046 Irina Slav, Energy Writer & Substack Author

[00:00:00] Irina Slav: There are differing opinions, but my opinion on the matter is that if you want cheap energy and you can’t produce it locally, And you have to get it from somewhere else. It’s a good idea to not continuously attack this somewhere else in every way possible and to be aggressive, politically aggressive towards it and, you know, as we saw last year, sanction it.

[00:00:31] Intro: Just because the facts are A, if the narrative is B and everyone believes the narrative, then B is what matters. But it’s our job in our industry to speak up proudly, soberly. And to engage people in this dialogue. Those two and a half billion people that are in energy poverty, they need us. America cannot meet this threat alone.

If there is a single country. Of course the world cannot meet it without America. That is willing to. We’re gonna need you. The next generation to finish the job. Overhaul nuclear radiation. We need scientists to design new fuels. And focus on net public benefit. We need engineers to invent new technologies.

Over absurd levels of radiation. Entrepreneurs to sell those technologies. And we will march towards this. We need workers to operate a. Assembly lines that hum with high tech, zero carbon components. We have unlimited prosperity for all of you. We need diplomats and businessmen and women and Peace Corps volunteers to help developing nations skip past the dirty phase of development and transition to sustainable sources of energy.

In other words, we need you.

[00:01:35] Mark Hinaman: Welcome to another episode of the Fire2Fission podcast, where we talk about energy dense fuels and how they can better human lives. My name is Mark Hinaman and I’m joined today by Irina Slav, energy writer and sub stack author. Irina, how are you doing?

[00:01:49] Irina Slav: I’m great, Mark. Thanks for having me.

[00:01:52] Mark Hinaman: Yeah. so Irina for our listeners why don’t you give a self introduction about what a energy writer and sub stack author does.

[00:02:05] Irina Slav: Well, I write about energy, all things energy. I started exclusively with the oil and gas industry about ten years ago or so. And then, as the energy transition began to, you know, really gather momentum, I started writing more and more about it, and I started having doubts and questions about it. And these, you know, really grew over time, so I started my substack to address these doubts and questions.

[00:02:36] Mark Hinaman: That’s great. Yeah. And it’s let’s see, it’s irinaslav. substack. com. So yeah. I R I N A S L A V. Yeah. And Arena where are you based?

[00:02:46] Irina Slav: I’m in Bulgaria.

[00:02:48] Mark Hinaman: Bulgaria. Okay. Are you from Bulgaria?

[00:02:51] Irina Slav: I am from Bulgaria.

[00:02:53] Mark Hinaman: How important are, I guess is the sentiment Bulgaria is similar to the U. S. where oil and gas is not very popular. Or is it different?

[00:03:03] Irina Slav: Not really. No. We’re more conservative. We’re backwards, I like to say, in energy matters. We like our energy reliable and available. And you may have heard that right now there are protests by energy sector workers and coal miners.

against the EU plan to phase out coal power. And coal miners are currently still protesting, they’re blocking a highway near where I live, actually because they’re not happy with the promises and plans, because they don’t want to be out of a job, they don’t want the next… generation to be out of a job and they know about the importance of reliable and affordable energy.

Bulgaria is one of the poorest EU members so we can’t really afford the amount of wind and solar that Germany can afford for a while longer.

[00:03:59] Mark Hinaman: That’s Refreshing to hear

there’s pragmatic people in the world. They’re like, man, we really like the lights to be on and we’re not willing to compromise. Yeah,

[00:04:11] Irina Slav: Yeah. I think most of us are simple this way. We do have green activists. They’re just not a lot of them. I don’t think there are a lot of green activists in the U. S.

either as a portion of the total population.

[00:04:25] Mark Hinaman: Yeah. Okay. What was your background before coming into writing about energy?

[00:04:33] Irina Slav: Funnily enough, I started my professional life, you know, started making a living by translating European Union documents and working on projects. that required European Union funding. And after doing this for about a couple of years, I vowed to never, ever have anything to do with the European Union again.

And that’s really ironic, because I’m dealing with the European Union right now, but not as a translator. You know, I don’t have to read the bureaucratic garbage. I just have to interpret it.

[00:05:15] Mark Hinaman: Yeah. How long did you do that?

[00:05:19] Irina Slav: Just a couple of years while I was at university, frankly, I didn’t have to do it for longer.

[00:05:27] Mark Hinaman: Yeah. sO tell me about the the substack what kind of projects do you write about? What are some that you’re, most excited about.

[00:05:36] Irina Slav: Well, I started this sub stack because while oil price is a great place in terms of editorial freedom, it’s not exactly appropriate to, to be sarcastic and personal and brutal.

Sure. Yeah.

[00:05:51] Mark Hinaman: Yeah. Rhetoric and prose is excellent. I find it to be funny, so, and I guess we didn’t mention that you you do write for oilprice. com but you wanted to have your own independent platform.

[00:06:01] Irina Slav: Yeah, but I really needed a place to basically vent about the energy transition and everything that was wrong with it, but it was not being talked about.

It was being hinted at from time to time, occasionally when you know, mainstream media really could not hide the truth anymore, but I needed to do it more bluntly to, to cope with this. With all the questions I was having about the energy transition. So I started this sub stack and apparently a lot of people like it.

They feel the same way I do about the whole transition thing.

[00:06:44] Mark Hinaman: I mean, your writing is extremely funny. As I’ve read it, I feel cynical, a bit sarcastic, but it’s fun to read, which is engaging for readers. I had a quote here that was just really good. He said, now for the language for journalists, and that’s a quote, language for journalists section.

Each debunked myth has one. The presence of that section does not aim to help journalists who, for some reason, find themselves at a loss expressing the thoughts they have while researching and writing a story. No, the section aims to package the message that CNN wants to send in the most effective form so it has maximum impact on the audience.

Yes. I know you knew that, but I felt the need to spell it out. Nevertheless, shall we say it all together? Indoctrination.

[00:07:29] Irina Slav: It is. This is not news reporting. I mean, this is a repeat and amplification of certain talking points. You could see it on all the big media outlets. And because they have such a good reputation based on their history, people tend to believe them.

They tend to believe that, well, these outlets… Right is actual fact, but it’s not. It’s a repeat of the climate change propaganda. Extreme weather events. You can see it everywhere in the big news agencies. And they state it as fact. It’s not fact. And a lot of scientists have challenged these so called facts.

But they are being silenced, they are being ridiculed. You probably are on social media and you see what happens there. It’s really brutal.

[00:08:23] Mark Hinaman: Yeah, absolutely. So Irina, are there a couple of projects in your career that you remember that you really enjoyed or you’re proud of, or maybe you dread?

[00:08:35] Irina Slav: well, do you mean my total career or just the energy writing part of it?

[00:08:42] Mark Hinaman: I guess I either perhaps the energy writing part. It’d be more interesting to listeners, but I’m curious about both,

[00:08:48] Irina Slav: right? Well, one really great project I did a couple of years ago, more than a couple, I don’t know, a few years ago was a series of educational articles about the technical parts of the oil and gas industry.

Literally how oil and gas is extracted from the ground. And I loved it because first of all, because it had nothing to do with energy policies. So, there was no source of frustration and annoyance for me, but I learned a lot because I have not worked in this industry, I don’t know the technicalities, so I learned a lot.

And it gave me a new degree of understanding just how complex this industry is. And it is the industry that keeps our civilization going. I think few people realize this. And they are all people who have something to do with the industry. They either work in it or adjacent to it. But most people never think about that.

And that’s why the climate change propaganda is so successful. Because they tell people, Oh, we can totally do without coal and oil and gas. It’s just very easy, we replace them with wind and solo, well no, it’s not. Yeah, so that’s really one of my favorite.

[00:10:12] Mark Hinaman: Where did you, were you able to visit any sites or did you, were you just no,

[00:10:17] Irina Slav: I just did a lot of research online and talked to people, but it’s one of my, you know, items on the bucket list.

It’s to, to visit an oil production site. There are precious few in the vicinity, you know, Romania, gas production is the nearest and I haven’t had a chance to visit.

[00:10:38] Mark Hinaman: If you ever make it to the U S then call me I’ll introduce you to some folks and I can go and give you a tour.

You know, like I climate propaganda piece, let’s focus on this for a little bit because I really frustrates me that it’s so disconnected from reality and I mean, people might argue that it’s not, but it feels rampant in the media. And like, for example, there’s been a recent merger Exxon has bought pioneer natural resources, which is huge. Acquisition Pioneer is the eighth largest publicly traded company in the world by market cap. Not including of course the national oil companies, but so, and Exxon’s obviously the largest. And so they bought Pioneer and the huge deal, it will have implications in the financial sector and the energy sector.

But the newsletter that I subscribed to that, I mean, it’s sarcastic and fun, fun to read. But you know, the guys that write it live in New York. And the first thing that right was, Oh, climate activists are going to need more tomato soup to throw at paintings. I was like, what? So what’s your response to that?

[00:11:53] Irina Slav: About the tomato soup.

[00:11:55] Mark Hinaman: Well, and I mean, just the total dissonance. I mean, this is a financial newsletter that, and they commented about, you know, it’s a huge transaction, but it is,

[00:12:05] Irina Slav: yeah. It will change the shale oil industry forever. I’m not sure it’s for the better, but it will change it. But, you know, activists are very easy to pick on, to mock, so maybe that’s why they chose to cover it this way.

And I would add that activists would have to also buy a lot more paint to throw at historical artifacts and building facades. And there will be paying the oil industry, including Exxon who produced these paints feedstock for these paints. So, you know, balance is out in the end.

[00:12:52] Mark Hinaman: So looking at oil price over the past eight years it’s been crazy. It’s been very volatile. When I was prepping for this interview, I was looking at prices compared to the eighties and nineties and it just feels like they’ve been all over the place. As an energy writer and somebody that’s studied this what’s your perspective on that?

Why has price been so volatile over the past decade?

[00:13:14] Irina Slav: Well, I think to, to significant extent, it has to do with online trading in the nineties and the eighties and nineties. And before that, there was no such thing as online trading platform. You couldn’t just make an account and start trading, even if you have no idea about anything.

You just, you know, open an account and start trying to make money. And most often you lose money, but it doesn’t really matter. So, I think that the fact that anyone, literally anyone, can trade oil online and… Millions of people do it is one reason because these people read the news they fail to see the bigger picture and their selloffs and Buy ons, so that’s one big reason.

I think the other reason is US shale. I think Because really the United States became a reasonably big producer, actually the biggest producer as of, you know, the past few years. So that too contributed to volatility because… You know, before OPEC was the biggest as a group producer, it still is, but it didn’t really have any challenges, but U.

S. shale became a major challenger. Unfortunately, this is not really the case anymore. As we have seen with the latest OPEC plus cuts, they still, you know, call the tunes. But but the U. S. shale did change the game. It might, I’m not sure it had, it has directly contributed to price volatility, but possibly indirectly in that OPEC is no longer the only big producer that caused the shots.

[00:15:15] Mark Hinaman: Yeah, from my perspective. And of course I’m engrossed in the U. S. shale industry. It’s always been the. Americans have had no seatbelt and no speed limit for how much they want to produce. It’s like, if we can go out and make money, then go and make money. There was a lot of capital destroyed throughout the 20 teens or 2010s.

[00:15:39] Irina Slav: They didn’t make lots of money, but they did burn through a lot of money. They

[00:15:43] Mark Hinaman: burned through so much money. Yeah. And it flooded the market with oil and it was, you know, these 400 independent companies all trying to get rich at the same time. And then it’s like somebody trying to you know, Take all of their apples to the central market.

And then suddenly there’s only so many people that want apples, right? So, yeah, but I haven’t heard the online trading argument and I agree with you. I think that probably made an impact.

[00:16:06] Irina Slav: I have been thinking about this. Yeah. Because before only big institutional traders could trade, but now just people like you and me trade online and it moves prices.

Yeah. It’s inevitable.

[00:16:23] Mark Hinaman: Yeah, I’d be interested to go back and look at some of the data for total volume trade and… Yeah,

[00:16:28] Irina Slav: it would be interesting. I haven’t done this research, but it would be interesting

[00:16:33] Mark Hinaman: to your thoughts on the energy transition? I mean, you’ve alluded to your opinions already but we had this listed.

Which projects have the most legs? Which ones do you like the most? Which ones do you like the least?

[00:16:47] Irina Slav: I like, as I said, I’m a reasonably simple person. I don’t like complications in my life. So like most people, I like my energy reliable, affordable, and if possible clean. And by clean I don’t mean how should I put it?

An absolute zero. But I’m thinking about technology for reducing fine particulate matter pollution from coal power plants. We have developed as a species, we have developed this technology and we are using it. The region where I live now. is the region that’s home to the two biggest coal powered plants in the country.

And they supply a lot of the country’s electricity and heat. And it used to be a really dirty region. The air was polluted, it was horrible. But they started, the owners, the operators of these plants, were forced by regulators to clean up their act pretty literally. So they did, and the air is clean. So these are my personal priorities.

When we talk about the energy transition, I don’t mind things like rooftop solar. In fact my husband and I have been thinking about putting up some solar panels on our room because we have the perfect roof for it and we have the perfect exposure for it. But the reason to do it would not be to be cleaner because I don’t care about that.

And I know how solar panels are produced. The reason is to be a bit more independent from the local you know, electricity distributor and from the pending changes in in the household electricity market. You know, right now we have a regulated market. So there are price caps and electricity for households cannot go above a cap.

So it’s reasonably affordable but because of EU requirements. The government would have to move households to the I was going to say the liberated market. That’s how it is in Bulgarian. Sorry. They have to move us to the unregulated market, which means much higher prices and we don’t want that and solar power rooftop solar gives us the opportunity to make a one time investment, but then be, you know, at least for a few hours a day to not have to be on this unregulated market.

So that’s one, one, one sort of project that I think do have legs, which is not the case with utility scale solar. I think that’s devastating for the environment because you don’t just put solar panels anywhere and the world is not full of deserts that are conveniently, you know, dry and uninhabited by too many species to cover You know, in panels, and then there’s all the issues surrounding the transmission of this energy to the end consumer.

There’s maintenance and another thing that very few people know outside of the industry, I mean, is that inverters, a necessity that convert the current into usable form, are extremely vulnerable to everything, and they can break down very easily and compromise. part of the whole system. So it’s really more complicated than it needs to be and once again, no matter how huge the utility scale solar farm is, it only works while there is sun shining in the sky.

Same with wind, although wind is even worse because it literally kills animals. There’s plenty of evidence even though activists try to ignore it. I mean, evidence is piling up. There is no other explanation. And they’re too expensive. And they require huge amounts of materials that are mined using hydrocarbons.

Yeah, sure, there are some solar powered trucks or something, but I haven’t really looked into how long they can work on a single charge, and how often they need to charge, and where the electricity for this charging comes, and you see, it’s a vicious circle that can go on forever. It’s a spiral, it’s not a circle.

[00:21:33] Mark Hinaman: Yeah. Okay. Do you spend much time looking into the global coal markets?

[00:21:39] Irina Slav: Coal? Not really. I follow the news as they come when something interesting happens, like in Germany recently, you know, they are reopening coal power plants after they closed their nuclear power plants. It could have been a brilliant joke, but it’s not.

[00:21:59] Mark Hinaman: Yeah, I guess that’s a good segue. Energy in Bulgaria and Eastern Europe versus the rest of Europe. beFore we, well, how is what’s the energy system like? Is it reliable? Is it… It is reliable, yes. There’s a cap on price currently.

[00:22:17] Irina Slav: Yeah, for households. Yeah, industrial users have worse luck and they’re on the unregulated market. Well, I recently looked at data, generation data, and it was something like 40 percent of our energy in Bulgaria was generated energy.

I mean, electricity, sorry came from coal. 24 percent or something came from the nuclear power plant and the rest was hydro, solar, and a little bit of wind. But mostly we are almost entirely dependent on nuclear and coal. I Don’t know about the rest of Eastern Europe, I know Poland is even more heavily dependent on coal than we are, I know Romania is, again it has a lot of coal generation and nuclear generation, and they also have some locally produced gas they use.

Bulgaria is not a huge gas consumer, which is good. Under the current circumstances, but I also know that Eastern Europe has been building a lot of wind and solar because of the European Union and because of all the subsidies available up for grabs,

[00:23:32] Mark Hinaman: I, I didn’t realize that Bulgaria had a nuclear power plant. That’s interesting. I just looked it up. How do you pronounce this? Cause the Dewey.

I like that. You know, It’s like two gigawatts of power, right?

[00:23:44] Irina Slav: Yeah. And that’s just the two remaining blocks reactors. We actually had six reactors, but the European Union made it a condition to close four of them. To take us into the European Union because they were old they said they were They it’s Russian technology, and you know what happened in Chernobyl and apparently it’s been happening all the time with all the other Russian built nuclear power plants, so they couldn’t risk it

[00:24:19] Mark Hinaman: So, yeah, then they made, which it’s not right , which

[00:24:22] Irina Slav: it’s not no.

Yeah,

[00:24:24] Mark Hinaman: sorry. In case the audience didn’t catch the sarcasm. Like it’s not happening .

[00:24:29] Irina Slav: Yeah. I didn’t think I was being subtle, you know, , you would’ve heard about it. But yeah, that’s one of the unforgivable things that the EU may just do. I think. There were plans to build a second one construction started, but then government changed and the incoming government ended the deal with Rosatom, and they wanted to take the deal to AEC, I think, because it’s a friendly U.

S. company and we hated Russia under that government but it didn’t work out. And now we have an almost complete facility physically, I think, but it’s not moving forward for political reasons. But sure, we’re building with wind and solar.

[00:25:23] Mark Hinaman: You guys were trying to diversify fuel source, because you used to buy all your fuel from Russia, and then

[00:25:30] Irina Slav: you wanted to trying to do this in Kosovo as well.

I think there’s been partial success, but Oh, I don’t want to talk about it. It’s really too frustrating.

[00:25:39] Mark Hinaman: Okay, you mentioned gas. I think everyone’s acutely if you’ve been paying attention at all to the energy scene over the past year and a half, two years the situation in Russia and Ukraine, and then the subsequent gas supply to the rest of Europe.

Has been problematic to say the least that might be an understatement, right? Oh, is this a good idea for Europe to be so dependent on Russian gas or was, were there better solutions?

[00:26:09] Irina Slav: Well, there was no cheaper solution. That’s for one. It’s not the whole of Europe, if you think about it. When we talk about Europe and gas dependency, we mostly mean Germany the Netherlands, Belgium.

We’re just a smaller country, so we mostly talk about Germany, the biggest economy in the European Union.

There are differing opinions, but my opinion on the matter is that if you want cheap energy and you can’t produce it locally, And you have to get it from somewhere else. It’s a good idea to not continuously attack this somewhere else in every way possible and to be aggressive, politically aggressive towards it and, you know, as we saw last year, sanction it.

Some have said that Russia has used gas as a weapon. Well, Russia has not exactly stuffed Germany against Germany’s will with cheap gas. It is simply objectively cheaper than LNG. So, you know, it’s controversial whether if you have political and philosophical differences with your energy supplier, you should act on them the way Germany acted, or you should, you know, let the supplier’s actions go to ensure continued reliable and cheap supply of energy.

Well, we know what Germany chose and now is paying the price, literally paying the price because LNG. Is it’s new addiction, if we’re talking about addiction, like the, you know, the activists, climate activists like to talk about hydrocarbon use as an addiction. So, basically when last year, Germany and other European countries patted themselves on the back saying we, you know, threw off the Russian gas shackles.

Well, yeah, but you put on American ones. And sure, America is the friend of the EU, but… So what you are still,

[00:28:17] Mark Hinaman: it is significantly more expensive

[00:28:20] Irina Slav: supplier. Yeah. So it doesn’t really matter and you’re paying a lot more and you’ve proven to the world you have shown to the world that everything you’ve been talking about that Europe can do without gas in Germany can do with wind and solar.

What it did with gas is. A lie, basically.

[00:28:44] Mark Hinaman: A lie might be a different language. I mean, it is. They’re deceiving themselves that they would be able to survive on, yeah, delusion perhaps, right? That they would be able to survive on just wind and solar. I liked your comment about it being cheaper. I mean, from a physics first principle perspective, like it’s like putting gas in the pipeline and not having to refrigerate it and, you know, drag it over an ocean and then reify it.

Exactly. , exactly. It is, you know, if the pipe is connected from one, you know, the wellhead to the stove and all you have in between are compressors to move it through a pipeline, then yeah, that will objectively be

[00:29:25] Irina Slav: cheaper. So, yeah and this would never change. And let’s not forget that Germany and, well, I’m not sure about Germany specifically, but Europe was importing Russian LNG.

Well, that’s because Nord Stream died, but they did not kick off their dependence on Russia either. That’s how important… Gas is for a large part of Europe.

[00:29:55] Mark Hinaman: There’s lots of Europe right now, and there’s been lots of talks about building more nuclear in Europe, specifically Eastern Europe Poland, Romania, Estonia. Yeah. But what are your thoughts? Why is this happening? And will it happen? Number one, I guess. And why is it happening?

[00:30:15] Irina Slav: Well, I do hope it does happen.

Because really nuclear is cleaner than coal. Definitely. I’m not talking about carbon emissions because this is not pollution. I’m talking about fine particulate matter. Nuclear power is absolute zero, unless you count the emissions during the construction of the reactors and the production of the cement that goes into the concrete of that reactor, etc.

But I’m not an activist, so I’m not counting it. Nuclear provides reliable and clean energy. I’m not sure about cheap, but I think it is cheap over the long term, because reactors can work for decades. And even though the upfront investment is quite considerable for big big nuclear power plants, it pays off.

And Poland really doesn’t have any alternatives because the EU is pressuring it to reduce its dependence on coal. Poland is about 70 percent dependent on coal. It’s unacceptable for the European Union. And then there are the other countries that are building nuclear because they are seeing how wind and solar perform.

And they are seeing that they do not perform as baseload because they are not baseload. Even though some activists appear to believe that it’s an obsolete concept, which I was informed about this by Meredith Angwin. The author of Shorting the Grid.

[00:31:54] Mark Hinaman: And we just interviewed her.

[00:31:56] Irina Slav: Yeah. Oh, that’s wonderful. She knows what she’s talking about, but I was perplexed when I was told that some believe that baseload is obsolete. How can it be obsolete? I mean, it’s like, the laws of thermodynamics are obsolete.

[00:32:14] Mark Hinaman: We’ve moved beyond that. We’re progressive. Yeah.

[00:32:18] Irina Slav: It’s amazing. So I think that’s why nuclear is becoming popular again in Europe, except in Germany, of course. Germany is strictly no nuclear.

[00:32:29] Mark Hinaman: Isn’t that just so baffling? I, yeah. I need to find some Germans to talk to, to go through this part. Oh, I talked to one to a fellow subscriber,

[00:32:36] Irina Slav: I interviewed him by email a couple of weeks ago and I published it on Substack, his name is Eugipius, his username is Eugipius, and he comments on all sorts of German politics. And I asked him specifically about that because it’s irrational and truly delusional. And he said it’s a cultural thing, it has to do with the Chernobyl disaster.

[00:33:01] Mark Hinaman: Germans have been educated to hate nuclear. Yeah.

[00:33:06] Irina Slav: Yeah. Indoctrinated against nuclear. Apparently there is also a book written by a German author. About all the horrors of nuclear energy, and as Eugipius said, every German has been made to read this book at one point or another in their life.

So we’re talking about complete and very strong indoctrination. And even with that indoctrination, more than half of Germans were against the closure of these nuclear power plants. More than half. Yeah.

[00:33:36] Mark Hinaman: More than half. Yeah. They had 17 plants that were providing 22 gigawatts of power to their country.

And now

[00:33:45] Irina Slav: they have to It’s baffling. To cover their, you know, countryside with wind and solar to make up for that lost capacity, which will never happen, of course. Yeah. And they will be importing electricity from France, which comes from their nuclear power plants. It’s really idiotic. Yeah.

[00:34:05] Mark Hinaman: How can people be entrepreneurial in the nuclear space?

[00:34:11] Irina Slav: Oh, I don’t know. Maybe we need more prone nuclear activism. I’m seeing such activism in the us maybe we’ll see more of it in Europe as well as people start to wake up to the realities of energy supply and electricity supply and what’s reliable and what’s not. But regular people, I don’t know. I mean, nuclear.

Power and nuclear plant construction is the domain of big companies. I think what we could do is be activists about it and, you know, try to overcome the sentiment that it’s very dangerous and any reactor can have a meltdown at any point, which is not the case,

clearly.

[00:35:00] Mark Hinaman: Yeah. Who, who would finance it? I mean, some of these activists, most of the activists in the nuclear industry work on a volunteer basis.

And the number of paid lobbyists is de minimis and laughable compared to the number of paid lobbyists in every other

[00:35:17] Irina Slav: energy sector. Oh, there’s no money in nuclear lobbyism. Yeah, because everyone’s in wind and solar and green hydrogen, I expect. I don’t know, I’ve actually, I have not researched how banks…

about nuclear. They clearly don’t feel very friendly to oil and gas. But I don’t know have the banks gone sour on nuclear or do they wait

[00:35:41] Mark Hinaman: for I think it’s changing. I mean, I think the green bond in Canada and I think the reclassification of clean energy that’s happening across the world I will say in the U.

S. Banks are all in currently on oil and gas, like they want to be lending to oil and gas companies because it pays. They can lend hundreds of millions of dollars and oil and gas companies will service

[00:36:07] Irina Slav: this debt. That’s actually good to hear because I remember the last Dallas Fed energy survey.

I read the comments and one of the comments was that… from some independent company, production company and it’s representative, it’s executive, said that the bank that the company is working with had reassigned the officer in charge of you know, oil and gas industry deals to another position.

And there was no more officer in charge of dealing with oil and gas companies. And the same oil company had trouble finding a new accountant.

[00:36:49] Mark Hinaman: There’s the shortage of accountants is a very real thing. That’s still random in the industry.

[00:36:55] Irina Slav: They refuse to use oil and gases, has bad reputation.

I couldn’t believe what I was reading, honestly.

[00:37:02] Mark Hinaman: Well, that’s an example of a profession that. I mean, everyone needs an accountant so they can go and work in any industry and the pay differential, I mean, eventually supply and demand you know, oil and gas will start to pay better if they can’t.

[00:37:15] Irina Slav: And

[00:37:18] Mark Hinaman: yeah, so, arena, you let’s switch to several of your sub stack pieces. If you want to chat about them the, I like the price of propaganda and. Remaining logic and climate change narrative. I mean, I would just let you pick one to, I guess, which was perhaps one of the most recent that has been the most fun for you to write.

[00:37:44] Irina Slav: You know, I write every other day, basically. So they tend to mix up in my brain. That’s

[00:37:50] Mark Hinaman: fair. Yeah. Okay, well, let’s. Let’s chat on the climate change narrative. And I had a quote here that I’ll I’ll just read out loud for the audience. Okay. Once that point is reached and inevitably gets reached because such is the nature of reality.

The narrative has no chance. It has to either adapt or die very much like a living being. Climate change narrative I fear has been moving in a direction that makes it inflexible and capable of adapting very well. So I guess, do you think that this narrative around the climate catastrophe movement is changing, adapting, or dying?

[00:38:26] Irina Slav: It’s not changing fast enough. In fact, what I see is the narrative leaders, like the head of the UN, the head of the European Commission, various European Union officials at the Biden administration, Trudeau in Canada, they are doubling down on the catastrophizing, they are doubling down on the, you know, the fear mongering.

And I don’t know, I think I wrote about this in an older sub stack. I think this is caused by desperation, because they can see what they are doing is not working. There can be no energy transition from hydrocarbons to other sources of energy. For the very simple reason that not only are hydrocarbons much, much more energy dense, they are also a lot more versatile.

You cannot electrify a whole country. You cannot switch to 100 percent EVs and 100 percent electricity for any energy need. You just can’t do this. Because there are thousands of different products made from oil and gas and coal. And you can’t replace all these thousands of different products with electricity.

Ha. And because I think we’re seeing the first signs that this is not working after the massive build up of wind, solar and attempts at green hydrogen and batteries and EVs. They see it’s not working and it’s making life more expensive, which is, you know, priority number one for the regular people who pay the bills.

You know, governments are experimenting on their own people. And it’s not a successful experiment. So at this point it’s too late to turn back and say we made a mistake. They have yet to come up with a way to do this. So maybe there will be more wars coming and things like that. Maybe another couple of pandemic scares just to get our minds off our electricity bills and the price of petrol.

But until they come up with a way to, you know, go back and pretend they never actually pursued this transition, they are doubling down. Yeah. And to me, it means they’re really desperate and have no way out. So they basically have to double down and to have a chance to, you know, get people to agree to what they’re doing.

And by they, I mean governments and narrative leaders. That’s why they’re stepping up the rhetoric. That’s why they’re talking about the boiling planet. tHat’s why they’re talking about extreme weather. Ursula von der Leyen even talked about carnage in Bulgaria when there was a flood in the southern corner of the country.

There was huge rains and yeah, a dozen people died, which is tragic. But it’s not the first flood that has happened and it’s not like this tourist town was properly planned. To, you know, to cope with such phenomena. Right. It was overbuilt, like every tourist town, it wasn’t maintained well enough.

There are a lot of reasons. These tragedies happen. There have been floods since the dawn of time. The only thing we can do about them is to adapt, which is my idea for a proper, you know, energy future.

[00:42:27] Mark Hinaman: I wonder if the pendulum will swing the other way. It is already swinging politically. Yeah, space for politicians to come in and say, no, actually what we value is cheaper electricity bills, cheaper energy and industry and economy, because if we have cheap energy, then we will be able to have good.

Industry, good economy, and then we’ll be able to take care of the environment.

[00:42:54] Irina Slav: Yeah. It is already swinging in Europe. I mean, the new Swedish government walked back some net zero commitments. There’s a new government in Slovakia right now, and I think they have plans in this direction to Hungary has been against total net zero.

It is prioritizing energy security. Which is why it wanted and received an exemption from sanctions on Russia because Hungary’s landlocked It cannot get oil from anywhere else Poland is actually suing the European Union for some of its net zero policies and on right now in Bulgaria We have a vote today.

There was a vote of no confidence to the government because of its energy policies We can only hope that this vote leads to, you know, yet another election and more sensible people will come to power. But I think there is a tide rising of, how should I put it, energy pragmatists, perhaps.

[00:44:03] Mark Hinaman: Energy pragmatist. There shouldn’t be anyone else.

[00:44:07] Irina Slav: You’re absolutely right. But apparently for now we’re stuck with the delusional people who have some sorts of vision. And they desperately want to make it happen, to see it happen, but it’s impossible. So it’s probably not easy for them either, but I don’t care.

[00:44:32] Mark Hinaman: So, I mean, you listed several countries, Hungary, Sweden, Poland, right. I’ve followed these countries, but these are countries that are pragmatic. They want to build energy for their economies and they’re prioritizing reliability. Over emissions. Yeah. Cool. This has been good arena. What’s what’s the most impactful step that we can take to build more nuclear in Let’s say in Europe.

[00:45:02] Irina Slav: We’ll continue pressuring governments to accept it as a clean source of electricity. I think that now that they’re under pressure from, you know, the pragmatists and voters who care more about the size of their electricity bill than where this electricity comes from, they might be in a mood to listen.

You know, because it is clean electricity, it’s reliable electricity, and it’s relatively affordable electricity. So maybe we’ll see some sense from European post makers.

[00:45:43] Mark Hinaman: So pressuring policy makers and government as much as possible. Yeah, as much as possible. That’s how people could help. Is that? I think so.

Writing and participating in the process. And I mean, we live in these democracies,

[00:45:55] Irina Slav: right? Just talking about it and, yeah.

[00:45:59] Mark Hinaman: podcast. If

[00:46:03] Irina Slav: you have online audiences. Yeah, if you have a podcast or a sub stack or, you know, a great following on X. Any, any channels available.

[00:46:14] Mark Hinaman: Okay. And so if we do that, then what does Europe look like in the next?

5, 10, 15 years.

[00:46:22] Irina Slav: Oh, I don’t think it will happen in the next five or 10 years, but maybe if nuclear gets the place it deserves and countries stop shutting down their plants Europe will have more reliable energy supply, electricity supply, then probably this would help more people buy electric vehicles.

Without worrying whether and how they would be able to charge them. That’s, I’m joking, EVs are, I think, near the saturation point. I Think electricity supply will be more reliable if, you know, the skepticism against nuclear changes.

[00:47:08] Mark Hinaman: Yeah. Okay, well, Irina Slav, thanks so much for taking the time to chat with me.

Folks can find you on your sub stack, Irinaslav. substack. com. Yeah. This has been

great.

[00:47:19] Irina Slav: Thanks for having me. It was a pleasure.

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