Listening to Joe Biden talk about his energy plans is reminiscent of Barack Obama’s ill-conceived 2008 “green jobs” promise, which proved to be nothing more than a costly boondoggle. The only difference is that Biden is making even greater pie-in-the-sky claims. He says his climate agenda will make the country a “100% clean energy economy” by 2050.

Like Obama, Biden wants to eliminate coal, but he’s also expanding that to all fossil fuels. Biden would ban all drilling and fracking on public land, while also creating an “enforcement mechanism” to limit carbon production on private land. That would likely happen via a carbon tax meant to make the extraction of fossil fuels prohibitively expensive.

But don’t worry, Biden assures those currently employed in the American energy structure. He claims his plan would create “10 million good-paying, middle-class, union jobs.” American taxpayers would contribute $1.7 trillion to help “train all of America’s workforce to tap into the growing clean-energy economy.” And what would these newly trained clean-energy workers be trained to do? Why, they’d be installing “millions of new solar panels and tens of thousands of wind turbines,” of course.

However, like Obama’s boondoggle, Biden’s clean-energy jobs would not come close to providing the type of good-paying consistent employment that the current oil and natural gas industry does today. Even the unions know this reality, as they have come out against Biden’s plan.

“The Bureau of Labor Statistics says the oil and gas industry provides an average annual salary of $108,000, nearly twice the private economy average,” The Wall Street Journal editorial board notes. “A Journal analysis last year found even higher average wages at large companies like Exxon Mobil, where median worker pay is about $170,000 a year. Renewable medians are harder to measure, but NABTU president Sean McGarvey estimates that many union members would ‘take a 50% or 75% pay cut.’” That’s a steep price to pay for Biden’s Green New Deal fairy tale.