Asked at the recent G-7 conference whether he believed in climate change, President Trump answered with a remark about energy dominance and a swipe at the oft-labeled “aspirational” Green New Deal: “It’s tremendous wealth. I’m not going to lose that wealth. I’m not going to lose it on dreams and windmills, which, frankly, aren’t working too well.”
Not everyone looks at things that way.
We are well into the 2020 presidential race and yet Democrat candidates have not yet learned from one of Hillary Clinton’s major blunders of the 2016 campaign. At a Mar. 13, 2016 CNN Town Hall, Clinton discussed her plans for renewable energy, explaining with her fateful quotation, “because we’re going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business, right?”
Voters in coal states heard that one loud and clear. It was possibly the first time in U.S. history that a presidential candidate promised to put people out of work.
Trump subsequently went to work in the opposite direction. He has added over 5.6 million jobs to the economy as of July 2019, including many jobs in the oil and gas sector. The U.S. became the world’s largest oil-exporting nation in 2018. Even coal jobs are up 2,200 since Trump took over — no small feat, given the scorched-earth war-on-coal policies of the Obama-Biden administration that pointlessly axed 50,000 coal jobs before their time.
Democrats learned nothing from this. The Green New Deal, as originally introduced and co-sponsored by all of the top Democrat presidential candidates, would eliminate high-paying coal, oil and gas jobs in favor of much lower-wage jobs installing and maintaining Chinese-made wind turbines and solar panels. And the elimination of all those coal, oil and gas jobs would also devastate many rural communities and other support businesses built around those jobs, as well as local and excise taxes used to fund local schools and governments.
As Clinton fantasized in 2016, Democrat candidates in 2020 believe that high-paying coal, oil and gas jobs, along with the dignity and self-esteem associated with such work, could be replaced with welfare or workfare, in vague hopes of “retraining” the unemployed to do, well, who knows what?
Bernie Sanders’ vision of the Green New Deal imagines 20 million jobs, about one of eight jobs in America, would be focused on “solving the climate crisis.” Sanders doesn’t exactly explain what these jobs would be or how exactly they would change the climate, but he does say they would be union jobs.
Joe Biden doesn’t promise a specific number of climate-related jobs — again, only that they would be unionized. Although Biden promises that coal miners would be taken care of (with welfare, of course), Blue Collar Joe skips right over his own past, in which he helped President Obama kill 50,000 coal industry jobs and destroy 95% of the market value of the coal industry.
Elizabeth Warren wants to spend $2 trillion to create “more than a million jobs” in her bid to “combat global climate change.” That’s more than $1 million spent to create each job!
Targeted by the Green New Deal, of course, are many more industries than just coal, oil, and gas. All the industries that depend on those fuels are at risk too, including auto, steel, and other energy-intensive manufacturing industries. And in the original Green New Deal, the airline and livestock industries would also be targeted for eventual elimination.
What goes unsaid here is that nothing would be accomplished at all in terms of improving the weather or the climate. There would just be the same climate situation, but with massive unemployment and a wrecked economy.
Currently, we have full employment and all the economic and social benefits that come along with that. Thank Trump’s policies and his refusal to abandon wealth for bizarre green dreams.
Steve Milloy publishes JunkScience.com, was on the Trump EPA transition team and is the author of “Scare Pollution: Why and How to Fix the EPA” (Bench Press, 2016).
