Energy Insecurity

Ladies and gentlemen, our next topic, Energy Insecurity. Please welcome, Vice President of the Heritage Foundation, James Carafano. From the great state of Texas, Congresswoman Beth Van Dyne. From Alabama, Congressman Gary Palmer. And your moderator, from Epoch Times, Joshua Phillips. Thanks for being here everyone. Energy used to not be one of the most interesting topics. We're interested in it, but it's something now that's impacting all of us. Because energy is now about national security. Energy is now about whether you can afford to keep your home. It's about the survival of your family here in Europe. It's also about socialism. So this has become something that's hitting every single home, every single person, what you pay at the pump, everything. And Texas, where we are right now, just had a real experience with that. I want to talk to you first about this. You know, really, Texas had these failures with natural energy. I'm sorry, with renewable energy. We saw what happened. What exactly happened in Texas? Well, we saw last year, last February, we had a huge demand on our grid and we weren't able to handle it. And for several days, there were hundreds of thousands of people that were out of electricity. We weren't able to control that side. We have the exact opposite experience right now. We have hit 25 different records so far this summer on demand on the grid. And it has worked out very well. But there's a reason why. We have reliable energy. Now, Texas is the leading state for renewable energy. 37% of our energy use comes from renewable energy. But it failed us. Wind failed terribly this summer. In fact, there were examples of when we had the most damage that we were only getting 2% of the expected use of wind, 2%. And yet, the government supersubsidizes our renewable energy, making it detracting from the actual reliable energy, or thermal energy, which is what has saved us so far, which is coal, natural gas, nuclear. If we didn't have those energy sources, almost half of our state so far this summer, at peak time, would be without energy. And we want to talk about life and death. I mean, you guys are here in Texas right now in August. A little warm out, right? Imagine what would happen if we did not have air conditioning, if we did not have the use of tanks. And what has happened is because we are supersubsidizing the renewable energy, when they come on market, when they start bidding, it completely distorts the market. It pushes coal and those reliable thermal energies out of the marketplace. And as a result, we are dependent on the renewable energy to fail. And that's exactly what happened in February and February. Now, we'd assume that when something like that happens, you learn a lesson and you change things. We would assume that maybe they put safeguards in place to make sure this doesn't happen elsewhere. Gary, I know you're on one of the commissions overseeing this. Have they put systems in place to make sure this doesn't happen again in other parts of the U.S.? They're really pushing more renewable systems that are going to put us in a very difficult position. The North America Electric Reliability Program, NERC, put out a report last summer. They put out a report and said that the single biggest threat to our power grid is by way. Our power grid is not a completely connected grid. It's a patchwork grid. And the whole grid, even the patchwork, requires a consistent replacement. And they said the single biggest threat to the grid is not cyber. It's changing the mix that fuels the grid. In other words, the conversion to renewable. This summer, they put out a report saying that they anticipate blackout, not in California, where there's a regular current, but in the Midwest, in Louisiana and Kansas City. It's also a serious conversion threat. And Beth just made this point without really elaborating on it, but the thing that saved Texas during the polar blackout was they had backup systems. And this renewable grid will not function because there's not a consistent system to replace our power. The only way it will function is if they have a backup. And that's going to be natural gas. So they had systems to prevent this. They knew it was coming. They didn't do it. Not only have they not fixed the problem, but they are continuing to do over what caused the problem in the first place, and we're about to face it again. Well, Earthquake is a serious problem. I want to make sure that we understand that. Earthquake is a serious problem, but what we see with this administration is that they're continuing their war against states and against free trade, and that's what we see. I mean, James, I know you're at the forefront of a lot of this, and people are kind of wondering what's going on. I mean, is this intentional? Is this accidental? Like, what's really going on with American energy right now? Yeah, great. First of all, the first thing I got to say is I love CPAC. No, really. You guys are awesome. This is, like, better than the Oscars because nobody gets punched. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Look, the one thing, directly to answer your question, there are three things you cannot lose on. When you go forth from here, there are three issues where you cannot fail. It's not optional. One, of course, is election integrity because if you lose on that fight, you lose your political rights forever. The other one, of course, is peace through strength because if this nation cannot defend itself, then China and Russia and Iran will eat our lunch. The other issue that you cannot lose on, and it is non-negotiable, is the issue that they've just been talking about, energy, because if you lose on this fight, you will starve. And the policies that they're putting in place, they don't care about physics or chemistry or economics. They have an agenda which is based on a transformation that is a political agenda. It's not an energy agenda. It's not an environmental agenda. And it's absolutely not a national security agenda. It's about political power. And so they want to seize political power at any price, and the price will be the prosperity and the security and the future of American generations because you cannot power a modern society without electricity. And this is the historic opportunity you have to push back because two years ago, the climate debate was done. You know, we were all on the green path to la-la land. And because of really the war in Ukraine and the incredible disruptions we've seen on energy prices and energy supplies in the last couple of years, we have reopened this debate. And the reality is we only, if you want a better environment, if you want a better economy, if you want to defeat their political agenda, you only do that by insisting on policies that are going to deliver reliable, affordable, abundant energy. And they fundamentally, whatever you take away from here, know that what you have to have is America has to become an energy-dominant power. And that is going to be achieved with our oil, gas, and nuclear industry. And if we don't push them out and let them do their thing, we will lose and they will win. And that's what the fight's really all about. Well, and on that point, too, like, weren't we one of the leading powers on this just a bit ago? What happened, right? I mean, America was one of the top countries, the top oil producers. What happened? We have inexhaustible resources. For two reasons. One, the shale fracking revolution gave us literally inexhaustible resources. And you're talking about, let's not be honest with you, you might get hit. Every American, when they go to the gas pump, gets slapped. Every time you go to the grocery store, you get slapped. Energy is the most inflationary component of the entire country. There's an energy cost for everything you do, everything you come in contact with today in terms of goods and services has an energy cost. And you're getting hammered by it, by this administration. And there's no reason for it. We not only have the ability to provide for our own region, America, we literally could have stopped Russia if we had been a principle supplier of energy to Europe. And that brings up another point. I mean, we're here in Texas again. When I think Texas, I think cattle and oil. In Texas, of course, they're going the opposite way. They're going, I don't know what they're doing to the cattle right now. But with the oil especially, we see them building wind turbines. They're not working. It's not working as planned. And I assume this is some kind of intervention, as you mentioned, subsidizing a failing industry. Well, this is the problem that we've found with this administration is they are demonizing the energy industry. They're absolutely demonizing the U.S. energy industry. So you've got great plants in Texas that are able to actually provide for our needs. But you have a government that from day one, Biden has declared a war on it. When he started, when he stopped the pipeline expansion, got rid of 11,000 jobs and our ability to be able to do. He's also now added regulation upon regulation, building upon the Obama regulation to basically make it almost, it doesn't make any economic sense to be able to invest. Then you've got the financial markets when if they want to expand, they want to produce, which is being demanded right now by the Biden administration to produce, but they can't get funding because the Biden administration basically said there will be no future for you. This is as far as the left is willing to push this. They are willing to use taxpayer dollars to crush industry, to bring us to our knees, all for their ideology. This is exactly what this is about. It is about control. It is about power. It is about making America weaker. When you've got a president who has to go all the way to Saudi Arabia because they won't return a phone call, and he still comes back, and he says, we're not going to be able to produce anymore. Now he's having to go to places like Venezuela, where, by the way, if their interest was legitimately on clean solutions, legitimately on that, why are we not looking at U.S. products? Why are we not doing that? Why are we not forcing that more? Why are we going to places that make dirtier energy to be able to provide our needs? When Trump was president, when we had the last administration, we were energy independent. Not only that, but for national security, we were able to provide liquid natural gas to other countries peacefully, that we had, without having to use military, we actually had a lot more influence over the rest of the world than we do now. That is a direct result of the Biden crisis. They're willing to have people die in order to push their ideology. One of the big things, too, I mean, Trump was warning, when he was still president, he was warning that Russia is going to gain control over energy and is going to use it to bring Europe to its knees. Now, Biden's blaming not, of course, his policies on what's happening with energy, but he's instead blaming Russia on what happened, the Russia that they gave our energy market to, through uranium and other deals. But, James, talking about the national security element of this and how Russia ties into it, I mean, is Russia the real cosmos we're being told? Like, what's really driving it? Well, first of all, can I have a show of how many people in the audience have liberal friends? Wow, that's shocking. All right, so, I want to give you two arguments for your liberal friends on why our energy policies are better than theirs. You already heard one from the Congress folks talking about we are strangling our own economy and we are diminishing ourselves. You brought up the point which is spot on. It's not really Russia imposing their energy will on the world. It's us and our Yahoo allies who essentially have demobilized in energy competition to make ourselves more dependent on people that hate us. And it's not just oil and gas. It's also renewable energies because right now, this administration is insisting that we buy more solar panels from China, even though they know that those solar panels are less effective and they're made with slave labor and they're actually making us more and less dependent on our enemy. So we get the nationals, we get the national security argument. We get the American, but here's the two other arguments which I don't think our liberal friends understand and which we need to explain to them. One is Joe Biden is diminishing the entire world. This is a humanitarian catastrophe because we are telling countries around the world that you cannot have electrical grid, that you cannot have a modern economy. We have women in countries that get up at two o'clock in the morning and spend their entire day parting water to their houses because they have no electricity. And this is the green energy is the new imperialism. We are imposing a view on the world and we are impoverishing them and we are calling them poverty and horror and chaos and war because they're not green enough for us. And that's just wrong and your liberal friends ought to understand that. And the other thing they will understand is, you know, we love this blue dot too, right? Because this is the only blue dot we have. I don't know about you guys. I'm not sure Elon Musk is going to come through for us. You know, I don't think I'm going to get a condo on Mars. And the reality is, if you want better environmental outcomes, if you want cleaner air, cleaner water, the best contribution that a country can make to the environment is to be free and rich. I mean, we've been doing the Index of Economic Creativity. It's true. We've been doing the Index of Economic Freedom of Heritage for 30 years and invariably what the data shows is the richer a country is and the freer the country is, the better environmental steward it is for its society. So rather than impoverishing America, Joe Biden ought to be on it and trying to make us richer because then we will help build a better, better blue dot. And the thing I love about this, sorry, is this solves all the problems. It solves our economy. It solves our national security. It makes us the strongest power in the world and it will actually, in the end, make the blue dot a better place to live. There's a couple of books that you really ought to take the time to read and they're written by hardcore liberals. One of them is Michael Schellenberger's book, Apocalypse Never, and that's the very point that James is making. The impact, not only on this country, but also on the world and particularly on low-income people. Energy is a pathway to prosperity. You've got over 800 million people who have zero access to electricity worldwide and there's about three billion who have very limited access to it. What's going on in Europe and in Great Britain in particular when they've converted to renewables, they've had a tremendous increase in the number of what they call excess wind or gas. These are people who are not freezing today, but they cannot afford to keep their homes adequately warm in the wintertime and still be able to afford their food and medicine. In the winter of 2016-2017, they estimate 17,000 people died just in Great Britain. There's 17 times more people dying from cold-related illnesses than people. You're being fed a bunch of bull, just to be honest, and this is Texas and you know what bull is. The other thing that you need to understand is how unreliable renewables are. You could take one next-generation nuclear facility and set it on a site of 640 acres. To generate the same amount of power from a wind farm would take 70,000 acres. That next-gen nuclear facility has a life cycle of 100 years. You can imagine what the technology would be like in 100 years. A wind farm has a life cycle of about 30 years, and each turbine starts losing generating capacity after about 10 years, and the blades are not recyclable. They're burying them in giant landfills in Wyoming, and the solar panels, by the way, will make us reliant on China. You think it's a problem being reliant with Biden going over to Saudi Arabia with a gas can in his hand? Wait till we become reliant on China. And the solar panel of farms have a life cycle of about 30 years, and you cannot recycle the panel. This is a pathway to disaster, particularly for low-income people in the middle class. This administration, with their energy policy, with their economic policy, are determined to destroy the middle class. How many of you in here are middle class? How many of you want to be middle class or better? Your future's at stake right now. One of the big scams right now I've been hearing about, America is one of the leaders on energy technology. The energy industry could be more efficient. It could be cleaner, coal even, nuclear even, because we have the technology, and we are better at it than the next four or five different countries in the entire world. America could lead the entire world on energy, and it's not happening. I mean, I know you're working on this. I mean, what is stopping America from leading world energy with the technologies that are, in fact, better? It's the war on policy. It's the Biden administration's war against US energy. That's what's killing us. And before that, prior to that, it was Obama. It's amazing, though. We're up here talking pragmatism. We're talking facts. We're talking realism. You don't see that on the left. And I'll give you a perfect example just how divided and just how nasty some of these folks are. We did a poll in this area. So I represent Texas 24, which is right here in North Texas. Yeah, baby. We did a poll. Last year, I talked to a number of businesses. They were trying to hire people. So we did a job fair. We had one of the most successful job fairs that we have ever had in North Texas. We literally had thousands of people come out. We had over 250 businesses participate. We just did a poll, and we asked folks, would you be more or less likely to support me, knowing that we had put on a job fair in North Texas? Overwhelmingly, most people said great job, and they supported it. People who identified as strong Democrats said that they would be extremely likely not to vote for me because we had a job fair. Because we were helping connect people get jobs, they would not support me. Think about that, what that means. You've got folks who identify themselves as strong Democrats who don't want people getting connected with jobs, that don't want people being independent, don't want people being able to self-sustain. They are looking at control. They are looking at running your life, and they want everybody 100% dependent on a huge, large, loaded federal government. That's where we are right now. That is what we are trying to fight moving into November, because right now, we don't have a stopgap. We don't have a House, we don't have a Senate, we don't have the presidency. I am fully convinced that we're going to be able to have a House if we continue talking about the issues that matter to American people. It's energy. It may not be sexy, but it absolutely matters to every single person in this country. A couple minutes left. Gary, last statement. I was talking to a representative from Walmart, and he told me that for the average Samaritan in 50,000 years, before the Biden administration, they spent about 20% of their income on food and fuel. Now it's almost 50%. Walmart just laid off 7,000 people. The energy policies of this administration are inflationary. They're destructive to the economy for the long term. They're destructive to our national security. And we're determined to do something about it. Jane's last statement. Yeah, can you guys wave to my mom? Beth. All right, I'm also going to hold every one of you accountable. If we don't fix this issue, we are going to lose the America that we have. So walk away and know that, right? I think we all agree. All right. Beth, how can we not lose the America we have? Get out there and vote, obviously. I'm talking to a room who knows that. You're going to get out and vote. Vote for strong candidates. And if you yourself aren't going to work for a candidate, then become a candidate. Also, do not be shy about your opinion. Share these facts. Work around it. Talk to the media. If we don't have a voice, you see what happens. We have strong solutions to these things. I always say, let's be happy Republicans. OK, we've got a lot to be happy for. We live in the best country in the world. There's a reason why. It was not free. We all fought for it. We have had generations and generations that have fought for it. And it can be lost in a single generation. It seems like it's almost been lost in a single administration. Fight for it. Love it. Talk about it. I'm very proud of it. Thank you all. That was awesome. Thank you.