We saw a glimpse of Biden’s win-win messaging on climate on Wednesday. At a White House briefing, climate adviser Gina McCarthy explained: “We’re going to power our economy with clean energy. We’re going to do that in a way that will produce millions of American jobs that are going to be good-paying, that are going to be jobs that have the opportunity for workers to join a union.” She stressed that “we’re going to make sure that nobody is left behind, and I’m not just talking about communities, in terms of environmental justice, but workers as well.”
Later in the briefing, she came back to the same point. “We have millions of people out of work, out of jobs; millions of people that are afraid they can’t feed their families,” she said. “If you’re faced with that, what do you do? You boost the economy, and you grow jobs.” In that vein, she argued:
We’re not going to ask people to go from the middle of Ohio or Pennsylvania and ship out to the coast to have solar jobs. You know, solar jobs will be everywhere, but we need to put people to work in their own communities. That’s where their home is. That’s where their vision is.
John Kerry, the administration’s international climate czar, went even further, suggesting a seamless transition to a new green energy economy. He noted that before the pandemic hit, the projected fastest-growing job in America was solar power installer. Second to that was wind turbine technician.
Just after that briefing, Biden appeared in the State Dining Room to sign his package of executive orders. He repeated the win-win promise: “A key plank of our ‘Build Back Better’ recovery plan is building a modern, resilient climate infrastructure and clean energy future that will create millions of good-paying union jobs — not 7, 8, 10, 12 dollars an hour, but prevailing wage and benefits,” Biden said. He painted a rosy scenario:
We see small business and master electricians designing, installing and innovating energy-conserving technologies and building homes and buildings. ... We see these workers building new buildings, installing 500,000 new electric vehicle charging stations across the country as we modernize our highway systems to adapt to the changes that have already taken place. We see American consumers switching to electric vehicles through rebates and incentives, and the residents of our cities and towns breathing cleaner air, and fewer kids living with asthma and dying from it.
That’s the vision. But workers, policy mavens, unions and private sector leaders will need convincing.
Ali Zaidi, McCarthy’s deputy, understands that communicating the Biden administration’s vision can’t come from accountants and bureaucrats from Washington. “It’s going to be at the state and local level,” he told me. He points to the team Biden put together — including former South Bend, Ind., mayor Pete Buttigieg for transportation secretary and former Michigan governor Jennifer Granholm for energy secretary — as critical to explaining how workers in specific locales may already be trained for jobs in clean industries.
There is reason for some optimism when you look at sub-national efforts over the past four years. “Even with the federal government tilting the playing field in the opposite direction, state and local leaders, the private sector and unions have been running in the direction of the end zone,” Zaidi said. State compacts and city initiatives to promote green energy have given us “better field position” now, he argued.
There are a couple points worth underscoring. The administration is facing millions of workers who remain fearful about their own place in the new economy. Meeting that genuine concern will take considerable effort.
First, the administration insists that in giving a “demand signal” (e.g., creating a market for green products and new infrastructure), workers can find work in their own locations. But at some point, workers might want the security of a backstop. Just as we provide trade adjustment assistance for workers displaced by free-trade deals, we should have a similar panoply of benefits and assistance for those displaced from carbon-based jobs. The Labor Department website explains: “The TAA program offers a variety of benefits and reemployment services to help unemployed workers prepare for and obtain suitable employment. Workers may be eligible for training, job search and relocation allowances, income support, and other reemployment services.” Make the same available to workers in North Dakota, Texas or Ohio whose carbon-polluting industry jobs get phased out — if only as an insurance plan.
Second, workers — rightly or wrongly — are skeptical about how this is going to work. Workers need a concrete example — a clear illustration of the type of jobs that might be available to them in the new economy. The specter of leaving a good, union-paying job to be a $10-per-hour cashier at a big-box store looms large.
After the pandemic passes, expect to see events, meetings and local media outreach around the country to educate workers and businesses. Once Biden and his team can present workers with an alternative image (e.g., jobs closing abandoned wells in Pennsylvania, construction work available on green public transit), resistance from workers who fear for their incomes might abate.
Third, while the gas and oil industries and car manufacturers, for example, have historically fought efforts to move to green energy, they are not immune to market forces or political realities. Well before the new administration arrived, the Energy Department had been tracking the decline in coal consumption and the rise of renewable energy. On Thursday, General Motors announced that “it plans to become carbon neutral in its global products and operations by 2040 and has committed to setting science-based targets to achieve carbon neutrality.”
The administration will need to highlight these and other developments to convince workers its promises are more than spin. This could help make language in Biden’s executive order seem more plausible, such as his promise to create “jobs in construction, manufacturing, engineering and the skilled-trades by directing steps to ensure that every federal infrastructure investment reduces climate pollution and that steps are taken to accelerate clean energy and transmission projects under federal siting and permitting processes in an environmentally sustainable manner.”
In sum, the administration has just begun to spell out its green energy plans. But it should be both realistic and detailed about the economic transformation it envisions. That means bringing its pitch down to the state and local level and giving concrete data to reassure workers about their future job prospects. Only then, I suspect, will workers put aside the zero-sum view of green energy in favor of a win-win attitude.
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