welcome to front running 2020 as we head to the elections are looking at the key issues democrats how they handling them look at a little bit on the economics today stacey it's all about 3 magic words green new deal yes and they were proposed by 8 o c alexandra cortez who i guess was basing her thing on f d r franklin delano roosevelt and his new deal so the green new deal is supposed to be a jobs program and a climate change still we have with us james howard kunstler and randy bowler jim now tell us what you think of a green new deal is it a great jobs program is it

a bad jobs program is that a good reason to have a deal it's see when you wish upon the star program because you know we've entered a kind of period in our history which is a era of wishful thinking and i think the truth of the matter is unfortunately we're not going to run while disney world the u.s. military suburbia the interstate highway system. and our great metroplex cities on any combination of all to fuel and all to energy and i'm afraid it's going to come as a is a big disappointment to the american public the main reason for that is you really can't fabricate the quitman for all these things and service them and maintain them without an underlying fossil fuel economy platform for that to happen under and unfortunately. this is the country has not figured that out including

a lot of pretty intelligent people and people with good intentions you know we'd love to keep running our stuff the way we're running it now by other means it's just really unlikely to happen you know this combines 2 things that are really shouldn't be combined one is climate change denial the green part and one is that governments can possibly do anything positive the new deal part so these are 2 areas that the predominant political forces like to tell us are socialist or they're impossible or we don't have the money for them so all the branding on this is horrible is there a way to present this that would be more palatable because clearly infrastructure needs to be upgraded that that's something that i need to do somebody needs to do it by and it's crumbling how is that going to happen and clearly what sea levels rising and with asifa cation of the oceans and with all the other problems that come with the toxicity of industrialization there is

a problem in the climate how to brand this in a better way maybe why do you think branding it is a green you do it's a bad idea the new deal was a vastly successful idea and one of the problems i think that we've had in america is not having aspirational programs that we had in the past that actually moved the needle we had the new frontier that's what j.f.k. around on we had the great society i think for the last 40 years we've had the raw deal isn't it time to have a better deal whether you call it the green new deal or whatever you do isn't it time that we aspire to doing something to fix these problems or the front new frontier was had a great like man landing on the moon and it was that is very appealing to the infantile ization of the population in a great way kid little boys want to land on the moon but how do you get you know the infantilization which is the name population in america to agree that cleaning up your room and eating broccoli is a good idea in us not the oprah for cation of the economy how do you brand it and.

appealing that hordes of millions that go see superheroes every weekend at the box office you know you have to appeal to this kind of inner teen angst to get anything down in america have you should be the avenging new deal but look the point is my friend here was talking about whether this can actually be done and you're getting to the energy issue i mean one of the challenges when you're dealing with solo with photovoltaics or you're dealing with wind power is how do you store the excess energy well battery storage is in development and that is improving and you know and i would posit like in states like north carolina when they studied the amount of excess energy you can get from wind if you could use it in an industrial process for instance you started you put a windmill and you started making batteries and you you split water and took your hydrogen over here and your actions over there you could use that to provide the energy of a manufacturing plant that created jobs and you were trying to make batteries by you know splitting water i mean just an idea but there are things you could do with

this excess power in the interim that are job creating well my sense of all this is that there are a lot of technological stunts that you can run and a lot of science projects that you can accomplish successfully that simply don't scale for our way of life the general belief out there for example is that because we're running suburbia and so many people live in it we have to find some way to continue to run it and mitigate all the problems with with it by running it differently and then the the proposed solutions do your are that we're going to everybody's going to drive electric cars we're going to change out the internal combustion fleet for an electric fleet i think that that's another thing that people are going to be very disappointed about if there are all kinds of weird currents that are running in the back row. around of this set of problems and

predicaments that we face for example the the motoring system in america is probably not going to fail on the basis of the fuel issue how you power the vehicles what's really happening is because the financial system is in such distress there are fewer and fewer people who are capable of buying cars the way americans are used to buying them on installment loans and making payments on them every every month and we've been to every possible method we can to allow them to continue to do that like 7 year loans for used cars a parallel proposal is that we'll have this driverless car fleet of vehicles that operate like taxi cabs and there will be there for that that many fewer vehicles to run the problem is that the way the car industry is scaled they have to sell about $17000000.00 cars a year in order to maintain their business model they can't just sell 3000 cars a year or you know a 1000005 cars

a year so there are many hidden problems in this whole matrix of of green energy predicaments in terms of this green energy of course barack obama held himself as making america the greatest energy producer in the world as a result of fracking in particular natural gas natural gas by many on the left and the democrats hail as a great you know green energy when in fact the new data shows that indeed all of the global warming the massive excel aeration of the last 3 years is due to the methane from fracking so that has increased the output loads enough that is what's more the whole fracking industry has really amounted to a financial stunt yes providing a lot of 0 interest loans and very ultra low interest loans to the fracking companies who have spent the last 10 years. demonstrating that they can't make

a red cent fracking oil yes but it did create some great jobs very high paying jobs and yes also in a very impressive rise in oil production but for a very brief amount of time even something like the economist just had a headline saying we don't actually know about fracking we don't know what it's doing and this is 10 years after it happened so we don't know the consequences we don't know about the radioactive waste involved and we don't know about what it's doing to our water supply we don't know those things that's from saying with the green new deal is there a chance that they could just be running into a similar thing possibly but the move toward natural gas was in part about air quality and this whole issue was about coal and coal fired plants and other legacy industries and so they were saying ok how can we improve the air quality and have a clean burning gas that's that's abundant and cheap and to into his point there are saying we're going to fuel an electric fleet with that well the problem with fuel in the lecture fleet of course is we pay for highways by the gas tax we don't

pay by vehicle miles traveled so consequently in states that you get an uptick or if you've got a lot of electric vehicles you would start getting declining revenues to pay for fixing these highways so jim's right and you're right there's a lot of other unintended circumstances of making these moves but when they made these moves they thought they were moving to something that was more environmentally sound but there were a lot of us who had seen gas land in its infancy and read up on hydraulic fracturing and warned that it's not something that's proven yes it could actually help us in the interim but there are unintended circumstances expression with the methane right but as i also understand from the very beginning that this was a net cash flow negative industry that can never be cash flow positive and it reminds me so much of the other part of the economy like the giga cami that goes public on wall street whether it's the burner or these other big economies that are just burning money all the time and they never have any hope of making any profit this seems to. point on the scaling and show if the basic underlying assumption is

that nobody will ever make money ever that you can always borrow money for 0 or less than 0 and it's just about getting an incremental quarterly gain how can you do something like infrastructure that needs you to look out 51015 years into the future and eisenhower's interstate highway program took some you know looked at the big map created the big highways and that was a big project for strategic reasons 1st to change it raises for a lot of different reasons but so if no one can look out and make those types of decisions and they're only looking quarter to quarter to your point can you ever ever get to the point where you're going to have an infrastructure no matter how your brand is green or a new dale or what have you if you're just looking for quarterly profits there are a number of additional thinking problems that attend this whole discussion notice for example that in our discussion about how we're going to mitigate suburbia you know with our petroleum quandary there's almost no discussion at all about walkable

communities in walkable cities and the reason for that is simply that americans are not interested in that and the reason they're not interested is because of what i call the psychology of previous investments the idea that we've sunk so much of our national wealth into this living arrangement with no future that we can't imagine letting go of it or even reforming it substantially and so you know the the one thing that we could do probably just to reduce the the general larger problem of too much mass motoring and burning of gasoline and diesel fuel would be. places to live that people could walk around in or you know take public transit in or a combination of both of those and in fact in point of fact the places where those exist in the world like the the city many of the cities and towns of europe are the places that are the most. rewarding and psychologically pleasurable places to live

in the world and yet americans refuse to think about making those kinds of changes which they get a lot more bang out of than they would from all of this fantasizing about green energy right let's take a quick break and is the great new deals that are nick anomic problem or is it a mass psychological problem much mark coming away on front running. time after time called parisian to repeat the same mantra sustainability it's very important it's accelerating the transition to sustainable prize board sustainability spain overmanned a more equitable and sustainable well. they claim their production is complete the hamas. has.

its own design the companies want us to feel good about buying their products while the damage is being done far away and this is something else this must be going to anyone and i mean look. this is the moves of news limited window nieminen einstein seemed to be based on that understood with superman and. what politicians do. to put themselves on the line to get accepted or rejected. so when you want to be president. or somehow want to. have to be right to be close to survival before 3 of them or can't be good. interested always in the waters. there shouldn't.

be. the mayor then there's a mighty i'm not. on the side of the one who made the vows of a time about what members of us have it than that one listen to the bomb was more about . what when or what in the fight the both of what they. see in the car going to him but i'm before but a cop on earth to him but i've. been out by now i'm by the imam by the.

welcome back to front running 2020 you know stacey in the 1st on the screen new deal we were talking mostly about the green you know but then there's the new deal and that implies jobs and war and we go from there well jim consol i want to turn to you because you ended on the last half saying that we have this psychological commitment to our prior investments and that's why we have the suburbia but many studies have shown that the new millennial is the generation z. who made brooklyn a livable place they've turned this into a livable thriving community and so they do like to live in livable places but how do you turn that into a huge jobs program because this is what they want they want to shovel ready projects the question for the millennium really for all of us is what are the assumptions were making about the structure of what work is going to be and what economic activity is going to be and right now i think the assumption is well we'll

just continue to have these lower this large corporate matrix of giant companies that you know provide enormous amounts of just for people i think what we're going to see really happen in what will be a long range contraction of economic activity will be the relocalization and the down scaling of of economic activity and what we really need are not so much jobs but vocations and economic needs is for people to apply that also come with the social role in their community and this was in fact the kind of country that we were pretty much before 950 you know that was the that this is the country that we were from the jimmy stewart movies of it's a wonderful life you know where people had a role in their community and they had an economic place in their community and the place listen is of. birbiglia is very much like the place listen this of people who

have no place in this country and in their community because there is no community for them to be and you can see a lot of this behavior for example in the rise of the chain store world of the 19 eighties nineties and present time in which we eliminated all of the local business in america and we forget that those people who ran businesses in small town america and the cities of america they employed people in their community they had a vested interest in the success of their community a lot of the money stayed in their community they supported the civic life of the community they pay supported the little league teams they sat on the hospital boards they set on the library boards and none of this happens with the k.-mart's the walmart's the in numerable chain store operations of america that is not only does it have to change you can bet that it's going to change but what about the

jobs because where you live in upstate new york east have mills paper mills clothing mills you had all sorts of jobs there and then those sort of communities those local communities developed around that now we just have finance capitalism or we have hollywood or silicon valley so of course new york city is getting a huge infrastructure spend with that building up the seawall along there to prevent flooding in the future but is it does it have to be a more local mayor state level thing or can the federal government can agree no deal can i say in ed markey new deal help across america i think the assumption that the federal government is going to continue to be a competent and effectual management system for this part of north america may be assuming too much i would say that the trend head is because we're going to have to relocate laws and we're going to have to go down the hierarchy of governance that the federal government is we could expect it to become a. only more ineffectual more impotent and more incompetence on the side of

localization the local is ation has become completely toxic if you look at like los angeles or san francisco where the reintroduction of medieval diseases where you have these encampments on the street where the tech giants and the hollywood giants there's a cognitive dissonance going on right there in their backyards is a devolving degrading collapsing economy and a country that they don't seem to think there have any role in having created that mess so we can't even go back to localization because we're going back to the middle ages when we yeah well we can go back to it but but my guess is that we're going to be dragged kicking and screaming back to it not because we want to go there or have an organized plan to go there i think the key to understanding where we're at in this country is that we cannot construct a coherent consensus about what's happening to us and therefore we can't construct a coherent plan for what to do about it yeah i think that's an excellent point

actually it's like we can't really describe what's going on what's happening what what what are the elements that are contributing to this and the discussion seems to be relying on the tropes and the talking points from 20 years ago 30 years ago but so much is happening and a lot of those troops are dedicated to a program matic destruction of the common good and the sense of a common culture and a common purpose i mean as far as i'm concerned and you know i remain a registered democrat as strange as that seems but but you know the democratic party is all but destroyed the idea of a common culture and common purpose in america with their program of multiculturalism which is really at all odds with the idea of a common culture randy you were a mayor of a small city in north carolina if amc and ed markey is bills passed through that congress in the senate it becomes law and green new deal comes into effect what happens when do you do with the money every municipality operates enterprise. it's

fun which is your water and sewer no water no town you've got to supply clean water you've got to handle waste so of course if you brought in money you're going to repair your distribution system you might build a new wastewater treatment plant you might build a new reverse osmosis water treatment plant or you might want to reuse water plant to 3 m. which is south of town which we did when i was mayor instead of sending in potable water we send them actually water that comes from our sewage treatment plant which is more environmentally sound and smarter there are a lot of things that local governments can do that put people to work like filling potholes and building sidewalks so you could walk to the schools in the community or building parks that help the quality of life well one of alexandria cortez's the resolution within her bill that she proposed was in upgrading out of all existing buildings saying i say some building new buildings to achieve maximal energy efficiency water efficiency safety affordability so weatherproofing them and things like that that of course could provide a lot of security in terms of not only jobs but also energy security bill security

electric bills yeah i mean that's an idea that those of us that have worked in the industry know about i mean some of the low hanging fruit is essentially taking existing buildings and making them more energy efficient making the quality of living in the building better and those jobs can't be outsourced because you have to actually do them in and out very well it just seems that there's no role for government in the current thinking that it's all about individual enterprise and survival of the fed and mint and getting rich at all costs and externalize and all risks including environmental and financial risk and to jim's point without a common culture at some point this situation is only going to become more factual and more degrading so how do you even bring about this idea of a common culture that would be needed to tackle a huge infrastructure project or a huge green project without it. spawn as

a return or an introduction of socialism and all these other catch phrases that are used to by the corporate media the american media is i would say 98 percent corporate led media they hate the idea of cost efficiency which you would need to solve these problems that of course would means that their profits would be decimated so how how where does that come from and from what i'm hearing here you say it won't happen there's going to be a collapse and then it's going to have to come from the rubble do you agree with that from or you're sitting in a small the city in north carolina is there a way to maneuver toward a brighter future or must we just wait for this collapse to happen and rebuild from the rubble my experience in working in local regional and state government in politics is there's actually 3 types of people not to those that say that the cup is half full those that say that it's half empty but the 3rd type is this someone

that spills the glass and makes chaos so we may get to the situation jim's talking about because there are groups in our country that are pushing chaos and that's why for example we can agree on what being an american is in my town right now we have new confederates united with nazis arguing about confederate flags and monuments we don't really have an idea of what our common culture is that has nothing to do with providing clean water or providing pot you know making sure that your roads are safe and the potholes are filled and that your schools are good these are other external issues from the past in the present are putting pressure on having that common american culture so there is a place where there is a successful green new deal many of the millennial voters want a green new deal there is a green new deal and it's in china china's built $45.00 nuclear power plants over the past decade they have a plan of course train is allowed to plan they have an energy development strategy action. 20142020 they are building 15 more nuclear power plants at the moment

they've built hundreds of thousands of miles of high speed rail they're able to do it why are we ever going to be able to do this jim consular i think that the experience in china was a remarkable achievement however it may not represent what it appears to be you know it's true that they've built a great deal of nuclear infrastructure but again you have to get back to the question can they continue to maintain and run that stuff without. petroleum supply and they have. they have been able to build it they have been able to put people to work we say we do it where americans we can't do it we don't have the ability we kept the people that work we can't come up with the deal but they built a giant machine for this giant country for a living in that may not be maintainable in any case i disagree with the notion that we can do it i think we can do it and i think that we have other issues that

are affecting our ability to do it for instance we have a debate on immigration we need immigrants in this country in order to fuel this building green new deal what about that's to the green new deal in order to have a green new deal with building infrastructure to do our population all of us republicans vote for more immigrants because we need to create new deal that's like a loser not really we rely on people coming into this country in need 2.11 people to replace the ones that are here we're not actually replacing the people who are here our population is aging but the people who are taking opiates and shooting meth in the midwest because they're leading purposeless lives of the enemy and on way they're not the ones who are anxious to bring in you know millions of other new workers to replace them i said earlier that societies are emergent and self organizing reality has mandates of its own that go beyond what are we. and

preferences are and our utopian visions may be you know and we're going to be subject to the min dates of reality and we'll do what we're required to do we'll do what we're compelled to do i think that the human project is going to continue i think it will represent a time out from the kind of technological progress we've enjoyed but it's something we might have to consider ok a green new deal this is a flash round will it happen won't happen jim consular we're going to get a new deal but it may not be the green new deal that people are expecting will get the green new deal that we have we deserve rather think we are going to get a green new deal because the green you're dealing compass is things beyond just right infrastructure healthcare's in that new deal there are other elements if you go back to when it started in 2006 that we are going to get and that are popular in this country all right well it's all comes down to our branding that's how i say it you know america's great a war about the war on apathy that's it for this edition of front running back

skies are at stake and select by. this footage is unique because there's a tribal lands a normally off limits to the public eric's allowed in because he's the. people here know him simply is don't to eric he's rich famous some always on the move sailing yachts and flying in a croft. he's considered one of the best neurosurgeons in. result. the that's

happening amazon. or you socialists going to busy doing nothing is going to do the population much remote is going to the people the amazones. chose seemed wrong. but old rules just don't hold. the old beliefs yet to shape out these days to come to educate and in gains from an equal betrayal. when so many find themselves worlds apart we choose to look for common ground.

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