Hello, Brianna and James. It's the cool pop here, pop Francis. I'm back on the Clean Energy Show to announce that the Vatican has become the eighth country in the world powered by 100% renewable energy. I will never have achieved this without the wisdom of the Clean Energy Show's putting me on. I have just one request. Please, I can no longer take James's confession. It's just too gross. Hello, and welcome to Episode 220 of the Clean Energy Show. I'm Brian Stockton. And I'm James Whittingham. This week, a new study says solar parks provide sanctuary for birds. Don't tell Donald Trump or I'll deport them. Congratulations to Pope Francis for achieving net zero at Vatican City. If there's one thing the Vatican is known for, it's progressive, forward-thinking policies. Sigmund, I deserve that. Big oil was caught at Mike saying how they have close ties to government officials, even cornering them at Costco to infiltrate their minds. Brian asked me about the new Costco cookie after we're done with our intro. It's amazing! I would listen to Satan lobby me while eating that thing, honestly. The world's largest solar farm has come online in China. The power it generates is equal to the power needs of the entire country of Papua New Guinea. If I had any idea how big Papua New Guinea was, that would really mean something. All fat and more of this edition of the Clean Energy Show. Oh, you tell me about that cookie that... Oh, it's really good. Do you have a Costco membership? No, I don't. I don't either currently, but we get it occasionally. And my kid came home with a cookie a week ago because they were there stocking up because our membership was ending, and we do get some things from there. And they had this food court cookie. They had the food court hot dog, which is subsidized by Costco for $1.50 at a drink. And it's a big meaty hot dog. Credit, some people don't care for it. Anyway, the cookie is 750 calories. It's a meal. It's this big. It's thick and it's warm. And my mother used to make chocolate chip cookies with lard as a kid. This is made with butter, but it tastes the same. And it just, when she nailed it, it just reminded me of that. So it was basically the perfect, in my mind, the perfect chocolate chip cookie warm. Even brought home across town, it was still warm. So probably best to let that membership lapse. Yes. And I was very relieved, though, that it was $3.50. I was mentioning this on my Comedy podcast that if it had been subsidized like a hot dog, I might have a month, maybe a month to live, that would be bad. So I'm really relieved that it's bad. Okay. So last week we mentioned in passing about the fact that we have no passenger rail service in our city. And I thought that that was maybe worth talking about more because it really is a little bit sort of puzzling and annoying, but it definitely speaks to a problem we have in generally North America, but particularly here. So we live in a capital city. This is a, you know, it's not a big city, 250,000 people, but it is one of Canada's capital cities. We have 10 provinces and we're right in the middle, Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada. And about 25 years ago, they canceled our passenger rail service. We used to have it and they canceled it in Calgary as well, which always puzzled me because, you know, rail service, like most of the population of Canada lives close to the US border. And so, you know, we have the number one highway that goes across the whole country. But, you know, it's massive, like it's 8,000 kilometers from the east coast to the west coast. And sure, that's big, but, you know, you could have almost the entire country served by that one passenger rail line that goes, you know, east to west. But for some reason, they canceled Regina and Calgary. So then it cuts north to Saskatoon and Edmonton and then comes back south again. Through beautiful Jasper National Park. Sure, wonderful scenery. These are amazing train trips if you can ever take them in the mountains in Western Canada. And we don't have passenger intercity bus service either. That was canceled by our ridiculous provincial government about five years ago. We used to have a subsidized provincial bus service that would serve all these small towns. Like this is a very, very large province with lots and lots of small communities. But this bus service, they had to subsidize it a little bit because it's not a practical business. So we don't even have that. So, you know, lots of people are in these small towns. And if you don't drive, you're in huge trouble. If you need to get somewhere, you know, you basically have to ask a friend to drive. Basically, everyone does drive. But what happens when you get to be elderly and maybe you shouldn't drive? Maybe you're good enough to stay at home, but you can't drive. Those are the people I worry about. They're also the people that I'm hopeful that automated robotaxes will come to small towns eventually and help people, well, maybe my age by then, not current people. But, you know, in a few years, when it trickles down to small towns, I can have one robotaxi and it might be cost efficient because the carbon lasts forever. And, you know, if you don't use it much, it's still okay. Oh, it'll eventually solve the problem, but, you know, not in the next few years. So, you know, they could have waited another five or 10 years to cancel that bus service, which would have been smart. But our government's not known for doing anything particularly smart. But I don't know. It also got me thinking about all this road infrastructure that we have in North America. And I had that recent road trip down to Indiana. And, you know, what do you do when you're on a big road trip in the summer? You constantly come over road construction, right? We have all these massive roads and highways, but they need constant, constant maintenance. So, you know, every few hours on the highway, we were slowed down for construction. It wasn't, you know, not a number particularly bad, but you lose five minutes here, 10 minutes there. You know, it's this amazing system, but it just takes an insane amount of money to keep it running. And here again in our province, like we have this grid road system, which is this really amazing thing. Like, you know, most of our province is flat or at least the populated part, completely flat. So, 100 years ago, they built this grid road system. So, every mile, basically, there is a gravel road. And it really helps the farmers, like it facilitates all the agriculture that we have. But, you know, and the statistic is something like a third of all the road mileage in Canada is in Saskatchewan. We have so many of these grid roads. It's ridiculous. But again, like it costs a lot to maintain. And as a result, they don't maintain them properly. And, you know, the roads are falling apart. So, in a future where we have robo-taxis, you know, what's going to be different? It's going to definitely help people in small towns. You could probably, every hour, you could have, you know, a robo-taxis service running in a small town and, you know, with two or three passengers. I think that's eventually doable. We'll have less car ownership, but probably more actual car trips, right? Like, you know, that's what they're thinking, yeah. Yeah. So, we're not going to be getting rid of our road infrastructure anytime soon. So, you know, we're going to have to keep maintaining it, I guess. This could sneak up fast on us if there's a major advancement in robo-taxi technology. And suddenly, you know, St. Tesla was able to deploy it all over North America within a matter of months. I mean, the regulation is going to be the stickler when they do reach that point. But it's going to have to be regulated so that people do take public transport, so that they aren't discouraged from using last mile transportation, like scooters and bikes and walking and, you know, public transport, like buses and subways. Because, you know, I've said it before, as my one-year experience in a big city of Toronto, I figured that if I had a robo-taxi and it was really cheap, like we expect it to be the same cost as taking the subway, maybe. Yeah. I would rather take the robo-taxi and just be by myself without people coughing on me and going into that dark dingy, you know, subway. But if everybody did that, the roads would be clogged, even if the cars parked to each other and, you know, it wouldn't be a good situation. So we have to tempt people away from doing that. And that could be a government regulation that, you know, is tricky because it could happen quickly. Yeah. And cities like ours, robo-taxis are going to make sense because our public transport in the city is not particularly good. It's not very frequent, so we expect it to take off here. But yeah, in this sort of dense cities, that could end up to be a problem where, yeah, you'd have to disincentivize, perhaps, robo-taxis to make sure people keep using the subways. It makes me think, though, that in our case, I know we're a unique case, but we could have robo-taxi buses, like small buses that are, you know, automated. And maybe that becomes, and it's run off electricity. And, of course, they get cheaper. Ten years from now, they'll be very cheap, hopefully. And maybe everybody can take that. Maybe there can be not everyone driving a car here, robo-taxi-wise, but maybe, you know, sort of public transportation version, even if it has to be scaled down. Also, remember, we used to have the Dayliner train, because I used to live by the train tracks about a block away, and my best friend lived right next door, so I'd see it all the time once a day. The single passenger train with an engine built in that went from us to the city that had the train or didn't have the train. I think we had the train at the time. I'm sure we did, actually. Then we'd go to the other city and pick up people. Why couldn't we do that, you know, instead of a bus? You know, one train car, for God's sake. And eventually, that's going to be automated, probably five years from now. And if it's electrified by battery or something like that, I can't see how it wouldn't make economic sense. But it is a physically massive country. The second biggest in the world, like I said, you know, 5,000 miles from east coast to the west coast. So it would be expensive to really do proper rail and high speed rail or something like that for such a massive country. You know, there is some... But maybe you could reduce the workers, the infrastructure, they just get on the train at a certain stop, you know, like a bus stop, practically, and you just scan your smartphone and you get on the train, and there's a retinal and genital scan or something as well, and let you on. The technology is there to reduce the cost of some of these small case, I think. If these think outside of the box and start thinking differently, there's going to be ways that this could be on the horizon. And we do have a private bus company that has sort of filled in, but they only do the two or three routes that are actually profitable between, you know, two or three of the major centers. So it's really bad. We're in a transportation desert here. And thus, we're, you know, very focused on driving. Yeah. This week, from the independent, the Vatican is ready to achieve 100% green energy, says the Pope. The Pope himself, you said that. Thanks to Pope Francis for contributing to this episode. So this is now the eighth country in the world. The Vatican Vatican City is technically its own country, and this is the smallest one by landmass that has achieved this. So the other countries that are 100% renewable are Albania, Bhutan, Nepal, Paraguay, Ethiopia, Iceland, and the Congo, they all generate more than 99.7% of their electricity from renewables. And this is according to data from market Jacobson, who we quote a lot on the show, who's doing great research into all of this. He keeps saying over and over again, we don't need miracle technologies to go to green, clean energy. It's going to be a combination of onshore wind, offshore, solar photovoltaics, concentrated solar, geothermal electricity, small hydroelectric, and large hydroelectric. Mark Jacobson doesn't think we need the nuclear option. It is, of course, very expensive and takes too long, and we got to move this quickly. But there's also a nice chart here. There are 47 countries that have more than 50% renewable. That chart is quite shocking to me. Like the number one country in the world is Albania is 100%. I didn't know that. Yeah, and I don't know much about Albania. I knew less about Bhutan, which is number two, which is very close to 100%. But this is all scalable. If you can make Vatican City 100% renewable, and they've got a solar farm coming online, I think maybe it's not 100% yet, but they're making a solar farm now to go with the solar that they already have. But this is all scalable because the Vatican City, it's very small in terms of its footprint. So you might think, oh, they don't have enough room to do solar. No, that's not true. This is scalable to really any country. We all have various sized populations in various sized countries. But if you can make Vatican City 100% renewable, then you can go larger and go quickly. But yeah, Canada made the list. We're above 50%. There's a bunch of countries in South America that are above 50%. Some in Africa and then Norway and Sweden are above 50%. So it's obviously going to take time. But look at these countries that are the top and the world with renewables. Albania, Bhutan, Nepal is basically 100% Paraguay, basically 100%. Ethiopia, basically 100%. Iceland, very close to 100%. Costa Rica is around a little over 98. And Norway and Zambia is about 97 and a quarter. I didn't associate these countries with renewables, but I mean, they don't have to depend on fossil fuels or importing them. That's great for one thing. Yeah, and they probably also don't have the power appetite of the, you know, what that we have here in North America to power all of our, you know, giant homes and air conditioners. That's true. There was another Mr. Beast Philanthropy video released on the weekend, where he added more solar to this village. It's quite an interesting story. We mentioned it a year ago because one of the women of the village has a popular TikTok channel, which she's using to, you know, fund education. It's so popular, she's making money off and it's funding education. But, you know, they needed more power. So they put up a new solar farm for them and suddenly everything, all these things that they can do now is just incredible just by putting up. When I say solar farm, I mean, like something you might see on a farm for a farm room, like a small installation that, you know, they've never seen light before. At night, it was incredible and they all screamed and gasped. And then, you know, suddenly education is taken on new opportunities there. And that can lift them out of poverty and crime as well. This is not rocket science. If I humbly, valuable being can make this happen, then other more valuable leaders have no excuse. Let's make this happen, pop out. All right. Well, we have leaked recordings from TC Energy. They are a pipeline company and they had a conference that somebody recorded and the publication, the left-wing publication in Canada called the Narwhal has received those recordings and have written an article about it. And I've got the link, hopefully, that'll show up in your show notes. And last week's some shocking claims from a fossil fuel company, Executive, were revealed to the public. The executive, his name is Liam Illiev, pardon me. And he talked about how TC Energy, a major oil and gas company, conducts its business. TC Energy builds and operates oil and gas pipelines all across North America. And his 42-minute talk was part of a Lunch and Learn session in March for 150 employees involved in external relations across the continent. Evil, evil stuff. That's the bad stuff that's going on. External relations means making people want to die from fossil fuels and be okay with it. British Columbia's Attorney General, the Subprovince in Canada, is investigating that TC Energy improperly influenced the province's climate policies. Leaked recordings revealed the executive boasting about ghost-writing ministerial notes and staging encounters with officials to push the company's agenda, even cornering them at Costco, the vegetable oil at Costco to influence them, like stocking them. I guess this is how politics works. He is a former senior advisor to premier John Horrigan in BC. He joined TC Energy shortly after. Was Horrigan an NDP government? I can't remember. I don't recall. I think he might have been. And one of his ministers that's left of center is now working for the pipeline. The recordings made during sessions in early 2024 suggest TC Energy influence the province of British Columbia's carbon-taxed adjustments and other policies. And he resigned after the claims surfaced stating some comments were exaggerated, but basically not denying them. How can you deny it when there's recordings? So the leaked recordings of this executive claimed the company's ghost wrote ministerial notes. And why not play a clip? A really interesting thing about the government is that a lot of people, public servants, who are overworked under pay, and sometimes they just want the job done for them. And we've had instances where we've been able to get an opportunity to rank entire briefing notes for ministers and pre-abairs of protesters. And it got stuck on to her up on her head and put into it out of the low pit, we're briefing package that goes to that old to the ghost satellite to figure it out. There's nothing more powerful than that. And those relationships are key. So he's basically getting the government ministers to basically just circulate their own propaganda. It's not even rewritten. It's just they snap their letterhead on it and give it out. They wrote entire briefing notes for government ministers, premiers and prime ministers. Their work gets picked up and repeated by this government officials. And he said there's nothing more powerful than that. He told the audience, including the Wall Street Journal published an editorial, basically, that they wrote. This is another clip. We have had opportunities to shave stories, play stories, develop positive stories, say in some instances as a corporation, trans stories to have negative stories that were even not true. We really, really armed us in some way that was irreparable. So they developed stories for the media that, in some instances, attempt to stop negative stories that are harming them irreparably. So if the climate is a story and it hurts them, they try to change that and shift it. And that's what's going on all the time. This is one of the rare instances where they're caught red handed and what their techniques. But know that probably some of the thinking that you have is influenced by fossil fuels that you may not realize that they are doing an awful lot of that. Anyway, that's my story. It's a negative one. But you know this is going on. We know this is a fight right now. That's the depressing story of the week, for sure. Okay, so I came across this interesting YouTube channel. It's called Tech Ingredients. And I just thought it was fun. We talk a lot about heat pumps on the show and how a heat pump is basically an air conditioner that can run in reverse. So it can do heating as well as cooling. But the thing I hadn't realized that it can do, and what he does in this YouTube video is he does a comparison where he takes a sort of a normal, resistive heater and heats up like a bedroom sized room. So it's a thousand watt heater, like a hairdryer type heater. And he lets it run for half an hour and it's able to warm up the room by about 10 degrees Fahrenheit. Okay, fair enough. And then he mounted a window air conditioner unit in the door of this bedroom. He cut a hole in the door and put the air conditioner in. And all he did was put it in essentially backwards. So a window air conditioner unit, it's got the part that's inside the house that blows the cool air. And then it's got the part that's supposed to be outside the house. And that's where the heat exhausts from the air conditioner. But if you just mounted backwards, well guess what? That heat goes into the room. And I thought it was a really nice kind of explanation of how you can heat a room. So he did that same 30 minutes and it was only about a 350 watts for the air conditioner as opposed to 1000 watts and he was able to raise the temperature about 15 degrees Fahrenheit in that 30 minutes just by putting in the air conditioner backwards and having the heat escape into the room. So first of all, I hadn't thought of that before. Like people could literally take window air conditioner units and physically flip them around to heat their houses in the winter. I don't think anyone's talked about that. But I also thought it was fun. It's sort of entertaining because he takes a stab at explaining how heat pumps work. And this is something we've discussed before on the show. I think it's hilarious whatever somebody tries to explain how a heat pump works. And I'll have you just maybe edit in a part of it here, you know, just as an example. But you know, he starts out with these two beakers that he fills up with like plastic balls and he pours some of them into another beaker and he's trying to explain equilibrium. And then he does it with two beakers full of nickels. Like that somehow makes a difference like he does it twice. But this is how people struggle to explain how heat pumps work to the fact where he does it first with plastic balls and then with nickels in two different beakers, like somehow that's going to explain it even further. But you know, in the end, it doesn't matter. Heat pumps are electric heaters that just work at three to four times the efficiency of a normal electric heater. That's really all you need to know. But I'd like to maybe, I don't know, I should collect these and maybe cut together a super cut video someday of, you know, 10 different people try to explain how heat pumps work. Because I don't know, I haven't found one yet that actually explains it to me. Okay, so I'm thinking about different places I lived. And I would live in a sort of our starter home that had a window air conditioner in the master bedroom. And it was very leaky because you can't really seal it very well. I did a pretty good job of sealing it, because it was one of those windows that slide up and down. I can't remember the name for them, not casement, something like that. And anyway, you could seal it fairly well. But I mean, it wasn't airtight, so I wouldn't want to leave it open in the winter time. And, you know, use that, especially in a very cold climate. But maybe a lot of people wouldn't. On the other hand, I had this apartment where they installed pretty big air conditioners and all the units when they was bought by a different company. And they did that right through the brick. They cut through the brick wall. So that would be if you could just buy one. And this is something that happens all over Europe, I think, all the time, right? As they do work both ways. But in North America, they don't. Maybe we should be doing that, making two-way air conditioners that are permanently mounted mandatory that they be heatiers as well. Because you could offset, you know, in not too cold of weather that we get here. But certainly fall and spring, you could transfer the heat. It would be cheaper than what you're using it in the building. It would be nice to do that. Yeah, the heat pumps, they weren't the same as air conditioners. But a heat pump just has a valve that's able to reverse. So it can do both without you physically having to flip it around in the window, like I was talking about. But yeah, that's the tech ingredients YouTube channel. He's got 900,000 subscribers. So he's doing something right. But I couldn't follow his explanation of how he pumps it. So if our listeners know of a good heat pump explanation, consider this an open invitation to let us know. And speaking of that, it's time to dip into the mailbag. Okay, so I mentioned last week that a blue sky where the social media channel that is almost the same as Twitter, but nobody's not enough people are over there. But that means that the bad people aren't over there. So yeah, he got back to us and said some more things. He said, great call out regarding the Toronto study of how people arrive at businesses. There is a survey of businesses. They assumed people arrived by car. In fact, they did not. Very few of them arrived by car. They came by bicycle foot and transit. Totally understand the focus of your podcast is about EV cars and personal transport. I appreciate the spotlight on multimodal transportation options. He was saying he stopped listening to the show because we didn't. We only focus too much on cars. We are too car pro car. And I agree that cars and trucks will be part of our transportation network for many years to come. My advocacy is focused on option awareness, which we try to. And that is a good criticism of our show because we can try and do that more. We're just not encountering those stories as often. It's more of a North America that is just not happening enough. As I was talking about at the top of the show, we just have all this built road infrastructure that it's going to be difficult to switch from that, right? Like you at a certain point have to start closing highways because it's a sunk cost. It's the sunk cost fallacy. We've got this sunk cost of all these highways that we're probably going to keep perpetually spending money on. That's just the way it works here. Yeah, so he also sent an article for a bit of background. He says, "My interest is an alternative EV solutions is similar to you all. Any barrel of oil not used is a great step forward in our world." And I certainly think that too. He sent an article from the Guardian. I don't have the link for it, but I do have the title at the moment. And it is EVs are booming, but electric bikes are really cutting emissions. This is something we've talked about with electric two-wheel transport transport in parts of the world where that is popular two- and three-wheel transport. This cutting, I think, a million barrels a day and maybe two million this year, perhaps. It's pretty significant. It's more than EVs. Those gas scooters are often highly polluting because they're the smaller two-stroke engines. So yeah, that stuff going electric is amazing. And a shout-out to a writer, a person who's written in, who's donated big to our show. T.M., I'm not going to out him completely, but he made an extremely generous donation to our show, which is very helpful to me. He donated big and then he got laid off, but he said he's listening to our podcast. Well, he's laid off. We might have to make some extra episodes then or something. Well, the laid off edition, but no, he's searching for jobs. We'll listen to back episodes of our show, which is hopefully comforting, soothing, but yeah, he'll get a job soon. He's highly qualified. We'd love to hear from our listeners. Please contact us by email cleanenergyshowalloneword@gmail.com and we love it when you leave a voice mail at speakpipe.com/cleanenergyshow and we have store and donate links in your show notes if you want to check out. Yeah, and if you're able to donate, there is a link in the show notes. James does a lot of work for editing the show and it is amazing when people contribute to that. All right, this is from MSN, the world's largest solar plant. It's got over 5 million solar panels and it's now come online in China. We're often talking about big projects and often these big projects are things like nuclear plants, but whenever someone's talking about a nuclear plant, what are they talking about? They're talking about 2030, they're talking about 2035. This is already online. Like we didn't even necessarily hear about this. I can't remember if we talked about it before, but this is already online, the world's largest solar farm and there's a picture here and it's like there's so many panels, 5 million panels. They kind of don't even- Yeah, it's like a large vast desert that's painted with panels, not completely, but maybe 60% of it is black from solar panels and it's a very interesting as well. Almost even can't even picture them in the same photograph, like they just kind of go on and on, but the photograph doesn't cover the whole thing, it just covers a portion of it. Yeah, rolling kind of desert. I don't think they had to displace any humans to build this. It looks like a sort of a desolate area of China, but this is- I've never heard of a human being displaced by solar farms. I mean, farms get displaced by solar farms, but not cheap. There was a story like in Germany, they're actually displacing a town to build a new coal mine. It's not in my notes to talk about, but that seems kind of depressing. Where's Germany? They still need coal in Germany, apparently. Oh, boom. Why would they do that? That's boo. But anyway, yeah, so 3.5 gigawatts. This is the same amount of power that Papua New Guinea uses. It's just massive. And there's more of these massive, massive solar farms to come. There is huge production of solar panels. Obviously, a lot of those are in China. Well, this is obviously making use of all those solar panels. This is crazy. 10.5 million people in Papua New Guinea, Alexa says. I asked her off mic, 10.5. There are smaller countries, but that's pretty big. They're so spread out that I wonder about the desert dust, like they're going to have a lot of maintenance. It's not like you evenly place things where you can stick a robot, and it'll go on for a couple kilometers of panels and go down a foot and go back. Yeah, it also shows you don't need a flat surface to put the panels on. Yes, and they're on these rolling hills. Because it's on rolling hills, it's not actually used. I mean, if it was pasture, that's one thing, but it's not. And it's using land that's otherwise, and maybe it helps erosion and things like that. There are things that maybe it helps. Maybe it helps some of the wildlife that's living there to give it some shade. If I was a desert creature, Brian, I would love a solar farm. And we'll talk a bit about that in the lightning round, which is coming right up. It's time for the lightning round. The lightning round is a fast-paced look at the latest headlines in climate. Clean energy and transportation. A new heat record for the day was set in California's Death Valley last Friday. One of the hottest places on Earth, the previous high, shattered by five degrees Fahrenheit. Not 0.5 by five. With the mercury climbing to 127 Fahrenheit or 52.7 Celsius. I said to before I was there when it was 50 Celsius or 122 Fahrenheit. And it was windy and the wind seriously hurt. I was talking about this was my family. As we saw this on the news and I was saying, I wonder if I could have tolerated being outside for more than 10 minutes if there was no wind. Like at what point does the wind become a negative? And my son thought, well, it's hotter than your body. So any ambient temperature in your body that is 37 Celsius gets replaced by 50 Celsius. It's like the reverse wind chill. Like it does heat you. And there's a lot of wind that heat will get transferred more quickly to your skin. That's a horrible thought. The old mark was 122 Fahrenheit, which was tied in 2023. So it was set initially before 2013. Pardon me. It was set before that at some point. Time magazine has a feature on a Texas town whose residents are getting sick from the noise pollution produced by a nearby Bitcoin mine or data center. All these fans decool it if you're air cooling it. It's very noisy and people have said they've gotten sick from wind turbines. And that's kind of dubious, but it's not been proven. It's been studied, but it's not been proven. Yeah. So this noise is terrible. Apparently they're looking at removing the fans and cooling it with liquid instead, which is much quieter. But yeah, there are governments in the United States and various state capitals that are cowtowing to Bitcoin interests and reducing their noise regulations. So they don't give a crap about their people because this is the whole town. I mean, noise is bad period. It affects your health, but overabundance of it has just caused all kinds of bad things to happen to these people and a wide variety of them. From the United States Energy Information Administration, US energy production rose 4% to nearly 103 quadrillion British thermal units. Or quads, which is something we haven't called them before. Measurement of energy on the show. So the energy production rose by 4%, but the energy consumption fell by 1% last year. So that's quite interesting. Apparently, this has never happened before. The production exceeded consumption by nine quads more than any other time on their records. So I don't know. We're going to use more energy with data centers and Bitcoin mining, if it's worth it. From the Guardian Environment in Florida, the tree cactus becomes the first local species killed off by sea level rise. There's a link to that story there. It's time for a CES passed back. In 2023, there were 1.89 million farms in the United States. And that is a decline of 7% from just 2017. The number of different farms is consolidating and getting smaller. I expect that to continue. Brian, you know, there's a hurricane affecting Texas right now. There's a lot of power outages, but there's no map to show where those power outages are. So people are using the water burger app. That's the fast food chains app, because there's so many water burgers that they can see which ones are offline and those are the ones with a power outage. And you can see on this picture that I posted for you, most of Texas was in the dark because the water burgers were in the dark. So what could you do? As the U.S. hits the 30% renewable energy in power generation mark and solar has increased 25% year on year, small scale solar remarkably produced a third of all solar power in the United States. There's a lot of solar power. It's on the rides. It's rising quickly. But a third of that is not from farms. It's from people's homes and businesses and actual farms that have installations on them. The Atlantic says you can buy a 2023 Tesla for $22,000. That's remarkable because you still have most of the warranty left. And it's half the price of the car. It's bad that used market is falling out because people kind of want their new car warranties with because they're scared about buying their first EV. I can understand that. It's not necessarily valid, but it's something that people will do worry about. So used EVs are down there. So if you drive in a gas car, what's stopping you? I ask, in Canada, it's not like that, but they have come down. But still, $22,000 for a Tesla. That's practically new. Come on. And new EV prices are still quite high. But yeah, with the used EV market, it is becoming a little bit more affordable here in North America. From the Guardian, a new study says the odds of a live birth decreased by 38 percent when comparing the highest quartile of exposure to air pollution to the lowest quartile. So air pollution is affecting your health. And we can do something about it. We're not because of this previous story. The fossil fuel interests are screwing with our governments and doing bad things to us. That's the moral of the story. After the UK shifts to a center left government last week, they are lifting the previous government's ban on onshore wind farms. That's good to hear. The UK labor party is now in power and it is set to double onshore wind. Triple solar power and quadruple offshore wind by 2030. And boy, 2030 is not as far away as it used to be when we started our show. It's pretty soon. We're going to be pretty close to that. So it used to be a long ways off. Now that's a plan. New car sales are 20 percent EVs in Germany. That's a good benchmark to hit and just 0.2 percent below 20 percent. Grid alerts in Alberta last night. Alberta, the province in Canada with all the oil and gas, that said that they're going to get a moratorium on wind and solar for a while. And they're making it very hard for wind and solar. And they've basically all the wind and solar people have left. Well, their natural gas grid is breaking down. So people are going to boil their homes there. If you don't get smart about it eventually, the odds of, oh, pardon me, a new electrify America pilot will limit EVs to 85 percent state of charge. This is controversial, Brian. Yeah. Because sometimes most people stop at 80 because it's very slow. Sometimes the say 10 percent to 80 is the same amount between 80 and 100. So you just get on your way in the highway. But some people like you, maybe you count a long session of highway going to the states there where you needed to charge to 100 percent. And they're not going to let you do that. So this is the electrify America charging network. They're doing it at just a limited number of charging stations at this point. But it's true that 85 percent to 100 percent can take a really long time. You're charging slows down. So the best thing when you're on the road charged from 20 percent to 80 percent, that's usually quite fast, but it didn't sound like there was any kind of override here. So that's the unfortunate thing. They will do this sometimes with the Tesla chargers where if it's a busy charger, you'll plug in and it'll say we've set your charging to 80 percent because this is a busy charger, but you can override it if you want. So I would be pretty annoyed if I wanted to override that. It couldn't. But yeah, this is the kind of thing that's got to be worked out in the next few years with our charging networks. I think it should be higher than that, say 95 percent or something or 90. Or you discourage people with pricing. The top 20 percent is more expensive, so people don't do it if they don't need to. I guess the thinking is the assumption is that people are just screwing off to waste the time at lunch and it's taking up charge or space. But there's people out there. I guess maybe they would know where the places were that you needed. The more sparse locations it wouldn't matter or it wouldn't matter to keep it to 100. Maybe they could just do it in cities where there's lots of options or something. So we'll see about that. And finally this week from PV Magazine Chilean researchers say that a 10.8 megawatt La Colonia solar plant produces habitats for bird. That is to say the plant is good. The birds are like in the plant and I'll tell you why. The research team observed the behavior of several local bird species for six months. The solar park presents favorable conditions for the development of this type of species. They said the plan considered the reproductive cycles of the species in the study and how these cycles varied with the plant's maintenance activities. As there is almost no presence of people, I don't know that everyone is solar curious like we are, but I've walked up to solar plants and they're basically a big fenced in area that is mostly silent. There's an inverter in the middle that might have a fan on, but they're peaceful places and the fence keeps the predators of the birds away. So you've got that going on. You've got some shade going on. You've got the plant species that are maybe not drenched by the sun and dehydrated that are thriving underneath the solar panels. And there's no combustion smoke or anything. And no contamination of the soil like you would have at other close perennials. So this is a protective spaces for species. And we hear often about how birds sometimes are killed by wind turbines. This is a good news story for because all power generation kills birds. This is a positive angle. And this species of birds, they issued a statement saying, please less wind turbines and more solar farms. All right. That's our show for this week. You can contact us cleanenergyshow@gmail.com. Around social media, we are clean energy pod. There are videos of the show on TikTok and YouTube with special content not featured on the podcast. The video version of our podcast is usually released the weekend following the audio version. So look for that on YouTube and remember our store is there. We ask and we plead, please rate and review us an Apple podcast. If that's where you're listening to us or on Spotify, if that's where you're listening to us because bad people have given us bad reviews, because of, well, they are threatened by clean change. And we don't like that by oil and gas propaganda. And if you want to be like our friend who helped us out, you can donate with a PayPal link that is there in your show notes. If you're new to the show, welcome and remember to subscribe on your favorite podcast app so that you get our episodes delivered to you every week and we'll see you next time. See you next week. [Music]
