Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said on the latest episode of “Pod Force One,” out now, that the Biden administration crippled oil and natural gas-producing regions in the US through a flurry of executive actions — effectively sanctioning America “more than Iran.”
“We were under assault in North Dakota, as an energy resource state, under the Biden administration,” Burgum, the former North Dakota governor, told Post columnist Miranda Devine. “By the time I left [office, in 2024], we were engaged in over 30 different legal battles with the federal government.”
Burgum, 69, added that as a member of the Western Governors’ Association, he got a clear sense of how the Democratic administration’s push to eliminate fossil fuels as a source of energy was harming states with large tracts of public land.
“Alaska had 68 executive orders by the Biden administration against it,” he said. “The Biden administration sanctioned Alaska more than Iran.”
“Supposedly under the Biden administration,” Burgum elaborated later, “there were sanctions on Iran and some sanctions on Russia — but Russia and Iran … the price of their oil went down about 20% [under Biden] and China bought it all.”
Weeks before leaving office, Biden banned offshore oil and gas drilling along most of America’s coast, including Alaska’s Northern Bering Sea — though Trump reversed that decision upon becoming the 47th president.
Biden also blocked energy producers from developing drilling operations on most federal land, following through on a 2020 campaign pledge to ban new fracking sites.
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“Joe Biden said it out loud, ‘No more drilling on federal land,’” Burgum noted. “I mean, he said it, but that’s craziness at a time when we need more energy, and we specifically need … more electricity to win the AI arms race.”
“They were trying to stop mining in this country, stop harvesting trees in this country, stop oil and gas production on federal land,” he added.
The Biden administration also handed out hundreds of billions of dollars in tax credits and other subsidies to renewable energy sources powered by wind or solar.
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Meanwhile, Biden began draining the US Strategic Petroleum Reserve to the tune of nearly 300 million barrels of oil to try and bring down gas prices in the weeks before the 2022 midterms.
“Really going back to the Obama years,” Burgum explained, “there was a big push to move America away from the natural resources we had and become dependent on intermittent, unreliable, expensive sources of electricity.”
“A lot of those sources, like solar, required buying material from China. So we had dependence on supply chain versus relying on the affordable, reliable power that we have here that can come from all kinds of sources, including geothermal, nuclear, oil, gas, coal,” he added.
“We just turned our adversaries into China’s discount gas station and it wasn’t effective.”
Much of the processing of critical minerals for the US defense, auto and other key industries is also being conducted mainly in China, the Trump official claimed.
The Interior Department oversees 500 million acres of land and 2.5 billion acres of offshore regions “rich with critical minerals and oil and gas resources” that the secretary — once the owner of a billion-dollar software business — described as “the largest balance sheet in the world.”
“Coal assets in its raw form, just on federal land,” he went on, “it’s $8 trillion, is what it’s worth. But if you just say, no, we’re going to not touch that, we’re not going to touch this, you’re effectively taking a resource away from the American people.”
