i'm going to do this segment of summer a solution which may mask guys or stay there and our guests tyson slocum welcome great to be here all right and welcome. so the summer solutions and we're looking you're the energy guy we have an energy president everybody thought george bush was the energy president but this guy trump is like back to the stone age sort of energy coal probably whale oil soon i would think he promised to make coal great again is he doing that you know because there's nothing that trump can do to make coal great again coal is dying a slow death because it's been out competed in the marketplace by cheap frack natural gas by the rise of renewables because the declining cost curve for noble

deployment just continues to go down and continued energy efficiency in the united states if you've got a smaller market to sell into then coal slice of the pa is just going to get smaller and smaller as it gets out competed so this is really just kind of intellect toral strategy to try to appeal to disaffected whites in the very big coal belt of the united states to continue to promise them something that he can't possibly deliver so it's a really cynical ploy none of the big industries in the energy sector electric utilities any of these guys are applauding a revival in coal or pushing for this so what trump is doing isn't even supported by some of the biggest corporations operating in the energy space what is claimed coal well clean called doesn't really exist very well there is one facility that's been under construction for years in mississippi called kemper being built

primarily by southern company a big. utility there in mississippi with several hundred million dollars in taxpayer assistance from the department of energy and it's a colossal failure billions of dollars over budget years behind schedule and it still isn't producing electricity the concept behind clean coal is let's instead of you know spewing the emissions in a smokestack up into the atmosphere we're going to trap the c o two greenhouse gas emissions and injected into the ground and permanently store it there or maybe pipe it to a mature oil field and pump the gas in there for what's known as enhanced oil recovery but the fact of matter is that it is colossally expensive and it would be one thing if there were no other clean energy alternatives available but a brand new combined cycle natural gas power plant you can be on line in less than two years it's going to cost you under a billion dollars and it's got

a really favorable emissions profile compared to coal so it's just an hour well and term absolutely and call that loophole it doesn't exist it's a marketing term that the coal industry came up with you're going to could be you're going to see a big revival of it in terms of efforts to direct taxpayer resources to fund some of these boondoggles sequester ation is the term exactly put act art and now that they could turn it into printer cartridge thing they could do that right or i could drink by delicious coca-cola with the bubbly emissions from a power plant that sounds pretty delicious what's your age just making that up no the c o two they i mean this is industrial waste c o two so you definitely don't want to inject that into a beverage that you're going to be consuming you know without internet right accounts and i lie and lie well maybe they won't though the first cell in india or something like that right do a trial run yeah right sammy farmers kill themselves exactly you mentioned

subsidies for these seaquest. ration boondoggles but what about coal so chunk does want to make america and make coal great again is even stablished that the market itself has destroyed the coal industry the propaganda and the rhetoric out of the right wing is that it's somehow birkenstock wearing hippies that caused the cold the destruction of coal not the price of natural gas and the ease of building a national gas plant so will we you have this perry memo if you can explain what rick perry how he's involved in this and is his solution to throw taxpayer money essentially at helping coal exist right so rick perry the former governor of texas now the secretary of energy in april of two thousand and seventeen he wrote a memo directing his chief of staff to write

a study to examine whether or not cheap renewable energy is unfairly causing baseload generation coal nucular natural gas to be an economic and whether or not corrective actions need to be taken in how our wholesale electric power markets are structured and regulated to account for the unfair advantage that renewables have been granted and i see this perry memo is actually a very dangerous incursion into the efficient operation of wholesale energy markets now the secretary of energy actually has very limited legal authority to do anything in wholesale markets the only way they can do something is if the president states the claires a national emergency and the secretary of energy has some emergency powers i don't put anything past trumpy could do that but a much easier path is to delegate this to an independent federal agent. called the

federal energy regulatory commission so this is one of the many independent agencies like the securities and exchange commission like. a commodity futures trading commission where the president appoints you know five members the senate confirms them but then once those members are appointed they serve a set term and do not serve at the pleasure of the president so like rick perry the secretary of energy or scott pruitt the head of the environmental protection agency these are cabinet level officials that are hired and fired by the president the chairperson of the federal energy regulatory commission can't just be fired by the president and it's called first for exactly and so what my fear is is that trump is going to do a komi here because he hasn't named a chairperson of her cat at the point that we're recording as a recording this by

a little bit now right but i'm not sure that we're going to see it for a while really because i mean they haven't seen we might not be as what the what i think is going on is trump is making sure that he's going to secure a loyalty pledge out of the chair for to say i you need to be in line with our new radical vision of how wholesale power markets so that when the radical vision for the health of the radical vision is to revisit on power markets to provide additional what's known as out of market payments to baseload generation because what the perry memo is trying to say is the free market in electricity in united states is not assigning a proper value to the benefits that baseload generation provides and is a liability claim baseload baseload is like the coal and nuclear power plants and then you have the natural gas and the renewable plants what's the difference and

how fast and slow they can do right so what base load refers to is is what. is the minimum amount of electricity that you need to operate in a given day so the electricity demand say at three am is going to be about half of what it is at three pm and so your three am benchmark is your baseload amount so you've got some power plants that are going to be operating twenty four hours a day churning out electricity to meet that base load amount and then the rest is peak or so traditionally it was natural gas but now because natural gas prices are actually cheaper than coal you see natural gas become baseload new so nucular coal and increasingly natural gas service baseload whereas the peakers are are increasingly renewable energy and one of the happy coincidences is that solar capacity is at its greatest during peak hours of demand so solar actually can play a very big role and of course the big thing is once energy storage technologies you

know continue to mature and decline in price energy storage is going to balance out the intermittency of these renewables and really make these other baseload units irrelevant at the base load i read your article in your earlier perry memo stuff about this so the baseload the coal and nuclear power it's not like you just go turn on and off just like you can with a national gas you could just like easily flip on the switch and turn it off these that take a long time to hit up and down like you can't just they do yes so you don't typically turn these power plants on an office freshly with a nuclear power plant you've got pretty big lead times you know you don't just turn off a controlled nuclear reaction. so so this is the danger i see is trump is trying to reengineer wholesale power markets to give huge rate payers subsidies to increasingly an economic nucular coal and in some markets even natural gas it's

amazing but. in california where renewables are sometimes have fifty percent penetration they're driving home sale power prices at some points close to zero right and so even cheap natural gas is having a hard time competing when you've got a whole bunch of renewables unleashed on to the grid and so this is freaking out the trim piece and so they're coming up with this new plan to try and create billions and billions of dollars in subsidies to bail out some of these these baseload operations we've seen a few states like new york and illinois pursue some limited bailouts of inefficient baseload but the perry memo would put this on steroids ok so the perry memos saying that the government is subsidizing renewables and they want some subsidization for coal that is absolutely correct yeah the government is subsidizing renewables because they're trying to change course from coal which is. a cost if

you were to calculate all the environmental costs completely noncompetitive absolutely i mean your knowledge is there nowadays are incredibly expensive so the government steps in the government steps in sometimes they stepped in during world war two they stepped in to build the highways under eisenhower they stepped in to put a man on the moon sometimes the government steps in i like it when the government because the people want to have an environmentally sound economy and country absolutely rick perry does he understand the role of government i don't think any of trump's team really understands the role of government i don't think there's a lot that they and ok well that's an important thing to understand is that they are running the government and yet they don't really have any familiarity with the role of government in a country like united states i do want to mention rick perry famously stood up on the platform there against all those other republicans when he was running for to be the nominee for the republican party he said he would get rid of all the government agencies like five of them and he could he could only me one what he

could not name the. apartment of energy he didn't know that was a department and now he's had it so joe you know it's pretty outrageous and rick perry has never been known for his intellectual heft but he's got some staffers some of them worked for some of these front groups for the fossil fuel industry that are going to be writing this report and as i say we've got the water up there also you can stay for another segment absolutely all right stay tuned for the second half a lot more coming your way. but i do think that archie is a propaganda arm of the russian government and helps to spread. information that

helps advance russia's interest and so that's why i think it's important for people like me to come on if it were me would be somebody who was less capable who had maybe not to his good job presenting the american point of view. you mentioned in the six thirty five if you ever career and career involves using your are fluent in your computer things that have been in an office . perhaps you sort of getting headaches or getting fatigued you're going to have to stop doing this and this is how do you do the minutes must be for. my world became smaller and smaller and smaller until i ended up winning it in a box. addict a very strong magnetic field held in my head. like

a real heart my skin burned and that wireless. access point out there just continues all day with our students in the schools. we are just continually bathing our citizens in this microwave radiation it is certainly electro small and it's getting worse. welcome back to summer solutions of a mass geyser as they say over and i guess tyson slocum is over there at day's director of the public citizens energy program here in washington d.c. he's a big shot over here pretty good all right tyson welcome back good to be here so we're talking about energy rick perry try to get you to release a christmas album in this style of perry como but calling it the perry memo because apparently rick bama rick rick time out time on rec rick time ow forget us with all

right so tyson slocum. trump was pulled out of the paris agreement is this a big deal it is a big deal because trump is now aligning himself with three countries north korea nicaragua and syria as the only countries not to sign on to the paris climate agreement one thing that we've got to understand about the paris climate agreement is that it actually was incredibly modest and it was all voluntary wipe a blot of who cares it's a piece of garbage anyway because trump is all about destructive symbolism and he wants this discussion he wants to destroy all of these multilateral institutions for this but it's a serious a crime as well as an american for a symbol to say it was a make a bunch of liberals feel good about hug a tree sign a piece of paper it's meaningless why not why not pull out you know it's meaningless he gets a nice bump as ratings and he can always do some other climate dail he can do is own climate deal and do something else he doesn't need to be

a part of this talk talk talking shop the thing about the paris climate agreement is that it got the entire world on the same page about the direction we needed to go to agree to curtail greenhouse gas emissions from the energy sector big for it in delhi i mean that's such a boring snooze fest i mean what no it's taken action now it's got the power to take any action it's just a bake. it was an empty it was a can of worms now is the paris agreement replaced kioto right correct kyoto did have basically measures by which you could force people to the nations to actually do what they were supposed to do your absolute race is all voluntary nicaragua by the way did not sign it because it was a step down from kyoto so to say that you know now the us is in the company of nicaragua nicaragua said it's a fake agreement as max's thing and you knew that i said you're being disingenuous or you're talking the book here i was the only way i was sorry to only company i

didn't give nicaragua's reason as yet no warning and i mean we're getting it was there any misinformation well but the thing is having this and you're absolutely right that paris was the first step the next step was going to be the binding agreement part that is so paris was a step in the right direction global climate change requires a global solution paris is not perfect but withdrawing from it is just removes us leadership doesn't own leadership if now all a bunch of non leaders talking about nothing that's not leadership i mean this opens the possibility for a leader to step forward so whatever that the withdrawal from the paris agreement coincided with donald trump's evisceration of our domestic regulatory agenda to control greenhouse gas emissions at least to the bit we talked about the first half right so but also through the what's known as the environmental protection agency's clean power plan which was going to that see the u.s.

news doesn't cover any of this stuff because it's all rushing us again mr gates and nobody knows anything about what's going on with all the other parts of our economy and our political system absolutely i haven't heard of that i hadn't heard of this so what did you do what did you get out of it. the real scandal here are the radical policy moves that trump is making particularly on energy and climate so back in two thousand and fifty. name barack obama announced that the environmental protection agency was going to start regulating greenhouse gas emissions from power plants for the first time in history this followed up on a rule where we started to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from tailpipe emissions from automobiles and all of this stems from a two thousand seven supreme court decision called massachusetts vs e.p.a. where bunch of states said hey we're feeling the effects of climate change e.p.a. you need to regulate it under your existing clean air act authority and the john

roberts court in a five to four decision said the e.p.a. must regulate greenhouse gas emissions as a pollutant so the obama's ration did it and trump just completely threw it out the door says so basically violating the supreme court decision so they have to come up with a replacement but he can slow walk that for years i mean creating a rule to implement a law from or from a regulatory agency like the environmental protection agency it will take years and so he's just going to slow walk it and not do anything on it some entities environmental groups or states can sued to try and prod the top administration to move faster but that litigation will take years so where some are solutions the paris agreement where pulled out. some states you mentioned state states and cities are actually coming up with their own solutions tell us some of those you're absolutely right and so what you're seeing is more than a thousand and to tease across united states hundreds and hundreds of municipalities dozens of states are saying if the federal government is good isn't

going to lead we're going to step into that vacuum and so the big leaders here are california and new york that have established very aggressive in the case of california greenhouse gas emissions regulations they've got super robust programs that are funding renewable energy deployment same thing in new york where they've got a fifty percent were. energy target. in california they're actually debating one hundred percent renewable energy then you've got hundreds of cities across the country that are taking all sorts of concrete actions to either green up their electric cars sector or promote electric vehicle infrastructure and i know e.v.a.'s aren't one hundred percent perfect but the electrification of the transportation sector is a key if we're going to move beyond oil especially if the electricity generated to power the batteries in our transportation section sector are coming from renewable

energy in the u.s. you have this power. struggle between the states and the federal government and many times of course the federal government says we're going to throw it to the states you know that's a phrase that you hear so it looks like that's what's happening and why is that a bad thing it would be better if we had a coherent national energy but we don't and the states are stepping up and they're doing concrete stuff sounds a lot better than having a global institution just talk about the situation and not do anything ok the states like new york and california the very powerful states and they're actually stepping up and they have the where with all the money in the technology to do stuff and why not do stuff they do and stuff in this the you know the california is like the eighth biggest economy in the world or something like that and i think it might be the fifth it's in a definite optimistic huge economy the island of manhattan has almost the same g.d.p. as great britain when it you know half a trillion or so so i mean why not just the states do it i mean what's the what's the big so what jumps to be stuck on his policies the states do it definitely

having states go it alone or collaborate together within regions there's going to be benefits from that but then there's going to be states like mississippi taxes that aren't going to do things and think about creating jobs say let's say the seller industry it's a job booster and california generates tens of thousands of jobs in new york tens of thousands of california is going to have a lot of jobs in the center where nobody is on this but they have a lot of desert i mean. if they go solar get a lot of jobs in texas and folks in texas going to say your ideology sucks we want to job there's solar jobs you've got office we're going to bring a folks to do it california's doing isn't that the way democracy works in america it is and the states it is going to be effective but would be more effective if we had two issues we're going ashes we'd all be fat you know i mean it's just a sloppy right but the thing i like about what max is saying here is that this is we need a lot of innovation and diversity and i think having experiments san diego is trying to go one hundred percent renewable with their own plan their plan is

different from portland's planned and i think that the fact that you can experiment to see what works and what doesn't work that i think we might have a better find better ideas and one guy and one committee in here in d.c. saying how about we make them do this and it competition yeah you know it's free market competition and if a state or city goes completely energy renewable and the cost of their energy drops precipitously you're going to have people migrating to that state that you know because they say you know i pay a lot for a bamma care you know i don't want to cut my energy costs i'm going to move from this state and move that state i mean that's happened in america time and time again people move around it's very mobile that's one of the duties of it it's like a europe where you have different cultures different passports different you you know governments different paperwork it's just one big frick and three hundred thirty million entrepreneurs waiting to go to the next idea so let competition roll why you are right in that that we're going to see. a whole lot of different types

of policies being promoted at the municipal and the state level and that's a good thing but again i mean pages are going because you're in washington and you're paragraph and you're over there at this institute and he want a job i mean why not you know i buy my job is not dependent upon only working on federal issues and now i think you mentioned i thought destructive symbolism was a good word because i think that you know that fakes. symbolism this whole sort of virtue signaling of these paris agreement sort of things where a lot of liberals and i count myself as a liberal it's like they feel like look how great i am i support obama signing this meaningless non-binding contract and now i feel good about myself and i'm going to get in my car my private jet fly everywhere and do everything but i think the fact that he's like forced this issue and people to confront the reality of what we are doing and what how how little meaning it actually had in the first place and it forced an actual real reaction on the ground rights is real change and i don't mean

to me insulting by saying that you're just being herself the preservation in your view but i mean is that to be so that you would have a bit of a bias in terms of thinking that there is a top down government approach a solution that you would reach for automatically instead of a more diversified competitive approach on the ground right when you looked at the environmental protection agency's clean power plant proposal which was to regulate greenhouse gas emissions it did not set a single standard it basically developed a fifty state standard it said here of the emission reduction goals that you know mississippi california. and you have four different ways to address that and you can do a mix and match you can try to make existing coal plants more efficient you can bring more natural gas into the market you can deploy more renewables and you can and invest in energy efficiency and so the thing is the federal approach under

obama wasn't this one size fits all you know d.c. is going to you know ram down the states throats one solution it gave a ton of flexibility and so getting rid of that kind of national flexible approach yes you're right there's going to be a whole bunch of states that are going to be. pursuing stuff there's going to be competition there and that's going to be a good thing but then you're going to have the end of all states that are controlled through the economic politics of the incumbent electric utility having got a lot of evolution involved man you have to lead it into jean-paul prove on its own accord the government can't be out there having sex with every single american but i'd like to they got to have sex by themselves and generate smart babies or dead babies is smart babies are dead baby but i don't know if that how is that a solution to the energy situation because you're gravitating toward the light and energy is light and the plants gravitate toward the trueness of the light they

don't stay in the forest in the shadow or they die so if texas want to be a neanderthal and stay under that cloud of forest canopy of stupidity they're going to perish when along with perry care he sends a parish to parish ok all right i still think you should do a christmas album with perry como songs i don't think we're going to say on your life she says she's all for it. to be singing so all right that's it for this edition of the kaiser it for me max kaiser stay here would like to thank our guest very common. tyson slocum he's the big quake over there at the public citizens energy program which is the shop they use to be run by ralph nader correct member of our i will say turn for the next episode of gadgets on twitter a car as reported told them by all.

in the u.s. a child can choose a nominee course in school. with retired officers as teachers we don't. recruit we'll sr if the president is interested in going in the military or we don't recruit ourselves. program to boost interest in the military. but some veterans are willing to take children a little more they ask me very popular video. play. call of duty turn off duty.

to be told. just need more recruits. you can revolt against the dictator but what about the day after i think we as libyan people did not give much thought about facts and so they waged passion off the resolution does not build nations. and certainly does not build states. lead. they all. told me. yes to all nations all the food.

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and our team correspondent has caught up in unrest she reports on the latest clashes between. an israeli police and jerusalem. and the syrian opposition they agree on terms for a first deescalation zone near the capital of damascus. interpol releases a list of one hundred and seventy three islam exchanged suicide bombers that it could be preparing to carry out new attacks and you are. an activist said c monitoring how my gran's having to europe are dealt with by.