All Episodes
Previous Next
Jan. 25, 2023 - Doug Collins Podcast
32:49
Remember Common Sense is not Common
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Hey everybody, I don't know about you, but as you've watched out over the world, the war in Russia and Ukraine is not just isolated to Eastern Europe.
It's spread all over the world and you can see it in market instabilities.
You can see it here.
People who do not think that that war is affecting you, all you gotta do is look at gas prices.
You look at your food prices.
You see the global change that has happened.
But you know something that's also affected investments as well, and I've said all along, Legacy Precious Metals is your navigator.
They're the ones that see you through to get to the next level.
The good news about this is, even with market volatility, market instability, you've got options.
Gold prices are rising as investors turn to gold, and gold presents a hedge against this inflation and protects you against the weakening dollar, which we are seeing.
Legacy Precious Metals is the only company I trust to deal with gold and silver and the other precious metals.
You need this investment.
You need this as part of your portfolio to keep you buffered from what we're seeing in the world.
War and volatility in the market.
This is where you need to be.
Call Legacy Precious Metals today.
Be proactive about this.
Get on board with it.
Call them at 866-528-1903. 866-528-1903.
Or you can download their free investor's guide at LegacyPMInvestments.com. LegacyPMInvestments.com.
Your navigator in a volatile world of investments.
You want to listen to a podcast?
By who?
Georgia GOP Congressman Doug Collins.
How is it?
The greatest thing I have ever heard in my whole life.
I could not believe my ears.
In this house, wherever the rules are disregarded, chaos and mob rule.
It has been said today, where is bravery?
I'll tell you where bravery is found and courage is found.
It's found in this minority who has lived through the last year of nothing but rules being broken, people being put down, questions not being answered, and this majority say, be damned with anything else.
We're going to impeach and do whatever we want to do.
Why?
Because we won an election.
I guarantee you, one day you'll be back in the minority and it ain't gonna be that fun.
First off, though, before we really get into the pilot stuff, how is the, you know, the new Congress looking out for, you know, from your perspective at the Competitive Enterprise?
Well, it's early yet.
I focus more not on the big spending issues, but on some of the energy and environmental issues.
And I think we have some good people at committees like the House Energy and Commerce Committee.
So it's encouraging to see the beginning, but there's just so much to push back against.
It's going to be a tremendous amount of work just to expose some of the problems that the Biden agenda is causing.
Ben, do you think most people have any real idea of the energy policy dance between an administration and the congressional office?
I call it, because being there for eight years, I would love to say we do oversight.
I'd love to say we set policy.
But in many ways, Congress is reactive.
And I think that's become an issue over time in energy policy and other things where the Congress seems to always be reacting to what the administration is doing, and especially if they're of different parties.
Oh, absolutely.
But part of it is Congress's fault.
Congress passes these grandiose bills.
It allows regulators who may be in a few years controlled by the different party to do a whole bunch of things.
And then you have members of Congress saying, oh, we can't stand what these regulators are doing to my constituents, but they're using statutory authority that that same member may have supported several years earlier.
You've hit something that was my pet peeve in Washington, D.C. Number one, bill authors who had no idea what their bill did.
And number two, leaving the language blank.
Pelosi took a beating when she said we don't have to pass it to see what's in it.
The truth of the matter is she was actually being truthful.
Not the way to do life, but she was actually being truthful.
There was no way Obamacare could be understood in the language that the bill was passed in.
My rule is that any bill that's more than 200 pages is a bad bill because people just don't know what's in it.
Members aren't going to read something that long.
Exactly.
Well, I have to say, being a former member as well, you read what you're interested in that gets calls from constituents.
And the rest of it, frankly, you trust staff and everything else.
Folks, we're talking with Ben Lieberman from the Competitive Enterprise Institute today.
We've got to talk about energy policy.
We're going to get to the wonderful gas stove issue here in a minute.
But, you know, as we talk about Congress and you talk about the ideas that y'all have, compare and contrast the last six, seven years.
Because I was there in Congress, we did a lot concerning especially natural gas.
We did, you know, propane export.
These kind of things that was building up our energy sector.
And it seems like within two years, have we really reversed everything good that we had done there to really build up the energy sector?
Or is it salvageable at this point, Ben?
I think we've done a lot of damage in just the last two years.
Going back to when I started following these issues, everybody was talking about peak oil.
America's running out of energy, certainly oil, probably also natural gas.
Then comes the fracking revolution, the shale revolution.
It stood everything on its head.
It made new American energy and energy increases possible, energy exports.
Who thought we'd be talking about American oil being exported elsewhere?
But that's all happening.
Natural gas as well.
So it's the shale and the fracking revolution.
That was going very well, even under Obama's Maybe because it snuck up on the Obama administration, they were able to stop it as much as they would have liked, although they did do some things.
Under the Trump administration, it was really flourishing.
More natural gas production, more oil production, infrastructure to get that energy to where it's needed.
But now we're really slamming the door in almost every way.
I mean, for things like natural gas, we're talking about restrictions on gas.
Leasing of natural gas on federal lands.
We're talking about restrictions of needed natural gas pipelines.
And so, for example, in Appalachia, they've got a tremendous amount of natural gas that's bottled up because they just don't have the pipeline capacity to send more of it out to the East Coast population centers.
You've got the administration pressuring banks not to lend for oil and gas activity, so it's a multi-pronged attack.
And as we'll get into, it's also starting to reach into homes trying to discourage us from using natural gas appliances.
So it's soup-to-nuts restrictions.
Well, and look, let's put this in perspective.
I mean, because I'm old enough to remember looking at the magazines in the grocery store rack and seeing the hole in the ozone, we're going to freeze to death, you know, this hole, and then it became global warming, then it became cooling.
I mean, put in perspective for the listener here, Ben, a little bit of this whole issue, because we go from a really bad EP, you know, environmental environment in the 60s, 70s.
I mean, we saw the, you know, what was in Cleveland, the river was burning, you know, that But we have improved.
I think that's what gets lost in this.
And if you take the LP emissions, the natural gas emissions, compared to some of the others, you know, environmentalists, they don't seem to take a win here.
I mean, let's put that in perspective for us.
Well, I think these are the folks who live by the cliche moving back the goalposts.
I think part of it is because they have a larger ideological That they're using environmental scares in order to advance, that they're not really interested in fixing environmental problems like the Cuyahoga River being as dirty as it was, like air quality being bad as it was half a century or more ago.
And as more real environmental problems get solved, and I think we've gone a long way to solving the real problems, then it becomes a matter of exaggerating and Or even inventing problems just to keep this whole agenda going.
And I think that's how I look at climate change.
And you're absolutely right.
Right before there was the climate change crisis, there was the ozone depletion crisis, the acid rain crisis, the rainforest crisis, the radon crisis, asbestos crisis, dioxin.
I mean, we could spend the rest of this afternoon taking a stroll down doomsday memory lane, none of which turned out to be nearly as bad as you would think if you read the New York Times or watch the network news.
So with that backdrop.
We head into climate change, and I think already we're seeing a number of apocalyptic predictions whose deadlines have come and gone.
That doesn't stop those folks from just moving back the deadlines instead of saying, you know, the glaciers will be gone by 2010. Now they're saying they'll be gone by 2030. But I think there is a lot of reason for skepticism about how serious the crisis is, but even more reason for skepticism over the supposed solutions.
Right.
Well, I think you've hit something that's really interesting.
Look, I'm not one of these sitting here saying that we don't...
From my perspective, from a faith perspective, you're a steward of what I believe God gives us.
And that's the earth.
And you don't intentionally damage it.
But what we've done is we've learned.
We've gotten better.
I used to be in the industry of doing safety monitoring.
In other words, gases and stuff at plants.
And so we got into stack monitoring.
The CO2 monitoring, O2 monitoring, that kind of thing going out of stacks.
And what's interesting to me is America is now, especially some of the environmentalists, are trying to get us to levels of water phosphates, air pollutants, that are almost immeasurable by the current equipment, but yet they're still fining cities, towns, and businesses for, quote, not making the measurements.
Have we gotten to a point in which, with taking care of the environment, taking care of what we have, but yet we've got it to a point now where we have unrealistic expectations given that we live in a global community?
Oh, absolutely.
And I think you're right.
People of faith do have an obligation.
To take care of God's creation.
But when you turn environmentalism into idol worship, then you've gone way too far.
And I think you can also just look at the Ten Commandments.
First, thou shalt not lie.
A lot of these environmentalists are deliberately exaggerating for effect.
Thou shalt not bear false witness as well.
So I think people of faith, I think, should have...
Common sense concern for the environment, but we've gone way beyond common sense, and we're, you know, we're pushing back the standards to the things that are not achievable, and that concern me because the cost could be greater than the benefits, and that's a real impact Especially those least able to afford higher energy costs and who need those blue-collar jobs that get killed off when energy prices are high.
So we hear about environmental justice sometimes, and supposedly climate change disproportionately targets the poor.
Well, it's climate change policies that disproportionately target the poor, and that's one of the things we have to push back against.
I agree.
This is a great conversation because we're hearing it now.
Of course, we're in that season of Davos and all the World Economic Forum folks.
And again, the hypocrisy that just reeks from that conference, especially when it comes to the environmental issues and climate change issues.
But, you know, one of the things, and I don't know if you caught this, is it's become a little bit of a viral video, and it was from England, I believe it was from the, like a debate club kind of thing, where this gentleman sort of outlined the fact that, you know, the real issues of climate change and all are going to come in these other world areas in which You can't fault them for wanting to do better.
You can't fault them for using the energy they have, whether it be coal or other things.
And what the issue pointed out was, is how do we get them better tools and raise that economic climate?
Because simply doing it in the industrialized countries is not going to work.
It's going to be the less industrialized countries that are growing, where we're sending business to, that are actually doing this.
Isn't climate change in many ways, yes, it is an economic issue that could be addressed in a different way?
Oh, absolutely.
And yes, it's very much a global issue.
And in fact, China has now surpassed the U.S. by a very wide margin in terms of greenhouse gas emissions.
If the environmental activist community really cared about climate change, they'd be spending 90 percent of their time focused on China these days, rather than trying to hamper the American economy.
You almost got the impression that knocking the U.S. economy down a peg is the goal for many of these folks.
And yes, these countries, especially we hear this from African countries who often don't like this, what they sometimes call environmental colonialism, that they have these costly measures forced upon them where they're still dealing with abject poverty, Development, economic development is far more important.
I mean, if you look at the worst case scenarios that are speculated under climate change, they pale in comparison to the actual things we see among the world's most desperately poor.
So let's deal with the real problem of global poverty.
And absolutely, let's not...
Use climate change as a reason to stifle economic development in those countries, for example, by trying to prevent them from using low-cost coal and natural gas and to develop these resources.
I was told one time by someone who was in the environmental movement, they were talking about, well, see, all these countries in the world agree, even the poor countries agree they need to be cleaner.
And I said, do you really think they signed on to these agreements Because they actually thought it was best for their country?
Or did they sign on to it because they knew that the World Bank and others and the other countries would not invest in them if they didn't sign these documents, you know, these treaties and these climate change plans?
Because look, at the end of the day, it's like I said a few minutes ago, you're going to do what is best for your family, you're going to do what's best for your country, and you're not going to be able to stop that.
It's inherent.
And so, you know, look, they may not be able to make it, but inherently they're actually hurting themselves in the long run here.
Oh, absolutely.
And there's also a lot of graft involved.
I've been to some UN conferences, and there's people from developing countries who are some of the representatives at these conferences, and they're doing very well for themselves, and they always get their piece of the action when it comes to UN and other aid, including climate-related aid.
So yeah, they're looking at the At the dollars they can get by saying yes, and the difficulties they would face by saying no to the environmental agenda.
That's why I admire some of the people from these nations who do speak up and say there are problems with forcing first world Well,
one thing that did, before we get to the hot topic of every meme and everything else, and that is the gas stove.
One of the things, and I want to hear your opinion on this, I remember that we talked about how the energy market has changed in the US and how we became an exporter instead of an importer.
I remember one of the big things we passed was the ability for LP, exporting it to Europe in particular.
And it seems like the Biden administration has basically shut that down.
Can you give me an update?
Because we were trying to curb basically what we're seeing now, Russia's blackmail of Europe with gas, and that we could have actually helped in that.
But it seems like we've pulled off that stage.
Can you give me an update or correct me if I'm wrong on that?
Yeah, our most powerful weapon against Putin would be to compete against him in global energy markets.
And that's happening or has happened with a liquefied natural gas export.
But these export facilities, they're very complicated and expensive to build.
Some of them have been built.
Others could be built to expand our export capacity, but that's running into roadblocks from the Biden administration.
I'd also point out some people make the argument, oh, if we're exporting natural gas, we're exporting oil, that will increase the price here in the U.S.
We should keep it all in the U.S.
I don't necessarily agree with that because I think one of the things that having access to global market does is it gives a green light to producers and, They can produce more natural gas and oil without having to worry about, you know, will there be a localized shortage?
Will I have to store that oil and gas for months and months before I can find a local outlet for it?
The more global outlets there are, the more you can just go ahead and produce.
So I don't necessarily I agree with some of the protectionist arguments that we hear on these exports.
But you're absolutely right.
Exporting this energy is something that Vladimir Putin very much doesn't want us to do.
And in fact, there's anecdotal evidence that the Russians have bankrolled a number of environmental groups.
We've never been able to nail that down, but I'm 97 percent sure that it's happening.
I can imagine that.
And one quick follow-up on that issue is that you talked about, and I'm a big one on this one because a lot of people forget about it.
There's two energy sources that I believe are the untapped energy sources for the U.S. that have taken a lot of beating, and that is, number one, we've got to look at our refinery producer capacity.
Because in the future, especially from oil, and we're still oil-driven, if we don't start re-upping our refineries or even building a new refinery, Then we're putting ourselves behind.
And the other is nuclear power, in which, you know, we've had one in Georgia here built in the last, you know, 40 years.
I think they're trying to get the one in South Carolina, but again, cost and cost overruns, mainly from the government, is causing that.
How do you see us in 10 to 15 years at the current capacity rate of production, whether it be ore refineries or in the, you know, gas fields?
How is that affecting the global market price?
Well, that's certainly one of the reasons why we're seeing problems here in the United States, especially with the big jump in diesel fuel prices.
Refining capacity is very tight, but if you were thinking about investing in expanding your refinery, How would you feel when you hear President Biden saying, I want to spend more money on electric vehicles, I want to subsidize electric vehicles every step of the way?
Well, you know, you can't logically want to invest in liquid fuels when electrification has the playing field tilted in favor of it.
So, you know, every time you hear Joe Biden say something positive about electric vehicles, that's by implication something negative about expanding this refining capacity.
And then you add all the other pieces of red tape that it takes to not just to build a ground-up refinery, but just to expand an existing refinery or just to keep an existing refinery open.
And it's part of the reason...
We're seeing some refineries closing down in very tight refining capacity.
One other thing I would mention is the Renewable Fuel Standard, which favors renewable fuels, corn-based ethanol, soybean or fat-based biodiesel.
That's another reason for not building more refinery capacity because you have to, by law, include these other fuels.
Exactly.
And there's so much for those credits.
I mean, look, getting into that is a whole different animal.
And again, it's more of a racket, in my opinion, the way those fuels are actually done.
But one of the things that you actually have to look at, too, is still the hypocrisy.
The hypocrisy of an ethanol or a corn-based fuel, which requires more oil to actually produce than a regular gas line.
And then also the electric vehicles.
Where do they think they're getting electricity from?
I mean, that's the part that just, again, is so hypocritical.
The batteries have issues.
And look, I'm not against electric cars.
I have a hybrid myself.
But it's one of those things, let's at least don't ignore that you're going to get the electricity from places that do natural gas, coal-fired electrical plants.
And in places like California, they're having a hard enough time Just keeping the residential and businesses side of this, you know, without adding this on top of it.
So it's going to be interesting, but that leads us well into the hypocrisy of the Biden administration.
Now going, as you said, like, I like the way you put this, into the households of folks who have a gas stove.
Break this down for us.
I mean, where did this come from?
I mean, this just seems like another wild Biden out of left field, but surely somehow it's been building for a while.
Oh, it's definitely been building for a while.
This is all part of the war on natural gas.
Natural gas is one of the fossil fuels, like coal and oil, that contribute to greenhouse gases that environmentalists say is raising the Earth's temperature.
And so there's been this war on natural gas, as I mentioned, going after natural gas production, natural gas pipelines, but also going after end uses of natural gas.
So natural gas, some of your appliances around the house, your heating system mainly, but also your water heater, your stove, these can come in natural gas or electric versions.
Natural gas is more than three times cheaper On a per unit energy basis.
And that comes straight from Department of Energy.
One of the agencies is actually trying to crack down on natural gas, but even they admit natural gas is cheaper.
And when it comes to stove, I'm not much of a cook myself, but a lot of cooks are, they swear by the superiority of natural gas.
And that ought to be their decision.
But there is this push to try to end the use of natural gas.
And I think that's the real reason The stated reason that the Consumer Product Safety Commission started going after natural gas stoves and why one of the commissioners said that a ban is a real possibility was supposedly the combustion of the natural gas leads to indoor air quality that is a threat to asthmatic children in the home.
I don't buy it.
Mainly the timing of it strikes me as suspicious.
Natural gas stoves, natural gas appliances, I've been around since the middle of the last century.
And it's not like there was some recently discovered mystery that burning natural gas has these combustion byproducts.
All this was known.
Nobody raised a fuss in the past.
You know, I grew up with a natural gas stove.
Probably a couple hundred million Americans grew up with a natural gas stove.
It was such a danger we didn't seem to notice.
But now there's this A sudden push that natural gas stoves posed as a health threat.
But I don't buy the health threat reason.
I think this is just a reason to want to restrict the direct use of natural gas for climate change reasons.
And so I think what was really encouraging is once the public got wind of it, they said, nah, this is no good.
And it was such a backlash.
That the Biden administration said, oh, no, we would never think of banning gas stoves.
And the media kind of, you know, some of the same media outlets that were doing stories about what a threat natural gas stoves are and almost applauding Consumer Product Safety Administration for going after them.
48 hours later, they're saying, oh, this is just a Republican scare tactics, Republican culture wars.
So it was kind of fun to watch the flip-flop.
But the encouraging thing is the public just isn't buying it.
And I think that's something that we can work with on other issues as well.
Well, I mean, look, we switched to natural gas about eight, nine years ago in our house.
I mean, I'm now sold.
I don't want to go back because I love to cook some.
My wife cooks.
I mean, she does a lot of stuff.
But one of the things, I'm going to throw sort of an idea up here.
I see the Biden administration, the administration sort of backing away from this, saying, oh, it was just sort of the talking, we didn't mean this.
But what about states like California and New York even, or Illinois?
Some of these that, what I say is they take, it's the wink and the nod effect from the liberal administrations to some of these liberal states.
Because what we see in turn, just like California is now, quote, banning electric, the combustion engine by 2035 or whatever it is, Could this be something that grows in the States and it was thrown as the sort of the, here's the idea at the Washington level, we're going to back off, but the wink and nod is, hey, here's where your next attack is.
Oh yeah, and it is happening in states.
It's also happening in some blue cities across the U.S. where new natural gas hookups and newly constructed homes and commercial buildings are outlawed.
Natural gas appliances have been outlawed in California.
I think starting in 2030. So there is a lot of war on natural gas, state and local addition.
I would point out that in some of these blue cities that are in states that aren't so blue, and state laws have been passed saying, you can't take that choice away.
Because I think what burns me up the most, no pun intended, It's taking away consumer choice.
I think that if I want a natural gas or an electric stove, that ought to be the consumer's decision.
A man's home is his castle.
A woman's home is her castle.
And I think that's where the American people are.
So I think we can push back against it, but we have to shine a light on it.
You're absolutely right.
It is happening at the state and local level.
We need to fight those battles as well.
And I would also add In the biggest climate bill, which I think had to be called the Inflation Reduction Act, which tells you how much the public really cares about climate change, there's a lot of money for electric appliances, but you have to choose the electric version to get the money, like $840 for an electric stove.
No money for a natural gas stove.
Up to $8,000 for an electric heat pump.
No money for, you know, like a natural gas heating system.
Same for water heaters.
So not only are state and local governments moving ahead with some of this stuff, not only is there a wink and a nod from the federal government, but there's also billions of federal dollars going to these states to help bankroll all of this.
Exactly.
Well, one of the things is, and if anybody listens here and actually works for one of the tankless water heater companies, I have a tankless water heater.
That would probably, you would have to fight me first to get rid of that before I went to my stove.
It was right in behind because the tankless water heater powered by gas is the best thing I've ever had in my life.
And, you know, it is amazing.
I once met a lobbyist for tankless water heaters, and I said, you've got a tankless job, and he never came back after that.
I love it.
I love it.
They're just not catching on as much as you might think.
No, but folks, I'm going to tell you right here, if you've never had one, I mean, when we first got ours, like I said, about eight years ago, I had two teenage 20-year-olds and my wife, my daughter.
We could literally be all taking showers at the same time and none of us run out of hot water.
It was the most amazing thing and it still is now that we're a little bit older.
But one last thing before I let you go, Ben, and this is a forward-looking question.
We've seen the damage in two years of the Biden administration and the administrative state.
Frankly, it was fought through the Trump and even through Obama and back to W as well.
It's still there, but we've seen a lot of damage in the last two years.
We still have two more years of this, at least, of this legislative state if it doesn't change.
Is it possible, what do you see if we could change, say, to X, I mean, I'm not even talking about a person, but a Republican or somebody with more free market energy ideas, will four years really do permanent damage to where our energy industry is now, or will it be able to survive and then, God forbid, we go eight years with this kind of a thought?
What do you think?
I think things still can be salvaged.
I'm optimistic.
I wouldn't be fighting this fight.
You wouldn't be fighting this fight if you thought it was absolutely hopeless.
Well, we have to lay the groundwork.
You know, good repeal legislation, good reform legislation.
You know, you don't start in the year that you pass it.
You start years before.
So we need to see good legislation from, for example, the House Republicans, even though it's not going to pass this year.
But then when the political tides change and they eventually will, then they have to come back and still push those bills.
Because sometimes we see Republicans talk big when they know they can't get something across the finish line.
But then when they can, that's another matter.
So, you know, we...
Like on so many other things, we have to hold the Republicans' feet to the fire, and we still need to reach out to Democrats.
Hopefully we can win over some of them as well.
And when you see an issue like gas stoves where, you know, I don't think anyone on the left or the right particularly liked the idea of Well, not taking away your gas stove, but making it impossible to replace your current stove with a new gas stove.
I think, you know, there is room there, given the overreaching.
I think there is reason for optimism.
We have to try, you know, what's What's the point in giving up?
And I think, I would just add that it's the common sense of the American people that wins out in the end.
I think we saw this with gas stoves, and we can see this on other issues as well.
I think so as well.
And they also don't think they realize how much of their fine restaurants that they love to go to, all of a sudden the chef said, uh-uh, you're not taking my gas stove.
That's going to be an issue.
Folks, Ben Lieberman with the Competitive Enterprise Institute here.
It's great to always be with you, Ben.
Thanks for all the insight.
All right.
Well, thanks for having me.
Hey folks, MyPillow is excited to bring to you their biggest bedding sale ever.
For a limited time, you're going to get the Giza Dream bed sheets for as low as $29.98, a set of pillowcases for only $9.98, and rejuvenate your bed with a MyPillow mattress topper for as low as $99.99.
$99.99 to get a mattress pillow topper.
Look, they come in all sizes.
They've got all kinds of stuff.
Blankets, they've got duvets, they've got quilts, they've got comforts, they've got body pillows, they've got bolster pillows, they've got all at big, big discounts.
And also, they're extending their money-back guarantee for Christmas until March 1, 2023, making them the perfect gift for your friends, your family, and for everyone you know.
Folks, and just from a personal note here, I have the Giza Dream Sheets.
They're on my bed right now.
I slept on them last night.
Some of the best sheets that we and Lisa and I have ever owned.
They are worth, I mean, at this price, they're a steal.
My wife and I have bought bed sheets, linens, at much higher cost.
It's supposedly much higher quality.
These from MyPillow are at the highest of quality and at a price like this, you can't beat it.
So go now to MyPillow.com, use promo code Collins, C-O-L-L-I-N-S, or call 1-800-986-3994 and you'll get huge discounts on all the MyPillow bedding products, including the Giza Dream bed sheets for as low as $29.98 and get all your shopping done while qualities last.
▲
Export Selection