In this podcast episode, EWG President and co-Founder Ken Cook talks with Matt Randolph, aka Mr. Global. Randolph has more than 33 years of experience in the oil and gas sector, including his work as a Shell expert and as co-founder of Sentinel Energy. As Mr. Global, he’s an internet educator using TikTok and YouTube to combat political lies about energy policy.
Although Randolph is an oil industry veteran, he actively promotes renewable energy and believes in climate change, while warning about the consequences of moving too fast on clean energy without proper planning.
Cook and Randolph explore why Americans’ electric bills are skyrocketing, what environmentalists get right and wrong about energy transitions and why California's rollback of rooftop solar incentives was such a devastating mistake.
This conversation proves that an environmentalist and an oilman can learn from each other through curiosity and facts. Whether you care about climate change, energy policy or just want to understand why your electric bill keeps climbing, this one is for you.
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Ken: Hey folks. Ken Cook here. I'm having another episode. My guest today has them all the time, and I've been watching him now for as long as I've been addicted to TikTok. Did you know I'm addicted to TikTok? I am. And I'm going to follow up and talk more about that when I get out of treatment. My guest today is a fellow Mid-Westerner, which is my home turf as well.
The Midwest, when you fly over the country at night, all those lights down below, those are cities with buildings and roads. I'm in California now, so I'm on a yoga mat. I've had my gluten-free breakfast. My chakras are fully aligned, and I'm thrilled to have that fellow Mid-Westerner, Matt Randolph, AKA, Mr. Global with me here today.
I really enjoy his thoughtful insights and commentary, which he shares to his over 900,000 followers on TikTok and his over 100,000 followers on YouTube. A huge audience and so well deserved. Matt is a bonafide expert in the oil and gas industry with over 33 years of experience. And Matt, I just want to start by asking a little bit about your background.
I know you've run and owned an oil company. I'm excited to hear about what your oil company does while being mindful that you're on the show of an environmentalist. And I have to say, I have learned so much about the oil industry just from listening to you on TikTok and YouTube.
I'm really curious about what you think environmentalists like me get right and what we get wrong because I've deeply benefited from your perspective. So we've got a lot to talk about. I'm excited to dive in. Matt, thanks for coming on. I really appreciate it. Mr. Global, the floor is yours.
Matt: Thank you for having me. I'm excited to be here. I started in the industry 30, almost 34 years ago now, working on a drilling rig as an 18-year-old kid, working nights, going to college during the day, and I was going to school to be a teacher.
And I realized, oh my gosh, I'm already making like four or five times more money now than I will be when I become a teacher. Anyway, I stayed in the industry and it's funny you talk about learning because I was one of those people that I just have to know how everything works, whether I'm involved in it or not.
So like people over here will be working on something and I'm over there like, Hey, how does this work? That's always been my nature and that's really kind of what carried me through my career. I worked my way up the hard way. Anyway, I ended up landing at Shell and I ended up being able to work on the team that wrote the global standards for Shell exploration.
And through that process, I became a formally appointed expert. I decided, okay, I'm done with this industry. I've done it long enough. I'm bored with it. And so I came home, I bought a business. That's all I was going to do. I was just going to kind of relax and do this. It was a small business.
And then I got calls like from a very well known oil and gas figure in the United States, and he's like, Hey, I want to start an oil company and I want you to help me run it. I want you to come on board.
And so that's how I became a part of Sentinel Energy. Our whole thing was, it was more of a personal challenge to us than trying to build a billion dollar company. We wanted to see if we could take a little bit of our money with no investment dollars, no backing and just build a company through hard work and sweat, like a bootstrap operation.
We started with a few wells. We signed management services agreements with oil companies that had left this field out here, the Western Anadarko Basin. What that would mean is we would provide the management services for their wells because they had pretty much left town and moved off to other things, and most of them were trying to sell these assets.
And through that process, any investment dollars that needed to be invested in these wells to bring them back online, we would put that money up. We would get equity in those wells. We would get ownership in those wells.
Ken: So if they abandoned the wells, I presume because they weren't making enough money compared to their other opportunities to make money, how was it that you were able to make money from operating them?
Matt: Right, so one, they didn't abandon them, they just weren't maintaining them properly.
Ken: I see. Okay.
Matt: Okay. So these weren't abandoned wells. These were just fields that were still operating. So when an oil company, you know, if a well goes down, you know, it costs a lot of money to get a well back online. When it goes down, it can cost $40, $50,000.
And that was the issue, there was nobody present to maintain the field. So how we were able to do that was during COVID, we went to oil field auctions and we bought all the oil field equipment we could get our hands on for pennies on the dollar. And so we had our own service company, we had our own rig.
We could go work on these wells ourselves. We weren't having to hire companies to come provide services for us because we were the service company too. So I compared our business much to like a farmer. When we had a problem, we went and fixed it. We didn't call somebody and spend $50,000 to fix a problem.
We went out there and fixed it ourselves. When you own wells, you operate a well. There's anywhere from 5 to 10 different owners of that well. You know, four or five different oil companies can own an interest in a well. I might have 70%, another company might have 10%, another company might have their 10%.
So when we would go out and work on our own wells with our equipment that we bought for nothing at auctions, we could actually bill those other companies for their share of that expense as well. So we were working on our own wells for the cost of our labor and our fuel, and we were getting paid by the other interest owners in the wells.
You know, we started with less than a handful of wells, and within a couple of years we had 80,000 or so acres. A hundred and I think 80 wells and an interest in another 450 wells, a non-operating interest where we were the company that had a little 3% to 5%, 7% interest in other wells. Anyway, that's sort of the story with Sentinel Energy.
Ken: I notice on your website that you talk about the investment you make in your team members to become generalists or become experienced in other aspects of what's going on.
Matt: That's exactly what we do. What you see in the oil and gas industry a lot is people who specialize in like one specific thing.
We try to find people who we believe are leaders who have a more broad experience. They know how to do five or six things. If you already know how to do five or six things, then we can teach you how to do a hundred more things. I talked about this a while back because that's kind of what I view myself as now.
People call themselves, you know, influencers or content creators. I sometimes call myself an internet educator, something along those lines because that’s really what I do is I teach people.
Ken: Yeah, I used to be out on the, on the circuit a lot with farm groups, even though I was a big critic of farm policy and I was a critic of how pesticides were regulated and so forth.
My hosts were always surprised that I was curious about what they did and how they did it. And more than curious, I found it fascinating and I used to say to people, look, if you think you've invited someone who's not interested in amazing new tillage equipment or the latest chemicals, you've invited the wrong guy.
I'm very interested in that. I just have a different view about what the effects of them are, but I can't learn really what the effects of them are unless I spend a little time in your shoes. But what do you think environmentalists get right and get wrong about energy policy?
Matt: So first of all, I think there's this perception that energy companies don't care about the environment.
Ken: I think that's true that that's a perception.
Matt: Yeah and if they saw the work that energy companies do to try to help the environment in their operations. I already know the counter argument is well, you're burning fossil fuels. Like nothing you can do can replace that.
And I totally understand that argument. But these are companies that have done what they do for over a hundred years. But I think this idea that we can stop and tear down the very foundation of our entire industrial economy and switch to clean energy overnight, I think that is extremely shortsighted.
And I do believe in climate change and I do promote renewable energy.
Ken: Yes, you do. I've seen it many times. On your TikTok yeah.
Matt: Yeah, you can't just stop producing oil. You can't, we're talking famine, disease like I could, I could go on for hours about the disasters it would cause if we just cut off, right?
Honestly, I think under the Biden administration, they were too aggressive with some of these policies trying to force the closure of thermal generation power plants, assuming that renewables would keep up. And then it didn't pan out like that was very aggressive. You know, they've had to delay the closure of a lot of coal.
It's weird in this country, when you try to push change forward, what always happens is the backlash and the amount of pressure you apply to try to change something comes back to you two or threefold from the resistors.
Ken: Yeah. I always feel like we're giving, like giving a gym membership to the oil lobby.
The harder we push, they come back. All pumped up and yeah.
Matt: It’s difficult to make the argument to people that won't listen that we need clean energy for climate change, and it's easy to make the argument that we need clean energy because we don't have enough energy, because people can look at their electric bills and see that they're $800 or $1000 dollars.
People don't go outside and look at the sky and think oh, this is terrible.
Ken: Look at that excess CO2 up there. Yeah.
Matt: So just from a standpoint of the argument you're making, and while it is important for climate change, I'm not denying that at all, you're trying to change something, you have to sell it, and I think it's much easier to sell and it's going to be easier to sell in the future as energy bills continue to skyrocket.
Ken: Yeah, that’s right exactly.
Matt: I think it's easier to sell. We just need the energy. We need the energy for data centers in AI growth and energy consumption's growing faster than it's ever grown in history. We need the electricity no matter where it comes from. To me, that's a better argument and a better sell than focusing on climate change because people are so resistant to that argument.
Nobody can resist or deny the fact that we need all this energy. That's a real thing people can see. So is climate change, but some people need to see it a lot better?
Ken: Yeah. The person who runs our energy work here and just started with us earlier, this year's named Bernadette Del Chiro and she ran the California Solar and Storage Association for many years.
I joined EWG into the fight to try and maintain incentives that would keep California installing rooftop solar, which we consider to be a pretty important part of renewables. A lot of folks in the environmental community have sort of stepped away from too in favor of utility scale solar.
And the whole notion is we have to decarbonize very rapidly and anything that gets in the way of that including local support, it doesn't matter. And so deals get made with utilities. Most of those are going to pan out in a not great way for the environment. I think the Inflation Reduction Act had a lot of good features, but the thing that worried us the most was the degree to which the utilities loved it.
Matt: Mm-hmm.
Ken: I want to go on the record and Sam in favor of polar bears having adequate ice flows. But we didn't think that was a selling point for most people. Whereas financial self-interest, which we need more electricity for the environment and for human wellbeing and for all of the purposes that you mentioned.
And it should worry an environmentalist when someone says we need to go really big and really fast. That's never really totally worked out for the environment before. Maybe we need to rethink that.
Matt: Mm-hmm. I think we all understand that people are very averse to change, and the bigger and faster you try to make that change, the worse of a response you're going to get from those people.
And that's what we're seeing I believe right now in the Trump administration. Like he is literally just trying to decimate renewable energy. He is. And it honestly blows my mind that we've politicized energy. Energy is one of those things that sustains life. It's like food or water, but we don't think of it in that way.
But let the lights go off for a week and see what happened. Like, it would be complete chaos if we had a blackout across the entire, just say the Northeast corridor. We talk a lot about PJM interconnect lately. Let that whole system black out for a week and see what happens. Well, here's what's going to happen.
A complete collapse of the stock market. There's going to be madness. People in 2025 cannot function like they did in 1500. They have to have lights. We're not built to survive off-grid. And people don't understand how many people in any given moment, you know, in an area that PJM services, 65 million people, how many of those people are on some sort of life sustaining healthcare?
Ken: Yeah, for sure.
Matt: That disappears when the energy goes off. You're talking fatalities in tens of thousands of fatalities, and I think people don't understand the true consequences of the power getting shut off for any period of time.
Ken: The one exception to that might be the politicians in California, or maybe politicians, but certainly here because when there was just the merest threat of some brownouts in California a few years ago, Gavin Newsom invalidated a deal that was struck between environmentalists, PG&E, the big power company out here, labor unions, and said, no, we're going to, you know, rush through the legislature. Let's extend Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant for another five years. You know, all the things that environmentalists were told they should do, strike a deal, make a compromise.
All of that was done and then out the window because, and they openly talked about this when they were debating the bill on the floor of the assembly and the Senate here, that, you know, our jobs are at stake. You know when you have those moments of candor with politicians, you have to pay attention, right?
Matt: Yes, absolutely.
Ken: When things are so serious, they tell the truth. Whoa.
Matt: Yeah. That's when you know it's bad when they start telling the truth.
Ken: Yeah, exactly. It comes to that. So how did you discover social media? You're such a natural at it. It seems like I'm sometimes sitting with you in your truck. You convey that familiarity, that desire to have a conversation, which is so rare, I find.
Matt: How that started - so I was working at Shell and there was a guy in my office, his name's Nick. Great guy, great friend of mine. I had noticed that he would stare at his phone for hours, just laughing, like belly laughing, just crying.
He was laughing so hard and I was like, Nick, I wasn't into social media at all. I was focused on work and career and you know, hey, I gotta finish this frack design.
Ken: But you were into laughing your ass off.
Matt: Well, I just saw how much joy this person was getting out.
Ken: Yeah, exactly.
Matt: And I'm like, what could you possibly be looking at? And he said, it's this new app. It's called TikTok. So I downloaded the app. I had just written a book and I thought, okay, I'm going to download the app and I'm going to post a couple of videos, see if I can sell a few copies of this book, because I was self-published and I didn't have any marketing, you know, I just wrote a book.
I posted a couple of videos, I think, for that book, and then I kind of forgot about it. Whatever I was seeing on TikTok wasn't what Nick was seeing, because I thought it was really stupid. Honestly, I was seeing a bunch of lip syncing videos and that's not my thing. I didn't understand how an algorithm worked.
I didn't understand the vastness. Anyway, one day I opened it up and there was a guy on there who used to be pretty big on social media. His name was Casey Van Arsdale, and he asked a question about EVs. How long does it take for an EV to become carbon neutral? Because at the time there was a ton of misinformation.
A lot of people were saying never, it doesn't happen. You know, they were talking about the intensity of the manufacturing, of the EV and the batteries. So I made a video and I introduced myself. I said, Hey, I'm an oil and gas expert, but I know a lot about this stuff. I laid it all out for 'em.
You know, how much do you drive? Where do you live? What type of sources is your power generated from? And I laid out like six or seven different scenarios with different sorts of mileage points where your car becomes carbon neutral, right? If, if you're in the Pacific Northwest, it's very fast, a lot of hydroelectric power. So the power you're using to charge your cars clean as well.
If you are in West Virginia or Kentucky, it's going to take a long time because your electricity's probably generated with coal, right? I'd laid all that out. And I didn't think much about it. I answered it, I posted it. I got up the next day and I had like a hundred thousand followers just like instantly.
And I was like, oh my, like, I don't know what to do with this. Because I, you know, that was like my third maybe video ever. I had posted it on the internet. And that's where it took off because TikTok had a q and a section where they could go to your page and they could hit the q and a button and they could ask you any question.
And so I built my channel on that q and a because I was getting hundreds of questions a day. The Keystone Excel. Right.
Ken: Yeah. I've seen your videos on that. I've learned a lot from that. Yeah.
Matt: Now that sort of started my social media journey was answering a question about when EVs become carbon neutral, and I think the reason it landed so well - it was a data-driven, fact-based answer.
It had nothing to do with my opinion on EVs or my opinion on different kinds of power. It was just this is how it works, specifically. And I showed them the receipts. I showed them studies that had been done by multiple universities, like I showed 'em all kinds of stuff. That landed very well. People loved that sort of apolitical, just fact-based answer.
And it took off.
Ken: Yeah. And I know you're, you're accused from time to time of being anti-Trump and you always, you take the time to address those insinuations or those allegations. And I think those are also some of your most effective moments. You say, I didn't vote for Joe Biden. I, you know, I'm not a big Biden supporter or whatever, but here are the facts around, you know, drilling in the Gulf of America
Matt: Right
Ken: I'm kind of obsessed with how authority in this day and age settles, how it's established, who's in authority and who's not. A lot of it to me, if it's enduring authority, has a couple of elements.
One is, it really is fact-based. And when I say fact-based, it's if you have counter facts, please show me. I want to be based on facts and maybe my facts have run out, or maybe they're outdated or whatever. And you come through in that way very strongly.
And the other thing is humility that you convey. I mean, sometimes you say things smart, alicky and strong and all that. But what comes through underneath that is the attitude of a teacher to go back to what might have been your original persona, right?
Like you, you probably like the idea of helping someone learn.
Matt: Oh, I love it. So when I worked for Shell, I immediately became a mentor. And that's the thing about young people that are, that are very well educated, they have a lot of knowledge, but they don't have a lot of practical, real world knowledge. So when I'm giving them the practical, real world knowledge, they can take some different perspective or idea that no one ever thought of and say, why don't we do it this way?
And I would look at that. And maybe their idea wouldn't work completely, but their idea was a piece of a greater idea that could literally change the way we do something entirely, that we've always done it. So I learned as much from those people as I taught them. And that's why I kind of got addicted to being a mentor, because my role as a mentor is what really launched my career and my knowledge in the oil and gas industry because I was absorbing all of these diverse perspectives from well educated people that was able to look at something without any of the biases that I had because I had been looking at that thing for 30 years.
Ken: Yeah, yeah
Matt: And when you look at something for 30 years, you become blind to the opportunities that are there.
Well, when someone that's never looked at it, looks at it, and they have enough understanding and knowledge and education around enough pieces of it, then they can say, well, what if we did this instead of this? And look, 9 times out of 10, it was a terrible idea. And I would say, well, we can't do that because you know, blah, blah, blah.
But that one out of 10 times, or even that one out of hundred times, that one great idea is what turns that person from being a middle management, average oil and gas employee for the rest of their life to being an executive, it's literally one huge moment that can take a company from being a a hundred million dollar company to a billion dollar company or take an employee from being a middle management person to an executive.
It's always one huge thing. And I learned so much from people that knew so little. Because it offered me a different perspective.
Ken: I mean, it feels a little bit like my experience at EWG, which I started 32 years ago, I guess now. And, in this day and age, you want people who do that because things are changing so quickly around you. Norms don't last very long, right?
Matt: Mm-hmm.
Ken: Those are the moments that I learned the most. And that gets me excited about the next great thing, whatever it's going to be. One of the things I'm fascinated with the success you've had is that you've been able to reach out to Trump supporters who are for whatever reason, I think there are multiple reasons, but when he says he could shoot somebody in the middle of 5th Avenue and and he wouldn't lose any followers, I think that's true.
And when he says, I could give people a load of bullshit about my energy deals and not lose a follower, I think that might be true too. But here you come along and in a very straightforward way, I think your recent post where you talked about the deal he made with Europe and the deal he made with Japan to buy energy.
Export it from the U.S., import it to Japan and Europe. If that were real, we'd be exporting more than 100% of all our exports to those two countries. So it seems to me that you're not, it's not tit for tat for you. It's more like, no, we can't let this crazy inauthentic authority be what we're grounded in.
We need facts. And is that what drives you to open up your iPhone or whatever and do a video?
Matt: Yeah, I, you know, the thing that I think is the biggest threat to our country is misinformation. It all comes down to misinformation, disinformation, and it's easy for politicians to lie about. Very complex matters that nobody knows anything about.
It's easy for a politician to say we’re going to sell, you know, between the EU and Japan, we’re going to sell I think $1.4 trillion worth of energy to them. Yeah. It's easy for people to be fooled by that because they think oil companies and energy companies have $1.4 trillion worth of stuff to sell.
Yeah. You know, and some people replied to me and said, well, we'll just produce more energy. It's not that hard. And they totally missed the point. That we have 57 more trade deals to go with a lot of countries that need our energy. Like no, we can't just produce more. We can't, you know, and they don't understand how hard it is in the United States to actually increase the production of fossil fuels.
It's very difficult. You know, the decline rate of our wells is so bad that we have to drill, likely 10,000 wells a year, combination of oil and natural gas, just to maintain current production.
Ken: Just to stay level.
Matt: Yeah, just to stay where we're at. And people don't realize that. People see a drilling rig and think that's going to change the world.
Like no. Like we have to. You don't get it. And that's what makes it difficult. But I do get accused a lot of being anti-Trump. I want to be, make it very clear, I am very much anti-Trump. I'm not even trying to deny that I am anti-Trump, but I'm not a liberal. I have a lot of conservative values. The issue with that is that the conservatives don't hold those values anymore.
I would say I have some of the conservative values that you would've seen from Republicans in maybe the eighties, but I also have a lot of liberal values. I'm sort of one of those in-betweeners, I guess, but I'm definitely anti-Trump. But I also vote for Republicans and Democrats both.
Right. I try to vote candidate, not party. I think Donald Trump is a scourge. And I think he makes us dumber. I've seen how much dumber we've gotten, and I think it's his fault.
Ken: I think you're right. And I think there's a dumbing factor to tribalism that we've not paid enough attention to.
Matt: There is
Ken: You can't receive information, if it has a D next to it or an R next to it. You can't receive information if it's something that contradicts Trump, even if it's right in front of you.
Matt: Yeah, yeah, for sure. You know, I made a video about continuity of government. That's one of our big problems is there's no continuity.
Ken: Yeah. Yeah.
Matt: There's nothing that lasts more than one administration anymore. I believe we're entering an energy crisis. No one agrees with me. That's fine. But here's what I know. People's electric bills are passing their mortgages in a lot of places around the country. And the reason why I think is because we became very lackadaisical with our energy grid.
We had a 20 year period where our energy consumption did not rise at all.
Ken: It was flat. Yeah.
Matt: We added 40 million people, 40 million cars and 20 million homes to a country and did not increase our energy consumption by one bit. That is equivalent to the size of California. So we basically added another state of California to this country and didn't increase our energy consumption.
So I think that our government and people got lulled into this idea that we're going to be fine. You know, we've added another California and we're still not consuming any more energy. We're going to be fine. Well suddenly AI comes, data centers. And energy demand and consumption is about to skyrocket, and we're sitting on our old grid.
We have 110,000 miles of high voltage transmission lines that have to be replaced. We've only replaced 2,000 miles of it in the last five years. I think we're facing an energy crisis. I think most people relate energy crisis to like gas prices. Oh, gas is $4.50, $5 I know you're in California, you might be a little more used to that, but when gas is $4.50 in Oklahoma, it's a state of emergency, right?
Ken: Yeah, yeah, sure.
Matt: Because we're still on the $7.25 cent minimum wage here. I don't think people understand an energy crisis, as it relates to a grid and what their energy bills will look like.
Ken: I think you're right.
Matt: Yeah. And I think it's coming. I think it's already here actually, so
Ken: I'm one who does agree with you and our energy work here in California is premised in part on the reflection that this is coming and also already the boiling anger out here about utility bills.
Matt: Mm-hmm.
Ken: I mean, I think if you went from the northern tip of California down to the border with Mexico and knocked on doors and asked every single person, Hey, how are you feeling about your electric bill? I think you'd get an earful. And, it's going to get a whole lot worse. And Trump's I call it energy dominance, I mean to give up renewable energy, just because he doesn't like the look of windmills, he calls them and or you know, he's discovered that since the sun doesn't shine at night
Matt: mm-hmm.
Ken: That's a big flaw with solar. Right. So insights like that are guiding our energy policy now, unfortunately, and no one dares stand up to them and say, Hey, hey, you know, these renewables really work in the right circumstance and are a really smart thing to do.
Matt: Yeah.
Ken: That's forbidden now. And when you add to that, a whole bunch of deregulation going on. And then I tell people the deeper damage that's being done to our government now is that to invoke the, the biology term, it's dysregulation. It's the cutting of staff, expertise, eliminating jobs without any analysis as to whether they should be eliminated.
Just this wholesale and you have to go fast. That's their most important attribute right now, when you listen to Gingrich or some of the other, you know, behind the scenes key players, they're most excited because Trump is going fast. Because if he slows down, it'll be harder, it'll be too hard. The opposition, the consequences will begin to pile up.
So speed is of the essence. And we're speeding into this energy crisis in a bad way.
Matt: Yeah. And what's really frustrating is I can't scream loud enough for people to listen. If gas went up 50 cents, it would be the biggest story in the United States right now. All Americans have seen increases in their energy bills, but easily half of the people in this country have seen their energy bills more than double in the last couple of years.
Yeah. And some people have seen their energy bills quadruple and triple, so it's like, we want to celebrate that people are saving maybe $25 or $30 a month on gas compared to last summer, but we can't talk about the fact that their electric bill is $600 a month more than it was last year. Even when it comes to what we complain about or celebrate, we choose fossil fuels.
Does that make sense? It's like it's a huge deal that my gas is 20 cents a gallon cheaper. It's not a big deal at all that my electric bill is $600 more because gas is gas and electricity's not flashy. Right? No pun intended. But it blows my mind. I do think it's a thing that is going to grow and fester and become
Ken: I do too.
Matt: A huge issue, and I think it's going to happen this winter, and definitely by next summer, it's just going to be madness. The electric bills are going to be madness.
Ken: Yeah. It's really already happened. People are now paying much more attention and, you know, places like the Central Valley where you can't live without air conditioning and the cost of running those air conditioners, especially at a time when we have dramatically reduced the incentives to put solar panels on your roof.
Bill Reily, who ran the EPA, was a mentor and friend of mine for many years, still is a dear friend and I had him on the show recently and he said, you know, something I think we might have gotten wrong as environmentalists talking about climate is we made it seem like it was going to be so painful to deal with, when in fact if we just applied some of the technologies that we had at hand,
He said that, you know, we still have cars that are just electric and his experience at EPA was like that, you know, regulatory steps that were taken during the Bush administration where they passed the last Clean Air Act. People don't know we haven't passed a major environmental law in decades. That should tell you something.
We're operating under the 1990 Clean Air Act and it's rickety. But you know, his experience was always that the leaders in industries that anticipated and had accounted for, had metabolized these coming policy changes and gotten ahead of them, actually made money from the new regulatory environment, and found the smarts, the technology, the engineers, and solved the problem in a way that it didn't seem so insanely painful after all.
And we kept talking about sacrifice and there is sacrifice, no question about it. But it’s doable also. Right?
Matt: Mhmm Yes, for sure. I think fear comes with the unknown and I think there's a lot of unknown about climate change that generates a lot of that fear. But you know, in any situation, fear doesn't help.
It doesn't get you anywhere. You, you have to think logically and critically and say, okay, what can we do? What can we possibly do? And I've read, you know climate change studies. I'm certainly not an expert in it, but I have a very good understanding of it. You know, Gavin Newsom is a great example. And look, I like Gavin Newsom.
I do disagree with a lot of his policies on energy, which he seems to be changing on. He’s a politician, but we're going to sue big oil for climate change. That's political. That's completely political. That is not an attempt to help climate change, that is an attempt to win something politically.
And what really bothered me about it was all of the oil and natural gas that was produced in California during those years that he's talking about was all approved by the state of California that had the same knowledge the oil companies did. You know this idea that the people who led, who legislated and the governors in California didn't know about the studies of climate change is asinine.
And he said, well, you know, the oil and gas guys paid him off and blah, blah, blah. It doesn't matter, you know, the state permitted something that they knew was harmful and now they want to sue those who did it, right? And I don't care, you know, if he wants to sue big oil, whatever. But I just feel like we focus too much on the political and not enough on what is actually relevant and matters.
And it's going to help. And I feel like we get so caught up in politics. That we lose sight of what we actually need to be doing the rooftop solar thing in California. Just honestly, that blew my mind. I feel like that, has that been decimated pretty much?
Ken: Yeah. Like a 60% drop in applications or more at the time when we should be going in the opposite direction.
My colleague Bernadette Del Chiro says we're sort of back to 2015 levels of installations and it was thousands of people working for, you know, small businesses who took the brunt. The whole industry got hit, but a lot of small companies went out of business. Matt, I really appreciate what you do.
I don't agree with you on everything. I know you wouldn't agree with me on everything, but I really do enjoy your contribution to social discourse at a time when there's so much about social discourse online to not like. You make a real contribution and I'm so grateful that you gave me a little bit of your time.
Matt: Well, thank you for having me. And, and I want to thank Will Westmoreland of the back 40. For dropping my name. I think he had something to do with this. I'm going to be doing more stuff with Will. I think Will's a great guy. I really do.
Ken: I do too. You know, and when and when he came on the show, I mean, environmental Working group and me in particular, I'm not always the most popular guy in farm country.
Because we publish the names of all the farm subsidy recipients online and the amount they receive, for example. Because we felt like people should know where your money's going and why do we have to keep spending it? And anyway, I'm not in the slightest bit surprised that the two of you have found one another.
He takes the same sort of calling balls and strikes approach to life that you do, and just because something fits the tribal mode in the region that you live in or the political surroundings doesn't phase him. He has his convictions and they're grounded in fact and observation in his life. And I can't say enough about Will Westmoreland.
We loved having him on the pod. He was great. And so were you.
Matt: He's relentless. You know, I'm positive that in the near future I'm going to be standing in the middle of a cornfield with a microphone speaking to three people in lawn chairs. Because that's how relentless will is. He will go anywhere to speak to any number of people.
He doesn't care if it's 10,000 or 10. He's going to go talk to the people.
Ken: Yeah, that's right.
Matt: And he's dragging me along with them. I said, you know what, just whenever you need me, let me know. I shouldn't have said that. Because now I'm going to be going everywhere.
Ken: Oh, great. Well, Matt, thanks so much. It's great to spend some time with Mr. Global, the person I really appreciate what you're doing. I hope we can chat again in the not too distant future.
Matt: Absolutely. Let me know. Thank you for having me.
Ken: Yeah, you bet. Thank you to Mr. Global AKA, Matt Randolph for joining us today, and thank all of you out there for listening.
If you'd like to learn more, be sure to check out our show notes for additional links. To take a deeper dive into today's discussion. Make sure to follow our show on Instagram @kencookspodcast. If you're interested in learning more about ewg, head on over to ewg.org or check out the EWG Instagram account @environmentalworkinggroup.
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Thanks again for listening.