Every day, 400 veterans receive honorable discharges and return to civilian life.
Fortunately for them, they’re entering the best job market for former servicemen and women in recent memory. Veteran unemployment recently hit an 18-year low, thanks in large part to America’s booming energy industry. Oil and natural gas companies already employ nearly 200,000 veterans. And they’ll hire tens of thousands more in the coming years, as long as politicians and radical environmentalists don’t impede their mission to provide cheap, reliable energy.
America’s energy companies are producing record levels of oil and natural gas. The United States pumps nearly 12 million barrels of oil a day — the highest level in almost 50 years and considerably more than any other country. Crude oil production has doubled in the past decade.
This production surge didn’t happen by chance. America has always had plentiful energy reserves, but they weren’t easily accessible until companies perfected “fracking,” the drilling technology used to extract oil and gas from shale rock formations buried deep inside the earth.
Fracking has created millions of jobs — and those positions are disproportionately filled by veterans. Veterans make up 7 percent of the total U.S. workforce, but they account for 11 percent of energy industry employees. The industry supports 10 million jobs in total. And according to the Chamber of Commerce, fracking will create an additional 3.5 million jobs by 2035.
Through programs like the Veterans Energy Pipeline, oil and gas companies actively recruit veterans for careers that leverage their military experiences. Companies prize veterans’ work ethic, attention to detail, poise in stressful environments and technical expertise.
These veterans receive excellent wages and benefits. The average salary in the oil and gas industry is more than $100,000 a year.
A strong American energy sector does more than just put veterans to work — it keeps troops from having to fight never-ending wars in the Middle East to stabilize global energy markets. For decades, oil has been a major cause of military conflict. Since 1973, up to 50 percent of all global wars have been linked to disputes over oil. If we continue to tap into domestic energy resources, the likelihood that we will have to send troops abroad in the future decreases.
Unfortunately, green activists are dead set on halting America’s energy renaissance — even while lamenting that U.S. wars are often brought about by oil shortages.
Last month, activists successfully lobbied Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz to halt the construction of a new oil pipeline. This much-needed project would have created 8,600 American jobs and generated more than $330 million in wages for workers. The activists have no concrete backup plan, just talk. They weren’t going to get any of those jobs anyway, so they appear not to care that other workers are denied the opportunity.
Last year, activist group Colorado Rising gathered signatures for a ballot measure that would have banned oil and gas drilling throughout much of the state. Fortunately, Colorado voters defeated the measure, which would have eliminated close to 150,000 jobs.
The next time these activists want to raise energy prices and block jobs, tell them “You first.” Let them stop driving cars, flying in planes, and using computers and cell phones. Once they do that for a few years, maybe we will listen. Until then, let’s keep energy prices low and our veterans gainfully employed.
If we are producing so much “cheap” energy…why does the price of gas at the pump keep rising? Why do my gas and electric bills keep going up each year? I’d love to know where this “cheap” energy goes cuz its not at my house and I try my best to be a good conservationist!
If the “Democraps”, led by mental midget “AOC”, implement her green new deal all these workers will be
unemployed and the price of everything will be thru the roof. The time to speak up and resist is now!
We must stop this lunacy NOW!!!
Question: What are the anti- hydrocarbon people going to use if they are successful?
Answer: candles
It should be noted that while Colorado voters decisively defeated the ballot measure, they also elected a bunch of Californicators to the legislature. Now the damocrats control both houses, and with our new lgbtQ democrat governor in place, they passed a bill doing what the voters turned down. It will have to go back to the voters to try to correct their idiocy. This is an example of the insanity that has infected the damocrats.
Our veterans deserve all our honor and support.
The one major issue none of these environmental extremists never want to discuss, aside from the whole massive job destruction and economic collapse of our country that would accompany any attempt in the near-term to “go green” (rely solely on solar and wind to power the country as the Progressives all want to do), is that we would would go from being a major global energy supplier and nearly independent of all foreign energy countries to once again being dependent on other countries to meet our energy needs.
Not one major industrialized country on this planet has been successful in going 100 percent “green” for a reason. The technology the left desires to rely on can NOT supply the reliable base load power required to support a modern, vibrant economy. Europe has had to suppliment their wasted tens of billions in solar and wind farms with new coal-fired power plants.
Going all electric for cars and trucks means we would have to import ALL the rare earths essential for battery production from countries like the Republic of the Congo and elsewhere. This amounts to hundreds of billions a year being sent to foreign nations forever. Plus having to upgrade the electricity grid to accommodate 75 to 80 million vehicles being charged up each and every night, would require another couple of hundred billion dollars in investment to handle the load. Which of course means even higher energy costs. To make matters even worse, the Chinese have already signed extremely long-term deals with all these foreign countries over the last 10 years as part of their Road and Belt initiative to secure sole source control over such rare earths resources. So we would be completely dependent on China’s willingness to sell us these materials that they completely control at this point. What happens when they demand major price hikes for these materials or simply say no? We will have put ourselves into a situation where we have put ourselves at their mercy.
Do we really want to shovel more hundreds if billions a year to China, so they can continue to build up their military forces to challenge us on the world stage while continuing to steal our IP as fast as they can to eventually over-take us? Somehow that doesn’t seem an intelligent direction for our country to pursue. At least not if we expect to either maintain our ability to protect ourselves militarily or economically going forward.
Sorry if this is too complex for some, but I thought some of you would appreciate something beyond the rudimentary discussion such articles produce.
Need to invest in: Thorium reactors,clean coal, fusion, energy storage, EV networks,
All you need to do to put a Millennial slobbering over the “GREEN” New Deal into a vibrating shock is to explain to them that without Oil, Gas and Coal, they won’t be able to charge their phone when the wind quits blowing at night. Recent survey said that Millennials consider their phone battery dying the 15th “most stressful” thing in their lives. Folks, we should hang our heads in shame; we have babied and coddled and sheltered these brats to the point that they get PTSD from having their phone quit working!
Keep up the good work, inform every possible voter.