Working for a Clean Energy Future for Our State and Country

Creating Jobs (0.00 / 0)

As someone that works in the construction industry, it is hard to stomach hearing about how many jobs a partnership with environmental organizations are going to create.

Those that work in the construction industry can tell you that environmentalists have killed thousands of jobs in this state.  Desperately needed jobs, by desperate families that could be working right now if it were not for the very environmentalists that are supposedly so interested in jobs.

BigStone would have created thousands of jobs.  That project would have been one of the cleanest coal burning facilities in the nation and would have added capacity to build more wind turbines.  Instead, the money behind it will likely just go to a different area, with less environmental restrictions and get one built there.  Creating more pollution than would have been created here, and creating thousands of jobs elsewhere.

Polymet nickel/copper mining project would create hundreds if not thousands of jobs for an area that desperately needs them.  Environmentalists vigorously oppose that project as well.  Again, this project will have to satisfy strict environmental protections of MN, but that won't be good enough for the environmentalists and I'm sure they will file lawsuits anyway.  And I'm sure that they will stall and delay and cost the company money, like bigstone, to the point where they will go mine somewhere else, most likely somewhere else not in the United States.  Somewhere else that again has less stringent environmental laws if any, and somewhere else where our people won't get the jobs.

The list is a mile long.  Good projects, that meet stringent environmental protection rules, that create thousands of jobs, and are killed by the very people that are running around saying they are interested in creating jobs.

The environmentalists won't be happy until we make nothing in this country, and everyone is sitting under a tree eating granola enjoying the view of the river.  What they don't understand is that we will have to be sititng there, because we won't have a job, and we won't be able to afford a house to live in so a tree might be our only shelter.

But hey, at least the tree didn't get cut down to build something, and at least the river still is clean so the turtles can enjoy themselves.

If we can create jobs in this new green economy, I'm all for that, wind turbines, solar, whatever, build it all, build it here.  

But in the mean time, how about asking your environmentalist friends to be a little bit more pragmatic and less ideological about our energy and mineral needs right now.

   

---

by: Construction Worker Guy @ Wed Nov 25, 2009 at 11:04:02 AM CST