CLIPS: Neil Young on Howard Stern, Oct. 14

Neil Young interview clips.

YOUNG: The things that we don't know, you know, we can do little things to fight climate change. And yet our army and our armed forces are the biggest CO2 providers into the world, they just...it's amazing. And yet we are fighting what? ISIS...

STERN: What do you think about that?

YOUNG: ...al-Qaeda. And we are fighting these wars against these organizations and their carbon footprint has got to be like 1% of our huge army and our navy and all of this stuff that have with all our big machines. We're doing more damage to the earth with our wars. And you try to find out? Hey, freedom? No, freedom, you don't get it. You can't find out what that carbon footprint is of the military. It's not available for us.

STERN: Are you upset about what's going on in the Middle East? I mean of course you're upset about, everyone is...

YOUNG: You know, I don't like war and I, you know, I think it's all about energy. In the end, it's all about energy. That's what's about. And it's going to be about water.

STERN: We're over there because there's so much oil. There's a lot of hotspots...

YOUNG: We ought to just start getting smart and use what we have: renewable energy. There's energy from the sun. Hello? It's right there. You go outside and if you don't wear a hat, you can burn a hole in your head. There's something there. Let's use it.

From 12 Things We Learned From Howard Stern's Interview With Neil Young | Rolling Stone:

3. He wasn't kidding last week when he said he's never going to perform with Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young ever again. "Playing with Stills and Nash in that band was really great," he said, intentionally leaving out a certain other member. "I wish [Crosby] the best with his life. There's love there. There's just nothing else there. [A reunion] will never happen. Never happen, no, not in a million years….You have to think about things before you do them. If you make a mistake, you have to fix it right away. [A reunion] will never happen. You don't have to worry about it. It's easy to say 'no.'"

5. Even 45 years later, he's still pissed about all the cameras onstage at Woodstock. "They didn't have to be right there on the stage," he said. "They're cameras, hello! Use zoom, dickhead. We were playing music and there's some jerk standing there in black clothes. We're playing music, get out of there."

7. Bono gave him advice about how to write more commercial music. "I sung all the songs in Greendale," Young said. "And Bono commented that the songs needed hooks that went over and over again and more people could hear them." Young didn't take him up on the advice.

8. He's tremendously disappointed in President Obama. "He just opened up the Gulf of Mexico to fracking," he said. "Like the Gulf of Mexico didn't need a break…Politicians are empowered by the system to do nothing but take money from the corporations that control them. Obama campaigned on change and hope, and they're fracking in the Gulf of Mexico. Barack, hello! Wake up, buddy."

9. The first batch of Pono players are sold out. "We're going to try and make more in January," he said. "We're starting to build and scale up, but the demand for them was awesome…We're making this for people that want it. We're not making it for people that don't want it, but they may not know then want it until they hear it. It's a gentle revolution. We're not trying to bowl over the world. We don't think success is anything you can tangibly see. It's a smile."

12. Sharing a Toronto apartment with Rick James in 1966 was nonstop fun. "We did some wild things," he said. "It's all very hazy to me now. I'm glad I made it through that stage. It got a little dicey. There were some drugs going on. I remember singing one song for about a day and a half."

Neil Young on environment: "You look at these leaders like Stephen Harper up in Canada where they have the tar sands in Alberta," Young said. "And the leaders in Russia and our own leaders here. Although we had this huge thing in the (2008 U.S.) acceptance speech back there in Chicago. 'I'm going to take on climate change and everything.' Obama just opened up the Gulf of Mexico to fracking for all the oil companies and gave all the rights away. This was like three weeks ago or something.

"I just don't see the prescience, I don't see the wisdom in that. Maybe it's that, 'Well there's only 10 per cent of the fish left anyway so it's not really going to hurt that many fish.' And that's a sick joke. So when all this crap starts coming out of people's faucets and they can catch their water on fire and people are dying and people are sick because of fracking, then the solution is, 'Let's do it on the bottom of the ocean because nobody will be bothered by it, they won't see it.'"

"Realize that if the United States of America is the leader of the free world, why is it that we are saying we can maybe have two per cent solar energy by 2020 and Germany has 50 per cent renewable energy right now," Young said. "It's because of leadership in this country but even more than that it's because of corporate control of democracy. In America it's hard to make a change against the corporate powers that are in control of us. They're in control of all the politicians, everybody that we elect they are all tainted.

"Why do we have Hilary Clinton when she was Secretary of State going to Europe to convince the little European countries, 'Don't get your oil from Russia! Don't do oil, we'll give you this fracking technology and it's really great. You can frack and you can get your oil and energy right out of the land.' These are our Democrats, these are supposed to be the saviors. None of them are empowered by the system that is here now to do anything other than take money from corporations and be controlled. I don't know one politician that isn't controlled to some degree by the amount of donations from corporations. That's who paid for their campaigns. All these laws are wrong. They made it legal for corporations to be people, corporations aren't people."

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Neil Young will be on the Howard Stern Show tomorrow morning, Oct. 14.

Anyone can listen for free with a free trial from SiriusXM, @ SiriusXM.

Listen to Howard Stern reveal the news:

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