A transition from traditional energy was “always a fantasy” as alternative sources are not reliable, dependable, or affordable, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said during an event with Breitbart News on Monday.
Burgum said there was a massive shift in the world toward green energy, which he said was “being pushed by certain elements” calling for the need to transition to new energy sources. This, however, was always a fantasy and a borderline lie, the Interior Secretary explained.
“And transition meant we’re going to move from one form of energy to another. And the transition was always a fantasy, even stronger. You could call it a lie, because if you’re going to go from affordable, reliable, and secure energy to intermittent, weather-dependent, foreign-sourced, it was not reliable, not dependable, not affordable, and not secure,” Burgum explained, emphasizing the alternative was none of those things at all.
“Then that transition, when you go from something that’s seven by 24 base load to intermittent, then that’s actually energy subtraction,” he said, noting that this so-called transition would also increase costs.
“That’s all just a fact. It’s not an assertion. It’s a fact. In most cases, the states that did that have about a 50 percent minimum higher energy cost pursuing that because, again, you were reducing the supply, and then you needed to maintain all the stuff you had before for those times when the sun wasn’t shining [and] the wind wasn’t blowing,” he said.
President Trump changed the policy direction completely, focusing on energy dominance and reliable, affordable, and secure energy, he said. It goes beyond that as well, as Trump envisioned a world where America is so energy dominant that it had enough to sell to allies, thereby cutting off America’s adversaries at the knees.
“Who would our adversaries be? People that are waging war in Eastern Europe. People that are funding 24 terror groups. So specifically, Russia and Iran supplying lots of energy to the world. So can we displace that? We’ve displaced about two thirds the Russian gas in Europe with LNG exports,” he said, reemphasizing that the transition on energy that was being sold to the world prior to Trump was “often being funded by those countries that are actually producing hydrocarbons — the dark money that was coming in to try to convince people to to transition to this energy subtraction policy.”
Burgum also addressed the ongoing leftist narrative that “climate change” serves as an “existential threat,” contending that the Trump administration is handling actual existential threats quite well.
“Two existential threats that the Trump administration was facing was Iran having a nuclear weapon and China winning the AI arms race. And guess what? Both of those require the strategy of energy dominance. That’s why President Trump declared an energy emergency on the first day,” he said.
“That’s why he created an Energy Dominance Council, which is about half the Cabinet, working across the whole range of things, from critical minerals to electricity production to oil and gas production to, you know, policy and regulations to tariffs, to sanctions, all the tools that we need to achieve energy dominance,” he added.
WATCH the event below: