From oil refineries to solar plants, unions bend California climate change policies in their favor
No contour of California’s vast landscape inspires such passionate devotion as its coastline, so state lawmakers recoiled when President Trump announced in April that he wanted to expand offshore drilling. The outrage was channeled into a proposal for preventing any new infrastructure along the water, pipelines or otherwise, for additional oil production.
But the day before a key Sacramento committee hearing this summer, Sen. Hannah-Beth Jackson (D-Santa Barbara) received some bad news about her legislation — it was opposed by a politically powerful labor group whose members’ paychecks depend on the steady flow of oil.
In a letter to lawmakers, the top lobbyist for the State Building and Construction Trades Council of California said he feared harming projects that “maintain and create new employment opportunities.” The legislation, Senate Bill 188, stalled the following day, an unceremonious defeat for a proposal announced with much fanfare months earlier.
“I was startled,” said Jackson, who represents a region with a painful history of oil spills but said she recognizes the jobs that fossil fuels provide. “I don’t think people say, ‘I love oil so much.’ It’s, ‘I have to feed my family.’”
The episode was a reminder of how an array of California unions, despite their vocal support for fighting climate change and their willingness to embrace green issues scorned by national labor groups, either bent or blocked environmental proposals during the legislative session that ended last week. At a time when the state is trying to dramatically reduce greenhouse gas emissions, their effort to protect or create jobs threatens to conflict with goals to combat global warming.
Unions torpedoed an ambitious proposal to phase out fossil fuels for generating electricityafter lawmakers refused to insert a provision limiting clean energy projects that don’t hire their workers. Another group pushed for changes that could stop the state from awarding electric car rebates to automakers involved in labor disputes.
Perhaps most notably, the building trades reinforced oil industry opposition to an early version of cap-and-trade legislation shortly after they forged a new statewide labor agreement with Chevron, which operates two of California’s most productive refineries. The cap-and-trade program, which requires companies to buy permits to release greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere, was eventually extended by lawmakers in July, but on terms more favorable to oil companies.
Although the fossil fuel industry is the most obvious adversary of climate change policies, labor resistance can be an especially potent factor in a state dominated by Democrats who rely on political support from carpenters, electricians, pipe fitters and other blue-collar workers.
“I don’t think it’s a secret the influence they have,” said Assemblywoman Cristina Garcia (D-Bell Gardens), who authored the cap-and-trade legislation defeated with labor’s help.
The situation has frustrated environmentalists, another crucial Democratic constituency that often works with labor to advance green goals. The two factions have previously built alliances around landmark climate policies, such as a renewable energy mandate that protects union jobs with incentives for building new solar and wind plants in California. The building trades also support cap and trade because the sale of emission permits finances mass transit projects, including the bullet train from Los Angeles to San Francisco.
“We’re like cousins who occasionally go off in different directions, but sit down at Thanksgiving together,” said Kathryn Phillips, a Sierra Club lobbyist.
When schisms develop between environmentalists and unions, they reflect an anxiety over finding dependable jobs during a shift from fossil fuels to renewable energy.
“We believe that green energy is the way the world is going,” said Robbie Hunter, president of the state building trades group.
At the same time, he wants to protect the dwindling number of blue-collar jobs left in California, rattling off a list of industries — aerospace, steel, cars — that have fled the state over the years. Too many regulations have occasionally been a problem, Hunter said, and defending facilities like oil refineries is “no different than a miner showing up trying to save his mine.”
The pressure to curtail fossil fuels has been a source of tension among progressives around the country. Last year, national trade unions harshly criticized an alliance with Tom Steyer, a billionaire donor and environmentalist from San Francisco, after he opposed building the Keystone XL Pipeline, a project expected to create jobs.
Trump has directly appealed to that kind of divide, recently standing before a North Dakota oil refinery and promising to “unlock the extraordinary potential of our great American workers.”
“We're getting rid of one job-killing regulation after another,” he said.
Kim Glas, executive director of the Blue Green Alliance, a national partnership of unions and environmentalists, said pitting workers against fighting global warming represents a false choice. The goal, she said, is creating “an economy and a climate policy that’s more fair and equitable.”
In California, oil companies are also vying for labor’s loyalty and the clout that comes with it. During an industry conference in Kern County two years ago, a member of the audience asked a California Resources Corp. executive why the Los Angeles-based oil and gas company had signed a union agreement.
“We’re using the trades, mainly for their quality, and for the political power they bring with them,” said the executive, Robert Barnes.