BRETT: The pipeline shutdown and that saga continues for so many millions of Americans, and I have endless sympathy for the folks who have been adversely affected by this. I am among those who have been adversely affected by the pipeline ransomware shutdown that we found out about last week. (chuckles) We also found out that the company paid ransom money to the organization, DarkSide, the hacker group that’s out there.

But millions of people… I’m here in the Carolinas, and I’m telling you, it is difficult. It is difficult at best. As of Sunday in Charlotte, 50% of gas stations still don’t have gas in their tanks to sell. As of 1 p.m. on Saturday, 61% of North Carolina gas stations had no fuel according to GasBuddy.com, a strong improvement from 68% at 9 a.m. earlier in the day.

As I was driving around over the weekend, I did see little pockets of activity, and the only way you could really tell if a station had gas or not was the crowd that was trying to get into the parking lot. The empty stations obviously didn’t have any gasoline, and we even had a little instance of what some are saying gouging here in Charlotte. One guy was selling gas for $9.99 a gallon and he was limiting you to (chuckles) nine gallons of gas.

So basically a hundred bucks to put nine gallons of gas in your tank. When he was confronted by the media and some official, he said he wasn’t gouging. He was trying to manage the amount of gas going out of his pumps. He didn’t want to totally sell out, so he created a price that would be prohibitive to a certain portion of the population. Really that’s what price is supposed to do, right?

Supply and demand — high demand, high price; low demand, low price — and that’s how the economics of all that works. But try as hard as they want to, the left and specifically President Biden and AOC and Bernie Sanders and company, they want to go to the wind energy plan. They want to go to an electricity energy plan. They want to go to all that sort of stuff. Well, Rush laid it out pretty plain and pretty easy to understand that we need oil.

RUSH: Here you have a truth: energy demand and growth is going to skyrocket. There’s no other way around it. That makes total sense. There are more people and societies and populations that are becoming modernized. It makes total sense that this would happen.

We can’t conserve our way out of this, and the rest of the world is going to do whatever it has to do to find the energy that it needs to sustain its growth, because they all want growth; because growth equals prosperity, and prosperity equals power, and they all want more power than they’ve got.

In the meantime, we’re in the middle of being slaughtered by many members of our own nation here, Democrat Party leftists who are doing everything they can to help everybody else cut us down to size. While the rest of the world is guiltlessly walking down the path trying to figure out how to get more energy so they can use it, what are we doing?

We’re being told to back up. We’re being told to reduce our lifestyles. So much common sense is being abandoned in this. If the world is going to have its energy demand grow by 50% over the next two decades, I’m sorry, folks. You can conserve all you want — you can go get the plastic bags and you can go change your lightbulbs; you can unplug your chargers — it ain’t going to matter a hill of beans.

You can put a windmill in your backyard and put solar panels on your house. You can go buy some of these electric cars, plug them in, and hope they work. You can do all that, and it isn’t going to matter because conservation does not equal growth. Conservation may make good sense, and I’m not against it, but as a policy for economic growth? Not a chance.

You know, it is clear, folks, the Democrat Party and the American left hate oil. They despise oil. Is that rational? No. Why hate oil? John Kerry couldn’t fly around on his wife’s jet without it.

BRETT: The two biggest crises we’re facing in the country right now — the two biggest — were self-inflicted wounds signed into effect by Joe Biden: The border crisis and what’s going on when it comes to gasoline and energy independence in the United States. He killed off a hundred thousand jobs, and proudly killed off a hundred thousand jobs.

After telling you he was going to be the president for the working men and women out there, he proudly killed off the Keystone XL pipeline. He killed it off. He said, “We’re not doing it, we’re not permitting it, we don’t want it. It’s done, it’s over.” He did that, and he did the border. He created a humanitarian crisis at the border, created an economic crisis with the Keystone XL pipeline.

He wants to do the same thing to coal, wants to do the same thing to fracking, wants to do the same thing to electrical plants or any of that sort of stuff. Remember Barack Obama when he was running for president saying you could build an electric plant but we’re gonna bankrupt you, the cost is gonna bankrupt you? You’re not be able to afford to do that.

Where do you expect to get the electricity to charge all those lovely Teslas and EVs that are out there driving around with their radiuses of between 200- and 300-miles distance? Where are you gonna get that electricity? If you don’t think that the Russians can hack the electric grid, you’re wrong.

An earlier caller today referenced comments that I heard myself from other folks who watch this very closely and who understand that you can hack an oil pipeline, you can hack an electrical grid, you can take the entire East Coast down in terms of power. The bad guys have ways of doing this. It’s the internet of things.

Stuff that’s connected outside the rest of the world can be exploited or you can pay somebody to bring in a technology that can then go into an isolated system. Stuxnet comes to mind with the Iranian nuclear situation back a number of years ago and then most recently in the last few weeks, the failure at their centrifuge. We’re not gonna be able to live without oil.

And if you want to do electricity you better figure some places you want to put some nuclear power plants, because even the French use those. The Europeans understand the value of nuclear power plants. Nuclear power plants get a bad rap in the United States ’cause of a terrible movie by Jane Fonda and Michael Douglas called The China Syndrome in 1979.

It was an awful movie, and it created this impression of abject fear as it related to energy choices in our country. The Europeans use nuclear power. Other nations have used nuclear power. Yeah, you can look at Chernobyl and understand that was a bad setup by a corrupt, rotting, Soviet communist government in 1986. And you can look at the situation at Fukushima as a result of an earthquake and a tsunami knocking Fukushima offline.

But that’s your cleanest shot at energy. (chuckles) That is your cleanest shot at energy. You don’t want to do refineries? Wou don’t want to do with that? Fine. Let’s just generate a whole bunch of electricity. But it’s not gonna work with windmills across the prairie. Go ask the people in Texas what happened this winter. Ask them how that worked out for them this past winter when their capacity went offline.

We have got to be energy independent. Can you imagine what would happen if the Midwest, if the plains states in the dark of winter had the Russians, the Iranians — some unaffiliated hacker group, what have you — come in and take the power grid off line in the Midwest, in the Dakotas, in the dead of winter? You’re talking about dead human beings.

Now, the president needs to understand that we have people that want to do us harm in the world. The reality is with this — with this gas shock that we just because of the Colonial Pipeline being shut down — we have done nothing to deter that group, the DarkSide or whatever other group shows up in the future from doing it to us again because there is no visible consequence.

There’s just the president and Biden saying, “Yeah, we’re gonna look into doing something about these people.” Really? He sounds frightening. I’m… I’m quaking in my boots, Mr. President, that you’re thinking about doing something about what happened to the United States.

We have to at least have people in power in Washington who love America more than they fear the bad guys. You just gotta love the American people and love America more than you fear the bad guys or world opinion around the world. It’s not a difficult bit of calculus.