CHARLES PAYNE (FOX BUSINESS HOST): You know, as bad it is here, I say look overseas, look at what's happening in Europe, particularly in Germany. I don’t — you know, listen, some of these things sound great on paper, some of these things sound fantastic when a professor’s talking about it. In real life, we're talking about in the level of agony, we’re talking about going backwards in this country.
And again, you know, Germany, Europe in general, they're in such bad shape, and it's going to be bad. Their electricity bills — no one would be able to afford electricity, they're already trying to cut back, they're trying to get their neighbors to stop using natural gas, which is of course a main source for electricity. You know, many of them, Portugal, Italy, Greece, they're saying, heck no. I mean, you know, listen, we invented air conditioning for a reason. And so, it's just an unnecessary suicide, it really is.
Between that and not having children, Europe is on a path toward economic suicide that America should be watching very closely, because I don't know that there's any return from that. And some of these things that we take for granted, that you say, “Nah, we don’t really need air conditioning,” maybe you might think we don't even need, you know, gasoline, or petroleum oil. But we do.
And if you want to get to this green utopia, there might be a smart way to get there over the next 20 to 30 years. But why inflict this unnecessary suffering — on their children, by the way, they’re talking about their children. If they can get the world that they're talking about, their children will suffer, they will be less prosperous, and their daily lives will be more onerous. They don’t really, I don’t think, realize what they're asking for.
RACHEL CAMPOS-DUFFY (CO-HOST): Yeah, I agree. It is a cultural and societal suicide that we're witnessing right now.
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PAYNE: It's interesting to me that [Secretary of Transportation] Pete Buttigieg and others right now think that, you know, they have to — if you have to subsidize something that costs a lot more money, then you already have answered your question. It’s too expensive, it’s too early, and it’s not going to work. As far as this guilt trip, you know, when you drill for oil, you typically put a hole in the ground, you go down and you crack a few rocks. With the fracking, you go a little deeper, maybe, for oil.
To make this utopian green energy deal a reality, for lithium you’ve got to poison waters all around the world. For cobalt, you’ve got to get seven-year-old African kids and force them to mine in dirty water and dangerous, toxic water. For other products, you know, like the copper and other things, you’ve got to strip-mine the planet. You want to talk about ecological harm? We are going to have to strip-mine and poison the planet, strip-mine the entire planet, poison all the waters, mostly in third-world countries, and make children in Africa de facto slaves to make Pete Buttigieg's dream come true. Thank you very much, I can't wait for this new, great new utopia.
CAMPOS-DUFFY: The great reset.