A Just
Transition for U.S. Fossil Fuel Industry Workers
Robert Pollin & Brian Callaci
Wednesday, July 6, 2016
The American Prospect
According
to the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, 2015 was the
globe’s warmest year since at least 1880, when such figures were first
recorded. 2014 was the next warmest, and the hottest five years also include
2013, 2010, and 2005. Can it be any more obvious that we absolutely must stop
playing Russian roulette with the global climate?
The two
most important things we need to do to stabilize the climate are
straightforward. First, the world must dramatically cut its reliance on oil, coal,
and natural gas in energy production. This is because carbon dioxide (CO2)
emissions generated through burning fossil fuels, along with methane emissions
released during fossil fuel extraction processes, are responsible for about 75
percent of all greenhouse gas emissions causing climate change. Second, as the
alternative to fossil fuel consumption, again on a global scale, we must
massively expand investments in energy efficiency and clean renewable energy
sources—solar, wind, geothermal, low-emissions bioenergy, and small-scale
hydropower.
Both parts
of this climate stabilization program will produce large-scale impacts on the
employment opportunities for working people as well as on the communities in
which they live. The investments in efficiency and clean renewables will
generate millions of new jobs. But workers and communities whose livelihoods
depend on the fossil fuel industry will unavoidably lose out in the clean
energy transition. Unless strong policies are advanced to support these
workers, they will face layoffs, falling incomes, and declining public-sector
budgets to support schools, health clinics, and public safety. This in turn
will increase political resistance to any effective climate stabilization
program.
AP Photo/David Goldman, File
Coal miners
return on a buggy after working a shift underground at the Perkins Branch Coal
Mine in Cumberland, Kentucky. As recently as the late 1970s, there were more
than 350 mines operating at any given time in Harlan County. In 2014, it's
around 40.
It follows
that the global climate stabilization project must unequivocally commit to
providing generous transitional support for workers and communities tied to the
fossil fuel industry. The late U.S. labor leader and environmental visionary
Tony Mazzocchi pioneered thinking on what is now termed a “Just Transition” for
these workers and communities. As Mazzocchi wrote as early as 1993, “Paying
people to make the transition from one kind of economy to another is not
welfare. Those who work with toxic materials on a daily basis … in order to
provide the world with the energy and the materials it needs deserve a helping
hand to make a new start in life.”
In this
article, we propose a Just Transition framework for U.S. workers. Our rough
high-end estimate for such a program is a relatively modest $600 million per
year. This is about 1 percent of the annual level of public investment that
will be needed to advance a successful overall U.S. climate stabilization
program. As we show, this level of funding would pay for income and
pension-fund support for workers facing retrenchments as well as effective
transition programs for what are now fossil fuel–dependent communities.
One reason
that the costs for this program can be kept relatively modest is precisely
because the fossil fuel industry cutbacks will be occurring in conjunction with
the growth of the clean energy industry. This is critical because, among other
factors, within the U.S. economy, the number of jobs generated by clean energy
investments will be much larger than the jobs that will be lost through fossil
fuel industry retrenchments. Specifically, spending $1 million on clean energy
investments generates about 17 jobs across all sectors of the U.S. economy,
while spending the same $1 million on maintaining the existing fossil fuel
infrastructure produces only about five jobs. Clean energy investments will
produce more jobs for electricians, roofers, steelworkers, machinists,
engineers, truck drivers, research scientists, lawyers, accountants, and
administrative assistants. One major policy challenge is to locate good jobs in
areas that will be hard hit by the decline of fossil fuel businesses.
Developing a viable Just Transition program is a matter of simple
justice
Developing
a viable Just Transition program is a matter of simple justice, as Mazzocchi
emphasized. But it is equally a matter of strategic politics. Without such
adjustment assistance, the workers and communities facing retrenchment will,
predictably and understandably, fight to defend their livelihoods. This, in
turn, will create unacceptable delays in proceeding with effective climate
stabilization policies. As one stark case in point, in mid-May, the AFL-CIO
Building Trades department sent a blistering letter to the federation’s
president, Richard Trumka, condemning the AFL-CIO’s newly announced
get-out-the-vote alliance with environmental funder and activist Tom Steyer.
The broader rift in the U.S. between several major unions and environmentalists
over projects that provide union jobs, like the Keystone Pipeline, demonstrates
clearly what is at stake.
How
Large a Contraction for U.S. Fossil Fuels?
The
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) provides conservative
benchmarks on what’s required to stabilize the average global temperature at no
more than 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit (2 degrees Celsius) above the pre-industrial
average. A fair summary of their assessment is that global CO2 emissions
need to fall by 40 percent by 2035 and by 80 percent by 2050.
Let’s say
that U.S. emissions will need to decline at this average global rate, and let’s
focus on the 20-year goal of a 40 percent decline. To accomplish this goal will
require across-the-board cuts in both production and consumption in all
domestic fossil fuel sectors. But cuts will need to be greater for coal. Per
unit of energy produced, emissions from burning coal are about 40 percent
higher than oil and 50 percent higher than natural gas. In addition, certainly
over the next 20 years, it will be more difficult to find substitutes for oil
as a liquid fuel in transportation than for coal as a generator of electricity.
Given these considerations, we proceed with the assumption that, by 2035, U.S.
coal consumption will need to fall by 60 percent, while the cuts will need to
be around 40 percent for oil and 30 percent for natural gas.
AP Photo/Tulsa World, Mike Simons
The rift
between several major unions and environmentalists over projects like the
Keystone XL Pipeline demonstrates clearly what is at stake. Here, hundreds of
union workers rally in support of the Keystone XL Pipeline during a Local 798
Rally Tuesday, April 9, 2013, in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
Other major
differences between coal versus oil and gas are also important for our
purposes—in particular, the fact that the U.S. coal industry has experienced a
sharp decline in profitability over the past decade. The rise of environmental
regulations has been only one factor here. Competition from low-cost natural
gas, generated through fracking technology, has also caused major losses. The
combined impact has been devastating. Bloomberg News reported in January that
“coal producers are suffering through a historic rout. Over the past five
years, the industry has lost 94 percent of its market value, from $68.6 billion
to $4.02 billion.” In addition, half the debt issued by U.S. coal companies is
presently in default, and major coal producers Arch Coal, Alpha Natural
Resources, and Peabody Energy have all filed for bankruptcy over the past year.
This is all before we would begin the 60 percent cut in production over the
next 20 years.
Conditions
in oil and gas are different. The industry was booming from 2011 to 2014, as
crude oil prices hovered around $100 a barrel. But profitability fell sharply
as the price of oil declined to less than $60 a barrel in 2015 and less than
$40 a barrel in 2016. Plunging oil prices also rendered unprofitable most
projects to produce natural gas through fracking. In 2016, defaults on debt by
oil and gas companies reached nearly 15 percent. In Texas alone, the industry
shed about 70,000 jobs. It is not clear how much of an increase in the oil
price would be needed to reverse these negative trends, or whether any such oil
price increase is likely to emerge soon. In any case, a 30 percent to 40
percent production cut over the next 20 years will certainly worsen the already
unstable situation. What will this mean for fossil fuel industry workers and
communities?
Subsidizing
Early Retirements
The U.S.
government has mounted multiple programs designed to assist workers facing job
losses resulting from government policy choices. The most prominent of these is
the federal Trade Adjustment Assistance (TAA) initiative, which was first
implemented in 1962 and still operates today. The TAA is designed to help
workers displaced by shifts in U.S. global trade policies. The program supports
wage subsidies, health insurance, counseling, retraining, relocation, and job
search. The overall cost is about $10,000 per worker per year, and workers, on
average, benefit for about two years. However, the labor movement has long
derided this level of funding as paltry, the equivalent of burial insurance.
Similar
federal programs have been no more effective than the TAA in relocating
displaced workers into good new jobs. Rather, despite such initiatives,
displaced workers have been largely shunted into low-wage occupations. For
example, a 1999 study by Laura Powers and Ann Markusen on the post–Cold War
transition programs such as the Defense Reinvestment and Conversion Initiative
found that “a majority of the workers displaced from defense-related industries
between 1987 and 1997 now work at jobs that pay them less than their former
wages and that fail to take advantage of their defense-bred skills, and a
sizable minority has experienced a drop in earnings of 50 percent or more.”
Given this
pattern, one cannot be optimistic that the results would be significantly
better if similar policies were implemented as one component of the clean
energy transition. Fortunately, there is a simple and relatively inexpensive
alternative approach that can work. This is to provide a one-year early
retirement program for some workers. If we focus on the industry contractions
through 2035—60 percent for coal, 40 percent for oil, and 30 percent for
natural gas—the needed retrenchments will be only slightly in excess of the
normal rate at which fossil fuel–sector workers will be retiring anyway at age
65.
AP Photo/Susan Walsh
President
Obama signs the renewal of the Trade Adjustment Assistance, the most prominent
existing program designed to assist workers facing job losses resulting from
government policy choices, on October 21, 2011. The labor movemnet has long
derided this level of funding as paltry, the equivalent of burial insurance.
Here are
the basic figures. As of May 2015, there were 69,000 people employed in the
U.S. coal-mining industry, and 194,000 in oil and gas extraction. This includes
the people directly engaged in the mining and extraction work itself as well as
everyone else doing all kinds of jobs involved in producing coal, oil, and
natural gas, ranging from office support to top-level executives. The
adjustment assistance program would apply across the board to all employees in
both industries, regardless of occupation.
Starting
with the coal industry, let’s assume that production does decline by 60 percent
over a 20-year period. This means that the industry will shed about 41,000 jobs
over the next 20 years. That averages out to about 2,100 job losses per year in
the industry.
There are
28,000 workers in the coal industry between the ages of 45 and 64. This
translates to an average of 1,400 workers retiring per year over the next 20
years. In other words, two-thirds of the 2,100 jobs that have to be shed per
year in the coal industry will happen through natural attrition via retirements
at age 65. But that does still leave nearly 700 jobs that need to be shed by
workers who would not have reached the standard retirement age of 65.
These
additional job cuts can be handled simply by providing a fund that would
provide full-compensation buyouts at age 64 for these 700 workers. We estimate
the average level of total compensation (wages plus benefits) in the industry,
including that for executives, to be about $78,000 per year. This would amount
to buyouts totaling around $55 million for the 700 workers per year. The
federal government would need to pay for these buyouts.
The buyouts for workers in both the coal and oil industries total
about $165 million per year—a remarkably modest sum.
We can
apply comparable calculations for the 194,000 people employed in the oil and
gas industry. Assuming that production in the industry will need to fall by
roughly 40 percent within 20 years, about 900 workers per year will need to be
supported through a full-compensation buyout when they reach age 64. The
average compensation in the industry, again including the pay for executives,
is presently around $120,000. This means that the total buyout package for the
900 64-year-old oil and gas workers will be about $108 million per
year. The buyouts for workers in both the coal and oil industries total
about $165 million per year—a remarkably modest sum.
In addition
to workers directly employed in the U.S. coal, oil, and natural gas industries
in all occupations, there are additional workers engaged in “support
activities” for these and kindred industries. Providing fair retirement
subsidies for these workers should also be readily manageable. As of the 2015
government figures, about 412,000 people were employed in all support
activities for all U.S. mining and extractive industries. These include workers
in management, professional jobs, manufacturing, construction, transportation,
clerical jobs, and cleaning services. There are another 72,000 workers in the
U.S. engaged in various petroleum-refining activities.
Most of
these roughly 500,000 people—including workers employed in support activities
as well as refining—will not be significantly affected through retrenchments in
the fossil fuel industries. Among other factors, a high proportion of them are
connected with sectors such as iron and copper mining rather than fossil fuel
extraction. With refining, a large share are engaged in producing
petrochemicals, as opposed to refined gasoline. Petrochemical production will
not have to be cut as part of a clean energy transition, since it generates
only negligible CO2 emissions. Still more significant, the
expanding clean energy sectors will need to employ a large number of support
workers to perform services similar to those needed for fossil fuel production.
It is difficult to calculate with precision how many workers
employed in these support activities will be significantly affected by the
decline in U.S. fossil fuel production.
It is
difficult to calculate with precision how many workers employed in these
support activities will be significantly affected by the decline in U.S. fossil
fuel production. A high-end estimate would place these costs at being
roughly equal to the costs of the buyouts for the directly affected
workers—another $165 million per year. As such, a high-end estimate of total
costs of providing buyout benefits at age 64 to all workers facing layoffs—as
opposed to the natural progression into retirement at 65—would be about $330
million per year.
Guaranteeing
Fully Funded Pensions
If our Just
Transition program is going to rely heavily on workforce attrition through
retirements at either age 64 or 65, then it is imperative that all affected
workers have secure and decent pensions waiting for them upon retirement.
Accomplishing this will be a major challenge. This is because most U.S.
workers, both those working within the fossil fuel industry and more generally,
have inadequate pension coverage.
U.S.
workers finance their retirements through a combination of three sources—Social
Security, their own private savings, and employer-based pensions. Individual
savings are not nearly high enough to finance retirement. This is especially
true in the aftermath of the 2007–2009 financial collapse. Most households have
yet to recover from the nearly 30 percent decline in overall household wealth
resulting from the crisis. With Social Security, the current average benefit is
about $16,000, which is only slightly higher than the $15,300 threshold for
food stamp eligibility. Meanwhile, about one-third of all private-sector
workers had no access to retirement benefits from their employers.
Within this
context, the most effective approach to guaranteeing adequate retirement
support for fossil fuel industry workers would be provide such support to all workers,
regardless of the industries that employ them. However, short of such an
ambitious overhaul of the entire U.S. pension system, there are measures that
the federal government will need to take to ensure pension security for the
fossil fuel industry workers specifically.
At present,
the main pension programs in both the coal and oil industries are already
underfunded. The situation is most severe with coal. The industry’s pension
funds are managed through the United Mine Workers of America Health and
Retirement Funds, which covers multiple employers. But this fund has suffered
from the rapid attrition of the coal industry and is currently underfunded by
$1.8 billion. A February 9 Washington Post story
reported that the coal miners’ fund has “rapidly declined as some coal
companies shed dues-paying workers and others filed for bankruptcy protection.
Without intervention, some of the funds—chiefly those associated with firms in
bankruptcy—could run out of cash before spring.”
Harry Han/Creative Commons
Large cities
tied to the fossil fuel industry, like Dallas and Houston, pictured here, will
unavoidably face big adjustments, similar to those experienced by major
manufacturing cities such as Detroit and Pittsburgh over the past three
decades.
The Obama administration
introduced an initiative last year called “Power Plus” that calls for more than
$1 billion in spending for jobs training and economic development as well as
additional funds to shore up workers’ pension and health funds. To date, this
proposal has been blocked by the Republican congressional leadership. But even
if a version of it were to pass, it is not clear that it would fully cover the
current $1.8 billion underfunding gap.
This
pension fund simply must be made whole. To prevent an even greater underfunding
gap, the fund could be “frozen” at its existing level of commitments to
workers. The fund would be closed to newly hired employees, but there are
likely to be very few such new hires in any case, as the transition from fossil
fuels to clean energy proceeds. The required policy intervention here—through
Power Plus and any additional measures, as needed—would be for the federal
government to ensure that the $1.8 billion gap is closed through a combination
of commitments made by both the companies and the government.
As noted,
the oil and gas corporations are currently at nowhere near the level of
distress faced by coal companies. From 2009 to 2014, publicly traded companies
in the industry reported $234 billion in profits, $147 billion in dividends,
and $47 billion in share buybacks. They did lose $200 billion in 2015 as oil
prices plunged. But they still managed to distribute $23 billion in dividends
and $1.5 billion in share buybacks that year. At the same time, however, the
five largest U.S. oil and gas companies by themselves—ExxonMobil,
ConocoPhillips, Chevron, Devon Energy, and Anadarko—were carrying nearly $13
billion in unfunded pension liabilities as of 2014 and $14 billion as of 2015.
Given that
the oil and gas industry will need to contract by between 30 percent and 40
percent over the next 20 years as part of the clean energy transition, we
should expect that the companies are not going to prioritize replenishing their
pension funds as a matter of course. The federal government will therefore have
to mandate full funding. One way to enforce this would be for the Pension
Benefit Guaranty Corporation (PBGC)—an arm of the federal government—to utilize
its powers under the 2006 Pension Protection Act to prohibit the oil companies
from paying dividends or financing share buybacks until their pension funds
have been brought to full funding and then maintained at that level. As needed,
the PBGC can also exercise its authority under the 2006 act to place liens on
company assets when pension funds are underfunded.
Combining
Community Support with Green Investments
Communities that are dependent on the fossil fuel industry will
face formidable challenges adjusting to the decline of the industry.
Communities
that are dependent on the fossil fuel industry will face formidable challenges
adjusting to the decline of the industry. This will be true even if all
workforce reductions can be managed through attrition by retirement and all
pension fund obligations to retired fossil fuel workers are honored in full.
Large
cities tied to the fossil fuel industry, such as Houston and Dallas, will
unavoidably face big adjustments, similar to those experienced by major
manufacturing cities such as Detroit and Pittsburgh over the past three
decades. But smaller communities that are less diversified will experience
still greater losses. Midland, Texas, a city of 120,000 residents, relies both
on traditional oil and gas extraction as well as more recent shale oil projects
to generate 65 percent of the city’s overall economic activity. Midland and its
sister city, Odessa, were booming in recent years, with average real earnings
in the fossil fuel sectors rising by an average of 22 percent between 2006 and
2014, due especially to the growth in shale oil extraction. But the area also
experienced a loss of about 13,000 jobs in 2015—7.5 percent of the area’s
overall workforce—as oil prices fell. Without an effective transition program,
this pattern of decline will persist.
The
situation is, again, still worse for coal-dependent communities. For example,
in Boone County, West Virginia, 47 percent of all jobs in recent years were
with the region’s coal industry. However, just between 2011 and 2015,
coal-mining employment in the area fell from 4,600 to 1,400, a 70 percent
decline. The county’s budget also fell 45 percent between 2012 and 2015. Since
the beginning of 2016, the county has laid off 70 teachers and consolidated
three elementary schools. Again, in the absence of a well-functioning
transition program, this pattern will persist in Boone County and in similarly
coal-dependent communities.
The U.S.
can nevertheless advance viable readjustment programs that are capable, at
least, of significantly softening the blows to be faced by Midland, Boone
County, and many similarly situated communities. Accomplishing this will be a
matter of political will.
To begin
with, let’s recall that the decline of fossil fuel industries will be occurring
in conjunction with the rise of the clean energy economy. In the 2014
study Green Growth, one of us (Pollin), along with co-authors,
estimated that the overall annual public and private costs of a 20-year program
to cut U.S. CO2 emissions by 40 percent would be about $200
billion per year. Of that total level of investment spending, Pollin and
co-authors estimated the annual need for public spending at around $50 billion
per year, or 25 percent of the total, with about $150 billion per year coming
from private investments encouraged by public support. This combined level of
public and private investments in clean energy projects should generate a net
expansion of about three million jobs throughout the U.S. economy, even after
we fully factor in the job losses in fossil fuel industries and related
activities.
Within this
broader clean energy investment program, policies can be designed so that
regions with larger-than-average fossil fuel industries will receive generous
support to advance regionally appropriate clean energy projects. For example,
Texas and Wyoming could receive additional support to build wind-energy production
projects. Initiatives along these lines have already begun. The Appalachian
region could receive extra support for upgrading the energy efficiency of their
building stock and electrical grid transmission system.
Previous
federal programs can serve as useful models on how to leverage this wave of
clean energy investments to also support fossil fuel–dependent communities
facing transition. There are both positive and negative lessons on which to
build. One example is the Worker and Community Transition program that operated
through the Department of Energy from 1994 to 2004. Its mission was “to
mitigate the impacts on workers and communities caused by changing Department
of Energy missions.” This program, along with related initiatives, was targeted
at 13 communities that had been heavily dependent on nuclear-industry jobs but
subsequently faced retrenchment due to nuclear decommissioning. It provided
grants as well as other forms of assistance in order to promote diversification
for these 13 affected communities and to maintain jobs or create new employment
opportunities. Appropriations for the program totaled around $200 million
annually in its initial years, but became much smaller, in the range of $20
million, in the final years of operation.
AP Photo/David Goldman
Coal miner
Johnny Turner, 35, puts his coal boots on top of his locker after finishing a
shift underground at the Perkins Branch coal mine in Cumberland, Kentucky.
Since January 2012, the state has lost more than 7,000 direct mining jobs, some
of the most lucrative in this part of the country. Mine employment in Kentucky
is at its lowest levels since the Great Depression.
A study by
John Lynch and Seth Kirshenberg in 2000 provided a generally favorable
assessment of the program. They concluded that “the 13 communities, as a
general rule, have performed a remarkable role in attracting new replacement
jobs and in cushioning the impact of the cutbacks at the energy-weapons complex
across the country.” But as Lynch and Kirshenberg note, “The most serious
problem facing the energy-impacted communities … was the lack of a basic
regional economic development and industrial diversification capacity for most
of the regions affected by the cutbacks.” To address this problem directly,
community-assistance initiatives could encourage the formation of new clean
energy businesses in the affected areas. One example of a successful
diversification program was the repurposing of a nuclear test site in Nevada to
what is now a solar proving ground. More than 25 miles of the former nuclear
site are now used to demonstrate concentrated solar-power technologies and help
bring them to commercialization.
It is not
realistic to expect that transitional programs will, in all cases, lead to
developing new economic bases that support a region’s previous level of
population and community income. In some cases, the role of community
assistance will be to enable communities, moving forward, to shrink to a size
that a new economic base can support.
It is
important to keep in mind that the extent of the overall community displacement
that will result through the clean energy transition will be no greater than
what the U.S. experienced after the end of the Cold War. Between 1987 and 1996,
1.4 million jobs were lost overall in the defense and aerospace industries, a
40 percent decline. San Diego and Philadelphia both lost around 50,000 jobs
over this period, representing declines in both cases of about 6 percent of
their respective workforces.
The federal
government did advance substantial transition programs during this period, in
particular through the Defense Reinvestment and Conversion Initiative, whose
total funding amounted to more than $16.5 billion from 1993 to 1997, or about
$4 billion per year. The 1999 study by Powers and Markusen found that these
programs were adequate in terms of overall funding levels, at about $12,000 per
displaced worker. Still, Powers and Markusen concluded that the program did not
succeed in supporting the well-being of the individual workers and their
communities. This was because the transition policies were primarily focused on
providing support for the defense-industry contractors, through the promotion
of mergers and the expansion of foreign weapons markets. The laid-off workers
often did not find the assistance necessary to make satisfactory job and career
changes.
Clearly, mounting a federal transition program, even if it is well
funded, is not a solution in itself.
Clearly,
mounting a federal transition program, even if it is well funded, is not a
solution in itself. The central challenge will be to effectively integrate
these transition programs with the coming wave of public and private
investments in energy efficiency and clean renewable energy and the millions of
new job opportunities generated by these investments.
Overall
Costs for Just Transition
The Just
Transition program that we have sketched here will require significant levels
of government spending in three areas. These include:
Retirements
at age 64 with full compensation. Our high-end estimate for this,
including workers employed in the relevant support and refining activities that
are outside the fossil fuel industry per se, is $330 million per year.
Fully
guaranteed pensions. As a high-end figure, the U.S. government will
have to spend $1.8 billion to bring the United Mine Workers of America Health
and Retirement Funds to full funding. This amounts to $90 million per year over
20 years. The figure can be lower to the extent that the coal companies can be
made to contribute toward closing their underfunding gap. The oil and gas
companies, by contrast, are still fully capable of closing their underfunding
gaps. These gaps should therefore be handled through regulatory interventions.
Community
transition. Working from the largely successful Worker and Community
Transition program, the high-end level of support would be around $200 million
per year. This would be in addition to the direct clean energy investment
projects flowing into all regions of the country. Alternatively, if we use the
less-successful Defense Reinvestment and Conversion Initiative as a financial
model, that would imply spending about $12,000 per displaced worker, amounting
to annual spending of around $150 million per year. Thus, a reasonable range
for these programs is between $150 million and $200 million per year.
Combining
these three policy areas, we approximate the total costs as being about $600
million per year over a 20-year transition period. This level of federal spending
can be readily absorbed within the broader $200 billion annual U.S. clean
energy investment program that we have sketched above, with direct public
spending in this program at around $50 billion per year. The Just Transition
program we are proposing, costing around $600 million per year, would amount to
about 1.2 percent of the $50 billion in overall public spending needed to build
a U.S. clean energy economy.
As one
option, these funds could be generated through the savings the federal
government would obtain through investments to raise efficiency standards by 30
percent in most of the buildings they own or lease, as stipulated by the 2007
Energy Independence and Security Act. These building-efficiency investments
should save the federal government about $1.3 billion per year, or more than
twice as much as would be needed for the Just Transition program. Beyond this,
establishing a carbon cap or tax to discourage fossil fuel consumption could
realistically generate about $200 billion per year. The total costs of the Just
Transition program would therefore amount to about 0.3 percent of the revenues
that could come from a carbon tax or cap.
In short, a
Just Transition for U.S. fossil fuel industry workers is eminently affordable.
It is also an imperative—both a moral and strategic imperative. It will be
virtually impossible to move forward at the pace that is necessary for a clean
energy transformation without making firm commitments to generously supporting
the workers and communities that will be hurt by this transition. To
again recall Tony Mazzocchi’s words, “Those who work with toxic materials on a
daily basis … in order to provide the world with the energy and the materials
it needs deserve a helping hand to make a new start in life.”
__________
Robert
Pollin is Distinguished Professor of Economics and co-director of
the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI) at the University of
Massachusetts Amherst. His most recent book is Greening the Global Economy.
Brian
Callaci is a UMass Amherst Ph.D. student in economics and former
researcher at Change to Win.
Links:
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to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD
21218. Ph: 410-323-1607; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
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has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
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