The US presidential campaigns both have their eyes on the critical swing state of Pennsylvania – and Pennsylvania, as always, has its eyes on energy. The state is the country’s second largest producer and exporter of fuel for energy – mostly natural gas and coal. The future of those industries is so important to the state’s voters that one of Vice President Kamala Harris’ first political decisions as a presidential candidate this summer was to drop her support for a ban on fracking.
But even with continued fracking in the western part of the state, the state’s fossil fuel industry jobs are ready to dry up, and they have been showing signs of it for years. The future for the state’s energy industry is starting to look very different from its past: Polling shows that Pennsylvanians broadly supports an expansion of clean energy. That support isn’t just limited to climate-conscious Democrats in the state’s urban areas — it’s also starting to emerge in the industrial professions that have long depended on Pennsylvania’s legacy fossil fuel industry. In the latest sign of this shift, a coalition of unions last week launched a new advocacy group, led by the state’s AFL-CIO president and aptly titled Union Energy, to try to ensure that workers in Pennsylvania have a ” just “transition” to a fossil fuel-free economy.
So far, lost jobs in fossil fuel extraction have yet to be 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 come up, that’s where we say we want to be a bigger part of this conversation, ensuring that what is going to be driven by good quality union jobs,” Angela Ferritto, the president of Pennsylvania’s 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 signature strategy has been to garner union support for climate projects in states across the country. Perhaps the band’s biggest success story to date organizing the coalition of trade unions and environmental groups who backed a groundbreaking climate bill passed in Illinois in 2021.
Union Energy’s launch event was held at the Cleveland-Cliffs plant in Steelton, PA, which is the nation’s oldest operating steel mill. Labor leaders spoke against the backdrop of a giant American flag and metal letters that read “Good work done safely.” The location was symbolically important, not only because of its history, but also because Cleveland-Cliffs represents the kind of progress that Union Energy wants to champion in the present. Just a week before the event, Cleveland-Cliffs was awarded $19 million from the federal Department of Energy to electrify its steel production furnaces at another one of its Pennsylvania facilities. It will help the company reduce fossil fuel emissions by using induction heat, a key step for the notoriously difficult-to-decarbonize steelmaking process.
“Cleveland-Cliffs built this country, and it will build the steel of tomorrow cleaner than it ever was,” Robert Bair, the president of the Pennsylvania Building Trades union and the secretary-treasurer of Union Energy, said at the event said.
The case for union involvement in the energy transition is not just about uniting the nascent clean energy sectors, although that is indeed starting to happen. According to s federal report on energy employment released last week, the (slim) proportion of clean energy workers who are in a union surpassed that of the energy sector for the first time. Even beyond making sure the new jobs are well-paid and unionized, labor leaders argue, unions are crucial partners in making the energy transition truly happen. For one thing, they are uniquely equipped to build the out high-skilled trades workforce this is a major shortfall in what is, after all, a massive industrial project in a country hoping to rebuild industrial jobs.
Union apprenticeships and training programs are particularly valuable pathways for large numbers of people to join relatively lucrative blue-collar occupations. One like that apprenticeship program launched in Pennsylvania on August 26 by the United Mine Workers of America in partnership with the state’s governor, Josh Shapiro. Through the program, the miners’ union will train workers to repair the hundreds of thousands of abandoned oil and gas wells it blanket the western half of the state, contaminating drinking water, and leaking large amounts of planetary heating methane gas.
In addition to training workers, unions can also play an important role in building political support for the actual projects where new jobs will be deployed – as Climate Jobs’ campaigns in states like Illinois have shown.
Along with the launch of Union Energy, an affiliated research institute at Cornell University has a report the series of similarly ambitious, worker-centered efforts Pennsylvania could take to degas every sector of its economy, from energy to transportation to agriculture. It’s a vision whose realization would require a degree of cooperation between the labor and climate movements that once sounded implausible — but in Pennsylvania, it 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 see our children and grandchildren running around the earth as we did as children – and we also want to be able to go to work, come home and know that we will families can care.”
