The Biden administration has long promised that as it moves to shut down coal plants and restrict oil and gas drilling on public lands, workers in coal and petroleum industries would find new careers in the “green economy.”
It doesn’t appear that’s happening.
A new study by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) finds that fewer than 1% of all workers who leave jobs in coal, oil and gas transition to jobs in low-carbon industries. In most cases, the report determined, people working in a high-carbon industry end up moving to another high-carbon industry.
Dirty To Green
In June, the administration bragged that “clean” energy jobs grew 3.9% in 2022, which amounted to an additional 114,000 jobs nationally. The NBER report found that the rate of transition from “dirty” to “green” jobs increased 10-fold between 2005 to 2021, which means it rose from near zero to less than 1%.
The report considers all extractive industries as dirty, including mining, oil and gas, coal and refining. It also includes many manufacturing industries, such as cement production, paper and pulp factories, and chemical production.
Green jobs include anything in wind, solar and electric vehicle manufacturing.