Don't stop thinking about tomorrow
How do we get from here to there? The Just Transition Fund and guaranteed income offer answers.
Mining operations in Galatia: we have to recognize what’s fully being lost before we can address what can be found to replace it. (Facebook)
By Ameya Pawar and Ted Cox
We were excited to read about the Just Transition Fund in Monday’s 10-point plan for clean energy submitted by Climate Jobs Illinois.
Understand, it’s not “just” a transition fund. It’s a transition fund to provide a sort of justice to workers and communities that have either been left behind or are threatened with being left behind in the transition from fossil fuels to clean, renewable energy.
On the one hand, it’s nothing new. The Clean Energy Jobs Act pending in the General Assembly also calls for fossil-fuel firms to clean up communities and provide new job training to idled workers. The Climate Jobs Illinois plan, the product of a coalition of major labor groups, has been called more “utility-friendly” because, thus far, it doesn’t hold those firms’ feet to the fire the same way when it comes to financing what needs to be done.
But look at what it sets out to provide: three to five years of wage, health care, and benefits replacements, along with three to five years of tax revenue lost in those communities, in addition to other supports.
That’s thinking big on a very big issue, and it’s about time.
One of Hillary Clinton’s many mistakes four years ago was her attack on coal. Yes, it’s critical to move away from fossil fuels to slow climate change, and she claimed to have plans to retrain those workers, but those plans got lost in the nuance — with miners, for instance, disdaining a shift to computer coding — basically handing coal miners as a voting bloc to Donald Trump. (By way of comparison, this election cycle, notice how Joe Biden has refused to get drawn into the fracking debate.)
Across much of southern Illinois, coal mining remains one of the few top-paying jobs available, with incomes of potentially $100,000. That’s a hard thing for a family breadwinner to walk away from, no matter how urgent global warming might seem, and that has to be recognized by those seeking solutions to the climate crisis.
That’s what makes the Just Transition Fund exceptional. It thinks on a scale capable of confronting the problem, and it shows consideration for both the communities and the workers affected. It’s a powerful concept, especially when married to the expansion of rural broadband — touted by Gov. Pritzker at the same time Monday — which has the potential to both train workers in remote communities in new fields, and then find them new jobs working, yes, remotely.
And, in that, the Just Transition Fund is not an outlier, but is actually similar to other plans being proposed to smooth the way for other necessary transitions — like, say, guaranteed income.
Much is made of the rural/urban divide in our state, and with good reason. But we insist at One Illinois that more unites us than divides us. Chicago may not have coal mines, but it has communities that have been hollowed out in much the same way as coal towns, only with factories shutting down instead of mining operations. For years, working families have been having the same conversation in the city as they’ve been having in towns like Galatia.
How do we get from here to there, from today to tomorrow, from the old answers that no longer work to the new answers that will work in the future? And the answer isn’t just training, it’s also providing families the resources that tide them over while they remain in the communities that sustain them.
Take guaranteed income: as many have pointed out, it’s the same basic idea behind the $1,200 stimulus checks that were supposed to tide families over in the ongoing coronavirus crisis. So there’s a nexus of connected thoughts and approaches here that applies in a variety of environments, from abandoned coal towns to blighted urban areas to the lost income and suspended livelihoods too many are experiencing in the COVID economy.
Or take public banking. If a commercial bank is reluctant to lend to a development that includes affordable housing because it thinks it might lower the resale value if it fails, what if the government were to lend those resources — in another way of tiding people over to achieve a greater good.
Our society appears to be at a tipping point in any number of areas: public health, the environment, institutional racism, income inequality, and general social inequity. It sometimes seems overwhelming to have to confront them all at once. But perhaps the key is to see the similarities between these issues and recognize a unified approach to address them.
The goal is to get from here to there, from today to tomorrow, by providing people the resources they need to tide them over and the new skills that will be called upon as we all move forward after the pandemic — and after this election cycle, which has proved to be its own sort of political scourge.
True enough, a coal miner may not want to be a computer coder. But what if we offered that former miner a job in the outdoors constructing wind turbines or installing solar panels — good, union jobs, as proposed in both the Climate Jobs Illinois Plan and the Clean Energy Jobs Act.
It’s generally recognized we need to tide people over in the pandemic. But that’s not the only ongoing crisis. We need to tide people over wherever they’re hurting and get them back on their feet again.
It’s how we get from here to there and from today to tomorrow.