Premiered on April 1, 2023
He noted Biden adviser for clean energy John Podesta’s keynote speech at CERAWeek, saying: “He was talking about the green initiative money associated with the Inflation Reduction Act and the omnibus bill, which came out to—with both legislations, it’s over $500 billion of taxpayer money that’s set aside for green initiatives. He referred to that money—this is really interesting—he referred to that money as government-enabled investment, which meant that any company that was in the audience, including oil and gas companies like Shell, Exxon, and so forth, Chevron, could qualify for that money … as long as they had investments in green energy initiatives like hydrogen, and so forth. And all of the major oil companies are doing this. As a matter of fact, they’re rebranding themselves from Big Oil to Big Energy, which means that they’re going to qualify to get part of that $500 billion omnibus and Inflation Reduction Act money for green initiatives.”
As for what the solution is, Lee said: “My viewpoints on this is that we do need to migrate part of our grid to renewable energies. And I think you’re going to see a lot of that’s going to be done through hydrogen. … And one of the things they’re doing with hydrogen is they’re able to go into a coal power plant and say, ‘Okay, it’s 100 percent coal today, but we can actually retrofit this power plant with hydrogen, and make it 50 percent dependent on coal in the future.’ And I think that’s a compromise that we need. We can’t go all in one direction. We’ve tried that in Texas, and that resulted in costing people their lives a couple of years ago, during the Texas freeze.
“So I think the migration needs to be done in a sensible way, and there needs to be compromise. It can’t be all or nothing. [Secretary of Energy] Jennifer Granholm said it herself: Fossil fuels equal energy security today,” he added.