At a celebratory gala at his Mar-a-Lago residence, the president-elect of the United States, Donald Trump, announced last night who will be the man in charge of carrying out one of his campaign promises: expanding oil and gas drilling. on federal lands or, as one of the magnate’s mottos summarizes, “drill, baby, drill”.
The chosen one is the governor of North Dakota, the billionaire Doug Burgum, who will lead the Department of the Interior if he is confirmed by the Republican majority in the Senate. In that role, he will oversee the management and conservation of some 200 million hectares of federal lands and another 400 million on the high seas, in addition to the country’s cultural heritage and relations with indigenous peoples.
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“We are going to do incredible things with energy and land,” Trump celebrated at the gala, organized by the think tank conservative America First Policy Institute. Burgum was present, as well as the founder of SpaceX, Elon Musk, who since the elections has been a constant presence at Mar-a-Lago (Palm Beach, Florida), and the president of Argentina, Javier Milei, who maintained an informal meeting with Trump before his speech, in which he described him as “my favorite president.”
Elon Musk, Javier Milei and Donald Trump, posing during the gala at Mar-a-Lago (West Palm Beach, Florida).
Burgum, 68, made his fortune first in the software industry and then in the financial sector, and is currently one of the country’s wealthiest politicians (with an estimated fortune of more than $1 billion, according to Forbes ). He maintains close ties to the fossil energy industry, especially through his relationship with Harold Hamm, founder of Continental Resources, one of the largest US oil companies and major campaign donors, who also donated $5 million. dollars to Trump during this election cycle.
As governor of a state with an economy closely tied to oil and gas production, Burgum has promoted industry-friendly policies and defended drilling. In office since 2016 and with no prior political experience, he has promoted projects such as the Dakota Access pipeline and has criticized federal regulations that, according to him, limit national energy production.
In government, he will be in charge of granting concessions to federal lands for “massive” drilling, one of the pillars of Trump’s promised reduction in inflation, who already abandoned the Paris climate agreements in his first term and intends to return to do it in the second. “Global warming is a scam because, in fact, the Earth is cooling,” Trump has repeated in numerous speeches this year, which is on track to be the warmest in recorded history.
Burgum ran in the Republican primary and, after dropping out of the race, became a loyal supporter of Trump
Many experts warn of the impacts of expanding oil and gas drilling developments on the climate, whose warming will make hurricanes such as Helene and Milton that devastated the south of the country increasingly more frequent, intense and extensive.
Although the largest investment in renewable energy in the country’s history was approved under Joe Biden’s mandate, as part of the Inflation Reduction Act, the US remains the second largest emitter of greenhouse gases. , and 22% of its total carbon emissions come from burning fossil fuels extracted from federal lands.
The North Dakota governor, who “probably knows more about energy than anyone I know,” Trump said, ran in the Republican primary, but dropped out at the end of 2023 and ended up becoming one of the magnate’s most loyal supporters. Like Vivek Ramaswamy, Elise Stefanik, Marco Rubio and Tulsi Gabbard, he was in the polls to become their vice presidential candidate and, like all of them, his loyalty to the Republican leader has rewarded him with an important position in his cabinet.
Unlike other more controversial appointments, the reaction of Republican senators, in charge of confirming Trump’s appointments, has been positive upon learning of the name Burgum. Not so among environmental groups, such as the Center for Biological Diversity, whose director, Kieran Sucklin, has defined the future Secretary of the Interior as “an oligarch completely disconnected from the overwhelming majority of Americans who value our natural heritage and do not want our parks, wildlife refuges and other special places be destroyed.”
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