President Joe Biden faces an uphill battle to convince people in fossil fuel-dependent regions that his infrastructure and clean energy investment plan won’t leave coal, oil, and gas workers behind.
Leaders of nonprofit groups located in coal-dependent regions of Appalachia told the Washington Examiner that while they appreciate Biden’s attention toward helping diversify their economies, they are skeptical about the ability of the federal government to create change to stem job losses.
“There is a healthy skepticism of the promises for a new economy,” said Brandon Dennison, founder of Coalfield Development Corporation in Wayne County, West Virginia. “I see an appreciation from this administration for how hard this is going to be for fossil fuel communities, but the reality is there’s a lot of resentment. That resentment will only deepen if there is not a fast response.”
Biden’s infrastructure plan introduced Wednesday is the first big test of whether he delivers on his promise to support fossil fuel workers as he looks to phase down the use of coal, oil, and gas in the economy in order to combat climate change.
Biden is vowing not just to rebuild roads and bridges but also to spur development of solar panels, wind turbines, electric vehicles, energy-efficient homes and buildings, and power grid transmission lines while creating a domestic manufacturing supply chain of components to build them.
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Biden will introduce his green infrastructure plan in Pittsburgh, a former hub of U.S. industrial activity, where he is expected to tout the potential of creating millions of high-paying union jobs in clean energy across the country while providing financial assistance and benefits to support fossil fuel-dependent regions.
Biden, as part of a Jan. 27 climate change executive order, established an interagency working group to come up with ideas to help deliver federal resources to areas whose economies depend on coal, oil, and gas and to support workers employed by them. The group was expected to release a report to Biden 60 days from the executive order, but it has not done so yet.
But Biden’s infrastructure plan provides a preview of his approach.
Dennison said he participated in a virtual listening session convened by the working group on March 10, in which administration officials “asked a lot of the right questions.”
Biden’s efforts are intended to build on the Obama administration, which tried to prepare Appalachia against the decline of coal, the dirtiest fossil fuel that has suffered over the last decade mostly because of market competition from natural gas, which is cheaper.
In 2015, the Obama administration created the POWER initiative, meant to help retrain workers in coal-dependent areas by spending on local workforce development programs.
Biden’s aggressive climate goals of using carbon-free electricity by 2035 and achieving net-zero emissions across the economy by 2050 would largely necessitate not just moving off coal but also oil and gas, likely leading to job losses in those industries. His infrastructure plan calls on Congress to invest $40 billion for training to help “dislocated” workers transition into new clean energy jobs.
It also invests $16 billion to employ “hundreds of thousands” of fossil fuel workers to plug leaking oil and gas wells and restore and reclaim abandoned coal mines.
Dennison said retraining won’t help unless lost fossil fuel jobs are matched with new opportunities created in clean energy.
“Training doesn’t matter if it doesn’t actually lead to good quality employment,” Dennison said.
Peter Hille, the president of the Mountain Association in eastern Kentucky, said that retraining won’t help displaced coal workers who’ve already moved elsewhere because of job losses suffered since 2012, at the start of the shale gas boom.
“A lot of the miners who lost their jobs are not sitting around waiting for some workforce development,” said Hille, who also participated in the listening session with the Biden administration working group. “It can’t be a laser focus on helping the laid-off coal miners because many have moved. There is a regionwide community focus that needs to be made to create a viable economy that is sustainable.”
The National Bureau of Economic Research produced a report last year on the employment effects of the Obama administration’s spending on green job creation as part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. The researchers found it did not lead to much short-term job growth in clean energy and that the jobs that were created did more to enhance opportunities in areas that already had an existing clean energy industrial base.
“There is a mismatch between where energy jobs are getting lost and where they are created,” said Jason Walsh, executive director of the BlueGreen Alliance, who led the effort by the Obama administration to help workers and towns shift away from coal.
Walsh, however, said the Biden administration has sent a “totally different signal” by proposing a “whole of government approach” to diversifying the economies of fossil fuel-dependent areas.
“They are clear-eyed about the fact you can’t just look at the energy sector,” Walsh said. “That is why you see robust investments in the U.S. manufacturing sector in ways that are strategically targeted.”
He also credited the Biden administration for trying to “close the job quality gap” between renewable energy jobs and fossil fuel-related employment, which tends to be higher paying and more highly unionized. Biden’s infrastructure plan asks Congress to condition federal investments in clean energy with policy mechanisms requiring employers to pay prevailing wages, follow “strong labor standards,” and “remain neutral” when employees seek to unionize.
“It’s pretty hard for workers and their unions to embrace a transformation unless the jobs they are getting are the same or better,” Walsh said.
The Biden administration backs creating new jobs not just from the installation and deployment of wind and solar but also from manufacturing and federal government procurement of electric vehicles and the batteries that power them.
The infrastructure plan calls for Congress to extend an advanced manufacturing tax credit program deployed as part of the Obama-Biden Recovery Act by offering companies subsidies to build or retool manufacturing and industrial facilities in rural areas to make clean energy technologies.
It also expands tax credits for power plant producers and steel, chemical, and cement manufacturers to install carbon capture technologies on their facilities to prevent emissions from entering the atmosphere.
Dennison said he welcomed the focus on manufacturing, whose work has a similar character to jobs in fossil fuel industries.
“It’s proud work, it’s hard work, and not everyone is cut out for it,” he said.
But Hille argued it’s unrealistic in a rural, remote state like Kentucky known for its extractive industries to be able to transition into a manufacturing powerhouse.
“We aren’t going to be Pittsburgh,” Hille said. “What we are looking at is small communities, many of which existed because of resource extraction. When you think about the kind of businesses that make sense, there should be a reason for it to exist in these places.”
That’s why Hille is encouraging the Biden administration to help strengthen eastern Kentucky’s growing healthcare industry, which he said has surpassed coal in recent years, along with tourism and hospitality.
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Hille said his group, as part of a job training program, teaches local residents how to set up Airbnb rentals. He just approved a loan for an Airbnb operator trained by his program to install solar panels on its roof.
“It’s knitting all of these things together that’s important,” Hille said.
