Please, no more talk of green jobs. Or climate change. Let’s discuss our economic and environmental policies without euphemism, describing current and potential calamity in plain English, like Joe Romm, who prefers “hell and high water.”
The recent and starkly revised projections by MIT and NOAA, among others, indicate a catastrophically warming planet which will have clear and devastating impacts on prosperity, health, transportation, food systems, etc. It may also change the nature of work and the skills required to advance in the labor market (more on this in a later post).
Energy efficiency and renewables are a key part of any strategy to mitigate the disruptive impact of carbon-intensive economies. What’s more, with appropriate investment (R&D, infrastructure, etc.) and the policy and market signals that drive it, clean energy can be a key cross-sector job-creator. Yet it seems we have returned to stale “jobs vs. the environment” arguments. These have erupted in brutal controversies over energy resources – like Keystone XL — that are tearing apart the labor, industry, and community alliances built over the last decade around clean energy and climate change.
How do we return to a debate that focuses not on more or less short term job creation, but on what kind of energy future we want for this country, and what sort of jobs and job quality we want to see in our communities?
One of the great promises of a greener economy – in and outside of the energy sector – is a more broadly shared prosperity, led by the development of a concomitantly greener polity based on equity, sustainability, and transparent democratic institutions. A tiny but critical piece of this vision is education and training, or human capital development. The United States has a broken skill-delivery system—tens of millions of adults inadequately prepared for even the most basic post-secondary education; fragmented education and training programs poorly aligned with industry demand; a dearth of technicians and engineers. It is not the responsibility of energy industry to resolve these issues. But it is in their interest to advocate for the technically-trained workforce needed to build a robust and innovative clean energy economy.
Training, however, is not the answer for what ails the American economy. The primary challenge facing the U.S. labor market right now is not a skills shortage but a jobs shortage. Indeed, even if we perfected our workforce development systems tomorrow, it would be an inadequate response to the challenges of equity and climate disruption.
The U.S. is burdened by a dispiriting jobs deficit and record levels of long-term unemployment. This will likely become worse as climate shocks and energy prices buffet industry. The challenge is to figure out which mitigation and adaptation strategies are most likely to create jobs, how workers at all skill levels can prepare for them, and, perhaps most importantly, how the US can become a competitive clean energy leader in a way which is sustainable for workers and communities.
A key factor in sustainability in this context: job quality.
Reforming U.S. skill-delivery systems can address issues of quality work in a greening economy: a well-trained, highly skilled workforce can realize the promised savings, safety, and environmental advantages of renewable energy and energy efficiency. But it is up to industry and labor policy to deliver quality jobs — those that pay more than a poverty-level wage, have a modicum of benefits (e.g., sick leave, health coverage, etc.), and pathways, where possible, to advancement. The US labor market is notable for declining median income and the rise of dead-end, poverty-wage jobs—nearly one in three working families in the US is low-income. A more sustainable model for growth and prosperity addresses job and environmental quality together.
How can we put clean energy on the high road, creating a simultaneous response to equity and climate imperatives? Without a good answer, the long-term U.S. economic trajectory may well embody the irony essential to great tragedy: In the name of jobs, will we consign workers and communities to hell and high water?
