A slew of executive orders by President Joe Biden has shown his preference for pursuing the radical environmentalist agenda over supporting American jobs. Jordan McGillis writes in The American Spectator (abridged):
An awkward conflict in Washington reveals both the tectonic shifts remaking American politics and Joe Biden’s Achilles’ heel. Biden has tabbed climate change as one of the “four interrelated existential crises” facing America today and has released a barrage of energy orders aimed at slowing it. Most visibly, he has halted fossil fuel leasing on federal lands and axed the Keystone XL pipeline, immediately sending thousands of workers into unemployment. In so doing, Biden has alienated a core Democratic Party constituency: labor.
In line with the breaks with fiscal austerity and trust in the free market on family formation, competition with China, and worker protections, the new conservatives may coalesce around subsidies for carbon capture and sequestration and for carbon-negative technologies like direct-air capture. These policies will acknowledge the growing national awareness of climate change without directly hiking energy prices or inducing mass layoffs in industry. Though insufficient in the minds of Biden’s advisers and too interventionist for libertarian thinking, this approach may appeal to union workers, to others in industrial fields, and to the broad swath of the middle class that the Democrats have exiled.
On Labor Day 2020, Biden spoke directly to American workers, asserting that “the great American middle class was built by unions” and that he would be “the strongest labor president you have ever had.” Now holding the keys to the White House, Biden has shown that belief, however earnestly held, to be false. A political realignment is underway in the United States, and, as climate policy exposes, Joe Biden and the labor movement are no longer on the same side of the divide.
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