Will the US have the workforce it needs for a clean-energy transition?

Will the US clean-energy transition be hampered by a shortage of
electricians, plumbers, and skilled construction workers? In this
episode, Betony Jones, director of the DOE’s Office of Energy
Jobs, talks about the challenge of bringing a clean energy
workforce to full capacity and the need for job opportunities in
communities impacted by diminished reliance on fossil fuels.


(PDF
transcript)


(Active
transcript)


Text transcript:


David Roberts


Now that the Inflation Reduction Act has lit a fire under the
clean-energy transition, a new worry has begun to emerge: can the
US create the workforce it needs to build all of this stuff? And
can it care for the fossil fuel workers who are displaced in the
process?


Across the trades that will be necessary to build out clean
energy — electricians, plumbers, construction — industries are
reporting worker shortages. Meanwhile, entire communities are
being disrupted and displaced by the closure of refineries and
other fossil fuel facilities.


What can the government do to help growing industries create the
job pipelines they need? And what can it do to help cushion the
blow to fossil fuel communities?


To get to the bottom of these questions, I contacted Betony
Jones, the director of the Office of Energy Jobs at the
Department of Energy. She has spent years thinking about
clean-energy workforce issues and working with industries to
create shared job training and apprenticeship programs. We talked
about the jobs that are coming, the jobs that are going away, and
the need for an active hand in smoothing the transition.


With no further ado, Betony Jones. Welcome to Volts. Thank you so
much for coming.


Betony Jones


It's great to be here. Thank you.


David Roberts


You know, ever since the Inflation Reduction Act passed and the
rest of the legislation sort of like kicking off a new era of
clean energy acceleration, I've been thinking about what are the
remaining kind of now the policy log jam has broken, what are the
remaining impediments? What are the remaining dangers? And I've
sort of narrowed it down to the four Horsemen. The four or four
horsemen of the clean energy apocalypse political blowback, which
is basically Republicans taking back over and undoing everything
NIMBYism, which is the difficulty of building all the things we
need to build interconnection queue and transmission i.e. making
the grid big and robust enough. And then, fourth, workforce
issues. I'm going to try to do a pod on all these eventually, but
we're here to talk about workforce issues. So just by way of
background, maybe start by telling us what your office is and
what it's for and what it's intended to do.


Betony Jones


First, I just want to say when the Inflation Reduction Act
passed, that was really game changing for someone like me who's
been working at the nexus of climate change and labor issues for
so long. And so to answer the question of what my office does,
the Office of Energy Jobs at the U.S. Department of Energy is
responsible for a few things, but one of them is making sure that
the jobs that are being created from these historic investments
are good, quality, family sustaining jobs that people want. And
so writing the rules around the funding and how it goes out the
door and how it's made accessible.


David Roberts


Was the office created by Biden, or has this been around a while?


Betony Jones


This iteration was created by Biden, but it has also been around
for a while. I think Obama had an Office of Energy Jobs, and so
did President Trump. But our office is really focused on, first
and foremost, making sure that the investments are getting out
into communities, that the investments are creating broadly
shared prosperity and good jobs for American workers, and that
we're investing in new industries in the domestic supply chain to
provide the materials and equipment for this clean energy
transition. So that's really exciting. It's actually just an
absolutely incredible opportunity to show that we can address the
climate crisis while creating real material benefits for American
workers.


David Roberts


Yeah, you're really at the nexus there. That's a white hot area.
So when I think about workforce issues and the clean energy
transition, there's sort of two sides of it. There are the people
in communities who are going to lose fossil fuel based jobs, and
then there are the people in communities that are going to gain
clean energy jobs. I want to start with the latter, although we
will return to the former later. So there's all this work to be
done electrifying and everything else. But I wonder, do we have a
clear quantitative understanding or projection or good models or
a sense of exactly what the job shift is going to be? I.e. Like
how many jobs are going to be created in what industries, how
many will be lost in what industries, or is there so much
uncertainty that we're sort of adapting as we go?


Betony Jones


There's always uncertainty because nobody can tell the future. I
mean, my office puts out the U.S. Energy Employment Report every
year, which is a backward look at energy jobs. And we can see
some trends in that backward look. But in terms of forecasting,
that's really challenging to do. For the bipartisan
infrastructure law, it's difficult to determine where exactly
some of these investments are going to take place because for the
Department of Energy and most of the energy investments, they're
competitive. And so different private sector companies compete
for funding, and then they decide where it is that they want to
build their hydrogen hub or their battery factory or what have
you.


And so it's hard to determine exactly where those jobs are going
to be. But we do know that a lot of them, and I would say
probably 75% of them are in the construction sector. And so this
is traditional jobs. This is laborers and operating engineers,
the folks who move heavy machinery, earth moving equipment to
prepare the ground for these things or drill the geothermal
wells. They're electricians, plumbers, pipe fitters, iron
workers. These traditional construction occupations. And it's not
that different building a battery factory from building a data
center or building a hospital, for that matter.


Construction is construction. The jobs that are created are
mostly in traditional occupations sort of regardless of the
technology that's being deployed. For the Inflation Reduction
Act, this is the really game changing legislation because of the
way that it's structured with tax incentives, so we expect to see
those investments pretty much everywhere. Now, obviously for
things like wind and solar geothermal, you're constrained by the
location, by the availability of that resource geographically.
But if you're building a factory to make solar panels or battery
cells or EV charging stations, you're much less constrained
geographically. So that's one thing.


I mean, communities all across the U.S. are competing for those
types of investments and then at the same time and this maybe
gets to the first part of your question there's fossil assets
that can be repurposed for some of the things that we're trying
to develop now. And so there's a lot of attention on how do we
repurpose those fossil assets, these facilities that have grid
connections, that have water and other resources, that have a
workforce and a community that supports that. So that's another
area of focus.


David Roberts


Yeah. The reason I ask is just because a theme I'm going to
return to again and again is just the difficulty of guiding this
stuff with policy on any sort of macro scale. That's kind of
something I want to interrogate a little bit. But as you say,
this legislation that Dems passed we expect ought to create a
surge of new jobs in the trades, in pretty conventional trades.
And yet all I hear or read in the news is the trades telling us
that they face a huge shortage of workers, that they can't find
new workers, that the pipeline is drying up, that there's like a
million jobs for every applicant, et cetera, et cetera.


So I guess I want to know why is that? Clean energy aside, why
doesn't — you would think a market like this is what markets are
supposed to do, right? Like when demand for something increases,
the market produces new supply. So what is going wrong here that
we have these shortages?


Betony Jones


Well, a little bit of it is who you're hearing from. So there are
employers out there who can't find workers for sure, and then
there are others where there's a line out the door for the
opening. You have these established firms with some, you know,
where a worker feels like there's some reliability. Siemens, for
example, or GE, they can generally fill their positions. The
other thing is registered apprenticeship and in particular the
union apprenticeship programs. I am being told that even now with
this historic low unemployment, they have ten times the
applicants as they have openings for.


So what that really shows is that people want jobs but they want
good jobs. And so if employers are counting on paying yesterday's
wages or counting on the labor market from pre-pandemic, then
yeah, they're going to struggle to find workers. But the
employers that have a good track record, unionized firms, union
pathways into construction as opposed to just general
construction, but the pathways that provide reliable access to
the middle class, the ability to buy a home, to go camping on the
weekends, have a garage full of toys, whatever, people want those
jobs. And so the more that we can make sure that we're creating
those kinds of jobs, jobs that people are excited about, that
they want, it shouldn't be a problem to attract workers.


Is there a bit of transitional pain? Sure. But I think that
that's okay because we're in a ramp-up. We're at the bottom of a
ramp-up phase. And so what's really exciting, I think, is that we
have this big boom. This inflation reduction act is really
significant, not just in terms of the greenhouse gas emission
reductions, which is huge, 40% by 2030. I've been working in
climate change for over 25 years, and I never thought that I
would see that actually. So it's really significant in terms of
the greenhouse gas emission reductions, but it also is
significant in terms of its ability to transform our economy and
rebuild a lot of these jobs that historically have provided
pathways to the middle class for workers without a college
degree.


And so the fact that this is all happening so quickly, yeah, it's
an abundance of riches and we have to do some work to realign the
labor market. But it's also a great opportunity because there's a
lot of buzz and it's a really exciting time to get into energy.


David Roberts


That's what kind of breaks my brain, is that on the one hand, we
have all this hype, all this talk, all this new legislation, et
cetera, et cetera. And then on the other hand, over here you have
electricians saying "Hey, we have a graying aging workforce. We
don't have enough young electricians. We're falling short here."
Trying to fit those two things together in my head is what kind
of doesn't compute.


Betony Jones


Well, I think that's exactly where this is an opportunity
because, yeah, there is sort of this silver tsunami in the
trades, and it hasn't been an area of work that parents have
pushed their kids into for a while. And that's also true with
manufacturing. But now with these investments tied to actual
labor standards that will make sure that these are good career
track, family-sustaining jobs, that's going to shift. The promise
of a college degree has changed. It's no longer the reliable path
to the middle class that it has been. And so we're seeing even
people with college degrees going into apprenticeship programs
where not only do you not have to take time off work to go get
trained because you're earning as you're learning, but there's
also no tuition associated.


So you're not going into any debt. You can tomorrow go sign up,
get into a registered apprenticeship program. You start earning
money immediately. You get to work with your hands. You get to
see the fruits of your labor. There's a lot of people actually
who want to do that. And so this wealth of investments that we're
making really, I think, shows workers, young people or people
looking to transition in their careers, that this is a pretty
stable area of work to get into, that there's going to be
investments for a while. This is a reliable career path, and I
think that's really attractive to people.


David Roberts


Yeah. One of the articles I read, it says the Bureau of Labor
Statistics estimates that there will be 80,000 job openings for
electricians every year until 2031 as we electrify everything. My
own 17-year-old son is seriously considering going into the
trades instead of college.


Betony Jones


And how do you feel about that?


David Roberts


Because of all the stuff you mentioned, working with your hands,
making decent money, not going into debt. And of course, he's
like, I don't want Zoom meetings. I don't want cubicles. It's not
just that blue-collar life maybe is looking a little better these
days, but also that white-collar life is like "ugh". Young people
aren't all that excited about it. Yeah, so we're thrilled. Of
course, he's a teenager, so we're trying not to act thrilled. But
the Bureau of Labor Statistics also says that the manufacturing
sector is short 764,000 workers. So just catching up from that
deficit plus all the new growth prompted by IRA to me just says
that these labor markets, these particular labor markets in the
trades, are going to be tight for a long time.


Betony Jones


They're going to be competitive for a long time. They're going to
be competitive. And I think they'll compete with other sectors
for workers like warehousing or the service sector. These sectors
that have traditionally relied on low-wage labor are probably
going to feel a bit more of a pinch than they have for decades,
because now there's manufacturing and construction work that have
the ability to pay more, be more stable, be more rewarding.


David Roberts


But I see you would think if you're a company in one of these
areas and you're short on workers and you're competing for
workers, one of the things you could do to compete for workers
would be to make the jobs higher paying union jobs. And you would
think that would attract people. And yet it just doesn't seem
like that's spontaneously occurring to many companies. Instead,
they're complaining to the press about entitled workers and
asking the Fed to raise interest rates to weaken the labor
market. What would it take? And now you're here basically saying
it's got to be policy forcing, basically, or using incentives and
tax credits to force these companies to make these decent jobs.


Why is it just habit of having crappy jobs in these sectors in
the US? Like, what is it with US employers and the resistance to
the sort of obvious solution of just making the jobs better?


Betony Jones


Yeah, I think there is some habit there. And to be honest, we
don't have a lot of really strong policy levers. We have carrots
and carrots and carrots and we're trying to use those. And I
think this administration is really committed to helping
companies to provide better jobs. I mean, certainly at the
Department of Energy, we bake job quality into our funding
guidelines because we know that these companies are really only
going to be successful if they are able to attract and retain the
skilled workers that they need. And so we want them thinking
about that up front.


And we're not the only agency doing that. But I think there is
habit. There's decades of anti-union sentiment. Some startups say
to me, I don't know why, but I've been made to believe that I
should never talk to unions or that I should fear that at all
costs.


David Roberts


Yeah, it's just ambient now among that class, I think.


Betony Jones


I think for a long time in the clean energy realm, we've thought
about the lowest cost as the solution to the climate crisis. And
that lowest cost sometimes usually comes on the backs of workers
and lower wages. And there's been even a concern among climate
advocates that better jobs are going to slow down adoption or
slow down deployment. And so I think that it's pretty entrenched
and not just among employers. And I think this administration and
certainly the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act puts that
theory to the test because the Inflation Reduction Act passed in
part because of the labor standards, the prevailing wage
requirements, and apprentice utilization standards that are tied
to so many of the infrastructure investments.


David Roberts


And I would be remiss if I didn't also insert here that states
pioneered those kinds of policies, including my own home state of
Washington were really early in doing that, in tying the sort of
level of tax credits to the level of worker agreements and things
like that.


Betony Jones


Right. I mean, it makes sense, right, because when people see a
future for themselves in a low carbon economy, it's much harder
to remain resistant to that transition. But for decades we didn't
design our policies that way except at the state level where some
states were innovative.


David Roberts


Right. Even that it's pretty recent at the state level. Yeah. So
the traditional ding you hear when you talk about workforce
issues, one of the things you often hear is we're asking the
country, the workforce, to move away from jobs that are really
well paying and unionized to jobs that pay less, basically to
worse jobs. The idea is that solar and wind and retrofit jobs and
solar installation jobs are just worse than the jobs that are
being moved away from. And this is one of the things that creates
immense resistance among unions because, you know, not
unreasonably, they want to keep the good jobs and are not induced
by the promise of less good jobs waiting over the horizon. So do
you feel like that's changing or will change?


Betony Jones


It does have to change. Again, employers that are paying well
with some career stability for workers do not have the same
challenges with recruitment. And we have data that shows there's
a lot that shows that that's the case. And it's also true that
solar jobs don't pay as well as fossil jobs, but they also don't
pay as well as just general construction jobs. So this effort to
drive down costs of renewable energy has been really important
for increasing adoption, but it has not been helpful for
fulfilling the workforce needs of that industry or building a
nimble workforce that can transition from one technology to the
next, which is really what we're going to need.


We don't need a massive workforce of solar installers or wind
technicians or EV charging infrastructure maintenance workers, we
need people who are able to perform tasks associated with those
technologies, but not only that, who can also pivot when the
incentives for solar decline and something else picks up that
they can pivot to another job. So I think the narrow focus on
clean energy workers as if they can only do one thing has been
detrimental to building the broader workforce that can do more of
these things and also making clean energy jobs compelling.
Because right now, if they're lower paying and less stable and
you have to travel all over for work, that's just not very
attractive for very long for workers. And so it has to change and
it will change.


But the other thing that is changing is that clean energy, while
we might think of solar panels and wind turbines as these iconic
symbols of clean energy, now clean energy means so much more than
that. It means battery factories for electric vehicles and EV
charging infrastructure all across the US. And geothermal.


David Roberts


Geothermal!


Betony Jones


Yeah. I love Geothermal. I love Geothermal because it's such a
direct —


David Roberts


Everybody loves geothermal.


Betony Jones


Do they? That's news.


David Roberts


Well, everybody in my tiny world.


Betony Jones


Well, we should be friends. The workers who maintain the fossil
infrastructure, those skills are directly transferable to
geothermal and so it's a really great opportunity for
transitioning workers, whereas the workers from a natural gas
power plant, that is a pretty different workforce from building a
solar farm.


David Roberts


Hydrogen hub.


Betony Jones


So there's some technologies a lot we're investing in now. Yeah,
hydrogen hubs are another example where you have much closer
alignment between skills from the fossil industry and the clean
energy. And not just the skills, but some of the employers are
the same. Some of the fossil fuel companies are the ones who have
the resources to invest in some of this new clean energy. So that
could also help.


David Roberts


So over time, as these labor markets are tight and employers are
competing for workers, there's going to inevitably be a movement
to make the jobs better, if only just to attract the workers. In
some sense, that's just like the normal operation of market
capitalism at work. So my question to you is to what extent can
public policy speed that up? To what extent do you have levers
that can induce employers to improve their jobs, that can create
maybe like, programs to onboard people into these areas? How big
of a lever is public policy relative to what are huge
macroeconomic trends?


Betony Jones


Yeah, so we have our funding, but I wouldn't say that's the
strongest lever that we have.


David Roberts


The carrot?


Betony Jones


Yeah, we have the carrot. We have the 62 for DEO, the $62 billion
for energy infrastructure through the bipartisan infrastructure
law, then another $30 some billion through the Inflation
Reduction Act. And there's the tax credits that are tied to,
again, prevailing wage and apprenticeship standards. So we have
our funding levers. And those are significant, I think especially
the Inflation Reduction Act lever is significant. It will kind of
move the needle for construction job quality, I think. But we
have these other levers, too.


Or maybe lever isn't the right word, but the federal government
has real great convening power. And so one of the things we're
doing to address manufacturing, and battery manufacturing in
particular, is to bring together employers and unions and other
experts in the field to identify what are the skills required to
manufacture battery cells? And then we'll look up and down that
supply chain and can we get to some industry consensus? And the
argument that we make to employers is this there's no coherent
system of workforce development for advanced manufacturing in
this country. And so what that means is that every employer is
responsible for training their own workers and there's nothing
really to keep their trained workers working for them as opposed
to going to work for a competitor.


David Roberts


Right. You invest in the worker and then the worker goes
somewhere else. And that's inducement not to do it in the first
place.


Betony Jones


Right? So there's this free rider problem. We can move away from
that because workforce doesn't need you're competing on so many
different areas. Workforce development, workforce doesn't need to
be a point of competition. We're trying to rapidly grow this
industry and facilitate the ability of American companies to
compete with Asian companies in this space. So let's take
workforce development out of the competitive arena for
manufacturing and figure out what are the skills that everybody
needs. So there's always going to be 15% or something that's
proprietary, but what's the 85% that's not? And then how do we
standardize that, communicate it to community colleges or support
the development of new apprenticeship programs that will really
support the rapid growth of that industry. And so that kind of
thing where you're building industry consensus and trying to do
that in a really rapid way to get these training guidelines to
support the development of a whole new industry that's I think a
really powerful tool that we have and that we're using.


David Roberts


It seems like other countries, specifically European democracies,
I guess specifically, I'm thinking of Germany. But I'm presumably
not only Germany are sort of better at this than us. There's more
sort of like bringing industries together and doing this sort of
common work and setting up institutions for training people that
go into these. Are there models from other countries that you
think are really promising in terms of trying to not just shift a
workforce so that it's ready for a booming industry, but to do so
purposefully and quickly? Are there other models in other
countries?


Betony Jones


There are models, but I would say I more look at the success of
other countries. So Germany has a really robust apprenticeship
system. They have seven times the number of apprentices per
capita as the US has. And it's a really valid training pathway in
the eyes of parents and students and workers. And I think we need
to build up our apprenticeship system to get there. But the
challenge of looking at other countries is that the context is so
different. Other countries, I was talking to a roundtable of
embassy people recently and I was talking about our approach with
the Inflation Reduction Act and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law
and they were just floored that all we have is incentives.


They were like, can't you just require this? Like what?


David Roberts


You just got to explain budget reconciliation to them. It all
makes total sense.


Betony Jones


Right. I mean, the context is just so incredibly different that
our solutions really do have to be American made. But there are
examples in the US that work really well. So I will refer again
to the construction industry and the system of registered
apprenticeship. Let me just tell you for a second why this is
such an incredible system of workforce development. One, it's
privately funded.


David Roberts


This is here in the US you're talking about?


Betony Jones


Here in the US union apprenticeship training for construction
occupations. It is privately funded by both the employer and
workers. Workers take money out of their paycheck to fund the
next generation of training. And so the people enrolled in
apprenticeship, they work out in the field, learning on the job
while also taking classroom training. And they're paid from the
get go, they're paid from day one and their pay increases as they
acquire skills and training. And so they have this articulated
trajectory of pay until they graduate three to five years later
with their journey card.


That is a transferable industry recognized credential that they
can take anywhere in the country and get work. And so again, it's
privately funded. Employers are putting in money and workers are
putting in money. And that ensures that the system is accountable
to the employers in terms of the skills that it's providing
people and accountable to the workers in terms of realizing that
they're going to get more money as they advance in their career
development. And so that system works really well and it's
collaborative. A bunch of employers contribute to that same
system of training and then they can draw workers out of that
system of training when they need them on the job.


How do we translate that to new industries? How do we expand that
model for manufacturing?


David Roberts


Was that born of some kind of public policy nudge, or is that
just something the industry developed itself over time?


Betony Jones


Oh, my gosh, that's a stumper. I don't actually know. But it has
been around for a very, very long time and it serves everybody
well. It's sort of one of these things. If it was developed
today, it would be like the greatest social innovation. It would
be all over the headlines. It's this incredible system. The
unions put $2 billion a year into apprenticeship training.


David Roberts


Oh, wow.


Betony Jones


That's the contribution of workers and then there's an equal
contribution from employers. It's not dependent on public policy.
It's not dependent on the whims of philanthropy. It's not
dependent on anybody. It's built into the system to make sure
that the construction industry will be able to retain and grow a
skilled workforce continuously.


David Roberts


But on the other hand, the Bureau of Labor Statistics also says
that the construction industry is short 413,000 workers.


Betony Jones


I like your stats, and BLS is a reliable source. But the thing
is, the construction industry is not very heavily unionized. So
on the one hand, we see ten people seeking apprenticeship
openings as there are positions for. Ten people for one position.
Why can't apprenticeship programs just accept more people? If
they have ten people who want in, why don't they just bring ten
people in?


David Roberts


Right.


Betony Jones


It's constrained by their ability to put people to work. So if
they don't have a project labor agreement to build the thing,
then they can't guarantee a job for that person they're bringing
into apprenticeship. As they get more agreements and as more
construction activity gets built union, then that system of
training can expand rapidly. And we've seen that in the past.
It's very, very nimble. It can scale, but it is driven by demand.
And not just demand for construction workers, but demand for
union construction workers.


David Roberts


It sounds like the slow pace or the anemic state of unionization
in the US is a big part of what is creating this backlog or this
appearance of backlog or this sort of choke point. Would you like
to see and maybe you aren't allowed to say, but would you like to
see other kinds of policy? I mean, are there other things that
Congress could do to accelerate unionization or to support unions
that you think would have the sort of side effect of accelerating
the clean energy workforce?


Betony Jones


Sure, Congress can do whatever they agree to.


David Roberts


Or can't, as the case may be.


Betony Jones


But there was an early proposal, I think, to tie the electric
vehicle tax credits to union made, or at least have some higher
level tax credits and bonus credit if the vehicle was made in the
US and made union that got stripped out, that would have helped.
Right now we have Davis Bacon is the law that applies to
federally funded construction work. So for construction, if
you're using federal dollars, there are certain labor standards
and wage standards and reporting standards that you have to meet.


And then in the Inflation Reduction Act there's wage standards
and apprentice utilization standards. But beyond construction
there's nothing statutory to nudge more work or to make it easier
to unionize. Ultimately, unionization is the choice of the
workers. But there are a number of barriers, ever increasing
barriers, to support unionization. So it has actually been the
National Labor Relations Act was passed in 1935 and that act says
quite clearly: It is the policy of the federal government to
support worker organizing and collective bargaining because the
quality of bargaining power is important to the free and fair
conduct of commerce.


Or some 1935 language that I'm not paraphrasing very well, but it
says explicitly it is the policy of the US government to support
worker organizing and collective bargaining and yet lawsuit after
lawsuit and decision after decision have kind of cut away at that
right of workers.


David Roberts


Yeah, I wonder to sort of loop this back in. So there's this
story in The Washington Post about how during the pandemic and
post-pandemic, basically inflation kind of brought down the
purchasing power of upper income people and labor market
tightness raised the wages of lower income people. And as a
consequence, the inequality gap in the US shrank by a crazy
amount in a crazy short period of time, which you might think,
woo! But in Rides, Powell and the Fed who say explicitly the rise
in worker wages is a problem, we have to solve this problem by
raising interest rates.


So it seems like we have a macroeconomic institutional setup that
is intrinsically hostile to raising the wages of blue collar
workers. Even as with the other hand of the federal government,
we're desperately trying to improve those jobs. What do you make
of that? Is that resolvable?


Betony Jones


I mean, I can see how one would draw that conclusion. I don't
know. I think there's a lot of barriers to trying to improve job
quality, particularly for workers without a four-year degree. And
all I'll say is that I don't think we can achieve our ambitious
clean energy goals without doing that and that employers will,
whether they do it because we're now asking them to or they do it
because they eventually realize that they have to. The labor
market is competitive. The balance of power has shifted more to
workers after the pandemic or during the pandemic, and I think
workers are asking for more from their employers.


If you're an employer and you want to find and be able to retain
a skilled workforce, you're going to have to make some
investments in that workforce. And think about workers really as
something that you're investing in and not this disposable
commodity, because that's not a recipe for success, to be just
churning through workers that employers aren't willing to invest
in the skill, development, and advancement. I mean, you think
about things like batteries or advanced manufacturing. This
requires a really high level of skill. And right now, the way
that that work is structured is to bring in low-wage workers to
do very rote work and bring in foreign workers to do the skilled
work.


And there's no transfer, there's no knowledge transfer happening.
That's not going to work. Once we have 100 battery cell factories
across the country, we're going to need to invest in our own
workforce if we're going to be successful here.


David Roberts


And also, I think, worth noting here is we can remember back to
sort of globalization draining away these high-paying jobs and
the federal government responding. I remember Bill Clinton sort
of responding with this sort of hand-waving about worker
retraining. This was kind of a mantra like, oh, retraining,
retraining. We're going to help our workers adapt. And to my
understanding, those federal worker training and retraining
programs just have an abysmal record. And so, consequently, jobs
were degraded, people got kicked out of jobs, and there was an
immense and still ongoing political backlash. So you would hate
to see like a decade of transition to clean energy followed by a
backlash against the sort of low-wage labor it's involved.


Betony Jones


And sometimes, I mean, not just accounting for the track record
of those programs in terms of job placement, but sometimes
massive training programs can actually have the opposite effect,
where even during the ARRA period, we invested tons of money in
solar training and other clean energy workforce training. And
what happened then is that we sort of flooded the labor market
with basically qualified people who couldn't find work. And so
that drove wages down, right? That people were competing with
each other and trying to get a job. That drove wages down. That
served the industry, or it served the employer part of the
industry, but it maybe hurt the industry long term because now
people think of clean energy jobs as unreliable or as volatile,
and that might not have helped us long term.


And so this time around, Congress passed these policies with very
little money in the way of workforce education and training.
There's very little. There's a few programs for a few things, but
most of it is money that we're investing in the infrastructure
itself, in the implementation, the deployment, the
demonstrations. And so employers need to think about how they're
building workforce development into their implementation plans
because there's not just this massive pool of public funding to
go train a bunch of people and hope that they find their way to
jobs. This time it's much more demand-driven in order to ensure
that there's good calibration.


And even if Congress were to pass or put some money into
workforce development, the timing of that is more likely to align
with when real jobs are going to be created. Because right now,
there's a lot of construction planning happening, engineering
happening, but a lot of the construction is yet to materialize.
And then the manufacturing jobs are even a little bit further
away. First, you have to build the factory before you can staff
the factory. So we do have a little bit of time to kind of
reorient the labor market to meet the demand for these positions.


David Roberts


But the overall message here is this is not going to be a thing
where the federal government steps in and sort of spends a bunch
of money taking charge of the workforce itself. You're basically
convening private industry and trying to help them and train them
and show them how to develop these programs themselves so that
they become kind of self-sustaining?


Betony Jones


Yeah, I think it's an all-hands-on-deck. I mean who knows what
Congress will appropriate in the future? But right now we're not
dealing with a lot of public money for workforce development and
so we are looking at how do we engage strategically? There's a
massive community college system out there, 8.5 million students.
There's a massive apprenticeship program out there, there are
states and there are workforce boards that are funded through the
Department of Labor. How do we align all of this existing
workforce infrastructure to meet some of the needs of the clean
energy sector? That's where I'm thinking more.


I don't think we have as much power when we have a million
dollars to spend and we go train 26 people but if we have a
million dollars to convene and corral the massive community
college system out there then we're getting somewhere. So it's
just what resources do we have available? And that's just an
example by the way, we're not spending a million dollars —


David Roberts


It seems like —


Betony Jones


— to community colleges.


David Roberts


community colleges for their own purposes have all the incentive
in the world to try to get smart on this and to try to orient
themselves toward the big burgeoning jobs of the future. I'm sure
they're hungry for guidance or are they? It seems like they
should want this.


Betony Jones


Absolutely and it's hard. Guidance is hard to develop. Getting
industry consensus for an emerging industry, that's challengin.
And so yes, people want that because they want their curriculum
to meet employer needs. They want the students that they train to
be able to find work in their community. So yeah, people are
hungry for the guidance and I think that's a really valuable
thing that we can do.


David Roberts


Okay, my attempts to goad you into badmouthing the Fed having
failed, let's move on into one other thing, which I didn't leave
all that much time for. And it's really, really huge subject, but
maybe we can just sort of say some broad things about it, which
is the other side of the coin, which is fossil fuel jobs going
away. If you count not only sort of direct fossil fuel jobs but
all the kind of second-order peripheral jobs around fossil fuel
jobs serving fossil fuel workers, et cetera, et cetera. There are
a lot of those and there are communities that depend on those
fossil fuel jobs almost completely.


And there's been a lot of hand-wringing about this, about what to
do with all these workers that are going to basically be pushed
out of jobs if we do the clean energy transition successfully. I
hear a lot of talk about this and I hear a lot of happy talk
about how we're going to retrain them to work in geothermal or
whatever. But the scale involved, I have not yet seen anything
that seems of the scale of the problem. So are these sort of like
fossil fuel worker retraining programs, are they just like nice
brochures? Is there any prospect of having a humane response to
that problem at scale?


Betony Jones


Well, there has to be the prospect of it, and I think that's the
thinking around and talk around a just transition. We can't leave
people behind. It's not the right thing to do, and it will slow
us down in terms of building political will to do more of the
kinds of things we need to address the climate crisis. So it's
not just a moral imperative, it's just a pragmatic issue. It's
not just jobs. It's the fossil fuel industry's hold on the
economy, actually the tax revenue for communities that are
dependent on those industries. There's a lot of issues beyond
just the jobs that threaten or pose risks too.


David Roberts


Yeah, I mean it's their schools, it's public services. It's all
sustained by fossil fuel money in some of these places.


Betony Jones


So our approach is really, like, looking at economic
redevelopment and diversification. There is no one-for-one
replacement for a fossil fuel facility in a community. Like, I
live in a county that has five refineries.


David Roberts


Oh my God.


Betony Jones


They are at risk at some point due to transportation
electrification. There's no single industry that can come in and
replace that economic base or those jobs. So then the challenge
is economic diversification. And how do you retain an industrial
base for blue-collar workers? It's not all just transitioning to
the creative class or something else. How do you retain an
industrial base in these communities?


And I think that advanced nuclear carbon capture and storage,
direct air capture, hydrogen, some of these technologies that
we're investing in provide those opportunities because they
aren't necessarily dependent on a resource. They can be anywhere.
So why not locate in a place that can use existing assets,
including the infrastructure but also the workforce? There's a
whole interagency working group that is really looking at how to
serve energy communities, how to connect them with resources, how
to make sure we get this transition right and create new
opportunities for workers.


David Roberts


Let me ask about that because you wouldn't expect jobs in those
new industries that you're talking about to sort of spontaneously
align with lost jobs, right? You wouldn't expect them to sort of
spontaneously line up with the places that need to replace fossil
fuel jobs. So aligning them has got to be active, right? It's got
to be done by someone and a) sort of like whose job is that and
how does it work? And b) sort of like do we have a track record
of success? Everybody's talking about this return to industrial
policy, which is fantastic.


But industrial policy involves a lot of really difficult
questions that we have not necessarily done great on in the past.
And one of them is like trying to match new jobs to the places
that most need them. What are the kind of instruments you can use
to push that alignment?


Betony Jones


Well, one, I will say the track record of success is really with
military base closures.


David Roberts


Right.


Betony Jones


And there's a whole process that they follow so that they're not
just leaving a community high and dry. And so again, there's
domestic examples that we can think of. Aside from fossil fuels
there's this massive transition underway in the automotive
industry where the places where we're seeing new investments in
battery factories are not necessarily the places that were
supplying the parts and innards for internal combustion engine
vehicles. And so in some of our grants and Congress gave us
language to do this, we can create extra incentives for projects
that are locating in communities that have or had an automotive
facility. Or repurposing, I think there's funding for repurposing
automotive factory supply chain factories, for battery factories.


So there's some levers in order to kind of put the thumb on the
scale of locational decisions and then some of it is getting the
word out around what are the assets of these energy communities
and getting that in front of investors and people who are looking
at where they can set up shop. And that's what the Interagency
Working Group is really doing, like trying to draw investments to
these communities.


David Roberts


Yeah. What I come back to again and again is the scale of these
macroeconomic trends relative to these policy interventions
you're talking about is the thumb on the scale. I have no doubt
that in a few years there will be a few success stories you can
talk about like oh look, this factory closed and this one opened.
But does that seem adequate to the scale of the problem? Does
anything seem adequate to the scale of the problem? Is there more
you would like to see or more you think the government could do?


Betony Jones


Yeah, I think that's a good question. I mean, I guess I approach
this with a bit of curiosity. I mean, for years again working on
climate change, I sort of knew that we weren't doing enough to
combat the crisis and yet I kept working on it. And then we got
like a pretty significant bill adopted to reduce greenhouse gas
emissions by a lot if we're able to get through some of these
hurdles that you're going to cover in your podcast series. And so
I think right now, me and I think others are trying new and
creative things, partnerships, bully pulpit, levers with the
funding that we have and with the authorities that Congress has
given us.


And we're studying what works, and we're trying again and we're
looking at what it's iterative. I feel incredibly optimistic. It
might be because I don't have time to read the news or the
headlines, which are always all so negative, but I see the kinds
of things that we're putting into place for the long haul, and I
sort of like I kind of can't imagine how it won't work.


David Roberts


Well, let me raise one possible way that it won't work, as my
special talent is imagining problems. And this is probably not
something you're going to want to answer since it's political,
but one of the —


Betony Jones


There is a big reason why it won't work.


David Roberts


Yes. It's called the Republican Party. But let me flesh that out.
One of the big trends we're seeing and there's been a bunch of
headlines about this since the passage of IRA. IRA has spawned
already billions and billions and billions of dollars of
investments in factories, et cetera, et cetera. And most of them,
the bulk of those investments are in red states. Most of the new
investment is going to red states. And red states sort of
notoriously have this kind of low unionization, low wage, you're
on your own.


Betony Jones


Yeah, they're all right to work states.


David Roberts


Right to work states, et cetera, et cetera. So in a sense, the
Biden administration's quest to make these high paying unionized
jobs is, it seems to me, going to run into red state's long-time
habit and ideological commitment to worker precarity, lack of
unions, low wages, high churn. There's this article in the
Washington Post the other day about, "Oh, why are red states
hiring more?" And then they looked more closely at it, and then
"Oh, they're just hiring and firing more" because there's more
churn, because these are crappy jobs —


Betony Jones


People are quitting.


David Roberts


move through them more quickly.


So do you worry about that? Do you have any way to circumvent
that? Do you see any prospect that Republican policymakers might
change their tune on those issues to attract those kind of jobs?
What are your thoughts on that?


Betony Jones


Yeah, I mean, you're right that it probably is too political to
weigh on some of the specifics, but I do think that the Inflation
Reduction Act is designed in such a way that I think Americans
who haven't seen why they should care about climate change, their
livelihoods, are now going to be tied to somebody caring about
climate change. And how does that not sort of shift the way that
people think? Not that people always vote in their self-interest,
but —


David Roberts


I mean, Florida is sinking under the water and they're still —
self-interest.


Betony Jones


But again, your livelihood is tied to a battery factory and the
electric vehicle transition, it has to change a bit how people
think and how lawmakers think, I don't know. I mean, the other
thing is red states. Companies are locating in, quote, red states
for a lot of reasons. But I don't think it's primarily because
they're right-to-work states or because they're cheap labor
states. It's usually because the permitting is quick, they can
break ground quick, and they can get going quickly. And maybe
there's some tax credits thrown in as a cherry on top.


And so there's a lot of factors that go into locational
decisions. But I think, like, if you take Tennessee, for example,
tons and tons of investment, well, that's going to make the labor
market tighter, more competitive, and that will ultimately give
workers more power. And so how do we change this dynamic? Some of
it is going to be — the drive to organize your workplace going to
grow right now that's seen a resurgence. Is that going to
continue? Are workers going to feel empowered to ask for more?
And how is that going to be a differentiator between companies in
a state or between states?


David Roberts


What a fascinating dynamic. That will be fascinating and
terrifying to watch. Well, I've kept you for too long. Let me
finish with a sort of general question about your broad feelings
about this area. So my analogy is sort of there's a lot of worry
these days about the material specifically like minerals and
metals requirements of clean energy. And there are a lot of sort
of specific issues and specific problems and the solutions are
not necessarily obvious or ready to hand. But generally my
feeling is like, that's going to work itself out. Like of all the
things that capitalism is good at, substituting materials and
finding materials, is really good at that.


So I can't necessarily give you chapter and verse why, but sort
of my strong feeling is like in 10-20 years we'll look back and
be like "Oh, that just sorted itself out." Is that how you feel
about the workforce issues or does your worry run deeper? Do you
worry that this could be an actual bottleneck, an actual slow
work to slow the transition? What's your sort of general level of
optimism about this stuff?


Betony Jones


For the clean energy transition, I'm not at all concerned because
I think there's the capacity of these jobs and industries to
compete really effectively for workers in the broader economy and
labor market. Where I'm concerned is like, am I going to still be
able to get cheap takeout? Or like workers will come from
somewhere and are they going to come from the service sector
where we've gotten really comfortable with very low-cost
services.


David Roberts


Right.


Betony Jones


So that's more likely, I would guess, to be where things are
going to change. But I would also say this, this is an incredible
opportunity to get more workers who face systemic barriers to
employment off the sidelines and into the labor market. There's
workers with a history of incarceration that have a very hard
time finding work. Can these jobs be more accessible to them? Or
to veterans? Or to youth who've been funneled into these
four-year degrees, taking on enormous debt, not being able to
find jobs? Is this more opportunities for workers like that? Or
for women who have sat out since the pandemic because they can't
find good childcare?


This is actually an opportunity to tap more of the full talent of
the American workforce that hasn't been able to access it because
of one barrier or another. And if we think more broadly around
the workers that are available, if we do a little bit of work to
help reduce some of those systemic barriers that are keeping
people out, I think then I really don't worry. But I don't worry
anyway.


David Roberts


So we have the people.


Betony Jones


I think so.


David Roberts


This is super interesting. I'm going to maybe slightly downgrade
my worry about this particular horseman and compensate by
worrying more about one of the other ones.


Betony Jones


Worry about permitting.


David Roberts


I worry about that plenty. Okay, Betony Jones. Thank you so much
for coming on and talking with us. It was great.


Betony Jones


Thanks for having me.


David Roberts


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