President Joe Biden signed three executive orders on climate change on Wednesday, promising to put the issue “at the center” of US national security and domestic and foreign policy. The executive action follows its decision to end construction of the Keystone XL pipeline, which was expected to support about 11,000 jobs in the U.S. in 2021 and generate $ 1.6 billion in gross wages.
Before signing the orders, Biden started his press conference by saying, “Today is a climate day at the White House, which means today is a job day at the White House.”
Neal Crabtree, 46, was one of the first American workers impacted by the new government’s aggressive approach to tackling climate change.
“I think the best way to put it would be a jobless day,” Crabtree responded to the comment in an interview with Fox News.
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As a welding foreman fired after President Biden rescinded the Keystone XL licenses, Crabtree spoke openly about the damage the new government’s radical climate agenda is doing to American workers in the oil and gas industries.
“I think they are listening to us, but they just don’t care. They promised voters that they would do something and seem determined to do it,” said Crabtree.
New US climate envoy John Kerry said on Wednesday that coal workers and other fossil fuel industries were fed a “false narrative” that climate policies end their jobs.
“Unfortunately, workers have been fed a false narrative, unsurprisingly, in recent years they have been fed with the notion that somehow dealing with the climate is taking place at their expense, isn’t it,” said Kerry. “What is happening to them is happening because of other market forces that are already occurring.”
“This is not true,” said the 46-year-old pipeliner. “They are killing the jobs that are here and selling a fairy tale of jobs that are not,” said Crabtree, who said that these new climate policies have nothing to do with market forces, but rather with the stifling of a industry with a lot of natural demand.
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During the press conference, Kerry also recommended that oil and gas workers should dedicate themselves to making solar panels if their jobs were eliminated as a result of the Biden government’s environmental policies.
“What President Biden wants to do is make sure that these people have better choices, that they have alternatives, that they can be the people who are going to work to make the solar panels,” said Kerry.
Crabtree said he has no intention of learning how to make solar panels, “I am a plumber. My grandfather did it. My father did it. This country was built with fossil fuels. We are the superpower that we are today because of fossil fuels.
His advice to the government was: “start training people who have just left high school or college and put them in the green energy field and we are not going to kill our industry because there are some of us, that’s all we know how to do”.