Chicago Sun-Times: All posts by Ben Jealous

Michigan is speeding up the transition to clean energy. Other states can too.

2023-12-11T17:39:19.374-06:00

Solar panels in Ann Arbor Township, Michigan. Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer recently signed legislation that will require utility providers to transition to 100% carbon-free energy generation by 2040.

AP file

If you live in Detroit or another part of Michigan where there’s a looming threat of bodily harm from fossil fuel pollution, it just got a little easier to breathe a sigh of relief … and to maintain your ability to breathe in general.

The historic Clean Energy Future Package and Clean Energy and Jobs Act, just recently signed into law by Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, will greatly accelerate the state’s transition to the exclusive use of clean power sources like wind and solar.

That’s a victory for Michiganders and for the country’s goals of slashing the pollution that fuels climate change and harms our health. It’s also a major win for environmental justice, hard-hit communities and workers.

Michigan’s codified commitment to fighting the pollution driving climate change is inherently good news for communities of color that bear a disproportionate burden of the effects of the crisis, and the benefits go even further New incentives to make buildings energy efficient will have an outsized positive impact for these communities, where a higher number of homes are old, drafty, and not energy-efficient.

Finally, air pollution from many power and industrial plants, also disproportionately located in these communities, will be reduced by the state’s mandates for clean energy. This is huge for all Michiganders, and especially for those communities where public health is suffering from pollution.

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The Detroit tri-cities area — encompassing Detroit, River Rouge and Ecorse — and other parts of Michigan experiencing the worst air pollution are predominantly Black or Black and Latino. The Harvard Medical School Primary Care Review has pointed out that within the two zip codes that make up Southwest Detroit alone, “there are more than 150 facilities that emit toxic fumes, gasses, chemicals, and particulate matter.”

Black residents make up 80% of one of those zip codes, 48217. The statistic was noted at an October gathering of activists near the Marathon Petroleum Corporation’s refinery in Southwest Detroit by Ember McCoy, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Michigan’s School for Environment and Sustainability, in discussing the disproportionate impact of air pollution on the city’s residents.

More air pollution, more disease

According to 2019 figures from the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services, adult residents of Detroit were 46% more likely to have asthma than the statewide average. Within Detroit, Black residents were hospitalized for asthma three times as often as white residents. And that’s just asthma.

The National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences says this type of pollution is also known to increase rates of cancer, cardiovascular disease, neurological and immune disorders, and other health concerns. And, as McCoy also noted at that Detroit panel discussion, “certain pollutants, when combined, as they are in the air, are worse together than they are alone individually … but we still measure them and regulate them as if they’re acting separately.”

So, yes, a lot still needs to be done. Especially in terms of how these chemical and particulate pollutants are regulated at the federal level. Still, we shouldn’t lose sight of the positive action that states like Michigan are taking right now and the example it sets for other states.

There’s a lot to be hopeful about in the clean energy bills’ impact on public health. The bills also set a powerful example for how to help ensure a just transition away from fossil fuels with strong protections for labor. Part of the clean energy package is the creation of the Community and Worker Economic Transition Office.

The office will develop a plan and coordinate efforts to address the impact on workers in the shift from fossil fuels to renewables, helping to ensure that no worker is left behind. By delivering historic federal action in the Inflation Reduction Act, the Biden administration has already given states a powerful way to capitalize on massive federal investments in their economies and a green future for us all.

That’s exactly what Michigan is doing and doing it right. In addition to the billions that Michigan has already secured in federal investment dollars, a recent report by the Michigan-based 5 Lakes Energy shows that passing the 100% clean energy legislation could mean over 160,000 additional quality jobs over the next decade and $7.8 billion more in investments by 2050, which is more than twice what Michigan would expect to receive without enacting these policies.

Thanks to the IRA, states now have an unprecedented opportunity to address the harm done by climate change while also jump-starting economic development, creating jobs, moving towards energy independence, improving the health and lives of their residents, and leading on environmental justice.

Ben Jealous is executive director of the Sierra Club and a professor of practice at the University of Pennsylvania.

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Oil, gas industries have too much power at UN climate change conference

2023-12-04T13:00:00-06:00

John Kerry (third from left), the U.S. special presidential envoy for climate, attends the formal opening of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change Thursday in Dubai, United Arab Emirates.

Handout/Getty

Frederick Douglass said, “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”

Those of us with history in the Civil Rights Movement know that taking on entrenched power and changing the status quo requires dogged tenacity and seizing key moments to break down barriers.

The United Nations Climate Change conference, know as COP28, happening now in Dubai could be one of those key moments for tackling the climate crisis. To ensure we truly create a better world for us all, we must include the participation of every country.

The biggest obstacle is the entrenched power and stubborn influence of the fossil fuel industry, the very cause of the greenhouse gas emissions driving global warming. The industry has had a stranglehold on international climate talks, and this year is showing up to the conference in greater force than perhaps ever before.

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Hundreds of oil and gas industry lobbyists usually descend on the climate change conferences. This year, by some unofficial estimates from reporters and watchdog groups, it looks like the number of lobbyists and industry representatives could be more than double what it was at last year’s conference in Egypt.

The purpose of the summit is to assess and improve global efforts to curb global warming. The only way to do that is by drastically reducing emissions, far more than we’re already doing, and that means completely phasing out all fossil fuels.

Two reports released late last month, one by the UN and one by the Rhodium Group consulting firm, reached the same conclusion: The most likely projected temperature increase by the end of this century will be about 3 degrees Celsius, based on current trends. Scientists say that any increase over 2 degrees would be catastrophic. The current trajectory puts us well above the 1.5 C target established by the landmark Paris Agreement from the conference in 2015.

Added to the backdrop of these international negotiations is that this is the hottest year on record, with resulting floods, fires, superstorms and other extreme weather events impacting humanity in increasingly undeniable ways.

With the urgency so crystal clear, there’s no way that the industry driving the climate crisis should be empowered to the degree it is to protect its own profits at the expense of our planet. By allowing oil and gas companies to have so much power and influence, we’re pulling our punches against the greatest existential threat faced by humanity, all to spare those companies a threat to their bottom lines.

An oil baron as host

Of course, plenty of controversy has swirled around the lead-up to this year’s summit. There’s been no shortage of newspaper ink, and website pixels, dedicated to commentary about the host country, the United Arab Emirates, being a nation built on oil. UAE is part of OPEC — which has played a significant role in obstructing progress in past climate negotiations — and has an oil and gas company which is one of the largest in the world, the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company, or ADNOC. The CEO of ADNOC, Sultan Ahmed al-Jaber, is serving as president of this year’s summit.

Having an oil baron at the helm of the world’s most important event focused on curtailing greenhouse gas emissions is an irony that’s been hard to swallow for many. At the organization I lead, Sierra Club, we decided to send a delegation to this year’s conference anyway, in the spirit of hope and determination, as this is a cause too great and too important to be deterred from our efforts — no matter how many foxes are let into the henhouse.

A larger concern of mine has been the voting rules. UN climate talks require all parties involved (in this case, 197 countries plus the European Union) to be unanimous on the adoption of any agreement. On its face, the requirement for consensus agreement is a way to add greater legitimacy to the conference’s outcomes and ensure that Global South countries, and those most drastically impacted by the climate crisis, have an equal say. However, it also means that a single oil- and gas-rich country, or a small group of them, has veto power over any agreement. It’s a structural weakness of these summits that has been exploited for decades by oil- and gas-rich nations (including the United States) to impede progress.

Just think about how much power that gives an industry that spends hundreds of millions of dollars a year in lobbying. Even if every government on the planet was in basic agreement on some new framework or commitment, fossil fuel companies would only need to persuade — or co-opt — the leaders of a single nation to have a game-ending proxy vote.

It’s no surprise that the fossil fuel industry is focused on securing its own future and increasing its wealth. However, that focus is completely at odds with the entire purpose of climate talks like this one, which is supposed to be the health and well-being of humanity, and protecting our fragile planet. To have oil and gas interests influencing global climate talks undermines the whole endeavor.

For now, we maintain hope that the gravity of the crisis drives the 197 participating countries to agree on robust, meaningful action. If that doesn’t happen, we need to turn our focus to overhauling the rules for future climate talks so that fossil fuel companies, or the countries they influence, can’t continue to sabotage the global effort.

Ben Jealous is executive director of the Sierra Club.

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When it comes to enjoying the outdoors, Black and low-income families left out

2023-11-28T13:33:00.918-06:00

Midlothian Meadows Forest Preserve.

Sun-Times file

My family made a deliberate choice to #OptOutside last week, after a restful Thanksgiving.

#OptOutside is a growing movement in which participating organizations and companies close their doors on Black Friday, give their employees a paid day off, and encourage all of us to embrace the serenity of nature instead of succumbing to the frenzy of Black Friday shopping. I’m an outdoors enthusiast, from a long line of outdoors enthusiasts.

As a dad, I try to instill a strong love of nature in my kids and make sure they reap the vast benefits of spending time outside in nature. However, I’m aware that my family’s ability to enjoy the outdoors is a blessing that’s been denied to far too many other Black families. Like pollution and climate change, inadequate access to nature is not a crisis shouldered equally.

Sadly, it won’t surprise you that it falls hardest on people of color and low-income communities. A study of park accessibility by the Trust for Public Land concluded that “systemic racism and redlining have led to chronic disinvestment in parks and recreational facilities in marginalized communities.”

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The result is one that perpetuates a cycle of inequality: “too few parks as well as parks marred by cracked asphalt, barren fields, and broken play equipment.”

All people, and especially children, need easy access to safe, clean outside spaces for healthy bodies and minds.

Yet a third of all Americans — including 28 million children — don’t have any sort of park or natural space within a 10-minute walk of their home. According to an analysis of 2017 demographic data by Conservation Science Partners, people of color were three times more likely than white people to live in an area that is considered nature-deprived, with people who identified as Black or African American being the group most likely to live in one of these areas.

Exclusion from public lands

Altogether, 68% of people who identified as Black or African American lived in a nature-deprived area. Seventy percent of low-income people did. And a whopping 76% of low-income people of color lived in a nature-deprived area. Inaccessibility to nature is not only an issue of one’s physical proximity to a park or green space.

People of color, especially Black people, have an unfortunate history in this country of segregation and exclusion from public lands and natural places. We’ve been met with threats and violence while in nature. And for too long we were even excluded from the conservation movement fighting to protect natural lands.

The consequences of this are still felt today. What does this nature gap and nature deficit mean for our kids? Years of studies have shown that children who spend less time outdoors are more likely to deal with physical health problems, ranging from childhood obesity to vitamin D deficiency, as well as reduced motor skills development and higher rates of emotional illnesses like anxiety and depression.

Meanwhile, we also know that when kids spend time in nature, besides the general benefits of exercise, it helps build confidence, reduce stress, and promote creativity. So closing the nature gap should be a priority for all of us who have fought long and hard to close the opportunity gaps faced by our kids and our communities.

That’s why I’m glad that this week marks a broad, rejuvenated push for Congress to pass the bipartisan Outdoors For All Act, which would increase access to nature and opportunities for outdoor recreation in urban and low-income communities. By codifying the Outdoor Recreation Legacy Partnership program into federal law, the Outdoors For All Act would make the immense benefits of local parks more equitable and accessible to all.

Those benefits, according to the office of U.S. Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.), one of the bill’s sponsors, include job creation, shade and tree cover, and clean air, as well as “new trails, green spaces, playgrounds, cultural gathering spaces, and more.” It all adds up to healthier bodies and minds for our children, and building more of a shared understanding, for all of us, of why spending time outdoors and protecting nature are so critical to our wellbeing.

Ben Jealous is executive director of the Sierra Club.

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Voters are clear about the need to address climate change

2023-11-13T13:30:00-06:00

The hall of historic Waiola Church in Lahaina, Hawaii and nearby Lahaina Hongwanji Mission are engulfed in flames on Aug. 8 in the deadliest U.S. wildfires in more than a century. Environmental disasters are not lost on voters, writes Ben Jealous.

Matthew Thayer/AP

This November’s election results should be a wake-up call to any politician who was unsure of Americans’ desire for robust climate action and support for a green economy. In states and counties that are red, blue and everywhere in between, voters favored forward-looking candidates who embraced both the need for and the economic benefits of aggressive climate action.

As much of the reporting on this election cycle has already pointed out, reproductive freedom was clearly a heavy driver of Democratic performance on Election Day. That shouldn’t overshadow the fact that, in marquee races, well-funded attacks against strong climate policies from the far right and fossil fuel interests were ignored or rejected by the voters they hoped to sway. And the emphasis on reproductive freedom doesn’t diminish the role that issues like clean energy and a healthy future for our planet and our communities played in galvanizing voters.

The climate crisis is here. It’s not politely knocking at our door; it’s banging it down. Americans in every corner of this country are hyperaware of it, especially after the dangerous and deadly heat waves and wildfires many of us experienced this year. What we’re seeing in our backyards is connected to a larger, global crisis that is affecting all life on this planet we call home. Just-released research shows that the past 12 months were the hottest on record.

This fight has always been about our future, but increasingly it’s also about our present. Voters get it.

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This was especially evident in Virginia, where voters forcefully denied the Republican governor’s bid for full control of the state government. The electoral rebuke of Gov. Glenn Youngkin and his views — in which Democrats didn’t just protect their state Senate majority but also gained control of the state House — effectively ends his push to undo the climate progress enacted under his predecessor.

Climate change means warm autumn days, but it’s also overheating the planet

Youngkin sought to roll back emissions standards aimed at moving Virginia away from the sale of new vehicles with internal combustion engines as of 2035. And he has been waging an effort to withdraw Virginia from the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative cap-and-trade program.

LaTwyla Mathias, who leads Progress Virginia and worked to mobilize voters in this year’s election, said that among her organization’s digital ads this cycle — which were shown to voters of color, young voters and women — the ads focused on climate were the top performers.

“Our research shows that climate voters care about freedom: the freedom to breathe clean air, the freedom to live in a healthy environment, and the freedom to make decisions for themselves,” Mathias said. “Black and brown voters showed up on Tuesday because they know we’ve fought too long and too hard to let special interests take these freedoms from us.”

“By electing climate champions, we can fight back on growing health risks and pollution in marginalized neighborhoods, defend our neighbors with severe medical conditions, make sure that our communities have an opportunity to get trained in new jobs so that the transition to clean energy doesn’t leave anyone behind, and protect the progress we’ve made with the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative,” Mathias said.

So, as we discuss all the fundamental rights that were on the ballot this year and will be in 2024 — abortion, the right to vote, gender equality, workers’ rights and more — let’s not forget that the results of the Nov. 7 elections prove that the right to a clean environment and a habitable planet is a major election issue for an ever-growing number of Americans — especially those who live in communities on the frontlines of the climate crisis.

Ben Jealous is executive director of the Sierra Club and a professor of practice at the University of Pennsylvania.

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Give people more info about federal energy-efficiency rebates, tax credits

2023-11-07T06:05:00-06:00

An electric heat pump installed at a home in the Belmont Cragin neighborhood. Electric heat pumps are eligible for tax credits of as much as $2,000 under the Inflation Reduction Act.

Pat Nabong/Sun-Times file

If we’re going to realize the climate benefits of historic federal support for clean energy and jobs approved in the last two years, connections are the key. And I’m not just talking about electrifying homes and buildings.

We need to connect people to the benefits spread throughout the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act and the 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Act. We do that by connecting people to others in the communities where they live and with the individuals, local units of government and non-profits who can help them take advantage of a lengthy list of tax credits and rebates for everything from electric cars to more energy-efficient windows and doors.

The need is clear. Seven in 10 Americans say they know little or nothing about the Inflation Reduction Act by name. The same is true for specific parts of the package, like tax credits for home solar panels and heat pumps.

Bobby Foley of Elephant Energy, a climate tech start-up in Colorado, sees the information gaps and hears the questions up close. “We are on the ground, scoping out a heat pump with homeowners and installing it.”

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Foley can help that homeowner use rebates from a local utility and the city of Denver, alongside state and federal tax credits, to cut the cost of a new $20,000 electric heat pump to heat and cool their homes by more than half. He can install heat pumps in homes without ducts and in places where temperatures drop below zero. The result is far less carbon and 300% greater energy efficiency than a furnace and air conditioner at a substantially lower monthly cost to the customer, he said.

But the people Foley meets already know enough to at least inquire. There are more than 100 programs scattered through the $370 billion in the Inflation Reduction Act that aim to assist individuals, businesses, and state and local governments. Projections show if we can use all that money thoughtfully and equitably, we can cut greenhouse gas emissions by 40%.

There’s a good deal of evidence to show that people need help to connect. The National Council on Aging, for example, estimates seniors leave $30 billion of potential government assistance for food, housing and health care unclaimed. There’s often a lack of awareness or misconceptions about the difficulty of applying.

The non-profit Code for America, which works to make government more effective and accessible, found that even the words used to offer programs like tax credits and food assistance to Americans make a difference in their response rate.

For clean energy incentives, many states also have stepped in with their own support that can significantly improve the attractiveness of acting to switch to a cleaner product. That means the opportunities can vary a lot from place to place.

To help fill the gap, the Sierra Club is making a national push to recruit, prepare and offer volunteers across the country — community advocates — to help people and their communities get the support that’s available to protect the planet.

Bekah Ashley has worked with Utah school districts to apply for funds from the infrastructure package to transition their transportation to electric school buses. Communities can share $1 billion a year. School buses account for the largest public bus fleet across the country, but school systems “often get overlooked in climate action,” Ashley noted.

School board members might have sticker shock; electric buses can cost more than two times the cost of new diesel buses, Ashley said. But the federal incentives and the far lower operating costs change that perspective.

Communities recognize the need and are in favor of government support for a cleaner economy. It’s something most of us believe in. But we need to ensure that support doesn’t stay written on the pages of legislation. We need to learn more — preferably from using the incentives ourselves — and share that knowledge with others who can benefit from it.

Ben Jealous is executive director of the Sierra Club, professor of practice at the University of Pennsylvania and author of “Never Forget Our People Were Always Free.”

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Gary, Indiana community activists deserve a say in cleanup of steel mill pollution

2023-10-24T05:30:00-05:00

In this file photo, the Gary Works plant stands in the background of City Hall in Gary, Indiana.

AP file

U.S. Steel gave birth to Gary, Indiana, in 1906. The city, named after a chairman of the corporation’s board, started as housing for steelworkers. The Gary Works opened in 1908 and for most of the 20th century was the largest steel mill in the world; it’s still the largest in this country.

Kimmie Gordon understands the civic pride that grew from that history and knows about the 30,000 jobs Gary Works offered at one time. There’s more to the story, she said. And those chapters need to be appreciated.

“You’re looking at 115 years of degradation of our natural resources, starting with our air,” Gordon said, noting that emergency room visits for respiratory issues are 30% higher in Gary than in neighboring counties. “We not only smell it and are harmed by it now, it’s our entire lives.”

A report last month from the Sierra Club named the Gary Works as the largest greenhouse gas polluter among more than 200 industrial plants nationwide.

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The consequences don’t end at the steel mill’s gate, she explained. “People look at Gary, Indiana, and see we’ve been run over and dumped on for decades. They say let’s put our trucking company there or our plant to turn trash into jet fuel.”

She and other residents formed Gary Advocates for Responsible Development to oppose projects like a trucking hub in the West Side neighborhood where Gordon grew up or a gasification plant to turn Chicago’s plastic trash into fuel.

Gordon’s story about Gary is familiar in so many places that get deemed disposable because they lack political and economic power. In places like Gary, where the poverty is more than double the national level, people are forced to make an impossible choice between their health and jobs that pay for groceries.

The historic investments in clean energy, jobs and infrastructure that President Joe Biden and Congress pledged in 2021 and 2022 offer an unprecedented opportunity to change the narrative in places like Gary. More than $6 billion will be used to reduce carbon pollution from steel mills and other industrial plants.

Communities that have had to bear a disproportionate brunt from corporate polluters qualify for nearly $3 billion in recovery block grants. There’s funding to cut diesel trucking emissions and to provide more monitoring in neighborhoods on the fence lines of plants.

The challenge now is to make sure Gordon and community advocates like her have a say in applying for and deploying those investments. The Environmental Protection Agency can help by implementing much more stringent air pollution standards for steel mills.

Gordon works to get more people of color into the outdoors through a group she founded called Brown Faces Green Spaces. Gary has natural places, like the Ivanhoe Dune and Swale, the Brunswick Oak Savannah Trail and the western tip of Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore, that other communities lack, she said.

Industrial sites are nearby, Gordon explained. “When we do get a day when there’s no ozone alert, we try to get people outdoors for recreation, reflection, prayer or meditation. Going and enjoying those places, you can’t get away from how close it all is to being degraded.”

Ben Jealous is executive director of the Sierra Club and a professor of practice at the University of Pennsylvania.

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Clean energy efforts by utility companies don’t go nearly far enough

2023-10-17T06:00:00-05:00

The clean energy and jobs package Congress approved last year offers corporate tax credits to lower the cost of solar, wind and battery storage projects. But too many utilities are slow-walking projects, Ben Jealous writes.

stock.adobe.com

Imagine telling your boss that you’ll complete less than half of the work that’s needed, getting almost nothing done over 12 months, then asking for a raise.

That’s essentially the story of the 77 utility companies still most heavily invested in fossil fuel-fired electric plants, according to a report last week by the Sierra Club and Bloomberg Philanthropies. The utilities plan to replace only 30% of that coal and gas with clean energy by 2030, and more than half of them have made no progress since last year.

For example, We Energies announced in 2020 that it would retire the mainly coal-fired Oak Creek power plant in Milwaukee. Two years later, it extended the timeline by 18 months. In August, on a call with investors, corporate officials wouldn’t commit to that schedule.

Nonetheless, the company is asking the state public service for a 3% rate increase, which would follow an 11% rate increase last year.

“We Energies is asking for an additional increase saying they need it to move toward green energy and lower greenhouse gas emissions,” said Keviea Guiden of Citizen Action Wisconsin. “They should be doing that more quickly, but they shouldn’t be doing that on the backs of their poorest customers.”

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The homes that those customers live in typically are 100 or more years old; they aren’t well insulated or weatherized, Guiden noted. “We’re pulling more gas for heating and more electricity for cooling.”

At the same time, those same residents face exposure to gas and particulate pollution from Oak Creek every month that the transition is delayed, she said.

Wisconsin’s minimum wage still stands at $7.25 an hour. “If you’re a family making $18,000-$20,000 a year, 10% of that income would go to those electric and gas bills,” said Guiden, who organized 24 residents to oppose the rate increase at a state hearing last week.

We Energies isn’t struggling. It reported increased revenue of more than $1 billion last year. Wisconsin allows the public utility to earn a profit of almost 10 percent.

The fact is there’s never been a more opportune moment for We Energies and other utility companies to make the switch to clean energy. The cost of solar power, which We Energies said would replace more than half of the coal-fired plant’s generated electricity, has fallen nearly 100 percent in the last decade. In its plans, the company acknowledged it would save $50 million in lower fuel and maintenance costs alone at Oak Creek.

Yet the company only has plans to build enough clean energy capacity to replace 8% of the energy it makes with dirty fuels and plans to add 66 megawatts of natural gas-fired power — which like coal is more expensive than solar power — by 2030.

More significantly, the historic clean energy and jobs package President Joe Biden and Congress approved last year offers corporate tax credits that can lower the cost of solar, wind and battery storage projects by more than 30% (50% if they are built with domestic materials and in the most impacted communities). The oil, gas, and coal industries have benefited for decades from subsidies for everything from exploration to depletion of their reserves in the ground, giving them among the lowest effective corporate tax rates and ballooning their profit margins.

In addition, utilities can apply for $30 billion in grants and loans to increase their clean energy capacity.

So utilities can spend less than ever to generate electricity without dirty fuels that will lead to lower energy costs for Americans.

It’s past time for utilities to stop making excuses and to take seriously our national target of 100% clean energy by 2035. It’s time for the rest of us to be like Guiden and her neighbors and stop accepting those excuses.

Ben Jealous is executive director of the Sierra Club and a professor at the University of Pennsylvania.

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Auto workers deserve to benefit from transition to electric vehicles

2023-10-02T17:35:33.188-05:00

Drandi Funches, an assembler for 12 years, waves a flag as SUVs pass by during a rally outside the Ford assembly plant in South Deering on Sept. 29. Workers at the plant walked out to join striking UAW workers across the country.

Pat Nabong/Sun-Times

When General Motors, Chrysler, and Ford — the “Big Three” American automakers — were close to extinction 15 years ago, their workers and the American people stepped in to save them. The United Auto Workers (UAW) gave back wages and benefits they had every right to get under a contract they had negotiated just a year before.

Now, rather than being paid back, union workers face getting left out of the future of the car business. And the rest of the country is being told we have a Hobson’s choice when it comes to electric vehicles: We can have them, but only at a cost to our neighbors who build them.

We see this when Ford announces it is slowing construction of a battery plant in Michigan. And when Donald Trump, who leads Republican presidential primary polls, goes to a non-union company outside Detroit to claim that “the auto industry is being assassinated” by the move away from dirty fuels.

Neither auto workers nor the climate can afford for us to fall for this false narrative. If anything, we should see that momentum is moving squarely and more rapidly in the other direction. That’s what President Joe Biden means when he says that talking about the climate is talking about good jobs.

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New York’s city council voted unanimously to move its fleet of more than 30,000 municipal vehicles — the largest in the country — to buy only zero emissions cars and trucks beginning in 2025, and heavier vehicles after 2028. By 2035, the entire city fleet will be zero emission.

That’s the same year that California, New York and 14 other states will require all cars and trucks sold to be zero emission vehicles. The standards they’ve agreed to ask carmakers to increase the share of electric vehicles they sell slowly and continuously over the next 13 years.

This isn’t a rash rush to abandon the internal combustion engine and gas pumps overnight, even if our warming planet may need quicker action. That fear-mongering is inaccurate and misplaced. It’s a measured, unmistakable direction that UAW leaders see clearly. Their members must benefit from that, they told me when we met in Detroit last month.

Instead, the Big Three have been pushing battery-making and electric vehicle assembly to states that don’t offer union workers protection, or to plants created through joint ventures that allow them to operate outside the UAW’s deal.

This is an all-too-familiar pattern in this country’s history — corporations, billionaires, and the politicians representing their interests, pitting poor and working Americans who actually aspire to the same future against each other. They do it with hyperboles like “assassination” and altering established expansion plans.

We’re well beyond 2008. Profits for the Big Three are soaring. Consumers want electric vehicles, and as a nation we’re encouraging them to buy them through tax credits passed last year. It’s those cars and trucks that we’ll drive into a livable future. We must ensure that clean energy transition is a fair one to the people who will make it possible.

Ben Jealous is executive director of the Sierra Club and a professor at the University of Pennsylvania.

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Native Alaskans, wildlife win with Biden’s cancellation of oil and gas leases

2023-09-11T13:32:17.822-05:00

In this undated photo, Porcupine caribou migrate onto the coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in northeast Alaska. In a move that angered Republicans, the Biden administration canceled seven oil and gas leases Sept. 6, overturning sales held in the Trump administration’s waning days.

U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service via AP, file

The Sacred Place Where Life Begins. That’s what the Gwich’in people call the coastal plain of Alaska where they live.

The Porcupine caribou that the Gwich’in have relied on for tens of thousands of years for their subsistence way of life migrate hundreds of miles each spring to give birth to their calves there. So that Gwich’in name rings true.

It was that life that the Biden administration protected for years to come with the announcement last week that it was canceling oil and gas drilling leases in the 19.6-million-acre Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and moving to prohibit drilling in another 13 million acres of protected lands bordering the refuge.

It wasn’t just the Gwich’in, who have been fighting drilling for nearly 50 years, and the caribou who won. The Inupiaq people who live at the edge of the Arctic Ocean, polar bears, musk oxen, Dall sheep and birds you can find in all 50 states have roots in the Arctic Refuge.

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That corner of Alaska is one of the world’s last untouched wild places, our country’s largest wildlife refuge, and the only one designed specifically for wilderness purposes. Its continued existence in its pristine, rugged state signals our commitment to nature and our appreciation of its wonder. It’s a sign of our national character.

But the value isn’t just symbolic. We’re on pace this year to produce more oil in the U.S. than ever before. Creating a glut will only extend our addiction to fossil fuels when we know that we need to move swiftly in the direction of burning less. And the trade-off is infrastructure needed to drill that will destroy the refuge forever.

It’s a trade that the American people repeatedly have said they don’t want to make. In polls in recent years, roughly two-thirds of voters opposed drilling in the Arctic Refuge. After the president’s decision to allow another Alaskan drilling project to proceed months ago, this is the leadership most voters want.

The argument of proponents that Arctic drilling will boost U.S. energy independence and national security falls short when you know that all the oil under that part of Alaska is barely a year of the nation’s consumption by many estimates. We won’t drill our way out of the need for fossil fuels, but we certainly can drill our way to irreparable damage to the climate in just a few years.

Protecting Indigenous people and their way of life in Alaska should demonstrate that we can stand firm to defend more communities on the front lines of climate change against the unabated greed of Big Oil. An unscathed, unmatched landscape shouldn’t be the test for doing right by our neighbors and the planet.

Too often, we’ve allowed a few people lacking political power and desperate for economic opportunities to bear the immediate cost of bad environmental choices. The flaw is that, more often than not, we all end up paying.

Whether it’s the cancer alleys created in the communities neighboring refineries along the Mississippi or coastal towns repeatedly crushed by extreme weather, they’re only the first to feel the burden. As the hottest temperatures ever recorded showed us this summer, no one can escape the toll that fossil fuel charges the planet.

Ben Jealous is executive director of the Sierra Club and a professor of practice at the University of Pennsylvania.

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Green jobs shouldn’t make auto industry workers blue

2023-09-05T13:58:29.851-05:00

A Electrify America Charging Station for electric vehicle is seen at Westfield Old Orchard shopping center in Skokie on Jan. 29.

Nam Y. Huh/AP

Nicknames like the Motor City and Motown make clear that the auto industry built Detroit. Cars did a lot to give the neighborhoods in and around the 48217 zip code on the city’s southwest side their nickname too — Michigan’s most polluted zip code.

A Ford plant, a U.S. Steel mill and, most prominently, a Marathon Oil refinery that’s the only one in the state and one of the nation’s largest have fouled the air for decades in what locals call the Tri-Cities. In all, the Environmental Protection Agency monitors more than four dozen polluters in the area that’s home to poor Blacks and Hispanics.

In the mid-1960s, Interstate 75 bisected what was a vibrant neighborhood and added the fumes of 100,000 cars and trucks a day. Many trace their roots to the 13 original families that settled there in the Great Migration, and houses are a big part of neighborhood families’ wealth.

Residents of the 48217 have fought for years to slow the pollution, protesting, and appearing at public hearings for decades. The corporate interests have won more often than not.

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The city historically traded the promise of jobs for residents’ interests. Marathon promised 51% of jobs at the refinery would go to city residents when it won a $175 million tax abatement for an expansion in 2007; a decade later, 6% of the workforce was from Detroit.

We’re at a moment when we can change these patterns, when places across the country like the Tri-Cities can get relief and we can stop creating them in the first place. The hundreds of billions that the federal government has committed to infrastructure and clean energy — more money than we spent sending astronauts to the moon — can do that.

For example, there’s $3 billion alone set aside for communities like 48217 that have felt the most environmental and climate harm. It’s not enough, but it’s a significant start.

When it comes to the auto industry, our country is spending heavily to speed the transition to electric vehicles (EVs), from a $9.2 billion loan the Energy Department gave Ford and its South Korean partner this summer to build battery plants to $7,500 tax credits for car buyers who choose new EVs. We’re lowering the cost of supplying the bigger demand for EVs that we are building for automakers at the same time.

Bring electric vehicle manufacturing to Illinois to help spark our economy

It begs the question why Ford, General Motors, and Stellantis are trying to make the work to build EVs less desirable for their 150,000 employees represented by the United Auto Workers. Their contract expires in less than two weeks.

A critical part of the negotiations underway is the question of how workers in plants making EVs will be treated. It’s a question not just for this contract, but for years to come as EVs become the standard for U.S. car buyers.

The automakers are forming joint ventures to open battery plants where they don’t have to pay the wages that they do at vehicle assembly plants. The union points to the starting pay at an Ohio battery plant that’s half the top pay at gas-powered car plants. The companies also are placing new plants in southern states with right-to-work laws to avoid unions.

The people who make cars shouldn’t have to choose between a green, sustainable job and one that pays good wages they’ve negotiated. That’s not what American taxpayers expect in return for the incentives flowing to the auto industry.

Ben Jealous is executive director of the Sierra Club and a professor of practice at the University of Pennsylvania.

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