The Growing Climate Workforce:

The Environmental and Energy Study Institute (EESI) held a briefing about the current state of the climate workforce and the job creation potential of key climate policies.

Decarbonization provides an opportunity for job growth in multiple sectors, including energy efficiency, renewable energy, transmission and storage, and clean transportation. As businesses and government agencies seek to understand and mitigate their climate risks, climate adaptation and resilience are likewise rapidly emerging as attractive career options. EESI’s recent Climate Jobs fact sheet examines 2020 climate employment and provides further context for the briefing.

Climate policies currently being considered in Congress--including a clean energy standard, tax policies for renewable energy, and the Civilian Climate Corps--have potential to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, build resilience to a changing climate, strengthen environmental justice, and contribute to job creation.   

Panelists discussed the state-of-play for climate jobs and explored the benefits that could come with well-designed and durable climate policies.

 

HIGHLIGHTS

Hannah Traverse, Communications Manager, The Corps Network

• Corps are service and workforce development programs, operated by nonprofits or state or local governments, which engage in projects focused on stewardship and community involvement. These projects can range from maintaining trails in national parks to growing healthy food in urban gardens.
• The corps model is based on the Civilian Conservation Corps, a program created by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt during the Great Depression. It employed three million young men in planting three billion trees and developing park infrastructure that we still use today. The Civilian Conservation Corps, however, was not equitable because it was segregated.
• The Corps Network, founded in 1985 and based in Washington, D.C., is the National Association of Service and Conservation Corps. The Network supports 139 member organizations across the United States, which engage young adults, typically aged between 16 and 30 years, from a range of backgrounds. The Network provides technical assistance, project and grant opportunities, and advocacy to these organizations.
• Here are some highlights of corps accomplishments from 2019 to 2020:
  • 1.73 million acres of habitat restored,
  • More than 1.3 million trees planted,
  • More than 7,300 miles of waterway restored,
  • 32,000 acres of fire fuels treated,
  • 25,300 miles of trails constructed or improved,
  • More than 20,000 industry-recognized certifications earned by corps members,
  • More than 7,300 community spaces constructed or improved, and
  • Corps responded to more than 500 wildfires and other disasters.
• Corps can help young people earn a variety of different certifications in areas like forestry, natural resource management, energy efficiency, and disaster response. These certifications include but are not limited to: Weatherization Tech, Building Performance Institute Certified Building Analyst, Energy Auditing Certification, Solar Panel Installation, and Wilderness First Responder.
• One current area of growth is in wildland fire and natural disaster work. Corps are engaged in disaster mitigation and response, such as stabilizing hillsides or planting native plants. The California Conservation Corps is training members to fight wildfires. Some corps focus specifically on training military veterans for a civilian career in wildland fire work, while other corps focus on engaging more women in wildland fire and forestry careers.
• Certain corps are working on improving energy efficiency in communities by conducting energy audits, weatherizing homes, and installing retrofits. For example, Civic Works in Baltimore trains young adults in certifications for weatherization and solar installations. The Sustainability Institute in Charleston gives young adults the opportunity to learn how to weatherize homes and conduct efficiency audits.

 

Danielle Owen, Director of Government Relations, The Corps Network

• In 2021, a dozen bills have been introduced related to the corps model. As of the date of this briefing, funding for a civilian climate corps is included in the budget reconciliation package.
• The Biden-Harris Administration also included a civilian climate corps in section 215 of its January 27, 2021, Executive Order on Tackling the Climate Crisis at Home and Abroad.
• There is broad support for a civilian climate corps. In July 2021, 80 representatives and senators sent a letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer in support of the creation of a Civilian Climate Corps. In September 2021, Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Joe Neguse led a letter from 70 House members supporting a robustly funded Civilian Climate Corps.
• The Corps Network’s vision for a Civilian Climate Corps is to start from strength, not from scratch, meaning that the funding should build on the already existing network of corps across the country. Federal support should include $30 billion over 10 years to help fund project partners, capacity building, and adequately supporting corps members. A civilian climate corps should also prioritize projects involving equity and enrollment in environmental justice communities.

For more information about the history, benefits, and current work around conservation corps, check out EESI’s Issue Brief: Conservation Corps: Pairing Climate Action with Economic Opportunity.

 

Kate LaTour, Director of Government Relations, National Cooperative Business Association CLUSA International (NCBA-CLUSA)

• The National Cooperative Business Association CLUSA International (NCBA-CLUSA) is the oldest and largest U.S trade association for cooperatives of all sectors, including electric, agriculture, housing, workers, financial services, and many more. Cooperatives invest in local development and can help to build more resilient economies that look towards long-term improvements.
• Electric co-ops assist with wealth building in rural America. They have brought reliable and affordable electricity to 90 percent of households in these rural areas. Today, there are more than 900 co-ops that handle generation, transmission, and distribution of electricity to rural households and businesses that serve over 60 percent of the U.S. landmass.
• Electric cooperatives remove economic and educational barriers by providing access to utility services and broadband to rural homes and small businesses. These co-ops serve over 90 percent of persistent poverty counties in the United States.
• Lower quality housing stock in rural areas leads to higher energy usage and in turn to higher energy bills.
• The Rural Energy Savings Program (RESP) provides 20-year loans with zero percent interest rates to electric co-ops and other entities to implement energy efficiency upgrades for homes and small businesses. Electric co-ops act as an intermediary working with households that would not otherwise be able to afford these improvements.
  • With on-bill financing, electric co-ops can set up programs for households to repay loans taken out for energy-efficiency upgrades on their monthly utility bills, which are lower than before the upgrades because of reduced electricity usage.
  • In the last four years, RESP has obligated $183.7 million through 29 direct loans to electric co-ops, and the most funded states through this program are Arkansas, Colorado, and Texas.
• RESP creates jobs within the electric co-ops by allowing co-ops to hire in-house expertise as needed. Co-ops also contract with local small businesses and create manufacturing and construction jobs.
• The president’s budget this year as well as the annual appropriations bill included increases to RESP. Somewhat small appropriations have leveraged a high dollar amount to be able to lend. For example, with $22 million in budget authority, the U.S. Department of Agriculture could lend up to $400 million to co-ops to finance energy improvements.
• The current version of the Build Back Better Act would advance the equitable participation element of the program. It includes $200 million over 10 years to supplement annual appropriations and expands on the program to include a grants component. For persistent-poverty counties, the grant would cover up to 10 percent of the loan amount (up to 5 percent for other counties).
  • For electric co-ops, the grants can be used for administrative costs such as creating office jobs and for repairs to bring low-quality homes up to certain standards to allow them to qualify for energy efficiency improvements.
• Cooperation among co-ops creates potential opportunities that could benefit communities. Worker, housing, and grocery cooperatives can work together to increase local ownership and can lead to a higher quality of life in rural communities.

 For more information about the Rural Energy Savings Program and on-bill financing, check out EESI’s Access Clean Energy Savings Program.

 

Uday Varadarajan, Principal, Carbon-Free Electricity, RMI

• Rapid climate action is going to require a significant transition of very large, energy-intensive sectors of our economy. Rapid climate action will be a significant equity challenge for energy consumers and communities. Imperfect competition throughout the economy means investors are protected by regulatory protections, while communities are left vulnerable to the risks of climate action.
• Climate policy must focus on equity, and that means protecting energy customers and communities. This is an urgent issue because without any policy intervention, climate action has the potential to be doubly regressive. Lower-income states have many more communities that face employment and economic risk from climate action. In addition, low-income households bear a disproportionate burden from energy usage because energy costs take up a larger fraction of their income. The costs of decarbonization will be the highest for those communities with fossil fuel-dependent economies.
  • For most people, the energy burden is higher than the tax burden, with the exception of payroll taxes.
• Customer and community risks and costs related to the energy transition are concentrated in the service territories of coal-heavy Southeastern and Midwestern utilities.
• Federal financing can play an important role in funding the transition to a low-carbon economy while mitigating the energy burden for customers.
• Utilities continue to invest in coal and steam plants, while the number of employees at the plants have decreased. To encourage the transition to clean energy while investing in fossil fuel-dependent communities, we can use tax incentives and programs like the Clean Electricity Performance Program (CEPP).
• In addition to cost burdens, there are also enormous health burdens associated with pollution caused by fossil fuel plants. Fossil fuels have a direct impact on morbidity and mortality, resulting in 10.2 million premature deaths per year globally. These burdens are especially felt by vulnerable groups, including Black, indigenous, and communities of color, low-income communities, newborns, and the elderly. These same communities also shoulder the cost of retiring polluting power plants as ratepayers, with impacts magnified through regressive electric rate structures.
• In the long run, the cost of reducing fossil fuel emissions in the electricity sector in the United States has dramatically dropped over the past 15 years—at least when current solar and wind federal tax credits are included.
• However, some features of the current tax incentive system do not appropriately mitigate the burden on vulnerable communities. Under current tax law, the tax incentives provided by the federal government are not efficiently usable by utilities that own the vast majority, 80 percent, of the remaining coal in the system. These utilities do not have tax liabilities or have very little tax liability coming in the next few years. Therefore, they cannot use the tax incentives to replace existing coal plants with clean energy.
• Current tax law also only focuses on a few clean technologies. For a rapid shift to clean energy, we also need emerging clean technologies like carbon capture and storage and hydrogen to be supported.
• With current policy, climate action is economic in the long run, but there are immediate issues like energy cost burdens, extreme weather risks, and fossil community job losses that are not currently being addressed.
  • Tax incentives are not working as well as we would like. Replacing an existing coal plant would be very expensive for customers, with fewer benefits.
• The current package of policies proposed in the Build Back Better Act includes changes in tax benefits that will address these issues. Specifically, there are reforms proposed to the Production Tax Credit (PTC), Investment Tax Credit (ITC), and the [Internal Revenue Code (IRC) Section] 45Q tax credit (for carbon storage) that could work alongside a Clean Energy Performance Program (CEPP) and Department of Energy (DOE) loans.
• One major proposed change is to allow solar installations to use the Production Tax Credit (PTC). This would allow utilities to make use of tax incentives.
• Another major proposed change is to remove tax normalization requirements. These requirements actually force investor-owned utilities to keep some of the benefits of the tax credit to increase their returns rather than pass them through to their customers. Fixing these issues can make solar and other advanced technologies more attractive for utilities and their customers.
• Co-ops, municipalities, and regulated utilities cannot currently use existing tax credits. A direct-pay provision will allow these utilities to use the ITC, PTC, and 45Q, regardless of their tax status, as long as they pass the benefit through to their customers.
• Another reform makes the PTC and the 45Q available to all clean generation technologies that help address local environmental and economic issues in communities.
• To be effective in reducing cost and mitigating risk to customers and consumers, these credits need to incentivize the widest range of potential options, including those that focus on making the grid more resilient through storage and transmission. Extending the ITC to storage and transmission reduces the cost of enabling grid technologies, while also making the same benefit available to technologies that reduce or shift demand.
• A combination of loans and tax credits can make climate solutions like carbon capture and storage at an existing coal plant more equitable. Right now, carbon capture and storage would be significantly more costly than continuing to run an existing coal plant. The combination of a DOE loan with direct pay of 45Q tax credits can reduce the ratepayer cost of carbon mitigation through carbon capture and storage by $1 billion, making it a more competitive option.

 

Yvonne McIntyre, Director of Federal Electricity and Utility Policy, Natural Resources Defense Council

• The Clean Electricity Performance Program (CEPP) is modeled on a clean electricity standard. If enacted, it would be a federal investment program supporting steady growth in carbon-free energy over the coming decade. It uses federal financial incentives to encourage suppliers of retail electricity to increase their share of clean electricity from baseline levels by four percentage points every year starting in 2023.
• Clean electricity is defined as any source of electricity that emits less than 0.1 tons of CO2 equivalent per megawatt-hour.
• Retail electricity suppliers that meet or beat the 4 percentage points per year increase would receive a Department of Energy (DOE) grant to protect electricity consumers and offset the costs of increasing the clean electricity supply.
• Suppliers who are unable to meet the goal must pay a shortfall payment for each megawatt-hour short they are of the four percentage point goal.
• Suppliers that are at 85 percent clean energy or more are exempt from any payments as long as their overall use of clean energy does not fall.
• The economic benefits of a CEPP that achieves 80 percent clean electricity by 2030 are multiple: it would expand the American workforce by nearly 8 million job-years over the next decade [a job-year is one year of work for one person], grow the economy by nearly $1 trillion, increase federal, state, and local revenues by $154 billion, and drive new economic development through the construction of more than 600 GW of solar, wind, and other clean energy projects.
• CEPP would create 7.7 million net new job-years across the country over 10 years. This includes jobs for electrical workers, solar installers, wind technicians, battery manufacturers, and construction workers.
• The CEPP and clean energy tax incentives complement each other to achieve the Biden-Harris Administration climate and clean energy goal of 80 percent clean energy by 2030. Tax incentives reduce the cost of renewable and clean energy generation.

 

Q&A Session

 

Q: Many of the policies you have mentioned already exist in some form: there are already corps across the country improving our environment, clean energy tax credits have helped accelerate clean energy adoption, and many states have their own version of a clean electricity standard. How could additional federal investments, such as those proposed in the Reconciliation Bill, build on existing efforts at the state and local level?

Owen: Additional funding at the state and local level could help with capacity building. From a corps perspective, it could help build more career pathways for corps members and allow them to engage more youth in the corps movement.

LaTour: I think capacity building will be hugely important. I also think that these investments could build on existing efforts to make these programs more accessible. The Build Back Better Act could help the lowest tier of housing stock get up to the grade it needs to be eligible for energy efficiency upgrades.

Varadarajan: I think that state and local officials, particularly regulators and those who oversee local utilities, are the ones who face the unenviable task of finding how to transition our economy in a way that still keeps rates affordable. These tax incentives will be critical tools for these people so they can make the transition happen in a way that will bring the benefits of clean energy, especially new jobs, to their communities.

McIntyre: There are a number of states that have Renewable Portfolio Standard (RPS) or Clean Energy Standard (CES) type policies or programs in place, but none of them have been taking us out to the 2030 or 2035 timelines. These programs are also not across the entire country—not every state has an RPS and a CES. The CEPP would be a national program that would drive every state to move to clean electricity and allow for a faster transition. I worked in the power sector for 30 years before moving to NRDC, and I am heartened by the fact that many utilities are making substantial commitments. Still, the fact is that you can make these commitments and not move forward to actually achieve these goals. Providing a financial incentive will give the utilities money to help with the transition, which will allow them to make a stronger argument to their public service commissions.

 

Q: How could investment into these programs contribute to improve energy affordability or reach other environmental justice goals?

Owen: One of our goals with the Civilian Climate Corps is to help frontline and environmental justice communities. We would like to see these communities be a large percentage of the ones getting the project work and funding.

Traverse: The main way to promote environmental justice is to create employment opportunities and empower communities to address past climate injustices. There is so much impact that can happen when you are empowering young adults with the knowledge and the skills they need, as well as the recognition that they can make a difference in their communities. There are already a lot of corps doing this work in communities right now, training young people to weatherize homes and make our housing stock more sustainable.

LaTour: In addition to the provisions from the Rural Energy Savings Program (RESP), I also think a provision that will help to move the needle is the Rural Partnership program. The Rural Partnership program will help local governments partner with nonprofits, for-profits, and other entities to build capacity and carry out projects. There is flexible funding proposed in the Build Back Better Act that would allow local, state, and regional government or quasi-government entities to take a more holistic approach, whether that is advancing energy affordability specifically through RESP or looking at housing or small business more broadly.

Varadarajan: I think the connection is most clear with the tax incentives and the Clean Energy Performance Program (CEPP). These programs are fundamentally about making sure that we are not financing global climate action on the backs of those who cannot afford to do it. They are designed so that the financing is coming from those who can afford it so that those who cannot afford it can have the jobs and lower energy costs that will allow them to grow their local economies. You could ask why aren’t you doing this with carbon taxes? By focusing on clean energy and not only on carbon, we can acknowledge the historical injustices associated with environmental impacts that are not related to carbon. This would provide financing in communities that might not be relevant from a carbon perspective but could benefit from clean energy rather than just carbon emission reductions alone.

McIntyre: CEPP is not an emission reduction program, but obviously you would get substantial emission reductions because as you increase your clean electricity resource deployment, you are pushing out fossil fuel plants. There was a study done by NRDC and the Environmental Defense Fund that showed that reaching 80 percent clean energy by 2030 will lead to an over 80 percent reduction in carbon emissions, 93 percent reduction in SO2 emissions, and 76 percent reduction in NOx emissions from 2005 levels. The Clean Energy Futures study found that achieving 100 percent clean energy by 2040 would lead to $1.8 trillion in climate and public health benefits. We are going beyond talking about jobs and economic impacts, we are also talking about public health and a cleaner environment in general.

 

Q: The four things we have talked about today might not come together naturally. We would love to hear more about how these four separate policies could work together or how they could impact emission reductions or climate resilience across multiple sectors.

McIntyre: The power sector is the key to driving emission reductions economy-wide. For example, policies that promote electric vehicles will not be clean if the vehicles are charged with energy generated using fossil fuels. The rural electric programs can work in tandem with CEPP tax credits. Rural electric cooperatives are primarily powered by fossil fuels, so providing funding to help them transition is very important. There are a lot of components throughout the reconciliation package, which all work in tandem.

Varadarajan: The CEPP does not provide additional benefits until the utility has done basic investment in clean energy, which provides that extra incentive for utilities to go above and beyond the existing incentives. The existing tax incentives may not be enough to drive change as quickly as we need to, or make sure that a transition to clean energy does not raise rates for customers. We also have a workforce which does not just need money, but also support and training, and this is where the Civilian Climate Corps is complementary. Finally, this is not just about utilities making investments alone: there is an opportunity to improve the building stock, for example for households and businesses in rural areas, so they can be a part of the solution.

LaTour: We need to make sure tax credits are reaching the right entity. Electric co-ops are nonprofits, so tax benefits would not reach them like a for-profit company. The Corps Network talked about improving workforce development for licensing and skill building. Ideally, this could help form worker co-ops, allowing them to be the workforce that partners with the implementers of the Rural Energy Savings Program.

Traverse: As we transition to a more sustainable energy system, there is a lot of opportunity to do workforce training, which is something that corps are already doing. Some of our corps are doing pre-apprenticeships and working with different industry partners.

Owen: The Civilian Climate Corps has the potential to make that workforce look like the face of our country today. It is a wonderful opportunity for all of us.

 

Briefing highlights compiled by Isabella Eclipse and Roshni Vora