Most presidential campaigns feature a familiar refrain: Each candidate promises to create millions of new jobs. The 2020 primaries are unusual in that nearly all the Democratic candidates, including Joe Biden, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders and Michael Bloomberg, are solemnly pledging to destroy millions of jobs by ending the shale oil and gas revolution.
The Democrats’ war on fossil fuels was on full display at the debate in Los Angeles, where Joe Biden, the supposed moderate, was asked if he would rein in America’s shale oil and gas production even if it meant “thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands” would lose their jobs. He unhesitatingly responded “yes,” to cheers from the audience of college students and professors. He then recited the familiar liberal riff about how investment in wind and solar power will save the economy. (Soon afterward he told a New Hampshire audience that unemployed energy workers should “learn how to program.”)
The gaffe evokes the moment in 1984 when Walter Mondale pledged during a presidential debate with President Reagan that he would raise everyone’s taxes. Mr. Mondale went on to win one state and the District of Columbia.
Curtailing U.S. oil and gas production would be economically disastrous. At least $1 trillion of U.S. economic output is related to the shale revolution, and more than 1.5 million Americans are employed in the industry. A PricewaterhouseCoopers study for the American Petroleum Institute found that at least four million American jobs are tied to the shale oil and gas revolution in areas like auto production, construction, petroleum engineering, pipe fitting, service stations, steel production and trucking.
Democrats’ quest to eliminate these jobs would hurt them in the swing states they’ll need to win to unseat President Trump. Ohio and Michigan have a combined total of more than 400,000 workers in the shale industry. Pennsylvania has another 320,000. Colorado and Florida each have more than 200,000 workers in oil and gas.
Pittsburgh has become a global energy hub, and whole towns in Ohio and Pennsylvania that were once left for dead have been revitalized thanks to shale gas and related industries.
Then consider Texas. Liberals have long wanted to turn the Lone Star State blue, or at least purple. But nearly two million Texans are employed in oil and gas and related industries. Many hard-hat workers and truckers employed in the oil-rich Permian Basin earn more than $100,000 a year with overtime. How do you win in and around Houston, Dallas and Midland with a platform that opposes oil and gas?
One might have thought that Joe Biden and other Democratic contenders would have learned their lesson after their war against coal in 2016. Liberals cheered when Hillary Clinton promised to kill the coal industry, then scratched their heads on Nov. 8, wondering how they got clobbered in former Democratic strongholds like Pennsylvania and Ohio. The major difference between the 2016 anti-coal campaign and this year’s anti-fracking crusade is that instead of killing hundreds of thousands of jobs, the left now wants to place millions of mostly blue-collar workers in unemployment lines.
Climate-change radicalism has become a drag on the Democratic Party. Not long ago, the party advertised itself as the champion of the working class and blue-collar unions. Democrats held rallies in the streets to keep miners and auto workers on the job. They agitated for better pay and benefits. Now the radical greens hold rallies across the country to save the planet by replacing these well-paid jobs with pink slips. In contrast, the professors, journalists and activists who cheer for these policies won’t have their jobs axed.
The recent rhetoric from Democratic presidential candidates leaves little doubt that the greens have won the battle for the party’s soul. Republicans should redouble their efforts to court industrial unions and their millions of members, reminding them that the GOP is the party that wants to save their jobs. Hard-hat voters drifted toward the Republicans in 2016, but this year could be a stampede.
Mr. Moore is a co-founder of the Committee to Unleash Prosperity
