Two former Keystone pipeline workers said they have not found work in the two months since President Biden suspended construction on the Keystone XL oil pipeline, and are not interested in finding work under his upcoming $3 trillion dollar green infrastructure plan.
Laid off pipeline welder Lynn Allen and retired pipeline worker Guy Williams talked about the situation on “Fox & Friends First” Monday.
“You think about it every minute of every day,” Allen told the program about finding work. “There’s nothing out there.”
Allen said he doesn’t want work under the president’s new plan to provide “high paying union jobs” to address climate change and build roads and bridges.
“None of that fits my plan. I’m a welder. That’s what I’ve been doing,” Allen told the cable show.
“And him wanting to rebuild the middle class in cutting welding jobs and cutting oil and gas. The oil and gas is pretty much the heart of the middle class and the upper class. The oil and gas is what drives the United States and the world. And he cuts everything out from us,” Allen said.
Williams said that many of his former employees are now on unemployment in Texas.
“There’s quite a few people. There’s a lot of welders, pipeline people that live in my general area and a lot of young guys. And I know some that used to work for me when I was working in the trades. But they don’t have anywhere to go,” Williams told Fox & Friends First.
On his first day in office, Biden signed an executive order suspending construction on the Canadian-linked crude oil tunnel, citing environmental hazards.
The decision left about 11,000 people out of work — jobs the White House claims will be repurposed in the emerging green energy sector.
Speaking to reporters at the White House in January about Biden’s green energy plan, White House Climate czar John Kerry insisted that energy workers had been “fed a false narrative” about what environmental policy changes would do to their livelihoods.
The truth, he said, was that the people working in energy and coal impacted by climate change efforts will “have better choices” and can “go to work to make the solar panels.”
“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.”
The Obama-era secretary of state was responding to a question about Biden’s climate plan causing massive job losses in oil, gas and coal industries in states across the country, as it already has for those employed on the Keystone XL oil pipeline project.