“No Road”: Buttigeg Gaffes in Alaska

August 18, 2023

When he isn’t faking ‘being green’ by staging a bike ride to a cabinet meeting, or bungling the fallout from train derailments, among many other gaffes, U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigeg’s day job should have him focused on roads, bridges, airplanes, ports and ships.

The Secretary has expended tremendous efforts during his tenure to make transportation less carbon-intensive – part of the larger Biden Administration goal of saving the planet from the so-called ‘existential crisis’ of climate change.  Drawing on his (ahem) successes with electric buses while Mayor of South Bend, Indiana, Buttigeg has preached the need to electrify America, while even noting the role critical and strategic mineral production would play in that goal.

But, while in Alaska this past week, he showed how unimportant a domestic supply of critical and strategic mineral supplies must be to him and Team Biden as a whole.  While traveling across the state to highlight the one-year anniversary of the Inflation Reduction Act (which has nothing to do with its name, and everything to do with empowering China, but we digress), he met with a group fighting a road that would allow access to world-class levels of copper and other strategic and critical mineral sources, in an area Congressionally authorized for such development.  He accepted a “no Road” t-shirt from the group; a moment captured on social media, and reported by Must Read Alaska.

The man whose job is to help get roads approved and infrastructure built and whose stated goals of electrification necessitate exponentially more critical and strategic development accepted a “no Road” t-shirt?  Are you kidding? 

Let’s hope Buttigeg realizes both the irony and stupidity of that action and works for the Ambler Road project’s approval.  The road would allow for hundreds of Alaskan jobs, hundreds of billions in responsibly-developed minerals to be brought to market, and advancements in the Biden Administration’s ‘go green’ goals.  Anything else shows – once again – that Team Biden has no ability to walk its talk.