- U.S. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum warns that America could face catastrophic blackouts like Spain’s due to overreliance on intermittent renewables and policies sidelining stable energy sources (coal, nuclear).
- Spain’s April 2024 grid failure, triggered by rapid renewable adoption and coal/nuclear plant closures, caused widespread chaos (stranded commuters, halted flights) and €1.5 billion in losses — highlighting the instability of solar/wind dependence.
- Burgum criticizes federal subsidies for renewables and restrictions on traditional energy, arguing they mirror Spain’s mistakes by prioritizing “green” symbolism over grid reliability and baseload power needs.
- A 2023 NERC report warns of “unprecedented” blackout risks in Texas, the Southeast and New England due to infrastructure underinvestment and overreliance on intermittent energy, worsened by extreme weather.
- While the U.S. pushes renewables, China invests in coal and nuclear, raising national security concerns. Burgum urges pragmatic reforms to avoid Spain’s fate, stressing the need for stability over ideological climate targets.
(Natural News)—In the wake of Spain’s recent catastrophic blackout, U.S. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum has warned the country could face similar chaos due to overreliance on intermittent renewable energy and misguided government policies. Speaking on the All-In podcast, Burgum cited Spain’s grid collapse, which left millions stranded in darkness following a rapid shift to renewables, as a cautionary tale for America. “You cannot run a grid on solar or wind alone,” Burgum emphasized, criticizing Biden administration policies that favor renewables while sidelining stable power sources like coal and nuclear. With states like Texas and the Southeast facing heightened winter reliability risks, the warnings underscore a growing divide over energy security and climate priorities.
Spain’s blackout crisis: A harbinger for the U.S.?
Spain’s April 28 grid failure, which trapped commuters in subways, halted flights and disrupted hospitals, began with celebrations just weeks prior. On April 12, the country shut down its final coal plant—a milestone in transitioning to renewable energy. By April 19, officials hailed hitting 100% renewable energy production for a weekday. But within days, solar energy’s inherent instability — coupled with reduced inertia from nuclear and natural gas plants facing closures—caused the grid to falter. Michael Shellenberger, an energy policy analyst, noted that Spain prioritized deploying renewables over maintaining grid stability, leading to a “perfect storm” of physics-defying energy policies.
“Solar and wind are intermittent by definition,” Burgum said, likening the Spanish debacle to a potential U.S. crisis. “Grid operators can’t control when the sun shines or the wind blows, so baseload power is essential to prevent failure during lulls.” The outage caused €1.5 billion ($1.6 billion) in economic losses, leaving European leaders scrambling to reassess energy strategies.
Renewable subsidies over stability?
Burgum’s critique targets Biden’s federal subsidies and regulatory restrictions on traditional energy, arguing they mirror Spain’s missteps. He accused the administration of gambling energy security on “green” goals without addressing grid vulnerabilities. “Every time a coal plant shuts and a wind farm opens, we’re moving closer to the edge,” he said, while defending the Trump administration’s emphasis on pragmatic energy sourcing.
The interview underscores a broader debate over the tension between climate ambition and reliability. States like California and New York have adopted aggressive renewables targets, often paired with closures of nuclear plants—a stable energy source. Burgum called for a return to pragmatic policymaking: “Grid operators need predictability, not idealism. Right now, we’re prioritizing symbolism over safety.”
Risks on the horizon
A 2023 report by the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) flagged “unprecedented risks” of power shortages in Texas, New England and the Southeast, citing underinvestment in infrastructure and over reliance on intermittent energy. These regions, including Texas — the nation’s energy hub — face winter cold spells and summer heatwaves exacerbating grid stress.
“It’s not hyperbolic to say blackouts could threaten hospital equipment or force life-saving devices offline,” said a NERC official. Burgum echoed these concerns, linking them to broader geopolitical stakes. “While we’re subsidizing unreliable tech, China is doubling down on nuclear and coal. That’s not just bad for energy — it’s a national security issue.”
Security or sustainability?
Secretary Burgum’s warnings reflect a deepening ideological rift over the future of U.S. energy policy. Spain’s blackout underscores the high stakes of real-world grid physics, forcing a reckoning between climate goals and the reality of maintaining power on demand. As winters grow fiercer and solar-dependent grids wobble, the debate will center on who bears responsibility for keeping the lights on: bureaucrats chasing green targets or engineers prioritizing stability. With summer 2025 looming, Burgum’s message is clear: Without practical reforms, America may soon repeat Spain’s mistake.
Sources for this article include:
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.
