Biden rushes jobs reassurance along with his 50% emissions cut

As President Joe Biden unveils an ambitious target this week to cut the nation’s climate-warming emissions, his administration is also taking steps to refute critics who say it’ll put large numbers of American jobs at risk.

Administration officials such as White House climate adviser Gina McCarthy and Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm have events scheduled on Monday to make the case that the president’s fight against climate change will be a net gain for employment, creating more jobs than it will eliminate.

“This administration is focused on ‘clean energy means jobs’ and we want to create jobs in every corner of the country,” Granholm said at a forum held by BloombergNEF last week. “It’s really about equity and jobs and deployment of clean energy.”

Granholm is scheduled to speak Monday at an event featuring AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka entitled “Accelerating the Energy Transition to Deep Decarbonization: Infrastructure, Jobs and Equity.” It follows another featuring McCarthy and labor leaders being put on by the World Resources Institute.

Separately, United Mine Workers of America President Cecil E. Roberts Jr. is appearing Monday morning with West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin, a Democrat focused on helping workers in the state’s coal industry.

A pledge to reduce U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by about 50% from 2005 levels by the end of the decade, which Biden is expected to announce this week, would require dramatic changes to the nation’s power plants, automobiles, oil wells and agriculture.

Biden and the rest of his team have been pitching the idea as an economic opportunity, an argument that will be central to winning public support.

Not everyone’s convinced.

“From our analysis, the cumulative impacts of the Biden climate agenda will be to kill good-paying jobs, many of which are union jobs, to reduce American competitiveness, and to make us more dependent on China for our energy,” said Tom Pyle, an adviser to former President Donald Trump and president of the American Energy Alliance, a free-market advocacy group.

Trump campaigned on promises to save the coal industry, and miners’ jobs, by rolling back climate initiatives from the Obama administration, but his efforts didn’t lead to an industry resurgence.

Coal Jobs

The U.S. had about 47,400 coal mining jobs as of January 2020—about 7% fewer than when Trump was inaugurated in January 2017—- before the Covid pandemic crushed more of them.

That’s a far cry from the 863,000 coal miners in 1923, the heyday for the industry’s employment in the U.S., and before automation and sweeping changes in railroads, steelmaking, home heating and electric power generation.

“Energy transition and labor policies must be based on more than just promises down the road,” Roberts, the mineworkers chief, said in a statement. “We want to discuss how miners, their families and their communities can come out of this transition period and be certain that they will be in as good or better shape than they are today.”

One challenge for the Biden administration has been getting unions, a key Democratic constituency, on board with the president’s climate plans.

Biden’s decision to cancel the Keystone XL oil pipeline as one of his first actions after becoming president angered labor groups representing pipefitters and other workers who lost their jobs as a result.

Other Biden environmental goals, such as increasing the use of electric vehicles, have drawn concerns from unions that fear such a move could imperil the jobs of autoworkers.