Pennsylvania

By Christina E. Simeone, PhD - Union of Concerned Scientists, March 2023

Following the explosion of a Philadelphia oil refinery, the refinery went bankrupt and closed.

The explosion and closure left community members grappling with toxic pollution, cleanup, worker dislocation, and an uncertain future for a site that occupied 1,300 acres just 2.5 miles from center city Philadelphia.

In a report commissioned by the Union of Concerned Scientists, Dr. Christina Simeone, author of the Penn Energy Center report, Beyond Bankruptcy: The Outlook for Philadelphia’s Neighborhood Refinery, highlights key findings and shares lessons learned from the events in Philadelphia.

These lessons can help policymakers and other refinery communities prepare for future refinery closures, especially as the transition to electric vehicles inevitably leads to dramatic reductions in demand for gasoline and diesel in the coming decades.

Download a copy of this publication here (link).

By Joe Goodenbery, Eliasid Animas, and Jennifer Gorman - Ohio River Valley Institute, December 12, 2022

This report describes the development and analysis of a clean energy pathway for a 10-county region in southwestern Pennsylvania. Due to its abundance of fossil fuel resources, the region has a long history of substantial energy production, often at the expense of local environmental quality and economic diversity. A transition to clean energy provides a compelling opportunity to transform the local energy profile, while ending the region’s overreliance on fossil fuels, to reduce emissions and pursue a path of sustainable growth.

To date, the prevailing narrative for decarbonizing this region has centered around the perpetuation of the natural gas industry and costly investments in carbon capture and storage (CCS) technologies and infrastructure. Strategen’s analysis provides an alternative focused primarily on zero emissions resources, energy efficiency, increased electrification, and leveraging clean energy imports from outside the region, while minimizing the local need for fossil fuels.

Key Takeaways from this study:

• A renewables-based pathway, including energy efficiency and clean energy imports from the PJM market, is more cost-effective than continued reliance on fossil fuels. A strategy focused on natural gas and carbon capture will be 13% more costly than the clean energy pathway, which avoids expensive investments in CCS technologies to reduce emissions, while limiting the region’s exposure to fuel price volatility and mitigating the risk of stranded fossil fuel assets.
• In the developed decarbonization pathway, all coal plants and a significant portion of natural gas plants in the region will retire or reduce output by 2035, drastically reducing emissions going forward. A limited portion of natural gas plants may be kept online as capacity or peaking resources and to ensure reliability, though clean dispatchable resources could potentially serve this role in the future, as technology progresses.
• The clean energy pathway results in a 97% reduction in CO₂ emissions from the power sector by 2050, leading to environmental benefits of nearly $2.7 billion annually. These benefits are greater than those associated with strategies built around natural gas and CCS, furthering the case for the clean energy pathway as a least cost option for energy transition.
• Deep electrification of the transportation and buildings sectors can directly lower regional CO₂ emissions from these sectors by 95%. The total annual value of environmental and health benefits associated with combined reductions from the power, buildings, and transportation sectors reaches $4.2 billion in 2050, through avoided social costs.
• Through reduced reliance on natural gas for power generation and in buildings, Strategen’s decarbonization pathway will decrease natural gas consumption by 96% and 98%, respectively, for two these sectors by 2050. Lower consumption provides an opportunity to reduce emissions associated with natural gas extraction. The value of these avoided emissions would surpass $1 billion in 2050 alone.
• Energy efficiency is projected to increase over time, reducing regional electricity load by an average of 2.6% each year of the study period. Combined with electrification, the clean energy pathway results in overall load growth of 33% by 2050.
• Efficiency measures not only reduce load, emissions, and the need for additional generation, but also lead to local job creation and savings for consumers. Expenditures on efficiency and resulting residential bill savings support 12,416 total jobs in 2035, and 15,353 total jobs by 2050. Compared to both power generation and fossil fuel extraction, energy efficiency has a greater potential for local economic development, leading to more, higher-paying jobs served by workers and suppliers within the region.

Download a copy of this publication here (Link).

By Jessica Corbett - Common Dreams, September 19, 2022

"Their false claims do not add up and cannot be allowed to stall a rapid transition to 100% clean, renewable energy," says the Food & Water Watch report.

A Food & Water Watch report released Monday undermines the fossil fuel industry's claims about its positive impact on employment, showing that as oil and gas giants ramped up production and raked in record profits at the planet's expense, jobs have declined.

The advocacy group's fact sheet—titled Oil Profits and Production Grow at the Expense of Jobs, Consumers, and the Environment—comes as scientists continue to call for a swift transition to clean energy and critics around the world accuse the fossil fuel industry of war profiteering.

"The oil and gas industry would rather pay shareholders than workers," said Food & Water Watch (FWW) senior researcher Oakley Shelton-Thomas. "It should be clear by now that more production means more pollution, but it hasn't meant lower prices or more jobs."

By Jeremy Brecher - Labor Network for Sustainability, July 2022

People are acting at the local and state level to create jobs, reduce greenhouse gas pollution, and equalize transportation by expanding and electrifying public transit, electrifying cars and trucks, and making it safe to walk and bike. It’s a crucial part of building the Green New Deal from Below.

More than a quarter of greenhouse gases [GHGs) emitted in the US come from transportation – more than from electricity or any other source.[1] Pollution from vehicles causes a significant excess in disease and death in poor communities. Lack of transportation helps keep people in poor communities poor.

Proposals for a Green New Deal include many ways to reduce the climate, health, and inequality effects of a GHG-intensive transportation system. “Transit Oriented Development” (TOD), “smart growth,” and other forms of metropolitan planning reduce climate-and-health threatening emissions while providing more equal access to transportation. Switching from private vehicles to public transit reduces GHG emissions by more than half and substantially reduces the pollution that causes asthma and other devastating health effects in poor communities. Changing from fossil fuel to electric vehicles also greatly reduces emissions. Expanded public transit fights poverty and inequality by providing improved access to good jobs. And expansion of transit itself almost always creates a substantial number of good, often union jobs. Every $1 billion invested in public transit creates more than 50,000 jobs.[2]

Plans for a Green New Deal generally include substantial federal resources to help transform our transportation system.[3] The 2021 “bipartisan” Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act provided $20 billion over the next five years for transit projects. But meanwhile, efforts at the community, local, and state level have already started creating jobs reducing transportation pollution – models of what we have called a Green New Deal from Below.[4]

These Green New Deal from Below programs are often characterized by multiple objectives – for example, protecting the global climate, improving local health, providing jobs, and countering inequality. And they often pursue concrete ways to realize multiple goals, such as “transit-oriented development” that builds housing near transit to simultaneously shift travel from cars to public transit and to expand access to jobs and urban amenities for people in low-income communities.

By April Siese - Daily Kos, April 20, 2022

Way back when I was splitting my working time freelance writing and working live events, I signed on with an audio-visual company that provides services to hotels. It was considered the retirement gig for production folks, as there was no touring involved and very little stress. As a lighting designer, my job consisted of gussying up a ballroom in corporate colors and making sure the lights I used to illuminate a podium made presenters look good. All that gear came from a warehouse, run by a cherished coworker who used to lovingly chide me for wearing ballet flats on show days because they weren’t exactly as safe as steel-toes. He stood up for me when there did come an opportunity to work out of town and I was the only woman on the gig. And he was known for his relentless work ethic, which was just as strong as his belief in the people around him. That relentlessness may have cost him his life.

A lawsuit has been brought on behalf of this friend, who likely succumbed to heatstroke one blazing summer day in the New Orleans metro and ultimately passed away. The company claimed it was heart-related. Rumblings from his friends and colleagues made it clear: It was likely heat-related.

There’s little recourse for workers who die from extreme temperatures, which have been made much worse due to climate change. As Mother Jones notes in a recent report, median penalties for on-the-job deaths stand at just $12,144 for federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) plans. State OSHA plans typically penalize companies with median fines of just $6,899 for worker deaths. For companies like the one I worked at, with revenues in excess of $40 million, a penalty like that certainly wouldn’t inspire a whole lot of change. Not that enforcement has even come close to allowing for such penalties to be incurred in the first place: As the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) notes, underreporting of such tragedies is altogether too common.

By Wenonah Hauter - In These Times, February 14, 2022

For years now, any discussion about climate action or the need to move off fossil fuels has run headlong into a familiar quandary: The industries fueling the climate crisis create good jobs, often in areas of the country where finding work that can support a family is incredibly difficult. 

This leaves activists gesturing towards well-intentioned goals like a ​“just transition,” a promise that likely rings hollow for workers and many labor unions because it’s hard to see where this has actually happened — even though, by every measure, we need to create some real policies that turn this vision into reality. While there are encouraging examples of labor unions throwing their support behind robust climate plans, it has proven difficult for the climate movement to find its way out of the jobs versus environment framing. 

But that is especially true when we refuse to question the original premise. The truth is that the fossil fuel industry wildly inflates its employment record, and the recent data show they are producing more fuel with fewer workers. Instead of avoiding this reality, perhaps it is time to tackle it head on. Dirty energy corporations are not creating jobs as much as they are cutting them these days, and that provides an opening to envision the kinds of employment — in areas like orphaned well clean up and energy efficiency — that will provide employment for the thousands of workers the industry is no longer employing. 

Some of the most common jobs estimates are produced by the American Petroleum Institute (API), the powerful oil and gas trade association. Over the years, API has released reports claiming that the domestic fracking industry creates somewhere between 2.5 million to 11 million jobs, both directly and indirectly. These numbers — or versions of them — are floated in political debates and in the media, but they are significantly out of step with other estimates, including the federal government’s labor reports. Food & Water Watch, an organization I founded, created a more accurate model that relies on direct jobs and relevant support activities, including pipeline construction and product transportation. The total comes to just over 500,000 in 2020, or about 0.4 percent of all jobs in the country. 

How to explain the massive gap between industry propaganda and reality? The API figures include a range of employment categories; in addition to direct industry employment, they add indirect jobs (those within a supply chain) and induced jobs (those that are supposedly ​‘supported’ by direct and indirect jobs). These categories make up the vast majority of their total. Convenience store workers, for example — working where gas happens to be sold — make up almost 35 percent of the industry’s supposed employment record.

By Dan Bacher - CounterPunch, January 28, 2022

The Western States Petroleum Association (WSPA), the most powerful corporate lobbying group in Sacramento, claims that there are 368,000 jobs in the oil and gas industry in California.

“The oil and gas industry is a vital part of California’s energy mix,” WSPA stated on their website. “As a leading economic force and major employer, we proudly contribute to communities across the state, providing more than 368,000 jobs in CA.” www.wspa.org/…

But a just-released Food & Water Watch analysis counts just 22,000 jobs in the industry in California, based on Department of Labor statistics — and says this total has dropped 40 percent over the past decade.

“Overall, oil and gas production account for barely one-tenth of 1 percent of all employment in California,” the analysis revealed.

WSPA spent a total of $4,267,181 on lobbying California legislators and officials in 2020 and $8.8 million in 2019 as thousands of oil and gas drilling permits were approved by CalGEM, the state’s oil and gas regulatory agency: www.citywatchla.com/…

The research from the environmental organization Food & Water Watch debunks fossil fuel industry claims about job creation throughout the U.S. showing that “overall employment has suffered even as production has increased.”

“When Gov. Gavin Newsom announced modest plans to phase out permitting for new oil production in California, industry advocates freaked out,” according to the analysis. “The Western States Petroleum Association claimed that the oil industry supports close to 368,000 jobs in the state. That is surprising since, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, only 22,000 Californians were involved in oil production in 2020, down 40 percent from the industry’s peak in 2012. In the Golden State, oil and gas production accounts for barely one-tenth of 1 percent of all employment.”

The analysis notes that one of the most misleading aspects of industry jobs analysis is the conflation of direct jobs with indirect and induced jobs.

“Direct jobs are positions directly within a given industry. Indirect jobs are those within the supply chain that supports that industry, while induced jobs are positions supported by wages from both direct and indirect jobs. Indirect and induced jobs account for nearly 75 percent of the top-line numbers that some oil and gas companies are referencing. Misattributing these jobs to the oil and gas industry itself distorts the size and scope of the industry’s payroll,” the analysis noted.

As the state continues to suffer from devastating fires and drought and salmon, Delta smelt and other fish species continue on the path to extinction, both the state and federal governments continue to approve oil and gas well permits in California.

By staff - Ohio River Valley Institute, December 21, 2021

By Liz Shuler - AFL-CIO, September 17, 2021

AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler delivered the following remarks virtually at the Long Island Offshore Wind Supply Chain Conference:

Thank you so much for that wonderful introduction, Congressman [Tom] Suozzi. Thank you for your strong voice for working families in your district but for all working families, and for chairing the House labor caucus.

Good morning to all of you! Even though I’m Zooming in, I’m so happy to be joining you today—sounds like you have a great crowd in person and online. Hello to my labor friends—John Durso, Roger Clayman. I heard Chris Erickson is there and everyone from all walks of life who care about our climate.

I got fired up hearing your intro Congressman. I’m inspired because I see the future: that win-win-win is right there for us to grab it, and a modern, resilient and inclusive labor movement is what will help us meet the challenges of the climate crisis.

New York, I don’t need to tell you that working people are seeing and feeling the impacts of climate change. Ida recently flooded the New York transit systems and parts of Long Island saw record rainfall. 

It’s happening all across the country. Wildfires. Heat waves. Climate change is already here, happening in every community and every ZIP code. From your local news reports to the recent IPCC report, you’re hearing the alarm: we have to transition to a clean energy future. The question is how? 

The answer: with good, union jobs. It’s why we are building a labor movement that will meet the moment.

Just look at how our movement, government, industry leaders and environmental groups have worked together to bring offshore wind to the Atlantic Coast. Our progress working together shows that the way to respond and adapt to the climate crisis is through a high-road strategy with good, union jobs. 

That’s the only way we can meet the urgency in front of us. 

Robert Pollin interviewed by Paul Jay - The Analysis News, August 4, 2021