Ken Salazar has a climate and energy message for Democrats gearing up to fight President Donald Trump’s machine in 2028: Unite the countries of North America — and particularly work with Mexico — to counteract the Trump administration’s retreat on global climate action.
The lawyer, who led the Interior Department during the Obama administration and served as U.S. ambassador to Mexico under former President Joe Biden, makes the case for a new era of collaboration in a memoir that explores his Colorado roots and role as one of that state’s pioneering Hispanic politicians.
“What I’m calling for is this new American alliance,” Salazar said in a wide-ranging interview about his new book, “Borderlands: My Fight for an Inclusive America.”
The interview, like the memoir, ranged from his views on the current era of anti-immigration policies in Washington, how his upbringing on a ranch in Colorado shaped his political trajectory and the role Mexico’s current leader — President Claudia Sheinbaum — could play in creating a different politics around climate action.
“We are a North American continent that has so much potential to bring our peoples together,” Salazar said. “Right now, we have a present administration that has turned its back on that very positive agenda.”
Salazar was raised in the San Luis Valley — his family’s roots in that valley in Colorado and New Mexico span back to at least the 1600s — in a single-story adobe house with limited electricity and running water. He went on to become a lawyer working on water issues and eventually won election to become Colorado’s first Hispanic attorney general on the cusp of the state’s transition from mostly politically red to mostly blue. After winning that seat in 1999, Salazar recalls embarking on a road trip through the state blasting folk songs, Mexican norteño music and Bruce Springsteen’s version of “This Land is Your Land.”
The memoir explores Salazar’s relationship to the Western landscape, recounting how his family’s stewardship contrasted sharply with the “exploitation” he witnessed from nearby absentee cattle ranchers. Salazar said in his book that he came to believe that “when land is treated sustainably, it can be both healthy and productive. There is no need to sacrifice one for the other.”
That ethos of both using and conserving the environment could be seen when Salazar later became the director of Colorado’s Department of Natural Resources under former Gov. Roy Romer (D), and when he became the U.S. senator for Colorado from 2005 to 2009. But some environmentalists criticized his openness to mineral development on public lands when former President Barack Obama tapped Salazar to be his first Interior secretary.
“Ken Salazar is very closely tied to ranching and mining and very traditional, old-time Western extraction industries,” the Center for Biological Diversity’s Kieran Suckling told NPR in 2008. “We were promised that an Obama presidency would bring change.”
Salazar’s period as secretary from 2009 to 2013 boosted natural gas development on federal lands, even as the administration also hammered out some of the nation’s first climate regulations to deal a blow to coal dependency. At the time, coal was responsible for about half of the country’s electricity supply, and Salazar argued that natural gas was a bridge fuel away from the more carbon-heavy power source.
Salazar told POLITICO public lands still have room for natural gas development but that the U.S. also needs “to recognize that fossil fuels have had a tremendous effect on our planet.”
“We need to address those realities,” he said.
During Salazar’s tenure, Interior developed the nation’s first federal offshore wind program and held the first national wind lease sale in 2013, just a few months after he left the post. Offshore wind would make little progress until the Biden administration supercharged the program as part of its all-of-government approach to climate change. The nascent industry, however, has faced tremendous setbacks under the Trump administration, and companies have been pressured by the White House to relinquish their offshore wind leases and invest instead in fossil energy.
Salazar, 71, politely declared Trump’s attacks on renewables as “the wrong way to go.”
Asked if his book launch precedes a return to politics, Salazar said his immediate passion is convincing Democrats of the “Borderlands agenda,” both in the upcoming midterms and in the presidential race of 2028.
Pressed on whether he will run for office, the former secretary quoted his granddaughter saying, “Papa, one thing at a time.”
This interview was edited for clarity and length.
You speak at length of the need for a new deal between the U.S. and Mexico, where you served as the U.S. ambassador under Biden. What would that relationship look like?
If we had a new energy and climate pact for North America, we could frankly set an example for the entire world of what we can do with renewable energies — also with traditional energies that we need, because you’re not going to transition from one day to the next.
You think about Arizona, which is one of the best places for solar energy in the world, and you take the state to the south, [Mexico’s] Sonora, they have huge, huge solar energy resources. The interconnectivity of the power grid becomes important.
You think about minerals like lithium — the state of Sonora has some of the largest lithium deposits in the world — and how we use lithium for batteries for the future. That’s all part of integrated supply chains.
Why do you think that kind of collaboration hasn’t emerged already?
Because of historic inattention.
We need to create a stronger Western Hemisphere, and different presidents have given it attention. President Bush did a lot, in some areas. I think President Obama did an outstanding job.
I helped lead some of this, at Big Bend National Park and the [Mexican] state of Coahuila, all the things we’re doing with our national parks to try to create this bi-national conservation area [and] our agreements on the Colorado River Minute 319 [a pact between the U.S. and Mexico on managing Colorado River water].
Unfortunately, 2016 comes around, and this president, who’s never been to Mexico as president, is continuing this agenda of inattention. It’s a wrong-headed approach, and I hope it gets turned around.
Your Hispanic heritage appears to have had a profound impact on your life and career — your family’s footprint in the West dates to when the land belonged to Mexico, as you talk about in your book. How has that relationship to the land shaped you?
I’m proud to be Mexican American, proud to be a U.S. citizen. My family has been in what is now the southwestern part of the United States since the 1600s. They settled the upper reaches of the Rio Grande in New Mexico under places like Santa Fe and north into Española. After the Mexican-American War, they moved to the ranch in the San Luis Valley, and we’ve been there 170-plus years. We’re not going anywhere.
When you look at where we are today, there are some 50 million Mexican Americans in the United States, 70 million Latinos and 130 million Mexicans. It’s important to recognize history to understand where we are now, and to plan for a future where we have respect for the sovereignties and histories of both countries. You also understand the importance of them working together.
There’s been a ton of ink spilled about the Trump administration’s border wall, most recently because of plans to put border infrastructure in Big Bend National Park. What are your thoughts about the border wall and its presence on public lands?
The creation of a physical wall is not the solution here. The solution has to go beyond the border itself, it has to look at the realities of flows of illicit products, including drugs from the Americas to Mexico.
We need to have a secure border and a modern border, and that’s where I think the United States, both Democrats and Republicans, have gotten it wrong. We need to have a secure border, we need a modern border, we need to have technology that fixes the border. But it needs to be done by both the United States and Mexico. You can’t secure the border only on one side.
Do you view climate as a potential political unifier in your vision of “North American energy independence”?
It is a positive, powerful, unifying challenge and opportunity that we have.
There’s a reality in Mexico that you have the first president who really understands climate better than almost anybody, because she’s a scientist, Claudia Sheinbaum. She was part of the [U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] report. She, through many conversations I’ve had with her, recognizes the imperative of dealing with the realities of climate change. The table is set, except that we don’t have the right leadership with us.
The Trump administration has doubled down on fossil fuels on public lands, arguing that we face an energy emergency due to rising energy demand. What are your thoughts on that?
They just took our country back to a place where it was in probably the 1950s, maybe 1960s. Since then, we’ve been making progress to diversify our energy resources, to become energy independent.
When I got to the Senate, I remember sitting down with former Sen. Tim Wirth — a progressive Democrat — and a conservative —Republican C. Boyden Gray — who’d been a White House counsel. And our agenda on the table was called Set America Free.
That means set America free from the dependence on oil from Iran and Iraq and the Middle East and Venezuela. But it also made sense for us to embrace this broad portfolio of energy through technology, and we have been doing that. The unfortunate reality is that since Donald Trump came into office, all that has been given a 180-degree about face.
When politicians talk about ending fossil fuel dependency, they very often don’t have a concrete route to get there. Do you have a road map for that?
It’s a tough nut to crack, because it can’t happen instantaneously, but it’s happening. If you think about electric vehicles and fuel efficiency, we’re a lot better today than we were 10 years ago and 20 years ago. When you think about the power of wind and solar energy — the top states for wind are Texas and Iowa. So it can be done, but it doesn’t happen in a year or five years. It takes a long-term commitment, and that’s the greatest danger of this time, this president. His people have basically done away with, or are trying to do away with, all the progress that’s been made.
Jennifer Yachnin contributed to this report.
