Live from Music Row Wednesday morning on The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. –  host Leahy welcomed all-star panelist Crom Carmichael to the newsmakers line to discuss renewable energy in relation to the power outages in the oil and natural gas capital of Texas.
Leahy: The original all-star panelist joins us on the newsmaker line this morning. Good morning Crom.
Carmichael: Michael. How are you, sir?
Leahy: Well, I am warm and cozy in the studio, but getting here wasn’t so warm and cozy. You know, I’m staying that the Aloft Hotel and I walk about four blocks in the morning and it’s very cold very very cold. And I think Crom you are probably nice and warm at your residence but are not going to be coming in today of course. Perhaps it will clear up by Friday. We don’t know yet.
Carmichael: Well, we’ll see. I was planning on a short business trip and southwest didn’t fly yesterday. And I don’t think it should be flying today out of Nashville. So we’ll see. We’ll see.
Leahy: That’s right. You had a business plan a trip planned for Friday.
Carmichael: That’s not going to happen now.
Leahy: Not going to happen.
Carmichael: It’s going to be next week. I’ll give you the details. I know it got canceled and I’m working on rescheduling now.
Leahy: Well, everybody is sort of in that situation now with the airline’s canceling flights left and right. All sorts of crazy things going on. Speaking of crazy things. Crom, I don’t know if you’ve followed this story. Texas, over four and a half million people, are without power in Texas. There’s a story. I know you’d like to read in The Wall Street Journal. And there’s a story in The Wall Street Journal on this question. Why is Texas experiencing power outages? Did you watch Tucker Carlson Monday night?
Carmichael: Well, I saw that Texas now has a whole bunch of wind farms.
Leahy: Yes.
Carmichael: And they get a larger percentage. It’s kind of interesting because here you are in the oil and natural gas capital of the United States at least I guess it used to be. I still think it is. And they turned more toward wind energy and the ice storms have frozen up the turbines. So they’ve got this huge shortage. And that points out one of the weaknesses of wind turbines.
I kind of look at this when I saw that story the Audubon Society which you would think you’d think the Audubon Society would be all about birds. I mean, that’s what they claim to be. They go out of their way to to explain that even though wind turbines kill millions and millions of birds. I mean, we’re talking hundreds of millions of birds.
And they kill hundreds of eagles. And eagles especially that the Audubon Society purports to care greatly about. They turn themselves into a pretzel trying to explain how they can support the preservation of eagles and wind turbines at the same time.
Leahy: the Audubon Pretzel Society. (Chuckles)Â
Carmichael: And what they do is they say that wind turbines can be built where eagles don’t fly. (Leahy chuckles) Isn’t that nuts?
Leahy: Yeah. We got a lot of craziness going on here from the political elite and left-wing social justice warriors. I’m looking Crom at The Wall Street Journal article and it says what types of electricity are generated in Texas? And here are the facts. Natural gas-fired power plants generated 40 percent of Texas’s electricity and in 2020 according to ERCOT.
That’s the electric Electricity Reliability Council of Texas. Now talk about an oxymoron. The largest single source wind turbines were second at 23 percent followed by coal at 18 percent and nuclear at 11 percent. In recent years coal has been declining on the Texas grid and renewable sources such as wind and solar have been increasing. Hmmm. They forgot to do their analysis of what happens when the wind turbines freeze.
Carmichael: Solar can be a nice part of the equation. But even when you are doing solar you still have to take into account the cost of building the panels. And then you have to take in the cost of doing away with the panel’s when the panel’s life is over. And so there’s still a great deal. There was this article I mean it was the most fawning article I believe I have ever read. And that’s saying something.
Leahy: That says something.
Carmichael: The Wall Street Journal on Bill Gates. And Bill Gates says we have to have zero worldwide carbon footprint by 2050. Now that sounds like a long way away, but it’s really not. But he takes pride in buying carbon offsets for his own personal footprint including flying around on a private jet. Now I don’t have any problem with somebody flying around on a private jet except when they’re telling the rest of us that that we have to pay significantly higher for fuel in the name of saving the planet.
Buying carbon offsets I’m sorry doesn’t get it. The first problem is that he himself thinks that it’s okay for him to burn as much energy for his personal lifestyle as he wants to. And that’s true with John Kerry. It’s true with most of these people that what you and I would call the Davos crowd.
Leahy: Yes. Davos Switzerland where they all gather once a year to talk about how globalization is great for everybody except for most people. Great for them.
Carmichael: It’s going to be interesting. I did a little bit of research and this is slightly off-topic of what we’re talking about but not really and that is his globalization idea. And that is that there were lots of us companies big companies at the time the biggest U.S. companies who were doing business with Nazi Germany all the way up until the U.S. and Germany had a declaration of war against each other.
And of course, the war had been going on for quite some time before we entered the war. And so you have companies like Coca-Cola and Alcoa. Alcoa is helping them build their war machine with aluminum. You had IBM that was probably the largest company that did more business with Nazi Germany prior to our entering the war.
And so it’s really interesting how globalists at that time which was which globalism at that time was a was much much smaller than it is today. But it gives you an idea of the mentality of how global corporate types really are able to intellectually put the interests of the United States and Americans behind the interests of their of themselves and their own companies. That’s really what we’ve got going today.
Leahy: There’s an interesting example of that with China. A very interesting report that Tony Blinken who is the Secretary of State under Joe Biden. There’s a report at Breitbart that Secretary of State Tony Blinken founded a firm that received Chinese money for Department of Defense research linked universities. How about that?
Carmichael: Well, the biggest difference between the Soviet Union and China is it China has been much more strategic in spending hundreds of billions of dollars over the last 10 years essentially establishing themselves in the educational community in the United States. In Hollywood and businesses and in government. And so so you’ve got these tremendous financial interests now that China has established.
Whereas the Soviet Union might have had a tiny amount of money on lobbyists. But their involvement in the United States in colleges and universities would have been only with actual spies not with things like the Confucius Institute, which actually is a propaganda arm of the Communist Party of China. How many Confuscious Universities are there?
Leahy: Probably a couple hundred.
Listen to the full second hour here:
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Tune in weekdays from 5:00 – 8:00 a.m. to the Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy on Talk Radio 98.3 FM WLAC 1510. Listen online at iHeart Radio.Â
‘green’ energy generation is a fantasy. a liberal dream from which texas woke up.