Simply?
Fossil fuel jobs are paying the mortgages and for food for a lot of workers in America….
Cutting those jobs could make some people happy now and help the planet….
But?
It COULD cost Joe Biden and others their support they need to keep their jobs….Labor people are NOT happy.….
Biden has proposed to serve both constituencies with a multitrillion-dollar “recovery” package that would create good jobs rebuilding the nation’s crumbling infrastructure while kick-starting the transition to a clean-energy economy. But that package is likely to require months of haggling on Capitol Hill. In the meantime, Keystone XL and other pipelines that transport fossil fuels have emerged as a flash point.
Many tribal activists and those from such groups as the youth-led Sunrise Movement — who want the country to stop burning fossil fuels immediately — were heartened when Biden vetoed Keystone XL, a major oil project, on his first day in office and paused new leases for oil and gas drilling on federal lands. They are also urging Biden to halt pipeline construction in the Midwest and on the East Coast.
But some labor leaders want Biden to slow down, noting the pay disparity between jobs in fossil fuels and renewable energy.
Roughly 4 percent of solar industry workers and 6 percent of wind-sector workers are unionized, according to the 2020 U.S. Energy and Employment Report, compared with about twice that in coal- and gas-fired power plants. Wind turbine technicians and solar panel installers are lower paid than many of their counterparts working in coal, oil and gas. Many of the biggest onshore wind farms lack collective bargaining, labor leaders said.
“You get guys that are coming off of fossil jobs in the Dakotas or the wind belt, and are making, you know, eighty, ninety, a hundred thousand a year,” said Brad Markell, executive director of the AFL-CIO Industrial Union Council. To put wind turbines up, “they’re looking at thirty to thirty-five thousand, with either no or substandard benefits.”
“The green sector is like any other new sector. … They want to pay as low as they can,” Markell added. “But that just can’t be the way this green economy thing is going to go down.”…