Mike Rowe Just Gave the Biden Administration a Lesson on the Truth About Fossil Fuels
For Mike Rowe, the Biden administration’s push against the petroleum industry is missing a major point.
The industry liberals love to loathe over “climate change” is also the source of products that are key to the American culture.
And no amount of destructive, virtue-signaling moves by President Joe Biden, such as canceling the Keystone XL pipeline, is going to change that.
In an appearance Monday on Fox Business’ “Varney & Co.,” Rowe took on statements made last week by former Secretary of State John Kerry, who is now a special presidential envoy for climate, that workers put out of a job by the Keystone XL cancellation can simply go somewhere else to make solar panels.
“I think what he said is kind of simplistic,” Rowe told host Stuart Varney. “And if I were in charge of his PR and messaging, well, I’d probably have a talk with that person.”
“Simplistic” aside, Rowe said Kerry’s comments ignore a bigger reality: The petroleum industry is far bigger than heating fuel or filling up the car’s tank.
“The truth is, Stuart, the thing that we miss all the time when we talk about, ‘This government official said that, and now these workers are out of a job.’ It makes it a binary conversation.
“The conversation I think we ought to be having involves the degree to which 330 million Americans are truly reliant on petroleum products and fossil fuels.
“Not just at the pump. It’s not just oil and natural gas or clean versus dirty. It’s the yoga pants. It’s the plastic on the keyboard that allows people to type their angry letters to me from time to time.”
As he usually is when it comes to puncturing liberals, Rowe was dead on.
It’s a good bet that even the greenest of green liberals are clueless when it comes to how pervasive petroleum products are in the modern world. Whether it’s the asphalt that paves the roads and shingles roofs or the plastic products that are ubiquitous in American life (even the yoga pants Rowe mentioned), the petroleum industry is embedded in the fabric of Western culture.
“Energy can’t be the enemy,” Rowe told Varney, noting that fossil fuel companies are already major investors in the alternative fuels liberals love.
“So we can’t just separate two sides of the same coin and expect to come out on the other side.”
Then Rowe got to one specific of Kerry’s speech Wednesday — where Kerry gave his patronizing advice for pipeline workers to go into the solar panel trade.
“I think that, unfortunately, workers have been fed a false narrative, no surprise, for the past few years,” Kerry said, with a snide jab at the Donald Trump presidency.
“They’ve been fed the notion somehow that dealing with climate is going at their expense. No, it’s not.”
Rowe wasn’t buying that, and brought up New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s now-infamous statement from 2019 that the world was going to end in 12 years without some kind of action on “climate change.” (She later claimed, unconvincingly, that she was joking.)
“He called it a ‘false narrative,’” Rowe said of Kerry. “Well, there are a lot of people in the country that also believe that the end of days, in 12 years, is another false narrative. So, there are a lot of narratives being flown around.
“And in the end, Keystone, 11,000 guys out of a job,” Rowe said. “Happily, most of them are skilled and ought to be able to find work elsewhere.
“Because even if our government turns its back on fossil fuels, the country can’t. No matter what we want, we can’t do it.”
That’s a point liberals will never want to accept, but Mike Rowe just made it to anyone willing to listen. It’s a good bet John Kerry won’t be one of them.
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