The Cost of Mass Poverty - It's Not Good

We scream in the west all the time about the environmental cost of wealth, but the environmental cost of poverty is way higher, way higher. And this is something I can't figure out. I cannot figure out why the greens don't get this, because in principle, they're on the left, and the leftists in principle are on the side of the poor.

But when it comes... but like, the thing is, I take Germany as an example. The green lobby got into essentially a position of power within that country, and they're effectively left with, um, yeah. And they heavily campaigned against nuclear to push for other renewable solutions. So they pushed heavily into wind and solar, but the result of that was that the country no longer could power itself. It had to buy power from Poland, which was manufactured by coal, and it had to buy lignite coal. Right? Not just coal, but the worst kind of coal.

Yeah, I know. Brilliant, brilliant. Which is incredibly polluting. And they also had to buy, um, ironically, um, energy from France, which was generated by nuclear power. So, right, right, the costs, the costs of the German went up for their power, and their carbon footprint went up. Right, right. So, we want to dwell on that for a minute.

So the consequence of the green movement in Germany was that power—let's lay it out—power was five times more expensive than it should have been. The Germans became reliant on fossil fuels to a degree that they weren't before, including reliant on Putin, which turned out to be a very bad idea. Let's point out. Plus now, Germany is now in the throes of de-industrialization, so the poor are going to get a hell of a lot poorer.

And you might say, well, that's all worthwhile because we're so much greener. But the truth of the matter is that Germany now has among the world's dirtiest energy per unit because of their idiotic policy. So they didn't just fail on the economic front entirely and make the poor poorer; they failed by their own standards because the bloody goal was to decrease pollution. And what they did instead was increase it per unit of energy, and not just a little bit, a lot.

And so this just bedevils me because I cannot put my finger on why it is that the leftists are simultaneously pro-environment, pro-poor people, and anti-nuclear. It's like, sorry guys, you don't get to have all three of them. You can have two. Yeah, I imagine there's a lot of posturing here, and it's, yeah, yeah, not just saying that.

All right, yes, but like, as an example, like I was working in Utah once, and there was this—I was working in this small little town, and there was a massive coal power plant there. And I was like, oh, so this power is for Utah? And they're like, oh, no, we send all of this power straight to California. I was like, why? And they're like, well, they shut down a lot of their power plants, um, so they can claim that they've greened essentially.

But really, they're still powering their Tesla with coal that's being generated in Utah. And so it's the same kind of optics. Well, you know, Californians and Utah... and the inhabitants... I have no idea what you call Utah. Utahan? I have no idea.

Anyways, you know that Californians and people from Utah, they don't breathe the same atmosphere. It's like China and the United States, completely different air supply, as everyone knows. So, yeah, one of the reasons I like to talk to engineers is because they don't get to posture. Like, the thing that's cool about engineers is their stuff either works or it doesn't, and it's very unforgiving.

And so, you know, and, uh, yeah, it's okay. The DEI people and the politically correct types, they're going to take all you engineers out too, so you better get prepared. Well, as a—my days might be numbered. So, well, plus you're an engineer, man, you've got a lot of things, you know, a lot of strikes against you.

So, okay, okay, so we've made a case for, um, for these small micro reactors. Now I'd like to know, and you alluded to something quite interesting. You said that when you first started to contemplate doing this in the American environment, you realized that there was a lot of, um, a lot of industrial and infrastructure pieces that needed to be in place that had been allowed to decay because the Americans had had a reliable supply of fuel material from the Soviet Union as a consequence of its collapse.

And so a lot of things were left to de-integrate, let's say. But now you've realized that that's also another economic opportunity. So it sounds to me like you guys are planning to build a, what would you say, from the ground up enterprise that will allow for these micro reactors to exist.

So then I want to know where you are, how you came to that conclusion, where you are in that process. And then again, because I have a particular interest in Western Canada, I'm curious about how these ideas have been received in places like SCU.

So I would say, um, there are like three questions there. Yep. So, um, how these things have been received—let's start with that one. So yeah, um, I think certain territories like Alberta become very friendly to the idea of powering a lot of their remote industries, even the oil sands operations, with nuclear power. Right, right, right.

And that's an incredibly energy-intensive industry, um, and so there has been support voiced for the—and there's like an Invest Alberta program which is looking actually to bring in SMRs. But that's not ubiquitous across the whole country. Like you don't—you wouldn't see the same receptiveness from, say, British Columbia, where I am currently. It's, again, certain more industry-friendly provinces would drift in that sort of area.

And I think, honestly, Toronto—well, the Ontario, the greater Toronto area, came to the conclusion that nuclear had already provided a substantial portion of the energy for the province. And, um, they didn't want to substitute that for, um, more fossil fuels. So they've gone back and invested in it.

Canada actually has a pretty decent—I quite like the reactors they put together that can do reactors, and they also—they almost generated their entire independent industry because they opted for designs that weren't being widely used across the world. So Canada is actually in a very strong position to build out their own SMR industry if they invest properly now in doing that.

Otherwise, they're going to suffer in the same way that the United States is suffering from getting going now. And another thing you mentioned is why we saw these problems that we saw with big companies like, say, TerraPower. It's a big SMR company, and it's backed by Bill Gates, so there's no shortage of money for this thing to get going.

But they effectively could not find enough fuel to put into their reactors to complete the test work, and we thought that's very interesting. So what happened there? Well, they effectively had to shut down for two years, and that's the worst thing that can possibly happen because you just burn cash.

And so they probably—they're probably going to burn through hundreds of millions of dollars. And so the advantage—you know, a wise man can learn from the mistakes of others, so hopefully we just saw that and we thought, well, if we can't— we're not backed by Bill Gates, so we can't afford to make a hundred million dollar mistake like that or a billion dollar mistake like that.

And so really, before we saw the US government realize that there was a significant problem—which very closely mirrored the Ukraine war—when relationships began to become very strange, and they began pushing a lot of funding opportunities out there to build back their infrastructure. And they're doing that now, but it's still coming a bit late.

And so the advantage we had is we started doing that before these funding opportunities from the US government came out to build conversion facilities, deconversion facilities, fuel fabrication, enrichment facilities. Because otherwise, if Russia cut off the states now—and they're still— they are still through back channel dealing in the supply of enriched uranium because the US can't afford to go without it.

But they don't want to have those channels open anymore, and they want to cut ties, but they can't do it. And you mentioned earlier that Germany lost sovereignty over it—over itself, partially because it couldn't power itself. It was reliant on Russian gas. Right? That's a situation no country really wants to be in. You want to have sovereign energy, um, you know, absolutely.

Otherwise, your diplomatic strength is completely gone. And, um, yeah, well, you'd think that no country would want that, but when you watch the policies that they're pursuing, a sensible person would conclude that that's exactly what they want. And I do believe that posturing has a very large amount to do with that because almost all of the green idiocy is narcissistic posturing. It's the pretense of doing good without doing any of the actual work.