President Biden Continues to Give False Promises to Union Energy Workers Who Have Lost Their Jobs from His Policies

May 24, 2021

President Biden has delivered on his climate change campaign promises to his eco-left supporters who continue to puppeteer his policy proposals. Among Biden’s green energy pushes, he reinserted the United States into the Paris Agreement and pledged to cut greenhouse emissions in half by 2030, a target that would require transforming the country’s fossil fuel-based economy.

 The Washington Examiner reports:

Clean energy industry lobby groups worry a greater emphasis on domestic manufacturing and a related focus on unionizing jobs could make renewables more expensive, given a lot of key technologies are imported cheaply from places such as China.

Last year, Power The Future released a study, “The Fight for Rare Earths,” which outlined China’s dominance in rare earth minerals. The study found: “’Since the late 1990s, China has provided 85-95 percent of the world’s [rare earth minerals],’” while, between 2014 and 2017, the U.S. imported 80 percent of its supply from China.”

Biden’s infrastructure proposal includes measures to assist fossil fuel-dependent regions vulnerable to Biden’s clean energy push, in an appeal to unions irked by the president’s early moves to cancel the Keystone XL oil pipeline and ban the issuance of new oil and gas leases on public lands.

But he risks underdelivering on his vow to create millions of high-paying union jobs in clean energy across the country while providing financial assistance and benefits to support fossil fuel-dependent regions.

“There is an intrinsic conflict between union fossil fuel jobs of today and green jobs of tomorrow,” said Kevin Book, managing director of ClearView Energy, a research group, adding that the wage gap between those industries is not “trivial.”

In a previous blog post, Power The Future reported:

According to Texas Independent Producers & Royalty Owners Association, the U.S. oil and gas industry posted a net decline of 160,323 jobs due to lower demand in 2020. These jobs pay $133,601 on average, with 20% filled by women. 

Biden has continued to wreak havoc on the industry, displacing even more fossil fuel workers across the U.S. while promising clean energy jobs as “better” choices according to John Kerry, Biden’s Climate Czar.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that solar power technicians make $43,000 and wind turbine technicians earn $53,000 annually. In other words, these new “high-paying jobs” pay $60,000 to $70,000 less than their oil and gas counterparts. This is a significant wage gap to close by any standard.

The Biden administration continues to give the American people false promises while putting more people out of work, depleting energy-rich communities’ budgets, and pushing our energy dependence overseas to countries like China.