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For those of us working on the clean energy transition, professionally or as volunteers, the last few months have been awful in many ways. We’re seeing policies change for the worse, funding cuts, and layoffs. The planetary consequences are real, but there’s also an enormous human impact on all the people who have made working on the transition either their vocation or avocation.
You can make your own list of recent harms, but here are a few:
- The US House of Representatives’ passage of a terrible bill that would eviscerate clean energy industries
- Executive orders targeting every aspect of clean energy – electricity generation, gas/oil exploitation, clean transportation, and diversity, equity, and inclusion (which is key to a clean energy transition)
- Attacks on the rights of states to take action on climate
- Layoffs in the offshore wind industry, thanks to executive orders about permitting future and existing projects
- Layoffs at the federal Department of Energy (DOE) and Environmental Protection Agency, and basically the disappearance of the Joint Office on Energy & Transportation
- Rescissions of loans made by DOE’s Loan Program Office for cutting-edge new programs and projects
- Rescissions of grants already contracted between the federal government and grantees – state, local, for-profit, and nonprofit; There have been so many, but one that stands out is the administration’s freezing of $20 billion appropriated for the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund (i.e. Green Bank). This has caused layoffs in several places, including at Rewiring America, one of our partners and a leading organization promoting electrification as a cornerstone of the clean energy transition.
Some of the moves are so obviously illegal that one can only assume that they are intended to intimidate and create enough uncertainty to squelch further investment in clean energy. We cannot let that happen.
It’s not just about layoffs.
Green Energy Consumers recently had a job opening for an entry-level position. We received 230 applications. Most were excellent candidates by virtue of their resumes, many were overqualified. Almost unanimously, their cover letters expressed great hope and enthusiasm. We tried to narrow the list down through phone screens and that helped a little, but the candidates were as impressive on the calls as they were on paper. We asked several to write essays about the blogs we post – but the essays were great, too. So, we interviewed a lot – far more than normal. And we diligently checked references before making our selection. The point of this story is that we probably could have put the top 25 candidates in a hat and picked out someone who could do the job well. We wish we could have hired several, and we will if we can raise some more money.
This vignette makes us both sad for the applicants and hopeful for clean energy and society as a whole. There are way more good people looking to create a just transition than the few powerful folks at the top of their corporate empires looking to deceive and delay. We wrote recently about how we can’t afford to ‘other’ when it comes to climate impacts, but in this case, we’re comfortable saying that there are far more of “us” than there are of “them.” To paraphrase a song, each of us is a drop of rain, but together we are a hurricane.
What does solidarity mean in this context?
We have to be empathetic to all those excellent public servants and private sector professionals who have lost their jobs or might soon. And the communities that will face dirtier water, dirtier air, and worse health outcomes as a result of all of these federal actions.
But we can do more than that. If we do our jobs in clean energy well, we can hasten the day when they can return to the cause. While our minds are going haywire over all the chaos, we have an obligation to be as productive as we can, to achieve our corporate or organizational goals, and to be as efficient as possible so that we can grow or at least have staying power. The better we perform, the faster we can bring our friends back. Those of us who are still getting paid to work or have the ability to volunteer on the energy transition are fortunate and must not take it for granted.
What does perseverance look like?
The actions we’re seeing at the federal level are intended to intimidate. The people benefiting from our society’s reliance on fossil fuels want us to feel confused, overwhelmed, and scared, so that we stop doing the work we’re doing. How do we persevere in the fact of these tactics? We rely on each other and we take firm action where we can to mitigate all the bad stuff coming out of Washington. For some groups, it’s about legal defense. For others, particularly Green Energy Consumers Alliance, it’s simply about doing our job and staying true to our mission of speeding a just transition to clean energy by working at the state level. There is so much to be done in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and every state in the country. Our leaders in State Houses might get a little weak in the knees as a result of losing federal support, so we have to prop them up.
And as Yoda would say, "Do or Do Not. There is No Try."
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