The Haake Take on Green Energy

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1:12This is the Tom Harbin Program. Come on online with us is our old friend Sabrina Hake, the federal trial attorney, 20 plus years. Specialized in 1st and 14th Amendment defense contributed in numerous law journals and publications including the Chicago trip. Sabrina Hake.substac.com is her website HAAKE. It's called the Hake Take, HAAKE Take, TAK, TAK, which you can easily find just plug it in over its substac. Great news letter. It's free. Sabrina, welcome back to the program. Thanks Tom. It's always nice. It's always so nice having you with us. And you always have some really interesting and thoughtful things to talk about. Gary Indiana? Yeah, yeah. So Gary Indiana is still in my heart. I lived in Gary for decades when I worked in Chicago. I still work in Chicago, but I don't live in Gary anymore. And Gary just had this horrific storm a couple of weeks ago that left almost 70,000 people without power for two weeks because Nipsco, the monopoly that runs the utility there, has

2:17been spending their resources and their time on other things. And I don't want to really go into the Nipsco stuff. But people need to understand that this is climate change. This is exactly the same warming planet that caused the glacier to fall into the pool, killing over 1,000 people. So we're really connected in a not good way, but if people start connecting the dots and accepting the commonality, we have a better chance of fighting back and doing what we need to do to address climate change, which we have the means and the science to do it. So that's basically what I was talking about. My understanding is that it was mostly low income areas. A lot of people of color who were majorly impacted by this is that reflection of this company's emphasis on upper middle class neighborhoods. Well, I don't know enough about their demographic distribution to make it about race particularly, but it's absolutely true that Gary is 90% black. And it is one of the most amazing areas you've I've ever been to.

3:19The people are resilient, they're intelligent, they've got a lot of natural resources. And Gary has some systemic challenges. You know, we had a major white flight in the 70s when the steel mills went down. I don't necessarily think it was because of race. A lot of people think it's because Gary elected its first mayor, Mayor Hatcher. I think it's because the steel industry went down hill and people left and went where the jobs were. So those two things kind of happened at the same time. But yes, it's a climate justice issue, but I don't like to focus on climate justice because we need the white boys with money to understand that this is an issue that will affect their pocketbook. When I ran for Congress in 2020, my hope, my basic premise was that Gary is dependent on steel mills. It still is. And we need those industries. Gary burns coke and coal in those industries. We have a terribly outsized carbon footprint because of it. And the whole deal is that we could be converting this to hydro power. A lot of steel mills in Germany and Sweden have been on the cutting edge for this.

4:24And it is possible to convert those coke and coal burners to hydrogen that is then powered by solar and wind. Gary has so much vacant land and they have onshore wind capability because it's right off the shore of like, I mean, it sits right on like Michigan. And I was saying six years ago that if we would convert these facilities in the long run, it would make Gary steel more economically viable because as the cost for green energy go down, the cost of making it with fossil fuels goes up. The problem with converting and not just for steel, I don't mean to pick on Gary steel, but the conversion capacity and math and technology is there. And the bigger picture, the reason we're not addressing climate change is because fossil fuel and the people with the most money, the top one percent are trying to extract as much ROI as they can out of their sunk equipment costs. Any big oil executive, if you get them under oath, will admit this. They know that fossil fuel is what's causing climate change.

5:26They have known it from the late 80s at the latest. And this has been talking about this for a very long time. And a lot of young people are upset about it, but in general, it's hard to push back when you're pushing it back against one of the biggest and wealthiest industries in the world. They are also investing by they, I mean, big oil fossil fuels, either the big oil extractors. They are also invested in wind and solar. They know that that's the next chapter. But before they will agree to jump and move most of their resources there and stop extracting as much, they want to try to get more ROI on their existing sunk costs. And to me, it's criminal. And I would like to see obviously the Supreme Court and the other courts hold them liable and accountable for the damage that they're causing. One of the statistics that I read was that fossil fuels now are turning $3,000 in profit a second. And climate change is going to cost $37 trillion per year.

6:28Just look at what happened in Gary. It's going to take years. I was just in Asheville, North Carolina a few weeks ago. They still have not recovered from the last hurricane in its take years. So who's holding the bag here? Who's going to pay for this damage? How about the people who are causing it? And Gary in particular, why I ran for Congress and I got my ass kicked, but got the message out there, was because we don't have to do it that way. We could be making steel with green energy. And it would be a lot more economical in the long run. It would be a better product for the steel industries to have. And if they don't catch up with what steel concerns are doing in other parts of the world, they will find themselves non-competitive. Because green energy is getting more affordable by the hour and fossil fuels are getting more expensive, especially when the courts, when we have a balanced court, they start finding these concerns liable for the damage that they're causing. It's going to be a lot cheaper in the long run to make steel using plain energy. And they'll be more competitive.

7:29And if they don't do that, at some point, they will find their steel can't be competitively priced. And the only way to protect them is through the traditional market manipulations of tariffs et cetera. I wonder if there might be another dimension to this. In the early 2000s, Louise and I moved from Vermont here to Portland because we had started Air America Radio and the local radio station here wanted me to do a local morning show in addition to my national show. And at that time, I think it was 2005, the Enron had collapsed. And Enron owned the local utility here in Oregon. They owned the power company here in Portland. And they were selling off all the various pieces of Enron in that process. And the city got together, the city of Portland, and maybe Multnomah County, maybe the larger metro area. And offered to buy it. And they offered actually, as my recollection, I was on the air at the time, so we were heavily covering this. My recollection is that they offered several million or tens of millions of dollars more

8:33for the utility than the private utility company that wanted to buy it was offering. And what happened was that the people who ran Enron simply refused to sell any of the various pieces that they were breaking off to any public entity. They would only sell it to another for-profit company. And so we got screwed. And we still, now we've got PG&E, which is a for-profit company that just put in for, I think, a 17% rate increase or something. So massive. I mean, it's just, wow. Is the privatization or the private ownership of a power company and Gary part of the problem? Oh, absolutely. And Gary, the state of Indiana is one of, I think, 30 states that are governed under the organized legalized monopolies. The utility regulatory commission in Indiana is supposed to watch rate hikes. They're supposed to watch what their investors are spending money on. But the kicker is that they have a guaranteed ROI on what they invested. We're trying to invest money, yeah.

9:35So it's crazy. They're going to make the more money they invest, whether it's right or wrong, the more their investors are going to extract from the process. But I mean, so after I ran for Congress, I worked for the next mayor's administration. And one of the things I was really trying to push is the fact that Gary, which is historically black and very poor, has enough vacant land and onshore wind capacity to become wealthy. I did it. And this was six years ago before AI really hit. But I did an AI search right before I came on today. And I want to share this. Gary has a concentration of so much vacant parcels, 25,000 vacant parcels. As they consolidated just 3,000 acres, they could power the entire city. If you added the wind to that, the clean energy yield would be 7,700,000 to 800,000 megawatt hours of existing vacant land, only 3,000 acres of it and onshore wind. They could sell that energy for $48 million, excuse me, $40.8 million a year.

10:39So instead of having Gary residents pay into this monopoly that screwed them royally and left them without energy for you know, not having power for two weeks left them without air conditioning, true, but it also left them without the means to refrigerate their food. So the world of rich and came in and he was outrageous what happened. And of course there's racial overtones to that, but I want to stay on the positive. I want to stay on what Gary and other cities like Gary who are subject to these monopolies could do. They could go in and rest. If there was a chain in this utility regulatory commission where the state of Indiana, the Republicans have a monopoly over it, Gary is sitting on vacant land in hydropower that could make it wealthy within a matter of 10 years. So the cost on setting up those the wind and solar came out to be about $1 billion, excuse me, that was on converting the steel mills. That's about $1 billion. The return on that would be take about 10 years to make it profitable as the energy cost

11:39go down. But for Gary in general, if they were producing this power, they would be making 800,000 megawatt hours of electricity, which sells for $41 million a year. Gary could be wealthy. That money could be going into the city of Gary's coffers and set it to this monopoly. We just need people with the will to push it through and we need, I need people in Gary and the state of Indiana to understand that this math works. Do a deep dive. If you don't with your skeptical, do a deep dive. Run the numbers yourself. I'll tell you when I ran for Congress, people don't want to talk about climate change. I was one of those Democrats bringing a policy paper to a gun fight. People don't want to hear about it. They don't want to think about it because it's an abstraction. It's an end-to-future issue for too many people. Young people of course are outraged because they're the ones that are going to be here when stuff starts flooding and burning up at a rate that you can't keep up with. But by large overall, Americans are somewhat concerned about climate change, but they don't want to talk about it. I learned that first and when I pushed this on the campaign drain.

12:41It's amazing. Oregon is on fire right now. Fire is all over the state and the fires are mostly in red parts of the state and they will not discuss climate change. It's just too horrible. What's it going to be? She's burning up in your backyard. I know. It's going to take some kind of major disaster, I suspect. They're great Sabrina Hake. Her newsletter is called The Hake Take, H-A-A-K-E, over on Subsex, or SabrinaHake.substac.com. Check it out. Sabrina, thanks so much for dropping by. That was fascinating. Did you know your brain is roughly 73% water? That's why even mild dehydration can sometimes contribute to things like headaches, dizziness, brain fog, and irritability. Staying properly hydrated with water and electrolytes plays an important role in supporting memory, focus, and mental alertness. As we age, hydration becomes even more essential for helping our bodies function at their best. That's where native hydrate comes in. Native hydrate is 100% natural, with a thoughtfully designed formula that includes BCAAs and all

13:44nine essential amino acids to support muscle recovery, strengthen overall wellness. It helps replenish key electrolytes to support your body's natural energy levels. It's free of artificial flavor, shurs, and dyes with only five calories per serving. Every order comes with a 365-day money back guarantee. Try and risk free at nativehydrate.com slash Tom THOM. And see what it can do for your hydration and wellness. That's nativehydrate.com slash Tom. Chris and a little in Colorado, I Chris, what's on your mind today? 2,000 to 3,300 data centers are planned for the US. Okay, just a few days ago, Scott Bessonet was asked by a reporter about the billions of gallons of extra water each year that each data center will use. And his answer to the reporter was, well, beef and agriculture used more water than that.

14:47And he refused to answer the next question when they asked that agriculture provides food for every American. Are they going to let American starve and use the water for data centers and not for farms? That kind of seems like that's his argument. I mean, this is the same guy who blamed Ukraine for our inflation. He's not the sharpest knife in the drawer, you know? He used to work for George Saros. He did what George told him to do, and that's how he got rich. But the guy is just at that bright. And my second point, every citizen's utility bills will go up hundreds of dollars every single month to take for the cost. They're going up hundreds, but they're already going up. I mean, there's not a utility place in the country. I'm guessing that hasn't seen significant increases in the last couple of years since a while. While the billionaire investors keep all the profits. Exactly. Exactly. And go ahead. The third point that I wanted to make is thousands of data centers powered by fossil fuels

15:55will put more climate disaster carbon pollution into the air than half the gas powered cars on the road. Yeah. Yeah. The numbers are pretty wild. You know, again, I'll say Moore's Law suggests that this is a temporary thing, but wow. Chris, thank you. Well said. I'm going to be a little bit more careful. Russ and Hickory Hill a little bit of egg. Russ, what's up? You got to wonder from outside how much longer than this party would stand at the Republican. They've got to collapse. That's not as watching Johnson, the guy running in Maine. They had Susan Collins on. Oh, I regret putting Kevin all on. Oh, kill us. We got to get rid of this guy. Another vote is one that put them in their time. Oh, now my Johnson, 92 voting places in Texas, all we're going to expand. We're going to win, win, win. Yeah. And know what the new bill is? Time you left out. 92.

16:55It's give huge tax projects to these data, data centers and make the people and they put them and pick up the tab. But you know what? You don't have to forget, actually, you didn't bring up the biggest money grabber next week for Trump. $25,155 cents a mile. When they had that convention for Trump next Tuesday, no Wednesday, Thursday, the day before our anniversary of 9-11. Yeah. This party time has no. It's also. It's also. They're a little party down in Texas is also going to happen on the first two days of the NFL season. I mean. Trump, you watch the whole show up. You know, time they're all the same. Like you said, he wants to run for president. That said, he's got right charges against them. They had to pay. It's like Malcolm Nancy. Yeah, I think Seth paid $50 grand to a woman to keep silent about.

17:57I don't know. I can't see how these guys I put in front of a fire squad. What they did to this country. He's got a lot of. Republicans love to vote for rapists, Russ. I mean, they put one in the White House. Well, that's what I'm saying. So Pete has been accused of rapists not going to disqualify him for the president of the Republican. But let's put it this way, Tom. Me and you are the same age in 10 years when it's in 19 20, 36 election. How much of the white race is still going to be their voting form? They killed the non-right race. This is what they're trying to do right now is they're trying to get everybody who's not white out of the country and invite more white people in specifically from South Africa. But now I get it, Russ. I get it. And you nailed it well. Thank you very much. Jessica in Chicago. Hey, Jessica, what's on your mind today? So I've been calling reps and senators, telling them it's not okay for a military to be

18:59purged by an incompetent idiot. I know we're living in the police state right now, but there's no way this country should be run by the drunken idiot and the orange idiot's military, who they're putting in place. And we all see it happening. So when the drunk idiot Pete was questioning it, hearing both Senator Asuf and Senator Kelly called him out for it for the way he's running their military. That by our rules, not by the American rules, the idiot has said, our military is for no quarters and no mercy. And Senator Kelly said that is against what our military law manual says. And then the drunkard idiot defended himself and said, well, I have untied the hands of our fighters.

19:59And he won't go back on his word. And he's asking for $330 billion for more than an issue of weapons, munitions. I got a mouthful of it. Yeah, because he pissed him away in Iran. Exactly. So I've called our senators and congressmen. They like what I'm saying. And I've also said they need to write up on the rest warrant for the idiot because the IACH has filed a formal human rights, human rights petition against the fisherman's family of the fisherman, Elja Dardo Karazah, he amended in that. And I messed that up. But I really hope that it comes to pay that. Yeah, well, we found us that at least some of those boats that they've been blowing up had absolutely nothing to do with drugs. They were fishermen or they were tourists. So there were people just commuting from one island to another.

21:02All war crimes, and especially the second strike, all war crimes. He had so many, over 100, he had so many war crimes against him. And I just wanted to end it with. My husband was right. My friend is serving over in the Middle East. And I said she's coming back in December. I wasn't even going to tell who put a pronoun to. My friend was told they would be over there for six months. And now the idiot has set his extending deployment into 2027 for nine months to a year. And Tom, I was able to text with them in the beginning. And I loved being, they would send me texts and they said, oh, you're having a heat wave. And I said, oh my God, what about you? And they said, I'm okay because it's dry heat. But when the bombing began in the very beginning, I text, be alert, be cautious, be careful,

22:05be wise like you are. And then I sign it love. And my text just disappeared. And so one time when I was talking to a senator, I said, you know, I text my friend in the military serving. And I said, the army, the military just stopped a text and he said, yes, they can just deny texts from going there. And then I thought about it a little bit. And I think it's because I realized it's probably not safe to text someone there's bombing going on because then they can see row in where they all of your communications to anybody that you know who is in the military overseas are going through military servers. And so they they can censor anything they want. And that's that's one of the provisions of joining the military is that you give up your first amendment. You give up all your constitutional rights essentially when you sign that contract to join the military. So Jessica, thanks, thanks for the report that's fasted and stuff. Thank you. I'm sorry if you've already talked about this, but it's the proposed land diversion out

23:15of the assembly. Oh, yeah, we mentioned that a couple of days ago, but feel free to go there again. It's outrageous. Well, not only that, but I'm thinking he's going to pull what he did at the big bend national park for his wall. He'll have Homeland Security declared some kind of emergency for rich people, you know, commuting time and wave all the laws that protect these parks. Yeah. I don't know what we're talking about. By the way, Susan, there's this very wealthy Trump donor who bought 80 somebody, hers of land that's just about adjacent to, is it Yellowstone or? It's just them. And he wants to develop it. He wants to build houses there, but he can't do that until he builds a road. You know, if he can build a road into the use of somebody from there, if he can have an easement, then suddenly the value just explodes. And so he's, you know, he's got a Trump and said, would you please help me do this?

24:19Yeah, but I'm talking about, there's a precedent what's going on down there at the big bend national park in that wall where Homeland Security's community declared an emergency and a conservation group like listed all 28 federal laws from protection of Indian sites, Indian gravesites to archaeological sites, not to mention endangered species, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And yes, it's for one of his rich friends, so they don't have to commute around the Yosemite to get to their luxury, fifth homes. It makes me sick. And I don't know. I've looked it up. There's no precedent. There's no precedent for this declaration of a national emergency down at the big bend national park, which is where the river is, you know, they're trying to go right to that park, for any kind of sale of national park property. Yeah, no precedent. It is kind of the middle Donald Trump's middle name these days. But yeah, I'm with you, Susan, it's outrageous. It's just one more outrage coming out of this guy. You know, and one more sign of how corrupt he is.

25:22Susan, thank you. Thank you. That was so well said. Thank you. Linda in Auburn, Washington. Hey, Linda, what's on your mind today? There may be one or two Christian or profess Christian listeners besides me that listen. And if they would join me in a prayer related to ecology and Trump, that this little God might do it to prove his existence. So the prayer is that Trump who likes to, he kind of wants to win the affections of everybody, even Democrats, I think. So if he will, like, get the idea, talk to the oil industry to capture methane and like, and it's a gas. So capture it like propane and have it so that our fuel running cars can actually run on methane, but it's burned very cleanly. They have, they can do this when they incinerate trash. They can re-burn the fumes. So that sort of thing. And also, he'd like to have

26:25a name. So how about he creates lots of preserves for kelp beds, forests, kelp forests, and plankton and seagrass. And also there is supposedly a type of small nuclear reactor that uses the waste to create energy. So then you don't have the nuclear waste. That way he can talk to the oil industry people that he knows probably personally and say, like, do this because we don't need any more oil coming out of the fossil fuel carbon. Okay. I get it. I get your prayer, Linda. Thank you for sharing that. Kathy and Madison Wisconsin, hey Kathy, what's on your mind today? I was just wondering if you were considering writing kind of a biography, but not the usual kind, because you've had so many experiences, so many travels, so many different kinds of jobs. I think it would be great if we learn from you what informed, actually informed your life, your worldview, your politics. Everybody wants to know how to talk art and get to be

27:26Tom Hartman. And I think that would inform us about what informed you. The random travels of an ADHD kid. I actually did write that book, Kathy. It's called The Profits Way, which is the name of a path in Germany that by mentor, Godfrey Mueller used to walk on every day where he would say his prayers and yell at the profits. So he called it the profits way. I published that back in 95 or 6. And it's still in print. You can find it if you just go to, you know, for your favorite local bookstore, you can find a copy of it. And it talks about my time in my time in Colombia, my time in Russia, my time in Israel, my time in Uganda. It's not a bit of a sell or anything. I mean, you know, it's an autobiography, but I wrote the book. You want to update it? I probably should, but I've never been, I kind of wrote it for my kids to know about me. Well, actually, they lived through it a lot of it, but I don't know. I'm always

28:30a little reluctant to talk too much about myself on the back. You know, I've had a real, I've been very blessed, Kathy. I've had a really, really interesting life. When Luis and I first got married 54 years ago, we had been reading John De MacDonald's Travis McGee novels. And he's this guy who lived on a houseboat down in Florida. And whenever he needed money, he would find things that people had lost in exchange for half of the value of them. And he would just work long enough to get enough money that he could go into the year without having to work. And we thought, that's kind of cool. His philosophy was why wait until you're old and feeble to retire? Let's take our retirement in pieces. And so we've built five businesses and sold them off. And we've retired five or six times. And we've just continuously reinvented ourselves. I'd never done anything more than five years throughout my life, other than this radio program. We've been doing

29:33this 23 years. And we started this when I retired. We retired in 2003. And actually in 97, we sold the last business and moved to Vermont and said, okay, that's it. I'm going to write books or something like that. We're just going to retire. And instead, we started the radio show and it just has turned into this thing. You know, I mean, it was supposed to be a proof of concept because I started, you know, I helped start Air America. And, you know, we started the radio show about six months before Air America went live just as a way of showing that it is possible to have a successful progressive talk radio program. So anyway, I'm, I'm, I'm blithering here. Kathy, thank you for your kind words. And, you know, the book is there if you want to. Matthew and Madison Wisconsin. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks, let's just civic media, Matthew. What's on your mind today? I'm hoping you can get Gild Doran on your program. One of these days, the author of the program last week. I want to talk about that book that inspired this far

30:38right lunacy, the sovereign individual. And how it relates to this kind of billionaire far right network around the world that wants to separate from the general public. I think because they see robots automation, these ways to just self-sustaining their own little kingdoms. And how that relates to the debt problem, the way that they're obviously trying to attack national parks and other things to pay off some kind of debt. Oh, I don't think they're trying to pay off the debt. I think I think they're just trying to transfer them to the other country, the rich friends. Yeah, these billionaire, because he also talks about how these billionaires now have so much money that they're more powerful than nation states and how states that themselves will collapse. As they're wondering if we take that stuff and you combine it with what Magyar did in Hungary. And I don't know if you talked

31:43about this yet, but one of the ways he's clawing back assets and repairing the damage that Orban their Trump did and his people was Magyar is using the argument that if you are not, if you're obviously against the good of the country and the people, you're technically not a political party at that point, you're illegitimate. And he's using that with his supporters to get those assets back and things like that. Do you see anything in our constitution or a way that we can make a similar argument to get back some of the money they're stealing, whether it's the gold from the treasury or money they've taken from pensioners, all these other things, these ways they're taking from us. I think an awful lot of what Trump and his cronies have been doing probably falls into the category of fraud. And you can recover damages in addition to the

32:43original loss with a fraud prosecution. These guys are looting our country. And stuff like Trump and Elon Musk firing all these IRS officers whose only job was to auto billionaires and they're estimating that we're going to lose $800 billion this year because the IRS is no longer auditing the morbidly rich people. I mean, stuff like that, arguably they have the power to do that to fire these people, but the consequences of it are just so obvious to promote fraud. So I'm not an expert on the nuance of how this all happens, but Matthew, thank you. Thank you for pointing that on.