Fact Check: AP and Washington Post Destroy Biden Job Claims in Brutal 1-2 Punch
President Joe Biden was operating at his usual level of veracity as he signed yet another series of executive orders on Wednesday.
“Today is ‘Climate Day’ at the White House,” he told reporters, according to The Associated Press. “which means that today is ‘Jobs Day’ at the White House.”
He continued. “We see these workers building new buildings, installing 500,000 new electric vehicle charging stations across the country as we modernize our highway systems to adapt to the changes that have already taken place. … We’re going to harness the purchasing power of the federal government to buy clean, zero-emission vehicles that are made and sourced by union workers right here in America. … This will mean one million new jobs in the American automobile industry. One million.”
Surprisingly, he was called out by the AP for his claim that the implementation of his administration’s new green initiatives will create one million new jobs in the auto industry. According to the AP fact check, Biden omitted “important context and used fuzzy math” to arrive at this conclusion.
They added, “that’s actually far from certain, if not unlikely.” One million new jobs would mean “a doubling” of the number of current auto jobs.
Statista, an organization that collects and analyzes data for the auto industry, reported that as of August 2020, “the number of motor vehicles and parts manufacturing employees amounted to around 905,000 people.”
The AP spoke to a number of auto industry analysts and several United Auto Workers union insiders who were highly skeptical of Biden’s claim. Many cautioned that the shift to the manufacturing of electric vehicles “probably will mean fewer net auto-making jobs.”
Kristin Dziczek, a vice president at the Center for Automotive Research, said Biden’s claim “isn’t well defined” and will be “a heavy lift.”
“Anybody who tells you it’s all positive for jobs — you can’t say one way or the other at this point,” she said.
“If more Americans drive electric vehicles, then it stands that fewer will drive gas-powered ones,” the AP explained.
“And because electric vehicles generally have 30% to 40% fewer parts and are simpler to build, fewer workers will be needed to assemble them. That will require a reshuffling of jobs, as workers who once made engines, transmissions and other components for gas-powered cars have to switch to electric motors and batteries.”
Sam Abuelsamid, the principal analyst for Guidehouse Insights, told the AP, “Because they [electric cars] are simpler, you’re probably going to have far fewer people working in vehicle manufacturing than you have today.” He also noted that “it’s far easier to automate manufacturing of battery cells and packs, which could reduce job levels even more.”
The AP found that “automakers pay workers who assemble batteries less than they pay those who manufacture vehicles.” They also learned that the process of assembling batteries lends itself more to automation than vehicle manufacturing, so the safety of those jobs should be questioned.
Next, former Secretary of State John Kerry, who is serving as the special presidential envoy for climate in the Biden Administration, was awarded two “Pinocchios” by The Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler. (Four “Pinocchios” would indicate a whopper.)
Speaking at the White House on Wednesday, Kerry said, “You look at the consequences of black lung for a miner, 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. And similarly, you have the second-fastest-growing job pre-covid was wind turbine technician.”
On Thursday, he repeated those remarks to MSNBC viewers.
Kessler points out minor errors in those statements. For instance, according to a Bureau of Labor statistics webpage of the fastest-growing occupations, “wind turbine technician” takes the number one spot. This occupation is expected to grow by 60.7 percent between 2019 and 2029.
“Solar power technician,” expected to grow by 50.5 percent between 2019 and 2029, takes the third spot.
The fact that Kerry had the order wrong or that those occupations were first and third instead of first and second is not the issue Kessler is concerned with.
Kerry won the “Pinocchios” due to the number of jobs these percentages represent.
Kessler writes, “at the White House, Kerry mentioned these statistics in the context of coal mining jobs — “The same people can do those jobs” — which before the pandemic amounted to [a total of] about 50,000 jobs (and [of those] about 30,000 below surface).”
According to the BLS statistics, the number of wind turbine technicians will grow from 7,000 to 11,300 in ten years, an increase of 4,300 jobs. Likewise, the number of solar power technicians will grow from 12,000 to 18,100, adding 6,100. These two occupations will add 10,400 new jobs to the economy.
Kessler’s point is that the number of new jobs expected in solar and wind jobs will not make up for the lost jobs in the fossil fuel industry.
Neither wind nor solar jobs appear on a BLS list of the 30 occupations with the highest projected growth rates, Kessler notes.
“In fact,” he writes, “when we tried to find solar and wind on another BLS list — jobs ranked by projected annual openings through 2029 — we had to scroll past about 600 occupations before we landed on solar installers, with an average of 2,300 openings a year. Wind turbine jobs, with a projected average of 1,300 openings a year, was even further down the list.”
Additionally, citing BLS data, Kessler found that “the median wage of coal miners in 2019 was about $59,000. The median wage for wind turbine technicians and solar installers was about $53,000 and $45,000, respectively.”
Finally, “moderate-term on-the-job training” is necessary to become a solar technician and “long-term on-the-job training” to become a wind turbine technician.
And that is why the climate czar received two Pinocchios for his remarks.
Two fact checks on the same day from media outlets whose coverage of President Biden is typically fawning is quite remarkable.
Lying with numbers and statistics is one of the easiest things in the world to do. I recall having to read a book for a college course on the subject called, “How to Lie with Statistics” which showed how numbers can be manipulated to say almost anything one wants them to say.
The reality is that “Climate Day” is not “Jobs Day.” The Biden Administration will sacrifice American jobs in a heartbeat to advance their climate change agenda. He already has. On his first day in office, Biden revoked the permit for the Keystone XL pipeline, which killed thousands of high-paying jobs.
I’ll leave you with a chilling quote from Sam Ricketts, co-founder of the climate policy group Evergreen. Ricketts told Vox, “Biden’s economic agenda is his climate agenda; his climate agenda is his economic agenda.”
Think about that.
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