Another pro-Biden union just told its rank-and-file members: Sorry, guys. You are all fired.
Last week, the United Mine Workers of America endorsed Biden’s Green New Deal. Yes, you read that right. The coal mining union bosses have embraced a proposal that outlaws coal mining.
This is about as dumb as the Pipefitters Union endorsing President Joe Biden. He repaid them with his first act as president: killing the Keystone pipeline. So, now we have the Pipefitters Union against pipelines and the coal miners union against coal.
Did anyone bother actually to ask the rank-and-file members what they thought? Can they get their union dues back?
They should. The livelihoods of more than 50,000 coal miners just got sold down the river by their union bosses.
And for what? So these miners can be given Biden welfare checks or so mining jobs, which typically pay $75,000 a year, can be replaced with solar panel installation? Ask any miner about that trade, as I have, and they will laugh in your face.
UMWA President Benedict Arnold (his real name is Cecil Roberts) conceded that his union members “may lose a few more jobs here.” Still, he defended his capitulation to the Biden anti-coal radicals by saying, “We’re trying to insert ourselves into this conversation because a lot of coal miners in this country and their families have suffered already some traumatic losses.”
So, his solution is to make the trauma a whole lot worse thanks to the Neville Chamberlain appeasement with the green enemy fanatics of the industry.
Cecil, why not, instead, defend your industry? It’s not a heavy lift.
America was built on coal. We are the king of coal. We have 500 years’ worth of this energy resource in states from West Virginia to Wyoming. We have the cleanest coal in the world. It is still one of the cheapest and most reliable forms of power production. We still get about twice as much energy from coal as from wind and solar. And even if we were to move toward “renewables,” as the Texas power outages this winter should have taught us, coal is essential as a backup power source when wind turbines don’t turn and solar panels freeze over.
Don’t for a minute believe that shutting down U.S. coal production will save the planet from warming. Nikkei Asia reported that China has an “addiction to coal” and that its use of coal is rapidly rising, not falling.
The Chinese are expected to build hundreds of new coal-fired power stations over the next decade. India, Vietnam, Indonesia, and other Asian nations with a combined population that is at least five times that of the United States are also binging on coal as a significant source of cheap power for decades to come. For every coal plant the U.S. shuts down, the rest of the world builds at least 10 new ones. I am sure that will put an end to global warming.
There is something wretched about rich, college-educated “humanitarians” pontificating about the sacrifices we must all make to stop global warming and then, without irony, develop plans that make other people, often who make far less money than they do, suffer all the pain. Suppose climate change meant every college professor, media personality, and million-dollar donor to the Environmental Defense Fund had to lose their livelihoods. In that case, I doubt they would be so supportive of this green economic “transformation.”
The victims of the Green New Deal in Washington are the blue-collar workers whose job losses will continue to stack up. And the worst betrayal of all is that the unions are in on it.
