Former Gov. Sarah Palin (R-AK), a candidate running to represent Alaska’s At-Large Congressional District in the U.S. House of Representatives, said in an interview on Breitbart News editor Adrienne Ross’s eponymous podcast published on Tuesday that if elected, her policy priority will be to “open up” the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) as a measure against a “fake energy crisis” that President “Biden made.”
Palin called for increasing energy and natural resource development in ANWR while highlighting the synthetic nature of rising energy costs driven by government policies marketed by the Biden administration as “environmental” measures.
Relevant portion begins at 37:56:
The former governor of Alaska emphasized the richness of the northern state’s natural resources.
“[We must] make sure that the other congressmen understand how important it is that we really ramp up domestic energy production,” Palin stated. “Up here in Alaska, we’re the Fort Knox of America. We have the minerals. We have the oil and the gas. We have the rare earth [minerals]. We have all these natural resources of energy, and we should be turning on a spigot and utilizing them, exploiting them for good, for responsible use of mankind.”
Palin continued, “Instead, there’s this fake energy crisis going on. The reason we have an energy crisis [is that] Biden made it. He’s overseas, hat in hand, asking for dirty, dangerous sources of oil — from enemies, even — to be produced for us.”
“This is crazy,” she determined. “We can develop [fossil fuels] safely, ethically, better than any other country in the world, our domestic supplies of energy. So my first agenda item will be making sure that we open up ANWR.”
Within hours of assuming the presidency, President Joe Biden signed an executive order suspending the issuance of oil development leases in ANWR.
Anchorage Daily News reported on the Biden administration’s framing of its restriction of fossil fuel development in ANWR as a “public health” measure and action against “climate change”:
President Joe Biden signed an executive order placing a temporary moratorium on oil and gas activity in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, hours after his inauguration on Wednesday and one day after the Trump administration issued nine oil and gas leases in the refuge’s coastal plain.
The moratorium was one of several actions Biden issued during his first hours, sending a strong signal that the new presidential administration will take a vastly different approach to Alaska resource issues than the previous one. It fell under a wide-ranging executive order, billed as an action to protect public health and the environment and to address climate change.
Palin addressed Democrats’ and the broader left’s regular calls for total elimination of public use of fossil fuels while pushing for a government-created industry and market for “alternative energy sources.”
She said, “The road that we’re on is to get America off traditional [and] conventional sources of energy that we have, and that we know how to produce, and to go into this utopian, fake, weird, New Green Deal of these alternative sources of energy.”
“Those are just boondoggles,” Palin continued. “That’s just a bunch of crony capitalism for people to get rich off some harebrained ideas– because we’re not anywhere close to getting rid of conventional sources of energy, and all of a sudden, getting to rely on these alternative energy sources that people who don’t know anything about energy are pushing all the time.”
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