shrinking now. And so people want to point to Putin, and it is true that the reduction, it’s not gone by the way, the reduction in natural gas dependence in Russia. If Putin turned off the remaining gas that Europe gets, they still get about 15% of their natural gas from Russia lights would go out all over Europe. So let’s be clear, he holds a lever that most people are ignoring, and I guarantee you the German government is not ignoring, it’s not easy to replace the last 15 or 20%. They still get Russian gas, but the reaction to their dependency did cause a price spike. If you look at a European spot, prices for natural gas, they spiked briefly when the readjustments were made, which were largely by the way, buying RLNG, sporting our natural gas in liquified form. But look, the idea that is extent in the inflation reduction Act, which again is about energy, is the myth that’s been promulgated that wind and solar and battery powered cars are inherently better, cheaper. That’s the essence of the myth Set aside, why they want to do this, because they don’t burn hydrocarbons. They don’t burn fossil fuels. We know that. But the myth underlies the push is that we subsidize it, push it. This stuff is inherently better. It’s renewable, it’s inherently cheaper. The sun is free, the wind’s free. That’s the essence of what this thing is anchored in.

Bill Walton (08:19):

I wanted to read this to you from the Chevy Chase. I think you live in Chevy Chase, don’t you?

Mark Mills (08:24):

I do.

Bill Walton (08:25):

Here’s what the leader, your mayor of Chevy Chase writes in their recent newsletter. Irene Lane tells us that has our unusually warm fall and the devastating storms elsewhere in the US Got you Thinking about climate change. We can all take steps to reduce the adverse impact of fossil fuels by going electric. Here’s some of the actions you can take now to make a real difference. I mean

Mark Mills (08:51):

A real difference.

(08:55):

We could set aside opinions about climate change just for a second, because the easy way to demonstrate that this is profoundly silly thing for an otherwise ostensibly smart person to say, I mean profoundly silly, we can make a difference. No, you can’t do bupkis to make a difference. And we know you can’t make a difference because no matter what one thinks about your personal CO2 footprint, what carbon dioxide does in the atmosphere, it doesn’t matter what you think about that. China’s increased coal use every week is wiping out all of the entire United States is savings and carbon dioxide emissions from the inflation reduction act. And worse than that, the stuff we’re buying to build windmills and battery electric cars we buy from China, which they fabricate by burning coal. This is insane. If the United States admitted nothing, everybody rode bicycles in Chevy Chase in the entire country. We went to true zero emissions. The global emissions of carbon dioxide are going to go up.

Bill Walton (10:01):

Well, and I also laugh at our new community out in Hanock County. We had a Christmas parade this weekend and the committee has gone green and they’ve banned plastic spoons and they’ve sort of ignored the fact that what is, there’s a Texas sized island of plastic debris that’s been spewed down the Chinese rivers into the Pacific Ocean. So I mean we’re missing the big picture

Mark Mills (10:25):

Here. And the fact you’re pointing out of course, is actual science. We have satellite measurements and observations to know where the trash is being dumped into the global oceans. And it’s not because people use plastic spoons here, but it’s because of what China’s doing. But again, the underlying trope there, because I’m kind of a data guy, if people want to feel virtuous about not using plastic spoons, but it would be useful to actually have the facts. And when you look at what’s called the total fuel cycle from mind mouth to disposal, plastic has the lowest carbon footprint, lower wood, lower than even, lower than paper products, lower than the steel that everybody, the steel cups you have to use and recycle because you don’t want to use plastic disposables. You’d have to use that steel thing something like a hundred thousand times before it would offset the energy it was used to make it. And therefore the emissions people are believing things which are demonstrably notably and indisputably false. I’m not talking about climate. I’m talking about things that we know a lot about, which is how much energy it takes to make plastic and make steel and aluminum just very silly things that are being thrown around as being a virtue of greening. You’re not greening when you es shoe plastic. You’re doing the inverse.

Bill Walton (11:48):

Well, let’s swing a little bit back to the Inflation reduction Act and where all that money’s going because there was one of the entrepreneurs in the green energy field who was probably getting billions of dollars from the energy department was quoted as saying this is the biggest personal wealth creation opportunity in history. And so we focus on the spending, we talk about the 3 trillion or the 6 trillion or whatever unbelievable number it is, but it goes to people, it goes to companies, goes to people with their handout. And the thing I didn’t quite realize until I started studying it was that the energy department manages this 400 billion loan program, which was run by John Podesta who worked for Clinton and is a deep state political operative if there ever was one. But I kind of kick out of, it’s the same lending department inside Energy that gave us Hold it Lyra. Yeah, Trump killed the agents, just shut it down for a little bit. Biden brought it back and now it’s brought back. It’s morphed into something way beyond.

Mark Mills (13:05):

Yeah, 10 times bigger. So there are two things here. What’s more offensive to me than the loan office, even though that whole idea offends me and it offends me, not because there isn’t a role for government to participate in the loan market. Personally, I’d like the government not to be in the loan business. If it’s a good loan, there’s a lot of private lenders willing to loan money

Bill Walton (13:26):

To.

Mark Mills (13:27):

So if that’s the trope, this is a really valuable thing and we’ll loan them money because it’s important and valuable. I would guarantee you, I’ll just take the bet. There’s far more smart people with deep pockets than there are bureaucrats that are deploying our money to make those guesses and bets and doing the due diligence. I just think, well,

Bill Walton (13:46):

It’s not investible without the subsidies. I mean as my private equity world, you wouldn’t put a dime in it except for the federal subsidies.

Mark Mills (13:54):

But if the subsidies exist and therefore that induces loans, the private market will loan money against the subsidies that they believe they if they’re there. But here’s the bigger problem. I mean, I just don’t think the government should be picking winners and losers that way and they claim that they’re doing it by good due diligence. Some of these people who prosecute the loans are perfectly respectable and honest people. However, we just know for a fact this is not disputable. This is no insult against anybody in DOE today or anywhere. We know for a fact that government is not only full of waste, it’s full of corruption.

Bill Walton (14:27):

And

Mark Mills (14:27):

As you increase the magnitude of money with the attack surface to use a cybersecurity term, the attack surface for corruption explodes. So we have hundreds of billions of dollars being disgorged from federal agencies, not just DOE in the name of climate science energy projects. And it just as a fact, if you look at GAO reports on government waste, fraud and corruption, there’s billions and billions of dollars in what the government believes is true corruption, not just waste. So we’ve expanded the attack surface and worse than that, it’s not just the loans, it’s the grant giving program. I read a great piece in the real clear investigations, the real clear people have a set of channels, one of their operations does old fashioned investigative journalism.

Bill Walton (15:17):

Yeah, they do a good job.

Mark Mills (15:19):

Great job. So Varney wrote a piece two weeks ago, which I commend everybody to read a long piece of investigative journalism looking at just one program and under the Inflation Reduction Act, which is a 27 billion grant giving entity created in the EPA, not to build windmills, not to subsidize or but to give money away to 5 0 1 c threes, c fours, nonprofits to, I don’t know, talk about climate social justice stuff, 27 billion not to build bupkis just to give it away. And let’s just say if I’m Congress, I’d want to hold hearings and ask who got the money? What are they doing with it? So Varney did that. They published who got the money? So he calls the people to get the money and he asks them, so what are you going to do? I mean, one example which blew my mind, this is one example was a nonprofit that with $100 of income, it reported to IRS got its 5 0 1 C3 status and a week or two later it got nearly 1 billion with a B dollar grant from EPA. Well, I mean this is a whiskey tgo foxtrot moment. You call a guy up and say it’s a lot of money, whatcha going to do with it? And they wouldn’t tell the reporter.

Bill Walton (16:36):

No.

Mark Mills (16:37):

I mean, if you’re so proud of educating people about whatever the evils of carbon dioxide are, you should be proud to brag about what you’re going to do with nearly a billion dollars.

Bill Walton (16:47):

Well, we were talking about this before we started up this show was that if Elon Musk wants to start looking for $2 trillion, you have a suggestion about where he can start.

Mark Mills (16:59):

Yeah, it’s three letters. IRA inflation reduction act. I mean it is first trillion of free fine money. There’s no extra work required. Just do a pause and review. I mean, I have no influence over the incoming administration, but I have publicly said, and others have said the same thing. While it may be hard to get the Republican votes to repeal IRA, and by the way because it was passed on reconciliation, it can be repealed on a simple majority, but it will require the House and Senate on a simple majority just repeal it personally, I would say it should just be repealed. But you could pause it and figure out where the money’s going.

Bill Walton (17:39):

Here’s what I worry about. It seems like they’ve been very smart about how they want to distribute this money

(17:46):

And with ethanol, when they created ethanol, it created a constituency for the ethanol in all the Midwestern states that produce corn. And then all of a sudden the normally conservative Republicans in those states all of a sudden love ethanol and you can’t get rid of that subsidy. Well, they’re doing the same thing with the inflation reduction act, my understanding that a big chunk, maybe a majority of the proceeds have gone to red states, and so they’re trying to get those senators and congressmen to think twice about shutting the thing down because they’re bringing the bacon back to their districts.

Mark Mills (18:24):

Well, you’re spot on and your instincts of course, because you are a brilliant political analyst and you’ve been around the swap a long time as I So not only is what you said true, but they are bragging about it. It’s not like you have to go hunting to find these facts. So there are a number of reports from different climate tracking, carbon tracking organizations. So you could find them in Google and just look up, you could ask Google the question because they use an AI engine to give you an answer, which is pretty good, is where is the Inflation Reduction Act or which states are getting inflation reduction act money, all of them. So it’s like the military base back in the day, the money is marbled through every state and more than half of it’s going to red states, more than half, maybe as much as 60% of the money. Yeah,

Bill Walton (19:14):

That’s what I,

Mark Mills (19:14):

Because if you want to build a subsidized factory, the higher probability it’s going to be in Georgia or Tennessee than in Texas and it’s going to be in Minnesota or New York for all the other reasons that are real. So they have created deliberately, it is a feature, not a bug. The biggest moral hazard politically in our lifetime, possibly ever since it’s the biggest piece of legislation ever passed in dollar terms. And it’s now already marbled into every state. They’ve worked really hard for the last two years to rapidly preliminarily approve, put in the pipeline, all these different projects. It’s going to be really hard to, I think there’s a solution. By the way, bill, you and I are of a certain age and we’ll remember Reagan’s challenge in affecting the closure of legacy World War II military bases. There were hundreds and hundreds of bases in every single state of the union, dozens in each state, and you couldn’t close ’em because they were a former sinecure for the congressman or senator to steer money to his district.

(20:21):

But everybody agreed with the principle that the Defense Department needed those billions of dollars for other purposes. It wasn’t a good use of the money they needed to save it because this was back at the last time we had inflation and bloated government spending under Jimmy Carter Carter. So what they did is the Congress agreed with the president to form the Brack Commission, which is the Base Reduction and Closure Commission, which was an independent body. The president appointed its members and then they took recommendations from DOD and did their own work in public full public scrutiny and set a priority list of basis that just made sense to close. That list goes back to Congress and they get an up down vote. They either all close or none of them close. So this gave the politicians the obvious political insulation. I hope that well Trump and Elon Musk and AK Ram Swami can do, this is my 2 cents that they can convince Congress.

Bill Walton (21:22):

I want to get them the show. So let’s count on Vivek and guys, this is for you.

Mark Mills (21:31):

Yeah, they can only do so much through legislative fiat. I mean they can look at really bad legislation, but it’s legislative spending.

Bill Walton (21:41):

How much can Chris Wright do? I mean, we’ve got a night and day difference in who’s coming in to run the energy department. And Chris is, and I do want to get into the carbon, the CO2 issue with you, but Chris is an incredible guy. He thinks. He basically says everything involves a trade off and on balance. The benefits of a little global warming or the negatives of a little global warming are vastly offset by the benefits in terms of agriculture, human life, all those sorts of social goods. So what can he do about this? He’s inheriting this. He’s inherited the loan program and the loan program. They’re working 24 7 to try to get all those dollars committed before January 20th and Trump gets into office.

Mark Mills (22:34):

Well, first I should disclose my bias. I mean, I know Chris, I’ve known him for some time. I like Chris. He’s an incredible entrepreneur, incredible businessman, very smart guy. And also we agree on a lot of stuff intellectually. So I’m predisposed to, I predispose. So I like it. I think it’s a great, great choice.

Bill Walton (22:54):

I love Don’t you love him when people agree with you?

Mark Mills (22:56):

I do. I know it feels much better. The arguments are less fun. It’s much more fun to have an argument with somebody who’s a smart disagree. But look, secretaries have, this is why I think there has to be a brack commission. A Secretary of Energy only has so much discretion over what Congress has enacted. So he can do a couple things that’ll be important, and I don’t know if he’ll do these things, but this is what I would do first I would pause everything and that’s what the Biden administration expects to happen. Let’s just slow down and take a deep breath and take a look at what’s going on on two counts. There’s a certain amount of elasticity in all legislation increasingly in recent years because Congress is lazy. So any incoming administration, including this one, can look at what the legislation Axe says and decide that they have a different interpretation and steer programs and change and repurpose the money.

(23:52):

So some of that will probably happen. Some of it that’s foolishly spent will have if the administrative function errors in DOE have done their job, honestly, they will have all kinds of codicils in these loans conditions that have to be met. And Chris can have his team look at it and be rigorous about the scrutiny. You didn’t meet the conditions, stop the loan, right? Because the conditions, if they’re done honestly will be somewhat onerous because a lot of money they’re talking about giving away and he could also launch through the Inspector general’s office to go hunting for the corruption, not the waste. Waste would be a misallocation of money for something foolish that a friend of this current administration got the money for. Not illegally, they just got to the table. They knew how the system works, you know how that works. But then the potential for corruption is enormous. So I mean, if I’m Chris, I don’t want to accuse anybody of any corruption, but I sure as hell want somebody looking for it and looking for it rigorously so that if I’m a DOE function error, there are good people there. I know lots of them. Do your job, do it. Honestly, you’re fine. But if you’re on the take, I want to find those people and stop other things.

Bill Walton (25:05):

Well, it seems like there are a couple of ways to get public opinion behind this. Number one is what you’re just saying is put a bright light on the corruption, put a bright light on the recipients show that this money is not at all going to what the headline says it’s going to, and that’s going to be very powerful. The other thing is the inflation piece of this, and you and I both know it’s inflationary, but we need to develop something that’s a simple way to explain that. I mean, just for us to talk big picture misallocation of capital, which is inflationary and we’re putting our money into more expensive sources of energy we need, have you done any work? Maybe we ought to do some work on figuring out how to tell that story in a couple of paragraphs.

Mark Mills (25:50):

Well, that’s a good idea. I mean the high level, what is it? Most people who follow this, and I mean there’s a whole constituency that don’t follow these things, but those who are worried about it on both sides of the aisle have already accepted the narrative, which is largely true, right? That when the government during covid and post covid during Covid, you could rationalize jam a trillion dollars of spending into the economy because of the totally, in my view, feckless and inappropriate lockdowns. But set aside whether or not that should happen, put that debate aside. Everyone’s accepted a narrative. You jam up trillion dollars of spending in the economy creates inflation. The lockdowns end Covid crisis is behind us. And the Biden administration jammed another trillion dollars into the economy. And most economists, including people like Larry Somber said, that’s inflationary and bingo, you got one, 2 trillion jammed in the economy, get inflation. The inflation reduction Act will jam at least $2 trillion more in the economy when we’ve just managed to tamp down the growth rate in inflation. How can that be good?

Bill Walton (26:53):

And so the other piece of it is this is going to, if you’re a voter, it’s going to increase your utility rates when you start getting that 3 trillion mandate. So that’s the effect there. And the inflation argument I think is a very strong one because people are, that’s the thing, apart from the fact that he wants to take on wokeness, I think that that’s the reason Donald Trump got the mandate he did was to do something about inflation.

Mark Mills (27:23):

Well, inflation, everybody gets inflation because you can’t hide it. So the idea that the Democrats were running around the country telling people don’t believe your own eyes, there’s no inflation. The economy’s doing fine. I mean 90% of the country that don’t live with the 10% of the wealth, including the wealthy experience inflation, it’s not as if wealthy people don’t know they could tolerate it more even if they’re offended by it. I agree with you. The inflationary feature of this is easy.

Bill Walton (27:58):

So we need to make that something, a talking point that

Mark Mills (28:02):

It’s critical president

Bill Walton (28:03):

Can use.

Mark Mills (28:04):

And your point is it’s a double whammy. It’s one thing, it’s inflationary to print money and jam it in the economy, but if you print money and jam in the economy, it’d be the equivalent of it. Everybody knows inflationary to disrupt the supply chains. That was a disruption. So we gave you money. What if we jammed that money in the economy and forced you to use a supply chain that was inherently more expensive than the one was there that was working? That’s a double whammy. That’s what the Inflation Reduction Act is doing.

Bill Walton (28:32):

That’s it. That’s it. Now, I wanted to cover something in the time we have implicit in what we’re saying though, and I looked at your interview with John Mauldin’s guy not too long ago, is CO2, and it’s been treated as a poison as something that has to be avoided at all costs. And yet I’ve been involved with the CO2 coalition and Chris Wright I think has done the work on this and he’s an MIT graduate, and you’ve got about 19 degrees as I recollect and done some work on this,

Mark Mills (29:07):

I quit graduate school. Okay,

Bill Walton (29:09):

Well,

Mark Mills (29:10):

I’m one of the least degreed person in my family.

Bill Walton (29:12):

Everybody has, well, you went out to get real jobs. Okay, so

Mark Mills (29:15):

I did. I quit graduate school, started building things. I’m sorry.

Bill Walton (29:19):

Yeah, I shoulda stayed. You

Mark Mills (29:21):

Did. So Bill Gates quit earlier. He was much smarter.

Bill Walton (29:25):

But the fact that we, we’ve reorganized a massive amount of society’s resources to chase a demon, which is not a demon, which is in fact beneficial. That’s a talking point which definitely needs to come forward if we can do that. And yet, if you do that and it’s happened to me, you get demonized, you get trolled. It’s like you’ve taken on the sun. God.

Mark Mills (29:57):

Well, and you’ve probably noticed this. So what I discovered starting more than a decade ago, and I’ve been following the climate science issue, the science part of it, I don’t know, three decades because as a physicist it fascinates me. I mean everything about the modeling and the atmosphere. I mean, I wanted to be an astrophysicist, so the planetary science stuff was sort of, I didn’t become one because there were no jobs that I could discern or maybe I wasn’t good enough to become one. I have friends, a good friend who’s an astrophysicist. He’s a wicked smart guy, but it’s a fascinating area. But what you’re not allowed to do is to discuss the science without being labeled with this silly, insulting invective as a climate denni. If you take the position, which is the position that Chris Wright takes, I think he said it publicly. I’ve said it that people like Dick Linson, who you and I both know well,

(30:50):

Roger Pelke, who was run out of academia by the climate apocalyptic also takes, which is that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, so is water vapor, so are clouds. That’s why life lives on earth, not just because CO2 is the food for plants. I mean, kids learn this in elementary school. Plants eat CO2, we eat oxygen. I mean it’s the trade. So the nature has this interesting balance. The claim, as you know, is that man’s additional contribution to the natural flux of carbon dioxide. There’s a massive natural flux is a tipping point problem. That’s the claim made by the apocalyptic. But the real scientists in the International Commission, the IPCC aren’t saying that if you read their reports, and Roger does a really good job in his substack column. In fact, he just wrote, for those who don’t follow it, they really should read his last column.

(31:49):

About a week ago right after the Washington Post did a hit job on Chris Wright trying to label him as a climate denier because of what Chris said about weather and about what the NOAA data show what the IPCC said. Roger published a long piece not defending Chris per se. I think he likes Chris because I think I know he’s met him. I’m pretty sure he is met him. He defended what Chris said from the primary data. And Roger is as insulted as I am, and as Steve Coonin is a friend at this climate, Deni, when you enter into the realm trying to explain the complexities of this what needs to be done, what I’ll call the activist left, which has made this a political, not a science issue, comes after you. I mean it’s really unfortunate. It has done damage, I think to the integrity of scientific debate and respect for the scientific community, much as the covid apocalyptic did they damage done to science in the name of protecting people from covid. It is very similar to the damage being done to scientific discourse in the name of climate. You could take the position that humans have an effect on the environment. This is self-evident. And you can also take the position that many have that there is a human effect of adding CO2 to the atmosphere, but we don’t know the magnitude or velocity with accuracy. In other words, we don’t know how soon it’ll be. The fact of that tells you how small it is. The effect is small, not huge.

Bill Walton (33:27):

And I don’t think people understand the proportionality because CO2 is a vanishingly small part of the atmosphere. Parts per million parts per million is infinitesimal and what is it, 380 now or 430, something like that. Yeah,

Mark Mills (33:44):

We just got north of 400.

Bill Walton (33:45):

And at some point in a hundred thousand, 500,000, 10 million years ago, it was a thousand parts. It was 2000 parts. I mean, through most of the earth’s history, it’s been a much, much, much higher number. And of course, that’s when most of life was created. And I think there was some calculation that it got down to the point in the late 19 hundreds that it was almost to a point where we didn’t have enough to sustain life on earth.

Mark Mills (34:19):

There’s a level below which we go to what’s called CO2 starvation plants

(34:24):

Will start dying because it is their primary fuel. Well, here’s what I found personally more effective in public policy domains on the climate debate. I’ve taken the position that I generally don’t argue the science on this first, I am not personally a climate scientist. I used to be a scientist. I understand science enough to be able to reasonably discern whether I’m being told bs. But here’s the essence of the problem. And Bill Gates said this this year in an interview after Davos, no matter what you think about all the things that are being done to avoid emitting carbon dioxide, even if they all were to be put in place on paraphrase and Bill Gates in the year 2050, what the models show is that whatever temperature the earth is going to rise to, it’s going to happen anyway. No matter what we do. It’s going to happen anyway.

(35:21):

And what he was describing, of course, is the inertia and the systems that we have. These are planetary systems. So he’s pointing out that all the actions, he’s not saying we should stop them. By the way, gates didn’t say we should stop building windmills. He just said, everyone should understand that doing all these things won’t change the outcome of what the models predict will happen in 2050 in any noticeable or directly measurable way. So then he went on to say that we have to spend more money on resilience and adaptation because if you believe the models, then we’re going to have to have more money available for resilience and adaptation. I think that’s the place we all should be going because it gets us out of the climate argument because then the bill gate to me, and maybe Bill will change his mind and say something different.

(36:08):

I don’t know the man, but that he’s been saying things. Many scientists have said adaptation, resilience against nature’s. It’s a good idea. That takes money. So that means that the essence of the debate for me is whether or not the claim is true or we should try it anyway, wind, solar and the electric cars because it’s like an insurance policy. It’s cheap insurance against just the chance it would make a difference. The problem with that argument is it’s not cheap insurance. It’s the industrializing level of insurance. It’s like buying an insurance policy for your house that costs more than your house costs to replace. You wouldn’t buy a policy like that.

Bill Walton (36:51):

Well, and you said at the outset that the United States and Europe we’re about the only two societies that have decided this is a priority and have been rearranged ourselves. And we haven’t done as dramatically as Germany. China’s not paying a bit of attention. India’s not paying a bit of attention in developing countries say, forget it guys. We’ve had wind and solar and it hadn’t worked out all that well. We’d like a little inexpensive fossil fuels to drive our economies. And that’s doing well.

Mark Mills (37:22):

They said something else, bill, which the followers of this domain by an appreciate coming back full circle to our corruption in waste. They’ve said, oh, oh no, the climate thing, the last climate conference we’re on board. Okay, you want us to do that? You got to give us you. Europe and United States need to give us 300 billion a year. That’s the starting point. You have to just give it to us to do what you’re asking us to do. What they really want is 500 billion to a trillion a year to be handed to them. Now, this is to countries that are largely fragile at best. Corrupt often. Sure, they’ll go along with this. If we hand the money,

Bill Walton (38:00):

Well, in the old days, LER goes to Swiss bank accounts. I don’t know where it goes now. Maybe crypto, but it doesn’t get used to advance green energy, that’s for sure.

Mark Mills (38:09):

Well, that’s exactly the problem. And of course, China, China’s very happy to genuflect to our self predatory energy policies because they are selling us the stuff.

Bill Walton (38:20):

Well, anyway, so why don’t you summarize what we need to do about the Inflation Reduction Act, and we’re going to come back in future episodes with, I still want to win the CO2 argument, but I understand the reasons. If you’re a practitioner, you just don’t want to get onto that very dangerous playing field.

Mark Mills (38:40):

I think it’s first of it’s an important argument to have, and my friends in the CO2 coalition are engaging in the debate and God bless ’em for doing that. What I found is a political policy matter is that, and it is true, they’re utterly independent magisterial. It doesn’t matter what you believe about climate science. You can’t build energy systems the way they’re describing to do what they claim. This is kind of like, it doesn’t matter what you think about gravity. Gravity wins if you jump off a cliff. The physics of energy machines are like gravity. We know a lot about it, and you can pretend you can fly, but it doesn’t matter how much money I give you to flap your arms harder, it won’t end well if you jump off a cliff. So I have made a point of focusing on the things that are provable.

(39:29):

Demonstrable don’t that require easier argumentation. And the Inflation Reduction Act is a classic example, not of climate science. This is why it’s important. It’s an inflationary piece of legislation, giving money to people, to your point, to do things that are inflationary, set aside, the corruption and the waste. They’re being given money to do inflationary things and creating inflation by printing the money to do inflationary things. So fixing it repeals is technically possible. But do I think, I mean, I’m not a political expert. Do I think the House and Senate will vote by, let’s say you don’t need a one vote majority to repeal it? It’s possible. It’s not crazy to think that could happen. In the meantime, I would be operating on the assumption that we need a brack like commission. A independent party agree. You

Bill Walton (40:22):

Got to shame these people and to understanding they’re taking Welsh, highlighting your more

Mark Mills (40:28):

Highlighted shame. Where’s the money going? And it’s good if everybody agrees it’s a good source of spending. That’s how politics works. Reagan would take 60%, as you know, I’ll pledge to the same thing. I don’t. I’ll take 60% win over a hundred percent win because we just got to resear the ship back to sanity and energy.

Bill Walton (40:52):

Well, mark, thank you. And you’ll be back. We bet a lot of things we didn’t cover today, but we’ll cover in the future, Ben. And for everybody watching or listening, Mark’s founded the Center for the National Center for Energy Analytics, which I think will be if neither. It is sort of the go-to place to understand all things about energy and not just its uses and sources, but Mark’s also got a tremendous background in manufacturing how the stuff is made to create our energy sources. So anyway, mark, thanks so much for being here and I’m committing you, you’ll be back.

Mark Mills (41:32):

It’s Federal Promise, can’t tell, but

Bill Walton (41:34):

It’s a little bit of both.

Mark Mills (41:36):

Thank you very

Bill Walton (41:36):

Much. Anyway, everybody, thanks for listening, watching. I hope you learn a lot about it and go out and lobby your senator and congressman on the evils of the Inflation Reduction Act, and let’s just get this thing turned around and end up with, I mean, if we do something like this, economic growth of four or 5% is well within reach. Amen. Okay. So thanks for watching. Thanks for listening, and we’ll be back soon.