The decision to open up trade with China sent millions of American manufacturing jobs overseas, and policy makers did little to create any in their place. Detroit deindustrialized and fell into poverty and disrepair. Appalachia lost its coal jobs and gained an opioid epidemic. Yet it is hard to identify many, if any, just transitions in the United States.
The area lost nearly 1 million production jobs but gained nearly 1 million service jobs. Employment in coal mining in the region went from 473,000 in 1957 to zero by the end of 2018.
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The German government, labor unions, and industrial leaders came to a series of agreements to diversify its economy, providing payments for displaced workers and making investments in service-and-knowledge businesses. The Ruhr region in western Germany, for example, once produced coal, iron, and steel, with extractive and heavy industry employing a majority of the region’s workers. “If we’re doing things that are for the benefit of society but screw over a bunch of people, that’s not a societal good.” Mijin Cha, an environmental-studies professor at UC Santa Cruz, told me. Without them, “you risk dissuading future efforts that are for the societal good,” J. They are also meant to generate political support for green policies, or at least dampen any backlash. They are meant to defray the cost of having whole communities fall into persistent economic distress: a loss of social cohesion, people living shorter and sicker lives, the rise of “ deaths of despair,” the growth of right-wing populism.
Just-transition policies are not merely about bailing out blue-collar folks. But to shut them down in a way that punishes the workers in those industries, or the places where those industries are concentrated, would be unjust. Some industries are too toxic for society, he argued. The legendary American union leader Tony Mazzocchi pioneered the concept of a just transition a half century ago. And it is not clear that it will be just. To prevent other workers from experiencing the same, the Biden White House has promised to pursue a “just transition,” employing policies to ensure “new, good-paying jobs for American workers and health and economic benefits for communities.” But the green-energy transition is already underway. And those new gigs came with more dangerous working conditions. Some workers were earning as little as $14 an hour. Their earnings had declined sharply, with the median hourly wage of employed workers plunging from $50 to $38. They found that, more than a year after the shutdown, one in five Marathon workers was unemployed. Virginia Parks, a professor at UC Irvine, and Ian Baran, a doctoral student, tracked the consequences of the Marathon shutdown in near-real time, getting more than 40 percent of the workers to return surveys and a smaller group to sit for interviews. Read: Why the energy transition will be so complicatedĪ pathbreaking new study shows just how real the damage could be, absent policies to soften the economic blow. The result could be not only economic pain for individual families, but also the devastation of communities that rely on fossil-fuel extraction and a powerful political backlash against green-energy policies. It also stands to put hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of people like Feldermann out of work. That shift is necessary to avert the worst outcomes of climate change. The United States is embarking on an epochal transition from fossil fuels to green energy. Feldermann and his co-workers would be out of a job in 90 days. The plant was being shut down, as the rise of work-from-home and the spread of electric vehicles depressed Californians’ demand for gasoline.
“I didn’t actually hear management tell us that they were laying us off,” he told me. While some of his colleagues struggled to get the audio to work, Feldermann received a phone call from his union representative. On a Friday afternoon in July 2020, Feldermann was abruptly summoned to an all-hands Zoom meeting. In time, he rose to the position of head operator at the Marathon Petroleum site.
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He learned how to isolate pipes and vessels, load railcars with molten sulfur and ammonia, and helm an industrial control panel. It was hard work, with 12-hour-minimum shifts, but Feldermann came to excel at it. In 2006, James Feldermann got hired as a trainee at a refinery in Martinez, California, in the Bay Area.
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