Why is it so hard to build anything in the West?

Well, welcome, everybody, to the other side of the story. I'm Todd Royal. I am your host today. We have got a really special guest for me. My co-host is still, he's sailing around the world.

He's having the time of his life in Spain. So everyone, I wish Tom Harris the best. But here's what we're doing, something really special today. We're going to talk about what does it take to build things. My special guest is someone I know very well.

His name is Ron Stein. I know him more as Ron Stein. Ron and I have written three books together. Please go buy those books. We encourage you to.

I'll put some links up for that. You can also find our America Out Loud website. But let me tell you a little bit about Ron. Besides just being a friend, and, frankly, a very close personal friend, Ron is an ambassador for energy and infrastructure. Ron is also an over 60-year engineer.

He has the designation PE after his name, which people don't realize. that means professional engineer. It's the highest order that you can get. He's co-author of our third book, was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. We still thank the people for that.

We actually thank Jay Lehr, who was instrumental in doing that for us. God rest his soul. We missed Jay. Ron is also, he's a policy advisor on energy literacy for the Heartland Institute and the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow, CFAC. I encourage everybody to go there.

He's a national TV commentator on energy and infrastructure, with Rick Amato. Besides being an engineer, he's an energy consultant. He's a speaker. He's an author of books. He literally has hundreds of articles that can be found all over the world on energy literacy, energy itself, environmental policy, human rights.

He is the founder of PTS Advance, a California-based company. It does staffing for the energy industry. So he understands workplace development. And he also understands what does it take to build over anyone you're really going to meet. Ron advocates that energy literacy starts with the knowledge that renewable energy, mainly solar panels and wind turbines, is only intermittent, meaning when the sun doesn't shine and the wind doesn't blow, they don't work.

And this is only electricity. And it's generated from unreliable breezes and sunshines, as he likes to say, as wind turbines and solar panels cannot manufacture anything for the 8 billion on this planet. I will also say we will get to this later in the podcast, but I would tell anyone, please go read his articles. Ron has the absolute best understanding of anyone you're going to read, anyone you're going to listen to on the products that we need for our daily lives, that modern society doesn't work without it. So, with that illustrious introduction, I welcome Ron Stein.

I'm glad to be aboard. Good to see you again. You too. OK, Ron and I have talked, and Ron asked me a great question. yesterday.

We talked about the show. He goes, Todd, are you trying to scare people with the questions that you've given me? And I go, no, Ron. I go, I'm really trying to show people a little bit of the ridiculous. I also want to highlight some things that Ron has written.

So our second book, here's going to be my first question. And you, the audience, and you, Ron, I really would ask, would everyone please be patient with me? Because normally I would just ask Ron a question. I'm going to give a long excerpt here from something Ron wrote in our second book called Just Green Electricity. It's on page 15..

And Ron, seriously, if you want to interrupt me, say, Todd, I want to make a point here, but I want to read to you, the audience, what Ron wrote. Here's a list of the 16 components, just the components that are needed to build wind turbines. Now, these have to be aggregates and they have to be crushed stone for concrete. Bauxite is aluminum, clay, and shell for cement. Coal.

Wait a minute, Ron, did you write coal?

Copper is used for the wiring. Gypsum is for the cement. Iron ore is for steel. Limestone, something called molybdenum, that's the alloy in steel. Rare earths, which those, I believe, Ron, what are those?

About 31 different rare earth metals and minerals needed.

These are 17 components needed to build a solar panel. They are arsenic. Doesn't sound very good. Gallium, arsenide. semiconductor chips, bauxite for aluminum, boron.

minerals, cadmium, which are thin film solar cells, coal. Oh, coal again is here. The byproduct is coke, not what we drink, but a type of coal is used to make steel. Copper, wiring, and also for thin film solar cells. Gallium, this is for solar cells.

Indium for solar cells. Iron ore is for steel. This molybdenum is for photovoltaic cells. Lead is for batteries. Lead.

So we have lead and coal and something that is green. We have phosphate rock, which is phosphorus. We have selenium, which is for solar cells. Silica for solar cells. Silver for solar cells.

Tellurium for solar cells. Titanium dioxide for solar panels.

Ron, I've done these books with you, but this doesn't sound like something that is very green to me. Any comment, as I continue?

And to get all those exotic minerals and metals, you got to move a half a million pounds of earth to make one battery.

Now, an EV for a truck is 16,000 pound battery. So to make one battery for a truck, you've got to move 8 million pounds of earth to get those various minerals and metals to make one battery. Okay. This is perfect, because this is, you.

And you write this beautifully. You go, extensive mining is required to support the supply chains of the minerals and metals needed to build all these things, what we just described.

I love, now you go into wind again, you go these magnets. And Ron, tell us what, when you talk about a magnet, we're not talking about something we're putting on our refrigerator or something I play with my children with, correct? What do you mean by a magnet?

Yeah, that's a nice car. Yeah, it's a nice car. But after writing the book, I'm emphatic. I will not buy an EV. And people ask me why.

And I say, for ethical and moral reasons. And they say, well, what do you mean by that? I say, I know where the lithium and cobalt are coming from. And I'm not willing to financially support that. Now, on the contrary, our government is.

Our government's providing incentives, subsidies to buy EVs, to build wind, to build solar. They're basically encouraging China and Africa, continue exploiting where people have yellow, brown, and black skin, continue the environmental degradation of your land. We're going green. I think it's unethical. It's immoral.

And I say it's hypocritical.

And I had a real problem writing the book. It took me over a year, because I think what people don't realize is what Ron just described. He says it so eloquently, but

it's horrific. I would tell anyone, please read our book because it's horrific what's been described. But I want you to talk to me now as an engineer, because I want to stay with this kind of long first question I've given because it's got extensive parts. You talk about extensive mining.

Walk us through and remind me, Ron, you're a civil engineer, correct?

energy projects, is that correct? Since 95, yes. Since 95.. So 30 years of this, over 50, maybe even 60 years of engineering experience. When you say, when you write the words extensive mining is required to support the supply chains of the minerals and metals needed to build these solar panels, these wind turbines, these EVs, talk to us about the mining.

Just take us down the path, because the numbers you give, I wrote these books with you, but they're hard to understand. 500,000 pounds of earth, 8 million pounds of earth. Can you walk us through that, what you mean by all of that? Because it can be a little overwhelming, quite honestly.

We're basically extracting them at alarming rates, because we now have 8 billion people on earth we're trying to support, keep alive and well.

There's always a question, what's the reserves? How much oil is left? How much cobalt is left? How much lithium is left?

There's forecasts, maybe 100 years, but with technology, we can find more and more. As time goes on. But eventually, well is going to run dry. We're going to extract this oil, coal, lithium, et cetera, et cetera. All the resources we're extracting out of planet earth, be it 100 years worth, be it 500 years worth, maybe 1000 years worth.

When it's all gone,

humanity might be in real trouble. But the 4 billion year old earth,

Can I defend you right now on something? Because the critic could come back right now and go, wait a minute, you're talking to this guy, Ron Stein. This is your friend and colleague and blah, blah, blah. But this is the guy who promotes fossil fuels. This is the guy who, I mean, he's causing global warming.

This is the guy. I just want people to understand. Yeah, please. What you just said is so incredibly important.

We are a materialistic society. The products we have today didn't exist 200 years ago. And right now they're made from oil. We've had 200 years to replace oil and haven't been able to do it. So I'm all in favor of the products, because I want to continue my lifestyle and have this communication with you with iPads, which are made from oil and everything else.

But no, we're a materialistic society. And that's the thing that we are failing to address. How are we going to maintain the supply chain of all the products?

Because electricity can't make anything. In fact, everything that needs electricity is made from the products that come from oil.

I want to go down that path before I go.

I'm not pro-oil or pro-coal or pro-natural gas or pro-anything. I'm pro our lifestyles. I'm pro-innovation. I'm pro-human ingenuity. I'm pro-human longevity.

Am I saying that correctly in my defense and, frankly, promotion of you? Exactly. Yes. We have,

Can you tell us, how many people do we have a couple of hundred years ago and how many people do we have now?

We now have hospitals. We now have sanitation. We have clean water. And we have airports. Today, we have 50,000 merchant ships.

There's 20,000 commercial jets, 50,000 military jets. These didn't exist before 1800.. And life has changed because before 1800, life was hard. People very seldom lived beyond 40 years of age. When they're born, they're very seldom traveling 100 miles from where they were born.

But right now, without a replacement for oil, if you get rid of oil, you're going to close all the airports, close all the hospitals. And without those products, we could lose billions of people from starvation and malnutrition, diseases, weather-related fatalities. And it's, yeah, we're in a real sensitive position right now. And the concept that, you know, wind and solar energy is going to replace fossil fuels, it can't. Wind and solar does something totally different.

I came to this yesterday, and I'd forgotten about it. I remembered it. You and I spoke, you know, about coming on the show, and we talked about this, and I found it. So here's what I found. And you wrote this.

So this is our third book. It's on page seven. So everybody talks about our governments, and, you know, you live in California, you write expertly about California, and the new Democratic nominee, Vice President, Kamala Harris, is the former senator from California, and she is all for this. What I love how you write here is that you're telling everyone, I'm not telling if I'm for or against this. I would probably say, you don't want it, but you're very realistic about this.

I want everyone to hear this, what Ron wrote. This is page seven of our book. He talks about. there are 31 permits,

31 permits from 22 different agencies for transmission lines, meaning the electrical lines that take all this electricity, whether it's from wind, whether it's from solar, a coal plant, a natural gas plant. Anytime you need additional transmission, it takes a lot, meaning fossil fuels. It's what, Ron, about. two or three transmission lines out of a fossil fuel plant or nuclear plant versus a renewable plant, wind and sun take about anywhere between eight to 12 transmission lines. Okay, here's what Ron writes.

Using the U.S. as an example, not even Canada, for our Canadian listeners, and the absurdity to imagine Americans relying on renewables, the wind and the sun, for their electrical grid. Why? Because the American grid is in shambles. Does any sane person believe U.S.

citizens will allow darkness to cover their days and a return to a world without fossil fuels? Most transmission and distribution lines that he calls T and D lines in the U.S. were constructed in the 1950s and 1960s with a 50-year life expectancy. Again, to remind the audience, an engineer wrote this, not a policy analyst. This is an engineer we're talking about.

50 years later, our book is what, now, I think it's about four years old. This was before the Inflation Reduction Act. This is Ron writing this before the Inflation Reduction Act and before this push for green, that's come out of the Biden administration. 50 years later, most of them, over 450,000 miles of transmission lines, connecting 5,800 major power plants across the country, have not been replaced. Permitting for new power lines typically needs 31 permits from 22 different federal agencies, with this process taking up to 10 years to build a line that could be built in one year.

Our second book, Just Green Electricity, Helping Citizens Understand a World Without Fossil Fuels, deeply examines the intricacies of electricity and the tens of trillions of dollars, not millions, not billions, but the tens of billions of dollars it will take to construct new electrical grids in the U.S. and across the world. With that long exposition, what's your comments about me, bringing back what I felt is one of the most important things that you've written?

That's the tough part about transmission lines, because just the planning takes three to four years, permitting takes another three to four years, and the construction, that's the easy part. But getting through the planning and the permitting process and getting everybody's okay, and it just takes one no to delay it further. Yeah, that's the tough part of transmission lines. The tough part about transmission lines, you talk about transmission lines for wind and solar that don't work most of the time.

The thing is that they get subsidies based on their nameplate rating, but they never deliver the nameplate rating on an annual basis. When you take a look at the current electric regeneration system we have, which is coal, natural gas, hydro, nuclear, they're delivering, quote, their nameplate rating, probably about 95% of the year. They're operating all the time, continuously, uninterruptible, and supplying reliable electricity versus wind and solar. that's only occasional electricity. And, Todd, if you're in the operating room, you don't want the.

I'm not talking to a policy analyst. I'm not talking to anybody in an NGO, anyone from the United Nations or the government. I'm talking to someone who builds things, who has been in the process of hiring people to build things now, with over 80, 90 years of combined experience. If I just heard you correctly and kind of expound upon this, you just said it's the permitting and planning. that's the hard part, particularly the permitting.

And you said, if I heard you correctly, we know how to build a transmission. Did I hear you correctly?

Oh yeah, that's the easy part. I mean, you can build.

It's easy, just go, do it. Why do we think it's so?

Well, it is easy to build it because it is easy to build it. Yeah, the tough part about this whole green movement is the fact that, I guess, a total misunderstanding of the word energy. Because everybody is against, everybody's, against fossil fuels because of emissions. And so they think, well, wind and solar have no emissions. Well, you have to understand that electricity came after oil.

I'm going to say it again, it came after oil. The light bulb was made from oil. We got six ways to generate electricity. You got wind, solar, coal, natural gas, hydro, nuclear. All six ways of generating electricity cannot exist without oil.

Because all the parts and components, the computers, the wires, the insulation, the air conditioning, the lights, everything behind the doors is made from the oil derivatives we get from crude oil. And everybody is saying, well, wind and solar is going to replace crude oil. Well, can't, they do different things. And if you get rid of crude oil, you get rid of all the electricity, because electricity is based on crude oil. The Tesla is 100% made with oil, from the tires, the insulation, upholstery, the computers, I mean, all the telemetry in it.

Yeah, everything is made from the compounds from oil. So we're a product-driven society. And the challenge is, can we replace crude oil? And we've had 200 years to do it, haven't been able to do it yet.

And lines for gasoline were horrendous, and it paralyzed the country. That was in 73.. And the Department of Energy was formed at that time. And their main goal at that time was, don't let this happen again. And since that time, we've gone 50 years.

Well, in 50 years, the DOE, Department of Energy, has grown from zero employees to 14,000 employees, have an annual budget of more than $50 billion.

And they're instrumental in a lot of this regulatory stuff. And it's amazing, they have remained silent. You know, don't let this oil embargo thing happen again. Because at the time, California was the fourth largest economy in the world. And back in 73, oil production in California and oil production in Alaska provided 95% of the demands of the state of California.

California was only dependent on foreign oil for 5%. Well, because of this effort to reduce oil production, reduce oil production, etc., etc., California has successfully done that, reduce oil production. So now California is more.

Here's what we're going to come back with. I want you to say again about the DOE. And that's just one of these agencies. That's just one. And I want you to repeat that.

And then you and I talked about nuclear power. The audience knows I work in nuclear power right now as an analyst. And so I want to talk about with you what it takes to license a new nuclear reactor in the United States from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, just on this, this theme of regulations and agency. So we got to take a break. I'm here with Ron Stein, my co-author, with three books,

60, 80, 90 years of combined experience in engineering. So we're going to take a break right now. We're going to come back and we're going to talk about the Department of Energy, the massive budget and the amounts of people. We're going to come right back.

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We're back. Thank you for coming back, everyone, to our show, The Other Side of the Story. I am here with Ron Stein. Ron, before we took a break, we were talking about all the different regulatory agencies in the United States. Just for transmission, it's tens of agencies, and this permit and that permit.

You were telling me about the U.S. Department of Energy. You gave a great brief history to us about how it came about from the OPEC oil embargo of 73.. Say again, just before we move on, how many people are at the Department of Energy, and what is their budget, and how long did it take for this very large agency to come into existence?

The DOE was formed during the oil.

California is a big state. We got nine international airports, 41 military airports, three largest shipping terminals in the entire country, all being run by foreign oil. The DOE has remained silent while this is happening. Right now, California is a national security risk for the entire country, with our dependency on foreign oil because of the DOE.

If you go online, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is who regulates nuclear reactors in the United States. The United States has the largest fleet of nuclear reactors in the world. I believe we're at 94 now. I always get it confused between 94, 92, and 95.. We're going to go with 94..

I sent Ron an infographic that shows what does it take to license a nuclear reactor in the United States. It has 31 different steps. I repeat that again, 31 different steps.

There's a company, Ron, called NuScale Power, N-U-S-C-A-L-E, NuScale Power, Northeast, pardon me, Northwest part of the United States. They recently got a small module reactor that's based on existing technology, meaning it's water-cooled, because reactors are all cooled by water right now. It took them 10 years and $500 million to do that. Any general comments you would like to make off 10 years, $500 million, 31 different steps for these folks to get a license based on existing technology?

is, if it's government subsidized, the permitting goes quicker. To build, for example, wind turbine solar panels, the permitting is a lot quicker because they grease the skids, because it's the government policies and regulations that are stopping private enterprise from doing anything except for 10 or 20 years. When they grease the skid, they can get turbine solar panel permitted really quickly. You got to have deep pockets to build anything, be it an office building, be it a transmission line, be it a nuclear power plant, be it a refinery. You got to have deep pockets because you're fighting an uphill battle.

All these regulations and the public's, especially when the public's against it, when they have public hearings, we're going to talk about building a refinery, building a nuclear power plant. Obviously, the public is against it. The hearings are going forever and lawsuits. It's just constant, constant delays. It's tough to build anything.

I keep looking at the built-in obsolescence because, yeah, we have refineries in existence. We have nuclear power plants.

The neat thing about small modular reactors is, I think some of the new technology is they're developing a way to basically use the nuclear waste of old reactors and burning that. That's an unlimited supply of fuel for these new nuclear reactors.

Everything needs electricity. It's made from fossil fuels, but the electricity demands are going up. Data centers, artificial intelligence, they need continuous, uninterruptible electricity. They can't function on wind and solar electricity because when you lose power to your computer for a second, you got to reboot your computer.

Data centers, the glitch that happened that shut down Delta Airlines, shut down the world.

You brought up something, and I love your answer. when you're just talking about lawsuits and delays. There's two big ones that we know of right now. You brought it up in our first segment together, the National Environmental Policy Act, or the acronym is NEPA, N-E-P-A. Can you explain that to us?

I have it, though, too, that it's a little bit, NEPA is also the precursor, or they're very similar to the California Environmental Quality Act. I put that here, the similarities, because we do have to realize, whether you like it or not, that Vice President Harris is now the nominee against former President Trump. I believe. when she was a senator, she endorsed CEQA, and I think she also defended it when she was the state's attorney general. I think it's important that people understand, even our Canadian listeners.

Will you explain NEPA and how that is similar to CEQA, the California Environmental Quality Act?

I'm 100% in favor of going green, but before I jump out of the airplane without a parachute, what a backup plan. Do you think NEPA does that?

Like I said, I look at them as documents. that just prevents construction of anything.

And I saw, you know, changing the subject a little bit with Elon Musk, you know, leaving California. He's throwing up his hands. He says, this is too difficult, you know, here, and trying to go to a state that's a little bit more friendly to building things.

We've talked about that. I'm going to, you've written about this and I know it drives, this drives you and me both a little crazy. We both believe in environmental controls. We both believe in labor controls. We believe that people should be paid a fair wage, have retirement, have healthcare.

I mean, I'm setting the question up here for you because you're going to laugh a little bit. Why can countries like China and Russia build large infrastructure projects? Let's say whether it's a wind farm, a refinery, or a shopping center. Quicker, cheaper, and more efficiently than the United States and Canada. Well, I think we addressed that in our book,

We haven't built a new refinery in the United States in about 50 years. The existing ones have expanded.

through a lot of effort. It takes 10 to 20 years to expand them. But we haven't built a new one here in like 50 years.

Asia is building 88, new refineries. 88..

Say that again. How many refineries are they building?

That what they're doing, what they're building, what they're using. And then I'm going to, let's laugh about this together. So you just said, we talked about China and Russia. They have no labor laws. They have no environmental controls.

They can just build whatever they want. And oh, by the way, if they decide that they don't want Todd Royal and Ron Stein living on a piece of land, well, there's no eminent domain laws either. They just kick it out of, kick us off our lands, our property. It doesn't matter. It's all owned by the government anyway.

I don't think they have any lawyers over there. Yeah. They're for the Chinese Communist Party and for Vladimir Putin. That's for darn sure. Talk to me about this process.

I've read this before, and I don't know if you have as well, but one of the most energy-intensive things you can do, which means you use a whole lot of electricity to do it, is turning polysilicon into solar panels. Have I read that correctly, that it is just incredibly, it just takes a massive amount of electricity to make a solar panel?

The processing to build anything, solar panels, wind turbines, everything is based on oil. And you want to basically have everybody drive an EV, but it's 100% made with oil, the same oil you want to get rid of.

But either way, you're going to need 50,000 merchant ships that were also made from oil to move it. And so, yeah, we're a materialistic society. And that's the thing that we're not focusing on. How are we going to maintain the supply chain of the products that are keeping us, the hospitals, open, keeping the airports open? You know, Todd, when you're flying, go in an airport, try to identify one thing in the airport.

One thing in the hospital, just one thing in the office, hospital, the airport, one thing that was not made from oil. And like I say, we're a materialistic society. And, you know, I joke with people, we had a zero-emission society back in the 1800s. There was no crude oil. The Beverly Hillbillies hadn't discovered crude oil.

There was no electricity. There were no vehicles. There was no coal-fired power plants, no nuclear power plants. I mean, life was hard in a zero-emission society. And, you know, we're pretty capable of adjusting to anything.

And, you know, they talk about the temperature is going to increase a 10th of a degree. Well, Todd, you and I are in California, you know, we can, in one day, we can see a 30 degree change between morning temperature and afternoon. Absolutely. Well, if it changed 30.1 degrees, I don't think I would notice it. No.

But we can, we can adjust to, you know, temperature changes. We're able, you know, with CO2 increases, we're able to increase agricultural development, and we can feed the world. We have now pesticides and fertilizers that help, you know, us in the production of food. And we're, I think, a pretty successful society where, if we want to rid the world of crude oil, without having a replacement, as I mentioned before, Todd, we're going to lose billions of.

I had the pleasure of traveling over there for a conference that was in Mumbai. I got to travel, I think what they call like the gold, it's like the gold coast, the gold circle. I got to see the Taj Mahal, but I really, I was, I did some personal travel. while I was over there. I had a driver, because that's how you have to do it over there, because they don't really have traffic signals.

And what I saw was really one of the most eye-opening things I've ever seen. And it really makes the point of what you're talking about. Trash was everywhere. And when I mean everywhere, I mean everywhere. There was no big box stores.

There was no Walmart or large grocery stores or hardware stores. People were living on top of each other. There was filth and homelessness, and wild animals, truly everywhere. Monkeys, dogs, cows, goats. And I know that's part of the religion, but you're talking about a world where New Delhi was, or you call it New Delhi or Delhi, was definitely more modern.

But I mean, I went out into some of the rural countrysides, I went to a national park, I stayed in somewhere, there's a lion sanctuary. I was way out in the country. When you hear me say something like this, like, Ron, it was dirty. It was dirty in the air. The trash was everywhere.

It was just eye-opening. I didn't see hospitals. I saw nothing. I saw people living on top of each other. And I went, how is everybody alive?

And then, of course, I was a Westerner. I was taken to all the Western places, and I was taken to where food was clean. Oh, and by the way, we had no clean water. You had to carry a water filter with you. And even when you got bottled water, we were encouraged to put it through a water filter that I had with me, a bottle, and buy it for like $90, $100 on Amazon.

When you hear me talk about that, what does that make you think? And I've only got a few minutes left, because I feel like we could talk about this all day long. Let me summarize what you just.

Most of the country, most of the world, can't subsidize themselves out of a paper bag. But in the wealthy countries, we're basically trying to quote, unquote, go green. And we're basically exploiting the people in India and in China that are making no money at all. But they're the ones providing all the exotic metals and metals.

You can't make- wind turbines don't make tires, don't make asphalt. Don't make it. Don't make cosmetics. Don't make it. Well- And let's have conversations before we jump out of the airplane without a parachute.

I'm solo. My co-host, Tom Harris, will be back next week. America Out Loud, this is the other side of the story. This is Todd Royal with Ron Stein. Thank you so much, Ron, for being my guest tonight.