#1163 Robert Bryce | Russia, Ukraine, Nuclear, & Bitcoin: Energy Market Deep Dive

Robert Bryce is one of the foremost experts and reporters on the energy business around the world. He is also the author of a book, “A Question of Power: Electricity and the Wealth of Nations.” In this conversation, we talk about energy markets, about renewables, can the United States become energy independent? What is going on with Russia & Ukraine? Why does China have a monopoly on different metals and magnets that are necessary to actually build renewable technology? And what does Robert think about bitcoin and the energy markets? ======================= Announcing LYCEUM | Miami, a day-long event on March 4th in Miami Beach hosted by Pomp. We’re gathering an explosive group of experts to engage in a series of bold discussions, covering topics from investing, emerging tech, longevity, space exploration, entertainment and more. The speaker lineup includes names such as investing legend Cathie Wood, NYT bestselling author Vivek Ramaswamy, billionaire Christian Angermayer, master of Contrarian Thinking Codie Sanchez, Modern Wisdom host Chris Williamson plus many more. Listeners will receive an exclusive 40% discount on VIP and Insider Pass tickets with code POMP40. General Admission tickets are free of charge. Spots are limited so head to lyceummiami.com to buy your ticket today. ======================= Pomp writes a daily letter to over 200,000+ investors about business, technology, and finance. He breaks down complex topics into easy-to-understand language while sharing opinions on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at https://pomp.substack.com/ =======================

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02Anthony Pompliano?

  What's up everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Many of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, which is my effort to find the most interesting people in the world and sit with them for hours while I ask questions in an effort to learn. We have no advertisers on this podcast, so it would mean the world to me if you would subscribe to the show on your favorite audio platform, watch episodes on YouTube, and tell your friends and family about the podcast. My goal is to help millions learn from the world's most interesting people. So let's get into today's episode. Robert Bryce is one of the foremost experts and reporters on the energy business around the world. He also is the author of a book, A Question of Power: Electricity in the Wealth of Nations, along with a number of other books that he's written over the years.

• 0:47Anthony Pompliano?

  In this conversation, we talk about energy markets, about renewables. Can the United States become energy independent? What's going on in Russia and Ukraine? Why does China have a monopoly on different metals and magnets that are necessary to actually build renewable technology? And what does Robert think about Bitcoin and the energy markets? I really enjoyed this conversation with Robert, and I hope you guys enjoy it as well. Once you get done listening, jump on Twitter and let us know what you liked, what you didn't like, what you agreed with, and what you didn't agree with. I always appreciate the feedback, and it helps us improve these conversations for each of you. Here is my conversation with Robert Bryce.

• 1:25Speaker 01

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• 1:56Speaker 02

  Everyone's got a hard question about AI. Your job, your kids, where it's going. Anthropic was built to surface those questions and share what it finds along the way, because there's hope in hard questions. Ask yours at claude.ai/spotify and keep thinking. That's claude.ai/spotify.

• 2:20Speaker 03

  Anthony Pompliano runs Pomp Investments. All views of him and the guests on his podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Pomp Investments. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp or his guests as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only.

• 2:43Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, guys. Bang, bang. I've got Robert here with me. Robert, you are one of the foremost experts in electricity and also other energy forms and markets. And I thought a great place to start our conversation today would simply be on this idea of electricity rich and electricity poor and how there is such a big difference in terms of access to electricity and also based on geography, what people are able to do with electricity in these various locations. How do you think through the importance of access to electricity and what really is the defining factors for making somebody electricity rich or electricity poor?

• 3:19Speaker 04

  Well, thanks, Anthony. Thanks for having me on. You're right. This is the defining disparity in the world today. As you look at the world now, we're some 8 billion people. There are roughly 3 billion people, almost 4 out of 10 people in the world today live in places where per capita consumption of electricity is less than 1,000 kilowatt hours per capita per year. So we're talking about an amount of electricity that's roughly equal to the amount that is used by an average kitchen refrigerator in the U.S. So, you know, when we look around the world, nearly all of Africa, South Asia, these are places where people live in dire energy poverty, but in particular dire electricity poverty. And why do we care? Well, if you care about women, if you care about girls, if you care about women's rights, this is the key issue because electricity, as I've said many times and I talk about

• 4:04Speaker 04

  in my book, electricity frees women and girls from the stove and the wash tub and the pump. I mean, they, you know, if you don't have electricity, you have to carry water. If you don't have it, you gotta, you know, all of these chores that we take for granted that women have to do in the home, if they don't have electricity, they're effectively slaves to the home tasks. So electricity is the most important and fastest growing form of energy in the world. And it's the biggest challenge we face globally in terms of bringing people out of the dark and into modernity.

• 4:37Anthony Pompliano?

  In your opinion, what are the obstacles that need to be overcome to get electricity to all seven and a half, eight billion people in the world? What are the things that we could do to kind of accelerate that adoption and make sure that people in developing nations have as much access as people in the developed nations?

• 4:53Speaker 04

  Ellen, that's a really good question, Anthony. It's a hard one to address because you need civil society fundamentally. And in writing my new book, A Question of Power, and in my new documentary, Juice, we went to Beirut and we were also in Puerto Rico. And you look around the world at where countries are racked with corruption, the grids reflect that corruption. You have to have a strong civil society. For electricity grids to work, people have to pay for the power. You can't just give it away. I mean, you can for a while, but electricity grids run on money. You have to keep investing money. You have to buy the fuel. You have to upgrade the generators.

• 5:32Speaker 04

  You have to continually monitor and repair the poles and the wires. This is a complete... Electric grids need continuing investment. So if the society is corrupt, and we saw this after this fall of Saddam Hussein in Iraq, Saddam was a bad guy, really a bad guy, but he kept the lights on. And nobody stole electricity when Saddam was in power because if you got caught, bad things were going to happen. But once Saddam fell and the US, you know, we were in this kind of coalition, power theft skyrocketed. And so today, Iraq is a basket case when it comes to its electric grid. And the same is true in Beirut, the same we saw, the same in India, where people steal electricity.

• 6:14Speaker 04

  So creating that civil society is not easily done, and it has to be done by the people in the countries that where they live. And it's a very difficult task. That's the key one. So, but then after that, if you don't have the, you don't have that civil society, you don't have the capital, and then if you don't have the capital, you can't build it, build out the grid. So these are tough challenges. And then there's the issue of challenges of fuel, nuclear power, whether it's coal, gas, these are other issues, but they, the first issue is the corruption issue.

• 6:41Anthony Pompliano?

  What have you seen in some of these areas? You mentioned Iraq being one example where they basically had electricity. There wasn't a lot of electricity theft and then it kind of reverts backwards. But obviously, things like natural disasters. We've seen Puerto Rico specifically, but many other places around the world that have some level of development, some level of connectivity, and they kind of get thrown backwards. Sometimes decades worth of progress is erased by some sort of natural disaster. Are there any lessons that we can learn from what happens in those societies once they've kind of gotten a taste of the connectivity, but then are kind of thrown backwards?

• 7:12Speaker 04

  Well, you know, it's good that you mentioned Puerto Rico because we were there and we filmed for Juice. We filmed in Puerto Rico. And remember, these are American citizens on American soil. Now, they're a colony effectively of the United States. They're, what is the right word? It's they're not, they're obviously not a state. They don't have representatives in the, in the House of Representatives. But they don't, what we saw, they got hit by two hurricanes in a row. Well, that's difficult, right? In any kind of circumstance, but you need hardened infrastructure. You need power poles, steel power, steel towers instead of wood. We saw this in South Louisiana where, you know, they're hit by hurricanes regularly there.

• 7:55Speaker 04

  Well, if you use wood power poles instead of steel ones or concrete ones, they're not going to last. And that's a, again, that goes back to the capital issue, which requires these continuing infusions of money to make sure the grid has integrity. But natural disasters are, I mean, they're hard. I mean, I've seen it, I saw it in South Louisiana. People will use local, you know, small generators to get the power they need if they can't rely on the grid.

• 8:18Anthony Pompliano?

  Another place in the world where we've seen a huge impact is Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Now, it isn't just electricity, it's natural gas, it's oil, it's a bunch of these different forms of energy. But it seems like there's a lot of confusion because headlines will read tons of sanctions against Russia, but then if you look at the dollar-denominated trade with Russia, it appears up in that same year. And a lot of that has to do with just spiking prices and things like that. How did you, as someone who pays a lot of attention to various energy markets and kind of the adoption of these fuels, evaluate what is actually happening, right? What is going on in that sector of the world when it comes to natural gas, oil, and mainly electricity as well?

• 9:02Speaker 04

  Well, let's talk about Ukraine first because this is a complex and multi-faceted challenge. And what is Russia doing and what have they begun doing since really they started last October, started attacking the Ukrainian grid? And this was a way that you, if you want to, if you want to kill modern society, what do you do? That you attack their electric grid. And so the Russians have been slowly degrading the Ukrainian grid. And there was a very good article in the Wall Street Journal a few, a few days ago, talking about that you, the linemen and I, my, some of my personal heroes are electric linemen. I love those guys, right? The people who turn the wrenches, who get up in those bucket trucks and all kinds of weather, that these were, you know, they were being lauded by the Ukrainians as their heroes

• 9:47Speaker 04

  because of what they were able to do. But the Russians are slowly degrading the Ukrainian grid and making it harder for ordinary Ukrainians to get along and to have heat in their homes and lights. And this is, this is a corrosive effect on society. And that will continue. I think we've seen that the Russians are going to continue these attacks on their, on the Ukrainian grid. And then that becomes a problem because then you don't have the necessary transformers. You don't have, you run out of wire, you run out of the poles, you run out, all of these things in the supply chain then become more difficult. And then we haven't talked yet about nuclear power and then in the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant that the Russians are now claiming as their own. That plant has been shut down.

• 10:28Speaker 04

  It's in safe operating mode, not at no big danger of, of an accident there. But this is what the Russians are claiming as one of the spoils of war. And they want that plant for themselves. And so the, I'm adamantly pro-nuclear, but it again, as I talked about before, requires civil society. You need strong governments with strong systems and people that are trained and well-trained that can run nuclear power plants. And that's no easy task.

• 10:54Anthony Pompliano?

  If we then bring it here to the United States, what's fascinating to me, and I know something that you've covered before, is this idea that renewable energy is meeting immense resistance in rural America. So it's an idea that has kind of received a lot of popularity and support in the coastal elite cities and inside of our academic institutions. And then when you kind of meet reality, whether it's in the plains of the Midwest, if it's kind of in the deep oil and gas sector of Texas or elsewhere, people kind of aren't as excited, or they may actually be anti some of these ideas, or not believe that it's actually possible to do this. What has been your experience in trying to unpack what's going on between the ideas and the theoretical, and then the reality on the ground, especially in the rural parts of America?

• 11:39Speaker 04

  Well, this is one of the key challenges, Anthony, is that we hear a lot of promotion of renewable energy, and it polls very well. You look at any of the polling data, a large majority of Americans say, oh, we love wind and solar, but they don't want to live next to these big projects. And so what I see is very clearly an urban-rural divide in this regard. And I'm not a partisan, I'm not a Democrat, I'm not a Republican, I'm disgusted, right? But the Democrats are very much pro-renewables, right? And the Democrats get the majority of their votes in the big cities. You can see this on any of the Electoral College maps, you know. But in rural America, there is widespread resistance to the expansion of wind and solar projects. I maintain the Renewable Rejection Database.

• 12:24Speaker 04

  I started collecting this data in 2015. Why? Because, as the famous industrial analyst W. Edwards Deming said, "In God we trust, all others bring data." So I started collecting the numbers, right? And now I've done it for going on nine years. Here's the punchline: Last year alone in the United States were 79 rejections of solar projects. Seventy-nine. And of those, more than 40 of them were in the state of Ohio, where you had more than 40 townships rejecting wind or solar projects, or saying, "They are not welcome here," either wind or solar, or both. It's happening in Iowa, it's happening in Indiana, in Illinois, and all across the central part of America, but really it's from Maine to Hawaii. This is a story that was never reported on the New York Times or big media outlets.

• 13:07Speaker 04

  In 2019, there were 200 people arrested on the island of Oahu protesting a wind project. 200 arrested. So this idea that wind energy and solar are clean and green, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But they require massive amounts of land. And that's the key issue. And it can't be overcome because of the low power density of wind and solar. And so this is one reason why I've been reporting on it. And of course, the wind and solar guys don't like that I report on it. They don't like it. They want to discount the rejection database. But the numbers are the numbers, not my numbers, they're the numbers.

• 13:37Anthony Pompliano?

  One other aspect of this that I was not aware of until the United States pulled out of Afghanistan was there are these mines where minerals and metals and magnets and all these other kind of components that end up being put into various types of technologies or physical products that are supposed to be helping accelerate the adoption of renewable energy. There are mines all over the world, obviously throughout different African countries, Afghanistan, China, et cetera. But as I dug into Afghanistan specifically, the Taliban essentially came under control of this mine, or they came into control of the mine.

• 14:18Anthony Pompliano?

  And as I dug deeper and deeper, I started to realize, well, China has very deep control of a lot of these mines as well. Sometimes in the country of China, other times they have partnered up or financed, they have a lot of debt on some sort of mining operation or logistics, moving the metals, minerals and other components to kind of their destination. Are we just at a point where even if everyone accepted renewable energy, it would be hard to actually build enough of the physical products because the components are either too expensive or too inaccessible for kind of the Western world and the United States of America specifically?

• 14:55Speaker 04

  Well, I'd restated this thing that this idea around the energy transition, which is the phrase we hear all the time, is that the energy transition, the metals, minerals, and magnets that are required for the energy transition. China has a dominant role in nearly all of those. I spoke in Houston yesterday about this. The Department of Energy last year released a report on neodymium-iron boron magnets. These are the high-strength magnets that are doped with dysprosium and terbium to make them work better in high temperature. But these are the critical magnets used in electric vehicles and in wind turbines. China controls more than 90% of the global production of these neodymium-iron boron magnets. But you look at this, there was a report that just came out in the last few days from the International Energy Agency.

• 15:40Speaker 04

  You look at electrolyzers to produce hydrogen. You look at wind turbine blades, the nacelles, the electric vehicle batteries, electric vehicles themselves. China, again, controls dominant market share in all of those. And further back to your point on the mining and the processing, the same is true for rare earth elements. I mentioned dysprosium and terbium, neodymium, lanthanum. That market is also, the rare earth elements, also controlled by China. And the growth areas for processing of things like cobalt, copper, lithium, nickel, again, China has the dominant position in, not just in current production, but in the projected production of those metals. So there's nothing free, right?

• 16:25Speaker 04

  There's no such thing, as Milton Friedman said, there's no such thing as a free lunch. And this idea that, oh, we're just going to shift away from a hydrocarbon-based economy, which we've been doing now for more than 120 years, and go to something else. No, no, no, no, no. This is going to take a lot of time and a lot of money. And we have to be very clear about the supply chain risks and what this means in terms of the U.S. and China and our long-term relationship with China. I'm not a China basher. China is going to look after China. But we have to be very clear-eyed about this.

• 16:56Anthony Pompliano?

  There's another idea that you've popularized and I've seen you talk about this idea of natural gas to nuclear as a way for the United States to address a lot of different problems. What exactly does that mean? Natural gas to nuclear? Is that just we need the full array of options from an energy standpoint?

• 17:13Speaker 04

  I typify it this way, Anthony. I say this is the no regrets policy if we're serious about decarbonization. So global warming and climate change, this is a real challenge. And the way I put it is climate change is a concern. It's not our only concern. So if we're going to be rational about how we go forward and we think about what we're going to do with regard to reducing emissions, what is the, what are the best ways to go about that? For 13 years, I've been saying the same thing, end to end, natural gas to nuclear. Why? Because both of those sources are lower no carbon, they're abundant, the technologies are well-known, and the, and the ability to grow them and allow them to

• 17:54Speaker 04

  scale up is, there is real potential there. The amount of natural gas and new discoveries in the Mediterranean, just in the last few weeks, offshore Egypt, massive discoveries of new natural gas, same offshore Africa. The world is awash in natural gas, but we have to drill for it. The technology of nuclear energy, well-known, well-developed, the Chinese, the Russians, the South Koreans, the United States, the French, there are a lot of countries that can deploy nuclear at scale. So if we're serious about reducing emissions, we need to be serious about natural gas and nuclear because renewables cannot, will not be able to scale up to the degree that we need to if we're going to make a serious dent in global CO2 emissions.

• 18:33Anthony Pompliano?

  So what fascinates me about you and why I wanted to talk to you was kind of two different components that are related. The first is that you have been a very outspoken critic of the United States' goal to reach energy independence. You basically said that is not feasible to actually accomplish. On top of that, you, I believe testified, but for sure have publicly criticized both George W. Bush and Barack Obama, two different sides of the aisle, for many of the energy policies that we're pursuing, specifically around using renewable energy to eventually get to a point where the United States could be energy independent and serve all of those energy needs that we have. As you approach this...

• 19:12Anthony Pompliano?

  Is there any path to where the United States could actually get to an energy independence? Or is it just that the renewable energy path that is being pursued can't get us there? Hey guys, what's going on? I hope that you're enjoying this conversation, but I wanted to interrupt for a quick second and tell you about a brand new conference that I'm hosting on March 4th at the Miami Beach Convention Center. The event is called Lyceum Miami and tickets are completely free for anyone who wants to come. I'm bringing together many of the most popular guests from the podcast over the last couple of years. Some of the guest speakers that we've already announced are people like Vivek Ramaswamy from Strive Asset Management, or Delian and Mike Solana from Founder's Fund, Chris Williamson

• 19:54Anthony Pompliano?

  from the Modern Wisdom Podcast, Codie Sanchez from Contrarian Thinking, and billionaire Christian Augermeier, among many others. I've got a number of amazing surprise guests as well, some that you definitely will not expect, and others that come from walks of life that you will be scratching your head as to how I even got them to show up. But come check out Lyceum Miami on March 4th. The Lyceum was a public gym in Athens, Greece, where people used to come together, talk about ideas, and debate topics that were important to society. I want to meet people in person, in real life, once again, after three years of a hiatus from real life events.

• 20:36Anthony Pompliano?

  And so I'm hosting the event, and as I mentioned, anyone from anywhere can come to this event completely for free. All you need to do is go to lyceummiami.com and you'll be able to pick up a free general admission ticket. Make sure you claim your ticket in order to get in through the doors. Lyceum Miami is going to be a great time, so come check it out. Come hang out with me, many of the popular guests from the podcast, and other like-minded individuals. Lyceum Miami, March 4th, Miami Beach Convention Center. I hope to see you there. All right, let's get back into this conversation.

• 21:12Speaker 04

  Well, the latter, I would agree. There's no way that we can rely solely on renewable energy to get us to be independent. As I talked about China, the supply chain with China is one that is going to take decades to change. We can't suddenly begin producing these magnets and metals and minerals at the scale that the Chinese are now. We can't do it in a couple or three or four years. We can't do it in a decade. It's going to take multiple decades. But I think the issue that go back to the energy independence, this is a marketing slogan. We are interdependent in the world today on all kinds of different things. We could talk about tennis rackets, or shoes, or beer, or wine, or you name it. We live in a global

• 21:51Speaker 04

  economy, and yet this idea of energy independence, it goes back even back to the 1973 and the OPEC oil embargo, where politicians are saying, "Well, we should be independent of foreign oil." Okay, well, I get that. And now we've talked about this same issue now for almost 60 years, but we are still not energy independent in the US. We export a lot of crude oil, we import a lot of refined products. We export a lot of refined products. And so, we live it in particular when it comes to the oil market, and now increasingly in the natural gas market, we are interdependent in the world. Forgive me. We're independent in the world, and that's not going to change. And well, it shouldn't, because look at the energy independent.

• 22:36Speaker 04

  Well, if we were energy independent, we wouldn't be able to send natural gas to Europe, right? So, we have to, the reality of a global integrated economy is real, and it's particularly real when it comes to energy and energy supply chains.

• 22:51Anthony Pompliano?

  I recently spoke to a gentleman, Bill Perkins. Bill Perkins is a natural gas trader, pretty well-known in the poker world, a number of other industries. And one of the things that he brought up was, actually, many of the actions of the United States in the Russia-Ukraine conflict have caused more inefficiencies. We've seen backups and storage around the world. We see places saying, "I'm not going to use that pipeline, but instead I'm going to put it on a ship, and then I'll just sail it around and get it there from a different geographic approach."

• 23:22Anthony Pompliano?

  What is the kind of measurement that you could give us in terms of how inefficient is this entire logistics and energy market becoming? Or is it actually becoming more efficient over the long run with some short-term hiccups where there's inefficiency introduced? Like, is the trend that is becoming more efficient? Or is the trend that is actually becoming less efficient over time?

• 23:45Speaker 04

  That's an interesting question. I hadn't thought about it in those terms, but I put it this way. I think that the molecules that we are producing, whether it's natural gas or particularly propane, my friend Chris Wright, his favorite hydrocarbon is propane, right? Because it's easily transported under a standard temperature and pressure. You can use it as a cooking fuel. You can use it as a, you know, a transportation fuel, as a process of chemi... You can turn it into chemicals. I think that market, we see it in the maturation, the very fast maturation of the global LNG market. Remember, it was only about six years ago, the US began exporting LNG at all. And now the US is one of the world's biggest suppliers into the, of LNG into the global market.

• 24:27Speaker 04

  So I think the short answer would be that the market is becoming, the energy market is becoming more efficient because those molecules are finding homes faster than they ever have before. And the US is playing a bigger role, fortunately, in this, in this marketplace because of the shale revolution, has fundamentally changed how the US interacts in this global market.

• 24:47Anthony Pompliano?

  For those that are listening, LNG is liquefied natural gas, which is relatively new to the market. Robert, another thing that you've talked about, which I gotta admit, this gave me a good chuckle because as someone who is native to the internet, I love someone who can come up with an idea that just probably absolutely really, really upsets their critics. And one of the things that you have criticized is this whole idea of the safety of birds or wildlife protection laws. And what you explicitly call out is that there are oil producers and electric utilities that have been charged and fined under the migratory bird treaty act for killing birds, right? It is no good, it's bad, there's rules that prevent them from doing that.

• 25:32Anthony Pompliano?

  If they do it, they are end up getting fined, etc. But you wrote this article in the Wall Street Journal, which is so important and deemed so important that is literally on your Wikipedia page with this excerpt that says, "Yet there is one group of energy producers that are not being prosecuted for killing birds: wind powered companies. And wind powered turbines are killing a vast number of birds every year. A July 2008 study of the wind farm at Alamo Pass, California estimated that its turbines kill an average of 80 golden eagles per year. The study funded by the Alameda County Community Development Agency also estimated that about 10,000 birds, nearly all protected by this act, are being whacked every year at Alamo." 10,000 birds is a big number.

• 26:15Anthony Pompliano?

  Why is it that there is such a different treatment to the different companies when it comes to just birds, let alone other things?

• 26:21Speaker 04

  Well, thank you. This is a key issue for me. I'm a longtime bird watcher. I'm proudly a bird watcher. I'm an outdoorsman and I, you know, this is something that gives me great joy and a whole lot of other people. And the bird populations around the world, numerous studies, including a recent one by Cornell, have documented dramatic declines in the bird population around the world. And yet, these wind companies are allowed to build these wind projects. And in fact, I wrote about a, published a piece last year in Newsweek. The biggest renewable energy company, producer of renewable energy in the world, Next Air Energy, built a wind project in the middle of known golden eagle habitat. They were warned three times by the Fish and Wildlife Service not to build the wind project where they built it.

• 27:06Speaker 04

  They built it anyway and they got fined under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act. They should have been charged criminally under the Golden Eagle and Bald and Golden Bald and Eagle Protection Act. They weren't, but they paid a fine to the federal government that less, I think it was, memory serves something, less than $30 million. But they did it on purpose, Anthony. I mean, they did it on purpose. They knowingly went in an area where they knew they were going to kill eagles and they did it anyway. And so this just grinds my gears, as my late brother John Bryce said, grills my cheese. How, I mean, in what other industry would be allowed to do this, except this supposedly clean energy business? It's outrageous. It is totally outrageous. And the way the wind industry responds is, oh, well, it's only a few.

• 27:49Speaker 04

  Or, oh, cats kill birds. Cats don't kill golden eagles. Cats don't kill bald eagles. I mean, this is a farce. And yet this industry is allowed to get away with murder. And it's not just birds, it's bats as well. And this is one of the other parts here that I think is critical because, in fact, the impact on bat populations may be ultimately, in terms of ecosystem impacts, greater than the impact that these wind turbines are having on birds. Bats are important pollinators and insectivores. And so we've seen in numerous studies from in Canada and all around the US.

• 28:29Speaker 04

  In fact, studies showing that the number of bats who are being killed by wind turbines may be greater than the number of birds being killed. And this is a real problem because bats generally have very slow reproductive rates. They're only flying mammal. And so this, you know, this impact on wildlife and this excuse that it's only a few, or, well, you know, global warming or climate change. Well, damn it, no. This is not okay. We need to think about these impacts first. And it's one reason why I'm so adamantly pro-nuclear. If we're serious about reducing emissions, we need small footprints. And nuclear energy has the highest power density of any form of power generation. We should be doing that instead of littering the landscape with these giant wind turbines.

• 29:14Anthony Pompliano?

  Why is nuclear so toxic as a topic? Why is it that no one wants to approve the building of these new facilities? Or whenever it's brought up by anyone who appears to be in the mainstream kind of conscious or talk track, they just immediately discount it and say like, that's not an option. Let's go back to the renewable conversation.

• 29:40Speaker 04

  How long do we have today?

• 29:44Speaker 04

  I mean, the demonization of nuclear energy by the left, by what I would call the NGO corporate climate industrial complex and their push for renewables instead of nuclear, it goes back decades and it has been Sierra Club, for instance, and the Natural Resources Defense Council. The Natural Resources Defense Council, by the way, has an annual budget of over $400 million a year. They bragged about the closure, the premature and foolish closure of the Indian Point Nuclear Plant in New York City, or just outside of New York. And what has happened since the closure of that nuclear plant? Emissions in New York State have skyrocketed and so have consumers' bills because now they're more reliant on natural gas. So this

• 30:29Speaker 04

  demonization of nuclear is not new. It's been part of the playbook for these NGOs. I don't call them environmental groups because I don't think they're environmental groups. I don't call them green. I don't think they're green. This has been part of their playbook now for decades and they're not going to change. But if they're serious, in my view, if you're serious about climate change, and numerous climate scientists have made the same point, you can't be serious about reducing emissions, reducing greenhouse gas emissions, and dismiss nuclear energy. In my view, if you're anti-carbon dioxide and anti-nuclear, you're pro-blackout. Well, Anthony, I am adamantly anti-blackout.

• 31:04Anthony Pompliano?

  So am I. One of the industries that has forced people to become much more informed about energy is Bitcoin mining. I don't know if you know anything about the mining industry or have any thoughts there, just given its intersection with so much of the energy conversation, both in the United States and internationally?

• 31:25Speaker 04

  Sure. Let me just add one quick point on the nuclear thing, if I may, just jump back to that, because... Anthony, I think that the conversation has shifted. I think that, and I'm seeing it here in the US. We see it in the, in the extension of the Diablo Canyon Nuclear Plant in California. We saw it in the extensions of the nuclear plants in Illinois, Byron, and Dresden, that there is a new cadre of younger climate activists, pro-nuclear people. Matty Hilli with the Campaign for a Green Nuclear Deal, Mark Nelson with Radiant Energy Fund, Paris Ortiz Wines, a big group of people who are campaigning to save our existing nuclear plants and build new ones. And it's a different generation. I'm 62. It's a younger

• 32:06Speaker 04

  generation that is carrying this issue forward. And I think that we're seeing some momentum on Capitol Hill with a push to reform the NRC, to add, you know, federal funding and support for new nuclear power plants. So that's very hopeful, I think. And it's something I wanted to just make clear before I talked about Bitcoin and Bitcoin mining. It's clear Bitcoin mining is, you know, it's an enormous power consumer. There are some miners here in Texas that are using, they're locating in West Texas, they're using low-cost power when, when wind energy is, you know, blowing, when there's a lot of wind energy in West Texas, mining their, you know, mining Bitcoin and Ethereum and other, other cryptocurrencies when they have cheap power, then shutting them off when power prices go up. So there's

• 32:51Speaker 04

  no doubt that this, you know, Bitcoin mining is essentially, you're just arbitraging the price of electricity and turning it into crypto. And so they're looking all over the world for low-cost electricity because they're looking for that arbitrage. And so they're finding it some in Texas, of course, in China, and, you know, different locations around the world where you have hydro or so on. But, you know, I'm not opposed to Bitcoin. You know, I think it's interesting. I've seen, you know, crypto mines in Iceland. We visited some and featured them in our film Juice. So it's an interesting industry. Is it real? Is crypto real? Yeah, that's a longer discussion. I mean, we don't have all the time for that today, I'm sure.

• 33:28Anthony Pompliano?

  What's fascinating, I think, for us to discuss today, because the audience will definitely have their opinions about real or not real, is

• 33:37Anthony Pompliano?

  Mining as a ability to stabilize the grids. Texas, for example, when there was a number of different blackouts or problems, miners basically were getting paid to shut off. They did it. All of a sudden you get the stabilized grid. And I think a lot of people in the Bitcoin community kind of hold those events up as an example as to, we should have miners everywhere in the United States so they can help to stabilize these grids. Is there flawed thinking there? Or do you think that that has some merit?

• 34:08Speaker 04

  I don't necessarily agree with this word stabilize. I think that it's what I, how I typify it is that the miners are able to use power when power is cheap and then shut down when it's dear. And that, good for them. I mean, you know, in that regard, they're not any different kind of in a macro sense than maybe other big industrial users. So I don't see any problem with that, right? You know, people, you know, people always are finding different ways to use electricity. And data centers are massive, you know, Google and Amazon, they have effectively created their own grids with their own backup power generators. And they're doing it because they need five or six nines of reliability, right?

• 34:51Speaker 04

  99.999% on time or online rates for their customers, make sure they don't go down. So the Bitcoin miners, you know, look, they're going to locate where they, they find an opportunity where they can find cheap power and then, you know, but they're, I don't like the word stabilize. I think they're, they're using the grid to their best advantage and so am I.

• 35:14Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 35:17Speaker 04

  I have, and I say that because I have power, I have solar panels on the roof of my house, right? I have eight and a half kilowatts of solar panels. So half of the year I get, I don't pay anything for my electricity to Austin Energy. So I use the grid when it's convenient for me. So in some ways, I'm not, I don't.

• 35:32Anthony Pompliano?

  Are you stabilizing the grid?

• 35:34Speaker 04

  Yeah. If the Bitcoin miners are stabilizing the grid, then so am I.

• 35:40Anthony Pompliano?

  Another topic that is frequently talked about in both the Bitcoin world, but I think also oil and gas, is this whole idea of the flare capture and the ability to actually monetize that energy source right there onsite. What's your thoughts there? Or have, have you kind of seen anything that people should be aware of?

• 36:00Speaker 04

  Well, yeah, I think this is really something that's very positive. One of the problems, and it is a problem with the oil and gas industry is the issue of flaring. And so people are not familiar. If the given oil well is not within proximity of a natural gas pipeline, then the producers will flare the natural gas that's coming out of the ground. And this is particularly prevalent if natural gas prices are low, and they're low now. They're about less than $3 here in the US, the latest Henry Hub prices. But that's bad because you're just wasting a valuable resource and you're emitting CO2 because you're burning this gas for no reason. So what Bitcoin miners, particularly in West Texas that I'm familiar with, and I know

• 36:42Speaker 04

  some of them, they're locating in areas where there was a lot of gas that was being flared, and they're saying, hey, we'll use the gas that you were going to burn, we'll run it through a turbine or a reciprocating engine, we'll produce power, and then we'll mine Bitcoin with that juice. And so I think this is great. I mean, you know, they're producing something that has value from something that has no value and was creating pollution. So I think that's a big win.

• 37:08Anthony Pompliano?

  For a layman like myself who knows just enough about the energy industry to be dangerous, it feels like that is the one thing that everyone, oil and gas, politicians, entrepreneurs, Bitcoiners, et cetera, all kind of look at and say, that seems like a good idea. And then once you kind of get outside of that flare gas capture and use case, there's a lot of debate, right? Like there becomes much more questions and debate, but that flare gas capture seems to be the winning strategy to get a lot of different types of people, groups, and perspectives all to come to the table and say, okay, I can get on board with this. Is that your experience as well?

• 37:46Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think it's, you know, it's a simple, I mean, this is what in poker you would call a lay down hand, right? Well, you know, look, we're preventing the waste of this resource and we're creating something of value from it, and we're making money at it. And so I think it's a win-win-win-win. I don't know how many wins you can claim there, but yeah, I mean, this is a really positive development. And the next step would be then for some of this other gas. That's being flared. Well, could we turn it into other products? Or could we turn it into power and put it back on the grid? Or could we turn it into, you know, something else we haven't thought about yet? But I think this is a very positive thing. And it's some, you know, just entrepreneurship at, at work. This is what, it's what people and entrepreneurs do. They look for that, what my friend Porter Bennett calls the, what a fat margin.

• 38:28Speaker 04

  And he said, then they find that fat margin and it gets squeezed as more people find that, that opportunity and exploit it.

• 38:36Anthony Pompliano?

  Before I let you go, one of my favorite questions to ask reporters, authors of books, or people who have the, the ambition and, and the heart to create documentaries, is what are the stories that are most interesting to you in the world right now? Like what, when you think about things that you're interested in or, or things that are developing? What stories are you paying attention to?

• 38:56Speaker 04

  I like that question, you know, on, on my podcast, The Power Hungry Podcast, I always ask people, what are they reading and what gives them hope? Those are my closing questions, but as a, and that's, I, I think of myself as a reporter, right? I don't, you know, I'm, I've written six books. I've made a documentary, I'm a podcaster, I do these other things. I'm doing a lot of public speaking, but I think I'm just at root of reporter. And what, what, what do I respond to? I respond to people, you know, I, and I think that one of the strengths of our documentary Juice is that it's a people movie. And so why do I maintain the rural rejection database? Why do I care about these people in rural America? Because I love those people, you know, and I've met some of them. I'm, you know, these, these claims that, oh, wind energy is green. Well, what, talk to some of the people that have wind turbines built near their homes and they're suffering because of the noise pollution from these wind projects.

• 39:41Speaker 04

  And it is noise pollution. I've met these people, I've been in some of their homes. So I care about them and I care about, I care about those human stories. And those are the ones that I want to tell. I mean, you know, there are a lot of policy wonks and a lot of policy stuff. To me, what really resonates and what the stories that I really respond to are people's stories and humans and, um, working on another documentary called Burning Down the Grid, in which we're really going to do some of that and talk to people who are, you know, and, and that are on the, they're being affected by, uh, low quality electric grids, the spread of renewables, et cetera.

• 40:16Anthony Pompliano?

  What has been the most surprising thing of your career when it comes to electricity and the energy markets?

• 40:23Speaker 04

  Another good question. Well, you know, I'll answer it in one way. We went to India for when I was reporting on the book and on my latest book, A Question of Power, and when we were making juice. And I think the thing that surprised me there was the absolute abject poverty that I wasn't. I thought I knew poor. I thought I knew poverty. I didn't know what that was until I saw it in India, the level of poverty. But I think that's one answer to what surprised me. I think the other is ingenuity. And the thing that I'm maybe it's a different not surprise, but maybe it gives me faith or gives me hope and that we are smart and we're figuring things out. And I'm very hopeful for nuclear.

• 41:06Speaker 04

  I'm very clear eyed about the challenges for nuclear power in America, but I'm also seeing a lot of opportunity and entrepreneurs who are looking at this market and saying, how can we build a better, smaller, faster, lighter, denser, cheaper reactor and deploy it at scale? And so I wouldn't necessarily say that's surprising because I have a lot of faith in the human spirit and entrepreneurship, but that is gratifying and one that I'm continually impressed by this entrepreneurship and this the level and the depth and the amount of people, a number of people that are pursuing these different opportunities, like we talked about with the Bitcoin miners locating and using flared gas for power.

• 41:47Anthony Pompliano?

  A Question of Power: Electricity and the Wealth of Nations is the book that came out in 2020. There it is right there.

• 41:54Speaker 04

  There it is on your screen. There you go. Tell your friends, tell your neighbors. You don't have to read it. You just have to buy it. You buy it on your Kindle. I make a better royalty. So there you go.

• 42:03Anthony Pompliano?

  Amazing. All right. My last question for you is after this book, what's the single best piece of feedback you got from a reader?

• 42:14Speaker 04

  Well, readers are, well, I guess I'll answer it this way. What gives, what heartens me, what motivates me, what keeps me going, because I work hard. You know, I travel a lot and what keeps me going is that people respond and they say, hey, you know, I really like what you said there or, you know, I'm pleased you're covering this or, or people in Madison County, Iowa, saying, thank you for covering the controversy in our county and in our fight against Berkshire Hathaway and Mid-American Energy and the encroachment of these wind projects. That, that is something that, I mean, I take to heart and keeps me motivated and, you know, what fuels my, my passion for this business and I have a lot of passion for energy and power.

• 42:58Speaker 04

  It's my purpose, it's my focus, it's what I plan to do for the rest of my, you know, my, as long as I'm, as long as I'm able to work, that's what I'm gonna do.

• 43:06Anthony Pompliano?

  Amazing. Well, anyone who has not read the book yet, I highly suggest they go and they check it out. Robert, where can we send people to find the other things you're doing? The podcast and any other platforms online that you think would be helpful?

• 43:17Speaker 04

  Sure. Well, I've moved to Substack lately and had great fun there. I have just a recent piece that I published there called, "The Billionaires Behind the Gas Bans," which has gone viral. I've been pleased to see that. So I'm on Substack, robertbryce.substack.com. Of course, the Power Hungry podcast is available on where all fine podcasts are found. I've written six books. I'm easy to find on the interweb, but I have a website, robertbryce.com. So, but yes, robertbryce.substack.com if you please.

• 43:45Anthony Pompliano?

  Awesome. I appreciate you taking the time to do this. I think that the work you're doing is incredibly important and I always appreciate someone who's willing to think for themselves and kind of say what they think. So keep up the great work and we'll definitely do this again in the future.

• 43:58Speaker 04

  I think, I really appreciate it, Anthony. Great fun.