Both U.S. presidential campaigns have their eyes on the key swing state of Pennsylvania — and Pennsylvania, as always, has its eye on energy. The state is the nation’s second-largest producer and exporter of energy fuels — mostly natural gas and coal. The future of those industries is so essential to voters in the state that one of Vice President Kamala Harris’ first policy decisions as a presidential candidate this summer was to withdraw its support for the fracking ban.
But even with continued fracking in the western part of the state, work in the fossil fuel industry in the state are ready to desiccated up, and there have been signs for years that they will. The future of the state’s energy sector is starting to look very different from its past: Polls show that Pennsylvanians broadly support the expansion of clean energyThat support isn’t circumscribed to climate-conscious Democrats in urban areas of the state — it’s also starting to show up in industrial jobs that have long depended on Pennsylvania’s classic fossil fuel industry.
The latest sign of that shift came earlier this month when a coalition of labor unions formed a modern advisory group, aptly named Union Energy, led by the president of the state AFL-CIO union. The group aims to ensure Pennsylvania workers have a “just transition” to a fossil-free economy.
So far, the lost fossil fuel jobs haven’t been fully replaced by clean energy jobs. “They’re starting to emerge — we’ve seen some solar, we’ve seen some wind — but as these industries emerge, we’re saying we want to be a bigger part of that conversation and make sure that what’s coming is driven by good quality union jobs,” Angela Ferritto, president of the Pennsylvania AFL-CIO, told Grist.
Union Energy is a collaboration between two unions—the Pennsylvania AFL-CIO and the Pennsylvania Building Trades—and the Climate Jobs National Resource Center, an organization whose flagship strategy has been to rally union support for climate projects in states across the country. Perhaps the group’s biggest success to date has been organizing coalitions of trade unions and environmental groups who supported the pioneering 2021 climate law passed in Illinois.
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Union Energy’s inaugural event was held at the Cleveland-Cliffs plant in Steelton, the oldest operating steel mill in the country. Union leaders spoke against the backdrop of a giant American flag and metal letters reading “Good Work Done Safely.” The location was symbolically significant not only because of its history but also because Cleveland-Cliffs represents the kind of progress that Union Energy is trying to promote in the present.
Just a week before the event, Cleveland-Cliffs received $19 million from the federal Department of Energy to electrify steelmaking furnaces at another Pennsylvania plant. That will support the company reduce fossil fuel emissions through the utilize of induction heat, a major step for the notoriously difficult-to-decarbonize steelmaking process.
“Cleveland-Cliffs built this country and will produce the steel of tomorrow cleaner than ever before,” Robert Bair, president of the Pennsylvania Building Trades and secretary-treasurer of Union Energy, said at the event.
The case for union involvement in the energy transition is not unique to unions in the emerging clean energy sectors, although that is starting to happen. According to a modern federal energy employment reportThe (miniature) percentage of clean energy workers who are unionized has surpassed that of the entire energy sector for the first time. Even beyond ensuring that modern jobs are well-paid and unionized, as union leaders say, unions are key partners in the actual energy transition. First, they are uniquely equipped to build highly qualified craftsmen which are very few in the context of a huge industrial project being implemented in the country that hopes to rebuild industrial employment.
In particular, union apprenticeships and training programs are valuable paths for a immense number of people who want to join relatively lucrative blue-collar professions. One such an internship program has been launched in Pennsylvania on August 26 by the United Mine Workers of America in partnership with Gov. Josh Shapiro. As part of the program, the miners’ union will train workers to repair hundreds of thousands of abandoned oil and gas wells This Blanket the western half of the state is polluting drinking water and leaking massive amounts of planet-warming substances methane gas.
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In addition to training workers, unions can also play an essential role in building political support for specific projects that will create modern jobs — as Climate Jobs campaigns in states like Illinois have shown.
With the launch of Union Energy, a related research institute at Cornell University published report imagining the scope of similarly ambitious, worker-focused efforts that Pennsylvania could undertake to decarbonize every sector of its economy, from energy to transportation to agriculture. It’s a vision that would require a degree of cooperation between the labor and climate movements that once sounded improbable — but in Pennsylvania, now seems a little less far-fetched.
“We all want the same thing, at the end of the day,” Ferritto said. “We want clean air, we want clean water, we want to be able to watch our kids and grandkids run around the land like we did as kids — and we also want to be able to go to work, come home and know that we’re going to be able to take care of our families.”
This article was originally published in Milling On . Grist is an independent, nonprofit media organization dedicated to telling the stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org
