I’ll get to the factual problems here in a minute, but first let’s just clarify what these folks are trying to say, which is a little bit of what-about-ism, but also: If you’re so worried about jobs, how could you celebrate the Keystone XL’s cancellation or, for that matter, the closure of a coal power plant or mine? After all, that hurts real people, too.
It’s a valid point.
But DOGE’s rampage is very, very different than Biden’s Keystone XL cancellation.
First off, Biden didn’t fire anyone. He cancelled a permit for the Keystone XL pipeline, which led the developer, TC Energy, to abandon the project and lay off about 1,000 temporary construction workers. While DOGE is slashing jobs as an end in itself, Biden cancelled the permit because:
- When the Trump administration approved the permit in 2019, it was defying a court order to take a “hard look” at the pipeline and the effects of current oil prices (they were super low at that point), potential increases in greenhouse gas emissions (the oil carried by the pipeline would emit 178 million tons of carbon dioxide annually when burned), new data on oil spills (the XL’s sister pipeline, the Keystone, had already experienced nearly 1,500 spills during its first seven years of operation), and potential effects on cultural resources (the diluted bitumen carried by the pipe is harder to clean up than conventional crude).
- The line would cross huge swaths of tribal and private lands. Many of those tribal nations and landowners didn’t want the line on their lands, and Indigenous advocates and the Rosebud Sioux Tribe and the Fort Belknap Indian Community had sued the administration to stop the line.
- The line would have cut through sage grouse habitat and the 378 miles of new power lines needed to run pumping stations would have crossed whooping crane habitat, thereby imperiling the endangered birds.
- The line was being built by a Canadian company to carry Canadian crude from the tar sands to U.S. refineries. That oil wasn’t needed — the market was glutted in early 2021 — and it would have competed against U.S. producers, damaging the oilfield-reliant economies in the Permian Basin and elsewhere.
Had TC Energy gone forward with the project, it would have created about 6,000 jobs over the three-year development phase. Those jobs, of course, never came to be. While that’s a lot, its nothing near the 14,000 that social media posters are throwing around. Nor is it even close to the job toll DOGE has racked up so far. The Keystone jobs were temporary; after the three years they would all go away, leaving just 20 to 35 permanent, full-time workers to operate the line. So comparing the Keystone cancellation to the current chainsaw-butchering of the federal workforce is way off.
But the larger point stands: When Biden cancelled Keystone XL, he also put a lot of folks out of well-paying jobs that, even though they were only temporary, could not easily be replaced. That hurt real people. And it was naive, even a bit callous, for Keystone XL opponents to suggest that the laid off workers could get jobs in the clean energy industry, or that fossil fuel workers in general could simply learn to code — as Biden said in 2019. A few years before, Hillary Clinton was skewered for telling an Ohio audience that “we’re going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business.”
It’s almost as bad as Musk. Right? Not quite. Clinton followed up that statement with this: “We’re going to make it clear that we don’t want to forget those people. Those people labored in those mines for generations, losing their health, often losing their lives to turn on our lights and power our factories. Now we’ve got to move away from coal and all the other fossil fuels, but I don’t want to move away from the people who did the best they could to produce the energy that we relied on.”
Policies aimed at reducing fossil fuel use and cutting climate-altering and human health-harming pollutants will and do have an economic impact. Closing a coal mine or power plant can be devastating, both economically and culturally, for the communities that rely on them, even if it does improve the lives of people who live nearby by cleaning up the air and water.
While some environmental groups and the politicians that support them don’t care about those job losses — their goal is to protect the environment, human costs be damned — these days most green groups not only care, but fight just as forcibly for a just transition as they have to make facilities clean up their acts. For example:
- After the Mohave coal plant and its associated mine on Black Mesa shut down at the end of 2005, the Grand Canyon Trust helped spearhead the creation of a Just Transition Coalition that then pushed regulators to require Southern California Edison to invest revenues from the sale of sulfur credits into economic and clean energy development benefitting the Navajo Nation and Hopi Tribe. The plant had sullied the air for years, and the coal mine was rapidly depleting the Navajo aquifer by using huge volumes of water to slurry the coal across Arizona to the plant.
- Tó Nizhóní Ání is leading the effort to push Arizona utilities to help fund a just transition for the communities most affected by the December 2019 closure of the Navajo Generating Station and the Kayenta coal mine on Black Mesa, as well as the imminent shutdown of the Four Corners power plant.
- When Public Service Company of New Mexico announced it would shut down the San Juan Generating Station in 2022, environmental groups and Democratic state lawmakers passed the Energy Transition Act, which allows PNM to issue bonds to fund the power plant’s abandonment, which included about $40 million for local economic development and displaced worker assistance and another $30 million for coal mine reclamation, which kept some workers employed. The Act also required PNM to build some of the replacement power facilities in the same area. The San Juan solar installation employed hundreds of workers during its construction and helped replace property tax revenues for the Central Consolidated School District.
And while Biden may have been a little oblivious about the ease of switching careers, he not only showed empathy toward those who are losing their jobs in the energy transition (he never brandished a chainsaw or insulted the folks who lost their jobs), but also pushed through legislation — i.e. the Infrastructure and Jobs and the Inflation Reduction acts — which poured billions of dollars into clean energy development and manufacturing and abandoned mine and oil and gas well cleanup programs, creating hundreds of thousands of jobs in the process.
That’s in contrast to the Trump administration, which is not only slashing jobs at a frenzied rate, but has also frozen and even tried to claw back funding from those job-creating laws, which is not only illegal, but also jeopardizes thousands of jobs in the private sector.
I suppose Trump believes that if he can convince some company to come back and build Keystone XL, perhaps by promising them a blank check to tear up the environment and private and tribal lands, then it will replace a fraction of those lost jobs. At least for a little while.
That may be a little more difficult than he thinks, however. The pipeline’s original developer is no longer interested in the project. And anyone else looking to build it would run up against another one of Trump’s harebrained policies. On the same day that he posted about reviving Keystone XL, Trump also announced that he was going ahead with tariffs against imports from Mexico and Canada, including on the oil that a future Keystone XL would carry. That diminishes if not destroys the economic case for anyone who might be considering building the pipeline. It’s typically oblivious behavior from the oligarchs running our country.
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When reports started coming in that the Trump administration was unfreezing its hold on seasonal National Park Service employees or rehiring some federal workers it had fired only days earlier, I began to think — or at least hope — that the bloodshed was almost over. Mmmm … nope. Two days ago Russel Vought, the Director of the Office of Management and Budget, sent a memo to all federal agencies ordering them to “promptly undertake preparations to initiate large-scale reductions in force.”
Here’s the way he introduced the memo:
