‘An Administration Trying To Crush Your Future’: Laid-Off Keystone Workers Condemn Biden’s Executive Order

Laid-off Keystone Pipeline workers say President Joe Biden’s cancellation of the pipeline will negatively impact their futures, according to multiple outlets.

Labor groups have said that the cancellation eliminated 1,000 union jobs and could erase ten times more construction jobs that the Keystone Pipeline would have offered, according to Fox News. In 2014, the State Department estimated that Keystone would have offered jobs for 10,400 construction workers over several seasons, reported CNBC.

“It’s hard to make plans when you’ve got an administration that’s trying to crush your future,” an unnamed Keystone worker told Fox News. “The best stimulus they could do for this country right now is keep people working.”

Tyler Noel, a Keystone worker in South Dakota, told CNBC that he needs the pipeline job.

“Anything that was coming in the next few months was supposed to be Keystone,” Noel said. “If I hadn’t saved my money through the years I would really be in a bind. But I’d say I’ve got at least three months, then I’m gonna have to do something.”

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“I wish he hadn’t done that on the first day,” said AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka to Axios on HBO. “It did and will cost us jobs in the process. I wish he had paired that more carefully with the thing he did second by saying, ‘Here’s where we’re creating jobs.”

The Biden administration has proposed a solution to the job losses by creating job opportunities in clean energy. “[Oil and gas industry workers] can be the people who go to work to make the solar panels,” climate envoy John Kerry told reporters at CNBC.

Biden signed the executive order cancelling the Keystone Pipeline project on his first day in office in order to cut back on oil and gas emissions.

The order states that the administration will prioritize job creation in renewable energy. “We will combat the [climate] crisis with an ambitious plan to build back better, designed to both reduce harmful emissions and create good clean-energy jobs.”

Many Keystone workers believe that the switch to clean-energy jobs would mean “starting over,” reported Fox News.