(Bloomberg) -- President-elect Donald Trump’s choice to lead the Interior Department will champion America’s energy wealth as a means to achieve both “historic American prosperity” and “world peace” in his Senate confirmation hearing Thursday.
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The incoming president’s “energy dominance vision will end wars abroad and make life more affordable for every family by driving down inflation,” Doug Burgum, the former governor of North Dakota and a onetime Trump rival for the Republican presidential nomination, said in written testimony prepared for delivery before the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee.
If confirmed, Burgum would be a key figure in executing Trump’s plan to escalate domestic energy production, including by expanding the oil and gas industry’s access to federal lands and waters managed by the Interior Department. On Thursday, he’s expected to face tough questions about his plans to balance those energy development imperatives against other public land priorities, including conservation and recreation.
The outgoing Biden administration has sought to elevate conservation, even codifying a regulation that effectively puts that on equal footing with energy development. President Joe Biden also has moved to insulate special areas from oil and gas drilling, imposing protections on much of the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska and new designations of national monuments.
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Trump has outlined a sharp pivot from that approach, promising voters before his November election that he would “free up the vast stores of liquid gold on America’s public land for energy development.” The president-elect has also pledged to end climate policies he calls Washington’s “green new scam” and lower energy costs.
The Interior Department oversees energy development, grazing and other activities on federal waters and some 500 million acres of public land, territory responsible for roughly a quarter of the country’s oil production.
Oil industry leaders have pressed Trump to make more of that land available for development, setting the stage for an expected increase in the sale of offshore drilling rights and efforts to ease limits on activity within the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska. At the same time, oil executives have shown little interest in dramatically boosting output that ultimately could suppress prices, instead favoring strict fiscal discipline and a focus on shareholder returns.