Democrats and Republicans Go Hard Against Biden Regulation

The historical society notes a Butler Eagle article dated Feb. 17, 1982, in which Mayor Fred Vero estimated a $60 million loss to the county. School districts lost significant portions of their budgets; suppliers and contractors laid off employees. Approximately 2,000 jobs outside of Pullman Standard were lost due to the plant's closure. County unemployment skyrocketed to 17.5% practically overnight. Census data shows that since that closure in 1982, the city of Butler has consistently lost significant percentages of the local population.

Pullman's demise had to do with changing American habits. People no longer flocked to passenger trains for transportation. They used cars. That is not the case today with Butler Works. People across the country desperately depend on a reliable, affordable electrical grid. Killing the local plant would not be an organic side effect of changing habits but instead a government-created disaster, all in reaction to pressure from the Sierra Club and other heavily bankrolled and powerful climate justice entities.

Sychak said it was last March that his team was shown a draft letter about a rule proposal on efficiency standards for distribution transformers.

"We brought the letter back here, read it, and thought, 'What is this all about?'" he said.

He deployed his whole union leadership team to decipher its effects. "There are seven us and we spent every waking moment researching this," Sychak explained.

They were stunned by what they learned. The Natural Resources Defense Council, Sierra Club and some others had sued the Department of Energy for not properly doing its customary six-year review of energy efficiency standards. That lawsuit started the collateral damage.

"They trumped-up this bogeyman theory they refer to as a social cost of greenhouse gas and put a financial, an astronomical financial price tag of potential liability on the DOE for not doing this," he explained, saying the environmental groups' theory is that the department's failure to review would add trillions of dollars in costs to the world due to excess greenhouse gasses.

"It's a crazy theory. It's 1,240 pages. It's nuts. Yeah, and they drag the study over 30 years to get some significance to the value," he said.

Sychak grew up here right in the city of Butler. He went to school here, as did his father and his father's father, and all of them worked in the steel plant. The grandfather of 10 credits its existence to keeping three out of his four children living in the area.

His colleague Ray Pflugh also grew up here in Butler County and has worked here for 24 years. His two adult sons are the third Pflugh generation to work here.

As for their colleague Gilliland, he is the third of four generations in his family who have worked here.

Sychak said he has met with the White House on this, but "we didn't get anything definitive other than I felt that they genuinely listened to us while we were there." Still, he has had no luck meeting, let alone getting any reply, from anyone from Secretary Granholm's office.

He adds he is heartened that there is this rare moment in American politics that both sides have come together so succinctly to lean in and help them overturn this rule. Still, uncertainty reigns.

"We've seen this story play out in America over and over again. We've seen the impact it has on communities, churches, schools and families," Sychak said. "I don't want to be looking for a new job at 53."

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Salena Zito is a CNN political analyst, and a staff reporter and columnist for the Washington Examiner. She reaches the Everyman and Everywoman through shoe-leather journalism, traveling from Main Street to the beltway and all places in between. To find out more about Salena and read her past columns, please visit the Creators Syndicate webpage at www.creators.com.

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