The Inflation Reduction Act is seen by so many as a once in a lifetime opportunity to right the wrongs of our industrial past.

With hundreds of billions of dollars in federal funding.

On the table comes the opportunity to correct the imbalance between energy companies, workers and the environment.

So how have we been doing?

And what can we anticipate seeing going forward?

Today, we're going to hear from experts in the climate workforce to find out.

I'm Jasmin Singer, and this is Environmental connections.

With solar installations increasing by more than 2,000% over the past decade in New York, the state still needs to expand its capacity significantly by 2050.

This raises a crucial question.

Will these projects create the high quality jobs that communities need?

Today we're discussing that.

We're discussing green jobs, a topic that's not only crucial for our environment, but also for the economic well-being and sustainability of our communities.

And I'd like to welcome my esteemed panel of guests Milena Novy-Marx, a professor of political science at the University of Rochester.

Thank you for being here, Milena.

Thank you so much for having me.

Batabyal, the Arthur J. Gosnell Professor in Economics at the University of Rochester.

Thank you for being here, Amit.

Thank you for having me.

And George McConochie, the co-founder and chief operations officer at Green Spark Solar, Thank you so much.

Nice to be here.

Yeah.

Wonderful to have you.

And joining us remotely is Avalon Hoek Spaans, the principal investigator for the research into the solar workforce in New York State She's also the assistant director of research at the Cornell ILR's Climate Jobs Institute.

So before we dive into specific topics, Amit, can you briefly explain how big the issue is?

Like how do green jobs fit into the larger economic picture for New York State?

Right.

So generally, the idea not only in New York, not only in the United States, but across the world, is to decarbonize our economies as rapidly as possible, given the almost existential threat that the phenomenon that we now call climate change poses.

So there are various ways in which an economy can take steps to decarbonize, but it is generally understood and agreed that a big part of decarbonization is a move towards renewable energies across the board.

Solar is one kind of renewable energy.

So generally speaking, the point is to shift the fuel mix and the industry mix to emphasize those aspects of energy production that are renewable and deemphasize those that are based primarily on fossil fuels.

So along with this emphasis on greening the economy come green jobs.

So it's definitely a very big thing that not only New York State confronts, but our entire nation confronts looking into the future.

Oh, well, there's so much looking into the future that I want to do with you today.

But let me check in with our remote guest today, Avalon.

Avalon, given the increasing importance of climate adaptation and resilience, can you discuss how this new sector of the economy is emerging and what kinds of jobs are being created?

Yeah, so our study focuses on the solar industry, which I would consider to be more in the climate mitigation job workforce sector.

So those jobs look like jobs that are working to reduce emissions.

So there are things like renewable energy installation, decarbonization of buildings and then decarbonization of transit.

And then there's another sector, which is the climate adaptation and resilience sector.

And those are more jobs working to reduce risks, climate risks, so that can look like installation of green infrastructure, stormwater management, installation of seawalls.

And then under my practice, I also consider disaster recovery workers and climate adaptation as well.

Okay, Well, thank you.

And I have quite a few questions for you about the report that you recently coauthored.

So we'll get back to you in just a second.

So, George, This must be bananas for you just to, like, watch the world sort of think that this is an overnight thing, and you've been working on it for a very long time.

Yeah, it is.

You know, I think that it's exciting, you know, to sort of have the tailwinds and the recognition from the broader sort of population and market of what we have been doing and what we've been trying to build.

It's a little scary, I think, with the increased attention.

You know, there are sort of unscrupulous folks getting into the industry and trying to make a quick buck.

I think the report study that Avalon authored, I think really highlights the risks that a growing industry faces.

And I think as a business that's been around for a long time, we've really tried to maintain a long term focus on growing an industry that's going to last, Great.

Well, I have a bunch more that you just talked about that I want to unpack with you and with Avalon.

But let me chat with Milena, Milena, could you help us understand the political piece of the green jobs puzzle?

What has the Inflation Reduction Act actually done for this sector?

And also, is there like a disconnect between training opportunities and workforce needs?

Can you speak to that?

Absolutely.

So the Inflation Reduction Act was passed a couple of years ago, and it's really the most major climate legislation we've ever had and one of the most major pieces in the world.

And it provides $370 billion in incentives for clean energy and for a transition to a low carbon economy.

So it's using a carrot, not a stick approach.

So businesses are incentivized to invest in clean energy.

There's $62 billion, for example, just for clean energy production in our country.

There's $32 billion for clean air manufacturing to incentivize manufacturers to actually construct solar panels and wind turbines in the U.S..

So all of this creates jobs, plus the incentives for individuals to buy an electric car or to install solar panels.

So the jobs are there.

They estimate that 1.5 million jobs will be created from the Inflation Reduction Act alone and 170,000 have already been created in the clean energy just since the bill was signed.

But then it comes to is there a gap in terms of these workers, and we know that there is there's not enough supply.

And so it's really about building the training institutions, the programs that we need at the level that we need them.

And that's starting to happen.

We're starting to see more short courses, maybe degree programs or certificate programs, even at Monroe Community College.

We're seeing some of those.

That’s something that is making me want to check in with Avalon about, because Avalon, regarding the report that you recently came out with, talk a little bit about what your impressions were, maybe your biggest takeaway from the report and kind of your driving force for moving forward.

Yeah.

So in terms of racial disparities, we found many racial disparities in how workers receive compensation, access to benefits.

For example, black workers were more likely to report that they were paid in cash compared to other workers, and also were least likely to receive benefits and also more likely to receive to have experienced wage theft.

And so I think we I want to keep in mind our study was exploratory, so a lot more research should be done.

The racial disparities weren't surprising.

It's often mirrored in different industries in our economy, but we need to address it.

And racial disparities, any industry are unacceptable.

I do want to kind of go back to what was being said about fossil fuel jobs and why there's they have better working conditions and better wages.

And I want to say that that's not a coincidence.

Workers worked for many years to organize fossil fuel industry.

Those jobs were extremely dangerous.

And I think that, you know, conditions in the renewable energy industry are just going to improve overnight By coincidence, it's going to take a lot of worker organizing and a lot of corporate accountability to get these jobs into a better place.

Milena, I'm seeing you nodding as Avalon is sharing that.

What are your thoughts and how do you think we can get to that better place?

I mean, that's it's a combination of incentivizing industry.

And the also when there's a shortage of workers, workers do have, you know, the upper hand in a sense for demanding better conditions and better wages.

And that may not apply to undocumented workers that don't have a lot of bargaining power.

But for us workers that do have permission to work in the country, ideally they're able to go to companies that are offering better conditions such as Green Spark Solar.

Well, going to Green Spark Solar for just a moment, George, did this report throw you at all or was it not at all surprising?

I'd love to know what your reactions were.

Yeah.

I mean, the findings were stark for sure.

You know, I think it wasn't a complete surprise to us.

Right.

We were pretty active in both state and sort of federal policy making and sort of trade associations.

So we know these conditions exist.

You know, I think to some extent, we do see these kind of conditions as an opportunity to really highlight the working conditions that we can provide Okay.

All right.

Great.

Well, thank you.

Avalon, I want to chat with you for just a moment.

The rollout of cannabis jobs, which is also a fast growing sector, has led to unionization of some workers in that industry.

So can you speak to the state of unionization in the clean energy field here in New York?

Yeah, definitely.

So in New York State, New York has one of the highest unionization rates in the country generally and above 20%.

IREC's National Solar Census estimates that nationally solar jobs are unionized at 10.5%.

We kind of question and hypothesize that that might be an overestimate, especially in New York State.

That percentage might be skewed by large scale renewable projects in California that are being done under union work.

study found that many workers work for multiple employers as well as our transit across the country.

And so we want to see larger rates of unionization in the country.

Things like the IRA that have prevailing wage can lead to higher like union lead to more union workers.

But there's also a lack of enforcement mechanisms to ensure that those labor standards actually happen since since projects are paid after they're completed.

So I think it's a really big question, what is the actual unionization rate in New York state and clean energy?

And I think it's something that our institute is going to be investigating a lot further.

Okay.

Well, lots to talk about in the future, too, then.

But sticking with you for just a moment, kind of backpedaling for for a second, what motivated the Climate Jobs Institute to conduct this study on the New York solar workforce?

Yeah.

So our institute works to guide New York in the nation's just transition to a clean energy economy.

And so we work with worker groups, labor unions, labor leaders and government officials across the country.

And we've heard from so many people anecdotally that these jobs were not high quality jobs.

I've even talked to some whistleblowers at high that are executive level at some national solar companies that flagged the same issues.

And so I worked in partnership with Nico Reese at Green Workers Alliance.

They do incredible work with nonunion, renewable energy workers across the country to help develop a survey that really tries to get on the ground data of what we've been hearing anecdotally for years.

And unfortunately, I think our findings are more stark than we we predicted.

This is actually a sister study to a similar study we're running in Texas and we're finding very similar findings as well.

What jobs are considered high quality jobs these days?

Yeah, so that's a great question.

So high quality family sustaining jobs, they're paid wages that are living living wages.

We have great researchers at Cornell working on things like that, but also have access to benefits.

And so I think like what we found through our solar study is that the majority of the workers that we sampled do not have access to any benefits.

30% are paid piece rate, which is really dangerous and can incentivize unsafe levels of productivity.

And then I think, you know, racial equality at job sites is really important.

Finding racial disparities in how workers are paid.

If they experience wage theft and things like that, It's not surprising, but it's still and it's mirrored across many industries, but it's still unacceptable.

And if we are going to build a clean energy economy that starts, we really have to work to address these issues now as the work is rapidly being scaled.

Amit, I want to check in with you.

At the same time as everything we're discussing as one sector is increasing, presumably fossil fuel based jobs are shrinking, one would imagine.

So how do you see this transition impacting our regional economy?

So I'll give you one specific example that in my opinion, is underappreciated and also under emphasized.

So you're totally, definitely going to see a decline in the workforce in the fossil fuel industry.

That's hopefully one of the goals and at the same time create an increase across the board in renewables.

Not just solar, but renewables.

Renewables across the board.

But one thing that I've noticed in my research that has been paid very little attention is that the location where the fossil fuel workers are and the location where the green jobs are not one in the same.

So unless you provide some attempts at a very basic level, it might be a mobility subsidy.

You're going to create jobs in areas where there are no workers, but where there are workers and jobs are needed, there are no green jobs.

As a result, there is this renewed debate about should policy be people based or place based?

Okay.

And we've seen that a lot of places are decimated because people don't want to move.

If you've lived in a particular place for 30 or 40 years, that's where you've had many generations of your family live.

Example, North Carolina and furniture manufacturers.

So what if there are good jobs in Seattle?

You're not going to move there.

Or at least that's what the evidence shows.

So the idea that investing in people is going to take care of the problem is not necessarily the case anymore.

And that's this location aspect that I'm emphasizing here.

Turning to you, Milena, I'm I'm curious how the wages compare between the green jobs and the, for lack of a better way of putting it, the fossil fuel jobs.

I guess that's not how others would put it.

There's a whole range.

I mean, it depends on like we're talking about itinerant workers that may not have a lot of negotiating power.

A lot of times it's in the hands of companies like Greensburg Solar that choose to pay people well.

So we really do need regulations that enforce these prevailing wage laws.

And we need more workers that can fill those positions.

on it.

Just switching gears briefly, climate change, damage costs.

astronomical, right?

Like the climate change damage costs the world an average of $16 million per hour.

I had to reread that multiple times because I was sure I was wrong.

But no.

Can you elaborate on how these costs translate into job losses and reduced productivity?

So it depends.

We need to begin with what our goal is.

What is the objective of a society?

The objective of most societies on planet Earth now is not to bequeath to their children and grandchildren a society, and particularly an environment that is significantly worse than what we currently have or what they found at the environment and when they appeared on the job scene.

So because these costs are so astronomical and because we have this utterly useless debate about whether climate change is or is not anthropogenic, that is human caused, we lose a lot of the focus on these costs.

And these costs are, as you pointed out, very, very large.

So if we don't make the transition that we should, that is away from fossil fuels and fossil fuel based industries to cleaner energies, renewables in general, we're going to continue to add to these costs.

And as these costs add up, one obvious way in which they translate into action is in things like rising sea levels, more adverse climate events, more cyclones, typhoons, hurricanes, depending on which part of the world you live in and more generally difficulty.

But simple things that many Americans take for granted, like, for instance, being able to find homeowner's insurance.

We've already had one company say that they're no longer going to insure homes that are located in certain beachfront areas because they know it's going to be a staggering problem on a regular, repeatable basis.

So this is another example of where India rightly, because of the insurance industry taking a particular action, people are going to be forced to rethink where they live in a way that they simply would not have thought about, even say, five or ten years ago.

So the costs are staggering and they have direct and indirect impacts on the economy and on people ultimately.

But I'd argue, just to add to what the professor saying, that it also provides an economic opportunity for us because adaptation to climate change is a very important, you know, aspect of policy.

So it's not just about mitigation, but adaptation.

So it might be planting mangroves in Florida to, you know, for sea coast, you know, coastal protection, better disaster preparedness and better weather forecasting, for example.

There's a lot of investments that we can make that also provide jobs.

And so it's really a need for us to develop the skills training systems so that we prepare young people and others to fill those kinds of jobs.

And what I'm hearing from MIT is talking about the fact that this isn't just about jobs.

This isn't just about like what our kids or our dogs do for a living when they get older.

This is would you say this is a matter of life and death?

Like, I don't want to put words in your mouth, but it seems like you're speaking about the very, very dire situation and how it needs to be looked at from a holistic.

Oh, absolutely.

Absolutely.

I mean, for instance, in the wealthier countries of the world and we are one of the wealthiest countries, questions like adaptation and mitigation make sense.

Okay, because we have a choice.

But for many people who live in the world's developing and poorer countries, adaptation versus mitigation is not really an issue that they, you know, lose much sleep over.

It's a question of survival.

In some countries, low lying ones in the Pacific may go completely underwater if actions are not taken by them and the richer countries of the world to deal with the problem of climate change.

You see adverse impacts of climate change in countries like Pakistan.

For instance, two years ago they had these massive floods which had destroyed significant livelihoods from an agricultural standpoint as well as a non agricultural standpoint.

But if you look at Pakistan's contribution to greenhouse gas emissions, the stock of greenhouse gas emissions, it's minuscule.

So the problem that I would like to emphasize is there is the stark difference between which nations or groups of nations caused the problem as a result of which we have these high stock of greenhouse gas emissions and which countries are bearing, I would add, unfairly the burden of actually dealing with the fallout from climate change.

And those two countries are not.

Those two groups of countries are not the same, which is one of the key reasons why we have such great difficulty getting nations of the world to come together to form meaningful climate action via treaties.

Milena, yes?

Well, I agree.

But I also do see progress.

If we think about the Paris Climate Accord and signed in 2015, that was an amazing feat of international cooperation and today the commitments that we have are maybe not quite enough, but have been vastly increased in terms of commitments to reduce greenhouse gases and then in adaptation there is the Green Climate Fund, which now has about $100 billion, which is focused on supporting developing countries to invest in adaptation.

So every country, including the U.S., is asked under the treaty to have a national adaptation strategy, and that can be funded through private sector multilateral institutions like the Green Climate Fund or the World Bank, and also from national funds.

And we now have carbon credit mechanisms so that wealthy countries can fulfill some of their treaty obligations by supporting adaptation and mitigation in developing countries.

So I recently went to Guyana and they have preserved almost 85% of their biodiversity and forests, and they're getting paid hundreds of millions of dollars every year just to preserve it because it is a carbon sink.

So there are, you know, you ask, well, is that going to be well enforced?

There's actually quite rigorous mechanisms for monitoring and evaluation of these resources to ensure that these really are viable carbon sinks and that they stay that way.

So there's opportunities being developed and more and more cooperation.

And so I do see, I like to be an optimist, I guess, and definitely a lot of suffering, but also a lot of human ingenuity and dedication to addressing the problem.

Are you hopeful, Avalon doing the work you do?

Yeah.

I mean, I think what we're dealing with is extremely stark, but I feel very hopeful because I think we're at a tipping point where we can't keep going in the extractive way that we have been historically and right now is an incredible opportunity to really rectify historic inequities in our country.

And I think that the only way to do that is if workers lead the way and through worker power.

So I am very hopeful.

I'm also it's a really exciting time in the labor movement.

there's incredible organizing happening in the South.

There's so much happening with the transition, the Starbucks, Starbucks workers unionizing just there's so much that's rapidly happening.

And I was just at Labor Notes in Chicago and I was able to hear from so many incredible workers working so hard to change working conditions in their industry that I just feel really hopeful and motivated by all the work that workers are doing across the country.

George, what about you as you're in a slightly different position than our other guest today with running Green Spark Solar.

Are you feeling optimistic about the clean energy transition?

Yeah, absolutely.

I mean, I think that if if we weren't optimists, like, it's tough to get out of bed these days.

You know I think the the you know things like the IRA from our perspective do give us some runway right in in order to make investments in sort of longer term projects,like workforce development, like creating financing options for low and moderate income.

we really believe that that there's a huge opportunity to shift how we generate and use electricity in this country.

And there's a lot of momentum.

And, you know, I think there's a lot of really well-meaning, purposeful companies that are driving that transition as well.

So Amit, any final words as we start to close out today?

I'll answer the same question by fudging the issue a little.

So I am optimistic, but, you know, cautiously optimistic to use diplomatic speak, because we cannot deny the fact that our country is very polarized and there are very different views on the extent to which environmental matters in general should be considered in active policymaking and in particular, even whether climate change is or is not an issue that we need to take serious action about.

So given that state of affairs, it's unclear what's going to happen if the administration changes at the next election and if and if we see a President Trump again, many of the positive developments that have occurred in the last couple of years under the present dispensation may well be reversed.

And one has to take that into account when one thinks about whether or not one can be optimistic across the board.

So I am, but I'm also aware of the potential pitfalls.

there's no telling what the future has in store.

But one thing is, for certain.

A clean energy transition is crucial for the future of our planet.

Until next time.

I'm Jasmin Singer.

Thank you for making today's environmental connections.