U.S. Sen. John Barrasso criticized a number of new policies signed into law on Wednesday by newly sworn-in President Joe Biden.
Just hours after Biden was sworn in and signed a series of executive orders, Barrasso criticized various moves the new president made, including stopping the Keystone Pipeline and returning the United States to the Paris Climate Agreement.
“A return to the Paris climate agreement will raise Americans’ energy costs and won’t solve climate change,” the senator said. “Under the agreement, the Biden administration will set unworkable targets for the United States while China and Russia can continue with business as usual.”
President Donald Trump’s administration withdrew the United States from the climate agreement in 2017, a decision Barrasso then praised.
“The Paris climate agreement is based on the backward idea that the United States is a culprit here, when in reality the United States is the leading driver of climate solutions,” he said in his statement Wednesday. “It will result in spiking electricity bills and higher prices at the pump. These are additional burdens during a particularly tough time for Americans and for every small business. It hurts America’s competitiveness and gives a free pass to our adversaries.”
In a separate statement, Barrasso said that by stopping the Keystone Pipeline, Biden will rob both American and Canadian workers of good-paying jobs.
“Currently, one thousand union workers are busy constructing the Keystone XL pipeline,” Barrasso said. “When completed, the pipeline will ship oil from the Canadian and Bakken oil fields to American refineries along the Gulf Coast and across the Midwest. President Biden’s actions will not end our need for oil from our strongest ally, Canada. Instead, it will cost jobs, result in more shipments of oil by rail and make America even more vulnerable to OPEC and foreign adversaries, like Russia.”
Finally, Barrasso questioned Biden’s Secretary of State nominee, Tony Blinken, for what he referred to as “policy failures” during Blinken’s testimony in front of Congress.
Barrasso touched on topics such as China’s human rights abuses, the Keystone Pipeline and more when questioning Blinken.
“You admitted, ‘We failed in preventing a tragic loss of life as well as millions of people made into refugees or internally displaced, and that’s something that we will have to live with,'” Barrasso said. “You also went on to say, ‘In Syria, we rightly sought to avoid another Iraq by not doing too much, but we made the opposite error of doing too little.’”
