Hello everyone and a warm welcome to the formal handover ceremony for Aptis Devices to the Bahamas. I have the privilege to present Professor Asha Kanwar, President and CEO of the Commonwealth of Learning for her address. Honorable Minister and friends in the Bahamas, greetings from the Commonwealth of Learning. I so wish we could have had this in your beautiful country because the last time we were there was when the Conference of Commonwealth Education Ministers was held in 2015. But even though we haven't physically been there, several activities have been going on. In fact, last year, Minister, you will be pleased to know that we held a Caribbean-wide event to train mid-career women and teachers in artificial intelligence to develop chatbots. And at the end of three days, they actually did that. More recently, we've been working with several institutions and ministry, in fact, the Ministry of Agriculture and Marine Resources. We have this very good program called the Lifelong Learning for Farmers, which actually leads farmers towards livelihoods and enhanced economic opportunities. And it's going on very well in 11 other Commonwealth countries, and now it started in the Bahamas as well. And we ran an ag MOOC in the Bahamas, which is now becoming a model for other Commonwealth countries because it's worked so well. There was another MOOC which we offered for training teachers because once this pandemic happened and people had to pivot quickly to online learning with Athabasca University. And we've been doing a several series of these, and I think you'll be pleased to know that 189 teachers have benefited from these MOOCs. With the Bahamas Technical and Vocational Institute, we've also done a capacity building exercise in online training of teachers in how to offer effective online education. So I think a few activities are happening. And all these are happening because of the strong support that we get from your ministry. So we are very grateful, honorable minister. This is strong financial and intellectual contributions that we receive from you. I think the Bahamas has been particularly consistent and we really value that because it enables us to do our work with greater confidence. Now, today we are talking about the Aptus device. We know how Hurricane Dorian created such devastation last year. And at this time, we felt we had to do something. And we heard that 15 schools were really impacted by this disaster. And how could call do anything to really support you? Now, Aptus, as you know, is a low cost device that allows educators and learners to access digital content without any need for grid electricity or connectivity as such to the internet. And this mini server operates on a battery which can be easily recharged using solar chargers or even electric power. And thousands of books and videos can be uploaded on this little device. And we call it a classroom without walls that can be accessed by any learner with a mobile device, tablet or even computer. So what we did is by working with your officials, we have now curated content aligned to your curriculum and loaded it on this device, which is already in the Bahamas. And in addition, we have loaded a whole lot of videos, especially in difficult subjects like maths, et cetera, from the Khan Academy, then simulations for science experiments, et cetera, which students find very interesting. In addition, we feel that for this content to be really valuable, your teachers must develop their own content, contextualize it and upload it on this device. So this is going to be an ongoing process. And we will continue to build the capacity of your staff to be able to do this. Unfortunately, it will still have to be done online until, you know, all those restrictions and lockdowns are lifted. This device has worked very well, you know, when Cyclone Geeta hit Tonga two years ago. The minister had asked us to deploy this in some of the atolls and it worked well for secondary schools. It's worked well in Pakistan, it's worked well in Fiji, Kiribati and other island states. So hopefully, this will be the start of a kind of scale of this device. Let's see how it works in the two islands that it's destined for in the first instance. So Honorable Minister, it's an honour for me to formally hand over 30 Aptus devices and 300 tablets to you as a very small token of our solidarity and support. We have prepared a set of videos to train your staff on how to use and maintain these devices. And there will be a help desk here at Paul, which will be on Paul for any time the staff needs any support or help in dealing with these devices. In addition, Honorable Minister, before I conclude, I wanted to also say that during this pandemic, we partnered with Coursera to offer free licenses for workforce recovery programs. And they started by giving us 10,000 licenses and then they've increased it to 100,000 because call works so well and hard with that. And we offered it in 49 countries. In fact, you'll be pleased to know that the biggest uptake has been in the Caribbean. Diana has enrolled 30,000 unemployed citizens, followed by Barbados, Grenada and St. Lucia. We haven't had those numbers. We've had a few numbers from the Bahamas. But I would like to make that offer and renew that offer once more, that if there are people who need training and reskilling for this new world, this is an excellent resource because it offers more than 4,000 courses from some of the top universities, Yale, Stanford, Michigan, etc. And one of these licenses is actually worth $400, but we've got them free. So nobody has to pay anything. And if there are enough people in the Bahamas who are willing to undergo this training, it'll have to be done fairly quickly because then the licenses expire at the end of March. But even then they can generate certificates if they successfully complete the courses. And the courses can be anything related to technology, to instructional design, anything. It's a very nice repertoire of courses in professional fields. So if you could give us any number of people, we are happy to accommodate them. If it's 1,000, 2,000, 3,000 who are in need of scaling, all we need is their information and their email. And we will send an invitation to them to make use of these courses. I really think it's a very valuable thing. And many people have benefited from them. Some people have already got promotions. Some people are getting jobs. So this might be something useful to consider Honorable Minister. And then, of course, my final comment would be that the pandemic is one. The hurricane last year was another. And in future, there can be any number of climate related or health related or social, political disasters that we might have to face. And we do need to build resilient education systems. We are providing targeted support to countries. Dominica is one of them. So if there is anything we can do, Honorable Minister, to further your agenda, we are here to provide all possible support. And we are experts in distance and online learning. And we can provide any kind of support that you need. So please reach out to us via your organization and we work for you. So on that note, thank you so much for taking the time to be on this call. It's good to see you. And I'm looking forward to the time when we can actually meet in person either here in Vancouver or in the Bahamas or any other part of the Commonwealth. So thank you very much, Minister. Thank you, Professor Kenmore. It is our great pleasure to introduce the Minister of Education, the Bahamas, the Honorable Jeffrey Lloyd. Dear Minister, welcome. Thank you very much, Madam Chair. And it's a great pleasure to join with you this morning on a privileged occasion to be the recipient of this outstanding gift and offer. And Professor Asher, I wish to begin by extending our gratitude on behalf of the Ministry of Education in particular, but the people of the Bahamas for this most gracious gift that the Commonwealth of Learning has provided and is enabling us to meet these, what has been described as unprecedented challenges here in this 21st century, in particular in the 2019 and 2020 in our country. I am joined by a number of our senior managers of the Ministry of Education and they share, I'm sure, my deep sense of gratitude and appreciation and continuing regard for the excellent relationship that we have with the Commonwealth of Learning and the incredible benefits that you have provided to us over these many years in assisting our educational professionals to meet the challenges but also to help them realize their highest aspirations and educational achievement, both in terms of their own professional advancement and development, but also for the benefit of our people. You know, 2020 has been a unique year for the world. However, as unique as it has been for the world, it is even more unique and perilous for us here in the Caribbean because in addition to the pandemic which visited us beginning last December, all the way into what we are now confronted with, we in the Caribbean are particularly vulnerable and have been, unfortunately, victimized by a number of additional hazards and we call them unwelcome to guests who come by every single year, blazing a trail of destruction and devastation upon our countries, leaving many times incalculable disruption in our lives. Fortunately for the Ministry of Education, in 2019 we launched a virtual school which I have described as a godsend because within a day or so we were visited by a most devastating hurricane in the name of Dorian. In fact, so devastating that the United Nations Secretary General, Mr. Antonio Guterres, described it as a category from hell, left in wake, as you noted, two of our islands, Grand Bahama and Abaco, on which sits our second and third largest population centers, both in terms of our demographic as well as our student population, eliminating 20% of our economy and inflicting some three billion dollars in damage. But thankfully because of the virtual school, we were able to provide continuing educational services for those students. But as you indicated so brilliantly and insightfully, Professor, this is a time in which online learning now has become the feature of the modern educational apparatus. And I don't see personally and I think our team shares the view that we are not and the world is not going back, not only from an educational standpoint but now in all other subdivisions and dimensions of human existence, you will find that technology and virtual or online engagement will become a featured part of our existence, whether in employment or in social engagements and otherwise. This new reality has required of us in the Ministry of Education and I am grateful and proud of and highly inspired by the leadership of our team led by our Permanent Secretary, Mrs. Lorraine Amburster and our Director who joins us today, Mr. Marcellus Taylor, for the creative adjustments that they have had to make literally on the fly in terms of continuing to assist our students who many of whom would be vulnerable to the disruption that we have experienced because they didn't have or don't have devices or don't have internet access or both or, you know, environments that are not necessarily the most excellently conducive to educational excellence. As a result of that, your contribution by these devices is most timely because in Abaco as the district superintendent, Mrs. Russell who is on this line now can share, there is still a struggle to provide the basic amenities by way of facilities and infrastructure which means that many of those students who ordinarily would have probably been able to enjoy the use of the internet cannot now because power, energy is not now presently available or if it is, it is spasmodically so. But nevertheless, we soldier and carry on making the best of the circumstances, meeting those needs, collaborating with our stakeholders and making adjustments as is necessary. And again, your very well considered and most timely intervention in this gift of yours is most welcomed. And again, cannot more than emphasize the gratitude that we share and the appreciation that we have for it. The world over now speaks of a change in the way we think, which of course must lead to the way we act. You will find commentators, I refer recently to Jack Kelly who is the founder of We Cruder who said in a recent Forbes magazine article that because of COVID-19, but in our case the Bahamas because of our vulnerabilities being as they say in Death Valley, the path of hurricanes almost every year once they leave the west coast of Africa, they seem to have a beeline for the Caribbean states. Because of that, we will have to change the way that we think and the way we act and what would have worked in the past simply may not work in the future. And everybody I think now recognizes the radical seismic shift that the world is undergoing on a shift I don't think is going to ever return to whatever someone may call normal. I consider it to be a new reality. One of the things that we have always remarked in us in education, the director myself and others is that because of COVID, it has exposed or emphasized some of the inadequacies that education has unfortunately either overlooked or has been tepid in its response over the years. But now because of COVID and because of Dorian, because of other hurricanes, we have had some serious ones since 2016, Matthew and Irma and others, we have got to accelerate our response one but also the development of a new way of delivering education. I am heartened by the gift of I think the Coursera and the licenses that through you would be made available to our Bahamian citizens. You can put my email and name down right away, professor, as a recipient because when you talk about Harvard University and other schools of academic excellence, proficiency, stellar achievement over the many decades and courses that are being offered for free with certification, I am sure that there are many thousands of Bahamians who would be more than delighted to participate in an opportunity for upskilling. I want to say especially a gratitude on behalf of our teachers that you have helped to train. As you know, in addition to our students, many of whom can certainly be a little bit more adaptable than say us adults, this pandemic and these hurricanes have caught us a little bit off guard. We have had to upgrade and activate our technological skills much more quickly than probably we would have liked and many of us would feel comfortable with. But because of you and your team, we have been able to bring our people, our staff, our educational professionals up to a standard of I think proficiency, acceptable levels of proficiency and they will continue to master that effort over these next coming months and years. So I again want to express my deep gratitude and appreciation and great honor in having this wonderful relationship we have with you and the Commonwealth of Learning. I am sure that there will be many more opportunities for us to collaborate, for us to further invite your intervention into our ongoing educational development here. We in the Bahamas, unlike many Caribbean countries, in addition to the unique circumstance of just being in the Caribbean, we have well over 17, 18, 20 population centers, districts, which many times have their own cultural nuances and but nevertheless deserve to be given as the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal number four states opportunities for equal and equitable access to quality education, whether it's in preschool or all the way up to tertiary levels. And because the world changes and is changing so rapidly, the promotion of lifelong learning, which means that there were persons more in the afternoon of their lives like me and the noon time of their lives like the director still must continue to learn, relearn, acquire new skills and continue to be responsive to the subordinate staff or those who we are privileged to serve by way of mentorship and leadership. So we have an extraordinarily daunting in my mind task. I see it more, however, as great precious opportunities to meet challenges which I think can advance the cause of humanity with great efficiency over the coming years and decades. So please accept our thanks, share it with your team at the Commonwealth of Learning, Vancouver. We look forward to seeing you somewhere as you say on the planet and would be more than happy to welcome you to the Bahamas at any time of your choosing. Know that our borders are open. You are welcome to come and join us. I understand today that American Airlines has now increased their flight offerings to the Bahamas to five when it would per day when it was only one up to yesterday. So there are more than sufficient opportunities I think for you to jump on the plane and come and be with us and let's have our further discussions and see how we can meet the needs of our behaving people and others around the world. Thank you so much and God bless you. Thank you Honorable Minister and thank you Professor Kenmore. And this brings us to the close of today's ceremony. Thank you for participating. Goodbye.


Hey, welcome to Stand the Energy Man here on Think Tech Hawaii. Stan Osserman, coming to you live and direct from Kailua, Hawaii. And the weather's nice. Book your vacations now. It's not gonna get any better. So perfect weather right now. Even good surf on the North Shore if you're into big waves. So come on out. But today, we're gonna talk again with Dan Goen, one of my regulars on the show. And we're gonna talk on the macro end of energy. I like to talk about hydrogen and what's going on in Hawaii, but there's so much happening in the world right now that's different. It's really different. And we can't look at energy the same way that we used to look at it where it was just something that we could negotiate the cost of a barrel of oil and we could manipulate things and we could take care of inflation because it was kind of just a finite problem to solve for the federal regulators and stuff. But now you have huge economic, international, geopolitical, national security, things in motion all the way on the other side of the world that most Americans are just oblivious to because we're busy talking about silly local stuff instead of looking at really big picture stuff. And just for an example, you can't stop producing oil and turn it all into clean energy overnight. I mean, that task is a multi-year, if not decades long or more, goal that we've done a very poor job of transitioning into. And now we're running headlong into international relations issues and other things that are impacting the cost of energy. And so we got Dan going on and he's gonna give us a little bit of a brief but before we actually get into the brief, I'm gonna ask him a question that is really important and we'll probably do a whole nother show about it. And it's, okay, Dan, a barrel of oil has a lot of energy in it. And right now it's going for in the 80-something dollars a barrel. What do you think a barrel of oil is really worth in terms of work and energy? What's the real value? In my opinion, as an engineer, I think it's worth $10,000 a barrel. So what we're paying $80 a barrel for and screaming about because of the increase in gas prices is nothing compared to the real value of that oil in terms of manufacturing durable goods and important things like even things that we think are important for clean energy, like wind turbines and solar panels. If you don't have oil, you can't make those. And we're sitting here just kind of focused on the fossil fuels being burned in turbines and stuff like that. And we're not really thinking about the value of that oil. And I've been telling people for years burning oil in machines is like burning $100 bills.  And it's the same with the oil. So Dan, I'm gonna let you take it away and start off with your presentation. Then I'd like to get into a discussion what's happening over there in the middle Asia world. I get to slide number one, please. So what we're gonna do today is we're gonna, just a pitch for the company but what we're gonna do today is we're gonna start off with a couple of slides. And what I'm gonna show is the hill that Stan and I are climbing up and so everybody can see it for themselves. I fully expect everybody to play these videos a couple of times and watch the first 15 minutes in these slides and hopefully digest what we're gonna show. And the second part of this we're gonna show you what's going on right now in Europe and what's happened, the collision that's occurred probably what caused it a long time ago, right? And probably how this is actually gonna get resolved. And it's gonna get resolved in a way, well, I'm fairly sure the folks in Washington, DC don't want it to resolve this way. Maybe they know about it, maybe they don't but we're gonna go ahead and talk about slide number two, please. Okay, so what that slide is that's a global oil demand, that's the latest data. The world right now we are back to consuming 100 million barrels of oil every day. Now, according to the International Energy Agency the surplus, the buffer, the extra oil the world has is only about 1.5 million barrels. And we will, that buffer, that excess energy, the excess oil will be out by July. The reason why you're seeing inflation is quite literally the human species we're burning up, there's more demand than there is physical supply of oil. And so as we have more and more demand that means you get higher and higher inflation. That's why you're seeing inflation because right now our growth is being limited by the master resource and that is oil because oil is in everything. It's in all our transportation systems. It's in the plastic in this laptop, your cell phone, the paint, the shingles on your house, everything. And now this master resource is limiting our economic growth. Now, if everybody says, well Dan, the economy's not growing all that great right now. Yeah, we all know that. Okay, that's the sad part. So the other thing you need to remember is that our old oil fields, especially the super major oil fields, they're all more than 40 years old and the annual decline rate of the world's oil fields is 6.7% per year. So if we're burning through 100 million barrels of oil, 100 million barrels every day, that means that by next year, by December, by January of 2023, the shortfall will be 6.7 million barrels every day. So from here on out, we're running into a shortfall. Maybe there's some things we can do to extend it, but that's kind of what I can add even more to it. Let's go to the next slide, please. Okay, that's Alaska LNG project. That is a project it was approved by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission in December of 2020, the Army Corps approved it in Q4, 2021. The US government has provided a 30-year loan guarantee of $25.6 billion. So in 80-20, in other words, the oil and gas business had to put down 20% and the banks loaned the other 80%. So what's going on here? Well, it goes back to this whole saying, Stan and I have talked about for quite a while, and that is the last thing that passes to the oil head is natural gas. When you have an oil deposit, the very bottom deposit is asphalt, the top of it is natural gas, between the two is the oil. When they find the exact center of the deposit, what they do is they look for the edges and that's where they drill. They drill around the edges of the deposit because they use the pressure of that gas to force the oil out of the ground. You've seen those old black and white movies where the oil shooting out of the ground like a gusher? Well, that's why, because the natural gas is powering that oil to the surface. Whenever that deposit gets down to the point where there's not enough pressure to push the oil out or there's not enough oil in that deposit, right? The last thing that they pull out of that deposit and bring it to market is the gas. So what this is telling you is that Purdue Bay is going dry because there's no other reason why they would do this other than they've got all the oil out of it that they can and that's where we're at. Now, to put this, so to talk about some of the large oil fields that are being depleted around the world and more specifically in the western part of the world, I know we talked before about the North Sea going dry. Well, the North Sea was discovered back in the 60s, came online in the late 70s and the reason why it took almost 20 years to bring it online is because it's an oil field that's between Scotland and Norway. It's out on the middle of the ocean. They had to put oil platforms, lots of infrastructure, very expensive to bring that oil online. That's why it took almost 20 years to bring that oil and gas to the oil line. They had to invent a lot of technology that did not exist up until that time. The last one was Purdue Bay. Purdue Bay was actually discovered in the 1970s and didn't come online until the 1980s, 10 years later. And the reason why, if you look at that map there, they had to build a pipeline over a mountain chain. The northern part of Alaska, that's the Arctic Ocean, it's frozen. You couldn't get oil tankers up there. So they built the pipeline up over a mountain chain from the north part of Alaska to the south part of Alaska. Not only that, but that pipe had to be heated and insulated. The oil is hot enough that if they ever spring in lake, if the oil hits the air, it catches fire. All right, so there was a lot of technological engineering. It took them 10 years to build that pipeline to bring that oil to market. So the North Sea, like I said, went into a term of decline in the late 1990s. There was another major oil field down in Mexico called Cantrell, and it went into a term of decline back in the 1990s. So those three oil fields right there have set the stage to today. The term of decline of those major oil fields are setting the stage for the energy prices that you're seeing today. Okay, so if I can get to the next page, please. That there is some data from Art Berman, and Art Berman is a scientist, he's a geologist. This is a guy who actually goes out and drills wells, okay? And he's somebody I converse with probably about once a month. And an arts are really, really smart, man. He's been in the oil business for something like 40 years. I think he started at Chevron years ago. But in any case, right there, that's a combination of data of the price of oil, West Texas Intermediate, and inflation data of the Federal Reserve. And there's a pretty tight correlation with oil and inflation. Those two track each other. The price of the primary energy resource and inflation track each other, right? So if you wanna keep inflation low in the world, you need to have lots of energy, you need to have lots of oil. You need to keep your inflation low. And if you don't have lots of the master resource, you're gonna have inflation problems in your economic system. To give you an idea of some of the resource problems we're running into around the world, because most of us don't recognize this is happening. So as of right now, I was checking the price of natural gas that at the Henry Hub is $4.80 per million BTUs in natural gas here in the United States in lower 48. Japan, a liquefied natural gas to Japan. It's $26.81 per million BTUs. So you think we have high natural gas prices here in the United States? Go talk to somebody in Japan or Korea. And if you think that one's ugly, Dutch, the Dutch liquefied natural gas at the TTF terminal is $29.51. It's $29.51 per million BTUs. And what was the US price again? $4.80. Yeah. And if you say why is that liquefied natural gas so expensive? Couple reasons. One is it's being compressed into a liquid. They burn a lot of natural gas to compress natural gas into liquefied natural gas and then put it on those ships and ship it over there. So you get it, you know, you get a multiplication, okay, of cost there. What unfortunately has to happen is the Federal Reserve is in a situation where they really have to slow our economy down, slow the world economy down to match the resource because otherwise inflation will run away and it'll cause more and more problems. Now if you say, well, Dan, the economy is not all that great right now. Yeah, we all know. We all know. And if the Federal Reserve is forced into slowing the economy down to match the growth rate of this energy source and it goes back to what Stan and I've been talking about is we need to diversify. That oil, what I said is worth $10,000 a barrel. If you don't have it, a lot of things are not possible. Right? If there's any way we can come up with a transportation fuel for trucks and cars and so forth, we need to do it.  We need to get it done. Not doing the things we're doing in Washington DC right now. If I can get the next slide please. And that there has to do with high prices to kill demand. So that depends on the strength of the economy, the rate of inflation and those high prices. But there's one thing that we definitely know and that is high oil prices relative to the strength of the economy and inflation will cause a recession. Oil will cause a recession. It caused two recessions back in the 70s. We had an oil shock in 1990 because the first Persian Gulf War, right? It caused a recession and the great financial crisis was probably triggered by oil going to $147 a barrel in July 15th of 2008. We were having banking problems leading up to 2008, right? But that's probably what triggered it was July 15th of 2008. Lehman Brothers collapsed September 15th of 2008, exactly 60 days later. If you say, Dan, is that coincidence? The answer is no. It has to do with the future, what's called the futures contracts. Futures contracts are 60 days net due. So if you can go from July 15th when that futures contract for oil when it was due and you go forward 60 days, that was the exact date that Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy. That is not an accident. What happened was Lehman Brothers owed somebody some money and nobody would loan them the money and eventually were forced in the file for bankruptcy September 15th of 2008. Next slide, please. All that is, all I'm trying to show there is just that there's an engineering diagram. I'm not gonna go into it. I'm just saying if we're going to use a wind and solar to try to replace something like natural gas, use wind and solar to try to produce enough hydrogen to replace that natural gas, that's the equation that slaps me in the head all the time, right? Let me show you in here. But that's what I have to deal with, but it also makes it clear that you've got to have a lot of wind and a lot of solar to make up the amount of energy that's in that natural gas that's in the oil that's in those coal deposits. So that gives you an idea in just plain mathematics how hard this subject is. Next one, please. That there shows that's the mountain that Stan and I are climbing, okay? Now there is a piece, there's some hope here and I'll tell you what it is. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna talk about something that in engineering is a kind of an important concept and it has to do with something called a BTU or a British thermal unit. So we measure energy resources in BTUs per pound. A British thermal unit is measurement of heat in one pound of fuel. It could be Joules per kilogram or BTUs per pound, okay? So coal, now we can argue about the quality of that fuel but these are average values for these fuel. So coal has 9,000 BTUs per pound. Diesel has 18,300 BTUs per pound. Gasoline has 18,700 BTUs per pound. Now jet fuel is usually between the diesel and the gas. Natural gas has 20,000 BTUs per pound. The master chemical fuel is hydrogen at 51,000 BTUs per pound. So if you want to lie to the engineers and scientists Stan and myself while we're into this hydrogen thing, now you understand why. Because not only is it flimsy fuel but it's got more bang for the buck, literally, right? If you're gonna do anything with fuel, that's the good one. Hydrogen's the good one, okay? That's why we're so focused on it. Now there is a fuel that I kind of allude to on this page here that everybody kind of needs to pay attention to. And the fossil fuel industry, they tend to try to ignore this fuel. And we in the renewable energy sector, we kind of ignore this fuel because it's not really renewable but it's something we can't ignore. And that is uranium. Uranium, plutonium, nuclear power in general but uranium. Uranium, BTUs per pound, 265 million BTUs per pound. And I was checking the spot price uranium today, it's $46 a pound. It's the most energy dense, the most economical fuel that we have in this plant, okay? Now there are two advantages that the United States we have. We have a glimmer of light for the United States. Now there are safety issues with nuclear power, we need to work on those things. There are long-term radioactive material waste issue things we need to work on, we need to do that. We have to, okay? But here are the two bright points about uranium for the United States. I can't say this about the rest of the world but I can say it about us, United States. The long-term radioactive waste issue, 90% of that issue can be resolved by simply recycling the spent fuel that we have in dry storage around all the power plants we have in the United States, okay? Here's the better part. We have enough spent fuel, we could power the United States for 500 years just on the spent fuel. So when you see congressmen and senators that are like, oh, we need to do something about the price of uranium and so forth and et cetera, really easy, it's not really a problem for us. Like I said, just recycling the spent fuel that we have in dry storage around the United States, we could probably United States for 500 years. The other thing is, and this has to do with the byproduct of the Cold War, and I can't go into the details of some of this, but here's what I can tell you. We have enough uranium in storage, we could probably power the United States for 5,000 years, just the uranium we have in storage here in the United States. And those are things that are just byproducts of the Cold War, okay? So those are the good parts of the story. Yeah, that's gonna be a whole show by itself now. Yeah, yeah, I know. Last page and then we're gonna talk about the serious thing. So now we're gonna get into the geopolitical and some of the policy aspects. Okay, the headlines are now Ukraine, Ukraine, Ukraine, Ukraine. So where does most of Europe get a bunch of their energy from that is in that picture? Is it Russia? 40% of the natural gas going into Europe is from Russia.  United Kingdom and us. Yeah, that's it. None of them do. Germany doesn't want to, France doesn't want to. They're all just kind of, and they're NATO. I mean, NATO was meant to stand off the Soviet Union from rolling into Europe. And now we're sitting there face to face with Russia and all the members of NATO, except for the United Kingdom and the US really are not all that excited about getting into a conflict in the Ukraine with Russia because it'll impact their energy. And this subject is complex in a lot of different ways. One is everybody needs to step back and remember that the Russian people, this isn't Vladimir Putin. This is the Russian people, right? They have this collective experience. They've had a Frenchman and a German invade their country and murdered millions of people, okay? That's Napoleon Bonaparte and Adolf Hitler. And there isn't a Russian family today that has not been affected by the last 200 years. So you have to understand the Russian people, not Vladimir Putin, the Russian people have a fear of the Europeans, okay? When we ended the Cold War, James Baker, whenever we reunited basically East and West Germany together, James Baker, who was Secretary of State, made a promise to Gorbachev that we would not expand NATO beyond where it was for this today, okay? And unfortunately, George H.W. Bush, President Bush, basically backtracked on that. And the Russians have always wanted for allowing East and West Germany to join together and understand the reason why Germany was split because millions of Russians died in those two conflicts, Napoleon Bonaparte and Adolf Hitler. And that's why Russia was divided. And to reunify Germany back together, they wanted in writing to guarantee that NATO would not expand beyond its original members when of the Cold War ended in 1990. Well, then we had President Clinton and he sort of doubled down and yeah, we did make an agreement, nothing was in writing. Well, back in the 90s, so it went from Gorbachev to President Yeltsin. They're a Russian. And the Russians actually made an overture. They wanted to join NATO, okay? And a lot of us here recognized the wisdom of wanting that to happen. And here's why. I don't know how you would do it politically or any of those things. But if you could have had Russia join NATO, you could have pulled them into this European sphere and they would be much more European centered and we wouldn't have problems today with Russia. But we didn't do that. What happened in the last 30 years is NATO's expanded. We added a bunch of countries to NATO, okay? And we forced, we pushed Russia into China's backdoor. That's what we did. Well, then that kind of leads us to another topic which is Turkey was one of the countries that came into NATO fairly recently. And what's going on in Turkey right now? And that goes back to, this is gonna go to what is really gonna happen. So two weeks ago, Turkey has three countries that supply them with natural gas. Russia, they're in Baku, Azerbaijan, they're in Baku and Iran. Two weeks ago, Iran turned off the gas, right? So they've had a power blackout in Turkey for the last two weeks, no electricity, shut down 67,000 factors. The only gas- We're not talking to rule out, I mean a blackout in a couple of cities that are rolling blackouts. We're talking they are blacked out. Yeah, for the last two weeks. You haven't seen that on the news? No. It hasn't been on TV, but there's been a blackout. 67,000 factors have been shut down in Turkey. There's enough gas coming from Vladimir Putin and from Azerbaijan that they're keeping the houses warm. They're in Turkey, so they don't have cold houses but they've got no electricity in Turkey. And I was looking this morning, Turkey's central bank, they're down about $7 billion worth of US dollar currency reserves. And basically they burn about $10 billion a month in growth of natural gas. They ran out of money to pay the Iranians, the Iranians turned the gas off. So it's not like the Iranians are being bad or nefarious is that the Turkey's not paying their bill. Now the contract with the Russians and Azerbaijan is in euros and Turkey still has access to euros and those bills are still being paid. So when everybody thinks that Russia's gonna invade Ukraine and China's gonna do the Taiwan thing, that is not what's gonna happen. In the background, and I caught one of this about four months ago, is Russia has a 20 year deal with Iran. They had completed 90% of the agreement and I think the last thing we're doing is dotting eyes and crossing teeth. But it was kind of strange because they hadn't actually signed the agreement. I understand this was on the heels of Iran's 25 year deal with China. So this agreement with Russia, between Russia and Iran is like to deal with China. Now I've got some copies of that contract, it's in Cyrillic, so I have to go through Google to translate it, I've read it. Basically, well, we've been in these conversations with Iran trying to give it their new growth program. Well, part of this agreement, the Iranians are gonna give up their new growth program, not only that, but they're gonna pack up all the new material and put it on trucks, let the United Nations Atomic Energy Commission witness it and they're gonna ship it all back to Russia and exchange the Russians are gonna build a permanent military bases in Iran. So when you put all this together and in context now, America's weak foreign policy standing right now has basically driven Russia and Iran together, China and Iran together. And what have we been spending the last 20-something years in the Middle East doing is basically trying to set up a democracy as it were in Iraq to offset Iran because it would hold off this big unholy alliance that is now developing. So we got like 30 seconds left in, wrap it up. Well, you said it right there and what happened the last couple of weeks is what the Russians were waiting on is they went back to the United Nations and they talked about not letting Ukraine join NATO, put a list of demands and that was between the January 10th to January 13th. We flat turned them down the following week, January 19th, the president of Iran was in Moscow, made a big speech in front of the Dumas that's like the Congress for the Russians, right? And talked about that there needs to be a permanent, that Russia needs to have a permanent influence or a permanent presence in Iran from here to the end of time, basically. So what cemented that 20-year agreement, we did it by basically refusing the demands of the Russians of saying, not allowing Ukraine to join NATO and the fact that Ukraine's right on Russia's doorstep. And yeah, and this has been brewing for a long time, unfortunately. So just an observation from my point, it seems to me like a lot of our weaker politicians or bureaucrats or executive branch state department people tend to go and say, well, back in 1970, this worked, so let's do it again. Or back in 1990, this worked, so let's do it again. And when we really have to understand is history in context and not just make a decision based on, well, it worked back then, so we'll do it now. And that's why I came up with there, looking for the 70s energy policy. When politicians and policymakers don't have a good grasp on the subject matter in context, like we've discussed today, that's when you sit there and make really poor decisions at the treaty table, at the negotiating table, at the, you know, on the international level. And right now we're paying the price, a serious price for a very weak US policy. And it could be driving us into a really terrible hole. So we'll try and paint a rosier picture of some other time, but... Well, I mean, Stan, and just everybody understands that the watch and the show, Russia is in a position right now, just by turning off that gas and turning off the oil, they can drive inflation here in the United States through the roof, by simply turning it off. Not invading, not doing it, just by turning it off. Exactly. As a military guy and a UR-12, that's just one center of influence.  He could do, if the easiest thing for him to do is to shut the resources off. And that's probably what he's gonna do. Well, we've maxed out a time and gone a little bit over. So before we get kicked off, I'd like to thank you down for your insight and a good discussion today. And we're gonna bring back some more discussions on this macro-level energy talk, because I think people really need to understand and have a grip on it and understand that they're not seeing things in the news that really impact a lot of what's going on in our country today. So, Dan, thanks for your time and we'll catch you next week, next time. Until next Tuesday, stay on the energy man signing off. Aloha.


Thanks for checking out this unboxing video. This is the December BAM box. So at the moment when I'm recording this I got this BAM box and I'm sorry I don't know at this particular moment if this is the horror box or if it's a pop culture box usually I can figure that out based off the Tracking number because it'll have the information in there saying it's pop culture or or but for some reason and Adam MacArthur the CEO of BAM box had put something about this on social media for some reason And they don't know why We weren't getting any updates on tracking numbers. So no tracking numbers went out to anyone So, you know boxes were kind of just showing up whenever so I'm not sure if this is horror or pop culture But the title of this will be the correct one. So I won't know going into this until I pull out the first item I'm sure so figure this out as I go They're still on the For the second month right now That's the plain boxes because they're working on their new design for boxes Which they had a little blurb about in the last box Explaining that this has like three points that I need to cut So I'll be excited when they go back to their normal type boxes with a obviously new design. That'll be cool If I hope this is the horror one because then if it's a horror one that I can say a little bit about it for either of them I'm not remembering a whole lot about the franchises for the horror one. I'm remembering like one And One yeah, actually the same all right tissue paper one tissue paper for my cat two tissue paper for my cat three always like I want to get three because Cats they be loving tissue paper Okay, so the first thing I'm gonna pull out is a prop replica I want a button. Okay. I'm gonna do this button not pin a button. Although. I'm sure there's a pin in here as well I don't know Oswald means order What is that from? I'm sorry I'm sorry, I don't I have no idea what this Oswald means order comes from so depending on what it's correlating with I may not care for this. I don't really care for buttons in general. There is kind of a way you can display them You can pin them on stuff, but people are really big into buttons right now pins are the hot thing That's what I'm all about is the pins in addition to the art prints, but buttons. I'm not huge on so But I'm never looking for you know those types of items in this. I'm kind of whatever. So here's a prop replica It's relatively large kind of heavy ish. Oh Okay, this is the pop culture box. I am now understanding. It's the pop culture box This is cool. Actually, I like this. This is a nice display piece And it'll go with a prop replica that we already got which is another prop replica I actually like because you know, I don't like a lot of them, but this is from the Goonies. This is the key People can see that I'm gonna put it all on there, but this is the key that they use When they're looking for one-eyed willies gold and jewels and all that jazz this is the part where they're like in the cave and They have like these little like stones sticking out So they have like match it up with the eye holes in the nose hole and then like turn it And then they go down like those water slides. It's pretty sweet It looks pretty good. It's it's not like solid metal, but it feels metal ish so It's not as weighty as you would think being metal ish, but I mean it looks good I think it goes along with I put it in one of their like There was some stupid in this before but this is the doubloon from the Goonies and I put it in that and see the other side of it for display So this is better than than that thing, but putting those two things together Like side by side, which is exactly what I'll do. It's gonna be good That's nice and I like okay, so I Like the fact that well, some people may may not appreciate that they kind of like repeated a Franchise and repeated it for the proper replica. I enjoy it just because the they go together So I can put this with the other thing and that's cool to me I like it. Excuse me like urban Gonna go for the pin Is done by cotton head. Oh, no, I'm sorry. That's damn it that kind of like ruined it for me It's by Brian Romero, which I believe I remember that he's done it before And this is cotton-headed nitty-muggins. So some people will be able to figure out what that is from Yep There's your dude from elf It is buddy the elf from elf Looks good does kind of look like will Ferrell That's good. I like it. Yeah Yeah, looks good. I wonder what the other ones would be For that like the variant pins we'll find out. All right, so next is probably the art print Did the do this is done by Oscar van. It's one of their fan art collection ones and Oh, dude, this is cool, man. Okay, so Perfect timing for this for people who know or don't know there's a debate out there about whether Die hard is a Christmas movie and a lot of people will tell you yes, including me I will say it is a Christmas movie. It is set on Christmas So die hard one of the quintessential Christmas movies and here's an art print for die hard John McClain Hans Gruber friggin die hard and The cool thing about this is it looks 80s and style So it's kind of just like really sticks with the film I know with a lot of like the prints they'll do kind of if it's an older film It'll kind of look more modern which is cool too, but I really like the retro type stuff and I dig this because of that That's nice. I got number two fifty two out of two thousand Thank you again to Oscar van.  I like that I like that we got die hard now. We're going for the autograph Okay Signed by Donald full of love who played Goldie Wilson in back to the future one and two Oh, that's cool. Nice. Yep. Yep. Yep. I like that Re-elect Mayor Goldie Wilson Honesty decency integrity That's cool. Yeah It looks good and and the the nice thing about this is it's not just like a headshot From like a scene in the film.  I'm not like the biggest back to the future fan But I know there are a lot of people out there who are like huge into back the future I like it. Don't get me wrong. I quite like it It's just like I don't keep coming back to it like a lot of people do so. I mean, this is cool to have I probably won't display it just because You know, I'm not like a huge fan of it, but this is cool for them to put in there So let's see what these variants were and what not so Yep, so they have the thing about the Goldie Wilson signing Donald full of and there were a few things that could have been signed including a actual like spatula, which is fun and a hat a Like a fry-cook hat and then a potential like hoverboard could have been signed by him. So that's pretty sweet That's cool. Um They just have the thing about the the prop from the Goonies Which I don't need to show you that because it's the same for everyone. It has the same look the Okay, the Oswald means ordered now it makes sense to me is from Batman Returns I'm sure when I flashed it up there. There were plenty of people watching this who were like, it's freaking Batman forever It's Batman forever, which I like Batman forever. It is a good film. It's very very dark And I like Tim Burton because I like his aesthetic. I like things that are dark I'm in the horror films So naturally it's a film that I really dig and that is also a Christmas film people because it takes place at least Partially during Christmas a lot of people forget that but um, there were a few options for the buttons. I think my favorite Obviously is the cobble pot one. I mean that looks good Yeah, but like I said, like I'm not huge enough buttons to be honest. Okay, so the variance excuse me a Little tickle the variants on the pins from elf. You have the buddy the elf one, which is what I got then you have I Forget what her name is in the film and then the guy the elf who ended up adopting buddy as his own So he's out of 99. So honestly I'm fine without getting either of the limited ones because the buddy the elf one's the most recognizable and the other ones like Aren't that cool? Not that the design's not good because the design's totally good It's just for that franchise. What else are you gonna do? You know what I mean? So I would want the one that was most common because it's the most recognizable as being elf So I like that and then the diehard the variant. I Can't even really tell what the variant. Oh, it's just kind of like a color Color scheme kind of like shading difference. It might even be hard to tell So this is one of the things that does kind of bother me is like when these variants are done and they're not like Really variants It's kind of like with like pop figures when they'll do it and it's like here's a pop figure Here's the exact same sculpt and look at the pop figure, but we splattered blood on it You know, it's kind of like you're not really doing that much but You know in this instance like don't have a variant just like give everyone One, you know, it's fine. It's fine. You can do that. It's all good because it looks really good Like I said, I really dig that artwork. It's cool artwork And it's friggin diehard. So who's not gonna like it and then they had a giveaway for a Yoda and R2-D2 Dagobah ARTFX statue That's pretty cool Yeah, for all you Star Wars fans out there. Nice. Okay, so overall I think this is cool. It's not, you know, I'm not gonna display it But it's a good it's good autograph in my opinion for pop culture the diehard Obviously really like that. The pin is cool as usual the pin usually looks good So I'm down with that and then the prop is cool because it goes with prop. We already got and it looks pretty sweet So overall good job. This is a good December box. Happy with this one and thank you everyone for checking this out Please hit the subscribe if you want to know whenever I'm putting up videos hit the notification bell I'd appreciate that Like comments. Let's talk about nerdy stuff, but please please please do subscribe Means a lot to me, but until next time keep it brutal