S5 E09 - Greta Thunberg, Take the Win for Stopping Iran Oil

The Biggest Oil Disruption Ever—and the Climate Movement’s Silence Says Everything

This episode argues that a massive Iran-linked energy disruption has effectively locked up about 20% of global oil supply in the Arabian Gulf, yet major climate activists and groups (Greta Thunberg, Just Stop Oil, Greenpeace) are largely silent despite years of demanding reduced fossil-fuel use. It contrasts U.S. and European costs for food and gasoline, noting Americans still pay far less, and cites impacts like idled tankers, fewer flights (including Lufthansa canceling 20,000), and potential reductions in driving and shipping. The script claims EV adoption is declining just as high fuel prices were supposed to accelerate it, and offers three reasons for the silence: media incentives favor catastrophe, activist fundraising relies on crisis, and the disruption demonstrates that removing fossil fuels before alternatives are ready causes price spikes, instability, and harm—highlighting the need for more domestic production, LNG, nuclear, and realistic accounting of renewables.

00:00 Oil Shock Silence
02:01 Meet the 10th Man
03:25 Greta and Just Stop Oil
04:37 Road Safety Irony
05:38 Greenpeace and Tankers
07:09 Farms Flights and Fuel
09:38 Food and Gas Context
13:04 EV Moment Fizzles
14:42 Why No One Celebrates
16:57 It Was Never a Win
19:49 Realistic Energy Path
20:27 Closing Thoughts

Commentary on trending issues brought to you with a moderate perspective.

Transcript

The Tenth Man 0:00

The biggest oil supply disruption in history just happened, and the climate movement has nothing to say about it. The same people who find a climate catastrophe in a plastic straw can't find a silver lining in the greatest reduction in oil consumption in modern history. Americans spend half of what Europeans spend on food. You've never heard that on the evening news. Ask yourself why 20% of the world's oil is bottled up in the Arabian Gulf and Just Stop Oil just stopped talking. Europe has been paying$10 a gallon for years. Americans are paying half that and the media call it a crisis. The Iran conflict didn't come out of nowhere. Anyone paying attention to 40 years of Iranian behavior saw this coming. The people discouraging American oil production saw it coming too. They're not celebrating because it's not a win, and they know it./ Here's a question. Nobody in the media is asking, why are the people who spent the last decade screaming about oil completely silent? Now that 20% of the world's oil supply is locked up in the Arabian Gulf? Think about that. These are people who find a climate emergency in a sunny day in a hamburger. In a transatlantic flight or a plastic straw. The biggest oil supply disruption in human history lands in their lap, and instead of calling it a turning point, a first step, a long overdue market correction, they've got nothing. No press release, no emergency summit, no teenagers sailing across the Atlantic to declare victory, nothing. And the reason for this tells you everything you need to know about what this movement was ever actually about. Welcome to the 10th Man. Today we're connecting some dots, the mainstream press with rather leave unconnected. A B, C. News reported recently that the Iran conflict has triggered what they're calling the greatest energy disruption in history. 20% of global oil production bottled up. Tankers sitting idle prices spiking at the pump and at the grocery store. Now, let me ask you something. If you had spent years gluing yourself to highways, throwing soup on paintings and sailing across the Atlantic in a zero emission yacht to lecture world leaders about fossil fuels, wouldn't this be your moment? Wouldn't you be on television right now calling this a breakthrough? A validation, a silver lining that proves the world can function with less oil. Wouldn't you be saying finally, the global economy is being forced to reckon with its dependence on petroleum. But Greta Thunberg is quiet. Just Stop Oil is quiet. Greenpeace is quiet, they're quiet for a reason. We're going to get into that reason today. But first. Let's just enjoy the irony because there's a lot of it and nobody else is enjoying it. Let's start with Greta. The same Greta Thunberg, who was recently on camera protesting the Venezuelan oil embargo, arguing that the Cuban people were being deprived of a necessary resource oil. She was defending oil access. Now 20% of global supply is sitting idle, and she has nothing to say, not a cautious acknowledgement that the disruption, however painful is finally forcing the conversation she claims to have wanted. Not even a tweet. She wanted us to stop oil consumption. She has a passionate public reaction to everything, yet she has no reaction to the greatest involuntary reduction in oil consumption in modern history. A reduction that by her own logic should be a cause for at least a measured complicated hope. Just Stop Oil has spent years blocking traffic in London to protest petroleum's impact on the climate. Well. Somebody just stopped a lot of oil. This should be their Super Bowl. So where's the trophy ceremony? It's not just the climate crowd that's missing their moment either. Think about Mothers Against Drunk Driving. Higher gas prices mean less driving. Less driving means fewer cars on the road and fewer drunk drivers along with them. It actually goes further than that. Higher grain prices get passed along to the breweries and the distilleries, which pass them along to the bar, which pass them along to the drinkers. Now that chain is long enough, you could measure it in the accident. Statistics probably. Even though the climate movement has never let an untraceable causal chain stop them from making an argument, but higher prices mean less driving. By MADD's own math this supply disruption is doing more for road safety than a decade of legislation. They should be calling it an accidental public health victory, but instead, silence. Kinda like they were silent about George Floyd and his public intoxication. They're silent now as well. From road safety. Let's go to the ocean. Greenpeace has sailed into active shipping lanes to protest the disruption of whale migration patterns. They've raised millions of dollars to fight underwater noise pollution. The supposed sonic damage caused by commercial tanker traffic, the harm done to marine ecosystems by the relentless churn of global shipping. Well, right now, hundreds of tankers are sitting idle in the Arabian Gulf. Hundreds of ships engines off, anchors down. Not grinding through migratory routes, not generating the underwater noise that shows up in Greenpeace fundraising emails. This is the quietest those shipping lanes have been in decades. Can we measure what that's doing for whale migration in real time? No, of course not. The whole thing is bunk and we'll admit that. But Greenpeace has never once required measurable evidence before issuing a press release about marine disruption. Yet by their own standard of proof, this should be, they should be calling this an unexpected gift to marine ecosystems. They should be saying the whales are getting a reprieve that no international treaty ever managed to deliver. They should be demanding we study what happens to marine life when shipping traffic drops this dramatically. Instead, nothing. Apparently the whales only matter when there's someone to blame. Someone to blame in the west, that is. And while we're talking about the environment, let's talk about what's happening on land. High diesel prices. That means fewer tractors operating on the farms. That means less planting and less planting means less fertilizer runoff into the waterways. Well, there's also high fertilizer prices that are gonna reduce fertilizer use. So less runoff that environmental groups have spent millions lobbying against. And fewer gallons of herbicides like Roundup in the imaginary diseases that they supposedly cause. And about the fertilizer runoff. Farmers already control fertilizer use carefully because runoff is wasted money. They're actually better stewards of their land than the activists give them credit for. But responsible farmers don't fit the narrative, so that doesn't get mentioned either. And from the fields to the skies, the climate movement has spent years pushing what Europeans call flight shame, the idea that taking an airplane is a moral failing. They've celebrated the rise of train travel, and they've run the carbon numbers on every major airline flight. Well, flights are being cut. Lufthansa alone has announced a cancellation of 20,000 flights over the next six months, 20,000 fewer flights. They should be running the numbers on the carbon those flights won't produce, and putting it on a billboard. They should be calling Lufthansa's announcement, an inadvertent climate victory, proof that when fuel costs arise, aviation contracts exactly as they always said it would. This is their thesis being validated in real time, but there's nothing, not one press release. And where it gets interesting is this isn't just a missed opportunity for the left. The right is leaving something on the table as well. More expensive diesel means more expensive imports and more expensive imports mean American consumers start looking at domestic goods. That's the reshoring argument conservatives have been making for 20 years. It's the"Buy American" argument that the left too adopted whenever it became politically convenient. Yeah. Both sides have complained endlessly about trade imbalances and manufacturing moving overseas. The political class as a whole complains about the problem for decades and then refuses to acknowledge when conditions accidentally start solving it, at least in theory. And then there's food prices. Now they're complaining about food prices. And yes, prices are going up. But here's the context you never get from the mainstream media because the mainstream media has spent decades telling you that Europe does everything better than we do. Well, Americans spend somewhere between six and 8% of their after tax income on food. European households routinely spend 12 to 20%. That's double or more. And that's before you account for the tax burden that dramatically it reduces European take home pay in the first place. Adjust after tax income and the gap gets even wider. And this isn't a pandemic phenomenon or a supply shock phenomenon. And, and, and maybe this is why Americans are overweight or at least very well fed, because American food has always been cheaper proportionally than European food. It was cheaper before the disruption. It will be cheaper after, and it's still cheaper now, even with prices elevated. The same media that praises European food culture, European farming subsidies, and European agricultural policy, including excluding American products, every chance it gets will not show you that comparison because that comparison makes America look good. And more to the point, it would force them to cover the Iran disruption as a story where Americans, even at elevated prices, are still better positioned than the Europeans they spend so much time admiring. The same selective amnesia applies too, to gasoline. Americans are wincing at four or$5 a gallon for gas. And the news coverage treats this as an economic disaster. The climate movement, which which spent years arguing that cheap American gas was the problem, that artificially low(actually, market set low) prices encouraged over consumption, and that Americans needed to feel what Europeans feel at the pump. But the media have suddenly discovered sympathy for the American driver. But here's what they won't tell you. In the Netherlands, currently among the most expensive fuel markets in Europe, drivers pay the equivalent of roughly nine to$10 per gallon, about 2.3 to 2.5 Euros per liter. Do they say Euros and cents? I don't know. I'll just read it. Read it the way I wrote it. On a normal day, not during a supply crisis, just on any Tuesday. Americans at elevated crisis level prices are still paying roughly half of what a Dutch driver considers a routine. The same media that holds up European fuel prices as enlightened climate policy are now covering American prices half as high, as a catastrophe. You can't have it both ways. Either high gas prices are good climate policy or they're not. The climate crowd made that argument for years. They just don't want to be associated with the outcome, now that it's arrived, but without their permission, All of which brings us to the electric vehicle, supposedly the solution that makes everything else just a bridge to cross. If high gas prices are the climate movement's long sought inflection point, the moment when consumers finally abandon petroleum out of economic necessity, then EV adoption should be surging right now. High fuel costs, captive audience, perfect market conditions. This is what they said they were waiting for, but instead EV sales are declining. The federal tax rebates dried up. The charging infrastructure isn't there. Range anxiety is real, and every new cycle about electric vehicles right now is about why nobody wants to buy them. The movement's flagship solution is stalling in the showroom at precisely the moment it was supposed to break through. They should be using this moment to make the political case for reinstating incentives, accelerating infrastructure investment, and declaring a national transition ER emergency. They should be saying the crisis proves we weren't ready, and that readiness needs to be the national priority. This is their argument. Their moment, their megaphone, and they're not picking it up. Because picking it up means admitting the transition isn't working on the timeline they promised. And that's the one story nobody in the movement is willing to tell it. So why isn't anyone taking the win? Three reasons. First of all, the media don't cover good news. When I was a kid, I sold newspaper subscriptions to a paper called Grit. It billed itself as the newspaper that covered good news. Well, there's no Grit newspaper equivalent today, and there's a reason for that. There's a saying, if it bleeds, it leads, and that's how the press operates. So a quieter Arabian Gulf, cleaner waterways, fewer flights, less drunk driving. None of that gets ratings. Economic disruption does. The media's job as currently practiced, is not to inform you, it's to alarm you, and you can't alarm people with good stories, even if the good stories are just silver linings on a bad story because every story has to be a catastrophe. And catastrophe is what keeps you watching. Second, the movement is more interested in attention than outcomes. Try watching the coverage of the Iran conflict on TV with the sound off sometime. You would think that the war was going remarkably well for the US. It's only when you turn on the sound and look at the chirons below that, you get the full negative framing. And that's all just showboating. The performance of concern as a substitute for simple, honest reporting. And environmental groups as a whole, they operate in an identical fashion. You, they don't fundraise off good news. They fundraise off crisis. If the whales are doing better this month, or the polar bears or whatnot, they don't send you an email. If the shipping lanes are quieter than they've been in a generation, there's no press conference for that because a movement that declares victory has no reason to ask you for money and asking for money is their whole point. Third, and this is the one that actually matters, and we mentioned this already, it's not actually a win and they know it. This supply shock didn't come out of nowhere. It didn't arrive without warning. Iran has a 40 year history of using energy as a weapon of destabilizing the gulf of probing and pushing wherever it perceived weakness. Anyone paying honest attention knew this was coming. This disruption was always inevitable. The only question was when and how bad. And American oil production systematically discouraged by Democrat energy policy over the past several years could have provided the buffer that makes a disruption like this manageable rather than catastrophic. And it didn't because the politics wouldn't allow it. Just look at Britain. Like the US, they're coal rich. They shut down their last coal fired power plant with great ceremony flags, speeches, and a bunch of self-congratulation about the future they were building. Now, the people there are hoarding gasoline. Their citizens are still almost entirely dependent on petroleum based fuel. The solar panels aren't producing what was promised. The windmills aren't meeting the projections. And the whole world desperately needs American liquified natural gas. The same LNG exports that were made harder to obtain because of the Biden politics of the moment that demanded it. The climate movement isn't celebrating because this disruption doesn't validate their thesis. It destroys it. It proves that when you remove fossil fuels from the equation before the alternatives are ready, people get hurt. Prices spike, supply chains break, and the vulnerable suffer first. The orderly transition they promised turns out to depend entirely upon the disorderly world behaving itself and the disorderly world has never once agreed to do that. They spent 20 years telling us the solution is less oil. The Arabian Gulf just ran that experiment and the result isn't a cleaner planet. It's a more expensive, more unstable, more dangerous world. So they stay quiet. They keep their heads down, they wait for the news cycle to move on, and they go back to finding catastrophe and plastic straws in sunny days because that's a story they can control. The solution was never less oil on someone else's timeline imposed by someone else's crisis. The solution is more of everything pertaining to oil, more domestic production, more LNG, more nuclear, more honest accounting about what renewables can and cannot currently do until the alternatives are genuinely ready to carry the load. But that's not a message that fits on a protest sign. It's just the message the facts keep delivering whether the climate cult wants to hear it or not. This is the 10th man connecting the dots. Thank you for listening./