Leading Off: Transforming Energy Systems

If you read our Guiding Philosophy, you noted this passage:

Just Transition means evaluating how energy, and other social goods (such as clean water and clear air), are equally shared. In the future, access to electricity will increasingly require broad democratic rights to establish more publicly-owned energy resources to deliver energy at affordable local prices. To fashion such a paradigm will mean nationalizing large portions of the emerging “green” industries—and that goal should be pursued now.

There is a good reason to link “high bar” Just Transition for workers together with the question of how energy systems will operate in a de-carbonized world:

• Working to create publicly-owned energy resources—power plants and the like—will strengthen alliances with the community voices who would be vital allies in advocating for a “high bar” Just Transition for workers;
• It makes economic sense—cheaper, affordable energy, which would be a fairly predictable outcome when energy is publicly-owned, means lesser of a hit to the pocketbooks of workers who are facing job losses or are in the midst of a transition to a good job (not to mention, cheaper energy helps people generally);
• More democratically-run energy systems set up a greater likelihood that unions will find at the bargaining table a more cooperative environment to reach fair collective agreements, though no one should be entirely naive to assume friction will be absent entirely in an inherently adversarial process (note “adversarial” is not the same thing as “hostile”—it simply means parties represent different interests).

For consideration, here are two views that explain how energy transformation is a crucial element of Just Transition.

From Southern Africa, we recommend an important paper “Defining A Just Transition For Sub-Saharan Energy Workers”, which found that “for each one-million US dollars invested in renewable energies, 292 jobs can be created compared to 129 in the fossil fuel sectors.” And:

The unique energy context in the region will experience a combination of these impacts. In many countries where fossil fuels are not dominant or with an immense energy backlog, renewable energy can create new jobs that did not exist before. In such scenarios, the employment impact will be the highest. New jobs will be created, and the transition cost will be the lowest. In countries where hydropower is dominant, the diversification of the energy mix can also lead to additional job creation. In coal-producing countries such as South Africa, jobs will be lost without intervention. The challenge in the region is thus twofold. While it is about replacing old jobs with decent jobs, it is also about negotiating for new decent jobs. [emphasis added]

In other words, energy transformation is not just about shifting the technical aspect of how we get our power. Energy transformation has to fold in a plan to create decent jobs.

On the other side of the globe, Puerto Rico has been rocked by natural and economic crisis for at least five years—hurricanes simply fed off existing poverty. In arguing very recently for energy transformation on the island, Ruth Santiago, a member of the White House Environmental Justice Council, wrote. 

The sun’s energy is abundant in Puerto Rico. In fact, a study from National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) found that Puerto Rico’s rooftop solar energy potential is more than four times the total energy usage of the entire archipelago.

Biden has taken an important step to advance an energy transformation in Puerto Rico. He recently gave Granholm authority to supervise federal resources for the electric system while driving a plan for renewable energy transformation.  Granholm must make sure the federal funds are only used for a climate-resilient plan that prioritizes a transition to rooftop solar and battery storage systems.

Note the focus on moving the island to “green” technologies, specifically to take advantage of the abundance of solar power. To underscore again, it isn’t inherently guaranteed that energy transformation automatically translates into better jobs and a “high bar” Just Transition. That is something workers, and unions, have to insist on, especially when “green” jobs are, to date, paying less than unionized jobs in virtually any fossil fuel-related industry.

But, the conversation about energy transformation, and the likely partners who are sitting at the table of that debate, make it more likely than not that a “high bar” can be achieved.

SPONSOR MESSAGE

A message from the Australian Mining And Energy Union

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Spotlight: A Just Transition Road Map For Unions, Part II

In our last newsletter, we explored how unions can structure powerful coalitions, drawing the key steps from a central section found in “A trade union guide of practice for a Just Transition”,  which is a road map for unions to build Just Transition campaigns. Today, we dip into another linchpin of Just Transition campaigns for workers: educating members, or, in similar parlance used by others, building capacity.

Simply put, without the buy-in from members, a campaign will struggle to gain traction. We note that union leaders are often faced with a conundrum: on the one hand, winning a “high bar” Just Transition is a long slog, requiring a plan and commitment of many years. On the other hand, if a country’s net zero goal is far in the future—for example, India, whose government now circles 2050 as the year to reach that goal—then, many current members, especially those aged forty and above, may take the view that it’s not a pressing problem since older members might think “I will likely be long retired before jobs begin evaporating.”

So, education is crucial.

The Guide offers this rough outline to build capacity among members:

Among the topics to address in presentations, group meetings, newsletters and webinars:

• The basic idea of the Just Transition concept.
• The basic concept of a high-bar Just Transition. Members need to know what the current situation is and what the goal is, and what future that they should want and demand.
• The status of the Just Transition discussion in the country and within the company/sector.
• The status of renewable energies and the possibility of employment in renewable energy industries, and the wages and benefits in those industries.
• The availability and prospects for job re-training.
• The broader social community interest and need for Just Transition.
• A vision for better jobs, not just any jobs, which also grapples with gender inequality.
• If the company is using the Just Transition term, members need to understand whether the company is offering a real Just Transition plan or
  is just using the Just Transition rhetoric to appear responsive to the climate crisis. We can only talk about Just Transition if it involves workers and their representatives. If not, they are only talking about transition without the just element.
• The union should also educate leaders and delegates to become Just Transition trainers who can guide members through the process once job
  losses actually occur, especially in directing workers to the strongest options for re-skilling and retraining for future jobs. This will set up better outcomes for workers, rather than workers having to rely solely on government or company programs that may be underfunded or inadequate to the task of identifying future jobs.
• The union should create a helpdesk and/or a list of knowledgeable contacts that any worker can call at the local and regional level if she or he has questions about their job or the Just Transition plan.

Ideas: Willy Sutton Would Salivate Over The Wallets of Carbon Billionaires

You may have heard this story. Willy Sutton, a famous bank robber, was once asked why he robbed banks. His answer: “Because that’s where the money is”.

We thought of this wise piece of advice—apocryphal as it might be—in sifting through a report from Oxfam entitled “Carbon billionaires: The investment emissions of the world’s richest people”, which came through just as COP27 was convening, a gathering where, in fact, the main question is: where will the money come from for adaptation/remediation especially for less fiscally robust countries.

The summary of Oxfam’s report:

Opinion: The Boundless Bull and Just Transition—RIP Herman Daly

Long before the debate over the future of the planet was awash in piles of reports, theories and analysis, Herman Daly stepped forward with a broad theory about what ails the planet. Daly was a senior economist at the World Bank but left the institution, which tried unsuccessfully to muzzle him. Essentially, Daly believed that the very culture of the “free market” and a culture that worshipped constant economic growth was harming the planet, and not aiding the people. In many ways, his views were far ahead of his times, coming before “climate change” was broadly accepted as an existential threat.

Though Daly didn’t specifically opine about “high bar” Just Transition, I am going to take the relatively simple leap to assume he would embrace the concept. Daly passed away very recently at the age of 84.

Perhaps his most memorable short essay that I read—a synopsis of his ideas incorporated in a series of phenomenal books—captured the crisis in what he called the culture of the Boundless Bull. Daly, once a free-trader, saw the Merrill Lynch bull as the metaphor for the U.S. economy.

He wrote:

“If you want to know what is wrong with the American economy it is not enough to go to graduate school, read books, and study statistical trends-you also have to watch TV. Not the Sunday morning talking-head shows or even documentaries, and especially not the network news, but the really serious stuff-the commercials…One such ad opens with a bull trotting along a beach. He is a very powerful animal—nothing is likely to stop him. And since the beach is empty as far as the eye can see, there is nothing that could even slow him down. A chorus in the background intones: ‘to…know…no…boundaries…’ The bull trots off into the sunset…Finally we see the bull silhouetted against a burgundy sunset, standing in solitary majesty atop a mesa overlooking a great empty southwestern desert…”

“The message is clear: Merrill Lynch wants to put you into an individualistic, macho, world without limits-the U.S. economy. The bull, of course, also symbolizes rising stock prices and unlimited optimism, which is ultimately based on this vision of an empty world where strong, solitary individuals have free reign…Why do they want you to believe it, or at least be influenced by it at a subconscious level? Because what they are selling is growth, and growth requires empty space to grow into. Solitary bulls don’t have to share the world with other creatures, and neither do you! Growth means that what you get from your bullish investments does not come at anyone else’s expense. In a world with no boundaries the poor can get richer while the rich get richer even faster. Our politicians find the boundless bull cult irresistible.”

Daly believed that we fail to distinguish between a growing economy that gets bigger versus a developing economy that gets better:

“An economy can therefore develop without growing, or grow without developing…The advantage of defining growth in terms of change in physical scale of the economy is that it forces us to think about the effects of a change in scale and directs attention to the concept of an ecologically sustainable scale, or perhaps even of an optimal scale.’ He sums up by arguing that “the apt image for the U.S. economy, then, is not the boundless bull on the empty beach, but the proverbial bull in the china shop. The boundless bull is too big and clumsy relative to its delicate environment. Why must it keep growing when it is already destroying more than its extra mass is worth? Because (1) We fail to distinguish growth from development, and we classify all scale expansion as ‘economic growth’ without even recognizing the possibility of ‘anti-economic growth’-i.e. growth that costs us more at the margin; (2) we refuse to fight poverty by redistribution and sharing, or by controlling our own numbers, leaving ‘economic’ growth as the only acceptable cure for poverty. But once we are beyond the optimal scale and growth makes us poorer rather than richer, even that reason becomes absurd.”

He was, in many ways, ahead of his time. And his words are worth keeping front-of-mind as we try to repair the damage to the planet.

By Jonathan Tasini

Tasini is the founder and executive director of Just Transition For All

Links

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