Big Digital Energy

0:00 About two and a half weeks ago, I go to the dermatologist, I have a bump inside my nose, he cuts it out and he cauterizes it, right?

0:09 And anyway, that's one fact you need to know. The other fact you need to know is I lavage my nasal cavity twice a day just for allergies. I'm an idiot, I didn't stop doing that. And so about a

0:22 week later, I had obviously gotten rid of all the scabbing, etc. And my nose is gushing, bleeding, and will not stop. Like blood is everywhere, all over the house. I'm holding toilet paper,

0:38 leaning back, so I go to the emergency room. And I'm expecting them to cauterize my nose again. And I've learned my lesson. I want lavage. I won't blow my nose for a while. Swear to God, they

0:50 put a 10 foot tampon up my nostril Literally touched my brain. And so they shove it up there. And I'm like, we're not. cauterizing, they go, no, no, no, we do this and you go see your ENT the

1:04 next day. And I'm like, okay, so I call my ENT. My ENT, who is now, I think the most sadistic person on the planet says, no, no, no, no, you don't come see me today, you come see me in 48

1:16 hours, we need it to, we need it to, to heal. So I 72 hours, I have a large tampon in my nose. And yes, to answer the question that both of y'all are thinking and that my buddy fish asked, it

1:30 had a little string hanging from it. So I did that for 72 hours. And then I went and he removes it. But then I can't lavage or blow my nose for 10 days. And I'm on day seven of that. So it now

1:47 feels like I have a cement block in my left nostril, because I'm not allowed to pick my nose or do anything. So what a story. That's my last two weeks. How are you guys? I'm actually. You saw

1:60 any software with that thing up your nose? I did not. I was strangely absent from Zoom meetings. Well, I'm glad you're feeling better, Chuck. That's crazy. Thank you. Don't do this. Yes,

2:16 there you go. Anytime you have something in your nose, don't touch it for 10 days. Let it heal because the ramifications are not great Well, Shel Silver's team wrote a poem about that, I think.

2:29 Probably, probably so. All right, Mark, you wanna kick us off? Yeah, you know, it's kind of hello, darkness, my old friend with oil. I know how much you love talking about oil at the kickoff

2:42 every week. At least it's not the eye yet. Thank God. Which may or may not come up.

2:49 You know, we're in the midst of a number of crosswinds, competing factors, you know. I think Javier Bloss has written an origin, called him out, about a cartoonishly large glut,

3:06 and then you have things like, you know, Indian demand up 7 year over year, US. shale or US. production in general looks like for the year 2025 has been adjusted slightly upward by, I think,

3:22 about 110, 000 barrels a day to just around 1355 for the year So, as she said, Chuck, you were just a little early, I think, right?

3:34 And then the Saudis didn't raise their official selling price to Asia. And then of course you had the somewhat hopeful glass half full increase for November from OPEC plus 137, 000 barrels a day yet

3:50 crude maintains a six handle. What do you guys think? Well, I mean, I'm gonna go with. the fact that markets don't lie, people do. So the price holding at 60 tells you demand isn't dead, no

4:06 matter what the talking heads say. I mean, that's sort of the cutting through. That's my read.

4:14 So, you know, it's interesting. Is that what you would say you Chuck? You know, I always found in my career that we were really good knowing supply and demand and where we were kind of six to

4:28 nine months in the rear view mirror. But always in the moment, we were always a little hazy. And so,

4:37 I think your big question is truly what are the economic measures of the United States, right? I mean, we're getting goofy data out of there. The Fed has definitely held interest rates higher than

4:53 I think, if it - hadn't been Donald Trump as president. We potentially would have seen. So I don't know what to make of it, but I think your point's right. You know, what is a barrel of oil

5:05 worth? Go look on the NIMEX 6432 or whatever it is. Boom, that's what it's worth. Yeah, I mean, there's been a lot of, you know,

5:17 playful jabs, I guess, back and forth. I did see someone, I wish I had grabbed it, and unfortunately it's not easily searchable on X, but there is a, I think there's an extreme500 a barrel call

5:31 being made on the basis of what this analyst believes is shaping up in the, along the fundamentals, but, you know,

5:45 500 has kind of brought me back to the days I used to work for about zones. Yeah.

5:54 Well, we got a lot of damage to absorb if we head in that direction, but they're just such a disparity because it seems this growing chorus of big supply gut, a lot of oil on the water and building.

6:10 China's continuing to restock

6:14 as

6:16 they should if they believe we're in a physically tighter market But at the same time, we sit here kind of muddling along and quite frankly, it's a bit boring at this point. I wanted to ask you

6:28 Chuck, OPEC surprising with a not as big increase, 137, 000 barrels a day increase for November. I think it was fairly well-telegraphed that they were gonna come in more conservatively. What does

6:45 that do to your OPECsautie thesis? You

6:48 know, well, actually I think we have

6:52 kind of bifurcated now. I think it's Saudi and the others. Saudi may actually have their excess capacity. Who knows? For years, I was kind of like, they just don't have it, guys. They can do

7:05 it for 90 days, that's about it. Maybe they do have more than that 'cause they've been running. They've been running kind of, I'm gonna say on slow or relatively slow the last few years So maybe

7:20 they do have more excess capacity. I'll go from neutral to, or I'll go from negative to neutral on that. But I will say this, it doesn't look like the rest of OPEC really has the ability to meet

7:33 their

7:36 allocations. You know, if you look kind of across the board, people have been under producing here for a while. Yeah, I think the Saudis are

7:46 not, It's a one-month data point on - what they decided to do in terms of leaving the official selling price alone. Maybe a little heightened awareness of demand fragility that we don't see or

7:60 hasn't shown up in five-handle crude. You know, at the same time, I did see something and I think it was a sovereign loan as opposed to a bondish one by the Saudis of when they ordered10 billion.

8:13 So I

8:16 think we're kind of approaching that point where we need to see or they need to see higher pricing It's just gonna be interesting to see where this all goes in the near term for the remainder of the

8:25 year and

8:28 where activity goes, economic activity and industry activity, which shows no signs of doing anything, but - I'll get it, I'll get it - It's very, very conservatively postured. I'll get a kirk

8:40 first on this and marking answer it too. Does the potential Donald point 20, Donald Trump, 20-point plan for Gaza Peace, play anywhere into this. I mean, are the Saudis gonna play nice to try to

8:59 get that deal through and then potentially play hard ball? Is it have anything to do with it or is it unrelated? I don't know that I have an opinion. I haven't connected those two things. Go ahead,

9:12 Kirk. I mean, let's talk about what we just, I mean, yesterday was the two-year anniversary of one of the most horrific killing sprees.

9:24 I don't think

9:27 there's nothing that seems on the horizon that, I mean, really the bigger issue would be if Trump tried to blow up the whole thing, no pun intended, and all how war would happen. But in this case,

9:40 we're talking about a president that's saying I could maybe solve, going back to, potential peace doesn't change a whole lot. Maybe the oil markets open up, but I don't see necessarily Trump's

9:54 plan. In fact, you can correct me here. He's not holding anyone accountable like the Qataris or someone else. So that to me, what would be more interesting is us trying to figure out, as we're

10:09 looking at sort of OPEC, OPEC trying to micromanage outputs of Fools' Aaron when the markets are naturally schizophrenic. But what are they trying to actually communicate in their forecast and

10:25 actually what they're doing? That to me is the bigger question is, what is OPEC actually trying to forecast? 'Cause ultimately, forecasting is trying to tell the market what we wanna see, 'cause

10:37 we know the market's gonna act as what the market does. But in terms of how this impacts, how Gaza impacts it,

10:45 The Gaza with Trump's plan actually reduces pension versus make oil markets more erratic. I think it actually smooths out the curve in my opinion. Yeah, it's complicated. I think there's a big

10:60 shrug because it is so complicated and these things get protracted. The latest update I saw was probably a couple of days ago was that Hamas had agreed to some things, not all Pointy's a lot. And

11:16 so is there an out here for a while, we didn't get full satisfaction on a capitulation? You know, Trump's trying to push a quick resolution, particularly the remaining hostages. And that's as we

11:32 head deeper into the year and heading into midterm year. You know, can he score another point of getting a, you know, a major conflict result?

11:45 I don't think there's, I don't think there's an immediate kind of translation, a headline rest that everything falls out of bed because the tensions have magically disappeared because they've got

11:57 this, this peace plan in place. And just from a fundamental standpoint, it doesn't really move the needle, right? In terms of, it does feel like the Saudis are owed something. And I hate to, I

12:10 hate to say it in such a way that I'm justifying. I'm just saying if you're, if you're looking at cutting a deal right here, hey, we need you to, in effect, back Israel on this, or at least be

12:23 okay with it. And then number two, I need low oil prices going into my midterms, you know, kind of interesting of, okay, Saudi, what do you get at, you know, what do you get out of it? And

12:35 maybe it's higher oil prices in 28, 29, something like that. I don't know. There seems to be kind of something there. Although maybe Saudi just to have the bombs going off in Israel and the

12:53 Palestinian issue over, maybe that's good enough. I think there could be

12:60 a lot of deal fatigue around that for the whole Arab world. Next story, what's next? Well, it's somewhat related and if you're thinking that we're eminent to peak oil, then I don't think you'd be

13:20 playing aggressively in a bid for a Canadian oil sands producer, Amy Meg Energy, which Sonovis just up their bid in response to Strathcona coming in

13:32 with a competing bid

13:36 Sonovis has got I think 80,

13:40 000 barrels a day of current production over 600, 000 that is oil sands. So I think this bodes well unless you think they're behaving totally irrationally that, you know, we're going to, we're

13:53 going to see a lot of demand for both consolidation and volumes to maybe backstop some of the

14:03 heavier stuff that US. refiners are finding harder and harder to get. You know, it kind of ties back to the old story, but the500 oil call she drills, Christine Guerrero said, we'll never hit

14:17 500 because it's way before then the United States will just invade Venezuela and start pumping all their heavy crude given that we need it. And she's probably right about that. So are you saying

14:31 that the refineries that can't Canadian, this heavy oil sands is actually good for our refining.

14:42 Okay, let's take that as a yes. So

14:46 that means the price of oil sands, which is gonna be naturally higher 'cause it's more like mining than it is drilling, correct? It's more expensive. That's an interesting, 'cause it tells you

15:00 that Synovis, at least in their modeling is saying that, they're falling market incentives, not political narratives ultimately, is

15:10 what they're trying to do I'm actually very curious, but this is gonna be a fun one to watch throughout the next year to see if they're estimations, 'cause I wonder what the cost to pull this stuff

15:23 out of the ground really is. And clearly, they're thinking that the price that they can sell their oil is gonna be higher than that. I wanna follow that math, and we should probably pull that

15:35 together to see if we think the estimates are actually there but go ahead and talk. Well, I was gonna say, and I'll give credit where credit's due. I went on Groc, and I said, Give me a hot take

15:49 on the Megs and Sanova Steel. And it said, Sanova says last minute sweetener on the Meg deal, bumping the cash option to2950, and tilting towards a5050 cash stock split isn't a bold master stroke.

16:05 It's a panic band-aid on a bid that's already screaming overpay in a world where oil sands hype is cooling faster than a SAG-D steam chamber without the heat. Sure, it juices Christina Lake's

16:19 synergies to400 million a year by 2028, but folding into Megan to Synovis just creates another bloated Canadian oil giant chasing volumes in a market that's pivoting hard to EVs and carbon taxes

16:34 Shareholders cashing out now might dodge the real right down when WTI dips below 60 again.

16:43 Strathcona is still lurking with its illiquid shares, like a bad ex who won't sign the papers. But honestly, Meg's boards pickin' the devil they know feels like choosing a leaky lifeboat over

16:55 jumping ship entirely. Wow. Well, there you have it. Unbelievable. Welcome to BDE. Grazette AGI. Grazette AGI. That's progressive though. Still though, Chuck, because the world's not going

17:09 to EVs and renewables I mean, let's just - I think it was implied, I think it was implying Canada's doing that.

17:19 Not the world. Yeah, but Canada's almost doing that. I mean, Norway did it. And I still use 19 barrels per capita. Yeah, per person, per day. I don't know, we need to watch oil prices to see

17:28 if, to me, I've always, you know, who likes oil sands 'cause the price is higher, but, you know, maybe they know something we don't. I think Grazette might be onto something,

17:42 I'm more, let's look at executive incentives to do the deal. Maybe there's something in that, but Ensnobus is a Canadian energy company. What else are they gonna do? That's very true. The,

17:55 so why don't we roll from that into renewables? I mean, did we like way over play the death of renewables already? Well, I think there are two frames of reference here One is confined to the US

18:10 within the political framework of particularly offshore wind taking it on the chin and a rollback of an early rollback of some of the incentives, but we're still spending a lot globally on renewables.

18:26 It was first half of this year at386 billion. And right before I jumped on, I saw, and I'll mention the name,

18:34 IEA, It's executive director posted. hosted a long piece about what's going on globally with renewables in every subcategory from onshore and offshore wind to solar to battery, battery storage,

18:50 everything is up substantially. But in the case of offshore wind, he did reference a bit of concern in alarm in that there's some policy headwinds, but more importantly, there are economic

19:05 headwinds and supply chain related issues, not to mention the fact the stuff that we've been talking about again, it's very bias to what we hear and see on offshore wind

19:17 here in the US, but the fact of the matter is we're still spending as a globe a ton of money on this stuff.

19:26 And so are we just off by ourselves with the rhetoric, but we're still putting capital that is increasingly challenged to make a return, a competitive return. relative to other things and energy

19:40 that you could be doing. And how much of this capital should have gone over the last five years into actually delivering the electrons in terms of the the grid transmission distribution? I worked

19:53 for one of the largest energy companies on the planet. And their management team and

20:02 colleagues of mine were literally convinced of climate change, literally convinced that the world needs to go renewables. Despite knowing like our wind team could never win deals because when a deal

20:21 finally closed, they're like, there's no way to make money. I'm like, well then, but the management team and the company culture pushed, we got to do it Now, YL came in and just cleaned house

20:34 and well, we need to make money. But when the largest, when society, when children believe the planet's about to burn up, and management teams are pushing a narrative thinking, hey, maybe,

20:48 because half of that 365 billion is probably subsidies.

20:55 I mean, so you're trying to game a system and be, I mean, Elon's actually, of all people, has done a great job of leveraging government subsidies I mean, Tesla and SpaceX are all built on

21:09 government subsidies, but the reality is there's a lot of people that you'd call smart that are making really, really dumb decisions. So

21:19 let's not like, to me, I sat there going, you guys, we need to go into exploration. We need to, you know, be better at finding low oil, a cheap oil, but people on the other side are saying,

21:31 Wait a minute, we're getting out of oil. 386 billion in the first half of the year is about what the run rate is annually, at least order of magnitude well within the order of magnitude, what

21:43 we've been spending here lately annually on upstream catbacks. Yeah, that's a great point, Mark. And if you look at, like I started surge in 2010 thinking, hey, let's see if energy tech

21:57 investing works. Let's try renewables, let's just investigate So what happened, I shut it down because there's no way we can really make money here. And then all these energy funds came in behind

22:11 me and raised significant capital to put money behind it. And what's happening to those funds? These are all partners that have raised significant capital, their own money in, and these are 10

22:22 plus year funds. They can't just quit, well, they can, but they're not going to 'cause it's their careers. And so they're gonna double triple down and look at the performance of these funds,

22:35 they're terrible. So this is what I think we all need to wake up, but there is a reality that some things are just too big to fail. And if you talk to most of people and people listen to our

22:49 podcast, it's gonna be hard for them to be like, wait a minute. Wow, a bunch of smart people are being really stupid. It's too big, I must be missing something. But the reality is you're not

23:01 missing anything They're making really stupid decisions. Now, we all would love to see the world, actually not all of this. But let's just say the world goes renewable. Well, guess what? We're

23:11 watching it in real time. Everyone's prices and cost a living are going through the roof. So accept, guess who's playing 40 chess, China. What's China doing? As you said, Mark, how many coal

23:26 plants have they built? Last year alone. 95 gigawatts.

23:33 equivalent size up. Texas peak demand was 86. So why is the Chinese using dirty call? And what's the cost of this power? It's cheap. Yeah. Cheap eight, nine cents, 10 cents. I mean, nothing,

23:52 right? Yeah. And that's the 40 chest that you referred to is we're going to continue, you know, and the spending on renewables is certainly very heavily China weighted because they're the almost

24:08 monopolistic supplier, a lot of a lot of the value chain of renewables. And so as Kyle Bass tweeted out today and in one of his many diatribes on China is that, you know, they're playing a game,

24:24 a supportive game to help continue to fuel a destabilization of energy security. for countries in the West that have gone headlong, very generation heavy into renewables. And we've talked to ad

24:40 nauseum about all the system level problems related to grid reliability and transmission infrastructure, et cetera. But the fact that China built enough coal last year to power Texas peak demand and

24:57 then some is pretty stunning. I love this quote by Frederick Hayek in the constitutional liberty. He says, To act on the belief that we possessthe knowledge and power which enable usto shape the

25:11 processes of society entirely to our liking, knowledge which in fact we do not possessis likely to make us do much harm. Renewables funding without market discipline is a recipe for waste.

25:28 And what's interesting about the365 billion invested, it's these are people trying to push a narrative and they haven't stopped and taken a step back saying, Wait a minute, is this really smart? I

25:41 think it's really interesting. You're gonna see a lot of failure.

25:46 A lot of failure is continuing to happen and we've seen it. Now debate meets, from your arm. No, I think it's really important too Could you sit there and go, Well, why can this happen? Well,

26:01 it can happen because the people that pay the price for this are poor people in the continent of Africa. Let's just be real about this. If we're not, if we're gonna shut down hydrocarbons and not

26:13 provide energy resources to the cheapest and best energy resources to the rest of the planet, I mean, those are the people that pay the price and they don't have a strong voice I mean, let's be

26:27 real. If rich politicians

26:37 in

26:40 DC paid a price for high energy prices, for erratic energy service, you might get something done about it. But so long as it's the poor people, nobody cares. I mean, it's really expensive to

26:45 live on Nantucket. Let's just take, let's make it personal for a second. We have offshore wind. That price increased our cost of living But we have a lot of, 'cause it's a sanctuary state, so

26:59 we've imported a bunch of illegal immigrants here to the island who can't afford to live here. So the island has decided let's increase the taxes on wealthier people and let's subsidize the poor

27:13 people and what they're paying. So in many cases, not in Africa, 'cause no one cares about the poor people in Africa. I don't care who you are Now, we might personally be like, man, that's sad.

27:27 but no one really cares 'cause if they cared, they'd do something about it in a major way and they don't. So let's just get that off the table. And if you're a listener and you care, come prove to

27:37 me you care. If you start in a nonprofit grade, if it's a business decision, then you're a smart business person. But the government is subsidizing and hiding the true cost of this energy. And

27:50 it's these bad policies that are being passed on And in some cases, most people don't really know. It's the same issue that we have with the fact that your property taxes are rolled into your

28:03 mortgage for most people so they don't really know how much property taxes really are. Or health insurance, they don't really know because they work for a company that pays half. And then their

28:15 health insurance cost is being pulled out of their paychecks. So they don't really know the cost I think that's part of the issue is. Most of us really do not understand the cost of delivering and

28:28 using energy. So with that being said, how do we even know? And part of our job at Collide is to inform them. I wish we had more people that weren't experts, but that really didn't wanna learn

28:42 because that's part of the issues. Most people just don't know. So they say electric cars, you know, are ice cars bad

28:52 Or in Martha's Vineyard, just yesterday, I saw a Tesla that said, you know, my car was cool until Elon fucked it up.

29:01 Or I bought this before Elon went crazy. Yeah, that too. Yeah, and although when he went, hold on, when he went, anti-Trump, did that cause him to come back? Where are we on that spectrum? I

29:14 can't keep up with it. I don't know, Chuck. I've never been to Martha's Vineyard And Holly was like, I want you to go.

29:23 couple day trip and the grit and it was a lot dirtier than I, then Nantucket by the way. I'm just saying it. It's dirty.

29:33 And there's something, and there's a lot of businesses that are like businesses closed. I don't know, the island doesn't seem to be doing great. But the best thing about it, the best thing about

29:44 it, just I got so giddy is to see chap Aquatic and that bridge that dead Kennedy drove off and killed Mary Jo and didn't even report it. I mean, that was the highlight is seeing that in chap

30:01 Aquatic, you can kill people and get away with it. So

30:05 I shouldn't make light of her death. That is a tragedy. We really shouldn't by all accounts. She was a very good person. And quite frankly, even if she wasn't, no one deserves that. But not at

30:17 all. Yeah. I'm being kind of in jazz, but that was the coolest part of Mars.

30:25 The let's get back to the, a little bit under the umbrella or inside the 10 of renewables. So the push, the corporate push is not, again, if you zoom out on a global basis, you still have about

30:41 70

30:43 by revenue, the top 2000 companies globally that are still very progressively pushing a net zero agenda, which, you know, is going to drive incentives for

30:59 stacking more on top of you, know, I would say less than a reliable and a fragile system right now. My only looking back on it, a rational person would say, we need to look at the entire

31:13 integrated system and figure out beyond generation. what our pinch points are, what needs to happen with transmission, what needs to happen with distribution and substations, interconnects, and

31:26 all those things are manifesting now in some of the problems that we're seeing. And when you layer in a massive amount in the US, and probably globally too of big chunky power demand from AI data

31:40 centers on top of that,

31:43 it just feels like there's some collisions coming Yet we continue to extol the virtues of stacking tens of billions, hundreds of billions, mostly on the generation side, where in the case of China

31:59 or Texas or in other places, that's not the problem. But has anyone seen any kind of comprehensive policy pronouncements on what are we gonna do about what makes the system work reliably? And that

32:16 is the infrastructure of the grid. the transmission, the distribution. Yeah, I did see Frack, right before we got started, Frack put out a post that said, I'm interested in building, I guess,

32:29 building a company that builds transformer, who's transformers, who's with me. Yeah, their backlog is tremendous. I think that's actually the brilliant point, Mark, is that, and that's a knock

32:40 maybe against kind of the market, if there's any knock, and the knock is most companies think short-term and are about what can I do today to make money. We're talking about an energy system that's

32:55 super complex and super long-term, but at the same time, you can point to, Hey, during the shale revolution in Pennsylvania, people built new refineries to make plasticsbased off this cheap

33:11 by-product. So I think people will make long-term decisions if it's in their economic incentive. The biggest challenge is the infrastructure in this country at least is sort of a government thing to

33:25 do and the government has to be as part of sort of organizing this massive energy system like our COT in Texas, for example, which is a super interesting challenge and very difficult problem to

33:40 solve. I do like the new Hampshire solution that I circulated I was

33:49 having a coffee at Joseph's with the old guy. They get the Wall Street Journal every day. So I had to go to old school and take a picture of it instead of finding the digital copy. And that's what

34:04 I've sent around to y'all, but House Bill 672 basically says, so long as you're not connecting to the grid, anybody can kind of build whatever generation they want in New Hampshire and God bless

34:17 them. You know,

34:20 so I think we're gonna see more and more off-grid solutions happen because of all the things you just said, Mark, it's congested freeway out there. Yeah, and yet most of the, you know, the

34:38 proposed or in motion data center projects, we talked about Texas a couple of weeks ago. I think there was the top 10 that RBN covered Not out of those 10 were grid dependent. Well, nuance there

34:54 is they're connecting to the grid and Urcott is unique in that the connection to the grid and Urcott is you can connect anywhere you want to. We can shut you down whenever we want to. Other, other

35:12 of, FERC grids within the United States. You have to do a study, you have to get approved. There are plans on how they shut down things over time. Urquat's like, yeah, you can pop on, dude,

35:25 but if we don't need you. So it makes sense to me that every project you build connects to the grid in Texas, 'cause

35:35 you just assume sell some power when you have a shot to sell some power That's

35:42 a fairly recent, the kill switch legislation, which is what I think you're referring to, Senate Bill, I forget the number. That was, yeah, two years ago, three years ago. Something like that.

35:52 Yeah, and so. Response to Uri. And you're trying to concentrate. You're trying to concentrate the load sheds when you get into, I think, a period, Allah, Uri, or something farther back than

36:06 that, which I think the frequency of those things is. pretty low over decade-type periods. But when they do happen, they can be quite dislocating and damaging. And to have a haircut come within

36:22 four minutes and 27 seconds of a total collapse would have been catastrophic. Not only for Texas, but also for the rest of the country.

36:32 So last thing on renewables and somewhat related, I was happy to see that the Trump administration reversed something we talked about last year, which was the Biden administration's one of their

36:46 last moves. The Department of Interior had issued a no action on the Ambler mining road. You guys remember that? The Ambler has been in discussion and on pause for the better part of 20 years. You

37:03 got Copper and Zink and other things up there in the northwest of Alaska And so what Trump did was essentially, via executive order or something akin to that, reverse that no action and essentially

37:16 approved the Amble Road, which is critically dependent upon a,

37:21 it's 200 and 11 miles long, I forget what was going through the national forest, but apparently that's back on it. It led me to get in my own brand with myself about, okay, we're seeing a lot of

37:38 quick action in the form of executive action. But what's Congress doing to codify and legislate so that when the pendulum swings back the other way, maybe it's not 28, maybe it's in 32, kind of

37:52 here we go again.

37:56 It's just a constant back and forth through the executive action channel as opposed to making durable legislation.

38:06 Yeah, I think DC's a joke these days. I mean, they can't even agree on a continuing resolution for seven weeks. And so I think if the Trump administration came out for any of this stuff, there's

38:19 no way you're getting Democrat votes for it. Maybe, you know, maybe three or four at the most. And so Anne Bradbury, when she came on the podcast, Chuck Jobs, probably about a year ago, it was

38:32 post Trump election, but I don't think he had taken office yet. She swore there was kind of bipartisan efforts to

38:45 do things like permitting, et cetera. And we just haven't seen it and I don't think we're going to see it. I think until Trump goes away, the Democrats just can't bring themselves to support

38:56 something even if it saved the world. Joe Manchin left the term too early. We could use energy permitting reform act or some framework like that. So are we going old school and we have a finger of

39:12 the week? Yeah, it's kind of a review thing and maybe a bit of a victory lap. We'll spike the freaking football mark.

39:26 So,

39:28 the net zero banking alliance, which is a sub-alliance of G-fans, which is the Glasgow Financial Alliance for net zero, has said we're going to cease operations as a member-oriented group. We will

39:45 now operate under the framework of guidelines. And this was quickly on the heels. I think this announcement came out last week This was quickly on the heels of The Mass Exodus by several months ago

39:59 of names like JP. Morgan, Goldman Sachs, City, et cetera. This is something, as you guys all know, came out of the euphoria for some of 2019-2020, where it was born out of the cop that was in

40:20 Glasgow

40:22 I've always thought of it as a bit of a.

40:27 a dangerous frontier for US. listed companies and banks in particular, where there was arguably at least the tone of the messaging was what I believe to be something worth looking into, which is

40:44 restraint a trade, and not financing certain types of otherwise legitimate companies and projects defined as oil and gas and coal. And that was the read between the lines message of both of these

41:01 groups. So Congress had some hearings a few months ago. Jim Jordan, you know, there was a lot

41:10 of inflammatory language. I think he called him climate cartels. But my issue is none of this has been subjected to any kind of forensic discovery as it would be in litigation. And to suggest. and

41:25 I'm probably a little bit guilty of thinking back to how the FTC treated Scott Sheffield in Pioneer, yet you've got this industry group that is explicitly and implicitly saying, we're gonna pull

41:41 back on or we're not going to do business with, potentially not do business with a certain otherwise legitimate segment of our borrower base, our

41:52 financing clients And so anyway, good riddance too. That was the politest and nicest fuck you I've seen Mark. I think I have yet to swear. I think, I think you're probably right. Four years in

42:06 counting.

42:08 You know what my favorite part of Monday night football was back in the day with Don Meredith when he'd get drunk, turn out the lights, the parties over. We can just sing that too. Oh yeah. You

42:21 think he was drunk in the booth?

42:24 I hope so. Well, the safest road to hell is the gradual one. So thank goodness they're getting off that bandwagon. Well, and this thing potentially could have had a real teeth to it. And I would

42:37 argue that, you know, there's probably some measurable increase in the cost of capital while in gas providers over the period of this questionable behavior that ultimately translates to

42:57 harm to the American consumer of their products, right? Not the

43:04 banks, but those that have a higher cost of capital because you've got some virtuous risk premium or risk framework related to climate net zero. And I gotta believe part of it was, you know, Larry

43:23 Fink certainly backed off on his lecturing of CEOs early in this wave of energy transition rhetoric. But I got to believe part of it is people are looking around and saying,

43:37 and maybe the two weren't connected. But if you had an FTC that was so motivated, I wouldn't see why this might not be something worth looking into But I think it's gone away. So two things.

43:57 Number one, I have to admit, when I was wrong, I actually made a prediction on Chuck Job at some point in the last four years that at least one, if not two of the large money center banks would

44:11 completely divest of hydrocarbon lending and all associated forms with it. So thank goodness I was wrong to best that.

44:22 You know, I was I was kind of feeling it and then the second thing and I don't know that I told you guys this So I made an executive decision, but it was really cool stuff. I went out to pro frack

44:33 day They were demoing a lot of their equipment a lot of their their systems Out in the field I went and I was able to sit down with Matt Wilkes of pro frack and Panos adopt Adam my Palouse who I know

44:53 his name known him for ten years and I apologize for butchering his name But I sat down with he's with size most and I sat down and talked about their joint venture They've done together real-time

45:05 data on fracks so the Decisions can be made in real time. I mean I fracked a lot of wells where you got your report two days later And you said okay, we'll adjust this on the next frack We're

45:19 actually, the industry's able to do that in real time. Then also followed up with Larry and Steve from their shops to talk more about it. So we pushed that out on BDE and Chuck Job today. So those

45:34 are great interviews to see. That's awesome. Good to see you boys. Good to see you. Hope to you. I love it,

45:44 Chuck. Stay away from that nostril. Stay away from that nostril Exactly. Exactly. I just, thanks for sharing that. Hey, if you like what you heard today, subscribe and forward as long as

45:58 somebody that you care about. Exactly, somebody you want to see warm in the winter. And buy some Collide Enterprise. There you go. Good to see you. Good to see you. And make your life so much

46:08 better.