Rep. Dan Crenshaw and other Republicans slammed U.S. special presidential envoy for climate John Kerry for suggesting people laid off in the fossil fuel industry should find jobs making solar panels.
“John Kerry – worth hundreds of millions – telling blue-collar workers to just ‘go to work to make the solar panels.’ By the way, solar will pay on average $20K less than oil and gas jobs,” Crenshaw tweeted Wednesday.
“John Kerry thinks you should just shutup and accept it. No.”
John Kerry – worth hundreds of millions – telling blue-collar workers to just “go to work to make the solar panels.”
By the way, solar will pay on average $20K less than oil and gas jobs.
John Kerry thinks you should just shutup and accept it.
— Dan Crenshaw (@DanCrenshawTX) January 27, 2021
Kerry spoke with reporters at the White House on Wednesday and said that energy workers had been “fed a false narrative” about their jobs under the Biden administration.
“They’ve been fed the notion that somehow dealing with climate is coming at their expense,” Kerry said. “No, it’s not. What’s happening to them is happening because of other market forces already taking place.”
“Coal plants have been closing over the last 20 years. So what President Biden wants to do is make sure those folks have better choices, that they have alternatives, and they can be the people who go to work to make the solar panels.”
Crenshaw wasn’t alone in slamming Kerry for the comments, with fellow Republicans such as Sens. Tom Cotton and Ted Cruz echoing his comments.
“John Kerry’s message to the tens of thousands of Americans who lost their jobs thanks to the Biden administration: go make solar panels. Where is the empathy that Joe Biden promised in his inauguration?” Cotton said.
John Kerry’s message to the tens of thousands of Americans who lost their jobs thanks to the Biden administration: go make solar panels.
Where is the empathy that Joe Biden promised in his inauguration? https://t.co/CvQovUlEoD
— Tom Cotton (@TomCottonAR) January 27, 2021
“John Kerry—who flies in private jets, owned a 76-foot yacht and several mansions—has the carbon footprint of a small nation. Yet he tells energy workers to ‘make solar panels’ when the Biden administration kills their jobs,” he added, alluding to a report that Kerry’s family still owns a Gulfstream Aerospace.
John Kerry—who flies in private jets, owned a 76-foot yacht and several mansions—has the carbon footprint of a small nation.
Yet he tells energy workers to “make solar panels” when the Biden administration kills their jobs. pic.twitter.com/QhK2FVykxU
— Tom Cotton (@TomCottonAR) January 27, 2021
“What an arrogant, out-of-touch statement for a centimillionaire to say,” Cruz told Fox News of Kerry’s comments. “You know, ‘You little people, you know, I don’t like the choices you’re making. And so your jobs go away,’ as John Kerry said right there. Quelle surprise that the Democratic elites have decided that blue-collar workers, that union members, that men and women with calluses on their hands, they’ve made the wrong choices, in John Kerry’s words.”
Biden announced on his first day in office that he was revoking a key permit to the Keystone XL pipeline, which is expected to lead to the loss of up to 11,000 jobs.
One of the laid-off workers took to Facebook to decry the move and loss of jobs.
“Just like the rest of the country, COVID hurt us bad. We had a lot of projects canceled,” Neal Crabtree, a welding foreman, said about being laid off. “We’ve got guys that haven’t worked in months, and in some cases years, and to have a project of this magnitude canceled. It’s going to hurt a lot of people, a lot of families, a lot of communities.”
