This week, on GrokTALK!, Trump’s EPA tries to save recycling by reclassifying it as a manufacturing process instead of waste management. I’ve also got some great news about the next generation of Electric Vehicles. Plus a rant on how Democrat behavior, from Climate Cult antics to AI scaremongering, proves they hate America and Americans.
00:00 Introduction to Grok Talk and Topics Overview
00:41 The Recycling Debate: Myths and Realities
08:53 Electric Vehicles: The Government’s Role and Market Distortions
13:13 Democrats and Environmental Policies: A Critical Perspective
19:57 AI and Environmental Narratives: The Bigger Picture
“Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire.” – Gustav Mahler
Watch on the ‘Grok Rumble Channel if the Embedded Video does not load.
Links:
- https://granitegrok.com/blog/2022/11/greenpeace-admits-that-recycling-doesnt-work-and-is-probably-worse-for-the-environment
- https://granitegrok.com/national/2024/09/in-mad-desire-to-sue-exxon-california-admits-recycling-plastic-is-a-hoax
- https://www.dailysignal.com/2026/09/05/epa-treats-plastic-waste-energy-manufacturing-resource/
- https://www.coffeeandcovid.com/p/revolutionary-reform-monday-labor?
Authors’ and Speakers’ opinions are their own and may not represent those of Grok Media, LLC, GraniteGrok.com, its sponsors, readers, authors, or advertisers.
Edited Transcript:
Steve (00:00)
Welcome back for another edition of GrokT!alk brought to you by GranitGrok.com and Grok Media LLC. Make sure you check out everything we have to offer on the website at GranitGrok.com. Sign up for our newsletter over at Substack.
We also have a rather impressive growing audience on Rumble. We finally got over a thousand followers, and we are currently cranking away at over 600,000 views per month. So something fun’s going on over there; you should go check it out. Today, a little different program. Normally I pick a topic and sort of beat it over the head. Today we have, well, three.
The first one is recycling. I know it’s funny. It’s a joke. Recycling is a joke. Gonna talk about that for a couple of minutes. The next one is related. Electric vehicles are evolving. We’re gonna take a quick jump into that subject with the help of Jeff Childers from Coffee and COVID. And then finally.
A little rant about why Democrats hate America. So, where do we begin? Well, we begin with an article where I quoted Greenpeace, and Greenpeace says, and I quote,
They preached it to children, mandated it for adults, and bludgeoned municipalities and virtue-signaling corporations into wasting vast sums, probably hundreds of billions of dollars worldwide, on an enterprise that has been harmful to the environment as well as to humanity.
I will add my own words from a previous article.
It’s been documented and reported for close to two decades. Look it up. The energy wasted to clean recyclables before you recycle them. The energy needed to recycle glass, cardboard, paper, and metal into a reusable form is carbon-intensive. Trucks, facilities, power, people, and processes all consume more energy than just burying the stuff in the ground, which is where it came from, if not in that form.
We’ve been railing against the recycling regime for years, even though we participated at the local level because our towns make us sort our stuff. And we used to have to sort it by type.
Which probably was a better way than the way we’ve been doing it for a while, which is you just throw it all in there, they bundle it all up, and somebody else does that. The problem is that most plastics, in particular, aren’t recyclable.
So you can recycle glass and cardboard and metal, but plastic’s always been a problem, but a big problem. But we’ve been pretending for a very long time. And lots of states turned it into an opportunity to generate revenue. Revenue for the state, revenue for homeless people, anybody who wanted to collect cans and bottles and get the refund for recycling. And again, the recycling is incredibly energy intensive. In fact, it’s so energy intensive that sometimes it’s just cheaper, easier, and better to throw it away. Now, we send a lot of it to China, and they just toss it in rivers. That’s why most of the plastic that’s in the ocean comes from Asia. But we need a better way. Yes, you can burn it, put it in an incinerator, and do all kinds of stuff, but there’s still lots of plastic.
And we need plastic. You can’t just say stop using plastic. Plastic shopping bags are more environmentally sound than the plastic fiber, whatever you want to call them, reusable bags, because you have to reuse those things thousands of times. They get dirty. You can pass germs and infections. People don’t wash them, but if you do wash them, that requires energy and soap, and it ends up in the water. And there are just a million things that could go sideways.
And we’ve written about all of them.
To follow up on another post, recycling plastic was a big lie thirty years ago. The little triangle of arrows aside, most of it can’t be recycled. What can, about five to eight percent, is reprocessed into pellets that can be repurposed as post-consumer material, but the processing has a much bigger carbon footprint than burning it or burying it.
So again,
They’re still looking for a way to address the problem. I mean, in my town, there is a benefit. If you throw it in the recycling bin, we don’t end up paying tipping fees on it. So it actually does save some money. It serves a purpose. If you decide that’s not the purpose you want to serve, great, then do something different. But what is that different thing? Well, Trump’s EPA- yeah, Donald Trump’s EPA has come along with an idea.
Quote: The Environmental Protection Agency under President Donald Trump has launched a quiet revolution in the approach the EPA takes towards some forms of plastic waste, removing regulatory barriers by treating some plastic recycling as a form of manufacturing rather than waste disposal. The EPA’s new approach aims to incentivize advanced recycling of plastic, contributing to the economy
While addressing the spread of plastic waste into oceans and ecosystems, the EPA under Trump and Administrator Lee Zeldin has taken several concrete steps to reinvigorate recycling in the United States, including actions that directly support the advanced recycling industry.
So what the heck is that? Well, in March, EPA announced it would consider revising the definition of municipal waste combustion units under other solid waste incinerators under the Clean Air Act of 1970 to remove the reference to pyrolysis combustion units. The new definition would clarify that the rule for other solid waste incinerators will not apply to pyrolysis.
Or pyrolysis. I’m gonna say pyrolysis; it’s easier.
EPA accepted public comments until May and is currently revising the rule. Eisenberg praised this move as a key step toward improving recycling and spurring innovation in the United States while retaining high environmental standards. Pyrolysis technologies convert used plastic into valuable feedstocks to make new products rather than combusting the plastic for energy purposes or landfilling it.
So I don’t know a lot about how plastics get recycled. I know it’s intensive, but apparently they’re coming up with better ways to convert more plastics into something that can be reused- plastic that you can use to build or make other things with. They’ve got a similar thing they’re working on for tires, which is a huge problem because tons of tires, and if you drive an EV, they go through tires faster than who knows what because they’re so damn heavy, which is funny. And they’re related because we’re going to talk about EVs in a minute.
But the idea is to find an actual process where some engineer or a scientist comes up with a way to salvage and reuse this and possibly even do so in a way that is better for the environment and cost-effective, meaning it actually does something good economically and the end product is useful instead of us just pretending to go through the ritual.
Our little Sunday service (on Saturday) where we bring our recycling to the landfill or take our returnables back to the center that receives them, of which there are fewer and fewer. And just, you know, I mean, we use a lot of stuff. People create things; people make waste. We need to figure out how to deal with it.
Incineration is a great idea as long as you have the air quality controls in place because it’s garbage, and you can create heat, which will create energy. So it’s not a bad idea. But if we can take anything that is going to end up in the waste stream, get it out of the waste stream, which reduces the costs of burying it or burning it, and turn it into something that generates jobs and tax revenue for those people who are into that sort of thing. And actually literally recycles back into the economy. So Trump’s EPA is doing this, not Biden’s, not Obama’s. And they’re doing it by removing some regulations and suggesting some guidelines.
That’s what the government’s supposed to do. The government’s supposed to just have some guidelines. And then if somebody goes outside the guidelines, they break the law; you investigate them. We don’t presuppose guilt. Well, at least we’re not supposed to. The entire Democrat Party presupposes guilt on everyone who disagrees with them on a wide range of subjects. But hopefully, with any luck, this will improve some situation.
Now, I wonder if we I don’t know where Democrats stand on this idea. They’re probably like, it’s gonna ruin the environment. But then again, they thought they were doing a good thing when they said we should all recycle, when in fact it was worse. The same was true with solar and wind. The same is true with electric vehicles, which is our next subject, and we’re gonna jump into that right after this
Very short musical interlude.
Okay, there’s no good reason for the musical interlude. But anyway, Coffee and COVID, if you’re not following it or reading it, you should. It’s a great Substack. You should just it’s free, dude. Just go read it.
EVs, of course, were riding high on taxpayer handouts; the seventy-five hundred dollar benefit to anybody who purchased one actually just drove the price of EVs up. You didn’t really benefit from anything. The car makers found a way to get more from you and me as taxpayers and still sell an automobile that’s bad for the environment, especially if it catches on fire. EVs are here. If you want to buy one you can I just don’t want to help you pay for it. That’s always been my rule. The same thing is true with wind and solar. If you want wind and solar, you pay more for it.
Don’t make me pay for it. Unfortunately, the way the grid’s set up and the system set up, that’s not how it works. Therefore, I have to pay more for electricity so you can pretend that you’re improving the environment when all you’re really doing is offshoring emissions to places that have absolutely no air quality control. So that’s on you.
EVs are, well, they’re here. I don’t think they’re going away. Tesla’s still cranking them out, but car makers who jumped into the EV market because the government was subsidizing it and making promises, hundreds of millions of dollars worth of promises, that you and I would support their business model if it was EVs. And they were, of course, driving you to the point where all we’d have his EVs, even though it was never gonna be enough power to power them, even though there was never gonna be enough infrastructure and time. That’s how stupid Democrats are.
It doesn’t just apply to EVs. So anyway, EV makers had to figure out what they were going to do. We still have these cars. We have this market. Some people might still buy these things. And the answer from industry professionals is, well, it probably won’t surprise you. Add a gasoline engine. I’m not kidding.
EREVs will still be all-electric vehicles, but with a gas generator. It’s a generator, not a motor, sorry. And added to charge the battery when it runs low. Do not call it a hybrid. It is an electric vehicle with a battery, a gas tank, an exhaust system, and a 250 horsepower V6 gasoline engine. Sorry, generator. Please try to keep up. Admittedly, the distinction is not completely obvious. The point is car makers have solved the electric vehicle range problem with a daring new technology called fossil fuels.
Insert lots of laughter.
Ivan Drury says now we’re throwing in another layer of complexity and oddity. So the brilliant new plan for EVs is to give them gasoline engines. How great is that? And Childers writes, there are many morals to this story. First. Whenever you see a distortion in the market, like electric cars without a charging network, look for the withered, interfering hand of government. Second, relying on the government to support your business is probably on the reckless side.
So we have EVs with the gas-powered extender coming soon to a car lot near you. And they’re not hybrids. Just remember that. They’re electric vehicles with gas-powered generators, which…
Welcome to the real world.
You know, at some point I wonder if EREVs will evolve again, because the market keeps changing depending on how elections go and who decides whether something you don’t want should be subsidized with your money by government force, which is what taxation is. If they end up being ICE. You know, just take the EV part out, and then we’re back where we started. It’s a lighter vehicle. It has a smaller carbon footprint up front. It has a smaller carbon footprint at the end of life. We’re just debating the carbon footprint in the middle. And if the rest of the entire green movement is any guide, they’re lying about that middle part.
So what about my rant?
Well, I started writing this down. I had some thoughts, just in my little earbud here. I’m just gonna read it, and you can take it however you want.
Democrats hate America, and it’s not just about Donald Trump. For four decades, they’ve used the climate lie to undermine the use of abundant, affordable energy and the prosperity and human flourishing that the West is built on; they demand we replace it with ineffective, intermittent, unreliable alternatives, then lie to us again about them being clean. They aren’t. Neither are there green programs which offshore the emissions to other countries who happen to be the worst emitters on the planet. Do they go to protest there?
They do not.
Do they demand changes in policy over there or hamstring the economies of India, Africa, Southeast Asia, and most especially China? They do not. If you were serious about emissions and the planet, you’d go where the emissions are. Instead, you punish Vermont farmers whose emissions account for so small a fraction of the global total that China likely erases a year’s worth of regulatory wrath, taxes, and regulations in about an hour. If emissions matter, you’d go where you could do the most good for the planet.
So they don’t. They don’t even talk about it. They harass you for using your gas mower, your gas-powered leaf blower, driving your car, living in comfort. While countries like China are cranking out emissions so fast they dominate the world, and they aren’t slowing down.
And nobody is going over there to talk to them about it. Now, they do show up at the climate conferences and pretend. But at the end of the day, they don’t care. They’re just lying to you, just like the Democrats are lying to you. Because they’re all the same people. They’re telling you one thing while they’re doing another, which explains why people like Bernie Sanders and Sandy Cortez can fly around the country in private jets, emitting all kinds of emissions.
So that they can then lie to you about a republican oligarchy, which is entirely projection.
If emissions matter, you go where you could do the most good. It was never about that, and it still isn’t. But it will take a few years for us to get out from under the pile of bullshit Democrats have been shoveling these past few decades. It’s the bullshit that made your electric bill stink.
Remember that story? Started with, I don’t know, maybe Maury Healy in Massachusetts. It’s your electric bill sucks because of Republicans. No, actually it doesn’t.
They’re our best hope for a lower electric bill for advanced nuclear technology. They’re the only reason we might get a bill to go down. Democrats can’t do that. They don’t even know how. It’s anti American. It’s anti human flourishing, the Democrat Party’s agenda. Because otherwise, they would be over there cutting those emissions, right?
We actually have rules for clean air and clean water. These countries don’t. And those are the places where the Democrats wanted all the stuff that you buy that they say is green all the mining, all of that. It’s all dirty. Very dirty. So why would you do that? Why would you lie about caring about the planet?
Cobble Americans and American industry, the American defense, and everything else, and let your enemies do whatever the hell they want and pollute as much as you possibly could. They hate America. It’s anti-American, it’s anti-human flourishing, and a dangerous path that could leave us vulnerable to our enemies outside of America. Yeah, the Democrat Party and its many faces are the domestic enemies. And you can’t hate America without also hating Americans.
They don’t like you. And the same people who lie to you about climate, many of them funded by our enemies, are lying to you about AI. They are.
I’ve talked about it many times, and I’m not gonna stop because it’s poisoning the Republican Party. My own governor said, Well, we don’t really need any AI data centers. You’re an idiot.
Read GraniteGrok. We have links. We have quotes. We have scientists. We have researchers whose information we share.
And a lot of that negative stuff, most of it, is funded by our enemies. They want to get an advantage. They are fooling you into thinking horrible things about the environment and AI, just like the lies they told you with all the other climate bullshit. So now we have the decrepit comrade Bernie, and he has proposed something called a ban on artificial superintelligence. I’m sorry, he calls it the Ban Artificial Superintelligence Act. It creates more government.
You get to pay for it to ensure that Bernie’s buddies in China get ahead and stay ahead of the US in the AI race. The measure includes up to 20-year prison sentences for AI engineers who refuse to line up under Bernie’s jackboot. He’s got a whole bunch of rules. And you know what I think? Somebody needs to put a jackboot up Bernie’s backside. That’s what I think. So China’s really the only competition we have in AI in real terms, but everyone from Comrade Sanders to my own governor is buying in on this communist propaganda.
The water narrative is a lie. It isn’t even anywhere near the truth. The energy cost narrative is lie. The environmental impact narratives are lies. And all those lies, just coincidentally, are funded by Chinese interests or the Democrat Party. So I apologize for repeating myself, but Bernie and his DSA buddies, every Democrat down to the state level, have bought into the environmental lie, and it’s carrying over into AI.
While Trump and Republicans have been onshoring chipmaking, high-tech, low-tech, manufacturing, pharmaceuticals- everything we weren’t making here when some asshats shut the world down over a bug that 98.5% of people survived.
The end game of the Democrat Party is what the DSA wants. Feudalism with client states, all answerable to a central government, with as few opportunities for you to interfere with their five-year plans as possible. You want some inconvenient truths.
Democrats love guns, and their government will have a monopoly.
You’ll get democracy, which is to say mob rule, until they no longer need it, at which point illegals on the voter rolls won’t be an issue because voting will be an exercise not unlike wiping your ass. Everyone expects you to do it.
The AI thing is a big deal. I’m gonna keep talking about it. We have plenty of articles; just look for it. I’m not gonna repeat all that here. I already kinda did. And it’s all tied to the original environmental BS. It’s the same line. It’s bad for the environment. They’re gonna take all your water, and they’re gonna harm all your water. AI uses less water than a golf course.
I already wrote about that. Go look it up.
So I guess today is a very environmental program. And the gist of it is that you will continue to be lied to by people who really don’t care about the things they say they care about. I talked about it on the morning update. They don’t care about women or gays. They’re just using you to get power. And they don’t care about the environment. They’re just using that to scare you.
Into giving them power. So that you won’t really have any; you won’t have any power, real political power or actual physical power. Electricity will become a luxury. And so will technology. Because they want to control it, not so they can use it for good, but so that they can control you. And that’s all this has ever been about. And that’s all I have to say this week.
Well, that’s not true, but I’m gonna stop. Cause that’s enough. All right, thanks for tuning in. Don’t forget: Morning Update five days a week, Monday through Friday, sometimes on Saturday.
Have a great week.
Don’t forget to vote tomorrow, New Hampshire. It’s your primary. And then on to the general election in November.
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