The News
US Interior Secretary Doug Burgum on Friday defended the Trump administration’s review of national monument designations, including those made by previous presidents.
“In our country we don’t have a shortage of federal land to take care of,” Burgum told Semafor’s Morgan Chalfant at the World Economy Summit in Washington, DC.
The Interior Department is considering removing at least six national monuments for energy development purposes, The Washington Post reported.
“We have Western states that are being choked because they have so much public land,” Burgum said, arguing that government overreach and the overlap between federal agencies and state agencies had led to “suboptimal” protection and use of those lands.
Burgum also said he was confident that the department’s plan to fast-track oil, gas, and mining projects would prevail in court, citing President Donald Trump’s January declaration of an energy emergency.
In this article:
Know More
Burgum said the department’s main priority is to bolster America’s national security and, in particular, its energy security in order to win the artificial-intelligence arms race with China.
That, Burgum argued, means building out more fossil fuel infrastructure and nuclear energy as a reliable power source to enable US innovation.
“We may be ahead of [China] on the technology for AI,” Burgum said. “[But] they’re way ahead of us in terms of building the horsepower to power that, because this is where you convert a kilowatt of electricity into intelligence,” Burgum said.
The Semafor View
Beijing is facing significant challenges to its economy, but how Chinese officials choose to navigate those risks could look quite different to other countries’ approach. Beijing wants to project influence abroad, and for global companies there is a need to balance supply chain shifts with China’s push into cutting edge technologies.