The United States is undergoing a historic shift away from carbon-intensive energy sources and toward clean energy sources. This process will have far-reaching consequences for firms, workers, and consumers, but little is known about how costs and opportunities will be distributed. The clean energy transition has has frequently been argued to be an opportunity to address systemic inequality; however, whether it reduces, exacerbates, or has no overall effect on pre-existing disparities depends on how new opportunities and costs are distributed as well as the consequences of new energy technologies on the broader population.

Using individual-level administrative records covering the entire formal US workforce combined with detailed residential and employment histories, we are working to provide systematic evidence on how the costs and new opportunities that emerged during the early years of the clean energy transition in the United States were distributed across workers and their communities. Our research identifies who has had access to new opportunities, alongside the consequences of these new opportunities for workers and their communities. We also provide new insights into how the decline of legacy fossil fuel activities has affected workers, their families, and the broader community, providing a more comprehensive understanding of the costs of the clean energy transition.

Nice Work if You Can Get It? The Distribution of Employment and Earnings during the Early Years of the Clean Energy Transition

Jonathan Colmer, Eva Lyubich, and John Voorheis

In this working paper, we show that both clean and legacy energy establishments hire a disproportionate share of non-Hispanic White and male workers compared to the working population, that workers rarely move from legacy to clean firms, and that, conditional on education, workers do not earn more in clean firms than in legacy firms. The occupational categories of jobs at clean firms differ notably from occupations at legacy firms and, on average, tend to be performed by workers with higher levels of education. Regional overlap in employment opportunities is not sufficient to facilitate worker transitions from legacy to clean firms. Substantially lower earnings outside of the energy sector combined with low mobility between legacy and clean firms suggests that the costs of the clean transition on workers in legacy fossil fuel sectors may be substantial. At the same time workers moving into clean activities from outside of the energy sector experience significant increases in earnings and greater job stability, suggesting that clean jobs are “good jobs” for those who can access them.

Transitional Costs and the Decline of Coal: Worker-Level Evidence

Jonathan Colmer, Eleanor Krause, Eva Lyubich, and John Voorheis

In this working paper, we evaluate the transitional consequences of the decline of coal. We find that, on average, coal workers most exposed to the decline received lower cumulative earnings and spent fewer years employed than observationally similar workers with less exposure to the decline. Losses are driven by years in which workers do not work in mining and extraction activities but remain in their local labor markets. We find little evidence that coal workers are less geographically mobile than other workers; however, relocating to other labor markets does little to mitigate losses.