A Just Transition or Just a Transition?
J. Mijin Cha talks about how to ensure people and communities don't get lost in the transition to alternative energy. Plus should Big Oil pay for the LA Fires?
Welcome to the fifth issue of State of Change, a monthly newsletter from the Climate Equity Reporting Project.
Featured Stories
Building Decarbonization Could Push Out Low-Income Renters. A San Francisco Program Hopes to Prevent That
By Twilight Greenaway, Inside Climate News
Why Climate Change is Fueling Efforts to Bring Pay Equity to Home Electrification Industry
By Taylor Barton, Local News Matters
The Overview: Will Polluters Have to Pay for the LA Wildfires?
Today State Senator Scott Wiener introduced a bill that creates a pathway to allow both California residents and insurance companies to sue oil and gas companies for damages caused by climate disasters.
It’s a logical next step at a time when all eyes have been on the insurance industry, which some believe has been permanently changed by this month’s devastating fires. As economist and Wesleyan University Gary W. Yohe wrote in The Conversation, “The scale and intensity of the Southern California fires—linked in part to climate change, including record-high global temperatures in 2023 and again in 2024—has brought a big problem into focus: In a world impacted by increasing climate risk, traditional insurance models no longer apply.” [emphasis ours]
The fires have revitalized the push behind a “climate superfund bill” such as the ones that passed recently in Vermont and New York. But lawmakers like Weiner will likely face an uphill battle in their effort to hold the oil and gas industry accountable. Last year, the Polluters Pay Climate Cost Recovery Act didn’t make it through the California legislature thanks in part to tens of millions in lobbying spending by Chevron and the Western States Petroleum Association, a large fossil-fuel trade group. And even before Wiener announced today’s bill, the Western States Petroleum Association had already launched an ad campaign implying such measures would force them to raise oil prices.
And yet, the tide of public awareness may also be turning. In an op-ed published last week, Dave Jones, the director of the Climate Risk Initiative at UC Berkeley and the state’s former insurance commissioner, wrote in favor of a California super fund, comparing it to similar lawsuits brought against the tobacco and opioid industries.
“According to a yearslong congressional investigation, even as these companies publicly pledged to meaningfully contribute to a transition away from fossil fuels, they were privately working to continue production for decades to come,” wrote Jones. “We should require these highly profitable companies to compensate communities, homeowners, businesses and even insurers for the losses.”
If passed, the new bill might do just that.
In Other News
Federal Policy
As we enter the second week of Donald Trump’s second term, big questions loom about the future of climate-related work in California.
Many of last week’s executive orders—including the withdrawal from the Paris Agreement and efforts to reverse the Biden administration’s environmental justice programs, energy-efficiency regulations, and other climate initiatives—will likely impact federal programs and funding that could ultimately threaten the work being done to reduce emissions and mitigate climate change at the state level. Others were more targeted, like the one that seeks to impact water policy in the state, by “routing more water from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta to other parts of California” and another that could halt or “kneecap” California’s nascent offshore wind industry.
According to the San Jose Mercury News, “Trump is likely to clash with California on the environment in five main areas: Vehicle emissions, offshore oil drilling, offshore wind energy, water policy and federal aid for wildfires and other natural disasters.”
An Interior memo released on Friday also ordered a 60-day pause on new approvals for renewable energy development—including wind and solar—on federal land.
More Wildfires News
Beyond the limitations of the insurance industry, talk of rebuilding in Los Angeles is fraught for a number of reasons. While the state has had “home hardening” rules on the books for years, they haven’t been enforced because people haven’t liked the idea of spending extra money to put gravel buffer zones around their homes or replace wooden decks. These fires might change that. But a new round of tariffs on lumber from Canada could make rebuilding much more costly.
Those who have lost homes are also likely among the growing number of Californians considering leaving the state due to increased housing prices. According to Redfin’s chief economist, the top cities site their LA users are considering include San Diego, Las Vegas, Bakersfield, and Phoenix, and Salt Lake City—all places that are facing their own share of serious climate impacts.
Although most didn’t lose their homes, many of the city’s domestic workers and landscapers may be among those looking to relocate. According to CalMatters, “as many as 35,000 jobs held by Latinos could be lost permanently because of the Los Angeles County fires.” In the Palisades fire area, for example, Latinos held 34% of jobs despite representing just 7% of the population.
Want to help communities and firefighters navigate the aftermath of the fires?LAist has a helpful list of resources and links.
The Energy Transition
Over a dozen massive AI data centers will soon be built in Silicon Valley. And while they’ll rely on electricity from the grid to power their servers, they will also be connected to dozens of back-up generators that will burn diesel in emergencies. At a time when the state is working to improve air quality in frontline environmental justice communities, this contingency plan would result in more climate-warming emissions and an uptick in air pollution.
Earlier this month, a concrete building full of lithium batteries at the Moss Landing Energy Storage Facility in Monterey County, California caught on fire. According to New Scientists, the fire “destroyed 300 megawatts of energy storage, forced 1200 area residents to evacuate and released smoke plumes [that contain heavy metals and PFAs and] could pose a health threat to humans and wildlife." Experts described the fire, which was too hot to be extinguished by firefighters, as a wake-up call that should draw attention to the need for safer battery storage systems.
According to new research, decarbonizing over 80% of economic activity in the US and European Union would “pays for itself.” In other words, the cost of replacing most technology that burns gas, coal, and other fossil fuels would ultimately cost less than the costs of the damages caused by climate-related disasters that would come about in a business as usual scenario. This may not be the case in much of California, however, because electricity rates have increased at a rapid rate in recent years.
A biomass plant in Humboldt County is a target of community activists who see the plant as bad for the climate, despite being “technically carbon-neutral.” According to a report from Jefferson Public Radio, “The plant emits around 300,000 metric tons of CO2 a year, which is about 75% of all the emissions from Humboldt County's passenger vehicles.”
Transportation
Getting more people out of their cars—more often—is key to reducing greenhouse gas emissions in the transportation sector. However, in Southern California the regional transportation agency, Metro, is working with Caltrans to take the opposite approach: it’s expanding freeways instead. LA Streets Blog recently published a list of all the current and planned freeway expansions, and it makes clear the fact that the region is very far from prioritizing a shift away from driving culture. This despite clear evidence that the agency’s freeway expansion projects are leading to increased emissions that far outweigh the savings from its bus and train lines.
On a related note, more than 60 environmental groups sent Governor Newsom a letter arguing for more spending on public transit and less on highway expansions given the recent efforts by the Trump administration to hamper progress on electric vehicles. It reads: "In the next four years of the Trump Administration our state’s ability to regulate electric vehicle and truck technology may be greatly diminished and necessitate that we make even more progress in reducing driving to achieve our climate goals, a policy area that is entirely within state and local government control."
Building Decarbonization
Right before Biden left office, The Department of Energy (DOE) awarded the California branch of the U.S. Green Building Council $3.8 million to “accelerate building decarbonization” in the states. The funds will support training for people working in architecture, engineering, and construction, as well as building inspectors as well as the new Building Performance Peer Learning Collaborative and Research Hub, which is designed to help prepare more people in the building and construction industries to execute state level building decarbonization policies.
A bright spot
Young people from 19 countries across four continents worked together to design a climate curriculum for middle schoolers. According to an op-ed by two of the students that appeared in Teen Vogue, the new unit, “is not a typical doom-and-gloom story of environmental disaster” but a manual for climate action.
The Q&A: J. Mijin Cha Believes a Truly Just Transition is Possible
By Twilight Greenaway
J. Mijin Cha has been thinking and writing about the intersection between justice and the energy transition for over a decade. An assistant professor in the environmental studies department at the University of California, Santa Cruz, Cha uses research and writing in hopes of broadening the dominant frame on addressing the climate crisis beyond cutting emissions. Her work prompts the question: What are the systems creating emissions and how can we begin to rethink them?
In her new book, A Just Transition for All: Workers and Communities for a Carbon-Free Future, (also available as a free, open-access download), Cha writes about a number of sizable transitions that took place in the last century—deindustrialization, globalization, the end of some logging in the Pacific Northwest, and the wave of military base closures in the 1990s are just a few examples—and what they have to teach about the move away from fossil fuels. In it, she writes:
“The response, or lack thereof, to these transitions from government and corporate interests left bearing the burden of transition to the workers and communities experiencing the change with little to no transition assistance. This history of unjust transition makes workers and communities understandably wary of further transition. And, given the scale of fossil fuel use, there is no aspect of societies or economies that won’t be affected by an energy transition. That level of disruption and upheaval without proper support cannot occur. Therefore, deliberate attention and effort are needed to prevent mass disruption, unemployment, and suffering.”
We spoke with Cha about the book, what she believes are common misunderstandings about the energy transition, and what lies ahead for just transition work under the second Trump Administration.
Why did you want to write this book, and what do you hope people will take away from it?
I had been working on several projects that were really deepening my thinking around a just transition. Yet it became one of those terms that was being thrown around kind of randomly. And it was like, “That’s not what just transition means!” So I wanted to set the record straight. But I also wanted to work on a broader critique of business-as-usual climate advocacy, and really take a step back and think about what we are trying to accomplish.
Take the electric SUV. Creating more giant automobiles that require a ton of resources, that are very material intensive, is not actually what we need to be doing. If you think about trying to move away from the systems that create this kind of emissions exploitation, then you can think more about smaller vehicles, and about policy that focuses on public transportation, E-bikes, and other kinds of mobility. If the only problem we have is emissions then an electric Hummer is by definition a good idea. But maybe we shouldn't have Hummers generally—electric or not.
You point out a few times in the book that we're not actually in a true energy transition yet, because we haven't really stopped extracting fossil fuels. Do you see your role as pulling back the curtain on that at this moment?
I understand why we have to keep talking about how much renewable energy is being generated, and I totally agree it's a good thing. We need to generate as much renewable energy as possible. My issue is that people keep assuming that that's enough to then cause an energy transition. It's not. Every piece of new fossil fuel infrastructure, like the [new and proposed] liquid natural gas (LNG) terminals; they're not just going to build them and use them for a year. We're talking about 20 more years of guaranteed fossil fuel extraction. So I think it’s important to get away from this idea that the market is going to solve all of our problems. Yes, we have record-high renewable energy generation in the U.S., we are also at record-high greenhouse gas emissions. So something isn't working. And I think it then obfuscates the fact that the harder fight, but the more essential fight, is about fossil fuel drawdown.
As you point out, the Brooking Institute estimates that 1.7 million people will potentially lose their jobs in a transition away from fossil fuel based work while the American Petroleum Institute’s number is 10 times higher. How many people working in oil and gas will need new jobs in the coming years?
It's hard to quantify, especially when it comes to the downstream effects. It's very easy to say, "Okay, this number of people work in extraction, this number of people work in refineries. This many people mine coal." Those numbers are easier to quantify. It's a little bit harder to figure out how an industry like plastics manufacturing [which also relies heavily on fossil fuels] would be impacted.
It's also important to point out that even if the number is relatively small in a place like Appalachia, because the role of fossil fuels is so dominant that the impact of losing those few jobs is much more amplified than if it would be in a place with a more diversified economy, like Los Angeles. There has been a lot of talk of one-to-one replacement, and I think that message falls really flat. A lot of times, the skills are not the same. Where renewable energy is being generated, it's not in the same places where fossil fuel jobs are being lost.
So rather than quantifying it, we should think about what would it take to make every job a good job. Then we don’t need to create a specific number of renewable energy jobs so that all coal miners can become solar installers. Because those positions are very different. Instead, if we focus on creating good jobs across sectors, then the [transition] can be much more place-based. So, for instance, jobs like care work and teaching—both sectors that are not typically considered “green jobs”—can be seen as key parts of a low-carbon economy.
You write about how the oil and gas industries play this larger-than-life role in the communities where they are working, and the way they've made their way into the culture in those places, like in the Powder River Basin, where you did research, and in places like Bakersfield, where the high school football team is called The Drillers. Do you want to talk about why it's important to understand that cultural identity piece, and how it can be tied to extractive industries?
Sociologists like Richard York and Shannon Bell have done really amazing work around this idea. In regions of Appalachia, for instance, as coal mining started to automate and people lost jobs, the industry started to [emphasize] the value system around coal mining—to convince people that it's not just a job, it’s a way of life. And it was because they were automating, and they were really reducing their workforce. I think it’s important to remember that fossil fuel jobs pay more than renewable energy jobs because workers have organized to demand better pay. It's not because fossil fuel industries are benevolent employers.
So if you're from outside these communities, and you go in demonizing the industry that has provided economic stability, growth, and generational employment, you're not going to get very far. And this is one of my critiques of the climate movement. So much of it is focused on the “right ideas.” But maybe we need to think more about the most effective approach. Beating people over the head with data on rising temperatures and emissions doesn't get you very far. We need to approach these things a little bit more holistically, and understand where opportunities for entry are. Just going in gangbusters, talking about how evil the fossil fuel industry is may not be the best way.
You write about a number of other large, managed industry transitions that you think people interested in creating a just energy transition can learn from. You point to the Master Settlement Agreement—in which cigarette companies were required to pay out billions to Southern states and farmers were paid to stop growing tobacco—as an instructive example. What did they get right?
I hesitate to describe what happened with the tobacco industry as a successful transition, because [the companies] just pivoted to buying tobacco from farmers outside the U.S. But I do think it's helpful to think about how we need to use different tools. They were forcing some market changes and so instead of just saying, "let's just let the market play out," they realized it had to be a managed transition, which means they had to think about things like economic diversification, supporting impacted workforces, and supporting tobacco farmers. And I think that's the kind of deliberate planning that we need for the energy transition. But is largely missing, because we still refuse to grapple with the drawdown part. In the case of the Master Settlement, [which was a response to large numbers of people dying] the point was to reduce tobacco use. So they knew they had to plan for the decline of an industry. There was mixed success, because states used their money differently, but if you have a dedicated funding stream, you will see more success.
With the Montana climate lawsuits, I think we're beginning to see some similar successes in the fossil fuel industry. It's very important for us to find ways to hold industries accountable. I really worry that we're in this era when industries are just untouchable, and if they're untouchable by government, it’s very bad for all of us.
You also write about New York State's Build Public Renewables Act—which promises to use public funding for publicly-owned renewable energy production and green union jobs—and you contrast it with the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), which was based on the idea that building more renewable energy would eventually crowd out oil and gas production. What role do you think public utility ownership has to play in a truly just transition?
[Public utility ownership] just gives us a leg up. When you remove the profit barrier, it provides more opportunities to do things that are in the public good. And utilities are very complicated terrain and I think that’s deliberate so that it limits public participation. Private utilities have to maximize profits for their shareholders. And just removing that means that you free up that revenue, either to go back to the state to distribute in other programs, or you can invest in things that may be a little bit more costly, like decent worker pay. Either way, you don't have to basically redistribute that money to the wealthy, which is what happens when you have shareholder primacy. The BPRA passed in 2023 and is in the process of being enforced. They're advancing a cap and invest program to help build out a strong funding stream, which I think is a great idea. I don't agree with cap and trade as a means of emissions reductions, but because they have the different emissions reductions tools, I think it will basically create a dedicated funding stream for transition policies.
And this is also not to say we can just build more public power and then everything will be fine. All of these things require constant vigilance to make sure that they're being enforced correctly.
You wrote this book before Trump was elected, and in it you talk about the value of working toward a just transition at the state level during the last Trump administration. Do you think that will happen again now?
It's important to remember that, until the IRA, almost all climate action was happening at the state level. States have always been in the forefront of climate action. We’re seeing some resistance from Gavin Newsom, and from the governor of Illinois and New York. And maybe states will organize regionally, because they have more power regionally than they do individually. That's what needs to happen. But I’m struggling a little to see who would drive it.
At first I was very apocalyptic in my thinking about [the impact of Trump’s second term on the climate]. But I think it may also be an opportunity for more of us to really think differently. One of the challenges of the Biden Administration was that it was focused on maintaining the status quo. But I think what you see with the results of the election is that that just doesn't work. And even though a lot of liberals are making fun of it, people care about the cost of eggs because they're really struggling. The conversation about food prices are a proxy for how much economic insecurity there is. And in the face of that, people didn’t want to vote for someone who's going to continue the status quo. But I hope that books like mine and other research can help people think about ways that we can do things differently and actually make people's lives better.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
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