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Dirty Moderates. My guess today stands at the intersection of, I think, the most important things going on in the world right now. I would say Steve Levine, who is here, is at the intersection of technology, oil, green energy and foreign policy. And I think the fact that he's orbiting in that little quartet of ideas in our world is so important. Steve, thanks for joining us. Thanks, Adam. I just want to go back to the beginning with you a little bit because of your as I said to you before we started your protein career, given where you started and what you're doing now. So first and foremost, as warrages on in Russia, you were a Wall Street Journal reporter. Were you in charge of the Bureau when it was the Soviet Union after so I arrived a couple of weeks after it broke up. So tell us about I know there was a very interesting experience about you being expunged, and why don't we start with that and your reporting work expelled? Well, they might have expunged me, too.
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I am a former Foreign Correspondence. I was based in the Philippines, first for a few years, then Pakistan, Afghanistan. And then my last posting was the former Soviet Union. And I covered the stands. So all those countries that end in stand in Central Asia and the Caucuses, so those eight republics, and
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they were not countries before I arrived there. And I arrived three weeks after the place broke up. And it's not defined. So as a reporter in that space, it is thrilling to everything you write. You're figuring out what is this place. And it's not just one place, but again, eight places Armenia, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, all those stands, Central Asia, that whole country. Yeah. Do they fit together? What's their identity? What does it matter to the rest of the world? It started at one thing, which was a bunch of places that had small wars. It took a while for them to figure out that. But then it turned into a geopolitical conflict, and it's because oil it turns out the Caspian Sea separates the Caucuses from Central Asia, has a lot of oil. And a conflict erupted between the United States and Russia. Who is going to control that oil? And Furthermore, how could these countries be permanently or semi permanently excised from the Russian Empire, meaning that Russia was not going to
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do what it's doing now in Ukraine, rush back over the border and take over these countries again. And that was oil. That was oil. And so that's how I get to oil and geopolitics or energy and geopolitics, that's the most basic geopolitics. Do you survive as a sovereign country or not? Yeah. And obviously, it's interesting how you were reporting on a post Soviet Russia, and yet how that kind of and of course, oil and how we've now morphed into a full throated discussion in the years following, and certainly in the past 15 years about green energy and the battery. And you write a publication called The Electric, which is on the Silicon Valley website, the information where people can read about what you're doing. And one of the reasons I also wanted to have you on, and I think we have a lot of cross currents here today. Am I right in saying that when it comes to the electric car and Steve has a book out called Powerhouse, by the way, guys, which talks all about the battery. But am I correct
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that? But for Elon Musk, the supply chain of this business is really just in the hands of China. Is that a fair statement? Yes. Wow. Absolutely fair. Yeah. I didn't want you to say yes because I think that's so depressing. But I've heard your expertise. Yeah, no, it's true. But at least we have the guy, right? I mean, there was one Steve Jobs also, and we had him. And I just learned today this is a crazy thing. Pete Buttigieg, our transportation Secretary, has never spoken to Elon Musk. He said, no, I'm here just like I am for all the other auto companies. If Elon would like to speak to me, he can call me. Right. Really, Pete, you're bigger than Elon Musk. Well, I think and that's actually very pertinent to one of the reasons I created this podcast, my take on that. First of all, I like people to judge very much. Do I think he's a Secretary of transportation or qualified for it? I don't know. I like him. I think he's got a bright future. But I think that speaks to a certain subtext in our
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politics. Right. Which is the Democrats are in now we're for green energy, but big bad Elon Musk, he might by Twitter. He might be, I don't know, politically a hybrid, maybe conservative who would so free market. It's such a viewpoint. And I think that really is why Pete probably hasn't done that. I think it's short sighted just because it's short sighted. But I think it's woven into the ideological idiocy that we have in our country, which is the stupid binary of, boy, people just are on team Blue or team Red and everyone's either here or a villain. I think it's so damaging democracy. And as we can see, it's certainly putting us a tremendous competitive disadvantage. Yeah. I have nothing to say because I agreed with everything you just said. The surprising thing about Buttigieg, who I agree, so bright, articulate, and seemingly free of these ideological hangups. But yet he has decided he's going to be subject to this one. And it also has to do with unions. Right. So the administration
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only wants to deal with companies that have unions. I'm pro Union, but the biggest guy in electric cars is not a Union guy. Does it matter that much? Right. So we need to embrace our champion, who is Musk and
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champion him. And also the short sightedness of that. Let's unpack it. I hate that word, but I'm going to use it. Let's unpack it. You probably do that in your classes at Georgetown, right. You have Elon Musk, who is the guy when it comes to electric cars. Right. And you've got dying industries. Our manufacturing sector is blighted, if not completely obliterated. We don't have a powerful Union presence like we did in the middle of 20th century. Right. And we have people who need to transition out of, for example, coal mines because they can't work there anymore into new opportunities to me. Right. In the public private partnership that I always think the government should have with the free market. I'm a free market here. First, shouldn't we be encouraging Elon Musk because he has an opportunity to hire and employ so many people, I would believe to be very more than livable wages.
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I don't do their job for a living. And I seem to feel like I knew this when I was two or something. Anyway. Yeah, you're right. So think about Henry Ford. And this is important not just because Henry Ford invented he popularized automobiles, but because Elon Musk is following Henry Ford's script. I'm currently reading a biography of Ford, and I can tell you Elon read this book. You can just see tell me about this book and tell me how it overlaps with Elon. That's so interesting. Well, vertical integration and the building, the construction of big factories, also the craziness. Right. So where Elon
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is very sensible economically when it comes to his business, but says some pretty crazy things on Twitter. Well, this was Henry Ford also. So he set up. But he was a vicious antisemite. I know he was. Yeah. And so how do those fit together? It just means forwarder's pro worker,
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the famous $5, he doubled the wages. He forced the whole industry to double the wages of workers to Ford, the company two universities set up and to train the workforce. And this is something you're describing. So Musk can drive up wages so we can set up a system where all these factories, the battery factories, the automobile assembly factories, the metals processing, all of these are jobs that forget the $20 wage. Right. Go for 30, let's go for 40 and train people in those clubs. And there will be tons. But see, that is also like you would think. Right. That the government's policy would be to encourage an Elon because Elon is innovating and that would hire people who've been previously, let us call them displaced. But instead, we're stuck in the politics of Elon Musk is going to reinstate Trump to Twitter. So therefore, we can't engage them. Number one, that is so preposterous. Number two, what's it have to do with the price of eggs? And I don't think it's vindictive per se, but it's
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sort of hamstrung all these opportunities in an industry that, hey, the American automakers aren't doing it. Let's talk about the Chevy Volt. What happened to that? Why is that so deficient on our country's automotive manufacturers part? Let's talk about that. I want to understand one thing that isn't recalled about. You asked what are some of the similarities? So Ford was the first manufacturer of commercial airplanes in the 1920s. Ford aviation. I do not know that Ford. I love learning some every day. I love it. And then when everyone else caught up and everyone had their own aviation factories, he stopped. But it does tails with what we're seeing in Silicon Valley. Right. Everyone wants to make these aviation companies. And in World War II,
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he was anti war going into World War I and fought against it. And in World War II, once the wars were engaged, Ford was the biggest maker of the warplanes that used in World War II. And so again, the Pentagon just decided you had all these people promising that they could make these planes, but they knew that Ford could actually do it. And I'm sure Ford right. And again, I'm reading biography, but I didn't know about his antisemitism. He probably was opposed to the war because of his America first anti Semitic views, I'm assuming. But then the war took off. It was a war time economy and he capitalized on. Is that right? I'm assuming. Right. It was like a father clockwise kind of guy, you know what I mean? Not him himself. But he was in that camp of isolationism which sort of encoded the antisemitic movement that didn't want us to get involved. Right. And not certain that Hitler is such a bad guy. Right.
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But that's Musk also. We have Musk Musk has done in space. We know what he's done with vehicles. I feel like we're chewing this over probably as much as we can. But just to say that ideologically we do as a country get tied up in knots about what touches all of the right tones if you're left or touches the tones if you're right. And we're going to fail if we keep doing that. Yeah. But it's a good segue because of the Mustang, because one of the big questions I want to talk to you about today is I'd like you to go back and take the listeners, myself included here about the origins of the electric car as an idea. I don't mean electric car in the history of the world. I just mean, when did we begin engaging it, thinking about it? Can you, like trace that path? Just go back to 2009 or when did this start? So, of course, electric cars were made and driven and favored at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century. Ford's wife Clara loved her electric car. But the gasoline
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engine and the starter, right. When the starter was invented, so you didn't have crank. That was the key to combustion winning. And electric vehicles were tried episodically through the century they were tried in the 60s by Ford. We know that GM actually produced the EV one and then unproduced it in the 1990s. But this chapter right now starts in 2003. You have JB Strawble, who is Musk's alter ego when it comes to the birth of Tesla, meets Musk in Southern California. And JB is all about hydrogen. At that point, he was in his 20s, super young guy, and wanted to put together a hydrogen vehicle and heard that Musk had just come into all this money from PayPal. He was running SpaceX at the time and had lunch with him. Right. And ran the idea. What about it? I'm not interested. But then later in the conversation, he mentioned, what about electric cars? I'm working with this company that was putting together and had put together an electric car. And Musk attacked that. Yes, I'll go for that.
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And sort of just fast forward that worked its way through. So over the next five years,
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conceived the name Tesla, and they work their way through to making the first Tesla Roadster in 2008. And they got all their friends in Silicon Valley to buy them. There's something about I mean, I personally don't have this bug, and maybe you do, but somehow cars and electric cars strike a chord with a certain kind of person and the same people who create these new companies in Silicon Valley, this strikes a chord with that kind of people. So he sold out of the Roadster, and that validated the idea. Could you make an electric car? Could you have an electric car company for a long time? Like from then that's 2008, really, until 2019, it was regarded as bonkers electric vehicles. Regard as bonkers. Elon was on the edge of bankruptcy numerous times through that period. He's called a fraud.
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All these names and this will never work. The other auto companies only dabbled in this. You said, what happened to the Volt? Exactly. And in 2019, he suddenly turned the corner, right. And the Model Three came onto the market. And this created like a mania. You must remember, people were lined around the block around the world to put a deposit on this car. And that finally woke up the other auto companies,
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China, by the way, China and the United States embarked on the EV race on the battery race at the same time, 2009. It had to do with the financial crisis.
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We're desperate to create a real industry. After the both economies crashed, economies around the world crashed. Both of them glommed onto electric cars and batteries. But the US dropped it as soon as the economy was back. Cylindra. And a one, two, three was an electric company. It also failed. And you get these again, these politics, you can't simply be an electric car company. It's not an electric car company. It's an Obama mobile. Oh, yeah. Also Lindra thing they ran with that. That was a Fox News special for a long time. Yeah. Okay. But China stuck with it. Why is China in the catbird seat now? Because it stuck with it for the whole decade of the teens. In 2019, Musk marked his first profitable quarter, and the rest is history. We're in 2022, he's the wealthiest man in the world. Tons of money in the bank and the other auto companies don't know. None of them can say flatly they're going to make it. I mean, obviously, it's also an interesting discussion because here we are having energy
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in this country, in the world, and obviously the whole test of the whole electric car thing figures into that. But, you know, since you are a man of great knowledge about oil as well, I'm very interested in this the energy crisis, because historical comparisons are often so facile and incorrect. It's the Jimmy Carter years and all this stuff. Well, first of all, it isn't because that was OPEC and we were in a very different place. But what do you think? Obviously, I'm not asking for a policy prescription per se, but the high gas prices, which for a lot of reasons exist. What do you think America can do right now? To start, we had an ideal political system. I don't care if it's Republican or Democrat to start encouraging our dependence on the combustion engine and our move towards the electric car. Can you address that in a sort of distal kind of way? Yeah. Simply encourage, do the things necessary to make batteries, the battery supply chain work. It's as simple as that. So I'm kind of not
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one of these let's get off of oil people because I think that you will get there by producing an alternative technology that people want to buy. And this whole thing of stopping or hounding investment banks and hedge funds not to invest in fossil fuel companies. This is a huge mistake. We have a civilization that relies on a certain amount of energy. And we were independent. We were I understand people don't like it. Right. The global civilization relies on the energy infrastructure that we have. So are you suggesting not you but suggesting that they don't want to have lights at night? No, they do want lights at night. They want heat. They want to move in vehicles, some kind of vehicles. And so you've got to produce the technologies that get you there. And then naturally, the technologies that you don't want, like the fossil fuel technologies, they'll fall away. But what you don't want to do is stop our civilization or we're there. Right. Our government policy is a day late and a dollar
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short. Right. We had government policy that didn't encourage for all these politically radioactive Obama era reasons, encourage the growth of the electric car. And then we have the Biden administration. Right. Sort of basically. And many in the administration and many activists saying if we were just off foreign oil, you know what I mean? And we were completely energy independent and had clean and renewable energy, the world's crisis would go away. It just seems so, to your point, so naive and so misguided and again, caught up in the swirl of politics. And it's quite frankly, it's just stupid, Steve. It's just stupid. It makes people feel good. Right. I get asked this question about so what can we do to get off oil invent a better battery, go become a battery scientist and work on batteries. But it's preferred to bang the drum about oil. It's preferred to paint nasty signs on the house of the CEO of Exxon. It's going to come back and buy it. Is it already is. Why are oil prices so high?
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It's because we haven't invested in exploration. There's a shortage of oil around the world. So prices it's supply and demand. So oil prices are down. We have super high prices. Our frackers are not responding to that signal, that economic signal and drilling more. And why is that? The reason is that the hedge funds, the private equity funds, a couple of things. They got tired of supporting the frackers through low profit and lost years, and they want to make sure they're earning money. But also it's bad politics. It's super bad politics. Anyway, we've already said it, but that's what's happening. That's why we have high prices. Right. What is because you covered Russia, which is also a good, interesting pivot point. What is the relationship of our gas prices to Russia? And I asked that to say because there's natural gas, that's one thing. And Russia can sell its oil elsewhere, presumably. Right. There's just so much Din going, so much in the Din and the noise of this. You know what I mean?
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And obviously it has an impact, but can we delve into what that impact is and how Russia relates to this? I really want to have. You want to talk about this, too. Yeah. There's not a connection. It's a lot of, as you say, Din and noise about Russia and oil. Oil is since, like the 1870s, when the oil tanker was invented, oil has been a fungible commodity. That's what gives it so much power is that it can go anywhere in the world. It can be used anywhere. It can move on a dime. It's going to the US. Okay. The US doesn't want it. Let's turn we're going to take it to Spain instead. So that's it. And so Russia sells, I think now the last time I checked, nine or 10 million barrels of oil per day or drills, I should say produces nine or 10 million. That's among the highest production in the world. And it sells maybe 5 million barrels a day. And it's earning all that money since prices are high. That's what people are upset about, that we want Russia to stop fighting, to stop flattening Ukraine
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and to behave itself. And so we don't want to fund the machine and it earns most of its money not from natural gas, but from oil far more. We ourselves never bought that much Russian oil. So we just want to stop it elsewhere, like in Europe, stop the market for Russian oil. But its flow of oil has not stopped. It's still going. And so it's not responsible for this. And really, Europe, stopping buying Russian oil will not hurt Russia. Russia will simply sell it elsewhere. Right. It's fungible. Right. They're not just going to say we're out of business. I know people are both sort of weird naivete, and they're trying to connect things that shouldn't be connected. So I have a couple of questions, because the dirty moderate, we get this sort of larger political issues, too. Should cancel the Keystone pipeline? No. Why? Yeah. Again, this is oil produced in Canada and flowing down into the United States. It's meant for export, so it's not necessarily for use in the United States. It's again,
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what is the upside of canceling the Keystone pipeline? It's one of these virtue signaling things. We need the oil. Canada is selling the oil, and we're like the ways station for it to get to the rest of the world. What are we saying by canceling that pipeline? No, it should not have been canceled. But politically, it's sort of one of these things in the Democratic Party. You have to be against it. Right. I know. And the oil is exported. Sorry. Is coming from Canada to ultimately be exported, to go down to the Gulf to be then sold to China. Is that right? Is that how it works? Well, wherever it was going to work, is it transported by rail? Well, now it is. Yeah. It was going to be pipeline. Rail is far more dangerous. I know. That's what I was saying. No, I know that you're putting it on rail. Has anyone ever heard of a train crash or an explosion? I mean, isn't that hazardous? In many ways more hazardous. Yeah. We're poorly led. We're letting people have a megaphone who are idiologues.
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Yeah. Not smart. No. Well, I think one of the things that's happened, our politics with environmental policy, certainly in the 50 years that the EPA has been around. Right. And just the whole climate change catastrophe and all of that is implicated in that discussion is that the left, I should say, has a very onesizefitsall approach. Look, climate change is very real. There's real damage being done. There are ways you can address it, and there are ways you can address it. By the way, there's China and India, too. So even if we had the perfect green policy, that doesn't necessarily mean there's not going to have deleterious effects on the climate. But what the left, I think, does is loops everything in sort of an environmental activism that is always,
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I would say, sort of pure in the minds of never ever believing that anything business does in the marketplace is good. By definition, everybody is either a polluter or an oil Baron. No, seriously. And I think that has become an infection in the blood of the Democratic Party to the point that Joe Biden knew I voted for. I'm an independent. I'm not a member of either party. I have issues with both. But it's already moderate. But Joe Biden comes in and with day one, he signed that Keystone pipe. I mean, I remember jumping up and down and I remember thinking and thank you for your explanation and obviously just want more than me knowing it listeners to know I thought myself, why are you excited about this? A it's been an albatross around his neck now, especially with high gas prices. But it just wasn't good policy, irrespective of our economic or our post pandemic slump or supply crisis. Right. Yeah. A lot of this, Adam, was interesting. So the oil companies have been jumping up and down shouting
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for years, we want to drill. We want permission to drill on federal lands and offshore the East Coast, offshore all the way down to Florida. I am absolutely certain. I know oil guys basically what they want. They're like your kids. They want permission to name it. Right? To go out 24 hours a day and never come home unless they want to. But will they do that if they have permission? That's the question. Oil companies give them the permission. They won't do it.
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They're filled with projects. They're not drilling. We've already said they're not fracking. Right. They're not adding even though prices are above $100. It's a game. Stop having this debate. Should we not allow drilling exploration on federal lands offshore? Just open it up, end the conversation. I guarantee you there's not going to be drilling in either one of those places. That's interesting. What is your take on the argument that
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no matter our oil necessity, no matter what, then this is the other side. We have to be more than mindful of the environmental concerns. I mean, how do you balance what they used to call the cost benefit analysis of this? Well, it depends, you know, exactly what you're talking about. Which part of it like, for example, in fracking, natural gas fracking, they're not regulating the emission of natural gas fumes, which is crazy like a main contributor to that should be. I mean, there has to be sensible regulation.
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Really. The only part that I sort of object to is sort of the mindless stigmatization of fossil fuels and getting off of fossil fuels today when we need them. And fossil fuels are going to be part of the economic equation around the world into the second half of this century. And we're going to step by step get there. Let's do that. I could just tell you that Democrats need smarter about it should be the sensible party and don't get caught up in the ideological virtue signaling stuff. Amen to that. What about the claim that oil companies are just ripping everybody off now, which is why gas is high. What do you say to that? No, it really is. There's a shortage, the shortage of oil and it has to do with you population didn't want oil companies to drill. Right. So they haven't been. Right. It's not because they said, okay, well, you don't want but sort of the environment in which. Right. And so they just haven't they haven't been vesting and it's going to get worse. Right. Because they haven't
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been investing in the upstream. This whole decade is going to be like that. Does it make any sense, given the environment, for the oil companies to invest in new supply for the 2030s? This is a question. Right. So they're saying they're going give them the politics and
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there's real pressure on them not to again, we're not there yet. And anyway, it's a problem. Do you happen to know in the by part is an infrastructure bill that was passed, Thankfully, Bill Beckbetter bill was shelved at least for now, because there's so much wrong with that. But I was a supporter, I think in principle, the bipartisan infrastructure bill, is there any money for battery, for green energy? What are they allocating that doesn't mean it'll work because bureaucracy often stifles it. But do you know if there was an attempt to get the United States a little bit more on a path to reality? Yes, there is. So there is $7.5 billion in there for electric cars and batteries and the supply chain, it's a drop in the bucket. And so it costs a lot more than that. We're not being systematic about organizing.
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Biden has said he wants 40% or 50% of the vehicles that the new vehicles sold to be electric. We know approximately. So half of 16 is eight. So that's 8 million. How big should the batteries be? Okay. This size. Okay. Those batteries require this amount of lithium, nickel, manganese. Okay. So how many mines, how many processing plans do we need? This is easy. Add up like you and I could do it in this conversation the math. But they have not done it. Right. So that should be the plan. There should be like big white paper, Butcher paper on the wall in which they've written all this. Who's going to do the nickel? Who's going to do the manganese? Who's going to process it? Okay, let's get it going. And we want a timetable. We want it done by 2027. Let's say right now we're not doing that. No. It's almost anti innovative in a way, counter innovation. Right. In a way. And it's a stasis and it's hurting us.
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I'm paraphrasing the Groucho Marks quote. You know, politics is the art of looking for trouble and then applying all the wrong remedies. Once you diagnose it, then the Democrats will advance bad policy for policies they didn't appropriately advance. You know what I mean? Whether it's blaming fossil fuels or further prohibiting drilling or whatever else comes about that will ultimately not just in this time of our crisis, but really hurt our energy policy down the road. Don't you agree? Yeah. So in a few short months, the House is going to switch to Republican control, be a red wave. That's what the polls show. I'm just going by the polls. The Senate might also. And so the chance that's it basically the chance is now to get it right. I had one question like our whole lives, your whole life. My whole life. Infrastructure has been a question we read in the newspapers our whole lives about crumbling bridges and hospitals and so on. And there's a number Buttigieg says his list of requests $3
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trillion. That's the amount to fix in all the States. Right. When the infrastructure bill passed, my first question was why didn't they just take out the list and put all, every dollar to that? Right. Infrastructure was never done. Here's the chance that the politics lined up. It's not going to happen again. Anyway, I did have that question. Yeah. Well, that's because I worked on the Hill. That's not how Washington does business. I mean, the bipartisan infrastructure bill, which was a legislative victory for Biden, remember, was an opportunity for Republicans and Democrats alike. Right. To pork barrel their way to popularity. So it became less about and there are very good things in it. I believe we need better broadband and Amtrak and all these things. But I don't think it's why Mitch McConnell voted yes. And Kentucky got another bridge or whatever they needed. Bridge to nowhere, right. Bridge to nowhere. So that's really foundational to what animated the politics of that bill. And you
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know what's not foundational or even central, probably not even that ancillary is what to do about the battery and electric cars. It's there. But it wasn't treated as a priority. You know what I mean? I don't think so. Yeah. But Adam, so all of these projects, infrastructure by its nature is pork barrel. So that whole $3 trillion that the States are asking for is pork barrel. It's not like we're not talking about it's. Just recognizing the opportunity, the once in a lifetime opportunity things lined up. You and I both know how hard it is to get Congress to agree to spend for infrastructure. And here was that opportunity. I see what you're saying. And I know they're competing things and they have virtue to those other. Okay, but you got to make choices. Well, and also the bills and I have to say this, when I say the bills are if you'll allow me to comprehensive, there's such a thing. Meaning, remember the bill back better bill, it was universal, pre K. It was rental leave. It was more money
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for infrastructure. It was tax on this. It's mind numbing. And all of that becomes a shambles, a jumble, meaning that they should have done it in a non corrupt, truly a world that doesn't exist. A bipartisan infrastructure bill should have dealt with an infrastructure, not just Congress people's pork barrel, but also real energy policy as well. This was a moment, not some 1992 bill, which is when it should have happened. And the old usual, well, we'll get your mansion's vote because now we're in the park. We should be dealing with the fact that, as I said at the beginning, but Freelan Musk, China controls the supply chain. And that can't be good. You reported on Russia, you report on China. These are the behemoths, these are the world is being remade. Look, Trump pulling us out of TPP was a disaster, in my opinion. Trump's tariffs were a disaster in my opinion. I think tariffs are just taxes at the border. And as the cost gets passed along, it's just not that, again, this economics is not
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that complicated. You know what I mean? Yeah, but the Democrats are against TPP also. They are. Well, the left is Obama Shepherd it. So the left is that's Bernie Sanders nonsense.
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It's kind of I hate to say it's a scale, almost quasi Marxist view, you know what I mean? And that's punitive to corporations. Do you know what I mean? And to the idea that trade could, we know, should flow freely, goods and services should flow freely with safeguards. But the idea that you're going to put up some kind of protectionist wall, like the Holly Smooth Act or something, and America was built behind protectionist walls, but that America doesn't exist because that world doesn't exist. Right. So one question that I have. So I am the only one who in my circle is who I know I'm pro Biden. So I like Biden because I think he's sensible. But who succeeds him? Who is the next Biden? Well, one of the things that's happening here and we hear a dirty moderate, we sort of sort of we fight like hell for democracy. And every day, whether it's Twitter, whether it's here first and foremost, country first, democracy first, we're in big trouble. The Democratic Party, I'm answering your question
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on that is a 50 state party. I always tell people with a much more moderate base than it's Washington face, right? We saw everyone said, oh, no, Biden had 20 people on that stage talking a lot of rubbish, in my opinion. And Joe Biden, who is more feeble than he once was, Cruz to the nomination. Bernie had another bite at the Apple. They can't DNC then screw them again. You know what I mean? You saw what happened. He didn't win single county. He didn't win single county. People don't want it. And they keep talking about it again, like the way MAGA is a loud minority, but it's a menacing one. The Bernie Bro, Lee, the Squad. And they are a minority of people. Those people would never get elected outside those safe districts. It's not what America want. America is not conservative or Liberal. It really is moderate. I believe the Democratic Party. I'm answering your questions, trying to answer your question. Yes, it has a problem because the national media coastal party is looking for the next,
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I believe, successor to buy to be some sort of kind of evolved progressive, for lack of a better word. But in truth, the party is not that progressive. The actual party is a more moderate party. So who's a successor? Elizabeth Warren, I think has terrible policies on a lot of things. I don't dislike her, but I think she has some bad ideas. I don't think Buttigieg is ready. I don't have a distaste for Kamala Harris, but boy, is she unpopular. And the fact of the matter is if Trump is the nominee, he may well be your DeSantis. They're going to have to find some moderate governor to even have a shot, especially if even with the Republican Congress or Republican win this November. There's a lot of good things. But the feeling is that we are in a transitional slump. Right. Things aren't going the way they should have. All this post coven world has transformed us enough for the better. And the Democrats at the national level are going to bear the brunt of that this year. But I think to answer
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your question and to question your question, who is going to be the standard there? And I'm concerned I'm concerned because I'm voting mostly blue, because I feel the alternative is an authoritarian group of wackos liars, white nationalists and assholes. I take it you don't like them, but I don't really like I have terrible problems with the Democratic Party's policies and a lot of things for this conversation. Yeah. I'm politically homeless here. I am suspended in mid air, but I think a lot of Americans are. Yeah. So it would be good. So I'm totally all that you said the whole way you framed that on who the next person should be, sensible, moderate. So I like Tim Ryan. Me too. Ohio, what is the name of that Colorado Senator? Two of them ran it. Bennett. Oh, Michael Bennett. Yeah. He is sensible. He is sensible. Yeah. The Democrats I don't have even following. Speaking of Colorado politics, Governor Jared Polis is a very forward thinking and I don't mean progressive. He's really breaking
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the mold. He's kind of a libertarianish guy. He stopped a lot of the overmassing of kids in schools much sooner. He sent people back to school. He said we have to live our life. And he's really about how can the market work with the government to be innovative? I don't know what his national profile would be, but he certainly got good ideas. And maybe him, I don't know. So we're really focused on Colorado saying, if you're asking, I'm thinking because there aren't a lot of look, there was that guy, Steve Bullock out of Montana, and he didn't win his race against. He had been governor. He lost to Steve Gaines in 2020. So he was a guy like a Tim Ryan's, I think the most important Senate race in the country. But back to energy policy. I'd like to ask you this before we close out. Okay. If you could right now implement three things, green energy, electric cars, your whole area of expertise for energy policy. You were brought in, you literally could sign and do it like a King. What would those
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three things be? What do you think we would do? What's the best thing for America? I don't care what party anybody's in to do right now. So
00:49:47
it would be heavily EV oriented. So organize the supply chain. So I think don't worry about the vehicles. They'll take care of themselves, the gigaf battery, they'll take care of themselves. Where we need help organizing in a very systematic like a war footing, getting the supply chain, the raw material supply chain organized. I would be super
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pro, but not anti fossil fuels. Right. So making sure that while we're getting there that we don't lose again, I keep using this word civilization, but our standard of living, how we live. Right. I mean, if you want to lose forever in politics,
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advocate politics, that results in all the lights going out. And what's a third? I guess it would be something environmental. Right. A third leg on making sure that while the oil guys are drilling, that they are capturing emissions, that we are in all the places that we're watching, people really care about that that's bipartisan. Sure. Right. And so that's it. How about you? Do you have three? Well, I think first I actually would put a reality based fossil fuel policy first to your point. You know what I mean? That's number one. Number two, I do agree about federal land. I think, for example, take the Arctic refuge out in Alaska, things like that. I mean, we need to be as flexible and open in our energy policy. I do agree with the drill with you, because fossil fuels, we're not in a non fossil fuel world, but because we have, I think, been derelict in the way we've failed to innovate and move to green energy, we have to play it as it lays. Do you know what I mean? Yeah, it's very important.
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And also I am not of the belief that some tax, some windfall tax on oil companies akin to what the Carter administration did makes any sense. There's no evidence that that works. I'm not here to Hawk for big corporations, but I don't think that makes for good public policy. I think that's economic virtue signaling, and I'm not sure what that accomplishes. So I would not be for that. My energy thinking evolves all the time. I'm constantly learning about it because it's become so chaotic. Do you agree we should be doing a windfall profits tax on oil? I'm not sure what that does. I could be wrong. No. It suggests that the oil companies are over profiting when they've gone through years of losing money and now they're suddenly making money. But I do think that there could be some kind of a tax incentive that resulted in more investment. For example, in the fracking. It is a national security issue when you're producing what you require and your exporting. Because our trade imbalance was almost
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entirely energy driven. We were importing so much oil, suddenly we're not that's good for the economy. Yeah. And then balance out over time. Things bounce out. We are moving. We're moving to a battery driven EV age.
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We need to put the pieces in place so that can happen in the smoothest, fastest way. Right. Steve Levine, you are a dirty moderate. I'm going to put that moniker on you. I have to tell you it's been great talking to you because you make sense. And folks, you should know two great books I recommend of Steven Powerhouse which is his latest. And then Putin's power because Steve has been at the intersection, as I said, of very important quadrants here in our world. Whether it's oil and green energy, geopolitics and of course the electric car. So he is prodian again. And I really enjoyed my conversation with you. I learned a tremendous amount today and I love hearing someone make sense about energy policy without hyperbole. Right. Thanks so much, Adam. It's really been fun and it's good to hear someone being non ideological at discussing these issues sensibly. I'll close by saying that I was fortunate in my education at Brown and NYU to learn critical thinking. I think I probably had it anyway.
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But to be a critical thinker means that you have to issue dogma. You have to resist certainties that are based on nothing and think more and read more and go deeper. So anyway, I appreciate that. Steve. Thanks for joining us. Come back and see us anytime. Thank you. Thanks, Adam.