On President Joe Biden’s first day in office, he signed an executive order stopping the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline, which was intended to transport crude oil from Canada to the United States.
Americanpipeliner.com estimates that up to 11,000 jobs were lost directly because of the pipeline’s cancellation. The pipeline workers will now have to remain in their hometowns and compete for local jobs that pay a fraction of what they were earning before at a time when jobs are hard to come by. Complicating matters further is the fact that their skills are so specialized that they cannot be easily transferred to other positions and industries.
A 46-year-old welding foreman who was working on a pump station for the pipeline, Neal Crabtree, recounted how he broke down and cried in his truck when he heard the news. He told Fox News in an interview that this is not a time to make political statements. He said that lots of projects were canceled recently due to COVID, and some in the industry have been out of work for months and even years. The impact, he said, will be felt by lots of families and communities.
He also criticized Democratic politicians who said the workers whose livelihoods were ruined by the Biden administration’s fossil fuel policies could find work in other industries.
He said: “You spend a lifetime fine-tuning your skills, and if you go start another job, you’re starting at the bottom. I doubt that these politicians would like it if someone told them to go start over and find a different job. They’re killing the jobs that are here and selling a fairy tale of jobs that aren’t.”
The Association of Oil Pipe Lines (AOPL)’s President and CEO, Andy Black, said in a statement: “Killing 10,000 jobs and taking $2.2 billion in payroll out of workers pockets is not what Americans need or want right now.”
Effects of pipeline cancellation will be far-reaching
Losing that many American jobs in one fell swoop is bad enough, but the economic impact will also be felt deeply in the communities that the Keystone pipeline would have gone through. In addition, a further 50,000 people were going to build the lines off the mainline toward cities and houses.
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau expressed disappointment with the move, emphasizing the importance of bilateral relations between the U.S. and Canada. Some Alberta legislators even suggested a potential trade war between the two nations in the wake of the pipeline’s cancellation.
Moreover, some experts have said that Canada may reduce its oil sales volume to the U.S. significantly following the cancellation, which would see energy costs rise for Americans. Americanpipeliner.com founder Tim Latter told The Epoch Times: “It’s naïve to think that we’re going to use wind and solar to meet the energy demands that we require.”
Meanwhile, energy expert and author Alex Epstein told the publication that green energy is a failure around the world, pushing up heating prices dramatically in the UK and causing electricity prices in Germany to double over the last two decades – and that’s only with small percentages of wind and solar energy.
Biden's move seems to stem more from a desire to undo measures put in place by Trump than out of any real concern for the environment, especially when you consider the fact that experts have said that it won’t do much, if anything, to reduce emissions. It won’t reduce U.S. oil dependency, and Gulf Coast American refineries may become even more reliant on countries like Russia and Venezuela for oil imports – not to mention the emissions that will be created by shipping in foreign oil.
The executive order canceling the pipeline was one of 30 executive orders Biden signed on his first days on the job, ten of which directly reversed Trump policies. If Biden was willing to eliminate 11,000 American jobs on his first day in office, it’s scary to think what he has in mind for the next four years.
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