 This is the Human Action Podcast, the weekly show looking at politics and events through the lens of economics with your hosts Jeff Deist and Dr. Robert Murphy. We welcome everybody to another episode of the Human Action Podcast. I am one of your hosts, Bob Murphy, and with me is Jeff Deist, who is calling in. He's on vacation in an undisclosed location in Florida. Jeff, do we have you? Yes, in cold rainy Florida where spring break, spring training during spring break has been canceled due to the Major League Baseball Strike. And I feel you have some strong feelings on that. I do. I do have some feelings on that, but I won't issue them here. Okay. So it seems like maybe the thing we should talk about today or at least start with our conversation, things that have changed slightly since the last time we talked, Jeff, situation in Ukraine and world energy markets, of course, is still in the news, folks. And one of the developments has been that President Biden has now announced that the U.S. and I think the UK also, they are going to embargo or, you know, not accept imports of Russian oil. But Biden conceded that some of the European allies, that might not be a path they can follow us down on. And so just to explain the logistics here, so what's happening is the U.S. actually and for those of you who are older and you may have grown up in an environment when the U.S. was always this huge importer of oil and oh boy, we got to wean ourselves from foreign oil. That actually because of the fracking and horizontal drilling revolutions that happened in the last decade or so. Actually, the U.S. is much in a much more solid footing in terms of being able to produce the oil. It's still a net importer, but it's not nearly the degree that it used to be. And the numbers I checked, the U.S. basically doesn't get any of its crude oil coming from Russia. So the U.S. saying we're not going to accept imports from Russia isn't a big deal. In contrast, Europe gets about 40 percent of its natural gas from Russia and about 27 percent was the figure I saw of their crude oil. And it's not even evenly distributed. Like so Germany, for example, is very dependent on Russian natural gas. And so that's why when you see the comments from various leaders in the EU, they're saying things like, yes, we look, you know, we deplore the Russian aggression in Ukraine and so forth. But right now it's not realistic to, you know, it would be far too painful. We're not we're not there yet to be able to completely abstain from Russian energy exports. Well, it seems to me about the first casualty is always truth in any war. And we're seeing just absolute economic illiteracy presented as fact. So yes, I did some digging last night and it appears that only about 8 percent of U.S. imported oil comes from Russia. So it's a little easier for us to be morally upright because we don't need it as much, you know, relative to some of our European counterparts. Now, maybe they've made a mistake in a sociopolitical sense of, you know, buying or requiring that much oil from this cronyist state of Russia. OK, but that's sort of a different question. But I guess what bothers me is this idea that we need to politicize this immediately. But Jen Psaki, the White House's press secretary, this Dunderhead Elizabeth Warren, who somehow made her way to the U.S. Senate, you know, basically saying, well, this is oil company greed. They're using this opportunity to crank up their profits. And Jen Psaki, which is just, of course, absolute nonsense. Jen Psaki is trying to say this is Putin's oil hike, you know, so we need to absolutely demonize an entire nation based on their leader of sorts. And so that's what's so depressing here is that in this day and age we can still get away with this kind of rhetoric. Yeah. And by the way, just to reconcile in case some of you in the audience have cognitive dissonance like Murphy, you just said there was zero percent and Jeff said there was seven or eight percent. The distinction is because I ran this to and I was looking at these numbers, Jeff, if it crude oil, you know, narrowly, I don't think we get basically any from Russia. But petroleum imports, that's what they call seven percent. And so petroleum, the way the EIA defines these things is a slightly broader category than crude. So in case folks at home think that Jeff and I are making up numbers, we're saying the same thing. It's just the definitions that these reports use differ slightly. Yeah, you're right. So I saw a funny thing, Jeff, where it was one of those memes with the guy putting on the clown makeup. And it started out saying, you know, inflation is actually is not happening. And then it was inflation is actually good for the workers and bad for the capitalists. And then the next, the final pain was the inflation is Putin's fault, you know, so that just the various stages of how the Biden administration is dealing with rising prices. It keeps going through all these ridiculous loops. Well, I guess what mystifies people about oil is a commodity relative to other commodities is that it experiences such huge fluctuations seemingly overnight. I mean, when you're driving around town, you see gas prices even during normal times go up or down a few cents and then they'll maybe trend one way or the other for a while. But Bob, other commodities don't do that. If you're buying bread at the grocery store, for example, that may contain wheat and flour, you know, it may go up over time, but it never goes back down. It doesn't go up and down. And so what what makes oil such a unique commodity obviously needs to be refined before it works in your car. But what why are there these wild swings? Why is it so politically or geopolitically sensitive? Okay, that's a great question. And why don't I first just make sure the listener realizes just how dramatic these price swings have been. So the benchmark, the European, the Brent crude oil. So it was earlier this week, I think it's come down a little bit since then, but early on this as we're recording so that this would the week of March 10th. So earlier this week, it had got up to about 140 a barrel and it had been in the 70s just in early December. Okay, so that's almost a doubling just in a few months, which is, you know, pretty extreme. And then natural gas, the situation is even more dire. The figures I saw the natural gas prices right now in Europe like the Dutch hub is one of the benchmarks they use over there, that that's tripled since October. And it's up by a factor of eight since last April. Okay, so again, it's like if you the number that was last April, you'd have to multiply it by nine to get the current natural gas price. All right. And so that partly underscores some of the folks at home who may follow this stuff. They were calling it a full blown energy crisis in Europe even before, you know, let the recent outright invasion or even the hostilities building up that, you know, something is really screwed up with the natural gas market in Europe in particular. And it's not just, oh, is the world economy rebounds after COVID. So the natural gas prices there are just levels far higher than anything anyone's seen, whereas oil, it just kind of rapidly returns to the pre pandemic levels. So to answer your question, Jeff, it's, yes, oil tends to be very volatile. I think it's a few things. So one is that it's a global market and so events around the world can affect it. And there's also, I think part of the issue is there's a pretty small margin of error, right, in terms of, you know, the match between global consumption and global production that if, you know, the production falls off, you know, there's not a big margin whereby they can just make it up somewhere else. Okay, so it's, I think that's that's part of the issue. And so that's why whenever there's a geopolitical event, then speculators were, you know, rationally and often correctly think that, oh, that's going to mean higher oil prices, at least in the near term. And so then they bid the price up right away, you know, speculatively, which I don't know if we want to talk about this, Jeff, that's actually a good thing. Like that's what you want markets to do if oil is going to be relatively more scarce. In terms of the fundamentals a month from now, you don't want that the full brunt of that to hit consumers in exactly one month, you want them to be eased into it. And that's what speculators do when they push the price up in anticipation of disruptions that may not have yet hit, but might hit a few weeks down the road. You want the speculators to push the price up so people economize now, other sources have time to get up to speed and, you know, and so forth. So that's that is the market working. But in terms of why is it so volatile? I think it's partly because they have they have a pretty narrow margin of error there to match the quantity supplied and demanded. And I think there's a lot of political reasons for that. I mean, oil has been demonized for the last several decades, you know, especially with the climate change stuff in general. And, you know, if you're a rational investor, you're going to be pretty reluctant to go ahead and sink billions of dollars into expanding your capacity when you don't know what the landscape is going to be. In 10 years from now. Well, and we've had a real Marie Antoinette moment on the left the last few days, this let them eat cake, let them buy EVs. Of course, electric vehicles are not cheap. And replacing the batteries in them is especially not cheap one, which affects the resale value of them mightily. And I've also heard the commentary it on the left say things like, well, you shouldn't be driving. You shouldn't be using 30 gallons of gas a week anyway. Who even does that because they tend to have no conception of people who might live in rural areas, for example, where the distances are far. They might have no conception of people who drive big trucks that suck down a lot of gas. They don't like big trucks. Not all big trucks are just a status thing. Some people need big powerful trucks to carry tools or to, you know, haul, you know, hitched wagons, whatever it might be. I mean, this is this strikes me as a bad look for the left. But what's interesting is I think this might be an opportunity just like COVID was an opportunity of sorts. This might be an opportunity to say, look, people, given the state of the world, capitalism is unreliable. There can be wars. We need to wean ourselves off this dirty, nasty oil, which is the source of so much conflict on earth. And we need to be moving towards green renewable energy sources. And, you know, Bob and I could do a whole show with safety and Ammus and others about how unrealistic that is. If you really expect people to be able to heat and cool and drive and have things brought to them on trains and trucks over the next 50 years. The idea that we're going to do away with fossil fuels is almost unbelievably naive and almost sadistic in the sense of what that would mean for people's standard of living. And what we really mean is people's standard of living in the third world. But this demonization of oil is real. And I think that this idea, well, it's your patriotic duty. Who cares if you have to pay a little bit more at the pump? We're at war. Well, actually, no, we're not at war. Russia and Ukraine are at war. Last time I checked, the other thing that irritates me, Bob, is that the Bakin shale formations up in sort of along the Canadian border up in the North North Dakota region of the United States. This is a little known fact, which was not trumpeted at the time, but back in 2013. As we were really starting to realize what the Bakin shale formation meant in terms of just quantities underneath our soil, the Obama administration, the energy department put out a press release that basically said, you know, we got about 60% more oil than we thought we had. We meaning within US borders. So now shale is not as good. It's a little harder to process and turn into usable oil and then into refined gasoline. But you know, this idea that we have to be dependent on this chaotic world supply is just nonsense. I mean, as a factual matter, we have enough oil and natural gas within the United States to be utterly self-sufficient and still export. Now, I'm not an autarkist. I think we should get oil from wherever we can get it cheapest. But this idea that we're beholden to geopolitics because of this, and so we need to move away from fossil fuels towards so-called renewable sources because of the sort of the dirty politics of oil, it just isn't true, Bob. Yeah, I'm glad you hit that point, Jeff, because that's something that I, as you know, Jeff, I spent several years working for the Institute for Energy Research and got hip deep in this stuff. And that was one of the eye-opening things to me. And again, folks, part of it is just the technological innovations of perfecting both fracking and what's called horizontal drilling, you know, where they go down and then they can make the pipe go horizontally and go find the oil deposits that way. And so those two, the interactions, those things, I mean, U.S. natural gas production like basically doubled over the course of a few years. I mean, just to give people an idea of just how significant that those innovations were in the industry. And that's why the situation changed so much. And there's assessments of things, you know, like especially if you consider North America as a whole, looking at just the fossil fuels they have and just, you know, standard industry estimates, even relying on government estimates, as you say, Jeff, you know, the Obama administration, so this isn't something you got to go to the Heritage Foundation to dig up. And I mean, there's, at current rates of consumption, there's literally centuries worth of coal, natural gas, oil, and so on. They're varying degrees of being able to be developed. And so economically it doesn't make sense, you know, if Saudi Arabia can bring a barrel of oil to the surface more cheaply than they can in Alaska, then you'd go ahead and do that. There's this notion that, oh, yes, the world is running out of oil and therefore, you know, we got to wean ourselves from it is wrong. You know what it reminds me of, Jeff? So this, I think it's not just the left, too. I think it's also there's some strands of this in the neocon wing on the right where they think that, oh, yes, how can we stick it to these Middle Eastern dictators, these people overseas is we got to make it so that we're not relying on their exports because that's the only card they have to play against us. So that's why at home, you do see there are some people like James Baker and so on, people that you normally wouldn't think of as a, you know, hippie leftist that are all in favor of a big carbon tax, for example. And so there's a movement on the right wing for a carbon tax. And of course, in their way, you know, they say, oh, we'll have to be revenue neutral and because we're smart and, you know, we consult with Arthur Laffer and so on. But I think that's partly what drives them is geopolitical concerns. But what's weird about that is it's they're saying they're hobbling US fossil fuel development in order to make us less reliant on foreign fossil fuel development in their eyes, which makes no sense. It's sort of like back, if you remember, Jeff, during alcohol prohibition, when the authorities would go around and randomly poison bootleg alcohol so people would get sick and die just to show them this is how dangerous bootleg alcohol is. You know, like they were making the problem worse than if they had just minded their own business. Well, the EV push is really something. I mean, obviously we know about the subsidies, but the battery issue is is really a problem. I mean, the range on these EVs, especially when you start getting into trucking, where they travel long distances, especially when you start talking about electric airplanes, where the range is going to need to be, you know, quite large, quite far. It really is something. Look, Eddie Rickenbacher, the flying ace was involved heavily in the automobile industry, the nascent automobile industry in the US in the 1910s. And at the time there were hundreds and hundreds of tiny manufacturers all battling it out to see whose car might make it. And they were very much, I mean, the idea of having it be battery powered electric versus combustion engine was very much an open question in the 1910s. No one knew which was going to win out in terms of affordability, efficiency, range, you know, marketplace preferences, et cetera. So this isn't something brand new and they struggled. I have a wonderful biography or excuse me, autobiography of Eddie Rickenbacher and they struggled mightily to string multiple batteries together to try to figure it out. And so this range issue has not been solved. And I'm not saying it's unsolvable, but I recently rented a big full size SUV, sort of like on that big Cadillac Escalade size three row thing, whatever. And I mean, it had a 600 mile range on a full tank. Wow. I mean, that is really something that's a significant market advantage. And I don't know how far they're going to go. But what I fear with the majoritarian process we have in this country with everything going through Washington and virtually all environmental regulations now preempted and going through Washington that the climate change people are going to prevail. And they're basically going to start squeezing combustion engines with the cafe standards, the corporate average fuel economy across the range, across the fleet of a particular manufacturer's vehicles. They're going to squeeze that so much higher that that EVs will effectively be legislated into our lives rather than chosen by the marketplace. And I think we've already seen that to an extent. And I'm not down on EVs. They have instant torque. When you go from zero to 60 in a combustion car, that zero to 10 is much slower than 10 to 20. Whereas with an EV, if you've ever driven a Tesla, I mean that torque will put in you in your seat right away. And that's a market advantage, I suppose. But I fear that this war, this oil thing is going to be all sort of used as fodder for what I consider a very anti-market and very anti-human environmentalists left. Yeah, I agree with you, Jeff. And I'm glad you emphasized that it's not that we are saying, oh, fossil fuels are good and wind turbines for sissies or something like that. It's let the market decide. And yes, there's pros and cons of the various technologies. And in certain areas, for example, little niche markets where it's really windy a lot. And so, yeah, the wind turbines make a lot of sense that, hey, nature's doing it automatically for you for free, as it were. And you just got to harness it. But there's downsides. So with electricity production, the wind doesn't always blow, the sun doesn't always shine. And so that's a problem with winded solar and why you need so-called dispatchable energy sources. And that's why even places that rely heavily on so-called renewable energy sources still have back-up natural gas generators, for example, just because there's times when the city's needs cannot be supplied purely from those sources. And I say, Jeff, with vehicles driving, that say what you will, but gasoline, it's a very dense, energy-rich liquid. And it's just a very convenient way to power things. And the other thing, too, is it's not merely solving the battery issue, but then just getting the infrastructure in place. So it can't be that if everybody had an electric vehicle tomorrow, there wouldn't be enough charging stations. Because right now, Europe and the United States, they're designed, they have regular gasoline stations all over the place, and that's where you go to refill your vehicle. And so it would take time. It's sort of a chicken and egg problem that people can't transition too quickly into all having EVs, unless the infrastructure to recharge them for long road trips also goes along with it. But you're not going to build a station that caters to EVs when the market doesn't have that many right now. So it's that sort of issue as well. But again, we used to have a horse and buggy, and then we switched over to automobiles. And the joke I use is it didn't take a manure tax to force everybody to switch over from this silly technology of relying on horses and how dirty that is to driving cars. People voluntarily did that and the market switched over of its own accord because it just made a lot more sense. And so likewise, when it it's interesting, Jeff, I don't know if you've noticed this in the energy debate where the advocates will tell us how great and how cheap, you know, electric vehicles are and everything. And oh, yeah, they passed the market test. Don't listen to those old fuddy duddy conservatives who are warning about economic pain. They're always, you know, the sky is falling. And yet it's critical that we have all these government policies like a huge carbon tax or outright mandates on the percentage of renewables to force people to use the technologies that they're telling us already passed the market test. So it's like, well, you're actually admitting no, they don't pass the market test. And so of course, you know, they'll bring up the Trump card of climate change and say, well, that's the wild card that doesn't actually, you know, people aren't taking it into account. But still a lot of this rhetoric it when they so even I guess one by point is even on their own terms, if they're admitting that the government is going to have to force us down our throats to get everyone to switch over to wean us from foreign oil, especially from that dastardly Putin, then if people need to be forced to do it, it's because it's less convenient for us. You know, other things equal. And then so that's going to be painful. So you might say the pain is worth it, that the cost is worth it. But still, I think it's very disingenuous when the left often tries to bill it as, oh, this will create green jobs. You know, as if like, it's the government just outlying the way we do things right now is going to make us wealthier because now we got to have all these workers adapt things to the new requirements. And so I mean, if that were true, the government could just randomly ban. Hey, anything that's purple, you can't use anymore and look at all the jobs they'll create as we make things now that aren't purple. So that's I just picked that because of my shirt. So, you know, that that's the level of the economic illiteracy that we're dealing with here where something that causes us to work harder to get the same result is is viewed as good because it creates jobs. And no, actually, economic progress occurs when we get more stuff or the same amount of stuff with fewer inputs. That's that's what efficiency actually is. Well, I wonder how we might more localize energy production and energy source. I mean, that's that's the libertarian argument, I guess, against big corporations and far away fossil fuels. In other words, oil needs to travel from places where it can be found and brought out of the ground more cheaply to places where it's needed for cars. So oftentimes that means pipelines, oftentimes that means ships. So oil, the oil we use sometimes it comes from the US, but it also comes from from vast distances. So if you take a country like Mexico, Mexico has vast oil reserves off its shore, and it could be a very wealthy oil exporter. You know, like the Middle Eastern countries, but it's expensive to get that oil up out of the seabed. So that's that's a big process. And Mexico has basically a state owned and operated oil company called Pemex. So it's in the sense it's akin to the old Gazprom, which was in a very cronyist way privatized in the former Soviet Union. But so you have these companies and even the ostensibly Western private ones, the big oil companies, which have to deal with so many countries and jurisdictions. And then they have to run these pipelines across so many hundreds or thousands of miles or even under the sea, that you get into all kinds of libertarian property questions of eminent domain and, and, you know, problems like that apart from, you know, the environmentalists don't really love that, although I think pipelines are generally not bad for wildlife. So you get into all these kinds of questions and you start to say, well, isn't it a little strange that I need to run my car in Phoenix off of oil that came from so far away? And I suppose it is a little bit strange, but the thing here is some libertarians argue that, for instance, nuclear power wouldn't exist in a truly free society because although nuclear power is pretty green and pretty clean, when and if there is an accident, the harms from the radioactive fallout are so great that the nuclear power plant could never pay or even insure itself against those harms that it would inflict on society. So in some sort of Rothbardian tort system of regulation, you know, the costs, the potential costs of a, of a, you know, problem with a nuclear plant, a meltdown or something like that would be so, so high that you couldn't even insure against them and thus no even super huge firm would ever grow to the size where it would undertake nuclear power. I wonder, Bob, if there is an almost libertarian case against the fact that we have, you know, become, become so dependent, for instance, on the Middle East, you know, because of our anti-environment, our anti-drilling and also our anti-refining attitudes here in the United States. In other words, we want oil, but we don't want it in our backyard. Like, if you go down to Romp, also in town of Lake Jackson, Texas, which was basically started in swampy Gulf, Gulf South Texas by Dow Chemical, a place nobody wanted to live, they created a bunch of chemical refineries and oil refiners because that was considered kind of a less desirable place. And so, but today it would be very hard to create a Lake Jackson, Texas, almost impossible, I would argue, within the United States. So because of our attitudes, we sourced a lot of oil offshore and we don't, we refine a lot of oil offshore. And so as a result, we end up with this unbelievably Byzantine patchwork of global oil production. And that makes us a little bit more susceptible to wars, for example, and, you know, just to supply chain disruptions and transport disruption. So it seems to me that we've had one market intervention on top of another, all the layers to the onion that have gotten us to this point. We're in the United States. I mean, why, why couldn't we have oil that we use in our cars come basically from the nearest state and nearest refinery in the US? Yeah. Yeah. Good point. And it's what you're saying there, Jeff, reminds me that I had heard an old oil industry executive was explaining, you know, to a friendly crowd that, you know, part of the issue with like the Exxon Valdez, you know, these big oil tankers when they run aground or something, you know, and they spill all this oil. And he said, well, that's partly because of regulations that prevent us from, you know, having pipelines. Like it's a lot safer and cheaper. So, you know, if we know it's got to go from, you know, somewhere in Alaska down here to a refinery south of there, then we just build a pipeline. But if, if for various reasons, because of concerns about the wildlife, you can't do that, well, then you got to put it on a ship and or similar thing with, you know, the keystone and so on that it's not that Canada is just going to say, oh, okay, I guess we're going to get out of the oil export business. Well, no, if they can't just ship it directly, then they're going to go ahead and, you know, go east or west with it and then load it on ships. And then they're going to take it down and then it'll get unloaded at a dock somewhere and then it'll get put on, you know, so it's, there's ways that it gets moved around. And, and yeah, just banning one particular method like a pipeline really doesn't, you know, doesn't, doesn't keep the oil in the ground the way that some of the activists think it will. And it ironically makes it more likely that there's going to be spills, just they might be in a different area. And you're right too, Jim, I don't want my remarks to be construed as a blanket endorsement of that keystone project because yes, there were some issued genuine libertarian issues of eminent domain and you know, they were going to go through and seize property from people that weren't giving consent. So I'm not, you know, rah rah about keystone per se. There's there's some genuine issues there, but certainly the the attitude of people saying no more pipelines because we got to get off of oil. That attitude and even if you were to push those policies through that doesn't therefore mean we're not taking oil out of the ground and using it just as you say Jeff just making it move around a lot more and increasing the likelihood of there being an accident. Another thing to just to add to all the different issues you you raised is I know for example like in California, they can't sell the same gasoline and nerve stations that they sell in Alabama that they're you know they have environmental regulations in terms of the quality and so you need refineries designed specifically for the California market and so that again that's part of this. What's making this this this market so discombobulated and having things getting shipped around that you know something on paper might make more sense like how come we don't just have a go from here to here. Isn't that easier, and then they can't do that necessarily because of these regulations. The question now is what does this mean for Biden. I mean I have to agree I saw that the MSNBC article yesterday said oh no these Republicans are trying to put this on Biden and it's Joe Biden's fault that fuel prices have gone up but as you were saying you know even before this this conflict between Russia and Ukraine. They were already talking about an energy crisis in Europe. I think oil prices per barrel were going up even towards the very end of Trump's term so I think that's that's true in a sense that this. This isn't Biden or his administration is doing I mean he can't control world events but what he can do is affect the regulatory environment here in the United States and I think we all know that he's not going to be pro oil or pro refinery. Right yeah I mean let's also not forget to mention the Federal Reserve and you know European Central Bank and other central banks to they certainly have contributed a lot you know without the torrent of monetary inflation they unleashed during the covid scare that that certainly has something to do with I think this this huge upswing and commodity prices. And you're right so it's it's not that Biden is responsible for all of these direct causes it's more you know what what steps could he take to alleviate the problem and certainly he's not doing those like allow for more US production. And then you alluded to it earlier we didn't really discuss it but like Elizabeth Warren coming out and you see a Robert Reich and all the familiar characters are using this opportunity to see the big oil they're just using this these events as cover to jack up prices and pad their bottom line and that's why we need a windfall profits tax. So just in general. Even if you thought that were true right so even if you thought that oil prices are set by the whim of the of the oil companies and they just wait for when people are going to believe a cover story I guess that you know in other words if big oil had jacked up prices to four or five dollars a gallon a year ago people would have balked but now that there's a situation in Russia they can go ahead and do it and people I guess are going to foolishly pay these prices even though they wouldn't have a year of I mean that's kind of the implicit model that these people have when they say they're you know the companies are taking advantage of this situation. But even if you thought that were true. Okay so yeah let's say big oil is this big greedy monolith and they just wait you know to stick it to people when they can how is imposing a big tax on them going to help anything right that it's. Taxing a company doesn't make them want to lower their prices especially if you had a model that you know this is this company that's very greedy and it uses. Events in order to jack up prices why wouldn't big oil say well we just got hit with this huge profit tax from Elizabeth Warren so now we got to pass it on to the consumer. And raise prices even more right so even in her own worldview it's not clear to me how raising prices raising taxes on big oil is supposed to help the little guy. Well I know that station owners make only a few pennies per gallon and that's constantly adjusted above their costs so they're actually counting on you when you fill up your card you get you know 20 gallons they might make 50 cents off you they're counting on you to come in and buy that bag of chips or that soda or coffee or something that which is where they're actually making their money. But beyond that I'm just not sure that Americans understand the extent to which let's say $10 per gallon gasoline would absolutely devastate the US economy and I'm not sure everyone understands how far flung. I mean our country is built on roads and roads are roads and transit I mean you know you go to Texas things are far flung things are really far apart you go to the you know go to Southern California. That is car culture that people are so far apart and oftentimes you know inflation has driven housing farther and farther away from work center so what they call the inland empire in Southern California for example along the 15 freeway. There are lots of people who live out there because well up until recently not so much now up until recently you know you could get a house out there for maybe 400,000 or 500,000 instead of a million. And so those people drive huge distances every day oftentimes in their commutes to go to work and pay the mortgages on those houses and it's this is not something that people ought to be taking lightly or say well it's just a it's just a minor cost for most people. The less money you make, the greater percentage of the money you do make is spent on really basic things like gas and groceries and rent. And I don't know how the Democrats turn this to their advantage because I'm not sure that they can control where gas prices go or tamp them down between now and the midterm elections and I'm not sure that their narrative is going to work. I mean Americans like the idea of green energy. I think Americans in some senses due to propaganda like the idea of electric vehicles but they don't like them that much. I think this is this is a real problem. I'm actually very very worried about what this might mean for average Americans because everything you get everything you buy everything you consume at Target got there on a truck at least on the last mile. It may have been on a train it may have been on a ship it may have been on an airplane but you know the last mile was on a truck running diesel and I don't I don't know how you reengineer. You know transport in in the US quickly enough to electric or anything else to deal with $10 a gallon gas. Yeah I mean you're exactly right and unfortunately you know some of these people who have designs on you know a different vision of the future. They don't like the American way of life. They want people not going out of their house you know just staying in their own little cubicles and plugging into the metaverse and getting all their products you know delivered with Amazon. And even there I appreciate that still the Amazon trucks are running gasoline so that's or diesel so that's going to increase the price there but yeah I think there's I mean there's there's been a war on as you as you know Jeff I'm sure like on the left there has been for decades this notion that the American automobile represents you know a crass American capitalism you know consumerism and oh individualism you you think you're king of the road and you get to go with you instead of rubbing shoulders with the with the unwashed masses and man in terms of you know subways or something that for some people. The idea that this is going to permanently wreck the ability of people to have their own vehicle and take their kids to soccer practice and whatever they're going to think that's a good thing you know and so. I think it's a feature not a bug unfortunately for some of the people that are in positions of influence so some of this stuff it may be that the that that's what they want to have because it fits in with things they've been pushing for a long time anyway. Well on that pessimistic note perhaps but we're realistic effects we will tell you the cold hard truth here on the human action podcast we will wrap up this episode. So thanks everybody for tuning in and we'll monitor these events and Jeff and I will be back soon with another episode to keep you up to date. Catch Jeff and Bob next week for another show but in the meantime you can find a world of content like this at nieces.org.