“Drill baby drill” is not the only objective for the Trump administration to reach energy dominance, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum told Breitbart News’s Washington bureau chief Matthew Boyle during Wednesday’s policy event, “A Conversation with Interior Secretary Doug Burgum,” walking through the “four babies.”
Boyle noted that most people are familiar with the phrase “drill baby drill” but said there are three other “babies” that are not discussed as much, asking Burgum to walk through how these concepts go to together.
“I’ll start with drill baby drill,” Burgum began. “When we have public and federal lands, there’s required by law the auctions, and the federal government is required to hold an auction so private sector people can bid and say, ‘Hey, there’s an area of acreage that is now eligible to be bid on for mineral development,’ let’s say oil and gas. And those auctions happen, the private sector companies come in, they bid on that, and when they win the bid, they write a check up front to the Treasury. Boom. You know, dollars come in,” he said, noting that in the last two weeks of President Trump’s first administration, “just the state of New Mexico pulled in $900 million from lease sales; the state, and then the federal government gets a big chunk of that.”
Burgum used some of his time as governor of North Dakota as an example of what they went through on this front.
“We were engaged in a lawsuit the entire Biden term because the federal government wasn’t holding leases that they were required by law to hold. I mean, every president since Harry Truman had held the quarterly lease sales. And so after two years of foot dragging, we finally said we’ve got to take him to court. We went to court. We fought for two years. We won, and the federal judge said to the Biden administration, the law says you must hold lease sales, so you need to hold the lease sales. And the Biden administration decided to appeal. It was just black and white. They’re breaking the law, and then they appeal. So it’s like, this is the frustration that I had as a governor in a… state where we had the cleanest air, the cleanest water and the best soil health, and we were producing … and we wanted to send checks to the Treasury,” he said, walking through some of the many hurdles and making it clear that “drill baby drill” is not going to result in drilling rigs surrounding Old Faithful.
“No, we again — remember 700 billion acres of federal land. I mean, something like 7 percent of that is national parks. We can protect any acre. We can make bigger parks. We can do all that, and we can do both. This is a time of abundance, so we have to get going again,” he said, explaining how this ties into mine baby mine, build baby build, and map baby map.
“On the map baby map, U.S. Geological Survey is part of Interior. Their job is to go map these enormous resources we have onshore, offshore and specifically subsurface,” he said. Burgum urged people to read a book called “The Map That Changed the World,” telling the story of an aspiring geologist and cartographer in England, Scotland and Wales, “who actually, personally, between 1800 and 1850 went around and mapped the whole country, all the subsurface acres, and people, like, here’s where the coal is, here’s where all the resources are,” Burgum said.
That, he said, led to the century of the UK becoming a global power, and it serves as an example of why it is important for the United States to return to mapping.
“The U.S Geological Survey (USGS) was created — in many of these executive orders and things that we’re seeing where we’re taking service land or others off the map, you know, completely extending beyond the original language in the Antiquities Act to create massive national monuments, which I think courts will find that some of those have gone way beyond the law — in the fine print that says, oh, you can’t even do any mapping. I mean, there was a conscious effort to hide the resources that the American public owns and all these public lands, and actually sort of put USGS out of business,” he said, emphasizing the importance of getting back into the mapping business, which he said is key “because that relates to mine baby mine.”
“Because we’ve killed the mining industry in our country over the last 30 years. Just check the number of college graduates — we have the programs that are shutting down. And then what did we do? We outsourced our, I guess, our environmental angst by saying, oh, we’ll just buy them all from China,” he explained, noting that we are in a cyber war with China as well.
“I mean, they have export controls. And you take the top 20 minerals we need for national defense, for technology, for your cell phones, and we are almost completely reliant on foreign sources, many of those China,” he said, asking how the United States can catch up when we have so much dependence on an adversary.
“So map baby map, mine baby mine, and then if we — the third one is build baby build,” he said.
“We’ve got to start building. Got to build power generation. We’ve got to build more base load power. We got dangerously out of whack between intermittent, unreliable, expensive, versus the affordable, low-cost base load. That endangers our whole grid. … Those are the, sort of the four babies,” he added.
WATCH the full conversation below:
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