The War on American Energy with Fred Ziedman and Dr. E.J. Antoni

The US dollar has lost 85% of its value since the 70s, when the dollar decoupled from gold, and the government seems bent on continuing the tradition.

Charlie Kirk here. From now until after the elections, the government can print as much money as they want. The last time they did that, inflation went up 9%. Gold is the only asset that has proven to withstand inflation. Invest in gold with Noble Gold Investments. You will get a 24-carat, one-fourth of an ounce gold standard coin for free. Just use promo code KIRK. Go to noblegoldinvestments.com.

That's noblegoldinvestments.com, the only gold company I trust. Hey, everybody. Today on The Charlie Kirk Show, Fred Zeidman joins us to talk about the war on energy.

E.J. Antoni continues throughout this very important economic energy-focused episode of The Charlie Kirk Show. Text this episode to your friends and subscribe to The Charlie Kirk Show podcast. Get involved with Turning Point USA at tpusa.com. Turning Point USA is on thousands of campuses across the country with hundreds of thousands of members, high school and college members. Get involved today in the movement that will save America, tpusa.com. We are doing the work to save America at tpusa.com.

That is tpusa.com. Start a high school or college chapter today at tpusa.com. Also, check out Fred Zeidman's organization, counselforsecureamerica.org.

That is counselforsecureamerica.org. As always, you can email us, freedom at charliekirk.com. Buckle up, everybody.

Here we go. Charlie, what you've done is incredible here. Maybe Charlie Kirk is on the college campuses. I want you to know we are lucky to have Charlie Kirk. Charlie Kirk's running the White House, folks. I want to thank Charlie. He's an incredible guy. His spirit, his love of this country. He's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created, Turning Point USA. We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country. That's why we are here.

Brought to you by the loan experts I trust, Andrew and Todd at Sierra Pacific Mortgage at andrewandtodd.com. We don't talk about energy enough as a movement. Energy is life.

The environmentalists are destroying life in the Western world and specifically in America. It was one of the great accomplishments of the Trump administration, was being energy independent. Joining us now is Fred Zeidman, co-founder of Council for a Secure America, really understands this issue deeply. Fred, thank you so much for making time.

There's so many things we could talk about. Just sum up how disastrous Biden's war on American energy has been. I don't think the story has received enough coverage. No, it really hasn't, Charlie. First of all, as a devout follower of yours, I'm thrilled to have the opportunity to be on the show.

Thank you. And I think if you go back to his very first day in office, if you remember, you know, energy independence is truly, truly a security issue. It's not a climate issue. And if you look at what we're doing these days and you look, we take folks a couple times a year after Harold Hamm's Bock and Shale and show them that the only damage that's being done to the climate is being done as a result of the directives of the Biden administration. But if you recall, the very first thing he did the day that he was elected, I was sworn in on January 20th. The next morning, he canceled the Keystone pipeline. And, you know, I remember telling everybody that day, this is a disaster about to happen to the United States.

And it's not only a result of that, it's a result of our security. If you look at this, if you remember, the earliest moves that the administration made were all against fossil fuel. And every alternative energy source depends on fossil fuel for their raw material. You know, what do you make windmills out of?

I mean, what do you make solar panels out of? And the only the only effect it's got on the climate is a result of the fact that you've got to flare all of this gas because there's no other way to transport it. 90 percent, 90 percent of the aviation fuel in the United States is produced in the Houston ship channel, in the port of Houston, along the ship channel here.

And I think it's something like 70, 80 percent of the gasoline. So you've got to be able to get it down here. Well, how are you going to move gasoline? How are you going to move oil to begin with? You're going to do it through pipeline. You're going to do it through trains. There's only so many trains and they're all filled. You're going to do it through trucks and they're all filled.

And they've got to get down here to the Houston ship channel or arguably to some extent to Long Beach. And if they don't get here, we're not going to produce oil. And if you look at, again, these issues, anytime there is a natural disaster like we're facing right now in California, I mean, I don't know for a fact, but I got to believe all the refineries in Long Beach are closed down. Well, why do we have a strategic petroleum reserve? We have a strategic petroleum reserve so that when the refinery shut down, there is a supply of gas to give to the areas that are going through a disaster.

It's certainly going on in Hawaii right now. But all of those things being said, the other thing is energy independence, which is what for the most part Harold Hamm created. I love to tell Harold there's only one place in America that he's not the single icon of the industry. And that's in Houston, because we had George Mitchell down here who also discovered horizontal drilling. And by the way, Harold will tell you over and over again, we shouldn't talk about fracking. We should talk about about horizontal drilling. Yes, that's what it is. We're not blowing up the ground. Yeah. And there's there's so much garbage around the fracking issue.

I just want to say the technological advancements of fracking has improved humanity. It is a fact. And the greenies are doing everything they possibly can to spin it. So I want to ask you, though, from a policy perspective, what has Biden done? I know that he probably has not been expanding leases.

He also is. It's probably stuff. This is the way the Chinese Communist Party works. It's stuff that's hard to always prove. But I hear from people that are in the space more audits, more headaches from the EPA, you know, just kind of government knocking on their door more. Tell us about that. All of it.

Sure. Well, the first the thing that he did the first day was shut down the pipeline. It's just unbelievable. Which, by the way, that pipeline was also bringing all the oil and natural gas out of Canada. So it had an incredibly detrimental effect, if you will, on the Canadian energy as well. But they were selling it to us and we were bringing it down here. The next thing he did was was prohibited any drilling on federal lands. There was no federal leasing. And and I'll apologize that I don't remember the exact number, but 60 or 70 percent of oil drilling is on federal land.

Yeah, that's right. So you couldn't drill there. You couldn't drill offshore, which is all for the most part in international waters. Then finally, he said, well, maybe we'll promote this a little bit. But then you couldn't get a permit.

Well, hello. How are you going to get how are you going to drill a well if you can't get a permit? And the permitting process, even after he said he's going to support drilling, which he never meant, by slowing down the permitting process, this is what you're talking about. You can't really prove it. It's easy to prove if you can't drill, you can't produce. And if you've got to flare gas because you can't get it anywhere, those numbers are fairly finite. What you can't prove is the permitting process and how that slows it down, even if you can get a lease. So these are the direct actions that he took to do away again with fossil fuel and fossil fuel, the raw material of everything.

I mean, it's life. I mean, you're not going to have alternative energy and forget the effect that that's got on the environment. I mean, how many bald eagles get killed a year trying to get to Aransas Pass down in their normal migration? In Geese, offshore Texas, because of the wind farms that are out here.

So and we know when the wind doesn't blow, which it doesn't a lot in West Texas, Texas is the biggest producer of wind energy, but only when the wind's blowing. So, I mean, all these things out, Charlie, towards what has happened to America. And the fact that we have allowed China to if you look at what's happened to American exceptionalism and you look at what is allowed China to do and taking our place as the exceptional country in the world. We were always the guardian of the world.

We're not anymore. We're back to being at the whim of Mideast oil, of Iranian oil. And this affects everybody. This affects all of the countries in the Middle East that always could turn to us. And now they're turning back to Iran because they don't firmly believe. Again, look at what the Biden administration did to us in Afghanistan. Look what they've done in Syria, although they started a little action there. So all these countries that always relied on us now feel that they can't rely on us. And they've gone back to buying all this sanctioned oil from Iran, who is now producing, and Russia, who's under sanctions. We greatly curtailed the export of LNG. So all of a sudden, all of Western Europe was dependent on Russian oil and didn't join us for the most part in the early days of the war in Ukraine because they didn't want to come out against Russia.

Otherwise, it would be a very, very cold winter. I want to just make sure I plug your website, counselforsecureamerica.org. One of the most important stories is how Joe Biden has basically, he is, we're committing slow motion energy suicide in this country. And it is so hard to witness. We have been given a gift from God, which is our LNG in this country.

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StrongCell.com slash Charlie. Would you close down the other way? I would transition from the oil industry, yes. Oh, that's a big statement. It is a big statement because I would stop.

Why would you do that? Because the oil industry pollutes significantly. I see.

Here's the deal. But that's a big statement. Well, if you let me finish the statement, because it has to be replaced by renewable energy. That should have made him lose the race for the White House immediately.

Love or hate Donald Trump. He was an excellent president when it came to energy. Fred Zeidman continues from the Organization Council for a Secure America. Fred, build this out geopolitically. What does this look like if this continues, this all out crusade against one of our great blessings, liquid natural gas? Well, first of all, I don't think it ever can because I don't think what people realize is that nothing happens without fossil fuel.

Again, I had said before, Charlie, it is the raw material that's used for the production of all of these alternative energy equipment. California says they're going to do whatever is going to become an electric car, except they tell you their grid is no good. Texas, I'm the proudest Texan there is, but I mean, one of the issues we have here is that, you know, we went all independent here. If we have a power problem like we did a couple of years ago, we can't look to any outside our state.

We don't have to give it to anybody else who's got a problem, but it's not coming here either. But it has destroyed American exceptionalism. It has made us dependent on imports again. The fact that we have two lifetimes, two lifetimes, I mean, how many thousand years of supply of natural gas that we have, that we are flaring into the air, which by the way, is the only damage, if you will, that we're doing to the climate, to the environment.

And it's not that much because it's in such isolated places. But these are the issues that continue to come up. Who made the biggest contribution to the Paris Peace Accords, to the Paris Accords? It was the United States, and we weren't the problem. So yeah, we're going to, half of the reduction in emissions is going to come from us. So we're only nine percent of it to begin with.

So okay, so we go from nine to four percent, right? And that still leaves 96 percent of it coming from China, coming from Eastern Europe, coming from the countries that are depending on coal. And if you look at the emissions from the coal plants in the United States, and by the way, it's my understanding that 30 percent of the power still produced in the United States is coal produced. But if you look at the changes that have been made, I mean nobody, nobody could be more off track than Joe Biden was and President Biden was in that debate and the comments that he made about the pollution of the environment. You know, was that true 60 years ago?

Maybe so, but I don't even know what the numbers were then. But it certainly isn't today. This industry has cleaned it up so much. I mean, we have walked through coal plants and there is no emission. If you go out to any production facility, the only emission at all is gas flaring. And that's just because this administration has cut back the only way of getting a gas out of the field and down to Galveston, where you can turn it into fuel oil.

What is, you know, what's going to happen if all of a sudden he's successful and you cut production? The airplanes aren't going to fly. I mean, 90 percent of the fuel, we're not sure, we're sure not going to trust our airplanes, I don't think, commercial airlines, to solar power. You know, it's just not going to work. So the implications of this are so big and it has virtually nothing to do with climate.

We're not going to have a life. You know, we're certainly not going to be secure. We are intentionally impoverishing our nation. And the other part of Council of Secure America is the relationship with Israel.

And that's being stressed tremendously right now because of the relationship with this administration and the things that they're doing with regard to that. You know, they're talking about not, you know, about cutting aid to Israel. And who is our eyes and ears in the Middle East? It's Israel. They have been on the front line forever. And now, all of a sudden, we've got these countries that know they can't defend themselves and now can't count on America. And they know that Israel will do everything they can, but they're not big enough to take off in the Middle East. Fred, excellent commentary.

I'd love to have you on again soon. And thank you for telling the truth. Do you get the feeling that something bad is going to happen soon? Well, I do.

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PrepareWithKirk.com. Joining us now is E.J. and Tony.

So much to talk about. Dr. E.J. and Tony, economists for the Heritage Foundation.

Doctor, so much happening in the news right now. How should we think about the BRICS summit and what does that mean for the American dollar and the American economy? Well, Charlie, I think the best way to look at this is yet another failure of Bidenomics. One of the key elements of the president's economic plan has been the destruction of the dollar, whether intentional or not. They have destroyed the dollar at home by devaluating it. We've seen the dollar lose 16 percent of its value in an incredibly short period of time, just since Biden took office. But we've also seen an effective devaluation of the dollar abroad. We've seen that through the unprecedented sanctions imposed by Russia, the confiscation of Russian dollars. And what that has done is shaken people's confidence around the world in our currency. And as a result of that, you now have countless individuals who are wondering whether or not the dollar is still a safe bet anymore or whether they actually need a safer alternative such as a gold backed currency.

And that's one of the things that these BRICS countries are looking at. So do you see any urgency or concern from our leaders? I just feel as if our leaders are ignoring the fact that we might lose the status as the global reserve currency. You know what? Not only have they been ignoring it and downplaying it, but now as it is becoming increasingly reality, we are seeing some of them acknowledge the fact that it's happening and they're going from saying it can't happen to brushing off the consequences.

We've seen that with the Treasury secretary, for example, Janet Yellen, saying that, oh, yes, de-dollarization is actually happening. Just kidding. I was wrong. Oh, but don't worry.

Nothing to see here. It won't be a problem. It absolutely is a problem because the global reserve currency status is the mechanism by which we have effectively been exporting deficits for about seven decades. And now imagine if seven decades worth of deficits all come rushing back into the United States. The result of that would be absolutely catastrophic. You would see inflation not of an extra 1%, 2%, but 10, 20, 30, 100%. Again, it is difficult to overstate just how catastrophic that would be.

And our leaders really don't seem to care. So what would be a prudent American response then to these nations trying to join BRICS, like India and Mexico? The most prudent thing would be for the United States to get together with all of the nations in BRICS and to go back to some kind of commodity-backed currency to say, look, let's all have currencies that are backed by commodities, and we can develop fixed ratios again between our different currencies. In other words, let's say a dollar is redeemable for one two-thousandth of an ounce of gold, and then we have a similar fraction for the Chinese yuan, for the Brazilian currency, currencies in Saudi Arabia, Russia, Germany, etc. And then once you have that standard in place, you don't have these competing devaluations, for example, anymore. I don't see anybody in the kind of American ruling class seem overly concerned. But so, E.J., if you were to say this economy is one of the most confusing economies I've ever seen and the devaluation doesn't exactly play neatly into that, if it happens at all with the BRICS nation, how would you grade the health of the American economy currently?

Well, Charlie, I agree with you. One hundred percent is incredibly confusing right now. And one of the reasons for that is because we have a very big difference between the aggregate numbers and how the average American is doing. Just one very good example of that is the fact that virtually all working class folks, people in the lower and middle income classes, have completely exhausted their pandemic era savings that they had. And they are now going into debt to just be able to afford not luxuries, but necessities. Conversely, the upper income spectra, they still have pandemic era savings left over.

And so when we look at savings, we see that they remain elevated today, but it's almost exclusively among a very small group of people. So for the vast majority of Americans, the economy is not doing well. More than half of small business owners believe we're already in recession today. And so we very, very likely will officially be in a recession by the end of this year or sometime at the beginning of next year. We have just far too many economic indicators that are pointing in the wrong direction.

So, E.J., can you just give me some idea? So when Silicon Valley Bank collapsed right around February and March, is it true that the Federal Reserve quietly expanded their balance sheet and increased the money supply? Because this is a debated topic. It feels that from that point forward, we had this little sugar high of an artificial increase in the Dow, where obviously dollars will find its way to the Dow if you expand the balance sheet. Is that a fair assessment of what's happened so far this year, E.J.? Because this market is ridiculously overpriced.

A hundred percent. So, Charlie, if you put two things on a chart together, one being the securities held by the Feds. That's all of the bonds, bills, notes, etc. And then total assets, which would include other things like loans to banks.

You see something very interesting happen in March. While the securities that the Fed holds continue to just steadily decline as that chart moves forward, you all of a sudden get this huge spike, hundreds of billions of dollars worth in total assets. And that's that emergency lending that you were just talking about.

So you absolutely did see a big spike. And also, we've seen not only the Federal Reserve willing to bail out these bad actors and create a moral hazard, but on top of that, they have failed to continuously raise interest rates at a pace that is necessary to really tame inflation. We actually saw the money supply grow for the last couple of months. So far from taking everything they can to try to fight inflation, they are truly doing this in a very halfhearted way. But that's necessary in order for them to continue funding all of Biden's and Congress's unfunded government spending.

Is there anything that could be done to slow this down? I mean, from a policy perspective, obviously, there's some things to be done. But I'm afraid that we're going to see a simultaneous collision of the worst possible economic effects where we're going to continue to see high inflation, low growth. The thing we haven't seen yet, E.J., but I think we're starting to see the beginning of it is the labor market start to dry up. Then we're going to have some huge concerns. Are you seeing early indicators of that?

We are. We're seeing early indicators of precisely that. You know, manufacturing tends to lead the rest of the economy, for example, into recession.

And when you look at the manufacturing surveys done by each of the regional Federal Reserve banks around the country, universally, you have seen manufacturing not just slow down in terms of growth, but actually begin to contract. And so you are seeing some job losses in that sector, which, again, is a very strong indication that the rest of the labor market is soon going to turn that way as well. We're also looking down the barrel of some major revisions by the Bureau of Labor Statistics on those jobs numbers.

We'll get those tomorrow, I believe. And it's very likely that they are going to show that the number of jobs created over the last year is not actually as high as we thought it was. They are playing games, intentional games and manipulations with these numbers. E.J., what's the best case scenario here?

You know, no spin. What is the best case scenario that somehow there is this legitimate artificial intelligence sugar high and it results in higher productivity and higher growth and we're able to persevere? Because I'm afraid even the kind of just balancing the worst and the best to kind of the average. This is going to be a very difficult economic year and a half upcoming for most Americans.

I think so. You know, we've already had a very difficult year and a half looking backwards. And now looking forwards, we are probably going to have another difficult year and a half because the government continues overspending, overregulating and therefore also overborrowing and overprinting money. And a consequence of that is not only slow economic growth, but continued inflation. You know, this claptrap about how inflation has been trending towards 2 percent, it's utter nonsense. If you look at the monthly inflation data for the last year and you annualize that out, what you find is that inflation has not been trending towards 2 percent. It's been trending towards 3 percent.

We've arrived there. There's no indication we're going any lower. In fact, inflation accelerated last month for the current month of August. Inflation looks to continue to be accelerating. Obviously, the month isn't over yet, but it looks like things will continue to get worse. Not better.

It's just it's really hard to to see this through. Middle income, middle class, ordinary Americans are getting crushed. Everything is getting more expensive and the economy is grinding to a halt in a very serious way. But yet, E.J., Chuck Schumer says it's the best economy we've ever had. If you're one of the ruling elites, Charlie, and and you don't have to face the ramifications of your own actions, in other words, the policies you put in place don't actually affect you, then yes, things are going just fine right now. If you're a wealthy elite and you have lots of money in hard assets like a house or or even equities like the stock market, then those things are inflating with value as other prices rise. And so your net wealth is rising as well.

You're doing just fine. But look at the average American. The average American last month, Charlie, was effectively paying an inflation tax on his wages of four dollars and 60 cents an hour every hour he worked. Compare that to federal income taxes, which cost the average American worker less than four dollars an hour.

In other words, inflation under Joe Biden has effectively more than doubled what you pay in federal income taxes. That is just crushing working class folks in this country. Energy is a huge part of the American economy. And right now we are being lectured that we need to transition to a green economy. What would that mean for the economy in general? What evidence do we have that that's a really bad idea?

Well, it would send us back to the Stone Age. I mean, my goodness, none of these things are are actually efficient. These things that the left wants, whether that's wind power, solar power, you name it, if these things were actually as efficient and as profitable as the left claims they are, then private business would be doing these things already. But instead, what is China doing? For example, they're bringing a new coal power plant online every single week.

Why? Because it is cost effective. It is efficient. And unlike how they do it, when we do it here, you can actually do it in a very clean manner. You can actually keep the air clean. You can actually remove all of those particulates and other harmful particles and molecules from the exhaust streams of those power plants. You can have clean, reliable, domestic American energy and you can do it very easily if you simply remove all of the regulations and tax burdens that we have in place on coal, oil and natural gas and even nuclear, frankly. But I mean, it's just absolutely nonsensical to think that you can take a net negative like and like solar, like wind, for example, and you can somehow run the country's electrical grid off of that. It is completely and totally ideologically driven, not driven on what is best for the economy, but ideologically driven. E.J., I want you to respond. What would this mean for the economy?

Play cut 30, please. Because the fact of the matter is there's a beast at our door and that's the beast of climate change. It seems like the whole world is on fire. We need to defend ourselves from climate change. We need to decarbonize our economy so these fires don't ravage us. There's not enough fire trucks in the world to protect us if we don't stop climate change. Decarbonize our economy. What does that mean?

E.J., make that make sense. Well, we're made of carbon, so I suppose that means this is part of the left's war on humanity, just like abortion, you could say. But I mean, please explain to me how climate change had anything to do with the decision to withhold water from firefighting efforts in Maui for five hours while literally thousands of people burned to death. This has nothing to do with climate change. This is everything to do with failed government policies. It's, I mean, the decarbonization argument is perfect. Well, are you gonna get rid of human beings? Because that's, I mean, we're all made of carbon.

Carbon is a life and without it the whole civilization falls apart. Closing thoughts here, E.J., economic anxiety, economic concern, the current Biden regime. Rich people are doing fine. Ordinary people are getting crushed. And we're going to see, I think we're going to see big job layoffs and concerns. Final thoughts, E.J.

and Tony. Well, we're certainly moving that way, Charlie. Again, all of the economic data that we have is pointing to a future recession. And it's just simply a question of how much is the Fed going to step in and bail people out? How much is the Treasury going to step in and bail people out? Now, mind you, the common man is not going to get bailed out. But once again, it will be the bad actors on a big scale.

Things like the banks that we saw in March. E.J. and Tony from the Heritage Foundation. Excellent job. Thank you so much. Thank you for having me. Thanks so much for listening, everybody. Email us your thoughts as always. Freedom at Charlie Kirk dot com.

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