On Monday night, anti-labor Senator and climate denier John Barrasso (R-WY) gleefully posted a letter on Twitter from AFL-CIO unions raising concerns about the Green New Deal. The letter came not from the entire AFL-CIO and the more than 12.5 million workers it represents — as Barrasso incorrectly suggested — but from Cecil Roberts, president of the United Mine Workers, and Lonnie Stephenson, president of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, on behalf of the AFL-CIO Energy Committee, a body on which four-fifths of the AFL-CIO member unions are not represented.

Still, the letter generated massive attention, as commentators quickly slotted the story into their ready-made “labor versus environmentalists” frame. Few questioned the idea that the Green New Deal could inflict “immediate harm,” as the letter put it, on workers in fossil fuel–intensive industries. And no one bothered to wonder why we weren’t talking instead about the actual imminent danger these workers face — a recent 26 percent increase in fatalities in extractive industries.

The whole incident exposed how climate deniers, anti-union politicians, and labor officials in certain unions have become strange bedfellows in an effort to prevent the decarbonization of the US economy. In the process they have stifled real debate about how best to include workers and their unions in shaping policies that will directly impact them, instead turning them into props for climate-denier talking points.