The presidents of the American Petroleum Institute and North American Building Trades Union may have come to their Feb. 4 press briefing to discuss their cooperative program to train pipeline construction workers on building projects that are increasingly safe and reliable. Reporters who attended were more interested in what API’s Mike Sommers and NABTU’s Sean McGarvey had to say about the Green New Deal.
The much-discussed concept would develop programs inspired by US President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s strategy to rescue the country from the Great Depression in the 1930s. The GND’s economic programs would help the US address global climate change more aggressively, proponents suggest.
Sommers and McGarvey each said they have heard about the idea. Both added that they would like to hear more details.
Specifically, they suggested that it will be necessary to consider whether jobs created in a transition from fossil fuels to alternative and renewable energy would pay as well as jobs NABTU members now have building oil and gas pipelines.
Alternative energy proponents “tend to get a little vague about this” when they say their proposals would provide economic benefits, Sommers observed.
Moreover, there have been substantial reductions already in US greenhouse gas emissions as electric power plants have shifted from coal to natural gas in the last 10 years, he said.
“We don’t talk much with investors, but one place where we agree is that workers who build infrastructure should be paid fair and reasonable wages,” said McGarvey. “We’re not climate-change deniers, but we still haven’t heard much about what people will be paid in these new energy industries. We know how it works with the fossil fuel industries because they have provided well-paying jobs to our members for decades and decades.”
Potentially lower wages
By comparison, the latest Quadrennial Energy Report from the US Department of Energy placed the average wage for a worker installing a solar energy system at $16/hr, McGarvey said. “We’ve recently received outreach from a few people who are helping put this idea together, and are a little bit encouraged.”
Sommers said API and its members realize that energy increasingly will come from sources other than fossil fuels, and they’re ready to discuss the transition. “We don’t like it when a state’s environmental department withdraws a water permit for an interstate gas pipeline in an apparent maneuver to reduce emissions by stopping the project,” he said.
New York’s Department of Environmental Protection essentially did that on Apr. 7, 2017. A federal appeals court vacated the action and remanded the matter back to the agency one day after Sommers and McGarvey’s press briefing.
