The Biden administration seems to recognize it's got a problem with its green energy schemes, as it takes a wrecking ball to the nation's economic edifice in the name of green and strikes at it with all the people still in it.

Exhibit A: Biden's day-one cancellation of the Keystone XL pipeline, at an immediate cost of 1,200 jobs, a projected loss of 2021's 11,000 jobs, an additional loss of 42,000 knock-on jobs, and one angry Canada.

Exhibit B: Biden's executive order banning new oil and gas drilling on federal land. "It's climate day," Biden chirped.

Here the rest of Biden's spin:

Transcript from Rev.com:

When I think of climate change and the answers to it, I think of jobs. A key plank of our build back better recovery plan is building a modern resilient climate infrastructure and clean energy future that will create millions of good paying union jobs, not seven, eight, 10, $12 an hour, but prevailing wage and benefits. We can put millions of Americans to work modernizing our water systems, transportation, our energy infrastructure to withstand the impacts of extreme climate. We’ve already reached a point where we’re going to have to live with what it is now. That’s going to require a lot of work all by itself, without it getting any worse. We think of renewable energy, we see American manufacturing, American workers racing to lead the global market. We see farmers making American agriculture first in the world to achieve net zero emissions and gaining new sources of income in the process.

Some jobs he cited included capping oil wells (supposedly abandoned, but that will be the case for all wells when he shuts drilling down), building solar panels, building electric cars, building wind turbines and investing in community organizers in the nation's blighted blue-city regions.

Meanwhile, Biden's new climate czar, ex-Sen. John Kerry, did his best to gaslight the narrative, too.

Here's a bit of the transcript from Rev.com, emphasis mine:

With respect to those workers, no two people, in this room, are more concerned about it and the president of the United States has expressed in every comment he has made about climate, the need to grow the new jobs that pay better, that are cleaner. That, I mean, you look at the consequences of black lung for a minor, for instance, and measure that against the fastest growing job in the United States before COVID was solar power technician. The same people can do those jobs, but the choice of doing the solar power one now is a better choice. Similarly, you have the second fastest growing job pre COVID was wind turbine technician.

John Kerry: (24:15)
This is happening. 75%, 70% of all the electricity that’s come online in the United States in the last few years came from renewables, not… Coal plants have been closing over the last 20 years. So what President Biden wants to do is make sure those folks have better choices. That they have alternatives. That they could be the people who go to work to make the solar panels. They were making them here at home. That is going to be a particular focus of the Build Back Better agenda. And I think that unfortunately, workers have been fed a false narrative. No surprise, right? 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. And what the financiers, the big banks, the asset managers, private investors, venture capital are all discovering is there’s a lot of money to be made in the creation of these new jobs in these sectors.

John Kerry: (25:27)
So whether it’s green hydrogen that is going to come, whether it is geothermal heat or whatever it’s going to be, those are jobs. The same worker who works in South Carolina today putting together a BMW, which happens to be made there, and is currently an internal combustion engine can put together a car, but it’s electric. So this is not a choice between having jobs, having good jobs, having the quality of life. Quality of life will be better when Gina has put her team together, that produces choices for us that are healthier, less cancer, cleaner air, the greatest cost to America, the greatest cause of children being hospitalized every summer in the United States, we spend 55 billion a year on it, is environmentally induced asthma. That will change as we begin to [rein] in what we used to call pollution in this country, because it is pollution. And I think that workers are going to see that with the efforts of the Biden administration, they’re going to have a much better set of choices. And frankly, it will create more jobs than stuck where we were.

It's a toss up as to which one was worse.

Biden claims to be thinking of jobs, imagining that someone with expertise in energy development can happily get to work hammering solar panels. The skill levels are different, and likely lower on the solar front, given that these jobs are easily moved to China and Mexico. And lower-skilled jobs, of course, are easily subject to competition, such as that from the millions of illegal aliens who are beginning to surge across the border and Biden's planning to hand green cards to. They'd like those solar panel jobs, too, so lucky energy workers, good luck with that.

All of this is speculative, of course. Kerry cites the hedge fund investment in green as proof the jobs will appear, but somehow, that didn't happen when President Obama was in the saddle.

Nor is wide-scale worker retraining a solution. The Obama administration was littered wtih failures on that front, with workers scoring only worse jobs after that useless re-training.

The other hypocrisy is time. Converting an economy through central planning at a minimum takes time - just check the history of the Soviet Union in its creation of collective farms. What didn't take time was Biden's wrecking ball to the jobs of the workers who have them. Apparently, they're supposed to be glad they've been laid off because if they just sit tight after Biden's executive order and wait for the Biden administration to get its act together, they'll get these new green jobs of very different skill level ahead of all the foreign nationals, both here and abroad, who also want them.

It's nonsense. We all know how unprepared the old Obama administration was when they promised and failed to produce all those shovel-ready jobs. We know how Wall Street made out like bandits on boondoggles like Solyndra, just as Kerry cites, pay no attention to what it did to the worker jobs.

And Kerry's claim about the 'fastest-growing' jobs being the green ones is nonsense, too -- in any tiny industry the addition of one job will goose the total. Percents are useless in this context, given the size of Big Oil and the tininess of green energy stat-ups.

Perhaps the most insulting part is when Kerry tries to gaslight workers about "better choices" as if green jobs were good for you and oil jobs were junk food. Where he calculates the workers won't notice is that in reality, there is no choice. The good energy jobs will be shut down and the green jobs will supposedly (but hardly for sure) be on offer. Got an objection with that? Too bad. After all, everyone would choose a green job over a fossil fuel job, no matter what their skills and specialities, right?

It's total gaslighting, trying to make America's laid off energy workers imagine their layoffs are a good thing and all we have to do is click our heels together and the Biden fairy, or Good Witch Kerry will wave his wand and rain the jobs on down. That's not how things work in this world and both workers and these miserable leaders trashing their jobs and promising better, both know this well.

Image: Screen shot from Fox News video, via shareable YouTube.