Fixing Forests & Fueling Growth: Rep. Bruce Westerman on Energy, Permitting, and Public Lands

If you want to talk about a healthy environment, it starts with forest. I mean, forests are critical for clean air. and clean water. A lot of people don't realize the role that healthy forests play in protecting our watersheds. You also get wildlife habitat. You get great recreational opportunities. I often say there's no downside to having a healthy forest, and we know how to have healthy forests. The public lands have been severely mismanaged.

Forestry is a huge, huge part of the economy in my district and even in Arkansas. Forestry is the number one sector of agriculture, which is the number one industry in the state. And I spent a career working in forestry before I went to Congress. And it's just very frustrating to have all these public lands and all these assets that everybody treasures that could be providing useful products like lumber to build homes.

Americans are capable of achieving extraordinary things when they have the freedom and opportunity to do so. This is American potential. Welcome to the American potential podcast. I'm your host, David from.

so we're on the road again in montana big sky country and we're at the big sky bright future economic summit talking about how to really unleash economic energy all over in this state of Montana and across the country, really. And so we have leaders from throughout the country who, especially in the energy sector, and so we're really, I'm really...

glad to be joined by Congressman Bruce Westerman, who's the chairman of the House Natural Resources Committee and a congressman from Arkansas. So thanks so much for joining us, Congressman. David, great to be with you. Always fun to come out to Montana. And what a great conference the governor and the Chamber of Commerce has pulled together here on energy. A very critical topic in today's world.

Yeah, and one that I know you're super involved in, probably up to your eyeballs. But before we get started, I mean, when we're recording this, the government's been shut down. So I'd just love to hear, you know, what are your thoughts on what's going on and about the shutdown? Well, it's just the craziness of Washington, D.C. Actually, if the government weren't shut down, I couldn't be here because we were scheduled to be in D.C. doing work and that's the real harm.

The fact that the government shut down and people aren't getting paid. People are working in hopes that they're going to get paid. But things also aren't happening. We're not having hearings. We're not having markups. We're not able to. advance our agenda which we've done a great job of since president trump's come into office you know we've passed the the one big beautiful bill the reconciliation bill we've done some quite a few energy specific

activities and legislation that affects Montana and other Western states. And we're working on a big bipartisan permitting reform bill. And I need to be in D.C. having hearings, having markups and getting work done. But we're not able to do that with the government shutdown. Yeah, it really is a shame. To have political theater really sidetrack the nation's business is so unfortunate. You're dealing with our men and women in uniform. You're dealing with...

People who, you know, they just want to go to work and do their job every day and that's all being interrupted. It ultimately has a negative impact on things that people who aren't in government are trying to get done because of government. interjects in so many things in our lives today. And then it's not really about an issue. It seems to be about personalities and Senate Democrats.

You don't want to open the government. It's a clean CR. There's not, as Speaker Johnson said, there's nothing for me to negotiate on. I can't take something out of the bill because it is a clean CR. to keep the government operating just like we did back in March and like has been done many times in the past. It's not a way to run a government. We need to get the appropriation bills done, but we need the government open so we can get those appropriation bills done. Yeah, it's so sad.

Well, turning to better topics. So, you know, President Trump and his administration comes in to office again, and it's really changed the landscape with regard to energy and natural resources. And then you running this. the Natural Resources Committee are really in a pivotal place to help, you know, really make that agenda, you know, of really unleashing our natural resources.

happen. So tell us about the work that you're doing to do that. Yeah, we want to be, first of all, great stewards of the resources that God's blessed us with. America has tremendous natural resources from element and mineral deposits to energy and whether it's oil or gas or coal we have amazing technology and innovators here I was talking about the can-do spirit of America and the way we've led the world in innovation. And, you know, I think everything from the hamburger to electricity.

Going to the moon. Think of something great that didn't come from America. It's a really short list of great achievements that didn't come from America. And it came from a society that could go out and... and make judgment calls and do things with the best interest of the country and with humankind involved. And we've over-regulated that.

We try to make everything objective. Say there's got to be a law for every single thing. You've got to check all these boxes. And we're just stuck in a morass of bureaucracy that doesn't allow us to utilize our resources. When I was in graduate school many years ago, I had no idea I was going to be serving in Congress someday and no idea I would be chairing the Natural Resources Committee.

I was in a forestry program, and I actually took a class called the Economics of Natural Resource Management. I would probably pay more attention back then had I known. But the one thing I remember from that class is that wealth comes from our land. And if you think about that, by producing agriculture products, timber, oil, gas, mining, all of those things, the food, clothing, and shelter.

and everything else we produce from the land, that's where the wealth lies. And in exploiting those resources, and that's not a bad word to say that, and from that you get manufacturing, you get refining, you get a whole... another set of economic benefits from using our resources. And then you release that wealth and it allows you to have the great things we have in our country, like an unbelievable health care system. We have...

tremendous colleges and universities and education systems. And all of that came from unleashing the wealth contained in our resources. The cool thing is we've still got... Lots and lots of resources and lots and lots of wealth we can unleash that can help us have a better way of life. As a member of Congress, I've traveled all around the world.

The countries that have the strongest economies also... get this, have the best environments. They take better care of their surroundings. If you're living in poverty and you're worried about where your next meal is going to come from, if you're worried about where you're going to get energy, where you're going to get clothing and shelter.

You don't pay a lot of attention to the environment around you and you do things in a mode of survival rather than in a mode of conservation. And that's what I want to see in our country is use our resources.

Be good stewards of those resources and leave the world a better place to pass along to future generations. You know, that's so true. What do you say about poor nations are much rougher on the economy because they're just trying to... survive i i was actually on the border in texas a number of years ago and one of our staff members was with us said look over there point to mexico is a poor area of mexico and there's he's like do you see those fire there's just these black

you know, smoke fires just all over the place. He's like, those are happening all the time because they can. And, you know, they're just trying to trying to make it. And, you know, we, we wouldn't tolerate that. on our side of the border. Well, actually, we have tolerated that because about 40% of the southern border is on federal land, which falls under my committee jurisdictions. I've made a lot of trips down there. When there were so many illegals coming across the border,

They were trampling our federal land. They were using those resources like they would in the country they came from. And, you know, a lot of our federal agencies at the time just turned a blind eye to it.

If a U.S. citizen had been there doing those same activities, they'd probably got thrown under the jail. Yeah. But we've had a lot of... resource degradation along the southern border just because of the massive numbers of people that were coming through, carrying an average of eight to nine pounds of trash that they would dispose of per person.

tons of trash along the border. That's another benefit that we weren't seeing a year ago is that the illegal crossings has really, really, I think it's... come to a halt. Yeah, it statistically seems like it has, certainly in contrast to what it was. But I mean, it's just another one of those secondary things that you didn't anticipate or even, I've never thought about that. Yeah, there's pictures of mountains of trash. Wow.

I want to ask you about something in your role as a natural resources chairman that's a little different than what I thought about. I definitely want to talk about the permitting. reform. I think that's so important. That's the biggest thing we've got coming up right now. You have a background in forestry.

Especially in Western states, it's so important. I think there's just been an irresponsibility to some degree on the part of certain sectors of government. And we see these wildfires and other. You know, other things like somehow there's a scarcity of timber and all, which just isn't the case. Can you kind of talk about that problem a little and characterize it? How long have we got? So I often joke with people. I have the two worst.

educational backgrounds to serve in congress my undergraduates in engineering and you know engineers think with logic and reason then i've got a graduate degree in forestry where we look at long-term horizons and i say neither one of those are usually that much appreciated but if you want to talk about a healthy environment it starts with forest i mean forests are critical for clean air

and clean water. A lot of people don't realize the role that healthy forests play in protecting our watersheds. You also get wildlife habitat. You get great recreational opportunities. I often say there's no downside to having a healthy forest, and we know how to have healthy forest. The public lands have been severely mismanaged.

Forestry is a huge, huge part of the economy in my district. And even in Arkansas, forestry is the number one sector of agriculture, which is the number one industry in the state. And I spent a career working in forestry before I went to Congress. And it's just very frustrating to have all these public lands and all these assets that everybody treasures that could be providing useful products like.

lumber to build homes yet we're dependent on 20 to 30 percent imports of wood products to build our homes and we and we watch our forest go up in smoke every year which again It's putting pollutants in the atmosphere through particulate matter and all the things that go up in a forest fire.

putting more carbon in the atmosphere. If you're concerned about carbon, you should be concerned about keeping our forests healthy. And at the same time, destroying wildlife habitat, destroying streams and watersheds. Really a sad commentary on where the bureaucracy has taken us in our country. We've got a bill called the Fix Our Forest Act. Yeah. Passed with huge bipartisan support in the House.

And it's in the Senate, hopefully going to be marked up and passed out of the Senate and headed to President Trump's desk very soon. It's a really good bill on putting common sense back into forest management. We need more markets for not just the lumber that comes off of the timber, but for the raw materials. But there's some very exciting things happening with stuff like biostimulants, biochar, energy to really.

maximize the value of that wood coming out of the forest, both the saw logs and the low-grade material that needs a market. That's great to hear. I hope that passes and we get back to a more sane position here.

So let's talk about one of your main pushes, which is permitting reform when it comes to energy projects. Can you tell us about the legislation and where it's going and what it does? Yeah. So this is something we've been working on for a long time. And we call it the SPEED Act, Standardizing, Permitting, and Enhancing Economic Development. Permitting in our country and the regulatory process is really...

throwing a wet blanket on development. And as a result of that, we see China leading the world in energy development and leading the world in mining and processing of not only copper and steel, but rare earth elements and critical minerals. And we've become beholden to China on things that are critical to our national security. And the maddening part of that is that we've got all of it here in the United States. We've just been exporting our wealth.

to China. Back to the statement I said about when we develop our resources, it generates wealth. Well, we've quit developing our resources. We purchase those resources. So we're exporting our wealth to bring in other people's resources when we could be producing them right here at home. But the permitting process and particularly NEPA, the National Environmental Policy Act, which was over 50 years old now.

Well-intentioned, along with things like the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, really did some good things to clean up some bad practices that were happening. But now the pendulum has swung way too far, and you can't... hardly get anything from it the average is 4.7 years if you're talking about public infrastructure over six years

If you're looking at mining, you start measuring it in decades. There are projects that are 30 or 40 years in the process of trying to get a permit, and they're still hung up. And on top of that, you can get a permit. And the current NEPA law allows you a six-year time frame to be sued in an Article III court where a judge can issue an injunction to stop your project after you've invested millions or billions of dollars in it.

It's putting a real damper on the appetite to invest, and it's doing great damage to our economy, which now is affecting our national security. Energy has been kind of at the front of the permitting battles because it's so critical and there's been such an attack on fossil fuels. Litigants and bureaucrats have used the law to stop projects, offshore energy production, onshore oil and gas production, coal mining. All of that's been under attack.

Not to mention forestry, building new roads, building new bridges, advancing or keeping our navigable waterways open, building ports and airports. There should be a massive coalition of people reaching out to Congress saying you have to get permitting reform so that we can get that can-do spirit back and we can build things in our country again. And it's not just...

projects that are, I hate to even use the term Republican projects or Democrat projects, but we can't build transmission lines. You can't permit windmills and solar farms. So there is a bipartisan effort and we have a bipartisan bill. It's going to take 60 votes in the Senate to get the Speed Act passed. That's why it is critical that people get engaged and call their members of Congress.

and get active in getting this legislation passed, we can't meet our energy demands under our current permitting process. But it just seems like such a basic... It's common sense. Yeah, it makes all sense. I mean, you know, because we're not talking about streamlining this so that there's irresponsible permitting and polluting. It will actually be good for the environment. Go back to the forestry part of it.

If we could manage our forests and not be burning them down, a lot of times it's the Endangered Species Act during the NEPA analysis that stops a project from happening. Is it good for that endangered species when its habitat burns up and it gets cooked to a crisp? No, that's not helping the environment in any way. Is it good for the environment when federal agencies... are bogged down in litigation instead of doing work on critical habitat, doing work on making sure that

clean air and clean water standards are met we're not saying to do away with the standards but create a process where you can actually get an answer and not worry that the answer is going to be taken back And your permit's going to be reneged after you start the construction process and do it in an orderly time. 4.7 years on average. is four years at least too long. Yeah. I mean, it just seems so imperative to unleash American resources. I mean, really, we have them.

We can be self-sufficient. We can export. We already do export some. But it's incredible that, you know, there's such a demand for energy, you know, based on, you know, data centers and just our consumption of, you know, we have the cloud, we have everything. We need a lot of energy.

energy we have it throw artificial intelligence into the mix and you're you're now into a scenario where i've had people in the the ai world and understand it a lot better than me that say if we lose the AI race with China to get to what they call super intelligence, then our communication systems, our financial systems, our defense systems are vulnerable to being undermined.

by super intelligence being in the hands of a bad operator. It is a real Cold War race that we're in, and we're behind the eight ball. China's... Producing twice as much energy now as we're producing. And it takes a tremendous amount of energy to have AI and data centers. Well, I'm glad you're working on this. It's so important for our nation. Are there any other issues that are before you in Congress or in your committee that you're excited about or that you really want people to know about?

Yeah, well, the forestry stuff, we've made great strides on that. We're also right now working on something called the Great American Outdoor Act. Some people want to call it 2.0. I'm going to call it 250 because we're in our 250th year celebration of the country. But this was first signed into law by President Trump during his first administration.

It was a five-year program. It got off to a slow start, but we're seeing some really good stuff happening on our federal lands. And there's a bipartisan desire to re-up the Great American Outdoors Act and to continue. taking care of the maintenance and the facilities and the infrastructure on these parks and forest service land and fish and wildlife refuges, things that they don't.

most all Americans enjoy. And if they don't, they still probably have a fondness in their heart for those things. So that's another reason we need to be back in D.C. working on the Great American Outdoors Act 250. We passed the Explore Act last year. It's the largest bill ever to address outdoor recreation, which is another very popular topic. People always talk about the gridlock in D.C., but the Explore Act passed unanimously in the House.

unanimously in the Senate and went on and President Biden signed it into law, which has huge benefits for all of the country, but especially on our public lands in the West. That's great. Well, Congressman, thank you so much for joining us. Yeah, David, great to be with you. Thanks for what you're doing. Getting the message out. I get to just talk to people, hear stories, talk to people about their stories about what great work they're doing. I mean, I get so excited about...

what people like you are trying to do for our country, and then ordinary people, what they're trying to do to make their country and communities better. So I got a great job. Well, the things I'm working on, the major cable networks aren't that interested in reporting.

But I appreciate you having a podcast to talk about what I say are the real issues facing our country. Well, Chairman, thanks so much. Yep. Thank you, David. Appreciate it. If you like this episode and would like to stay connected with the podcast, please subscribe to our channel.

Find us and like us on Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube. And always remember, freedom and liberty are easily taken for granted. Don't take them for granted. Go out there and defend freedom and liberty. Thanks for joining us, and we'll see you on the next episode. Thank you for listening to American potential.