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During a U.S. House Natural Resources Committee hearing Wednesday, Joe Biden’s Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, a former congresswoman from New Mexico, burst into tears while talking about “climate change.”She said, “All of this is because climate change is the crisis of our lifetime!” claiming weather events were responsible for changes in temperature. “We can’t continue to be a one-industry country, referring to oil, gas, and coal.WATCH: https://twitter.com/RNCResearch/status/1648751050810355716 Also during the hearing, Rep. Pete Stauber (R-MN), chair of the Energy and Mineral Resources Subcommittee, rebuked Haaland about the administration’s decision to ban new mining near the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness....

Rep. Deb Haaland (D-N.M.), President Joe Biden’s nominee for secretary of the interior, refused to answer basic questions about energy and fossil fuels on public lands. Haaland had previously campaigned on eliminating oil and gas production in New Mexico and Biden has pledged to eliminate drilling on public lands, yet the nominee played dumb when faced with elementary questions on these issues.Rather than responding to basic questions and acknowledging the economic devastation that banning or restricting fossil fuels on public lands would entail, Haaland repeated that she has not been “briefed” on “that specific issue.”Here are five gobsmacking moments from...

President Trump announced Monday afternoon he will nominate Acting Interior Secretary David Bernhardt to serve as the next Secretary of the Interior. Donald J. Trump ✔@realDonaldTrump I am pleased to announce that David Bernhardt, Acting Secretary of the Interior, will be nominated as Secretary of the Interior. David has done a fantastic job from the day he arrived, and we look forward to having his nomination officially confirmed! 18.7K 12:13 PM - Feb 4, 2019 Twitter Ads info and privacy 6,746 people are talking about this Bernhardt took on the acting position last fall when then Interior Secretary Ryan...

Oklahoma Gov. Mary Fallin is emerging as President-elect Donald Trump's leading contender for interior secretary, three people close to Trump's transition team told POLITICO. An advocate of oil and gas development, Fallin signed a bill last year that would prevent Oklahoma cites from enacting bans on drilling. Fallin is a staunch critic of the Obama administration's climate change regulations for power plants. She signed an executive order last year saying that her state will not comply with the rules.

On the day before President-elect Donald Trump came to Washington, D.C., to meet with President Obama, a list of the names of possible Trump cabinet choices and other key jobs was leaked to reporters. This being Washington and all, the list of names is undoubtedly a way to vet these choices in the court of public opinion before spending any political capital defending them. And, revealing the list also creates a sort of buzz around the campaign.

President-elect Donald Trump’s transition team is seriously discussing the possibility of giving former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin a cabinet position, Politico reported Wednesday. The Trump campaign is floating the idea of tapping the former Alaskan governor as Trump’s interior secretary. Palin has made no secret about her interest in holding a position in a Trump administration.

Interior Secretary Sally Jewell told attendees at an event on Hispanic-American entrepreneurship on Tuesday that if it were not for legal and illegal immigration into the United States “we would not eat.” Jewell said that the country is still trying to address the rights of farm workers, including the role immigration plays. “I’d say the challenges of immigration reform are a good example,” she said. “If we did not have immigration to this country we would not eat. Whether it’s documented or undocumented, we would not eat,” Jewell said at the United States Institute of Peace in Washington, D.C. …

As promised, the Drakes Bay Oyster Co. appealed to an expanded panel of a federal appeals court in San Francisco today to allow it to keep operating at Point Reyes National Seashore. The oyster farm and owner Kevin Lunny asked an 11-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to reconsider a decision in which a smaller panel of the court ruled against the company by a 2 to 1 vote in September. In that ruling, the smaller panel upheld a federal trial judge’s denial of a preliminary injunction that would have allowed the oyster harvesting to continue...

The Senate approved Sally Jewell to be the next Interior Secretary on Wednesday, placing her atop an agency at the center of intense political battles over energy throughout President Obama’s tenure. Lawmakers voted 87-11 to approve Jewell to run the department that oversees conservation, recreation, oil-and-gas drilling and other uses on vast swaths of federal land. Eleven Republicans opposed her nomination. “Sally knows that business and environment both benefit when we are committed to protecting our national parks and national treasures,” Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) said. Jewell, who lives in Seattle, is the head of outdoor gear giant REI, Inc....

Maybe the Pentagon’s legendary $600 toilet seat was a bargain. The personal bathroom used by the secretary of the Interior is so swanky that its renovation cost $222,000. No detail was overlooked: It has a $3,500 sub-zero refrigerator (hey, if you’re going to have a fridge in the bathroom, it might as well be a good one) and a $689 faucet. At least the “vintage tissue holder” was cheap: just $65 bucks. The renovation was done in 2007 under President George W. Bush’s Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne, but is only now coming to light, thanks to the dogged reporting by...

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar appears today before the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee. He will hopefully answer questions about his refusal to allow deepwater drilling to resume in the Gulf of Mexico, despite a federal judge twice ruling that the moratorium is illegal. The BP oil spill was a disaster, but not as big of a disaster as the moratorium that followed. The granting of exactly one drilling permit to Noble Energy this week underscores just how cynical and politicized Salazar's response has been. Last week, Salazar said that he would not bow to "political pressure" to restart...

Stewart Udall, interior secretary for presidents John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson and a member of a major Democratic political family, has died at age 90, his family said on Saturday.

No warning. Just resigned. No further details.

Compromise: The accord would divvy up the basin's water during dry years Representatives of the seven Colorado River Basin states announced Friday they have reached a tentative agreement about how the river will be managed during water shortages. The deal culminates a year of sometimes stormy negotiations between upper basin states Utah, Colorado, Wyoming and New Mexico, plus California, Arizona and Nevada in the lower basin over how the river's precious resource should be shared. The stakes are enormous. Interior Secretary Gale Norton late in 2004 gave the seven basin states until February to submit a joint proposal for an...