The global energy transition must move more swiftly and provide generous employment opportunities so that workers in vulnerable communities aren’t left reeling from the accompanying economic disruption, a panel of experts said Tuesday.

The Center for Strategic and International Studies and Climate Investment Funds gathered panelists for a webinar entitled “Road to COP26: Just Transitions and the Climate Agenda,” in preparation for the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference in November.

Panelists agreed that a just transition to climate-friendly energy policies should sustain or improve vulnerable communities — and fast.

Climate Investment Funds CEO Mafalda Duarte said the transformation of the planet’s energy systems must combine the rapid with the respectful.

“If we are to meet our climate goals, we will go through some very significant social and economic transformations,” she said. “In fact, potentially, and most likely, at a scale and speed that we have not experienced in human history.”

Duarte said such disruptive and rapid changes will hit especially hard for communities and workers who are dependent on fossil fuels for their livelihoods. She said climate action will fall short of goals without a transition that embraces all sections of the population.

“We already live in a world that has quite deep-rooted inequalities,” Duarte said. “We all know this very well.”

She said it’s important to avoid exacerbating social inequalities while making necessary changes for the climate; “In fact, we should take advantage of this opportunity to really try to address some of those social inequalities and make sure we are not leaving anyone behind.”

4 Times Faster

Kate Hughes, director of international climate and energy for the U.K. Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, said the global energy transition must move four times faster than the current pace to meet the goals in the Paris Climate Accord.

Countries around the world, especially those in the G20, need to re-evaluate their 2030 goals.

“Coal must be rapidly phased out,” she said.

Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development nations should plan to end coal use by 2030, she said, while other major emitting countries should strive for a 2040 target. The rest of the world should quit coal by 2050, she said.

“We’ve got to speed up and really sort of deepen that shift of global investment patterns away from brown and towards green,” Hughes said.

Jobs in the green sector are growing faster than in the traditional economy, she added. She pointed out that the International Labor Organization estimates that 24 million new jobs could be created in the green sector by 2030.

But Hughes said the changeover won’t be simple because green jobs don’t typically take root in the same areas where fossil fuel jobs become extinct. Climate actions need to consider the impacts on workers and communities, she said.

“We must bring society together in an inclusive manner.”

The U.S.

Andrew Light, head of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of International Affairs, described the Biden administration’s four “pillars” of current focus: pandemic recovery, the economic downturn, the climate crisis and racial justice issues.

Light said the administration and the DOE firmly believe that “attending to climate change is a job creator.”

“It always has been,” Light said. “It is just now that we’re beginning to see this much more clearly than we did back in 2009. … It is, I believe, the greatest job creation opportunity that … we have in our lifetimes, that we’ll ever have in our lifetimes, to shepherd through what will be a just transition to a global clean energy economy.”

Light pointed to Biden’s Jan. 27 executive order creating an interagency working group to examine economic revitalization for coal and power plant communities. The working group will focus on U.S. communities that have already experienced employment losses from the energy transition.

“The United States has been largely sitting on the sidelines [on climate issues] … in the past four years, and now we are back,” Light said.

Developing Nations

The energy transition is a “particularly difficult task” for developing nations, said Ajay Mathur, director general-designate of the International Solar Alliance.

Developing nations already suffer from energy adequacy problems or have populations that cannot pay for energy services, he said.

“Solar electricity is the cheapest electricity available in India, but only when the sun is shining,” Mathur said of his native country, adding that coal becomes the cheapest energy form at dusk. He noted that any country with a “decent standard of living” consumes energy at four times the level of India on a per capita basis.

Mathur said it’s vital that in the next few years energy storage becomes inexpensive enough to pair with renewable generation. Renewable resources must also be offered cheaply to developing nations, especially considering that developed nations built entire empires on the backs of fossil fuels, he said. Coal use will vanish once it becomes economically infeasible, he added.

Light said it’s up to the economic powerhouses to offer favorable lending rates to other countries trying to fund energy transitions and coal phaseouts.

Mathur said while it’s clear that renewable energy creates more jobs than coal mining, the jobs require separate skill sets. He said areas that most stand to benefit from renewable expansion are not those where the coal industry thrives.

A just transition would ensure that “the day the last coal power plant closes is the day the last coal mine closes is the day the last coal miner retires,” he said.

“Only that would help us move in a just transition towards a renewable future,” he said

Mathur noted that when people lose jobs, they lose not only their financial lifeline but also a big piece of their social lives. He said communities entrenched in the coal industry contain families and friends across generations. Replacing those jobs in the same region is important and could lead to creative new options, he said, pointing out that coal mining has been supplanted with more lucrative beekeeping jobs in some communities.

‘Good’ Jobs

Samantha Smith, director of the Just Transition Centre at the International Trade Union Confederation, said she’s “a mixture of beaten down by a year of bad news” and optimistic about political climate developments in several countries, particularly the U.S. and the European Union.

But she also warned of a “jobs apocalypse.”

“We’re going to be talking about the need to create good climate jobs,” Smith predicted. She said good green jobs must come equipped with workers’ rights, pensions, social protections and health care.

“If we can’t have a recovery that is rich in good jobs, and that respects peoples’ rights — also rights to form trade unions — then it’s pretty hard to see how you’re going to have the kind of political stability we need to roll out climate policy,” she said. “And if climate policy isn’t really a jobs program, it’s hard to see how people are going to support it more broadly.”