The Biden administration, with its push to combat climate change, is not looking to "transition people and workers to nothing," but to create jobs that will be "suitable for every worker in every community," former EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy, national climate adviser to President Joe Biden, said Thursday.
"We will put together a task force to look at the communities that are highly dependent on localized utilities, localized coal, and bring them together on how we revitalize those communities," McCarthy told MSNBC's "Morning Joe." "We will open up opportunities for those workers to look at all the mines and all the literally thousands and thousands of oil and gas wells that were never properly closed that are spewing methane. Those are jobs they can immediately do out of the gate better than any of us can."
However, Biden's move to stop the Keystone XL pipeline means the end of a project that could have sustained about 11,000 U.S. jobs, including 8,000 for union workers, according to the company.
But McCarthy said Wednesday that the administration's plan is shaped to look forward and grow the number of jobs that look to the future while making the environment more healthy.
"President Biden said yesterday he is embracing science again," said McCarthy. "He is setting up infrastructure to make us rejoin the Paris agreement and address climate change, and he's going to make sure that every step we take domestically is strengthening our economy, growing millions of jobs, relying on a clean energy future and not leaving communities or workers behind."
She added that a lot can be done with the money the federal government spends, as subsidies to the fossil fuel industry will be reduced while investments in public resources will grow.
The president's "Buy American" agenda is also about revitalizing manufacturing to build the products of today and the future, said McCarthy.
"This should not be a Republican versus Democrat issue," she added. "This is about America. We're facing four crises today. We better figure it out and work together."
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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