Kerry and Granholm: No Need to Drill, Just Buy an Expensive EV!

BUCK: We have the highest average price of gas ever nationwide, right now, and it is hitting records day after day. Credit where it’s due: Biden does keep breaking records when it comes to the high price of gas, inflation. So at least he’s number one in something. And now, after really months of prevaricating on this issue of, “Oh, well, we can’t do anything about gas prices,” now they’re saying, “Oh, we’re…” NPR reporting Biden is under pressure so he’s putting pressure on oil companies. So apparently, he can do something — and if he can do something now, why wasn’t he doing something for the last six months?

You see they change their tune not based on the reality of the market and the prices that people are dealing with, the pain at the pump that you’re feeling. They change based upon what the polls say and what the politics dictate. And, man, have they gotten this one wrong the whole time. Biden’s getting it wrong. The White House is getting it wrong. Clay, increasingly I’ve been telling people, maybe Biden meant it when he said that Hunter was the smartest person he knows, because this White House is not impressive.

You got Jennifer Granholm saying, “Yeah, just go buy an electric vehicle.” She’s worth, I see, about $8 million. So buying a Tesla is not some big deal to her. But the best on this issue… I just want you to know, these are the Democrats — in this case, a Democrat who was almost president, who was the Democrat nominee, who has been secretary of state under Barack Obama.

CLAY: Thank God Hillary didn’t happen.

BUCK: I was almost… A Hillary Clinton presidency? Whoops! Under a Barack Obama president. And this guy more than anyone else says the quiet part out loud, which is that the Democrat elites actually think that the suffering that you’re feeling — as much as they don’t like the politics of it — they think that this is necessary for you to suffer through, you know, “you” being the hoi polloi because we need to go to a green economy.

BUCK: Clay, that’s John Kerry, who flies private everywhere —

CLAY: Oh, yeah.

BUCK: — who moved his yacht’s registration, a multimillion-dollar yacht so that he could pay less taxes on it (I think he went from Massachusetts to Rhode Island for yacht tax purposes); who paid when he was running for president, I think it was, 7% effective actual tax on his investments; who has married two — not one, two — very wealthy women. So this is a guy who’s good at spending money made by other men, and he wants to at this point when people can’t afford to put gas in their cars, lecture you on, “We don’t need more gas.”

CLAY: Well, I appreciate fact that he’s not suggesting that we all travel via kite surfing, if you remember that memorable.

BUCK: Windsurfing. Kite surfing is actually kind of cool. Windsurfing I think he was wearing the wet suit that got a lot of attention.

CLAY: That’s right. And so look. John Kerry, as you mentioned, I believe, now is married to the Heinz heiress.

BUCK: Billionaire. He’s a billionaire.

CLAY: Yes. He mostly has made his money by marrying very, very rich women, and I think we gotta have a flashback from John Kerry because you’re right. What they really want is high gas prices because they want for energy — whether it’s solar, whether it is electric, whether it is wind turbines, they want all of that — to be more competitive in terms of cost right now when it’s not. And this is him saying, “Hey, if you happen to lose your job, if you happen to lose your job because oil and gas is an issue,” and, by the way, hopefully nobody is right now. He told those people who lost their jobs, go make solar panels! I mean, you talk about out of touch? Listen to this.

BUCK: (laughing)

CLAY: I mean, telling people who are losing their jobs, “Go make solar panels or become a wind turbine technician”? I don’t know where that would test in terms of a political statement. Pretty bad, and I want to play this in a sec, give a heads up to the guys back there. How about Jennifer Granholm? The other major talking point is, if you don’t like gas prices, you should just go buy an electric vehicle. You mentioned earlier, this is Debbie Stabenow.

The senator from Michigan, which is a toss-up state, was bragging about her drive to Washington, D.C., and how she was driving past all the gas stations and just kind of laughing at how high the prices were. If you are already struggling to pay for gas, if you’re struggling with $5-a-gallon gas, let me tell you something, your options aren’t, “Hey, well, instead of struggling for $5 gas, let me buy a $60,000 vehicle!” Those aren’t fungible alternatives. That isn’t the real decision that Americans are facing right now.

BUCK: Whether it’s Energy Secretary Granholm or Climate Czar Kerry or anybody in the Joe Biden orbit on this issue, they make it very clear. People are picking up on this. They’re hearing it. Not just Republicans, conservatives, people listen to talk radio, the whole country is starting to figure out to some level, at least those who are capable of processing new information, that they really do look down on the dirty, CO2-producing masses, that if you have to suffer because we’re gonna save the planet, too bad. The problem is that as people figure that out, they get annoyed because, as we said, John Kerry is a big private jet guy.

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: This is the same nonsense, the same crap we saw with Al Gore, all these bloviating jerks who are, “Oh, I’m gonna save the planet, but I fly everywhere in a G6!”

CLAY: (laughing)

BUCK: Well, the rest of us right now are looking at the price of gas and saying, “What does this mean? It’s not even just about the gas that goes in your car. It’s about the transport of food, it’s about petroleum that goes into products, everything is getting more expensive. People’s budgets, people that have been showing up, working hard for years, doing the right thing, thinking, “We’re gonna get through covid and everything is gonna get better economically!” I thought that might happen. Of course, I overestimated the Democrats ability to not be crazy. And here we are. You’re hearing it from Kerry. You’re hearing it from Granholm, from Debbie Stabenow. They on the one hand despise fossil fuel usage by the lessers, by the poors, by the people that can’t actually get a $90,000 Tesla.

CLAY: And also producing, by the way. Everybody who has to work in coal plants, everybody who has to work — I mean, you’re really doing down on those people in a substantial way.

BUCK: Think about John Kerry. “Oh, if you’re a petroleum engineer, you should just make solar panels.” I mean, that is a guy who has had calluses on his hand in 50 years. Give me a break. And here’s what us is a Democrat elite that has pushed for exactly where we are and they don’t even have the honesty, because the Democrat Party is rooted in the irrationality of catastrophic climate change that’s gonna destroy our species, they don’t even have the honesty and the courage of their convictions to say, “You know what? Yeah, gas prices are high, and this is what it takes,” because they know that people are gonna say, “Really? Okay, let’s vote on this one.”

CLAY: Yeah. By the way, Buck, my grandfather, who I was named after, eighth grade education, Muhlenberg County, Kentucky, he and his family members, a lot of them worked in coal mines. He came down to Nashville where I live now to work at DuPont in the factory during the 1930s. But this idea that people who have been their entire lives and have a certain skill set should suddenly change and become experts in solar panels or wind turbines? It’s not a reality, it’s not a rational choice that people who have been doing these jobs for a long time can make. And let me just say this, too.

I want to play this cut because this is a Marie Antoinette “let them eat cake” moment, to me, for the Democrat Party. We’re talking about why Congressional District Texas 34 flipped like it did, ‘cause there’s a lot of Latinos out there listening to this right now, a lot of Hispanic people. When you’re being told, “Hey, you should, if you’re dealing with high gas prices, just go buy an electric vehicle,” it’s among the most tone-deaf comments that I’ve ever heard a politician make. Listen to cut 14.

CLAY: Yeah, just go buy an electric vehicle. If you’re having to pay a hundred dollars to fill up your car right now and that’s putting you in financial straits, I have the solution. Just go buy an electric vehicle. And also, if you’re living in an apartment and you wish you had more space, you should just go buy a house. Right? I mean, this is so tone-deaf that it actually disgusts me. (laughing) So many incompetent people all brought together in this Biden White House. Imagine, Buck, if they came to us and they said, “Hey, you guys need to talk to the biggest radio audience in the country right now. I know a lot of people in your audience are struggling with high gas prices. You should tell them they should go buy electric vehicles,” we would both say, “You’re absolute imbeciles.”

BUCK: I sat on a Bill Maher show panel with Granholm, and I remember thinking, it is appalling that this woman was the governor of any state. It would be appalling if she was president.

CLAY: They wanted her to be president. She’s not eligible to be elected president, but they loved her in the Democrat Party.

BUCK: Not a smart person, not a serious person. But I just remember thinking, “Oh, my gosh. Michigan, what has gone on here? What has happened to the state of Michigan? “ But you’re seeing that there’s a dissonance here. On the one hand they care so much about saving the planet and driving — and they say we’re gonna have to spend more, gotta go solar, gotta go green, gotta do all these things, and now Biden, because they’re just hemorrhaging in the polls or hemorrhaging support, Biden’s saying, “Well, I’m gonna…” What, they’re gonna cut the profits of oil companies, gonna demand more production? Which is just bonkers.

What do they think they’re doing? They don’t even know how these industries work that they want to not only regulate, but do some confiscatory profit seizing. By I just did a quick search, Clay, I thought this was interesting because, you know, “Just become a solar panel worker.” I’m on one of the biggest job recruiting sites in the country while we’re sitting here just to check this out average oil rig worker in America, $70,000 a year. Average solar energy worker in America, median salary of $46,000 a year. I’ve made in the forties and lived off of it and I’ve made in the seventies and lived off of it.

CLAY: Big difference.

BUCK: It’s a big difference, folks. It helps a lot. That extra 20 or 30 K helps a lot.

CLAY: It’s a massive difference — and moreover, it’s just insulting, right, because these are not fungible jobs and to me it just demonstrates, to your point on this idea of an excess-profits tax, first of all, how is that going to help in any way with the overall cost of oil and gas? Making oil and gas companies less profitable is not going to encourage them to invest more to produce more oil and gas. It would actually do the exact opposite because if they’re making less money, they have less money to invest, and if you compare — and I know almost no one in the media will.

I was reading this morning. If you actually look at the profits that were produced in the Obama years for oil and gas companies, they actually were more profitable than most of these oil and gas companies were in 2021. And remember, a lot of oil and gas companies were coming off 2020 when overall demand because of the lockdown, the shutdowns, the lack of people going to work for gas cratered. It wasn’t very long ago.

Two years ago, Buck, where the price of oil and gas went negative. Remember how crazy that was when you had that scenario, where all of a sudden you could buy the future deliveries on oil and gas for negative dollars because suddenly there was zero demand out there? It’s just an embarrassment, a lack of understanding of basic economics — and also an insult to all the working people out there, the arguments that the Biden administration is making right now.