New York Times:
The country’s largest mine workers union signaled on Monday that it would accept a transition away from fossil fuels in exchange for new jobs in renewable energy, spending on technology to make coal cleaner and financial aid for miners who lose their jobs.
“There needs to be a tremendous investment here,” Cecil E. Roberts, the president of the United Mine Workers of America, said in an interview. “We always end up dealing with climate change, closing down coal mines. We never get to the second piece of it.”
The mine workers’ plan, which Mr. Roberts is presenting at an event with Senator Joe Manchin, Democrat of West Virginia, calls for the creation of new jobs in Appalachia through tax credits that would subsidize the making of solar panel and wind turbine components, and by funding the reclamation of abandoned mines that pose a risk to public health.
The mine workers are also calling for spending on research on carbon capture and storage technology, which would allow coal-fired plants to store carbon dioxide underground rather than release it into the atmosphere, and for policies that allow coal plants to remain open if they commit to installing the technology.
The union wants the federal government to support miners who lose their jobs through retraining and by replacing their wages, health insurance and pensions.
Many of these proposals appear in President Biden’s $2.3 trillion jobs and infrastructure plan, including funding for research into carbon capture, which critics deride as prohibitively expensive, and money for reclaiming mines.
“Change is coming, whether we seek it or not,” stated a document that the mine workers union released on Monday, titled “Preserving Coal Country.” It notes that employment in the coal industry had dropped to about 44,000 as of last December, down from 92,000 at the end of 2011.
Mr. Roberts said the union would resist any climate legislation that did not help ensure a livelihood for its members.
Long, worthwhile, but daunting analysis in Politico:
Fairness is where workers, especially those involved in organized labor, find fault with Democrats’ green economic makeover.
Some clean-energy companies lack the most basic of labor protections. Many categorize their workforce as contractors, denying them full benefits. Very few wind and solar companies have unions, and many opposed unionization efforts. Tesla CEO Elon Musk has taken a particularly strong stance against unions, with the National Labor Relations Board demanding he remove a tweet that allegedly threatened organizers. (Tesla appealed the ruling in March.) And making electric vehicles requires fewer parts than internal combustion engine-powered cars, translating to fewer workers.
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Still, labor leaders insist that much of the administration’s and Democrats’ plans amount to tinkering around the edges of the real problem. They pointed to efforts to impose prevailing wage requirements to ensure fair pay on federal clean-energy projects, to boost training programs, to diversify local economies. But truly transforming the landscape and making clean energy work for labor, union leaders said, would require changing federal labor laws to make it easier to organize — an effort that would be highly unlikely to prevail in the 50-50 Senate without Republican support. Organizers contend that without passing legislation like the Protecting the Right to Organize Act, or PRO Act, the U.S. clean energy manufacturing renaissance Biden envisions would be free to engage in a race to the bottom for wages and benefits.
Continue reading “Bringing Coal Country into the Clean Era”
