Speakers

While the Trump Administration has attempted to reverse progress on climate change, the market continues to trend toward the electrification of our economy. As policymakers look to the future, industrial policy will be a critical next step in manufacturing technology locally, growing jobs in the energy transition, and building political consensus around climate action—while learning from the lessons of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA).

What the IRA attempted to do—and what was the norm during our 20th-century industrial transformation—was to leverage the partnership and expertise of unions to drive the buildout of a new industrial future. However, decades of neoliberalism and a singular focus on profit maximization created a divided climate community. Businesses, scientific institutions, and policymakers focused on the energy transition did not necessarily see or understand the value of bringing labor into the buildout of a new climate economy, and this played out across the country during the Biden Administration.

As we look toward building a politically durable vision for the energy transition, we return to the basics: defining what "labor" really means; examining its history, including its growth and decline over the 20th century; explaining why worker participation and empowerment are important to building and enabling the clean energy economy; exploring how labor can help repair and advance broader societal change; and identifying where some of the negative perceptions of labor originate, both inside and outside the climate community.

We argue in this session that a successful strategy must incorporate 'high-road' principles to address both the climate and affordability crises while creating the economic opportunities needed to bring communities into the massive, whole-of-economy transition.