Ryan Zinke has resigned as Secretary of the Interior:
“In new year, Ryan Zinke, the Secretary of the Interior, seemed certain to catapult into that top tier of political nemeses for Democrats. Like Pruitt, Zinke excels at generating bizarre scandals; also like Pruitt, his own heroic vision of himself seems to survive any amount of bad press. House Democrats, salivating over their new oversight power, had already promised to subpoena Zinke over a number of issues, including a sweetheart $300-million contract for electricity in Puerto Rico that he allegedly gave to a small power company based in his home state of Montana.
But Zinke’s star turn is not to be. On Saturday morning, President Trump announced that Zinke will step down at the end of the year. David Bernhardt, the current deputy secretary and a former oil lobbyist, will take over the department.
Little is likely to change under Bernhardt. The Interior Department oversees the nation’s public lands, encompassing nearly a quarter of its total area. This makes it a kind of extra-powerful environmental regulator, especially out West, where it owns 47 percent of the territory. The department also includes the National Park Service, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and the Bureau of Indian Affairs.
Under Zinke, the agency has gone on a spree of deregulation. It has cut more than 1 million acres of wilderness out of Bears Ears National Monument in Utah; with help from Congress, it has opened up 19 million acres in the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge to oil exploration. The agency is also in the process of overhauling the Endangered Species Act, the muscular 1973 law that helped save the bald eagle, the gray wolf, and the American crocodile from extinction.
Many of Zinke’s efforts seemed particularly helpful for fossil-fuel companies, which can lease public land from the government and then sell the oil or coal they find there. Near the end of his term, President Obama blocked Interior from releasing any land for coal mining. Zinke, by contrast, has sped up the process of obtaining these leases for new oil and gas drilling.
Every single one of these initiatives is almost certain to continue under Bernhardt. What will not continue is Zinke’s penchant for publicity. The man embraced his role as the Cabinet’s cowboy. He arrived to his first day at the department on horseback, wearing a stetson. A former SEAL, he transplanted an arcane military ritual onto his new life as a downtown bureaucrat: Whenever he walked into the Interior Department’s downtown D.C. headquarters, he ordered his staff to fly a special flag. …”
This isn’t going to change much.
As Secretary of the Interior, Zinke’s pro-business policy on energy and the environment has essentially been Drill, Baby Drill. The U.S. has become a net exporter of petroleum for the first time in 75 years. Unlike the French, Americans are enjoying low gas prices and the United States is no longer dependent on OPEC which is good news considering where we were in the 2000s.
The most important thing happening in the world today: the U.S. shale energy revolution has transformed geopolitics. https://t.co/EH5vD6i4kQ
— Avik Roy (@Avik) December 15, 2018
Note: If a Democrat wins in 2020, they could screw this up and go down the road of Macron’s France by putting a “Green New Deal” at the top of their agenda.
Well, if we had been smart enough to develop Thorium Salt Reactors and more Geothermal, we wouldn’t have to be worrying so much about effing up the environment with wildcat drilling all over.
If us National Socialist were in charge we’d have nuclear fusion energy by now.
That could well be, too, spahn. Way back in the 1950s, we had a chance to start developing Thorium Reactors, but Admiral Rickenbacker wanted fission reactors, so that’s what we got stuck with. Of course, one has to assume that our rulers actually want us to have cheap energy.
North Dakota has surpassed Venezuela as an oil producer.
obama was 100% against this, and tried to block as much of it as he could. blocked pipelines, blocked drilling on federal lands, installed impossible CAFE regulations, ridiculed republicans and energy industry people and actually mocked the idea of drilling having any helpful effect. who could forget obama’s energy plan: tire pressure gauges.
that’s standard operating procedure for democrats though. it doesn’t require anything like a green energy plan. that stuff will all return when a democrat is back in the white house. they’re more hostile to energy production now, than they were during obama.
and yeah, horizontal fracturing of shale to release crude oil and natural gas, is the only important thing, and the only good thing, that happened in the last 10 years. it’s not a coincidence it’s peaking under trump.
So who’s left for Drumpf that’ll work in his chaotic cabinet?
Sarah Palin? Kid Rock? Ted Nugent?
Manipulated out, not resigned. Probably by Jew boy Kushner who is really pulling all the strings. Jews will infiltrate and attach themselves to anyone of power and influence in order to manipulate everything. He’s probably doing it via daddy’s little girl. Never underestimate the cunningness of a Jew, Chinese, or Indian.