“Who gets through this crisis more or less whole, and who does not, is almost entirely a political decision,” writes Dean Baker in TNR’s June cover story, which publishes online tomorrow. Rebuilding the American economy brings both an opportunity and a moral imperative to aim for “more just economic outcomes.” And reforming the economy, he argues, should also mean decarbonizing it—while providing a “just transition” for workers in the fossil fuel industry.

That jargony phrase has become increasingly common in climate rhetoric these days. A just transition, in its simplest form, refers to policy that provides employment and other resources for workers who might otherwise lose their livelihoods in the necessary but disruptive shift away from oil, coal, and natural gas. This issue is particularly timely as Congress wrestles with the economic fallout of the coronavirus pandemic, and long-unprofitable oil companies report billions in losses and start to file for bankruptcy.

As it happens, TNR explored two straightforward ideas this past week for how to create a just transition amid the economic recovery.

Kate Aronoff has written extensively about the deep inefficiencies in the American fossil fuel industry: why fossil fuels aren’t even a very good investment, how overproduction has plagued the sector, and how shale companies’ exploitation of cheap credit has masked the fact that they have never been profitable. The current crisis has only exacerbated those problems. As drillers race to close unprofitable rigs, and oil-producing states steel themselves for devastating job losses, there are a couple ways the government could keep those workers employed, instead of handing no-strings-attached bailouts to oil executives, perpetuating an industry that’s both environmentally and financially unsustainable and that will probably shed these jobs anyway.

One option, Aronoff pointed out, would be to enact policies favoring geothermal development. “Ordinarily,” she wrote, “geothermal is the runt of the renewable power litter. But because it uses much of the same infrastructure as is used in fossil fuel extraction, geothermal might offer an appealing off-ramp for some of the tens of thousands laid off in the oil and gas industry, while helping build a low-carbon future.”

Another option: The federal government could hire workers directly to clean up the extraction sites the oil industry has left behind and to use some of the same skills needed to suck oil out of the ground to inject carbon dioxide back into it. The politics of carbon capture are complicated, Aronoff wrote, but most climate models suggest that this technology is a necessary part in any plan to keep warming below two degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit):

The labor-intensive side of carbon capture might be a saving grace for suffering oilfield communities. A 2013 report from the Rand Corporation found considerable overlap between the type of work done by workers in the extractive sector and that required to inject and maintain carbon underground. From geologists to pipe fitters to drill operators, “the types of firms and employees who are in the existing oil and gas sector could easily transition to building carbon dioxide pipelines and injecting carbon underground,” said Costa Samaras, a co-author on the report and a civil engineer at Carnegie Mellon University. “We do a lot of things underground that aren’t oil and gas drilling.”

This week, we also published the second in our “My Climate Anxiety” series. Check out journalist Abigail Higgins’s account of reporting from the climate change front lines in Turkana, Kenya, and how it’s shaped her thoughts on global warming. The piece pulls no punches, but it’s also a beautiful meditation on perspective. “I suspect that many of us are homesick less for the loss of a physical place than for an idea,” she writes, musing on middle-class global northerners’ climate stress. “We’re nostalgic for a world that for most people never existed.”


—Heather Souvaine Horn, Deputy Editor