Dan Crenshaw Deconstructs the Green New Deal | Joe Rogan

We're just, we're, instead what we see is just very extreme talking points. First of all, very extreme interpretations of the actual problem and therefore leading to very extreme solutions to that problem. Or if you say the world's ending in 12 years, then why not have a Green New Deal? Right? Like it's, you're operating off of a premise that is highly extreme. And it's just, it's not, it's not healthy political discourse. It's meant to animate people. It's meant to get people upset and to have a villain. It always comes back to the villain and the oppressor and oppressed. It always comes back to this. Everything, everything somebody like Bernie Sanders says can be traced to this specific ideology where one person is to blame, where one institution is to blame. And I think that's extremely unhealthy way to look at things and also intellectually dishonest. I don't know the parameters of a Green New Deal, the New Green Deal, whatever the fuck it is, but you hear it all the time. What is the idea behind this? At its core, a complete shift to wind and solar at its core. So an idea that if you do that, you will, you will have zero emissions in the next 10 years. But it's an obsession with wind and solar, which I think is interesting. It bans nuclear. Remember when the talking points came out from the Green New Deal? Didn't like nuclear. So that's how you know it's not an actual environmental plan, or at least associated with carbon emissions and climate change. Because why would you ban the one reliable piece of energy that we have that has zero emissions, which is nuclear? So you know it's not about that. It also includes free healthcare for everybody. It includes free college. So it's like, it's like every socialist plan wrapped into one and then they call it an environmental plan and ban fossil fuels and things like that. So that's a fundamentally what it is. It's a wish list of things like that. Well, nuclear has this inherent fear of things going wrong. Chernobyl. Yeah. But we also put nuclear reactors on like submarines and put a bunch of people on them and go down to depths and put torpedoes and stuff on them. So I mean it's- Sure. It's the overwhelming amount of nuclear energy that's been used in this country versus the amount of times we've had nuclear disasters. And there's also the problem with these old systems that were like Fukushima that were implemented in the 1960s and 1970s. They just, they're not as good. Yeah. It's true, but we do have the technology to make them good and I think we should look at ways to research more, the miniaturized modular nuclear devices that are being looked at. I want a nuclear car. Maybe we can get you one. That would be the shit. Yeah, we don't have them yet. Can you imagine? You should have a nuclear car, Joe. Why'd you have a nuclear car? What about a nuclear flame thrower? Ooh. Now we're getting crazy. So the new Green Deal's just wind and solar. It concentrates on just windmills and solar. And the idea is to replace the grid with some sort of, I mean, California, it seems like it could be possible. Like you could just put solar panels on everybody's roof in California. You'd probably reduce the amount of electricity that we need from the grid radically. Yeah, it gets complicated because you don't have sun at night. And so this is the complication of wind and solar in general is that you need battery back up to really make this work. And that technology just isn't there. The theoretical, it's just not there. I mean, you'd have to- But I mean, people live off the grid with solar power. Right, but to make this, to do that, but when they don't, like, so when there is no sun, the plants shift to either natural gas or coal or something else. But here, this is a perfect example. Like here, this is a goofy place to live because it doesn't rain. We have sun every day. But not at night. And so this is- Right, but 12 hours of sun is enough. Well, only if you have the batteries to store it. Right. And so yeah, in theory, if you, and we don't right now. Like for, if you actually, if you want to shift the entire energy grid to that, we do not have the massive amounts of, there's some good data on this. I don't have it all throughout my head, but it's massive. It is a massive amount of batteries and farms to actually hold that. There's an energy density problem with wind and solar. It's just a physics problem. So the science can only go so far. And even the theoretical limit to how much a battery can hold, probably, which we're not even, we haven't discovered yet, but it's a theoretical capacity of a battery, it would still make it very difficult to actually do this. And so it's just not realistic. Also, there's other consequences to wind and solar, like massive solar or wind turbines. Okay. Those are, some people don't like those things. Massive amounts of space needed for solar. And also where are you going to get the special materials needed for solar panels? Like there's other consequences to this. And it's not self-evident that that's the only possible way to do it. It's not that we should shun it. Nobody's saying that. It should, we advocate for an all-in-the-above approach. If our goal is less carbon emissions, then we need to be focusing on 100% of carbon emissions, meaning the world's carbon emissions. The Green New Deal focuses on 15% of carbon emissions. Basically it says, let's kneecap the United States economy. We'll destroy fossil fuels. We'll have a utopian society full of wind and solar, even though the batteries don't exist to make that work. But hey, we'll make it work. And then that solves 15% of the problem and has almost no effect on the actual climate. So when I say 100% of the problem, what I'm saying is technological innovation, whether that's nuclear or carbon capture. If the goal is less carbon, then let's actually focus on carbon capture. So I just dropped a bill Senator Cornyn did on the Senate side called the Leading Act. And it basically repurposes grant funds in the Department of Energy to focus on carbon capture for natural gas plants. So we have natural gas plants in Texas that are zero emissions. They take in natural gas, they operate the facility, they create electricity, and then they recapture that carbon and they power the facility with it. Zero emissions. So if our goal is zero emissions, let's do what works. And also, by the way, that plant can keep going no matter what. Doesn't matter what time of day it is. That's a crime, buddy. I didn't know that that existed. That's amazing. It's called net power. We talked about something on the podcast before, just as a joke. I was saying, why don't they just make a giant building, but make an air filter, like a huge building the size of an air filter. Carbon capture. Yeah, huge air filter the size of a building. But apparently they're doing that. Apparently China is in the process of building things like that. I've heard of some things in China that, because they have an air pollution problem that's different from carbon. Okay, so like because carbon dioxide, you're breathing it right now. You're not polluting it necessarily. So they've got a different problem and they're just a mess. And so that might be what they're doing. But on the carbon capture side, it's definitely happening. It's all the oil companies actually doing it because there's actually an interest in the oil and gas industry to reduce carbon emissions. There's a huge interest. I mean, they realize where the conversation is going and we should encourage that. So there's pretty impressive big projects going on by a lot of these folks. So your take is that what the Green New Deal is, I mean, if I can encapsulate it, the Green New Deal is basically more of an emotional plea to people that are worried about the future and that see wind and solar as being free and clean alternatives. It's a dogmatic approach to this. It's not based in... Makes people feel good. It's a feel good thing and it really shouldn't make them feel good, just evolve consequences I said about wind and solar. These aren't necessarily clean by themselves. It also involves conflict minerals that you need for these countries. No, that's what I was getting at too. Yeah, like where do you mine these things? It's not in the United States. It's not in the United States where we have child labor laws. It's Afghanistan, it's the Congo, it's a lot of places that have these. Good intentions often lead to bad things. So look at the ethanol issue. When we decided that we wanted ethanol in our gasoline, well, I think it was... It's Indonesia or Malaysia, but they cleared tons and tons of forest to make room so that they could produce the ethanol oil. Carbon emissions, they're increased rapidly because of that, all because of our good intentions. These incentives and these second and third order effects, they matter and we have to think about them when we're talking about policy. If our goal is less emissions, then let's be thoughtful about how we approach that. Let's not decide on a solution and then look for reasons to back up that solution.