Prof. Michaël Aklin's research on green jobs cited by the White House
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A recent study co-authored by Prof. Michaël Aklin (Lim et al. 2023) was cited in the Biden administration's Economic Report of the President. To accelerate the clean energy transition in the US, policymakers must address frictions created by the lack of mobility of workers, especially in the fossil fuel sector.
Abstract
The green energy revolution may displace 1.7 million fossil fuel workers in the US but a Just Transition to emerging green industry jobs offers possibilities for re-employing these workers. Here, using 14 years of power plant data from the US Energy Information Administration, job transition data from the Census Bureau, as well as employment and skills data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, we assess whether people employed in fossil fuel resource extraction today are co-located and have the transferable skills to switch to expected green jobs. We find that these workers could leverage their mobility to other industries and have similar skills to green occupations. However, today’s fossil fuel extraction workers are not co-located with current sources of green energy production. Further, after accounting for federal employment projections, fossil fuel extraction workers are mostly not located in the regions where green employment will grow despite attaining the appropriate skillsets. These results suggest a large barrier to a Just Transition since fossil fuel extraction workers have not historically exhibited geospatial mobility. While stakeholders focus on re-skilling fossil fuel extraction workers, this analysis shows that co-location with emerging green employment will be the larger barrier to a Just Transition.
Lim, J., M. Aklin, and M. Frank. 2023. “Location Is a Major Barrier for Transferring U.S. Fossil Fuel Employment to Green Jobs.” Nature Communications 14: 5711. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-023-41133-9 .