Wind and solar jobs pay far less than fossil fuel, nuclear jobs

President Joe Biden and Climate “Envoy” John Kerry seem more than happy to tell pipeliners and coal miners that their jobs are over, but the alternative they propose, getting them jobs in the wind and solar industry, is sentencing them to massive pay reductions.

According to Politico:

President Joe Biden’s efforts to sell the country’s workers on his climate agenda will face a major hurdle, data obtained by POLITICO show — a big wage gap between the new green energy jobs and the old fossil fuel ones.

Energy industry workers employed by solar and wind power companies earn significantly less than those who mine coal or drill for natural gas, according to data compiled by former Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz’s clean energy think tank. For example, the median wage for solar workers is $24.48an hour compared with $30.33 for those employed by the natural gas sector, which amounts to a roughly $12,000 annual wage gap.

These wage disparities threaten to undermine Biden’s promise that the nation can launch a multitrillion-dollar assault on climate change while growing its economy and transitioning workers to well-paying jobs.

Energy workers on the whole earn more than the typical American, but the highest-paying positions are skewed heavily toward nuclear, utility and natural gas and coal industry workers, the new data show. The wind, solar and construction jobs that would surge under Biden’s policies were well below them on the median pay scale.

The Green Leap Forward advocated by President Biden and Governor Walz will harm the local Minnesota communities that are the homes to the states reliable coal and nuclear plants, depriving them of the good-paying jobs and property taxes that fund their schools.

It would be one thing if these power plants were being replaced with a better alternative, but building wind turbines that only last 20 years is a gross miscarriage of justice that adds the insult of higher electricity prices to the insult of shuttering the lifeblood of these local economies.