Believe it or not, most people would like to keep their jobs, even if they’re in the mining industry, the oil industry, or one of the other fuel and energy-related industries the Democratic Party has deemed problematic.
Presidential front-runner Joe Biden should know this. He grew up in Pennsylvania, where oil drilling has recently made a comeback and mining jobs have finally become more common than those in manufacturing. It’s taken Pennsylvania years of job loss, financial insecurity, and deficits to reach its lowest level of unemployment ever (4%), with more than 123,000 jobs back on the market.
During last night’s presidential debate, Biden admitted he’d be willing to sacrifice this recent economic growth to combat climate change.
“As president, would you be willing to sacrifice some of that growth, even knowing potentially that it could displace thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, of blue-collar workers in the interest of transitioning to that greener economy?” moderator Tim Alberta asked.
Like many of the other Democratic candidates on the stage, Biden answered resoundingly, “Yes.” He then assured blue-collar workers, many of whom he must win over if he hopes to unseat President Trump in 2020, that there will be an “opportunity for those workers to transition to high-paying jobs.”
“We have to make sure we explain it to those people who are displaced that their skills are going to be needed for the new opportunities,” Biden added.
Biden’s answer is unconvincing. First, the insinuation that fuel and energy workers are not currently paid well is false — at least, not in the oil industry. Oil and gas drillers and refiners had some of the highest-paid workers in 2018, according to the Wall Street Journal, with some employees making as much as $200,000 per year within the first few years on the job. It is very doubtful that those workers would be paid nearly that much to install charging stations along the highway, as Biden suggested. Nor is there any guarantee that it would be most practical to retrain those workers for these new jobs rather than tapping existing, already-trained electricians.
More importantly, these industries provide crucial economic stability in places such as Pennsylvania. There is certainly more that the government can and should do to make sure the fuel and energy sector is environmentally conscious and waste-free. But stifling these industries entirely by forcing an aggressive climate change initiative down their throats would upend the Rust Belt entirely and send Biden’s home state back into the economic spiral out of which it just climbed.
Just look at the plan Biden is proposing. It might not be as radical as some of the other candidates’ plans, but it is essentially an endorsement of the Green New Deal, an unrealistic, radical initiative first introduced by Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Indeed, Biden even praised the Green New Deal as a “crucial framework for meeting the climate challenges we face.”
Biden would like to achieve net zero emissions of greenhouse gasses by 2050 and would implement a carbon cap approach to enforce this. He plans to reverse the Trump administration’s tax cuts, which have benefited the oil and gas industry, and refrain from investing in infrastructure unless it can “prevent, reduce, and withstand a changing climate.”
Unlike many of Biden’s policies, this climate change proposal isn’t in the middle of the road. It’s extreme, and it will both displace and stigmatize Rust Belt voters who depend on the fuel and energy industries for their livelihoods. This is in part why Trump was able to win the Rust Belt in 2016. Just like Biden, then-Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton vowed to “put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business,” and then promised to find them newly created clean energy jobs.
Clinton’s promise came across as much less empathetic than Biden’s (which explains why she was so disliked in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and the other swing states). But the principle is the same: If given the chance, the Biden administration would act against the very people he claims to represent, meanwhile offering them an empty promise of opportunity and innovation.
Democrats continue to employ the same tired strategy and then wonder why someone such as Trump is in the White House. Threats to kill jobs and stifle economic growth are not the way to win blue-collar workers, the Rust Belt, or the presidency. You’d think Biden would have learned that by now.
