green jobs

By Reid Frazier - Alleghany Front, May 30, 2024

A coalition of community and environmental groups is calling on the Department of Energy to suspend talks with a hydrogen hub in Appalachia and disclose more information about the project.

The Appalachian Regional Clean Hydrogen Hub, or ARCH2, was one of seven “clean hydrogen hubs” awarded by the Department of Energy last year. 

“Very little information has been shared, and the concerns have only continued to be raised by the public,” says Tom Torres, hydrogen campaign coordinator for the Ohio River Valley Institute, which wrote a letter to the agency outlining its complaints.

The hub is a consortium of companies, governments and nonprofits that will produce hydrogen from natural gas. The DOE awarded the hub up to $925 million to produce “low-carbon” hydrogen. 

But how it will do this, and where companies will build these projects, remains unclear, Torres said. 

The groups are asking the hub to disclose information like site locations for the hydrogen projects involved in ARCH 2, as well as track records of developers associated with them. They also want community groups to be involved in negotiations, planning, construction and operation of the hub. 

“[T]he Department has done little to establish the necessary conditions for ‘deep, deep partnership,’” according to the letter, which was signed by the Ohio River Valley Institute and 54 other groups. (Ohio River Valley Institute is supported by The Heinz Endowments, which also funds The Allegheny Front.)

The letter adds that the agency has offered “scant” public information about the project: “[L]ittle more than four approximate, selectively designed, preliminary maps…and project descriptions as short as three words — and no substantive opportunity to shape this proposal while negotiations continue behind closed doors,”

Jill Hunkler, executive director of Ohio Valley Allies, a community group, said in a statement that “even the most basic details” of the project are lacking. 

“Impacted communities deserve to be informed and have their voices included in the negotiation phase,” Hunkler said. “How can we take this process seriously when the DOE has yet to answer the questions presented to them by concerned citizens in our region?”

Announced last year, the hydrogen hubs were meant to kick start a low-carbon hydrogen network around the country. When used for energy, hydrogen emits no carbon dioxide. But making hydrogen from natural gas – the most common way it is manufactured – produces carbon dioxide emissions. ARCH2 developers have said they may use carbon capture technology to store those emissions and, in the process, create 21,000 jobs. 

By Anthony F. Pipa - The Brookings Institution, May 14, 2024

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By staff - Just Transition Partnership, April 4, 2024

Briefing for the debate in Scottish Parliament on 7 March on Site-specific Just Transition for Mossmorran

Since the publication of A Meaningfully Just Transition for Mossmorran in Summer 2022, progress appears to have stalled. As far as we know, none of its recommendations have been implemented. Neither national nor local government has publicly stated a commitment to lead the production of a Just Transition Plan for Mossmorran, and meanwhile the Scottish Government has repeatedly delayed its Climate Change Plan, the Energy Strategy and the sectoral Just Transition Plans.

The urgent need for regional just transition plans now appears increasingly important after the announcement by PetroIneos of its intention to close its refinery at Grangemouth which employs approximately 500 workers.

As the report pointed out “Mossmorran natural gas liquids processing plants face an uncertain future, with significant vulnerabilities due to the climate and environmental emergency”. This understanding (which applies to the Grangemouth plants as well) underlines the need to plan well in advance for a just transition which protects workers and communities and builds new green industries. Just Transition Planning should lead the process of transforming our economy, rather than being a response to crisis.

Instead of relying on market-based policies, the public sector must now lead the implementation of public policy. This requires the parallel development of coherent plans and sufficient investment. The top line responsibility lies with Government, in partnership with unions, businesses and communities, to produce transformed a vision for a better economy, in line with Climate Change targets; and clear timelines for changes in each sector. These must guide the transition.

By Norman Rogers - Jacobin, March 18, 2024

This article is adapted from Power Lines: Building a Labor-Climate Justice Movement, edited by Jeff Ordower and Lindsay Zafir (The New Press, 2024).

I have a dream. I have a nightmare.

The dream is that working people find careers with good pay, good benefits, and a platform for addressing grievances with their employers. In other words, I dream that everyone gets what I got over twenty-plus years as a unionized worker in the oil industry.

The nightmare is that people who had jobs with good pay and power in the workplace watch those gains erode as the oil industry follows the lead of steel, auto, and coal mining to close plants and lay off workers. It is a nightmare rooted in witnessing the cruelties suffered by our siblings in these industries — all of whom had good-paying jobs with benefits and the apparatus to process grievances when their jobs went away.

Workers, their families, and their communities were destroyed when the manufacturing plants and coal mines shut down, with effects that linger to this day. Without worker input, I fear that communities dependent on the fossil fuel industry face a similar fate.

This nightmare is becoming a reality as refineries in Wyoming, Texas, Louisiana, California, and New Mexico have closed or have announced pending closures. Some facilities are doing the environmentally conscious thing and moving to renewable fuels. Laudable as that transition is, a much smaller workforce is needed for these processes. For many oil workers, the choice is to keep working, emissions be damned, or to save the planet and starve.

United Steelworkers (USW) Local 675 — a four-thousand-member local in Southern California, of which I am the second vice president — is helping to chart a different course, one in which our rank-and-file membership embraces a just transition and in which we take the urgent steps needed to protect both workers and the planet. Along with other California USW locals, we are fighting to ensure that the dream — not the nightmare — is the future for fossil fuel workers as we transition to renewable energy.

By Kira McDonald, Daniel Aldana Cohen, and Ruthy Gourevitch - Climate and Community Project, March 2023

The massive backlog of deferred maintenance for public housing in the United States demands a comprehensive, holistic solution that brings every unit in the country up to the highest health and environmental standards: A Green New Deal for Public Housing. This plan would deliver healthy green upgrades and deep-energy retrofits of the nation’s public housing stock to massively increase residents' health and quality of life, finally remedy the long backlog of repairs in public housing, and eliminate all carbon pollution from public housing buildings, while creating badly needed, high quality jobs in the green economy for people in public housing communities. In so doing, a Green New Deal for Public Housing would also build on successful models in the US and abroad that have leveraged investments in public housing to accelerate green technologies throughout the buildings sector – benefiting consumers and hastening decarbonization well beyond only public housing.

Public housing is facing an existential crisis. Chronic underfunding has created the conditions for a rapid decline of units, with the loss of one out of every four public housing units in just over a decade. Our analysis shows that between 2009 and 2022, the public housing stock has shrunk from 1.2 million units to just over 900,000 as a result of demolition, privatization or other conversions from Section 9. In the context of decades-long underfunding of public housing, the Rental Assistance Demonstration (RAD) emerged as an option to address the large and growing capital repairs backlog. RAD mandates a transfer of ownership or management from PHAs to other entities, who can then circumvent restrictions associated with traditional public housing funding streams and access additional funding from which PHAs are excluded. RAD can often entail the privatization of public housing, although the new managing entity can also be a tenant association, non-profit, or a public subsidiary of the PHA. RAD has accelerated – but did not initiate – the loss of Section 9 public housing in the United States. Since RAD began in 2012, 230,000 public housing units have already been converted or are in process to convert to this alternative ownership model. 

Download a copy of this publication here (PDF).

By Lara Skinner, Fred Zalcman, Georges Sassine, Julie Tighe, and Vincent Alvarez - Cornell ILR, February 14, 2024

By Emmett Hopkins - The Climate and Community Project, February 2024

Transit plays a central role in providing access to schools, jobs, medical care, parks, grocery stores and other everyday necessities. For decades, the United States has underinvested in this essential building block for economic mobility and equitable prosperity. Transit is also a vital climate solution, providing the fastest pathway for cutting transportation emissions. Ambitious investment in reliable, fast, and affordable public transit systems will help communities flourish and support an economy that works for all.

Congressman Hank Johnson introduced a federal bill that would invest $20 billion in transit operations through a formula grant program that increases by 50% the operations funding for every recipient of the Federal Transit Administration’s existing urbanized area and rural area formula funds, and increases the federal share of operating costs for rural transit agencies from 50% to 80%.

This infusion of funds could translate into up to 230,000 new high-pay, high-quality jobs nationwide, including for transit operators and staff who work tirelessly to keep the systems moving, and also the indirect jobs set in motion by the increased economic activity.

Download a copy of this publication here (PDF).

By staff - Labor Network for Sustainability, January 30, 2024

It’s not every day that workers get to tell representatives of Congress how federal programs affect their work lives. But that’s just what happened when union members working on clean energy projects in Illinois, Maine, and New York spoke about the impact of federal climate investments in their communities to the Clean Energy Workers Roundtable hosted by the House Sustainable Energy and Environment Coalition (SEEC).

Kilton Webb, a member of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) Local 567 told the Roundtable how his union is training clean energy workers in Maine:

I’m in my final year as an apprentice, and after five years, I have put in 8,000 work hours on commercial, industrial, and solar fields. The work is hard, but rewarding because I am part of this new clean energy industry that is doing great things for the state of Maine. It’s also exciting because of the potential of having more union jobs ready for the next generation of workers. Students who were in middle and high school when I started my journey of becoming an electrician are now apprentices that I work with and teach every day.

By staff - Local Clean Energy Alliance, January 18, 2024

By Raidin Blue and Betsy Agar - Pembina Institute, January 17, 2024

Canada’s buildings sector is the third-largest contributor to the country’s emissions at 87 Mt CO₂e. That’s 13% of the total. Retrofitting existing buildings is the only climate action that can both drive down emissions and protect Canadians from weather events that are increasing in severity and frequency as our climate changes.

A deep retrofit goes beyond simple renovations, encompassing upgrades to various building systems and equipment, including the envelope, HVAC, lighting and building controls. Retrofits could also integrate renewable energy systems to enhance sustainability by reducing reliance on grid electricity, especially while Canada’s electricity grid continues to decarbonize, thus freeing up grid capacity to enable electrification of other sectors of the economy.

Work on retrofits needs to go deeper and scale up until 4% to 6% of Canada’s building stock is being decarbonized yearly if we are to meet our 2050 decarbonization goals. Investment in retrofitting is an investment in local economies and jobs, and an opportunity to grow the workforce by improving access to equity-deserving groups. The research in this report aims to support the supply chain needed to make these deep retrofits happen.

Recommendations

• Recommendation 1: Provide market certainty by implementing regulations that require deep building decarbonization.
• Recommendation 2: Drive demand by clarifying the benefits of deep retrofits, helping to build trust in industry, and helping reduce complexity.
• Recommendation 3: Work with utilities and other levels of government to increase grants and incentives to help reduce the high cost of innovative, low-carbon technologies used in deep retrofits that is holding back market growth.
• Recommendation 4: Foster a more inclusive industry culture and practice by raising awareness and removing barriers to access for equity-deserving groups, and by requiring the employment of equity-deserving groups.

Download a copy of this publication here (PDF).