John Kerry’s contention that coal miners can easily shift to building solar panels undersells the challenge the Biden administration faces with its plan to accelerate a transition away from fossil fuels.
“The same people can do those jobs, but the choice of doing the solar power one now is a better choice,” Kerry said last week. “What President Biden wants to do is make sure those folks have better choices, that they have alternatives.”
Experts and analysts say the comments from Biden’s climate envoy oversimplify the task at hand and provoke fossil fuel constituencies whose buy-in the administration needs. It doesn’t help that the fossil fuel industry and the unions that represent its workers have criticized Biden’s early moves, including his suspension of federal oil and gas leases and rejection of the Keystone XL pipeline.
“It’s too glib and easy to say someone working in the mines can get a solar job. That is too simplistic,” said Jason Walsh, executive director of the BlueGreen Alliance, who led an effort by the Obama administration to help workers and towns shift away from coal. “There is a mismatch between where energy jobs are getting lost and where they are created. We have to close that gap, but we also have to be real and help economies diversify their economies in ways based on their own assets.”
Kerry was generally right about a few things.
Coal has been losing out to cleaner, cheaper fuels in recent years due to market forces. The number of coal miners in the United States has fallen from more than 80,000 in 2008 to about 44,000 today, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Wind turbine technicians and solar installers, meanwhile, are expected to be the first- and third-fastest growing jobs in the country over the next decade, the bureau said in research before the pandemic hit. But the starting numbers are relatively small, with wind turbine jobs projected to increase from 7,000 to 11,300 in 10 years, while solar installer jobs rise from 12,000 to 18,100.
Skeptical unions
Biden’s plans for 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.
There were 164,000 oil and gas extraction jobs as of December, according to the bureau.
Unions that represent fossil fuel workers are skeptical of Biden’s pitch to replace these jobs with ones in clean energy.
North America’s Building Trades Unions released a study last summer touting oil and gas jobs as being higher paid and more highly unionized than those in renewable fields. The union later endorsed Biden, citing his plan to build “sustainable infrastructure.”
Union employment in the solar and wind industries is between 4% and 6%, close to the national average, compared with up to 12% in natural gas, nuclear, and coal, according to a report last year by the Energy Futures Initiative.
“The transition will happen a lot faster and be more abrupt for coal, but we will need to get a handle on the transition from oil and gas,” said Adele Morris, a senior fellow and policy director for climate and energy economics at the Brookings Institution.
David Popp, an economist at Syracuse University, said Kerry was correct to suggest jobs involved in oil drilling, for example, are transferable to wind turbine technicians, with some basic training. Popp co-authored 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.
“It’s hard to think about intuitively, but the skills are actually a pretty good match,” Popp said. “You want to have a good match between skills of workers in the jobs that might be going away and the jobs that might be created.”
While the recovery act helped spread wind and solar by reducing their cost, Popp’s report found it did not lead to much short-term job creation in clean energy. The jobs that were created did more to enhance opportunities in areas that already had an existing clean energy industrial base.
“It’s the matching the worker and the place that’s the challenge,” Popp said.
Biden has bigger plans
Popp and Walsh, however, credited Biden with proposing a comprehensive, long-term approach to strengthening the clean energy economy.
Biden, as part of a climate change executive order that paused oil and gas leasing on federal lands, established an interagency working group to come up with ideas to help communities dependent on fossil fuels.
The working group, headed by Biden Domestic Climate Coordinator Gina McCarthy and National Economic Council Director Brian Deese, is a first step to deliver on the president’s promise to create millions of high-paying union jobs in clean energy and provide financial assistance and benefits to help ease the pain from his agenda to move off coal, oil, and gas.
Biden wants to create 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. His plans envision using workers to install new energy-efficient homes, build electric vehicle charging stations, plug leaking oil and gas wells, and reclaim old mines.
“That is a far cry of from what I was trying to do in the Obama administration,” Walsh said.
Biden, Walsh said, has sent a “totally different signal” by tasking his Cabinet agencies with devising ways to help fossil fuel communities through tools such as grant-making, federal loan programs, technical assistance, financing, and procurement.
Environmentalists take a broader view of the clean energy industry.
E2, an environmental group, counted more than 3 million jobs in clean energy industries as of 2019, including workers in wind and solar but also in building efficiency, clean vehicles, power grid modernization, and battery storage installation.
The group’s research finds clean energy jobs provide a median hourly wage of $23.89, compared to $24.37 per hour for fossil fuel extraction and $33.31 per hour for jobs at power plants that burn fossil fuels.
“There is always a risk of overpromising,” said Bob Keefe, executive director of E2. “Is every coal miner going to become a solar installer? No. Is every oil rig worker going to be a wind turbine technician? No. But if we continue to grow the clean energy industry with a focus on clean, why wouldn’t we want energy workers to continue to work in the energy industry?”
A ‘risky bet’
States and communities should not count on replacing fossil fuels jobs with clean energy ones, Walsh said.
Walsh advises the federal government work with local officials to prepare economies to support other industries such as tourism, agriculture, or manufacturing.
“It is too risky a bet for a local or regional economy to be betting on a single resource,” Walsh said.
Morris of the Brookings Institution warned states and counties should also seek to expand their revenue sources. She co-authored a 2019 report that found coal-producing counties are unprepared for the fiscal collapse to their budgets. Coal-related revenue funds a third of some counties’ budgets, and the loss of that income threatens their ability to fund school systems, support other public services, and issue and service debt.
States and counties in places such as New Mexico, North Dakota, and Wyoming are similarly dependent on oil and gas.
“Even if you bring in new business, unless there is a tax stream, it won’t help the fiscal situation,” Morris said.
Success stories
Many rural counties are already preparing for and benefiting from the growth of clean energy, according to a report last month from the Rocky Mountain Institute that cited favorable land use planning, tax policies, and training programs as reasons for growth.
About 99% of onshore wind capacity in the U.S. exists in rural counties.
Annual revenues from wind and solar projects could exceed $60 billion by 2035 through taxes, land lease payments to landowners, and employee wages, the report said. That’s more than the expected revenues from the top three U.S. agricultural commodities, corn, soy, and beef production.
“There are rural leaders who have made it work for them and are capturing these economic benefits in a way that is sustainable and wealth-creating for their communities,” said Mark Dyson of the Rocky Mountain Institute, who co-authored the report. “Wind and solar can add to rural economies and not necessarily be a trade-off.”
