Robert Pollin

By Danielle Riedl and Devashree Saha - World Resources Institute, April 23, 2024

California is often considered the United States’ greenest state — a first-mover on climate policy, renewable energy, electric vehicles and more. But at the same time, the state is still a fossil-fuel production powerhouse.

This is especially true for its petroleum refineries, which turn crude oil into transportation fuels (like gasoline) and feedstocks for making chemicals. Despite declining oil production in the state, California still has the third-largest crude oil refining capacity in the country, just after Texas and Louisiana. About 83% of its refined petroleum is used for transportation, a sector that produces half of the state’s greenhouse gas emissions. California is also the country’s largest consumer of jet fuel and second-largest user of motor gasoline, fuels that are processed and refined at petroleum refineries.

At the same time, California has a legal requirement to cut 85% of its emissions by 2045. Phasing down petroleum refineries, along with petroleum-based transportation fuels, are crucial steps in meeting that goal. Which begs the question: What happens to the thousands of workers, families and communities who rely on the state’s oil refineries for jobs and tax revenues?

While California is developing a detailed roadmap on how it will reduce its emissions, it doesn’t yet include a plan for addressing the impact of refinery closures — specifically, loss of jobs, incomes and the critical tax revenues that support communities’ schools, healthcare systems and more. California therefore has an opportunity to not only lead on phasing down America’s refineries, but to also make the transition a just one.

By Alex Nieves - Politico, December 4, 2023

One of California’s most powerful unions is not loosening its grip on oil jobs.

Despite the Biden administration and California lawmakers pouring billions of dollars into new climate-friendly industries like electric vehicles, hydrogen and building electrification, a key player in state politics is still defending fossil fuel interests that provide thousands of well-paying jobs.

President Joe Biden’s investment in clean energy sectors through a pair of massive spending bills — which promise lucrative tax credits for projects that pay union wages — was supposed to speed up the labor transition away from oil and gas. That hasn’t happened in deep-blue California, home to the country’s most ambitious climate policies — and most influential labor unions.

“We believe we’re still going to be working in the oil and gas space for the foreseeable future,” said Chris Hannan, president of the State Building and Construction Trades Council of California, which represents nearly 500,000 members across dozens of local unions, from pipefitting to electrical work.

Unions’ longstanding — and well-founded — distrust of the renewable energy industry as a reliable source of labor-friendly jobs is slowing the “just transition” that Biden, Gov. Gavin Newsom and Democratic leaders around the country have pushed.

With federal officials trying to get clean energy funding out as fast as possible ahead of the 2024 election, and California politicians cracking down on the fossil fuel industry, unions’ reluctance to relinquish fossil fuel jobs undermines Democrats’ aggressive climate targets, according to a lawmaker who serves both a union- and oil-rich area of the state.

While the union embrace of fossil fuels is unique to California — one of the few blue states with significant oil production — the struggle highlights a larger question over how states can quickly build massive amounts of clean energy infrastructure without undercutting labor.

By Ted Franklin - Common Dreams, April 4, 2023

As it hits its 10th year, the divestment movement claims many moral victories, yet fossil fuel companies keep booming and carbon keeps rising. Divestment fails to turn off the taps.

"After a decade of action, we are making a difference in the fight against climate change,"proclaims DivestInvest, the global divestment network. Dozens of leading climate organizations from 350.org to the World Council of Churches have enlisted as core partners or endorsers of DivestInvest.

According to DivestInvest's website, 1,585 institutions have publicly committed to "at least some form" of fossil fuel divestment, representing an enormous $39.2 trillion of assets under management.

"That's as if the two biggest economies in the world, the United States and China, combined, chose to divest from fossil fuels," the site goes on.

DivestInvest's 2021 glossy prospectus intimates that, thanks to divestment, the fossil fuel industry has begun to collapse. At the very least, oil and gas moguls should be trembling with fear that divestment activists will soon force them to close their spigots and relinquish their financial and political power.

If only this were true.

The balance sheets of the fossil fuel companies say otherwise. Instead of the industry tailspin portrayed in DivestInvest's report, the fossil fuel giants are awash in record profits. In 2021, The Hillreports, "the four largest oil and gas companies made over $75 billion in profits, returned billions to their shareholders through record dividends and share buybacks, and handed out millions in compensation to their chief executive officers."

By Gregor Semieniuk and Robert Pollin - Political Economy Research Institute (PERI), April 2023

This report estimates the prospects for job creation through expanding green locomotive manufacturing at the Westinghouse Air Brake Technologies (Wabtec) Corporation’s Lawrence Park facility in Erie, Pennsylvania. We consider the employment effects of three types of green locomotive manufacturing activities at Wabtec’s Lawrence Park site: 1) Tier 4 diesel-electric locomotives; 2) battery-electric locomotives without onsite battery production and 3) battery electric manufacturing with onsite battery production.

We estimate employment creation under 2 scenarios: an initial Phase 1, in which Wabtec produces 500 green locomotives per year at Lawrence Park and a Phase 2 in which production at Lawrence Park expands to 1,000 green locomotives per year. As of 2008, Wabtec had been producing locomotives at the Phase 2 level of about 1,000 locomotives per year. Phase 2 would therefore just return the Lawrence Plant facility to its earlier level of manufacturing activity.

We estimate that by producing 1,000 green locomotives per year at Lawrence Park, employment creation would range as follows, depending on which specific locomotive production activities are operating at the plant:

• 3,400 – 5,100 jobs at Lawrence Park itself;
• 3,060 – 5,100 jobs in Erie County outside of Lawrence Park;
• 9,860 – 14,960 in the U.S. economy overall.

About 800 people are currently employed at Lawrence Park directly involved in locomotive production. Expanding production to 1,000 locomotives per year would therefore produce a net increase in employment at the facility by between roughly 2,600 – 4,300 workers.

Expanding green locomotive manufacturing production at Wabtec’s Lawrence Park facility will produce major gains in employment conditions in Erie County. This will be true both through the increase in the number of job opportunities relative to the 126,000 people that currently comprise the area’s labor market, and through the relatively high compensation levels associated with jobs at the Lawrence Park facility itself.

Download a copy of this publication here (PDF).

By Lynn Fries and Robert Pollin - The Analysis News, March 27, 2023

By Robert Pollin and Paul Jay - The Analysis News, November 29, 2022

By Faraz Rizvi, Matt Holmes, and Ted Franklin - Sunflower Alliance, November 22, 2022

Images and words by David Bacon - Sierra, August 31, 2022

In 2020, Washington State passed the Climate Commitment Act, and when it went into effect on January 1, 2022, Rosalinda Guillen was appointed to its Environmental Justice Council. The appointment recognized her role as one of Washington's leading advocates for farmworkers and rural communities.

Guillen directs Community2Community Development, a women-led group encouraging farmworker cooperatives and defending labor rights. She has a long history as a farm labor organizer and in 2013 helped form a new independent union for farmworkers, Familias Unidas por la Justicia. Guillen agreed to serve on the council but with reservations. She feared that the law's implementation would be dominated by some of the state's most powerful industries: fossil fuels and agriculture. 

"Its market-based approach focuses too much on offsets,” she says. “Allowing polluting corporations to pay to continue to pollute is a backward step in achieving equity for rural people living in poverty for generations." Just as important to her, however, is that while the law provides funding for projects in pollution-impacted communities, it doesn't look at the needs of workers displaced by the changes that will occur as the production and use of fossil fuels is reduced.

The impact of that reduction won't affect just workers in oil refineries but farmworkers as well. "The ag industry is part of the problem, not just the fossil fuel industry," Guillen says. "They're tied together. Ag's monocrop system impacts the ecological balance through the use of pesticides, the pollution of rivers and clearing forests. As farmworkers, this law has everything to do with our miserable wages, our insecure jobs, and even how long we'll live. The average farmworker only lives to 49 years old, and displacement will make peoples' lives even shorter." 

The key to building working-class support for reducing carbon emissions, she believes, is a commitment from political leaders and the environmental and labor movements that working-class communities will not be made to pay for the transition to a carbon-free economy with job losses and increased poverty. But the difficulties in building that alliance and gaining such a commitment were evident in the defeat of an earlier Washington State initiative, and the fact that the Climate Commitment Act lacked the protections that initiative sought to put in place. 

In Washington State fields, at California oil refineries, and amid local campaigns around the country, this is the big strategic question in coalition building between the labor and environmental movements: Who will pay the cost of transitioning to a green economy? 

Some workers and unions see the danger of climate change as a remote problem, compared with the immediate loss of jobs and wages. Others believe that climate change is an urgent crisis and that government policy should protect jobs and wages as a transition to a fossil-fuel-free economy takes place. Many environmental justice groups also believe that working-class communities, especially communities of color, should not have to shoulder the cost of a crisis they did not create. And in the background, always, are efforts by industry to minimize the danger of climate change and avoid paying the cost of stopping it. 

By C.J. Polychroniou - Truthout, August 23, 2022

California has a well-established reputation as a national and global climate leader, but despite its remarkable successes in cutting emissions between 2006 and 2016, it has recently begun showing signs of having lost its way.

California is increasingly falling behind on its emissions reduction targets, and its existing policies have now been deemed insufficient to hit its 2030 target of reducing carbon emissions 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2030, according to new modeling from the climate policy think tank Energy Innovation.

“Compared to historical trends, California will need to more than triple the pace of emissions reductions to hit its 2030 target of reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2030,” the Energy Innovation report states.

The report is disappointing news, representing a weakening of the climate action that began with California’s passage of AB 32 in 2006. Otherwise known as the Global Warming Solutions Act, AB 32 was a landmark program in the struggle to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Up until 2006, the United States was the largest emitter of carbon dioxide emissions in the world, and California was the second highest state in terms of total greenhouse gas emissions.

By various - Labor Rise for Climate, Jobs, Justice, and Peace, July 14, 2022

We are writing to you as rank-and-file California trade unionists to request revision of the 2022 Draft Scoping Plan to incorporate the California Climate Jobs Plan based on “A Program for Economic Recovery and Clean Energy Transition in California.” 

While making frequent references to equity, the Draft Scoping Plan fails to present a credible roadmap for the massive economic and social transformation that will be required to protect and promote the interests of workers and communities as California confronts the climate crisis and emerges from the fossil fuel era.

Four years ago, United Nations scientists reported that it would take “rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society” to limit increasingly catastrophic changes to the global climate. Among these rapid and far-reaching changes, the redesign of our economy requires an honest accounting and plan for the tens of millions of California workers whose lives will be changed dramatically in this decade and beyond. If there is to be a plan for transformation, it must center the aspirations and possibilities for working people. 

In this aspect, the Draft Scoping Plan falls short. Labor is treated as an externality. The draft lacks any discussion of public funding to create green jobs or protect workers and communities who depend on fossil fuel industries for their livelihood. The only union mentioned in the 228-page draft is the European Union. The draft’s abstract commitments to a job-rich future are based on crude economic modeling rather than concrete planning. We need more than vague assurances that economic growth guided by corporate interests will provide for the common good.