General Manager Working on Keystone Pipeline: 'Hundreds of Guys' Already Laid Off Because of Biden
Less than a week into his presidency, newly elected President Joe Biden has already negatively affected a large number of working-class Americans.
One of Biden’s first acts as president was to sign an executive order halting construction on the Keystone XL pipeline, a project that would transmit oil from Canada to the United States.
Josh Senk, a general manager at Michels Corp., a subcontractor of the project, said Monday that “hundreds of guys” have lost their jobs as a direct result of the order.
Many Republicans in Congress have stood behind union workers who have spoken about their job losses due to Biden’s order.
According to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Republican Reps. Bryan Steil, Glenn Grothman and Scott Fitzgerald of Wisconsin have shown opposition to the order.
The Journal Sentinel reported that the three representatives “met with employees of Michels Corp. … in Racine County to express their frustration with the executive order ending the project and encouraged Biden to reconsider.”
“We need to have good-paying jobs in the United States of America,” Steil said. “We need to have good-paying jobs here in Wisconsin.”
As Senk explained in the video, many of the project workers reside in Wisconsin — not just the states of North and South Dakota where the pipeline was being constructed.
According to a Keystone XL news release in October, the project was set to create around 8,000 jobs. That means that the damage caused by Biden’s executive order is just getting started.
Grothman went so far as to call Biden’s decision to halt construction “amateur night at the White House,” according to the Journal Sentinel.
The truth is that Grothman has a point. With the signing of this executive order, Biden continued to show just how out of touch he is with everyday, working-class Americans.
The president didn’t even appear to think twice about killing thousands of American jobs — after all, he did it within hours of being inaugurated.
While Biden claims he took this action in the name of environmental protection, Steil said that argument is “misleading to a lot of people.”
“Oil and gas is still going to be transported into the United States of America,” Steil said.
“It’s going to be done by rail, a less-efficient means of moving oil and gas, with greater risk to the environment from rail accidents. Far less safe than a pipeline.”
But instead of listening to reason, Biden is too busy trying to virtue-signal to his base about how much he cares for the environment.
In addition to being out of touch with everyday Americans, Biden’s order showed a worrisome lack of knowledge about foreign relations.
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Prior to a phone call with the president on Friday, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau discussed his eagerness to work with Biden.
“We have so much alignment — not just me and President Biden, but Canadians and President Biden,” Trudeau said at a news conference ahead of the call, according to The New York Times. “I’m very much looking forward to working with President Biden,” he added, The Hill reported.
However, it appears that even a prime minister as left-leaning as Trudeau was unable to voice his support of Biden’s order to kill the project.
During the call, Trudeau expressed his “disappointment with the United States’ decision on the Keystone XL pipeline,” according to a summary of the conversation posted on Trudeau’s official website.
“The Prime Minister underscored the important economic and energy security benefits of our bilateral energy relationship as well as his support for energy workers.”
It seems Biden does not share the same enthusiasm for retaining jobs during a global pandemic that has laid off millions.
One of the main purposes of projects like the Keystone XL pipeline is to help America become less dependent on Russia and Middle Eastern countries for oil, creating “energy independence” in America.
Instead, Biden killed the plan in favor of “woke” views on climate change. His website claims that his alternative solution is to create 10 million “clean energy” jobs, but he has yet to say when or how he actually plans to do that.
The bottom line is this: Biden decided to kill thousands of guaranteed American jobs.
If he wants to transition to “clean energy,” he needs to have an actual plan — which would most likely involve phasing out fossil fuels by eliminating new projects. Killing projects that have already begun makes no sense.
Biden has needlessly crippled members of the working class with his reckless order, and it didn’t even take him a week to do so. It’s time to hold him accountable before he makes it worse.
This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.
