Harriet Hageman
speaker
110 appearances
4 recordings
3 series
first heard Mar 2025
last heard 4 Feb
Harriet Hageman’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Feb 2026 with 1.
Appearances
I don't believe in energy poverty. I believe that it is not the role of government to make people's lives miserable. And I'm just gonna tell you a very quick story about my mother. My mother is 101 years old. And when you think about how her life has changed over the last hundred years,
When she was young, they would get up at 4 o'clock in the morning to milk the cows, they chopped the wood, they tended the garden, they canned the food, they worked in the field, they did all of those things, but it was more of a subsistence type of living.
In 100 years, look at the homes we live in, the cars that we drive, the travel, our clothing, our jewelry, everything about us has changed so dramatically. The increase in life expectancy, the decrease in infant mortality rate, and every bit of that is because of the commercial production of affordable energy. Yet when we have these debates, nobody talks about the opportunity costs.
So if we do away with affordable energy, what does that do in terms of increasing infant mortality rate? What does that do in terms of our lifestyle? What does that do in terms of our prosperity? Those opportunity costs are never addressed.
And again, it's this idea of adaption and recognizing that we really can make decisions about how we take care of our environment and we can do it in an incredibly effective way without destroying everything that we have built up and created over the last 100 years.
We lived in a house that we didn't have a telephone, we didn't have a TV most of the time growing up. We had a wood-burning stove and we would take big catalogs, Montgomery Ward catalogs, put them on the stove to warm them up at night, wrap them in fabric and take them to bed.
Now, granted, I lived a little bit isolated because of where the ranch was in Wyoming, and a lot of people in my generation didn't have to live that way. But I'm telling you, as someone who did, as someone who grew up that way, I don't want to return to it. And yet that is what we push when we push this radical climate agenda that's really an anti-humanist view of the world.
As I often say, you can either be a champion of abundance or you can be a lord of scarcity. I believe we should be champions of abundance. We should be looking at ways to innovate, to make sure that we can feed the masses, that we can provide the energy resources. I do not believe that, again, government should try to make people's lives miserable.
Yet that's what the entire global warming and climate change crowd is about.
But what you find in those countries that are ruled by dictators and despots is that they use natural resources and food as a weapon to control their people. Sudan is a classic example of that. Been in the throes of a civil war for years. What was one of the very first things that they did when they started having these intergovernment squabbles? They moved everybody off the farms.
They urbanized them. They put them in refugee camps. Now, over 90 percent of the food that is consumed in Sudan is imported. So whenever they want to control the people, they shut off the food supply. And when you look throughout history, that's really what dictators do. Dictators use natural resources and access to natural resources, access to food. access to fuel to control the masses.
Now, is that an extreme example? Of course it is. But the point that I'm trying to make is our capitalism, the way that we produce things, the way that we innovate, the way that we solve problems can address these kinds of issues. Whereas we have a situation in California where Karen Bass and Gavin Newsom
they're looking at oh my gosh there might be a one degree increase 100 years from now so we need to make everybody's life miserable today and take away property rights dictate what they can eat how they can travel what kind of vehicles they can drive that is not only not the american way it is so contrary to human nature and contrary to freedom
that you can't even imagine people like this can get elected. It does not make sense in a country like ours when we show year after year and decade after decade that not only can we protect our environment, but we can produce things to elevate the human condition in a way that is unrivaled in human history. And look at how well we're doing it.
It started before COVID, but COVID was a natural outcome of it. I would say it started with Woodrow Wilson thinking that the experts should control our lives. That was elevated under FDR with creating the administrative state. And then over the last 80 years, We've had a situation where we've allowed the bureaucracy to creep into areas that we never should have allowed it.
So under our form of government, separation of powers, it's the legislative branch that legislates. But over time, we've allowed the executive branch to do that. But none of those people are accountable. The president may be because he is elected. But the bureaucrats, do you know who was the head of the EPA? Under Joe Biden, of course you didn't. Most people didn't.
They're unaccountable because they're unelected. And as a result, they can do things and make really bad policies that are incredibly costly. Again, Deb Haaland, she was the head of the Department of Interior under Joe Biden. One day she was before our Natural Resource Committee, and I said, why is it that every single policy you adopt furthers energy poverty? Why do you want to do that?
She said, I've never heard that term. And I said, yeah, but I think that's pretty self-explanatory. You know what I'm talking about. The only answer she could give was, we're in a transition. And I said, that word is meaningless. What does that mean? What is a transition? This is the head of one of the most important agencies in the United States of America.
And she cannot describe for me what they're doing or why with the policies that they're pursuing. That is an unelected bureaucrat. That's how we lost our freedoms and we lost control of our government. We need to be bringing that back. That's why I'm doing a lot of work in this space with reform of the administrative state.
I am the chairman of the Article I Task Force, and the very purpose of this is to make sure that it is the legislative branch that is legislating, not people who are unaccountable to our voters.
Showing 41–60 of 110 · page 3 of 6
← Previous
Next →