President Joe Biden’s climate ambassador John Kerry says oil and gas workers who lost their jobs due to the new administration’s restrictions on their industry should start building solar panels instead.
When asked in Tuesday’s press conference what he would say to the people whose livelihoods are ruined due to Biden’s frenzied anti-fossil fuels orders, including halting leasing on federal land to use for oil and gas and canceling the Keystone XL pipeline, Kerry simply said those workers who were struggling need to make “better choices” for newer, greener jobs.
“What President Biden wants to do is make sure that those folks have better choices, that they have alternatives, that they can be the people who go to work to make the solar panels,” Kerry said. Jobs in wind and solar energy on average pay half what jobs in the oil and gas industry do.
John Kerry is asked what his message would be to oil and gas workers who "see an end to their livelihoods":
"What President Biden wants to do is make sure that those folks have better choices… That they can be the people to go to work to make the solar panels." pic.twitter.com/i9TYXlD9Jg
— Daily Caller (@DailyCaller) January 27, 2021
Following a decline in the coal industry, Kerry said workers should have no problem dropping the industry they work in now to learn a new trade involving green power such as wind or solar, which he noted have risen in popularity with investors. Kerry also denied that the Biden admin’s climate agenda was directly hurting oil and gas workers.
“I think that that, unfortunately, workers have been fed a false narrative, surprise, for the last few years. They’ve been fed the notion that somehow dealing with climate is coming at their expense. No, it’s not. What’s happening to them is happening because of other market forces already taking place,” Kerry said, calling climate change a “crisis” that needs to be addressed swiftly by banning the predominant forms of affordable energy in the U.S.
Texas Sen. Ted Cruz pushed back on Kerry’s statement, claiming it was crude of the non-scientist to assume that he knew what was best for millions of people.
“What an arrogant, out-of-touch statement for a centimillionaire to say,” Cruz said on Fox News. “You know, ‘You little people, you know, I don’t like the choices you’re making, and so your jobs go away,’ as John Kerry said right there. Quelle surprise that the Democratic elites have decided that blue-collar workers, that union members, that men and women with calluses on their hands, they’ve made the ‘wrong choices,’ in John Kerry’s words.”
Kerry, the failed 2004 Democratic presidential nominee, has very limited experience with climate change or science in general, only serving as a co-chair on Biden and Sen. Bernie Sanders’ climate unity task force along with “Squad” member Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York. Kerry also forced the United States into the Paris Climate Accord while he was President Obama’s secretary of state, which President Joe Biden rejoined after former President Donald Trump withdrew from it.
