Unleashing America's Natural Resources with Bruce Westerman

This transcript is from a CSIS podcast published on April 9, 2025. Listen to the podcast here.

Bruce Westerman: We have an unchosen obligation to uphold those values and principles that our country was established on. But then you look to the future, and you say, we also have an unchosen obligation to the future to leave what we've got in better shape than what we found it.

Quill Robinson: Welcome to Power Map, the CSIS Energy Security and Climate Change Program podcast where we explore the forces reshaping the global energy system. I'm Quill Robinson.

Joseph Majkut: And I'm Joseph Majkut.

Quill Robinson: Joseph. So, this week we spoke with Congressman Bruce Westerman, who is the Chair of the House Natural Resources Committee. And he's really a prominent player in Congress right now when it comes to a lot of the different issues that we're working on here at CSIS ranging from AI driven demand growth to critical minerals to permitting reform. And so, it was great to sit down with him.

Joseph Majkut: I agree. And we had a really nice conversation with the Chairman. It was great to hear a little bit more about his back story, his biography.

Quill Robinson: He's a conservationist through and through.

Joseph Majkut: Yes. And then to hear how Congress is thinking about the issues that we're reading about in the headlines I thought was really a unique opportunity. I'm glad we were able to spend so much time with him.

Quill Robinson: Yeah, completely. And I think one of the things that you teased out, you asked him and that conversation, was what is the role of Congress? Right? There are many things, permitting reform being a good example, that executive orders can only go so far. If you actually want to change the trajectory when it comes to building out power and infrastructure in the U.S., ultimately that falls on Congress to do, and so we dove into that topic a bit with him.

Joseph Majkut: Yeah, completely. And I know he was very close to the negotiations on permitting reform last year, fully expect to see him be in the mix on that question again. One of the key things I heard from him in the conversation was that he and his colleagues, I think on both sides of the aisle, feel a real sense of urgency around building. He seemed to indicate that the politics around that were changing. I really do hope that's true because it's such a priority for meeting larger national goals.

Quill Robinson: Another thing that we spent a good amount of time on was AI driven demand growth. It sounded like he's been meeting with a lot of people recently who are bringing this issue up. We talked more about electricity than we did fossil, I believe.

Joseph Majkut: Yeah. The two biggest conversations we had with him were trees and building enough electricity to win the AI race. I think that tells you something very interesting. Public policy change is so frustrating, can be hard to achieve until there is both the necessity and a sense of consensus around the issue deserving, so whatever trade-offs or political negotiation need to happen. It was really fascinating to me that when we're talking to the Chair of the House Natural Resources Committee, which is dealing with all sorts of energy production, that was the thing that was on his mind. That's the thing that is a big national priority.

I asked him if he has a working internal definition of energy dominance and the place that we end was we need to be able to meet this incredible demand that we see coming down the pike because that going to be what's important. If we lose that race, we don't get to choose anything else. Very interesting to hear that perspective directly from him and grateful that we've been doing so much work in that space: The Securing U.S. Leadership across the AI Stack report and various other underlying analysis. I think there's going to be a strong audience for the kind of work we're doing here as well as many of our colleagues around town.

Quill Robinson: Right. I mean, he had a clear message. We need more energy so we can lead on AI and beat China. I'm hopeful about that. I feel like this conversation, this debate, has been so gridlocked by renewables to mitigate climate change or fossil fuels to ensure energy security. While the need for more power is certainly a challenge, perhaps that's an opportunity to kind of move past this really unproductive binary that we have here.

Joseph Majkut: The other thing that listeners should really dive into or take some time to think about listening to the conversation is his views on conservation. You asked a really interesting question at the start. Are we in a new mode for how conservation policy is going to work? And it is so inexorably tied to resource extraction and the energy dominance agenda and the permitting and regulatory changes we're experiencing here in the United States right now. It's worth hearing his perspective on those questions.

Quill Robinson: It's always a good day when we get to talk about Teddy Roosevelt.

Joseph Majkut: I suppose. So thanks so much, Quill. It was a great conversation.

Quill Robinson: Alright, let's dive in. Chairman Bruce Westerman, welcome to Power Map. It's good to have you.

Bruce Westerman: Great to be with you.

Quill Robinson: Before we get into the sort of nitty gritty policy issues, there's a lot of them, I want to start by talking a bit about your upbringing and why you are such a prominent conservationist in Congress. So can you give us the background on how you ended up as being the only forester in the House of Representatives?

Bruce Westerman: You know, Quill, when I ran for Congress, I had no idea I was going to be the only forester in Congress, and I've had that moniker since I've been here. Actually, Senator Risch studied forestry in undergrad. There is somebody else here that studied forestry, went ahead and got licensed to practice forestry. Still keep my license up to date. If somebody says, "Didn't you used to be a forester?" I say, "No, I'm still a forester, I just serve in Congress." 

The same thing, my undergraduate degree is in engineering, I've maintained my professional engineer's license. Where I grew up in rural Arkansas, I don't even know that as a kid I knew, I even thought about the word conservation, but it was something that was just kind of ingrained in me. I loved to hunt and fish, that was entertainment when I was a kid, so I spent a tremendous amount of time in the outdoors. I understood how forest management affected wildlife habitats. Ended up going to graduate school at Yale and studied forestry and realized all this stuff I was seeing while I was growing up, that's what conservation is.

Joseph Majkut: So you brought that set of values, brought those experiences to Congress, which is a partisan challenging environment often. How much do you sense shared values, whether it's across the aisle or with your colleagues on the Republican side, when you're thinking about the kind of conservation issues. You described being grown up a very thrifty people with this real sense of place. Is that something that you can share with your colleagues?

Bruce Westerman: One of the themes I use as Chairman of the Natural Resources Committee is we're going to put conservatives back into conservation. Which we think about it, the word conservation is derived from conservative, and if you look at the conservation giants throughout history, there's a lot of 'em with an R beside their name. I mean Teddy Roosevelt was a Republican. He's considered the father of conservation. Gifford Pinchot. A lot of the so-called bedrock environmental laws were passed when Richard Nixon was president. So, conservatives have a strong history in the conservation field.

There's a philosopher, I can't remember his name right now, but he wrote that a conservative is in someone who believes in unchosen obligations. That's kind of deep, but if you think about that, a conservative is someone that looks at the past and says, we are standing on the shoulders of people who put laws in place, actually gave us a constitution, this form of government, and this country has been immensely blessed by those activities from the past. So, we have an unchosen obligation to uphold those values and principles that our country was established.

But then you look to the future and you say, we also have an unchosen obligation to the future to leave what we've got in better shape than what we found it. And that's really what stewardship and conservation is and it's not wasting things, it's using things but not wasting them. It's what my granny was doing in the garden, but a little bit larger scale when we look at our federal lands and our resources.

Quill Robinson: So, you mentioned Teddy Roosevelt, Gifford Pinchot. That was a particular area era, that was sort of the inaugural era of the conservation movement. There was another era that began in the 1960s, 1970s, Rachel Carson, seeing the Cuyahoga River catch on fire, and many of the modern environmental groups that we think of were born out of that era. I'm wondering if we're entering a third era when it comes to conservation, a new era as we think about the complex geopolitical nature of energy being traded around the world, as we realize that we need to unlock mineral resources to build the batteries that go in electric vehicles. Is there a new conservation move emerging or is there a need for it?

Bruce Westerman: That's a good question. I don't meet anybody that thinks we should dump chemicals into the environment. Everybody breathes the air, everybody drinks the water the more we find out about the impacts air quality and water quality have on quality of life. You were talking about the environmental movement in the sixties and seventies. That's when the EPA came along, when the Clean Air and Clean Water Act, the Endangered Species Act, all those were much needed laws at the time, but over time they've been used more as obstacles for conservation than actually practicing conservation.

Some of that I think comes from not bad motivations. I use the expression when I talk about forestry that we've loved our trees to death. Who doesn't love the forest? If you love the forest and don't understand the forest, you might make a bad decision for it, and we've made bad decisions about forestry in our country saying the way you take care of the forest is you take a hands-off approach except you put the fires out when the fire start.

Well, the forests don't really care what policy we make in Washington D.C. All the trees know is they're going to grow until they fill the sunlight space. They can't get any more sunlight, they can't get any more water or nutrients, then they're going to be competing with their neighbors. They're going to get weakened. Insects and disease are going to come along, and then you're going to get into this vicious cycle that we're in right now where the pendulum swings really far from one side to the other, and that's what a catastrophic wildfire does. You can't prevent fire from getting into the forest, but you can certainly take care of the forest so that fire doesn't devastate it. We've always had fire in the forest.

Joseph Majkut: I hear you calling for a higher degree of, in the forestry case, active management. To Quill's question, one of the things I think we might be entering is a time where we don't assume stasis. Whereas before conservation in that second era, if you will, had a sense of non-involvement, it actually turns out that stewardship and more active management, particularly as we think about changing population density, the urban forestry interface, these issues mean we do need to tend and adapt more than leave alone. And then you see the same thing happening with respect to effects of climate change, right? How we manage endangered species has to change when you see shifting ranges for different kinds of species undergoing this planetary phenomenon, right? That might be where there's this third age where you have much more of a adaptive set of policies as opposed to a more —

Bruce Westerman: Nature is dynamic. Nature is always changing. The built world is more static. I'll go back to my engineering roots. You actually take courses in engineering, one's called "Statics" and one's called "Dynamics". Statics is a study of bodies that are fixed and is dynamics of the study of bodies that are in motion. When I say bodies, structures and mechanical system. And we've tried to apply this static look at nature, which is dynamic. Forests are always changing. If we go against that, we're going against nature and we're going to lose every time. We've got to work with nature and take the techniques that we've developed from studying forest and use that to be good stewards and match the needs of the day. And you can talk about fisheries management, you can talk about agriculture and soil management.

Joseph Majkut: Maybe we can move a little bit to energy issues as well. You're the Chairman of the House Natural Resources Committee. You're responsible for conservation and management stewardship of federal lands, which includes allotted energy resources. What's the agenda this year in particular as the federal government's policies have shifted pretty dramatically toward the president wanting to see energy dominance, wanting to see higher levels of production, and the U.S. energy industry playing a much bigger role in our economic future.

Bruce Westerman: The demand for energy is increasing at rates higher than what we've seen in the past, and a lot of that's being driven by data centers and AI. There's demands for different kinds of energy. You're seeing more electrification, so it means you've got to produce more electricity. Now you got to talk about what fuel source are we going to use to produce electricity? You've got concerns about carbon emissions. When we talk about energy dominance, I'm a little bit concerned about just keeping up with the amount of energy that we need. We're going to have it to be dominant just to provide the energy that's needed.

Joseph Majkut: Do you have a working internal definition of energy dominance?

Bruce Westerman: To me it's meeting the energy demands, and I say energy policy should be built around three things: reliable, affordable, and clean. And those three can work hand in hand. But if we fail on reliability and affordability, we're also going to fail on clean. Energy is foundational to our whole economy. You can't really pick something out of our economy and say energy doesn't matter. If we see energy prices go up, it's going to affect everything. To be energy dominant, first I think we've got to be able to be reliable and affordable, which is going to take putting more sources of energy online. And it really is an all of the above approach. You look at the data on how much of our energy still comes from fossil fuels, and if you think you can take all of that away overnight — you want to talk about a science denier, that would be a science denier. The math and the physics just don't work.

So how do we take the energy sources that we've got, make them more reliable, more affordable, and make 'em as clean as possible? And that's kind of the focus and where I think we need to be trying to get to on energy dominance. We've also got national security issues that are around energy, and that gets back to artificial intelligence and data processing. There's in essence a new Cold War on who's going to get to super intelligence with AI first, and it's a race between us and China, predominantly.

Joseph Majkut: One of the only executive orders as far as I can tell that came toward the end of the Biden administration and has been maintained by the Trump administration is the data center infrastructure executive order, which still asked agencies to look at using federal land as part of that race; using permitting authorities and federal funding tools and widely available land, particularly in the West to build data centers. Is that something that you've paid attention to? Do you see that as an opportunity?

Bruce Westerman: It's more of a necessity than an opportunity. There's a new data center that's been announced that I've got a nuclear power plant in my district. It's hard for me to get my mind around this, but one data center would take three of those nuclear power plants to provide the energy to one data center.

Joseph Majkut: We talk about gigawatt scale data centers now, like they aren't immediately the largest electricity loads in the country, but they would be. That's a large nuclear power plant, that's a Hoover Dam at a gigawatt scale.

Bruce Westerman: So those are the challenges that we're facing. I'm by no means an expert on artificial intelligence, but it's all around us now. The more I learn about it, it's kind of one of those things I think maybe humankind would've been better off if we didn't discover this and if we weren't developing it. But the cat's out of the bag and it is definitely a race to see who was going to win AI.

Joseph Majkut: It has Promethean vibes.

Bruce Westerman: Yeah, probably Eric Schmidt, who was the CEO of Google, he's written a book called Genesis. I went to a presentation that he did, it was very eye-opening. I've been to a lot of briefings on AI. The thought is that if we lose on the battle to AI, then everything we've got can be undermined: our financial systems, our defense systems. It's that big of a deal, who gets to AI first. But AI uses energy in ways that we've never dreamed of energy usage. And on top of that, as we have more economic expansion, it takes energy to do all the things we've been using energy for in the past. So, energy is so key and pivotal at this point, and we've got to be producing more of it and accelerated scale, and that gets into something that I'm working on all the time that's permitting reform.

Joseph Majkut: I was hoping we would go there. We've looked at this issue a lot, Chairman, thinking through data center development needs for the United States. How do we keep us at the lead? And we sort of broke the problem up into two phases. First phase is about the next five years. There, the chips are already procured, the hyperscalers, these big companies, are just trying to figure out where can they build 'em out fast enough. And building — we call this the speed to power era, basically where you can get the energy and how quickly you can get it online is your primary area of concern. In the 2030s, we can think about sustainability and security and a variety of other things. And permitting reform, you hear in every conversation — with an executive from the utility industry, from the data center industry, that seems to be a place where everyone knows it needs to happen. We're not quite sure how we're going to make it happen.

Bruce Westerman: So, I get a lot of visitors come through my office from all different walks of life and businesses that they're involved in. Nearly everybody wants to talk about permitting reform. And we think of it in energy, which it's very, very important in energy, but we can't build roads and bridges and airports and dredge, navigable waterways and build ports. Anything that's got a federal nexus to it now gets bogged down in permitting. A few years ago, Congress passed something called the CHIPS Act to try to bring microchip manufacturing back to the U.S. These were private companies that got federal dollars to build a manufacturing plant on private land, and they found themselves burdened in the permitting process and the reason they had to go through the permitting process was because they've took federal funds. That might be a caution to any business that's wanting to expand.

There are strings that come with subsidies and federal funding, but it's really gotten out of control. And with the challenges we're seeing with more electric and power generation, with needing to manage our forest—permitting effects forestry management. So we're trying to figure out a path forward to not remove the environmental and conservation objective from the laws that we have, but to make sure we protect those things and do it in a more streamlined fashion so that we can build things and meet these massive demands as promised. Put a plugin for the United States right here.

Some other data that is hard to get your mind around is that it's reported that China's going to build a hundred gigawatts of coal power this year. A few years ago it was 40 gigawatts, which blows your mind, but a hundred gigawatts —

Joseph Majkut: Nearly the entirety of the U.S. coal fleet.

Bruce Westerman: I have a coal plant in my district that's 650 megawatt. So you're talking about putting one of those online every one to two days. That's mind blowing that they're building that many coal fire plants. Well, why would they be building that many coal fired plants? For one thing, coal is reliable, and it is affordable, and they know they're going to have to have this energy for AI. A lot of these plants being reported to me aren't even being started up.

Joseph Majkut: Right.

Bruce Westerman: They're not even putting power on the view, but they're sitting there so that when the power is needed, they can turn 'em on. Now we're closing coal plants down. It takes forever to permit a gas plant. We actually need more nuclear power plants. That's almost impossible to permit a nuclear power plant. The last one that was built down in the Southeast, it started off with a $13 billion price tag and ended up like $35 billion and it was reported because of the bureaucracy and the permitting and the changing of plans like during construction. So, we're not going to win the energy war if we're not taking a better approach at building more.

Quill Robinson: A lot of our listeners are outside of D.C. and they're trying to figure out this administration and Republicans' approach to energy. You were talking about coal, you were talking about nuclear. We touched on renewables. Obviously public lands play a big role in the development of energy. You mentioned all of the above and that's something that we've heard from Republicans for a long time, but there's also been clear skepticism from the White House when it comes to renewable energy, and as we are in the midst of all of these Inflation Reduction Act negotiations, I think a lot of our audience is trying to figure out: how are you and your colleagues thinking about one step further than all of the above? What are the attributes and what is the role of different types of energy, renewable and traditional, going forward?

Bruce Westerman: So, when you think about electricity, we need more electrons on the grid, and we need more grid. The engineer in me that likes to look at physics and things like that, if I could just wave a wand and make it happen, we'd be building nuclear power plants. But we need that scale of energy.

Quill Robinson: You didn't get that wand when you became Chair?

Bruce Westerman: No, they don't give me a magic wand.

Joseph Majkut: No nuclear reactor wand?

Bruce Westerman: No nuclear reactor wand, no coal plant or gas plant wand. But the simple fact of the matter is we desperately need electrons on the grid. You can make energy out of biomass, you can generate electricity from it. We've got huge opportunities to make more energy from wood and biomass, but is it as cost effective as building a gas plant? No, it's not. But can we build enough gas plants to meet the demands that we need? Can we build enough solar farms and wind farms?

I was out at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. They gave us statistic that said that if you developed a section of land with nuclear power, so 640 acres for a nuclear power plant, it would take 77,000 acres of windmills to produce the same amount of energy that nuclear power plant would. We have some very rich farmland in my home state. America feeds ourselves and helps feed other parts of the world, but you drive across this productive farmland anymore and you're going to see a lot of solar panels. And you can't really blame the farmer or the landowner because the solar companies come in with such lucrative land purchase values or lease values, and they can make a lot more money selling their land or leasing their land for solar than they can for farming.

But what does that do in our ability in the long run to feed ourselves and to be able to help feed other people around the world? There's big questions at stake when you look at these inner new policies and all of the above approach.

Quill Robinson: Would it be fair to say that this is a sort of recalibration when it comes to the emphasis on different energy technologies as opposed to a turn away from renewables altogether?

Bruce Westerman: I think you have to look at what's available, where you're at. If you're on a coast where you can do offshore wind, and that makes sense there, maybe you go for that. If you're out West where you got a lot of open land and the sun shines a lot, maybe solar makes more sense there. If you're in a place that's got a lot of natural gas or a lot of coal, maybe we should be developing that. You can't build a nuclear reactor right now someplace where you don't have abundant water. Now the new technology that still hasn't been perfected yet, where you get the solid cores where you're not relying on water for your tooling and someday you may be able to build nuclear power plant in the desert, you can't do that right now. So it's really more of a common sense approach and looking at how we utilize the resources that we've got, and I would say really an all hands on deck approach because the math is not adding up on what the demand for energy is and how much we're able to produce now and how much we'll be able to produce in the short term.

So, what happens when demand goes up and the supply's not there? The price goes up, and that gets back to what I said about reliable and affordable energy. If anybody can make any type of energy clean, it's the technology that we have here in the United States. I met with a group that was talking about enhanced oil recovery using carbon dioxide. It basically said you could take all, if there were a way to capture it, you could take all the carbon dioxide produced in the U.S. and put it in the Permian Basin for enhanced oil recovery. And then we got the Balkan and other places, and we're seeing the increase in oil production from fracking starting to taper off. I believe I was in the Wall Street Journal, I saw an article just the other day that said that if the Permian has not peaked, it's getting close to the peak of production. But the new technology to even go back in the Permian and recover more oil there is to use CO2 and enhance oil recovery.

Joseph Majkut: On that point, the federal government has supported carbon capture and sequestration through the 45 Q tax credit for years. Enhanced oil recovery gets a slightly reduced credit against other types of storage. Do your colleagues understand that as a sort of energy dominance tool and an energy production tool, or is it traditionally thought of as a climate tool? Can it be both?

Bruce Westerman: I think it can be both, and I think we need to re-look at penalizing enhanced oil recovery using CO2. I mean, you're accomplishing the same thing and you're storing it. The problem with that is we can't capture all the carbon. What you do capture, you've got to have pipelines to get it from point A point B. And there are people that are out there building carbon capture equipment where they're just pulling ambient air in and trying to get the carbon out of the air because they can't get it from the coal plant. And then there's also natural sources of carbon dioxide where they're taking it. We've got to be smarter about our energy policy and use all the things that we're blessed with to leverage our energy production. We got huge opportunities with geothermal and nobody ever really talks about geothermal.

Joseph Majkut: Oh man, geothermal is kind of buzzy at the moment. We're waiting for it to arrive a little bit more, but a lot of what I hear you talking about is regional diversity and energy sources, making sure what we're building and where works for the local community and economically. All that makes a lot of sense. The president has also moved forward really, really quickly on reform for NEPA. To their credit, they see this challenge of making sure that of companies facing large permitting burdens that don't really change environmental outcomes. What's the role of Congress in this context? I mean, congress is allowed — the administration can move forward with executive orders, that creates legal risk, it's temporary, right? There's no permanent victories in American politics, and Congress can really open the envelope for permitting reform, or whether that's for electricity transmission or pipelines or whatever. Where do you think the conversation is going to be this year?

Bruce Westerman: Early in our conversation, I was talking about a conservative looking back at the foundations of our country and saying, we're going to hold true to that. Well, checks and balances is something very unique to American government and the legislature makes the law, the executive branch enforces the law, and the judicial branch interpret the law. So, the executive branch has leeway within the framework of the law to carry out their activities the way they think they should carry them out. Now, somebody can call foul and go to the court and the court will decide where the executive branch is actually following the law that Congress passed. But if you want real change, if you want to have something that's long-term, you got to get an act of Congress to do that.

That's where the permitting reform comes in, and our founders also made it hard to change the law. They didn't set up a parliament, they set up a House of Representatives and they set up the Senate and you've got to get legislation through both the House and the Senate, which has rules to protect the minority interest. You basically have to have 60 votes to get a bill through the Senate, or 60% of the vote with cause of cloture. So, you can't make meaningful change to the law long-term without it being bipartisan. Our system of government is not set up that way. If you had a majority in the House and over 60 members of one party that would vote the same in the Senate, then you can force the will on the majority through the House and the Senate. That has happened very, very few times in the history of our country. To do meaningful permitting reform. We need to start with a bipartisan bicameral approach to permitting reform.

And again, I think everybody by far wants to take care of the environment and be good stewards. I think people are starting to realize how broken our system is right now and how, for the betterment of America and really for the Western world, we need to make changes so that we can address all of these issues with energy, with mining, with forestry, with infrastructure. I worked on some permitting reforms with Senator Manchin and Barrasso at the end of the last Congress. We weren't able to get an agreement that I could get the House to go along with and they could get the Senate to go along with, but it really laid a foundation for a good starting point. And even before that, the house passed HR1 in the last Congress that had broad permitting reforms in it.

So, in this Congress, we're trying to take a more organized, strategic approach. We're working in a bipartisan manner in the House Natural Resources Committee, the House Energy and Commerce Committee, the Senate Energy and Public Works and Senate Energy and Natural Resources. So I've got Republican and Democrat colleagues here in the House that I'm working with and working closely with the Senate where they're trying to work in a bipartisan manner, because it doesn't matter what your preference on energy projects are or infrastructure projects, you're not going to get any of 'em built in a reasonable amount of time and for a reasonable cost if we don't change something on the permit.

Quill Robinson: Chairman, I want to ask about an idea that Secretary Burgum has floated, has talked about, and that's putting America's natural resources on the balance sheet. I'm thinking about the resources that exist on our public lands and potentially how that could be used to help address the national debt. It's a different way of thinking about the resources that we have in this country. I'm interested in your reaction to that idea.

Bruce Westerman: If you've come from a private industry background like I did, if you've had accounting and financial classes, you understand that in business you have a cashflow statement or an income statement that's based on cashflow, revenue and expenses. But you also have a balance sheet that has assets and liabilities. The mindset in the federal government is more of the income statement approach where we're always looking at revenue and expenses and we kind of discount the balance sheet with assets and liabilities. We don't know what our assets are in this country.

Secretary Burgum as governor of South Dakota, actually for lack of a better term, put a balance sheet together for the state where they looked at how many assets do we have, what is the value of everything that's out there? If we were to do that for the country, you're probably talking about hundreds of trillions of dollars. Going back to business model, if you've got hundreds of trillions of dollars of assets and you've got $36 trillion of debt right now, well, 36 trillion of debt against $300 trillion of assets in the business world, that's not considered all that bad. Now, yet I'll imply that 36 trillion in debt, it's not bad, it's terrible. We've got to do something to fix that. But I think what Secretary Burgum is trying to do is to show just how much wealth is in this country, and a lot of that's in our natural resources.

Quill Robinson: Related to America's natural resources. There's this thing that kind of keeps bubbling up on Twitter where just when we think we're running out of a resource, some farmer in Pennsylvania discovers more of it, right, and we hear about new deposits of lithium being bound and that sort of thing. President Trump is very focused on reshoring, bringing supply chains back to America, fully developing our natural resources. At the same time, costs also matters for OEMs that are using these minerals to build vehicles or whatever else. How do you think about that trade off of bringing resource extraction and turning resources into valuable, useful goods for the economy, back to the U.S., but at the same time taking advantage of the potential cost benefit and benefit of trade with other countries when it comes to natural resource development?

Joseph Majkut: Security, value, and efficiency.

Quill Robinson: Right.

Bruce Westerman: I think we've always got to be mindful of national security, and when we look in the mining realm, you take the USGS list of critical minerals — I'll use graphite for example. We've got massive deposits of graphite in the United States. We are 100% dependent on imports for graphite. You won't be surprised to find out that China is the number one producer of graphite in the world. Graphite's on the DOD critical list, the DOI critical list and the DOE. You got Defense, Interior and Energy that says graphite is critical. We've got it here, but we're not producing it. Just go down the list of those critical minerals, and China is dominating the production and really the global control of where those go.

That's very important to our national defense. A lot of our weapons rely on these critical minerals to be able to produce our defense systems. We also see if somebody announces a new plant in the U.S. or one of our allies, if China will dump product into the markets to drive the price down to make it uneconomical. We've, we've got to quit being taken advantage of on that. One way to do that is with tariffs on those materials, but we have to have those materials to do the things we need to do.

Joseph Majkut: You need the nascent domestic industry to protect.

Bruce Westerman: Yeah, there's got to be a time where you, and then this gets back to permitting again. You got to be able to produce the things domestically if you ever want to be able to use the tariff tool to keep somebody from dumping into the global market. There's talk of a national repository where we set up a repository for critical minerals to give some market protection against dumping while we're developing our own minerals and elements, and while we're working with our allies to do the same. None of these problems are unsolvable. It's just going to take common sense, hard work, and it needs to be done sooner than later if we're going to be successful in these endeavors.

Quill Robinson: To close, Chair Westerman, I want to ask you a question that we've asked all of our other guests. Over your years in Congress, since you were in the forestry industry, how has your framework, your way of understanding energy and conservation changed?

Bruce Westerman: I like the joke sometimes that — my undergraduate degree is in engineering, and I studied forestry and graduate school — engineers think with logic and reason and foresters look at long-term horizons, and what I found in Washington D.C. that none of that's really appreciated. So, I've had to figure out the politics of how you get things done so that we can apply logic and reason and look at long-term horizons. When you come from a world in the private sector where everybody seems to be working together to accomplish a common goal and you come to Congress, people are working in all different directions and a lot of times you can't figure out what kind of goal anybody's trying to accomplish. That makes it more difficult to do common sense things and put good policy in place, but it comes back to relationships and coalitions, and education is a huge part of it.

When you understand the eight ball, we're behind on energy, I think that'll change your motivation on working towards a common goal, and we've seen our country do that many times in the past. As horrible as wars are, our country came together in World War I and World War II and other wars like never before to accomplish a common goal. When we got attacked by terrorists in 9/11, the country really came together to fight terrorism. The country worked hard to defeat the Soviet Union and the Cold War. We've got challenges ahead of us right now that I don't think people are seeing the challenges clearly as we need to be seeing. So, you got to define the problem — Here's what we're trying to solve, and get people on board, and then work together to fix it.

Joseph Majkut: Thank you so much for all your efforts and your leadership, and thank you for joining us on the Power Map podcast.

Bruce Westerman: Great to be with you today.

Quill Robinson: Thank you so much for listening to Power Map. Please make sure to subscribe and to review wherever you listen to podcasts. We'll see you next episode.

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