Doug Burgum, the soft-spoken Interior secretary responsible for managing the more than 507 million acres of federally owned land, is haunted by a fear that seems, at first glance, outside his mandate. He worries the free world will lose dominance in the field of artificial intelligence, and with it, the future.
So does the president.
“When President Trump declared a national emergency on his first day in office it was, in large part, because of what we’re facing with our electrical grid and making sure that we’ve got enough power to be able to win the AI arms race with China,” Burgum said Wednesday in remarks first reported by RealClearPolitics. “That is absolutely critical.”
Thus the stated policy of this White House: “It’s called drill, baby, drill,” Trump said earlier this spring.
The immediate goal, the one touted at every campaign, is to bring down the average price of a gallon of gas. The concurrent and long-term mission that Burgum obsesses over: AI dominance. The former governor from fracking-friendly North Dakota and tech entrepreneur who sold his software to Microsoft, Burgum laid out an abbreviated formula on stage at the America First Policy Institute.
Electricity generation via fossil fuels, like natural gas and coal, powers data centers “filled with these amazing chips,” the secretary said, “and you know what comes out the other side? Intelligence. A data center is literally manufacturing intelligence.” He envisioned a new world that follows, where the best computer programmer, or the most brilliant lawyers, could “clone themselves” again and again to train AI models to do the work of thousands in a process “that can be repeated indefinitely.”
No longer science fiction, the process has been headline news for some time. AI models like ChatGPT and X’s Grok are already available in every home with an internet connection. And the U.S. was the undisputed leader. That is, until recently.
American tech companies enjoyed a clear edge with not just the most powerful AI models, the most funding, and top engineering talent, but also the easiest access to those “amazing chips” that Burgum referenced. Former President Biden banned the export of the most advanced semiconductors to China. And yet DeepSeek, an unknown Chinese startup with less money and allegedly less sophisticated chips, still managed to one-up Silicon Valley earlier this year with a more powerful AI model.
The latest development in the battle for tech supremacy, in what some likened to “a Sputnik moment,” the DeepSeek launch rattled both markets and geopolitics. A new kind of AI nationalism now consumes heads of state convinced that their nations must develop their own technology or fall behind in the future. Said Russian President Vladimir Putin in 2017 of AI, “The one who becomes the leader in this sphere will be the ruler of the world.”
Burgum does not disagree. He would just prefer the West take on that role. “Trust me, you do not want to be getting your data from a Chinese data center,” he told the crowd, adding that “Whoever controls the manufacture of intelligence is going to control the world. The next five years is going to determine the next 50.”
This is the goal of the White House, including Vice President JD Vance, who once warned that falling behind on this front could mean that the U.S. meets China “on the battlefield of the future” with the equivalent of digital “muskets.”
Democrats on Capitol Hill are not thrilled. The day before, Maine Rep. Marie Pingree complained in the House Appropriations Committee that Burgum had gutted the department he leads and sought to slash Biden-era clean energy tax credits.
“In just four months, the department has been destabilized, and there’s been a stunning decline in its ability to meet its mission,” she told Burgum. “This disregards the climate change concerns that we have.”
The secretary replied that he was concerned with a more pressing order of operations. “The existential threats that this administration is focusing on are Iran cannot get a nuclear weapon, and we can’t lose the AI arms race to China,” Burgum said in committee. “That’s the number one and two. If we solve those two things, then we will have plenty of time to solve any issues related to potential temperature change.”
His immediate focus, then, is on how the U.S. can boost energy production. Burgum reported that industry leaders tell him electricity demand will soon outpace supply with astronomical numbers measured not in megawatts, but gigawatts. The power needed to run one data center, he said, would be equivalent to the electricity needs of Denver times 10.
Because AI has the potential to supercharge nearly every business, he said, “the demand for this product is like nothing we’ve ever seen in our lives.”
Concluded the Interior secretary, “The fundamental principles here again, as they say, we’re going to sell energy to our friends and allies, and we’re going to have enough energy here at home to be able to win the AI arms race. And this requires electricity.”
On this Burgum and Trump are simpatico. During the campaign, the president likened artificial intelligence to “the oil of the future.”
Bypass Big Tech Censors
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.