OPINION:
President Biden this week traveled to Dearborn, Michigan, to tout his green jobs agenda, which will further devastate our economic recovery and put millions of American jobs at risk.
Mr. Biden and the Democratic Party have long promised green jobs, and have continually failed to deliver. On day one in office, he canceled the Keystone XL pipeline, killing 11,000 jobs, many of them union-based. His climate czar John Kerry promised those jobs would be replaced with good-paying green jobs. The thousands who lost their jobs are still wondering when those jobs will appear.
Last year in Michigan, Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer ordered the shutdown of its Line 5 pipeline, which supplies many Michiganders with their fuel and propane to help protect the climate. Last week, the order officially went into effect.
The Line 5 transports 540,000 barrels of crude oil and petroleum products per day and is in full compliance with federal pipeline safety standards. The shutdown of the pipeline could kill 33,755 jobs and cost the Michigan economy and surrounding states $20.8 billion, according to a recent study by the Consumer Energy Alliance.
“Without Line 5, consumers will shoulder the burden of supply disruptions and related price increases, particularly for propane and transportation of fuel,” said Enbridge Regional Operations Director Mike Moeller, who operates the pipeline and is fighting Ms. Whitmer’s order.
What’s ironic about the Democrats’ pipeline obsession is they’ve greenlit Russia’s pipeline project to Germany just this week — so Russians can have more jobs and profit off of their energy supply, while Americans cannot.
Just last week, after Russian hackers took down the Colonial Pipeline in the U.S., leading to gas shortages and rising prices, Mr. Biden’s Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm actually admitted pipelines were the “best way” to transport fuel.
Their goal isn’t to fight climate change but to fundamentally reengineer our economy of one from capitalism to that of socialism.
And Americans should be wary of their promised new green jobs, because Democrats have promised and failed to deliver them over and over again.
Then-Vice President Biden promised solar company Solyndra would be “the foundation for long-term growth in the 21st century,” saying Solyndra’s jobs were the permanent green jobs of the future. The company said it would create 3,000 construction jobs and 1,000 permanent jobs after its factory opened. Two years later, it filed for bankruptcy. No green jobs created.
The same was true for Fisker Automotive, which in 2009 Mr. Biden said the government’s loan to the electric carmaker was “seed money that will return back to the American consumer in billions and billions of dollars in good, new jobs.”
Another one of Mr. Biden’s missteps came in 2011 when he visited battery manufacturer Ener1, touting how green industries would “ensure our competitiveness for decades to come.”
Just three years after receiving a loan from the federal government, Ener1 filed for bankruptcy and its promised 1,400 new green jobs vanished.
Democrats have long claimed green jobs are America’s future — and perhaps they are. They must be created, however, from the basic principles of supply and demand. The technology needs to be there, and consumers must see benefit from the products to make them economical. So far, that hasn’t happened.
Government has failed, repeatedly, by trying to force consumers into a green new living, wasting taxpayer money and costing fossil fuel workers their livelihoods without any other viable replacement.
Still, Democrats haven’t learned their lesson from continued failures. They’re bound and determined to transform the American economy, no matter what the damage is to U.S. citizens.
We need to trust Mr. Biden when he said on the campaign trail that he would be absolutely willing to “sacrifice” hundreds of thousands of blue-collar jobs in pursuit of a “greener economy,” because that’s exactly what he’s doing.
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