President Joe Biden has already succumbed to the wishes of liberal environmentalists and gone against his calls for unity, according to Public Service Commission President Twinkle Cavanaugh.
In a conversation with Yellowhammer News, Cavanaugh reacted to Biden’s executive orders canceling the Keystone XL oil pipeline and placing the United States back in the Paris climate agreement.
“It’s telling that Joe Biden’s first move is to kill tens of thousands of American jobs when he scuttled the Keystone pipeline,” pronounced Cavanaugh. “What this says is that he doesn’t care about unity and strengthening the American economy, and that he cares about appeasing a small group of liberal radicals whose priorities are out of touch with the rest of America.”
Within hours of being sworn into the office, Biden issued an executive order withdrawing the permits for the Keystone XL oil pipeline and reversing a key energy initiative bolstered during the Trump administration.
The pipeline, which would have ensured fast delivery of critical oil reserves to Gulf Coast refineries, has long been the object of environmentalist scorn.
Cavanaugh sees its cancellation as bad for the economy and a harbinger of things to come during the Biden administration.
“We are sitting on 250 years of coal and massive amounts of oil and gas in this country,” she outlined. “The very best thing for our economy and American families is to use it. All sources of energy must be at our disposal. That’s how we keep costs down for families here in Alabama, and that’s how we grow our economy.”
RELATED: Cavanaugh sees obstacles on road to recovery — ‘More regulations are poisonous to job growth’
In addition to his order on the Keystone pipeline, Biden also tied the United States back into the Paris climate accord, an international pact requiring member countries to meet certain standards relating to energy production.
“Handcuffing our country to all these other socialist economies is terrible for Alabama,” Cavanaugh remarked when asked about the effect of rejoining the Paris agreement. “First of all, we have now forfeited our sovereignty as a nation. We’re letting all these European countries dictate our energy policy. They no more care about the environment than they do our high school football scores. Since they can’t beat our economy and our natural resources, they simply want to drag us down to their level.”
As she enters a new term after having received more than 1.38 million votes, a record for state officials, Cavanaugh says she is not surprised by the new administration’s moves on energy policy.
“We fought against all of this during the Obama-Biden administration,” she explained. “When Trump took office he untangled all of these regulations. Guess what happened? We had the best economy in the history of our country.”
Cavanaugh believes environmentalists influencing Biden have a model in mind for his policy approach.
“California officials are saying that their state is going to be the blueprint for the rest of the U.S.,” she said. “Well, California’s energy policy is an unmitigated disaster. California’s catering to the radical left resulted in huge rolling blackouts this summer with no real fix for the problems they have created.”
RELATED: Alabama leaders cite poor energy decisions as cause of California’s rolling blackouts
“The reality is that on day one Joe Biden showed that he is too weak to stand up to the radical left and it is going to cost our economy and countless people their jobs,” she concluded. “Killing jobs is not unifying.”
Tim Howe is an owner of Yellowhammer Multimedia