Labor & Environmental Groups Finding Common Ground

The labor movement and environmental groups have not always been the best of friends. Labor tended to view environmental regulations as impediments to construction, auto manufacturing, and other activities that provided good jobs that paid well.

Both sides seem to be moving beyond that old construct. One clear sign of the determination to work together to hasten the transition to a low-carbon economy is the BlueGreen Alliance. It was founded by the United Steelworkers and the Sierra Club, a duo that its executive director, Jason Walsh, describes as the “original odd bedfellows.”

The Alliance has grown to include 14 major national and international unions and environmental groups that collectively represent about 50 million Americans. The guiding principle that keeps these groups together is a belief that Americans shouldn’t have to choose between good jobs and a clean environment; we can and must have both.

Research by the International Labour Organization (ILO) and the Worldwide International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) documented that employment in renewable energy reached 12.7 million in 2021, a jump of 700,000 new jobs in one year, despite the lingering effects of COVID-19 and the growing energy crisis.

Solar photovoltaic (PV) has so far provided the biggest share of renewable energy jobs (4.3 million), followed by hydropower and biofuels (2.4 million each), and wind power (1.3 million). Other sectors like geothermal, heat pumps and ocean energy make up the rest of the jobs growth. 

Guy Ryder, who recently completed ten years as ILO’s director-general, said; “Beyond the numbers, there is a growing focus on the quality of jobs and the conditions of work in renewable energies, to ensure decent and productive employment. The increasing share of female employment suggests that dedicated policies and training can significantly enhance the participation of women in renewable energy occupations, inclusion and ultimately, achieve a just transition for all. I encourage governments, workers’ and employers’ organizations to remain firmly committed to a sustainable energy transition, which is indispensable for the future of work.”

Of course, there can be friction between labor and the environmental movement. “Permitting and siting certainly is a tension point that we are working through,” Walsh told Dan Gearino of Inside Climate News, “particularly with all of these new investments coming online. That requires us as a country to build a lot of stuff at speed and scale, and figuring out a position for our coalition that honors and protects our existing environmental laws, while also building out a lot of infrastructure, is a needle that we have to thread. 

“We are working internally right now to be able to put forward a unified position on permitting reform, and particularly focusing on transmission, which all of our labor and environmental partners recognize is absolutely a critical part of realizing the climate benefits of the investments from the Inflation Reduction Act.”

Another challenge for the alliance, Walsh told Inside Climate News, is the pay gap. “We were and still are—because the law hasn’t fully kicked in yet—seeing significant gaps in wages between workers in renewable energy sectors and workers and fossil fuel sectors. And that’s a big problem. It’s an equity problem, and it is a political problem. And we certainly can’t expect workers to accept the necessity of this transition if their jobs are going away, or they’re getting other jobs in clean energy sectors that pay less and offer less voice on the job and security on the job. So, our push for clean energy investments with strong labor and equity standards was an enormous unifier.”

As implementation of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) continues, there will be more and more opportunities for labor and environmental groups to cooperate on the energy transition. Of course, that transition would occur more rapidly if Congress put an honest price on carbon.

Wind & solar power ride to the rescue in Texas

You probably know that Texas, a hot place, has been dangerously hot recently. Many parts of the Lone Star State have routinely had highs exceeding 100 degrees, and the heat index, which includes humidity, climbed as high as 125 degrees in some Gulf Coast cities.

Fortunately, the state has been able to meet skyrocketing power demands, thanks to renewable energy sources. The amount of solar energy generated in Texas has doubled since the start of last year, The New York Times’ David Goodman reported. “And it is set to roughly double again by the end of next year, according to data from the Electric Reliability Council of Texas. Already, the state rivals California in how much power it gets from commercial solar farms, which are sprouting across Texas at a rapid pace, from the baked-dry ranches of West Texas to the booming suburbs southwest of Houston.”

So far this year, about 7 percent of the electric power used in Texas has come from solar, and 31 percent from wind.

Solar energy and batteries played a large role in preventing power outages during the latest heat wave—even as other energy sources struggled to stay online, Kristoffer Tigue wrote in Inside Climate News.

“Yesterday at 6:31CT, one of the four nuclear units in Texas stopped producing power,” Doug Lewin, an energy consultant and president of Austin-based Stoic Energy, wrote on Twitter June 16. “A new fast acting backup reserve (ECRS, which is mostly batteries) stabilized the grid and prevented bigger problems.”

“Renewables are definitely saving the grid and saving our wallets,” said Alison Silverstein, an independent energy consultant based in Austin, referring to the impact on electricity prices.

Texas still trails California in the amount of solar power on the roofs of homes. But in the growth of solar farms, it has been rapidly outstripping the Golden State, Goodman reported in The Times. In Fort Bend County, outside Houston, there are now six large solar farms, up from one in 2020.

Some of the credit goes to former Gov. Rick Perry, a Republican who helped establish Texas as the leading state for wind power. He backed a multibillion-dollar effort in 2005 to create transmission lines to bring power from the windy western part of the state to the major population centers.

Unfortunately, the oil and gas industry remains so politically strong in Texas that the Republican-dominated State Senate passed several bills in the spring that contained provisions that would add new costs and regulations to the solar and wind industries and severely limit the number of new projects in the state, energy experts told The Times. Those bills failed to pass before the legislative session ended, but they are likely to be reintroduced when the Senate reconvenes.

“Renewables have proved a favorite scapegoat for any problems with Texas’s power system — even when they’re actually the key to alleviating those problems,” columnist Catherine Rampell wrote recently. 

Thanks to the Inflation Reduction Act’s incentives for development of solar and wind energy, other states may be able to catch up with Texas. The transition would be even swifter if Congress taxed carbon dioxide emissions.

CHINA AND THE U.S. MUST FIND A WAY TO TEAM UP TO COMBAT CLIMATE CHANGE

“We ultimately can’t solve climate change without China. It’s by far the largest emitter in the world,” Joanna Lewis, a China specialist at Georgetown University, told The Washington Post. 

And at times, China and the U.S. have risen above the challenges posed by their economic and geopolitical rivalry. At a UN climate conference in Glasgow in 2021, a joint U.S.-Chinese pledge to cooperate on climate issues helped push other negotiators toward a more ambitious final agreement, diplomats said at the time.

But there have been many ups and downs. As The New York Times’ Peter Baker wrote recently, “at an international climate change conference early in his administration, President Barack Obama confronted a senior Chinese official who offered what the American delegation considered a weak commitment. Mr. Obama dismissed the offer. Not good enough.”

The Chinese official “erupted,” Baker wrote, relying on an oral history produced by Columbia University. “What do you mean that’s not good enough? Why isn’t that good enough?” The official mentioned a past conversation he had had with John Kerry, then a Democratic senator. “I talked to Senator Kerry, and Senator Kerry said that was good enough.” Baker wrote that Obama “looked at him evenly and said, ‘Well, Senator Kerry is not president of the United States.’”

Can the two nations find a way to cooperate on climate? “Today we’re faced with a really complex geopolitical environment. And I don’t think that the U.S. government has a clear understanding of how climate fits within its overall strategy toward China,” said Kelly Sims Gallagher, a professor at the Fletcher School at Tufts University who was a senior adviser on Chinese climate issues under Obama.

She suggested that the Chinese may be using climate as a bargaining chip to achieve other gains in its overall relationship with Washington. “Climate is understood by China to be something the U.S. wants, and it's using climate as a source of leverage in the multifaceted relationship,” she told The Washington Post.

Kerry, who now serves as special presidential envoy for climate, said recently that he had been invited to China in the “near term” to keep talking about climate issues.

China’s climate performance is a mix of good and bad. Regrettably, provincial governments approved more coal-fired power plants in the first three months of 2023 than they did in all of 2021, according to Greenpeace East Asia. 

But China also installed a record amount of solar power capacity last year — and this year alone is set to install more than the entire existing solar capacity of the United States.

To nudge China to reduce emissions and act more ambitiously on climate, the Biden administration has started to explore other tools, including tariffs that would be linked to the carbon footprint of Chinese imports, reported The Post’s Michael Birnbaum and Christian Shepherd.

Such tariffs could be an effective long-term incentive for Chinese manufacturers to invest in cleaner technology and research to lower emissions in steel, aluminum and other exports, said Philippe Benoit, a scholar at the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University.

That idea has raised hackles in China, which contends that tariffs would be less about battling climate change than about blunting Chinese trade. A tariff would “primarily be intended to protect domestic industrial competitiveness,” said Sun Yongping, director of the Global Climate Governance Research Center at Huazhong University of Science and Technology. If implemented, it would “cast a shadow” over U.S.-China climate cooperation and damage mutual trust by creating challenges for Chinese exports, he said.

One way or another, the two giants must find a way to work together. “It would be a huge missed opportunity for the U.S. to not be engaging in one of the few areas where we can have constructive conversations with China,” said Georgetown’s Lewis.

Climate change threatens our homes and insurers

“An era of complacency is ending. If you decide to buy that condo where you can hear the ocean’s waves, realize that you are likely to pay more for that privilege — one way or the other.” That’s how Benjamin Keys, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, put it in a recent New York Times op-ed. “We have reached a turning point,” he wrote. “Climate risk is driving insurer decisions like never before.”

In 2021, the structural damage from wildfires, floods, and other climate-related disasters totaled $145 billion, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. In recent years, insurers have been paying claims for about 20 disasters a year with damages of over $1 billion, a sixfold increase from the 1980s.

Not all insurance companies can handle that level of claims. “Ten insurers have gone belly up in Florida in just the last two years,” Keys pointed out. “And in many cases, insurers are pulling back in risky areas, leaving state-backed insurance plans holding the bag. Both private and government-backed insurers are undercapitalized for dealing with the potentially massive disasters we could be facing in coming years.” 

Not surprisingly, premiums are rising even more quickly than other expenses in this country. Between 2021 and 2022, 90 percent of homeowners saw an increase in their home insurance premiums, according to a Policygenius report.

To save money, some people who are at risk of flooding do not buy flood insurance. It’s estimated, Keys wrote, that only one-third of households in flood zones have flood insurance — “with many risking financial ruin if the ‘big one’ hits.”

“Most homeowners should care about climate change and the potential impact on their families and property,” John Berkowitz told The Washington Post’s Michele Lerner. Berkowitz is the founder and CEO of OJO Labs, a real estate technology firm that owns the Movoto listing site in Austin, Texas. Lack of knowledge about climate risk makes it difficult for buyers to recognize that their home could be more costly to maintain, more expensive to insure, and more exposed to damage and possible destruction from a storm or fire, Lerner wrote.

There’s a way to estimate the environmental risks of your property: Use the Risk Factor tool created by First Street Foundation.

Of course, all of us who have insurance have a stake in this problem. As Keys explained, “To have the necessary buffer to pay out claims after catastrophic losses, insurers will need more reserves and more reinsurance, and they will pass those costs on to policyholders in the form of higher premiums. That includes policyholders who live well out of harm’s way. The year after the Marshall fire destroyed over 1,000 homes and caused over $2 billion in damage near Boulder, Colorado, average premiums rose over 17 percent statewide.”

The smartest way to reduce such risks is to reduce carbon dioxide and methane emissions–and the quickest way to do that is to put an honest price on those emissions. Please urge your senators and representative to support a carbon tax.

There's progress on curbing methane, but we need to move more quickly

In 2022, the global energy industry released into the atmosphere some 135 million tons of methane - a potent greenhouse gas responsible for roughly a third of the rise in global temperatures since the industrial revolution.

To address this huge problem, the Global Methane Pledge was launched at COP26 in November 2021. Led by the United States and the European Union, the Pledge now has 111 country participants who together are responsible for 45 percent of global human-caused methane emissions. By joining the Pledge, countries commit to work together to reduce these emissions by at least 30 percent below 2020 levels by 2030. 

Congress also took a significant step in this fight. As The Atlantic’s Emma Marris reported, the Inflation Reduction Act, which became law in August, contained one sizable stick tucked amongst a lot of carrots: a methane fee. It applies only to large oil and gas facilities with significant emissions. According to the Congressional Research Service, “This charge is the first time the federal government has directly imposed a charge, fee, or tax on [greenhouse-gas] emissions.”

Last November EPA proposed rules that agency chief Michael Regan said would reduce flaring—a technique used by gas producers to burn off excess methane from oil and natural-gas wells. Owners would be required to monitor abandoned wells for methane emissions and plug any leaks, he said.

Unfortunately, some congressional Republicans want to eliminate the tax on methane emissions. A provision doing just that is part of H.R. 1, the broad energy bill passed March 30 by the House. The legislation is not expected to win Senate approval.

Is the oil and gas industry cooperating with efforts to reduce methane emissions? The United Nations’s voluntary oil and gas reporting and mitigation program, the Oil and Gas Methane Partnership 2.0 now includes some 100 companies with assets on five continents, representing more than 35 percent of the world's oil and gas production. U.S. oil and gas companies are expressing increasing interest in mitigating methane emissions, considering it a relatively easy climate change solution and good business for making their gas cleaner to global buyers sensitive to the emissions intensity of their gas supplies. There are critics, however, who maintain that the industry is moving too slowly.

Agriculture, including livestock, is another major source of methane emissions, generating about a third of the total. Last month, the French food company Danone, owner of milk and yogurt brands like Activia and Horizon Organics, pledged to cut absolute methane emissions from its milk supply chains by 30 percent by 2030, making it the first major food company with a methane-specific emissions target. 

In Hadley, Massachusetts, Barstow’s Longview Farm is helping businesses turn food waste into clean energy through an anaerobic digester. The machine takes methane from cow manure and food waste and turns it into enough electricity to power 1,600 homes, The Boston Globe explained.

Another hopeful sign is improved tracking of emissions. The UN’s environment watchdog plans to launch a public database of global methane leaks detected by space satellites. The UN is calling it MARS or Methane Alert and Response System.

Next year, Harvard Professor Steven Wofsy, working with the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) and others plan to launch a satellite that they say is more precise than other methane-sensing satellites. Named MethaneSAT, it will allow scientists to track emissions to their sources and provide key data for reduction efforts.

Of course, carbon dioxide emissions remain the number-one concern as we struggle to combat climate change. But reducing methane emissions is essential.