Antonio Guterres has a fit – Energy Realities Live

Irina Slav International Author writing about energy, mining, and geopolitical issues. BulgariaDavid Blackmon Principal at DB Energy Advisors, energy author, and podcast host.Principal at DB Energy Advisors, energy author, and podcast host.Tammy NemethEnergy Consulting SpecialistStuart TurleyPresident, and CEO, Sandstone Group, Podcast Host

David Blackmon [00:00:08] Man, I just love that intro. That’s so awesome. Hi, I’m David Blackmon. This is the Energy Realities podcast. Welcome to our show today. It is Monday, June 10th in the year of our Lord 2024. I am joined here today by Tammy Nemeth who is in an undisclosed location in Canada. Irina Slav, who is in her usual location in Bulgaria, and Stu Turley, who is hunkered down in his bunker somewhere in West Texas.

Stuart Turley [00:00:42] I’m in West Texas, baby.

David Blackmon [00:00:43] All right, well, I’m in Mansfield, Texas. That’s kind of North Texas. And, the weather’s good and we’re having a good time today. We’ve already had so much fun. It’s hard to describe. So we’re going to talk today. The main topic we’re going to talk today about today is the latest incendiary lunatic outburst by our secretary general of the United Nations targeting the big oil companies from last Wednesday or Thursday. But first, before we get to that, we want to have a discussion round reviewing the outcomes in the EU elections held over the weekend, because they were in some ways highly impactful in and other ways not as impactful as we might have hoped. And I think, you know, I think the biggest thing to me, guys, is the fact that, Emmanuel Macron, the president of France, his party got so beaten down by Marine Le Pen’s Conservative Party that he felt the need to call snap elections and dissolve parliament, in that country. I wonder how, significant Tammy and Irina. You you guys think that is? Let’s go to Irina first.

Irina Slav [00:02:04] Well, I think it’s pretty significant. I was I was actually surprised he did that. But as I thought about it later, maybe it was a way to avoid unrest among citizens because. Really. The right wing party won in a landslide. Yes. And it says a lot about any future election. The snap election is going to be interesting in France. Unless the leftists of. Of whom France has many, don’t, you know, mobilize and go to to to the polls. So we’ll see how this goes. But it was a surprise. You know, it was a nice surprise. The same thing apparently happened in Belgium.

David Blackmon [00:02:55] Belgium? Yes.

Tammy Nemeth [00:02:56] Yeah. I was going to add that. Yeah, yeah.

David Blackmon [00:03:00] Yeah. Go ahead. Tammy?

Tammy Nemeth [00:03:02] Yeah. The the Belgian government resigned a few hours after the French government. I think what’s, what’s concerning about the, the outcome is that Ursula von der Leyen is the representative of the center, the center right party,.

David Blackmon [00:03:16] The center right.

Tammy Nemeth [00:03:18] The center right. And the EPP or whatever it’s called, the European People’s Party. And and she’s planning to still be the president. So she’s looking to. To a line she said she put. She’s putting out an olive branch to the socialists, the and the people on the left instead of the people on the right. So I don’t see that this is actually going to upset too much. The the Green Deal and the net zero trajectory in Europe. I think it just makes it, a little more difficult for them to continue. That’s all

David Blackmon [00:03:54] Hey Stu, put up with that, that chart for a second. There we go. So here’s the.

Irina Slav [00:04:01] Change.

David Blackmon [00:04:02] Yeah. So it’s not really a huge change from this election. No underlying still going to have a majority. But is it going to be harder for her to just continue forcing through these authoritarian policies, you think?

Tammy Nemeth [00:04:20] I don’t know. The European Parliament is an odd duck. You know how they do things, how stuff gets, put together in the committees. And then it all just goes into this massive voting thing where it’s an up or down. So all the work takes place in the committees, and I guess it depends on who’s in the committees and all that kind of politicking and, leverage and stuff. So who knows it, like you say it does, it hasn’t really changed much. And with the proportional representation, coalitions have to be formed. So I yeah, I don’t know if it’s really going to change that much except that for the public, there’s been this greater sense of awareness that, you know, this these policies are affecting our standard of living in our way of life. And, and we want to express our discontent with that.

Irina Slav [00:05:07] So and maybe if the band wins the the elections in France at the end of the month. Yeah, it will make job of the transition is harder with a right wing national government in France. Yeah, yeah.

David Blackmon [00:05:24] So what about the media coverage of this? What happened? And on that chart, they, they put the non attached, members of the EEC, which did expand quite a lot. Or it looks to be expanding quite a lot on the far right. Is that a fair depiction of, of who the non attached members of the EC really are going to be?

Irina Slav [00:05:47] I have no idea.

Tammy Nemeth [00:05:48] I have no idea. But it’s like they just kind of threw them over there on the extreme right, you know, and like the I think it was Deutsch about had a little also color coded thing and they had all the from left to right in the big blue in the center. And then all of these on the extreme.

David Blackmon [00:06:07] It was pretty, right? Yeah. So, you know, it’s it’s an interesting outcome, I think. For me. The thing to remember if you’re in the US is that the Brexit vote in 2015 was clearly a harbinger of things to come. In the 2016 US election, when Donald Trump was elected. I would submit to everyone that that this vote in Europe is reflective of a more of a global shift in attitudes towards globalists in general. This wasn’t just about, you know, a lot of the media tried to portray this EU election as being almost solely about immigration, but it wasn’t just about immigration. It’s also clear dissatisfaction with energy and climate policies coming down from that central agriculture.

Stuart Turley [00:06:58] I think egg egg has made a huge impact.

David Blackmon [00:07:03] Yeah. So I just think this is had some may look back on this and their birthday, on November 5th as being a preview of things to come in America. And with that, go ahead, Stu.

Stuart Turley [00:07:20] I just gotta give a half a half, hat tip to all of the, agricultural folks and their poo cannons. Holy smokes. Talk about a way to change somebodies opinion.

David Blackmon [00:07:31] Yeah, it seems to be working pretty well, didn’t it?

Irina Slav [00:07:34] Oh, just really.

David Blackmon [00:07:38] So I guess, with that, we can proceed on to our next topic. Our delightful, weird, leader of the United Nations, Antonio Guterres, and his latest outburst targeting the oil business. What did he say? He said that the oil companies are the godfather of climate chaos. Right? Godfathers of climate chaos. They rake in record profits and feast off trillions in taxpayer funded subsidies, which is an outright bald faced lie. And he says we need to tax them, with a global windfall profit tax and disallow their advertising. What do y’all think about that?

Irina Slav [00:08:27] It’s great. Wonderful idea. Yeah, yeah.

Stuart Turley [00:08:34] Are you asking me or Tammy.

David Blackmon [00:08:37] Or an either one of y’all? Go ahead. Somebody I’ll pick you. Stu.

Stuart Turley [00:08:41] Personally, I would like to interview that gentleman. And I would also like to invite the United Nations to be thrown out of the United States. I vote on this show to not pay another dime for those guys. I think that they are a, they do not have humanitarian interests at heart. So, I think that if they would live under their own ideologies, they would starve.

Irina Slav [00:09:13] Oh, that would be a good thing.

Tammy Nemeth [00:09:15] Yeah. Clearly, the health ministers could use that.

Stuart Turley [00:09:20] Oh, speaking of Health Minister.

David Blackmon [00:09:21] Oh, yes. It has a wonderful little.

Stuart Turley [00:09:23] Tammy, because you are a hybrid between Canada and the UK. I tried to find Bulgaria’s health, minister in there, and I could not find. So all I found was another.

Irina Slav [00:09:37] No idea of what is right now. Yeah. Very normal.

Stuart Turley [00:09:41] So. Yeah, the US just down, threw a challenge out here. So let’s see who has the healthiest health minister. Okay.

Irina Slav [00:09:52] You can.

Stuart Turley [00:09:56] Include. There’s.

David Blackmon [00:10:02] Well, I’m not gonna ask. How did you get that picture of the US health minister? Not in, his admiral’s uniform. I damn well you know.

Stuart Turley [00:10:14] That was out of a TikTok video. I have no idea.

David Blackmon [00:10:17] I vote, you know. England’s England’s health minister looks to be the healthiest among those. That’s my mum.

Tammy Nemeth [00:10:24] You’re Canada’s.

Irina Slav [00:10:25] Right. Go ahead already. Who was that? Health minister. Look. Really, really lean and healthy and athletic. Not to mention Belgium, the Belgian one. Yeah.

David Blackmon [00:10:40] Well, the. Yeah, the Canadian guy looks like he could be a sumo wrestler.

Tammy Nemeth [00:10:44] The the federal health minister, though was in the House of Commons last week complaining or maybe it was two weeks ago where he made had that rant about the road trips and how if you’re if you go on a road trip with your family in the summer, you’re burning down the planet.

David Blackmon [00:11:03] Yeah, yeah.

Tammy Nemeth [00:11:05] So, yeah, he’s he’s not as chubby, but, his comments are equally in alignment with what, the secretary general said. And what what’s so interesting is that that speech took place at the Natural History Museum. He was introduced by Mike Bloomberg, and Mike Bloomberg was saying that his daughter is on the board of the Natural History Museum. And then the guy who introduced Bloomberg, who’s the head of the museum, was saying how they try to incorporate climate change into their exhibits so that when all the kids come through, I want to look at cool stuff about natural history. They’re getting propagandized with the climate change narrative. So I thought that was.

David Blackmon [00:11:47] Yeah, the pervasiveness of the brainwashing is really overwhelming at this point. And, rolling any of this back, people, I think, don’t understand how big a job it will actually be to eventually if we ever get to that point. By the way, if through elections, we ever get to the point where that’s even possible, rolling things like this kind of stuff back is going to be a monumental task, possibly unprecedented. Yeah. Because it’s everywhere. It’s everywhere.

Irina Slav [00:12:18] Yeah. They’re trying to out alarm each other.

David Blackmon [00:12:21] Right? Right. That’s the whole purpose of Guterres rhetoric in it.

Irina Slav [00:12:26] Yeah. And what Tommy just said about federal health minister, was it the health minister.

Tammy Nemeth [00:12:31] Is a health minister.

Irina Slav [00:12:32] Yeah. Trying to to. Be as scary as possible and, you know, keep upping the ante verbally at least. So it’s a competition. It has become a competition.

David Blackmon [00:12:47] It’s yeah.

Irina Slav [00:12:49] I don’t know. It’s beyond belief.

David Blackmon [00:12:51] Now, I wrote a story back in February, you know, after Gutierrez, made a speech at the WEF when he rolled out the Highway to Hell narrative, you know, how do you ever top that? How do you top the highway to hell? And I’m not sure. Godfathers of climate chaos actually tops Highway to Hell.

Tammy Nemeth [00:13:08] I think asking the media that wiped out the dinosaurs tops that.

David Blackmon [00:13:12] Oh, and that’s the part we need to actually, I really want to focus on that part. And this is a direct quote from Guterres speech. In case of the climate, in the case of the climate, we are not the dinosaurs, we are the meteor. We are not only in danger, we are the danger. Isn’t that him giving a nod to the Malthusian monsters, who are an increasingly big part of the climate alarm movement?

Irina Slav [00:13:45] I think he mixed his metaphors because if he says we’re not in, we’re not only in the age of in danger, which the dinosaurs were. But before that, he said, we’re not the dinosaurs, we’re the medium, and we’re both in danger, and we are the danger. So the media was in danger. I mean, I was trained to do that. I was trained to pick metaphors. And he doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

David Blackmon [00:14:15] Yeah, yeah. I kind of took it as an argument for population reduction.

Irina Slav [00:14:21] I don’t think he would. You’re giving him too much credit. I think he’s like the sound of his own voice. He liked how the dinosaurs and made your, sound. He thought it was scary and impressive and poetic. And I’m sure he was putting himself on the back for the godfathers of climate chaos. Although I’m sure he doesn’t write these pages. No, no. So it’s just an exercise in, in, in speech, in figurative language with zero substance behind it.

David Blackmon [00:14:56] Okay. Well then. Well, I thought me down off here.

Irina Slav [00:14:59] Is that what you say? Actually.

Tammy Nemeth [00:15:02] I would add that it’s also the venue, right. He’s speaking at the Natural History Museum. And so then I think they wanted to include some kind of reference to the, you know, what’s happened on the planet, naturally, while the meteor crashing in and causing all the devastation and whatnot. And everybody kind of knows that, oh my gosh, you killed a bunch of stuff. And and so then we’re we’re the ones killing all the stuff.

Irina Slav [00:15:27] Yeah, but the meteor was natural. It just happened.

Tammy Nemeth [00:15:31] Right? I know, let’s see. His point is we’re doing it intentionally. We’re like the meteor, but we’re intentional instead of accidental or whatever. Natural.

Irina Slav [00:15:42] Yeah. Just don’t go through the things that. Right.

Tammy Nemeth [00:15:47] Yeah. But see, you’re a thinking person. The, you know, the person who’s just kind of hearing the rhetoric, are they putting that kind of thought into it or are they just like, oh my gosh, yeah, we’re a meteor. We’re gonna wait.

Irina Slav [00:15:58] So you feel really zombified. But I think a lot of people have had enough with this rhetoric because it’s exhausting. You can is exhausted all the time and you’ve got these people. I don’t even mention it, but that my Twitter feed is now full of climate activists. For some reason, I have no idea. I follow these people and it’s the same message over and over again. We should be scared. We should be very, very scared. And I see it in the comments. People. People have had enough. You can’t keep this up forever.

David Blackmon [00:16:35] Well, you know Irina. You know why that’s happening on your Twitter feed, right? It’s because you can go up at the top of the screen, and you can either have it give you results from people you’re following, a Twitter account you’re following. Our Twitter will curate. I know I’m probably on that that setting.

Irina Slav [00:16:56] Yes, but I have been on that setting forever. I haven’t seen my settings, but I’m starting to see the alarmists now. They must have changed something. Twitter must change something. Adam.

David Blackmon [00:17:07] Probably.

Irina Slav [00:17:09] No.

David Blackmon [00:17:10] Well, I mean, we’re we’re getting closer and closer to an election in the United States, and they’re probably kicking up, ramping things up in anticipation of the election. But, you know, I mean, really, over the last couple of years, I’ve noticed, of course, I don’t, you know, I, I pretty carefully curate my own Twitter feed, but I have noticed fewer and fewer people calling me names, on Twitter and LinkedIn. And, I have I’ve wondered why that’s been the case. Because 2 or 3 years ago, man, pretty much everybody who replied to me on LinkedIn called me a, what did they call it, a climate denier. And, yeah. You know.

Irina Slav [00:17:53] Else you probably.

David Blackmon [00:17:54] Yeah. All shill and, you know, all that stuff. I just called Jed. Hardly ever happens anymore. I guess maybe they just got tired because I never responded to them. What’s Stu,.

Stuart Turley [00:18:04] I just called you, jerk. But I steal your material.

David Blackmon [00:18:09] Yeah, I get.

Stuart Turley [00:18:09] All the hecklers on my my side. Go. Stuart, why are you even alive? You steal everybody’s information.

David Blackmon [00:18:17] I got Mumford an apology, by the way. David, when you say leader of the quotations implied, I have no leader I should have. I should have included the word nominal before leader. He’s the nominal leader of the UN. But that’s an excellent point, Tom.

Stuart Turley [00:18:33] And he agrees with me. So thank you, Tom.

David Blackmon [00:18:35] Okay, well, but but he did even better with Irina.

Stuart Turley [00:18:39] Oh yeah. He he goes yeah Robbo arena.

Irina Slav [00:18:42] Well did I say I’ve no idea. I don’t know.

Stuart Turley [00:18:45] We love Irina. And now for Tom. This one was very important. The, I, I’m.

David Blackmon [00:18:51] To to the propagandized comment. My wife and I stay attuned to what our woke schools are pushing. Narratives become dinner time talking points, and our kids are equipped to fend for themselves as they leave the nest. Yes. My daughter does the same thing with her daughters who are in junior high, you know.

Tammy Nemeth [00:19:10] Can I add to the Guterres thing? Because when I was going through a speech, a couple of things jumped out at me and that that is number one at the near the top. He talked about how the G7 and OECD must reduce oil and gas supply and demand. So he’s talking about that. You got to keep it in the ground, not just try to curb the demand for it. So then that will, of course, increase prices and make people more dependent on the Middle East and Russia and whatever else. And then the other thing was this UN climate Promise initiative, and where they say that every city, region, industry, financial institution and company must be part of the solution. So then I assume they have to take like a pledge or something. The climate.

Irina Slav [00:20:01] Action things, dummy. You just gave them an idea. You know, people, we need to be careful about these because we are giving them ideas. We are joking, we are mocking them, but these are their ideas. I mean, you think about all the the insane things they’re doing. Yeah, we joke about this sound like a joke because they’re so insane, but I fully expect in a few months that there will be a climate pledge.

David Blackmon [00:20:27] Yeah, we’re like their training manual, right? Which doctors are more appropriate for teachers?

Tammy Nemeth [00:20:35] Well, unfortunately with with the Glasgow Financial Alliance for net zero, they do take a pledge and all financial institutions pledge to do this. They they sign a document that says they’re committed. And in one of the articles that I put up for discussion today, Gina Pappano in Canada, who’s, the head of invest now went to the the shareholder meetings, put forward proposals for them to start net zero or whatever. And the responses she got back were actually quite shocking, where they basically said they’re prepared to drop clients if that they deem are insufficiently committed to net zero, and that they’re they will prioritize supporting clients actively engaged in the energy transition. So here we have major Canadian banks. And you know, you can’t do anything in this world without a bank account. And here they are saying, well, we’ll d bank you if we don’t think that your transition plan is credible or you’re not committed to net zero. And to me that’s that’s just frightening. And that’s actually what Guterres is talking about when he mentions climate finance. It’s about shifting all that money out of oil and gas into whatever they’ve defined as transition companies.

David Blackmon [00:21:55] Right? Yeah. All right. You know, on your comment about what Gutierrez is comment about, OECD nations needing to reduce both demand and supply of oil and coal. That’s a direct attack on the United States, which is the biggest producer of oil and I think coal on the planet. And it’s also a direct attack on developing countries who need the oil and natural gas and coal to develop their own economies. And this is, you know, part of the plan to deny those developing nations the access to the same affordable and abundant energy sources that we in the OECD nations have used to develop our own economies. And it’s a really evil, evil thing.

Stuart Turley [00:22:43] It’s a control mechanism because it’s the World Economic Forum and the World Monetary fund, world Monetary Fund would actually loan money to do what Africa needs to do. Look at how much resources they could do and do Africa first, drill their own oil, drill their own resources, manufacture their own things. They have their jobs and then export those materials. Holy smokes. Africa would eliminate huge amounts of, energy poverty and elevate people out of poverty. Oh, they’d also make a lot of people a lot of money through, trade. Yeah.

Tammy Nemeth [00:23:29] Sorry, but you’re assuming the money would get to the right people. I think the problem with these international funding organizations, it ends up like the gas up appear. What happened to all the supplies that were meant for the people? Right? Palestinian people. It just kind of vanished. So I think that’s unfortunately sometimes the way that goes.

David Blackmon [00:23:49] And yep.

Tammy Nemeth [00:23:50] In developing nations. So I don’t know what the solution is to that except to help individuals like Jasper.

David Blackmon [00:23:57] Yeah. I, I’m going to interrupt here because Tammy is going to have to go. She is keynote speaker at a convention up in Canada today. And, but before you go, we we should, talk about the headlines Tammy wanted to comment about in this, this episode. Stay there. You know.

Tammy Nemeth [00:24:16] Well, I already talked about the banks one and oh, and if I could just, go a little bit further. So when when Guterres was talking about all these different things that he wants the fossil fuel companies to do, and number one of them was to stop advertising, right. Is that he’s he’s calling on ad firms to cancel their contracts with oil and gas companies. I think that’s pretty disgusting.

Irina Slav [00:24:40] Yeah.

Tammy Nemeth [00:24:41] Right. And and that but the Canadian government went one step further. And I didn’t put it in an article here, but they inserted two paragraphs into a piece of legislation in their In the Competition Act that will basically ban oil and gas companies from talking about anything they’re doing related to the transition or any progress that they’re making towards, net zero. It it basically stops them unless they can confirm what they’re doing has been certified by some international methodology, which is undefined. So but it affects not just oil and gas companies, but technically any company that’s doing anything in the transition, they could be held liable. And it’s like millions of dollars in fines if they’re found guilty of, being misleading or whatever, which can be interpreted very broadly. And then there’s the other article there, which I thought was hilarious. So this Polish candidate was complaining that the reason why people aren’t accepting the Green Deal is that the communications plan was halted.

David Blackmon [00:25:45] Of course.

Tammy Nemeth [00:25:47] You know, you know, it’s not that people can’t afford to live or heat their house or no, no, no, that’s not it. They just didn’t get it properly.

David Blackmon [00:25:57] And it’s the same playbook over and over. And it’s the same thing they say about communism. Well, communism, socialism, whatever you want to call it, didn’t work because you didn’t talk about it. Right. And you didn’t do it right. We’ll do it right.

Irina Slav [00:26:11] Right. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly.

Tammy Nemeth [00:26:13] Yeah. Okay. That’s those are my things.

Stuart Turley [00:26:17] Tammy, you also had one other one. You had another.

Tammy Nemeth [00:26:21] Right. So this was this was my piece in the Financial Post last week, which was about the Canadian Sustainability Standards Board and their new climate accounting rules. And it was open for comments at it closes today actually for comments. And it basically aligns with what Guterres was saying, what he wants financial institutions to do, because he talked about having these transition plans. And one of the key elements of these standards is, is companies have to have these transition plans. They have to show progress that they’re actually meeting their targets, and they have to quantify all their emissions. And so in March, when Mark Carney was testifying before the Canadian Senate, he was talking about how important it was to have these this emissions data, because there’s $143 trillion in the world that asset managers have that they are ready to shift, but they just need the data.

David Blackmon [00:27:22] Right.

Tammy Nemeth [00:27:22] So so it’s funny because you had the article there about how ESG funds have been declining because, you know, they it’s not a really good return on investment, but yet they are ready to shift 143 trillion into transition companies that they just don’t know about yet. They need all this emissions data to know what’s a good transition company.

David Blackmon [00:27:45] And the truth is, they’re ready to shift it all into those those kinds of investments. If they can just hide the lower returns from their own investors.

Tammy Nemeth [00:27:54] Right. Well, they’ll because they’ll they’ll undermine those companies that would have the good returns. Right. If guitarists is saying oil and gas, you can’t you can’t advertise. You need to invest in in the transition and all that. Well then that makes those companies unprofitable. So then the only game in town are the transition companies.

David Blackmon [00:28:14] Right?

Irina Slav [00:28:15] Yeah. But they can start to phase. And, you know, as managers can keep funding them forever. Hasn’t anybody thought about that or is this.

David Blackmon [00:28:25] But it’s inconvenient to think about that.

Tammy Nemeth [00:28:27] Yeah. They just haven’t put enough money in I guess.

Irina Slav [00:28:32] Yeah. Yeah.

Tammy Nemeth [00:28:34] Anyway, guys, I have to go. Thank you so much for, being the great host, David. And great to see you all. And I’ll tune in and hear what your guys had to say a little bit later. Break away.

Irina Slav [00:28:47] Have a good time.

Tammy Nemeth [00:28:47] Thank you. Bye.

David Blackmon [00:28:51] Okay with that?