Putin Driving Up Oil Prices Is An "Outrageous Lie": USF Geology Professor Dr. Marc Defant
“I read a lot of the literature on global warming and for AOC to come out and say 2 or 3 years ago that the world was going to end in 12 years - that’s just hysterical craziness."
About two weeks ago, I published an interview with Dr. Marc Defant about why he thought President Biden’s oil policies were “bat-shit crazy” and creating more turmoil than they were helping alleviate problems in markets.
This past weekend, I was happy to welcome him onto my podcast for a discussion about the current state of energy in the U.S., including pros and cons of natural gas, fracking, shutting down pipeline projects in the U.S. and the cost benefit analysis of extreme activist environmentalists.
Dr. Marc J. Defant is a professor of geology/geochemistry at the University of South Florida. He worked for Schlumberger Well Services and Shell Oil for three years, with two years at Shell working as an exploration geologist.
He has been funded by the National Science Foundation, National Geographic, the American Chemical Society, and the National Academy of Sciences, and has published in many internationally renowned scientific journals including Nature. He has written a book entitled Voyage of Discovery: From the Big Bang to the Ice Age and published several articles for general readership magazines such as Skeptic and Popular Science and appeared on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast. You can reach him via this contact form.
First, we talked about how the price of oil got so high to begin with.
Dr. Defant told me: “Gas was up 40% and oil was up 80% before the Ukrainian war started. What got me a little incensed was that Biden is going around saying the price of gasoline is due to to Putin.”
“It’s kind of an outrageous lie,” he continued. “Most of [what’s pushing prices up] is totally unrelated to the war in Ukraine.”
“There was literally nowhere to put the oil, there was so much of it,” I said to him about oil’s crashing price several years ago.
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“They’re saying right now that the average family in America can expect to pay an extra $5,200 because of the rise of oil prices. For some people, that’s the difference between food on the table and no food on the table. It’s becoming a crisis and Biden isn’t taking the steps to mitigate this major problem,” Dr. Defant continued.
“Biden is literally destroying the U.S. economy trying to get to net zero pollution,” he continues. “I consider myself an environmentalist, but not a radical environmentalist.”
Dr. Defant told me: “I think we do have global warming but I’m not willing to destroy the economy to do some of the crazy things they’re trying to do. We’re supposed to go to net zero carbon emissions while the rest of the world is burning it as fast as they can.”
He added: “If we do it, we’re just being foolish and we’re losing out to these other countries - many of whom are still burning coal!”
“We’ve reduced our carbon imprint more than any country in the world over the last 10 years, and I think we need a pat on the back for that.”
“[Environmentalists] are creating an evil boogeyman where there isn’t one and telling people it has to be addressed in a certain amount of time with certain methods and it doesn’t matter what the collateral damage,” I tell Dr. Defant about the country’s obsession with net zero emissions.
“B of A says it’ll cost America $150 trillion in 30 years to go to net zero emissions. I don’t know an economy in the world that can do that and not have a major crisis. We and Europe seem to be the only countries interested in doing this,” Dr. Defant tells me. “We’ve seen how Germany has failed. Now Germany is completely dependent on Russian oil because they’ve tried to go to net zero. They’ve realized it’s going to take a long time and it’s going to be very expensive.”
“I read a lot of the literature on global warming and for AOC to come out and say 2 or 3 years ago that the world was going to end in 12 years - that’s just hysterical craziness. I don’t know where that hysteria comes from,” he adds.
From there, we go on to discuss the pros and cons of fracking, petroleum’s use in our everyday lives, why the U.S. is now dependent on countries like Iran for oil and what the future of energy generation will look like in the future.
You can read my interview with Dr. Defant from March 22, 2022, here and you can listen to our full podcast, for free, here:
It is necessary to clarify some of the things that were said by Mr. Defant concerning fracking and the production of gas from people's faucets. I fracked about 100 wells in the Appalachians between 1976 and 1986, and I am a licensed petroleum engineer. The situation of producing gas from faucets happened in Susquehanna County, Pennsylvania. About 10 years ago I talked to a hydrogeologist from Susquehanna County (I forget his name) who tested the gas from more than 300 faucets in Susquehanna County. He said that in every case, the gas produced from the faucets was low BTU methane which came from shallow formations. There was not one case of the tested gas being from the Marcellus shale, which is the deep gas producing shale formation which was fracked. The problem was caused by the gas companies who did not cement the surface casing all the way to the surface. When I worked in oil and gas we always cemented the surface casing to the surface and there was a state inspector there to make sure it was cemented properly. If the cement didn't circulate to the surface it was necessary to do a second stage cement job to circulate the cement to the surface. It was state law in every state to cover all the fresh aquifers with cemented pipe. Pennsylvania must have relaxed the regulations at some point since I left the oil patch. Natural gas was flowing behind the uncemented casing from the shallow methane formations to the fresh water formations. The gas companies eventually fixed the problem by doing a second stage cement job in each well. But there were no cases where this was caused by fracking.
I thoroughly enjoyed this podcast. It was like red meat for the base.