The Cole Memo

Mike Fourcher returns in this episode to recap his trip to Dubai and to chat about the climate.

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Links mentioned during show

• Heat Rising 
• Pritzker signs law lifting moratorium on Nuclear reactors – https://apnews.com/article/illinois-nuclear-moratorium-modular-reactors-solar-wind-225d14cefb03793e08f0802745df4e02

The auto-generated transcript is available below.

hello and welcome longtime listeners of mine will recognize my next guest Mike fuche from heat rising.net is on this episode of the Cole memo I am your host Cole Preston every episode is released in audio video and transcript format to find the transcript audio or video version of any episode please refer to the description of the episode that you’re listening to now Within that description you can find a link which will take you to our website which will display the transcript for this episode and the platforms where you can find this episode in audio or video formats if you’re unable to locate the episode description on whichever platform you’re listening from Simply take note of the episode number and visit the memo.com from there you can use the search functionality in the top right hand corner to find the the corresponding episode and then you’ll be able to access the audio video and transcript version of that episode you might also find any links that we reference during the episode so that you might be able to do your own research if you’re not listening to this episode of the coal memo on patreon then you are listening to this episode later than our patrons to become a patron go to the memo.com patreon it’s a great way to support our show and it gives you access to our episodes as they air for only three a month another way to support our show is by going to the memo.com support from there you can make a onetime monthly or yearly contribution of your choice that’s right you can donate a dollar once monthly or yearly if you donated a dollar once monthly you would donate $12 a year and trust me every little bit counts our show is funded by listeners like you it costs a lot to make this show between hosting fees fees distribution fees equipment the costs of equipment etc etc it all adds up so anything you’re any way you’re able to support is greatly appreciated one of the best ways to support our show is actually free subscribe to or follow our show leave us a positive review from wherever you are listening to us from favorite this episode give it a thumbs up leave a comment or post a review I think I mentioned reviews twice so you can see how important that is to us your engagement and support is appreciated today is February 29th 2024 enjoy this episode of the Cole memo once again folks sitting down with Mike fuche from heat rising.net really quick uh if you go to heat rising.net in the top right hand corner all you have to do is Click subscribe and you can get these uh this news sent right to your inbox Mike go ahead and introduce yourself to our audience uh hey I’m Mike fuche um I’m a longtime uh journalist but before that I worked in uh politics I worked at C Hill I worked in Clinton administration I worked at the US Department of energy and a whole bunch of stuff in Illinois too and uh I uh in the last uh year and a half I’ve picked up a dream of always uh that I always had of covering and Reporting on uh climate issues and uh this last year uh I’ve traveled as an accredited reporter to the major climate negotiations in Dubai and I plan on doing that again in the next year uh which will be in fabulous Baku azerbajan uh we can get into why that’s going to be interesting a little later um and uh I I run heat rising which is a newsletter that I’ve started uh that covers basically Global Climate politics and so there’s a lot of stuff about climate issues and the science of climate but what I’m trying to talk about is why countries do what they do and uh what the whole struggle is uh as the green economy takes over from a lot of the fossil stuff yep and once again it’s Heat rising. net for our listeners definitely go and check it out I’m a subscriber you should be too there’s a lot of good news that comes through so um where do you want to start today you know you did mention you just went to Dubai that was one of the things I thought I wanted uh that would be interesting to chat about uh we also have some really interesting data so I want to follow your lead where do you want to start today well we could we could talk about the climate negotiations uh so you know the United Nations hosts a meeting of 198 parties not countries because some of the people that participate are not really countries like the Vatican uh and actually the Palestinians have a representative group um but it’s all of these different organizations from around the world and they get together and they negotiate over exactly how we should be moving forward with climate and there’s a lot of tiny little issues that go into it but this year the big struggle was are we going to set a date certain for when we’re going to stop using fossil fuels and so what’s miraculous about these meetings is that they are 100% consensual uh they they never passed rules about what exactly it takes in order to have a a decision if it’s not consensual so that means that everyone has to at least not disagree they don’t have to agree but they have to not disagree and that that’s a very fine line there uh and so you have essentially a situation where if somebody wants to if some country wants to wreck the whole proceedings they can just say I disagree and that’s it but the result is is that you end up even though it’s not as ambitious as we’d like it to be the result is is that you get something thing that everybody in the world agrees to which is actually kind of a miraculous thing and while this meeting did not end up with an agreement on a date certain when we’re going to stop using fossil fuels it did for the first time have a statement where everybody in the world including countries that produce a lot of oil like Saudi Arabia Kuwait Nigeria and the United States all agree that fossil fuels are the cause of climate change and I know that sounds like a a no duh kind of thing but for countries that have all of their politics and all of their well-being sunk into oil and natural gas this is a huge deal like if if fossil fuel use went away tomorrow Saudi Arabia would have a revolution and a lot of people would die and this would happen in a lot of places so this was an incredible agreement was an amazing thing and there were a number of other big big things that happened uh in Dubai too and this all happens over the course of two weeks the first week you get a lot of big leaders that come Prince Charles was or I’m sorry King Charles was there uh and you know so were most of the leaders of Europe and uh you didn’t have Joe Biden you didn’t have uh Shing Chao ping from China or X Jang Ching XI jingping XI jingping uh from China but you did have Modi Prime Minister Modi from India you did have Lula D Silva from Brazil so there are a lot of important leaders that are there in the first week and then all the leaders go away and the real negotiations set in and this by the way is after a week of crazy activity and the second week everyone’s pretty exhausted and it always is supposed to end on a certain day it never ends on a certain day and usually goes for at least one maybe two extra days and everyone is up until 400 a for days in a row uh you know reporters negotiators and it’s exhausting uh and then you end up with a statement and sometimes it’s good sometimes it’s bad this time it had a lot of good and it didn’t have enough enough and there are certain people who certain countries who felt like it wasn’t enough but they didn’t block it because it was as much as they felt that they could get out of the rest of the world that’s super interesting so for the you’re saying if I could recap one of the big highlights is for the first time everybody at this um meeting for lack of better word summit what what would we call it you call it any of those yeah everybody agreed nobody disagreed that fossil fuels are are the cause of uh climate change yeah and and then after that it said we need to start stepping down we need to start moving away from using fossil fuels and the expectation is that okay now that we’ve done this we’re going to start coming up with in future years other things to say okay what are we going to eliminate and there’s a big push to say we’re going to start eliminating coal and the United States po use has been declining very rapidly uh mostly because all these other methods like natural gas and solar and wind are a lot cheaper than coal but China and India have been ramping up their use of coal uh mostly because there’s a lot of coal they have a lot of coal in their countries they don’t want to have to pay other people for fuels from other countries and it’s cheaper for them to build coal plants than it is to do anything else so but there’s an expectation then the next three four years China and India will stop building coal plants and you know who knows I mean that that that part is exciting that part is great but the big pressure on everything is is that we now know that we’re not doing nearly enough fast enough in order to keep the world from Heating and warming so much that we’re probably going to do irrevocable damage to the planet now that’s the very very upsetting part and this kept coming up in the meetings you know even with all the things that we’re agreeing to there there was another commitment from countries that were’re going to Triple the use of our Renewables in the world by 2030 but even if we do that that’s not nearly enough in order to keep the world from warming beyond the the line that they say is 1 and a half degrees 1 and a half degrees Centigrade more than the world temperature average was at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution and I know that sounds really kind of obscure and and strange but there’s lots of ways to measure this and right now we’re at about 1 to 1.3 so the thinking is is that if we get past one and a half degrees there’ll be all these super damaging things that will happen so we’ll lose thousands of uh species will die uh that parts of the world will you know weather patterns will shift like the you know one thing we’re experiencing here uh in Chicago is that it’s been an incredibly dry winter and it’s been strangely warm it was 72 degrees in Chicago a couple days ago so those kind of things might happen permanently and when that happens you’ll you know certain creatures will die certain creatures will have to migrate certain plants might not survive agriculture would shift have whole parts of the world that wouldn’t be able to grow certain crops uh and deserts would grow and and you know all of a sudden you have all of these problems uh might not be a huge as huge an issue for us in the United States because we have industrialized agriculture but in parts of the world where people still have a lot of subsistence farming and we’re talking about billions and billions of people uh and the Food Systems aren’t quite as sophisticated as in the United States we may end up with a lot of starvation uh and you know we’re also seeing things like increased force of hurricanes um already uh there are insurance companies that refuse to Ure in Florida and in Louisiana parts of Alabama um you know I’ve I’ve heard stories about people trying to buy buildings along the gulf coast and they’re told that the insurance company won’t cover it because the danger of hurricane damage in the next 5 10 years is too high and those insurance companies don’t want to take on that risk there’s already something like 15% of people in Florida that don’t have home insurance because they can’t afford it home insurance in Florida is like four times more than it is in other parts of the country uh you know we have parts of Colorado and California that can’t get insured because there’s so much danger of wildfire um so I mean it’s happening you know this is real um and uh you know what we’re seeing at things like the negotiations is is that countries just can’t come together in order to make strong enough decisions and actually one of the Big Blocks to that whole process uh is the United States because the United States refuses to take enough uh stand refuses to do enough um and take enough commitments and do enough um so yeah before I get to my next question I want to just uh lighten the mood with a quick uh Simpsons clip that I hope doesn’t get our uh if I hope I don’t have to cut out of the episode um uh let’s let’s watch it really quick it’s super short M house you don’t care about the environment hey I am very passionate about the planet say global warming is a myth it’s a myth further study is needed W that’s for selling out your belief so the the the reason the reason I showed that is because it seems like some people will step up and you know take the stand that this is a problem but then somebody will punch him in the gut and by that I mean so well you know as a regular human just living it it definitely feels that way I mean it’s really hard you look at government or you look at organizations like you know why don’t you guys do stuff but you know we can be doing some things too I mean I I have actually my family and I we we’ve made some changes is we actually uh we eat uh one vegetarian meal a week now you know which doesn’t sound like much but that actually is it’s an adjustment you know you making sure that you’re always doing that we eat one meal of fish every week um you know which fish tends to be much more sustainable than pork or beef or chicken um and uh we very consciously work to try and keep the heat down in our house um because you know want to consume less I mean those are things that you can do they seem small but if all of us are doing those things it makes a difference you know if you recycle if you compost uh if you take the train rather than a plane those are those are small things that add up you know if you can reduce your carbon profile that can make a difference and I want to get back that’s actually a point I had prepped for today it’s almost like the idea of this may not be a great word but a lot of people see it this way as like a sacrifice I don’t personally agree that that’s the best word for it but I don’t think it’s like inaccurate to say that but I want to get back to that uh to that point and I will reference Jimmy Carter in saying you probably already know what I’m going to ask by saying that I’m G to ask about Jimmy Carter but before I get to that I wanted to old enough to remember yeah I’m not old enough to remember I just happen to see it referenced but um uh before we get to that I wanted to ask you a question that maybe actually relates to that point you just brought up um a lot of people do see these things uh see them some of the things that you just listed off as a sacrifice that they’re not willing to take actually I’ll just Loop the questions together I think I can do this um some of the things you just mentioned like you say they’re not big things but they’re adjustments you’ve made I was referencing Jimmy Carter I guess during the particularly cold months of 1977 President Jimmy Carter and what some call the sweater speech famously noted how much energy could be saved if Americans simply reduced thermostat settings for heating their homes like you just mentioned the heat is not rising in Europe in your apartment sorry that was a stupid joke to heat rising.net um but I wanted to ask you how do we because there was from what I understand there was not a great response from Americans on that they were kind of like [ __ ] you I’m not putting on a sweater um how do we how do we get Americans and just people but it does seem like it is American issue where we like to live in abundance and surplus and so much comfort how do we get people to recognize that that they should be you know pulling back I guess a a little bit you know I think part of the thing is is that when we’re told that we should be doing these things it feels like a scold and it’s like you know you’re a bad person if if you don’t do it but I sort of think about it the same way that I think about that I would make sacrifices for family members so you know my kids or my son you know God damn it I got to shuttle them around to school you know I got to take him the stuff that’s sacrifice you know my parents are getting older I need to make sure that I call them and I have to visit them and take them out that’s sacrifice you know I mean that’s time that’s taken from my life there’s probably other things that I enjoy doing better but maybe not you know I think that I get a certain pleasure and I get a certain um just the knowledge that I’m doing something to contribute is makes me feel better that I’m doing a thing in order to help the world that I live in and the people that I care about and it seems abstract to say I’m going to put on a sweater part of the problem with the Jimmy Carter speech was is it wasn’t just that it was cold it’s that the price of fuel was high because the Saudis were limiting the supply and so Americans were pissed off and they thought that Jimmy Carter was being weak but here we don’t really have anybody other than physic and mother mother nature that we’re fighting against here and so what we have an opportunity for is for us all to be together and to work together and to contribute together when I compost I feel good that I’m not dumping something into a landfill that is just going to turn into methane and create more greenhouse gases um when I recycle I feel good that I’m not putting something into a landfill I I do uh I feel like I’m I’m adding something to the world when I wear a sweater rather than turn up the heat uh I feel good that I’m not uh drawing something out of the ground and taking something that isn’t necessarily needed you know I mean there’s it it can be a good feeling to be self-reliant in the same way that it’s a my son loves to work out he lifts and he feels really good when he hits a personal record it’s because he’s been sacrificing has been working hard to get to this place it’s that same kind of feeling it’s the same feeling that you have at the end of a great run you know yeah I did this thing uh the same feeling that you have with maybe volunteer somewhere yeah I did this thing I help these people that’s the feeling that I have and sacrifice actually is can be pleasurable it can be a thing that makes you feel good uh and it isn’t necessarily A taking from you it’s an adding in a way that you aren’t necessarily anticipating yeah and one of the things you brought up was my idea and how to I really like what you just have to say about that and I I I think that yeah I’m going to dwell on that for a while because even I somebody who does agree that these are issues sometimes when I hear you know turn the heat down or turn the AC down I’m like [ __ ] you you know kind of thing man I feel that way too you know yeah I mean I love a good hamburger yeah right you know I I I love ribs I mean you know all that stuff is good I’m not gonna deny it right you know I can’t I’m not a monk yeah but I can do these little things around the edges and start with that you know it’s it’s sort of like it’s like learning to brush your teeth you know you just got to get into this habit of doing it and you brush your teeth you know not just to be healthy but also to not breathe horrible breath on other people yeah and you know so I recycle I compost you know those those are things that I do it’s like brushing my teeth yeah and to your point about self-reliance that’s what I really thought was powerful and maybe we can maybe that is some if people can get it in their head that no you’re actually not only being self-reliant but you’re almost this is my pitch to Preppers you’re almost like prepping you know like you’re you’re putting off what what is a certainty which is that you know these resources are finite um yeah yeah they are so anyway uh one of the things that’s very interesting about this meeting in Dubai is is that it’s just an endless series of conversations about that yeah and not only is the meeting these negotiators but you end up with so there were about 30,000 40,000 or so people that are negotiators and people from governments but then there was like another 60,000 that were all U largely people from either the climate industry or energy companies that were there all doing deals and talking about how they can grow their business and that is one of the things that’s become very interesting about these meetings is is that they’ve tripled in size you know just three years ago there were only about 35,000 people that would go to these meetings this year there was close to 100,000 and most of those people were there to uh Network with each other and try and figure out you know all different kinds of things I mean I I met people who were I shared in Uber with a guy who had just done a deal to build a huge solar field in Morocco and he was there to go meet with other people about that I met with people who were there to talk about nuclear energy I met with people who were there to talk about uh agriculture uh so there’s all these different things that are going on at these meetings uh and everyone is trying to figure out okay you know how can we do stuff so that it becomes part of the daily living of people around the world yeah um I’m kind of shocked at how many people were there and how long it would last it really sounded like it was an endurance test Ona uh it was and and this meeting was held uh in an unusually large facility at this giant uh they they had had a World’s Fair in Dubai a few years ago and they have this huge facility and they don’t know what to do with it so they used it and literally to get from one end to the other was was about a mile and so you know I’d have these meetings where I’d have to I’d have about 10 minutes in order to get from one end to the other and so everyone’s constantly rushing back and forth uh I I did something I I easily did 15,000 steps a day oh yeah um wow and uh I was pretty I’m pretty beat I actually I got a micro fracture in one foot and I sprained a toe in another foot damn injuries that come with clim covering clim really beat up by the end of the trip um you know but it it was uh it was fascinating a lot of people a lot of amazing things going on yeah um any other any other things worth mentioning before we uh move on to some of the data you sent me I also have a small video that I wanted to have you uh shortly narrate that you shared from your time in Dubai but before we get to the ski Dubai uh oh yeah any other highlights I I’d say um um you know I think that we’re we’re moving into a time where climate discussions are really not so much now that the world has agreed that fossil fuels are the cause of climate change the real question is how are we going to fix it what they call implementation and the Really the way to fix it is not so much actions as is spending and um the estimate is is that it’s going to cost somewhere around 9 to 12 trillion dollars a year in order to invest in Green Technology now that’s different than just you know writing a check for9 trillion and it goes away that’s investment so most of the money should come back and increase but the idea is is that we need to shift how we’re spending stuff into these other activities and there’s a lot of different things you know for instance one of the things I learned on this trip that as an American I it never really occurred to me is Africa doesn’t have weather radar that covers the whole country or the whole and the result is is that it’s very difficult to track the movement of Storms and weather patterns and that doesn’t sound like a big deal but imagine if you’re a farmer you’d like to know what’s going to happen not only today but knowing patterns and they don’t have tracking in order to know those kind of patterns and they don’t have early warning systems for storms and tornadoes and stuff like that so imagine if we were to build out a system like that for Africa and the amount of additional money that would be made as a result because now people could be able to see those things they can plan accordingly they can become more profitable there’s a whole series of these kind of infrastructure things that are necessary to be built that could change the world uh and that sounds like a really small thing but it it it’s incredibly consequential yeah I mean I checked the weather before I just go outside in general I’m not even a farmer so you know what I mean like that’s kind of crazy to think about you couldn’t even really plan out your day or your week really yeah um because there’s no wow I didn’t even know that that’s interesting a small small question before we get to this just because have you ever seen those things with like the little thing that’s spinning and it takes the temperature and all that stuff weather stations yeah yeah showing my ignorance thank you I don’t know what they’re called but uh weather stations would the would something like that um obviously they would need power or whatever but would something like that get them there or what is the technology that’s required to there’s that uh you know they need like Doppler radar systems yeah you know like we have those in Spades every every TV station has it around the country and those are all is that like a uh what is a I could Google this but I’m just curious quickly what is a Doppler is it like a tower that’s like scan it like what I’ve never thought about that till you just talked about it yeah Doppler well it’s radar yeah and Doppler is um the idea that as something is moving away from you or coming closer to you right as a shift in frequency so for instance when a car goes by you hear and that’s the frequency of the sound you can do the same thing with measuring with radar so you can see how quickly a CL loud or weather system is moving towards you or away from you and so Doppler radar is radar that measures fast enough at a frequency that can measure the speed at which things are moving um and so now using that information you can predict the move the movement of clouds and weather systems so if you had a network AB Doppler Radars across Africa you would be able to predict the movement of weather system and that’s what I was asking about it seems like the weather stations are relative like I could set up a weather station in my backyard right now relatively cheap but I’m guessing a doler radar is like some big tower or something or what is it yeah yeah yeah yeah but weather stations positioned around Africa networked together would be a major major move I mean there are some of them but they don’t cover the whole continent particularly the central part of the continent and if you had all of that and if you had all of that Data Network together so that you could pull it up and know that would be a major progression forward yeah well let’s uh let’s talk about ski Dubai and then we can um uh talk about the data that the’re very interesting data you sent along um I’m going to have you narrate this if you don’t mind I mean I know you’re kind of narrating it in the video but I’d just be interested to hear your thoughts after the fact uh what are we looking at what are our listeners looking at right now yeah so this is a this is a mall in Dubai uh Dubai loved malls and this is like one of four or five really huge malls you go in and then all of a sudden you’re inside a ski I mean I’m looking up about halfway up the mountain there Hill and there is actually a chairlift and that is snow it’s all it’s all manufactured but you know you walk into this place and outside it’s 85° and inside it’s a chilly you know 28 29 degrees I mean it was cold and they give you what’s funny is when you when you go I didn’t get skis because I didn’t want to ski but I I got uh a permit to go up the chairlift they give you this jacket and flimsy pants um and it’s you know if you live in the midwest boy you know you’d look at this stuff and you think this is really pathetic but the the key thing is they don’t give you gloves you have to pay extra if you want to get gloves that I see your breath here cold in there yeah oh yeah it’s really cold and so you go up this uh chairlift and I this takes you up about halfway and I could go all the way up to the top but halfway they have this Chalet you can see a Kuwaiti flag or not a UAE flag there in the back and you go off and and to the right there there’s a chalet and you can go and just sit and have a hot chocolate and uh you know look at people and yeah that’s what I did and then uh in order to go down because I didn’t have skis uh there’s a zipline and I took a zip line down oh yeah miss that the video la and you know basically the people hanging out of this place for a lot of uh emirati Teenage Kids you know this is this is what you do you go to the mall and then you go hang out in the Chalet uh and ski down the hill and this is uh you know first off this is cool let’s just be straight up about it I mean it’s pretty amazing it’s an amazing thing to see yeah um but it is an incredible energy suck I can’t imagine how much energy it takes to keep that cold 24 hours a day 3 365 days a year 366 in the case of this year and uh and then manufactur all that snow and I mean wow but uh if I lived in Dubai I’d probably go I mean you know it’s a it’s a strange unusual you know if you’re hot and there’s sand and it’s dusty all the time this is a rest fit it actually is pretty neat uh I have family that live in Cairo there’s a there’s a similar one in Cairo and they told me that they’ve gone and they think it’s pretty cool um but it is a it was a very strange thing that really emphasizes that everything about to buy is entirely manufactured uh you know it is a World of Concrete and air conditioning uh and it really would not exist without just an enormous enormous amount of energy um so you know you kind of wonder how does a country like that continue to prosper uh in the future um you know I don’t know uh I they they definitely uh yeah that’s the view that big picture on the right that’s the view from the top of the the burall Dubai which is the tallest building in the world and you know you look at all those little buildings there um those the the small buildings those are like 40 stories tall you know it gives you a sense of how big everything is and the burel Dubai uh I didn’t go up to the top because it costs something like uh $200 to go to the top and I I really didn’t want to spend $200 to go to the top of a building uh but I went to the mall at the base and the mall is ridiculous there’s 1,200 stores in the mall um you know I mean that just everything about Dubai is just so much stuff to buy and do and I think this is a great picture it just shows you like the citycape and how contrast yeah you see the Burge right there in the middle which is like uh 800 meters tall um I mean that’s really really tall I mean it’s it’s a it’s a crazy City it’s um it is made entirely for the wealthy it’s very hard to get around if you don’t have a car which is a lot a lot of people there’s enormous number of people that are uh workers there from other countries like the population of all of the Emirates is the number of emirati citizens is like one and a half million but the number of guest workers is like uh four or five million yeah and I I don’t know how much truth there is but there’s always talk about like first of all I just have to say this looks like an evil villain’s layer the buron CLE uh but have you ever heard the talk to your point that you just brought up and we can move on to data but I’ve heard that like a lot of this Skyline allegedly is built by like slave labor pretty close I don’t know that you would call it slave labor but I I you know a lot of the people who go there from the Philippines and India and Pakistan and African countries you know they arrive and they have to if once they get a job they have to turn over their passport and where they live are in these big dormitories that are owned by the construction companies so you know your whole life is basically governed by these countries these companies and uh you go into a certain amount of debt when you work for the companies you know they for your uniform and your food and so you have to work there uh and then when you’re done you know maybe they give you your passport back and you can go back they’ve been trying to change some of the laws in the emir about that I don’t know how successful they are it’s it’s not an open Society so it’s not like there’s a free press That’s reporting on whether or not this is actually happening um and uh you know they they have a real security service that throws people in jail if you ask too many questions so that I mean it is the sheen of it as a visitor especially from the West is really glittery and nice and you stay in these beautiful hotels then when you start digging a little bit and I stayed in kind of a working class neighborhood working middle class neighborhood uh which is where my Airbnb was and it was almost entirely Indians and Russians uh and you know it’s a very certainly everyone had showers and their own Apartments but it was not the American standard of living you it was a little little less um and you if you’re not working you’re not valuable so like you don’t see families you know you don’t see kids um there are neighborhoods that have that stuff but those are very wealthy neighborhoods that are somewhere else and um you know from what I understand is that once you make your money leave you don’t come back so that’s pretty much how Dubai operates uh it’s a very strange place to be when you’re holding a meeting that is ostensibly about helping the world um because so much of the city is not about helping the world yeah I gotta ask another dupy question how did you get food and stuff sorry that just that just came up I was like um well at the at the meeting convention space they had all these kiosks set up all over the place could go eat but uh in the what I did for my breakfast in the morning is I found a grocery store and I got some food and and I kept it there and I would usually one of the great things about Arab countries is uh they love fruit juices so I would always have some fruit juice in the morning I’d have some yogurt and I’d buy fruit and that’s what I’d have for breakfast and then in the evenings um there are lots of these Street side in the neighborhood that I was living in lots of these Street side restaurants so I had Turkish food one night I would usually have chicken briani at some other place uh you know Chinese food lots of Chinese people there so there was lots of very good Chinese food um so that was pretty great and it was usually really cheap like I could have um some really good chicken briani and a drink and the drink that I like a lot is uh lemon mint where basically they make lemonade and then they put lots of little pieces of mint in it um and I would have a lemon mint you know that whole thing would cost me maybe $5 and it was a very filling meal and that’s what I would do every day very nice very nice that’s so cool I’m looking forward to the next time you uh go to one of these uh yeah well Baku Baku is the next one and uh the big worry about Baku is that it’s not a city big enough it’s only a city of about two million and and it’s not a city big enough to really handle 100,000 people that are going to come for a meeting yeah um all of the major hotels have already been reserved out for the meeting I haven’t gotten a hotel room because uh soon after in mid January uh the government shut down the hotel reservation process um because they’re worried that all the hotels will be sold to Rich westerners and people from poor countries won’t be able to afford to go I’m trying to figure out what I’m going to do uh turns out my dry cleaner has family in Baku and he offered to talk to his family to let me stay so that would be interesting um I don’t know I don’t know what’s gonna happen uh it’ll be really interesting yeah well folks you can stay tuned another plug at heat rising.net um and uh we’ll close out the show with looking at some data shall we yeah um I just wanted to show quickly who this data is from Bloomberg it looks like Bloomberg Bloomberg has a uh has a invest a research group called Bloomberg nef and this was paid for by the Business Council for sustainable energy which is basically a uh you know business group that wants everyone to use Green Tech yeah and one of the pieces of data you showed me out I tried to hold back my jokes you said we’re trying to eliminate coal I said hey what did I do um I’m just joking uh this is an interesting graph here I thought it was super interesting because it looks like we had a dip recently in our use of coal I don’t mean to focus too much on that though break this down why’ you find this interesting you you had noted this slide for me yeah well this is cost of electricity um cost this is cost of electricity so the gray line that you see there is the cost of coal and there was a dip in 2019 to 2020 and but not really much and it went back up again and basically the cost of coal is higher the cost of using wind which is that blue line the cost of solar which is that yellow line uh and then that light blue line is what’s called combined cycle gas turbine which is the most popular kind of gas natural gas system that’s being installed now so combined cycle gas turbines uh are a little bit cheaper than wind and and solar but long term it does seem like solar and wind costs are going down significantly and gas is really cheap in the United States because we have a surplus of it we produce a lot of it nobody’s really quite sure how long that’s going to last but definitely the cost of solar and wind continue to go down so not only is it good for the environment it’s good for the pocketbook to use solar and wind in fact if you live in a lot of States uh you can buy you know solar electricity as part of your uh you can you know go to these companies and buy solar rather than your local utility and oftentimes it’s a lot cheaper than what your utility would be and this right here is why because utilities continue to use coal plants uh because that’s what they have and that’s what they own and they want to use that but they have these other newer companies that are selling just solar and solar is a lot cheaper than coal you can see I mean it’s a it’s almost a a half to a quarter Less in cost that’s that’s really significant yeah yeah that’s insane that’s insane and I just have to say this just because you meant the black line is cold right you said the gray line is cold I sorry I thought it was dark gray but yes black okay just making sure just making sure is gas yeah cool yeah um that’s that is super interesting and so you’re saying that it’s actually just to put that back in a bottle it’s actually cheaper to go green this is what this is showing yeah yeah and and average citizens you know you can find these companies uh that will sell you solar electricity to replace your utility and utilities have to carry that solar electricity to your home you pay you pay both companies you end up paying the Sol you pay the solar electricity company for your electricity and you have to pay the utility for the right to use their wires you get a bill usually from both places but you end up saving quite a bit of money overall yeah yeah absolutely any other thoughts on this uh this slide gonna it’s you know this this trend is just going to continue and you know the world is installing a lot more solar and wind and because of this trend utility companies don’t like solar and wind because they already built All these power plants and they want to use the power plants until they run out of value for them so that’s why utility companies tend to resist solar and wind because they want to continue using the oil and gas plants that they built a long time ago yeah and I think it’s kind of crazy and feel free to correct me if I’m like wrong on this or if you disagree but I think it’s crazy and I’ll move to our next slide um like my uncle for example recently got solar and um it’s awesome because he doesn’t I mean I think they’re actually paying him at this point because his roof is so large oh yeah he installed it yeah you can do that too yeah yeah but I found it interesting it kind of reminds me of uh like hom grow and that which I’m talking about cannabis and that it seems like so like Amron still is he still has like paperwork he deals with with the power company and they actually take power from his house which I think is cool um I just thought it was notable that like the power company is even still involved again I think it’s cool because they’re able to like take the P his excess his Surplus if you will and and distribute it so that’s the cool part about it um but I just like it’s interesting how the company even is able to like work their way into that you know what I mean I don’t know if my question is typically if if you get solar panels installed the unless you add a giant battery to your house the problem is is that you the times when most people use their electricity is at the beginning of the day and the end of the day and that middle part is when the most solar is produced so unless you have a battery and most people don’t get batteries right you’re not going to serve yourself so you’re still going to need the utility company you could sell them the solar in the middle of the day which they’ll gladly take but then at night and the beginning of the end of the day when your demand is highest you still need them to supply it to you gotcha yeah that well that makes sense I think maybe uh I the way you just said that makes so much more sense and um I guess uh where I was coming from it was just interesting like you say some of these companies will oppose it it but then when you install it in your house they’re like well wait a minute we need we need that right oh yeah they want it right they definitely want it yeah um so if you want to get 100% off the grid you got to build you got to add a battery yeah and uh that’s another big cost and you know not everybody can handle that you know it’s uh you got to spend 30 $40,000 in order to get the P solar panels and the battery and you know that’s a lot of money yeah if you can tell I’m trying to make a pitch to the Preppers I feel like those are the the group that tend to be Preppers or the group that t and maybe I’m casting with a wide brush but they tend to be you know kind of right leaning anti- climate change and stuff I’m like no no lean into it make yourself self-reliant don’t depend on the big companies oh yeah there’s a real there’s a real case to be made for that absolutely yeah so so um 63 uh slide 63 I want you to break this one down as well um there’s a lot to this one I feel oh man yeah carbon capture projects so you know what what you’re looking at here so carbon capture is just Gathering all the extra CO2 that goes into the sky and what you’re looking at is there’s like basically no carbon capture projects that are underway and then all of a sudden by 2025 there should be a ton more in 2030 this should be you know way more this is million metric tons of CO2 and it give you a sense of how much CO2 right now we’re putting I think somewhere around or 500 million metric tons of CO2 into the air every year so by 2030 we’d only we wouldn’t even be doing half of what needs to be done in order to keep a pace but what you see here are all these different colors are different ways different projects are talking about Gathering CO2 and and then turning it in different things the the most common thing is taking it and pumping it into the ground in old gas and oil wells which is fine it stay you know it can stay there for a million years and nobody would know about it just like oil um and these are all the different ways in which they’re talking about it ammonia hydrogen which is one of the big ones you see that they’re purple on the bottom of 2030 that’s uh that is um fertilizer production a lot of people don’t know the way that most fertilizer is produced is by using natural gas as a feed stock and so when you create that fertilizer you’re creating nitrogen and one of the things that gases off is CO2 there’s a lot a lot of CO2 that comes out of fertilizer production and this is the fertilizer that’s you know the ammonia fertilizer that’s used on farms uh and so that that is a if you can capture all that CO2 that comes off of fertilizer production that would be a major thing power generation you know there’s a lot of CO2 that comes out of whole burning coal natural gas processing you know that’s where you’re pulling natural gas out of the ground there’s a lot of methane and CO2 that leaks out of that stuff ethanol production is a major major producer of CO2 that we have in Illinois in the Midwest um one of the big struggles right now is that there are companies in the Midwest and that have an idea of building these using old pipelines and building new pipelines and taking the natural gas from ethanol plants and then putting into Old coal mines in Illinois um that there’s been a tremendous amount of Grassroots resistance across the Midwest against these pipelines because people are concerned that if the CO2 pipelines rupture CO2 is heavier than air it will travel around along the ground and then suffocate people and kill them because it’s odorless and uh colorless you know that I something needs to be done in order to add maybe a smell to it like you have for natural gas there’s something that’s added to Consumer natural gas so you can smell it that smell is not natural um or some sort of federal standard and that’s something that the government has really really been struggling with before we’re going to have a real solution for that we have to have a way in which we can pipe this CO2 around in order to be able to put it into the ground in the United States it’s very interesting yeah I didn’t even think about the because you mentioned objections to the CO2 pipelines and I’m thinking what the hell could be the objections and that’s a yeah we got to figure that out very afraid of it uh Illinois and Iowa and South Dakota and Minnesota a whole bunch of projects have been cancelled because of local opposition um and uh there needs to be a national solution and it’s the sort of thing that Congress needs to get involved in but because Congress has been so just stuck none of these things are being addressed yeah yeah well said any other uh again this is a big one any other thoughts on this slide here no I mean you know there’s we need to I mean what you see here is great if it can happen but we need to do twice as much three times as much I mean not only do we need to stop putting new carbon into the air we need to start removing carbon from the air so you know what you see here is billions of dollars of investment you need many more ability you need to Triple what you see here we’re not going nearly fast enough if we’re going to stop global warming yeah this next one I found very very interesting I hope I read this one right I mean am I let’s just start here I guess am I correct in saying we’re almost in 2023 we’re almost to a point where 50% of our vehicle fuel is renewable is that true oh it’s natural gas damn it I’m reading things wrong renewable gotcha yeah thank you yeah yeah so this is using natural gas um yeah I mean you know n there there used to be a lot of natural gas vehicles that were used buses and things you’d see like that but now uh renewable vehicles are are really growing I I think that this isn’t nearly as interesting I think a couple slides later is the uh um oh no that’s the end um oh wait what’s that last slide there that this one renewable diesel spot no that’s not that one um sorry I’m trying to find I know I shared something with you uh and I’m trying to find the right one um oh here it is slide 67 one right before it perfect there we go so I I think that this is really fascinating the US electrical vehicle sales you can see it’s just exploded and um you know we’re in 2023 we’re probably going to have like seven times as many electric cars sold as in 2020 now I mean 1.4 1.5 million vehicles I think we’re selling something like uh 15 million Vehicles a year so you know this is only on10th to 5% of the total Vehicles sold in the United States but you can see it’s growing very very fast and what’s the company that’s growing the fastest you see Tesla in there that big blue chunk there um you but there’s a lot of other really great cars that are com coming out of the market uh and I you know I’m just I I went to the uh Chicago Auto Show couple weeks ago and I was really impressed I mean there there are some the the Mustang Maki yeah is an amazing car um and uh it’s a not only is it an amazing car it’s it it looks fun looks cool and it’s pretty well priced I mean you can get one for about $38,000 um the uh the new Kia ev6 which is basically a very sporty cool looking SUV three three row seating wow what a cool car uh I mean it there’s so many things that are great about it if if I had a bunch of small kids I would probably want to get one one of the things that I really liked about all the Kia too is they all have a 110 volt Jack in the back so you you know if you had a TV you just plug it right in um you know that just seems like a yeah of course you know if you’re driving around a big giant battery you should be able to plug in your TV right yeah so you know that I think that they’re we’re really on the edge of something really big happening um my car is uh I I drive a an old Subaru it’s it’s a little over 10 years old and a lot of the problems that it’s having now are are its engine and I’m really getting tired of it if I had an electric car I wouldn’t have those problems right um you know it it leaks a lot of oil now you know yeah a belt broke the other day you know I mean th those aren’t problems you’d have with an electric vehicle that they last longer supposedly um so you know couple more I’m going to make my car last a couple more years but you know I could see uh EVS being a really good solution for a lot of people and I think that uh it’s it’s about to happen yeah and as far as infrastructure goes it my same uncle has a Tesla as well and uh it’s interesting to me one of the things that my dad will give him [ __ ] about he’ll say well it’ll die when you’re driving across the parking lot and he’s like dude it lasts me 250 miles and he’s like but it takes forever to fill up my dad I don’t know why he just wants to prove him wrong on electric vehicles and he’s like dude it takes like 15 minutes to get over 50% and typically when I stop I’ll go in I’ll get a drink I’ll stretch a little bit I’ll use the restroom and just about there you’re talking five to 10 minutes so you can wait an extra five for your battery he makes a very convincing case for an electric vehicle so the one of the things that we’re really really close on with electric is uh you know the the batteries right now have uh they use a lot of water and they that is in order to be able to move I don’t really entirely understand the chemistry but uh in the next five seven years the expectation is to move to what’s called a solid state battery and has a de different chemical composition the expectation is that a solid state battery would probably hold three to four times the charge of existing batteries and would charge twice as fast if not more so I think that we’re really really close if you’re going to buy an electric vehicle I would I would get a lease because I think that we’re really close to moving to this different kind of battery you know so if you could imagine if you had a car that had a 600 mile range and you could charge it you know 50% in 5 minutes you know know hm you know that that really makes internal combustion engines look kind of lame and I think that we’re really close on that like there’s going to be some things that are going to change that are going to make gas vehicles seem like horse and Buggies you know it’s it’s just a matter of time yeah I think one of the things is and I know this is appealing to maybe the Macho side but uh you know you’re seeing these electronic vehicles for lack of better words smoke uh performance Vehicles their torque is incredible yeah like a sport like that vehicle you just described earlier which is a Kia it like some people have said yeah they’ve been blown off the line by soccer moms in their electric vehicle yeah you know yeah yeah I mean and if you’re driving a a Mustang Mai you know you’re you’re going almost as fast as a Lamborghini I mean you know these the torque in these cars are so high you don’t have gear shifting um so you know things move pretty quickly and I think to your point before we uh I wanted to give you space if there’s anything else on these because there’s the from what I understand the way it’s able to get so much torque is because each wheel is tracked kind of by like the computer in the car per se and it can track it down to like a decimal in other words like you can put the pedal to the metal and it will put it to the Max and the tires will not slip because it knows just the right amount and if they start to slip it’ll kind of tear back on it much quicker than a combustion field car is and another example I guess I could give just for folks in Illinois I’ve heard that like electronic Vehicles like if you hit black ice for example it responds so much not that maybe the outcome is any different but the way that it responds is so much quicker than a a regular car because everything is electronic I thought that was an interesting that is interesting I I I don’t know that um but I mean another aspect is is that because it’s an electric motor the the basic torque of it it has no limitation whereas a gas engine has limitations of physics yeah uh in terms of how much output it can have whereas a electric motor is only limited by the amperage of the battery and the amperages of these batteries are very very high it’s sort of like I don’t know if anybody does RC cars but if you get these if you if you buy you know you my son used to do this you know we would go get like a a, 1500 uh amperage battery milliamp battery and we’d plug that in and we drive it around and then we go really fast and then we’d go get a 3,000 milliamp battery and then it would just it would just cook you know it was really fast so that’s basically what you’re seeing with these electric cars but on a much bigger basis yeah and I wanted to give you some space on this one thing I felt like we should point out is before I give you the space is like these categories are really expanding yes Tesla has always dominated but check out these other brands getting into the game yeah um you know watch out for uh companies like G which is a Chinese company that also owned Volo um you know they’re they’re growing very fast Kia Toyota you know I think Bard is going to have some really really cool cars I saw some really neat GM cars that are in pre-production at the auto show I think those are going to be really great I personally feel a lot more comfortable buying a car from a traditional automobile company uh for a whole number of reasons so I’m looking forward to you know what GM uh has in the future I mean I I would really I’ve got you know there’s a lot of build issues with Teslas and I’m so crazy about how they hold a lot of stuff from you when you buy a car um you know I think Ford and and Kia are really really doing cool stuff and the Hyundai the Hyundai uh ionic 5 and ionic 6 are really really cool cars um you know I think there’s a lot a lot a lot that’s going to be coming on to the market that’s really fun and awesome yeah not sacrifice not sacrifice and in some cases more like we were just talking about you go faster um yeah yeah you plug things in Um well hey last time we talked I didn’t think about this until just now uh Governor pritzer had put I don’t know the right word he did not sign into law this nuclear uh bill that came his way but I think between the last time we spoke and now he did sign legislation are you able to talk about this sorry I didn’t prep you on this um I mean Illinois has a long history of nuclear power which um I personally think is a good thing um nuclear power tends to be extremely well-managed uh very clean you do end up with the nuclear waste and we do need to figure out what to do with that and that’s it’s a whole other story in and of itself um but nuclear power is doesn’t create any CO2 creates an enormous amount of electricity and can be a real solution for our global warming problem and um the the bill that was finally approved and signed by priter uh allows smaller nuclear power plants one of the problems is that most of the nuclear power power plants in the past that have been built have been these Mega you know thousands of megawatt facilities and pritsker is proposing or the bill that priser just sign would create these smaller like 400 300 megawatt plants that would go on sites of closed coal plants so you already have all the electricity infrastructure going to that location you build a new nuclear power plant in that location and there’s a lot of technology that has been developed in the last 30 years since uh the moratorium was entered where these plants are safer um they’re cheaper to build they’re building these in other countries are building them in Poland they’ve been building them in in uh Japan um and so I think it’s a a good solution for the United States and by the way Illinois is where the first nuclear reactors were you know the uh the in stag field when they split the atom for the first time that was a at the University of Chicago that was a a nuclear reactor and then they built other ones so Illinois has a long long history with nuclear power um we should keep doing it yeah and I can’t find the most recent figures but from 2015 here’s a look at the nuclear capacity and Illinois was top in the United States yeah there’s um there actually was a really good Gra in this thing that I sent you that shows it how uh how the Midwest is so different if I can find it real quick um maybe I can’t um but yeah oh here it is yep uh slide number slide number 19 page 20 all right um if you can oh wait 19 yep there it is so what you’re looking at there PJ these are the different sectors of electricity in the United States the United States has broken up in a different sectors and red is when you’re using nuclear power and pjm Chicago and Northern Illinois is part of pjm which includes Northern Illinois and Ohio and uh Pennsylvania which is where the most in Maryland which is where the most nuclear power plants are and you can see you know we’re we’re doing an average of uh 800 terawatts uh a year in the in pjm which is a lot of electricity and you maybe 40% of that is nuclear uh in our sector and you look at the rest there’s not a whole lot of other places that have that much nuclear the southeast does because there’s a bunch of power plants in uh Tennessee and Georgia South Carolina and then miso is Midwest ISO which is Southern Illinois and Iowa and Missouri and then there’s a few other nuclear power plants in Illinois and that’s part of the red that you see there the the fast sloping part you see the black that’s the bottom of each of those that’s coal so you can see how coal is just falling off really fast in all these parts of the country um and the gray parts that’s in the middle that’s natural gas so natural gas is growing very quickly um and you know a little bit of blue that you see that’s Renewables and so you can see Renewables are growing a lot in Midwest ISO because we have a lot of wind and solar um you know OT is Texas you can see that Renewables are growing a lot in Texas but pjm which includes Northern Illinois uh you know look at all that nuclear I mean it looks like we you know the southeast pjm and miso did you say Midwest mid yeah we run this country yeah we do well I mean in terms of the the size I mean New York uh that’s just New York State as its own section okay but I was surprised at California you think with just with how many people there are and with how green they seem to be yeah they are they are very green um well you know that’s just one state California is just one state sure um you know is a lot a lot of big States right soch different areas Pennsylvania Ohio Northern Illinois you know that’s that’s a lot going on there that makes sense cool well we’ve covered a lot of bases today I appreciate your time and I I just have uh two last I think there will be quick questions for you um the low gas prices during the last Administration there’s a dial in the the presidential office where they can turn up and turn down the gas prices right yeah you know gas prices are never going back down again I mean that’s that’s just a fact part of it is inflation um but the other the other big issue is is that uh the war with Ukraine and Russia you know Russia is one of the large lar world’s largest suppliers of of oil and uh so long as Russia continues this war there’s going to be a constraint of oil coming from them and uh that’s just the way GNA be you know I me I suppose we could settle the war with Russia but that would mean that Ukraine would basically have to give in and would yeah become under thrall of uh Putin and I’m not sure that it’s worth two and a half dollar gas for that you know we’re never going to see we’re probably never going to see $2 and a half dollar gas we’re never going to see a198 gas again um you know that’s just a fact of life um yeah and probably as we continue moving more and more green uh you know gases gas prices will go up I’m going to guess because it’s going to be less and less profitable for companies to be drilling in the ground interesting interesting thank you for addressing that yeah the main joke I was trying to make is that that that’s more due to economic factors the president does not control the gas prices right yeah I mean there’s a lot of weird things that are going on right now there’s a major story uh in the Wall Street Journal couple weeks ago or Bloomberg a couple weeks ago about how oil uh Oil Company oil companies have had record profits in the last year and yet oil company stocks are declining and what’s going on is the market is pricing in the expectation that green energy is going to be pushing these oil companies out of business and uh oil companies are you know they’re they’re making lots of money but their future is getting dimmer and dimmer as time goes by yeah well my last question I I do believe is an easy one I’m just curious because I appreciate your work uh do you ever plan to get any help man seem like you’re a oneman band and I you know only ask so that you can since this is a platform that you might be able to get people that are interested in helping yeah um you know well if there’s anybody that uh I’m looking for somebody that uh has uh right now I’m working on a database project so if there’s anybody out there that has some database knowledge i’ I’d love to uh um building uh database uh uh searchable databases in front ends for websites that would be really great love to have you your help if if you can help me with that I mean a lot of the work is um is very prosaic you know it’s it’s not it’s necessarily uh sexy there’s there’s no stakeouts or anything like that sure you know um so it it’s a lot of very basic things like that um so a lot about database front ends uh and and database Management on websites i’ I’d love to have your help absolutely that lots of Walkin comment was it joke about Dubai there’s lots of walking involved with this line of work um no but I asked that question uh at the end because if anybody’s still listening it’s people that’s really do care about this topic and so I wanted to give you the space in case you needed help yeah thank you very much great yeah um folks heat rising.net that’s probably where if you uh would like to get in contact with Mike you could uh visit like the about page or something like that um reach out and Mike any last thoughts before we go that’s it please subscribe love to have you as a reader yeah so folks once again heat rising.net you go to the page and in the top right hand corner you see a subscribe button and that will allow you to receive the news right off the wire as they say in the uh news business right um that’s it so Mike I always appreciate uh the fact that you’re willing to sit down with me to have these long form nuanced conversations uh just wanted to let you know that I appreciate you before we uh close out i’ love to talk about it love your show it’s really great thanks well folks I hope you found as much value in this conversation as I did and remember folks it’s not a sacrifice something that yeah lean into it helping your family that’s right helping your family and your fellow neighbor well folks we’ll see you in the next episode of the Cole memo take care