Energy
Declaring War on U.S. Energy and the U.S.
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Declaring War on U.S. Energy and the U.S.

As President Biden works to handicap both American energy production and usage, in the name of fighting global warming, he is destroying jobs, prosperity, and freedom. ...
Alex Newman

On January 20, 2021, the booming town of Midland, South Dakota, became practically a “ghost town” in an instant. In the morning, every single room at the rustic Stroppel Hotel was occupied by highly paid workers toiling away on the Keystone XL pipeline and associated operations. By evening, there was nobody left. “Our whole world turned upside down with the stroke of a pen,” explained Laurie Cox, who bought the hotel six months ago with her husband, Wally, with the understanding that the pipeline would be bringing in large numbers of guests and patrons for the foreseeable future. 

Now, thanks to Joe Biden’s executive decree canceling the pipeline, the Cox family’s future is uncertain at best. “Our real money was in renting the rooms — that’s where the pipeliners came in and really helped sustain us,” Cox told The New American magazine in a phone interview from her hotel. “We had a significant amount of people in the hotel, working on the pipeline and supporting them. Now, that’s done. We’re a small community, we don’t have a lot of opportunity. This was our once-in-a-lifetime chance and now it’s gone.” 

Weeks into the devastation, the situation is already a tragedy. “I’ll be honest, we’re going to struggle month to month to pay the bills, whereas before we had plenty of money coming in to re-invest and improve the hotel and even hire people,” Cox said, reading off a list of other people in the region whose lives were similarly turned upside down. “I don’t even take a wage — everything we’ve got now we’re putting back into this hotel. I had hired somebody to help us run the place, but there is just no more money to have an employee anymore.” 

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