Laid-off Keystone XL worker about Biden's new climate change policies: ‘They just don’t care’
Neal Crabtree, formerly a welding foreman on the Keystone XL, was ‘very disappointed’ in the new climate policies announced by the Biden administration Wednesday.
President Joe Biden signed three executive orders on climate change Wednesday, vowing to put the issue "at the center" of U.S. national security and domestic and foreign policy. The executive action follows his decision to shut down construction of the Keystone XL pipeline, which was expected to sustain about 11,000 U.S. jobs in 2021 and generate $1.6 billion in gross wages.
Prior to signing the orders, Biden kicked-off his press briefing by saying "Today is climate day at the White House, which means that today is jobs day at the White House."
Neal Crabtree, 46, was among the first of the U.S. workers impacted by the new administration’s aggressive approach to fighting climate change.
"I think a better way to put it would be a lack of jobs day," Crabtree responded to the comment in an interview with Fox News.
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As a welding foreman laid off after President Biden rescinded the Keystone XL permits, Crabtree has been vocal about the harm the new administration’s radical climate agenda is doing to American workers in the oil and gas industries.
"I think they're hearing us but they just don’t care. They promised their voters they were going to do one thing and they seem hell-bent on doing it," Crabtree said.
New U.S. climate envoy John Kerry said Wednesday that coal workers and those in other fossil fuel industries have been fed a "false narrative" that climate policies kill their jobs.
"Unfortunately workers have been fed a false narrative, no surprise, over the last few years they’ve been fed the notion that somehow dealing with climate is coming at their expense, no it’s not," Kerry said. "What’s happening to them is happening because of other market forces already taking place."
"That is just not true," said the 46-year-old pipeliner. "They're killing the jobs that are here and selling a fairy tale of jobs that aren't," said Crabtree who claimed these new climate policies have nothing to do with market forces but rather the smothering of an industry with plenty of natural demand.
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During the press briefing, Kerry also recommended that oil and gas workers should pivot to manufacturing solar panels if their jobs are eliminated as a consequence of the Biden administration’s environmental policies.
"What President Biden wants to do is make sure those folks have better choices, that they have alternatives, that they can be the people to go to work to make the solar panels," Kerry said.
Crabtree said he has no intention of learning to make solar panels, "I'm a pipeliner. My grandfather did it. My daddy did it. This country was built on fossil fuels. We're the superpower we are today because of fossil fuels.
His advice to the administration was to, "start training people who are just out of high school or college and get them into the green energy field and let's not kill our industry because there's some of us, that's all we know how to do."