UPDATE: Per several news reports, Haaland HAS indeed been chosen to head the US Department of the Interior.
New Mexico women appear to have the inside track in the Biden Administration for Interior Secretary. The post was apparently offered to Gov. Lujan Grisham who turned it down. Now, Albuquerque-area Congresswoman Deb Haaland is being promoted for the job by none other than Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
We at the Rio Grande Foundation have been critics of Lujan Grisham’s economic and COVID policies, but on energy issues, Lujan Grisham is actually a moderate while Haaland is on the far-left wing when it comes to energy issues. If implemented, her stated policies would be a disaster for New Mexico and other energy producing states.
Haaland told The Guardian, “I am wholeheartedly against fracking and drilling on public lands,” she said. She is also a staunch supporter of the Green New Deal.” According to a recent study of the issue, “New Mexico would see even steeper revenue losses under the study’s forecasts. The state would lose on average $946 million per year in oil and gas tax revenue in the first five years under a lease moratorium, and on average $1.2 billion per year in tax revenue in the first five years under a drilling ban.”
Lujan Grisham, on the other hand, voted FOR crude oil exports when she was in Congress. She also has said that she’ll ask for an exemption from any future drilling ban (on federal lands). While Lujan Grisham has said that New Mexico would “transition away from fossil fuels” and she even signed New Mexico’s own version of a “Green New Deal,” she is nowhere near as radical as Deb Haaland when it comes to energy.
If Haaland becomes Secretary of the Interior, energy-producing Western states better watch out!
So Biden’s appointments are diverse – by design, to beat out George Bush’s, which were based on competence first, and the most diverse cabinet to that time. But Biden’s are especially obscene as they are absolutely pandering, as in introduction of Education Secretary: Gave his name; added he was the first Latino in the job; then added qualifications. Backward, and insulting.
I saw an old Western show today, crooks selling a diamond mine introduced the team members, and last, the woman, as “our attractive assistant, who is very good at her job”
In terms of Haaland’s position, do not make the stupid mistake of changing policy without economic analysis/impact on the millions who will be out of work. So-called “renewables” will not create nearly the jobs, nor the reliability of produced energy and power.
And we have no battery storage system ($7,000 for a car battery that might take on 300-400 miles before needing a 12-hour recharge? Spare me). And as England and Australia have found (Germany also) that reliance on “renewables” increases delivered cost to triple the rates “enjoyed” today. And as California governor admits, they jumped on that boat way too early, and now are expecting the grid to be fixed to buy power from others who, if they need increased production, will be unable to provide.
Nuclear is and will be the renewable we need. How else do we power ships, trains, spacecraft? But we need batteries first, and should not add the “renewable” (wind/solar) subsidies until we can store a week’s worth of electricity for a home in a footlocker good for 10 years for $1,000. Get cracking!
Not to sound crass or reductive, but allowing trust funder primitivists – who would doubtless prefer that New Mexico were their private nature preserve – to impoverish the state and pauperize many of its residents in the name of some millenarian ideology, would be transparent lunacy.
I also can’t imagine a worse way to incentivize responsible environmental business practice a.k.a. “stewardship” than effectively to banish entrepreneurs regardless of what steps they undertake to promote or adhere to it.
It’s perhaps also worth recalling that the original early 20th Century conservationists were motivated by racist and eugenic thinking. What they were above all concerned to safeguard was the purity and integrity of their own genetic strain, for which other allegedly endangered species and resources were arguably mere proxies.