Giving a Fair Shot to Energy Workers and Communities in Transition, with Wesley Look and Daniel Raimi

Notable Quotes

• Ensuring the clean energy transition is fair and equitable: “We want to be thinking about ways to look at costs and benefits, but we especially want to be thinking about the distribution and the fairness of how those costs are borne by different segments of society. If I am a coal worker, let’s say my entire community’s economy is based around coal mining as an anchor institution. For me to potentially lose my job, and for the tax base to go away in my community, and how that might actually affect my children’s schools or healthcare in my region, those are a lot of costs for me as a worker and a member of that community to bear. When we talk about fairness, we’re talking about acknowledging that that’s maybe not fair for individuals to bear so much of the cost.” —Wesley Look (5:11)
• Just transition policy is urgently needed: “In an ideal world, we would have started on this topic a couple of decades ago, just like we would have started on real climate policy a couple of decades ago. But obviously we haven’t, so now is the time to start thinking about how to address negative effects before they occur … Of course, the transition is already underway for many coal communities … Many of those communities, especially in Appalachia, have really struggled for more than a decade now. COVID has exacerbated many of those strains, and it has raised new challenges for oil and gas communities as well.” —Daniel Raimi (7:21)
• Variety of approaches are necessary: “There’s no silver bullet for a just transition. Instead, we find in our work that policymakers need to assemble a package that includes the various policy types that we were talking about earlier: workforce development, economic development, environmental remediation, and public benefits. Furthermore, we find that policies often excel when they are tailored to unique local circumstances and when they are targeted for populations most in need.” —Wesley Look (19:51)

Top of the Stack

• “Enabling Fairness for Energy Workers and Communities in Transition” synthesis report by Wesley Look, Daniel Raimi, Molly Robertson, Jake Higdon, and Daniel Propp
• Fairness for Workers and Communities in Transition report series by Wesley Look, Daniel Raimi, Molly Robertson, Jake Higdon, and Daniel Propp
• “Economic Development Policies to Enable Fairness for Workers and Communities in Transition” by Daniel Raimi, Wesley Look, Molly Robertson, and Jake Higdon
• “Environmental Remediation and Infrastructure Policies Supporting Workers and Communities in Transition” by Daniel Raimi
• “The Role of Public Benefits in Supporting Workers and Communities Affected by Energy Transition” by Jake Higdon and Molly Robertson
• “Labor Policies to Enable Fairness for Workers and Communities in Transition” by Wesley Look, Molly Robertson, Jake Higdon, and Daniel Propp
• Just Transition Initiative at the Center for Strategic & International Studies (CSIS)
• The American Jobs Plan from the Biden administration

The Full Transcript

Kristin Hayes: Hello, and welcome to Resources Radio, a weekly podcast from Resources for the Future. I'm your host, Kristin Hayes. Today, I'm talking with Wesley Look and Daniel Raimi, two of my RFF colleagues who have led the organization's research on enabling fairness for energy workers and communities in transition. This work has been carried out over the past year in partnership with the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) and culminated in a synthesis report released on March 25th, 2021.

Wes and Daniel will share some of the lessons they and their EDF colleagues learned about this complex topic, including the many facets of transition, ways in which the federal government in particular can improve outcomes, and what researchers and policymakers alike can learn from various communities and countries already facing these changing links to the energy industry. Stay with us.

Kristin Hayes: Hello gentlemen. It's very nice to talk with you this afternoon.

Daniel Raimi: Hi, Kristin.

Kristin Hayes: Hi, Daniel.

Wesley Look: Hi, Kristin.

Kristin Hayes: Hi, Wes. Well, Daniel is very well known to our listeners, but of course it's always a pleasure to have him on as a guest. But Wes, I think this is your first time on the show so I want to give you a moment to introduce yourself. Tell us a little bit more about your background and how you found yourself at RFF.

Wesley Look: First of all, it's a pleasure to be with you today, Kristin and Daniel, both. Thanks for having us on. So I started with RFF in 2017. I came to RFF from the Senate Finance Committee and Senator Ron Wyden's personal office. I kind of split my time between the two. In my capacities as advisor on energy and environment for Senator Wyden and the Senate Finance Committee, I really got to know the exceptional technical capacity as applied to policymaking of the RFF team. So RFF was a natural destination for me, taking a break from the Hill. I've had the pleasure since I've been at RFF to work on a number of different topics. The broadest umbrella of my area of research and work is federal climate policy with some focus on US state policy as well. I've worked on a number of different topics, including topics related to carbon pricing, just transitions, and environmental justice.

Kristin Hayes: Great. Again, it's always a pleasure to talk with two folks who I get to work with all the time, and then introduce their work to the broader audience. As I mentioned in the introduction, today's conversation is about a new synthesis report, which is actually the culmination of a lot of work that you two have been leading. The title of that synthesis report is “Enabling Fairness for Energy Workers and Communities in Transition.” This is an incredibly important topic. There's a lot to dig into. I know I'm going to have to be judicious with my questions. Although this first question may seem kind of random, I actually hope it lays a strong foundation for the rest of the conversation. I want to spend just a little time parsing the words of that report title. As I know, they were chosen carefully, very thoughtfully.

So Wes, can you tell us just a bit about why this body of research is described in this particular way? Again, just to reiterate that title for our listeners, it's “Enabling Fairness for Energy Workers and Communities in Transition.”

Wesley Look: That is a great question, Kristin, to underscore the fact that we're talking here about energy workers and communities. There's a lot going on in the global economy, and in the US economy, with respect to the pandemic and associated economic disruptions. Our work is focused on economic disruptions and broader systemic transitions related to energy producing communities, communities where particularly fossil fuel industries have been fundamental sources of employment and prosperity. In this shift to clean energy as society addresses climate change, we're seeing coal production decline, and we're seeing the use of coal for generating electricity decline, so that's why we're focusing on energy workers. This is a body of research that's helping to look at the economic effects to energy workers in communities in the context of decarbonization.

The language around fairness is recognizing that there are costs and benefits to decarbonization. I think that most listeners will probably be familiar with the benefits of decarbonization. We are faced with this existential crisis of climate change, disrupting a number of aspects of our biosphere and our economies, et cetera. When we look at the costs, we want to be thinking about ways to look at costs and benefits, but we especially want to be thinking about the distribution, and the fairness of how those costs are borne by different segments of society.

If I am a multi-generational coal worker, let's say my entire community’s economy is based around coal mining as an anchor institution and basis of the economy. For me to potentially lose my job, and for the tax base to go away in my community, and how that might actually affect my children's schools or healthcare in my region, those are a lot of costs for me as a worker and a member of that community to bear. When we talk about fairness, we're talking about acknowledging that that's maybe not fair for individuals to bear so much of the cost.

So this research is looking at what policies and programs can be put in place to not have that burden land so heavily upon such workers, energy workers and communities. In other words, policies and programs to help them. This gets to the last key piece of the title, to make this transition into a clean energy economy in a way that is not disruptive for their lives, in a way that allows for them to continue to have family-supporting jobs, a healthy environment, and a stable economy and community.

Kristin Hayes: Great. Thanks for talking us through that. Daniel, I want to turn to you now, and ask you and Wes and others on the team who put this work together, why you identify this as a critical topic at this particular moment in time? Wes did a great job of explaining why this is a critical topic overall, but why at this moment? Maybe you could also say a bit more about what themes this work kind of brings together.

Daniel Raimi: Yeah, sure, Kristin. I think Wes did a great job of framing it all up. In an ideal world, we would have started on this topic a couple of decades ago, just like we would have started on real climate policy a couple of decades ago. But obviously we haven't, so now is better than never. Right now, this has the potential to be an inflection point, partly because there is a lot of interest at the federal level in doing ambitious climate policy. That's also true in many US states; we talk about it all the time on this show. To the extent that those policies spur rapid declines or have major effects in these energy producing communities that Wes was describing, now is the time to start thinking about how to address those negative effects before they occur.

The importance of pre-planning is one of the key themes that emerges over and over again in our work, and so trying to address this issue before it becomes a real problem is why now is better than waiting. Of course, as Wes mentioned, the transition is already underway for many coal communities. There's been rapid declines in coal production, coal mining jobs. Many of those communities, especially in Appalachia, have really struggled for more than a decade now. COVID has exacerbated many of those strains, and it's raised new challenges for oil and gas communities as well. So those are some of the main drivers as to why this topic is really present right now. Of course it's not just us; there are many other great researchers who are doing amazing work on this topic.

Then to briefly describe some of the components that this work brings together and some of the strengths at RFF that we're trying to leverage in this work, there are several different aspects of it that we're able to contribute. First is our experience and expertise on a variety of socioeconomic issues related to energy development, how energy development affects communities in both positive and negative ways.

Second, we have a lot of work at RFF on future energy pathways. We have our Global Energy Outlook project. We have incredible modeling from Dan Shawhan and from Marc Hafstead and others on the team who can help us understand the implications of energy policies and how those policies will affect energy producing communities. We also have an expertise on policy design, and we are doing more and more policy engagement with lawmakers on the Hill, as well as folks in states such as Kentucky and West Virginia and Wyoming and California and Texas, where we're trying to use the connections that we have with the policy community to inform our research so that we're asking the right questions and delivering those answers to the right people.

Kristin Hayes: Thanks, Daniel. Okay. Well, both of you have referenced here the role of the federal government—and I understand that that's the main focus here—the role that the federal government can play in designing policies that might alleviate some of the costs.

So Wes, the report series overall identifies four crucial areas of federal policy intervention to enable this fair transition for workers. Our workforce development and labor standards, that's number one. Second is economic development. The third is environmental remediation and infrastructure, a very hot topic these days. And the fourth is public benefits. So those are huge categories of potential intervention. I'm wondering if you could just give us an example from each of those categories to help illustrate the types of interventions that you and the team looked at.

Wesley Look: You bet. In workforce development, we do, as you noted, talk about policies that are in that stream of our research. We're talking about policies that are designed to advance the skills of workers: job training programs, programs that help connect workers with new potential jobs, what we would refer to as career services. Then we also talk about labor standards, and labor standards include things like compensation standards, such as minimum wage. It includes things like workplace safety standards.

As an example of economic development, I would point to the US Department of Commerce's Economic Development Administration Economic Adjustment Assistance program. So this is a program which actually has a sub-component that's very relevant to just transition, and that sub-component is called the Assistance to Coal Communities program. This is essentially a grant program to local governments and non-governmental entities to facilitate economic development through the investment in core infrastructure like municipal water systems. But again, that Economic Adjustment Assistance program is a good example.

In the category of environmental remediation and infrastructure, there are a lot of important programs, such as the EPA Superfund programs and Brownfield Redevelopment programs. Daniel has done some great research developing work to remediate orphaned oil and gas wells; that's more on the side of new opportunities. The one that I really want to underscore most for coal communities is the Abandoned Mine Lands program.

Lastly, in the category of public benefits, a key one is just our basic unemployment insurance system that we have in the United States. We recognize that ideally in a transition process, there will be no unemployment and that workers would transition from a solid, good paying job in whatever industry they are currently employed in—let's say the coal industry—into a new, equally solid job with equal compensation. There's a recognition that in some cases, there may be unemployment, and so having that safety net as a backstop is really an important piece. So UI, or unemployment insurance, is a good example of public benefits. Then there are some public benefit programs that are more focused on energy communities like the Black Lung Disability Trust Fund, which provides healthcare for coal miners who have black lung disease.

Kristin Hayes: I should note for our listeners that the series of reports that led up to the one that was released earlier this month—each of those four delves into one of these areas in great detail—and I definitely encourage listeners to check those out for more of these examples. But even the ones that you shared Wes really highlight not only how many pieces of the policy puzzle can play a role in providing solutions here, but also how complex this is and how complicated. There have been a number of policies as you talk through that have already been in place that are touching on pieces of the puzzle.

So Daniel, I'll ask you: of the interventions that have already been tried, maybe the ones that Wes referenced or some others that you've been thinking about, what do we know about the efficacy of those interventions? Maybe a follow-up question is what tools are available to you as researchers to know what's worked and what hasn't, and therefore how to inform future interventions?

Daniel Raimi: That's a great question, Kristin. This was one of the first questions that we tried to tackle when we began this research. We know we are looking at a broad swath of programs across all these different domains that have played out over years and years, but what does the evidence tell us about their effectiveness and how they might be deployed in an energy-specific context? Unfortunately, and surprisingly to me, the evidence is actually pretty thin on a lot of these programs, especially in the context of energy communities. This is partly because the scale of the transition that we're talking about with regard to achieving net-zero emissions sometime in the next few decades, the scale of that effort is in many ways unprecedented in modern American life. So there aren't analogs that we can really look to that help us understand the effects of public policies in the context of such a large-scale effort that we need to undertake to deeply reduce our emissions.

That said, there are some pieces of literature that we were able to draw from in a variety of domains to try to help understand the effectiveness of these programs. It's impossible to summarize across all these different areas, but one of the consistent findings from the economic development and workforce development literature was that we do see a variety of small positive effects of some of these federal programs for economic development and workforce development. The effects are relatively modest because the programs themselves are relatively modest. They're not trying to address the scale of an issue that we're talking about today.

Similarly, for things like environmental remediation programs and infrastructure, we do see considerable benefits to society from those programs. There are a variety of externalities that those programs are addressing that can improve people's lives. Once again, applying them to this scale and specifically applying them in an energy community context, we actually need to know a lot more before we can say with certainty what works and what doesn't.

Luckily for us, there are research opportunities that we are pursuing to try and answer some of those questions with more precision. There are also great researchers around the country doing similar things. A couple of those projects are currently underway. There have also been economic transitions in the past, whether it's moving away from steel or textiles or agriculture in different parts of the country, and taking those lessons and applying them to an energy context will be really useful.

In addition, there are some policies that are more advanced than ours in terms of energy transition in the European Union in particular. Wes has been looking into this as well, and I think he'll be publishing some stuff on it in the next couple of months. Then there's also some really nice evidence coming from the Center For Strategic and International Studies. They have a series of case studies from around the world, I believe Vietnam and South Africa and one other country that I'm blanking on. But there is evidence emerging that I think we can take advantage of, but unfortunately, I don't think we have all the answers right now.

Kristin Hayes: We never do. Do we, Daniel? Boy, if we had all the answers.

Daniel Raimi: Thinking for myself, I rarely have one or two answers.

Kristin Hayes: So Wes, clearly though, I say that we don't have all the answers and yet both of you put a tremendous amount of work into this with your team, and summarize a lot of what you learned in this final synthesis report that came out just a week ago from our recording time. That pulled together lessons from across the previous series of reports, and in five of those, you highlight in particular these sort of cross-cutting lessons for policymakers. So Wes, let me ask you if you could just sort of summarize those conclusions for us.

Wesley Look: So the five key takeaways from our research as compiled in the synthesis report, I'll just list them first and I'll say a little bit about each one of them. So the first is that multiple and customizable policy types are needed. The second is that coordinated delivery is essential. Third, we identify that strategic timing and sequencing of policy implementation are important. Fourth, we underscore in the just transition language that equitable and inclusive policymaking and implementation are critical. And then the fifth challenge is that the energy transition pose for public revenue streams must be addressed.

On the first, multiple and customizable policy types are needed. This says it all, in a way, that there is no silver bullet. Daniel and I are both often conveying that in various contexts. There's no silver bullet for a just transition. Instead, we find in our work that policymakers need to assemble a package that includes the various policy types that we were talking about earlier—workforce development, economic development, environmental remediation, and public benefits. Furthermore, we find that policies often excel when they are tailored to unique local circumstances and when they are targeted for populations most in need, let's say coal communities in transition.

On coordinated delivery, we talk about how there's both a need for horizontal coordination across federal agencies and then vertical coordination across levels of government, so you could imagine federal government, tribal government, state government, local governments, and then even stakeholder groups. Going from right down to the ground level, making sure that it's easy for participants to access the many available resources and that federal dollars are spent efficiently as essential.

On timing and sequencing, Daniel mentioned that we need to get started on this right away. Some of these communities are already experiencing significant disruptions, and others may be not far off. We talk about the staging of implementation of some of these just transition policies. One area that might have a good win-win, in terms of both near-term benefits and medium and long-term benefits, are some of these environmental remediation programs and policies and infrastructure. These dovetail well with the political moment we're finding ourselves in, where the Biden administration has proposed this big infrastructure package because you put people to work right away, or in the relatively near term, building the infrastructure that supports economic diversification, and therefore also supports long-term prosperity in a lot of these communities.

Fourth, on the point that equitable and inclusive policymaking and implementation are critical, as the term “just transition” suggests, equity and fairness play a central role. We talk about a couple of different pieces of this in a just transition context. First, we've talked about how addressing transition is an opportunity to also address a legacy of underinvestment and environmental injustice in low-income and minority communities. This includes coal-producing communities and communities of color. We also talk about something we refer to as “procedural equity” or what some might call procedural justice. So this is talking about how processes are run around the development of just transition solutions and then the implementation of them. The key point here is that the individuals who are being impacted by transition—the people, the workers and the communities that we've been talking about—are engaged directly in the dialogue that leads to the development of policy and then the implementation. We also talk about the importance of accessibility and transparency in how funds are allocated and then how programs are evaluated.

On this last piece on addressing the challenges to public revenue streams, I'm going to toot Daniel's horn here a little bit. Daniel happens to be an expert on the fiscal implications of fossil fuel production, and therefore, in the transition away from fossil fuel production. We may see that new economic activity—and that could include but may not be limited to clean energy development—could boost the tax base in a lot of these local communities. As we see these massive employers like a coal mine or a coal-fired power plant decline, and then perhaps shut down altogether, you see a real decline in that tax base. Daniel can talk more to that area, but that's a highlight of the key findings.

Kristin Hayes: Great, thanks. Daniel, I also wanted to ask you about the place-based case studies that your team has worked on. I find those a really useful part of the series. In addition to the high-level work that Wes just described, maybe we can focus on one of the case studies, which is about the Colstrip mine in Montana. Can you say just a little bit more about that particular research, including what you were hoping to learn by looking at that specific example of transition?

Daniel Raimi: Absolutely. The first thing I want to say about this case study is that it was led by Kelli Roemer, who is a really great PhD student at Montana State working with Julia Haggerty. It also included Rebecca Glaser, who was an intern at RFF. This is now a good time to just shout out our other co-authors who are Molly Robertson at RFF, Jake Higdon at Environmental Defense Fund, Gilbert Michaud at Ohio University, and Dan Propp who is a Master's student at Columbia. We have this amazing team. So the Colstrip study was really driven, or came from, Kelli's work. Kelli has been interviewing folks in Colstrip for years, and I was aware of her work there.

Colstrip in many ways is an extreme example of a community that's really dependent on fossil energy. As you might infer from its name, Colstrip, it was founded in the 1920s explicitly to provide coal to railways. There was a coal mine there. In the 1960s and 1970s, a large power plant was built with four units, and there was a population boom, and a town built up around the power plant and the mine. But last year, two of the four units of the power plant closed. As for the remaining two units, their future is highly uncertain. The town is almost entirely dependent on the coal plant. It's rural, it's isolated. When I say rural, I mean like Montana rural, which is really different from like West Virginia rural.

Kristin Hayes: Right. We're not talking about Maryland rural here.

Daniel Raimi: Yeah, this place is quite isolated, and so the implications of the mine and the power plant potentially closing are really dramatic for this community and everyone who lives there. So the question we wanted to ask is: how does a community start to plan for the future when its bedrock industry has the potential to essentially go away?

Returning to the theme of this conversation, planning is obviously really important here. But one of the really interesting things about Colstrip is that they have not been able to plan effectively for a variety of reasons. Part of the challenge has been that they've had uncertainty over the timing of the plant closure forever. They still don't know if and when the remaining units of the plant are going to close. In addition, there are different stakeholders with different preferences. Some folks in the state want to fight to keep the plant running as long as possible. Some of them want to close the plant down and remediate the site. Some of them want to have a phased out process. But there's really no clarity, and that makes it really hard for the community to effectively plan for the future. Those are not the happiest lessons to learn, but they're really important lessons to learn, especially for the communities that are most dependent on these energy sources.

One way to think about Colstrip is that it's not representative of many of the fossil energy communities that are at least somewhat more diversified and are less rural and have more economic diversification opportunities, but it does show you, as one fairly extreme example, the challenges that can face these communities and how—if we want to get ahead of them—you really need to be proactive and have some certainty about the future.

Kristin Hayes: Well, certainty about the future is not something that's been easy to come by in this past year in particular, but I do think that certainly the work that you both have done is designed to at least highlight some of the places where people can be thinking ahead, and that's hugely important here. Unfortunately, we're running out of time. There is so much here to dig into. I would really encourage the listeners to check out not just one report, but the whole series that really underpins this body of research.

I'm going to mix up Top of the Stack a little bit to close us out, but you're welcome to recommend of course, Top of the Stack in particular, Wes, because I know that this is a new opportunity for you. But maybe I'll just throw in that if on the top of your stack, you would also like to suggest kind of future research area, your top place that you want to go next in this line of research, I'd welcome that as well. So Wes, why don't I start with you, what's on the top of your reading stack and or your research stack?

Wesley Look: I don't know if this is an appropriate example for this particular Top of the Stack conversation, but really the top of my stack is this newly—I wouldn't necessarily say proposed—but now publicly discussed Biden infrastructure plan. This is an ostensibly $3 trillion package that would invest in American infrastructure and productivity. This effort is likely to be the primary vehicle for which just transition policy is established. $3 trillion is a lot of money, so at a level that is unprecedented. There's a lot of attention right now to thinking about how to apply some of the insights that have been developed through the research that we've done, and as Daniel's mentioned, the research of a number of researchers out there, and as well as the policy ideas generated by stakeholders on this transition question. I think it's a really exciting time. There's a lot of dialogue happening on what those policy solutions should be. So that's at the top of my stack in terms of what I'm focused on and excited about and interested in and learning from.

In terms of additional research, one of the things that Daniel has begun working on is assessing the scale of the challenge. Daniel mentioned that we have seen in the limited evaluation literature of these types of programs included in our research that we have seen generally some positive effects of workforce development programs, and you can have quick development programs, but also modest in their scale of impact and modest in their scale of investment. So I think more work needs to be done on assessing how much money we need to put in workforce development and economic development to make a meaningful difference.

The other area just to briefly highlight is what we refer to in our report as “employment matching,” and what we were referring to here is looking into the best opportunities for matching the existing fossil energy workforce to viable future employment alternatives. To use a simple example, are there good wind resources for wind energy generation, or solar? Not to say that clean energy should be the economic driver of the future, but as an example. But then also looking at things like what kind of skill sets that workers coming out of the fossil fuel industries have, and where is there a linkage into a new field of employment that allows them to bring along that capital with them those skills, so that they can have the highest wage possible in their new job? Also looking into linkage around geography.

There's a lot of questions about to what extent will we be able to fully stand up robust economies in these same locations. Then there are other things like, how do we make sure that job quality is the same? So matching job quality unionization of labor is, of course, a very timely topic right now, and we've talked about other aspects of skill matching. That's it.

Kristin Hayes: Great. Daniel, anything you wanted to quickly highlight about what you're really interested in looking at next in this area?

Daniel Raimi: Oh, gosh, there's so many things. I don't know exactly where we're going to go, but I think there's a lot of work to do still on the remediation side of things to quantify the benefits of remediation and learn about how to prioritize those projects. There's a lot of really interesting economic history work that we can do to try to get at some of the questions that Wes is asking about how to leverage the unique assets of communities, where fossil energy might be declining. But there's no shortage of great topics, so if anyone has other ideas, we'd love to hear them.

Kristin Hayes: Great. All right, listeners, this is your big shot to throw your ideas into the mix, but as you both have articulated, this is an incredibly complex area. It is incredibly important. Thank you for shedding some light on the work that you've done so far and telling us where you're going next. I really appreciate your time.

Daniel Raimi: Thank you, Kristin.

Wesley Look: Yeah. Thank you, Kristin.

Kristin Hayes: You've been listening to Resources Radio. Learn how to support Resources for the Future at rff.org/support. If you have a minute, we'd really appreciate you leaving us a rating or a comment on your podcast platform of choice. Also, feel free to send us your suggestions for future episodes.

Kristin Hayes: Resources Radio is a podcast from Resources for the Future. RFF is an independent, nonprofit research institution in Washington, DC. Our mission is to improve environmental energy and natural resource decisions through impartial economic research and policy engagement. The views expressed on this podcast are solely those of the podcast guests and may differ from those of RFF experts, its officers, or its directors. RFF does not take positions on specific legislative proposals. Resources Radio is produced by Elizabeth Wason with music by Daniel Raimi. Join us next week for another episode.