Glenn Woods recently spoke with Wyoming Senator Cynthia Lummis about U.S. energy policy, environmentalists, and inflation.

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Lummis said the Biden Administration should be doing more to promote oil and gas production in the U.S., and that it's "unconscionable" that they don't approve more natural gas terminals.

"I had been watching the failure of the Biden Administration to permit LNG terminals that would allow us to send our liquid natural gas to Europe, to help alleviate their dependence on Russian hydrocarbons," Lummis said. "It turns out there are still four pending permits that the Biden Administration is sitting on. These are permits that if granted would allow us to send our clean-burning LNG to Europe. Three of them are in Louisiana, one in Texas. This is just unconscionable, I don't know how they can live with themselves in the Biden Administration...They don't want us refining products in the U.S., they don't want us producing oil and gas and coal either onshore or offshore in the United States. The White House is held hostage by people like Gina McCarthy and John Kerry, who are religious zealots when it comes to stopping the use of oil, gas, and coal."

While talking about Democrat plans to pass another spending bill through reconciliation, Lummis said that ever-increasing inflation may put a damper on their plans.

"I believe Joe Manchin was once again, after toying with this idea within the Democrat conference, is getting cold feet. We saw yesterday that inflation is now at 9.1% and of course, that's without considering the fact that food and fuel, gasoline, are not even part of the consumer price index that is used by the Federal Reserve," Lummis said. "The CPI has those items in it, but the indexes that are used by the Federal Reserve to determine inflation, don't include those items."

The Federal Reserve used CPI to measure inflation up until 2000 when they switched to personal consumption expenditures (PCE), which values goods and services purchased by, or on the behalf of, U.S. residents, because according to them it is a better gauge of consumer spending.

After being asked if government agencies will abide by the recent West Virginia v. EPA ruling, Lummis said that she hopes federal agencies will back off from imposing more regulations.

"We're gonna watch them like a hawk. I'm hopeful that the admonishment that came through the U.S. Supreme Court opinion, will also go to their rules on waters of the U.S.," Lummis said. "As you know, that had become extremely onerous for our arid western states when the Obama Administration promulgated the water of the U.S. rule. The Trump Administration rationalized those rules and returned them to the confines of federal law. Then we saw when the Biden Administration came back in and tries to take not only waters of the U.S. but other agreements back to their environmentally and less statutory driven conclusion."

Lummis said that the issue came about when Elizabeth Warren was heading the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau from 2010 to 2011 because she brought on people that have infiltrated the U.S. government.

"Every agency has now become inculcated and many ways infiltrated by these environmental extremists. And it will be very difficult to extract their ideology from federal agencies...We are told by the governors at the federal reserve that they do not consider the environment and social and governance issues, but their staffers do. Here's the problem, when Elizabeth Warren was head of the CFPB, which is that consumer bureau that was created under Dodd-Frank, she brought a whole bunch of her acolytes with her into that federal agency. They became permanent and protected federal employees. And so when she left the agency, they stayed, and their ideology is now resident, every day within the federal reserve at the staff level. And so that's how these things happen, these ideologues bring into federal agencies people that share their ideology, they eventually become permanent and protected federal employees and then you can't fire them, you can't let them go when a new president takes office, it's scary when we have a federal government that is this big, this powerful, and this indoctrinated at the staff level."

Listen to the interview here:

Lummis did not provide any details on which employees she is referring to, how many became part of the federal government, or what views they hold that Lummis takes issue with.

While it is unclear the total number of people Warren brought on to help her at the CFPB, two people, Rajeev Date, and Elizabeth Vale were brought on by Warren to serve as associate director of Research, Markets, and Regulations and director of External Affairs respectively.

Date left the government in 2012 to work in the financial technologies business, and currently works as the managing partner of Fenway Summer.

Vale worked for Warren's campaign in 2012 before going off to work as a Senior Managing Director for IntraFi, which helps banks manage their money.

 

 

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