GOP blasts Biden over Big Oil jobs
Republicans say president is shrinking industry, damaging the economy
With refineries and chemical plants along Houston’s Ship Channel as a backdrop, Texas Republicans on Tuesday made a stand against the Biden administration’s energy plans.
Houston-area Reps. Kevin Brady and Dan Crenshaw gathered with House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, seven other Republican lawmakers, and oil and gas company representatives at Enterprise Products Partners to focus their response to the Democratic president.
President Joe Biden’s energy agenda, they said, will eliminate oil and gas jobs, shrink the industry and damage the nation’s economy.
“Biden is launching an attack on our nation’s oil and gas workers, including the hundreds of thousands here in Texas,” Brady said during a news conference after their roundtable, which was closed to the media. “That’s why today, I’m joining my Republican colleagues in Houston to stand up for our workers.”
Biden has already canceled the Keystone XL oil pipeline from Canada to the U.S., temporarily halted new oil and gas leasing on federal lands and waters, and said he hopes to end industry tax breaks.
Biden’s choice for Ener
gy secretary, former Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm, told senators at her confirmation hearing last week that the president’s plans “would create more jobs in clean energy than the jobs that might be sacrificed.”
The lawmakers from Texas on Tuesday, however, criticized Biden for what one said was a deliberate effort to eliminate oil and gas jobs.
“Millions of Americans are jobless thanks to the pandemic,” Brady said. “President Biden’s top priority, while defeating the virus, is getting Americans back to work.
So it is troubling that in his first weeks in office, he took steps to deliberately kill more than a million good-paying jobs. Many are blue-collar. Many of them are union. Many of them are here in Texas.”
The oil and natural gas industry directly employs almost 2.6 million Americans and supports 9.8 million jobs in America, according to the American Petroleum Institute’s most current numbers. If Biden were to ban existing in addition to new leases on federal lands and water — something the administration has not said it would do — Texas would lose 120,000 jobs, the API said.
“Our biggest concern is that we believe the administration is leading us towards more reliance on foreign energy from countries with lower environmental standards,” said American Petroleum Institute President and CEO Mike Summers. “It places hundreds of thousands of jobs and billions of government revenue for education and conservation programs at risk.”
McCarthy echoed Summers’ concerns, saying enough jobs have been lost already amid the pandemic.
“‘We will put in solar panels.’ That's the answer to the American essential worker that we need?” McCarthy said.
Crenshaw also expressed his frustration at Biden’s plans, saying they would give less-regulated nations such as Russia, Venezuela, and Saudi Arabia far more industry weight.
“President Biden says, well, they'll just go find a solar panel job. On average solar panel jobs pay less than oil and gas jobs,” he said. “The Democrats say that's just the price to pay for saving the world.”
Ed Hirs, an energy fellow in the Department of Economics at the University of Houston, said the Republicans echoed a letter from Texas Democrats in the U.S. House last week urging Biden to rescind his leasing moratorium while the economy recovers from the downturn.
But the GOP’s job loss estimates, Hirs said, just don’t add up.
“The industry has lost hundreds of thousands of jobs in the last four years,” he said. “We can't lose what they say they are going to lose in oil and gas without going negative. The simple math does not work.”
But Hirs criticized Biden’s numbers, as well.
“On the flip side, the Biden administration is truly exaggerating the number of jobs that green energy will create,” he said. “Electricity is not yet a substitute for gasoline or diesel in transportation. It will happen over time. But no edict from Washington is going to make it happen in the next four years.”