Leadership Quote by Kent Conrad

Conrad opens with a prairie postcard, then quietly turns it into an economic balance sheet. The wind isn’t just weather; it’s a shared bodily memory for North Dakotans, a line of lived experience that functions like an appeal to common sense. If you’ve felt it, you already “know” the conclusion. That move matters: it pre-empts skepticism about renewables by rooting the argument in place, not ideology.

“Inexhaustible” does heavy rhetorical lifting. It isn’t a technical claim so much as a frontier promise, swapping the old extractive grammar of oil and coal for a resource that can’t run out. The subtext is reassurance to a state shaped by commodity booms and busts: this time, the prosperity won’t be temporary. The real pivot is how fast Conrad slides from nature to wages. “Jobs” and “millions of dollars” are the bipartisan keywords, a deliberate translation of climate-adjacent policy into kitchen-table benefits. It’s also a pitch to local pride: North Dakota as an energy leader, not a flyover afterthought.

Context matters. Conrad, long identified with fiscal seriousness, frames wind as investment rather than subsidy, a forward-looking development plan for rural communities that have watched young people leave. He’s courting both constituencies at once: landowners who could collect lease payments, and lawmakers who can justify support as growth, not virtue. The wind becomes a political alibi for modernization: you can back clean energy here without sounding coastal, preachy, or partisan.